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Writer's pictureAdrian Emery

Personal depth

Updated: Jun 27, 2023



Tina Turner once had a masterful song titled River Deep Mountain High released in 1966, which is basically about the depth of love the singer feels for their beloved and is an often referred to attribute of love for another. We often speak about how deep our love for another is.


But how deep is your love for and recognition of yourself?



One of the true calamities of the modern age, with all its trinkets of distraction, is that we end up living extremely shallow lives playing superficially on the surface without ever really diving deep into the inner core of our being. As daily life speeds up, we are becoming time poor. As we become more affluent as a society and as individuals, externally, we are becoming poorer within.


We are in a permanent state of distraction: haste, work, family and social life, social media, mass media, television plus the incessant internal chatter of the egoic mind. We are surrounded by noise both from within and without. There is very little quiet and very little opportunity for reflection. We are always on the go even if that is on a mobile device.


The ubiquitous mobile phone seems to be ever present in everyone’s hand or earpiece. As the American Express Card advertisement once proclaimed, we simply cannot leave home without it, without suffering some form of anxiety or withdrawal. It seems the world will collapse or disapprove if we do not take that call immediately. Never in the history of humanity have we collectively been at the beck and call of others in such an immediate time frame.



I have led a very busy and successful corporate life building and leading many businesses and yet I have never been beholden to my phone or others’ needs to contact me and my world certainly did not

collapse. Indeed, others learnt more quickly to become independent, make decisions and think for themselves.


The tragedy is that we have no time left for us. We have no time for solitude. We have no experience of being alone that is not somehow complicated by guilt or insecurity. What is wrong with me? Why am I alone? No body loves me…… I am not good enough and so the precious and sacred time of solitude is spoilt by the negative ego. We become averse to being alone.


Yet, when you first meet someone and ‘fall in love’ all you want to do is spend time with that person to learn about them, to share quality time - alone. So too, with yourself. To know yourself, you simply must spend quality time alone. You must share time with you. To venture deep into your psyche, you must eschew the noise and haste of the outer world. You must put down your toys and devices and just BE!


We now live in a gilded cage built from fear and padlocked with pleasure. The pleasures distract us from our inner fear but also sustain it. For as we sink deeper into the morass of emptiness, we become ever more fearful of losing the indulgences we have accumulated around the self to fill the void and shield us from the terror of the impending truth.




The western world is collapsing. But it is not just the American Empire – it is the whole Judeo-Christian ethic and ideology that has dominated human thought, evolution and philosophy for millennia; that has kept us imprisoned in a false and misleading paradigm.


But deep within your being does not need to be an empty and neurotic void. It can be filled with surety, with self-confidence, with optimism and hope, with jubilant joy and good cheer. It can be a blessing of unimaginable delight. Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all.


But you must make that time to be alone, to befriend yourself, to learn who you are and to define yourself not in relation to a significant other or an external event but in absolute silence and stillness. You must dig deep into the spiritual foundations of your inner self to find the gold. If one wants to behold the wonders of a coral reef, one cannot merely snorkel on the surface but must dive into the beauty of the deep.


As the old structure collapses under the weight of its own corruption and repression, the blossom of the new dawn will emerge victorious. The old paradigm is losing its grip and hold on humanity as we emerge from the shackles of illusion and doubt and embrace the sanctity and truth of our divine being.


Take yourself out for dinner, alone, and see if you can thoroughly enjoy your meal without any pangs of being alone or feeling insecure. And do not touch your device. Touch your inner self instead!




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