Figures in a landscape

I didn’t see the figures on the sands when I took this picture. I was more interested in seeing how the polarising filter would help bring details out in the sky, while leaving the sands recognisable as, well,… sands. It was only later when I put the picture up on the bigger screen of my PC, then cropped and zoomed,  other details became apparent, and the ghosts emerged.

No, I didn’t know they were there, I don’t know who they are, and of course I don’t know where they are now. They’re simply gone. But for that moment, at 14:53 hours and 53 seconds on the 17/2/2013,  they were everything, creating a living harmony out of what is otherwise nothing.

I get this same eerie philosophical melancholia from watching crowds. There are so many of us alive, and each life of infinite importance to itself, each of us viewing the universe from the centre of ourselves in a uniquely different way.   But for me there’s something about the lone figure or a small group of figures set against a vast landscape that turns up the wick, and applies a more intense heat to the question of what it is to be human in the world.

On the one hand the seeming smallness of our presence can make the individual life appear worthless and futile, while on the other it might be said it’s in the very uniqueness of our  perspective there lies a value that goes beyond the material -  that it’s in adjusting to this perception of ourselves, and seeing more clearly through what one might call the eye of spirit,  we each have the potential to realise the preciousness that is the individual life lived well, no matter how fleeting and superficially futile that life might appear to be.

I’m reading Field and Hedgerow by Richard Jeffries at the moment. Jeffries (1848-1887) was a small-town English journalist, essayist and novelist, who, after labouring long in obscurity, became quietly popular in the late Victorian period. Another of his works “The Amateur Poacher” has been my companion since childhood, and I still find much in him to admire. His particular forte was nature mysticism. To say Jeffries revered nature doesn’t quite get to the point of him, though revere it he most certainly did. Here was a man who could look at  a grain of sand under his fingernail and tease the meaning of life from it  – all without the aid of opium -  but he was careful not to over-romanticise – being conscious and respectful of the red-in-tooth-and claw dimension of nature as well. He was also a man who saw more of God in a Greek statue than in the whole of King James.

Stay with me, this is relevant.

Of course we’re not all blessed with the divine attributes of a Greek statue, and I suppose Jeffries was getting at more than seeing a literal image of “God as deity” in hominid physiology. What the Classical Greeks saw in the human form, Jeffries hints at in his various works, while the rest of us cover it with loincloths for modesty, mistake it for a perverted Eros, and childishly titter at it. What is it? I don’t know, but if you’ll allow me a moment’s nudity, I can gaze for ever at John Collier’s Lillith (Atkinson Memorial Gallery, Southport UK), and see more than just her bosoms. There’s a ghost in her, and like my figures in the landscape, she gives me pause.

Getting back to the subject of nature, in “Field and Hedgerow” Jeffries writes of an unemployed farm labourer rejecting the grim soulless state-handout sanctuary of the Workhouse and choosing instead to survive the winter living rough, sleeping in out-buildings, finding what few scraps of charity he can from the farm wives. Jeffries suggests that in his struggle to maintain a personal dignified independence, against the rigours of nature, there is something noble, even Godlike about him.

Nature is impassive, impervious to our complaints. The rain falls and the frost bites regardless of our wishes, or the quality of our clothes. Still, on a sunny day, when the butterflies come out, you can look for God in it, a God that transcends deity, as the Romantics would say. Indeed when it’s not inflicting pain upon us, there’s enough stillness and sublime beauty in nature to see projections of all sorts of things. But whatever we discover, compassion will not be among its qualities.

In my  photograph, the tide is out. Three hours later it would be in, and the small lives that had scampered across the sands that afternoon would have to scamper for safety or be washed away. The beach is also known for quicksand. An unwary figure going down in them could not rely upon nature, or the gods, for deliverance. For the survival of calamity, or nature’s worst excesses, we’re always going to need the compassion and the selfless intervention of other human beings. We might pray to our deities but it will be another human being who pulls us from the mire, offers reassurance at our tremblings, and a hot cup of  tea to soothe away the aftershocks.

Some might take this as evidence the Divine works through us, that our capacity for compassion is a manifestation of the ineffable at work in the world. I’m coming to the same conclusion. It was Jeffries who taught me you don’t find God in mere deity, (Story of my heart), but only through a higher form of soul-life. And, incredible, as it seems, the fact remains that in a world apparently on fire, torn apart by the darker side of our natures, it’s only in human beings we find the contrary, even paradoxical evidence of a divinely transcendent and infinitely compassionate dimension, a dimension, the existence of which, is the only thing worth all the living and the dying for. If we are to understand the value of the individual life, no matter how fleeting or anonymous, like my figures in the landscape, we must first do what we can to nurture a compassion for the lives of others, and trust we’ll find it in others when we’re most in need of it ourselves.

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Feels pretty much like being alive to me.

Exploring duality on Darwen Moor

I drove up to the Royal Arms at Tockholes today and stretched my legs on Darwen Moor. My ancestors were weavers and mill-workers in this area, and would have been intimately acquainted with the ancient byways that criss cross these rather bleak hills. How can I describe Darwen Moor? Technically it’s an upland plateau, though more poetically I can’t help thinking of it as a dour blend of gritstone, peat and heather – black as a hag’s teeth in winter. And there’s a tower.

I needed the air. And I needed my ancestors.

A dull daily commute, followed by pastimes that center upon the contemplation of one’s navel can lead to some very insulated ways of thinking, particularly when we start probing the nature of reality. Many an unfortunate hippy has passed this way, picked up on the Buddhist idea of “Maya”, misinterpreted it, and concluded that the world we think of as real is just an illusion, that attachment to it is the biggest delusion we can fall foul of, and that the more valid experience is a total retreat into an imaginary inner world, aided, if necessary, by powerful hallucinogens.

But we need to be careful.

Personally, I prefer the notion that having a keen and clear-headed handle on the ways of the physical world is far from delusional, if only because our mortal contract insists we spend so much time learning the ropes here in the first place. I like the Daoist view which describes us as being caught with our feet in both camps, that we exist partially both in the inner and the outer world, and that we can’t make sense of either without paying due attention to both.

So, it does you good to get out once in a while, to climb the muddy trails up into the clouds, far above the towns and cities, if for no other reason than to remind yourself of your mortal nature by the feel of the wind on your face. If I had a more thrill-seeking personality I’d probably take up skydiving or base-jumping. As it is a walk in the hills is usually sufficient to re-calibrate and ground my sense of reality.

Temperatures have been getting down to below freezing here and the visitor center carpark at the Royal Arms was slick with ice. As I picked up the trail, I found the ground hard with frost and the paths, normally glutinous mud and stagnant pools of water, were rendered difficult with long stretches like rivers of ice. My instep crampons would have been useful, but I’d left them at home because this is only Darwen Moor after all, not Helvellyn, though the winter weather has been known to kill people up here. I decided to chance it anyway, trusting to luck there’d be enough clear stretches to get me to the tower and back without breaking a leg. I find walking boots are useless in conditions like this, hard soled and slippery as hell, needing the addition of steel spikes to bite. The fell runners were faring far better in their soft soled trainers. I cringed at the sight of their bare legs. It was cold. Biting cold.

As I walked, I was thinking about a passage in the story I’m currently writing. The heroine, Adrienne, has survived a near fatal car accident that’s left her haunted, not least by a classic near death experience – tunnel of light, meeting dead relatives and all that. The hero, Phil, is a survivor of a different kind of accident – a helicopter crash at sea that left him traumatized  having been tossed in a rubber boat for three days in a storm, thinking he was going to drown. He suffered hallucinations towards the end, and ever since has experienced lucid dreams and an uncanny intuition apparently guided by imaginary conversations with his great great grandfather. (Don’t ask me where I get this stuff from)

Anyway, when these two meet, their chatter inevitably circles around the meaning and the nature of reality as they try to make sense of their experiences, as well as dealing with the psychological damage from which they’re still both still suffering. At one point, Phil is wondering if they’re not both actually dead, that neither of them in fact survived their accidents, and that what they think is real life is actually some kind of strange mutual lucid dream experience, or a kind of purgatory. And how would they know otherwise? But Adrienne isn’t impressed and retorts that she knows what “dead” feels like,…

“and it’s a whole lot better than this, Phil. No, this feels pretty much like being alive to me.”

So,…

Ice on the ascent. You slip – best case, you bruise your gluteus maximus. Worst, you go over a crag and break your neck. But crags are few on Darwen Moor, and the way is relatively easy, plus they’re a hardy lot round here and I had plenty of company on the way up, most of them moving faster than me – not just hardy walker types, but rosy cheeked families out for a bit of a blow. I seemed to be testing every step, or paused fiddling with my camera, while my overtakers tramped gleefully on, passing me with a neighbourly “Ow do.” Maybe I should get out more. Maybe I should should swap my shamefully underused Brashers for a pair of cheap soft soled boots from the discount store, and simply learn to walk again?

It’s not a long hike to the tower from the Royal Arms, only a couple of miles, and well worth it. It’s one of the most impressive follies in the district, built in 1898, and a magnet for generations of walkers. Unlike many such structures these days, it isn’t fenced off and boarded up. You can still climb up it, and in spite of being in one of the bleakest spots in the West Pennines, it shoulders the weather well. With a little TLC over the years, it’s maintained its structural integrity, and bourne the occasional insults of vandals good naturedly. From inside, via a spiral stone staircase, you can access a mid level viewing balcony. If you’ve the nerve for it, you can press on to the top. The stone stairway ends just short of the top where you then climb a short section of iron spiral steps, to emerge through a doorway in the upper, glazed, pergola-like dome. This gives access to the upper turret, raised some eighty feet above the moor. The views from here are breathtaking, but I’m no good with exposed heights and usually need a braver companion to goad me into making the ascent.

The tower has lost its glazed dome twice, once in 1947 in a gale, and again more recently in 2010. The latest impressive replacement was built by a local engineering company and was lowered gingerly into place by helicopter back in January this year.

Ostensibly built to celebrate the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria, the tower also celebrates the victory of local people who regained their rights of access to the ancient trails hereabouts, and which had been blocked by the absentee landlord who was more concerned with rearing grouse for the guns of the monied classes. It was an unfortunate fact that much of the British uplands were once denied to the local population until the mass-trespass movements began the long process of winning those uplands back. The most famous of these was on Derbyshire’s Kinder Scout in 1932, but it all began here over Darwen in the 1890′s. It’s a sad fact however that access wasn’t enshrined in law until the Countryside and Rights of Way act in 2000, over a hundred years later. The moral is you don’t need to be a sage to appreciate the restorative nature of the uplands. Spend your working week doing 12 hours shifts on a loom down in a smokey town and you’ll appreciate it well enough.

I didn’t climb the tower today. I was feeling a bit done in to be honest, plus the light was going and there was sleet in the air. And, all right, I’m chicken.

Fear – rational or otherwise – and conflict, also the wind biting your nose, and the ever present risk of a slip, of physical injury. Yes,… like Adrienne says: Feels pretty much like being alive to me.

Yet I know the Buddhists have a point about Maya. I glimpsed it once in a brief moment of staggering awareness – that at a certain level of perception what we see and experience in the world is a mental construct, that there’s no difference between who we think we are, and what we see in the world. We are indeed “that“. But adopting this philosophical stance doesn’t make things any easier for us at the operating level of reality. We have no choice but to go with the world as we see and feel it, being bound by physical rules that restrict our ability to mentally manipulate our realities, rules that render us fragile in a world that can seem brutally impassive, rules that mean when we trap our finger in the car door, it hurts, and when we find ourselves on an ice-bound trail in the British uplands, we’re going to have to watch our step.

But this kind of thinking raises a paradox that haunts me: If I am what I’m looking at, then who are you? Since there’s nothing special about me, you must also be what you’re looking at, and if we’re both looking at the same thing, then at some unimaginable level we are the same, you and I.

I’m afraid my rather dull abilities as a philosopher won’t carry me beyond this point – how we can be both separate and unique expressions of spirit, yet also be the same. How can I look at the world, and at the same time construct it, yet do so in such a way that it makes perfect sense to you, as your world makes sense to me? There are many expressions of philosophical duality but this one beats the hell out of me. So I find myself slithering over the moors on contemplative walks, admiring the views, taking photographs and occasionally talking to myself.

Still, it’s better than fretting about the gas bill, or the price of petrol.

I made it back from the tower without incident, the only downside to the day being that the visitor center cafe was closing, and I didn’t get my bacon butty.

Damn.

Goodnight all.

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By the tarn of the Tree of Life

The rational view of life is enviably simple in its scope. It enables us to rest content in the fact that it’s an accident why we’re here, an accident we’re conscious of our selves and capable of self reflection. Equally it allows us to rest assured that mystical or spiritual enquiry is a delusion, and best left alone by all right minded material beings.

The secret to living in the rational world is very simple. We have to find a way of reconciling our screaming souls to the fact that there is no point to anything, and then to seek our pleasure in pursuit of those things that simply make us feel good: money, sex, material objects and social status. Any reassurances our ego might need can be found reflected in other people, by the degree to which they worship our virtues, a phenomenon no more accurately reflected in these modern times than in the number of  ”follows” or “friends” our Facebook, Twitter and WordPress pages we achieve.

However, though we naturally cower in deference before our magnificently – and these days expensively – “educated” materialist gurus, we all know this isn’t the best way of living at all, and that sometimes one’s screaming soul is just too articulate, pointing out to us that the more material objects we have, the more we want, and since there has to be a natural limit to what we can have, we’re never going to be happy, are we? Q.E.D. The same goes for the money and, regrettably, the sex as well. As for the pursuit of social status and Facebook adulation, well that was always going to be a sticky wicket, vulnerable to the transient moods of other people, to say nothing of our own ambivalent tendencies, veering haphazardly between shameless self-inflation and the much dreaded depression. That said, provided we can remain mindful of these cautionary caveats, the rational approach is not without its merits, not least of which is the fact that any other approach to life is even more problematic.

To abandon the rational view and think of life instead from the mystical or spiritual angle requires us to sign up to a belief, or at least a strong suspicion, that our presence in the world is not an accident, that there is a purpose to our consciousness, and our propensity for enquiry into the underlying nature of things. Adopting this approach, we become less enamoured of money, sex and material things – provided we’re not entirely without them in the first place of course – at least to the extent that they have awakened in us the realisation that the happiness they bring is short lived. And we say no! The secret to living the mystical, the spiritual life,  is,… what?

What is it?

Alas, we discover that having abandoned our rational senses, we don’t know. Indeed the more we ponder, the more we doubt we even understand the question.

But whether we understand it or not, in asking the question we become by default adepts on the road to non-material enlightenment, seekers without any clear goal, wanderers of those notoriously treacherous inner highways where we’re vulnerable to being waylaid by delusion, or the persuasive writings of charismatic charlatans, or any number of other metaphorical highwaymen. We shun the world of objects, cast off our collars and ties and dress ourselves instead in homespun rags. Perhaps we even dangle talismans around our necks and our wrists like hippies. Then we take up our staff of dubious awakening and set out along the lesser known paths into the mountainous regions we imagine others fear to tread.

Up here the air is noticeably insubstantial. The mists swirl and glower ominously, and our occasionally clear glimpses of what might be an enticingly mysterious new world are periodically consumed by vagueness, rendering all our fine philosophies – our new found virtues, our dignity, our self-confidence – as nothing,  filling our veins instead with something sour, something that saps our spirit and wraps us in the grey cloak of a cloying listlessness.

With a little luck we might still find our way to the fabled crystal tarn by which there stands the Tree of Life, its noble branches reflected in still waters. And all right, it’s just a mountain tarn, the tree nothing more than a wind-blasted hawthorn, but we’re into symbols now rather than reading the world as literally as we once did, so we can easily tell ourselves we have indeed journeyed to the mythical Tarn of the Tree of Life – and here we settle down to contemplate our navels. But in spite of our reverence, and our fledgling skills in mindfulness meditation, the wind stirs the waters denying us a reflection of anything at all but what we fear might be the twisted shades of our own stupendous delusion. It’s a cold wind too; it makes us shiver, it makes us wish we’d not thrown away that Gortex jacket, swapped it for these pitiful rags that protect nothing – least of all our dignity.

Determined to have our answers, we sit up all night, watching while the ghosts of ideas swirl in wreath-like dance upon the water, sometimes luminous, sometimes dark – but each of them equally mysterious, equally infuriatingly inscrutable. And if we’re really lucky, at some point in the slit-eyed rambling hours before dawn, we fancy we can almost remember a time when we sat here before, a time before even our parents were born, a time when we knew everything there was to know, a time when we understood there would come a time like this, a time of forgetting, when our lives would be reduced to a quest for remembrance, for the reconnection of a lost and insubstantial shard with the memory of its greater self.

And then our telephone rings, so we fish it out of our homespun shorts, and the boss is on the other end, and his grumbling is reminding us we’ll get the sack if we don’t turn up for work on time – which is the same thing as denying us our money to acquire those obligatory, glittery, material things and to maintain the leaky tub of our social status on the treacherous high-seas of a world now seriously upset. And we think: twelve thousand years of  pontificating on the finer things in life,  and here we are, reduced to nothing – indeed to less than nothing, for everywhere we look we see a world not increasingly conscious of its collective, spiritual self but rather the opposite, that we are daily slipping back into the unconscious void where we are daily plagued by demons from our own nightmares.

And we think, well,… since we were born into this material world, should we not assume instead our purpose is better sought within it than in some high falootin’ non-literal realm whose denizens seem capable only of teasing us with their infuriating symbols? So we finish the call with a heavy sigh, then take up our staff and we ram it hard into the earth to mark our presence, like a book mark, by the Tarn of the Tree of Life, and then we head back down the mountain, to the grey city, to the office, to the factory.

We punch the clock, we register our consent, our compliance to a set of values we don’t really believe in – but in the absence of anything surer what choice do we have? And maybe while we sit there clickety clicking at our computers, feeding yet more garbage-data into the materialist paradigm, it’ll come to us, the answer to the way to be, the way to fathom the shy wreaths of a more meaningful way of life.

Now and then, while we toil, we may remember how we once rammed our staff into the earth by the Tarn of the Tree of Life. But the years pass, and we wonder,…

If it could possibly still be there.

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Listening to the Universe?

So,… what’s the chicken telling me here?

I’m half way through reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love at the moment. I watched the film (twice) and enjoyed it both times, but even as I watched it, I was wondering to myself to what extent it differed from the book (which I’d not read) – because films always do that, don’t they? They miss a huge chunk of the real story out because it doesn’t fit into the cinematic way of telling things. Anyway, a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a link to You Tube of the author speaking about the writing process and the idea of the personal daemon, or muse, and was at once captivated by her wit and the marvellously easy way she was able to put across some of the very difficult concepts I’ve been wrestling with for years now:

So, after listening to that I no longer had any choice: I simply had to read the book! I found a ridiculously inexpensive Kindle edition on Amazon, and I’ve been enjoying it in snatches for about a week now.

The difference between the book and the film is perhaps no surprise (and there are some significant differences). I think the film glossed over a lot of the deep and meaningful stuff, a lot of the nitty-gritty that you just can’t get at with dialogue between photogenic characters or intimate voice-overs. You need that most timeless and basic of mediums: a page of text. You need a skilled journalist capable of peeling back the layers of themselves and one who’s capable of seeing themselves reflected in their surroundings, or rather one who is capable of reading what the universe is telling them, in a metaphorical way, simply by what’s in front of their eyes – and setting it down on paper in an accessible way, a way that makes your reader go aha!!

For those of you who don’t know, “Eat, Pray, Love” is the true story of an American journalist (Elizabeth Gilbert) whose life falls apart, and how she rebuilds it. Put simply, she does this by travelling, first to Italy, where she eats, to India, where she prays, and then to Indonesia, where she finds love. The real story is infinitely more complex than that of course, and you really need to read the book. It’s the story of a spiritual journey, a pilgrimage, and a psychological voyage into what Jungians would call the dark night of the soul.

I was thinking though that no matter how inspirational this book is to me at the moment, many of us travel through life without quite getting our lives turned to rubble. The black tide of depression comes in now and then, and washes up around our doorsteps but without quite drowning us in shit. We’re able to take shelter in the upstairs rooms for the night, but come morning, we’re just about able to stare down our demons and steer the car back in the direction of our day-jobs. We lack the intellect, the finances, the personal freedoms, or just the sheer balls to take ourselves way across to the other side of the world and immerse ourselves in something totally unfamiliar. Or it may be that we’d quite like to quit everything and devote a year of our lives to a cathartic experience of travel and inner soul searching. It may be that we think we’d really like to spend some time in an ashram in India, but,… well,… things just aren’t quite that bad, and that cataclysm we’re half expecting to overwhelm us just,… doesn’t. Not quite. So we don’t go.

Does this mean we’re not that serious about understanding our lives and our selves after all, not that serious about understanding what God is? Well, possibly, it does, but worse, does our timidity in the face of our life’s circumstances mean we are excluded from any chance of experiencing God’s grace – just because God didn’t destroy our lives and then kick us half way around the globe?

I think on this latter point the answer has to be no. Studies of religious or spiritual awakenings show they are a fairly egalitarian phenomenon – open to all. All right, the man in the street may not experience God’s presence as often nor so regularly as a genuine Yogi, but once we know how to listen, I think God or “the universe” can find all sorts of ways of getting his/its message across to us personally.

Which brings me to the rather goofy picture at the top of this post. It was raining this morning, and I was in a contemplative mood. I happened to notice a rather colourful display of late summer flowers on my patio. They were like sunshine laughing the face of the overbearing greyness of the day and I wanted to capture the mood of them through my camera lens. I know,… I keep trying this and it hardly ever works, but then sometimes you get more than you bargained for, if you can only look at things in a different way and perhaps broaden your perspective.

I was only notionally aware, as I focused in on those flowers, that I was focussing through two objects on either side, on my window-sill. They were just “foreground interest”, but I wasn’t actually interested in them in the slightest. I thought the main picture was somewhere else – like in the middle. But in the end the camera focussed itself on the raindrops on the window and blurred the flowers out, bringing my foreground into a more significant focus. The first of those foreground objects, on the left, is a rather ornate soap-stone incense burner. I use it when I’m meditating, or just chilling with a glass of wine, but its aura is undeniably one of spiritual contemplation and – well – navel gazing. On the other side of course there’s rather a cheeky chicken who’s been hanging around since Easter, never having made it back into his box in the attic, and which I can hardly look at without wanting to smile.

So, what’s the universe telling me here?

Well, you can read this many ways of course, and in some respects having a metaphorical perspective is simply a question of reading just about anything from anything. But to me it’s saying chill out Michael – don’t take yourself so seriously!

I reach for the Kindle and spend the rest of the day in the company of Elizabeth Gilbert.

Great stuff.

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Hartsop Dodd and Stony Cove Pike.

Pondering life, love, and meaning in  the Far Eastern Fells

I had a run up to the Lakes on Friday, just me and old Grumpy. I went to Hartsop, an idyllic hamlet where, in imagination at least, I spend the better part of my life in a sturdy little cottage, tending my garden – also writing, walking and pondering the meaning of it all. But in a denser level of reality known simply as “real life”, I was simply drawn back by memories of a walk I did from here twenty five years ago.

All of my Lake District walks exist outside of any normal time reference. I can remember each one as bright and shiny as the day I walked them, each sitting together in my mind in no particular order. So Hartsop Dodd and Stoney Cove Pike back in 1981, are every bit as relevant to me as that same walk last Friday, the revelations of each informing the other. The Buddhists would say I’m misguided in this, that the Michael Graeme who first passed this way in 1981 no longer exists, but I’m not so sure. I’ve only to come up here to find him again, and even across the gulf of a quarter of a century, we still recognise one another, still connect, and exchange notes.

 So, anyway… Hartsop Dodd was the first objective of the day, at just a shade over 2000 feet and about a mile away from where I parked old Grumpy, but the fells here are as steep as they get and the climb took me an hour. The weather wasn’t promising to begin with. I had rain and dark skies, and a mist that thickened as I climbed. I used to be afraid of conditions like this – the first hint of mist and wet sending me back to the mother-comfort of the valleys. But I think you’re fairly safe on the Dodd, and these days I’ve got GPS for an emergency fix if I should ever get hopelessly lost – also, while my self confidence at dealing with what I suppose I must call “society” has declined markedly as I’ve got older, here among the mountains, where I’ve only ghosts for company, I’m much less concerned now by impending disaster.

My legs were hopelessly sluggish as I made my start on the Dodd. I’d had a late night and rather too much of a potent red wine, and found it impossible to get going, but then I remember that time in ’81, I felt pretty much the same. Still, I thought years of Tai Chi training, and, more recently Kung Fu had built up the strength in my legs and the breath in my lungs like never before, but there was nothing there under the throttle on Friday. If you want to tackle the hills with a spring in your step, Michael, get and early night, and don’t drink so much.

 Anyway, as I made my pitifully slow progress, the mist began lifting ahead of me, and the rain stopped. It seemed my luck was in, so I pressed on. The landscape here is dramatically lovely from the valleys, gloriously desolate from the summits, a rough grassland speckled with crags and small tarns. There was no one else up here,… just me with my aching legs, and I was able to drop out of time, to reunite myself with that other self, the one who passed this way in ’81.

We were like brothers, I suppose, both looking for something – looking for love, I think – the kind of love that banishes an inner desolation to which I think many writers and poets at heart are prone. Back in ’81 I mistook it for human love and duly sought my cure in human places, but my older self realises that the desolation, that profound bone-deep loneliness, is a question that requires a different kind of answer, a different kind of connection. Yes, we all need human love, and I’ve been fortunate enough in finding it, but for the Romantic, human love is never going to be enough and it’s important not to confuse it with what, in the end, is a supernatural phenomenon, one that can only be found in supernatural places, places whose reflections we glimpse only at the frontiers of human influence, in the liminal zones. Seek it in life, in flesh, and you can be sure only of your own immolation and the ruin of everything you hold dear.

But what is it, this dangerous thing?

As you near the summit of Hartsop Dodd you pick up the line of an old drystone wall, which you can follow in any sort of weather, all the way to Stony Cove Pike. Your fears of going astray in the dark mists are groundless then,… there’s a reliable guide, but the way wends for ever upwards and you need strength to follow. It’s about another mile to the Pike, which sits at a shade over 2500 feet.

I caught up with the mists here. The fells rise up like a barrier between north and south and I’ve often noticed that foul weather gets held to the south while the northern valleys bask in sunshine. To the east of Stony Cove Pike, there’s a deep cutting called Threshthwaite Mouth, a dramatic pass through which the wind howls up from the south. You get drops in atmospheric pressure on the northern side of it and eerie mists forming as the air reaches dew point and the vapour precipitates out of it – classic mountain conditions that add a magical touch to the land.

My plan was to cross the mouth, a descent of some 600 ft, then up to Thornthwaite Beacon sitting atop the fells opposite Stony Cove Pike, on the other side, exactly like I’d planned in 1981.

For a while, the mists hid the depth of the mouth, also the enormity of the climb on the other side, but as I began picking my way down through the dripping, greasy rocks, the mist cleared and I was awestruck by the scale of things, also intimidated into settling for a safe descent and a return by the valley of Threshthwaite.

It came back to me as I struggled down from Stony Cove Pike, how I struggled in ’81. How my legs were like jelly by the time I reached bottom. I got crag-fast at one point. There’s a bad step on the route and I couldn’t work out a way down. But I’d committed myself to such an extent I could’t work out a way back up either. The pack was bulging with my wet-weather gear, and my walking poles, stowed on the back of it were grinding against the rock as I flattened myself against it for security. It was ridiculous; there is no bad step on this route, or least Fell-Meister Wainwright was never bothered enough by it to consider it worth a mention. Eventually, I worked out that it was just a question of dropping the sack six feet and hoping the camera didn’t break, then sliding off and hoping I’d enough spring in my knees to catch myself at the bottom without breaking a leg. I’ve had scarier moments in the fells,… but not many.

I made it in one piece, but felt suddenly very old and slow. Surely at one time I would have been down here like a rat down a drainpipe. It was enough. The mists enclosed Thornthwaite Crag, and the thought of that massive ascent was too much, so I turned north, and headed for the decent into Threshthwaite Cove.

What is it? This sense of desolation. Where does it come from?

Your first steps northwards from the mouth reveal desolation aplenty in the stupendous sweep of the cove. This is a world of inaccessible black crag, and coarse, acid grassland, frequented only by the hardy Herdwicks. It’s horrific in its scale and makes you focus in on little things, anything to give your universe a more benign face. I found several such things on the way down: a rock, a wind-blasted tree, a sparkle on the waters of Pasture Beck, and I photographed each one, playing with the exposures to give the right amount of contrast and framing them with an eye for the golden composition. But looking back at those pictures now I realise I failed to capture it. My pictures are pathetic, and I see in them now only what they appear to be on the surface: a rock, a wind-blasted tree, a sparkle on the waters of Pasture Beck. What I felt then, last Friday, as I descended on aching legs and bore witness to these things, whatever it was that granted me redemption in this wilderness,… came from inside of me.

There were ghosts here. I’d been inviting their company since setting out that morning, because I like talking to them, but they were keeping their distance. I wondered if it was my fault, if I was too agitated, too tired or if they felt I was simply too full of myself. I’d see them as a shadow off in the periphery of my vision, something moving but, when I turned to welcome them, they’d morph into a tree or a rock. I felt one take my arm for a moment, but she was a silly, light headed thing and didn’t have much to say for herself, except that I should forgive her silliness and take myself less seriously too, or I would never find it.

 But what is it?

What is the meaning of life? It’s a strange question. Does there have to be any meaning? There may not be of course, and the evidence of all the rational philosophies tells us that any talk of meaning is simply a delusion born out of a fear of death. Still, I’d like to think there is a meaning, but for all of my research, the nearest I can get to it is that our lives are a quest. We are navigating a way through our respective isolation, our personal wilderness, looking for things that reveal our connection with something, with it, We are looking for things that dissolve the desolation and make us feel deeply loved, deeply touched by the value of our apparently isolated and meaningless self, amid such epic vastness as the universe seems to present.

So,… this meaning,… You cannot buy it. It does not bear a label, and you will not find it in another person, nor in a place, no matter how holy. Like my ghosts, what it is is an aspect of our own nature, our own being. What we see when we look out at the world in this way is an image of our own self staring back at us.

Twenty five years ago, I hadn’t read a single book on metaphysics. I would have laughed at the thought of consulting the I Ching, or seeking the answer to life in the aphorisms of Lao Tzu. Maybe back then I thought the highest form of love was to be found in the soft valley of a sympathetic woman’s breasts. But I also descended the valley of Threshthwaite that day with my heart aching, aching for an unspoken and disembodied love, a love I saw reflected in the subjective details of this timeless desolation. I was aware of something other, something underlying the world.

 And now?

Now I’m older and I’m thinking the sages are right. The answer to life’s greatest mystery, isn’t really a mystery at all and the truth’s been known for hundreds, indeed probably for thousands of years, since the first conscious men and women sat down and looked seriously inside of themselves. What they found in there beggars belief, but you can’t just take their word for it and it’s no use them telling you about it anyway because it’s a thing so extraordinary it’s impossible to grasp it intellectually. You have to travel the miles, undertake the quest, weather the decades of your life,… the mists, the storms, the glorious summers, and the bitter winters, and then you begin to realise they weren’t mad, or that maybe you’ve finally become as mad as they, or at least mad enough to accept that there is no it, in so far as it is something separate from yourself. You come to realise that you are it, and it is you. And it’s a simple step, then, to the ultimate realisation that you are what you are looking at. And the biggest miracle of all is that while I am it, so are you. You are it too, you see, which means at some fundamental level of reality that’s impossible for me to grasp, we are the same, you and I.

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Picture perfect?

July. High summer. Already the solstice is a memory and the year is rushing headlong, glossing over details I really wanted to linger on for fear of missing something important. The garden’s looking shaggy after weeks of wet, and I really need to mow except I can’t seem to find a period when it’s dry enough and I’ve stopped working for long enough to get around to it. As for other matters, Old Grumpy needs new tyres, but I can’t seem to find the time to get to the garage, and I’ve just had the renewal notice on the motor insurance – gone up 50% this year, so I’m going to have to shop around again, because the differences in premiums are huge at the moment. Everyone wants a piece of you and they’re hoping you’re just too overwhelmed with the nagging details of your life, or that you’ve been pummelled into such a state of fatalistic apathy you won’t bother to challenge them and you’ll just pay up because you’ve been conditioned into accepting that things can’t be anything other than really, really bad right now. Right? Wrong,…  It’s a pain of course, and it’s with a sort of reluctant determination I add this item to my list of things to do.

We’re all the same of course, trying to keep pace with that endless list of chores, a list that occasionally gains on us so fast we feel in danger of finally having to accept our total inadequacy, our complete unfitness to live in the modern world, that what the world need us to be is a kind of machine in order to match its own machine-like demands.

But we are not automatons, s0 when you start to feel overwhelmed this way you should take it as a signal that you need to hold things at bay for a while. Take a breath. Push that list of chores into the periphery because its self- important triviality is beginning to hide the deeper truth of who and what you are. This truth is a vision of the world that needs time to cultivate and an inner eye to see.  And the eye sees nothing in the wearing of old Grumpy’s tyres, nor in the saving of a hundred pounds on your car insurance. These are material things, and as such a form of madness, as much as they are maddening to have to deal with. They are the faintly disgusting froth caught in the eddying currents of  a silty brown river, a river rendered thick and sluggish for want of the clarifying charm of any sense of a higher purpose - a charm visible only to the human part of you, because its nature is divine and you were made to know it when you saw it.

<At this point the spontaneous flow of my words is interrupted by my laptop suddenly switching itself off. So I reboot, and contemplate in disbelief the blank Wordpad page, wondering if what I had to say was that important anyway – or at least important enough to warrant the effort of reconstructing it piece by piece from a memory rendered sluggish by too many late nights. We decide it is, and continue>

Where were we? Higher purpose?

What I’m building up to is that I saw it briefly yesterday, in an unsuspecting corner of my garden – one I neglect because it seems to be able to take care of itself – and I’m not aiming for a manicured look or anything. It’s impossible to describe this thing, but it comes as a glimpse of something “inner”, a thing hinted at by the way the light falls upon it and in the mysterious pattern of things. It contains a warmth and a certainty of purpose one cannot put into words. It is a quality, the ghost of something divine drifting through and you only know it by the way it feels. It is a moment of pure Zen.

And all right, on a certain level is was only my gardening gloves and my clippers, but foolishly, I ran inside for my camera, thinking I would take a picture of it – this miraculous thing. The batteries were flat. I found fresh ones. There was no memory card in the camera – it was in my other camera, whose batteries were also flat. So I recovered the card, slotted it in place and returned to that little unkempt corner of my garden. Miraculously, the light was the same, the pattern of things the same, so I took my picture, but of course the quality had gone and it was after all of that just a picture of my gardening gloves and my clippers. I would have been better lingering a while longer in its company than rushing off, thinking I could capture it for all time – when I know such things are transient, fleeting, unpredictable,… and invisible to anything but the inner eye.

Never mind. At least it seems I’m still capable of seeing things in a human way – possibly also slightly mad. Never mind. Let’s have a coffee.  We’ll sort that car insurance out tomorrow.

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Carl Jung on birth, life and death.

Thinking along the lines of nature?

In an interview for the BBC, broadcast in 1959, Carl Jung, the Swiss depth psychologist was asked this, by his interviewer John Freeman: “I remember that you’ve said death is just as psychologically important as birth and like it is an integral part of life, but surely it can’t be like birth if it’s an end, can it?”

Jung’s reply was astonishing to me, and confirmed in my mind  at least the validity of my own emerging world view, or at least granted me the necessary permission to go on developing my personal philosophy along the lines it seemed to be wanting to go.

Jung  replied: Yes, if it is an end, and there we are not quite certain,… about this end, because, you know there are these peculiar faculties of the psyche; that it isn’t entirely confined to space and time; you can have dreams, or visions of the future; you can see around corners, and such things. Only ignorants deny these facts, you know? It is quite evident that they do exist and have existed always. Now, these facts show that the psyche in part at least is not dependent upon these,.. confinements. And then what?

When the psyche is not under that obligation to live in time and space alone, and obviously, it doesn’t, then in to that extent the psyche is not submitted to those laws, and that means a practical continuation of life, of a sort of psychical existence, beyond time and space.

Jung is telling us that there’s more to the mind than the narrow view materialist science suggests. He tells us that the mind is more than the brain, that the psyche is more than an illusion brought on by an accumulation of memory and environmental programming. The evidence for this, not only from modern times, but from all the ages past, is compelling – that the mind is capable of  existing in, if not exactly a place, then some form of psychical medium external to time and space, which is at any rate outside of our heads and independent of our biological being.

John Freeman, presses Jung on this point, seeking perhaps to winkle out the actual beliefs of Jung himself: “Do you,  yourself  believe that death is probably the end, or do you believe,..”

Jung cut in: “Well,… I can’t say – you see, the word ‘belief’ is a difficult thing for me. I don’t ‘believe’; I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing,… and when I know it, I don’t need to believe it. If,… I,… I don’t allow myself, for instance, to believe a thing just for sake of believing it. I can’t believe it! But when there are sufficient reasons for a certain hypothesis, I shall accept these reasons, naturally. And shall say: ‘We have to reckon with the possibility of so and so. You know?’

Jung has no use for the term “belief”,then,  because it implies the holding of certain things to be true, when one does not have good reason for it. Jung views were more than beliefs,  they were backed up by his own observations which gave him sufficient reason for forming what he saw as a perfectly reasonable hypothesis regarding at least some form of the psychical continuation of life, after death.

Freeman continues:

“Well,… now you told us that we should regard death as being a goal, and to stray away from it is to evade life, and life’s purpose. What advice would you give to people in their later life to enable them to do this when most of them must, in fact, believe that death is the end of everything?”

Jung:  “Well,… you see, I have treated many old people, and its quite interesting to watch what their conscious is doing with the fact that it is apparently threatened with the complete end. It disregards it.  Life behaves as if it were going on,… and so I think it is better for old people to live on,… to look forward to the next day, as if he had to spend centuries,… and then he lives happily. But when he is afraid,…. and he doesn’t looks forward, he looks back, he petrifies,  he gets stiff, and he dies before his time.  But when he’s living on, looking forward to the great adventure that is ahead, then he lives. And that is about what your conscious is intending to do. Of course it is quite obvious that we’re all going to die and this is the sad finale of everything, but never-the-less, there is something in us that doesn’t believe it, apparently, but this is merely a fact, a psychological fact. Doesn’t mean to me that it proves something. It is simply so. For instance, I may not know why we need salt, but we prefer to eat salt too because we feel better. And so when you think in a certain way, you may feel considerably better. And I think if you think along the lines of nature, then you think properly.”

What Jung means by this last bit isn’t quite as clear, and it strikes me as settling back a bit, and straddling the fence compared with his earlier, more visionary statements. Psychologically at least, he’s telling us we are better to disregard the fact of death as an end, that his observations suggest we are programmed this way, and the worst thing we should do is go against our instincts, against our nature and assume that death is an end, and fear one’s annihilation, because then you bring on the infirmities of old age, become prisoner to them, and die before your time. Those who disregard it, live normally, and fully. But then Jung tells us this does not prove anything in itself, only that by thinking along these lines, you feel better.

It is more natural to think of ourselves as immortal. Maybe it’s an evolutionary quirk that people who delude themselves this way are able to live longer, and that’s all there is to it. Or,…

This interview reminds me why Jung is such a significant influence over my thoughts and my work.

You can see this interview over on Youtube here:

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Behave yourself and never mind the rest

The true nature of reality?

Human reality may be exactly what it appears to be: a fragile existence on a rock in space, a speck of life born out of a biological accident, with all our self-conscious ramblings on the meaning of it amounting to nothing when the bag of bones we think of as our body finally quits on us. I may be wrong, but I imagine few of us are comfortable with this idea. Speaking for myself, if that’s the point of it, then it might as well be done with now as at some point in the future and I’d rather my genetic material found some other way of furthering its greedy existence without dragging me along after it and making me think I’m important when I’m not.

Fortunately I’ve come to believe there’s more to things than this, and my voyages into the greyer areas of reality have led to a more positive and optimistic outlook, rather than a negative one. And that’s without getting into religion.

A certain kind of psychologist will smile sagely at all our fanciful musings and tell us we are unconsciously afraid of death and would rather not face the pointlessness of life, so we invent scenarios in which “magic” becomes a part of our reality, thereby granting us the deluded notion of an escape route – reincarnation, heavenly realms, or some other form of personal psychical continuation of life after death. Magical, mysterious mysticism is thus demoted to the level of a childish coping-mechanism.

In my case,  there’s nothing unconscious about it – of course I fear death and I agree speculation on the magical or mysterious aspects of reality may be a coping-mechanism. If so, they are a very effective one  because I feel better about myself and my place in the universe when I explore these things.  I’m also convinced there’s more to them than wishful thinking.

There’s more to my conviction than deluded zeal, as anyone of an open and enquiring mind can surely testify. There are many clues that suggest the nature of reality isn’t so hard and cold as the materialists tell us. In fact its edges are fuzzy, and you don’t need to be religious to find them. I might even go so far as to say a religious perspective is the last thing that’s going to help you. In religion we say our lines, we conform to the group-speak, consider ourselves holier than the Jones’ if we go to church more often than they do, or we feel guilty if they go more than we. As for belief, well,  we trust the vicar knows what he’s talking about and leave it at that. That’s religion. But, if you want to know, really know then you have to blow the dust off the history of the world and you have to examine the experiences of ordinary people.

A certain kind of biologist will tell you the mind – the thing that makes you think you are you – is  confined to that lumpen grey organ called the brain and when the brain stops working, the illusion of you vanishes without a trace. This is the conventional view. It’s a safe position to hold, but when you start to dig you realise the truth is more complicated. A century of study has yielded a tidal wave of evidence that tells us the mind extends beyond the brain, that it can sometimes see around corners. It seems there really is such a thing as ESP, and people sometimes really do experience moments of precognition, and moments of heightened awareness in which time dissolves and all things become one  – like the mystics tell us.

But nothing in this fuzzy realm is certain. ESP can only be demonstrated as a general effect in a large group of people, but when it comes to specific individuals, ESP is difficult to reproduce on demand. It exists, but it cannot be reliably demonstrated in front of a body of hardened skeptics aiming at the gold standard of a peer reviewed publication. The same goes for precognition and so called mystical experiences: they cannot be dialled up, nor paraded for inspection.

What use is it then? We know these things exist, but for all practical purposes, they might as well not.

For me it’s enough we are given the occasional glimpse behind the curtain, for the reassurance it grants us that the cold, hard, physical reality we see is not everything there is. Personally I’d rather not live in a world where magical things are the stuff of every day experience. I don’t want others to know routinely what is inside my head because, like the contents of my diary, I would fear their misinterpretation. Similarly, I would not like the ability to see inside of yours, for fear your thoughts might be hurtful to me.

The most I think we can say for certain is that there is more to the mind than the brain. If we go one step further, we could also speculate, with some justification, that the mind’s ability to exceed it’s apparent biological boundaries suggests it might also capable of some form of psychical existence independent of them. What that tells us about the nature of reality, or the survival of the personality after death is anyone’s guess. Beyond this point the speculation becomes ever more tenuous, and we risk falling over the fuzzy edge of reality into a void that is impregnable to the human intellect – and where our only recourse is to invent stories.

So far as our personal, tangible, non-fuzzy reality is concerned, it seems to be defined by the choices we make. Whether those choices will lead us to happiness or to misery is very much dependent upon what our motives are when we make the choices. A certain kind of thinking will lead us towards a happier and more contented kind of life. Material circumstances are irrelevant: we might be rich, we might be poor, but material wealth is not a goal in itself, and story books are full of moral tales that teach us how its pursuit can lead to personal ruin if we’re not in firm control of ourselves in other ways first. So, while the true nature of reality remains largely hidden from us, there is a feeling the best way of approaching it is to discover what that “certain kind of thinking is”, and to practice it.

Like many of my generation, I’ve come at this down a long, rocky road, through the distilled essence of three thousand years of eastern philosophy, dimly grasped but enough I think to shine a light into my own little corner of the world. I can hazard a guess then at what that certain kind of thinking is, and when I’m struggling I have the eccentric option of consulting the I Ching – which usually puts me straight. For many of course this will seem barking mad. It’s just my way though, and you must find your own. But however we come at it, you can take all the words that were ever written on this subject and disregard them because a lady called Beatrix Potter summed it up long ago in this delightful quote:

“All outward forms of religion are almost useless and are the causes of endless strife. Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself and never mind the rest.”

You heard the lady. Just be congnisant of the fact that there’s something there.  It’s intentions are benign, and beyond that you don’t need to think about it much at all. Just behave yourself and never mind the rest. Behaving yourself is the tricky part of course, and working out what it means is possibly the one thing you were were born to do.

Graeme out.

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Big Mind is watching you?

In the summer of 2000, I was walking in the English Lakes, in a beautiful area called the Newland’s Valley. I’d recently extricated myself from a peculiar episode of neurotic anxiety that had lasted for a year. It had left me inwardly changed in some way I couldn’t define, but for now all I knew is that whatever shadow had been stalking me was gone and I could go about my business like an ordinary human being again, instead of a potential basket-case. I’d completed a longish walk called the Dale Head round and was on the homeward leg, barely a mile from the car and a hot cup of tea. My feet were burning, my legs were aching but otherwise I felt okay. It had been a good walk, a good day. Then I happened to look up at the view, and what had begun as a successful hike was transformed suddenly into one of the most remarkable experiences of my life.

I was looking at the shapely cone of a hill called Scope End, except I wasn’t exactly looking at it. What seemed to have happened was that although I was still aware of myself on the track, still aware of this bag of bones looking at Scope end, my perception had widened to the extent that my consciousness now included both my self and what I was looking at. Scope End and me, or for that matter the whole of that beautiful scene, that beautiful day, were the same thing. There was also the sense of a bigger mind behind my mind, a mind that was really my authentic self, a self which had known all along that there was no difference between me and what I was looking at,… only my smaller, every day self had forgotten this. It was like waking from a deep sleep to the realisation of who you really are. What I felt at this moment was the most profound sense of love. I was wrapped in it, carried aloft in it. It was a love I’d spent my whole life knowing was out there somewhere, yet had never quite succeeded in experiencing.

The whole thing lasted for no more than a few seconds. It was just a glimpse of something, but in the end I was afraid of it and at the first rippling of that fear I was delivered back into my old self and my old sense of separateness was restored.

Now, there are many rational explanations for what had happened. Part of me dismissed it as nothing more than a bit of a “funny do”. More technical explanations might include the possibility that I had experienced a sudden overdose of adrenaline, a kind of runner’s high. I’ve never indulged in recreational drugs so I cannot say it was like being “stoned” but there were certain elements of euphoria and a sense of the limitlessness of my own consciousness that others, more familiar with these substances have reported.

What do you do after an experience like that? Well, strange as it might sound, you do your best to  convince yourself you imagined it, that it was not real. To some extent this is easy: you go home, you clean the mud off your boots, you wash the dishes, take out the dustbin, and you mow the lawn. Our daily lives require a certain pragmatism if we’re not to go completely off the rails, and amid the grind it’s possible to dismiss the most remarkable of things as being of little account. Almost.

It may be a coincidence, but around the time of that experience my attitudes began to shift decidedly to the left. It was a classic mid-life thing. Up to that point I’d been measuring things in strictly rational terms, searching for the meaning of life in the mathematics of Newton, which was a fairly forlorn hope, but as an engineer with a mechanical background, Newton was considered perfectly capable of solving any of the problems I was likely to encounter. Things were changing though – maybe it was my last near crack up, a seismic shift in my unconscious manifesting itself as a tsunami, washing though my mind, and laying waste to a lot of the ideas I’d formerly held in such high regard.

I began to read Jung, I began to study of the I Ching, and was gradually seduced by various eastern philosophies. None of these were rational things and I had to keep quiet about them because I was still, on the surface at least, a rational kind of guy. In my reading of eastern ideas, I came upon descriptions that fitted perfectly my experience with Scope End that day. It was what certain sects of Buddhism might have called “one taste” and all of this began to confirm to my own satisfaction that what had occurred that day was indeed what it had felt like at the time: a direct experience of something greater than my own self. Moreover, I learned that these states are common and accessible to all human beings. They can be reached systematically by long years of dedicated practice in the meditative arts, or, every now and then, they can be blundered into by chance. And that’s what had happened to me.

So, like I said before, what do you do with it? Well, not very much because it turns out that no matter how much you manage to convince yourself it was real, there’s always at least a grain of doubt that keeps you grounded. Was it “one taste” or was it just the natural “adrenaline high” of a guy who’d walked too far that day? At the most, what it does is loosen up your grip a little. It makes you begin to doubt most of what you’ve ever trusted to be real. You still need to get up at 7:00 am to go to work, the dinner things still need washing up, and the lawn still needs mowing, but inbetween these things you sit down and you begin to wonder just what it is that’s holding it all together.

Eventually the works of Carl Jung lead to the works of those who followed him, to the Humanist Psychologists, to present day Transpersonal Psychology, which leads to people like Ken Wilber, who, like Jung, I understand perhaps about one word in every ten, but the tone of him resonates with a singular sweetness. Trans-personal Psychology tempts you into sampling all manner of weird stuff, like channelling for example, and so you discover the work of supposed discarnate entities like Seth who tell you that you tend to attract those things that reinforce your own preconceptions of the world. So maybe I’m only attracted to Wilber because he seems to talk sense in terms of my own distorted vision of things. And then some genius invented this thing called the Internet where another thing called Google lives and Google can find you information on absolutely anything that anyone on the planet has ever thought about and you quickly realise there are more ideas about the nature of reality than you can possibly take in, and where your only filter for authority is in the quality of the spelling and the grammar.

So you turn back on yourself, on your own experience of life, which is all anyone really has to go on, and you remind yourself that your own dreams have revealed a strangeness to the meaning of space time. Although you do your best to overlook this fact, you know you have dreamed of events that have subsequently happened – suggesting you must have known all along these things were going to happen but had somehow forgotten, in the same way you forgot that you’re the same as whatever it is you’re looking at. There is, you tell yourself, a strangeness to the world that was not mentioned in your days at Wigan Tech, when they were telling you about Newton – because it’s such a fickle thing you can’t pin it down and, though it might be true, it’s about as useful in practical terms as the delusion that the skeptics take it for. So does it matter that it’s there when really all you should be thinking of is that  the bills need paying, and the recycling needs sorting, and you still haven’t  got a washer for that leaky tap?

But once you’ve pulled the stopper out of the bottle, and released the genie – it takes a special kind of charm to coax him back in, and I’ve not managed it – don’t want to – because even though this genie is a fickle and oftentimes mischievous character and as substantial as smoke, he doesn’t half tell some interesting tales . So, in between the chores, or maybe even while you’re sitting in the car in a traffic jam, in the half light of dawn, on your way to work,  you wonder that if you’d dreamed of yourself having an accident, could you alter the course of things by taking a different route into work next day? You ponder the old “free will” thing and console yourself with the fact that the dream was merely pointing out the probabilities. Some things come true, while others don’t. Your life, you tell yourself, might be spread across an infinite number of possible scenarios. In one scenario you might be married to a Hollywood actress, while in another you might even be that Hollywood actress. You consider how the universe might split itself into any number of possible scenarios every time you have to make a choice, and agree that it would answer a lot of the paradoxes, but boy does it complicate  things!

And then Google tells you about the works of people, like the admirable Ron Pearson, who says: hang on: it’s really much simpler than all of that. We really do live in a three dimensional universe that exists in linear time, and you think: Thank God for that because, for a moment there, I thought I was about to go insane, lost in this sea of infinite possibility, of infinite universes, and a place where there is no such thing as time. But then you come to Dean Radin, and Google links you over to his lectures on You Tube, and you are reminded of the calm, authoritative voice who talked you through Newton’s laws of motion at Wigan Tech, except this same voice is now showing you the experimental data you weren’t shown in Mechanics level 5, that proves things like ESP and precognition are actually true, and not just the figments of a fevered imagination. Jung said in 1961 that we can sometimes see round corners, that it was perfectly well known, and it was only ignorance that denied these things. Fifty years later we still can’t get a handle on how we do it, or what it means, and the ignorance Jung spoke of seems more organised.

Now the kids are whining because you’ve forgotten to give them their pocket money, and you remember you’ve scratched the glass screen on your iPod and you’re frustrated because it’s still fairly new and you didn’t want the shininess to have rubbed off it yet. And you get the feeling  the people who remain skeptical of the strangeness of life are the ones who are barking mad, and its the calm, quiet, probing, and eminently sensible voices of the Dean Radin’s of this world who are the sane ones. And you wonder for the hundredth time what it means to you, to this, your life that’s ticking slowly towards its only certain conclusion. And it makes you wonder why that big mind you felt, way back in the summer of 2000, should have wanted to create this particular illusion of separateness for itself – I mean, what does it expect to learn when all my life seems to be about is tearing down the facade that separates us. Should I leave it alone? Should I not seek too soon a reunion with whatever the big-mind is? Should I just get on with this, my simple life, which it seems content simply to watch?

But what can it possibly learn from me? When I drove past my local filling station this morning I felt a rising sense of disillusionment, when even though the price of oil on the world market has fallen to an all time low, the fuel companies seem to want to push the price at the pumps back up to the pound a litre mark. Compared with the feeling of big-love that big-mind exudes, the price of petrol is trivial, stupid, banal. What does big-mind learn form that? And if, as I was once led to believe, there is no difference between me and the shapely cone of Scope End, there is, by inference, no difference between me and the greasy petrol pump selling its extortionate fuel. Big-mind created both the extortionate scenario and the personal outrage. But to what purpose?

And then you remember it’s Sunday night, you’ve just swigged down the last of the wine, you’re possibly a little tipsy and you’ve got another week of nine to five ahead of you. As you turn out the light and shuffle off to bed you know you’ll never figure it out, and when you settle back onto the pillow and breathe out, you wish you could have your old life back, the one in which there’s no such thing as Big-Mind and where Newton was the only guru you were ever likely to need.

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Searching for the meaning of our lives

I was sitting alone at a table at what was Alexander’s Brasserie, in Southport, one sunny Saturday afternoon. Those of you who knew this little place will perhaps share with me the memory of its unusual allure – a French cafe in Wayfarer’s, a beautifully glazed Victorian arcade just off the strangely Parisian boulevard of Southport’s Lord street. It was, for long time, a favourite little refuge of mine, vaguely foreign and yet at the same time easily familiar, somewhere to slip sideways,… to sit aloof from the crowd and yet be positioned curiously in their midstream.

My attitude that afternoon was not gloomy, nor was it entirely introspective. Indeed for a good hour I spun out my Omelette de Maison and my dainty Espresso thinking of nothing but the crowds that passed me by.

The cafe had a seating area under the high glass of the arcade, a sort of enclosure fenced off from the casual shoppers who carousel endlessly around it,… and who perhaps unwittingly provide one of its attractions. If you sit down for long enough in a place like that they say you will see the whole of life pass before your eyes. This is a strange notion, and at first quite puzzling. I’ve always understood it to mean that if you look closely enough you will see a metaphor for every possible aspect of life,… no answers perhaps,… just carefully phrased questions that will cause you to ponder your own place in the scheme of things. And this, I guess, is the allure of watching people.

I was aware, naturally, of the girls and their fashions – the bright peacocks of our kind. And to be sure, many a shapely body passed me by that afternoon, but where my eyes would once have rested with discreet admiration, I was suddenly aware only of the transience of youth. It’s perhaps a regrettable, but fairly obvious truth that the pert bottom of today’s teenaged girl will inevitably become the wrinkled buttock of tomorrow’s older woman.

There is a transience to our being which makes a nonsense out of what popular western culture teaches us to perceive as being beautiful and desirable, when it is but a snapshot of a point in time that cannot possibly be sustained. This is the culture of youth, of celebrity and the glossy media, and no lasting happiness can ever be gained from its pursuit. Indeed the only logical result of the adoration of these values is a permanent anxiety for their impending loss.
Ladies might seek to remedy their saggy bottoms with painful and expensive surgery and so prolong the illusion of their beauty well beyond their middle age. But it is entirely natural that such pertness should fade,.. and I believe we would do better to become more accepting of it.
So began the train of my thoughts that singular Saturday afternoon. And then as if reacting violently to this awakening, my thoughts at once leaped to the consideration of the opposite end of the scale, to those individuals popular culture would have us believe are no longer beautiful, those whose condition, it might be suggested, is not at all desirable. And this again is strange, for theirs is a condition to which we are all inevitably bound.
I’m speaking of the many old folks, stiffer, more angular, their gait not so graceful and the truth of their forms hidden under clothing designed more with practicality in mind than the exhibition of attributes they no longer possess. Some of them seemed to shuffle with eyes disconcertingly dulled by their lives. Then there were the rotund, scowling old dears with a permanent metaphorical grip on their frail husbands’ earlobes – husbands who’s industry-tired bodies seemed transparent, and bent, and wasted.
I searched those aged eyes for anything that might betray a secret knowledge, a knowledge that was perhaps gained only from the long experience of life itself, but I saw nothing. There was certainly no ethereal glow born of enlightenment and indeed there was in fact nothing to tell me that what I observed was anything more than an all to graphic illustration of the frailty of mankind, and the futility of our struggle in the face of nature.
From the time of pert bottoms, it seemed, there lay only a brief fluttering of angst before there loomed fragility and death. No, the meaning of our lives lay not in the contemplation of our physical condition, nor in the joys of our flesh. That was too fleeting a phenomenon for it to have any genuine relevance in the cosmic scheme of things.
Now this was really troubling because since the dawn of time there have been learned men who spoke of enlightenment – men whose mighty intellects have scoured the words of every age and culture for a magic formula. So what was it? Where was the fruit of their labour?
Of course no formula has ever been found, at least no serum to be injected en mass in order to induce a grand, collective enlightenment,… and those powerful intellects go the way of all flesh, eventually unfulfilled and, one might suspect, ultimately unenlightened. So the busy chase of learning was just as futile,… unless of course these scholars were tight lipped about their discoveries and took their secrets with them. But that seemed equally unlikely for in all the ages past, you’d think at least one of them would have blabbed it out: the secret to the meaning of our lives.
Then, added to the swirling carousel of life, there came families, their children in various stages of development, from blubbery babes in cumbersome buggies to the bright, alert eyes of pre-teen children, testing every nerve, every shred of patience of their middle aged parents. This was familiar ground for me,… these harassed mothers and fathers, always tired, a little unkempt due to having insufficient time for themselves, or even for each other – the complete sacrifice of one’s self for the creation of new life! I saw no ethereal glow in their eyes, only tiredness and the tight lined grimaces of a permanently simmering anger.
In my more cynical moments I have wanted to gather the pert bottoms and point out to them the disheveled parents who seem the only logical conclusion to the attractiveness of youth and the urge to partake of the pleasures of the flesh. Such is life, I’d say, and certainly it had begun to seem more and more like a process as ruthless and as cold as evolution. Was there no solace? Was there no profound satisfaction to be had even in the rearing of children? Well – and I speak from experience here – while it is true that in parenthood we discover an unselfish and instinctive love for our children, it is a love that we pay for in a currency that demands the negation of desire, clarity of thought, and contemplation of one’s self.
It did not seem altogether hopeful then, although I remained optimistic that a face would eventually present itself, however fleetingly, a face which, by look or gesture would convey a vital essence, a key that would unlock the riddle I had lately come to ponder: the true meaning of this carousel of life.
I saw a priest and my attention was at once arrested by his silvery white hair as he swept by. There was a stately grace in his movements which might have suggested an inkling of something, but the eyes cannot lie, and in them I saw as much self absorption, as much self doubt, and human pettiness as in the rest of us. Many would have turned to such a man, I thought, and no doubt he could have offered much in terms of ritual prayer, but for an old agnostic like me it was not a salve I needed, but a solution.
A waitress busied herself among the empty tables and obliged me with a friendly smile. She was very young and very pretty, with platinum blonde hair worn with all the natural softness of her youth. In another light she might have passed for the most desirable of women, but I guessed she was only sixteen or seventeen, her waitressing but a weekend job, and a break from her studies. In her face I saw promise and warmth, and hope. I saw a setting out and guessed she would not be waiting on tables when I next visited that cafe.
My own setting out had been like that, I thought, a sense of promise and hope, yet though I could not complain at the way my life had unfolded, my life had provided none of the answers I had sought for so long, and yielded instead only one vexed question after the other.
Perhaps in another thirty years the girl would be a woman sitting at this table pondering the slowly shuffling carousel of passers by, and where would I be then? Would I would be grey and transparent? Would I be a metaphor of another stage in life: the man who’d searched for something but gave up because he couldn’t find it,… or came to realise it wasn’t there at all?
Oh, how I hoped that would not be the case! Certainly, I would grow old and grey and bent – in simple biological terms, that was pretty much the best I could hope for – but I did not like to think of her eyes resting upon me and reading nothing. I would have liked to think she could look at me and realise that, yes, her life meant something,… that something in my eyes would betray the evidence of a deeper level to human experience, a level that the experience of my own life had revealed to me. And from that brief glimpse perhaps she might have gained a measure of encouragement, that the transience of her life, the fading of her youth, and the spreading of her cellulite did not exclude her from experiencing a profound understanding,… an understanding worth the searching and the living, and the dying for.
It had not been an expensive trip to Southport, which was unusual. Whenever I went with my family we always seemed to amass a weighty collection of carrier bags – metaphors themselves of the curious condition of our lives, the weight,.. the restriction, the sense of burden that our accrued goods instill.
My purchases that day were modest. All I’d bought in fact was a slim second-hand volume of poems from Broadhursts, the antiquarian booksellers, on Market Street. It was an anthology, a collection of verse written by members of the British armed forces at the time of the Second World War. It had cost me only a few pounds and yet it had granted me the priceless feeling of flight, of travelling light, of Zen-like simplicity and escape from those other burdened shoppers weighed down by their purchases, and by their lives.
What I would find in the book I did not yet know because for now it lay unopened at the side of my coffee cup. Its plain brown dust jacket and the wartime economy of its construction betrayed no particular flavour of its contents. And what could a book tell me anyway? If there was a book, a magical book that contained the formula of enlightenment, then surely it would be well known.
I did not even know what it was that had possessed me to buy it, other than its apparent contradictions – the idea that amid the horror and the filth of war, the human spirit could still find a voice, and resort to the uncommon and eternal beauty of poetry. It was a connection, I suppose, and lately I had grown fond of connections, fond of the idea of meaningful coincidences.
“Can I take your plate?”
It was the waitress, smiling again. The light in her eyes impressed me, for so many of our youths these days seem barely conscious, performing their movements without thought or enthusiasm, as if they’ve glimpsed the future in their dreams and it fails to animate them.
I thanked the girl and, with the plate gone from my little table, I was then able to slide the book in front of me and contemplate it properly. The dust jacket was in good condition, the book itself also undamaged. To a collector such things are important I suppose, but to a mere reader they can sometimes instill a sense of unease. The book had not been read much in the sixty years since its publication. Indeed it looked like it had lain undisturbed on shelves, possibly also behind sliding glass, its little poems, its slices of emotion unknown, untasted. Was this because they were not worth the effort? Or was it just that no one else had taken the time?
I’ve always liked poetry, though I do not always understand it. My taste in it is simple – some might say simplistic. I prefer the rhyme and rhythm of the verses I learned at Primary School – The Tyger Tyger and The Listeners, and The Land Where The Bong Tree Grows. Indeed some of the messages and fine emotion woven into the twiddly verse of our more revered poets, peppered as they are with unpronounceable names from classical antiquity, I find altogether too intimidating, too tedious. Nor do I understand the jarring brashness of contemporary work, which irritates me deeply, and which I always feel is sneering at my staidness and my stupidity.
I took a tentative flick through the book. There was rhyme and rhythm, and plain words. It seemed we would get on well! A closer look now revealed poems that dealt with battle, with death, with the Blitz, with thoughts on leave from the battlefront, on returning to units in far flung places. But two things immediately struck me as being of perhaps more value. These were not the types of puerile verse that dealt with the death-or-glory fantasy of war, nor did they expound nobly on its futility, but merely its matter of fact reality, and the emotions it aroused in the hearts of the whole spectrum of people who bore witness to it. Secondly it struck me that few of those people who contributed to the volume would actually have described themselves as professional poets. They were ordinary souls, taken from this carousel of life, put into uniform and sent out to do extraordinary things, to face extraordinary situations, including the possibility of their own death.
The poems were slices through the hearts of people, just like the ones milling around in the Wayfarer’s arcade on that Saturday afternoon. I closed the book and looked up at those people now with renewed interest. It was not much of a revelation I suppose, but of course each of those pairs of eyes on that shuffling carousel came with its own soul, each capable of conveying the impressions gleaned by its own experience.
I still have that book and nowadays I value its poetry in different ways, but there is not a single poem, nor line, nor even an isolated word that I can say has pointed me in the direction of anything new. The importance was the book itself, plucked as it was that afternoon from the shelves of Broadhursts bookshop, and its plain presence on the table in the cafe in Wayfarer’s Arcade,… a combination of events coming together and unlocking a single thought,… freeing up the rigidity of my own mind and forming a prelude for much that was to follow in the coming years.
We are rarely aware of the turning points in our lives, and only in retrospect do we sometimes see their importance. Then we might ask ourselves, how could we not have felt that change of course? How could we not have felt the sails, so long becalmed fill slowly with cool wind, and set us on our way?
I gathered up my book and left the waitress a tip, a token, from my hand to hers, and small payment for the changes brought about that day. Then I joined the crowds, and became aware of them more intensely than before. They were no longer a passive phenomenon. Indeed each pair of eyes, each soul seemed suddenly conscious of itself in relation to everyone else. Everyone was aware of themselves in relation to others, glancing at others, briefly judging their own state from the state of those they encountered, including me. We were all like little mirrors reflecting light, illuminating something for someone else. We were each of us reflecting images of each other, in whom we saw reflected images of ourselves.
We are each of us bound on different journeys, each of us possessing a different and seemingly unrelated purpose, but at a fundamental level we are the same, each of us an expression of the same tangle of energy that is seeking to know itself through us. Therefore we can never be alone in our quest. Help will come in many guises,… be it a dusty old book that we might previously have overlooked a hundred times, or the innocent smile of a waitress as she cleans tables in a cafe. Similarly, without knowing it we help others on their way, by an innocuous word or gesture, a kaleidoscope of reflection and connection.
The challenge for each of us is not the effort, nor less the intellect required in understanding the meaning of our lives, for that is unknowable. The challenge is more the opening of one’s self to the possibilities, and being always receptive to the connections.

Then the connections cannot help but be made.

Copyright © M Graeme 2008

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