The Story of Old English

This was my great grandfather’s watch, on my mother’s side. But is that my mother’s maternal or paternal grandfather? I don’t know for sure and I’ve no one to ask now, but I’m favouring the maternal side at the moment, though I’ve nothing more to go on other than gut feelings and the images that arise when I’m handling it. In other words I’m weaving stories with very little to go on. But that’s what writer’s do; they take the unknown and make it knowable, whether it be the truth or not, because even holding to a myth is better than saying we’ve no idea at all.

I discovered it among the keepsake belongings of a dear aunt who passed away recently – along with copies of wills, and family birth and death certificates going back to the 1850’s. The watch was thunder black and looked quite sorry for itself. The minute hand was missing, the seconds bent, and it wasn’t running.

A quick clean-up revealed a silver cased English Lever, hallmarked 1899. I consulted an old fashioned jeweller who was able to get it going for me. The missing finger was replaced with one that doesn’t really match, but apart from that the watch runs well now – most of the time.

I’ve written about old watches  before, being a bit of a collector – always on the lookout for the half busted, bent and obsolete waifs and strays of a bygone era. I’ve waxed lyrical about their significance, speculated on their archetypal, psychological meanings – and described how at times of inner transition I find myself obsessing over my collection. Then this one turns up – the great grand daddy of them all – the size and weight of a small cannonball, pregnant with history, all of it muddled, mythical, and possibly irrelevant, yet rising from my unconscious like a well aimed torpedo and suddenly sinking me further down into my own past than I’ve ever been before.

And while I consider the story of this old pocket-watch, I feel the currents that normally drive my own fictions are becalmed, as if lost in the balance that follows a deep sigh. Indeed I find myself wondering if there’s another story in me now, or if I’m spent. It would have been unthinkable at one time, this sense of creative emptiness, but now I really don’t care. I’ve tried several fresh avenues since finishing my last novel. I’ve rummaged among the stuff on the back burner, but I find it all trite and foolish, and I’ve set it  aside. Seven novels are enough, I think. So let the muse sleep, and me with her, in some Arcadian bower for a thousand years. And when we wake, let it be without the need to light the darkness with our stories any more.

A mechanical watch is like a human life. You create tension, apply it to a train of events, but without balance it would run down too quickly, deplete itself in a mad whirling blur. So the watchmaker creates balance with the hair spring – such a delicate little thing, like a  heart. Set it beating and away it goes, regulating the life force, playing it out more slowly, more usefully in time. But the balance is also the most vulnerable part  – easily lost, easily thrown out by wear or trauma.

No, I’ve not lost my balance here. That’s not why I’m becalmed. Rather I think this is one of those rare periods in my life when I can say I have attained balance, all be it temporarily  – that I know it by having known the lack of it. And balance seeks no other purpose for itself than the is-ness of the moment. Ambition, thoughts, fears – they all fall away, and the need for stories too. I don’t know anything. Let this watch be what it is, without the need to weave a myth around it, without the need to put a name to it.

And yet,…

Whatever its story, this watch is telling me something else as I write. Its tick is loud, like one of those old Smiths alarm clocks, and it’s pulling me out of the place my thoughts seem most inclined to settle this evening. Of all my old watches, this one speaks with the firmest voice, and it’s telling me I’ve been writing a lot about the fact I’ve not been writing, that I’ve been weaving an elaborate story about how I’ve run out of stories.

Sure, antique English levers have an inescapable and somewhat unsophisticated bluntness about them. They were old fashioned and idiosyncratic even when they were new – a bit like me then, born old and eccentric, and a little unreliable. Yes,  there were finer movements than this in 1899 – Swiss and American – fancy things, bejewelled and more innovative, yet here it is: this old English timekeeper, still ticking. And it’s telling me we’re not done yet, that so long as there exists a void in our understanding, there will always be one more story to fill it.

I can say what I like. It’s just a question of time.

Read Full Post »

Heaven in a Black Pudding.

It’s summer, 2000. I’m walking in the English Lake District. It’s been a good day, and I’m feeling a delicious body-weary tingle as I come down the last mile to the car. And then,…. I’m no longer fully there. I’m experiencing something I will later come to understand was a mystical experience. It seems you can fall into them by accident, like I did, or you can train yourself in one of the contemplative traditions, and bring them on whenever you feel the need.

I’ve tried to put this into words before but I always fail, so I’m not going to try very hard here. For now there’s a sense of expanding into whatever I’m looking at  – the hills, the trees, the road. Wherever my vision falls, I’m  both “in” it and “around” it, no longer separate. Strange? No. It feels familiar, like I’ve woken up from the dream of life and realised who I really am. I also feel unconditionally loved, wrapped in a presence, familiar as my own blood, and which both exudes and engenders an infinite compassion for all things.

Remarkable, yes, and I feel fortunate in in having had the experience, but actually, they’re not terribly rare. Countless others have reported them, and it doesn’t automatically mean we’re all going to end up as future novices in a monk’s cell either. I have no difficulty accepting tales of mystical states are exactly what they appear to be, nor that the universe we experience is only a fraction of the universe that actually exists beyond our normal powers of perception; but if one is not to become a monk or a shaman, or a guru, then what? How does one apply that counter-intuitive knowledge in the day to dayness of our ordinary lives?

Well, move forward with me now to the present. It’s a Saturday afternoon, in town. I’m a week into treatment for Anosmia (no sense of smell). I’ve not had a sense of smell for many years now, but the treatment is working and suddenly I’m overwhelmed by the scent of a world I’d largely forgotten. Right now I’m sitting in a cafe, a cafetière of ground Sumatran beans on the table. I’ve poured a cup and my eyes are closed as the aroma rises from the bowl, filling my mind with a symphony of soundless sounds.

Then lunch arrives: Black Pudding and Bacon Panini, with a salad garnish. There’s the heavy, slightly oily scent of the fried Black Pudding and the bacon, then the subtleness of the salad with its vinaigrette dressing – something sweet, and sharp. And I can smell a tomato, fresh cut, like a revelation, singing clear on the side of my plate. You cannot taste when you cannot smell, and right now I am lost in the appreciation of these unfamiliar and infinitely delightful olfactory forms. Beautiful, yes, beyond words really, but I’m also afraid – afraid of losing this dimension to life, of going back into the darkness of a world that does not smell, or taste of anything. Life delights us, but each delight casts also the shadow of its own destruction, and we fear its loss – for then how shall we ever be as happy again without it as we are at this moment?

Well, like the adepts, we can let these forms go, shun enjoyment of the sensual world, retreat into mindful contemplation of the formless, or we can remain in the sensual life but in so doing we must also be accepting of its ephemeral nature, appreciating beauty as it arises, while knowing it for what it is – a reflection of the formless realm, and not exactly the real thing. Still, to be reminded of its presence  is important, not least for the love and compassion it can also engender in the breasts of those who are sensitive to it.

Heaven in a Black Pudding? Well, maybe not,… but it was close, and for a time afterwards I was in love with the whole world, and everyone in it.

Read Full Post »

Looking back

I’m conscious that a lot of stuff we write as bloggers soon gets buried, and unless our tags are as hot as the current A list female celeb’s bosoms, our thoughts become like the tired old newsprint headlines of yesterday and which we next see on the counter of the chip-shop being used as fish- wrap. So, I’ve been digging back, meditating on my stuff, and if you’ll forgive me, I’d just like to put a place marker here, a few paragraphs dredged from the archives, and of particular significance to the run of my thoughts this evening. I dust them down, wonder why they caught my eye, and reblog them with a view more to self provocation than revelation:

I believe the turn of the nineteenth century saw us on the threshold of a new understanding of the nature of man, but two world wars blew all that away and an era of utilitarian globalization and consumerism seemed to get sucked into the vacuum that was left behind. Technically we’ve advanced beyond all recognition in a hundred years, but spiritually, psychologically, we’ve gone nowhere at all, and when we look at the stuff the late Victorians and Edwardians uncovered, we’re tempted to smile indulgently and say – well it was all a long time ago, so it can’t possibly be reliable can it?

Basically, I think the world we can see has a flip-side, and that’s the unconscious plane which, as the likes of Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge taught us, is a real place that you can visit if you have a mind to, or you can fall into it by accident, through a gap in time like I did in the Newlands Valley.

We’re all connected to it. We have no choice. We are alive, we are conscious, thinking beings, but this thing we call the brain is not the seat of consciousness, more of a one way valve through which a little bit of us is squirted into awareness when we’re born, and which also prevents us from flowing back into the endless ground of being from where we came. But sooner or later, that valve falls apart, we flow back, and then we wake up to who and what we truly are.

I’ll be pondering further on this in the coming week.

Thank you for your indulgence.

Graeme out.

Read Full Post »

Wilson and me – in the deserts of Baluchistan

Spring,1855. Andrew Wilson, a young, unemployed journalist, has ventured across the western frontier of British India and begun a meandering exploration of neighbouring Baluchistan. He’s down on his luck, looking for distraction in adventure. There, in the desert, he comes across ruins dating back to the time of Alexander – vast mausoleums, marking the passing of innumerable lives. He’s moved to sit and reflect on this, scribbles some lines in his notebook, speaks wistfully of the vastness of the ages and the obscurity of the individual life, a life of infinite worth to itself but passed entirely unknown and apparently worthless to anyone else now living. Those lines appeared in a magazine in 1857 where, in turn, they gave me pause when I discovered them in dusty archives a hundred and fifty years later.

Think about this for a moment – the act of that young man, sitting down in the dust and the desert hush, being moved to reflect. Who did he imagine he was writing for? He was not well known – certainly no darling of the literati. Indeed, his own failures and obscurity at the time, must have weighed heavily upon him.

Wilson had been studying divinity, thinking to become a  minister like his father, but he’d had a head-on collision with the German Romantic movement, an experience that had rendered him suddenly too much of a mystic for the staid pulpit of the Kirk, and landed him instead in the precarious position of a jobbing hack.

And then there’s me. Where do I fit in the strange equation of time and chance? There’s not much we have in common, Wilson and I, other than the fact we’re both an unlikely pair of mystics. All I can do is reflect upon his thoughts. If I’d been with him that day I would have replied it was the uniqueness of individual experience that makes each life infinitely valuable, not only to itself but to the greater consciousness out of which we’re all briefly incarnated. Yes, those Alexandrian era lives are gone, as Wilson is now, and as I shall be one day, but for a time we each look upon this world and reflect back, if only through our hearts, what we’ve felt about the whole experience of time and form.

We exist far apart in history, Wilson and I, but nowadays disparate souls need not wait upon the ages, nor the printing press to court these serendipitous encounters. We can blog our reflections, and if in doing so one other person  reflects upon what we write we have already entered upon that vast and subtle network of  human thought, pulsating, vibrating, self-reflecting, and ultimately, I’m sure, swelling towards a transcendental awakening in the collective being.

Take heart then, dear  blogger, and believe your persistence, even in the face of your individual obscurity will play its own part in helping sweep aside the sterile structures we see decaying daily all around us, that it will play its part too in building  upon the better reflections of all who have lived, nurturing what is best in human nature, and learning to let go of what is not.

We owe it to those lost Alexandrian era lives, passed entirely unknown in the wilds of Baluchistan. We owe it to every life alive now, reflective of its own experience, and of course we owe it to ourselves.

What say you, Wilson?

Read Full Post »

The yin and yang of modern living

I’ve been reading a paper by Roger Jahnke, a much respected author of many works on energy  medicine, and Qigong –  a rare sane voice in a field otherwise beset by fools and charlatans. The paper is quite technical and discusses research into how the body functions at the cellular level, how it sometimes fails, and how it repairs itself. It basically says Qigong is good for you, and then presents the evidence.

There was a lot of hype a while back about Genetics and the mapping of the Human Genome. We were told you could read the profile of a person’s DNA then tell them what illnesses they were going to get, even when they were going to die. It was a scary idea and only the life insurance companies really took to it with enthusiasm. For the rest of us, it was a depressing concept; here’s the roadmap of your life, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

But now we know better. Your DNA can present you with statistical data on those ailments you’re most susceptible to, but whether you fall foul of them depends mainly on environmental factors. In fact we have about the same number of genes as a rodent, but there’s clearly a great deal of difference between a person and a rodent, a lot more going on in the maintenance of our well-being than the bare facts suggested by a DNA profile.

What do we mean by environmental factors? Basically stress.

When early man roamed the wilderness with his bow and arrow, his stresses were obvious – an angry bear, a hungry lion, the threat of being killed by another man. Faced with an immediate and obvious danger of death, the body responds by pumping you up, it sets the heart racing and readies you either to fight for your life, or to run like the wind.

We still have this “fight or flight” response, but in modern living the things that scare us are less obvious. A powerpoint presentation in front of the top brass? The ever spiralling cost of utility bills? Rumours of redundancy at work? A two hour commute in heavy traffic? An endless list. But how do you fight or run from such things? You can’t. Modern man is presented with a new kind of predator, one against which the old responses are useless – indeed worse than useless, because if you don’t physically fight or run, your body’s response becomes toxic and makes you ill.

The fight or flight mechanism is Yang. It’s active, dynamic, hot, and potentially dangerous. It can burn you out. It pumps you up and it says: “Do something!”. But without balance, Yang is indiscriminate and self destructive. Fight or flight is important, but should be used wisely, and for that we need the Yin side of our nature. Yin equates to the body’s “relaxation response” – the mirror image of “fight or flight”, like the nestled tadpoles in the yin-yang symbol. It’s natural and we all possess it, but modern living  causes us to neglect it, to belittle it,… even to laugh at it.

Techniques like meditation, yoga and Qigong work by awakening the relaxation response – defusing and dissolving toxins, encouraging repair rather than corroding us with the bitter acid of a million nagging worries. The methods are quite easy to learn and they allow the mind to enter the whole body, to sense it, to enjoy its vibrant aliveness, and to soothe the parts that are tense and troubled. Over time, the stillness these methods induce becomes a part of who you are and you no longer see the old stressors in quite the same way. You react to them with more discernment. Instead of terrifying, your old enemies begin to look jaded and foolish.

Internal methods like Qigong are taken to their extreme in martial arts. When skilled opponents face one another, they do so, not in a state of tension, pumped up with the fight or flight chemicals, but in stillness. When action comes, it’s swift and purposeful, rising forcefully out of stillness. And that’s the healthy way to live: acting when required but out of a more general stillness, rather than being forced to run like the rodents those early geneticists tried to tell us we were, forever moving, jumping at shadows, for ever reacting to life’s imaginary enemies.

So stop. Think. Breathe.

Relax.

Read Full Post »

Doctor’s orders – Tai Chi and Qigong in the real world

I’m not fond of hospitals. The only times I’ve been in one was either for the births of my children or the seeing out of elderly relatives – all of them traumatic experiences, though in different ways of course. This was why I felt nervous sitting in the waiting room yesterday with a complaint of my own, the prospect of surgery hanging over me, and the knowledge that the last few times I’d seen a hospital doctor they’d told me there was nothing more they could do and someone was going to die. Doctors, I assured myself, were useless. All of this was irrational of course, but analysing it into stillness passed the time.

It was my nose.

Years of Anosmia (no sense of smell) had finally led me to the Ear Nose and Throat department of my local hospital. My GP – not the most reassuring of characters – had referred me there somewhat half heartedly and with the caveat there probably wasn’t much anyone could do. It was partly his negative outlook that had led me to explore all the complementary therapies first, including acupuncture. The acupuncture had worked, but only briefly – a three week window of scented delights, late last year, but which had then closed, and in spite of the continuing administrations of my TCM practitioner, had refused to open again.

So, there I was, waiting to see the doctor – not your ordinary doctor this time – not like my GP who was merely a “Dr”. This guy was a “Dr Mr”. A surgeon. A proper sawbones!

My GP had  told me off for wasting time and money on acupuncture. Complementary stuff definitely doesn’t compute with him. On previous occasions when he’d asked me if I exercised, and I’d replied I do Tai Chi and Qigong, he’d looked blank. When he’d asked if I was taking any medication he was unaware of and I’d replied: “Does Ginseng count?” again he’d looked blank.

He wasn’t entirely to blame, poor guy; it was as much my own insecurity, perceiving his credentials as materialist and stereotypically unsympathetic to the traditional eastern world view, while I feared my own approach still lacked the proper grounding in verifiable fact. So, I was guarded when the Dr. Mr. Sawbones asked me these same questions and I muttered the words Tai Chi, Qigong and Ginseng in an almost apologetic tone.

He was a young man – late twenties I guessed, studious, smart, clean looking coupled with an easy smile and an effortless sense of humour. His manner, his energy, was a world away from that of my GP – which always left me feeling slightly depressed. I’d gone to the hospital that day jumping at shadows, ready to run if anyone came near me with a scalpel,  but I decided at once this guy could stick a scalpel in me any time he liked. I trusted him.

He then astonished me by saying he thought Qigong was a remarkably effective mind-body technique, that he practiced it himself, and highly recommended it. I said I was surprised, given his background in western medicine and its traditional antipathy towards the non-materialist world view. He replied that things were slowly changing, then went on to discuss the Chinese meridian system – this while he slid a camera up my nose.

I wondered if he was having me on. Don’t tell me you support that as well, I said – though it’s not easy to talk with a camera up your nose. He replied that given the amount of compelling research data, western medicine really had no choice now but to find a way of assimilating at least certain aspects of traditional energy medicine into modern practice, though he admitted ruefully it would probably take another hundred years. His own view was that emotion played a large part in determining both the nature, and the incidence of a body’s malfunction, that he equated “emotion” with the term “energy”. The meridian system, talk of chi or whatever, was a tangible way of getting a handle on the emotions, thereby curing ills that were unresponsive to medicine alone, or for simply preventing illness in the first place. It was all related to the so called Relaxation Response, which we need to be able to balance out the other side of the mind-body equation – the Fight or Flight response.

Healthy mind equals healthy body.

As for my own ills, he announced I had a load of polyps up my nose – little non-malignant growths that stop the air from getting to the smelling apparatus, and there was a good chance he could get rid of them without surgery. He said I looked fairly fit off my Tai Chi and Qigong, and I should keep it up, otherwise the sackload of medication he was about to prescribe would be laying me pretty low.

I’ve been thinking long and hard about my encounter with this guy – almost forgetting I’d been to see him over my nose. But as well as identifying a concrete reason for my Anosmia, and a frankly positive assessment of the likelihood of curing it, my ten minutes with this highly educated western surgeon, working at the sharp end of the British National Health System had unexpectedly deepened my understanding and appreciation of  eastern energy yogas as well.

Any form of exercise is good for you. It doesn’t matter what it is – if it moves the body, it’ll improve the circulation of the blood and the lymph, and the body cannot help but respond in positive ways. But if, as well as moving the body, you can move the mind,… now there you have a powerful technique  – and not just as a health system, but also as a means of taking a human being to the very edge of what is possible.

I do hope this bag of pharmaceuticals helps me smell the world again, and they don’t make me too ill in the process. But I’ll also be taking my Tai Chi and Qigong practice far less self consciously in future.

Doctor’s orders.

Read Full Post »

How to make money without liking bloggers!

All bloggers like to get “liked” and we can’t help wondering what it is about the “liker” that caused them to “like” us. So, we click the links and see what those “likers” are up to. It’s part of the fun of blogging and I’m sure you’ve made many stimulating contacts this way – souls treading a similar path, and others who are not. But an increasing number of likers seem to be missing the point, mainly because they don’t read our blogs before “liking” them. I know this because I once posted a blank page by accident, and five people liked it within seconds. If we then follow these curious links back to their owners we discover a new breed of bloggers whose blogs have only one category, its raison d’etre being to share with us the secret of how we can all make a lucrative and easy living “online” – just by clicking a few links – and presumably by randomly liking other people’s blogs to attract “business”. You just have to send some money first. These poor souls are not bloggers of course, they are the victims of Multi-Layered-Marketing scams, whose promised millions in earnings, and retirements to the sun depend on getting others to sign up. So the victims sell out their friends and relations first, then wonder who else to target with their vacuous nonsense.

Anyone who has read my work will know how ironic I find this kind of thing. I am not a materialist. I work for a living, write for pleasure and view our consumer society with a troubled heart. So if you’ve not already fallen victim, listen to your uncle Michael – because clearly someone’s got to say this to you. There’s no such thing as easy money, and you can’t make a lucrative living by basically doing nothing.

In the pre-internet era we’d see adverts assuring us that we could do just that – “ring this number for details”. Nowadays it would be a premium hotline and the only person making money would be the one with the cynical “dog-eat dog” wit who’d set it all up. The jobs – if they existed at all – involved putting things in envelopes by the gazillion and mailing them off to people who didn’t want them – or some other bottom of the foodchain task related to marketing other dodgy, dog-eat-dog schemes.

Nowadays most of this nefarious stuff has moved online. Spamblasters try to filter it out, but it’s a relentlessly ingenious scourge that keeps finding new ways of breaking through. So dear professional “liker”, you’ll forgive me if I smile and urge you to pull out before the awful truth dawns. I’d also like to put my tongue in my cheek here and share with you the real secret to worldly success:

1) Get up in the morning. Do as well as you can at school. Go to college if you’re able, then university. Get yourself a graduate level job, preferably doing something you enjoy, because it’s less painful that way. You’ll work at least eight hours a day, possibly longer. Show the bosses you’re willing and dynamic. Smile. Maintain a positive attitude at all times, even those times you think the place sucks. Make no enemies, even those people you believe to be incompetent. Always say yes to opportunities for extra training and when a better paid job comes along, take it – same rules apply. Do all this and you’ll rise over time to a level that suits your own ambition or ability.

Or:

2) Get up in the morning, do as well as you can at school. If that doesn’t lead to college, don’t worry – we’re not all blessed with academic ability, so skip that bit and get an ordinary kind of job any way and anywhere you can – preferably something you think you’ll like doing. You’ll work at least eight hours a day, possibly longer. Show the boss(es) you’re willing and dynamic. Maintain a positive attitude at all times – even when you think the place sucks. Make no enemies,  even those people you believe to be incompetent.  Always say yes to opportunities for extra training. When a better paid job comes along, take it – same rules apply. It’ll take longer than option one – no disguising that – but you can still rise over time to a level that suits your own ambition or ability.

Or:

3) Get up in the morning etc. At some point get an idea for a service or a product or a need, and start your own business. You’ll need a bank loan. Hard route this – and you’ll certainly be working more than eight hours a day while you build it up. There’ll be sleepless nights too, and periods of self doubt, and maybe the bank will pull the plug on the whole thing, but with a bit of luck and lot of grit you’ll win through and maybe even find yourself an employer of people following routes one and two. Of the three this route has the greatest potential to transform you into a self made millionaire, but it won’t be overnight and there’ll be times you wished you chosen routes one or two.

What? Don’t fancy any of these? Want your easy money now? Then go ahead, start “liking” us bloggers – and see how far it gets you.

Of course in all of this we’re talking about “worldly” success.

Real success in life is something else.

And I’m still working on it.

Read Full Post »

Darkness within darkness

The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name
The unnamable is the eternally real
Naming is the origin of all things
Free from desire, we realise the mystery
Caught in desire, we see only the manifestations
Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source
The source is called darkness
Darkness within darkness
The gateway to all understanding

So runs the first chapter of the Dao De Jing, the seminal text of spiritual and philosophical Daoism. Although attributed by legend to the archetypal  and possibly mythical white-bearded sage figure Lao-tse, its true authorship is still debated. What is not in doubt is its antiquity – the earliest surviving versions thus far uncovered dating to around 300-400 BC, while tradition dates it much earlier to around 500-600 BC. In archeological terms its existence provides evidence of a remarkable awakening of a deeply spiritual, philosophical and self-reflective human consciousness – an awakening that seems to have taken place across many cultures, both east and west, around the same time.

The  Dao De Jing  is also a troubling text – just eighty one short, enigmatic verses that have been translated and interpreted in different ways. The above quote is from the opening of the Stephen Mitchell version which, although frowned upon by some scholars of Daoism, remains popular – perhaps, like the Dao de Jing itself – for holding more to the heart, than to the letter of an idea.

At first glance, the Dao De Jing reads like nonsense, and many of us will discard it as being too enigmatic for its own good. It’s only as we deepen psychologically and spiritually that more of the text begins to make sense. As children of a material and rigorously rational paradigm, we prefer our lessons delivered in plain words, our descriptions of reality literal, and our proofs of phenomenon to be demonstrated with an irrefutable logic. But the Dao De Jing suggests the ultimate nature of reality simply isn’t like that. This makes describing it in literal terms impossible, so the text uses paradox to provoke, twist and even to paralyse the mind into a logical impasse from which the meaning arises of its own accord, not as words but as visceral insights.

The unnamable is the eternally real. What’s eternally real is beyond language.  We know what it is, but not its nature. It is the ground of being, it is the gap in the perceivable quanta of the manifest world, but if we try to define it or even imagine it,  we limit our understanding to what we can perceive with the inadequate apparatus of the logical, thinking mind. It’s better then to have no mind, no convictions about the eternally real than any mind at all.

This is not to say the eternally real cannot be experienced. We are, after all, part of the ultimate nature of reality ourselves, our minds holographic reductions of a greater conscious whole. It’s through the mind therefore we can tune in, if we can first of all tune out the mind’s more daily preoccupations with material things or rational thoughts – for what we think about things is paradoxically our biggest hurdle to understanding any-thing at all.

If we can use our minds this way, and by a process of mindfulness seek nothing but the stillness in every moment, we might eventually glimpse the darkness of our immaterial self, and in so doing realise we can only be experiencing this self from the perspective of a deeper blackness, a more authentic all-encompassing formlessness that seems both self and no-self.

Impossible to define in intellectual terms this no-thing-ness is experienced as a sense of oneness, familiar and comforting as a passionate lover’s embrace. And with it comes the reminder this exquisite state is our most natural state, our own ground of being. It is who and what we really are – and we have merely forgotten it for a while, temporarily lost as we all are, in the world of forms.

Self in no self. Darkness within darkness.

The gateway to all understanding.

Read Full Post »