Not enough puff for the Pike

The Ravine, Rivington Terraced Gardens

I was determined to get out a bit further afield today. The forecast was poor, but I’d decided on a trip to the Lakes, anyway, so set the alarm for an early start. But then I woke in the small hours, and couldn’t get back to sleep. I’d had this dream about a belligerent copper who’d smelled something bad in my wardrobe, but wouldn’t say what it was. I wanted to know, then I could fix it, but he was rude and stalked off. So I went after him, and caught him being nasty to someone else. He was a right piece of work, so I thought it best to leave him be. I’m lying awake then until I hear the birds, around six. The alarm is set for six thirty, but I knock it off because there’s no way I’m going to be able to get out of bed. So then of course I fall asleep and the next thing I know it’s half past ten.

It’s a bleary-eyed breakfast, and no plan for the day, because there’s no point heading up to the Lakes at this time. I allow myself ten minutes of doom as I scroll the news. There’s a headline about the Metropolitan police being officially declared a bad lot. It breaks the dream, but the associations are too loose to say the latter informed the former, so we’ll let that one go as a coincidence before we claim it as one of those Dunnian dreams. There’s another headline about hundreds of people gone, and going, blind, for want of timely treatment by our struggling health service. By now, it’s eleven thirty.

The best we can do with the day is get our boots on a local hill, just for the exercise. Any hill will do, and the Pike comes to mind, it being a short drive to Rivington. Now, some days I can overlook the tiredness of Rivington, it being somewhat overrun as an amenity, but I suspect today is not one of them. That said, Rivington it is.

We take the big grey car, rather than the little blue one, because it’s raining, and the forecast is for more. The big grey one isn’t as fun to drive but, being more technologically advanced, it allows me to listen to podcasts. I’m listening to one about metaphysical idealism, which describes how everything is basically a mental construct, and we are disassociated alters within a Mind at large. It’s a counterintuitive way of looking at the world, but it makes sense of those areas where Materialism fails. It also seems to have fewer internal inconsistencies, especially when it comes to explaining consciousness.

The inconsistencies of consciousness are proudly on display, when I park up, noting the usual scattering of multicoloured dog bags. Perhaps I should say “self consciousness”, and the lack of it, otherwise no one would for shame treat our environment with such contempt. Today we also have tin cans courtesy of Dr Pepper and Monster Energy, a plethora of wet wipes, and a discarded pair of trousers (I wonder what he/she wore home). It must have been a busy weekend, but then all weekends (and weekdays) are busy at Rivington.

The Ravine, Rivington Terraced Gardens

Photography’s not really the point today, but I carry the camera out of habit, and you never know. We take a direct approach towards the Pike, up through the Pineatum, then the ravine. There was one shot here I thought I’d try, but there are people all over the place, and one guy in particular looking comatose, and clearly not for moving. So we grab a different shot and on we plod. It’s a steep route, and I can tell something’s lacking in me. It’s not post COVID, more likely that sleepless night, and sometimes the mind just tells you you’ve not got it in you, and there’s no way you can convince it otherwise.

Donuts on the lawn

We make it as far as the lawns, the entire route thus far being marked with a breadcrumb trail of detritus from visitors whose minds are trapped in the low bandwidth regions. There’s an occasional glow from the sun, but the overall mood is gloomy. The Terraced Garden Trust did some sterling work up here, clearing the Great lawn, and the Orchestra Lawn from a near century of scrub, and re-laying them. Summertime brings a delightful rejuvenation of festivals, and family picnics to a once derelict ruin, but I note with dismay the trolls have also found their way up, in their cars, and have been doing donuts. It looks like they had great fun, churning it to slime, and ruining all the hard work.

Decision time for the route. I’ve definitely no puff for the Pike today, so we make do with the Pigeon tower, then descend towards the car-park at Lower House. The track here seems to be disappearing into the earth, as it forms an ever deeper ravine. It sees brutal assault from four by four vehicles, and dirt bikes, then the run-off from the moor gets in it and does the rest. There’s wire cutting, too, to allow access off-piste to rogue mountain bikers blazing slime trails through sensitive woodland. The whole scene is a mess.

As the current BBC series by David Attenborough reminds us, the UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. A quarter of our mammals are facing extinction, 97% of wildflower meadows have gone, only 13% of the land is forested, and half of that is alien, monocultural plantation, with only a quarter being ancient, native woodland, and most of that in poor condition and under constant threat from rapacious developers. There seems little reason to be optimistic. I suppose the fact of the matter is we’re a small country with a large, and largely ignorant population, who has seriously fouled its nest, and the best it can come up with is to concrete over the nice bits that remain.

Track erosion by 4×4.

The fundamentalist eco warriors would sooner humans were wiped out, then the earth might eventually renew itself and thrive without us, and they have a point, since the earth is as much the rightful home to nature at large, albeit red in tooth and claw, as it is to us. But they’re missing a crucial point, that without us, there is no beauty. Metaphysical idealism to me, amongst other things, implies we are the universe becoming aware of itself, that we are the eyes and the ears of creation. That while the poor old NHS is failing our eyes due to budget cuts inflicted by philistines, we are still the bit of the universe that sees, and is moved by its beauty. Nature cannot do that without us, beautiful though it is. It is we who bear witness, and are moved by nature’s beauty, or horrified by its destruction.

So, as I see it, like it or not, the earth needs us. Without us, there is no point to it, and we have to balance the equation by assuming our proper place in the order of creation, as responsible stewards and witnesses to its glorious unfolding. Poor, tired old Rivington needs us too, or at least enough of us to look around at the despoliation, on days like this, and say oh,… for f*&ks sake.

As we return now to the big grey one, it’s coming on to rain. Three miles, eight hundred and ninety feet of ascent. One hour and twenty-five minutes. Not bad for a bad day with little puff, and we did manage some nice pictures of the ravine after all. But we’re definitely going to the Lakes next time.

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Searching for poetry, in the Quantum Fields

Our elementary teachers taught us the world is made of atoms. Atoms have a middle bit called the nucleus. The nucleus is made of protons and neutrons. Then there’s a cloud of electrons that orbits the whole thing. That’s an atom. But I’m losing you already. No need to be polite, I can feel it. There’s a resistance to these matters, I know, especially among the poetic, and the romantic. The material world, for us, is all oceans and trees and fluffy clouds. It’s birds and bees, and fancy red wine. It seems impertinent, even a bit dangerous, to enquire any deeper, but I thought I’d have a go anyway, see if at the bottom of this rabbit hole, there is any poetry.

Here goes then:

If we make it to higher school physics, we learn the number of protons, neutrons and electrons decides what type of atom it is – iron, titanium, helium, zinc,… whatever. Atoms of different types can combine to make molecules. Molecules make more complex materials.

College physics goes further – and here we start our journey into a realm of exotic language. Electrons, says our old, white-coated lecturer, are stable elementary particles. They are indivisible, and have an independent existence. But protons and neutrons are made of ephemeral things called quarks. Quarks come in six varieties, or “flavours”. Someone with no sense of humour called them: up, charm, down, bottom, top, and strange.

Then we meet the spaced out post-grad, high on weed, who explains things further: on their own, quarks are flaky and useless, but they combine into groups called hadrons. Hadrons are like teams. You’re stronger and last longer, as part of a team. The hadrons come in two varieties: mesons and baryons. The mesons are pairs of quarks. These are unstable and gone in the blink of an eye. It’s always an early bath being on team meson. The baryons are three quarks in various combinations, and they fare better. We find our protons and neutrons in this group, and they’re the most stable, especially the protons. Well, they last long enough at least to make atoms, and the world, and therefore a party worth us showing up for. The rest of the baryons are little better than the mesons in being here today and gone tomorrow.

Protons have two “Up” and one “Down” quark, while neutrons have two “down” and one “up” quark. It’s a tough job, being a quark. If you want to hang around for long enough to make a difference in the world, you need to be on a team of uppers and downers.

But you remember the electron? It’s not alone in being a stable elementary particle. There are five others: the electron-neutrino, muon, muon-neutrino, tau, and tau-neutrino. These form an independent super-team called the leptons.

So, where are we? I’m getting lost now. We have leptons, and hadrons. The hadrons consist of mesons and baryons. The leptons and the quarks, which form the hadrons, are all known as fermions. The fermions are what can manifest as matter. Everything else is a ghost. But just when you were thinking you’d had enough, and your head’s starting to spin, you discover there’s another team that gives rise to the forces of nature, and these are the tough guys, the bosons.

There are five bosons: the Higgs, the photons, the gluons, the W bosons, and the Z bosons. Each force has its own boson. The strong force has the “gluon”, the electromagnetic force has the “photon”, and the weak force has the “W and Z bosons”. The Higgs is a special case, and gives rise to the mass of any particles it interacts with. Particles have no mass of their own and have to borrow it from the Higgs, which is harder to describe as a particle because it isn’t one. It’s a field that pervades the entire universe.

In fact, says that stoner post-grad, the thing is, there are no particles as such, even though we say there are. It’s just an analogy, something we can visualise, but that’s not to say particles are what they are, literally.

A better, though more mysterious, description is a field of potential. Like the surface of a lake, when you apply energy, by swishing your hand in it, it causes a ripple. The ripple is the particle. But the particle isn’t a particle, it’s a localisation of energy. It’s all energy, you see? Or rather, you don’t, because there’s nothing to see. So, the punchline is the more you peer into the materials that make up the world, the more you begin to realise there’s actually nothing there. And that’s the only way anything can be said to exist at all.

Now that’s poetry!

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A Lone Tree Falls – The Secret Above all Secrets

Spies are interested in secrets, and will go to extraordinary lengths to obtain them. But for all their efforts, do spies keep us safe? They protect the interests of their home countries, or at least a certain demographic within them, but, taken worldwide, is the number of innocents lost to violence, any less than if the spies, as a profession, had not bothered to glean their secrets, or is it perhaps even the worse for it?

It’s a question suggested by a line from a le Carré spy novel, and it got me thinking. Around the same time, a beech tree came down in winter storms. I’d known it since childhood and thought it would stand forever. Its loss was a shock, and seemed an ill omen, considering all that was going on in the world, and in particular my own country – politically, socially, economically. And then there’s the old Zen thing – which isn’t actually a Zen thing – about how the tree that falls alone makes no sound.

Corruption in high places, staggering levels of inequality, unaffordable rents and energy, children eating erasers at school to stave off hunger pains. Britain, in 2022. Is that enough of a dystopia, or shall we project it forward a little? 2025, say? Or 2030? It should be easy enough to plot where we’ll be, given current trends, but do we really want to go there?

This is the background music as I sit down to write, in early 2022, and what takes shape over the course of the year is a story called A Lone Tree Falls. It proposes the quest for a secret, and the searcher is a former spy turned mystic. But this is no ordinary secret. This is the Secret above all secrets.

The Secret above all secrets tells us the world isn’t what we think it is, that our obsession with the materiality of it is a misunderstanding of the way things are. It is an illusion, and all we do by our obsession with it is perpetuate it. This is not to say we have any choice. It is our fate that our mortal lives at least are spent abiding in this state, but we do have a choice in how we react to it. We can either persist in ignorance of the deeper picture, in which case we gain nothing, and we finish our lives pretty much where we started. Or we can wake up.

Waking up begins with the lone tree that falls, and the realisation it made no sound, and it goes on to the conclusion that there is no difference between you and whatever you are looking at, that all there is to anything is mental phenomena, though the strict rules, spun out of an evolving Universe, leave us no option but to deal with the world as it appears – as solidly real and (mostly) impermeable to the will. But if that revelation is not to implode into the absurdity of philosophical solipsism, one must also wake up to the notion that the essence of one’s self, like everything else, is dreamed into being by the Universe, and not the other way round.

This is the mystical path. It’s a well trodden one, but what’s the point of it? My guess – since I’m only writing about it, rather than making a career of it – is, once you arrive at that destination, it affects your dealings with other people, who, like you, are dreamed into being. So, we are all the same in this respect, both the dreamers and the dreamed. The feeling you have of your own awareness of self, is the same as everyone else’s. All that’s different is our back-story. The other man’s pain, whether you like that guy or not, is your own pain. Hurt him, and you hurt yourself.

But it’s one thing to be told a secret, quite another to believe it. But such is the quest of our protagonist, this former spy of sorts who is also mostly the Fool from the Tarot, or sometimes the Magician, when he needs to be.

I didn’t want to write this story. I wanted to write a simple boy meets girl romance, but the story had other ideas and wanted out. We’re pretty much there with it now, and I’ll have it up on Smashwords in the coming weeks. As for the conclusion, does my protagonist believe in the Secret? Do I? Can we even get there by a pathway of words and thoughts? Or is that just part of illusion as well? I don’t know. We’ll see.

Next time though, next time, it will be a simple boy meets girl romance.

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Many a true word

The day begins with a scam text message purporting to be from the courier, Evri. It wants us to “Click here” to re-arrange delivery. I’ve not ordered anything. The sender intends emptying my bank account. I wonder how many poor souls have fallen for it, and thereby helped swell the coffers of an organised criminality the world seems unable to outwit. I wonder how they came by my number, since I am ever so careful with it. We block the sender for all the good it will do us, and, while we have the phone in our hands, we turn to the news.

In the UK, right leaning ministers of state are spurring hot-heads to violence with intemperate language. Internationally, the UN reports the last eight years were the hottest in recorded history, and that limiting global temperatures to what is calculated to be a relatively safe 1.5 degrees is now a forlorn hope with, thus far, no realistic plans in place, anywhere. In America, Trump looks set to begin a return to the presidency, following the mid-term elections, while various armed MAGA hatted militias are discussing outrages which threaten civil war. Back in the UK again, the pollster, Sir John Curtice, reports significant buyers’ remorse over BREXIT, with a 15% lead among the public for those in favour of now re-joining the EU, but the political debate has closed on that one, BREXIT being the one thing no one talks about. All this and we have only scrolled half way. What other grumblies await us down there? Shall we doom-scroll some more, and see? No, that’s quite enough.

We set the phone aside, rise into the cold of the house, make coffee and check on the washing machine.

Current affairs hold a significant fascination, dare I say even an addiction. We imagine, by keeping ourselves informed of the various goings-on, we gain a greater understanding of the world, that it is a virtuous thing to do, the mark of an intelligent, well-balanced and educated person. At least that is what I was encouraged to think at college, forty years ago. Now I’m not so sure. The media landscape has something of the nature of quicksand about it. Perhaps it always had, and I am simply less sure-footed than I was, for I suspect the older one gets, the more it seems the world is going to hell in a handcart. Things no longer conform to one’s personal expectations, and perhaps, too, one’s expectations begin to narrow, thus alienating us from life still further, whatever our disposition. And we find in media whatever data we need to support our personal hell in a hand-cart hypotheses.

There are plenty of things in life we should be wary of – alcohol and other drugs are the obvious ones, but also this connection to fast-food and short sell-by media. They each poison us, make us less useful as the eyes and ears, and the heart and soul of the universe. Our phones suck us down into a sorry world that is void of imagination, and creativity. They land us among the sterile refuse of data, where we become much less than our selves, as the spark of individual value drains from us. Then we merely subordinate our selves to a tribe who holds certain data to be sacrosanct, other data to be heretical, and thereby we become mere unreflective data-points ourselves, so we might be served more of the same unwholesome junk.

So now, the washing machine has finished its cycle. There are clothes to dry, and the maiden is still full from last week. Things dry slowly these colder, autumn days, and it serves to remind us there are only certain kinds of data that are unequivocal. Your clothes are still wet, or they are dry. Other data requires nuance. It requires a more right brained, wholistic approach in order to separate the wheat from the chaff. Anyway, after sorting that one out, we take up our coffee, pick up the phone once more, note that in the meantime there has been a glitch. The phone has rebooted itself, and come back with a curious error message in which, with brutal honesty and admirable self-flagellation, it tells me it is corrupt, and cannot be trusted.

Many a true word and all that.

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On Transcendental meditation and creativity

A wet week looks like having us confined mostly to barracks. Since the youngest flew the nest, last year, I have acquired a study. It has a view of the garden, and beyond, to a once grand ash tree, now beginning to die back. We resist the obvious metaphor, focus instead on the stripes of the lawn, and the remaining splashes of colour among the heleniums.

I’m thinking about something that happened a long time ago. It was a moment of transcendence, I think, one in which there was no difference between who I was, and what I was looking at. That I happened to be looking at Scope End, a shapely cone of a mountain in the Newlands Valley, made this a very grand experience indeed. And whether it was a genuine taste of oneness, as the Buddhists would have it, or just a bit of a funny do, is largely irrelevant at this stage. I’m inclined towards the former, since it has remained fresh in memory all these years, and has driven a lot of creative efforts in mystical directions, though I readily accept the possibility of the latter.

It’s hard to imagine everything we see as being made of atoms: the lawn, the heleniums, and the old ash tree. We know it to be so, thanks to the elementary science we learned at school, but we still tend not to think of things that way. To do so would lend the world a layer of complication we can manage perfectly well without, day to day. Atoms are mostly space, yet the world looks solid. Go down another level, and atoms are made of smaller particles. Then again, these smaller particles are made from even smaller particles, none of which are actually particles, but more like twists of energy, vibrating in what is called the Unified Field. The field is a thing beyond which there is nothing, because it is nothing, yet it gives rise to the world, to the universe of appearances.

It’s also here, while conducting science at this subatomic level, the consciousness of the observer has an effect on what manifests, on that which is observed, which leads to speculation that the unified field – if not in itself actually aware – is the ground from which even consciousness arises. All of this is simply to say that when I am looking at the ash tree, my relationship to it is more complicated than surface appearances, and certainly more complicated than I am ordinarily aware.

All of this, the last hundred years or so of scientific thinking finds itself converging on the Vedic tradition, which speaks also of a fundamental ground of being, an emptiness, a nothingness, a formlessness, timeless and infinite, from which all things arise. And the tradition holds that this state can be experienced directly, either by diligence in the practice of meditation, or you can even sometimes fall into it by accident.

In my case, the accident occurred at the tail end of a long and very beautiful walk in the mountains, some time around the millennium. It probably lasted only the length of time it takes for the raising of a foot, as I walked, and the placing of it down again, but, internally, the experience was much more expansive, and timeless. It posed many questions, of course, and the subsequent search for answers became a considerable part of my leisure time thinking, thereafter, a search for which one feels poorly equipped, bound as one is by the nine to five-ness of ordinary, suburban circumstances.

Scope End, June 2005

Although I have speculated on it before, a firmer link between Vedic – also to some degree Buddhist – philosophy and the Unified Field of contemporary physics came to me only recently while revisiting some old notes on Transcendentalism – Transcendent meaning a direct experience of the ground of being, or the divine, or however you want to put it. I first heard the term, long ago, when a work’s doctor was interviewing me, after I’d fainted. I was a manufacturing apprentice, and my mate had injured his finger on a machine. He swore, and I fainted. I came round in a sweat, the doc pronounced me fit, told me to get back out on the shop and then, as if he had peered into my soul, added that I’d probably benefit from some form of Transcendental Meditation. It was perhaps the single most sage piece of advice I was ever given, but I ignored it.

And just as well I did, because the “official” Transcendental Meditation (TM) would have been beyond my means. Even if I’d found a teacher, TM costs you serious money, and I’d a long way to go before I was ready, or desperate enough to take any form of meditation seriously, but especially one where they asked you for money. Now, I’ve no reason to doubt TM is as effective as they say it is – even though most of those saying it are celebrities who can well afford it – but there are plenty of other forms you can learn from books, or from inexpensive church hall classes, if you want to give it a go.

As for TM in particular, it’s a technique defined by the use of a mantra, a meaningless word that has a certain resonance in the mind as it is silently repeated. In the official TM that mantra is a secret – specific to you – given to you by your teacher and never to be shared. Naturally, this raises some sceptical eyebrows. Personally, I think you could find your own mantra, and that will do just as well.

I’ve used meditation – though not TM – as a means of controlling stress and anxiety, mostly work related, and found it effective, but it never took me back to that moment in the mountains. Then again, I don’t meditate very often these days, and I’m not sure I want, or need, to go back to that moment anyway, because it raised more questions than I can ever answer, at least in this lifetime. But I’m grateful for the glimpse behind the curtain, so to speak, if indeed that’s what it was. It’s certainly gifted me plenty of speculative avenues to explore over the years, and the mind has enjoyed toying with them in my various fictional writings.

It’s deeply strange to look at a mountain and have one’s consciousness expand until one is both oneself, and the mountain. That’s too clumsy a way of putting it. Perhaps a better way is to say the unified field contains both the manifestation of the mountain, and one’s own consciousness, and that, for a moment, one attains a glimpse of both, from some higher perspective.

Of course the ego resists even this one small concession, that while it might be possible this is the way it really is, Ego denies any certainty of belief, that beyond granting the world is indeed a beautiful place, and at times hauntingly so, it would sooner take anchor in a materiality we know full well to be a serious simplification of the way things truly are.

And now, after all of that, the sun is shining, so we’ll slip out for a walk, while the going is good, and I’ll leave you in the company of David Lynch (Lost Highway, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive) who I think explains it very well.

Thanks for listening

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In Wordsworth’s garden – a journey in time, and photography.

In May 2007, I was at Rydal Mount, the house Wordsworth occupied from 1813, until his death in 1850. While I was there, I took this photograph:

Rydal Mount, May 2007

But cameras don’t take images the way we see them. They make a recording that might be faithful in detail, but not in the mood. That has more to do with imagination and emotion at the moment we press the shutter. For the technically minded, I used a 12 megapixel Canon A640, set on aperture priority, with the lens stopped down to F8. At ISO 100, the shutter managed 1/125 second. On the plus side, the picture is evenly exposed, and sharp, no clipped highlights – a thing to which the A640, in common with many digital cameras of the period, was prone. On the downside, it looks flat, and dull, and certainly not as I remember it.

What I want to do is go back in time, to 2007, take this old photograph and see if we can liven it up a bit, using the tools and techniques we have now, that I didn’t have then. I want to make it look more like I saw it, and felt it on the day. To achieve this, I’ll be using two pieces of free, but powerfully sophisticated software: Luminance HDR, and GIMP,

Of course, the common objection among photographers is that if we have to manipulate an image to make it shine, then we should have taken a better image in the first place. That’s fair enough, and I shall always bow to greater skill. But I’m an amateur, not a pro, and if I can salvage a picture from the mess I’ve made of it, it’s all good.

The world’s earliest known, surviving, photograph was taken around 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, using a technique called heliography:

World’s earliest surviving photograph – Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_from_the_Window_at_Le_Gras.

Image manipulation began almost at the same time, either as an aid to overcome shortcomings in rudimentary equipment, or to enhance details for artistic effect. Film negatives or glass plates would have areas scrubbed with wire wool to blur them out, and make other details prominent, and prints would be hand-tinted. Indeed, without significant image enhancement, even this grainy image of Niépce’s is barely recognisable as anything at all. But back to Wordsworth.

He was nearly evicted from Rydal Mount, on the whim of the rentier, Lady Anne le Flemin, who wanted it for a relative. But by now he’d developed a deep love for the place, had invested much effort and emotion in landscaping the garden, and he was understandably desperate not to lose it. But he was up against the local Aristocrat, so had to fight canny. He purchased an adjoining meadow, and let it be known he intended building on it, thus spoiling the view from Rydal Mount. He even went as far as having designs for a house drawn up. The ruse worked. The Wordsworths kept their home, and their garden.

Nearly a century after Wordsworth’s passing, the house was bought by Mary Henderson, his great-great-granddaughter. It remains in the possession of the Wordsworth family today, and is open to visitors. I’ve been a few times since 2007, but something about that morning sticks in the memory, and I was never able to capture the garden again, without people in it. My digital archive goes back 20 years, and it was while browsing I discovered the photograph. What struck me was the gap between my memory of the day, and the image. Digital images do not fade over time, of course. But something clearly happens to memory, and it’s more complex than simply fading away. Perhaps it becomes more idealised over time, or those impressions that are important to us begin to crystallise more.

Anyway, first we take our original image and load it into Luminance HDR. HDR stands for high dynamic range, which we’re not going to bother with today. All we’re going to use are the tone mapping algorithms, and apply them to this single image. Tone mapping is a way of taking what’s there – the light, the tones, the contrasts, and amplifying them, simulating the wide dynamic range of the human eye and allowing them to be displayed on a screen or in a print. Not all images are suited to the method, but one that’s well exposed with a good balance of tones and brightness to begin with will usually respond well. Then it’s just a question of fiddling about to get the effect you want. It can be overdone, and I’m as guilty as all amateurs of overcooking images. But I think this is a big improvement:

It’s lifted the various greens, brightened up the rhododendrons, and the azaleas, even uncovered some detail and texture in the rendering of the house. I’d say we were nearly there with this one, but there’s more we can do.

The garden at Rydal Mount is very much in the Romantic in style. Wordsworth, along with Southey and Coleridge, were the founders and champions of the English Romantic movement. Wordsworth was the author of its manifesto, which stands as a preface to the Lyrical Ballads. One of the tenets of Romanticism is that we should not seek to command nature. We should cooperate with it, and learn from it. Hence, the garden is very informal, flowing with the lie of the land, using natural elements for decoration, rather in the fashion of the Taoist inspired gardens of China. Does the photograph capture that? Perhaps we’re asking too much. Perhaps we’re going to end up overcooking it, now, but let’s have a look anyway.

We can add a touch of the romantic to any photograph by adding a layer of blur, or soft focus. But having just restored all that detail, it would be a shame to lose it in blurriness. What we want is something impressionist, but not too much. So we turn to a technique mastered by the photographer Michael Orton in the 1980’s. Orton experimented with superimposing photographs of the same scene, one sharp, the other deliberately defocused. As a professional fine art photographer, he was aiming at something very abstract, but the method was thereafter widely adopted by others for the impact it can add to an image. In the days of film transparencies it took a lot of technical skill and a professional darkroom to make this work, but since the digital age, anyone can do it. If you have filters on your phone camera, the chances are there’s an Orton effect among them.

We’ll be using GIMP for this bit. GIMP stands for GNU image manipulation program. GNU means it’s free and holds to a certain standard and a set of egalitarian values. GIMP is an amazingly versatile tool for a photographer. Your alternative is something like Photoshop, which, last time I checked, you couldn’t even own. You have to rent it. No thanks.

GIMP allows us to take our image, overlay a blurred copy of it, then blend the two together. There are various ways of blending, and the best one depends on the image, so we have to experiement. I most commonly use the “Soft Light” merge, or sometimes just “Overlay” with a degree of transparency. Here I find the “Multiply” option works best, with about 50% transparency. It deepens the greens, and the shadows, and lends a more dreamy feel to the image, while preserving the highlights:

We’ve perhaps lost a bit of the crackle in the detail, though, and part of the joy of that garden lies in its textures, so we bring back a bit of sharpness and texture by blending in another layer to which we’ve added a high pass filter. This basically preserves all the sharp corners, like in a line drawing. Thus, we get the impressionist blur, while the detail is still there to draw us in. The difference is subtle, on a screen, but certainly looks better as a print.

If you’ve ever done the Wordsworth thing at Grasmere, you’d be forgiven for thinking he spent his entire life at Dove Cottage. He didn’t. He was there for fourteen years, and, having, escaped its poky confines, and its gloomy light, I can well imagine his delight at discovering Rydal Mount. The EXIF data embedded in my original photograph tells me I took the picture at 10:30 am, which suggests I left the hotel after breakfast and went straight there. I’m sure it gets busier later on, but for a good hour we had the house and grounds to ourselves. There was a timeless atmosphere. I could imagine turning a corner to find the man himself in dreamy contemplation. He smiles, he nods in gentle welcome, before wandering off, counting meter, in his head.

FAREWELL, thou little Nook of mountain-ground,
Thou rocky corner in the lowest stair
Of that magnificent temple which doth bound
One side of our whole vale with grandeur rare;
Sweet garden-orchard, eminently fair,
The loveliest spot that man hath ever found,
Farewell!–we leave thee to Heaven’s peaceful care,
Thee, and the Cottage which thou dost surround.

I’m glad his ruse worked, that he didn’t actually have to say farewell to Rydal Mount, though from the depth of feeling in his poem, he clearly felt it was going to be a close run thing.

Thanks for listening. And enjoy your photography.

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Random acts of kindness, on Darwen Moor

The falls on Stepback Brook

It’s a beautiful, mid-September morning. We reverse the little blue car from the garage, and let the top warm in the sun. It folds down easier when it’s warm, and I’m trying to spare it from further cracking. It’s a little frayed around the edges now, and not surprising at twenty years old, but still keeping the water out, so I’m in no hurry to replace it. We fold it back gently, flip the baffle plate, to keep the wind from sneaking up behind our backs, and make ready for the off. Every warm day from now is a bonus, and possibly the last we can get out with the top down, and enjoy the air.

I’ve wasted half the morning trying to load music onto my phone because I want to avoid the radio, but it’s a new phone and I can’t make head nor tail of it, so we’ll make do with the company of our thoughts as we drive instead. It’s a short run today, over the moors to the Royal, at Ryal Fold. It’s cool on the road, but pleasantly so with the heater on just a touch. Of the ongoing national mourning, there’s not much in evidence en-route, a few pubs with flags at half-mast. It’s a different story in the Capital, of course, with all-night queues for the lying in state, and extra trains for the influx of tourists.

The King meanwhile courts an occasional bad press for being grumpy. This is from both the political left and right, and both the royalist and the republican media. Memes are spreading across the Internet, some humorous, some spiteful. This seems to hint at the nature of the future relationship. Meanwhile, dissenters are being arrested. Even holding up a blank piece of paper will get you nabbed.

One broadcaster mistakes a crowd protesting the killing of a young black man by the Met, believing them instead to be well-wishers. It must be difficult trying to keep the commentary up for so long, when not everyone is following the same script.

Anyway, the car park at the Royal is busy, lots of people sitting out in the sunshine, enjoying an early lunch, but the Union Jacks are absent. There is an intoxicating scent of cooking and coffee, mingled with the moorland air. The plan is a circular walk to Darwen Tower, as I have it on reliable authority it is definitely open now after its years’ long refurbishment.

We follow the route up Stepback Brook to Lyon’s Den. There’s been rain recently, and the brook is musical, the little wayside fall running nicely, a generous and shapely mare’s tail. So we sneak down into the dell and try a shot or two, but we’re shooting into the sun, and the lens is flaring awkwardly. We’ll be lucky to salvage anything from it, but no one’s counting, and it’s always fun trying. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the day, and to be out in it, and looking at it the right way round.

Eighteen months retired now, and I’m still not sure if I can call it real, not sure if I’m making the best use of the time I’ve been waiting for so long to enjoy. I’m still aware of time ticking down, but now the deadline is not the Devil dragging me back to work on Mondays. It’s something more final, numbered perhaps in summers, and it needs to be overcome, for the sense of pressing time is the Devil itself.

Climbing the track to Lyon’s Den, we spy a note pinned to the fence. Someone is expressing thanks to the kind soul who found their photographs (we presume on a memory card, or something). We sometimes don’t appreciate how much stuff we have on these things, that their loss would be devastating to us. It is a random act of kindness, then, and a reciprocal gesture of appreciation. The finder gains nothing, materially, seeks no reward. It was a rationally meaningless act, then, yet also the act of any decent human being.

Lunch is served on the bench by the little copse above Lyon’s Den. The view from here is breathtaking. The cooler air of these September days cuts the haze, and jacks the clarity dial up to infinity. The Dales are so clear, it’s as if we could walk to them in five minute, the Cumbrian Mountains, too. Closer to hand is Bowland and Pendle, barely a stone’s throw.

An old timer comes ambling slowly by, trailing a pair of ancient Irish Wolf Hounds. They have the scent of my lunch, and are curious. He’s a pleasant soul, bids me good morning, gently tugs his giant creatures onwards, in the direction of the tower. There’s an air of ease, of gentleness to the day. The tower stands out, way across the moor, a Dan Dare rocket-ship, poised for take-off.

Darwen Tower – Yorkshire Dales beyond

So, a random act of kindness – finding a memory card in the mud, and placing it where the owner might find it, should they come looking. The simple goodness of that act has extended beyond returning those treasured photographs to a grateful owner. It has coloured the morning like a charm. It ripples out in time and space.

I have spent a long time on the trail of something “other”. Those more well travelled say it’s a journey that ends with the realisation there is no “other”. I think I know what that means, now. It grants a certain degree of shape to the cosmos that makes more sense, though it actually has no shape, beyond what we grant it, that subject and object are the same thing.

But the journey is like a long breathing in. And if you hold your breath long enough you get to the point of bliss, and it seems many travellers make do with that, sit on their cushions with their scented candles, and their singing bowls, lost in the emptiness. But you need to breathe out too, and that means bringing something back into the world, a world where there’s so much suffering it’s almost impossible to get anything done, and where nothing makes sense without these random acts of kindness.

But like the breathing in, we make a meal of it, and it turns out to be much simpler if we can only look at things the right way. I’m hoping it’s the same breathing out, breathing something back into the world, that it’s no more than a question of doing the good that you know, as it arises. But it’s a good that must come from an intelligence of the heart, which in turn comes from that journey to the realisation there is no other.

The finder of those photographs felt their loss, because it was they who lost them, they who also felt the joy of their return. I know I’m not making much sense, but it doesn’t matter. The message is in this mellow air, and in the ripples coming out from that little note, the lost, the found, and the random act of kindness.

Darwen Tower

We arrive at the tower to find it is indeed open, and looking in fine fettle after its long refurbishment. I venture inside a little way, take the spiral staircase to the lower balcony. The sun is very bright now and, entering the gloom, I find my old eyes are slow to adapt to the dark these days, so I’m fumbling for the steps with my toes. I’d get there eventually, but don’t feel confident in climbing to the top. The lower balcony will do, and in itself is a stupendous viewpoint.

There are two stories about the origins of the tower. One is that it was built to celebrate the jubilee of Queen Victoria. But there is another story, one about land ownership, and the public’s rights of access to it. Once upon a time, I would not have been able to walk, as I’ve walked today. It would have been an insane trespass, and I would have been seen off by gamekeepers in the employ of an absentee landlord. But it was courageous acts of trespass, defiance, and an ensuing legal battle that opened the ways over Darwen Moor to everyone, and that’s what the tower celebrates. The intelligence of the heart says it was a good thing, securing freedoms we continue to enjoy today. But that is not to say our freedoms cannot once again be lost.

Darwen Moor

Thanks for listening.

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On my Bookshelf – Caretakers of the Cosmos – Gary Lachman

Living responsibly in an unfinished world

The idea of a purpose to the universe, and our individual place in it, has mostly lost out to a rational world view that relegates the whole of creation to an accident of nature. The only mystery left is how consciousness can arise from within a system of physical matter. This is called the hard problem, but lately there has arisen a breed of fundamentalist scientistic thinker claiming to have solved the problem by claiming consciousness does not exist. We only think it does, and by doing so, we are trying to make more of the cosmos than there really is. How depressing! The only miracle is how we do not all go mad, when faced with such pointlessness.

But there is a view that such scientific fundamentalism is actually dangerous, and in this book, Gary Lachman argues we urgently need to move ourselves back to the centre of the cosmos, and realise our role as its caretaker, before it’s too late.

As in all his other works, Lachman writes as a champion of consciousness. He assures us that not only is consciousness real, it is primary, and he reminds us of the reasons for such belief with the aid of a tour through a long history of ideas and thinkers.

While the scientific consensus has moved towards an ever more hardened and eliminative position, as if drawing the shutters on the light of consciousness, other thinkers have been trying to keep them open, and to let the light back in. The book opens with the Jewish, Kabbalistic concept of Tikkun. This views creation as imperfect, that man’s place, man’s purpose, is one of seeing to its ongoing repair.

The world is always going to hell in a handcart, have you noticed? But it could always be worse. We might feel we cannot affect significant change in the world, as individuals, but if we all did the little bit of good that we know, and feel, personally, then the world would be changed. This might sound twee, but as we work our way into the book, we begin to see the profundity of the concept. The question arises, though, what is good? Can man decide, rationally, and make laws to define it? Or is the idea of good something that comes from within, and an inherent property of a fundamentally conscious universe? Or is it neither? Is it not so much an action or a prohibition anyway, as a way of seeing, and being?

Another powerful idea is that of evil, and the perennial question: why does it exist? Here Lachman turns the argument around and asks instead: is evil, or rather an amoral “might is right”, “survival of the fittest” world, not the default position? And if so, why is there good in the world? His answer is that in all of evolutionary history, there was no “good”, until man came along.

There are so many references here, so many springboards for further thought and study, it’s difficult to know where to start, but one of the more striking quotes comes from the Talmudic scholar Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz who says: “we live in the worst of all possible worlds in which there is yet hope.” The suggestion here is that the universe is an experiment in existence, an experiment that would be pointless unless carried out under difficult conditions. Similarly, it would be equally pointless if all hope were extinguished, for then we would be justified in taking the nihilistic position, simply giving up and lowering our necks to the block, bowing to the axe of an irresistible evil. But the world is not like that. It is always on the brink,… and we work, argue and even at times fight to keep it in balance and moving forward.

This is an idea also reflected in the work of Gurdjieff who once remarked that the earth is in a very bad place in the universe, almost the worst… that everything we do is difficult and costs a great deal of effort, but it may be the only place where we can get things done.

At this point we encounter the work of Ian McGilchrist, whose book The Master and his Emissary, describes the differences between the left and the right brain hemispheres, and the types of attention they each bring to the world. The right hemisphere is geared towards observing reality with a kind of patient, broad brush attention, while the left is geared more towards control and manipulation of details. As an example of this we’re given the grain of sand in which the poet Blake, in an extreme right brain mode of attention, sees a whole world of wonders, but which, in left brain mode, others might see more as being insignificant, or worse, an annoying piece of grit in your shoe.

The kind of attention we must bring to bear in order to realise the good within ourselves, is of the right brain variety. The act of Tikkun, or repair, then, is not so much a specific act, or an intervention, but a way of looking at something while we are doing it, and it doesn’t matter what it is we’re doing. It is the kind of attention we employ that’s the important thing, because the kind of attention we direct at the world, determines the kind of world we encounter.

In the Master and his Emissary, McGilchrist argues that the right brain is the proper, natural master. It is like a King who must rule a nation. The King has a broad grasp of many things, but favours and retains no specifics. When he needs to pay closer attention to something, he deploys an emissary, the left brain, to deal with the details, to summarise, and report back for the King to act wisely. But as time has passed, human consciousness has evolved in ways that have allowed the left brain, the emissary, to dominate. We have become immersed in details, we drown in them, and can no longer see the broader picture. Thus, the kingdom suffers as the scientistic emissaries shut the King out, and work against him, decrying him as incompetent, and fuzzy minded. The prediction of this kind of thinking, should it come to dominate, is pretty much the kind of world we have now, one that denies the very existence of consciousness, and treats people as objects, as dumb machines, to be exploited, dominated, controlled.

Returning then to the idea of “doing the good that we know”, this sense can only arise in us with a right brain dominance, also when our basic needs are met – food, shelter, warmth, intimate relationships,… once all these things are in the bag, so to speak, the way becomes open for a person to self-actualise, to become, in the words of Abraham Maslow, more “fully human.” Then the sense of what is good arises spontaneously from a kind of intelligence of the heart.

Of course a great deal of harm has been done by people imposing their ideas of good on others, but the more fully human “self-actualisers” tend to be less concerned with other people, and seek instead to apply their instinctive sense of the good in their own struggle to develop. And such development leads to the conclusion that while we are in the cosmos, in a physical sense, we are not entirely of it. Metaphysically, we are “outside” of it, looking in.

When we study the works of early civilisations, in particular their art, there is a sense that they did not differentiate themselves from their environment, or from nature, that self consciousness was as yet nascent. Their art is curiously two-dimensional, and child-like. Only later do we see a change taking place, and art separating man from his world by the use of perspective. The world and nature becomes “object” and through our sense of separateness, we start to wonder about our place in it.

Objectifying the world has had its downsides, and may yet bring us to self-destruction, but the genie is out of the bottle, so to speak, and there can be no return to earlier, pre-conscious modes of thinking. Evolution does not run backwards, so the task facing us is both critical for our own survival, but also for the cosmos, since, in a sense, we are the eyes and ears of the cosmos waking up to itself. If we stuff it up, the cosmos, as we know it, and therefore as it knows itself, will cease to exist.

The way ahead appears to be to achieve a greater understanding of the powers that we have. This means re-orientating ourselves back to the centre of our personal universe, to become more fully human, then to recognise and to do the good that we know. We bring the kind of attention to bear that we would like to see reflected in the world.

A thought-provoking and uplifting work, broad in scope but engagingly written. Fully referenced and with a lifetime’s worth of side reading.

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Being more than just one person

Photo by Rachel Claire on Pexels.com

Another posterior vitriol detachment, this one in the right eye, leaves me with a horseshoe shaped floater in centre vision to match the one in the left eye which appeared after a retinal firework display, a few years ago. I can’t blame this latest one on weeks of close work under the kosh of earning a living, so I must simply put it down to age. I mention this only as a metaphorical illustration of how one’s view of life can change suddenly, after a shift in the mode of vision.

Meanwhile, the horseshoes dance across the white of the computer screen, disrupting the flow. They have me closing my eyes from time to time, taking refuge in darkness, and in thought. Reading books is also suddenly tiresome as they drift across the text, obscuring it and causing it to ripple. I can still walk around and drive without interference. It’s focusing close that renders their presence more brutishly real, and I like to focus. The fresh one will fade a little over time, and having one in each eye has me hoping I’m done exploring posterior vitriol detachments forever. Then again, old age never comes alone. I’m looking at the next twenty years, and hoping my travelling companion into senescence will not be blindness.

We are never just the one thing. This struck me while reading of Ouspensky’s encounter with the magician Gurdjieff, in a Moscow Café in 1915. Gurdjieff – as near as I can understand him – describes people as automatic machines, reacting to inputs, and that they are never the same person, even two days in a row. He has a point. Reading back over the Rivendale Review, I have lost count of the number of people I am, or have been. While being a distinctly human characteristic, apparently, this is not a good thing when it comes to blogging.

Blogging, I’ve read, is about setting yourself up as just the one thing, as an expert at that thing, then readers know what to expect from you, and where to come for ideas. I suppose I’m off to a bad start in that respect, then, never having considered myself knowledgeable about anything, at least not to the level of expertise. Indeed, I’ve always fought shy of it, the level of expertise being where the shouting starts, as other experts vie for eminence. No, I’m far too reticent a character to set myself up as an expert.

I have written about tinnitus, which was once a defining thing for me, and, though all of that is old material, now, it’s still a piece that’s read a lot. However, those readers hoping to find more up-to-date material on the topic, will discover I am no longer that person at all. Of late, I am a writer of mostly local adventures in the English countryside, with occasional thoughts about writing.

Writing what? Well,… fiction and ,… stuff.

I have been a writer on spiritual matters, and still am occasionally, but spiritual seekers don’t know what to make of me, as the Rivendale Review is too eclectic to tune in regularly and expect things of a similar theme on a regular basis. One week I might be blundering through Advaita Vedanta, or Zen, and the next I am scrambling down a hillside to photograph an orchid, or setting up a camera to capture an interesting sky, talking about aperture and shutter speed and focal length because I like technical things as well.

And photographers, encountering such talk, might bookmark me, only to find me writing about the demise of Hen Harriers in the Forest of Bowland next. And bird people intrigued by those avian interests will then discover me uttering dark curses over the price of fuel and butter, as if I can make a difference. I have opined on politics, but no longer have the steam to make a thing of it. Political pundit, then, I no longer am.

I have written about Chinese martial arts, about traditional Chinese medicine, and its western medical correlates, but anyone looking for my current thoughts on the subject will be confused to find I am no longer that man at all. I have explored that world, found much in it that was good, absorbed it, made peace with it, and moved on. So yes, I am pretty well aware of the shortcomings of the Rivendale Review as it glides ever so slowly into deeper levels of obscurity. However, I find I cannot let it go, or change it to more closely resemble what I’m told a blog should be. That would not be me. The Rivendale Review, should be, is, and always will be – obscure.

Gurdjieff was saying this mechanical trait in people is unconscious. We do not know who we are at any particular time, and his route to awakening was a process of stopping the flow, and remembering. That I am writing about Gurdjeff illustrates only another person in me, a man who is interested in the history of ideas, and certainly not one who is a reliable expert on Gurdjieff. Next week I will be writing about something else entirely, while hopefully remembering all these different people inhabiting my psyche are connected by a single thread, and that it is the binding thread that is the important thing.

The world is just so awesomely big. There are two ways we can deal with its daunting dimensions. We can focus down on one thing, and ignore the rest. Or we can follow the ideas of the world wherever they lead. I think the world of ideas was meant to be explored, the universe itself being one’s personal guide with its whispers and its serendipitous segues. That in itself is a kind of stopping and remembering, that while we are indeed many people, knowing that to be the case, doesn’t put us far from the wrong path. While we are none of us anybody in particular, and none of us are actually going anywhere, it does not mean we should ignore the call to journey wherever the mind takes us, and to enjoy the scenery along the way.

The Rivendale Review is just an old-fashioned blog about nothing in particular. And if it must offer anything, I suppose I would like to think that someone reading about the various eccentricities of this one obscure life, might grant permission for other obscure lives to embrace their own eccentricities, and their obscurity too. We have all of us been many people, even in the same lifetime, and none of them are who we really are. Who we are, is the thread that binds them.

Thanks for listening

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Creativity and the Ideal

We think we know ourselves through our thoughts, our emotions, and our memories. We think about things, we feel things, as we explore our being in the world, and memory shows us there is a continuity, a story of ourselves we can rewind and play back in our heads. For most of us, this is enough. But what if there’s more? Would you want to go there? Do we have any choice?

The first inkling we get is when we recognise there is an awareness behind these things. Without this awareness we could not be “aware” of our thoughts, feelings and memories, because these things are not conscious in themselves. We must refer them to something else in order to see them. We could not experience the world, nor ponder its nature, without awareness. So, we have thoughts, emotions, and memories, but this does not mean we are them. We experience them, so it is the “experiencer” we must look to for an idea of who we really are. This might sound like nit-picking, but it puts on the path of a world view as laid out by the philosophies of Advaita Vedanta, also western idealism, and non-dualism. Literally, there is only one thing, and that is consciousness.

Thoughts and emotions come and go, memories rise and sink back. We extend our sense of self into our things, into possessions – cars, houses, clothing, all the bits and bobs of life. Then we mistake our selves for what we imagine those things say about us, that they differentiate us from others. But again, possessions come and go. If we were to lose everything, we would not stop existing. We might not like it, but “not liking” is an emotion, which, again, is not who we are.

Through meditation, we can separate our awareness out from the noise of our thoughts and become aware of observing them. Like chairs and tables, we identify them as things, and give them names: Thinking. Emotion. Memory. They exist solely in consciousness. And if we explore this idea a little further, we can say the whole of experience, that all things, exist solely in consciousness, including the apparent materiality, the very chairs and tables, of the universe.

This is not to say the universe exists solely in my consciousness, or your consciousness. We speak here of a transcendent consciousness, one that we all share, and are discreet localisations of. Nor are we saying the chairs and tables are conscious, only that they exist, like all other things, within the transcendent consciousness. It is not to deny the reality or the solidity of things, only that we misunderstand their underlying nature. Thus, the universe can be described as an idea, coming into awareness of itself, and exploring itself through us. This also means the awareness that observes the world through your eyes, and grants you your sense of being, is the same as mine.

This realisation can either be a wonderful thing, or it can be an unpleasant shock. Indeed, it can be such an awful revelation, we try to shut it out. We retreat back into the known territory of the material world. We nestle back into the familiar comfort of our thoughts, emotions, sensations and memories, what we call the Ego. But while the Ego can be a familiar companion, it is never comfortable for long, for “discomfort” and “dissatisfaction” are its very nature.

As a way of being, identifying through the Ego works to a point, and has carried us this far in our evolution. But the problem with it is it traps us at a finite level of being, one beyond which we can evolve no further. We are twenty-first century people, still possessed of a mind adapted for hunting woolly mammoths, and avoiding sabre-toothed tigers. It is a limiting of vision, through which the universe can explore no further this awareness of itself.

For the spiritually, and the philosophically minded, there is a belief we will all eventually awaken to this point of view, that the world is stuck unless we do. To identify more fully with one’s awareness is to be “present”. It is to be able to observe one’s thoughts and emotions, moment by moment, and to maintain a buffer around them. When we feel anger, we observe it, recognise it for what it is, and the anger subsides, allowing us to act or to speak without its influence. People who are fully present tend to radiate stillness, and never react angrily, even to the most severe provocation. Conceptually, then, we might say taking this view of reality to heart, and living it, has its attractions – both personally and for the world in general.

But what has this to do with the creative process? Well, whilst we can identify an inward call to awaken, to become more present in the world, it’s also important to balance that awakening with the realisation of an outward flow, of a universe exploring the idea of itself, and that we must also flow with it.

When we write, when I write, it’s impossible to say where the words come from. I do not think each word into place, except to follow linguistic and grammatical convention. The ideas, the characters, the stories, the thoughts, arise through me, and in some sense are mine, but only in so far as I am a channel for a deeper expression, one that is not me, or at least not my Ego.

The finest poetry is never written by an Ego. The poet settles, quiets the Ego, tunes in to that deeper frequency, like chasing static on the short wave, which, as anyone of a certain generation might recall, is mostly whistles, pops, and the ocean roar of signals we do not understand. But then, with patience, suddenly, there comes a voice, clear as a bell.

All of this sounds a bit highbrow, a bit esoteric, but it need not be like that. There is also a playfulness about it, a sense of joy in the experiment, and the creation. When writing, I find ideas popping up all over the place, wanting to be included, to have their say. They want to see what sticks, what pathways will open, see what evolves, what works, and of course what fails. This is the universe of ideas evolving through us. In this sense then, the Ego becomes, at best, the parent of these creations, these up-wellings from a universal consciousness. In writing, then, we should be nurturing, encouraging, but never too controlling of the spontaneity. And when it works, we know, because we are rewarded with a sense of joy in the participation.

And when it doesn’t work,… well we’ve all been there.

Thanks for listening

Ref.

Kastrup – Why Materialism is Baloney

Spira – The Transparency of things

Tolle – A New Earth

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