Old ways

Thursday evening, came home from work early. Long weekend in the offing, glad to have nailed it after a pig of a week. Walked in, looking forward to savouring every moment, only to find my Broadband router showing a stack of red lights instead of the usual blue. Everyone is glum. No internet. Looks like a call to BT, except I need to go on-line to get the number.

Ah,… right.

So I burn a few precious minutes of 3G data on my phone. Number in hand I call the help-line. I’m connected to India in a matter of seconds. I’m half an hour on the line, and across five thousand miles they’re testing my line, testing the router. What a marvellous thing it is we have invented, this global computer. Or is it?

What devices do I hook up to, sir? Couple of laptops, several tablet devices, iPods, phones, a couple of  Playstations,… I realise the list is endless, and this surprises me. My entire life has moved on-line.

Test results inconclusive! They need to send an engineer to poke about with a screwdriver, to tug at the wires, to test the physicality  of my connection. How about next Tuesday? What? That’s nearly a week! How am I supposed to manage a week without internet? I don’t say this to the guy in India of course – he’s doing his best. My heart quaking, I just say okay.

There’s a pall of silence when I end the call. Tuesday? We’ll have to manage until Tuesday! We are a family of four, and I am not alone in my total dependence on the world wide web for passing the time, for entertainment, for education, for news, for pseudo-nourishment, for information,…

When did this happen? At what point did so much of my life begin pointing in at this window? When did so much of my life become aimed at shaping an imaginary world online, of adding to to the info-glut of words and pictures and video, writing a blog, writing fiction, playing MYST? Dammit, I’d been looking forward to chilling out for a couple of days doing nothing but playing MYST!

So,… nothing for it then. No Internet. For days and days and days.

What now?

Well, what did I used to do? Sits down to think? Write! There was always the writing, sure and most of that ending up double spaced on A4, either in the post or in my bottom drawer when I’d given up on it. I used to draw too, and paint,… I used to read – and I mean PAPER books.

So I pick up a PAPER book I’ve had since it came out in 2012 – Macfarlane’s “The Old Ways”. I’d begun the book enthusiastically, but left off a few chapters in, not because I found the book dull, but because my head is always being lured back inside the online world. And the lure is strong. But in the space of a few minutes I reconnected with the book as Macfarlane took me a walk along the Broomway, off the coast of Essex. Then he took me up to the Western Isles, to Harris, then a sail into the Atlantic in an ancient open sailboat, to a tiny speck of the British Isles that doesn’t always make it onto the maps – North Rona. This is a voyage with a salty crew who know their way around the old sea roads. I spend a night on an uninhabited island in the Minch, belly warmed by good company and fiery malt, and I meet characters who still speak the stories of place, of physical places, places I touched once, a quarter century ago when I passed this way myself and which lit up my life in ways unexpected.

A few summers and a lifetime of memory.

And I remembered my old novel, the pre internet “Singing Loch”, which was about how I felt the land die whenever the old stories were lost, ripped up, forgotten, concreted over, and how the world descended then into a kind of grey. I remember how I’d once burned with the lust of the old ways, and believed with all my heart it was important we kept a spiritual tryst with the land. Then I remembered the books of Patrick Harpur, and again the tales from the mysterious north, the lore of the Norse and the Celt, of the spirits of place and of the mysterious Shee, whom only the Irish, full blood or part descended have the eye to see. And all of this is important because, although the stories are in our minds, we meet them in the land, because the land is where we are supposed to be, and when we honour it on bended knee, the spirit of it comes to guide our way.

And then I’m looking at my father’s old maps – crumbly and curly now – Ordnance Surveys of the West Pennine Moors, six inches to the mile, mapped in the 1840’s. There are marks on the map, old ways we once walked together, and the broad arrow benchmarks we came upon upon chiselled in stone by the sapper men upon the peaty moor – days of mist when the whole world was a figment of imagination, and summer days when the larks were aloft and time stood still.

And then, as I slept the shee were whispering in my ear what I knew already, that the Broadband Router is fried, and that’s all a week’s wait for the BT guy will tell me. Inscrutable race, the Shee – wise, curious, sometimes mischievous, sometimes helpful even in their misdirection. So then I’m off to Tesco at dawn break for a new router. £50 and I’m plugging it in. Blue light is on, and we’re back online,…

But I’m not sure this is a good thing any more. Maps, books,… memories of walks, of the old ways, set aside, forgotten again. For a moment last night, the spirit of the old days, the old ways crept back in at the door, and Shee had begun to look over my shoulder, guide my hand, my heart, my mind,…

But there are no spirits of place in here, no old ways to be explored. It is a place where the Shee do not venture for old things are like as not simply deleted. There is no archaeology on the Internet, no myth, no folklore. It is a dead place! What do they mean opening this portal again and pushing me back in? I write this piece after playing MYST till my eyes bleed. I tag, I click, I post,…

What is the internet for?

And is it friend of foe?

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Actively dreaming in non-literal reality?

I’ve been re-reading Dreamgates by Robert Moss and I’m finding it very interesting. All of this is related to my exploration the old Romantic notion of the imaginal realm, or non-literal reality. Non literal reality, as I’ve explained elsewhere, is basically the dreamworld, it’s the place we drift off to when we’re not paying attention, it’s the place we enter when we dream at night, and the place writers can draw upon in writing their prose or their poetry. There’s also a long standing mystical tradition that it’s also the place we drift off to when we die, that it’s the mythical underworld, or the afterlife. It is a place that appears to be entirely inside our heads, and is most often rationalised as something we simply make up. However, another explanation is that it’s actually a dimensionless realm we can view through the faculty of the mind, that it is a real place and that we can make our way in it, if we know how.

What I want to do here is describe a way of entering this subliminal realm, of entering a dream while being fully awake and simply observing the run of it. You can do it too, and make up your own mind regarding the validity of the so called non-literal realm. The technique I used was the very first exercise in Robert Moss’s book, which is only meant as a light hearted thing to get you warmed up for the later deeply shamanic stuff, but which none th eless yeilded a surprising experience.

If you close your eyes and cover them with your palms, shutting out as much light as you can, you start to see patterns: lights, colours, swirls. If you observe these thing in a detached though objective frame of mind, you’ll see how these phantom patterns seem blended with your now hidden reality. Stick with the experience for long enough and the chaotic patterns will begin to condense out or crystallise into shapes. They’ll take on detail and they’ll move. When I was a kid these visual phantoms confused me and I remember lying in bed in the small hours trying to catch them in my hands. What the hell were they? Where did they come from?

Well, obviously they come from inside your head but appear before your eyes, as if seen by another kind of eye in the same place as your physical eyes, but it’s a vision that is somehow subliminal. If you watch them for long enough the details condense out so much they fill your field of vision, and you then become a passive observer of a different kind of reality altogther, like watching a movie you haven’t seen before, a world that moves and flows of its own accord. But you’re wide awake! And you don’t need to be stoned or drunk or hypnotised to experience it. Anyone can do this. It’s just that most of us have forgotten how.

The pioneers of this territory are what we nowadays call Shamans, though in other cultures they may be called Witch doctors or medicine men. These are individuals both feared and revered by their own cultures for their ability to enter the twilight realm and use the knowledge they gain from it to alter reality, to apparently receive visions of the future and to heal. One of the tools of the Shamans’ trade is the drum. The shaman beats his drum, quite rapidly – about 200 beats a minute or 4.5 Hz if you want to be scientific about it. It’s not exactly a relaxing rhythm and listening to it feels more like running, but the theory is that if the brain’s own rhythms can be entrained to this same frequency it will enhance the “shamanic experience”, it will sever the link tying you firmly into literal reality and allow you venture more freely into the non-literal realm.

Brain waves in this region are known are theta waves and are associated with trance states, with hypnosis, and with the borderline hypnagogic (leading into sleep) and hypnopompic (leading away from sleep) phases of the sleep cycle. Theta waves are also associated with lucid dreaming – dreams where you’re asleep but also fully conscious and aware that you’re in a dream. Theta then is beyond relaxation. Theta induces a liminal state associated with high strangeness, half dream, half reality.

I didn’t use a drum for my own experiement, because my neighbours would think I’d gone nuts and I didn’t want an ASBO. What I used instead was an app on my iPod Touch that delivers something called a bin aural beat, in the shamanic region of 4.5 Hz. I suppose I could have listened to a drumming tape or something, but I didn’t have one and I didn’t want to fork out £7.99 for one either from a New Age Emporium.

So, you tune in to the beats and you close your eyes and let the visual patterns emerge of their own accord. You don’t try to influence them in any way, you take a purely passive role, just letting yourself go with whatever comes. The first thing that materialised before my eyes was a desert region with sandstone mountains set against a startling blue sky. There was a dust storm blowing up in the distance, and there was this character walking towards me, walking out of the storm –  a Victorian gentleman,  in a top hat and an overlarge coat. It was quite a detailed vision. He seemed to be on the verge of talking but I’d set a timer on the iPod app, which faded the beats out  at the crucial moment and delivered me back into ordinary reality.

This was an impressive opener. I’ve used a technique for actively guiding my imagination in the hypnogogic state, probably all my life, but this was different. This was letting go of the controls, and the experience was vivid, detailed, colourful. The difference between it and a dream was like the difference between a black and white movie and HD.

Encouraged, I gave it another try.This time I found myself surrounded by a lot of Alice in Wonderland imagery. There was Alice in her blue dress with black and white stripey socks, there were rabbits, and then my Victorian gent came through again, a sort of prototype Mad Hatter? I wrote all of this down because it was fascinating stuff and completely off the wall. I mean, for pity’s sake the Mad Hatter? where did he come from?

And the punchline? Well,… that night I was doing something else, surfing for information online when suddenly, and totally unrelated to my search, there popped up an image of the Mad Hatter. Coincidence? Maybe. Still spooky though!

As with all things on the edge of reason, we should keep an open mind, weigh the evidence, expose ourselves critically to the experience, but take care not to let our brains fall out.

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Further adventures in non-literal reality.

I’ve been reading a lot of Patrick Harpur’s books lately and it’s through these I’ve become familiar with this fascinating phrase: non-literal reality which, so far as I can tell, equates to the world of imagination, a world most of us do not consider to be real – even those like me, writers of fiction, who spend a great deal of time exploring it, and inventing stories in it.

Imagination is strange, entertaining, and very useful in that we can imagine scenarios and rehearse them “imaginatively” before doing things for real. Also by imagining what others will do, it grants us the ability to outwit them, to second guess their defences and thereby defeat them in combat or in competition. Simpler creatures, no matter how physically superior, are ultimately no match for the imagination of mankind, and this has ensured our dominion over them.

But for all of that, once we turn our focus back into the real world, into literal, tangible reality, we do not suppose for a moment that the imaginative, non-literal reality continues to exist. We simply switch it on when we need it. Imagination, we suppose, is confined to the insides of our heads and does not dwell in an independently existing imaginal continuum.

Partick Harpur’s thesis is that the imaginary world does indeed exist, and that much of our philosophy, from the pre CE Greeks to the Nineteenth Century European Romantics describe ways in which we can maintain a healthy relationship with this imaginal world. The imaginal world is what has been called by various cultures the otherworld, the underworld, heaven, the afterlife, or in New Age speak, the non-physical plane – and that once we quit our mortal coil we return to it; it is a real place and we can make our way in it as conscious, self aware beings, just as we do anywhere else.

Chinese Daoist philosophy also tells us that human beings exist at this interface between heaven and earth – the imaginal and the physical, the inner and the outer, the yin and the yang, that we can see reflections of the one in the other and in order to live properly we must be respectful of both. If we focus too much on physical reality, if we become too materialistic, utilitarian, and clinical, it’s bad for us. Similarly if we shun the material world and retreat completely inside our own heads, we risk madness. These are old lessons, like how we are taught that smoking and drinking will kill you, and we know these lessons are true, but equally we ignore them.

So, the imaginal world is real, but we must be careful not to take it literally. The reality of the imaginal world can explain all manner of Forteana – the strange creatures, the fairies, the goblins, the spooks, the demons, even the more modern UFO’s and alien encounters that no one of a rational frame of mind will ever take seriously, but which others have none the less repeatedly spoken of witnessing with compelling sincerity.

There will never be any convincing evidence that these things exist (in literal terms) because in literal terms, they do not. That they do exist is evident  from the things people tell us they’ve seen, but their reality must not be confused with their actual physical existence. This sounds like a paradoxical statement. They do exist. They have always existed, but if we go looking for them, looking to define them in literal, physical terms, if we try to measure or capture them, we will fail because we are looking for literal certainties where there are none.

The imaginal realm is something that exists inside of nothing, as indeed we apparently exist inside of nothing ourselves. The cosmos as we can see it is an infinitely small percentage of the cosmos as it truly is, because the cosmos is infinitely big, and anything divided by an infinite bigness equals nothing, as any pocket calculator will tell you. It has no size. It is therefore just as easily nothing as it is infinitely large, for both concepts have no physical meaning, and therefore all the cosmologies that mankind has come up with must deal with this paradox of something coming out of nothing.

But how difficult is this to imagine, really? In literal terms we seem to agree that life on earth began in the oceans, a long time ago, that it began from nothing, from a mixture of the right physical ingredients coming together by accident  and that the rest, the route from creeping slime to consciousness was simply a steady process of improvement by adaptation. And if the universe consists of a background matrix of purely non-literal, indefinable, non-measurable energy, as quantum physics seems to be telling us it does, then how much greater a step is it to imagine that there might have evolved an underlying conscious plane of non-physical reality that came about by the right twists of non-literal energy coming together,… purely by accident?

Clearly we exist, and if we accept our existence, as we self-evidently must, then how can we offhandedly deny the reality of an inner world as being fanciful? Equally though we have to respect the boundaries and not go looking to establish the physical reality of what is not physically manifest. Each in it’s place, and all that.

However,…

The two realms do have a relationship, and it’s this relationship that has granted so much richness to human life. Without it, life is sterile and pointless. The muse, who is the voice behind every written word, including these, is a dweller of these mysterious inner realms, as are other, darker creatures who can wreak havoc in the world by the same blunt instrument the gentler muse employs, namely the hand of man. These are autonomous entities, and they do exist, but you will not find them in the world because, you guessed it, their reality is not meant to be taken literally.

For a creative person, the muse is an unavoidable reality. She seems closely related to the idea of the soul, or the anima of Jungian thought. I am not schooled in these matters and can only go by experience but she seems like a facet of one’s multifaceted soul, for it is a fact that all things in the imaginal realm defy easy categorisation. She is soul, she is muse, she is both, she is none, she is lover, demon, harpy, and then muse again,… all within the same human heartbeat. But she is not a literal being, though sometimes we may project her onto unsuspecting women and pretend that she is..

How does one cope with such metaphysical fickleness? Pretty much as one copes with fickleness in real life: you accept the reality of it, you invite her counsel, but do not demand it. You welcome it when it comes, but do not chase it when it is no longer forthcoming – and above all you accept both its reality and its value to you personally and to some larger purpose of which you may have not the slightest inkling.

It is this acceptance that’s the important thing, the thing that appeases the denizens of the inner world, and grants us an inner pleasure that comes through our relationship with them. They are our kith and kin. They they tap upon the bell-jar of our consciousness, and they grow impatient if we pretend they are not there.

Our understandable incompetence in these matters is no barrier to making way, for the creatures of the inner world are possessed of infinite patience, provided we remain open and trusting, and then they will teach us what we each need to know. Individually, this relationship is essential for our sanity, for our sense of well being, and in maintaining our proper path in life. Collectively it means the difference between a world at peace, and a world on fire.

All of this is very simplistic of course. The imaginal realm is infinite in its scope and its possibilities, yet we can only think of it in terms of the pictures we have taken of our own physical reality, so anything we think or say or believe about the non-literal realm will limit its potential for us when we are eventually drawn back into it. We make what we will of the various afterlife journals that have supposedly come back to us from the likes of Frederick Myers and T E Lawrence, but they both speak of an imaginal realm that reflects very much our expectation.

If this is true I have a cottage waiting in the Lake District, at the foot of Drummaur Fell (you’ll have to read the Lavender and the Rose to know roughly where that is), oh, and a brand new pair of Scarpa walking-boots already broken in. But this otherworldly abode is no nearer a realisation of the ultimate nature of reality than is the physical nine-to-fiveness of the present workaday world. It’s still a literal interpretation, in a sense, and there is a suggestion from reading these curious afterlife journals that one’s progress tends to be further and further away from any form of literal or visually interpreted reality at all – that it becomes increasingly abstract, and even if we dismiss these afterlife journals as the rambings of an overheated imagination, we can still imagine how they might be true.

What I struggle to understand, however, is why the denizens of the other-world, if such there be, should bother themselves with us mere mortals at all. Why should they be so easily piqued by our blatant disregard of them, that they should feel the need to startle us now and then with flashes of their fantastic forms? Surely they can have no longing for the limitations of our literally interpreted reality? Compared with the infinite potential of the non-literal realm, our lives must seem sorely handicapped – worthy of their pity perhaps, but sorey unworthy even as humble pawns in their Machiavellian intrigues?

Why, dear muse, do you feel the need to speak to me at all? To have your voice travel from the world within, to this sterile world? What is it through the pattern-music of your words you seek to achieve? Is it only to remind us to look both ways now and then? Or are you not long gone from this life yourself and seek to impart your newly found wisdom of the wider reality to this enclosed one, from which you are still so freshly estranged and intimately attached? Is your dalliance with us the first stage on your journey to the abstract realms? Or have you never been flesh but eagerly await your turn?

** The picture at the top is Lillith, by John Collier (1892). If you want to see her in the flesh – and I recommend that you do – you’ll find her in all her resplendent glory at the Atkinson Art Gallery at Southport, Lancashire UK.

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A non literal reality?

So, what are you reading at the moment? I don’t know about you but my reading comes in waves, or moods – usually when I’m unable to write. So then I surf the tides of literature instead and can devour a novel in a couple of days, like I’m tearing it apart for the answer to why it is I can’t write. I started out with an idea about reading the Romantics, really settling in to Wordsworth and Coleridge for a bit, but an odd tide fetched up on Patrick Harpur’s shores instead, and in the space of a few weeks I’ve read both his “Mercurius” and “The Philosopher’s Secret Fire”. These books have in turn had me re-reading Carl Jung, and generally blowing the dust off that mysterious trail through the Perennial Philosophy, a thing that’s denied with equal vigor by both religion and science but is probably closer to being a description of reality than either of those curmudgeonly old sages will admit.

If you don’t know Patrick Harpur, but you’re interested in how you can tie up mythology, the Romantics, alchemy, Jung’s psychology, anthropology and even a belief in the fairies, then he’s your man. I wouldn’t say his books are easy going, but I’ve found them utterly engrossing, insightful and enlightening. I’ve just ordered his “Complete guide to the Soul”, and I’m looking forward to devouring that one as well.

I’ve also been reading “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, and a bleaker story I can’t ever remember having read, except perhaps for Hardy’s “Jude the obscure”, though both for completely different reasons of course. Jude was a reaction to a hypocritical morality, a bubbling up of unspoken nastiness through to the surface of the Victorian psyche. The backlash nearly ruined Hardy’s career. It’s thirty years since I read it and its  unrelenting break-heart bleakness has stuck with me ever since. Masterful though it is, it’s one the few Hardy novels I could never bring myself to re-read – it would just finish me off. In a similar vein, I’m wondering if McCarthy’s The Road is a similar bubbling up of something powerfully indigestible. It’s not  a very long book – you’ll get through it in a couple of days. The prose is beautiful but all the more shocking for the horrors it describes – you do need a strong stomach for it. It’ s a post apocalyptic vision that is surely without equal, and the benchmark against which all others will be measured.  I can’t remember the ending of a book that made me weep before, but this one did – and though it seems a long way off the other stuff I’ve been reading, I’m sure it’s all connected, all a part of the same meltings in the crucible of my imagination.

But apart from all that, and yet also similarly related,…

It’s summer, and it’s the weekend, and I’ve been sitting here in the garden thinking I should write something, if only to get myself in the contemplative mood. But that’s not how it works, so I’ve wasted most of the day, even to the extent of nodding off for a couple of hours this afternoon. All of this is trivial and not exactly what you want to hear, but there’s nothing much to tell, and certainly my reading isn’t yielding much by way of answers – at least not directly. The answers come like shy cats, and you can’t make a fuss or even look at them directly or they will melt away. But I’ve a feeling an answer is coming, and it has to do with the imagination, with the Romantic  sense, and an acceptance of its validity, though not in a literal way, and it’s this non-literalness that I’m beginning to see, thanks to Patrick Harpur,  is the important thing, the thing that keeps us on the straight and narrow. This is both complex and yet, I suspect, also very simple,… but I need to think about it some more.

At the moment my literal reality consists of this summer house I built back in the spring, and in which I am now sitting. It also consists of  a patch of garden, and some trees beyond. The sky is grey. It’s about 20 degrees, getting on for 9:00 pm and I’ve got work in the morning. I’ve just lit a vanilla scented joss-stick, and my head’s a little thick from too much cheap wine. But in imagination, I’m a long way from here…

In my mind’s eye I can see a  lake in a bowl of mountains, and by the shore there stands a pavillion, terracotta coloured, its pillars reflected in the gently rippling waters of the lake. I’m in the Swiss Alps somewhere, though perhaps not literally. It’s just somewhere that reminds me a little of the Alps. Anyway, this pavillion,… it has a domed copper roof, whose centuries old verdigris is luminous in the early evening light and inside, unseen, in the pavillion,  a woman is waiting for me, seated on cushions. I’m making my way to her. It’s been a while in coming and though I’m not exactly reluctant to have finally made this connection, I can’t hide the fact that I’m anxious, that there’s a gravity here I’m not sure I grasp properly, and I have to allow my unconscious to guide my hand now or my ego’s going to ruin the moment. I’ve no idea what she’s going to say to me because I’ve not written that part yet. It may yet be that she’s fallen asleep waiting for me, and I’ll spend the night just watching over her.

To what extent is this imaginative scenario a valid reality? Should one take any of it seriously? Where did the pavilion come from? I’ve never been there, but I know its shape, the feel of its pillars against my palm, the sound of the lake lapping at its base. I  did a watercolour of it yesterday just to explore it a little more deeply and if I were to see a photograph of it tomorrow I’d say: “Oh, yea: I know that place.”

It could be a subliminal suggestion of course, a pastiche of images, of experiences long forgotten. The thesis of  mentalist Darren Brown, for the degree to which we are suggestible is very convincing,.. and yet,…

Her name is Gabrielle. I don’t know where she came from, nor her sinister, gnome like parents who forbid me from having anything to do with her, nor the wily old hotelier, the white suited septegenarian, Herr Gruber, who seems bent on smoothing my way with her, if only I will take this thing seriously, he says. Indeed, he says I must, for all our sakes – his, mine and Gabrielle’s.

To be clear, I’m talking about a story I’m writing here – a story that may eventually be completed and stuck up on some free to download e-book emporium, or it may yet languish unfinished on my computer for years, like a puzzle unsolved until either time or carelessness results in its deletion. To some extent, the plot, the conflict, even the language,… these are literary devices that deliver up at the end of everything a story that someone else can read. It is a format for recording imaginary events, events that have no literal reality, no literal meaning,  but what about the abstract imaginative energy that created them? Where did that come from? And can it not mean something? That pavillion of my imagination – is it not a place someone else can travel to in their imagination, if I describe it well enough?

These are the themes that Patrick Harpur deals with – the daemonic reality, he calls it, and it’s the reason I’ve found his books so interesting. They are archetypal, and mythical, these themes – as all good stories are, and if I’d only studied the classical myths as a lad, instead of engineering, I might have a better idea of what my work is about instead of shunting myself into so many dead ends all the time. All right, if I’d clung to the writing at the expense of everything else, I would have starved to death by now, and I’m quite happy to be uncovering these kindergarten stories in my late middle age, thank you. You see, there are no new stories any more. They were all written down at the beginning of time, etched deeply into the bedrock of our mythology. Each generation of writers merely comes along and reinvents the myths in contemporary disguise and claims the stories as his own.

I think I’ve always  accepted the imagination is a window on a different kind of  reality, wherein dwell these mythical aspects of ourselves., these daemons – some of them close and personal, some of them much, much older, more fundamental, primeval, elemantary.  If we know how to balance our literal and non-literal realities, then I think we stand a chance of living as we should: we “think along the lines of nature”, as Jung said.

The trouble is modern man seems to have such an uneasy relationship with it. He can no longer think along the lines of  nature because two hundred years of Enlightement thinking has addled his brain. But we need to be careful in waking up from this delusion and jumping too far in the other direction. We can go too far in our acceptance of every little thing that comes out of the unconscious, not realising that it is the antithesis of logic, and that to analyse it in literal terms may be to tie ourselves in knots and waste decades of our lives until we can wise up and tell true insight from delusion. On the other hand it’s equally dangerous to deny the imagination any kind of voice at all  because it may end up coming back at us in ways we don’t like.

I’m almost convinced now of the ability of the collective imagination to manifest itself in some kind of  physical way. The thrust of  Dean Radin’s work on Conscious Entanglement is compelling, suggesting that human consciousness is capable of manipulating matter or events, that indeed conciousness itself may be the primary ground of being. It’s only a small leap therefore to speculate on what might happen when the collective unconscious becomes focused in literal reality.

People see things.

Only last summer a trio of tall angelic beings were spotted by a policeman near Silbury Hill in Wiltshire – part of the crop circle goings on that enliven that part of the world every year, and if that’s not a manifestation of a mythical reality, I don’t know what is! No amount of investigation ever yields a definitive explanation to these things. They are like smoke, and remain a mystery, fastened upon by the credulous and the needy and denied with equal fervour by the establishment as preposterous – yet people go on witnessing all manner of Forteana, all the time.

While we should be mindful of the reality of the imaginative dimension, and intuitively alert for any personal meaning coming out of it, it doesn’t do to spend too much time humoring its every whim. To be sure, the fairies are a beguiling crowd but we live in a literal reality while they do not. We are flip sides of the same coin so to speak, neither of us able to manage in isolation from the other, but equally neither of us are equipped to make way for long in the other’s realm, nor to make sense of it in any great detail. The literal reality is our domain, but it is perhaps the non literal that gives it, and our lives, its colour and its meaning.

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