Fire, Energy and Love

.. these are, I think different expressions or facets of the same thing (thing because as Einstein tells us matter is simply condensed energy)

“In the beginning was Power, intelligent, loving, energising. In the beginning was the Word, supremely capable of mastering and moulding whatever might come into being in the world of matter. In the beginning there were not coldness and darkness: there was Fire.”

The Mass on the World, 1923 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.”

Little Gidding, 1942 TS Eliot

“Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.”

Albert Einstein


“Love is the real power. It’s the energy that cherishes. The more you work with that energy, the more you will see how people respond naturally to it, and the more you will want to use it. It brings out your creativity, and helps everyone around you flower.”

Marion Woodman

“But what is passion, what are emotions? There is the source of fire, there is the fullness of energy. A man who is not on fire is nothing: he is ridiculous, he is two-dimensional. He must be on fire even if he does make a fool of himself. A flame must burn somewhere, otherwise no light shines; there is no warmth, nothing.”

Psychology of Kundalini Yoga Carl Jung

Rage against the dying of the life

Was there ever a time of gentle maturing toward a peaceful Indian summer? If so, can I go back there. Im 63. My urge

,almost an urgency, is to assimilate the threads of my aliveness so far. I want to disengage from the detail of day to day coping. What the French call train-train. Yet there is a rising tide that prevents me it seems. It’s all remembering your password and the commands in the different electronic screens. All those gizmos that supposedly make my life “easier” just make me work for the machine.

In case there are millennials reading this, there really was a time when you picked up a phone, had a chat and stuff happened. not long ago. Before mobile phones apps and the internet. 20 years ago?

When life was chat, smiles, touch and humour. When we did things together. Church, the pub, football, cinema, meals, public transport, gossip. Even – in my childhood before television. It was all people people and people.

Now we’re being strangled by screens clicks and keyboards. Why shouldn’t I rage against the choking out of our life together?

(R)udderless

There is an equivalence between the word, rudderless – and udderless. At least for me. You too?

A good-enough mother is, according to Donald Winnicott, necessary to bring an infant across in to the material world. Maternal reverie – the wondering loving reflection of mother to child – helps us to bear the pain of separation. Allows us to feel our new formed human edges and face this life’s loneliness.

Without this service from someone we would be lost – as those Romanian orphans. Remember those agonising images? Of the children abandoned by Ceaucescu’s communist state?

Anyway. I have been lucky to be one of those to have had a good-enough mother. She blessed me with a taste of the love that drives the universe – Dylan Thomas’ “green fuse”. It’s surely up to me and others to try to pass that on. (It is my ego that trips me up)

Direct with passion

We spend our lives, all of us, waiting for the great day, the great battle, or the deed of power. But that external consummation is not given to many: nor is it necessary. So long as our being is tensed, directed with passion, towards that which is the spirit of all things, then that spirit will emerge from our own hidden, nameless effort.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

All shall be well, when..

“And all shall be well and /All manner of thing shall be well/When the tongues of flame are in-folded /Into the crowned knot of fire /And the fire and the rose are one.” Eliot, Little Gidding

When we live at the point of intersection – “the still point of the turning world”. Where spirit meets beauty, and we meet each other in relation, After all everything is energy and matter (e=mc2), wave and particle, in spacetime or not (God, conceived as the Word existing beyond time).

Observation crystallises particular reality *1

We are, as Teilhard de Chardin says “co-creators of the universe”, and as he believed, as did TS Eliot, the driving force in the evolution of consciousness is. Love.

*1 yes, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics has been evidenced. Watch this BBC documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_4nYgrDJvc)

When poetry collides with physics

“The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation. Here the impossible union Of spheres of existence is actual, Here the past and future Are conquered, and reconciled,”

The Dry Salvages T. S. Eliot


“In quantum mechanics, wave function collapse occurs when a wave function—initially in a superposition of several eigenstates—reduces to a single eigenstate due to interaction with the external world. … Significantly, the combined wave function of the system and environment continue to obey the Schrödinger equation.”

Wikipedia “Superposition collapse”

TS Eliot, after the despair of The Wasteland, came to his realisation that the only way out of the endless cycle (“when is there an end to it, the voiceless wailing”) is the intersection between now and infinity -the Incarnation. The universe does not revolve around humans. Neither are we apart from all-that-is. Rather we are here to bear witness; or as quantum physics might put – to be observers – and thus to crystallise actual from the infinity of potential. What they would call observation collapsing the wave function, is what Eliot calls The Incarnation.