Tag Archives: eliot

Surrender to the flow

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”I said to my soul be still, and let the darkness come upon you; which shall be the darkness of God” TS Eliot East Coker

Eliot is discussing the essence of surrender, and what is to be gained from it. As he points out, “we all go into the dark”, because “in order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not”. Movement implies loss.

But all is change, which accelerates every day. There is no security in clinging on to the familiar.

The physicist and philosopher David Bohm searched for what he calls “the ground”. God, by another name surely. He concludes that this “ground” is a flux, or movement – and that what we perceive as solid – including matter and time – is simply because we are in an eddy – as in a river by the bank the water can appear calm and still.

In that case surrender into what we truly are – is more than acceptance and movement through darkness. It is having the courage to fall into that river. It is flux that is constant. After all even our seemingly fixed bodies are a stream of ever flowing atoms and molecules. We are not separate. We are that flow. It is our seeking for certainty in the material that is our delusion.

Here is a reading of East Coker..

Perspective on loss

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With time comes loss, and its companion. Grief. Suppose this is just an illusion? Imagine a different perspective if you will. Suppose that time is, as in the words of TS Eliot “eternally present”, and that to be conscious is to be outside time. This is not some crazy notion, indeed Einstein showed that time and space are one – space-time, and that time is relative. For instance as you go faster, so time slows. Many phsyicists and philosophers also subscribe to “panpsychism”, which holds that all of the universe and all matter and energy is conscious. Reality is just more than we normally perceive it to be..

If then all time is then eternally present, then it is our experience which designates it as a flow. It is one perspective amongst many.

I prefer the reality. Every moment is eternal. So then, my brother and my mother and father are still with me at tea in the sunshine of my childhood garden. Always, and no less true than this particular moment sitting alone in a park in a foreign northern city.

Without time – outside time – in our shared consciousness all of these fragments are with me in our treasure house and library.

This is a point of view that also calls me to live fully and lovingly, since also the ripple of my unkind actions remain. Always.

Burnt Norton

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I ramble a little below, but it has all been said by TS Eliot – and exquisitely – in his Four Quartets. So I have (yet again) begun a cycle of recording of these poems. The first of the four – Burnt Norton – is in the link below.

I have been reflecting on meaning. I man convinced of a timeless wonder and purpose within which this material universe is a part. I am fortunate because I have experienced fleeting transcendent bliss, the sense that “all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well”. I believe that the way of knowing this is not through logic, or algorithm – but direct experience of infinite loving other within people, nature and God. Why then do we think? Why speak? What purpose does our human edifice of philosophy and mathematics serve?

I have recently glimpsed one possibility. Whilst I have always experienced deep connection to “all that is” within Christ (and not necessarily within any particular church), I have had a rational stumbling block which I have recently resolved. Christ said “I am the way, the truth and the life. Except by me shall no man come to the Father”. How can that be? What about those before, and who are brought up in different traditions? What about Hindus and Buddhists, who I am sure access the same truth? My resolution is simple. I have come to see that it is the moments of epiphany and connection wherein reality lies. Those moments – quoting Martin Buber – of “I-Thou” rather than “I-It” living. What Christ meant I believe is that he embodied the I of I-Thou or the point of connection. So that he could truthfully be at the same time human and fragmented AND the oneness that is all-that-is which some of us call God. When he said “I”, meant both “I” as frail human and “I” as God. This is one of those mysteries and paradoxes that our rationality can’t touch – just like the physical paradox of light being at the same time a wave and a stream of individual photons.

I reached this personal insight – which allows me properly to want to follow Christ – through conversations with my dying brother Christopher last year. (Thank you Chris x)

Anyway – Eliot says it all so well – and he of course also came to Christianity – expressed in The Four Quartets. His journey from the materialist and atheist despaire expressed The Wasteland, was also one of finding “the point” of the turning world as intersection through Chist of infinity with finite.

East Coker

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In my end is my beginning.

East Coker Church
“Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning” TS Eliot

Burnt Norton

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“The still point of the turning world. That is where the dance is..” TS Eliot

“what exists is uncreated and imperishable for it is whole and unchanging and complete. It was not or nor shall be different since it is now, all at once, one and continuous”

Parmenides

Conjugating Being

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Yin, Yang – or Jung’s concept of Anima and Animus – striving for dynamic balance. Eliot’s “still point of the turning world. There the dance is..”

I like the concept of conjugation in relation to establishing this balance, as in Buber’s “I & Thou” – moving onward to an existential “We”.

Animus .. the male aspect of the female psyche, as the Anima is the female aspect of male psyche. Hence:

Animo, Animas.. Animamus.

Feminism is one of the phrases of conjugation; rebalancing centuries of dominance of male. Perhaps though the intense work is inside each of us, balancing our Anima and Animus to release our emergent self?

Reality and Joy

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All is not as it seems; in fact – better than we fear or even hope. Much. All the world’s a stage; a set to hold and enable connection. Reality is not within us – our self – but in relation. Which is itself movement, whence relationship arises.

It is our attachment to our unfertilised ego that binds and imprisons us. Sentenced thus to solitary confinement. Magic shimmers when synapses between us crackle with the vibrancy of what lies beyond.

Relation to, with, through. Nature, others, creativity, ideas. Anything in fact except the non-existent “I” (Ich-Es) and its bedfellow materialism; which is literally stuff and nonsense.

The language of love is movement and acceleration. Relationship is evanescent motion, choreographed by joy. The word existing beyond time.

Experience deceives. It is built from the the rubble of the dry concretised and digital past. It is history, always outmoded. As Eliot and Buber put it:

“In the act of experience Thou is far away” (Buber)

“In the knowledge derived from experience, the knowledge imposes a pattern and falsifies, for the pattern is new in every moment. And every moment is a new and shocking valuation of all we have been” (Eliot)

“just as prayer is not in time but time in prayer, sacrifice not in space but space in sacrifice, and to reverse the relation is to abolish reality.. I do not experience the man to whom I say Thou. But I take my stand in relation to him .. No deception penetrates here; here is the cradle of the Real Life” (Buber).

“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, Except for the point, the still point,There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.” (Eliot)

Thou Joy

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All is not as it seems; in fact – better than we fear or even hope. Much. All the world’s a stage; a set to hold and enable connection. Reality is not within us – our self – but in relation. Which is itself movement, whence relationship arises.

It is our attachment to our unfertilised ego that binds and imprisons us. Sentenced thus to solitary confinement. Magic shimmers when synapses between us crackle with the vibrancy of what lies beyond.

Relation to, with, through. Nature, others, creativity, ideas. Anything in fact except the non-existent “I” (Ich-Es) and its bedfellow materialism; which is literally stuff and nonsense.

The language of love is movement and acceleration. Relationship is evanescent motion, choreographed by joy. The word existing beyond time.

Experience deceives. It is built from the the rubble of the dry concretised and digital past. It is history, always outmoded. As Eliot and Buber put it:

“In the act of experience Thou is far away” (Buber)

“In the knowledge derived from experience, the knowledge imposes a pattern and falsifies, for the pattern is new in every moment. And every moment is a new and shocking valuation of all we have been” (Eliot)

“just as prayer is not in time but time in prayer, sacrifice not in space but space in sacrifice, and to reverse the relation is to abolish reality.. I do not experience the man to whom I say Thou. But I take my stand in relation to him .. No deception penetrates here; here is the cradle of the Real Life” (Buber).

“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, Except for the point, the still point,There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.” (Eliot)

Fire, Energy and Love

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.. 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

All shall be well, when..

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“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)