Tag Archives: life

We are together in no time

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Imagine

.. that there is no time. Rather perhaps, there is only all time. A rich and fertile landscape of meaning and sunlit connection.

This is the glorious loving immensity from which we cower within our fortress. Behind walls which we have fashioned from our insecurities, in our solitary confinement away from from all that is. Looking out from our our lonely turrets we see a long avenue which we call “the past”, and in the other direction a hazy road named “future”.  Both of these vistas appear to fragment at distance. The past appearing as a river with many tributaries dissolving into mists,  the future fanning into possibilities that shiver with terror, excitement and danger.

Imagine

.. that you step outside the walls that we have built. There are no roads, no journey, no loneliness and nothing to fear. All is now in the embrace of every present. Every way, always.

Loss and separation? These do not exist. All of our mothers, daughters and sons are here with us. And all of theirs withall. Here, close within my heart. And I am with them. It is separation and loneliness and fear that seem odd, from this perspective outside the prison that our body’s ego has made.

A new question arises within me.

Since I am part and also a-part, what is this boundary that distinguishes but also enjoins? This division that falls away on blessed occasion so that we are at home with each other. If that is the question, here is a prayer. Let these moments gather and coalesce so that I feel our ocean rather than the raindrop within which most often I have lived.

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.

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

Lord, Lady, Sister, Brother

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Beloved, whose heart is heaven
Hallowed be thy pain
Our kingdom come
As will is one
On earth as it is in heaven
Give us today a body bred
From shriven trespasses forgiven

Surprising lilacs out of dead land
Redeeming deserts of isolation
Delivering us from evil.
Thy love is the kingdom, the power and our glory
Now and for ever

The Void, life and all that

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When I was a small blonde child I had a nightmare about the void. Utter non existence. Dylan Thomas’ poem about his fathers death, “..rage against the dying of the light” holds that place for and to me.

In February this year, sixty years later I had a cycle accident. The “I”, that is to say – me.. well, it just blinked out. I was rebooted in an ambulance some hours later. I remember nothing of the time or even how the accident happened. Where did I go? Was I meanwhile in that void? I believe my ego simply ceased – being a confection of the brain. But that something – an essence continued. (As do our atoms and our effect also). It seems to me that we fade to white, not to black. That we rejoin our real life which is co-rooted in some different way, place and dimension. This after the separations loneliness and pains of this materialistic world. Indeed that this, here and now is the nightmare, not the return beyond death to our intermingling.

Something like “Life’s a bitch but then you die”.

The purpose of this moment of lonely and fragmented consciousness? Maybe simply to witness the glory of the universe in some way – then to help bring the whole to consciousness of the love the underlies all that is.

My answer to Dylan Thomas’ poem about death? ..

Rather than “ Do not go gentle into that good night..” it should be

“Let us go gentle into that good light, Old age should turn to brave the close of day; Courage guag’d against the flighting of its wight”

Dream relationships

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Intimacy can be a nightmare. Or dreamy. Which is it to be? It’s within our gift. To ourselves.

They want to take. Do I give?

Maybe. Probably, but do they understand that you are giving, and what they’re taking? It shouldn’t just be giving in. Just  It seems to me that this is how it works. I have my own image of who I am. You, my beloved, have your idea of what is “me”; it’s quite different from mine. When we started out on our journey together –  you needed me to be that person. Remember all of the friction back then? It was all around my idea of me and your idea of me. (Oh, and the versa of course. In fact probably more so!. So many years later our ideas and images of me have jostled toward each other. Giving and taking.

Mirror, mirror, you’re my all

It was a bit gritty sometimes, but looking back; thank you. Without your idea of me – I wouldn’t have become this facet of me-ness. You have been my  mirror; which seemed to be distorted at first. Not so much giving and taking; more pushing and pulling; cajoling, believing, shining a light.

Here’s what I think. All  the  versions of self  – are all dreams. Stories.. There is no real thing called me. Except perhaps the sum total of everyone’s idea of me. So can I change? As easily as changing channels. I can become how you see me, or how I’d like to be – just by thinking it.

Four in a bed

Really  there are (at least) four people in our relationship. Me (according to me). Me (as you imagine me). You (who you are, to you). You (as I need and imagine you to be).

And we dance, don’t we. So many steps and pirouettes and sore toes.; but it’s the stuff that’s kept us going through the years. Holding our our gaze. An emergent quartet. That’s us.

We have trodden on each others toes  quite often; but thank you for staying on the floor with me.

Think of all the fabulous stories that could be told. If we stuck, rather than twisted – when our dream of ourself is confronted. We’ve all walked out from friendships and marriages; all to preserve a fantasy of one particular me-ness or you-ness. Give, but don’t give in. Take, but not to cause heart ache.

Is there life after death?

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Doesn’t it feel like everyone is trying to sell you something on this one? As if they “need it”, that they gain if they convert you. There are so many evangelists. The worst in my view are the atheist humanist materialists – because they pretend that their beliefs are backed by science. Non. Sense. There is no unarguable rational line.

So where can you get to, using common sense?

First. What do we mean by the terms in the question. Leaving “life” and “death” till tomorrow – let’s start with “after”.

You can’t have an after unless you have time; and what we know from Einstein is that space and time are one thing. (So is matter and energy). So really the question should be phrased “is there life outside space time”. Suddenly there’s a new complexion – and a whole explosions of thoughts. My only point is this. It would be brilliant surely for each of us to set aside our entrenched positions, reach out and explore all of this together.

.. and in that exploration – David Bohm’s “Dialoguing” – we might just find love and joy in the connecting.

(I don’t know if anyone reads this stuff, but I’ll ramble on tomorrow about why (I think) we don’t die anyway.)

Touching the Flow

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I’m bumbling  bee not its sting

Flight of the gull not its wing

Not noun or thing-y at all

‘Cos I’m the bounce of a ball

Hop of a bird and its call

The verb, I am is to be

Container containing set free

Strong brown god striving to sea

For reading click here … touching the flow

All is not as it seems. Physics and Philosophy are pointing us to integration rather than differentiation. To wholeness rather than fragmentation.

The Nobel prize physicist David Bohm proposed that language is reshaped to focus on verbs, rather than nouns (subjects & objects). He calls this a “rheomode”, reflecting a reality of flow, of movement. He also picks up the insight of existential philosopher Martin Buber that we are the sum of our relationships – each to each.

And it’s relationship of waves not matter. In recent work Milo Wolff has shown that when thought of as intersecting standing waves, then reality can be described by simple equations. It is no longer necessary to invent a veritable zoo of exotic particles – and “dark” matter and energy. Wolff’s work is not new, but based on work by Maxwell, Schrodinger and Einstein.

Our watchwords, or better – watching words – and focus is shifting..

From nouns – to verbs..From quanta – to waves..From individuals – to connections..From fragmentation – to wholeness

.. or as Teilhard de Chardin would say – to the Omega Point – where humanity awakens to the reality of the whole, love.

Joy beyond angst?

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It is politically correct to assume a materialistic existence built on a series of microscopic random events unfolding in intransitive time. We live in the ship of our ego, afloat on an ocean of materialism. No wonder we are full of loneliness and fear.

Sigmund Freud observed that the more you avoid a fear, or abyss, the unhealthier you become. All of the mechanisms of dealing with unconscious pain (projection, avoidance, repression etc) simply lead at best to neurosis, at worst to psychosis.

The big fear, the monster lurking in the deeps is existential angst. The terror of nothingness inside the tiny baby inside each of us. How, then, to deal with that? It’s worth tackling, since our insecurity is rooted right there. The more secure a person is, then the more listening, creative, compassionate, generous, talented and capable of joy they are. Insecurity spawns withdrawal, narcissism, unhappiness and disconnection. So that horizons contract to world as prison.

How then does security arise?  Where do we find an ability to live in confidence? (Con Fides; with trust)? Some simply have faith. Probably they were securely attached as children. What about the rest of us?

Science is uncovering deep meaning at the most fundamental level. Experiments on matter at the most microscopic levels shows that existence is an infinite series of possibilities, potential – until observed. It is the act of observation that, in effect, crystallises out this particular existence from the cloud of possibilities. What then is this act of becoming, of creation that we are engaged upon together? . Surely there must be an “observer” to create this particular reality. Sure enough, our species are the most efficient engines of observation, whether through science or the arts. We each of us spend our life in observation (or as some would call it – witness, some knowledge). Interestingly our gathering of knowledge is escalating in a geometric progression. (Are we approaching Teilhard de Chardin’s “Omega Point”?)

It appears to me our purpose as humans is to be just this – engines of observation crystallising out existence; and we do this together. That puts the onus on us collectively. It is OUR task to work for “good effect” – rather than trying to live with our eyes tight closed against the fear that we float on a sea of random meaninglessness.

…and then comfort comes; and connection and joy. Atman replaces ego, and angst evaporates. Until we forget and have to realise it all over again.