Inspired and taken from ‘The Mind World’ – Volume Four of Hazrat Inayat Khan’s lectures.
The heart, in Sufi terms, functions as a mirror – and more …
Whatever is reflected in the heart does not only remain a reflection but becomes a creative power productive of the phenomena of a similar nature.
So, for example, a heart that is holding in itself and reflecting the rose will find roses everywhere. Roses will be attracted to the heart and roses will be produced from it and for it.
As this reflection deepens and becomes stronger it becomes creative of the phenomenon of roses and the symbolic qualities we associate with roses.
Equally, the heart that holds and reflects wounds will find wounds everywhere. It will attract wounds and it will create wounds; for that is the phenomenon of reflection.
There are examples to be found in the world of people who by retaining a thought have created on the physical plane its manifestation, its phenomenon.
The reason is – that the phenomenon is not only an image as produced in the mirror – but that reflection in the heart is the most powerful thing.
It is life itself – and it is creative.
If the heart is calm enough to receive reflections fully and clearly, one can choose for oneself which reflection to retain and which to repel.
☼ ☼ ☼
A calm heart is of course a rare event, especially in the turbulent and rushed environment most of us live in, or fight for existence. We may however remember such moments of grace. And to appreciate the process of reflection as a psychic law can explain many mysteries.
My two quest novels, ‘Course of Mirrors,’ and its sequel, ‘Shapers,’ (found on my book page,) are inspired by the phenomenon of reflection.
Doubt is generally considered a weakness, but it can also be strength, and a function of renewal.
We seek approval. We like to belong with people/groups that resonate with our ideals. We are trying to order the puzzles of our experiences into some coherence that guides our purpose and actions, and gives our life meaning. And who does not cherish the moments when all feels perfect? Yet only traces of perfection live on in the heart, because life moves on.
An invocation by Hazrat Inayat Khan used to intrigue and troubled me …
‘Towards the One
The perfection of Love, Harmony and Beauty
The Only Being
United with all the illuminated souls
Who form … the Spirit of Guidance …’
Perfection is not of this world, I told myself. And yet, the above invocation gains power in the context of how Hazrat Inayat Khan defines ideals:
‘The ideal is the means – its breaking is the goal.’
His grandson, Fazal Inayat-Khan, put it in another way:
‘With faith one attains and realises peace and harmony.
With doubt one destroys and gains freedom to move ontowards.’
It could be a safe space we aspire to, since once expelled from the warm womb, we struggle to find a similar space in this world. Whatever else we aspire to, it takes discipline, consistency, and perseverance to work towards one’s ideal.
Through discipline we acquire a basic understanding of things. In spiritual terms, this is also the challenge of the Buddhist Hinayana and Mahayana practices.
But what if we have proudly gained a level of certainty, be it about our achievements, identity, position, faith? And what if we cling to that certainty – at all costs – numbing the chattering of our minds? How do we escape a stagnant reality, the prison of certainty?
Chögyam Trungpa, in his lectures on Tantric Wisdom says doubt is ignored on the path of discipline, but during a further stage, Vashrajana (Crazy Wisdom,) confusion, and creepy questions about our truth are legitimised, and offer enormous potential. Allowing doubt – and including that doubt is part of our progress.
In a book of gathered lectures, ‘Journey Without Goal,’ Trungpa points to a fearless attitude.
My former Sufi teacher and friend, Fazal Inayat-Khan, operated in the realm of Crazy Wisdom. Some of his students understood where he was coming from, while others were super annoyed. I’m still inspired by Crazy Wisdom, but having lost my Sufi friend, I lack the courage to travel this goal-less path alone.
Teachers of that kind, who live life with fearless intensity, move on as soon as their purpose is done, they never grow old.
The theme of Crazy Wisdom, in the sense of stepping into the unknown, is challenging my imagination now in the third book, ‘Mesa,’ I’m writing in the Odyssey of Course of Mirrors. It’s about Mesa’s return to her future perfect world, where time has come to a near standstill. Against all logic, but understanding the truth in her heart, she is tasked to bring back history, and friction, as a cure.
Photo: The image was taken by son, Yeshen Venema, during a visit to Vietnam. I added the clouds 🙂
I was always drawn to subtle light, not the blinding bright one, but the humble light that searches and elevates hidden beauty in the shade … the stray beam on a patch of peeling paint, a spark of sun in a puddle, the amazing transformations of shapes and colours created by a tiny shift of its direction. I love how light sculpts the garden through morning mist, how it paints cloud landscapes, how it slips through the frame of a window, teases the shadowy folds of a gauze curtain, or how it honours leaves by flooding through the gaps to jewel the ground. When I took to squinting through the branches against the sky, I discovered their negative pattern – appearing like a distant universe.
Even as a toddler I’ve been mesmerised by the musical dance of light across the forest floor, any shifting shadows on surfaces, and, occasionally, I imagined strange new forms in a light and shadow show. This was not particularly encouraged by my parents, who thought my weird imagination was a bit over the top, too vivid. So obviously I shut up about these impressions, and any odd thoughts that crossed my mind..
Maybe my angel was annoyed that I wallowed in being lonely, but lacked the grace to acknowledge her being there, all the time. Anyway, she decided to introduce herself. The vision came while I was under deep anesthetic trance for a life-saving operation to remove a dysfunctional appendix.
I was around eight years old.
Waking up in in pristine white room, wrapped up in pristine white bedding, the first thing that flooded into my mind was the crystal clear memory of meeting my angel.
She invited me to follow her along a corridor; she was luminous, with translucent wings. She opened a door. While I was reviewing this instant in the pristine white room, I had a physical sensation or relief. She had opened a door.
The scene repeated itself in that there were many doors dividing the corridor, and one after another was opened with a soft nudge by my angel. She was basically telling me, ‘You don’t need keys; doors will open for you, if and when you want to, be it forward or backwards, future or past.’
The vision relieved the pressure of rejections; foremost felt from my father’s secretive psyche. My grandmother had warned my mother that her son was a closed cupboard. My angel suggested I had a choice as to what door I opened, and when. Opening a door backwards, I eventually I found that my dad’s cupboard protected a deeply sensitive romantic.
My next door is ahead, and it entails fully embracing the process of continuing with the writing of my third novel – ’Mesa’ – the most challenging project yet, especially since I’ve no idea where it will lead.
To come back to my angel … a spirit guide every individual has, though not necessarily perceived … it is a being (no matter what you call it) offering intimate rapport. In various cultures there are different terms for this guardian, be it angel, the Green One, understood as an ancient pagan spirit of the wild woods, or ‘Khidr’ in mystical Islam – appearing from nowhere when help and advice is needed, most often not the rational kind.
G. Jung says Khidr reveals not just the greenness of the chlorophyll within the leaves, not just the sunlight / water responsible for their nourishment and liveliness, and not just the (secondary) green ray of light that is refracted as the “middle-pillar” within the light spectrum, but also the (primary) undifferentiated light of a pure and altered consciousness. For Jung, Khidr resembles the inner self.
In that sense, one could say, Khidr helps us to adjust traditional maps to our present individual territory. When you think a little about it, you’ll probably recall the moments in your life, tiny as they may have been, when an angel being changed your life for the better, even when it required a disruption of your expectations. And think of the angels of dear friends who are on a wavelength with yours and support your best intentions.
Ideally, we find our kin over the years. My use of the imagination, distinct from fantasy, was often affirmed. Particularly the ‘The Creative Imagination’ Ibn ‘Arabi reveals as The Science of the Heart, influenced the writing of my novels (info. on my book page.) Meanwhile, you may like my short essay on the subject.
On occasional good days, mundane tasks, problem solving on the go, are like meditations, and how I begin, how I sequence, and how I end a task, has a fine rhythm to it.
Let’s say I prepare a meal, I go about it in the simplest, energy and time efficient way, via knacks acquired through practice. This applies to washing, cleaning, shopping, gardening, fixing things etc. …
What delights, is when I do a little thing different, like change the sequence of, or slow down the attention and attitude towards a task, and in the process discover symbolic correspondences. By symbolic I mean here the recognition of pattern similarities between different fields (contexts, scales, environments,) from being awed by how the geometries in nature resemble galaxies, to how the moon cycle affects plants in the same way as my mood. Creative minds are haunted by beauty and meaning. They may discover how their life’s myth is hidden in the narrative of a fairy tale, or, as suggested by Blake, see the world in a grain of sand …
Observing how I do myself, slightly distanced from the task at hand, can open novel perspectives. In the expanded space even a dream-image from the night before can revisit.
I can also project observing eyes on anything or anyone, including cats, dogs, foxes, birds, trees … let’s assume a fly – the fly that defies its instincts and does not go for the window or door, but insists on buzzing around my head, I could invest that fly with the function of spying on me and in the process craft an epic spy fly tale.
I’m easily sucked into stories, because fresh points of view sometimes bring on an AHA moment from the unconscious nowhere (suddenly now here.) I could call it a singularity, unfolding in my embodied being in time, and changing the way I operate my relationship with myself, others, and the world at large.
Imagination, playfulness, thinking out of the box and intuition bring joy to body and mind.
Imagination in German is – Einbildungskraft – the strength to make connections and build something in the sphere of one’s mind. For those who don’t make use of this human capacity, life may become reactive and stale. While hunger is a basic need, the desire for a variety of tastes is acquired.
We have our peculiarities in the ways we communicate between inside subjective reality and outside objective reality, the way we approach a problem, do things, see things, interpret events, and in the way we are influenced by the weather, our digestive system, or personal and collective moods. Each of us is unique in how we engage with the universal consciousness we are embedded in. Specialists with a narrow focus tend to make boring company, and will, I guess, soon be replaced by AI avatars, but well-rounded and irrational humans, aware of being present in their bodies and all the experience and memories held in their bodies, cannot be replicated.
At times I envisage copies of myself, to shake hands with, or relieve me of tasks I consider tedious … though these copies nest of course inside my psyche, assigned with different yet overlapping functions. Ideally I wish for this cluster of subs, let’s call them subpersonalities, to cooperate, and such synchronicities do occur on rare occasion. They are wondrous moments of being, infused with the deeper intelligence of universal consciousness.
Oh, and please buy, read and review my latest novel.
I should be shouting in the marketplace, with drums and megaphone, having just released my second novel, ‘Shapers.’ But shouting has never been my thing, call it false modesty … a few subtle hints must do. Presently, I’m reading ‘Shapers’ in my sunny garden, as if I’d just encountered the book, surprised how much I enjoy the read. Some authors may think me naïve – since books don’t normally sell without massive promotion, for which I’ve no agent or sponsor, nor the funds. Patience I have, otherwise I wouldn’t have finished two novels, considering I could only afford spending time on novel writing during the third part of my life.
So I belong to the writers lonely hearts club … where, unless you’re a celebrity, or achieve a short burst on a bestseller list, most writers will linger.
Not the Beatles though – whose brand of beats, lyrics and showmanship hit the mark.
I was par chance present when the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s lonely hearts club band album cover was arranged and photographed in London, by courtesy of a friend. I wasn’t allowed to take photos, especially since celebrities popped in and out of the shoot, but I helped by cutting out the image of Shirley Temple in the right hand corner of the cover, and I enjoyed a joint from the block of marihuana, freely available on a silver plate. Returning to my lodgings, I danced, swinging around lampposts. These were carefree times.
Creating poetry, songs, stories, any art inspired by the sphere of the imagination is a calling. There is plenty how-to-do tools for creators, which is useful, but only when the visions and ideas that propel expression emerge from inside, embodied by one’s senses and the experience of relationships, and, ideally, rearranged by symbolic understanding. It’s a fine balancing act, like carrying a cup filled to the brim with hot liquid and not spilling any.
This is my view on the subject, because writing for writings sake, like churning out generic plots, which I AI can do well, has no meaning for me.
Once I’ve processed my grief over releasing ‘Shapers’ into the web’s wilderness, I may attempt a few things to promote the novel – a local paper, bookshops & Twitter etc.
A lovely person, David Breitling, from New York, said about ‘Course of Mirrors’ at the time …‘This is candy for lovers of magic realism.’ … which could also apply to ‘Shapers.’ I’m into a third novel, about Mesa and her dystopian future, where time slows down through lack of conflict, though I may feel discouraged, if interest in my novels doesn’t pick up. Please buy, enjoy and review …
Imagine your brain functions like a psychic radio, tuned to a self-reflective universal mind, the field of consciousness of a cosmic being that gathers, transmits and receives information (aka Noosphere in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s sense, or the Akasha in Indian cosmology.)
We interact with this field. Some thought waves are fuzzy, others strong. We exchange thoughts woven from strands of routine interests, be they based on curiosity, fear, obsession, faith, doubt, novel ideas, myths, facts, dreams, wisdom … Let’s assume the way our brain radio communicates with this field shapes the smaller sphere of our individual mind.
I depict my mind as an island in a tumultuous sea, operated by an idiosyncratic stranded pirate, me.
On rough weather days, when the radio emits white noise, my pirate feels moody, lacks motivation to tackle survival chores, and vacantly skims across the crest of waves spanning towards the horizon. On other days the pirate is energised, be it by rage about world events washed up at the shore of the island, or the sun’s beauty shimmering back from the moon. On occasions the pirate is inspired to dive under the surface, where reflections are held in silence and darkness. Dream-stations may reveal the whereabouts of treasures deep under. There is a reoccurring rhythm to this process. In recent years my pirate has developed a bizarre humour, and tends to favour the dream stations, especially when the quest for coherence and meaning among the debris washed up at the shore seems a tad too tedious.
Maybe it’s the backward arc of old age, but memories pop up suddenly, before and after sleep, succinct impressions, lucid images of past and future events, faces, gestures, objects, the unspoken, and concepts too … associations are sought. A revision of the pirate’s life narrative is feeding surreal dreams. Intuitive hunches chase relevance. How do these images of people, landscapes, houses, objects and concepts, familiar and unfamiliar, relate to now?
Could the restless question be trivial as well as dangerous?
Calm returns when my pirate observes plant life and the movement of animals, then a wonderful symbiotic symphony resonates from cells within the body. Intimate knowledge arises, which also subtly confirms that my pirate has this intimate sense about people, too, and, well, just about anything. I’m hesitant to give weight to this phenomenon, since those who share deep knowledge without collectively approved evidence were and are often crucified. I don’t know about you, my readers, but with some controversial subjects my pirate is a little reticent.
It can’t be denied that our conditioned individual mind has access to primal clusters of knowledge, as well as intuiting visions of the future? What do we do with this information? It’s frustrating to realise that we have limited control over what we attract and reflect. A higher intelligence is at work, perpetuating divisions while consciousness expands.
The universal mind and its network of individual minds remains a complex mystery.
we all use thoughts which
once animated travel
to destinations
distance seems irrelevant
a wide open mind
may suffer indigestion
mirroring too much
spook actions from far away
thoughts are absorbed or bounce back
harmonise or clash
our energy in motion
signals at high speed
intention matters
‘Thoughts are beings that generate … One thought of kindness, gathers a thousand beings of love and kindness around one.’ Hazrat Inayat Khan
The random excerpt of Shapers, below, is where I’ve got earlier today while working through a last round of revisions, before proof reading and formatting towards an initial e-book, if I find the funds. From Course of Mirror’s mythic theme, the cast re-appears in a future SF setting, not on other planets, but on earth. The main protagonists, Ana, Cara and Mesa, connect back and forth in time. They are really one and the same, a triple soul. It’s a compelling work of the imagination with strong, memorable characters. Even my son agrees 🙂
* * *
The hall rocked with the rhythm of drums. All eyes were on Zap, who did a thrilling dance with silk ribbons, and at the same time juggled a round of colourful balls. They slid down his back and legs and with a kick of his heel were flipped back into rotation. He spotted Mesa and waved his ribbon, inviting her to join him, which she did, with sudden abandon. Her responsive dance provoked gasps of admiration. Elim stepped up with his violin, improvising melodies to Mesa’s sensual movements. Her waist undulated between the flowing ribbons, while her arms rippled like snakes.
The sight filled Cara with happiness, until she spotted Dillon staring at Mesa with rapture in his eyes. An intense bout of jealousy overtook Cara. Her lover was a pushover for mystery. When the muse grabbed him all else ceased to exist. She invited the pain, almost welcoming the torture of feeling rejected, though reason argued that Dillon’s infatuation would pass, like any storm, eventually. Still, she felt inept. And yet, only an hour ago she herself was irrationally impressed by another man. What was his name? He was not unlike Dillon, yet different, obscure, and more complex. The thought of him made her skin tingle as she ploughed through the crowd in search of Tilly, and the stranger.
The Stranger
Gart had escaped the festivities. Standing at the cliff’s edge, he clutched his flapping cape, while shouting into the storm, into the void. “Talk to me!” A deep rumble shook the ground. “What is it I am? Answer me!” A blinding streak of lightning split the night and dispersed across the fluid orb of black waters. “Who dropped me here? Take me home to my name.” Thunder resounded in his skull, a force surged through him, fused his feet to the rock under him, and roused senses he had no words for. “What’s expected of me? These people here … they sap my strength, and … I glimpsed something I’ve never seen before … forms behind things … behind her.” As if in response, the apparition of a woman, illuminated from within, rose from the waves below him. Gart sunk to his knees. “What are you?”
A name echoed from the cliffs, but was drowned out by another clap of thunder. The spectre of the figure scattered into shards of silver speeding out in all directions, the sea, the sky, across the sweep of rocks called Kerry.
“Aren’t the waves magical?”
Gart turned towards the voice and was confronted by the girl, Mirre, who by casually touching his shoulder at the banquet had made the hall spin. What was it about her? “Stay away from me!”
“Why?” Mirre’s eyes sparkled from under her windblown red curls.
Her candid question annoyed and intrigued Gart.
Mushki, having caught up with Mirre, skidded to a halt. Searching his holdall, he set up a tripod, screwed on a camera and focused the lens towards the flashes at the horizon. “You,” he motioned to Gart, “you obstruct my view.”
“Don’t be rude,” Mirre said. “Here, use my tablet. It records images in three or more dimensions.”
“No thanks. If I keep the shutter of my lens open I get the effect I want,” Mushki said, and readied himself. He was in luck. Another rumble … giant branches of light filled the sky.
Mirre shrugged and fixed her gaze once more on Gart whose looks reminded her of Crim, her favourite author of animations. “Tilly says you’re a Guardian. Their red uniforms are grand, but you’re not wearing one.”
A spasm gripped Gart’s spine. His head throbbed, and the memory of his identity flooded back. His eyes darted from Mirre to the ivy walls of the estate, to the bay where he glimpsed his airbus, and back to the girl. He burned the image of Mirre’s freckled face into his mind, turned on his heels and dashed down a path towards the beach, away from the chaos that had gripped his mind, familiar faces he couldn’t place. His Guardian training should’ve protected him from such emotional turmoil. What was wrong with him?
He now recalled a repeated interference on his console while heading for Rhonda after his spying mission in Sax. Someone called Zap seemed lost in Derrynane. Annoyed, yet curious, he had demanded his craft to find the place. Then the horizon wobbled, and as if taken over by some spook, he nearly crash-landed on this alien stretch of coastline.
With shaking hands Gart pointed the sensor towards the dolphin-shaped airbus glinting in the dusk. The craft responded. The signal light came on. Only a few more steps and he would be able to lift off from this bewildering place. A sense of vertigo made him stop. All sound ceased. For a brief moment he felt as if his body did not belong to him. Into the silence stirred a soft breeze. An invisible hand seized his and led him to where the water lapped at the sands. Before him the air wavered and the shape of an old woman appeared, more ancient than the yew trees on the peninsula. The crone looked at him like a fox, tilting her head. Her voice was firm. “When a heart cracks its myths flow free and the stories of river and sea mingle.”
Gart opened his mouth and closed it again. A melodic tune drifted across the waters.
Twinkle, twinkle, little rat … how I wonder what you’re at …
A subtle fragrance reached his nostrils bringing memories. Years of harsh drilling for leadership had sealed away images of his childhood. An ornamental garden with birdsong and blossom, a nursery filled with flowers, toys, and humour – a woman reading dreamlike stories to him. Children raised as Guardians were not read stories. They were trained from infancy to obey commands. He was different. Phrases he used as triggers to control his army had no effect on him. He tossed his hair back trying to shake off the confusion. The crone watched him. He realised his thoughts were exposed to her ageless knowing.
“You were led here to experience the sweet agony of emotion, what it’s like to be lovesick, and to yearn for a lost place,” said the crone. Her words seeped under his skin.
A gentle wave splashed over his feet. His toes squished in his sandals. Droplets of sweat soaked his brow. What was she talking about? He glanced back at his craft. Would the tide reach it? He must get away.
Heat shot up his spine when Cassia took a step towards him. “Stop your haste. Imagine deeply. What do you desire? Listen to what the sea whispers in your ear. Accept contradictions. They’re indispensable. You were raised to command the Guardians for a purpose.”
His head hurt. His skull seemed too small to accommodate this garbled talk. He blinked as the crone became fuzzy, then transparent, and finally vanished altogether.
Her last words echoed, “A woman needs your help, and you’ll need hers.”
Gart rubbed his eyes, squinting at the shimmering air before him. Some Shapers were known to materialise out of thin air. Was she one of them? Clinging to his wits he rushed to his airbus and fumbled with the console. How can the sea whisper? And how can a heart crack? His curiosity had often led him to unearth illegal information. He knew how to access a glossary of emotional terms outlawed in Rhonda. Agony – another troubling term – sounding like a woman’s name.
* * *
In late May I visited London – for the first time in almost three years. I met with my son, his wife, and her mother from Darwin. We visited the Tate Modern exhibition on ‘Surrealism without Boundaries.’ That’s for another post.
Rivers of thought swirl by and through me, day and night, changing hourly with impressions, mood, weather, star constellation. The thoughts I attract bring along eddies of fleeting association, a fraction of which create new connections, some bringing solutions and insights worth following. Having learned patience, I let most thoughts flow on and fade, to maybe return. An overly ordered mind would go mad trying to make sense of every thought, like a simulated AI would short circuit with floods of impressions it cannot contextualize.
What enables most humans to deal with ever turbulent feelings and thought processes; how does one edit out what is irrelevant?
I always liked to assume there is a core vibration each of us brings along, a theme around which passions assemble, and necessities, priorities, things that need doing to stay coherent and in rapport with our environment, family, friends, jobs, projects, and not least manage tasks that serve our survival in this ever more complex world.
Our culture rewards strongly defined social roles, though the drawback can be fossilized minds, made rigid, opinionated, avoiding doubt, and unable to imagine other points of views with a generous attitude. A strong definition of one’s place and function in the world could be likened to an instantly recognizable genre, with a predictable protagonist.
By comparison, be it a simplification, philosophers, artists and poets, dreamers, well, creative people with expansive interests, are a slippery lot. They don’t often fit a clear-cut social role, but tend to hang around in fringe positions, distanced from the gyre, observing and evaluating the system, the market place, and the wheels of politics with a wary eye.
From the fringe it is possible to gain a symbolic understanding of people and events, which can stimulate innovation and even visions that reveal deeper layers of the psyche.
These days people say, ‘I want a simple life,’ an option that is rapidly vanishing. More of us are pushed to the fringe, challenged to embrace the complexities of modern/digital life, having to struggle with doubt and inner conflict. This phenomenon may explain the desperate search for advice. Social platforms are brimming with quotes and aphorisms, which, unfortunately, only spark in a heart that is open at a personally timely moment. Otherwise these wisdom’s just float by like irritating advertising banners.
While pondering such thoughts recently, I was reminded of a book that came out in 1997, ‘The Soul’s Code,’ by James Hillman. He explores the guiding force in a person’s life, in various traditions called daimon, genius or guardian angel. He uses the term ‘acorn theory,’ based on the idea of an initial strong image we bring along that calls our destiny towards us. The book struck a deep chord at the time. I’ll read it again, to soothe my outrage with the world.
Hillman dared us to believe that we are each meant to be here; that we are needed by the world around us. An interesting mind, as you’ll find in this longish interview. https://scott.london/interviews/hillman.html
I noticed that since the lockdown of active living was brought in to control the spread of the Corona virus … the isolation from social engagement has affected children and the elderly in different ways.
The middle group, people who kept our social systems functioning, deserve deep gratitude. The work pressure surely involved intense stress and risk-taking.
As for children and young people, bursting with energy and hungry for experiences, I felt for them, being trapped in often cramped homes, while having their future projects halted. No rite of passage events, no opportunity to find their tribe, dreams lost in a distant mist, a mirage on the horizon, where sky and land meet. Recalling my own childhood and youth, I find it hard to imagine the sense of futility and sheer frustration. Some kids will have coped better with this situation than others, not least because there is now the internet, zoom, and generally the disembodied metaverse to engage with, but to what end, when bodies become redundant?
The elderly, to which I belong, for whom work and social engagement may have slowed, and then jolted to a standstill during the past few years, have at least the advantage of a rich and often meaningful past. At best, they can make use of an enforced solitude to regain contact with the unconscious, travel inwards, and use the overview from a distance to lift and re-weave the threats of their lived experience.
From where I observed the young and old sections of society, it seems that past and future flipped their meaning in relation to the expansion of consciousness, and, dare I say it, soul-making, which requires the organic experience. Compared to a bland future, the past holds abundant treasures for the imagination, and an almost luminous creativity.
As long as I remember I felt a desire to deepen my understanding of time and space, nature, human behaviour, the sciences, people’s perception and differences, the collective psyche … to which end I travelled to seek adventures, read countless books and studied many subjects, some of them formally, like philosophy, spiritual traditions, psychology, mythology, art, photography, film and video, each time meeting interesting and inspiring groups and ideas. I was too involved with people to value the poems and stories I wrote, until my introspection flowed into a novel, ‘Course of Mirrors,’ and a soon-to-be sequel, ‘Shapers.’.
I’m presently reading Italo Calvino’s ‘Invisible Cities,’ a dreamlike dialogue between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo about imagined or memorised cities. A sentence I came upon yesterday sparked this post …
“You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living … “
This does not yet apply, but I get it. During the last three decades I lost over 20 dear friends, including my parents, not taking into account writers and public figures I admired. Grief meanders freely in my mind, is palpable, and unavoidable. Yet, due to their influence, all significant people that died during these last three decades live on in my psyche.
While my physical engagement with people has slowed these last years, time itself has dizzyingly sped ahead, which, for me, is enough reason to resurrect the embodied insights of past decades, if only to defy a sensational but boringly flat metaverse. Young people might of course have a totally different view.
Several themes were on my mind to write about here this month, until this curious thought of a reverse past/future junction came up last night. So I wonder if my reflections resonate with some of my readers, especially those of you in the second half of their lives.
As an example, not a general theory, a parent who habitually keeps everything organised, clean and in place, may feel displeasure when their child does not follow this model. Sensing displeasure, the child may feel restrained and controlled, and possibly develop a reaction via contrary behaviour. Of course, reactions to initial conditions are way more complex. But both, excessive order and excessive chaos in the early environment set a tone.
My early impressions were in the middle, yet plenty of condensed experiences pull me into repetitive behaviour. But people for whom, let’s say, the organised model felt intolerable, meeting an adult partner who likes order, even in a mild way, easily hooks into their initial reaction. The desire for order is stability, beauty, keeping the wild and unpredictable at bay, and also serves as a buffer against anxiety. But someone who felt restricted by order may easily feel controlled. In this two-way process, any projection also frames the projector, and various complex relationships are such defined, with children, partners, work colleagues, mentors, groups, and even political parties. The irony is that instead of choosing a partner or group where this conflict does not arise, we often unconsciously attract an early model we disliked, maybe because of its familiarity, maybe because of the implied challenge. I assume it’s a psychological trick allowing for lessons in tolerance and, hopefully in time, a reframing of one’s life story.
While periods of stability are necessary, it is from chaos that creativity is born and new forms emerge, which is why some artists embrace chaos, allowing for the spontaneous discovery of new patterns and hidden harmonies.
To voluntary endure the dissonance between order and chaos is a spiritual quest towards an attitude of transcendence.
In this sense, and with the emphasis on becoming, my Sufi teacher, Fazal Inayat-Khan, who was also a musician and poet, used to orchestrate chaos in workshops for his students to great effect. He trained us well for the turbulent cultural changes that are now upon us, a global rite of passage we best consciously engage with. Faith in the unknown tends to signal our guiding spirit to open unsuspected doors towards a deeper resonance with the collective psyche.
“Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.’ — Fyodor Dostoevsky
‘The Gods envy the perfection of man, because perfection has no need of the Gods. But since no one is perfect, we need the Gods.’ … Carl Jung, Liber Novus, page 244
‘The ideal is the means; its breaking is the goal.’ Hazrat Inayat Khan
Ever since I came upon James Gleick’s book ‘Chaos,’ the William Heinemann Ltd 1988 edition, I was fascinated by the concept which has radically changed scientific enquiries, as well as giving new meaning to my practice of transpersonal therapy.
James Gleick’s book also contains the amazing Mandelbrot set. Here a short introduction …
James Gleick’s newest publication is on ‘Information.’
Phew … here I’m challenged … a new wordpress format with its insistence on ‘blocks,’ disallows me the use of the classic editor. It’s a headache to create a post.
Course of Mirrors 