Tag Archives: imagination

August 18, 2013 · 11:40 am

… storytelling and the primary world …

Knowledge is not the rare gem it used to be. Then again, without recording, analysing, sorting, summarising, calculating and disseminating mega quantities of data we’d have none of our ingenious toys to play with. Without statistics our systems would grind to a halt, and, yes, it’s annoying that almost daily yet another quantitative study announces what’s good, or detrimental, for our well-being. Thankfully, none of the churned out evidenced facts can make a claim on meaning. Humans remain idiosyncratic. We apply messy values to our life-choices, and we frequently ignore the logical road signs of scientific landscapes, or blank out the hassle of linear time.

Instead, we are tossed along by emotional encounters, the unexpected, are awestruck after a quantum leap of intuition, and are generally guided by what appeals to a body/mind that likes the stimulation of nature, her moods, seasons, the phases of day and night suggesting action or repose, like the in-and-out-breath, between which we may catch a glimpse of a dream, a relevant truth, an eternity even. Hardly anyone I know is without this conflict: liking order and control, as well as yearning for rapport with the dance and rhythm of nature.

Over 300 years ago G W von Leibnitz, who could’ve been a poet, was gripped by an emerging idea, to collate all human knowledge and to systematize it via a common language. Computers would have been his bliss. He loved to correspond with most scholars in Europe during this baroque era. And he might have gone some way to explain the whole universe in the hope to solve every conceivable problem. Paradoxically, he also stated … the universe had to be imperfect otherwise it would not be distinct from God. Near the end of his life, Leibniz wrote in a letter that combining metaphysics with mathematics and science through universal characters would require creating what he called:

… a kind of general algebra in which all truths of reason would be reduced to a kind of calculus. At the same time, this would be a kind of universal language or writing, though infinitely different from all such languages which have thus far been proposed; for the characters and the words themselves would direct the mind, and the errors — excepting those of fact — would only be calculation mistakes. It would be very difficult to form or invent this language or characteristic, but very easy to learn it without any dictionaries …

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristica_universalis

I’m not doing honour to this remarkable man, so here is a sketch of a biography … http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Leibniz.html … should you have the patience to read this, note the time it took for letters between Leibniz and Newton to be delivered, which makes me admire the tenacity of these scientists.

The notion of a calculus for a universal language intrigues and troubles me. Nature speaks a language everyone understands. Key-terms of my mother tongue (see my last blog post) easily bring back the plot of land my toddler feet bounced across. The stories I most enjoy writing grow organically, with tendrils of their roots nourished by the alpine woods and hills of my childhood.

But things change. Data collation is now available to authors, promising control, over marketing, though formulas and blueprints are now offered for the creative process, like how to write a novel in four week. Imagination serves many masters and is not easily controlled – its life-sap flows through all forms.

We can only explore everything known continuously in fresh situations and move on, in the way that children and creative people place a familiar object into a new context. The play of imagination destroys and creates, and has the power to shift the meaning of our past, present and future.

‘There is the truth of truth as well as the truth of fact.’ D.H. Lawrence

Being part of the dynamic process of evolution (which Philippa Rees ingeniously terms ‘Involution’ in her book of that title) we are walked by the tightrope of ecstasy and pain, of dependencies on environments and people, for better or worse, dependencies on beliefs too, mostly not by choice, but driven by binding needs.

We face exploitation, conflict, sudden change, harmony alternating with phases of chaos – the story of life, a record marked in DNA and every tree trunk. Instigating control, or preaching harmony while shading off the dark, the chaos, the collective psyche of humanity, will only repeat the distortions of otherwise genuine messages from enlightened thinkers, sages and prophets.

It would serve us as well to teach our children how to accept the dark and how to deal with conflict. Reading the collected folk tales of the Grimm Brothers to children would be a start.

Dore – public-domain-image

The inspired P L Travers, author of Mary Poppins, had a talent for highlighting the vital function of myth, symbol and story. She shared her reflections in a collection of essays that appeared in Parabola Magazine. The essays were later published in a book, titled: ‘What the Bee Knows.’

She wrote … The Primary World, in order to go on living, needs the things man cannot create – the earth with all its composted dead, the rain that raineth every day, the seasons, nightfall, silence – and the ear free of all pulsation but that of its own blood.

… The Primary World is that which has never been invented but came into being, along with the blood stream, as a legacy from the Authors who, according to Blake, are in Eternity. All the rest is manmade, or as Tolkien has it – sub-created.

As a writer I sub-create and grow stories from within, using images and words that resonate with personal experiences, myths and visions that provide an ever-changing way of relating to myself, to others and the worlds we share. So when Travers says … nothing is truly known until it is known organically … this chimes for me.

We forget – a happy fault – imagine there was no pause between one dream and another, no night. We forget so we can re-member creatively, which takes practice. We walk on star dust and ancestral bones that inform our bloodstream, as much as the stories of this world nourish our imagination, continuously re-shuffling our psyche, which explains our function as being the bridge between matter and spirit. Every bee knows this.

Image by Yeshen Venema

What the Bee Knows, by P L Travers http://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Bee-Knows-Arkana-Travers/dp/0140194665/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1376737128&sr=1-3&keywords=what+the+bee+knows Wow, no reviews

Parabola Magazine: http://www.parabola.org/

‘Involution’ by Philippa Rees: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/30171.Philippa_Rees

Images are mine unless the captures say otherwise.

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August 4, 2013 · 11:39 am

… mother tongue & other tongue …

Starnbergersee

Two languages, two rhythms, two patterns, two spheres, two perceptions … last week I attended a re-union of my primary school class in Bavaria. Around 20 of us turned up. The event included a ship ride on the lake that marks the geography of my childhood – Starnbergersee – whose shores are garlanded with castles and grand villas. Once I’ve won the lottery I’ll snap up one of these dream places and invite all my readers to a prolonged party with performances of magic theatre. Yeah!

Das Vogelhäuserl

The tour added a refreshing breeze to the sweltering heat. Later in the day a smaller group gathered at a lakeside restaurant, the same spot where, as a child, I turned up in summer holidays, at sunrise, to assist the local fishermen bringing in their full nets, in return for the free use of a small sailing boat during afternoons.

A re-union

The encounter with classmates I hadn’t seen for over half a century unfolded like a surreal dream as we cooled down with beer and wine and gossiped time away into the evening. I’m still trying to fit names to faces and places, and make sense of stories that cast stray beams on my memories of the village I grew up in, a village close to the Alps, set in landscapes whose ambiance morphed into the beginning of my first novel.

Schloss Berg

Among my class mates were a few women I quickly chimed with, not surprisingly, we were close friends during those early years, though we lost touch when we moved on to different schools. It’s deep and wondrous – the mystery of this precious resonance called friendship.

This is me, aged 6, on my first school day. I was a single child.

Erster Schultag

And I well remember the excitement. The Zuckertüte, the upside down magician’s hat filled with bonbons, chocolates and presents to sweeten the transition into the big world seems to grace my head in the photo my dad took. I can’t find the image right now, but I did receive a proper Zuckertüte on the day, filled to the rim.

My favourite teacher (in the group photo with the village poem post, link below) turned up at the re-union, slow on his legs but sharp witted. His eyes lit up when he recognised me, which gave me a warm feeling all over.

Living in England since several decades, I visit Germany periodically to see my grumpy late-artist-dad, and dear German friends, made during my later Sturm und Drang phase. What struck me about the school re-union was how the primary sensation of my childhood was brought to life through words tossed into the conversations, keywords from my mother-tongue, embedded in local dialect. My mother, who came from Berlin, never picked up the Bavarian dialect, neither did I, however, the term mother tongue incorporates for me my early environment, the village. https://courseofmirrors.wordpress.com/2012/08/31/village-poem/

For the greater part of my life I thought by and spoke in the other tongue, which I first learned at school. Aged 18, unsure of my path, I spent a cultural year with a family friend in London. She cherished me. Our relationship was a healing experience for both of us, given her loss of friends and family members in the Holocaust, and my inherited burden of the atrocities having taken place in my country. Later, studying in Munich, English was the language connecting a multicultural student population. When 9 years on I married a Dutch man and we moved to England together, my German vocabulary gathered dust during further studies. The distance from my mother tongue freed up a wider perception. It also helped me overcome an encoded traumatic experience. At secondary school I had written an essay, freely based on a painting of my choice by Spitzweg – writing was then a blissful creative process. The teacher read the essay aloud, praising its brilliance, after which she informed the whole class that I could not have composed this myself – a screaming insult! And yet, I thank the stupid woman, it changed the course of my studies. I initially used photography to express myself, resuming poetry and imaginative writing later, finding that English allowed me the necessary wings.

Who knows what the dusted off layer of my mother tongue will bring round. Writing in the other language helped me to transcend the mere facts of my life to essential themes, universal metaphors. The divided kingdom of parents, the psychology of the single child, her assumed bridging function between patterns of seeing, like the rational and imaginative perception, the distorted mirrors of relationships, betrayals, the search for the real, and the meeting of soul families. Essential themes lifted like green islands from dark waters during my protagonist’s river journey west.

Course of Mirrors is a gripping adventure story, as well as a psycho mythical opus. In its sequel the teller of the story is revealed as the visionary myth-maker overtaken by her myth – in the way that we can re-arrange the past and postulate possible futures, explore different time-zones, and expand expectations.

I must leave it to my readers to judge the results of my experiment. The first book, Course of Mirrors, will be published next year, by a small but devoted publisher.

Are you a writer/artist who processes experience through two or more languages?

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June 9, 2013 · 1:14 pm

… the house-guests of body electric …

SHE calls me body electric. SHE – incarnate as hu-wo-man – oh the mystery – and such hard problem for the scientists who establish evidence of truth via the elimination of untruths. Meanwhile they identify my parts, their functions and complexities …

I’m a miracle, my ears perk at the slightest sound – the little groan in the joints of wood and brick when the house moves a fraction as the weather swings about, soft tweet of a bird, the hum of fridge and its sudden shudder, a rumbling pipe, creak of loose floorboards, or the faint scrape on the stair in the middle of night, when the tip-toeing lodger sneaks to the kitchen to pinch a little honey. Not my concern, I only notice. Exquisitely attuned to my network of neurons, I pick up irregularities, tiny fluctuations of mood, unfamiliar smells, odd tastes, taut muscles … the chatter of Jego, but more of him later.

Whoever I house, I prompt stretching exercises, crack joints to unblock energy, flex shoulder-blades that still mourn their wings, and shortly massage cold fingers-tips, my antenna for vibes. I rejoice in my multitasking, my handling of objects with skills no programmed AI creature could ever hope to achieve. With the unfailing accuracy of a spy, I pick up signals against the faint background buzz of the blood river and readily adjust to spheres beyond my skin palace.

And SHE – my occupier – revels in the fleeting novelties of my gift, the senses – the paradox of pain and joy, where humour lurks between tears and laughter, moments with friends, bliss in a garden, like pruning branches for light to fall through foliage. SHE loves light. A breeze lifts the smoke of a roll-up, diaphanous shapes flow illuminated against a sunbeam until the shade swallows the spectacle, fluorescent spider webs, and blossoms fall.

I have bouts of melancholy, made aware that my fine architecture is only a short, temporary abode for my occupier. It saddens me when SHE pays no attention to my signals, or is absent, travelling in abstract realms.

One day she’ll be gone altogether, leaving me behind. There’ll be no more breath and currents flowing through my organs, cells, brain — switchboards to her mind-spheres. Will she take along her impressions and associations?

I perceive phenomena in passing, pure and simple, with an artist’s sensibility. Semi permanence is the business of Jego, a sophisticated but battered and nervous entity that draws conclusions from what my senses transmit.

Example – SHE lets me drive a car to visit a friend. On instinctive pilot, I allow Jego to grab surplus energy. He elaborates on what he perceives through my senses.

That pub, why did the new owner paint it dark grey? A monstrosity, insulting the eye, aesthetically revolting, this must be someone’s idea of a cool concept, what a waste of paint!

Though amusing, his habit of sending spam into mind-clouds affect my equilibrium.

I draw attention to a stomach-cramp. Jego quickly analyses the cause before chasing another thought. It’s marvellous, and thoroughly compulsive, how he creates realities, juggles thoughts, day and night, unless SHE attempts a pause – counting breaths, reciting mantras to calm my overexcited synapses, or diligently monitoring Jego’s pranks to get him to focus on something coherent and creative.

On occasions he achieves concentration, calms, then we all relax into harmony, and for a short while a crystal-clear comprehension dawns …

Ah – we are dancers in a hologram – oh – who’s in charge?

Here Pomp makes an appearance, an intuitive entity, a messenger born of many traditions, with equally many names and disguises, a channel to the universal psyche. Though Pomp is not in charge, he knows stuff, and brings a tribute, the remembrance of an unfathomable awareness behind timeless intelligences every particle has contributed to, is essentially part of …

‘We are more than dust,’ SHE confesses, ‘and to fulfil our purpose I must embrace you, little body electric, and partake of your pain and joy.’

‘What about Jego?’ I ask.

‘Poor chap, either he’s praised to heaven or cursed to hell. Some spiritual experts blame him for everything, and label him the greatest obstacle to higher evolution. It’s evidenced what happens to children we treat like that … we must be gentle with Jego.

His task is the hardest. In time, if we model tolerance and patience, he’ll learn to create more coherent realities.’

Her kind words calm me, and make me feel all warm and fuzzy.

Neti neti – not this, not this – no description suffices – what prevails is supreme consciousness, unidentified and unidentifiable, slipping in and out of embodied existence like a wind of light.

Though it gives us equal joy and pain, do you like your body electric?

And are you on a warpath with your neurotic ego, or do you exercise patience?

‘There is a strange frenzy in my head, of birds flying, each particle circulating on its own. Is the one I love everywhere?’

~ Rumi ~ transl. Coleman Barks.

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May 20, 2013 · 10:14 pm

… consciousness – the mystery …

People who engage in therapeutic work with me often ask – why dig up my past, it holds pain, why look at attachment patterns, why explore the theme (myth) of my life? What a waste of time. I only want to get rid of my symptoms.

We all, without exception, suffered injuries. The creative question to ask is – how has the injury shaped my life, and what purpose does it serve? Many years ago, during a group dialogue following the inspirational talk of my Sufi teacher, we discussed three basic kinds of injuries. I connect my own experience to the third injury.

1 Having experienced physical injury can result in fight and flight behaviour – it brings a heightened sensitivity and develops a sharpening of the senses.

2 Having experienced sexual, sensual and emotional injury can result in escape from one’s self into others, estrangement from self, lack of differentiation and boundaries – the great challenge is to accept one’s self, differentiate as an individual from the tribe and take responsibility for one’s unique potential.

3 Having experienced injury on a cognitive level accelerates individuation – the escape is into deeper realities, a search for authenticity and truth and the development of symbolic reality – universal reality.

My novel, Course of Mirrors, is the fictionalised account of an aspect of my personal myth made universal – in the sense that memories of events don’t have to be real for a story to be true.

@ Natasha Tonkin

Even the most die-hard materialists among us grok that life is animated and guided by an all-pervading spirit? We are vessels, psychic switchboards for the spirit that animates and records all life.

An ungraspable phenomenon we try to name in vain.

Mental states pass through us. We call in and then process thoughts and feelings, seeking coherence, and – given we assign meaning to what happens to us – are gaining wider perspectives and deeper insights. With every new connection made and every little light brought to what is forgotten and unknown – collective consciousness grows.

Our body knows, if we care to notice, what stirs in our psyche, what wants to unfold and emerge. When energy flows freely through us our essential nature is uplifted, and our desire is aligned with the potential in us that seeks actualisation – in the way a cocoon reveals the butterfly. Our life has many cocoon and wing stages. The proverbial flutter that causes a stir in all spheres of the universe is like yet another love-transcended aspect of us emerging from yet another cocoon.

Presence, responding to situations, accepting differences and contradictions, frees energy that is ghosted and stagnant. While blocked energy creates frustrations and often painful symptoms, it is totally inevitable, since every organism evolves through condensed experiences. Life enhancing and life destroying events subject us to a pattern of repetition in time until we embrace change.

‘A truth outgrown crushes you under its weight.’ Fazal Inayat-Khan

To bring a repeating pattern to a higher level of flow requires a kind of quantum leap of consciousness. Small leaps occur frequently, especially when we befriend the unconscious and allow fresh symbols into awareness. The released light/energy brings new meaning and allows the self-actualisation of new potential.

‘It is obvious that the percolation of a timeless NOW is penetrating everything!’ – Philippa Rees

* * *

The image above is by Natasha Tonkin, my son’s partner. It was done two years ago as Christmas card and gift idea towards illustrating my novel, to help bring it to life. I scanned and inversed the image for the mirror to appear light. Natasha’s animation website: http://pandahorse.com/

Link to a book I co-edited about the Sufi teacher I mentioned above, Fazal Inayat-Khan. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Heart-Sufi-Inayat-Khan-Reflections-ebook/dp/B00BFUO0T6/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369084226&sr=1-1&keywords=heart+of+a+sufi

Link to ‘Involution,’ an exceptional book by a kindred spirit, Philippa Rees. http://involution-odyssey.com/ her book will soon hit the market. Her site is being developed.

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April 14, 2013 · 7:20 pm

… inner time – writing – rant …

Beyond my window, robins, wrens, blue tits and blackbirds are nest-building, with bursts of passion. Dipping in and out of view, they settle shortly on a deck chair, branch or flowerpot, balancing lavish bouquets of fluff, moss, twigs and leaves, before darting off towards the next promising material. The birds winging through my garden make me happy.

My thoughts wing in similar fashion dedicated to another passion, no less preparing for a new round of birth – in my case the writing of the next chapter of a novel. I anticipate with joy each few hours of unstructured time that allows me to visit my garden of recollections, a space where myths re-weave themselves from the fluff, moss, twigs and leaves of memories. Like the visions I brought into this world, ambivalent responses to my existence, altered states, affinity with elements, genetic markers, epigenetic quirks … my bundle of life that fell into a mould and was conditioned by socially convenient patterns of time.

Dividing reality into past, present and future time, measured by clocks and dated events, called facts, is a fairly modern idea that made Science the grail of knowledge. The best of science deepens our understanding of the cosmos and improves the quality of our lives, but its method is limited, not suited to go to court on another reality dimension, inner time, infinite, immeasurable, where our experiences assume meaning. We may walk through life like snapshots of ourselves, collecting capture after capture of evidence for our existence, while longing for a dimension within, the bridge to a spiritual presence hidden between each breath, a truth impossible to evaluate? Some religions banked divine capital in heaven. Science too, in its present phase, projects a kind of heavenly capital, hijacked by corporates selling us the future, a Promised Land of artificial intelligences catering to our every need, uncannily resembling the Matrix or Plato’s cave.

My rhythm of life changed when I dropped out – the second time in my life – taking the financial risk to work from home and make time to write, which I had failed to combine with careers, family and social obligations. The experiences were vital, up to a point. Now I relax about clocks and tend to my inner worlds. I crave unstructured time. Not everyone does.

Recently a friend reflected humorously on her frustration at finding herself with one hour to spare, having miscalculated her travel time. She would have been happy had she brought a book to read. Instead, she endured a dragging hour of unplanned, wasted time. Intrigued, we reflected on this sense of loss when there is unexpectedly nothing in particular to attend to.

Is there merit in unstructured time … what do you think? Is it only for children, is it a luxury, a waste, or an opportunity to shift perspectives, discover your passion, break the mould and loosen up your ideas of reality? I don’t see unstructured time being much encouraged, or its lovely randomness being valued. I was burdened by the message that my imagination is fanciful, a kind of debility. It took me decades to claim the time for my passion, writing …

This seems the place to share a personal rant, blaming no one in particular, since, from where I look the rift between head and heart that is tearing apart the fabric of western societies may yet need to become wider before the peril is addressed. If the media is anything to go by, meaningful purpose, visions, let alone joie de vivre, are overshadowed by collective gloom. Feel free to disagree with my take on this. Straining under the pressure to change, I see our systems are attempting to cement a shaky launch pad towards a logarithmic future, with good intentions, though the consequences are dire. Every aspect of our lives is in danger of becoming: over-calculated, over-regulated, over-efficient, over-specialised, over-mechanised, over-prescriptive, over-secured, over-insured, over-compartmentalised, over-conglomerated, and over-economised.

On a more cheerful note, young people in their 30s, at least the ones I know, are asking sharp questions, and are finding ingenious ways to play with, while not getting sucked mindlessly into programmes that abuse data, spoon feed illusions, appeal to personal anxieties, invade privacy, and insult the intelligence of creative individuals.

Back to the birds winging through my garden …

* * *

To see a world in a grain of sand

And Heaven in a wild flower

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour … W. Blake, from Auguries of Innocence

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March 26, 2013 · 10:12 pm

… what’s your myth …

Do you paint your myth into clouds?

Do you find your myth on the ground?

Do you search for your myth in love?

Do you clean up writings on the wall because you weighed life on scales and found it wanting?

Is your myth in the process of being sculpted?

Are your myths about debunking clichés?

Are you shaping your myth into the future?

Are you the eternal traveller – like me?

This post was inspired by a writer friend I exchanged a few emails with. And I found myself expressing a thought in this vein … Writers and artists are like archaeologists; they dig, uncover and re-shape a personal myth until the myth takes wings and becomes universal, though many writers would deny this. And yet – think about it – the myths we live and re-shape give meaning to our lives and entice readers to explore theirs.

* * *

And who do we share our myths with?

A listener like this chap does wonders for one’s confidence :)

Re-posted at:

http://thirdsundaybc.com/2013/04/21/april-2013/

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March 12, 2013 · 3:34 pm

… surfing the virtual waves …

I first accessed the internet while doing a sabbatical film degree as a mature student in the 1990’s.

Struggling with basics, feeling the fool among bright young computer literates, I typed surrealism into the search engine, a subject that rhymed with my passion for transpersonal psychology and fascinated me. Take yourself out of your familiar environment, lose the original context into which your identity had been projected, then gaze and ponder. I had done precisely that. During my first year on the film course I felt displaced and, like my son at a stopover, did a trawling assessment of the oracular unknown.

I was going to write an essay, on how Freud’s work influenced art and film during the 20^th century, a glittering subject that led me into a dreamlike maze. Each follow-up link on the screen led to another site – another artist, philosopher, writer, page after page, world after world opened until I was afloat in a sea of rich associations. Gripped by Alice in Wonderland sensations, I thought – unless I stick to the context of my essay, the web will suck me into a whirlpool. Exploring the unconscious for its potentiality and its poetic combustion via dis-identification was of course the surrealists’ impulse, to the ends of tricking the rational mind by using trance to break out of trance – which may well be the ultimate purpose of the internet.

One of the lies would make it out that nothing

ever presents itself before us twice.

Where would we be at last if that were so?

Our very life depends on everything’s

recurring till we answer from within.

The thousandth time may prove the charm. – From ‘Snow,’ by Robert Frost

I had worked as photographer on film-sets in a former career, so I grabbed the opportunity to study the ultimate trance in its historical context, and play with it. Manipulated by high-angles, close-ups, masking, dissolves, and cross-cutting during editing, underscored by sound, images could be displaced, speeded, up, slowed down or distorted. The surrealists were among the first to love fluid images, using them to disrupt unconscious processes of identification at the same time scientists’ deconstructed particles, and time, and space in good measure. The search within, long pursued in the east, was taking hold in the west.

Deconstruction is the prelude to creation. Having learned that we are conscious of only a tiny island of our psyche, much like we can only see the tip of an iceberg, had affirmed my lifelong desire of seeking what is behind the mirror of appearances. In that vein, I recall feeling an awesome sense of responsibility when I first held my new-born son, imagining that my every gesture, my every tone of voice, and even my very thoughts might subliminally influence his pristine being. I was quickly grounded, adapting to the routine of being present to my little one’s basic needs, and soon realised that he had brought along his own world from another sphere, and that beyond my stimulating mirror, he would shape his own destiny.

So here was a kind of baby – an essay on surrealism. To deal with the mass of on-line leads, I took capacious notes, plundered the college library, and relied on intuition to guide me through the process of writing, allowing the essay its own agenda. It was when I first acknowledged that my sixth sense made writing a pleasure. Years later, starting my first novel, responding to subtle influences became the only way I could write, trusting that the unconscious – rather like a digital binary system – condenses and displaces material that can re-emerge with the right prompts.

Spending several months co-editing a beautiful book of reminiscence about a remarkable teacher, printed as a limited edition (also available in E-PUB soon), I started my second novel, and forayed into the on-line publishing world. Armed with the intention of finding a publisher my trust deserted me. I felt suffocated by the genre jungle, the flood of how-to-does and the racing schemes offering self-publishing. I scolded myself for procrastinating, being lazy, not believing in my work, but nevertheless stubbornly held back. Having ordered a few print-on-demand publications by friends I made on a writer’s site, who had got their act together, I was disappointed by the poor presentation of most books – cheap paper, cramped layout, narrow margins and too small fonts. Is this how small publishers and self-pub schemes treat writers who spent years on composing their epic? My heart sunk. I observed my frustration, took stock and decided to relax and wait for a beacon.

In any case, I had been fooling myself, betting on the wrong horse. Being a published author has its perks, but what truly matters to me is the actual process of writing, which is alchemy, a sculpting of feelings, a release, being other than what is familiar, uncovering myths and creating new ones, digging for treasure, a journey into the unknown that reveals horizon upon horizon. A metaphor for my life, about the how, about the journey inside with my others, relationships woven from layers of experience into something new, each time, and time again … life writes its stories through us.

Apart from receiving vague out-of-the-blue proposals offering dubious contracts, I had two chance-encounters with publishers who welcomed a read of my MS, encounters resulting from surfing the web on the crest of my interests, often as unsubstantial as a keyword from a dream. It’s no different from how I live my live. Not exactly a structured approach, I sometimes scold myself. But for better or worse I don’t attach myself to goals, only to transitional containers, which could be an object, a character, a dream image or a place, and the rest follows. My stories emerge from kernels lying in wait, and they pursue their own agenda. I let them, and trust they will find a readership.

Like Stan Brakhage, one of the early experiential film-makers, I think of the deeply personal as universal and conceive of the real world as invisible ‘… thus in the physical or spiritual or light world all forms are beings – stones, trees, stars, streams, men, flames and turds are really facts of invisible presences. Mineral, wood, fire, water, flesh are terms of dense soulful sense.’

In this way, rather than going nuts, as I feared when first exploring the global mirror of the internet, I’ve made peace with it, relating to it as a spacious, time-freed being that interconnects all our stories and projections and offers its content according to the container I bring to it.

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March 1, 2013 · 9:51 pm

… prayer …

When I hear of colleagues and friends who are having a stressful time, I usually exit my often self-defeating stream of thoughts and clear my mind – so my well-wishes can broadcast clearly. What works for me is tuning into thankfulness and often a little prayer or song comes to mind.

An image transformed during a rare attempt to be adventurous with photoshop.

Who or what are my little prayers addressed to? The One in me I’m not ready to manifest and therefore bow to.

Below is a German song that came to me just now.

The text misses two dots above the ‘o’ in the word ‘schonen.’ I’d be grateful if someone could point me to a source for dots.

Dank Dir fur jeden schonen Morgen

Dank Dir fur jeden neuen Tag

Dank Dir dass ich all meine Sorgen

Auf Dich legen mag.

Very freely translated: Thank you, for every lovely morning, thank you for every novel day. Thank you, that I may leave my sorrows in your wisdom’s way.

Some time ago I shared my favourite prayer, also a song, with words by Hazrat Inayat Khan: …https://courseofmirrors.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/my-favourite-prayer/

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February 18, 2013 · 8:10 pm

… global vision & synchronicity …

Less than 80 years ago, across the world, only about 200 televisions sets were in use. Today, a simulated reality confronts us with our collective mind. A click away, we sample the zeitgeist and witness some disturbing trends, like the continuous robbery of world resources.

How do we filter the mass of information? Do we shout treason when we see the failure of economic systems that allow 1 % of the population to own 40 % of global wealth, or when we discover that certain corporations privatise water – even rainwater – in underdeveloped countries? Traversing from one patch of light to another, do we make connections that apply to our scope of action? Or, lacking a meaningful context, are we hypnotised by this enlarged mega-screen, the global vision of a world that can mirror our inner fragmented states – a world where every viewpoint exists simultaneously, that over-exposes so-called reality and blinds us? Are we ourselves living inside the screen-myth, as extras, freed into bits, a reservoir of data?

As writers, what in-forms us, what material do we disseminate? And what is it that makes choices, switches from one networks of influence to another? What guides us through the data jungle? Are there perceptions beyond our wilful personalities that determine, agencies that operate through us from beyond time and space? I’m weary of the term God. For me this agency is a consciousness composed of past, present and future intelligences, a light-wave that echoes different signals according to the receptivity and needs of each animated vessel. Humans can be dense, but a calm mind recognises clear signals of this wave, since they chime with a joyous feeling of connectedness, a larger symphony, maybe even the sense of a destined purpose.

In my experience, this consciousness operates through synchronicity. There exist conceptual similarities between the behaviour of sub-atomic particles and archetypal images, (C G Jung and Wolfgang Pauli discussed such similarities in the context of synchronicity), a striking link between mind and matter that has been largely ignored. It implies that mind and matter connect, relate, mirror each other, and reciprocate. The process is given life in the realm of the psyche as imagination, not structured by time and space, but through layers of meaning illuminated by consciousness. Psyche is the changing room between cosmos and pneuma.

Jung thought of archetypes not as fixed, but as changing predispositions, universal patterns inherent in the human psyche, images that comprise our collective past and future unconscious. A pattern stirred into activity by an emotionally charged event in our lives, brings home related experiences, often through meaningful coincidences in a non-linear and a-causal way.

Such synchronicities draw on a deeper life-sap, as if an eternal intelligence were at work.

David Bohm proposed that subatomic particles remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them, and that their separateness is an illusion. Here a facet of his thinking – a short first part of a 5 part series http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGyDVF8GrLk A great and humble man I greatly admire. He has beautiful hands :)

A dream, for example, can attract an outer event, a meaningful coincidence, that powerfully substantiates a message from the unconscious, often accompanied by a numinous quality. In my own life, synchronistic events have challenged my narrow reasoning at certain crossroads towards seemingly irrational decisions. Exploring a hunch, while not attaching to the outcome, often clarifies a situation for me. Consequently, I respect the unconscious, and heed my intuitions.

‘The universe does not exist, out there, independent of all acts of observation. Instead, it is in some strange sense a participatory universe.’ – John Wheeler

Just as scientist are branching out from traditional imperatives that divide the world into subjects and objects, so we all, presented with a global vision, must modify some of the archetypal imperatives, images and ideas that have outlived their use, and look for symbols that carry a fresh mystery.

While sun and moon are forever formative and feed our imagination, they are no more our only lights.

With new associations from science come fresh symbols and exciting probabilities, in that we can question assumptions about time and progress, about the relationship between matter and mind, about our view of social units, and even the meaning we give to gender.

‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards’. The White Queen says to Alice.

* * *

Many of my posts here touch upon similar themes, but maybe pattern-which-connect in particular: https://courseofmirrors.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/pattern-which-connects/

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February 6, 2013 · 11:15 pm

… why spin tales? …

Why spin tales, why listen to them, enact them on stage, dance them, ritualise them, read them, write them, re-write them? We tell stories to ourselves and each other, to entertain, inspire, amplify events, or in search for meaning.

When it comes to stories, fact-finders tend to miss the point. Too many sequential facts can befuddle a truth that lingers in the higher or deeper layers of consciousness, from where vital symbolic insights shine through a narrative.

We owe much to Joseph Campbell, who with life-long passion explored the origins of myths and their functions throughout human history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell

And check out these fantastic documentaries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Myth

A myth is a public dream – a dream is a private myth. – Joseph Campbell

In my psychotherapy practice, clients present their story in unique ways that occasionally include lucid dreams of past lives. I deeply respect the power of the imagination. In neutral mode, I listen. So it happens that a trauma set in thirteenth century Languedoc, when Cathars were branded as heretics and massacred by the Catholic Church, can deeply trouble a person’s psyche with visceral images. I travel along, and as the story is released, I may bridge the emotional resonance of a pattern to the present life of a client. In this process profound cognitions can soften a psychological complex.

Lasting examples of deeper truths are mirrored in Fairy-tales and myths, where basic patterns of our collective unconscious psyche are brought into relief. That is, if we can grasp the metaphors under the primary meaning of words. Fictional settings for heroic or anti-heroic characters are particularly suited to convey powerful emotional themes infused with archetypal elements.

… the spirit of an age is more essentially mirrored in its fairy-tales than in the most painstaking chronicle of a contemporary diarist … Raymond Chandler – Realism and Fairy-land

Some religions persist in the literal truths of their sacred texts. Scientists, too, get stuck in dogma, but I emphasize more with the frustration of the latter, since, with the courage of doubt, scientists have pushed the horizon of knowledge outwards by painstakingly reading the book of nature through the language of data, evidencing processes poets and mystics before them intuited, but physical eyes cannot perceive – like radiations other than light. I’m trying to overcome the conflict of the scientist and poet in me. They interpret the world in different but equally significant ways. There is a need to read nature in both languages, so greater understanding and tolerance can develop.

‘With faith one attains and realises peace and harmony. With doubt one destroys and gains freedom to move ontowards.’ – Fazal Inayat-Khan

Memory, objectively true, or false, affects our lives every day. Stories lodged in the heart endure in a timeless dimension of the imagination. We can however alter their interpretation by exploring our perspective, be it from a pit of fatalism, a sense of insecurity, a belief in magic, faith in divine guidance, or the certitude of natural laws. Even the simple acceptance of life’s continuous dynamic change can shift the meaning of our stories, and, of course, it helps to overcome literal mindedness and make an effort to decipher the metaphors.

‘The mystical warrior is trying to reduce the obstruction in the doorway, and the worshipper is attempting to reach the construction behind the doorway, almost out of sight. There is a gap between the two … the vague band between the known and the unknown. In that band rapture is possible.’ – Fazal Inayat-Khan

Stories are the sap of life nourishing the roots and branches of humanity. We spin stories because during the birth of this universe the symmetry between matter and antimatter was broken, kicked out of balance, which resulted in a slight predominance of matter, the stuff we bump into. It’s a poignant thought that this little quirk caused the dynamic asymmetry that evolved into the universe we live in. Without this asymmetry between matter and antimatter our world would be empty, there would be light only – sans elements, sans plants, sans animals, sans night, sans saints, fools, villains – sans consciousness – no story.

* * *

For those interested in nuclear physics:

http://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/beamline/26/1/26-1-sather.pdf