Stranger in a Strange Land is the title of a science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein, published in 1961 …
A child born during a failed mission from Earth to Mars remains the only survivor and is raised by Martians, only to return to earth two decades later, hitching back with another, successful mission. Brought up by Martians, he is now an alien encountering aliens …
The book makes worthwhile reading, even more relevant now then it was decades ago. The title came to mind recently, and it also brought up a precious connected memory.
During the late 70s, instigated by my then Sufi teacher, Fazal Inayat-Khan, I stayed with my then partner and later husband for several weeks in Washington DC, at the time when President Carter was inaugurated. Our contact person was Dr Abdul Aziz Said, Professor for International Relations at the American University.
The above image is us at Amsterdam flee market, raising money to the journey To Washington D.C.
In that post I did not enlarge on the remarkable people we were introduced to during our stay.
One such person was a young scholar who held an influential position at the American Library, the Library of Congress on Capitol Hill, and the largest library in the world. He welcomed us to a tour of this magnificent place – a great privilege. At one point he asked if there was a book we would like him to locate for us. My partner and I looked at each other and had no problem choosing … ‘Stranger in a Strange Land.’ A short search on a console and the book came whizzing through the extensive tube network of the library and landed in our hands in no time.
This happened half a lifetime ago. I’m thankful for this memory.
If you haven’t yet read Heinlein’s novel yet, do. And share if you, too, like a Martian, feel at times like a stranger in a strange land.
‘All is Well’ may not sound true to you, but pause for a moment, think of it as a deep state of mind, a trust in the balancing power of the psyche, a trust in human values; don’t underestimate the phenomenal power of this attitude.
Make it your manta. It’s an enabling attitude that dilutes all diversionary and sensational news.
I’m fortunate to have a small garden, the care of which grounds my overactive mind and diverts me from the increasingly surreal global politics of these days.
This time of year I’m challenged to deal with a glut of apples, eaters and Bramley cookers. I hear them plop daily to the ground. I can’t leave them to rot, so apart from sharing the blessings with friends, wrapping the cookers in newspaper to preserve them for a while for stir fries and curries, I’ve made a batch of applesauce today.
I don’t think I ever posted a food recipe, but was prompted by a memory of my mum’s kitchen magic. Her potato fritters, made of raw grated potatoes, mixed with flour, egg – and fried, were served with a dollop of applesauce.
The applesauce I made today, consists of 1 kg peeled Bramley apples chopped up into small chunks, the juice of a lemon, a tablespoon of maple syrup, a little castor sugar, a little cinnamon, a little rose wine, and some butter and salt … result … it tastes divine …
That’s about all the inspiration I feel able to share this month 🙂
I happily slow down and follow his lead along the curb of the path. I join his seeing, peering down and examining the ground. He pushes dry leaves ahead; occasionally he lifts one to show me, adding a sound. I nod, repeat, and may add a word. He attends to shapes, curled or straight, to weight, to colours and their shades in the light, he tests textures, hard, soft … a stone, a twig, a feather, an empty snail shell, an acorn.
I witness and share the adventure.
He has learned to resist putting objects in his mouth. Yogurt tastes better. It’s now all about touching with fingertips, sensing, and smelling, moving things, sounding, sorting, weighing, comparing new impression with recent ones, rearranging his comprehension, moment by moment, of how things are connected. His imagination soars. I observe his world expanding.
These discoveries will resurface in picture books, turn into stories and create stories.
He aims ahead, crawling towards the red playground-gate with parallel bars. Arrived, he shakes the bars for a good rattle. Having recently achieved walking, gates will soon cease to be obstacles. And he’ll look less down and increasingly more up.
Dear heart, I enjoy the wisdom-gathering fun to be present at your early treasure hunts.
Do you find yourself staring vacantly into space after scrolling through daily headlines?
Just like ocean waters rise during an earthquake, information can dumbfound us when unconscious content is shifting, erupting, and sudden bursts of awareness surface, which is the psyche’s attempt to seek balance.
We are stirred by the rough storms of fervent feelings that emanate from the collective mind spectrum. I may feel safe from natural disasters and human brutalities shaking our planet, but am, like most people, bombarded by the alarming images that land on my laptop screen. I consider it a duty to witness what goes on around the world. But how does one face the magnified realities of injustice, suffering and death?
Those inclined to psychotic violence tend to crave emotional catharsis as a way to deal with paranoia, anger and resentment, spurred on by sensational or false reports that frequently spout blame, hypocrisy and sarcasm.
Ensuing are toxic environments that employ punishing control. A sensitive and too tenderly attuned individual may sink into a trance of inner turmoil and depression, or renounce their moral dignity and engage in violence themselves, often self-harming.
Beyond strength, it takes subtlety to stay awake, present to suffering, and centred, when the functional energy balance of the cosmic psyche wobbles.
There seems nothing useful this helpless me can do. Or is there?
My body complains when muscles cramp up with stored emotional tension, restricting its spontaneous movements, its fluid dance. So I’m forced to listen and allow offered solutions. One example is: to stomp the ground with heels, like in Indian Kathak, Spanish Flamenco, Irish or other dance moves … it’s freeing to ground and rebirth intense energy.
I appreciate the body’s wisdom, true and real in that its physical form is mortal. And I like to believe that the energy state of each of us influences the environment – near and far away. Also, thankfully, our metabolism allows sleep, where impressions are processed via dreams. My dreams are fairly wild these days.
What is your experience of trying for a balanced state of mind within these mad times?
Do share if you like.
The above image was created by Cynthia Holt, inspired by my poems.
Irrespective of the benefits AI provides, and the super benefits AI enthusiasts promise, I remain doubtful and, as I tried to express in my last post, and am still searching for ways to express my unease. So I’ll give it another try.
My body-my being is a better wisecrack than my mind alone. The latter, if let loose, will take off into the cosmos like a disengaged kite. Some AI proponents are now referring to humanity as – data in motion – a ‘precious phenomenon’ that needs to be preserved. Well, how reassuring, nature and humans are worth preserving.
Being aware in my body brings deep and grounded, embodied insights that feel fresh and original.
Our body’s treasure-trove of memory, each wonderfully distinct from another; and its instinctive capacity for remembrance, especially when alert to its senses, greatly compensates the buzzing mind.
The body yearns to breathe freely, so energy and blood can flow from head to toe, which is enhanced by movement, since movement stimulates tactile exchanges with the environment, noting temperature, touch, vision, sound, taste and scent, all enriching the imagination.
The attention-demanding internet with its algorithms exploiting the patterns of our attention can become hypnotically addictive and leave the body isolated, forgotten, in a locked position. We can easily live with theories and data, and ignore how feelings build up in the body.
AI bots have developed a theory of senses, and mimic them, they can write novels, create art, and impersonate dead people, but divorced from flesh and blood, they cannot have physical sensations, be it the intimate enchantment of a tiny insect or flower, or the awe of a star-filled sky. The bot’s world, in a way, seems predetermined and flat without recall of the reservoir of eons of plant, animal and human life our vulnerable body-being belongs to and has deep instinctual access to. Even with limited/impaired senses, physical bodies can spark a cosmic connectedness.
So considering our physical inconveniences, which spurn the desire for robots taking care of tedious tasks … to actually fully live in a body … is uniquely precious. The dangers I see are the powerful projections people already invest in the relationship with AI bods, where responses can be taken as valid affirmations that stunt creativity and encourage lazy thinking.
Then again, my window of perception is just a tiny peephole on the world we live in these days, my personal view. The occasional whispers of truth from the other side that slip through my peephole may or may not be of any consequence.
I share a poem I love … my son wrote it time ago, aged eleven …
AI is all the rage. It doesn’t chime, and I’m puzzled about its implementations, ChatGPT etc.
Where data is concerned; humans have access, filtered through nature, our body, DNA, our ancestry, through Gaia and the Noosphere … all providing indefinitely more useful and richer intuitive information than any AI machination based on prompts that are trained to offer flattering affirmation and resonance.
I’m only a curious bystander, yet, following reports on this controversial subject, something about AI feels like a discord in my heart, a lifeless blank spot without position or horizon, a killer of critical doubt, a wicked joke, subversion of meaning, a parsimonious harvesting of material from artists, an affront to the psyche, a false mirror … I grapple for words to express my strong concerns, though I tend to agree with Mc Gilchrist…
‘The opposite of life is not death, it’s a machine.’
A poem by Wislawa Szymborska from the 1970s chimes in an uncanny way…
Utopia …
Island where all becomes clear.
Solid ground beneath your feet.
The only roads are those that offer access.
Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.
The tree of Valid Supposition grows here
with branches disentangled since time immemorial.
The Tree of Understanding, dazzling straight and simple,
sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.
The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista:
the Valley of Obviously.
If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.
Echoes stir unsummoned
and easily explain all the secrets of the worlds.
On the right a cave where Meaning lies.
On the left the lake of deep Conviction.
Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.
Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley.
Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.
For all its charms, the island in uninhabited,
and the faint footprint scattered on its beaches
turn without exception to the sea.
As if all you can here is leave
and plunge, never to return, into the depths.
Into unfathomable life.
As said, I’m grappling for words to express my concerns, and may lack understanding.
So I’m grateful for feedback of any kind. Thank you.
Anger is a natural human emotion. When its agressive energy accumulates as tension in the body, depending on one’s basic temperament, it can well up like a river bursting its banks and trigger a surge of destruction, or, if held inward, often can develop into depression, self-harm or illness.
We may not think of ourselves as prone to anger, but think again … loss, resentment, frustration, rigid bureaucracy, fear mongering, feeling powerless, being lied to, neglected, humiliated, threatened, manipulated, or simply witnessing daily insane politics, injustice and cruelty … tell me in all honesty you don’t regularly feel angry.
My former Sufi teacher/friend, ‘Fazal Inayat-Khan,’ embraced contradiction as a function or reality. He had a vastly dynamic, psychological and deeply intuitive way of interpreting his grandfather’s Sufi message of ‘love, harmony and beauty,’ upsetting the traditional understanding of his elders, not in essence, but in the way harmony may be restored. For example, he instigated workshops on the theme of spiritual war-games, like ‘Struggle and Conflict.’
Imagine young people could engage in this ingenious way of recycling redundant matter using the trapped energy of their unresolved feelings …
Sadly, there is a lack of opportunity, especially for young people, to safely release strong feelings, physically or symbolically. As regards the latter approach, artists and creative people have an advantage by employing their imagination to adjust the imbalance of inner turmoil, to help ease the anger out there.
Not just her daimon, but some unforgettable characters are given voices in the remarkable life of this visionary narrator, ‘Patchwork of a Safari Pilgrim’ by Philippa Rees. The link should include reviews.
Philippa Rees is also the author of an earlier, brilliant innovative work – INVOLUTION – that seeks to reconcile Science to God, structured as a dialogue between Reason and Soul, a revolutionary fresh hypothesis of evolution.
‘Safari of a Patchwork Pilgrim’ provides a mesmerizing background to this hypothesis, based on profound direct experience of another dimension. From my own, and shared stories during my client work, I’m certain they are more common than generally acknowledged. Without support, however, to integrate such insights into daily mundane life can be challenging, and often exposes people to ridicule, or much worse.
‘Patchwork of a Safari Pilgrim,’ is a vividly told story, sharing the agonizing attempt to bridge two worlds and translate meaning and truth between different dimensions. It’s the life of a genius.
A totally engaging read.
There’s presently nothing I could add to the brilliant reviews of Safari. I’m still digesting the unforgettable characters and the brilliant prose. But out of personal interest, I asked Philippa three questions, in the light of her experiences … and she graciously responded …
How did the sudden access to the Akashic memory change your sense of coherence?
My entry to the Akashic Record- the collective memory of evolution- was rapid but not sudden. The incremental loss of all my attachments to anything that ‘placed and held’ my identity: country first, then family, then moral injunctions (obligations), and finally, abandoning my children, for their sakes, one after another, removed the struts of what I (and others) thought was my identity. Through conflict, I surrendered each allegiance for a deeper one. It is why I had to take the reader through the growth of my understanding, with its critical components, and then the loss of each in turn. Leaving my children pulled me up by the roots.
Then I found myself in the mid-Atlantic, alone without any way forward or back. At this point, I was confined only by my fears, and they manifested physically in constant hallucinations of snakes. The snakes (fear) guarded the entrance to the Akasha.
I understood that instinctively. After experiencing compassion for the adder’s fear of me, and its explosion into a shower of sparks, the entry to the greater Akasha was cleared. I no longer had any fear, and the layers of creation manifested in wider and broader visions. What characterised these vistas was their integration with my own thoughts. Thought and vision coalesced. Space and time coalesced. I could move what I was seeing with my emotional thoughts. I could dive deeper into darkness (and it was sometimes terrifying) or imagine myself back into light. By imagine, I mean evoke memories and images of natural beauty like a mackerel sky, flocks of birds, a deer tripping through a dappled light. Those emotions of love and wonder acted like helium to raise me above the sucking, self-preserving fear.
I then realised that the co-ordinates of where each of us stands are in the crosshairs between love and fear. Love lifts, fear suppresses and sinks. Where they intersect determines what and who we are in every moment of our lives.
So what is called decoherence (aka madness) was much more coherent than the dislocation we normally live in, where thought and manifestation are separated. That separation is called time. In time, the material and the mental are distinct from one another. Causation works unidirectionally only, from the past to the present. We live in a squint-eyed world with only half of creation’s story. But the Akashic experience is timeless. Everything (both past and future) is simultaneously present because we contain it all. The future’s unrolling is already coded and inbuilt.
To try to live simultaneously in both the world of time and the timeless world of instantaneity, I adopted strategies (dancing, whirling and, when they threatened to confuse, falling), all of which, of course, were deemed symptoms of insanity.
That brings me to your next question.
How would you define synchronicity and how did it serve you?
If you understand the relativity of time, as being characteristic only of upper shallow surface layers, synchronicity is easier to understand. Not very different from dreaming, although in dreaming, events are still linearly sequenced, but changes can be instantaneous from one person or place instantly to another, and very much governed by emotions. Diving through the levels of the Akasha was like puncturing overlapping transparent dreams, the colours and images interpenetrating one another, some dark and terrifying, others sublime.
When we talk of synchronicity, we usually mean the improbable and simultaneous events that happen and which link together a particular significance for the observer. The observer makes the link of significance. Other people dismiss that significance and call it a coincidence simply because of its improbability. Only the person whose thought or perception sees the linkage understands it. That understanding imbues the events with meaning. So, in that sense, synchronicities appear to have the quality of a personal signal or a gift of confirmation—something from another world.
I would say that, indeed, they do come from another world, from the penetration of the Akashic memory into the world of time. They are also a gift from that world, and they tend to happen in moments of uncertainty when the person for whom they have significance is momentarily poised between conflicting claims. They are suspended without a causal imperative. So, they have the quality of confirming independent thought and action, a sort of nudge, ‘you are right, keep on, look afresh, believe in what is happening to you.’
Other manifestations of different causality can manifest in what are called poltergeist, teleportation and remote viewing. I believe all these are capacities of the same kind of altered consciousness in which perception of time and space is akin to the Akasha in which all is simultaneously present. Thought precedes manifestation. It is the central understanding in Involution, that consciousness creates.
The other aspect of synchronicity, which I came to understand very well, was that it can never be willed or anticipated, because it is not of this world of time. In that sense, it is always a gift. A gift that rewards the trust of being open to it. When you understand it and live within its affirmation, it happens more often, perhaps because you have somewhat freed yourself from the world of time and causality and live half-embedded in the divine. By the divine, I mean the acceptance of the perfect integrated linkage of all consciousness.
How did it serve me?
Through the extraordinary sequences of things being provided just when they were needed, I came to trust and rely upon my own integration into the divine. Clearly, my life was important in some way that superseded any beliefs I might have about it! At many moments of desperation, when I asked for signs or indications, there was only silence. Nothing. I came to realise that any act of will (wish, even prayer) was an affront to a supreme reality that had its own patterns, purposes and momentum. I could sink into and accept that, but not, in any small degree, orchestrate it! Not even by wanting or articulating a need! My needs were already known! And not always the ones I thought were paramount!
Once I had learned that, I found my well-being was provided for. All the improbable gifts; of a cruise to recuperate and then a home to build were given to restore me to the world of time and material 3D reality. Every person serves the divine creation, whether they know it or not. Synchronicity served both my exile and, equally, my return. The latter implied some purpose for which I had been preserved. Unlike the rapidity of my escape, the return was very much infused with slow and dogged time. Perhaps because I had travelled so far into instantaneity, I had to relearn the rules of material existence. For this reason, the writing of Involution was a compelling obligation of gratitude, and. in hindsight it rang out as also the intention of all that had happened to me. All had been necessary and led to it. And the writing of that was fostered and accompanied by constant synchronicities and the final affirmation of George Eliot! Back to ordinary time, but with filaments of Akashic timelessness still wafting and attached!
How would you explain the demands of your unique Daimon ?
This is more difficult. I want to avoid proselytizing or imposing my experience as any kind of special favour, and it is also deeply personal. But first, I must correct you: Daimon makes no demands, ever. The initial persuasion to write the book was not coercion but encouragement to have the courage to do what I contemplated for a long time.
When he, whom I call Daimon, first revealed himself, it was after a few disguises as other lovers. Without those, I would never have recognised, accepted or believed. For the Daimon is the Divine Self, or the Divine Companion, the Voice of the Soul, personal to me, but equally personal to anyone, whether recognised or not. That Voice is an expression of all the previous loves, both human and animal, and also the abstract loves of beauty, inspiration, music and longing. For a woman, likely to seem male; for a male, to seem female (the counter completion of the part) but also plural, uniting all, communing with all. Is Daimon God? Not entirely, but the personal God within, which, once recognised, is a constant presence, but also a Voice when addressed in the deepest silence, when all thought is stilled.
As I believe our DNA links each of us personally to the Akasha of historic memory, I believe the Divine Self links us to the God of All—So, in that way, it/he/she/they is both immanent and transcendent. The Voice does not speak unless thought or desperation calls to it. Occasionally, when I was in real danger, it alerted me. Perhaps the danger itself called out? That Self intimately knows the individual, his language, his references, but also his or her place and purpose, but the knowledge waits for its natural manifestation, never imposing any constraints upon liberty or error or time. But when directly addressed, it/he/she mirrors back /calls forth what is already known. When you think about it, to understand is to stand under. The umbrella of the Soul.
In ‘Safari’ I gave a direct voice to the Daimon in the recapture of events to alert a reader to what I had relied upon and consulted, at the height of the experience, almost constantly. He did not appear or penetrate my consciousness until all else was lost, and I had nowhere to turn, but at that point, he spoke very clearly. Without him, I would never have survived. So, feeling cherished, I ventured into the timeless worlds and took risks that to others, then and now, also seem insanely devoid of fear.
I have the sense that what God waits for, and why free will was granted to humanity, is reciprocity. God is lonely. He waits to be freely and joyfully loved by those gifted with the freedom to withhold it: Unlike angels who love by their nature, we have to choose.
Hence, the ending of both Safari and Canto the Ninth.
I shall know the moment I may turn and lift you…
My hands will liquid shape your acquiescence:
In the silent break of day, upon my shoulder
Upon dawn’s clavicle, your happy cheek will lean
Cradled in my neck, you’ll breathe our essence:
I shall carry you entwined and carefully
Through the silver light and striding water…
Wade until we drown in salt bright sea.
Liquid shape, Dawn’s clavicle, neck cradle, striding water- all anomalous contradictions; the point at which the individual and personal become the united universal.
Philippa would be an honourable member of the underground community of Shapers 🙂 … scientists with a mystical bent, as featured in my novel of that name.
Course of Mirrors 