Steve Tanham is a founding director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness; a not-for-profit online School of Enneagram-based esoteric psychology. He lives in the English Lake District with his wife, Bernie and a cat and a dog. He can be contacted at rivingtide@gmail.com
My mother was not quite seventeen when I was born. She and my father, just three years her senior, had married early as he had joined the army. They were still living close to home when I first came into the world, but it was not long before they moved to married quarters at the other end of the country. My father, though, was not around for long as his unit was sent on active duty overseas, so my mother, still just a teenager herself and with a small child to raise, became effectively a single parent with no family close enough to offer the support and advice she needed.
In spite of being very young at the time, I have very clear memories of where we lived, the things we would do together and the places we went. We lived in a small, top-floor flat in an old building…
I’m standing on a plastic bottle, and, for once, I’m not trying to crush it for disposal so that it won’t fill up the bin–or even the recycling box. What I’m doing is testing it for weight-bearing density.
My bottle, which used to contain four pints of milk, is jam-packed with thin pieces of cut-up plastic, such as wrappers, carrier bags, the outer layers of couriered online-order packages… and a thousand other things for which plastic is essential…
But, such plastic in the wrong place is, as we’re all realising, deadly.
Many, larger-scale plastics are recyclable and so can be put into local centres. This milk bottle is, too. But this blog is not about the bottle, it’s about the bottle as container for the compressed contents – three weeks’ worth of non-recyclable plastic wrappings.
Most of our packaging and food wrapping materials – such as those used for toffee and chocolate – are not recyclable. Singly, each of these feels small – almost not worth worrying about. But start to collect them to fill a plastic bottle and you’ll be surprised how quickly they accumulate.
Sadly, being light, they are most likely to find themselves loose in the landscape, and then the oceans, where, as we now know, they become part of the marine life food chain and eventually enter our children’s brains… Soon, all our brains, and others part of our bodies, will be directly polluted by micro-plastic. No-one knows what the long term effects will be; but we know they will be harmful… possible even fatal to our species. You can’t take an antibiotic for plastic poisoning.
Plastic is a new material in the history of life on Earth. Our slowly evolved natural defences are good at dealing with molecular structures that have been around a long time. Plastic hasn’t… it’s a complex set of molecules derived from oil and it’s new to our biological defences.
(Above: Take a wooden ‘plunger’…)
The bottle I’m standing on is an ‘EcoBrick’, a term invented by the South American creator of the device – Susanna Heisse. Horrified at the level of plastic waste around her home near Lake Atitlán in Guatemala. She came up with the idea of using plastic bottles stuffed with non-recyclable other plastic as a building material.
The EcoBricks have to be clean and filled with clean, non-organic material. Once sealed, organic waste would generate methane gas, which could explode the ‘brick’. In addition, EcoBricks need to be stuffed so that an adult could stand on them without deformation to the repurposed bottle, as in my picture.
It’s important to use some brightly coloured plastic at the bottom of the stuffed bottle, because that lets the base of the brick be identified if one construction project comes to an end and, say, a wall has to be demolished and reused.
Once these conditions are met the bricks are used either horizontally as true brick substitutes, or vertically for cavity insulation – which they are very suited to. But this is a technology in its infancy…
Initially, Susanna Heisse built a simple wall, layering the stuffed bottles horizontally, with mud-based mortar on top of each layer. The local community picked up the idea and many similarly poor regions of the world began to investigate the potential for using EcoBricks as building materials.
(Above: and compress it as hard as you can)
But what about families in western suburbia? Are we really likely to have local projects to which we can contribute our efforts?
There are several dimensions to the problem of plastic disposal. The fundamental one is that our societies have fostered an attitude of ‘someone else can deal with this problem better than I can’. That, alone, produces an approach where its someone else’s problem. We could argue that in a society that was functioning for the good of all we could expect this, but the big drawback is it takes us – our shared consciousness – away from the problem – from the cutting edge of why our world is filling up with waste plastic…
Equally significantly, our trust that the ‘commercial’ disposal of our plastic waste will be carried out with care for the environment can be misplaced. As the headlines have shown us, small bits of ‘rubbish’ become part of larger batches commercially sold on. Many of them become part of a huge load dropped onto the open pit of a cargo ship; and then…
Do these end up somewhere that is sensitive to the wishes of those of us who recycled them at the local unit? How many of us would bet on this? Very few, I suspect. We are content with the ‘should have been’ situation that removes us from the problem; someone’s else’s problem.
Only now it doesn’t. Now, the plastic is coming back into the food chain and it is the problem of our developing children…
Sadly, I have to report that I can find nowhere local to take my EcoBricks… I will continue looking, but this has prompted other, and deeper, deliberations.
I may simply have not looked hard enough, but I think we may be missing the point. EcoBricks were developed in a poor part of South America. The greatest take-up has been in countries like South Africa, where projects in poverty-stricken townships have used musical carnivals to be the centre of clean up and restore projects involving them. The difference between them and, say the UK, is that they need to do it…
Will this stop me making my EcoBricks? No…
Every time I roll that washed chocolate wrapper, or cut-up sections of an old plastic bag to stuff them in the latest bottle, I know I’m doing something important… and that’s not just the act of packing the EcoBrick. The important part is the consciousness of the waste, and the determination that we in the prosperous west should be bringing local technology to all of this. I want to own this problem and fix it!
Remember the ‘Back to the Future’ films?
The bit where the time-travelling car needed refuelling and the professor hunted around the street for some rubbish, tipping it into the hyper-recycling unit, before hitting 88 miles per hour and saving the day…
We don’t have skateboarding Martys… or do we? To our children and their children the tyrants who stood in the way of solving these problems will be held up as examples of a (literally) dying age.
So, I’ll go on making my EcoBricks. It will keep me focussed on the need for a solution. Maybe a future government will create a working ‘corridor’ to the needy parts of the world. More likely, some engineering genius will develop a home machine that ‘bakes’ plastic into a universal raw material.
And who knows, when the PortaFusion Recycler Mark I comes along, I might still be here, with my garage full of plastic bricks, at the front of the queue. I hope to see you there…
In the meantime, I’ll keep researching and writing up that search. Please contribute here or on Carol’s blog from the Retired? No one told me! website..
Some useful links about EcoBricks. Warning, some may be commercial:
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
#ShortWrytz – short pieces inspired by photos I’ve taken
The beautiful coastal town of Peel, Isle of Man.
The former church of St Peters sits, alone, in what is now its own square. There’s very little of it left – just the frontage above, the bell tower at the back and the horizontal cross of its interior space still carved on the ground, suddenly thrust into the lighted world when the church was demolished in 1958.
The town of Peel never lost its fondness for St Peters. Somehow, it became a monument, now formalised.
It’s very moving. I wanted to make the above photo-montage as a memory of being there…
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
He aims to freak ‘em out when he won’t let the ice melt. Likes to see if they’ll notice – long after the dark liquid is gone – that the cubes are still whole and frozen.
Most miss it entirely, slinging the residual contents into the plastic liners of their swing-top kitchens bins, listening to the multiple clatter on dirty tins or the wet phwap onto the remains of food or packaging… and noticing nothing.
It’s got to be cola, mind. The alcohol in the subsequent mix is irrelevant. It’s the kind of sugar that matters. Millions of variants at our level, but the dark stuff just hits the spot; time, after time. The perfect sustenance…
We’ve been waiting for a long time: mixing, combining, testing, joining. There’s a lot of dark, enamel-rotting liquid sugar out there. The tiny holes are perfect dwellings… and we’re very well fed.
And microbiologist as saviour? Naw… this is life as you’ve never seen it before. Parallel life; a billion billion entities working as one, unseen, of course. Like the clear near-nothing freezing film around the unmelted ice. Got to hand it to Jespa, he’s got a helluva sense of humour.
Go for the teeth, he says. Imagine a billion teeth surrounded in a microsecond.
There they go… clunk, phwap. Pity. Jespa says he would have spared these drinkers if they’d noticed the ice cubes… but some poor sod’s got to be first.
We don’t hear as such, so the global screams won’t bother us.
Most people who venture into the mystical encounter it before too long – that momentary sense of the world dropping away and an intense silence taking centre stage. In that silence is a new perspective which does not belong to the subjective, reasoning consciousness.
I think of it as the ‘moment that teaches’.
It is to be sought after as though it were gold. We will not find it by normal methods of analytical reason. The brain cannot reason beyond what it already knows, in some form. It can re-assemble the pieces, but the ‘moment that teaches’ comes into the consciousness whole.
That very sense of wholeness describes it as something other. Other, in this sense, means originating from a place not inside the usual stream of consciousness. The new perspective owes nothing to memory – other than the ability to try to communicate it – like this blog. That very act is doomed unless the receiver; the reader has, at some point in their lives, been ‘touched’ in this way by their own silence talking to them…
It is a natural condition that societal forces have obliged us to put to one side in favour of analytical reasoning. I’m not one who advocates disparaging the brain or its reasoning. It is a magnificent organ of consciousness that has taken millions of years to evolve. It makes sense of the billions of sense impressions available to us every second. Learning is largely a process of diminishing this flow of possible events – thereby avoiding madness and also creating a reliable picture of our world in which we can ‘not bang into things’ as a good friend of mine summarised recently.
In doing this, and allowing us to communicate the essential elements of our existence, the brain serves its purpose. It keeps us alive, and alerts us to potential and real danger. Potential danger can become anxiety, something whose collective danger I suspect we are learning society-wide as we wrestle with the moral foundations of our western lives… and the nature and value of truth.
Beyond morals lie values. And these come from a world which is not based upon logic but upon inspiration – seeing with different eyes. Each element of a moral code has at some time come into existence in the human consciousness as a spark of deeper knowing. It is seen to be ‘right’ and that rightness is grabbed, grasped and remembered by a mind opened to the entry of what mystics call ‘the higher’. The extracted facts can be passed on for contemplation Bearing witness to the truth of the revelation can only exist in the personal consciousness.
The higher speaks to us when we learn to listen to its silence. It speaks to us in moments that teach.
In the Silent Eye’s cycle of three ‘landscape’ workshops each year, we try to provide a formula of experience and place which has the greatest chance of allowing the entry into our lives of such a moment that teaches. Sometimes we do this by being in a place that has a vibrational history of the sacred. Sometimes we do it by being in an ordinary place that we psychologically ‘dress’ in the collective imagination to be somewhere different.
Sometimes, we are lucky enough to have a combination of real history and real sacred place around which to spin a special tale -based on the truth. Such a place is the internal space of Whitby Abbey, the location, in AD664, of the Synod of Whitby.
We will go into the detail in the coming weekend and in the blogs that follow, but in brief, the Synod was the place in which Saxon Britain’s most powerful king – Oswald (Oswiu in old English) set in motion a ‘court of learned opinion’ that would determine some very key elements of how Christianity flourished in the future.
Two streams of Christianity operated side by side in the seventh century. One we know a as Roman, the other Celtic. Celtic Christianity, as practised by King Oswald himself was a descended from St Patrick’s ‘conversion’ of Ireland, through the monastery on the Scottish Island of Iona and to the establishment of the monastery at Lindisfarne, off the Northumbrian coast.
A local man gave his four sons to the care of the monks at Lindisfarne. Two of them excelled in their work and became Bishops. One of them was summoned by King Oswald to carry out what we would now call the ‘facilitation’ of the competing ‘learned opinions’ of the synod.
Our deliberations are made more complex by the fact that King Oswald’s beloved queen was also a Christian, but of the Roman faith – established in Britain by Augustine and gathering momentum as the Pope pushed for consolidation of belief in an important outpost of his religious world view. Husband and wife were therefore on opposite sides of the debate… or were they?
One of the young bishops from Lindisfarne was Cedd – later St Cedd. He had risen to fame and religious prominence by the force of his intellect, and his religious devotion – learned from the Celtic Christian monks on Lindisfarne, only fifty miles north of Whitby.
The man who became St Cedd is the psychological focus of our weekend; and in the story of the last year of his life, we will trace our own footsteps – spiritual and physical, across the former landscape of Northumbria, a place that is now the beautiful county and coastline of North Yorkshire.
It begins on a Friday in December, when Bishop Cedd arrives, via the near two-hundred steps, at the Abbey of Whitby. He has a heavy heart, but knows that his duty to his king must be at odds with the only life he has every known. And he also knows that duty must come before all else, regardless of the effect it must have on everything he has always loved.
Cedd knows what he shouldn’t… and is powerless to act upon it.
In that decision, he opens himself to the moment that teaches… And we will try to follow…
The Keys of Heaven: in the footsteps of St Cedd takes place on the weekend of 6-8 December, 2019 in Whitby and surrounding region. Come and join us in the mind and heart of the man who became history’s St Cedd.
Whitby is the location for our next weekend. Above is a taste of the opening day (Friday 6th December, 2019)… a few places are still available. You can click here for our website’s events page.
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
When we were creating the Silent Eye’s mentored correspondence course, we envisaged a three-year journey through a mental, emotional and spiritual landscape which would evolve as the Companion’s learning and depth of ‘being’ increased.
This landscape was to be internal – an active, meditative experience, whose presence would extend into the daily life as learning of true cause and effect deepened, and different aspects of modern living were brought into powerful harmony. In the true and ancient meaning of the word, this would become a very magical journey.
Lately, we have begun to re-examine the idea of actual landscapes being used as teaching aides; not passively, but inviting – invoking – them to work with the noble intentions of the workshop in question.
I’ve been to many workshops over the years. Many of them were good. Some of them were very good. Two or three were life-changing…
What’s the difference?
Good ones were well structured; you had a clear idea -going in – of what would be taught and what effort you would have to put in if you wanted to succeed. What was success in this context? Success has to be ‘something added’ to your life; possibly an additional skill, something to be dropped into that ‘kit bag’ that is us; a bit like the tarot Card of the Fool (below), striding, unafraid, into the morning of Life with a little dog nipping at his heels and his few important possessions slung over his/her shoulder…
Tarot image Wikipedia – Public Domain
Very good workshops were those in which you discovered that, whatever you thought in the first few minutes, it deepened way beyond that as the agenda developed. This might have been the appropriateness of the subject matter, or even the approach of the teacher.
A workshop that is life-changing is one in which the attendee immediately feels at home with the event and the inner process of the teaching – generating a hunger. That sense of ‘coming home’ is difficult to pin down, but deepens with each stage of the event.
Why this happens may not be apparent in the early stages; indeed I’ve been to a couple of such weekends where I still don’t know how that sense of sheer magic was created… But I know itwas. And the fact that the memory still generates a sense of wonder, years later, shows the power they had.
‘Let go and get out of the way’…
It’s a deeply mystical insight, and it may have a lot to do with the life-changing workshops. There’s an enigma at work, here: you have prepare the ‘skeleton’ of the event in sufficient detail for it to be viable. At the same time, the structure and keys of the weekend should only be the ‘tinder that lights the greater fire’. When this works, it’s obvious that something is happening beyond the planning and the preparation. It is as though an intervention is taking place that broadens and deepens a kind of group presence…
In the Silent Eye, this is what we aim for; that the landscape, itself, becomes the teacher, gradually aligning and moving forward each person to the degree that they are able to be receptive to it. More blogs will follow as we develop this theme.
Whitby is the location for our next weekend. Above is a taste of the opening day (Friday 6th December, 2019)… a few places are still available. You can click here for our website’s events page.
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
Back in June I wrote ”As I am nearing the end of my account of my feelings and experiences at The Silent Eye Spring Workshop I find I want to linger with the memories and stop time.”
I had joined the Silent Eye Work Shop back in April to learn what I could about Gilgamesh and his quest for immortality. In fact I learned a lot about myself and I am still learning.
I met some amazing people who by their example and knowledge taught me so mugh. It is strange that these beautiful people who I hardly knew, brought me to tears of sadness and beautiful joy. I feel so privileged to have been included I felt safe and, yes even loved.
I had previously been on a weekend with the Silent Eye last December which had also been a revelation. Sadly and not for want of…
