I knew it was early, too early to be getting up, and laid there pondering dreams for a while, thinking back through the night. There are many types of dream… the daydreams that lift us from the humdrum world and transport us in imagination to an elsewhere full of possibility… the dreams of what we would do if we could, if circumstances allowed… Nightmares and fears, memories replayed, the odd, surreal and symbolic dreams that leave us wondering just what is there in the deepest recesses on our own mind, and those that play out the events and worries that prey on our minds.
Then there are the gifts. There are dreams that have you scrabbling for a pen in the dark to capture elusive wisps of understanding before they fade, the inspiration that drags you uncompromisingly from sleep and sees you writing or sketching away through half opened eyes…
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It’s a tough one, this. I love technology and I have a lasting belief that it has brought us a lot of good… but a nasty feeling that we are touching some of its ‘dark edges’; brought on, not because of the technology, itself, but because of the motive for profit and dominance inherent in the power that a few mega-companies wield.
Such companies are ‘enablers’. The real threat is the big money that has seen the potential for manipulation – global manipulation.
It was a 19th century historian and Cambridge professor, John Dalberg-Acton, 8th Baronet, who said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
It’s a quote many of us know, but what he went on to say in the same speech is less well known; “Great men are almost always bad men…”
We all like to believe in ‘great men’ (and women). Many of the The tech giants have risen, like David against Goliath, to overturn traditional market leaders and introduce vast innovation that benefits us all. When I compare what I can do, what I can reach, what I can understand, courtesy of the Internet and its access to largely-free resources, I stand in awe of what the past few decades have brought. My writing, and my supplemental efforts as an illustrator, have all been the result of what would now be termed Tech tools.
So why the opening sentiments?
They were prompted by a quote from one of the product directors of a major Tech company. He was quoted as saying that a new breakthrough in that company’s products would help ‘use up the mind cycles’ of the young people who formed the largest proportion of its customer base. Young people are increasingly targeted by Tech companies, such as social media sites. The young see it as a natural extension to their ‘talkative’ world – a sign of belonging, a ‘cool’ skill.
It’s a very powerful ‘pull’. It also makes Tech billions…
The young and the naive fill in mock ‘surveys’: What type of doggie walker are you? With the results, Tech can sell deeply effective profiles of each person, so accurate that exact product targeting can be placed in front of them, in their favourite colours, linked to their favourite games or cartoons or literature heroes…. or other products, of course – ‘your best friends are showing how grown-up they are by eating frizzzle-joys in luscious purple….’
And then there are drugs… Drugs are what you can’t live without; habits of ‘feel good’ that, especially in the impulsive and immature young, take hold very quickly. Like gambling, or children’s computer games that require them to pay for the key to a ‘level’ that ‘all their mates’ have already achieved… “Daddy!”
Drugs don’t need to be chemicals. The body and mind can make its own.
Online gambling has grown totally out of control. Some very big names are buying up the stragglers because the profits are so vast. As are the wrecked families and the huge debts that lead to crime to ‘repay’. Social networks I can understand; gambling has always been designed to exploit those who can’t comprehend the inevitability of their suffering. And children are being targeted: ‘just click here to say you’re over 18.’
The word ‘evil’ isn’t used much any more. It should be…
From a spiritual point of view, Tech can be seen as angel or devil. It has turned the ‘globe’ into a village. But the downside is that every atom of that village is now a target for money – big money. But that’s judging it from my perspective – someone who can see the massive abuse that is taking place.
Why aren’t we doing something about the downside? Because the problem is global and we’re not. Big money in Tech doesn’t want its opposition to be global, because that would enable effective control of its excesses. Britain votes Brexit and is leaving the only institution that is really trying to clean up this mess. America lurches to the right and its president wants massively less regulation and a weaker UN. In both cases the Tech social media machines were a dominant part of the Tech used to manipulate the elections – in fact, the same Tech companies were involved on both sides of the Atlantic.
On a very simple level, I don’t want my children (grandchildren, really – my children are in their thirties) to have their ‘cycles’ stolen. I want them to have some time to think, to dream, to read and enjoy fantasy. I want them to walk through the woods and climb the hills… and create in their growing minds. I want all that to lead to an eventual awareness of the living magic in the now, to a series of questions about themselves that will begin their real search for meaning in their lives.
So, next time I read of a rich, Tech product director who wants to interfere with the core of my grandchildren’s life, I’m going to get angry…
… Oh, yes, I just did.
Stephen Tanham is a director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit organisation that helps people find the reality and essence of their existence via low-cost supervised correspondence courses.
His personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com
©️Stephen Tanham.
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“You are beautiful.” “You are love.” “You are light.” “Whatever you can imagine can be yours.” I am fed up of reading these feelgood assertions, offered as a placebo and generously sprinkled with glitter and fairydust. There is nothing wrong with the words themselves, but I grow increasingly frustrated by the way they are often used.
They have become buzzwords that frequently appear in articles designed only to reassure and placate, to stroke the ego. They often come with a promise of enlightenment to the reader while implicitly asserting the spiritual superiority of the writer. They are understandably popular concepts and they are everywhere.
Such articles can be demoralising, having the opposite effect of how they appear to be intended. Reading many of them, you could be forgiven for thinking that you are at fault for not having already realised your full potential. All too often, they seem to portray…
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Standing here
I feel as though my life
Were a rising of sap
An ascent of mind and heart
A hissing of vitality, akin to steam
➰
From earth I am drawn
To organic arising
Within a perfected tree
Which nourishes my
Imperfections
➰
Until, old and swaying
With faded crumbling leaf
Stubbornly past its fall
My substance golds then fades
And, once again, I become
Air…
➰
…Only the tree remembers
All its children
➰
©Stephen Tanham
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“Hindsight,” wrote my friend, “has twenty-twenty vision.”
It always seems that way, when we think back to what we could have, should have said or done. The witty retort, the other alternative…the thing we did not think of at the time… the course we ought to have taken instead of the one that we took…
Thinking about it, though, perhaps hindsight is a little more myopic than it pretends.
At the time, we did the best we could with the person we were then… and could not have done otherwise. Looking back on the past from where we now stand, we have a unique perspective. We can see how events unfolded, one after the other, from that moment until now. We look back armed with all the knowledge and experience we have gained since the moment in question and we stand as one who has grown and changed in the…
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Image: mweweringPixabay
It was just nine o’clock… I had potentially nine hours of healing sleep ahead of me and, as I’d been struggling to stay awake all day, I fully intended to use them. I was shivering, so I had, very sensibly, warmed the bed before getting in. I snuggled down in silent darkness and in absolute comfort…
…then couldn’t find a cool patch for my overheating frame.
Eons passed in a blur of tossing, turning and increasing desperation. I finally gave up, picked the discarded bedding back up from the floor and wandered off in search of coffee.
The dog raised her head from the sofa and stared at me accusingly. I had left her curled up on her bed in the hall, but the sofa is always a better place to sleep. Evidently, my inconsiderate appearance had disturbed her rest. But she would condescend to go out…
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*
It is clear that every ‘great philosophy’ is, no more and no less than, the confession of its author.
To explain how a philosophy’s highest flung claims have been derived, therefore,
we need only ask, ‘what really makes its author tick?’
The desire to know, is not, then, the Mother of Philosophy.
For, look, here one desire, and now there, another, has put knowledge
to use as a means to, shamelessly, further its own ends…
The fundamental desires of Man have always been’philosophers’.
And each of them is only too happy to present itself
as the be all and end all of existence!
As master of the others.
All Man’s desires are tyrannical.
And for the philosopher, everything is personal.
His ideas, inevitably, bear testimony to the hierarchy of his secret desires.
*
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+ #Silenti, Ancient Egypt, Consciousness, Initiation, Life and Death, Mystery Schools, Silent Eye School
Being here…
by Steve Tanham
We were lined up against a stone wall – a very old stone wall. Forty ‘mystical pilgrims’ stood in the intense humidity of the entrance chamber to the Great Pyramid, dressed in simple robes; robes that had been used earlier in the day for a ritual baptism in the ancient inland waters of Lake Moeris.
Lake Moeris is linked to the water-based initiations of the ancient priests of Egypt – as were many of the temples along the Nile. Water washes – the outer symbolism is obvious; the inner one not so much. Mystically, to ‘come alive’ in the present – which is the goal of true mysticism, we have to ‘die’ to our present state. The cares, the fixations, the emotional reactions, all of the baggage that we cling to because it defines our ‘self’, has to be let go of in a some special way.
A taste of Being is the result – if those carrying out the initiation are good at their job. Water is also an ancient symbol for truth, and contrasts with Stone, which is lower, fixed or literal truth; and wine, which is the highest form of truth.
With each transition from stone (fixed) to water (fluid) to wine (water ‘finished’ by man) we ascend in understanding – the nature of the alchemists’ gold. There is no wall that divides deeply understood physical truth from spiritual truth. The difference is the degree to which we find it to be personal… and with that experience comes the removal of doubt, the silencing of the nagging intellectual mind; the voice that says: this can’t be true… Well, it is; and there is a knowing beyond logic.
Initiation has always provided a portal to that deeper understanding. It is method particularly suited to the western mind – a mind so proud of the intellect (and rightly so) but so ignorant of the ‘easy depths’ of the spiritual touch. We like stories; most civilisations do. Myths and legends form the backbone of what is passed down to future generations. ‘Giants’ may be real giants or they may be heroes ‘giant in being’. It depends on the context – and so much gets borrowed and re-written by those whose eyes have not been opened to another way of seeing things.
Back to the wall filled with robed mystical pilgrims. It was 2005, a frightening twelve years ago. We were at the end of a two-week trip aimed at the spiritual discovery of Egypt. I was a field officer in another organisation, one of two I greatly admire to this day. My website bio is here, for anyone who wants to look deeper. Our journey had begun far in the south of Egypt, near Aswan. We followed the mighty Nile on a lovely boat that took us as far as Luxor, stopping at the major temples on the way.
We were delighted to relax by the Red Sea for two nights, then flew to Cairo. Two days later, having seen the sights, we were granted the rare privilege of being permitted night-time access to the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid. We were to have our own symbolic initiation, carried out by the head of the organisation – who had flown to Egypt, specially, to do this…
I should have known, then… should have read the importance of that action.
The constraint was that we had only one hour to carry this out, so every minute counted. Pressed up against that wall, I was given a lighted torch to carry and placed at the head of a group of fellow pilgrims. Our sandals slapped on the old stone as we marched down the main access tunnel to locate the narrow ascending passageway, then the steep ascent of the Grand Gallery – a huge space in its own right that links the upper chambers of the pyramid to the main access tunnel and the passage down to the so-called Queen’s Chamber.
At the end of the Grand Gallery lies a short passage that leads to the doorway into the Kings Chamber. We stopped in front of it for a short mediation; and to catch our breath. The Guardian of the threshold stepped aside, and the party entered this most special of places…
It is at this point that you get a feeling of where you are: on the edge of Cairo, in the Nile’s northern delta, located at an interior point about half way up the enormous mass of the Great Pyramid.
The King’s Chamber is a huge room, but plain. Very little is known of how it might once have looked. The air is hot and humid. I would imagine those with any breathing issues are advised not to enter. Two shafts run tangentially to the exterior walls of the pyramid, so there is fresh air of sorts; but it’s not plentiful. There is no stepping outside. This is it: the highest and most purposeful place in the ancient stone structure.
Apart from the forty pilgrims the only other decoration is the large granite sarcophagus at the far end of the chamber. This is damaged in one corner, but still functional. The head of our organisation was standing next to it. I will never forget his words – indeed, they are the reason for this short piece – because they were the most important thing I learned that day, and they could have been said anywhere…
“Do not question your readiness or worthiness to be here. The act of being here is the verification that your soul is ready for what this moment contains…”
The simplest of sentiments, yet one that conveys an entirely different way of looking at the world. It took me a decade to understand the depths of what he had said; but whenever I encounter another kiss of the wonderful now, I go back to that moment and thank him… and the ‘fates’ that led me to have that revelation in that very special place.
Author’s note: we were not allowed cameras inside the Great Pyramid, so the montage above comprises one of my exterior photographs of it plus another of the interior of the temple at Abu Simbel.
Stephen Tanham is a director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit organisation that helps people find the reality and essence of their existence via low-cost supervised correspondence courses.
His personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com
©️Stephen Tanham.
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The January Tree
—
Stripped bare of Summer meaning
Leaving only wood to sway
I wait, endure, while others pass
Along this rocky way
➰
Your feet are fast and fluid
While mine are mired in earth
Your thoughts too fast to capture
While mine are simpler truth
➰
Come spring I will awaken
Then will you stop again?
To see the youngest green of life
Drink from its mountain stream
➰
©Stephen Tanham
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An amazing visit… from Sue Vincent.
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The half-light of a winter morning swallows the stars, revealing a world frosted with white. The dog, redefining the phrase ‘global warming’, lays across the threshold, letting the heat escape from my comfort zone. Cold seeps in, reality nips at my fingers and mind.
The seasons meet on my threshold; only a transparent veil of glass separates me from the winter. Whatever the weather, comes into the room to be a part of my living space and yet its changes do not touch me until I open the doors and invite Nature in. Winter is cold… the warmth of my home no more than a reassuring illusion, and one easily shattered by a dog hell-bent on answering the siren-song of morning.
The doors stand open, more often than not, in both winter and summer. In part, that is because of Ani, who prefers to be a free-range dog whenever possible…
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Sun in Gemini 
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