It was happening very quickly… I looked at the collie – Tess. She looked back at me, equally confused. The boot lid continued to descend towards us…
It won’t make any sense unless I back it up a bit.
Once a week, we go to Grange-over-Sands to do our fresh-food shopping. The small but lovely seaside resort has a ‘one of everything’ approach to its specialised and individual shops.
There’s the collie to be walked, of course, so a certain division of labour is needed. I walk Tess around the local park, then onto the promenade for the return leg into the town. Tess and I usually arrive just before Bernie, whose last undertaking is to get us a couple of lattés from the local Costa Coffee. It’s a family tradition that began during the Covid restrictions (Grange was within the dog-walking zone from where we live).
Shopped and equipped with the coffee, we usually sit on the tailgate of the car, Tess’ head prominently gazing out (between us) at amused passers by. You get used to the attention directed at the dog and everyone is good-natured.
And so it was that I came to be seated, drinking coffee and swinging my legs; the shopping and walking done. It was my wife who first gestured, in panic, to the descent of the boot lid. Before I could react, it had reached my head … and mercifully stopped – the automated response to meeting resistance.
Tess retreated to the inner space, while I wriggled out and stood by the errant boot lid, feeling under its lower edge for the manual buttons. I tried several combinations, searching for a reason for the aberrant behaviour.
None could be found…
We reset: Bernie handed me back my coffee and Tess returned to centre stage to study her adoring public. The tailgate’s rogue performance faded into recent memory, and we all relaxed. I began swinging my legs again – something I often do in ‘relaxation’ and when I’m thinking, deeply.
Once more, equally unannounced, the tailgate came at me. This was becoming personal…
Perhaps in anticipation that it might happen again, I had memorised the position of the button that would abort the descent of all that metal and glass.
Bernie stood there, looking at the visible lower half of my face. She took the coffee from my uncertain hands and said she’d be back, soon. It was all very surreal, though Tess seemed unperturbed.
I pushed the middle button. The boot lid rose. Some distant memory of a story by Hoffnung of bricks and buckets entered my consciousness and a smile crossed my lips – which is more than could be said for the cooling coffee.
“It’s you!” She said it with a smile, clutching the car’s handbook that she had collected from the dash.
“There’s a proximity foot-switch under the back of the car. It’s supposed to help you if you’re carrying a heavy bag or two and have run out of hands…” She laughed. “It works to open and, if already open, to close. You must have triggered it – twice – by your habit of swinging your feet when you’re having coffee.”
We sat in silence, Tess twisting her head from side to side to consider our mood.
My feet were still.
©Stephen Tanham 2023
Stephen Tanham is a writer, mystical teacher photographer and Director of the Silent Eye, a correspondence-based journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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It’s a steep climb from Kendal’s town centre up to the old castle that still stands guard over this ancient town.
Once there, you are greeted with 360 degrees of lovely landscape, ranging from the north end of Morecambe Bay to the Lakeland hills. Just to the north-east lie the less visited Howgills. I always glance across, as the view of hills and dales is spectacular.
On the morning I took the opening shot, a few days ago, my attention was grabbed by the wildest looking cloud patterns I’d ever seen.
To the best of my knowledge, it wasn’t a storm… But it was one of the most surprising and mesmerising skies.
Here’s a shot of the castle, for completeness. Much of it is still standing and well worth a visit – as long as you don’t mind a steep and often muddy ascent.
©Stephen Tanham 2023
Stephen Tanham is a writer, mystical teacher, and Director of the Silent Eye, a correspondence-based journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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Shells from an Inner Sea (3 of 3): the inner flow
by Steve Tanham
When we find that the process of inner inquiry described in the last two posts actually works, and we see that ‘finding out’ things about our inner lives is both simple and replicable, we might wonder why and how this mysterious technique works so well?
What mechanism makes this seeming conversation with our experience and its storehouse of memory so powerful?
Hang on tight, because if you grasp the central reality of this, it has the power to change everything about your life – in a good way, of course.
The method of inquiry connects all your life’s experience with your intelligence and the presence of that intelligence.
The whole of spiritual development is about presence – the increasingly present companionship of a more real ‘us’ than our storm-tossed outer egoic personality.
The practice of inquiry, as outlined in these three posts, changes the usual ‘in here – out there’ relationship of living. Instead of experiencing ourselves as an in-here that is somehow superior to the world in which it exists, we begin to see that the edges of that division are not well defined, at all.
We are brought up from a very young age to think of the in-here as the surface of our bodies. We may have senses that supply an inference – homed by years of perceptive polishing – of what is happening out-there, but it remains a ‘me and it’ relationship; in other words an object-based view of our universe. We (surface of skin inwards) relate to not-me (surface of skin outwards) as an object; an object that can be subdivided into lots more physical and logical parts, many of which can never be never be ‘seen’, like anger directed at us, for example.
Our ‘self’ possesses many more means of ‘finding out’ about its world that our five traditional senses. When we enter a beautiful, budding glade on a spring morning, we feel a sense of renewal and eurphoria. This is a real feeling, though nothing of meaning has been transmitted to us in a sense that physics would acknowledge.
Similarly, when dealing with certain people, we know when they are lying – we can ‘just tell’. Body language may be part of it, but not the whole story; the rest being a kind of certainty of experience, a knowing.
We attribute much of this to psychological ability to make sense of our world, but much of it is an extension of our core out into the world that we know of as out-there.
An interesting exercise is to let go of your boundary of skin. Imagine yourself pervading the air around you, touching and sensing the moisture in the air, then the ground, the water in a stream, the grass of a meadow as you are walking through, the radiance of the sun in the sky. In the context of our investigation, we are extending what we know is our self out beyond its traditional boundaries and doing something slightly different to simple ‘mindfulness’.
Don’t try to push, say, ‘seeing’ out there in a forced way, simply let your awareness flow outwards, as though it were another kind of hearing.
If we carry this out over a period of weeks, with an open and welcoming expectation of forming a new relationship with our ‘felt’ world, we will begin to be both relaxed and expanded. Our ‘presence’ will seem to fill not just our bodies – glowing inside us – but the entire space around us.
This extended sense of intelligent and intimate presence is the ‘field’ into which we direct our Inquiry when we use a specific question or as a general exploration of ‘how we are’; which may be health-based or a dive into a specific issue of importance to us.
In our inquiry we simply have a friendly and open stance to whatever comes into our internal space. With practice, we find that the glowing state of presence is a powerful pre-requisite to a fulfilling session, and stays with us through the adventure.
When we are familiar and settled with the simple joy of the act of inquiry, we come to realise that the state of our presence in the act of inquiry is synonymous with the awareness of the all-embracing ‘now’, as discussed last week.
In this discovery, we become conscious that the ‘now’ and the feeling of glowing presence are in fact the same experience. With this new knowing, we enter a second and more powerful phase of inquiry, where we begin to question the nature of ‘space’ itself.
But that may be a step too far for this post!
Previous posts in this series:
This is Shells from an Inner Sea (3), the final part.
©Stephen Tanham 2023
Stephen Tanham is a writer, mystical teacher and Director of the Silent Eye, a correspondence-based journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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The damp demise of colour
In the hedgerow
The feral scent of water
Molding the undoing
Of what it kissed to life
So short a time ago…
———-
©Stephen Tanham 2023
Stephen Tanham is a writer, mystical teacher, photographer and Director of the Silent Eye, a correspondence-based journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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Sometimes, the moment just is … in all its beauty.
The leaves, their work done, let go the link to their sustenance and fall through space to an unknown place, where their form blazes briefly amidst their kin, before losing its cohesion in the harshness of winter, returning everything they have been, but not this memory, to the good earth.
©Stephen Tanham 2023
Stephen Tanham is a writer, mystical teacher and Director of the Silent Eye, a correspondence-based journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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Shells from an Inner Sea (2) A fresh look at the ‘now’
by Steve Tanham
We are urged by spiritual writers to ‘live in the now’. We might reasonably ask how we might live anywhen else, but that would go against the spirit of such good advice.
Some clarity might be needed, though.
As far as a reasonable self-inquiry goes, we – our composite consciousness – lives pressed up against signals from our senses that are very much of the now. What we do with these signals is another matter. Our psychological past has equipped us with gates to perception that ‘colour’ how we compose and react to the ‘inner now’ from the sum of what is actually received by the senses as experience.
Experience is therefore an inner and outer activity. We have signals from the world, and we have reactions to those changes of state. The two together form our view of the now, the present.
Those who exhort us to ‘live in the now’ mean that we should put effort into making quiet these inner reactions and let our ‘inner senses’ perceive the world as it is. It’s not a simple matter. The years of conditioning that everyone has imposed on them by society, let alone the need for survival, mean that we are far from being a real observer of the actual present of our lives.
The word present is linked to the word presence. The latter involves the discovery of an inner level of being that we all possess. Knowledge of this level of our selves changes lives. We come to know, with a certainty, that we are more than the body, and this deep knowing reorientates our lives and ambitions. What is the relationship between this presence and the now?
Isn’t the now simply a kind of ‘ticking-clock space’ in which we live?
When we are asked to think of the now, we tend to view it as amorphous. – without shape or form – rather than a ‘thing’. And yet most of the ‘non-me’ objects in our world are things… It’s curious.
And yet we are sure there is a now. We can’t define it without resorting to our-selves: I am in the now … er, but only now… But the previous now has gone. Not easy is it? A constant companion which might not really be there? And if the now is not reliably there, then what is it?
Perhaps it’s a flow? Time, itself is considered a flow, at least when viewed from one perspective. A flow can never really be pinned down to one location because it’s always ‘flowing’. So whenever you try to measure it by ordinary means, it’s not there as a flow – its a dead ‘section’ of something that was mysteriously and powerfully alive.
We can sense or measure a change in a flow. For example, the flow is a river, our minds can register a change in the nature of what is ‘flowing’ past us – perhaps we have had a rain storm the night before and the water level is raised and the volume greater.
We could express this as so many gallons per minute, for example. But we have no such units for the flow of our own now except the depth of experience and the movement of a clock’s hands, and that is likely to be all about the clock and very little about us.
All we know is that our apparent now flows with us, as tightly coupled as it can be. If we mediate on it, we might conclude that our now is actually inside us, and closely related to the discovery of our own presence.
Let’s ask another question: what’s more real, the ‘me’ or the now? The me seems to exists and move with and within the now, but we have seen how difficult the now is to pin down.
Which brings us to experience, itself. It might be reasonable to assume that our now is linked to our experience, since the now is registered as a continuous flow of experience. However, if we take time to be quiet and examine our experience, we find that the content of that is a stream of occurrences, synonymous with the presence (attentive or bored, for example) of our attention and the depth to which it registers what we experience.
And this is where we find the living link between all the things we have considered, here. The nature of our conscious experience is seen as the now of the supposed time-flow.
We know that ‘out-there’ in the world, real events are happening, but the residual experience – post our personality’s ‘gateways of perception’ is coloured and different. But there is a place where the actual events of the world are received and held … and that is the part of us that Carl Jung named the Unconscious.
So now to the crux of this post. Its very difficult for us to undo the processes of ‘blunting’ the world’s events that have become the patterns of perception from our childhood onwards. But our unconscious is a vast sea of true experience, stored accurately and available to our conscious minds if we cultivate a stable method of … yes, you may have correctly jumped ahead, inner inquiry.
If you have ever wondered at the power of such methods as Tarot readings, or divination with the I Ching – in the hands of a dedicated and honest practitioner, you will find the source of their skill is to tap into the presence of this level of your self.
Carl Jung said that a person who will not enter such inner waters will never know themselves, fully, and much will happen in their lives that is beyond their control – when it need not be.
Our inner worlds are intimately linked with the truth of our lives. The daily world of the egoic personality is only aware of a fraction of that wholeness. The beauty of it all is that it belongs to us, in its entirety… and we can talk to it!
Our inner worlds of thoughts and feelings are vastly more powerful than we know. Moreover, they can speak to us – if we develop the ability to explore and listen. Our post last Thurdsay on the nature of spiritual inquiry was a first step in that development, and offers a tool that can serve to deepen and clarify our consciousness.
Here is the link, again : Shells from an Inner Sea (1)
In the final post of this series, next Thursday, we will consider the kinds of powerful inquiry we can make within this living inner sea. All we have to do is to enter it and listen…listen with love and confidence.
©Stephen Tanham 2023
Stephen Tanham is a writer, mystical teacher and Director of the Silent Eye, a correspondence-based journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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©Stephen Tanham 2023
Stephen Tanham is a writer, mystical teacher and Director of the Silent Eye, a correspondence-based journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
(On the back of the card, partly rubbed out, it says in pencil: inclined to irreverence and humour… )
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Fandango’s FOWC Friday challenge asked us to make creative use of the word ‘askew’. Here’s my offering…
Photo taken at Laxey on the Isle of Man, last week, and post-processed to look like an old postcard…too many ‘p’s’ in there, if you ask me, not to mention ‘post’s. Mutter, mutter.
©Stephen Tanham 2023
Stephen Tanham is a writer, mystical teacher and Director of the Silent Eye, a correspondence-based journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
On the back of the card, partly rubbed out, it says in pencil: and he’s inclined to irreverence and humour…
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
———-
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—-//—-
What hollow world lies hidden
Within these solid forms,
Inviting me with eyes and mind to follow?
How would I live as leaf or twig
Or fruit as berry: thorn, if scorned?
A solitary round of life unknown but found.
Where would I find myself if self
Surrendered to this leave of flesh
To be enmeshed in natural and abiding weave?
Now hear the silent laughter’s peels
Through unknown trails, when green heart’s
Mischief ends in spoken soft enfolding:
‘We have never been apart’ –
The sweet and holding tones of One whose care
Has, selfless, furnished all my breathing.
—-//—-
©Stephen Tanham 2023
Stephen Tanham is a writer, mystical teacher and Director of the Silent Eye, a correspondence-based journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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The waterways of Bolton-le-Sands
by Steve Tanham
It’s like a Dutch canal system in miniature. It’s usually freezing cold, and seems to go dark quicker, there, than anywhere else we visit.
Welcome to the hidden gem of the shore at Bolton-le-Sands, Lancashire.
There’s a main channel that divides the long shoreline in two. The collie loves it, as she can vault over the narrow waters in pursuit of the frisbee; then turn to see if I dare follow…
Old two-legs is not as agile as she – even if she is an old girl, now, so I concentrate on landing the frisbee it where I know we can both go…
With the sun fading in the sky, we turned to pick our way back over the channels to the safety of the car.
We live to bark another day!
Stephen Tanham 2023
Stephen Tanham is a writer, mystical teacher and Director of the Silent Eye, a correspondence-based journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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On the third Sunday of every month, the Silent Eye hosts a Zoom-based discussion to explore one of the core topics of modern mysticism.
This series of ongoing posts features a summary of each monthly discussion; of which this is the second.
The talks are open to all, and we welcome new visitors to the group – whether you drop in to take a look, or decide to stay and join our work.
There is link at the end of the post to enable you to join one of our sessions.
No-one wants a dry set of ‘minutes’ of such meetings. We’ll tell the story of these special events as informally as possible.
The SE-Exploration talk for Sunday 15 October 2023 was : The Magic and Mystery of Identity
One of our number regaled us with a journey through comic books! He used it to illustrate how children literally ‘bind’ their attention to a character in an illustrated story, living it in so-called fantasy, but with powerful and very real emotions – a precursor to a later fondness for formal fiction works?
For him, his journey to adulthood was paralleled with a journal of adopted characters that his young self would ‘be’. Being (in contrast to Doing) is important in our work, as its unquestioning and unresisting nature is a key aspect of our own inner selves – and their eventual effect on our world of the personality.
Understanding the difference between being and doing is at the heart of a special relationship with the universe that understands we can – and need to – do both
We felt there was much to discuss in this shared subject and will return to it in future talks.
We had explored the actual foundations of the soul the previous month, resulting in a schematic reproduced above:
Now, we were keen to extend this, to pinpoint the origins of the power of identity in our lives – and its shifting focus.
One of the group remarked that that identity appeared to be an inner hunger for something that had been lost… We all agreed that there was a deeper story, here.
A summary of subsequent discussions led us to an inner journey of the soul
We talked about how identity brings us alive in a certain way – empowering us to act with purpose and direction. A comment was made that such action ‘in the world’ was an attribute of ‘doing rather than being’, but nonetheless essential. The view of the group is that our path is one of a twinned being-doing axis, where the presence of individualised Being as the Self was the ultimate identity, and the state to which all the formative experiences lead us.
Much discussion followed, prompted by one of the group who was experiencing a challenging and very real ascent of his own consciousness, and wondering at his capacity to ‘hold it all’.
Some guiding comments were made by the most experienced members, one of whom said that the ‘Christ nature’ or Self was the creative ‘blueprint’ for the individual human being, so we need not fear its power, because it had always acted in our best interests, respecting our true capacities, and would therefore not unfold within us in a way that was threatening to the stability of our being.
We returned to our core diagram of function of Self, soul and personality, derived after the last SE-Explore meeting. We agreed that an extension to this was only needed in the sense of a universal process that gradually turned our attention from the outer to the inner dimensions of our lives.
The antique pocket watch, laid faintly as a foundation layer of the diagram, reminds us of the (eventua)l inevitability of the correct realisation of our identities with the ever-renewing Self.
Why not join us for our November chat? The details are below:
The SE-Exploration talk for Sunday 19 November 2023 will be : The Power of Self-Inquiry.
Our regular closing text from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas urges us to Inquire within:
“Knock upon yourself as upon a door and walk upon yourself as a straight road. For if you walk on that path, you cannot go astray; and when you knock on that door, what you open for yourself shall open.
Let the one who seeks not stop seeking until he finds. When he finds, he shall be troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be amazed, and shall come to transcend all things.”
Gnostic Gospel of Thomas.
We will examine the practical techniques whereby we may ‘knock upon ourselves as a door…’
Join us for 90 mins of friendship and amicable sharing of views and experiences … not forgetting fun. Bringing a glass of your favourite beverage with you is encouraged.
If you’re not on our contact list and would like a Zoom invitation to join us at the next SE-Explore meeting (see above), send an email to rivingtide@gmail.com.
©Stephen Tanham 2023
Stephen Tanham is a writer, mystical teacher and Director of the Silent Eye, a correspondence-based journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
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Sun’s gold sinks beneath
Full waters of the open eye
Sea calls, singing ‘home’.
———-
©Stephen Tanham 2023
Stephen Tanham is a writer, mystical teacher and Director of the Silent Eye, a correspondence-based journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
Sun in Gemini 
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