As a child, I remember being conscious of a few autumn days that had a ‘special gold’ in them.
Walking the collie by the River Kent, I realised we were experiencing another. I looked down at the surface of the water and knew I had a short time to record one of the special moments that characterise such mellowness.
©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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Our modern age speaks glibly of the truth. We might even liken it to ‘knowing’ and entertain the idea that there is truth and Truth. The former would be a convenient or ‘conventional’ truth, a truth accepted as normal by the more prosperous world. But Truth with a capital ‘T would be an appreciation, a living understanding, and a state in which we could feel the presence of our inner being as it turned our discovery into a rightness of time, place, circumstance and heart.
We can adopt a catalogue of modern truths and know that it will take little effort to hide behind them in our actions. There is so much of this hiding in our ‘civilised world’ (and the politics that reflect it) that we would not feel at odds with the mainstream of life.
“Terrible about all those starving children but what can you do? Give money and it just ends up in the pockets of corrupt officials whose actions gave rise to the starving youngsters in the first place…”
All ‘practically’ true. But how do we feel in our hearts when we take such a stance? What happens if we face this cold attitude and challenge ourselves to find a personal answer that addresses that young child’s innocent and desperate eyes?
The degree of success is not the issue here. What matters is the engagement with what we know to be a cruel situation involving people whose lives are every bit as real and important as ours.
The core of this is a society that has taken the immediacy out of our relationship with living. Being shocked hurts. We value the stability and comforts of our way of life, so we build buffers that recognise and ‘front’ the reaction to something shocking that would rock our hearts.
Our fears run amok when challenged in this way. “I’d soon find myself selling my house and losing my job if I set off to help the less fortunate in a reckless way, like that…”
But the Truth in the situation is not asking us to do that. It’s really asking us to face something with presence and therefore know what is true in a living and personal way; to do some semblance of what we we do face to face with the ‘child’.
This state of presence is within us all. It is an unshakable knowing that we have a heart-based core that knows that every situation we face in life is special and different – and has something to teach us. It takes a degree of courage and lots of practice to come to rely on this inner part of us: our soul, if you like.
We cannot deal with any situation we are experiencing as though it is part of a formula of response. Each needs to be viewed as intimately related not just to us, but to this exact moment in our lives. Seeing it like this causes the presence within us to rise to the ‘control deck’ of navigating a truly conscious route through the present.
———-
©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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My wife and her sister had just left to do some local shopping. I was set to take the two dogs – one ours, the other minded for two friends touring northern Spain – onto the nearby beach for their second run of the day. It was a prospect neither seemed keen on…
My mind had registered the lowering sky … but only subconsciously. Finding myself suddenly (and pleasurably) alone, I responded to the young man clearing the debris of our Sunday morning breakfast buns and asking if he could get me anything else.
‘Thank you, no. I’m done.” I said.
And then immediately called him back.
He put his tray down at an empty table and returned, smiling.
“Tell you what,” I said, returning his wry smile. “I’ll have another latté.”
The dogs were fine. Another coffee wouldn’t do any harm at all…and it was Sunday.
He nodded and disappeared into the Rotunda’s bar.
The glare from one of the booth’s lamps made me conscious of how dark it was becoming…but this was only late morning.
A few minutes later, as the coffee was set down on my table, there came a loud clap of thunder, seemingly right overhead. Windows rattled. It got even darker.
The place went quiet in shock. Then, slowly, conversation returned – but hesitantly, as though no one trusted that one thunder-clap would be it…
The dogs needed some reassurance, but then settled back to their slumber beneath the table; they had been well exercised earlier in the morning.
Suddenly, the noise level increased. A throng of wet people were pushing through the doors into the Rotunda’s interior. I looked up to see the entire population of the outside deck fleeing the dark skies and sudden deluge. Many arrived with soggy Sunday papers folded over their heads and hot drinks clutched in their free hands.
Tess, our collie, opened one eye and yawned up at me, conspiratorially, as if to say, “Good call…”
Outside, the newly arrived storm tore into the building. I’ve never enjoyed a finer coffee.
©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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No gardener tends this sea wall
Of stone
The beauty of these scavengers
Of dust not loam
And
Rock as bed
Is all their own
A triumph of
Being improbable.
——
©Stephen Tanham 2023
Stephen Tanham is a writer, mystical teacher and director of the Silent Eye, a 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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Personality: friend or foe?
by Steve Tanham
When reading many modern books on mystical development, you might think that the personality was now viewed as negative; a foe to be overcome on the way to the real self.
There is much truth in this, but it is incomplete and spoken from an ‘immature’ perspective. That partial vision of it misses the finest potential of what we have loving crafted of ourselves during our lifetime, however long or short that has been.
The infant is born with the ability to see, but cannot recognition or sense of what is entering the consciousness via the senses. If the environment, centred on mother, is warm and nurturing, then everything in the infant’s world is grounded in beauty and love.
The new mind is as hungry as the body, and constantly adds to what it can perceive. There is no sense of separation; of a ‘me and it’. The young mind is simply adding to itself. The view through the child’s eyes is like a rich tapestry: differences are seen but there is no sense of objective boundaries, which will later become objects in the child’s world.
Eventually, the child learns that the seen ‘arm’ belongs to a body. Much later, that body is known to be something that others have, too, and is a ‘type’ of object that has arms and legs and other appendages. Each such object has properties knowable from all the senses. Loved objects, like mother; have a rich set of touch, smell and sound vibrations to add to the developed seeing that the human being now possesses.
That sense of personal possession of, say, an arm – of me– eventually becomes part of the young person’s identity. Having an identity is essential to the development of a strong ego – personality.
As the child matures – full of sensory capability and now equipped with logic and reason, the perceived world moves from an exterior reality, conveyed immediately to the senses, to an interior world of abstraction and representation. This power of the Mind uses its memory of ‘like objects’ – ‘all human bodies are similar in the abstracted mental world’ – to make the process of perception more economic. Why look at a hundred bodies in the street when you can scan them and know they are a concept called ‘people’, which share the same properties – at least at the level of encounter.
A lover’s body might well be different, and we take time and effort – at least in the beginning – to see and feel it in intensity each time we make love with them.
So what’s wrong with this loving persona that we have carefully cultured according to our preferences? Nothing at all… The adult has learned to ‘manage’ a complex material environment … but its reality has shifted from a constant stream of the ‘real’ to an abstracted and increasingly dull world based on memory rather than reality. Objects are memory, and the once ‘out-there’ world is now entirely made of them…
The dense world of matter is not our only home. This finite and ultimately corruptible stay in the most ‘solid’ of worlds has been undertaken precisely to give us this perspective and to enable us to objectively use a knowledge of the ending of the life of the body, though that is not a prerequisite of a well-lived life.
The spiritual path is one of moving our consciousness back to where we came from, but not in an immature sense of losing what we have gained in maturity and understanding. The hurdles to that reconciliation are the fixed views of life and ‘the world’ that we formed in early life and that create a constant ‘movie’ (link here) of all we do in our movement through life, twisting our actual perceptions into fixed forms of reaction.
This happens to us all, We have no control over it, and yet we are mainly unaware of it. However this set of ‘fixations’ distorts the whole of our lives.
These interior objects are not an ‘enemy’; they are a natural result of experience, hurts and bruising. They are like a suit of armour that makes our movement sluggish and lacking in grace. They were put in place to protect the developing child and they stayed there long past the need for them. But because they came first, they are the foundations of everything else that followed: our character.
Developmental psychology has shown that there are a small number of such fixations and modern mystery schools have developed their own techniques for the discovery and personal healing of these invisible but pervasive barriers.
The techniques for their removal are a soul-call to the deepest level of our selves – the inner sense of presence and power that we cherish at times of ‘peak experiences’. The joyful energy available to us from this level exceeds that of normal living, and has the power to make our fixations visible, as though we had shone a brilliant and other-worldly light through them – from the far side – exposing their anatomy for the insubstantial yet fearful matrix that it is.
In his book, Diamond Heart, A.H. Almass, the celebrated mystical teacher refers to this as the ‘Embodiment of Essence’, which is a stage beyond the usual reference to transcendence. Embodiment brings back the essential qualities of the personal Soul where they flower in the full potential of the person, now made whole in a truly spiritual sense: body and soul, dynamic, ultimately capable and filled with love.
This entire consideration encompasses the idea of a spiritual ‘death and rebirth’; a theme that has gripped mankind for millennia, as though we have always possessed an inner knowledge that this was and is possible.
©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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Continued from Part One.
I knew the line was coming…
“And I never saw him, again,” said my grandmother.
It was the story of grandmother’s eldest brother; a man deeply important to her, almost another parent – she the youngest sibling.
There was a tone of bitterness there. My Grandmother had suffered a hard life. Her husband, my paternal Grandfather, had also survived the Somme and come home to Bolton, where he immediately sold his medals and turned to drink; the horrors of what he had lived through too powerful for his fun-loving heart and mind.
“Stephen survived the Somme and met a local girl…” She always paused at this point. I had heard it many times, but was happy to listen again. It helped Grandma to tell it, though there were always tears in her eyes at the end, sometimes floods of them.
“They married in France, near St Omer, at the end of the war (WW1). She got a wife’s allowance from the British Army. Their daughter, Madelaine, was born here in Bolton.”
“They couldn’t settle in Bolton – she had no English and hated the place!”
Her tears were flowing. “They left… the family in France offered him a future as a baker in their shop.” A whisper. “ I never saw him again…” She died a few years after this. I often thought how wonderful it would be to find the missing relatives. But I was young and without resources.
Stephen and Adrienne returned to a small village near Audruicq, south-east of Calais, (see map). His French bread was said to be ‘unusual’; but he was loved and adopted as part of a shaken-up life in post-war France. No-one could conceive, then, that the further horrors of war were only two decades away in the form of a resurgent fascist Germany.
At the start of WW2, Stephen made a last attempt to travel back to Britain, but was stopped by the authorities. Being English – though now a French citizen – Stephen was watched closely by the occupying Nazis during WW2. They did not know that this simple baker, in France because of his new family, was also an active helper of the Resistance.
The family in Bolton knew nothing of all this. They hoped for the best, but feared the worst.
Wars end, eventually… By the time it did, Stephen was living a typically French life and raising a family. Between 1919 and 1927,Stephen and Adrienne had four daughters and one son – also ‘Stephen’ – Etienne. They, in turn had children, taking the timeline to my own generation, where, ironically, I am the only Stephen.
After WW2, the family prospered and eventually took over a classically-French cafe and bar in Audruicq, where they saw out their days.
In 2016, my wife Bernie’s developing expertise in online family-trees set her on a search for my ‘lost French family’. One evening, she turned to me and said with a smile, “I think I’ve found them!’
She showed me the screen of her laptop. There was a simple message from a lady named Mado, who wrote: ‘We have tried everything we know to locate our English relatives but with no success. I am leaving this message attached to our family tree in the hope that someone will find it in the future.”
It was literally the digital equivalent of a ‘message in a bottle’.
Sadly, the note was seven years old. In hope rather than expectation, we sent a message, detailing our connection to Stephen … and waited.
A week later, there came an email from a very excited Mado. The two sides of the family were about to be reunited … after 100 years of separation.
I will tell the story of what followed in another blog post. The above was to set the scene for the ‘girl on a motorcycle’ to appear. One of Stephen and Adrienne’s daughters, Micheline, had two boys. One of the boys had two children, a girl and a boy. The girl’s name is Cecile.
Cecile is the girl on a motorcycle…
The French family were and are based, in Calais, with another smaller group in Lille, near the Belgian border. Over the course of the next three years, until the Covid epidemic, we visited them all, and hosted holidays from them back to our house in Kendal to which others in the English families were invited.
One of the people we met in the second round of visits was Cecile. Her photo is above. She is from the family based in Lille. We first met her when she was visiting her then boyfriend in Edinburgh. Her parents and younger brother were already with us. One evening, they were speaking to her on the phone, in Edinburgh, and I suggested she could easily get the train to Oxenholme – our local station and on the West Coast mainline – and join us for a day or two.
She jumped at the chance, arriving at Oxenholme several hours later and throughly enjoying her stay and the reunion with her own family. She liked where we lived and we said she was welcome to return at any time. I well remembered similar hospitality being extended to me when I was of a similar age. It makes a big difference to a young life.
Fast forward to August of this year…
Cecile contacted us to ask if she could come back and stay for a few days. She said she would be on her way to Edinburgh to visit the Scottish side of the family. We were happy to oblige. We knew she was now a qualified engineer, working in Paris – a job she had always wanted to do.
We assumed she would be arriving by train, again. To our surprise, she said she would be travelling by motorcycle…
On the 13th August, in the late afternoon, a 650 cc Suzuki motorcycle purred down the narrow lane that leads to our house. In typical ‘Cecile fashion’ she swung herself off the bike and took off her helmet, her long hair cascading like a model in an advert. Quite a contrast to my ‘drowned rat’ arrival in Glasgow all those years ago. She had travelled all the way from London using only the A-roads … and looked as fresh as a daisy.
She settled in, and we talked about bikes. She had no idea I was a biker, and she laughed when I told her I had made a sodden journey to Scotland at sixteen at the same time of year. She was going up to stay with Louise – the same Louise who had been the first to greet me when I stumbled, half-dead, up their path in Glasgow. Louise and her family now run a farm in Haddington, near Edinburgh.
We took Cecile sightseeing, and over a coffee in Keswick, she asked if she could plot a route to Edinburgh to take in what she had heard was the beautiful Shap Summit. I had to pinch myself – so many echoes of my 1970 trip!
I smiled and assured her she could and offered to accompany her on my own bike some of the way. She jumped at the chance. I suspect I am her only relative who rides a motorcycle.
On Tuesday the 15th August, we saddled up. She wearing a brightly coloured outer riding suit that I had given her from a box of stuff I no longer use. It would keep her a lot more visible than the brown jacket and jeans she had arrived in.
With me leading at a gentle pace on the Honda, we crossed Kendal to get to the start of the Shap road. When I was sixteen, this was where the rain began to beat down… But not this day. Bright sunshine accompanied us all the way to Penrith and beyond, with her giving me the thumbs-up every time the bikes drew level.
I smiled, ruefully, at how pleasant Shap could be… and how awful.
Cecile was keen to avoid the motorway unless absolutely necessary. We followed the A6 to just south of Carlisle where we had to join the M6 which became the M74. I smiled as the first sign to Glasgow appeared.
The plan had been to try for lunch in Moffat, further north, but Cecile pulled alongside me and indicated she was in distress and needed to stop. We came off the at the next junction… Lockerbie! The place where the lady cafe owner had let me drip all over her floor and fed me hot food to revive my washed out and frozen being.
We cruised slowly into the town and found the main car park. She told me she was getting cramps and needed to walk to relieve them,
“And eat!’ She said. “I’m really hungry.”
I was not surprised when the Cafe 91 we had spied from the bikes turned out to be the (renamed) place that saved my life that wet day in 1970. I was grinning so much, Cecile asked me – after ordering a huge lunch – what was so funny?
I waved at the interior of the cafe and told her more of the detail of my sodden ride to Glasgow. As I re-lived the tale, I could see she was working on a proposal. “Why don’t you come all the way to Edinburgh? You and Louise are best friends, and she would love to have you..”
We’d covered about two-thirds of the distance to Haddington. But there was a poetry about parting here in Lockerbie. Her road to Edinburgh – the place where nearly all my Scottish relatives now live – was a different road on her different journey. And that was what mattered. Fate and coincidence had provided me with a beautiful experience containing so many magical coincidences, and we had shared that.
It was right that she go the final leg on her own…
The circularity … and lack of suffering of this special day had been wonderful.
An hour later, well fed and with her phone programmed to take her onwards over some of the most beautiful roads in southern Scotland, we parted company at the edge of the car park: she going north, me returning south.
Now it was just her story… and her journey. Perhaps some day she might write it up in her own blog … and mention her second cousin, once removed.
Two hours later, I was home, having taken the fast road back. I hate biking on motorways… but they have their uses.
I thought about the whole improbable story arc on the way back to Kendal, summoning up the face of my grandma in memory to talk to her in my mind.
“I didn’t get to see your beloved Stephen, but I did get to meet his son, Etienne, weeks before he died… but the link – the circuit of time – had been made. After nearly a hundred years the families had been reunited… and now that union continued to flourish.
Cecile arrived safely in Haddington 90 minutes after she left Lockerbie; safe and well. She had a great holiday and is now back in Paris … with a new and highly visible riding suit… which is a bit too big, but not so much that she won’t use it in a downpour…
©Stephen Tanham 2023
Stephen Tanham is a writer, mystical teacher and director of the Silent Eye, a 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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I used to row whenever I could. I found the action joyful and loved the intake of extra oxygen surging around my bloodstream.
The feeling of propelling yourself across calm water is a meditative experience filled with sensory delights: the ‘chump’ of the oars breaking the water’s surface tension; the accelerating prow’s quiet roar as it fights the clinging liquid, parting it like a comb on oiled hair.
And then, when the effort’s done, and quieter waters reached, the dripping of water from oars as the vessel glides the final few feet back to shore or jetty.
All real but in my mind, like a poem, remembered.
It’s been too long since I held the wood.
Perhaps a haiku is appropriate?
—-
Old wood, wise, defines
Ancient blade’s intent
Part but not to cut
—-
©Stephen Tanham 2023
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a 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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Nine Keys (9 – final): An emotional reunion
by Steve Tanham
How are we to end this series of posts? Each of these nine has been a glimpse into an aspect of true ‘spiritual’ knowledge … but only that. I’ve comes to trust that the correct alignment of ordinary knowledge will result in it becoming a channel of deeper and truer knowing. That truer knowing is alive and waiting to serve our outer self – the personality, which has a vital part to play in our development; in fact, we could say that it is the raw material of our development, since it is like a set of clothes, rather than the real person in them.
We considered how a certain ‘movie’ of our lives was formed in our early experience of life by reactions to powerful events that imprinted their foundational nature upon us. This crystallised into a set of fixed views, in the language of the spiritual enneagram – the fixations,, which bestowed us attitudes and expectations about life, and these we find recurring, though disguises, in everything we experience, even though that childhood is long gone.
We looked at how that act of ‘experiencing’ has a life of its own in the form of the Soul – portrayed as giant set of ‘sails’ which reacted to the prevailing winds of events and our choice of course – powering the boat along a course set by desire, determination and, as we mature, spiritual aspiration to discover our own true nature.
In our nautical analogy, that true nature is nothing less than the hull – the body – of our boat, with its giant rudder. The sails we can consider as grown from, and projections of this Self (capital ‘S’), whose nature is perfect but not of this world of matter, though it is its heart. Between the Self and the self (the personality, attempting to recreate the Self, via the mind) lies the soul, in contact with both inner and outer aspects of ourselves..
The problem with all of this is that it is theory, and therefore only has ‘life’ in the mind. To bring it alive in our lives, we need to actualise it. To do that we need to go beyond the ordinary perceptions of the discursive self to a place of greater intrinsic power.
People are often shocked to find – when they close their eyes and actually listen to their internal state – that there is a constant dialogue of chatter based on words.
Our outer world is a complex representation or image in the mind, based on the conditioned harvesting of events we have decided are important to us. Our reactions may appear logical, but most of them are emotional. Emotions are mysterious. We know how they feel, but few of us have ever stopped to consider what their nature might be.
Emotions are a release of energy; but where energy originates is the key to its nature. There are many form of energy.
Perhaps it is fitting, then, to end the series with a technique that holds a great degree of power and immediacy: that of an ‘enquiry into emotion’.
Emotions are powerful; they can be friend or foe. By this, I don’t mean that good feelings are friends and nasty ones, foes. I mean that all emotions, made truly conscious are friends. Left as ‘background’ effects in our lives, emotions are utilised at far less than their potential and can act like unseeen ‘anchors’, dragging back our efforts as the interfere, very powerfully, with our resolve.
Next time you find yourself experiencing a strong emotion – say, a sense of rejection – instead of putting your energy into denying it: ‘Don’t be so childish…’ – embrace the feelings being experienced. Try not to judge or mentally ‘comment’ on the feelings; simply let them be what they are. If you can do this without reacting, simply accepting, then you will find a secondary effect arises in your body. In the case of ‘rejection’ you will find a pleasant ‘glow’ of warmth and love arises in your torso.
The effect of this is to show us that the false nature of the emotion is generated by the personality, according to its ‘reactive processing’. This kind of experience often affects our sense of internal value: our self-worth. In the above example, it is the real and eternal self-worth, ‘our real value’ that arises as a feeling of love. Experience this goes beyond logic and so-called rationality. The reality of the feeling is self-evident. To feel this is to know the edge of Being.
That love generated by a successful use of the exercise belongs to our Self – in other words, it is ours in the deepest sense of the word, No-one can ever take it away. It is one of our Self’s primary ‘essential aspects’. When we see and feel this, the theory drops away and we glimpse the new reality of life and its potential.
Once you have tasted and felt that assured sense of contact with a deeper part of you, you can carry on and extend the exercise to other situations where there is strong emotion. At the end of this you will have come to know the existence and nature of some key parts of your own inner architecture.
—-
End of Part 9, the final part of the series.
To join our monthly SE-Explore Zoom meetings, simply send an email to Rivingtide@gmail.com. There are no prerequisites and you will be very welcome.
©Stephen Tanham 2023
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
Other Parts of this series:
Part Four: The Edge of the Known
Nine Keys (6) An uprising of Self
Nine Keys (8) When experience grows dull
©Copyright Stephen Tanham
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.
Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
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My father’s eldest sibling – my Auntie Mary – though hailing from the family hometown of Bolton, Lancashire, married a highly decorated and highly tall (6’4”) Scottish army officer at the end of WW2.
In 1946, on the way to begin her new life as the wife of a now Glaswegian police officer, two English serviceman in the same train carriage advised her to get off at Carstairs, walk over the bridge, and return home. Glasgow was a terrible place, they said.
She stayed on the train and began her Scottish life, returning to Lancashire to ‘get a refresh’ every now and then. She and her husband raised seven children, getting them all through university and into good careers.
When I was young, we’d visit the Scottish relatives every summer. Somehow, they would squash the four of us into their already-full police house located a short distance from the infamous Castlemilk estate. Uncle Robert was by then a sergeant in the Glasgow police force.
But he, and my beloved Auntie Mary – still with us at 97 – are not the subject of this story.
When I turned 16, my father bought me a Ducati 250cc motorbike and a family friend let me use the internal roadway of the nearby Burton Tailoring factory to learn to ride it – in the evenings.
Having passed my test, I celebrated by setting off on a long-planned odyssey to Glasgow, to stay with my relatives. It was a bold move for a new ‘biker’. This was in the days when the M6 ended at Lancaster, and further progress towards Scotland depended on the trusty A6 trunk road, whose highest point – the Shap Summit – was the scene of frequent ‘strandings’ in the winter, as lorry drivers struggled to haul their loads over the mountains and towards the borders at Carlisle.
Shap is the highest point on the western route to Scotland, and is also one of the most elevated sections of any of the motorway routes in the UK. Its reputation was fearsome, but my trip back then was taking place in high summer. How bad could it be? There was no choice. The A6 was the only sensible way to get north of the border.
The journey from Bolton to Shap had been overcast but dry. The familiar towns of Preston, Carnforth, Lancaster and Kendal passed by as we sped north on the purring Ducati along the venerable A6.
My new (to me) leather jacket had been bought by my mum off the Warburtons bread van driver (they all used to wear them) who delivered bread, daily, to our off-licence.
“It’s due a change,” he said. “Give us a fiver and I’ll tell the boss it’s been nicked again by them kids from Wapping Street!”
The padded and strong jacket was now doing a fine job of protecting me from the inevitable summer chill of riding a motorbike. I’d attached a sheepskin collar with glue and few strategic stitches using an industrial needle and pliers. It was rising up and stroking my face in the wind, a good and warm feeling. A flying ace on his maiden voyage to Scotland… Life was good.
I was exultant, excited and a bit nervous as I took the final sweeping climb out of Kendal and, 30 minutes later, passed the Shap Summit – 1350 ft. It’s a bleak spot, and the winds howl like they’re about to eat your soul – even through the insulation of a second-hand crash helmet.
‘This memorial pays tribute to the drivers and crews of vehicles that made possible the social and commercial links between north and south on this old and difficult route over Shap fell before the opening of the M6 motorway.
Remembered too are all those who built and maintained the road and the generations of local people who gave freely of food and shelter to stranded travellers in bad weather.’
Above: a sober reminder that life was not always comfy cabins and motorway services
And then the rain started… and got heavier and heavier. When I finally passed into the environs of Penrith, I was saturated. My recently acquired leather jacket – not designed for motorcycling – was holding water beautifully, and I was freezing.
The A6 gave way to the A74 and I saw the first signpost to Glasgow … only 90 miles to go…
The sheepskin collar I had proudly added to the jacket had somehow loosened itself. It was sodden and stuck in a vortex pattern that resulted in it slapping me on the cheeks several times a second.
The rain drove at me, horizontally intent on sending me back to Lancashire. When I couldn’t feel my fingers anymore, I pulled into the next town, Lockerbie, and parked the bike in an alleyway visible to the cafe next door.
The kindly lady owner took pity on my state and let me drip all over her floor, bringing me several mugs of sweetened steaming black tea. I hated black tea… but not that day. A bowl of piping hot soup followed, accompanied by thick crusts of buttered bread. Half an hour later, I dug into my meagre reserves and paid her with heart-felt thanks.
Outside, the rain waited… My saddle was as sodden as my jacket. 70 miles to go. I ripped the useless sheepskin collar from my failed ‘flying suit’ and dumped it into the nearby bin. I was now on the A74, nearly as infamous as Shap. I crouched low over the bars and clung on, humming – anything to take away the misery…
When I got to Hamilton, I knew I was near to Glasgow. The rain had continued and I was now shivering all the time. I would look at cars passing me and imagine how lovely it would be in their heated cabins.
With twenty miles to go, the engine began to splutter. The famous Italian electrics, the weak point of an otherwise lovely machine, were doing their best to thwart the final part of the journey. I pulled over. Somehow, I managed to sort it; sitting on the kerb at the side of the road and using my penknife to strip the offending wire and make a new connection.
My brain was numb and slow with cold, I got to the edge of Glasgow; then Castemilk and finally I knew where I was… My destination lay at the end of this dual carriageway, seen, finally, through tired and bloodshot eyes.
Two of my younger cousins came screaming out of the house to greet the ‘drowned rat’ as my Aunty Mary later described me to my mother on the phone, confirming that I was still alive.
I was soon learning to breathe again in a steaming bath…
One of the small girls was Louise, the other Eileen. The elder siblings were all away at Uni or travelling, and Eileen had to leave the following morning. For the next few days, Louise had cousin Steve and his motorbike to herself as she clung to me, young arms strong around my waist while we used the bike to explore local beauty spots, none of them too far from her home, but all of them fun.
All the ‘Scottish cousins’ were our close friends but Louise made heroic efforts to stay closely in touch. Later, as an adult (and qualified Archeologist) she took every opportunity to visit us in Lancashire.
For some reason, my arrival by motorcycle in the storm that day was viewed as heroic. Years later, Scottish family tales continued to be told in summers and at New Year of the cousin who practically fell off his motorbike and staggered to their front door, sodden, bandy-legged and exhausted.
But smiling…
But I am not the primary subject of this double post, nor is Louise, nor even her mother, Aunty Mary…
In fact, the subject of this post will not be born for another 28 years. But she will come to complete this story in a most poetic and wonderful way…
To be concluded in Part Two, next Tuesday.
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Our beloved ash tree, which defines the far end of the garden, is doomed.
We have several ash trees around the perimeter of the garden, and they – like all the others in this part of the world – seem destined to be either felled or cut right back to a small spread around the main trunk; the latter being left standing as a low-risk object.
Our tree specialist has advised that the process won’t kill the tree, and that it is not known if this might end the die-back disease, with possible recovery. It seems unlikely but we can have hope. Even in the best scenario it will take decades to recover, so we’ll not be here to see it return to its present glory. Let’s hope it brings others the same greeting each day that it’s given us…
There are three trees that need similar work, so it looks like I’ll be spending the next few months chain-sawing wood and chopping it for the log-burner in the house. Good to have the fuel, but that’s my winter sorted…
The ash in question is our largest, and borders on a neighbour’s garden, so they will be relieved at least.
A sad time.
©Stephen Tanham 2023
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a 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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Nine Keys (8): When experience grows dull
by Steve Tanham
Last Sunday evening, we held our monthly Silent Eye Explorations on Zoom; hosting an international audience for an informal and informative discussion on the subject of the ‘Ways of Knowing’.
These are open to all – see the base of this post for details.
The content of that 90 minutes was a thorough investigation of what it mean to know, and how we take for granted something that goes as deeply into our core as we care to travel… Towards the end of the talk we touched on the fascinating idea that ‘not-knowing’ has its own power and dynamism – a dynamism of surprising potency.
Our ordinary view of knowing might be summarised as this: we take in information via our senses, then organise it into useful structures known as knowledge. Using logic we can enrich this so that, over time, we come to transform it into wisdom; a process that often reverses our gut-reactions to the sensory stimulus.
Someone skilled in martial arts might have learned that the blow aimed at their body by an opponent has its own momentum which can be stopped or stepped aside from. If the latter, the foe is now disadvantaged because the target has moved but their momentum, now invested with all their energy, has not.
Wisdom is often the creation of a non-panicked ‘thinking space’ in which the goal is not to react; instead considering the options from an unhurried and more mature vantage point. Reactive people are seldom the most powerful.
But all this is centred on what we might call ‘ordinary knowing’ – the intake of experience and its transformation into reliable knowledge: something the brain excels at. We have proposed in previous posts that the ‘organ of experience’ is the Soul; and that the processing of experience is tightly bound up with our sense of self.
Ordinary knowledge may come to us in an exciting flash but is soon dulled. People in the SE-Explore group remarked how often in their lives this had happened. That breakthrough in understanding had a palpable excitement to it, and yet, a short time later, the shine had gone off what remained.
The nature of what remains is the story of how experience is translated from vivid reality into something quite different, and grasping this can be the key to opening a different relationship with our real world.
When the mind encounters something for the first time, it does not know its details. But it knows it to BE. In truth, this knowledge of the object’s Being is a deep and mysterious form of knowing in itself. The mind is forced to encounter this new ‘thing’ at a higher level of itself than that of the repetitive ‘now’ – ordinary knowing, as we have termed it.
But the mind’s function is to reduce all experience to concepts: the building blocks of its logic and the basis of the economy with which it can deal with the world’s sensory input. The problem is that such concepts are essentially pictures – representations of what was a vivid new experience, carefully labelled and packaged into the ordinary known.
Over a short period of time, the freshness of the experience is transformed into the ‘sameness’ of memory, and the excitement and energy of the first encounter with the true reality of the ‘object’ is lost. We may wax lyrical with prose or even poetry – which often get closest to restoring a sense of being freshly with the original experience. But the initial vitality of experience is usually gone.
To deepen our consideration, we need to think about the state of not-knowing. Is it valid to ‘not-know something?
It is, in fact we do it all the time…
When we approach something new – perhaps learning so make something in wood, learning a new language or cooking a new dish – we have a beautiful moment where we truly do not know what lies ahead. In view of what we said, above, about the dullness of previous experience, re-experienced as an representation in memory, it is to our great benefit to carry out this learning of something new by assuming a state of mind where we embrace the state of not-knowing. Then, when we embark on the new, the intensity of the experience will leave lasting and very alive traces in our soul.
Repeated use of this will change the way we approach everything new. Gradually, this will alter our consciousness, showing us that vivid experiences are possible at any stage of our lives.
In the final part of the series, next week, we will look at the states of mind and being needed to give your life enough of a ‘shake’ to make an initial path into this most exciting of journeys.
To be continued in Part 9, the final part of the series.
To join our monthly SE-Explore Zoom meetings, simply send an email to Rivingtide@gmail.com. There are no prerequisites and you will be very welcome.
Other Parts of this series:
Part Four: The Edge of the Known
Nine Keys (6) An uprising of Self
©Copyright Stephen Tanham
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.
Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
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I’ve been fascinated by the innovative and penetrating social commentary in (Sir) Grayson Perry’s work for many years, and not surprised when he was granted a knighthood, recently.
While in Edinburgh for a few days of frantic ‘Fringe’, we decided to also visit the National Galleries’ exhibition of Perry’s work – comprising hundreds of his most famous pieces (many of which have been sold, privately) gathered back together, with the owners’ permission, into a dramatic show on several floors of the main gallery.
Photography was permitted, which is refreshing and welcome. It allows me to share a small cross-section of the artist’s work in this blog.
It’s the biggest ever exhibition of Sir Grayson Perry’s work, covering his 40-year career. Perry has gone from taking pottery evening classes to winning the Turner Prize, presenting television programmes on Channel 4 and writing acclaimed books. He’s a classic polymath, but a most unusual one. Love or hate is often the reaction… Personally, I find his work challenging, refreshing and acute. It’s just the kind of subtly ‘deadly’ commentary we need in these divided times.
Perry’s vases have classical forms and are decorated in bright colours, depicting subjects at odds with their attractive appearance. There is a strong autobiographical element in his work, in which images of Perry as “Claire”, his female alter-ego, and “Alan Measles”, his childhood teddy bear, often appear.
Perry is decidedly odd – and likes it that way – shifting between his cross-dressing feminine side, as ‘Claire’, and his childhood identification with a character created out of the solitary conditions in which he spent many of those years – the teddy bear, Mr Measles was the result.
Perhaps unusually for artists, pottery allowed him the opportunity to indulge his fascination with sex, Punk, and counterculture in the most unlikely and polite of artforms. But he’s not afraid of controversial social issues and uses mixed forms to deliver his observations.
Perry describes Britain is Best as originating from a television programme he made in 2014, in Belfast, called Who Are You? As part of this a group of the production team, including Perry, went to see a march celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Ulster Volunteer Force. Perry interviewed five Unionists and this resulting embroidery depicts them all riding one horse. The image was based on a an existing mural of King Billy painted onto a gable end of a house in Belfast. Perry observed that they ‘seemed to be holding out for an imagined golden age.’
In Perry’s own words:
‘King of Nowhere refers to the gangs that roamed the Digmoor Estate, in Skelmersdale, near Liverpool. A lot of the bits and pieces were picked up off the ground on the Estate. It’s inspired by the African tribal sculpture I had seen at the British Museum. Gangs are tribal too. It’s a kind of power figure for gang members. And with the candles it’s also a kind of shrine to knife violence. Everyone was wearing branded clothing, particularly Adidas and North Face, so their logos are in there.’
Popular and provocative, Perry makes art that deals with difficult and complex ideas in an accessible and often funny way. He loves taking on big issues that are universally human: masculinity, sexuality, class, religion, politics and more. On view are subversive pots, brilliantly intricate prints, elaborate sculptures, and huge, captivating tapestries, the latter created by hand in Perry’s studio and then transferred to a computer-driven weaving process. They are breathtaking in their scale and intricacy.
Throughout, the works are imbued with Perry’s measured words, sharp wit and social commentary. Working with traditional artforms, Perry addresses the controversial issues of our times in a way quite unlike anyone else.
He’s clever; and being unusual and edgy has never bothered him. Two of the large tapestry sequences, each taking a full room of the gallery, depict a life story of an individual or couple as they develop from innocence to a life-finale.
The last piece I had chance to photograph – we were due at another performance in the Fringe programme – was titled ‘Vote for Me!’ The accompanying text, reproduced below, highlights Perry’s basic honesty and also his bravery at tackling controversial subjects…
Vote for Me! 2023 – Colour woodcut
‘I completed this image in early September 2022, long before the problems that engulfed Nicola Sturgeon and the Scottish National Party and now it feels very prescient. A self-portrait in homage to another well-turned-out female politician. I sit in my very nice modern home surrounded by the symbols of identity, success, culture and mortality. I have been asked many times if I would want to go into politics. I admire people who do, it is a hard and usually thankless task, but it is not for me.’
If you get the chance, go visit! We’re unlikely to see another collection of Sir Grayson Perry’s work on this scale, again.
National (Royal Scottish Academy)
On now until Sun 12 Nov 2023
Open daily, 10am–5pm
Bio of Sir Grayson Perry from Wikipedia:
Grayson Perry was awarded the Turner Prize in 2003. He was interviewed about the win and resulting press in Sarah Thornton‘s Seven Days in the Art World.[13] In 2008 he was ranked number 32 in The Daily Telegraph‘s list of the “100 most powerful people in British culture“.[14] In 2012, Perry was among the British cultural icons selected by artist Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork—the Beatles‘ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover—to celebrate the British cultural figures of his life.[15]
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