“Tell me about the ‘wave’?” Alexandra asked, excitedly. “I get the idea of the now, though I think that’s something we all take for granted; but the wave sounds like something to be discovered, something fundamental to existence . . .”
I sipped my coffee and looked back into those excited, bright eyes, and considered how to fill her with the sense of joy that the idea of the wave always generated in me.
I began slowly, almost hesitantly, “The wave is the substance of the now; just like the soul has been called by some the substance of consciousness.” I watched as she absorbed this challenging concept. Both these ideas were seldom comprehensible to the beginner, and yet, in what the Buddhists called ‘Beginners Mind’, lay the simplicity of comprehension that could make great leaps through not being bogged down by the weight of accumulated thinking. To the Buddhists beginners mind was not something belonging solely to the beginner, but a state to be sought by all of us.
She sat back and drank some of her coffee. Her brilliant mind was working hard at this. Eventually, she said, “So this wave, which is the now, radiates from the centre – in this case the centre of the enneagram, giving us this moment in time, presumably, in which we can choose to live . . .?”
“We have no choice but to live on the wave, there is nothing else. The choice is whether we give it the attention it deserves and stop worrying about the phantom constructs of the process of thought.” It was as direct as I could make it. I could see her reeling slightly from the mental force behind it.
She was gentle in her reply, sensing that these concepts were at the heart of what she found fascinating about our whole direction of investigation. “I can see that in our circle of the enneagram the wave originates from the centre and radiates outwards . . .” She paused, then, “But how does this relate to the character types we have been discussing on the outer rim, the Nine on the perimeter of the circle?”
It was an excellent question. Now, I had to reach into the now, my wave, and see what lay there, what could be taken at its most potent and used, with gratitude, to put more light onto the subject. Suddenly, it was in front of me – a perfect analogy for Alexandra’s vast and educated mind.
“The whole of the inside of the enneagram’s circle is a sea,” I said, leaning forward. “Around the outside are nine islands. Parts of this sea are calm and parts of it – the outer regions – are stormy. Life sweeps us from the centre, on our own wave, to the extremities; and the journey makes us fearful and changes us.”
She sipped her coffee, draining the cup, then smiled at me in a very beautiful way. “Full fathom five my father lies . . .” She winked, enjoying the allusion to The Tempest.
She had found the trail which had been in my mind seconds ago. “Perfect!” I beamed back at her. So, now, shipwrecked on a foreign island you meet–?”
She was close to giggling, again, with the excitement of real discovery. “Ummm . . . a wise old man named Prospero, his daughter, Miranda, and a beast of a man called Calaban.”
She was great. The barrister’s mind had retrieved the context, swiftly – doing what minds do best. I added more encouragement, “This is not specific to the enneagram, of course, but here you have a set of human characters which represent what we might call the ‘levels’ or centres of our lives: Prospero, the wise but impotent old man, who we could rightly say might represent the intellect; Miranda, his daughter who could be both heart and soul; and finally Calaban, the very potent but unregenerate ‘savage’ who is the very essence of instinct, appetite and human energy!”
“But these are not the ‘types’ we drew around the enneagram’s circle?” she asked, certain of her ground.
“No,” I responded, nodding my approval. “These are what we might call the vertical elements of each; the Nine are something entirely different – and each of them has the three levels, or centres in which their humanity – in all its vulnerability – is focussed.”
“A whole cast of players . . . ” she said, softly, speaking to the inner stage she had just discovered.
“Yes . . . and all unique to the wave that washed us ashore, that continues to wash us ashore, to the land of exile of our outer facing lives!”
She stood up. I looked at my watch and reached to get my raincoat – it was raining hard outside; not unusual for a Monday in May.
“No! Stay!” Her hand came down softly on my shoulder. “I need another coffee. You need to stay here and tell me more,” she grinned. “In return for yours . . .”
“But your train?” I laughed at her departing back.
“To hell with the train!” she laughed, her heeled feet dancing across the cafe’s wooden floor as she made her way to the counter.
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Nine Deadly Sins with Coffee is usually published on Thursdays.
All images and text ©International copyright, The Silent Eye School of Consciousness, 2015.
Contact details and an outline description of the Silent Eye School are on the other pages of this blog and via the website at www.thesilenteye.co.uk
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Between the heartbeats
(c)copyright words and image Stephen Tanham 2015
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Eye to Sky
From daffodil which fades and bends
Through old stone walls and moss
Between the furrowed opened soil
And green restored from months of loss
Till sky pulls eye to distant peak
Where arc of fading snow
Bisects on high the world of eye
from world of I, below.
©Copyright Steve Tanham, 2015
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The space between us had changed.
I smiled as I sat down next to the tall latté waiting for me in the coffee shop opposite the roaring spring sea which was doing its best to reclaim the old seaside town.
“You knew, didn’t you?” Alexandra asked, in a question that wasn’t. “Knew that the sun in the one-tree would change things?”
“I did,” I replied, “But it was a hope rather than a certainty. Such things are always at the mercy of the moment.”
She thought about that carefully. “Mercy of the moment – I like that . . . ” She sipped a little of her own coffee before continuing. I held back so as not to disrupt the gentle flow of her thoughts and feelings.
“The moment is important in the enneagram, isn`t it?”
“In the style of enneagram we use, it`s probably the most important thing” I replied, softly, putting as much flow into my voice as I could.
I watched her face: the barrister within her was fighting that quiet flowing moment, wanting to cut it apart, to dissect its intellectual content, not, simply, to leave it whole and approach it the way I wanted her to do. I watched as the struggle progressed and then smiled, inwardly but sadly, as the legal mind won.
“We,” she said, looking me in the eye with a hawk-like stare. “You said ‘we'”
She didn`t notice my slight sigh – I, too, would have to go with the new flow. “Yes, I did.”
“This is a group thing?”
“Groups generate their own power in addition to the companionship they provide. Learning in a group can be very empowering. “And no,” I added.
“No?”
“No, I don’t want you to join a group . . .”
“Why not!?” she blurted out, unable to contain the reaction I knew would result.
To hide my urge to chuckle at the smug response I was about to give – which did not reflect my real desire, but suited the moment, I drank a lot of my own coffee, which, mercifully, had cooled enough to allow it. I hadn’t chosen this route of discussion, but Alexandra always rises to a challenge, and the opportunity was too good to miss.
“Because you’re not ready yet . . .”
There was no scream; and yet, if you knew her well, there was. A long subvocal moan with the power to shock most of the people around us. What came out was a whimper.
“Not ready . . . ” She managed to keep the tone flat.
“That’s right,” I said calmly, pretending not to be rocking inside. “Despite the heroic efforts you have made . . .”
The inner lawyer gained control, again, and decided there was nothing to gain down this cul-de-sac, coming at me along a different tangent. “The moment . . . tell me about the moment.”
It was time to be direct and as powerful as possible. Time was passing and she needed her seed-thought for the week. “The moment is where the real happens. It is the only place where what is real is . . .
“What is real?”
“Yes. We live in a world of imagination,” I said. “The age we live in has conditioned us to see reality as lots of different things – the past, the future; as though they were not merely thoughts and had some substance. Try it – reach out now and touch the future . . .”
I watched her right hand actually move, just slightly, as she wrestled with the idea of grasping the not-present.
“Yes, that idea of reaching out for a reality defined only in thought is common to us all – but I didn’t say reach across the table, in space, I said reach into the future, which has no reality at all . . . though it’s components may have a probability”
She was silent; her thought machine fascinated by what would, ultimately, undo it.
“Because it’s a truth machine, the enneagram is centred in what is real; and the only thing that is real is now, the moment.”
“And where is that on the enneagram?” she asked, returning to the flow.
“Why, in the centre, and radiating the wave, I replied, leaning across the small table and tapping her watch.”
As I dropped her off at the station, I could see her lips forming the word ‘wave’ silently, as the legal mind in the background got out its scalpels and queued up to dissect it.
Her week would be an interesting one . . .
All images and text ©International copyright, The Silent Eye School of Consciousness, 2015.
Contact details and an outline description of the Silent Eye School are on the other pages of this blog and via the website at www.thesilenteye.co.uk
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`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
She gyred and gimbled down the steep slope of the hillside; full of music, laughter and the generally infectious good will that is the core of Ali – she of the golden heart, and one of the heroines of the River of the Sun, the Silent Eye’s 2015 main workshop in the lovely hills of Derbyshire.
Quite why Ali picked this poem (Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll) I’ll never know, but, as she bounced, singing playfully, down the steep, green meadow and back towards the Nightingale Centre, it became one of those iconic and wonderful moments, when any trace of pomposity would meet a ruthless evisceration from the moment, from the ‘now’ . . .
Her utterly human humour was a wonderful contrast to the fifteen minutes of chanting a greeting to the dawn that we had just carried out in the fine early morning that ushered in the Saturday of the weekend event. The chant, a pseudo-Egyptian creation that we had crafted and layered over a dimly remembered melody from a French folk song about the ancient cathedrals of ancient Paris, had rung out over the hillside towards a dawn that stubbornly moved itself along the line of its expected appearance and appeared only during our descent – no doubt summoned by Ali’s Jabberwocky and not our Egyptian chant with accompanying text from the Hymn of Akhenaten.
And that is the most perfect cameo I can think of to express the success of the Silent Eye’s third such workshop and our second birthday – duly celebrated at the end of the weekend with a gorgeous cake baked by one of my fellow Directors of the School, Sue Vincent.
The contrast between planned ‘perfection’ and the reality of mischievous manifestation was at the heart of what rescued the River of the Sun from the annals of what would have been groaning oblivion, as those present hurried to bury the memories in gestures of goodwill and personal reassurances.
The River of the Sun took a year to conceive and three months of solid writing to bring to readiness; but then disaster struck in the last week, with four people having to drop out with health-related issues. Even two of those present turned up full of the horrible flu bug that seems intent on incapacitating much of Britain. One of them, David, was new to the whole thing, and had heroically accepted the central role of Rameses the Great for which he had done months of preparation.
The surviving cast, of what should have been twenty-two members, were to fill the roles of either the ‘royal family’ – Rameses II, his senior military command, Obion, and a mysterious and elderly Mage named Menascare; the Temple Vessels of the Gods: Sekhmet, Hathor, Khonsu, Tefnut, Ptah, Thoth and Ma’at; or the fearsome Talatat, the military elite guard of Rameses under its commander, Obion. The island temple on the Nile was led by the High Priestess of Mut and her brother the High Priest, who had recently adopted a promising young orphan, Amkhren, and his ‘bent old grandmother’ nicknamed Snefer, who was his sole surviving relative.
But seventeen people do not equate to twenty-plus parts, even when a bit of last-minute whittling of the 150 pages of script had eliminated two of the Talatat, ridding the temple of the practitioners of the dark specialisms of inquisition and vengeance, part of the enneagram’s ‘outer leaves’ of the darker side of humanity.
They must have seen the despair in my eyes as we began the workshop with apologies for the decimation of our expected acting population and our inability to carry out the five rather vivid ritual dramas that formed the backbone of the event.
Dead in the water? Not on your Nellie . . . not with the magical edge of the esoteric fraternity present. Within seconds of expressing my sadness, regret and (at Sue’s timely prompting) our condolences for those who had been struck down with the vicious bug, two experienced volunteers had stood up to offer to be heroes. One was Ali, the aforementioned singer of ‘nonsense’ verse; the other was an old friend and senior figure in another esoteric School with whom several of us had shared many years of magical past – Dean.
For the Friday evening and on through Saturday and Sunday morning, the two of them battled the logistics, angular distance and the perils of the twin Wheels of Egyptian time – eternity and recurrence, as they skilfully played out multiple roles to hold together the coherence of the script.
Amkhren, now seven years older and about to be initiated into the priesthood, was duly petrified by the arrival of the river-borne war party of the young Rameses, travelling up the Nile for one last hunting mission and eager to drop in, unannounced, on the temple he suspected of harbouring one of the last pockets of support for the religion of now-erased Akhenaten, the self-styled Son of the Sun.
The scene was set for a confrontation of unequal forces as the gentle Temple Vessels battled with the cruel onslaught of the King-in-Rising and the military prowess of his elite guard – now played by a red-haired dervish (Ali) who could disappear into one of the time wheels on the perimeter of the enneagram-shaped temple only to reappear, a heartbeat later, as a different warrior with changed voice and persona at the other side of the temple . . . It should have been funny, but it wasn’t – it was brilliant! In like fashion, Dean, brandishing what must have been the heaviest replica sword we have ever sourced, darted and dashed through the internals of the enneagram of humanity and rounded up the missing and the fallen, re-animating them with spirit and vigour.
With considerable emotion, Amkhren repaid his mentors by charming and impressing the young Rameses; so much so that the King-in-Rising’s final act was to steal him to be be a royal priest in the family palace. The devious Menascare, the mage who turned out to be more sympathetic to the recent past than his new ruler liked, was led away to his death by the triumphant Obion, again with sword and, by now, well exercised arm muscles . . . The temple was not only spared, but given new royal patronage, and Rameses (brilliantly played by David, Sheila’s son) declared himself happy with the unconventional worship of the Divine Feminine.
During the third of the three ‘theory talks’ which always accompany the ritual dramas, I thanked those present for rescuing our workshop. The success had come, not from the play, but from the magnificent souls who had animated it. We were talking at the time about the Silent Eye’s use of the Djed Pillar and the Scarab. Ali’s character – the bent Snefer, was in the process of being elevated, with royal approval, to the Lady Scarab, in a twist of events, which were, in many ways, the reverse of those events which had brought us to the edge of disaster.
I was told later that, at that moment, the ‘presence’ in the room changed and I went off-script for a period of about ten minutes to talk about our approach to Being in a quite different way than before. I cannot remember all of it – I was truly ‘streaming’ something from another place; but I came back to normal consciousness and realised what had happened. There was no loss of continuity, but the content had gone into a gentle overdrive . . . truly a magical moment, made possible by the goodwill of all those present and my dawning realisation that the intellectually dominated approach to taking all the risks out of an endeavour like this is entirely secondary to the Spirit’s ability to mould and fashion the moment for its purposes.
We had people present who were new to us and also the return of many old friends. The Sunday morning saw the emotional content peak with Sue and Stuart’s Rite of the Seers, during which we were all led off, in threes, by the Vessel of Sekhmet, to come face to face with a living Ankh, marked out in another room in lights on the floor, with a projected picture of the Cosmos on the wall beyond. We returned with scrolls of Egyptian wisdom upon which to meditate in the main temple.
But my moment of the weekend remains that of watching Ali-Snefer-the Lady Scarab, lovely Slithy Tove that she is, bouncing down her green hillside, in the full power of her glorious and heart-warming humanity. The Nightingale Centre nestles at the foot of a Derbyshire edge that hosts a gliding and paraponting school. As Sunday’s glorious sun warmed the day, the air was full of people with wings or para-wings riding down and up on their thermal gradients above us. It struck me that we might need a new word for the way Ali could descend the green slopes below, chanting her ‘nonsense’ poem. I propose Jabberwalking . . . any offers?
Thank you to all. I believe you enjoyed our annual rite of the spring. We wish those stricken with the ‘flu a speedy recovery. Our target for next year is thirty to thirty-five people, so, if you’re interested in the 2016 event, the Foliate Man, which will cast the Arthurian legend of the Green Man and Gawain in the language of the magical enneagram, please contact us by email at rivingtide@gmail.com or via the website below.
All images and text ©International copyright, The Silent Eye School of Consciousness, 2015.
Contact details and an outline description of the Silent Eye School are on the other pages of this blog and via the website at www.thesilenteye.co.uk
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She leaned forward, and at the same time, took a large swig of her coffee. I had seen her do it many times; it signalled that she was about to launch her enquiry.
“Home” I said, softly, completely ruining her build-up.
“How did you–?” she laughed, there was little sign of the irritation that would have accompanied my impolite gesture back when we first started our discussions about the enneagram.
“It’s what I would have asked first, given where we got to last time.”
“Uncanny!” she said, sitting back and enjoying the coffee, now that she didn’t have to lead with the right question. It was hard being a barrister, her furrowed brows explained; but her smile said something different . . .
“Okay then,” she added, reasonably. “Home . . .”
I drank some of my own coffee. My reply had to be perfect – not in a general sense, but in the context of our meeting. I had something unusual planned, but it required careful staging – and her full cooperation.
“The enneagram is only a symbol,” I said, softly. “But it’s a very beautiful expression of some wonderful truths; and their relationship.”
I let that sink in, drinking some more coffee before continuing. She waited and considered what I had said.
“So home is where everything begins?”
“Yes,” I responded carefully, drawing out the word.
“But?” she had picked up on the hesitation.
“But, it’s not like regressing, going back in our lives. It’s really about taking the good stuff with us?”
“The good stuff?” Now she was looking mischievous. I could see she was enjoying this.
“There’s a difference between something like skills, and other, more negative things we may have learned from life.”
“Like fear?” She was being really quick, today. I had to keep her headed where we needed to be.
“Like fear, yes – but we’re all afraid . . .” It was a dead-end. I knew it would leave her little to grasp at, forcing her to open it up, again. I pounced before she could.
“As different types, it’s really a question of what frightens us, not whether we’re frightened.” I watched as she worked that apart. Her slight nodding – subconscious to her – indicated that she well understood fear.
“But fear is not primary?” she asked. “It’s not that we’re born with fear!”
I was there. “No,” I added, speaking so low it was practically a whisper. “Fear happens when we leave home.”
It took me a further ten minutes to persuade her to let me drive her to a different station. I knew that the faster London trains stopped at Oxehholme and that she would be at her destination no later than a half hour behind her usual schedule. I was banking on the fact that she would be well prepared, and have enough slack in her Monday to allow this to work. After the first few minutes she let me win, but gradually.
In the car she was relaxed. Her black bags were stowed in the ample boot and she was enjoying being ‘kidnapped’. When we got to the valley she was surprised when I passed her a pair of walking boots.
“Ten minutes, I promise.” I said. We began walking. As we approached the strange hilltop where I had often stood at this time of year, I diverted her attention, making her look back down the valley as we walked the final few steps to line us up with the sun, still rising over the far side of the steep hill. And then, I put my hands gently over her eyes, and turned her around to see what I had come to know as the One Tree.
There was nothing particularly special about it. It was just a tree set in an extraordinary spot. I realised I had been quite tense about the timing, but one look eastwards showed me that I need not have worried. We were right on time – we and the sun. I took my hands away and watched her focus in wonder at the tree, and then the sun behind it.
“Home,” I said. Smiling at the gentle conspiracy of sun and human intent. “Sometimes there are no words for what we are trying to say”. Her breathing deepened as she took in the idea behind the visual, but, magnificently, she managed to say absolutely nothing . . .
She was still holding her silence when I pecked her on the cheek and handed over the last of her bags as she got on the express from Glasgow to London.
———————————
Nine Deadly Sins with Coffee is usually published on Thursdays.
All images and text ©International copyright, The Silent Eye School of Consciousness, 2015.
Contact details and an outline description are on the other pages of this blog and via the website at www.thesilenteye.co.uk
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A free place at our forthcoming workshop this weekend. Donated by a Companion who has paid for his place but is unable to attend due to ill-health.
STOP PRESS
One Free place available
Would YOU like to join us for the Silent Eye Workshop in Derbyshire this weekend?
One of our Companions is too ill to attend and has generously donated his place to anyone who would like to attend in his stead but cannot afford to do so.
At such short notice and with our Companion’s blessing, we decided to throw this to the winds and see if anyone would like to attend. The free place includes the weekend workshop, room and all meals throughout the weekend.
Interested?
You can read more about this magical workshop by clicking the link here.
River of the Sun Derbyshire, 24-26 April, 2015.
Full brochure, prices and booking form can be downloaded here. Remember, we have one free place available:
If you would like to be a part of the workshop and spend…
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On Golden Wave
On golden wave our life is passed
In joy or sorrow’s dance
As solar heartbeat pulses through
And upward lifts our glance
—
We choose the crest or anguished trough
In looking with fixed eye
We play the chosen role that looks
For gaolers in the sky
—
But he is neither high nor low
Who judges our intent
And in the vaults of our own life
Lie roots of innocence
—
As old as time that gave us birth
In her warm sanctuary
As old as seeing who I am
and who this world might be
—
So lovingly the green-framed eyes
Look on our trials and pain
Green scales in watery deep pronounce
Our heart is born again
—
Now risen high in that clear sky
Which never saw us leave
And cresting joy with wings of spray
It teaches us, once more, to breathe
—
©Steve Tanham, 2015
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“So the circle of stations on top of your cheesy cylinder are the outermost layer of something?”
Alexandra was in fine form. Outside the coffee shop, the first real day of spring-like weather was in full flow, despite the early hour. We had decided to celebrate this visible end of winter by sitting outside.
I had bought the coffee. Alexandra had brought us a single daffodil around which I had unceremoniously wrapped my watch. She had stared at the gesture but said nothing. The mixture of technology and nature had her bemused.
“They are, indeed, the outer layer of something,” I replied, stroking my finger over the delicate edge of the daffodil’s petals and marvelling at the power of the wave to put into our hands exactly what we need for that point in time.
“A bit like a flower?”
She had caught the inference. “Yes,” I replied. “Just like a flower”
“And we are the flower, with all our petals being the numbers around the enneagram . . ?”
I said nothing, just nodded into her excited eyes. She had always loved the intellectual chase of such things. Becoming a barrister had simply cemented what she had always been good at.
“So the outer – upper – layer of your cheesy cylinder-enneagram is the layer of outer petals of our own flower?”
“Our own unique flower – and sometimes these flowers aren’t so pretty . . .” I let that one hang, watching her digest its implications. “In fact,” I added. “The enneagram is really a flower in reverse, with the most beautiful bits hidden, but otherwise sharing the same principles – the same soil, we might say!”
“Hidden?” She mused on that and sat back, sipping her coffee.
“Hidden in the way that, say, a root is . . .”
I unfolded the computer drawing I had done for her. For the first time, it had a complete list of the ‘sins’ in the penultimate layer of the circle. Each of what I had called the ‘stations’ had been filled in. Before her hungry eyes, there was now a perfect circle of information; and a set of frustratingly empty ‘petals’ to the outside of them.
“But the sins aren’t at the edge!”
“Quite right . . . that’s because modern esoteric psychology has come up with an extension to the sins which gives us a great insight into how each type of person looks at the world – their own world.”
She considered each of my words carefully. There were several new ideas in there, and I watched her tease apart the ends of the threads.
“Each type of person?”
“Yes, although the flowers that we are – cheesy or not – are unique, we all fall into certain types; and these particularly affect the overall way we look at the world.”
“And there are nine types, I assume?”
“Exactly so, each made up of a set of reactions to our infant life.”
“Infant life? So this is all about childhood?” She was leaning forward to be closer to me. The coffee was forgotten.
“Well, yes and no.” I sat back and, infuriatingly, sipped some of my own coffee, before continuing, “Where this type – the outer petals of our flowers – came from is most certainly our infancy. But how we use them to get back is very much about adulthood.”
She was looking at the time. There were only minutes left, and she had about a hundred questions. I could see her breathing had quickened, as she sifted what she wanted – needed – to know before she got onto that weekly train to London.
“Get back; you said get back . . .”
I nodded. She had picked on the very sentiment I had hoped she would. “Yes, get back . . .”
“To where?” She was putting her things back into her black leather handbag; watching the time in an agony of too little information.
“Where do the best signposts take any of us?” I asked, playing the most powerful card I would ever have with this lovely lady.
“Tell me . . . please?”
“Home,” I said softly, looking into her hazel eyes. “Home.”
She was long gone when the waitress brought me the bottle of mineral water and the small, turned wooden vase. I had spotted it, earlier, in the glass case at the back of the cafe. The owners ran a display of work for sale by local artisan painters and craftsmen; and the little vase had exactly met my immediate need.
Life was important – in all its forms, and it’s always been my belief that those with intelligence have a duty to protect and nurture it.
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Nine Deadly Sins with Coffee is usually published on Thursdays.
All images and text ©International copyright, The Silent Eye School of Consciousness, 2015.
Contact details and an outline description are on the other pages of this blog and via the website at www.thesilenteye.co.uk
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“You’re not going to eat that, are you?”
I watched the tableau unfold. The rolled slice of Dutch cheese was just an inch from my mouth when she stopped me. I was grateful she had, because, in my half hour of cheesy construction, the previous evening, I had mauled it somewhat, with my fingers and my wife’s borrowed cake cutters, and didn’t really relish the prospect of eating my explanatory creation.
“Why not?” I exclaimed, pretending to look hurt, and letting the cheese slice unroll onto my carefully prepared napkin.
“You’re not allowed to eat food not bought on the premises, dummy!”
And then she saw the unravelled slice and giggled. I love it when Alexandra giggles – she lights up a room and the relaxed behaviour is in such contrast to her normal legal manner.
“What’s that?” she asked, through bouts of laughter, now so loud they were making everyone else in the coffee bar look up from their drinks.
“It’s a piece of cheese full of holes,” I explained innocently.
Her laughter hadn’t stopped. “I can see that, but you’re never that simple . . .” She sucked in some much needed air and stopped the cackling, hissing at me, “What is it, really?” There were tears running down her cheeks.
“Well, its a cheesy slice full of holes.” I was maintaining the innocence very well in the face of her uproarious provocation.
“I can see that . . .” she took some much needed coffee to calm herself. “Okay, you want me to decode it?”
“Well if you can?”
She threatened to crack up, again, so I stepped in to help. “On one level it’s a slice of cheese, which I now thankfully don’t have to eat. On another level it’s–”
“–A kind of enneagram.” Her breathing calmed, remarkably quickly, as her razor-sharp mind focussed on the object she had so recently found hilarious.
It was lovely to watch.
“Okay, Mr Cheese has brought us a circle of nine sets of holes; each hole in its set is smaller than the other, with the graduation from larger to smaller going inwards – towards the centre of the circle.”
“Its a kind of cheesy perspective.” I added, not being particularly helpful.
“Quite literally, by the 3D look of it?”
“Yes,” I said. “There is meant to be the feeling of ‘descent’ in there.”
“Descent from?”
“From where we are now.”
She sipped some more coffee. “Oh I see, so we’re at the top of a cylinder thingy, and the world . . .” She paused again. ” . . . The real world falls away beneath this upper layer, which we therefore assume has some falseness in it?”
She was stunning. “Exactly so!” I said, smiling broadly into my own coffee, so as to disguise it.
“Well let’s see . . .” She was getting her teeth into it, now. “There are nine ‘things’ and I know that there are nine ‘sins’, although you – stubbornly – haven’t mapped them all out for me yet!”
“Perhaps you haven’t deserved it yet?” I knew that level of challenge would fire her up. “Anyway, we needed the cheesy thingy to make sense of the whole.”
She sat back and looked at me, adversarially, over the rim of her cup.
“None of this is going to be easy, is it?”
“You don’t like easy – you don’t respect easy!” I said, with complete honesty.
Her face lit up. “It’s full of holes–” She finished her coffee with a giant swig. “You never waste things, so something else is full of holes–” She drank from an empty coffee mug. “–my knowledge?”
“Yes,” I said. It was time to be helpful in a more obvious way. “We’ve darted around the enneagram on bits of paper and I’ve done that to let you to find our own way into it. But now we need to be a bit more structured about this truth machine.”
“And now, you’ll tell me what the Nine is?”
“I’m sure you’ve already looked it up.” I said. “In fact, I’m sure your office has several books on the enneagram scattered across its leather chairs.”
“But?” she asked, now taking on as much false innocence as I had ever mustered in her presence.
“But that’s not the same as insight, is it?”
“No, dammit, and you know that!”
“So, when you come back to me with a real insight into what the Nine is, I’ll confirm it . . .”
“And until then?”
“Until then, you’re having the time of your life figuring it out!”
She was already standing, looking at her watch.
“Can we fill in the cheesy holes next week?”
“Some of them – here, you can make your own cheesy thingy!” I passed her the piece of paper I had been keeping on my knee. “It often helps to draw it; I think we can graduate from napkins, now.”
With a flash of a smile, she was gone; looking as happy as I’ve ever seen her . . . ”
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Nine Deadly Sins with Coffee is usually published on Thursdays.
All images and text ©International copyright, The Silent Eye School of Consciousness, 2015.
Contact details and an outline description are on the other pages of this blog and via the website at www.thesilenteye.co.uk
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The rain lashed at the seafront cafe’s windows. Would this horrible wet weather never end? I wondered, as I hurried, slightly late because of the heavy and slow traffic, into the warm interior.
Alexandra had not wasted the extra time. Before her, on our table, lay a newly-drawn enneagram on a fresh serviette. I took off my raincoat, sodden despite the brief walk, and tried not to drip on her carefully prepared diagram.
“Coffee,” she said, pointing at my cup but not looking up at my face.
“Thank you.” I sat down, smiling at her relish at having the upper hand. I watched her draw in dotted lines connecting the numbers ‘2’ and ‘4’; ‘5’ and ‘7’; and finally, ‘8’ and ‘1’.
“Shoulders . . . ” I said softly into the silence of her concentration.
“Shoulders?” she asked, still looking down at the point of her pen, eager not to smudge the napkin too much.
“The lines you have just drawn – they are generally called ‘shoulders’.”
“Aha . . .” She looked up, finally, and put the top back on the pen. “Shoulders, then.”
“So, we have nine points, which originate from three?” I asked, innocently.
“Yes,” she replied, taking the bait.
I continued, “And the three – vanity, fear and something as yet unnamed, are the anchor points of the whole thing, and have other points between them, which are secondary.”
We both sipped our coffees. She was looking at me in a predatory way. She’d been doing her homework, I could tell. She wanted to show it off . . .
“I’m beginning to get the big picture.” she smiled. “The Nine are really only three ‘sins’, and these are indicative of something that we all share in our makeup?”
“I like indicative,” I said, nodding and attempting to look mysterious.
“So the ‘sins’ are something deeper – something that has been discovered to be part of human nature, possibly all human nature?” She fixed me with a wicked smile, and continued with, “Let me guess – psychology?” You would never have guessed she hadn’t just thought of it – well not unless you had known her for the past twenty years . . .
I sipped my coffee, enjoying the hunt and saying nothing.
She had never been good at waiting and filled the silence with, “And somehow these findings map on to the enneagram, which was not originally designed to show such relationships?”
“I didn’t tell you that.” I replied in a soft tone. “You’ve been reading!”
“As a good barrister should!” she parried, becoming very cat-like. But then her brows furrowed and she added, “But I can’t find any link between the original work and this ‘sins’ stuff.”
“Between Gurdjieff’s original use of the enneagram and those who developed it in a different but complementary direction?” I asked, delighted with her growing knowledge; though that would now make it harder to keep her on track.
“Precisely!” she said, looking triumphant.
I spoke over the coffee cup’s rim, “Connections – there isn’t one, unless you count people and their individual experiences.”
“People?”
“People with broad shoulders,” I said, noting the time and knowing she’d be furious that I was bringing our Monday morning to a close.
She looked down at her drawing of what I had called the shoulders flanking the main three points, puzzled.
“Vanity and fear mix, or, put another way, what is beneath them both varies its proportions. When you move from vanity towards fear you get envy at ‘4’ and then avarice at ‘5’, which we’ve already talked about.” I could see her razor mind filing this away for the train journey to London. “And between the unnamed top of the clock and vanity we have Anger at ‘1’ and Pride at ‘2’. We can talk more about this next time . . .”
“And the enneagram doesn’t resolve to three,” I added as a kind of checkmate and tapping the face of my watch. “It resolves to one . . .”
“You–” she squeezed out the words through thin lips.
“–taxi driver, as it happens . . .”
“Taxi driver?”
“Yes, the car is outside. I didn’t want you to have to walk with your heavy bags in this rain, so I stuck it outside”
“On the yellow line?”
“Broad shoulders . . .” I said, picking up two of her black bags and heading for the exit.
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Nine Deadly Sins with Coffee is usually published on Thursdays.
All images and text ©International copyright, The Silent Eye School of Consciousness, 2015.
Contact details and an outline description are on the other pages of this blog and via the website at www.thesilenteye.co.uk
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“It’s the fear thing, isn’t it?” Alexandra had me pinned into the corner of the coffee shop as though she was about to administer the final legal blow in a key case. I was even worried that my glass of water, bought to wash down the final sip of coffee, Italian style, would get spilled.
“Whenever you really think about fear, you realise that it’s at the heart of so many things that people–that I–do!” She continued. I watched her become conscious, not just of what she was saying, but of how defensively she was saying it.
Seeing this happen to her, sharing the act of deeper consciousness, was a catalyst. It always was with people taking this path for the first time. Still saying nothing, I looked on, a passive and friendly observer, letting her have the space to come to terms with how central ‘fear’ was to her life; and to everyone else’s.
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