We all have moments when we experience that inner sense of ‘glow and wellbeing’ – often quite unexpectedly…
This usually happens when we are carrying out a task or thinking out a situation and become absorbed to a depth that assists us to resolve something complex. That eventual sense of a breakthrough is indicative! As is the deep breath that usually accompanies the triumph…
We seldom stop to examine the parts – the mental and emotional components of what has come to our aid. The feeling of ‘calmer waters’ is often present; and that carries us along as a good canoe would after shooting a set of rapids – which isn’t a bad analogy to some of the problems we face in ‘modern life’.
In truth, life – taken as a whole – has probably always been much the same. There are just different ‘theatre stages’ on which we play out the same human interactions – like Greek plays – giving us slightly more to worry about in the techno-age, but faster methods of writing it down and sharing it… often part of the problem, itself.
In those glowing moments our sense of self is enhanced. We’ve never been taught to notice it, so we don’t look for anything unusual at that level – even in the calm euphoria of the self-moment. But it’s a core element of what we are.
It’s not an egoic feeling – we don’t feel blown up with pride or a sense of ‘showed you!’. There is a quiet flow that is more like a higher mental and emotional ‘current of doing’. Problems just drop away, swept aside by a quiet mind that has far more capability and an expectation of carrying out the task, once our egoic self gets out of the way.
That flow is powerful, and belongs to a deeper level of our selves. The flow is how the deeper Self does things… only we interfere with it, all the time. The flow is how our lives would be if we didn’t…react.
Reacting is part of our inherited response system. Reacting is a big part of what the brain and nervous system does. It’s there to protect us; a vital part of the survival mechanisms that looks after us so well.
The problem is the reactions we commonly experience – particularly those that take a lot of our energy, like worry and fear, are those belonging to the ‘fight or flight’ level of our brain. We’re not familiar with the art and science of governing the reaction. We are familiar with its use in other things, though – like driving a car.
We’re not familiar with the art and science of governing the reaction. We are familiar with its use in other things, though – like driving a car.
When we learn to drive, we have to go through a similar ‘mental engineering’ process to intelligently suppress some of the survival instincts. Imagine being the first person ever to drive! What is now a natural part of growing up, at least in the developed West, would have felt very experimental and uncertain.
So it is when we begin to engineer our reactions. As humans we are designed to be a vast ‘system’ of response to the universe – a universe that is all around us and within us. There is no real separation, save that which we decide is ‘us’, and that which is not.
Our five senses provide a harmonic spectrum of what the universe is. We may think that our real appreciation is only close-range – the world immediately around us. But what would be the point of us being aware of galaxies distant in time and space, and spread to infinity in the night sky, if we couldn’t participate in their lives, too?
Our bodies are fashioned from what we ingest of the planet. Our minds are a response to what we experience though the senses. Both of these are in the world of opposites: light and dark, hot and cold, for example. But what lies beyond them is not polarised in this way.
What lies beyond the body and the mind is the truth about us: our inner Self, which exists at the heart of what we are. It is our real existence and its actions are those that flow from the glow.
Under the guidance of that inner Self, we learn to respond much more proactively to the Universe and enter a relationship with it that ends our sense of separation.
©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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The massive Skiddaw
by Steve Tanham
The massive presence of the mountain called Skiddaw towers over the Lakeland town of Keswick. The entire north-eastern horizon is dominated by its sheer size.
I was intending to simply post the photo above, but the dramatic image invites a bit more background information for anyone who is not familiar with the northern part of the Lake District National Park.
The opening shot was taken from the edge of Keswick, adjacent to the local football club’s car park. In the map image the location is next to the letter ‘K’ in Keswick. From this you can see how steeply the mountain rises from the edge of the conurbation.
The nearest part of the town is Fitz Park, bordered by the River Greta and providing a ‘green edge’ between the town and the mountains. The photos were taken from various locations in Fitz Park.
Keswick is a half-hour drive away from the M6. Take the Penrith turn-off and follow the A66 towards Keswick and Cockermouth. If you’re travelling to Scotland, its well worth the small detour.
©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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And Cherries on Sunday
by Steve Tanham
©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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Barriers to Love
by Steve Tanham
Eight hundred years is a long way to look back and extract meaningful guidance about ‘today’s world’, and yet I can say with honesty that the historical figure whose wisdom made one of the most important differences to my spiritual life lived in the 13th century…
Generally known by the short-form of his last name: Rumi, the Sufi mystic and poet Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi can be said to have done more than any other contemporary to bring to us the essence and vision of the mystical tradition of the Sufi schools. It needs to be remembered that the Sufi tradition operates within Islam; the latter forming a basis for society, behaviour and everyday worship.
Sufism provides the living and experiential heart of the mystical tradition – the realisation of the ‘divine’.
As with Gnostic Christianity within its parent, the two are not easy bedfellows – and yet the strength of a culture that has both behavioural and visionary layers to its learning has been lauded over the centuries.
Sufism – a school of the soul – lived under constant threat from narrow dogma and authoritarianism. The ideas of Gnostic Christianity are embedded in many mystical schools, today.
Rumi, (1207-1273) also known as Mevlana (‘master’), was a Persian scholar and Sufi mystic. His influence, even today, transcends national borders, and – more importantly – ethnic divisions.
Rumi’s teachings – often expressed as poetry or simple sayings, continue to be central to spiritual thought in Iran, Tajikistan, Turkey, Greece and within the Indian subcontinent. He has even been described as the ‘best-selling poet’ in America; which perhaps demonstrates the continued hunger for his style of clear and intelligently mischievous writing.
Rumi takes us on a journey – it’s a story; the best way to learn anything is to immerse yourself in its story…
Below is the Rumi aphorism that made such a difference to my own mystical journey.
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers you have built against it…
The Sufi tradition is one of poetry and concealment ‘in plain sight’. Its goal is to unite the ‘seeker’ with an inner presence known as ‘The Beloved’. We all have a inner Beloved, just as we have a personal inner journey awaiting us when we are ready to take it.
The Sufi and Gnostic Christian journey is one of inner unity with a part of us that is more real than we can comprehend – until we get there. This strange-sounding dilemma is due to the properties of the mind.
Mind is the organ of experience, both inner and outer. It has vast power over our intellectual and physical vehicles, even allowing us to take an action that will end our organic lives.
But mind is object based… By this I mean it views itself as separate from what ‘its’ senses tell it is happening in the world of its things – objects. It creates an ‘in-here’ and an ‘out-there’, and the result of that is the secondary creation of a ‘me’.
Eventually, the ‘me’ – a separate entity in this colourful world – decides it is interested in ‘heaven’ – a super-state. It wants to aspire to this state, as this might assuage the deep hunger it feels for meaning. The mind, outward-facing since childhood, senses that its world of objects is limiting. The initially bright and wonderful world it had in childhood – when all the objects were new – has faded…
When the mind sets off to build this picture of heaven, it does so in the way it does everything else – by doing, and by adding more.
And this is where Rumi’s wisdom comes in…
The trouble with creating a picture of heaven to be your destination is that it is formed in the outward-facing mind and is therefore made up of separate objects – things, just better things.
Rumi’s words remind us that we are the ones who have separated ourselves from the goal, which is Love – the Beloved. What we need to remove is the inner separation, not build a new bridge to an unseen, unfelt place.
To get to that ‘heaven’ – the superstate of consciousness which is real and pre-existing in our lives, we need to dismantle the barriers – the negative objects related to our concept of self – and then feel the fresh breeze of the real Self – the Beloved – coming to transform our lives’
This task is the objective of the ‘mystery schools’. In various forms, these have existed for centuries – even millennia. Mystery Schools use different methods to light the path and enable the traveller, depending on where the School arose and what the background was of their founders.
But they all share the same goal…
The Silent Eye is a modern mystery school whose teachings include wisdom derived from the Sufis; though we are not associated with Islam in any way.
The ‘barriers to love’ are the negative states we have built in our personalities. They have no lasting reality and no real power beyond their bluff and bluster. With care and gentle supervision, they can be systematically identified and ‘turned’ to face our personal source of life and love…at which point they become their opposites!
This process unveils an ever-brightening path upon which the personal Beloved reveals itself and takes an active and unmistakable role in our advancement.
There is no reason why such arcane wisdom need be complex. The right understanding propels everything…
©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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Stories of Winter Fire
by Steve Tanham
Here in the Lake District, colour can be hard to find in the Jan-March depths of winter. So I thought it might be fun to explore the replacement of faded colours – like those found in last year’s grasses and ferns – with a colour treatment that was blatantly artificial, yet suggested hidden fire and life…
The grasses above are a good example of something that retains last year’s summer shapes, but whose shapes remain, leaving us with a form that defies the winter’s ravages, yet is pale.
The iPhone’s toolset, including the downloaded Google Snapseed App, is good at taking such a pale form and bestowing a richness that would have been hard to achieve using just the raw set of ‘sliders’ that come with the native tools to brighten, darken or increase contrast, for example.
Equipped with a test result, above, I set out to find other sympathetic subjects – all this while being dragged around by a decidedly unsympathetic collie…
An old overhanging oak, near the end of the lake at Newby Bridge, looked promising. I explored different captures and settled on the above framing, then used examples of the same settings – varied in two stages- in Snapseed as the previous ‘winter fire’ shot.
The final result, below, included a little ‘smoothing’, and had much more atmosphere than the raw shot. Armed with two successes, I went hunting…
I was looking for an artistic rather than a purist approach, and quite happy to entertain a high degree of distortion. The shot below had only one strip of old vegetation to be ‘lifted’ by the filtering. The contrast between this and the dark background still made it an effective photo.
The result is nowhere near photo-realistic, yet gives life to the ‘fire in winter’ idea.
And what follows are the best of the rest…
It’s a technique I enjoyed exploring. I will use it with other settings on future projects.
©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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It’s called ‘The Lots’. It’s a heavily protected stretch of undulating land behind the rocky headland of Silverdale’s rugged coastline.
Silverdale is one of the most northerly places on the Lancashire coast. Before the boundary changes that created Cumbria (soon to be sliced into a new set of nonsensical pieces) Lancashire extended all the way around Morecambe Bay to Barrow-in-Furness.
The peninsula on which Silverdale sits is shared with Arnside and Milnthorpe, both of them local gems and well worth visiting. I’ve written about Arnside in previous posts.
The path across The Lots connects the prosperous village of Silverdale – the former home of Victoria Wood – with a beautiful cove about a half mile away. You can reach the cove by road but where’s the fun in that?
The walk across The Lots, even with the zig-zags needed to throw the ball for the collie, is less than twenty minutes.
Its a cold place in February… but the clear air is ideal for photographs that capture the harsh essence of the place.
The muddy path narrows to a walled gate before descending towards the sea again.
The Cove. In February, you may well need a thick, waterproof coat.
©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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Age and the Inner Life
by Steve Tanham
How old are we?
It’s often a cruel question and we wrestle with the answer, knowing full well how many years downstream we are … but feeling, not too deep inside, that our inner state bears no relation to that set of two digits…
Traditionally, this has been dismissed as just part of our psychology. We don’t want to feel old, so we learn to feel young inside. Personally, I find this a thin explanation, and one that does not fit the facts.
Much of this is related to health. If we are fortunate to be well – regardless of our age – then we naturally feel young. That ‘youthfulness’ is actually part of being well, not of the numerals attached to us by officialdom.
Having spent most of my life in the mystical tradition, this mismatch between age and ‘felt age’ intrigued me, and I began to look at fitting it into a broader and much kinder explanation.
Our bodies gradually wear out. Genetically we are programmed to have a finite life. I read that, from the age of about thirty, we are getting old, rather than older. The decline takes a long time, and allows us to mature, become parents and even active grandparents.
We are not helpless in the face of this. We can take responsibility for our own health – in particular, for the state of the primary systems of our body. Smoking is obviously a route to a shorter life, and one in which the end may be deeply unpleasant.
Exercise is its own reward, but it takes effort to get to a mental and emotional place where we look forward to it. The quality of food we eat matters. What really makes a difference to how we live our lives is our mobility and flexibility – the elastic within our muscles and joints. The growth of Yoga and Pilates groups demonstrates the effectiveness of these ancient systems (Pilates is a modern derivative of Yoga). I can say from four years of personal experience of the latter that it has literally changed my life and that of my wife. We not only feel twenty years younger, but we have far more energy than we can remember having at say, forty.
As children, we are like rubber bands. Everything is fun and everything is bodily flexible. We exercise all the time, and our cardio systems are fully functioning. It is natural to simply feel the power of youth in our organic selves.
But these things are of the body. They are not about the invisible attributes that are so much the centre of the idea of ‘me’ – the sense of self.
The planet can be said to feed the body. We inherit from great Nature the patterns of healthy cellular life. The body, via the senses, feeds the mind: the self ‘inside’ the body, though we can’t really allocate the mind a ‘home’, just as we can’t physically point at the future, the past and the present.
Yet the present is all we have, and even in that we have what seems to be precious little. If we try to pin-point the present, it’s gone… And yet we know, somehow, that the present is at a level of ‘here and me’ occupied by no other presence in our shifting landscape of matter.
The present has an existence like nothing else… second only to the awareness that knows both the present and itself. The present is continuously passing and only our reactions try to cling to it.
That non-static awareness is our Being, whose properties are itself, and not built on or borrowed from anything that we would find familiar in the world of matter.
Put simply, the Being that we truly are – reflected in the mind and the body – has no age, and like the idea of Russian Dolls, nested one inside the other, it has always been there, prior to the mind and prior to the body.
The body will leave us at so-called death, its molecules returning to the good Earth from which it came – itself an eternal world of matter-as-energy and energy-as-matter.
The mind has spent the lifetime facing the body, but its nature is not the world that is the body’s home. At the end of the body’s life, it must ‘turn’ to see of what it is the product, and in that homecoming, it will find the answer to its final questions.
How old will it be? It will be as ageless as it was at the birth of its world.
At our transition, the mind loses its bodily senses, and turns to what was always the source of its world and even its own life. In that mystery is the answer to what does not age, and a suggestion that the golden trail to that state is what lends our personal inner it’s signature of agelessness.
©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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Kendal, midweek… the retail day was drawing to a close. A thin fog had covered the town and its surrounding hills for most of the day, and the encroaching darkness at the end of the afternoon made the gloom seem even more dense.
I have always been drawn by urban photos of streets where the lights have that ‘just turned on’ look. Collie in hand, I decided to criss-cross the town centre and look for a few examples of my own…
Kendal is full of very old alleys that connect various streets, revealing its old design in the process. Using these as shortcuts, you can plot an interesting figure of eight through the town.
As I approached the car park, two of the best shots emerged, though had I not been energised by the previous few, I might have missed them.
Neither were in locations that would have been considered attractive. The long and narrow alley to the foot of the steep Fellside district (above) would have looked dull and grey without the lights.
Setting off on the walk, I had no idea if the iPhone camera would cope – but it did. Using the edit tools over a coffee before leaving the town centre, I was able to isolate the light by making it more moody and yellow, and set it against a complementary sky by marginally upping the blue in the fog.
All of that on the iPhone… We are fortunate to live in an age where we can carry such creative potential in our pockets…
©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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One of the ‘easy wins’ in photography is to vary the shooting height of the camera by either getting higher… or, as in this case, lower.
The large-screen camera phones have made this easy to do, since once you have placed the device on or close to the ground – often thanking your last Pilates class – it’s still possible to see the shot framed in the screen.
A final trick is to tun the phone upside down, bringing the lens close to the … mud, in this case. Normally, this corrects itself when you look at the image, but if not you can easily rotate the photo using the device’s inbuilt tools.
The Stone Jetty, Morecambe, in the bitter cold of last Monday. I’ve upped the blues to emphasise this, but not by much… And good luck with the mud!
©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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There are many symmetries in life but one of the least remarked on is the complementary states of early and later life relative to where we place our attention.
When young, despite ‘trailing clouds of glory’, as Wordsworth elegantly wrote, we are completely in-volved with the physical world ‘out-there’. From the wonder and adoration of our baby state, through the realisation that we can interact with what is around us, into the fumbling competence of our teens when we sense that mastery of certain aspects of life might serve us well for what follows.
Our lives then follow a familiar pattern: the responsibility of parenthood, perhaps? Most certainly the looking after of ageing parents of our own. Perhaps we take on voluntary work of some sort, eager that our developed skills should serve some other purpose than our survival and prosperity.
These things are the beginning of the ‘invested’ foundations of old age; a time in which we need the grace of acceptance, but also the ability to discern and use the great curve of outer then inner on which our life has travelled.
Any contact with meditation in its many forms will show us the immediate value and astonishing peacefulness of time spent ‘lowering the volume’ of the world and increasing our presence in our inner world that belongs, delightfully, to us alone.
The first steps might simply be to lessen the habitual power that the ‘out-there’ world has over us. We may benefit from self-study of our reactions, in particular – coming to see how much of our behaviour is automatic and even robotic.
Mindfulness is a much-abused term, but a combination of mind-state awareness plus an identity with what slowly emerges as an ‘has always been there’ self will propel us into a profound lessening of our attachment to the things of the world.
Other things take its place: that love of, say, poetry returns. We may finally take the time to learn to draw, speak French, or join a local choir. In short, the world of things is being replaced with a world of not-things; a world where the self of habit simply crumbles beneath the warm and glowing presence of a ‘higher Self’.
This higher Self owes nothing to the routine development of personality, which is long-established, but it can change the personality to suit its more gentle and refined intent. Older people can assume a ‘wisdom of the elders’ – a state deeply valued in ages gone by, but little noted in this one, where the main focus seems to be the primacy of the 30 second piece of media fame.
When the body passes beyond fatigue and begins to fail, this new Self can look with great power back at the lifetime and know that it was strengthened by its further encounter with matter. As Professor Brian Cox (who holds no spiritual beliefs) has said:
Your very atoms were once the stuff of vastly powerful suns and they have been assembled to give awareness of time and space in an age when our technology allows us to physically see the process of the ‘birth’ of the universe. What more could you ask?”
Having grace in old age – internal Self focus- is the compensation for the far away youth where we were wholly in-volved with the world; where our bodies radiated health and we drank the stuff of life from dawn to dusk.
But this final stage of life need not be without purpose other than reflection. There is a trail of the wise to be had, one that, having cast off the attraction of materialism, wants to know where this sense of higher Self and presence radiates from. The answer will lie on the trail of what ‘awareness’ actually is, and on that journey more and more of the world will fall away… leaving more and more of the Self.. smiling.
We could say that the fascination with the ‘world’ is the sign of an earlier age that wraps us in its energy. Perhaps the development of peace, acceptance and presence is the embrace of the inner age of our lives.
©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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I was talking with a friend about life – not a generalised view of life, such as we might do in an introductory talk to mysticism, but in the sense of what life actually is…
The topic of life led us to consider health… and how we might picture health and it’s inevitable effect on the final stages of our lives.
And then I remembered a kind of moving image I had many years ago in a partial dream-state.
In this vision, life was revealed as a beautiful flowing ocean over which our ordinary waking consciousness navigated, as would the captain of a ship.
Beneath the level of the waves, the ocean depths were festooned with all forms of life, possibly representing the evolution of our bodies.
But the sea was anything but level. Far beneath the waves were giant mountains; countless in number.
The aging process was one in which the water gradually lowered its level, eventually revealing the sharp peaks beneath. The captain of the ship had to start being careful about the course – being prepared to change direction to avoid the emerging dangers.
The undersea mountains were the hazards of life – including injury and illness. When young (the full ocean) they were of no concern.
Eventually, as the water level fell further, great skill was required to navigate the vessel at all. There came a sense of inevitably that our fitness for organic life was diminishing and that we would find ourselves surrendering to the fact that our ship was no longer sufficient to continue our journey.
The undersea mountains had always been there, and always would. But the ocean lifts us above them…
Although this sounds depressing, the sense that accompanied it was not negative; rather a recognition that all life was linked and really one, but that our time as individuals in that gift of nature that is our bodies was limited: what has a beginning must have an end.
I hadn’t thought about this for many years, but our conversation brought it back, and I thought I’d share it here…
©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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Late afternoon and a final run on Heysham Beach for Tess the collie.
And then strange things began to happen in the sky. Bright sun on a collision course with a front of hailstones.
Not the place to be! So I grabbed a final shot and we ran for the car…
Only later did this joyful result reveal itself!
©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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