In an attitude that most of us would find chilling, Francis Crick, the Noble Laureate who co-discovered the structure of DNA, referred to it as ‘the astonishing hypothesis’.
He wasn’t talking about genes, but the proposal that all human feelings, actions and thoughts – right down to the level of consciousness, itself, are the products of neural activity in the brain. In truth, science continues to struggle to explain consciousness, which seems to precede matter in any serious consideration.
The results of such thinking expose the human to some of the most pervasive and well-funded exploitation in our species’ history; and this at a time when individual human rights are being eroded and, often, erased altogether.
Vast sums of money are spent influencing our consumer behaviour. One of the best examples, and known world-wide, is the annual American Super Bowl whose 30 second giant adverts have been a frontline battleground over the years for such clashes as Apple vs IBM personal computers and, more recently, the ‘cola wars’, in the form of Coke vs Pepsi.
Vast sums of money are to be made selling us flavoured, fizzy water, and the average costs of having a 30 second advert at the world’s most viewed sporting event have risen from $37,500 for the first one in 1967 to an eye-watering $7 million in 2022. We will return to the ‘cola wars’, later, as they now feature as a case study in large-scale doubts being aimed at this emerging pseudo-science…
The field of neuromarketing purports to offer a method of applying the science of Neurobiology to test and quantify our consumer preferences. Apparently, we are not always rational creatures… Who knew?
Technology that extracts, and possibly changes, the mind’s layers of preference and choice is expensive and very specialised. The idea of the ‘wired brain’ has long been the domain of sci-fi.
Neuromarketing or ‘consumer neuroscience’, studies physical and electronic changes in the brain to predict and manipulate our decision making. In decades gone by, it was considered a frontier science, but claimed successes over the past few years have bolstered its reputation and seen vast investment from companies who have most to gain.
But the most recent findings from ordinary human-based consumer research – which is fighting back – have confounded this. We live in interesting times in the battle for the dwindling money in our pockets.
“Neuromarketing” loosely refers to the measurement of physiological and neural signals to gain insight into our motivations, preferences, and decisions, which can help to fine-tune marketing programmes for advertising, product development and associated pricing.
The two primary tools for scanning the brain’s electrical activity are Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and EEG. Magnetic resonance imaging uses strong magnetic fields to track changes in blood flow across the brain, and is administered while a person lies inside a machine that scans them over a small period of time – a bit like a photocopier scanning its target piece of paper but a bit more intimidating. It’s a familiar device in images of advanced tech in medicine.
An EEG (electroencephalogram) reads brain-cell activity using sensors placed on the subject’s scalp; it can handle large volumes of data in a short time, but is less effective at pinpointing exactly where the activity occurs or measuring it in the deep, subcortical regions of the brain, where the more interesting activity takes place.
An fMRI machine can look deep into the brain but is cumbersome, and it tracks activity over the course of only several seconds, which may miss key data. One of the deciding factors is that fMRI machines are many times more expensive than EEG equipment, typically costing millions versus about £20,000 for the alternatives.
Tools for measuring other physical indicators that ‘track’ brain activity – called ‘proxies’ – tend to be more affordable and are easier to use. Eye tracking uses our focus ‘fixation points’ to measure attention and can even indicate ‘arousal’ using pupil dilation.
Facial-expression coding which reads the minute movement of muscles in the face can measure emotional responses; and also heart rate, respiration rate, and, again – via skin conductivity – arousal. We may surmise that arousal is related to craving and many companies could love to link it to their products.
Some of the neuromarketing approaches claim to, effectively, ‘reverse the process of evolution’; drilling into our motivation from the outer brain layers that control our rational behaviour, down through the powerful emotional regions and, even lower, to the ‘reptile’ layers of the inherited instincts – the latter have changed little in the recent development of mankind. At that level, we appear to be ‘hard-wired’ lizards and intent on staying so.
It’s sobering to relate modern politics to such a model. Instructive, too…
“I got ma beer…”
Lizard cartoon
It is fascinating that from the perspective of the law, neuro ‘science’ can operate freely within what even psychology regards as ‘moral territory’. For example the ‘lizard’ brain would equate with the powerful but unruly ‘id’ in Freud’s model of human behaviour – something even the most experienced psychologists approach with caution. The unchallenged nature of such intrusion by marketeers into what and who we are should worry us all…
The attraction of this market-led descent of consciousness into the primaeval, is that companies sponsoring such work can readily relate to it. If I’m a purveyor of a new fizzy drink, and have risen to the top of my management pyramid, I might easily understand why removing evolution’s constraints at the personal and social levels of consciousness – so that I could get my product to be not only acceptable but craved – would be a good idea.
Interest in consumer neuroscience took off in the mid-2000s, when business school researchers started to demonstrate that advertising, branding, and other marketing tactics can have measurable impacts on the brain. It’s currently on a high, but the exciting claims are not always being backed up by scientific results. Perhaps the big lizards in big marketing aren’t getting all their own way. Our human complexity may be our saviour, yet.
Pepsi is famous for funding a massive marketing campaign to knock Coke off the world’s top spot.
In 2004 researchers at Emory University served Coca-Cola and Pepsi to subjects in an fMRI machine. When the drinks weren’t identified, the researchers noted a consistent neural response, apparently in favour of Pepsi. But when subjects could see the brand, their limbic structures (brain areas associated with emotions, memories, and unconscious processing) showed enhanced activity, demonstrating that knowledge of the brand altered how the brain perceived the beverage. In simple terms, people in the test related more to the better-known Coke.
This reversed the prevailing ‘drill down to the lizard’ focus, and shows that our higher ‘selves’ could ‘reach down’ and correct the world of ‘craving’. This continues to be a hot topic…
Four years later a team led by INSEAD’s Hilke Plassmann scanned the brains of test subjects as they tasted three wines with different prices; their brains registered the wines differently, with neural signatures indicating a preference for the most expensive wine. In fact, all three wines were the same.
We can’t expect the newly graduated high-flyer to take a moral stance when she begins that hi-tech marketing job. Protecting the human should be the work of government, who need to be more on our side than ever before.
Sadly, the trends are the other way. Britain’s exit from the EU – one of the few institutions that has formulated punitive policies for corporate violators – is currently being celebrated by our right-wing government’s planning a bonfire of former European regulations protecting the individual’s rights and employment protections; exactly at a time when they need to be strengthened.
The fundamental crisis in all of this is the voting public’s lack of understanding of the heart of these complex issues. As long as that prevails, there is little hope that democracy will function as it is supposed to: to protect the people.
Power knows how to manipulate. When you’re hungry and your children are cold, you don’t have time to learn that.
©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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Some days define…
by Steve Tanham
Some days define…
In this case the cold. The vastness of Morecambe Bay is sometimes defined by its light. In this case the deep blue of an early afternoon with icy winds to match.
Ice on the foreshore by the lifeboat’s hovercraft station, clustered into tiny pools on the dark mud.
Two small fishing boats – most of Morecambe’s shrimping fleet – provide the only colour break to the endless electric blue; striking in their fragility.
From the jetty – unseen, left – falls a shadow so subtle, it looks alive, providing more dimension to the wet, black sand where none dare tread.
Blue, cold, vast.
©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 entire one-mile promenade at Grange-over- Sands is decorated with a series of rock gardens.
These are looked after entirely by volunteers whose work is most active in the summer, but continues, in terms of maintenance, during the colder months, when there is little else to be seen.
But that is not always the case…
Grange town centre is a few hundred metres behind the promenade and its gardens. The railway line is closer than you would imagine!
Each volunteer is assigned to a team which looks after a garden within the overall set. The quality of work and presentation are outstanding.
From time to time, a new section is created – often following a bequest.
The Stumpery is a recent example. Designed to provide both winter and summer interest, this simple ‘hidden park’ is small oval, only some of which is designed to be seen when walking by. The interior, seen above and in the opening photo, is an example of how grasses have a continuing presence when almost all of their companions have shrunk to an herbaceous mound.
All the other photos were taken in July…
©Stephen Tanham 2023
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
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We were walking through a very rainy Ambleside a few days ago. What I smilingly call my ‘camera mind’ spotted how well the lines and colours of the Priest Hole pub contrasted with the wet and uniform grey of the January light.
I also loved how the bright ‘double yellows’ led the eye away into the misty gloom…
The ‘lead-line’ of the road on the left was attractive, but my attention was fixed on the roof angle of the pub … and I didn’t know why…
I considered my options with the image. One colour stood out. I needed to conserve the paleness and the hint of yellow – I knew that was important but I had little idea why.
Studying the shot again at home, I remembered I’d saved a screenshot from Instagram of a beautiful image by a photographer I follow: bnwshot_world.
I dug it out and, sure enough, the angle of the woman’s hat, which partly obscures her face, was ‘sympathetic’ to the sloping roofline of the pub. I’m constantly amazed at what the mind can remember in symbolic form. I’m sure I’d have forgotten her birthday…
I was not planning to use the B+W image in anything other than an illustrative fashion, and at lo-resolution. Using the trusty iPad’s own image tools cropped it down to this:
One of my favourite techniques – and a pastime anyone can try – is to digitally ‘overlay’ two images that look like they belong together. I had my two images – one borrowed – and began to play with how they might look.
Immediately, I could see that ‘wedge of light’ of the model’s skin under the hat and above her society-event dress was a lucky fit for the slanting angle of the pub’s roof.
So, what’s the story, here?
A mysterious and rich woman moves into a rather grey Lakeland town. Perhaps in her mind, she is re-living something romantic from her past? Then again, she is dressed all in black. Perhaps there are darker motives?
Maybe we can make a contest of it. Bottles of favourite plonk (as before just images to keep the postage costs down) for the back-story that fits the crime… Sorry facts… Mmm.
I’ll do my best to publish any that are sent in. Just one short paragraph, please! Like you’d find on the cover of a new book.
If you’re an Instagram user, please take a look at bnwshot_world. I find them a constant source of classy inspiration.
©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 photos that epitomise some particular quality of the natural world.
January has a dearth of such moments. Its light is so thin that composition – outside of the contrasts of monochrome – is practically a matter of pot luck.
But I was lucky. This part of the promenade at Grange is one of the coldest places you can be at this time of year. The expanse of Morecambe Bay deposits it’s breezes in summer – and gales in the winter – on wary joggers and dog walkers. Almost no-one else is out there…
But, for a few moments, the sun shone. Then disappeared for the rest of the day. And I happened to be on top of the railway bridge when it did so.
©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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We were driving back from Ilkley with a clip full of ‘winter Wharfedale’ photos, many of which were destined be spoiled by the falling light along the riverbank or too ambitious in the first place.
In decades gone by, the pain wouldn’t only have been the attempt and failure, but the cost of paying to have them developed and copied to photo paper, only to consign most of them to the bin … with expensive regret.
Prior to the development of Manchester’s city centre tram service, which crosses forty miles in each direction: north-south and east-west, we would set off from our offices on Salford Quays to take our rolls of actual ‘negative’ film to one of a number of specialist high-street shops, only to repeat the journey for the collection of the finished prints a few days later.
It was a tiresome process. But when the results were good there was a great sense of elation as you held up that physical print that would, without doubt, be good enough to win a prize.
“Nonsense!”
It’s the competition judge in the back of your mind – even if you choose to ignore him…
Back then, when you looked at the pile of rejects on your desk, next to a much smaller pile of possibly worthy shots, you had an instant visual indicator of how well you’d performed with that roll of film and your expensive SLR (single lens reflex) camera.
None of this was remotely digital, of course … well, the metering might have been.
It was common for expert photographers to urge us amateurs to take lots of shots so that we could learn by doing: both well and badly. And also learn by bending the rules – like occasionally shooting into the sun, rather than the conventional wisdom of following the brightest light rays to the subject.
All photographers have this rosy picture that their children and close friends will want to leaf though their photos when they’ve gone…
They won’t. The best thing you can do for them is to take out 90% and consign them to the actual or digital bin – or persuade the local history museum to take them. If you do this, then you have a chance that one or more of your descendants or close friends might enjoy looking at your structured memories…
Most of photography is very much of the now…and we need to be prepared to pass out of other people’s now in a clean and orderly way.
But back to our return journey to Kendal…
Crossing through the pretty village of Gargrave on the outskirts of Skipton – one of the anchors points of the Yorkshire Dales, we tuned into a Radio 4 programme about the gradual handover of the stonemason’s craft to the architect.
Cosy in the car’s warm cabin, we listened as the quiet and intense ‘radio time’ passed in the company of Andrew Ziminski, the author of the book in the opening paragraph.
Ziminski is an authority on the history and significance of building in stone. His knowledge is respected internationally, and he lectures across Europe. His uniqueness is that he still works as a stonemason, and his special skills have been employed on many critical repair projects in stone.
Given that the master craftsmen in particular were often accomplished designers, architects and artists as much as they were artisans. He points out that, regardless of the fame of what they worked on, they were all engineers who spent years learning the technical skills needed for their craft.
One of his favourite tricks to immerse us in the world of the stonemason is to conduct a journey through time, and references two of his ‘perspective journeys’, the first of which examined the year through its festival holidays, ending on the Celtic festival of Samhain and the feast of All Saints – on 1st November.
Ziminski, who has a good eye for nature, can expressively describe the changing seasons in vivid detail.
House martins twitter as they close in on a condensing insect swarm, spiders spin webs around me as I sleep on site, and I am often to be found among bat roosts under bridges.
The second ‘time journey’ is one through the history of building with stone in the British Isles. It begins in a Neolithic chambered tomb and ends with the modern use of concrete.
In this way, Ziminski fills our imagination with the struggles and progress over a thousand years.
I’ll close this post with the two most dramatic perspectives that he gleaned from these time journeys:
In the first, he speaks of how, within a family of stonemasons, the father would begin the creation of the building. The son would continue the work but not see it completed. The grandson would be present at the grand opening and nurse it through the infancy of its use.
He contrasted this with the modern techniques of modular building and said that, by comparison in the world of the architects of today:
in the age of the modern architect, the building would be delivered by the architect; the ‘son’ would witness its decline, and the ‘grandson’ would see it demolished.
Two very different worlds… Perhaps it is no mystery that we return, time and again, to our favourite stone masterpieces in an increasingly transient world.
Photography is the most transient art. Can we photograph the future? On the face of it, no. But the future is an interweaving of the strongest currents of today. We can with some accuracy predict things. A very accurate example is the movement of the planets; vast but regular.
God does play dice, but usually at the level of the very very small. And she does it for variation and not amusement.
We could go back to the bank of the River Wharfe and say that this particular 100 metre mass of water travelling at 3 km per hour – will be very much the same mass that passes another observer, 3 km downstream, in an hour’s time. We could even throw in a rubber duck to test it… But that’s just my sense of humour rather than ‘sense’ of scientist…
Now, where’s that picture clean-up routine?
©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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New Years’ Day and we traveled from Kendal to Ilkley to have lunch with my son and his family. They live in Leeds and we often use Ilkley as a half-way meeting point to have a walk on the moor and then come down to the Hermit pub/restaurant that looks down on Burley-in-Wharfedale.
The River Wharfe is a beautiful river originating within the Yorkshire Dales National Park. For much of its course it is the county boundary between West Yorkshire and North Yorkshire. Its valley is known as Wharfedale. The magical hills of Ilkley Moor looks down the river valley.
The end of the afternoon had the most magical twilight. Tess the collie needed a walk before the ninety-minute journey back to Kendal, so we made our way down through the pretty streets of Burley to the the river Wharfe.
There’s something poignant about the end of the Christmas period. We’re happy to take the decorations down, come the end of the seventh day.
Soon it was time to go. The dogs had been well exercised in the meadows by the river.
Leaving Ilkley on the A65 we passed the edge of Skipton, then on through the lovely village of Gargrave. I’ve often remarked that the iconic Old Swan would make a fine photo if I could capture it from the car’s passenger seat!
©Stephen Tanham 2022
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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Musings on a Silent Night
by Steve Tanham
I received a nice little present from WordPress the other day: a certificate to say I had been blogging with them for ten years!
Ten years… Where did they go…
Back then, Sue Vincent was our Silent Eye blogger – and she already had a large online following. Persuading her to join the fledgling Silent Eye was doubly beneficial: I got an excellent foundational partner, and the School got the benefit of her digital reach! Not to be abused, of course…
Stuart joined us shortly after, and the three of us set off on a great adventure that launched officially in the Spring of 2013, in the remote Derbyshire hills with a workshop called ‘The Song of the Troubadour’.
My job was to set out the vision of the School and to create the three-year correspondence course, a task that took every day of those three years! But during that time, people began asking why I had disappeared from view; and so I tentatively tried out this blogging thing…
Nowadays it would be hard to imagine a week going by without the regular cycle of Sunday’s photographic blog on Sun in Gemini; the more personally oriented Tuesday blog – where I can provide whimsy and the odd peace of humour; and the build up to the serious stuff on Thursday, where I try to present the joy of mystical study, and the way it brings about a reorientation one’s life.
The ten years on the WordPress certificate mirrored the current life of the Silent Eye, and also our personal residence here in Cumbria in the extreme north of England.
The constant presence of the mountains and lakes of the Lake District on our doorstep certainly assists the creative impulse. There’s nothing like chewing over an idea while walking the fells to get a fresh influx of energy and expansion of the kernel with which you started. Often the problem is getting the rush of ideas down in some form before they evaporate from the mind.
The sad loss of our co-Director, Sue Vincent, still weighs heavy, and can be deeply poignant at this time of year. Sue made a big thing of Christmas, and was a superb cook. She could turn her home in the Buckinghamshire village of Waddesdon into the most Christmassy place imaginable in a seemingly short time.
Time moves us on with changes, whether we wish it or not. Covid brought great changes to the whole world – and is still doing so. But one of the great benefits of being home-bound was the international regularisation of the use of Zoom and other ‘remote meeting’ technologies.
We are now able to offer a monthly meeting online, in which we greet, chat a bit, then settle in for an hour’s deep but friendly discussion – with meditation exercises. Examples of the content of the past few meetings can be found on the Silent Eye Explorations FaceBook page.
Part of that online world we have entered is the gift of a new Director of the School: Caroline Ormrod.
Caro is a highly literate and competent administrator, and possesses that ‘lightness of spirit’ that make so much difference to how a School of the Soul presents itself.
Caro is helping us to consolidate the Silent Eye’s online presence and make deeper and more frequent use of our Zoom facilities. She’s based in Canada – which seems to be fertile ground for our work – and is coming across to the UK for the ‘Water, Circle, Cross’ workshop in Windermere in May 2023.
By way of a small Christmas present, here is the best photo I ever saw of Sue, taken by Darcy at the winter weekend in Penrith. We like to think that smile rides with us, still…
So, now I’ll take my leave for a short while and rest my mind and typing fingers over Christmas and the New Year. I leave you with my 2022 Christmas image of the giant Christmas tree at the Art Deco Midland Hotel, in whose coffee lounge we are frequent flyers! The beautiful staircase has featured in several Poirot adaptations.
We wish everyone a loving and restful Christmas. Thank you for your presence and support in 2022. May the light and kindness that is in all our hearts have the strength to unite through the differences and help us work together to rebuild our wounded world.
Steve, Stuart and Caro.
Reference and links:
Water, Circle, Cross will take place around Lake Windermere in the English Lake District from 19-21 May, 2023. Email us for details. See the Events page for details – The Silent Eye’s website
For an invite to the monthly SE-Explore Zoom meetings, open to all and held on the third Sunday of each month, email us at:
Rivingtide@gmail.com
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If your Christmas is shaping up to be less than that idyllic cameo on the TV adverts… come with me … and join us for the most unexpected Christmas evening we’ve ever had.
The first of December, 2022. The last day of our winter holiday.
It had not been a good day for my ego. Thrashed 6-3 by my wife, Bernie, at crazy golf, I was consoling myself with the thought of my final two pints of Devon Dreamer, an ale produced by one of the local micro-breweries that I had come to love during the course of the week of our winter break on the south Devon coast.
This was to be our last night in Marldon, a village just inland from Torquay, set in one of the rolling Coombes (valleys) that define this idyllic landscape.
One of the delights of the small cottage we had booked was its closeness to the local pub: The Church House Inn – a mere five minutes’ walk downhill, past the park and up the stone steps to where the carriages used to discharge their passengers.
Hearing from the people who owned our cottage (and lived next door) that the Church House Inn was both good and busy, we had booked three meals out over the course of our week. The first two had been excellent. This was the final treat.
Arriving at the inn, we found ourselves on the edge of growing crowd, with more families arriving by the minute. It turned out that the local Christingle parade of the first day of December ended with a gathering in the space outside the pub – where Santa Claus would give token presents to all the children.
We watched and waited for a while, being warmly included by the locals. Then we turned to to enter and find our table, as there were tight time-slots for dinner.
The meal was lovely. Washed down, in my case, by two pints of the fine Devon ale. We didn’t really want to leave. Many of the diners had retired to the bar. We thought about it, but wanted to get back to the cottage and pack, as we had to check out by 09:00 the following morning.
Outside, again, we gave Tess a moonlight walk into the park, then walked the short distance back up the hill to our cottage.
Thank you, Devon. Thank you, Marldon. You were a warm and hospital home for a much- needed break before the busyness of Christmas.
I’ll be taking a break after this Thursday’s blog… back in the New Year with batteries recharged for 2023.
©Stephen Tanham 2022
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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Frozen Shore; ten below…
by Steve Tanham
I don’t think I ever remember the temperature, here, being minus ten, before.
But that’s what it was, according to the gauge in the car on the way to Bolton-le-Sands, where – in the course of walking Tess the collie – I took this shot.
Few people graced the frozen landscape, which gave it a ghostly isolation. The one dark figure walking slowly along the horizon gave me the human interest I sought amidst the white and ice.
I published it on the local Morecambe and Heysham Facebook groups. So far it’s notched up nearly five hundred ‘likes’, and more relevantly, hundreds of comments.
Which shows how we all stand in awe when Nature does something extraordinary, even when it’s potentially life-threatening.
©Stephen Tanham 2022
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 Eight with Two Dots
by Steve Tanham
I remember being a child and considering the Yin-Yang figure for the first time. It fascinated me. I felt like I couldn’t ‘see it’ properly – as though something about it was hidden…
For several days after spying it on a street poster, I tried to draw it, but without success. The best I could do was render it as ‘an eight with two dots’. It was only years later, looking at how a tennis ball was formed, that the structure of the yin-yang became clear.
The ball, like the Yin-Yang, is composed of two symmetrical halves which perfectly and symbolically interact. The difference is that the tennis ball does it in three dimensions rather than the yin-yang’s two. It’s impossible to make a ball from a single piece of material, technically a surface. But with two such surfaces, it’s simple. The tennis ball pattern we have today replaced an older, more approximate clover-leaf design and the two intersecting ovals enable a tight seal at the time of manufacture.
Both fascinating… but let’s leave the tennis ball to another post. It’s the Yin-Yang symbol we’re investigating, here, and the driver for this is the approach of the winter solstice on 21st December at 21:45 – next Wednesday.
But why? What is the relationship between the winter solstice and the Chinese Yin-Yang symbol?
For many cultures, the winter rather than summer solstice has been the most important astronomical event of the year. I vividly remember a Silent Eye weekend hosted by Allan Pringle which was centred on the East Aquhorthies stone circle at Inverurie, an hour’s drive north-west of Aberdeen. It was memorable for the extreme weather, apart from anything else. But it was worth the effort and the drenching…
The East Aquhorthies site is one of the best-preserved examples of a recumbent stone circle in Britain. It is one of very few that still have their full complement of stones. Remarkably, all are to be seen, here, in their original position, without having been re-erected.
The stone circle at East Aquhorthies maps the points of the astronomical compass against the surrounding landscape, with particular reference to the line of hills in the south. One of these is a visual intersection of two hills: the place where the Winter Solstice sunset is to be seen, Scottish weather permitting, you can see the sun sink into the land on or about the 21st December, marking the birth of the new…
But why is an ancient Chinese symbol appropriate to our consideration of the northern hemisphere Winter Solstice? It turns out that there is a deeply mystical relationship between the yin-yang glyph and the year’s twin solstices, one applicable to any part of the planet that has them.
To approach this, we need to look at the nature and purpose of polarity in human consciousness.
The great cycles of our lives are driven by opposite extremes or ‘poles’. Winter and summer are good examples, and they have at their heart the quality of light… and its absence: dark. Dark does not come from light, yet its existence is the basis of our experience of light. We might consider whether dark actually exists at all – in its own right?
But each of these complements has a specific point where the quality of their brightness or darkness is at the maximum it can be. The winter solstice is one such point – represented, above, by the black half (yin) of the Yin-Yang glyph.
The ‘tadpole’ shape (many have also compared it to semen seen under a microscope) is not entirely its dominant white or black colour. Within the thickest part of the figure there is a small circle of the complement: the black Yang has a white circle; the white has a black circle.
I do not mean to imply that there is an historical connection between the Yin-Yang and such stone circles. The connection is in the commonality of these ideas:
- That everything in our lives is made up from dual aspects: active and passive, male and female, giving and receiving… above and below.
- That this polarity is the very basis of how anything happens – and also how it is observed in our consciousness.
- That a deeper understanding of this enables us to see that the very nature of opposite polarity is such that there is always some of the opposing quality in the deepest example of one extreme, such as the nature of the winter or summer solstice seen in the Yin-Yang.
If we wish to follow this mystical thread, then our most profound act on the winter solstice will be to acknowledge the presence of an invisible sun between the twin halves of what is really one continuous act of creation… and the birth of the summer’s sun in the depths of that darkness, corresponding to an inner journey of the development of Self.
Happy winter solstice!
Note: This post is also the orientation document for the Silent Eye’s SE-Explore Zoom gathering for December 2022. These online meetings, lasting 90 minutes, are held on the third Sunday of each month and are open to all.
Contact us: Rivingtide@gmail.com to be added to our invite list.
©Stephen Tanham 2022
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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Images of Consideration
by Steve Tanham
I read a lot into nature…
I study the natural world around me carefully; a lot of my joy in taking photographs is that it helps me to ‘see’ what’s there in more clarity. It’s remarkable what being considered with a landscape can do, and how it deepens your sense of truly ‘being there’.
Such acts of considering were central to what the philosopher Gurdjieff taught… You had to be in life in a different way, to really experience it. When I publish my images I sometimes get comments showing that something of what had been ‘seen’ is shared by others who view the images.
To consider is to put aside that separate sense of ‘me’ and simply flow into and with the act of being in that place, that situation, that landscape. Our being becomes the involvement with the act of observation, not the identity with it.
I don’t exactly look for ‘portents’, I’m not a trained shaman – though I have good friends who are – but I do believe that there is an intelligent alchemy – an active process of teaching and learning – taking place.
And then there is reaction. There are two faces to an experience: the duality because of our insistence that our ‘I’ is separate… There is the perceiving of the object(s) of that experience, then there is how it is received in what we take as the self.
That reception is a reaction – in most cases. When it becomes refined into something else, it takes on the stature of a space and separation-less act of what the ancients called gnosis; a ‘gnowing’ so powerful that it is more real than the apparent object under consideration.
©Stephen Tanham 2022
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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