+ #Silenti, Ancient Landscapes, Ancient Sacred Sites, Consciousness, English Lake District, Photographic techniques, Photography
The shifting beach…

What I love about the beaches around Morecambe Bay is the way you can go back a day later and find them completely changed.
Heysham Beach, near Morecambe, is a wonderful example. In autumn, the tides get stronger, and the landscape upon which you walk – often a liminal zone between rock and sand – changes with each tide.
Which is good news for photographers, as, once more, we can crouch down on a virgin pattern of sand and rock as a new basis for the shot.
©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
+ #Silenti, Consciousness, esoteric psychology, guided mystical walks, Higher Mind, Lake District, Mystery Schools
Beyond the Winter

It’s at this time of year, when the nights are long and the days short and getting shorter, that we turn our attention to a what could unfold in the spring – in the form of the Silent Eye’s May workshop. The idea is one thing, the success lies in giving it form and substance…and making sure that everyone there feels a creative part of it.
There is something special about the month of May… Just the sound of it is romantic. It’s the kind of month that demands we do something different; that we cast off the inward-looking considerations of the winter, and perhaps say that last goodbye to the crackling of the log-fires in the hearth.
We used to hold our first weekend of the year in March or April, depending on the date of Easter – which we had to avoid. But May offers a very different energy – and perhaps a degree of warmth and colour lacking in the months before it.

This past year, we celebrated the May 2022 weekend – and the relative freedom from Covid – with ‘The Journey of the Hero’, using the north Lakes town of Keswick as our base. Our adventures took us along the ridges of hills, down a long river walk in the Eden Valley, and deeply into ourselves within the Castlerigg Stone Circle.
This coming May, we have chosen a different theme – Water, and its associations with our emotional natures. Our name for the weekend of 19-21 May, 2023 is ‘Water, Circle, Cross – a rite of Spring’
This time we are basing our journeys around the massive body of water that is Lake Windermere; England’s largest lake, as we set off on a spiritual journey across its vastness, along the paths over its neighbouring fells, and a modest degree of merriment in the twin towns of Bowness and Ambleside.
‘Body of Water’ is our theme…
We will explore our spiritual relationship with water, the alchemical element that is most associated with the emotions, and ask whether we can use its healing power. At a time of great tension on the planet, we will carry out a series of guided sailings and walks that attune us to the vast power of harmonisation we all carry – in the water of our cells.
The inner journey, from self to Self, is one of personal discovery. No-one can gift that journey, but you can gift it to yourself.

The group will use a method of ‘characterisation’ to move from one state and landscape to another. Each participant will be asked to form a fictional character in their minds and hearts; a persona of great power and insight. At various stages of land and lake, we will enact a developing rite that explores and unites this body of ‘players’ into a working group…all leading to the powerful and healing finale on the Sunday morning.
Our personal rite will take the form of a Solarace – a set of movements and gestures that take place entirely within the space of the body. This mysterious and ancient technique has calming and focussing properties that will serve us well in our individual and collective quest.
No experience is necessary. We will all learn, together, by doing…
The central meeting point will be the lovely lakeside town of Bowness. Rail connections are available to the nearby town of Windermere, two miles up the hill from the Lake.
The administration cost will be £75.00, but additional monies should be set aside for a ferry pass to cover the weekend. We will notify the 2023 cost of these tickets nearer the time.

Those joining us are responsible for their own accommodation costs, meals, and transportation.
We will meet at the ferry point in Bowness on the Friday lunchtime. Attendees may join later if needed. Friday evening will see us having a shared dinner in Bowness.
The workshop will run through to Sunday lunch, allowing early departure for return journey.

If you’ve never been on one of our weekends, you will be doubly welcome. Those who have joined us, before, will testify to the quality, fun and happy intensity of these Silent Eye events.
Contact us at:
Rivingtide@gmail.com to book your place.
©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
Michael perfectly sums up his remembrance journey to the home of his forbears…

The gate to the war memorial at Abbey Village is locked. I usually visit in the week leading up to the armistice, to leave one of those little wooden crosses for my great uncle. He died in Mesopotamia in 1918, and is named on the column. He was one of the many sons of the village who did not come home.
So, what to do? Well, after a moment of indecision, I toss the little cross, as gently as I can, but still rather indecorously, through the bars, where it falls skew-whiff among the evergreens in the planter at the foot of the column. I offer a wordless apology. A token charged such as this should be placed mindfully, not tossed as a last resort, but I didn’t know what else to do. I had not wanted to walk away with it still in my pocket, for then…
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I just love it when you’re looking to capture something artistic, as opposed to just landscape, and nature conspires to assist…
There’s a long beach walk that links Rosemarkie, on the Black Isle, north of Inverness, with the lighthouse at Chanonry Point.
Halfway along, the sun became so bright that its autumnal ‘long flat’ rays began to create a glare in my side vision. For a second, I saw a structure, not knowing what it was in the visual intensity.
But I did point the camera at it…
Moments later, I turned away from the glare to examine what my eyes had glimpsed and the camera had snapped.
And went back to shoot it again, with the helpful sun right over the simple seat. The result is above.
The result is above; a natural ‘tau’ figure – elongated on the sand. Sun, sand and deep blue sky in perfect harmony … for which, a humble thank you!
©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

One of my favourite artists is the American Edward Hopper. His ‘Nighthawks’ is a study in late-night loneliness, set in a bar/diner whose light is a stark and emotional contrast to the isolating darkness outside.

He also painted isolated and often abandoned scenes, such as outdated petrol (gas) stations; again with a very ‘still’ emotional fascination.
The figures within the bar still have barriers: the space between them. But the hopeful fragility of that is there to be overpowered by the need to, collectively, respond to the dark with… friendship.
That’s my take on it, anyway!
Hopper and his wife were both artists, but they didn’t start off that way. Inspired by her, he took it up and eventually outshone the lady, who never painted again.


Last year, in the passenger seat on a night drive in Scotland, I noticed that one of the shots I had taken through the windscreen reminded me of Hopper’s work – which is not to say I am comparing our results.

Since then, I’ve been trying to recapture the look…
We have just finished a long drive to the Scottish Highlands for a short break to get Tess away from the infernal Bonfire Night firework bangs. I took the first leg from Kendal; Bernie drove from Perth, allowing me time to try out my experiment on the darkest part of the journey as we approached Inverness on the long and winding A9.


©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


It’s a song by Crosby, Stills and Nash, written in 1970 by their new band member Neil Young, for the best-selling album Déjà Vu; the event that propelled them to achieve what the music world described as ‘supergroup’ status.
Link. https://youtu.be/pWMyLDia6R0
It was a transformative moment for a sixteen year old boy-man who had just been bought the album as a Christmas present…
But it has nothing to do with the subject of this post, apart from the song title, and that the words ‘Country Girl’ have always carried a special magic.
Nor is the woman who owns this rather tasty Mini Countryman a country girl… Well, she might be, but that’s not our story, which is the nature of the chrome-plated letters that make up the revised model name shown in the second image.
I’m fond of gestures. I’m even fonder of clever gestures whose impact is understated…
Clearly irked by the misogynistic nature of the model name ‘Mini Countryman’ – bought by BMW as part of the bargain bucket of what was left of British Leyland, the unknown lady sourced an additional ‘W’ and ‘O’ , in matching chrome font and re-sited the letters:
‘C O U N T R Y M A N’
Giving us the full spread of
‘C O U N T R Y W O M A N’
Country Girl, I think you’re pretty. And you have a fabulous sent of humour…
©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
+ #Humour, #NightMoves, #Silenti, landscapes, mystery, Photographic techniques, Photography, Places and Prose
Night beginnings…

I love images that pull you in and suggest what might follow…
‘The car behind had been gaining on her for the past few minutes, getting closer with every mile. How far was she from civilisation! Would she be able to outrun him…assuming it was a him!’
—-
‘He looked ahead and saw the car slowing… No! It had stopped. And he was hurtling towards it at fifty miles an hour! Only then did he see the other car behind racing to close the gap; they were either going to crush him, or force him to stop for a robbery…or worse…
—-
Difficult to stop once you start!
Taken towards the end of our journey to The Black Isle, a very dark section of the A9. Happily we weren’t crushed or kidnapped… but that photo holds a fascination.
©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
+ #Poetry, #Silenti, Consciousness, esoteric psychology, Mystical poetry, Photography, Seasons of the year
The Human Eye in Winter

Within the blood of life the love is colour:
The lime-shine kiss of spring’s new fingers
The rising sun, the heart of gold
The mellow blaze as autumn lingers.
And listens to the human eye in winter
—-
Dark path the seeming death that follows fall
Pale exile when the tints have turned to bone
A zero-state as life, slow-frozen, bares its truth:
That colour moves from seen to see to none
Which listens to the human mind in winter
—-
The green, the gold, the falling mellow fold
The hardening of the ground, the ice’s splinter
The glimpse of death revealed as life unseen
Whose key we have to ask within, then silent be
To listen to the human heart in winter
©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

I find the autumn has distinct stages, and that these are subtly different on the coast.
I suppose the adjacent presence of the sea – with its residual warmth from the summer – has a modifying effect on the foliage of the trees, but this may be fanciful on my part.
Either way, as colour fades, the intensity of shadows becomes more important; knowing the light as well as the colour is draining from the landscape as we head down to the winter solstice.
©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

One of the most important things we do with our minds is to learn, yet we seldom ask: how do we learn things, and is it a single process?
How do we learn things, and is it a single process?
How do we learn things?
We have to be careful to define what we mean by learning. The child or young student gains praise by learning facts. Facts are important, as we are discovering in a world where idiots are given microphones and loud-hailers so they can bay at other adoring idiots; the entire set of bayer and recipient comfortable in a self-enclosed bubble, protected from knowledge osmosis.
Our collective sense of outrage at this treatment of the truth appears to have evaporated. Every day, the headlines bring us another loud idiot, looking to score in the rankings.
Every day, the headlines bring us another loud idiot, looking to score in the rankings.
On both sides of the Atlantic, we can point to populists who knowingly harvest the opinions (and votes) of people who do not have the capacity to question the noises they rally around. The protagonists here are in possession of the facts; the truth, but their character is such that the exploitation of the opposite side of that coin – the deliberate untruth – is acceptable as a route to power.
their character is such that the exploitation of the opposite side of that coin – the deliberate untruth – is acceptable as a route to power.
It’s a well-trodden path. Every fascist dictator or religious strongman/woman who rose to prominence claiming they represented ‘the people’ repeats the assault on the truth. In politics it is not unusual; even expected. But episodes like Covid vaccines and attempted overthrowing of audited national voting have exposed the new fragility of what used to be the self-evident.
…have exposed the new fragility of what used to be the self-evident.
Society depends upon that outrage. The collective derision of the deliberately twisted truth is one of our most powerful weapons to protect our civilisations. This is mirrored in the individual by the corrosive effect of having to live with untruths. We can rightly say that the soul is less bright; even dimmed, in the face of untruth.
This is not a political blog, though I may have opened with a rant…
Rather than look at the abuse of opinion, we might gain insight from examining the wider processes of truth, and how we truly learn – or surrender to happy not-knowing, but comfortably the same as our friend, Jack, in the pub.
The schoolboy’s accumulation of facts, regurgitated as multiple choice ‘ticks in boxes’, is valid for that stage of their learning. We can assemble accurate but empty facts into a ‘kit-bag’ of relevant information and have it to hand when we need to carry out something more important.
Which begs the question: what is the nature of that which is ‘more important’?
Which begs the question: what is the nature of that which is ‘more important’?
When information stored by us as reliable facts becomes part of something we can do, can achieve, then we know that the fact – the information is ‘a seed’.
A seed cannot fulfil its potential without soil in which to grow and water to trigger its life. Yet the seed contains all the ‘process’ it needs to set in motion the potential it holds.
If I know the radius of a potential circle, it might help me as long as I know that a piece of string constrained to stay taut and then allowed to move at one of its ends, would ‘describe’ a circle with that length of string as its radius.
More theoretically, I might be able to design a circular garden feature if I know that within any circle, the diameter and the circumference are related by the multiplication of the former using a mysterious number called Pi – approximately 22 divided by 7.
Put simply: the diameter (all the way across the circle and crossing the middle) times Pi is always equal to the length of the circumference; the length of the string stretched equally all the way round.
This means that the inner meaning of a circle is to be a ‘growing machine’; one that converts straight lines of certain lengths (single dimensional) into a higher two-dimensional figure (the circle) which has the unique property of that first length as its child… or more accurately, its seed.
The seed in this case is the mysterious number ‘Pi’, which is not really a number, but a process. hidden in our number system to point out to us that our rational view of the world has a few cracks in it. In schoolboy facts, Pi is thought of as the number 22/7 or 3.142. But that is just an approximation which works, as long as you don’t ask philosophical questions of it…
If you are fascinated by the truth of Pi there’s a bit more below, taken from the Careers in Maths website: Did you know Pi has your birthday written in it?

This means that the inner meaning of a circle is to be a ‘growing machine’!
To my knowledge, the ‘zombies against truth’ have not derided the properties of the circle in favour of an opinion to the contrary, though they might be preparing such a case…
Does this radical idea of a ‘growing machine’ have parallels in the human mind?
The philosopher Jidhu Krishnamurti considered such questions deeply. He studied the process of learning from a spiritual perspective; meaning that spiritual learning not only has the power to transform us, it must transform us…
He said some wonderful things about learning; including the statement “Learning is not additive – you cannot gather learning.”
Learning is not additive – you cannot gather learning
To the rational mind, this is anathema…
The mind gathers – accumulates – for a living. Its greatest joy is to add to the store of facts. This is not to say that those facts are not true, nor that they are not capable of being ‘seeds’ for action. But Krishnamurti was on the trail of a much higher goal: He wanted to find the ‘Pi of the mind’, and he found it in a different type of learning, one in which the mind has to be placed into a state of emptiness of (even) facts…
In this state, if we hold it open, the incoming seed, the ‘Pi’, does its work and converts our straight line into a mystically-experienced circle, where learning is immediate and total…
You cannot see if you are not empty. This means no commitment, always learning, not accumulating; it means observing, being awake, being aware without any choice, and therefore giving tremendous attention
Jidhu Krishnamurti
Does this denigrate the mind? Not at all… But it does point to where the mind might be more powerfully employed…
In the next post, we will examine this ‘other place’.
©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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