From the road that curls around the small hills on the way to the beach at Reef, in the Uig district of Bhaltos, it looks like a large cairn. The second time we drove by we saw the noticeboard and stopped to take a closer look.
We climbed up the path to find a beautiful and touching monument on the hilltop, whose design was not visible from below. It was surrounded by views on all sides. Two things strike you, immediately: The isolation of the hill, itself; and the ancient connectedness of the people to this place – suggested by what looks like a giant tau-cross, but is based upon a stone construction method used in Neolithic times.
The curse of constant rain seemed finally behind us. We had become more relaxed and able to take in the beauty of the lochs, as in the view from the monument’s hill, above.
The Highland Clearances are well known as a dark period in Scotland’s history. They were the evictions of a significant number of tenants, many of them small-holding crofters, in the Scottish Highlands and Islands, mostly in two phases from 1750 to 1860.
The goal of the rich landlords was to replace humans with sheep, which were more profitable than the small rents charges to the farmers, whose only real assets were their culture, small-scale farming skills and love of the land. The crofters had lives, jobs, songs, families and folklore… and this was the only landscape they’d ever known.
A group of them refused to leave.
The notice board reads:
“To the memory of the men and women who resisted eviction from Reef before being forcibly removed in 1850-51…”
For three years, ending in 1850, 28 Reef families peaceably resisted all attempts by the estate of Sir James Matheson to remove them:
We had no arrears of rent and therefore we refused in a body to do this and stood out against it for three years, when Mr Scobie’s (the factor) term of office expired…”
The ‘factor’ was the man who enforced the land management and the will of the landowner. The following entry shows both the honesty and the naivety of the crofters:
We naturally expected justice from the next factor but, on the contrary, he took up at once the work his predecessor had begun and at last got us forcibly evicted”
In 1850, they were dispossessed of their homes and removed from the land of their ancestors. Some were scattered throughout the Isle of Lewis and others sent as far as America.
The following year a further fourteen families were evicted from Bhaltos and Cnip. By the late 19th century, the remaining population of this peninsula, in the district known as “fourteen penny lands” were crowded together in two villages with no access to the land surrounding them, which had been deliberately added to large farms. Those crowded onto the single village included 31 squatter families, who owned nothing.
The resolute resistance continued and, in 1884, HMS Assistance, with a force of up to 100 Marines, arrived in Loch Roag to arrest eight Bhaltos men accused of placing animals on the offshore islands for grazing, not paying rents and ‘deforcing’ Sheriff’s Officers.
The men were sent for trial to Edinburgh and served time in prison. The following year ten men and seven women were fined for separate but similar actions. The women were charged with “mobbing and rioting and breach of the peace” and their fines, 5/- (shillings) each, were paid by the London branch of the Highland Land Law Reform Association, an influential organisation that was fighting for fairer land rights to reflect usage as well as ownership.
In 1891 and again in 1896, the Deer Forest Commission recommended that Reef should be scheduled for re-settlement…but no action was taken.
On 28th November 1913, 15 landless squatters from Bhaltos and nip drove the farmer’s stock fromReef to Timsgarry Farm. Alasdair MacKay, one of the raiders, told the parish Policeman:
“You can have plenty of prisoners now. We’ve waited too long. Reef was promised us long ago and now we have made up our minds to take it, whatever may happen to us.”
Interdicts were issued against them in February 1914 and when these were defied the raiders were cited to appear for trial in Edinburgh where the Court of Session sentenced them to six weeks imprisonment. This gave rise to much indignation throughout Scotland and a campaign led to them leaving prison after two weeks. Most of the raiders went off to fight in the Great War and those who survived came back more determined than ever to claim their own “land fit for heroes.”
In February 1920, 11 of the original raiders wrote to the Secretary of State for Scotland:
“We are demobilised soldiers and sailors unemployed since September …. we are compelled to begin Spring work on Reef Farm. If you will send the Commissioners of Small Holdings to us for the purpose of dividing the farm into crofts and putting us in possession as we trust you will, we will delay our operation to the 1st of March. If they are not here by that time we will be under the necessity of beginning work as a means to our livelihood”
Finally, in 1921, the land was restored to crofting tenure. The fact there is a population here today and a future for this community is due to the struggles undertaken by those who secured a just outcome at that time. As so often happens, the right outcome is fragile and often hangs by a thread.
The monument ‘An Suileachan’ was commissioned by the Bhaltos Community Trust and designed by artists Will Maclean and Marian Leven. It was constructed by island craftsmen – the stone circles by John Crawford, the iron brazier by John Macleod and the woodwork by John Angus Macleod.
The An Suileachan memorial is only seen in its full extent when you are on the high level. There is a central path that links two separate areas. At the central point of the path is what we named the ‘Tau gate’. You have to pass through this to see both ‘faces’ of the structure.
At the seaward end is a brazier, a beacon that gives off heat and the light of warning and preparedness.
At the landward end is a circular stone plaque around which are carved the names of all those brave souls who were evicted from Reef by the second ‘Factor’. In one sense, the light and heat of the brazier-beacon highlights and protects them. They did not know that the great wrong done to them was to be corrected by friends and relatives after their deaths – to the great benefit of their community.
Their only weapon was the sense of truth and rightness they felt in their cause. A rightness much like the Biblical story of David and Goliath, where the monstrous apparent power of the giant is overcome by the simple stone of truth…
We can only aspire to such courage. You can tell in the quality of the monument how precious the memory of those brave souls is…
Part One: https://suningemini.blog/2022/05/24/a-poolewe-diary-1/
Part Two, https://suningemini.blog/2022/05/31/a-poolewe-diary-2/
Part Three, https://suningemini.blog/2022/06/06/a-poolewe-diary-3-the-loch-on-the-back-of-the-oats-box/
Part Four, https://suningemini.blog/2022/06/14/a-poolewe-diary-4-once-upon-a-time-in-the-far-north-west/
Part Five: https://suningemini.blog/2022/06/21/a-poolewe-diary-5-over-the-minch-to-lewis/
Continuation onto the Hebridean Island of Lewis:
A Hebridean Diary: Part One – Impressions of Lewis
A Hebridean Diary: Part Two – Long Road to Uig
A Hebridean Diary: Part Three – Of Coats and Kings
A Hebridean Diary: Part Four – The Drowned Lands
This is: A Hebridean Diary (5) When power is unchecked
©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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“You might wonder,” said our guide. “Why the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) would spend £112 million on a completely new interior for its world-famous theatre, only to leave in place these scruffy wooden boards…
Looking at me, he continued: “Do you realise, Sir, you are treading the same boards that creaked beneath the stage shoes of Lawrence Olivier, Richard Burton David Tenant and Dame Judi Dench…”
We all looked to our feet, standing on the hallowed wood, feeling amused but unworthy…
We were enjoying a long weekend near Stratford-on-Avon; soaking up the delights of Warwickshire in late July. The theatre is always a treat, but the RSC creates experiences you never forget.
This to be followed by an afternoon performance of Richard III – all three hours of it. A cracker of a day, and the weather was beautiful, so an ice cream by the river was on the cards…
Part of the agenda of this visit to the RSC was a ‘behind the scenes’ tour of the restored Art Deco building and its support services, such as costuming. Another was a glimpse of the new Swan Theatre exhibition: a permanent treasure trove of acting memorabilia.
These will be visited in a short series of posts to come. But first, it wasn’t only the stage boards that were up-scaled to serve the new building; the entire Art Deco fittings of the previous interior were carefully worked into the design. The classic bar room doors were cleaned and polished to their original glory.
At the far end of the entry gallery is the cafe, and beyond that one of the original ‘fountain and spiral staircases’ so popular in the 1930s.
©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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We were visiting Stratford: a tour of the backstage side of things, then a matinée of Richard III. It’s a play I’d never seen, and very much wanted to.
An excellent production nearly three hours long left us desperate for coffee. We left the RSC theatre and headed into the centre of town.
We passed this amazing motorcycle on the pavement opposite a restaurant. It was too clean to have been ridden much, but what a delightful sight…
©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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We had wondered about the real nature of this landscape. On this our third day on the Hebridean Island of Lewis, we paid a long-anticipated visit to Callanish, the place of the famous stones – though the main site is not a stone circle. There, I came across a sign that perfectly described the rather barren landscape all around us.
The sign read: Welcome to the Drowned Lands…
Welcome to the Drowned Lands:
Following the last Ice Age, 14,000 years ago, the sea level rose, giving us the rather barren landscapes of the lochs and drowned valleys of the Western Isles – the local, and preferred name of the Outer Hebrides. They were, quite literally, drowned by the melting ice, having been crushed and worked by the glaciers.
The Callanish Stones are an arrangement of standing stones – but placed in a cruciform pattern with a small central stone circle at the cross point.
They were erected in the late Neolothic era (new Stone Age – 8000-3000 BC) and were a focus for ritual activity during the Bronze Age, 3300 BC – 1200 BC. This immense age means we have little understanding of their beliefs and spiritual methods, but we know that following nature in the form of the seasons, and studying the movements of the heavens were central to those beliefs. The cycles of crop planting and harvesting were likely to have been central to their myths.
You arrive at the site via the famous visitor centre – sadly closed on the Sunday we visited for religious reasons…something amusing about that! The ancient stones are obviously not looked upon as sacred places…
To be continued next week…
Part One: https://suningemini.blog/2022/05/24/a-poolewe-diary-1/
Part Two, https://suningemini.blog/2022/05/31/a-poolewe-diary-2/
Part Three, https://suningemini.blog/2022/06/06/a-poolewe-diary-3-the-loch-on-the-back-of-the-oats-box/
Part Four, https://suningemini.blog/2022/06/14/a-poolewe-diary-4-once-upon-a-time-in-the-far-north-west/
Part Five: https://suningemini.blog/2022/06/21/a-poolewe-diary-5-over-the-minch-to-lewis/
Continuation onto the the Hebridean Island of Lewis:
A Hebridean Diary: Part One – Impressions of Lewis
A Hebridean Diary: Part Two – Long Road to Uig
A Hebridean Diary: Part Three – Of Coats and Kings
This is Part Four – The Drowned Lands
©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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Lower left – my mother, Barbara; lower right – Doreen, whose husband has just died, and top – Mavis, the eternally youthful dancer)
The funeral of a much-loved ‘uncle’ from my childhood meant I had to take my 92 year old mother from the care home in Morecambe down to the old home-town of Bolton… in 30 degree heat. Mum has multiple heath conditions and the logistics are always a nightmare.
In addition, she has recently had a fall on the promenade and broken her wrist – you can see the cast in the photo.
The joy of the day was seeing these three ladies reunited – despite the sad occasion – for the first time in several years.
There used to be four of them. Louise died last year, but the remaining three – who coined the name ‘Golden Girls’ – have stubbornly refused to give up the ghost, despite all being challenged, health-wise.
All bar the elegant lady, top-left, who has just exhausted her last dancing partner and is looking for a replacement…
I can forward names…
Despite the sad occasion and the searing heat, the Golden Girls had a wonderful day, and send their love to anyone here who knows them.
©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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So high above this Lakeland landscape, it’s difficult to imagine its industrial past; in particular, how an army of labourers toiled here, competing with an impossible deadline to deliver a vital transport link between Preston and Kendal.
It’s 1819. The industrial revolution is in full swing.
But this wasn’t the railway. This was prior to the coming of steam. The labourers were navvies – mainly Irish workers whose job was to hew out of the ground the new watercourse that would allow the shipping of goods over long distances at low cost. Coal and gunpowder were the primary commodities related to this high landscape.
This was the birth of the local canal, though it was not the first to be built. The official name was ‘navigation’, which is where we get the name ‘navvy’ from.
They were powerful things, navigations. They required an act of parliament to establish; then a small army of navvies to live and work in tented villages along the route as it grew.
All by hand and shovel and sweat. With horse and cart to take away the spoil.
They were a huge success… but for a mere twenty years. Then came the canal’s slow decline. Too slow and the cargo volume was too limited – compared to the train.
The railway was cost effective and far easier to build… You could ride on the land rather than digging up a boat’s worth every few yards.
Follow my eye in this shot and you’ll see a distant stone bridge at the end of the fence-line. That’s one of the bridges to ‘nowhere’, as we call them; the only proof that the canal was ever here…
Except in those householders that bought their part of the canal (in the 1960s) and converted it as part of their property. Farmers filled it in to restore the original fields. A few householders turned it into twin-level gardens.
Only at the ‘bridges to nowhere’ can you glimpse life as it was. It makes a wonderful footpath, and the views from this section (which was said to be the boatman’s favourite) are stunning.
©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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In Part One, we looked at how most of our daytime consciousness is made up of actual words that are spoken within. This can be quite a revelation if we have become used to them but never really observed the fact. This flow of internal language is busy narrating the events of our existence, our opinions and our reactions, as though we carried it as a kind of ‘robot’ in our heads.
This robot forms part of our self, but it is a lower part compared to what is available to us. Studying this robot can teach us a lot about how we live our lives; and particularly about how we react.
But our true ‘selves’ are not far away. The robot has created its reactive maze over our lives, but beneath this domain, in a place it cannot reach, is the realm of the Real.
The Real is our realm of Awareness, which we do not realise is a separate place from the spinning wheel of noisy and intrusive thoughts.
Awareness exists in many forms. We can say the most primitive cellular life-forms have awareness of their physical or chemical environment. There is a hierarchy of knowing above this base level comprising: Information; knowledge, wisdom and eventually something that the ancients knew as gnosis – an intimacy with the truth of a situation that is self-evident and powerful.
The world of gnosis, or self-evident and self-powerful knowing, lives beneath our world of thoughts and personality. When we are able to stop the flow of verbal thoughts, we immediately sense its presence. The quiet sweetness of this place is like a summer breeze. There is no hurry or need to do anything. We have entered a state of simply ‘being’.
The mind has always bothered itself with the stuff of our lives, and primarily, the product of the senses – the most important of which is the concept of the whole body. In that ‘sense’ the body is ‘me’.
And for many people that is enough. They accept that the body will one day die and ‘take with it’ the psychological personality that has sustained a sense of self through that lifetime. We may choose to believe in a religious form of death in which that personality – refined to its soul essence – enters another Kingdom, after a suitable period of review of the life lived.
For others, there comes a strong sense that what might survive death is already here; already part of our daily life – but not the personality. Many who have been raised in conventional religious backgrounds struggle to grasp what the non-Abrahamic ‘religions’, such as Buddhism, are proposing as the deeper truth about life. The essence of this alternative approach to consciousness-development is to get ‘beneath’ thought; to find that quiet place where the chatter stops.
We can compare ‘being’ not to the letter three, but to the zero. Zero, becomes the final part of our One-Two-Zero sequence. We are not used to thinking about nothing: literally no-thing. Our minds are used to a flow of subject-object relationships: I make the tea. ‘I’ is the subject; ‘tea’ is the object. It’s the way we use language and is deeply useful for the level of thought needed in everyday life.
But I can’t say ‘I make nothing’. I might get away with it if I mean it humorously. But apart from that, ‘nothing’ is not an object the mind understands. It cannot fashion or describe no-thing. Mind is the organ of experience, and none of its body-facing experience has been about ‘nothing’. As Jung said, only deep sleep has brought it into contact with the infinite.
And now some blog-writer wants your mind to think about nothing; no-thing. And it can’t. But the value of attempting to think about no-thing – or zero – is that it trips up the normal processing of the mind and makes it think about what might underpin the world it constantly describes in worm-word chatter.
I can’t have zero carrots. But if I had seven carrots and someone took all of them from me, then the accuracy of now having zero carrots – in view of the fact that I did have seven, is useful. Someone might now owe me for seven carrots, for example…
The mind is capable of interacting with far more than just the body. But the finer realms in which it can fly freely are not those those of daily life and its habitual thought processes.
Which is what we have been doing in these three posts…
The deeper and largely unseen secret nature of awareness will be the subject of another series of posts.
The ‘One’ exercise in Part One is aimed at showing us the truth of this realm that lies just below our regular consciousness. All we have to do is to suspend the regular flow of thought (and keep doing so) to enter its beautiful space.
You may think access to ‘being’ is a lifetimes’s work, but it’s not. It is right there, right now. The seeing that looks out on the world through the lenses of the personality is at the heart of both our body and spirit. All we have to do is to shift habit with enough force to get the beautiful mind to drink the zero.
To paraphrase the Sufi mystic Rumi; All you need to do to get to love (the joy of reality) is to remove the barriers you have carefully erected against it…
Other posts in this series:
This is Part Three, the concluding post.
——————
©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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We had gone to bed early – exhausted by the journey from Poolewe to Uig.
What felt like a full night later, I woke, refreshed, to find the sun streaming through the bedroom curtains… Not a sight we were used to on this trip.
I smiled. It’s always nice when something really special ‘just happens’ on your birthday. Ahead of me was a day of gentle celebration and good food… However, for the next hour at least – since my travelling companions were all good sleepers – I had the world to myself.
Leaving my wife, Bernie, peacefully sleeping, I eased myself out of bed, put on a T-shirt, shorts and sandals and quietly ventured out into the lounge, then into the kitchen of the holiday cottage, smiling at how much better this place was than our rather basic accommodation at Poolewe.
I made a pot of tea – a cup is never enough – and grabbed a handful of cashew nuts; my usual start of day. Following the glow of the intense sun, I turned to go out onto the patio. As I slid the patio door open, I caught sight of the wall-clock. It was 05:30 in the morning…
As with the previous evening, the extent of the summer light was startling. The outside deck was flooded with the dawn, and it seemed to spill over into the rest of the garden. Clutching my tea, I sat down to commune with a dawn that had just broken over the nearby hill…
I could try to describe the beauty of that moment, but with this photo we can share it…
A birthday dawn of extreme beauty. I sat and gazed for a long time…
After two more cups of tea, I reluctantly left the natural splendour of the loch-facing garden and ventured back into the cottage. The ever-present midges were starting to feast on me and it was time to get the day started.
A leisurely two hours later, we were enjoying an egg and bacon breakfast surrounded by sunshine in the dining room. But as the meal progressed, the skies began to darken, and a chillier wind could be felt entering the open door. My main present brought a smile: my longed for coat… I would finally be not only warm, but weather proof…
No-one apart from Paul, whose people-carrier we were travelling in, realised that I had left my walking coat back in Cumbria, and had been relying on a windproof top plus three layers for survival…
Not any more! I slid the new coat on and ate my final slice of toast and marmalade wearing it. The darkening skies were beckoning… I was ready for the challenge.
We had a few simple things planned. After the tiring previous day, we wanted a gentle pace. We had heard that there was a local cooperative store a few miles away. The plan was to top up the car with fuel and see if they had any fresh produce. The following day would be Sunday and all the island’s shops would be closed.
But first, the two dogs needed some serious exercise; and a beach was called for. The frisky Collie and the blind but happy black Labrador had been wonderfully patient throughout yesterday’s journey. Now they would need a good run on another of Lewis’ famous beaches.
We consulted our detailed map and located a long beach – Uig Sands – not far from the cooperative store. A two-in-one approach would suit us well. We drove straight to the beach without stopping, but noticed a mysterious sculpted figure set back off the road. The dogs were too desperate, so we didn’t investigate. There would be time on the way back.
The Collie and the Labrador howled their way out of the people-carrier and we watched them chase off along the sands. My new coat – on since breakfast, was perfectly warm against the increasingly cold winds on the open expanse of beach. It was a warm and happy moment!
We walked for over a mile along the beautiful beach, stopping only when the incoming tide made the sand too wet to continue. An hour later, we were back in the car and intent on a coffee at the community co-op. But first we wanted to investigate the mysterious figure by the main road.
We had heard of the Lewis Chessmen, but didn’t know on what part of the island the famous Viking figures had been discovered. It turned out that the mysterious figure marked the most likely spot, though the exact location is not known.
The figure above, carved in oak by Stephen Havard, was commissioned in 2006 by Uig Community Council and erected with the co-operation of Ardroil Grazings Committee. It is based on one of the kings in the famous collection of walrus ivory chess pieces which were discovered near here in 1831.
They were found by Malcolm Macleod of Pennydonald, hidden inside a small stone structure in a nearby sand dune. Eleven of the exquisitely carved figures are in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh and 82 in the British Museum in London. They were probably made in Norway in the twelfth century during the 450-year period when the Norse ruled the Western Isles.
Back at the holiday cottage, the two ladies and I were treated to several rounds of gin and tonic. Paul had nobly offered to drive that evening to the local ‘fish and chip’ shop to get our tea, since nothing else was open. We were to eat them in the car overlooking Uig sands…
At least that’s what they told me… You can imagine my surprise when we pulled up at the most modern looking building on the island – the Uig Sands Restaurant
We had a delicious seafood dinner. The restaurant – one of the best on Lewis, is run by a local fishing family who have successfully diversified.
Soon, we were back at the cottage, being warmed for bed with a dram or two of single malt. It had been the most wonderful day… and I hadn’t been cold, once.
Part One: https://suningemini.blog/2022/05/24/a-poolewe-diary-1/
Part Two, https://suningemini.blog/2022/05/31/a-poolewe-diary-2/
Part Three, https://suningemini.blog/2022/06/06/a-poolewe-diary-3-the-loch-on-the-back-of-the-oats-box/
Part Four, https://suningemini.blog/2022/06/14/a-poolewe-diary-4-once-upon-a-time-in-the-far-north-west/
Part Five: https://suningemini.blog/2022/06/21/a-poolewe-diary-5-over-the-minch-to-lewis/
Continuation onto the the Hebridean Island of Lewis:
A Hebridean Diary: Part One – Impressions of Lewis
A Hebridean Diary: Part Two – Long Road to Uig
A Hebridean Diary: Part Three – Of Coats and Kings (this post)
©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 tree on the right marks the farthest point the setting sun reaches on its solstice progression across the ridge beyond the garden.
From the dark wood lattice of winter, through the joyous green spring, to the fullness of summer, I never tire of standing outside the house and attempting to capture a little of its evening splendour…
Falling away, now, as it nears the first tree – the marker that tells me I must leave behind this year’s zenith; though there is still much the garden will bring to profusion and song.
But summer is brief and we need to hold its glory in our hearts to remind us of ‘what can be’.
It’s a little like a nature-prayer, perhaps? Reminding us that the inner light that fires the emotions to action is never far away…
©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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In part one, we looked at a simple but effective technique to remove us from the ‘head chatter’ of the flow of verbalised thoughts in our mind. Use of the deep word ‘ONE’, although another word, itself, can act like a ‘bullet’ to stop the stream of often unconscious words that cloud our attention, affect our emotions and drain our energy.
If you’re tried this over the past week, you’ll know it not only works, but starts to reconnect us with peaceful and purposeful level of ‘belonging’ – a place and state with which we have a deep sense of identity. In other words, it feel like home.
It’s worth spending some time noting the qualities of this inner state: Alive, fresh, resilient and happy… and often described as ‘sweet’, in a literal sense.
A friend said of his experience: “It feels like the me I’ve always wanted to be”.
Do any of these things have ‘value’ in the normal, egoic-self world? They can’t be counted or have any other value placed on them; only an approximate description of how they are. But how things are can never be truly described. It exits only in your consciousness. To be more accurate, since consciousness is a much-abused term – how things are can only be the subject of your ‘awareness’. When we use this, we are doing so in a quite different way from it’s common usage. More will be said about this next week.
Mystical writers don’t mean to complicate things; they usually seek to be accurate, but in my experience, when dealing with things of the soul, we need to be direct… almost to shock…
Let’s greet it for what it is. This is the YOU. Its vibrant, sweet and resistance-less nature accompanied you to birth as an infant. It has always been you. If this is you, then what is the other, external you – the personality?
The personality is a machine of protective responses, a shell, an electronic suit of armour that you have grown around every aspect of your sense of self to protect its own preeminence from the attacks of the world.
But the real YOU is this new, inner being that has always been there. It’s not fragile. It’s just covered up and largely ignored because of the sophistication of your ‘day-self in the world’. It busies itself keeping you alive and healthy – when we let it, and waits for the time when you’ll want to meet.
To help us move further into awareness. Let’s add another Deep Word: TWO.
We can go into our ONE state in any set of conditions of the outer life. It doesn’t matter if we’re active or passive. Sitting in our favourite chair or driving the car through the horrible morning traffic, sitting on the bus or the Tube… Or meditating. let the ONE Word seize and silence the chattering Worm-Words, and, as soon as you feel that sense of sweet connection, say (mentally or physically) the word TWO.
As you do so, see the golden circle of calmed awareness created by the ONE word and visualise that it is just in front of you. Mentally reach out your hands and clasp the left and right sides; at the same time rotating this linked ‘you and it’ as though you are being spun around.
You are now on the inside… Looking out – not through the eyes of the personality – but through the eyes of this Inner YOU that contains everything you could need or want.
If thoughts persist in describing this as it’s happening, shoot them down with the ONE world spoken by the TWO consciousness.
The TWO place came before the personality – the ‘daytime you’. That is why the personality is wary of it. The personality – the egoic self – has no powers to affect it; only cloud it over with habitual patterns of what’s important.
The TWO self lives in the world of Being; a place whose nature and laws are different to the outer, material realm.
Nothing is more important than this TWO state, and the more we surrender to its loving embrace, the more we will see the outer ‘world’ in its true, non-reactive presence… and all its glorious beauty.
In the final post in this series, next Thursday, we’ll add another number to complete the series of ‘inner moves’, and come to better understand the nature of Being…
Other parts in this series:
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©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 day was already old by the time the ferry from Ullapool had docked at Stornaway. We had been warned that shops were few and far between on the Hebridean island of Lewis and advised to take advantage of the supermarkets in the capital.
The no-sunday trading laws imposed by the ‘Wee Free’ Presbyterian church were in force across the island, and we were unlikely to find exceptions, so stocking up the provisions was a really good idea – tired though we all were.
Finally equipped with a large box of groceries, we set off, somewhat weary, for the Uig peninsula, all the way across the width of the island. The route seemed straightforward, and didn’t look that far on the map. What we didn’t know was that most of the island’s roads were single-track, with passing places.
Fortunately, the main route east to west was a normal, two-lane highway, but it turned out this only took us half-way to our destination. Coming to the end of the major road, we were faced with single-track and having to use the stopping places to let oncoming cars pass us. The locals are used to this kind of driving, and are well able to judge the road, ahead. They were also very fair with ‘who was there first’. It took a few days for us to get the hang of it. Once you do, you can make much faster progress using this ‘protocol’ from the past.
The sheer ’emptiness’ of the island makes an immediate impact. The landscape is unchanging and composed of low hills, winding lochs and innumerable outcrops of white rock. The view across to the west showed a line of large mountains – presumable the last land before America. It was to take us several days before we had any sense of geography – or even orientation. There is no such thing as a straight line, here. The land is marked out by the need to follow the lochs, most of which end in the open sea, but take a convoluted route there.
Eventually, we arrived in Uig – a peninsula on the north-western shore of Lewis famed for its beaches. It had been a long journey from Poolewe, via Ullapool and the ferry, and we were ready to make a quick supper and turn in.
It was then we noticed how light it was. Despite being nearly ten at night, the sky looked as bright as an afternoon. The two dogs needed walking, so we decided to put off dinner for an hour and seek out one of the local beaches.
A ten minute drive from the holiday cottage and we found the small road that led down to our nearest beach. In the back of the people carrier, the dogs were going mad; being able to smell the sea after being cooped up in the car for most of the day…
But the next half-hour restored the wonder of the whole journey – and one of the primary reasons for coming this far. On either side of us, the near-white beach stretched out for what looked like miles.
It was scenic but – despite the summery sky – still cold. Lewis was a strange place, but we were warming to it… And tomorrow was my birthday… That long-awaited new coat would finally be providing me with real warmth!
Part One: https://suningemini.blog/2022/05/24/a-poolewe-diary-1/
Part Two, https://suningemini.blog/2022/05/31/a-poolewe-diary-2/
Part Three, https://suningemini.blog/2022/06/06/a-poolewe-diary-3-the-loch-on-the-back-of-the-oats-box/
Part Four, https://suningemini.blog/2022/06/14/a-poolewe-diary-4-once-upon-a-time-in-the-far-north-west/
Part Five: https://suningemini.blog/2022/06/21/a-poolewe-diary-5-over-the-minch-to-lewis/
Continuation onto the the Hebridean Island of Lewis:
This is Part Two
©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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A rocky height of towering truth
A hundred years of blood and sacrifice
Laid waste in haste to crown a naked lie
Where courtiers smile like truth and gloat
Up among the goat-men at the throat
Once taken, that first step reflects
The once-fine earth, which now collects
Within the wheels of grasping greed
Old boys, less good, embrace the skin
Beneath the hooves of goats and men
©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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