I think of them as ‘Easter skies’ – that combination of cold air, bright light, and the hue of fresh green as the trees begin to bud.
It’s not unusual for April to be winter-like, even though we are past the spring equinox and the light has an entirely different power. To my mind, the coming spring literally ‘shoots’ its presence into the skies, giving a dramatic life-colour to the more barren blues and silvers; wonderful in their own right, but nothing compared to the emotional effect of the three together.
‘Hang on,’ it seems to say. We’re nearly there…
©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 preparation of Magical Landscapes (2)
by Steve Tanham
You begin with an idea; in this case an entire workshop held outdoors, in the vivid landscape of the English Lake District. It’s vast and wild… and you have no control over the weather, not even in May.
The goal is for those attending to experience themselves in a new way. In these dramatic surroundings, and in the midst of warm companionship, we can become inspired and intrigued by a new kind of physical and emotional quest.
The inner goal, experienced by many on these weekends in the past, is to SEE differently. We consider that we see, accurately, all the time. But the brain is subtle in its power to replace the real act of seeing with ‘recognition’ of what it has already viewed and processed. Situations that are ‘different’ provide a split-second of potential to break through this. It is the intention of our workshops to enable amplified moments that have this ‘magical’ quality.
The content needs to be fascinating. People will join for many reasons:
- You’ve run workshops before, and that joyous bunch of people who support the Silent Eye team know you will, once again, put your heart and soul into making it special.
- They trust you to make ‘outdoors’ work. No-one wants to spend the day sodden, so you need to have thought through what it’s like to be in their minds on hour three of a rainstorm…
- But providence has seemed to move when you’ve done this before, so you trust…and have that Plan B tucked in your pocket.
The lakes, hills, and rivers of the Lake District are your best friends. People would come just to see a well-organised visit to them – but if you can add some additional and real magic into this experience, they will never forget it. But you are not in the comfort and ease of a village hall or retreat in the Peak District… It’s just you, the landscape, the people… and the plan.
That magic is already in that landscape – especially for an event beginning and ending at Castlerigg Stone Circle. The skill is in how you bring it out of the ‘ground’ and into the hearts of the players in this dramatic setting.
There needs to be a central theme to the whole event, one that faithfully follows – and to some degree dictates – the participant’s experience. This time, the theme is ‘The Journey of the Hero’, and is based upon the work of Joseph Campbell, whose book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces proposed that all myths followed a similar pattern. Campbell extracted this pattern into a standard form, which he called ‘The Monomyth’.
The ‘Monomyth’ describes a number of key stages in the hero’s journey:
1. The hero’s adventure begins in the ordinary world.
2. He/she must leave the ordinary world when they receive a call to adventure.
3. With the help of a mentor, the hero will cross a guarded threshold, leading them to a supernatural world, where familiar laws and order do not apply.
4. There, the hero will embark on a road of trials.
5. Other-worldly allies sometimes assist.
6. As the hero faces the ordeal, they encounter the greatest challenge of the journey.
7. Upon rising to this challenge, the hero receives a reward or boon.
8. They return to the ordinary world, empowered to act in a higher way.
It’s a potent formula which invites us all to pay careful attention, particularly when the word ‘ordeal’ is noticed. This has to be real. It won’t be life-threatening, but it will demand a kind of sacrifice… In return, what is found at the destination will be both unexpected and greater than the expended effort.
By gesture, the landscape will be asked to serve the heroes, as they travel from unknowing to knowing; each new location adding to their intimate knowledge of an inner process that belongs only to them….
The final element is something new: gesture. Being an outdoor event, we are limited in how we express the inherent truths of ‘being’, personality and self-development. Everyone attending will be shown a new set of gestures at each site.
By the end of the weekend, each will possess a compact but comprehensive vocabulary of gestures by which they can review and describe their own hero’s journey. We can confidently predict that each person will have experienced at least one extraordinary experience.
Waterproofs and sturdy, walking boots are strongly recommended. Regular walkers will be used to such things, but these events are also for the casual walker.
Our meeting at Castlerigg Stone Circle on Friday, 6th May will be an introduction to the weekend, and local to the site. Saturday 7th May will see the most active day, about which we can reveal no details. Dinner is booked in the early evening at a country pub local to our final walking destination. Sunday will see us walking locally to Keswick, followed by our closing gathering once again at Castlerigg Circle.
The Journey of the Hero, May 6-8th, 2022. A few places are available.
Contact us for details:
Rivingtide@gmail.com
©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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I’ve always been a bit artistic, but more of an illustrator than a painter. Sue Vincent was our painter, and a very good one – though she was modest about her achievements.
In the early days of the Silent Eye, Sue and I worked together to create a version of the Silent Eye’s enneagram – seemingly, a nine-pointed star, until you look deeper – in a style where I laid out the geometry in Adobe Illustrator, and she added the ‘heart’ of the interior in a rose-based design. People were still commenting on it, years later. it was a very emotive image…
When we lost Sue, we lost our ability to have ‘paintings’. There are some subtle – and usually emotional – creations that need the gentleness of touch that the painter brings.
Our world brightened in this regard when Giselle Bolotin offered to help our work with her designs for the Silent Eye’s Oracle Deck – a work in progress; example below. But we can’t keep abusing Giselle’s time and need a degree of expertise in the use of simple ‘painter’ techniques to support the photography that Stuart and I rely on within our blogs.
So, I gritted my teeth and bought a licence of Adobe Fresco for the iOS platforms – iPhone and iPad. My iPad is rapidly becoming my main creative tool – something I would have thought impossible a few years ago!
It’s not that it’s better than my desktop Mac. For one thing, it’s far less logical. But it is very fast at doing certain things; especially with images. I may not be a painter, but I’m a busy photographer… and the iPad/iPhone combination is at the very heart of that work.
I have a love-hate relationship with Adobe. In my former, corporate life, I had a licence for their entire Illustrator/Photoshop suite, including the desktop publishing component – InDesign, in which the three years worth of monthly lessons were created.
Adobe let all these older licences ‘die’ when they brought out their new ‘CC’ architecture, and would not update the older software to be compatible with new Macs. I can see the commercial logic – just about all the big software companies have moved to an annual ‘subscription’ model – but their actions increased the cost of running Adobe software as a ‘small creative user’ by an order of magnitude.
With the considerable skills of Caroline Ormond joining our management team, we were able to migrate the older InDesign documents to a Microsoft Word format, enabling us to roll out a new generation, protected from the considerable price hikes we would have endured. Despite all this, I remain a big fan of how Adobe software works and is thought through for the ‘professional’.
Generally, I avoid Microsoft applications, finding them non-intuitive and layered with things you need to know from their history, but Caroline says, with the right medication, I may even be able to use Word myself…
But back to Adobe Fresco; the App with which I hope to become a ‘painter’, albeit of simple things…
After some particularly harrowing TV news from Ukraine the other day, I took Tess for a walk along the old canal path. Festooned with golden daffodils, it’s a joy at this time of year.
There, in the middle of the path, were a group of daffodils that had been mutilated, perhaps by some children venting their frustration at something. I picked them up and photographed them in my hands, seeing in the unnecessary death a loose parallel with the unthinking emotions that drive occupying soldiers to massacre civilians. I’m not comparing the two, but the blind emotions of destruction are related.
By photographing their ‘wounds’, I felt I had prolonged their life a little bit longer. Later, I wondered if they would form a visual centrepiece for a post… this one.
The bright yellow reminded me of the Ukrainian flag. I considered whether I could create a photo-based image that also had that flag’s blue as well? To do that in the way I wanted, I would have to ‘paint’ over the photo in a way that showed the brushstrokes.
Warily, I opened the Adobe Fresco app and began to learn. Several hours later, I had the opening image, above, made by layering the broken daffodils over a recent landscape of Derwent Water, then painting over some of the flowers in different brush strokes and colour washes with a digital ‘watercolour’ brush.
It’s not great… but it’s a start. We can get better from here. The exercise also let me channel my feelings about Ukraine onto the flowers. Perhaps their mutilation was not a total waste.
Note: You can see more of Giselle’s work on her Instagram page. Just key in Giselle Bolotin.
©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 preparation of Magical Landscapes (1)
by Steve Tanham
There’s no ‘But what is it’, today. The series will continue for a few weeks, restarting next Sunday.
Three of us have been busy doing a ‘dry run’ of the plans for our ‘Journey of the Hero’ workshop 6-8 May, centred in Keswick. We’ve been crossing lakes, walking up hills and following rivers to mysterious stone structures… Oh, and a quick visit to a couple of ancient stone circles too.
It sounds fun… and it is – on one level – but its also exacting. You have to be certain that its going to be right. And that takes a lot of detailed thinking and creative imagination, which, as any psychologist will tell you, is at the heart of the ‘magical practice’ of encouraging things to happen.
The central issue you have to get right for each of the weekend’s segments is timing. You envisage a visit to, say the Castlerigg Stone Circle, a mere 3000 years old, and decide that will make a great beginning and finale to the ‘Journey of the Hero’ weekend. But that’s just one place and there can be several miles between each location, and that needs careful planning. A convoy of cars, each following the other, is not an exact science; not when they have to pull out, separately, onto a busy dual carriageway.
Believe it or not, we have even developed a ‘protocol’ for this that – if followed – ensures we all arrive together.
We known the drill. We’ve been doing this since 2013. On Tuesday, I’ll be writing about what it’s actually like to plan and execute a ‘magical landscape’ workshop.
For now, below is one of my favourite shots of the past three days: Ashness Bridge on the shore of Derwent Water, near Keswick.
The magic’s already in the landscapes. To work with it you just have to tease it out… On Thursday, in the Preparation of Magical Landscapes (2) post, I’ll be looking at this fascinating process, and how everything ‘comes together’ in the last week before the event.
©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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Reaching Realisation
by Steve Tanham
The purpose of language is to convey meaning. We cannot convey meaning directly because it exists in an invisible mental realm unique to the individual. We all live in slightly different worlds, based on our own experience. As a tribe, society or country, we each agree to subscribe to the inherent values present in that shared group.
We use language to pass meaning to others – such as our children, which is why the child’s brain is hard-wired to rapidly absorb language in infancy; an ability that is reduced as we grow older.
If we can teach our children to understand our meanings, then we have a hope of passing onto them our values – sets of meanings that assemble into patterns of behaviour; differences between selfish and selfless, the latter for the good of the ‘tribe’: a quality that seems to be abandoned, cyclically, in our common history.
Language changes. It can be likened to the sand patterns left on a beach. The water comes in and re-maps the sand (language) emphasising certain popular meanings but partly or wholly erasing the original, deeper meaning. The time-tides will always be there, but their effects on the beach will not always be positive, from any given perspective. It is up to us as a society to protect the deepest meanings if we value what they are. These are often considered to be spiritual; meaning representative of a higher order of consideration than those we are concerned with in our daily work.
Classical teaching protected the language, allowing the deeper, historical meanings to survive. But it may move too slowly to prosper in an ‘internet age’ of rapid changes. Modern society is both fickle and casual in its populist allowing of ‘meaning-slip’, allowing deeper meanings to be devalued or lost altogether. One look at the Internet shows the alarming erosion of what were considered essential meanings not long ago.
For ordinary meanings, this is frustrating, but the ‘next generation’ have always had the freedom to create their own idioms. For deeper meanings, we sometimes need reminding that they are there, and a review of their possibly timeless value.
One such word is ‘realisation’. It’s a word at the heart of true spirituality. Why is the act of realisation so important?
It is rare that a single word contains two states: one, the ‘before’; the other the ‘after’ – mirroring a quite definite process of growth within the human mind and heart.
That growth is in the understanding of something, and that something is nothing less than the nature of reality. To make this post into a journey of deeper understanding, we need to step back and define our terms…
An example of the common use of ‘realisation’, might be this:
‘Suddenly, James Strange realised the key to Mariella’s guilt was the colour of her hair!’
It could be a line from a detective story, which is not a bad way to describe the human ascent that moves from ‘world’ to ‘self’ as the mystic strives to comprehend their place in that world. In the above line of fiction, the word realisation means the dawning of a new level of understanding. It’s that moment when the inner comprehension goes ‘click’ and something more than the sum of the parts comes into existence.
The word has an ancient origin. We can approach the literal meaning of it by dividing it into ‘real’ and ‘ise’ (or ‘ize’), both of the latter implying to ‘be’.
We encounter the living act of realisation when we try to learn a new language as an adult. This may be in support of a longed-for trip, for example. Initially, we may struggle, but when, at the end of the term, our teacher invites us all out to a (say) French restaurant where we will be expected to speak a little of the language we have been learning, we have our chance to use this new way to convey meaning.
Initially fearful, we might find ourselves at a moment where – through living it – we come to a feeling of what can only be described as ‘belonging’. Suddenly, French is ours, and we will work so much harder to build on that foundation of inner growth.
We’ve all had such moments. They may be found in the acquisition of any new skill that requires work. In our trivial ‘detective’ example, the hero – by having that light-bulb moment – is able to connect everything he knows about his suspect.
A realisation has that power. It’s far more than the assembly of facts; rather it is a deeply personal involvement in the transformation of what we know into a new type of knowing. The ancients even had a word for it: they called it Gnosis – an increase of understanding that changes the person experiencing the ‘inner expansion’.
The mystical journey may be undertaken by anyone. Schools such as the Silent Eye are founded upon the development of a ‘path’ comprising stages of understanding marked by specific gateways. These gateways are often called initiations – a word that implies a beginning, or more accurately, a new beginning. In that new beginning, we understand the hidden meaning of realisation: to make real…
In that new beginning, a new world is born…
©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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Once every two years we go to a local ceramics fair, held in the middle of the Cumbrian countryside. The majority of items are pricey ‘artisan’ pottery. We usually admire them and move on, but occasionally we’ve been moved by a piece and return before we leave to make a purchase.
The other day, we were cleaning and partly rearranging the living room. My wife suggested we relocate two of our favourite pottery pieces onto one of the windowsills that face the garden.
We decided to give it ago… then sleep on it; seeing how we felt in the morning. The following day, we were delighted to find bright sunlight streaming through the blinds with such energy that it patterned the ceramics and their surroundings with shadow-stripes…
A quick snap with the iPhone later, I had the above photo…
You can’t always capture the moment; but, here, the camera did its job well. Let’s hope the summer ahead lives up to this bright promise.
©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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Badly out of pocket in Limoncello after the eagle-eyed spotters of last week’s ‘groyne’ image cut through my deviousness, I’ve upped the ante with this one…
The cunning clue: you wouldn’t want to get caught the wrong side of it!
++++++++++++++++++++ Answer Time ++++++++++++++++++++++
There were no fully correct answers. Audrey Driscoll came the closest, but I’m going to be magnanimous with this one and open two bottles of Cabalié and invite round all those who replied. We can all have a glass of this delicious French red and watch the sunset… well, we could if it wasn’t raining.
Thanks to all who took part. Another mystery image on Sunday…
We’re moving to wine for our tantalising tipple…. This is one of our favourite reds, Cabalié; from the Languedoc region of south-east France, close to the Mediterranean Sea. Smooth, lusty and refined… what more could you ask!
The brochure says:
About Cabalié Wine
One of Laithwaites’ customers favourite, Cabalie wine received many excellent reviews as well as a few awards attesting for its high quality. It is produced by the amazing winemaker Hervé Sabardeil in a 2,000 old vineyard situated in the south of France along the Cotes Catalanes.
And no, I’m not on commission… Nor am I a wine merchant!
The answer will be given – here– after 9 pm London time on Monday 28 March.
©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 man put down the copper piece. Its construction had taken months, each day a voyage of learning. The elderly and bearded tutor had been patient, his bright eyes – a contrast to the dark beard – had eagerly overseen the development of the shaping of the copper pieces, then the detailed carving of the flowers, followed by the refinements, and eventually, the final buffing and polish.
At the beginning, the student had known nothing of making art in metal; had never even heard of ‘industrial art’. All he knew were the valleys and hills and the cattle and sheep that grazed on them in the summer… but not in the winter, when there was no work…
In the December of a normal year, he would have been unemployed and near starving to death, with occasional hand-outs from the local church keeping him alive. Until the pasture work in spring returned, he would spend his nights in a barn, graciously granted by one of the farm-owners who employed him in the summer. Being ‘dumb’ – as the inability to speak was then known – was often a death-sentence.
Now he was being called forward to receive the school’s accolade for best-worked piece of the term. Hesitant, he carried the beaten copper ‘raised dish’ through the rows of benches to the front of the class. At the age of thirty-one, but looking twice that, it was the last thing he expected to be doing.
His mentor with the dark beard watched him, nodding and encouraging his progress to the front. When he got there, their class teacher held up the copper dish and the rolled certificate of merit that had resulted from it and said, “Gentlemen, we’d like to present this special award to Tom Hardkess…” he paused, then, as though the emotion were too much. “Tom has been unable to speak from birth, so his gestures are all he has to express his feelings at being such a successful part of the Keswick School of Industrial Art.”
Hardkess turned, nervously facing his classmates – all of them adult males. He bowed and placed his hand over his heart… nothing more. Then he went back to his seat beneath the glowing and somewhat misty eyes of his personal mentor, a man named Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley.
Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley wasn’t just the man’s friend and protector, he was the founder of the Keswick School of Industrial Art; one of several such metalworking ‘evening colleges’ found in the Lake District in the 1880s. They were established to alleviate the seasonal unemployment of the region, and, as a social force within the Arts and Crafts movement, to reduce alcoholism among the poor workers of that remote farming region… long before mass tourism lifted it to relative prosperity.
Rawnsley was a church Canon and had served as personal Chaplain to the King, George V. He attended Oxford University before rising rapidly through the church. He was deeply attracted by the writings and speeches of John Ruskin, a fellow student at Oxford, who was a pivotal figure in social reform legislation and the Arts and Crafts movement. Ruskin was a fellow Lake District dweller and I hope to do one of these post on him. Ruskin was the primary sponsor of the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of English painters, poets, and art critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Michael Rossetti.
Note to the above Pre-Raphaelite painting: The door in the painting has no handle, and can therefore be opened only from the inside, representing “the obstinately shut mind”.[2] The painting was considered by many to be the most important and culturally influential rendering of Christ of its time. Those of a mystical persuasion may reflect on the deep symbolism)
The Arts and Crafts movement was dedicated to the retention of ‘hand-made’ skills in the face of ‘ugly’ mass production’. We can perhaps smile at the implicit indulgence of those wealthy people who were at the centre of the movement. But it did provide a critical balance to bad design and produced its own practical creations – such as many of today’s most sought-after country houses.
Good design, like art, is timeless…
Rawnsley loved the Lake District. The latter half of his life was devoted to improving the lot of those in his small parish of Crossthwaite, near Keswick. He was a modestly wealthy man, though he donated much of it to local causes.
Canon Hardwick Rawnsley and his wife Edith founded the Keswick School of Industrial Art (KSIA) in 1884. Its aims were to teach woodwork and repoussé metalwork. The school prospered. Within ten years more than a hundred men were enrolled and working on the production of beautiful objects of furniture and metal-based decoration. Shortly the school became self-funding and was able to move to its own building on the outskirts of Keswick – see picture. The school closed in 1984. The building became a restaurant.
My personal connection with the Kendal School of Industrial Art came about unexpectedly when I spotted the copper dish above in the window of a Keswick antique shop. It was expensive and, after dithering in the shop, I walked away… only to run back an hour later and buy it, declaring that I would have it as a Christmas present. It sits in pride of place in our living room and comes into its own when the summer sun shines on its hand-worked surface. Recently, I began to research the school that created it, and the kind of man whose deft fingers made it… and decided to write this blog; hopefully the first of several on the unsung heroes of the Lake District.
Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley was a man of amazing energy, he devoted his life to improving the welfare of those less fortunate. In addition to his religious duties at Crossthwaite and as Canon of Carlisle Cathedral, he was a County Councillor in Cumberland and fought hard to extend education to a wider community and to bring about improvements in public health.
He masterminded campaigns against the despoilation of the Lake District by indiscriminate railway construction and mining operations. An active campaigner for the Open Spaces movement, he did much to ensure that public rights of way in the Lake District remained open – ensuring a lasting legacy for the millions of walkers who enjoy its unique scenery. Finally, and to his eternal credit, he was one of three founders of the National Trust, which spearheaded the preservation of our unique history in landscapes and historic gardens and buildings.
Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley published some 40 books, including biographies, travel guides and accounts of archaeological excavations. He published several volumes of poetry and wrote hundreds of sonnets.
He died in 1920.
There is an excellent family website here.
©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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©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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Here’s #4, a very strange object!
A new feature: the ‘cunning clue’ :
‘It may have been there a long time?’
The answer will be published below on Monday evening. This will give time for our blogging friends in far places to consider the image and cogitate!
Please write your entries in the blog’s comments.
Good luck!
————- Answer ————
I’m going to do badly out of this because several people recognised what it was…
So here’s the bigger picture! It was the wooden remains of a groyne or sea-break on Heysham Beach.
So congratulations and a virtual bottle of Limoncello to each of our winners:
Willowdot21, Caroline and Audrey Driscoll and Pensitivity.
Another one on Sunday…
Virtual bottles of this week’s fave tipple, Limoncello, to the two best answers. I’m not bored with this superb drink, yet!
©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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No-one needs reminding of the dangers we now face…
‘World War Three’ seems to be on everyone’s lips. There’s a danger of self-fulfilling prophecy about this, with images of clever told-you-sos grinning after the event… albeit it, briefly.
How did we get here? I’d like to propose four new horsemen of the modern apocalypse: greed, fear, impotence and ego. There’s nothing new about any of them, but, together, they have (in my opinion) come to define an age that was supposed to offer creativity and freedom to a world of people made comfortable by progress.
My father is Ukrainian and my mother is Russian…
Each of us has an opinion, hopefully, though there are signs that having an opinion actually formed by our own thinking is a dying art…
We watch the deadly horror of the nightly news, seeing Ukrainian cities destroyed by the will of a man whose response to protest is greater and more extreme violence. His techniques of destruction were honed in Syria, while the world looked on and did little. He is a psychopath, one of many thrown up by extreme events throughout history; Alexander ‘the great’ spent most of his time pursuing the same path, but history is written by the ‘victors’. Hitler was defeated but only by a remarkable unity of ‘Western’ determination.
They were never enemies…
Such determination is expensive. Britain only recently finished paying off its war debt to the USA. What was left of the British Empire changed at that point, effectively ceasing to exist. Hitler may have been vanquished, (and we should remember this was greatly assisted by Russia) but the new order soon marked itself by virtue of Europe and America’s fear of Communism, and for good reason, though isolated countries produce extreme and often violent responses.
This is a deadly thing when the front line of the technology of war is the hydrogen bomb, several of which will effectively destroy a country.
Such cataclysms are the place where history is re-written, where it comes to an end for many and where the world ‘order’ changes. Occasionally, there are even greater changes. Astrologers tell us we are in one of those periods. There is not sufficient space here to go into details, but the planetary conjunctions of the past two years have been once in a lifetime events…and continue to be so.
Our brotherly nations will then still be able to make peace…
It can reasonably be said that all of this is an externalisation of human nature; that everything befalls country is an outward projection of its collective inner state, which, itself, is the sum of the individual inner states.
That would have been rejected as fanciful before the last century – the period in which man’s internal ‘processes of self’ were finally made visible. We can acccurately label President Putin as a psychopath because we watch him accelerate the destruction of Ukraine and know he feels nothing.
Actually, that’s untrue. The self-centred person feels a lot, and it’s all to do with the inflation of their inner importance, their ego. President Putin knows this is his last chance to restore the cold-war status of Russia and go down gloriously in its history. That this is already impossible, except by coercion on a massive scale, is of no concern to him.
I am ashamed I allowed lies to be told on Russian TV screens…
It’s likely that China does not want a world war, but it does want a new world order. It will become the markets denied by sanctions to Russia, but will set its own price. No-one else will bury from him. Russia will become a vassal state to its Eastern neighbour. Its economy is already tiny, in comparison to other large nations, and the success of Western economic sanctions, although painful to the rest of the world too, are already destroying the rest of Russia’s economic options.
Into the arms of China it will go, leaving the entire far-northern hemisphere dominated by a single super-power, with Europe, now damaged by Britain’s exit at the worst possible time, facing the economically-united northern neighbour. Sobering thoughts…
The Russian oligarchs are an example of extreme greed, but are not alone. London is the world capital of money-laundering. When I last looked, something like 90% of the world’s wealth was ‘owned’ by less than 5% of its people. No-one sane wants Communism, but that Democracy has led us here suggests that Democracy has long ceased being democratic. Its societal manipulation of voters’ minds – gleefully enriched by the ability to buy social media influence – is a war on the individual. We can exercise few choices that affect the super-rich, or the continued growth of their power, just as the citizens of Russia and other authoritarian regimes have no real say in the running of their countries .
We were silent in 2014 when it all started…
Positives… We should end this by examining what they could be. Renewable energy on a massive scale could be one example. Against the odds, and thanks to strategic investment by companies like Siemens, wind power has become efficient and economic. Vast wind farms now operate offshore, delivering an increasingly significant proportion of our energy.
On the negative side, a prolonged economic war with Russia will empower the calls for restored ‘dirty energy’ to be given special and ‘temporary status’. This will include fracking, currently suspended in the UK. The first round of this has been negative from a parliamentary ‘advice’ perspective, but watch this space for manipulation.
Right-wing MP’s have their fingers in many pies. A good deal of funding has come from Russia into their coffers. Serious journalistic investigations are ongoing into the influence of Russian money on the Brexit campaigns. Anything that breaks up Europe benefits President Putin; the rest is common-sense logic for a dictator prepared to poison the city of Salisbury to get to one oligarch.
It’s unlikely we will stop President Putin from destroying Ukraine, though the valour of the people of that brave country is remarkable, and the west has made united efforts to support the democratically elected leaders. ‘Crush and destroy’ will continue to be Putin’s approach; and we needn’t think that he will stop at the Ukrainian border, as his missile attack on the army base only 20 miles from Poland has just demonstrated. It is the action of a determined man, one who cares nothing for the world’s opinion, and has seen how effectively it worked in Syria.
Hitler followed a similar path. He was stopped only by force, far later in the day than it could have been. No-one wants to believe that really bad things are happening… things that change their world-order.
It can be argued that the West had a chance to prevent this. To do so it needed to acknowledge Russia’s right to be protected from having a NATO country on its immediate borders in the former Soviet Union territories. Putin asked NATO not to do this. The West could have invested in Ukraine, economically, without accepting its demands to be a NATO member, thereby creating a buffer zone between European and Russian interests. The economic structures to support this were already well established – just look at the oil pipeline through Germany. Ironically, at the time of checking this post, there are new, ongoing peace talks centred on this very option,
The Ukrainian people would originally have rejected it, since they viewed themselves as politically independent, but how much better might this have been than a destroyed country and a massacred population?
No-one believed Putin would do what he has done. Nor did he believe that the West would be so efficient in its opposition to his actions. So here we are, with Putin holding the balance of terror and the trigger to his nuclear weapons. A psychopath isn’t worried about consequences in the same way that a sane person is.
I always worry when I hear people voicing the opinion that ‘our best hope is that someone close assassinates him’. It’s a clear failure of everything else.
If we have a prayer, beyond the devastating suffering of the Ukrainian people, let us use it for Marina Ovsyannikova, an editor at Channel One, Russia’s state media channel. On Tuesday evening, she rushed onto the early evening live news channel with an extraordinary protest against Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
She has been released after nearly 24 hours of questioning. A fine has been levied for her production of a video accompanying her actions. Other state legal action against her is likely.
I don’t know anyone else that brave… but our collective history does. The quotes throughout this post are hers, taken from the pre-recorded video she left behind. We should be suspicious if she mysteriously falls ill…
Moments such as Marina Ovsyannikova’s TV protest are pivotal in the world’s inner history of humanity. They strike through the slow crawl of politics and bring us into contact with our Being. Perhaps at that level, equipped with the power of truth, and facing our fears, we can make a difference.
©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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Rivers of the Sun
by Steve Tanham
And did we dare, upon these rugged Yorkshire hills.
To dream we could, then frame in would, then do…
Life mirrored in the human word, embracing those who spoke it
With commitment and with love
That, flowing into what was seen up high, in heather heaven
Became, like sparkling stream in winter, a promise.
-;–;–;-
Then, eight circles later of the Sun, you left us
Three into two does go, though not in maths
But in the chambers of the heart and soul
Shared streams still flow from heather’s heights
Forever new, forever home, forever in our thoughts
Yesterday, I heard your voice, homed upon the Ilkley wind
And smiled…
-;–;–;-
©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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