One of the ancient mystical traditions that has turned out to be startlingly modern is that of the Sufis. We may be familiar with Sufi thought in the form of its often quoted poetry, such as that of Rumi, or the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the ‘Astronomer-Poet of Persia’, whose work became widely-read in the west, following its translation by Edward Fitzgerald in 1859.
(900 words; a ten minute read)
The Sufis used the wine glass or wine jug as a subtle motif. The delicate glass may be filled with any liquid, but water or wine features in many of the teaching tales. We take such a vessel for granted, but it merits closer investigation…
The glass is fixed. If we try to insert something hard into it, like a stone, it will break. But if we pour a liquid into it, the result is harmonious. What actually happens? The liquid takes the shape of the glass, filling every cavity to such an extent that the two are practically the same… But we know they are not; the obliging liquid has taken on the shape and contours of the container into which it has been poured. If the wine were white and not red, it might be difficult to even know of its existence. The glass, though more ‘basic’ in its nature, is necessary for the wine to exist in a drinkable form. If the glass is finely made, it reveals the depths of beauty in the shimmering wine, and even allows reflections of the world back to itself.
Let’s imagine our wine is beyond ‘white’ and has a mercurial quality that makes it look silver…
Our silver wine not only fills the vessel, it also reflects the colours, lights and shadows of what flows through the glass from outside, but reversed. They become an imprint of each other, but the silver wine is fluid and flexible, whereas the glass is fixed and brittle.
If the glass is scratched or dirty, the light being reflected from within the vessel is less bright than it could be. But our silver wine still needs the holding power of the glass if it is to remain effective in the world of solid things. It is the glass which collects and transmits the light from the ‘outside’, giving the glassy material all its life, and the silver wine half its life.
In our continuing exploration of the nature of self, we can use this Sufi image to great effect, especially if we make it a bit more sophisticated. Let’s bring our glass alive… and give it feelings and the ability to react, making it it an engine of perception, reaction and response to the physical world.
Our new glass is evolved. It is made of the substance of the world, whereas our silver wine is from another place. To function in the world, the silver wine needs the cooperation of the glass, allowing its will to be guided by the sparkling liquid within.
Our new glass is imbued with the power of reaction, in the form of like and dislike to everything it experiences. The silver wine within the glass does not need to like or dislike; it is completely at peace with whatever happens, living in an ocean of wonder and reflecting it. But its life is now so closely mirrored with the glass, that it begins to absorb the reactions that the glass experiences to the outside world. It remains dutiful to the glass and its perceived world, but knows it could do much more for the glass than just receive and reflect its life. But the silver wine cannot function in the world of the glass without its container…
The only chance the silver wine now has for a greater life within the glass is for the outer vessel – the glass – to get to a point where it knows that it has tired of its reactions to the world and needs to get back to the limitless and unjaded level of life that is the silver wine’s inner vitality – a world the glass knew well when it was young and the silver wine had just been poured into it.
The glass represents the reactive life of the personality with its body, informed by its brain and will. The experience of the world passes through these and forms the life of something in the glass that is the mirror of the silver wine. This is the self, and it is only ever a lesser reflection of the shining inner liquid.
In mystical learning, we work to move the seat of the consciousness from the glass to the silver wine, quietening the reactive self, and allowing the consciousness to have dual centres, each used within its own realm.
We can take this exercise deeper by making it into a meditation. We first imagine that there are two worlds, one filled with light and fluidity, the others more bound by physical laws of form. We then imagine two streams of life meeting up, one as an inherited form being blown, beside a furnace, into a beautifully curved wine glass; the other becoming the finest silver wine and being poured into the beautiful glass. Together, they have the potential of perfection, but only the glass keeps the wine composite, whole and drinkable.
The analogy is ultimately limited, but contains some deeper symbols hidden in the story. At the right point these can speak directly to our own ‘silver wine’ triggering far-reaching events for both glass, wine… and the ultimate wine-lover.
Other parts in this series:
Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, This is Part Five
©Stephen Tanham, 2021.
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, A journey through the forest of personality to the sunrise of Being.
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I’m partial to stations… especially those that have history. The Victorian railways were a magnificent achievement, and changed British society in far-reaching ways.
(600 words; a five minute read)
During the late 1950s, and early 1960s my grandparents in Bolton used to take me for days out to the seaside.
We never got as far as Grange-over-Sands, the lovely town that nestles at the eastern end of the English Lake District’s peninsulas. My father first brought us here in one of our long distance days out sometime in my early teens. By then the ‘swinging sixties’ were in full swing. We had previously been on a two-week (static caravan) holiday to St Ives in Cornwall, and everywhere I subsequently visited was judged against that childhood perfection.
But Grange made an impact. Its natural features were framed by hills that swept down towards the sea, yet seemed held back by the solid combination of long promenade and twin railway tracks – tracks that would take you all the way to Barrow-in-Furness… or even up the entire Cumbrian coast to Carlisle.
The railways station is a classic. The information board states it boldly: The railway created Grange. A century before even the idea of a road linking north-west England with Scotland was dreamt of, Victorian day-trippers would take paddle steamers from bustling Morecambe, across the bay, to arrive in Grange for afternoon tea. They would stroll through the beautiful park before re-boarding their boats to return, filled with delight at their exciting and well-filled Sunday outing.
The railway wasn’t long in developing this potentially lucrative route; linking the coast and the main line to Lancaster, Preston, Liverpool and onwards to London. Grange boomed.
At first, Grange had only a wooden hut to serve as a station on what was then a single track line. The Furness Railway Company took over the line and doubled the tracks, engaging Lancaster architect Edward Paley to design the present station, which opened in 1872. The company also built the adjacent Grange Hotel, designed by the same architect.
John Brogden, a celebrated civil engineer and resident of nearby Holme Island, was commissioned to design the promenade and park that would frame the station, using land that had been a muddy swamp. The result was a centre that attracted both holidaymakers and new residents . Grange’s population exploded, growing from 200 in 1861 to 1700 in 1881.
Grange was considered ‘genteel’ compared with other northern resorts, but eventually followed the same decline after the death of the ‘railway age’. It was saved by the growing popularity of the Lake District as a place to live, not just visit. Ironically, this was made possible by the presence of the M6 motorway only twenty minutes’ drive away. Many people commute from here into the major towns and cities, sixty or more miles south.
The town is now a rare example of a self-sufficient community. A variety of individual shops have survived and prospered. We live a twenty-minute drive away, on the edge of Kendal, but our preference for everyday fresh food shopping is Grange-over-Sands. The promenade and large park at its end also provides our collie with good walks.
©Stephen Tanham, 2021.
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, A journey through the forest of personality to the sunrise of Being.
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Winter landscapes involving water are plentiful, but water can be a tricky subject to photograph. The eye is much more subtle than a camera lens, and we have to help the camera overcome this…
(200 words, a two-minute read)
Watery landscapes can look pale and ‘flat’ if you let the standard camera settings take charge. The lens is doing what it’s supposed to, but our eye takes in more than is being photographed. A good way around this is to take the shot, then use the built-in editing suite to increase the contrast of the subject, then the richness of the colours. Finally, use the saturation control to reduce the ‘overcooked’ shot to the level of colouration you want. Many photographers have their own ‘look and feel’, achieved in this way as a signature style. This isn’t altering the photograph, just a fine-tuning of the levels of light that are already in the image.
If you’re in bright sunlight and near a river with a reflective bed, such as limestone, find a submerged feature and get as close as you can; holding the camera just above the water line. Wellingtons or even waders are great if you want to lift your shot to the next level….
Winter is a great time to experiment with light. Sometimes I like to break the rules and see what kind of ‘arty’ shot I can get. The final two examples, here and below, are shots that should not have worked, but did. The one above had too much of the sun’s brightness through the trees and on the fast-flowing water. By dramatically reducing the brilliance of the image, the water took on an inky texture, and the sunburst changed colour to complementary mauve.
In the final shot, I was in bright, winter sunshine, crossing the River Kent on the old suspension bridge and decided to take a ‘vertical panorama’, as in previous posts. Instead of moving from a level line upwards into the sky, I started the shot looking down into the water, then panned up the length of the river and into the sun. I expected the result to be a washout… but sometimes, wonderful and artistic things happen! With digital shots, it’s easy to take many and throw away most of them… The ones that remain will be worth the experimentation.
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, A journey through the forest of personality to the sunrise of Being.
All images by the author and copyright.
©Stephen Tanham, 2021.
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As children, we lose ourselves in play and the toys or games that give the play structure: a skipping rope, chalk to mark out a court, balls to kick and control… perhaps, now, a computer to enter a virtual world. As adults we inhabit a different world, and the entanglements of our earlier years may pay us a return visit…
(1400 words; a ten minute read)
The big red ball was heavy. It was a toy for a large dog, and we didn’t have one, so I felt justified in what I was about to do. When you held it, there was strangeness to its mass, as though the density came from ‘another place’… Alien.
The only pet we had was a mangy old tom cat that my mum had rescued from an icy death one winter. I knew nothing of the world of dogs – my repeated requests for a collie falling on dad’s deaf ears… Looking back, I don’t blame him. I know, now, how much exercise those lovely creatures need… but it’s worth it.
Conceiving of the big red project had taken a while. The Norse legends, made modern in the context of an excellent book set in the sci-fantasy genre, had captivated me. I took the large meat skewer and set into into the middle of the glowing embers of the garden fire I’d been nurturing for the past hour. My personal ‘furnace’….
Both my parents were out… of course.
I watched the skewer glow red, then, slipping my dad’s ‘fix the underneath of the car’ gloves on, I picked up its curly end and approached the sold red rubber ball locked fast in its makeshift wooden cradle on the top of mum’s rockery.
There was an appalling hiss as the red-hot metal melted its way through the first two inches of dense, composite rubber. I had the good sense to avoid the life-diminishing fumes given off, and continued pushing. It soon became apparent that creating a passage through the exact centre of the giant dog ball was going to take several return visits to the fire… but, eventually, it was done, and I held it up to the sun in triumph, aligning the dark tunnel like a telescope.
I’d already constructed the rest of the kit. The new rope, bought from the local hardware shop as a scrap piece, was too large to fit through the hole, but perfect for the strength I would need. To get around that I had wound and tied a piece of string to its end so I could thread the smaller line through then pull the thicker length along the red ball’s axle tunnel.
The wooden handle, to attach to the two feet of rope, was a masterpiece. Carved by hand from a tree branch with my large penknife, then formed into a finer shape with a borrowed hemispherical file from dad’s toolbox. I had finished it off with hours of sanding, using a borrowed sheet of fine grade paper.
When I closed my hand around it, each of my clenched fingers slid into place with perfection. I threaded the end of the rope through the hole in the middle of the handle and tied the newly-learned knot, pulling the rope back into the upper part of the shaped hole so that it would not stand proud and interfere with the grip… and the all-important swing.
I took the mighty red ball in one hand and let it drop to the length of the rope. The impact jolted the handle, but I was ready. I still remember the smile as I swung the great weight round and round in the air over my head, so fast it began to swish and hum. Unexpectedly, my scorched tunnel had given my red beast a voice!
Nearly there… now I had to test it.
Raymond Barlow lived in a much older part of Ainsworth than we did, yet was a neighbour ‘over the back’ so to speak. The stone cottages were on the main road, but set back, and with huge rear gardens, most of which we allotments. At the far end of one of these, Raymond’s grandfather had made two wooden outbuildings with a tiny alley between and around the back of each. In a far corner, a solid wooden post was set into the ground, looking like it had stood there for millennia. My best friend and I used it for stone-throwing practice.
“Go on then, get it out!” he said, exasperated, when I arrived through the hole in the hedge that marked the terminus of the excellent secret path we had forged between the two houses – very painfully, for it was full of trees and shrubs with thorns and others pointed spikes.
I straightened my back and reached into the largest pocket of my anorak, pulling out the handle and letting the coiled structure reveal itself.
It was the first time I had ever seen him speechless. “Bloody hell,” he whispered.
Imitating what I hoped was a strong but silent Norse god, I took a step towards the post, leaving perhaps ten feet of throwing distance. There, I began to whirl the red ball of destruction around at great speed. In a practiced end-move, I snapped the handle down and towards its target, feeling the impossibly dense projectile whistle closely past my head on its descending curve.
It hit the post so hard it snapped the wood clean in two… I tried not to show my utter surprise… as delight filled me from the toes upwards.
“Bloody hell!’ Raymond shouted louder. We gazed at the severed spar. I stood and saluted.
“Let those who advance on Asgard beware!”
There was a new god in town. His name was Thor and he had a hammer that would shake your world… A far-away, but close in heart kingdom could sleep a little safer that night.
—————————
It’s all completely true, yet here’s a story with a deeper meaning. This is the most powerful memory I can muster to illustrate the principle of identification. Identification is a process that affects and forms most of our lives. The young Stephen knew he wasn’t Thor, of course; but then no-one was. The difference between what young Stephen was doing then, and what he had done, before, was that his new hero (and many identifications are with heroes) was a figure with profound values. The Norse Gods were good. They represented different aspects of us, though that was felt rather than understood at the time. In many ways, that fearful red ‘hammer’ was a ritual instrument, a thing forged and made, with the power of transformation gifted to of its worthy bearer…
The process of identification is one of the key areas where psychology and spirituality meet in entire agreement. What I identify with will change with time and circumstance. The more carefree stages of childhood – if we are lucky enough to have a stable family background – will see identification fixed on positive things, even if they are fantasy. As we pass from being looked after to looking after ourselves, to looking after others, the identifications can become more responsible and accepting, or more negative – descending even to anxiety and illness. Much depends on that first decade of encounter with reality.
In each case, the identification is a process of becoming fixed upon something, and that something is a projected image from ourselves. The thing identified with becomes us, the ‘me’. Its source may be unconscious, but it’s at the heart of who we are…
Much of the work done by psychologists involves gaining the trust of those they treat so that they can take them on an internal journey where the ‘light’ of adult understanding can be thrown on the less mature objects of fixation. The process is complete when the power is returned to the newly-balanced self, which, balanced, is free to grow, again.
A modern mystery school’s focus is not treatment, but exploration. The mystery school will create magical journeys in a landscape of the mind and the emotions in a way that is safe, mentored and discussed. Group meetings will examine, often with roles being played, how the self is built from such images, and their component identifications.
Identification can be a bad or a good thing. It passes us from stage to stage of our self, as we mature from fantasy to (hopefully) reality. The young Thor becomes the student, who becomes the junior in an office, where he or she has to redefine his very existence before becoming proficient in their chosen adult role.
Only at the end of this, at a stage of maturity in our lives, do we come to question the entire process of identification. We notice that despite all the power being with us, the objects of our identification can be limited and fixed. What happens if we refuse to have an identity which is external to this now-powerful sense of self that I know is mine?
In the next part we will go deeper into where this quest leads, and to the help that may lie a short way along that path.
Other parts in this series:
Part One, Part Two, Part Three, this is Part Four.
©Stephen Tanham, 2021.
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, A journey through the forest of personality to the sunrise of Being.
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+ #Cats, #Collie dogs, #FurryFives, #RagDollCats, #Silenti, Cats, Collie dogs, Consciousness, Dark Humour, Dementia
Books, coffee, knowing things…
by Steve Tanham
(This post is 600 words, a five-minute read)
I loved the image… I’d credit its creator if I knew where it came from; but there it was in my in-tray. The cool black cat with the importantly steaming mug of coffee, and an engrossing book with covers in my favourite colour… all of it pushing back the awfulness of an English February.
There’s a certain involved-detachment about the cat. I’ve always been a sucker for cats – and that attitude. We have one: a beautiful rag-doll that emerged from a large bush and followed my mother and her dog home one day, then refused to leave. It turned out that the cat was close to starving and had been living in the bush for who knows how long, just a few streets from where my mother lives… lived.
Taking it back to the bush twice didn’t work. It kept following her and the Pomeranian dog, knowing, beyond knowledge, that her cat future lay with this unlikely twosome. The faith of a centurion, perhaps…
In her mid-eighties at the time, Mum was a due to go with a group of her life-long friends on a river cruise in Germany the following week. We stepped in, of course. Driving down to Bolton to collect the cat, who bounced out of her front door and literally, into my arms.
You can’t argue with fate like that… She obviously ‘knew things’. By that time, it was obvious that she would have a better time here in Kendal, rather than sharing a home with a jealous Pomeranian. I took her to our local vets and they gave me strict instructions to check out every vet and animal shelter in Bolton to see if she had been reported missing. Only then would they look at letting us adopt her. It took me a full day of increasingly tense phone calls to verify that even if someone knew of her, no-one was telling. Later, we came up with a plausible reason for at least one of the silences…
“You’ve landed on your feet,” the lady vet said to the cat, but grinning at me, on the next visit. We had duly and officially adopted the cat Misti… Rag Doll, formerly of Bolton, Lancashire.
Since then, she’s shared our lives here in Cumbria. She and her Collie ‘sister’ have the life of Riley, whoever he was. One of the likely reasons she was dumped was her cat-flu. It’s viral and you can’t shift it. It comes back every few weeks and she snots over everything as she fights for breath and life. We hold her, boost her cat-vitamins and make sure she’s warm. Eventually it passes. Life can be messy when you love something fragile. Something bursting with love but physically flawed.
Now, fate has arranged that Mum, an increasingly frail ninety-one year old, with vascular demential, no lower intestine, and a newly-fractured spinal injury, has also followed us home… She obviously knew something, too. She’s offered to go into a home, but, Covid-wise, it’s not a good time for care homes at the moment. For now, she’s the latest Bolton resident in Kendal.
Our life is a recurring cycle of caring, learning patience beyond patients, and holding on to the interwoven gold that always accompanies such a task. There is a specialness about accompanying someone you love dearly to the end of their lives. You have to keep holding on to that, pushing back the grind and the sometimes near despair.
You have to know things…
So… I thought an occasional series of blogs about the lighter side of all this would be an idea. I’m not interested in writing up the grind. I’m interested in the moments filled with irony and the gold of that soul-to-soul contact that flowers briefly at the end of life and is gone. Thereafter, held only with a smile, in the memory… and perhaps, here in the words.
Opening image taken from Peedeel’s blog, an eclectic mix of poetry, art and other stuff.
©Stephen Tanham, 2021.
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, A journey through the forest of personality to the sunrise of Being.
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We think of winter as being full of disadvantages for the photographer, but it also brings unique colours and dynamic contrasts: from clouds in the sky to the low sun on the landscape.
(200 words, a two-minute read)
One of the most subtle contrasts is between the dull green of winter’s foliage and the colour of the residual life of trunk, branch, twig and crop stubble… each coming to life with the touch of the sun.
One of the brightest winter greens is the moss, especially in very wet parts of the countryside – like we have in Cumbria. Combined, here, with the limestone walls and soft afternoon sun, it produced a subtle composition.
Winter’s effects on water can be dramatic, too. After days of intense rain, the local rivers – all bound for the vast expanse of Morecambe Bay, exhibit different colours depending on their speed and depth. Here, the River Kent begins its ‘drop’ (also know as a ‘force’) through the edge of the village of Sedgwick. The change in velocity produces a change in the volume of air in the water, resulting in a spectrum of colours.
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, A journey through the forest of personality to the sunrise of Being.
©Stephen Tanham, 2021.
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+ #Silenti, Biology and mysticism, Consciousness, esoteric psychology, Higher Mind, Life-sciences, Psychology, Silent Eye School, Unconscious
The Big Picture (3) : objects of desire
by Steve Tanham
The word ‘object’ has many meanings; but none more mysterious and potentially wonderful as the meeting of spirituality with the findings of psychology’s Object Relations Theory…
(1400 words; a ten minute read)
Everything in our daily world comes from them; they are the highs and lows, the anguish and the triumphs, the misery and the joy… and above all else, the overwhelming violence of the world, permeated, occasionally, by the heroic kindness of someone selfless, someone who only wants to add a little love to the sad garden.
But it may not be entirely so…
Our world reflects our thoughts. Our thoughts are mainly habitual reactions to conditions, some are pleasurable but many induce a sense of anxiety, if not actual fear.
If we are fortunate, our inner relations are within a harmonic family – though this is by no means guaranteed. When we are older, we look back on our lives and sigh at what might have been, but also take some pride in what was.
Yet, through all of this, a sense of ‘I was there’ prevails. We can see the key decisions we made; can wince at the costly mistakes, and bask in the sometime triumph over adversity that we – often in concert with others – made happen.
We feel a pride in that accomplishment. The aspect of us that feels this pride is the self.
When the world of psychology came into existence in the early years of the last century, it caused quite a stir with its promise to accurately explore what it meant to be a self.
A ‘self’ is a permanent place of accumulated beliefs, views and and reactions that crystallised into a sense of ‘me-ness’ around the age of seven. One view, developed by Sigmund Freud and still used as a basis for much of modern psychology, is that our sense of self is threefold and divided into an energetic under layer – the id; an overbearing ‘should do’ layer – the superego; and a core of ‘conscious me’ stuck in the middle and attempting to mitigate between the wild, energetic and sexual creature and the overbearing tut-tutter that society might expect.
Anyone who tries to understand the world sees that our societies are also a response to the collective presence our psychologies – our selves. The individual adds their own psychological presence to the society in which they live. The pressures, norms, expectations and authoritarian tendencies of our societies can be a heavy burden throughout our lives.
We can retreat from the world, or we can face it with an intelligent and loving intent to react differently to it… or not react at all. By reducing our direct reactions to the world, we generate more power of self, and often find the world has changed, accordingly… which can be surprising, to say the least.
To live a life within a new ‘chamber of calmness’ is not to cut ourselves off. Rather, it requires the will to introduce a ‘catching gap’ between experience and reaction. In creating this, we begin to notice how powerful certain aspects of our lives are, and how difficult it is to control the reactions to them.
Sometimes, it is all we can do to watch this taking place. Any idea of control needs to be a secondary stage. Often, in watching deeply and not needing to react, the present reveals itself in a different way, perhaps not requiring our active participation at all… There is always a third force at work; the power of the ‘present’ helps us to recognise this, as we develop this side of our minds and hearts.
What we react to, and the way we react, became the subject of a new branch of psychology, beginning in the 1930s and extending to the present day. It is called Object Relations Theory. It developed from and extended Freud’s psychoanalytic theory into a more detailed view of how we visualise what affects us.
It also provides a shared space of understanding in which mysticism and psychology may meet and harmonise.
In 1975, physician turned psychiatrist Margaret Mahler wrote a radical and seminal work: ‘The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation’. The title surprised people – as it was meant to, implying that the physical birth of the body is not the same, nor synchronous, with the birth of the child in the sense of what will become the personality.
The personality develops from the mixture of experience and reaction. But the idea that the infant is simply a junior ‘us’, issuing automatically from the body, is wrong.
The psychological infant has to develop in parallel with the healthy body, but its development is of an entirely different order to the biology of cells. The essence of this – ultimately the goal of present day psychology – is the development of a strong and stable self. The goal of spirituality is to investigate the deeper mysteries of actually having a self.
Mahler showed that the infant exists, pre-birth, in a state of parallel life with the mother, knowing nothing else. This is bliss to the unborn soul. When birth occurs, the infant slowly discovers the sadness and dissatisfaction of separation, which is essential for its growth towards what Mahler called individuation.
It is important to grasp this: the unborn infant does not exist, in its own awareness in a state of oneness with mother, it exists simply in a state of oneness… There is no knowledge, and no presence of anything but this.
In terms of the world’s myths and religions, we might reflect that, at this stage, the infant knows nothing of the father, though his contribution was the seed that found its place within the ‘ground’ of the mother, triggering the process of new life and contributing half its DNA.
Mother and child move from oneness to a separation in which the child must increasingly come to know the world as an ‘other’ from itself, in order to fulfil its needs. The oneness becomes, first, two tightly-coupled entities, then two separate beings. How well and harmoniously this is achieved shapes the rest of our lives. The physical side of this is obvious to us, but not the stages of the psychological progress. Mahler revealed this in detail, and analysed the criticality of each aspect of healthy physical, mental and emotional development.
Within Object Relations, the word ‘object’ is used to describe an ‘other’ – typically a person, and this is not meant derogatorily, it is simply a notation. Our world comes to be populated with ‘others’ as we develop an inner vocabulary of ‘types of other’. Within the mind, such objects are always seen as pictures, as images. These images can be rich, with all manner of sensory information attached.
Mother is the first ‘other’, and definitive. Each subsequent stage bears the imprint of the mother experience. Mystically, we can also equate Nature with mother, a model that implies that the life-force may come from somewhere else…
The child comes to recognise another object called Father. Though there is no consciousness of shared origin in the same sense as that of mother. Father becomes important, ideally, as role model for individuation – making our own way in the world.
So far, you may rightly ask what this has to do with mystical development of the self. The key is that the early infant, although not individuated, is in touch with the states of inner beauty and completeness that are also the goals of all spiritual quests. What the child cannot do is function in the world. This must be learned, and as it is achieved, the beautiful early states of essence are gradually lost in the stuff of outer life, though, as Wordsworth wrote, we come into this life ‘trailing clouds of glory’.
As a mature person, of whatever age, we have a strong sense of self. We know, to some degree, how to work the world. The early lessons of survival are long behind us, and their wisdom is embedded in our matrix of stored reactions. At a certain age, we may feel that the early vividness of the world is gone; that life and duty are making us dull.
When faced with this, we are at what we call in the Silent Eye, the ‘turning point’. We now have the chance to take all our worldly competence, our balanced ego, and embark on a search for those ‘clouds of glory’ that still inhabit our innermost spiritual rooms.
Next week, we will look at how we begin such a quest – among the ‘objects’ our life has gathered. We will examine the nature of the new world we encounter as this unravelling begins. We are not talking about becoming an infant, again. We are looking for adult experiences of the active imagination that will act as triggers for a vast and excitingly new state of Self. The ‘objects’ we already carry with us will provide the fuel…
Other parts in this series:
Part One, Part Two, This is Part Three
©Stephen Tanham, 2021.
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, A journey through the forest of personality to the sunrise of Being.
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As January lets go its dark and icy grip, passing us, with a smirk, into the often colder clutches of February, the marginally lighter mornings contain surprises that are harbingers of the spring to come.
(440 words. A three minute read)
One of these is what I have come to think of as the ‘winter morning moon’. Often quite high in the sky, the pale gold of this moon combines with the clearness of the winter air to provide a quality of light more associated with the sun.
The course of the moon follows the line of the back of our house. Often, a visit to the bathroom during the night does not require the bathroom light, as the moon’s quiet radiance streams through in the darkest hours. It has surprised me how much more of a ‘moon’ place Cumbria is, compared with my native Lancashire. It may be the quality of the clearer air.
I am usually first up in our household. I empty the dishwasher and make the tea. This gives me a head start on the day – and the all-important time to write. Bernie is not an early morning person and is grateful for the two cups that get her started… We have complementary strengths, which helps when you are both looking after another – my elderly mother.
The Cumbrian winter can be dark, wet and savage but sometimes contains surprises. This morning, turning from the switched-on kettle, I was drawn by the pale gold light of what felt like the sunrise, but had to be the moon. Photographic opportunities can be fleeting, so I swiftly retrieved my iPhone from the still-sleeping bedroom.
The pale gold wasn’t the only joyful object in the sky. The thin, mottled clouds were letting through the awakening blue of what would be a rare clear morning. I jammed the camera into the doorframe and took several shots using ‘night-mode’.
The best one is above.
And then I realised it was the first day of the new month, and the sky seemed filled with the promise of the spring to come, and hopefully some respite from the COVID virus, in the shape of the mass vaccine programme.
One day at a time… Winter is a hard road, but the delight of such a start to the day gives you the sense of not being entirely alone in the struggle.
Happy February! – although it will be the day after by the time this publishes.
©Stephen Tanham, 2021.
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, A journey through the forest of personality to the sunrise of Being.
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I love that fragile first coat of snow that changes the landscape like a frosting… yet leaves the main features visible behind the sheet of white. Here, the thin snow is not sufficient to do anything but emphasise the railway tracks and the tall, bordering conifer trees.
There was something stark about the collie and the single post in the field near the coastal path. The distant sun, pale in the morning mist, seemed intimately linked to both of them…
Photographed before, but this time from a different angle to capture the sun over the trees, there is something exotic about the bandstand in the snow and mist…
©Stephen Tanham, 2021.
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, A journey through the forest of personality to the sunrise of Being.
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From Sue… and evergreen.
Yesterday, I was looking through my photo files in search of a particular shot amongst the tens of thousands of files stored on my various drives. Most of those photographs document our journeys through the landscape, visits to sacred places and the beauty and history hidden within our mediaeval churches and cathedrals. Some, though, document the events we have held at many of these places and in particular, the faces of those who have attended, caught, almost inevitably, in laughter.
Just looking at the pictures from those weekend events, I found image after image of smiling faces, happy to share a moment with the camera or caught off guard in merriment. Even the ducks were smiling. And I found myself smiling back. It was not something over which I had any control… each smile drew a response, both in memory and in actuality. The photographs may have been taken…
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I’ve drowned before…
Drowning comes in the form of waves. Eventually, when your ability to fight back has gone, even the smallest wave can make the difference and take you beneath the surface to a place of the unknown.
Many years ago, I faced the inescapable collapse of the software business that we had spent eight years building from nothing. The business climate had nose-dived, and no-one was spending money in the sector that our products served. We went from healthy company to likely extinction in about four months. It seemed that nothing we could do would make a difference.
It was likely we’d end up with nothing. We were going to drown…
Nothing can be a potent idea, and more potent than we know. Facing the idea of nothing – of the removal of our normal world – is a truly sobering process.
The world seems to be drowning at the moment. Hospitals are drowning in the fight against Covid, with doctors and nurses working on seriously ill patients at a level of four or five times their previous maximum load.
Compared to that, our own troubles should be trivial, but often aren’t. If you can’t escape them, then they matter – especially if someone else’s health or even life is in the balance. Not all problems are Covid related.
Two days ago, I was staring at the living pink tube of flesh that protrudes from the lower stomach of a person who survived ulcerative colitis via an operation that removed all of the lower intestines. Such operations require a ‘stoma’ – an aperture stretched into a tube (stomata), through the skin of the abdomen to the outside world from the digestive tract.
The most common forms involve the patient wearing a ‘stoma bag’. The bag replaces the bowel, and often the intestine, and must be emptied, manually, whenever needed. In the case of the ileostomy, which applied in this case, the waste matter is continuously produced by the body without the normal regulation of the intestine and bowel.
The person whose fleshy ‘stoma tube’ I was looking at is a ninety year old woman. She is my mother… Somewhat exhausted, I was wondering why my (untrained) third attempt to attach her stoma bag hadn’t survived for more than two hours.
Two days before that, I had been in an ambulance for the first time in my life, being ferried from Westmorland hospital to the larger Lancaster hospital for my mother to have a CT scan. She had fallen out of bed and landed on her lower back. Resistant to any form of medical treatment at the best of times, she had protested that it was ‘just a bruise’.
The morning after, we knew it was more than that and I drove her into the local Westmorland hospital, where the wonderful Urgent Care Team saw her rapidly, shook their heads and wheeled her off to “give her a rapid MOT”. This led to the rapid diagnosis of a fractured lower back, but, thankfully, not a pelvic injury. The bad news was that it needed a CT Scan at Lancaster Hospital to confirm, which might then lead us on to the specialist team at the Preston Spinal Unit.
An ambulance team were on their way. I was assured that my now-insufficient parking ticket would be overlooked, and mentally watched my car disappear in the distance as the ambulance crew took charge of us – mum now on a stretcher.
She had been staying with us for a few days of care and company to warm her spirits in these difficult and isolating times. Being heavily dependent on us for her health, this was within the brief of the current guidelines. Her vascular dementia has been getting worse, and we hoped that a weekend in Kendal would restore her spirits… and alleviate some of the paranoid fantasies (of theft of money and keepsakes by relatives, for example) that dementia sufferers, living alone, often face.
The ambulance staff were fabulous. They briefed me on how to not be separated to my mother and tagged her so everyone would know I was her official carer and allowed to enter Lancaster A+E alongside her trolley.
There was nothing I could do about it. I made sure we were liberally doused with hand gel and wearing surgical masks. Then I stayed with her, standing by the trolley, within the main A+E corridor.
After two hours, we were told that she could go up to the CT Scanner unit. A porter collected us, and, only fifteen minutes later, we had the results. She had fractured her ‘L3’ vertebra. This had been diagnosed by Westmorland, but needed the more powerful scanner to confirm. Treatment was not possible, but rest and painkillers would assist her body’s own recovery and bone-healing. It could have been much worse…
Fortunately the Preston team, having been sent the scans, confirmed they could add nothing to the diagnosis and the ‘rest and painkillers’ treatment.
My wife, Bernie, came for us at Lancaster…. It was nine in the evening on a day that had begun at ten in the morning.
But now a three day break with us had just become an indefinite period of residence, as there was no chance of her returning to the Bolton terraced house with its steep staircase… possibly ever. Mum has always been fiercely independent and we could imagine what this news would mean to her. But she was uncharacteristically accepting.
We settled her in as best we could. She slept well, exhausted by the events of the day. The following morning I helped her out of bed and she took some painfully slow steps around the bedroom. I helped her to the bathroom and was about to leave when she called out that her stoma bag had burst.
Her Ileostomy operation was sixteen years ago. She nearly died from the colitis in the days leading up to it, the surgeon describing her chances as no better than 50:50. The family have been deeply grateful to the surgical team at the Royal Bolton Hospital for those extra years. The stoma is a small price to pay for continued life, and she has managed it on her own, with an occasional visit to the stoma team at Bolton.
But we had not reckoned with the effect of the dementia, combined with the shock of the fall and the spinal fracture. She had literally forgotten how to change her own ‘bag’. Fortunately, we had a box of the stoma supplies at our house for safekeeping. I sat her on the toilet seat and grabbed a pack… I would have to figure it out from the spoiled one now in front of me. I gently peeled it from her sore flesh.
I do not propose to dwell on details. I am the father of two boys and remember the more pungent details of their infant life with nappies. There is a difference between the peachy bottoms of babies and a ninety year old’s stomach, but it’s basically the same science at work.
At that moment, the dawning extent of our new situation was a point of drowning. They are characterised by the knowledge that you can do nothing about the overall nightmare. You just have to put one foot in front of the other and look for any help that might come your way.
Now, three days later, I am able to change a stoma so that it stays sealed, but I’ve made a lot of mistakes. Living in Kendal, Cumbria, we are three counties away from where she is medically registered, but, as she cannot go home, we have at least been able to register her with the local stoma clinic in Lancaster. Some help will be forthcoming, if only to teach me how to do the job properly. We have discussed the situation with her local Bolton doctor of thirty years – who has been very supportive, and advised us that my mother really needs 7×24 care.
It’s that external help that makes all the difference. You know that organised assistance is out there, but can’t access it until someone at the centre of things shows you how.
The experience took me back to the commercial nightmare, now so long ago. Then, three of our largest customers said they did not want us to go bust, and brought forward enough business for us to survive the cash flow crisis. We did; and eventually prospered for another fifteen years until it was time for me to hand over the reins and step away… to do something else, which turned out to be the Silent Eye.
Sometimes we’re not meant to see the logic, or even the pattern. But the rescue from drowning can be there, and not within the scope of our own minds. Small miracles do happen.
So, forgive me for not doing the next instalment of the ‘Big Picture‘ series. By next week, I should be more settled on this new ocean of ongoing uncertainty. I have no intention of drowning.
©Stephen Tanham, 2021.
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, A journey through the forest of personality to the sunrise of Being.
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Mystical poetry.
(140 words, a two minute read)
➰
In icy dream
We ate our picnic, you and I
And watched while moonbeams
Lit the curls of how and why
And seated watchers watched the sky
➰
No frozen crusts of bread:
This food of soul was liquid light
Drawn, once, upon the glittering night
Enmeshed, entwined, in meanings bright
Like crystals on the icy table
➰
Afar, you gazed
And with your pointing finger
Sought my leave – I feared
But when I looked, the end
Now so far beyond the means
Had disappeared
➰
Instead, where finger had
Above the crystal surface, been
Was drawn in quickly melting ice
A signature concealed
That, grasped with eyes and ‘I’,
Revealed the path to morning
➰
©Stephen Tanham, 2021.
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, A journey through the forest of personality to the sunrise of Being.
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