The last time it happened, I was in Mexico, in the Mayan temple of Chichen Itza. After a long coach journey, and a beautiful swim in cold but crystal clear cenote, we had arrived at the fabled temple complex; and were lucky enough to have one the best guides I have ever encountered.
He was of the native people and described – with great gentleness – how the spirit of what happened at the city-temple complex was gradually being lost. As we were guided around the different locations in the vast complex, the day grew hotter, but the warmth seemed to take on an aliveness which fed me, rather than drained.
Minutes later I had a vivid image of a jaguar leaping from the central pyramid at me… Later the guide told the group of the importance of the Jaguar to the ancient Mayan priests.
My good friends Allan and Ann Pringle assured me this was a Shamanistic experience…. and implied that I had better get used to them. Several more followed in the heat of that day. Throughout, I felt no fatigue, although those around me were becoming visibly tired by the day.
Allan is a trained Zuni Shaman. In the same year, I had a similar experience at Uluru Rock in central Australia, while visiting my eldest son and his family. Again, there was the sense of being nourished by the heat.
Today it was a simple fire that triggered it; that and a thought I considered to be of great importance for my forthcoming Tuesday blog on Sun in Gemini – still unwritten at that point.
We have had a hard-working day, mainly in the garden. There’s not a lot of choice of location in this Covid-19 lockdown period. So, jobs that have been put off for a while are brought to the fore, and Bernie and I find ourselves putting in a long day of quite intense physical work. Our lawn has suffered over the very wet Cumbrian winter. The moss has overtaken the grass in large parts of the garden. The only cure is to scarify the three separate lawns – made simpler by a petrol-driven machine we bought a few years ago; but still a five or six hour job. We had set aside the whole day to get it done.
Extraordinarily for an English April, the sun has been beating down for weeks. Monday dawned the same. By the start of the afternoon, it was obvious that cooler weather was not coming to our aid. We began the work. It was towards the end of this very physical period of over five hours that I decided we needed a small bonfire to get rid of some of our excess cardboard and help reduce a pile of old logs that have been accumulating as we demolished earlier attempts at landscaping.
I was lighting the fire when the thought that had been in the back of my mind came again. Since the start of the Covid-19 outbreak, I have been having vivid dreams. Some of them have seemed to contain a message that my sleeping mind has struggled to retain. Usually, during the course of the day, these are lost to waking consciousness, but today I awoke with a clear picture of what I wanted to set down.
Over the previous week, I had noticed that other bloggers were making reference to similarly intense dreams. I believe they are all connected.
Staring into the flames of the garden fire, I recovered the clarity of my own dream. Jung spoke of the ‘collective unconscious’ – a shared place of conscious awareness which speaks to us in dreams and symbols. Throughout mankind’s history, periods of turmoil and chaos have been interpreted as being of deeper importance than just the ‘physics’ of their happening. I’m not fanciful in these matters, but I believe that it is essential that we throw off old ways of thinking. We have many crises to solve, but the old and powerful controlling forces that hold the planet’s social and economic conventions intact are resistant to change – seemingly regardless of the cost to life on Earth.
I believe that the intense dreams many are having are the seeds of the new. These will need to germinate in the collective unconscious mind until they are strong enough to break free into the ‘day-world’ of our social, political and economic lives.
When I came back to ordinary consciousness, I was still staring at the fire. The sun was setting and some time had passed. I felt at peace that the earlier dream memory had been recovered.
Time will tell if the vision is accurate or even important, but I sense a period of great change – one brought about by the breaking down of the present order of things and the fragility of our ecosystems on this beautiful planet.
There will be no escaping Earth if we get it wrong. I find the idea repulsive that, having failed to be guardians to such a beautiful place, we could escape a dying Earth to seek other hospitable planets without fixing ourselves first. There will be no second chance. We must fix things here…
Still intensely moved by this, I walked around the garden in the sunset to take a few photos that I hope express this mood… and this feeling of hope and renewal. I hope you like them.
©Stephen Tanham 2020
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
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Tess: I just love these lazy afternoons, Misti, don’t you?
Misti: zzzzz.
Tess: Whassat?
Misti: Food?
Tess: Nope..
©Copyright Stephen Tanham 2020
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From Sue…
Shards of glass flew everywhere, surrounding my bare feet and covering the work surface with sparkling motes. The sun through the window lit the tiny fragments with incongruous rainbows. My hand, abused by a heavy day in my son’s garden, had refused to grip the slick surface. It was nothing much, a simple accident that would normally have passed by almost unremarked, save for the odd expletive. Instead, I could feel a knot tighten in my stomach, the pressure of tears demanding release behind my eyes as I ordered the dog to her bed to protect her paws. The mythical ‘stiff upper lip’ began to quiver and I felt about as steady on my feet as a jelly.
Even as the tears came, I could not help laughing at myself. It was ridiculous to get so upset over a broken glass.
As I started to clear up the mess, though…
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Our garden is south-facing, which is lovely when the sun shines, as we benefit from its rays through most of the day.
I’ve begun to write about the history of our ‘gunpowder’ village of Sedgwick in other posts. The old (drained) canal bed that runs through our garden has been a challenge to incorporate into a coherent design, but, a decade on, we seem to have achieved it.
One benefit of the garden’s orientation is that the evening sun sets along a ridge about a mile away. In winter and early spring we have a clear view of this progression, as each day gives it a little more clockwise distance along the horizon line. As the foliage on the far side of the canal grows with the maturing summer, the ridge becomes more difficult to see, but is always there to our right – given that the sun is visible at all…
The approach to midsummer is, for me, the most emotionally powerful time of the year. As a mystically inclined person, I marvel each year at the level of sheer ‘aliveness’ that permeates the summer air, particularly as the sun is setting over that far ridge and filling the Cumbrian world with a last blaze of gold as it sinks between the distant trees.
I take a lot of photographs, as you may know from previous posts. One of the delights of the summer is to poke a long lens towards that sunset and let the blends and reflections create Their own work of art. It doesn’t matter if the photo is not technically good. What matters is to bathe in the beauty of the blazing reds and oranges as they project through the wooden branches of the near and far trees and shrubs.
Beginning in late March, if the day is clear, I will often be found nurturing a final cup of tea on our patio (occasionally, something stronger) and snapping dozens of shots of the moments just before, and just after, the sunset. I throw away most of these, but the odd few are worth keeping… and on a correspondingly dark day in winter, provide some fuel for the soul and a sense of ‘hang on in there’. Cumbria has long, dark and wet winters, which makes the spring and summer all that more precious. Summer, itself, is not guaranteed, though we always have the intense green and the knowledge of summer.
I’ve often tried to express that glorious feeling of the gentle months. It’s not just the obvious warmth, though that is pleasant. There is also a softness to the air, and the sense that it is filled with a kind of creative energy. There is the sense that you are being pulled out of the body and into a state of merged being… I suspect that we all, as children, do this naturally, and that is why kids go crazy with energy and fun when the sun shines.
Really, it’s a state of just being. As a verb it doesn’t need an object: In that golden state, I don’t need to be anything… It’s bigger than that and I will dilute it if I restrict it to a something. That golden feeling of summer captures this. Just to be is the most powerful thing possible. Throughout mystical history, people have sought to express and symbolise this in different ways. The Christian world, for example, names the longest day the Feast of St John. John is viewed as the most mysterious and the most mystical of the Christian fathers, and, for me, the attribution fits well.
This year, Bernie and I have decided to create a permanent marker in the garden to show the alignment with the solstice and the Sun’s final point of zenith on the horizon. One of my sons and his wife bought me, for my birthday last year, an armillary sphere, otherwise known as a spherical astrolabe. This is a model of objects in the sky, based on the the celestial sphere above us, rather than the celestial globe, which is a smooth sphere that maps the constellations.
The armillary sphere consists of a spherical framework of rings, centred on the theoretical Earth or the Sun. It shows lines of longitude and latitude and other important features such as the ecliptic. Our intention is to design a setting for it whereby the arrow can point to the point of farthest progress of the Sun as it crosses the far ridge in its final moment of setting.
This marking of the horizon of the longest day is, of course, an ancient practice. The solstice has been associated with festivals of ‘full-nesss’ for as long as mankind has gazed at the heavens and given thanks for the energy than enables us to have food for our bodies. The harvest comes later. The energy of the Sun is, by then, embedded in what keeps our bodies alive.
We hope our marking of the horizon in this way will provide us a little ‘food for the soul’ as we inch towards the third week in June. This simple act of marking the horizon, will become very special in the weeks to follow.
©Copyright Stephen Tanham
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
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Sphere or disc, it matters little
What your complex words cry
Into the wind – the only thing that separates us
Not distance, not when:
Your smallest sigh,
Your first breathed sound,
The movement, even, of your lips,
Stirs my heart to action
⦿
And, pumping blood,
In ancient ways you could not grasp
I change before your eyes into arrowed fur and claw
Head stretched on neck reaching into time
Purposeful and sleek beyond your unformed dreams of dog
And watching full of awe as wolf emerged
To hold you, hazel-spelled, with her softened eyes.
Intelligent, now, they guide the ‘snook’
The word you gave the tip of this living arrow
That now, like a lightning strike
Steals the ball from the air before it lands
A second time… waiting…
⦿
To hear, from far behind my vortex tail
Your howl of delight
A noise I taught you, long ago
When puppy legs were shaped like ‘A’
And we began…
⦿
Your she-wolf
Run me well. man-friend
as I curl my warm life
Around yours
In complex, harmonic motion
⦿
Stephen Tanham
20April20
©Stephen Tanham 2020
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
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Misti: Wasssat!
Misti: Tess! It’s a wasp!
Tess (sleepy): It’s a bee, Misti…
Misti: You don’t know everything, you know!
Misti (looks at camera): And neither do you!
©Stephen Tanham 2020
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From a photographic perspective, we live in a wonderful age. Even the most humble of today’s mobile phones boasts a decent camera. Used within their limitations, we can achieve an amazing record of our days – even locally to our homes – with the use of a few simple techniques.
My wife and I, plus our cat and dog, are lucky to live in the countryside, just south of Kendal, in Cumbria. Like everyone else we are ‘locked down’ except for buying food and exercising our Collie dog. The emergence of the spring has been a welcome respite, and has enabled a wider choice of photographic opportunities.
In my experience, taking photographs is a deeply therapeutic activity. It gets you out of the house, and makes you focus on something very positive. For the shots I’ve used in this blog my criteria were:
1. To walk only a short distance from home. A typical morning dog walk takes us about two hours and sees us less than two miles away, as we meander and the collie gets lots of ball-chucking.
2. To photograph only objects that are commonplace. The essence of this kind of challenge is to find something special in the ordinary.
3. To use only my mobile phone to take the shots, leaving cameras with more sophisticated lenses at home. Generally this means that the emphasis will be on the close-up shot, but, as we shall see, there can be exceptions.
The opening shot, above, is at the farthest point of our walk. The path along the old canal bank takes a sharp left and dives down into a field with sheep. This removes the middle ground and opens up the perspective available. A few seconds spent exploring the composition through the viewfinder can reveal a pleasing mix of foreground and distant background – in this case, a faded view of the Lakeland hills to the north-west, contrasting with the old limestone and aged wood of the fence.
The second image, above, is of Sedgwick House, in the middle of the village. Once the palatial home of a local gunpowder magnate, the gothic-style mansion has seen many roles; including army base and children’s home. Following a recent building conversion, Sedgwick House is now divided into luxury apartments.
I’ve photographed it many times, but today was the first time I’ve seen the light so perfectly balanced between the dappled area beneath the trees and the brighter approach to the building. The two tall trees should have interfered with the shot but, due to their helping frame the light effects, they have actually enhanced it.
The third shot is of the ‘skewed’ aquaduct in the centre of Sedgwick. What is now known as the ‘Lancaster’ canal once ran all the way into Kendal. The canal-carrying bridge was built using advanced stonemason techniques that allowed the shape to be bent. This avoided having to reshape the road into a ‘z’ bend. The photo deliberately emphasises the skewed right arm of the structure, thereby demonstrating its length. The tiny view into the continuing main street is a visual surprise in something so massive and dense.
The final photo is simply a tree bursting with the unique green hue of the spring. It’s impossible not to feel joy in its presence – especially after such a long and muddy winter. Always look for the dappled light at the base of the tree – it’s a joyous as the green on a lovely day like this.
Four simple techniques and sample shots. Anyone can take such photos, and come back home feeling something deliberate and mindful was achieved in the daily exercise walk. In addition, the air is clear and beautiful, given that there is so little traffic on the roads. Get your camera out and take advantage while it lasts… It will give you a record to discuss with your grandchildren, if nothing else!
©Stephen Tanham 2020
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
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Continued from Part One…
(Note: republished from my Mac laptop as the latest version of WP on the iPhone 11 Pro has crashed itself, repeatedly, and appears to have taken the original post with it… I’ve had to recreate this from a (mercifully) still open window that allowed a cut and past of the whole thing… Apologies to those whose links arrived at nothing!)
We have a somewhat unique connection to the history of our tiny village of Sedgwick, near Kendal and on the edge of the English Lake District. The village of only 350 residents has neither shop, nor pub nor church. But its location, four miles south of Kendal is an ideal basis for Lakeland life and also gives easy access to the M6 motorway – a mere fifteen minutes away.
The village has no shop, no pub, no church and about 350 residents. But it’s a gently attractive place to live…
Our home is one of the few properties which still bear the imprint of the old canal which ran from Preston to Kendal in the early years of the 19th century. Our neighbour, Richard – who has lived here all his life – remembers being allowed to stand on the deck of the maintenance barge as the water was finally drained from this stretch of the canal in 1958. The maintenance boat is buried on our side of the property, some ten feet below the lawn (see photo above) that now abuts the large stones that were the original wharf – the ‘dock’ – for Sedgwick’s interaction with the canal… and the canal, or rather, the reason the canal came here, is what created Sedgwick.
In the sixty years from 1770 to 1830 canals were the height of innovation. They helped fuel the industrial revolution. Each one required an act of parliament for its creation. They, plus the long barges that floated on them, were very important forms of transport, known as ‘navigations’, which gave the name ‘navvies’ to the labourers who dug them out by hand from Britain’s rugged landscapes.
Their reign was brief. Britain’s growing network of railways meant that the slow transport by inland boat was made obsolete within thirty years of the canal’s height of success.
Sedgwick has few claims to fame. One is the former canal; but a far more important reason is how and why the canal ever ran through this tiny place at all…
Let’s tell it as a bit of a mystery – by way of a walking tour and easy reading.
We have a large garden. It’s taken us ten years to transform it from the run-down wilderness we inherited when we decided to blow most of our savings designing and having built a home on the edge of the Lake District.
At the end of garden, on the south side, is a stone outbuilding known locally as the ‘Saltpetre’. It’s quite well known in the village and forms a key part of the industrial history of the place. A sign on the canal path about a hundred metres away describes it. It was built in 1830!
Historic gunpowder (also known as ‘black powder’ to distinguish it from modern smokeless powder) is the earliest known means of creating a chemical explosion. We associate gunpowder with war and aggression, but far more of it is used in mining, quarrying and other peaceful endeavours. The canals, themselves, were created by the use of gunpowder to blast away rocks that would have prevented the straight lines necessary to create the economic route.
Gunpowder was made from a mixture of sulphur, charcoal and potassium nitrate. The latter was known as saltpetre – pronounced ‘salt-peter’. The sulphur and charcoal are fuels for the core ‘burning’ reaction, while the saltpetre injects a literally explosive reaction of rapidly expanding oxygen, catalysing the ordinary burning into something entirely different…
No saltpetre, no bang…
Saltpetre is known, historically, as the ‘white mother of gunpowder’. We will explore its relationship to Sedgwick and the strange naming of our outbuilding in the next post.
The interior of our Saltpetre building is still floored in the original limestone ‘cobbles’ once used throughout Cumbria.
For now, let’s climb out of the old canal bed, through the gate and up onto the original canal path – still in use as a footpath and right of way. The immediate area is heavy with trees which follow the steep bank down to the adjoining farmland.
About a hundred metres along the canal path we get to the old bridge that is the centre of Sedgwick. The bridge is an aqueduct – designed to carry water over a roadway. Its strength is demonstrated by the fact that it’s still here, and still carries the bed of the long-drained canal through the centre of the village. A special national authority still exists to protect and maintain such structures.
The bridge is of the ‘skewed’ type. This allowed the existing track or roadway to operate directly beneath the ‘bending’ stone bridge. Without this design, the road would have needed alteration to become a ‘z’ shape.
The other side of the skewed bridge allows descent via a pedestrian slope. The village hall is directly ahead at the base of this pedestrian slope.
From here, continuing on the canal path, we walk southwards for a few hundred metres until we come to the edge of the village.
Eventually, after another five minutes’ walking, we come to one of our most iconic and mysterious structures: a ‘bridge to nowhere’ that crosses a canal that is no longer there. In this view you can see what happened to the canal along most of its length; it was sold off and filled in to create agricultural fields – as it was with the piece that is now our garden.
At this point, we can look down the slope to see a very different face of Sedgwick. There, set in its own grounds, is the largest building for miles around. Its present name is Sedgwick House, but originally it was named Wakefield House. ‘Wakefield’ was the family name of a man whose industry was to transform the landscape of Sedgwick; and connect it with the beating heart of the rest of industrial Britain.
(To be continued… )
©Stephen Tanham 2020
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
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+ Celtic Christianity, Christianity and modern mysticism, Consciousness, Egyptian Myth, Goddess Isis, Osiris, Spirituality
The Sacrificed King
by Steve Tanham
Easter is symbolically the time of the celebration of the death and resurrection of Christ. This thread of story and principle runs through our civilisation very deeply; and Easter Sunday is the most important day in the Christian calendar.
Jesus (the) Christ did not proclaim himself king, despite being labelled ‘King of the Jews’ – quite the opposite. He said he came ‘from the Father,’ not from some royal and kingly forebear. The lineage he claimed was of a deeper and less material nature – one that would only manifest itself in right actions and the generation of goodwill through a deeper understanding.
In so doing, Christianity is more explicit in the nature of the change to human nature represented by the older and more ‘pagan’ stories of the Sacrificed King. The common elements are worthy of exploration.
Would we expect any ‘king’ to be the subject of sacrifice? Killed by his enemy, perhaps, as in the case of the Egyptian king Osiris – cut into pieces by his brother, Set. But would we expect sacrifice as part of a process of psychological or spiritual transformation? Surely the state of kingship represents the pinnacle of temporal existence?
The King does, indeed, represent the ‘fullness’ of mundane existence, and it is precisely this quality of achievement that brings on a ripeness for a transition to a higher order (or plane) of consciousness. To continue the metaphor of ripeness, the King becomes the self-sown seed for what is to come. King in this sense may, of course, be male or female, though our patriarchal history more frequently assigns the male.
The Kingly achievements become the soil in which the seed of the sacrifice is sown, the fuel for the journey. The parallel stories of alchemy teach that, once begun, the transformation will continue as a ‘descending fire’ until the earthly nature is symbolically burned away, and the new and reborn spiritual nature shines for the first time in this world, potent and filled with the innocence of a consciousness that has no past.
The Sacrificed King has much to teach us. The force behind this transformation is particularly strong at this time of year, as the long winter gives way to the spirit of the spring – the astrological year, renewed…
A deeper understanding of this process will reprise the story of Osiris. The many parts into which he is cut are lovingly re-assembled – minus his penis – by Isis, who searches his ‘kingdom’ tirelessly. Eventually, he comes to rule a different land – the Egyptian underworld, the place of the ‘Gods’.
This year, surrounded by the horrors and frustrations of the Covid-19 situation, we have much to consider about life and death. The Sacrificed King stories refer to a symbolic rather than a literal death – but one which carries just as much potency… some would say, more.
We wish you healthy, happy and reflective Easter.
©Stephen Tanham 2020
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
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Our neighbour and I were speaking, quietly, looking through the spring buds at the rising of the full moon last night.
“I’ll be glad when this is over,” he mused.
I nodded my agreement, but privately held other thoughts…
What exactly is ‘this’ I wondered? Have we really thought through what we are all going through?
Many things have come to a ‘harvest’ over the past few years, among them are:
The state of world politics has grown bleak. Particularly in the USA and the UK – which, not surprisingly, seem to be linked by far more than a common language and historic genes. So much that we took for granted as ‘the normal state of civilisation’ has been swept aside by the force, abuse of information and the power of the super-rich. We all seemed to take a breath and wait for the natural intervention of hidden guardians who would keep the faith with kindness and the kind of liberal values many of us thought were the established bedrock of our societies.
But that didn’t happen. Instead, that ‘old order’ seemed weak at the level of power. Stronger, perhaps in the home and communities that watched with horror as so much that had been hard-won was torn apart, as a wild dog might destroy a fine meal.
The general concern about ecology and looking after the Earth seemed subsumed by the single focus on a gas – carbon dioxide – now generally dubbed ‘evil’ despite being an utterly essential molecule of life. The complex relationships being modelled as ‘climate change’ are now so polarised that no alternative viewpoints are possible without being pilloried. I’m content to let the experts agree that their simulations, plus ‘much faster than ever before’ warming is taking place. But I’m not going to declare war on a gas that, until the start of the industrial revolution (1760 – 1840) had declined to such an extent that oxygen-breathing life on Earth was about to be threatened with extinction. Global warming may well be happening, but our concern for the planet should be on a wider front…
Ironically, this is happening despite politics. Electricity generated from renewables (especially wind power) has now developed – despite politics – to such an extent that nuclear power is generally reckoned to have no future at all. I can only see this as an example of a much more potent ‘will of the people’ than the manipulation of political opinion during a once-in-five-years election that supposedly represents democracy. The alternatives to democracy are terrible, but are we really sure we have democracy in the first place?
And, now we have Covid-19. It’s a deadly ‘novel’ virus believed to emanate from bats via pigs in the ‘wet-markets’ of China. It has cut through the world’s societies without regard to any kind of status, wealth or privilege. As I write this, the British Prime Minister is in intensive care in one of London’s top NHS hospitals, suffering from the deadly virus… in a country which has yet to begin to face the difficulties of ‘Brexit’ that lie ahead in our severed world.
And, it was this more that any other thing that has happened that made me think of a different level of meaning to what is changing all our lives.
My neighbour was staring at a beautiful full moon that had just emerged from behind the trees. It was so clear you could see its features with the naked eye. Quietly, he said, “It’s like someone has drawn a line across the moon… no-one can take their mind off it.”
In that moment, I saw a new meaning to the Covid virus and its world-wide epidemic of misery and death. It was forcing us all, young and old, rich and poor, to think differently and as a single life-form.
The most potent part of this new thinking is the fragility of our world; not ‘world’ in the sense of nature – that will go on regardless of man’s waste, greed and folly – but ‘world’ as the way we live our daily lives.
The shock we are all feeling is a result of our previous way of life coming to an end, and of all of us staring into this face of the unknown ‘land’ where almost everything we took as inviolate is gone or dramatically changed… No longer will any British politician – regardless of ‘left’ or ‘right’ affiliation – be able to say that state money on a vast scale should not be spent from the country’s reserves to help people in need. That is already happening under the Conservative government’s own plan; recognising that those needy people are the very molecules of the economic system, itself – its life-blood.
All it took was a threat bigger than politics and more immediate than ‘climate change’.
That state of ‘gone’ may be temporary…or it may not. For the first time, nature has looked us in the face and dared us to survive. The scientific bits of how this happened are not irrelevant. I’m not looking for some action of ‘God’ in this catastrophe. But, collectively, we are awakening in a world changed beyond belief in the shortest of time. The power of this change makes politics look irrelevant. But perhaps the politics that replaces the stagnation of our present systems of government will find its birth in what the philosopher Gurdjieff would have called a ‘necessary shock’ to the system of regular rotation of events.
The archetypal ‘bully’ is on the floor, struck by a chance blow as we fell. But we are first on our feet, and a changed and dramatic future may await those who can ride this energy of the new as the spectre of the world-virus fades from sight…but not from memory.
A ‘line across the moon’ indeed. Here’s to the sunrise…
©Stephen Tanham 2020
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
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I will not tread upon your words
Whose worth is in these hills and lakes
Where golden flowers charmed the breeze
That carried you to greatness
➰
But armed with eyes of fingered glass
Which sense and frame intensity
I reach into the now of gold
To capture black’s propensity
➰
To frame in light what lies beyond
And host a soul that only
Reveals, concealed, the single light
Of daffodil that conquers lonely
➰
©Stephen Tanham
©Stephen Tanham 2020
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
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Human: Good grief! I heard a terrible thump…are you okay? What happened?
Misti <muted>: Crashed…
Human: Crashed! How did it happen?
Misti <muted>: Brakes…
Human: Brakes! Are you okay?
Misti: Never better…
©Stephen Tanham 2020
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
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