Some of the Silent Eye’s forthcoming weekends…
Full Circle? – Finding the way home…
Penrith, Cumbria
Friday 7th – Sunday 9th December, 2018
Home. It is an evocative word. The images it conjures are different for each of us, yet few other words touch heart and mind in quite the same way. Birth and death, laughter and love, longing, fear and aspiration… the cycle of human life plays out within its walls.
For many, there is another ‘home’ beyond the physical confines of this world. That too may seem different for each of us and the path to its threshold is shaped by dreams. Few places illustrate this as clearly as Castlerigg, an ancient stone circle ringed by mountains and one of the most spectacular sites in the country.
The people who have walked this world before us have left traces of their lives and belief, written in stone upon the landscape. From church to stone circle…
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Late Friday afternoon, 14th September. A group of travellers arrive in Bamburgh, Northumberland. Their intention is to invoke a landscape.
The meeting place is one of the hotels in the village of Bamburgh, but the first destination is that liminal place: the beach – and what a beautiful place it is…
The beach here sits between two worlds, yet is part of both. The huge and dominating presence of Bamburgh Castle to the west, and the pure white line of the sea’s breaking surf to the east. A shaded charcoal sky offsets the bright landscape, giving a perfect light for photography.
Close to the castle, the guide brings the group to a halt. To the north, just visible against the grey of the evening sky, is the rocky outcrop on top of which sits Lindisfarne Castle. The guide points…
“Our weekend will take us from this beach to that traditional and historic place of pilgrimage,” he says. “The blood we carry will hold the twin energies of breath, and food, to power our limbs. But we are to be pilgrims of both blood and stone.
He points to the castle…
“The stone is heavy, but our bodies will not be weighed down, because the stone we will carry will be of the mind… which is far heavier than any physical burden.”
The guide watches while the group absorb this sentiment. There is always a moment of transition between tourist and spiritual visitor. The liminal beach provides it – and everyone feels it. As though rising from the wet sand, a spirit of unity holds them, gently; a shared quest for the weekend embraced and accepted..
The guide walks them forward to draw level with the castle. As though adding a water blessing – quite common for these workshops – the sky darkens and the party are deluged. There is no going back, though, and the guide points to a dark aperture high in the castle ramparts; a portal through which they will pass, tomorrow.
“In your minds,” he says, against the force of the rain, imagine the castle is the whole of your egoic self – your personality – seen from an external point of view.” He pauses. The rain lashes down. “For one moment only, you may raise that gate and see yourself in a truly objective way…”
The others lift their wet heads and focus on the dark shape high in the walls. Each enters their own castle of stone, looking for a key… In the first of many pilgrim silences.
The lashing rain is test enough. The guide turns the group round and towards the sea, where they turn, again, to walk back as close to the waves as they wish, even barefoot within the waters…
The rain ceases as quickly as it came…
On the horizon the Holy Isle of Lindisfarne beckons… but that is to come. For now, the nature of stone and blood require deep thought.
He points out to sea. “Later, we will speak of ships, but first we need to consider the different natures of the castle’s stone and the ocean’s waves; both of the world of form but very different in their roles in our worlds.
It has begun well…
Later, arriving in the little port of Seahouses, two miles away, there is a double rainbow so bright it lights up the waves on the sea.
The new pilgrims are in good humour. A birthday is being celebrated. Each is warmed by a drink. Then Seahouses provides its famous fish and chips… and does not disappoint. Later, after a nightcap, it is time to retire, and to take the spirit of the beginning into what follows.
To be continued.
©Stephen Tanham.
Stephen Tanham is a director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit organisation providing low-cost, distance-learning courses with personal supervision.
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Inspector Sunday watched as the angel fell to Earth, directly over him, its form becoming a cloud of vapour hissing around him.
He turned, seeing tiny, glittering eyes everywhere.
“Mow,” said the eyes.
“Are you here to help me,” whispered Sunday.
“Mow,” said the cat, regrouping.
©Stephen Tanham
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Principles of Fire (6): A Tribe of Two
by Steve Tanham
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” Rumi
Jalaluddin Rumi was a 12th century Sufi mystic, whose approach to the ‘real’ was remarkably modern. This should not surprise us. Anything spiritually true will have that immediate and familiar ring about it – the sense of a homecoming, something ‘just there’ beneath the surface of our consciousness.
The Sufis knew that there is no need to use an overly ornate symbolic system to describe the psychologically-real in the human being; most of those that do were created, in times of religious persecution, to enable teaching in secret. Today, there is the danger that they become the tools of egoic gurus who use them to veil the truth, rather than light a path to it. This is not always true, but is a danger for those new to a path, who might not know the difference.
In the previous post, we examined how the primary behaviour of the egoic self is to react. Rumi’s quote, above, is directly related to this. Distilled, his words describe a self that has has built a shell around our essence – something that dwells in ‘love’. Love was the language of the Sufis: the seeker becomes besotted – intoxicated – with the discovered presence of what seems like another being inside themselves. Only much later do we see that we are the reflection of it and not the other way round…
The power of the shell that blocks out the interior love from our true Self is the power of reaction; the world ‘painted on our eyeballs’ from the last blog. The egoic, worldly self must constantly identify with reaction to life in order to maintain its illusory position at ‘the centre’. In the words of the Buddhists: there are two ways of looking at clouds passing; the first is to say “I see clouds passing”, the second is to say “Clouds are passing – there is consciousness of this.”
Nothing is lost in this, save the grip of the egoic self. Clouds are still passing; but, in the second example there is an implied, deeper relationship between the one who was the observer and the thing observed. One of them has vanished – making the world whole, again.
Our world is one of relationship. Our bodies are instruments for receiving the electro-magnetic signals that give notice of change to consciousness. The world is my relationship to everything within it – in particular, other people in my life. In part three of this series we spoke about ‘projection’; an unconscious externalising of what ‘I am’ as though projected onto a screen. When we fall in love, we see the other as the object of our adoration, but, really, we are projecting a very beautiful and inner part of us onto the perfect screen of sympathetic person. This does not diminish love; far from it. The love felt from the other person shows us the power of love to shine an other-wordly ‘light’ into our lives. When we project on someone else in this way, we are bypassing the rigid egoic shell that keeps us imprisoned in this world of reaction. Because this intense feeling is seen in the person of another, we are free to see it without our internal ‘commentary’ – a process that would reduce it to a regurgitation of our own egoic story.
When we look at a tree, we immediately get that voice in our head that names the tree, and we begin commenting on the nature, condition, habitat and a thousand other descriptions of ‘this beautiful, living thing in front of me’. As soon as that internal dialogue – based entirely on our history – begins, we have lost the moment of beingness with the tree. It doesn’t need to be a tree. An orange, apple, painting or a thousand other things could work just as well. As an exercise, gaze round for a few minutes each day and watch how quickly the internal jabbering switches on. Then try to ignore it, as though dismissing an unruly child… hold that feeling, that brief moment of being free to see things as they are, and without fear of losing the defensive commentary.
If we do not observe ourselves well, our world will be full of that confusion, projected outwards. If we know ourselves well, we can, day by day, draw into that knowing a certainty that our role is to ‘be with’ the world. This state of being happens in stages and needs to be accompanied by a systematic journey around our selves, beginning at the egoic level. Surprisingly, this is not a chore. it is an exciting adventure, with a considerable degree of humour and emotion along the way. Above all, from the first minute, it feels a lot more real that what is happening now…
With each bit of the defensive barrier taken down, more of the real – more of Rumi’s love – will come through. We do not need to invent, nor even visualise it. Its nature is to be; we need only let it in. It was there long before ‘we’ were.
To be continued.
©️Stephen Tanham
Other parts of this series:
Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five,
Stephen Tanham is a director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit organisation that helps people find the reality and essence of their existence via home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised.
His personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
You’ll find friends, poetry, literature and photography there…and some great guest posts on related topics
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A depth of past from Stuart…
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From Sue:
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I was struggling with the height of the walls – 10 metres. I am distinctly medium in height; my two sons tower over me, at six foot, three inches each. But ten metres is a long way into anybody’s domestic sky; and yet that’s how tall the central stone tower of the Broch of Gurness was.
The small cheeseboard (above) bought in Kirkwall, the capital, has served us well as geography prop. Locate the island of Rousay and, from its south coast, drop down to the shark-shaped headland on the West Mainland below. That’s where we are, at the Broch of Gurness, with Rousay opposite, so close you feel you could swim to it – but those waters are treacherous…
I hope someone else is asking, ‘What’s a Broch?’ It’s a well-known word north of the border, but I had to ask the Historic Scotland guide at the tiny visitor centre; and felt diminished by his incredulous stare. He wasn’t being unfriendly; he was genuinely surprised at my ignorance – but only momentarily…
… He ceased grinding corn on the rotary quern- just long enough to educate me – and then resumed his skilful use of the two stones; a steady stream of flour, below, being the result. Inviting me to have a go by way of penance, he explained that a broch (pronounced ‘brock’) was a fortified tower at the centre of an ancient settlement. In this case the settlement was a large one, and, 2000 years ago, would have been one of the most important places on Orkney.
The sea is everywhere on Orkney. Indeed, after a few days of meeting it beyond each bend in the road, or over every gentle hill, you come to realise that Orkney is the sea, and that you are in a kind of paradise where the gentle curls and fronds of the welcoming land live, in gentle harmony, with the mother force of the blue-green waters. We gave you this, the waters seem to say. Look after it and that which gave it life and it will become home in your heart.
The mysterious Iron Age peoples who lived here, two thousand years ago, felt that way. The sea was their highway, and probably a big part of their religion, too. Along with the fertile land, it fed them.
Ten metres. It’s a long way up for a drystone wall… though the full height of the cental broch tower is long eroded. Newly educated at the grinding wheel, I worked hard to recall what the guide had said: You build that big because you are important. The tower is domestic – being the ‘royal’ dwelling, but it’s also defensive; you can see for miles from a height like that, and Orkney has hills but no mountains. In addition, you can watch and manage those near to you – surveying the farmed land around. It was a really important place, concluded the guide, letting me leave my grinding duties and enter the historic site.
There are over 500 brochs in northern and western Scotland, but those with sizeable villages like Gurness are peculiar to Orkney and northern Caithness. The history of archeology is full of fortunate accidents that lead to discovery. The coastal storm that revealed Scara Brae being a very good example. The story of the finding of the Broch of Gurness is one of the best.
There had been a large mound (locally ‘knowe’ at Gurness, close to the shore, for as long as anyone could remember. One day in 1929, an Orkney Scholar, Robert Rendall, was sketching on the top of the mound when one of the legs of his stool slid into the ground. He dug to examine why the ground had given way and ended up uncovering the top of the staircase on the west side of the broch tower. There had been widespread interest in excavating Orkney’s ancient history and a series of donations enabled formal excavations, which began in 1930. It was soon taken over by the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works, under whose aegis it continued until the onset of WW2 in 1939.
A similar mound at Midhowe, on the neighbouring island of, Rousay, was excavated at the same time, and skilled workmen were shared between the two sites. For its time, the work was very skilled and disciplined. The result was a great achievement for the people of Orkney, who now had living proof of the ancientness of their landscape.
The work continued after the war and, in the 1950s, consolidation of the work took place. Loose and broken stones were secured in place and all walls were made safe. A set of concrete cliff were constructed to offer some protection from the unpredictable seas.
The picture below, taken from the site’s visitor board, shows the extent of the excavation, as it is today. On the left hand side you can see how close it is (and was) to the sea. The picture also shows the dominance of the central broch tower, with its twin, hollow walls and vast dimensions.
By about 100 AD, the broch and its village were abandoned. Successive failures in the structure reduced its size, and the remains were re-used by generations of later settlers, up to Pictish times, around 700 AD. The Vikings never lived here, but, in the 9th century, they honoured the site by burying a noblewoman, along with her grave goods.
Further information from Historic Scotland.
©Stephen Tanham
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The cat’s sudden appearance had startled Sunday. It took him a few moments to adjust; then he realised that the creature had been looking out of the window and not at him.
Sunday followed the feline gaze and found that a huge angel had broken loose from a high cloud and was expanding as it fell to Earth…
“Mow ” said the cat, suddenly closer to Sunday’s ear.
“Hush,” whispered Sunday, as he attempted to stroke the cat. But it had gone…
©Stephen Tanham.
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Principles of Fire (5): A Tribe of One
by Steve Tanham
They who set out to discover the twin meanings of the word ‘self’ must walk a certain path. The route to the deeper, real self lies only in the journey through the everyday self. Without this study – and its consequent effects – there can be no personal transformation.
We have to learn to look at ourselves with intensity if we are to begin to glimpse the false edges of what we take ourselves to be. There are many forces at work to guide and help us. This is not a journey that is taken alone. To paraphrase the ancient Kabbalists: The universe is awake to an awakening Adam. Our birthright is the state of full and inclusive consciousness, free from the accumulation of the personal past. What prevents this state of living is the power of that past…
The ordinary, everyday self is characterised by one word: reaction. To begin to examine ourselves, we begin by studying – with intensity – how we react. We react to pain, or the threat of pain, even though it is not present. We react to pleasure and the possibility of pleasure. Between these two poles our lives are strung out like a historical washing line. On this line are familiar garments, comfortable resting points in good or bad times; places we can reside and be at home with the history of reaction contained within. Many, such as those generated in our early months, are unconscious and very powerful. They can be positive (love) or negative (paralysing fear). With the latter, if seen in the light of adult discrimination they would lose their power; but to ‘sit with them’ is truly work and better accompanied.
Some reactions are more subtle. It is hard to think in an original way. Typically, each of us belongs to a kind of ‘tribe’, where the core values of that group of people are shared among thousands, if not millions, of other members. When we belong to a tribe we don’t need to think originally, indeed it is often dangerous to do so. We risk drawing attention to ourselves, and the ultimate sanction against such behaviour is to be ejected from the tribe. Finding ourselves alone is a dreadful thing. Some people fear that more than anything else in their world.
When we begin to watch ourselves on a daily basis, the very act of self-watching begins the generation of a different ‘space’ inside us. This new, differently-aware space is what brings the early results that can be so heartening to those beginning the Work. This new space is not part of the historic egoic structure of our lives, since its very existence is to watch and study how that structure operates and has formed. The techniques that begin the creation of this space are analogous to a person realising that, from the perspective of consciousness, the world is actually projected on to their eyeballs – like a movie – with no gap between the event and the reaction to that event. The egoic self is what reacts, instantly, to this projected world. The vast majority of such reactions are pre-programmed by the personal life history; in other words, they are not truly alive…
The five senses bring us the shape and behaviour of the world around us. Patterns in our personal history tell us, immediately, if there is danger in the encroaching environment, whether physical or psychological. At the most intimate level, these patterns reveal threats to our physical existence – that which threatens the body. We do not need to process the logic of a burn from a red-hot object; the automated mechanisms from our early childhood react for us. But there was a time when we had to learn it…
Beyond that, we have patterns of emotional recognition, which are largely automatic, too, but in a different way. I can bat away the approach of a wasp in Autumn, but I can’t do the same with a bad feeling; I have to think originally about its possible origins – including searching within ‘my self’. I might not want the effort of doing that. Instead, I could reach for an alcoholic drink or switch on a movie, allowing the bad feeling to pass. Sadly, avoidance teaches nothing, whereas a naked inquiry into the newly formed internal state can teach us a lot.
Beyond the emotions is the power of the intellect: that which learns by reason. This is the slowest of all; yet allows us to form patterns that deal with very deep and often complex concepts, such as how and why people lie to others and to themselves. Reason is clever, allowing us to out-think the life-forms that came before us; using the intellectual jewel of ‘what if’. And yet reason is wholly a thing of the brain, and so is conditioned by the entirety of our personal history.
These three ‘space helmets’ – each one inside the other, like the famous Russian Dolls – are the glass through which we see the world. But our conditioned consciousness does not look at the world, it looks, instead, at the movie being shown on the glass bubbles in which we live. Our egoic consciousness is nothing more than the sum total of our personal reactions to the movies… But, it’s worse: there is nothing inside those three helmets, except the history of themselves and the historic washing line of fear and pleasure.
The riddle of this is the story of our real existence – and our wonderful potential as fully conscious creatures, connected, in microcosm, with everything.
To be continued…
©️Stephen Tanham
Other parts of this series:
Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four,
Stephen Tanham is a director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit organisation that helps people find the reality and essence of their existence via home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised.
His personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
You’ll find friends, poetry, literature and photography there…and some great guest posts on related topics
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From Stuart
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Sue and Stuart’s journey through mystical Cornwall continues
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⦿
This berry ball, September’s song
Hangs boldly from the tree nearby
Unseen, till now, its blood-red tone
Displays the inner harvest of the sun
And radiance of the soft, enduring sky
⦿
Its fragile fullness tells a tale
Within this sphere new life responds
With readiness to live, then die
Red body hangs in space, an offered meal
For bird who with the seed absconds
⦿
Autumn orb of reddening gold
When life is ending, grant to me
As death returns my light to you
That hawks should feed upon my meal
Yet know the arrow that I bear flies free
⦿
©️Stephen Tanham
Stephen Tanham is a director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit organisation that helps people find the reality and essence of their existence via home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised.
His personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
You’ll find friends, poetry, literature and photography there…and some great guest posts on related topics.
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