Inside-Out Thinking

nightmare

This morning a fox trotted briskly but contentedly down the railway line, the length of a platform filled with commuters. Many laughed, as he seemed to be the only thing moving down the line on this very cold morning  - minus ten in some parts and the points frozen.

Later I remembered i'd had a vivid dream of a menacing, faceless figure looming over my bed. I looked to see if he was 'really' there and he dispersed.

He might partly have been the result of of having watched the Clint Eastwood thriller, Tightrope, the night before, in which the serial killer appears in shadows and finally in a black mask. Generally, i think, it takes the mind much longer than that to process waking experience so that it can appear in a dream, but i guess that if there is something there - in the spirit worlds - it can wear a very recent memory as a mask.

the commonsensical delusion

I met someone, a TV producer, just before Christmas who spends time with some individuals most people would consider dangerous lunatics. She even allows her young child to hang out with them. Perhaps sensing my surprise,as i pictured them dandling the child on their knee, she said they were kind and compassionate.

I'm touched by her tolerance. We should be careful not to be intolerant towards people people with a different mode of consciousness to our own. It's a persistent temptation. We tend not to like the idea that other people have different modes. If we're forced to confront it, it tends to makes us uneasy.

I guess that explains the commonsensical fiction, or perhaps better the working hypothesis, we tend to live by - that we all share the same form of consciousness.

I think the reality is that there's a spectrum from, say, Lorna Byrne to -I'm guessing - Richard Dawkins. All perceive the same physical objects in 3-dimensional  space, all live and work with these objects, make sensible arrangements and predictions about how these objects and other people will behave, and all negotiate a way through life on the basis of these predictions.

But that may be all they have in common.

the eyes of the world

On my I-pod coming over London Bridge early this frozen morning:

'Wake up to find that you are the eyes of the world'

The Grateful Dead.

Human eyes, our two eyes, have evolved so the universe can see itself in new ways.

On another level we may see the universe with the eye of cosmic vision. When we do so, we are in some ways sharing in the mode of vision of spiritual beings, but in our case it is informed by an ability to play with concepts, a capacity for abstract thinking that is perhaps uniquely human.

The definition of matter

from the point of view of idealism, of a mind-before-matter philosophy, is this:

Something counts as matter if it forms a barrier to spirit.

That, from the point of view of a sacred idealism - agh how do you switch off the italics? - that sees the formation of matter out of the cosmic mind as a historical process.. is what matter is for.. 

Dreams can come true

On NY's Eve some friends were talking about scenes in films that make you cry. I suggested when Baloo the bear turns out not to be dead. Someone said when ET turns out not to be dead. Then I thought of the end of that film when ET and the boy suddenly soar up into the air on a bike. Thatreminded me of when, in the theatre, Peter Pan suddenly leaves the stage and flies above the audience.

Why should that make us well up?

I think all of us have deep-rooted memories of the time before the Fall into matter when we were all spirits among spirits, flying free and bathed in the light of love and meaning. We all have a nostalgia for it and a deep longing for its return.

one in ten

Driving through an ancient, sacred landscape, like the one that surrounds Stonehenge, you can see patterns of old earthworks pressing up through the turf, like meanings trying to push up into our every day lives.

A report in yesterday's Sunday Times says that a team from Stony Brook University in NY scanned the brains of couples who'd been together for 20 years and discovered that one in ten couples still experience the same rush of joy at seeing each other that we all experience in the early years of a relationship.

One in ten doesn't seem much, does it? I wonder how many of us meet our soul mate, but fail to see it?  Or see it and don't have the courage?

Lorna's Vision

of Christmas, the one that was used as the basis for the Daily Mail article is now up in full on her website. Of course there are many very finely detailed paintings of the Nativity, some the result of visionary states, but this is the most detailed written description I've ever encountered. I think she really saw it!

I recently looked up Hildegard of Bingen's accounts of her visions for comparison. To me that they have an air of literary construction, of conscious symbol-making which is entirely absent from Lorna's writing. She gives an account of what is really happening in the spirit worlds which I think may be unique in mystical literature. 

trees for company

I went to stay in a cottage near the hamlet of Iken in Suffolk, in search of solitude and quiet. No radio, no music, no computer, no phone.  What a relief.

In one direction a footpath snakes through the rushes to the Maltings, the concert hall built for Benjamin Britten. In the other, the path runs along the side of the river to a church on a promontory that looks like an island. It has a fifteenth century font with a devil and beautiful remains of a Saxon cross, and is said to have been founded St Botolph, a Saxon saint. I asked him for his help.

Away to the south and west lies the forest. Has anyone else been taken with the extraordinary quality of the winter sunlight this year? Even trees bare of leaves sometimes seem to burn with a pale fire.

Orford is 4 miles east of Iken, down worryingly narrow, twisty lanes. It's near perfect Norman keep used to make my boyish heart leap. There also used to be a rather frightening life-sized model of a merman, hung up in a cage near the roof, commemorating the merman who was caged there in the Middle Ages until he escaped back to the sea. Now it has been removed. Historical correctness, I suppose.

A few steps from the castle is my favourite restaurant in the world, the Butley Oysterage. It's been smartened up a bit, but it still looks like a Fifties cafe. My father had a yen for the smoked sprats. They have a very intense flavor - the fish equivalent to bacon.

Also very close is Staverton Thicks. It's not signposted, but you can find it on an OrdinanceSurvey Map, where it's just marked the 'Thicks'. According to local lore it's a Druid's wood. Ancient oaks, weirdly contorted like in an Arthur Rackham, are set our in a regular and evidently man-made pattern, and interspersed with old holly trees. Some people think that they were planted by monks in the Middle Ages. Why would they farm acorns, I wonder?

Shortly before he died the naturalist Roger Deakin wrote: 'I'm interested in the society of trees. A wood is a society of trees, and it stands for democracy and society'. I think he was on to something there.

more filial thoughts

CLN has asked me what I was going on about - and on and on - in my last post. I think the comment is to the effect that perception is a complex process, but surely it's nothing more than that, surely there's nothing genuinely mysterious going on in the sorts of events and experiences I'm describing?

As I've taken up the task of trying to explain certain mystical and esoteric ideas, no matter how exposed to mockery, here goes..

I remember being in a multistorey car park with my father when he was perhaps just a bit older than I am now. He was parking the car in what was, I suppose, quite a narrow space, as they usually are. He  shunted it backwards and forwards over and over again, even once we were safely within the white lines, trying to get it exactly right, as an obsessive compulsive might.

He wasn't obsessive-compulsive, but he was even than more usually anxious that evening. His eyesight had been exceptionally poor since childhood and i don't know if that made him feel vulnerable, as if things might attack him and he mightn't see them coming. His father had had a drink problem so he'd grown up very poor, and I'm sure he dreaded a return to poverty.  He also seemed to be worried about losing his job, an anxiety that was increasing with age - an anxiety that a lot of people will identify with right now.

I became rigid with aggravation as he shunted the car, but said nothing. Afterwards he said, simply 'Thank you'.

If these days, in the dead of winter, I feel my long dead father with me, is it just a vivid memory?

Is it partly that he lives inside me because I've his genes? Perhaps I have inherited his memories? Memories are surely passed on like everything else?

Perhaps he lives on in a net of language, as a interlinked set of ideas that take on a sort of life of their own?

All these things, I think, but I also believe that he is sometimes with me as an independent centre of consciousness, helping me, and that we have moments of mental communion like the one we had in the carpark.

I find the process by which ideas enter our mental space a mysterious one on many levels. It's mysterious that thoughts may be sensed on the edge of consciousness before we become fully aware of them. This seems to indicate that they are pre-existing. Part of the mystery, it seems to me, is that they are living beings with a life and a consciousness independent of our own.

filial thoughts

I took my son to see Hellboy II a few weeks ago - partly because I'd been intrigued by the esoteric references in the first one. Driving home, we were coming up to the top of our road when we saw a spherical object moving sideways acrosss the sky, quite low, it seemed. It was pale like the moon with an orange patch along the rim at the bottom. At first glance i imagined this must be the fire in a hot air balloon - we get a lot of them around Tunbrdige Wells - but then why would it be inside the sphere rather than underneath it? Also, it was moving way too fast for a balloon.

I said i thought it was too small for a flying saucer. My son laughed and said How would you know?

There's a fenced off area full of big, old trees at the topof the road and over the past few weeks several people have heard a screeching that sounds very like a monkey coming from them and a huge commotion among the branches.

Perhaps the monkeys came down in the flying saucer? A more likely explanation, I suppose, is that this is just another result of global warming.

Somebody said that squirrels make a sound like monkeys during sex. Or perhaps they change into monkeys or just become more like humans at the moment of climax?

When my father died it turned out that he carried list I'd written out of the kings and queens of England, I guess when i was a few years younger than my son is now. Had i given it to him as handy reference guide in case he suddenly needed to know?

I took my son to Westminster Abbey. I remember my parents taking me - the tombs of the ancient English kings so worn down by the caress of pilgrims they looked like they were melting.

Now they reminded me of that scene in the first Alien film when our heroes chance on the fantastic, organic-looking tombs of the aliens. There was the same air that they are about to rewawake - which of course is what the people who built those tombs believed.

The tomb of Edward the Confessor is closed off from the public these days. You have to say you are going to pray. I asked someone in a red robe. She sat with us and we talked about the mosaics. There is a 'cosmati' mosaic - so-called after the family who originated the style - on the floor in front of the high altar, though it is usually hidden under a carpet. The mosaic also runs up the sides of Edward's tomb in a muted sparkling.

(I'm reminded now of a description of a wall Lorna has talked to me about in a very important vision she's described to me lately. I'm trying to get it published in a national newspaper. More shortly, I hope.)

The robed woman told us she's discovered that the design of cosmati pavement came from a mosaic in Santa Sophia of the 7th century. I said I was intrigued. She was enjoying telling us these secrets so I didn't interrupt with my own information - that the same pattern appears in Rosicrucian designs. I have on by by Michel le Bon propped up on the window sill of my office.

At this later date, at any rate, it represents the 'eternal pattern of the universe', which is to say idealism's concept of the way the physical world is generated by ideas - sometimes called the the Matrix. I imagine that standing in the Matrix would help you step into the other world.

I prayed and to St Michael - and to St Edward.

If anyone's interested, I wrote an article on celebrity and psychosis in the Independent on Sunday. As consciousness changes and we do away, more and more, with notions of private, mental space, we need to be careful about what we 'let in'. I talk about the tendency to psychosis that often lies behind the cheeky grin, and suggest that celebrity is incipient psychosis. What does it do to them and what does it do to us? If you Google Mark Booth celebrity, it's the first thing that comes up.

What I predicted in the earlier article in the IoS about changes in the book trade and publishing are all coming true. Supermarkets are beginning to withdraw from books. People at Haymarket, the magazine publisher, are complaining about not being paid. Amazon is now the biggest retailer of books, once you take into account the massive returns from the high street and the supermarkets.

The high street here is nearly deserted, even so near Christmas. We're approaching the deadest part of winter when the world is most like what lies immediately on the other side, when you might step over without noticing and when the dead step over freely in the other ddirection. Bookshops are perhaps more crowded with the dead than the living.