Inside-Out Thinking

just a thought

let's try and think a thought no-one has ever thought before

the secret church

you how you only think of a snappy answer when it's too late?

perhaps when Jumoke was worrying about why esoteric thought and mysticism has to be so secret, I should've said 

'Maybe the true church is always secret? 

That would've made her laugh, and she's got such a great laugh you always want to set it off!

are we nearly there yet?

On Sunday I was discussing with friends what it feels like when your father dies.

I'm next!  is one of the feelings, I think.

It's also a bit like when you're children, all crammed in the car driving to the seaside, getting more and more restless and excited, knowing that that maybe when you reach the brow of the next hill - or if not that one, surely the one after or definitely the one after that - you'll see the sea.

The sea is death, and when your father dies you begin to coast down the other side of the hill towards it.

love

Walking on Ashdown Forest late Saturday afternoon I saw two rabbits fightingg.

(One walks 'on' rather than 'in' this forest because there are hardly any trees, its foresty qualities being confined to its name.)

I heard a squeal and peered into the grey-brown gloom to see a thrashing of fluffy white tail. At first i thought that perhaps a rabbit was being attacked by a bird of prey, then they separated and sped off in opposite directions.

I told a friend. She said Why were they fighting?

I said I was too polite to ask. (Afterwards I realized I was echoing a Gore Vidal witticism. He said the same thing when a prying journalist asked him if his first sexual experience had been with a man or a woman.)

Perhaps they were fighting over a carrot? she said.

A carrot would certainly be a rare and valuable thing on Ashdown Forest. But i wondered if there might be a more likely sexual explanation? Psychoanalysts say that sexual love that is all fluffy empathy and kindness will peter out. There needs to be an impulse to degrade your partner.Perhaps ihad chanced on a rabbity attempt at degradation?

In my shed later I came across a copy of Hidden Journey, Andrew Harvey's book about his relationship with Mother Meera. They loved each other.

I have a habit of underlining the 'good bits', and i found this, which makes me wonder how Lorna and Mother Meera would get on'.

I began again. 'You said, Ma, that there were several divine powers on earth apart from you.'

'There are several. This is a time of crisis. The divine looks after all its worlds. We have all come to help.'

'Each avatar has a different work?'

'Yes.'

'But each avatar being the Divine is One with the Divine and all other avatars.'

'Yes'.

The same oriental emphasis onthe spiritual continuum that we noted a few days ago.

At the back I'd written 'There is a cause and effect continuum which is apart from the one you know, but which you can step inside and become a part of by acting graciously.'

I think the vast difference between those who act graciously and those who do not is going to show itself in publishing now it is entering its own time of crisis.

the spirit leaps

Something, maybe the dream of the shadowy figure, has prompted me to remember something Lorna said one of the first times i met her. She was sitting opposite me, the other side of my desk at Random House, and she said the light was shining so brightly out of my eyes that the rest of me was in shadow.

I don't imagine for a moment that my soul is usually is a dazzlingly illuminated state!I suspect it's something that sometimes happens to people when they meet Lorna.

I also remember Lorna saying that when she met my friend Rina in a hotel lobby near Victoria station, she saw Rina's spirit leap up to greet her.

the materialist elite

There was a review of a very interesting-sounding book in the Guardian on Saturday - The Magician's Book: a sceptic's adventures in Narnia by Laura Miller. But this review illustrates, i think, something of the intellectual and moral prejudices, one might say neuroses, of today's ruling intellectual elite.

In the final volume of the Narnia series, The Last Battle, a book which enthralled me as a child and made very sad that the sequence was over, it's suggested that Narnia is only a shadow copy of something in Aslan's real world.  The reviewer, Jenny Turner, calls this suggestion 'Creepy..disordered and confused..' She goes on 'Why did Lewis feel he had to do it?' I don't know if there's an implication here that he felt compelled to do something dishonest, but the straightforward answer to her question is that because Lewis was a Christian, he was a believer in idealism, the belief system behind most art and literature, from the Bible and medieval cathedrals to the paintings of the RRenaissance and music and poetry of Romanticism - and, as i suggest in my book, much of the great culture of even the twentieth century, the great century of materialism. None of it can be properly appreciated except if you are prepared to imagine yourself into idealism's world-view - assuming of course that that's not where you live.

I'm tying not to rant here. Just to say that a philosophy of life that was mature, balanced, secure in its assumptions - and perhaps a little bit genial as a result- wouldn't fear idealism so much. It would be relaxed about considering the strengths and weaknesses of the opposing arguments, rather than, as i've written in my book, trying pour scorn on it and to eradicate all traces of it from the universee.

 Why do today's intellectual elite find the possibility of transcendence so fearful? 

what we share

As I begin to review your recent comments, I'd like to thank Marcel Benn for his typically concise and clear statement of what i take to be the oriental position.

Some people experience spiritual influences in human or semi-human form, such as angels or spirits, whilst others, like Marcel (I hope I'm representing you aright, Marcel?), experience them in a more impersonal way, as aspects of a cosmic consciousness which is a kind of continuum.

What both groups - broadly eastern and western in style  - share and, what therefore we should all hold on to, is experience of a cosmos that is anthropocentric, at least in the sense that it responds to our hopes, fears, thoughts.

I think there's no doubt that what we experience depends to some extent on cultural conditioning, and perhaps also because spiritual influences adapt themselves to us as groups and individuals as part of their attempts to get through our thick skulls.

If we tried to determine the extent to which  it's proper to talk of angels' having autonomy, we'd risk getting into the sort of abstruse and boring theological debate that is so open to mockery by our enemies.

But it helps me to remember that Lorna, who regularly chats with angels with all the familiarity and vernacular of a neighbour over the garden fence, sometimes sees them all linked, as if by a sort of umbilical cord, back to God. 

iron for the soul

There's a scene in an early Graham Greene novel - perhaps Gun For Sale - in which someome allows themselves to get murdered in a sceance rather than face the embarassment of interrupting proceedings. Dread of making a scene isn't what it used to be, maybe, but I still find that if I'm sitting in a railway carriage, realizing as we pull away from Tunbridge Wells that I'm next to someone sniffing or spluttering or dripping phlegm it's quite beyond me to get up and move to another carriage.

Feeling a cold coming on a couple of days ago, i remembered a homeopathic remedy somone told me about a few years ago that I'd since forgotten. Iron Phosphate - marked Ferr. Phos. on the plastic container I got form the chemist - is what you take if you feel a cold coming on -

and I'm here to tell you it really does work!

nightmare II

I told someone about my dream. She said 'I bet the dark figure was your shadow side'.

WHAT?

'Yes, you're so good and empathetic and charming, I'm sure you have really well-developed dark side.'

Is that the equation?

(Have you noticed that when people describe you as charming, they probably don't mean it as a compliment?)

Typepad, who own this website have changed the password system, which means i can't do posts from my home computer. Well, i expect i could, but for the moment I'm stumped.  A drag, because at home weekends is when i have more time, so I'm still playing catch-up.

Commuters who work in American banks and other financial services in the City travel in from Tunbridge Wells. On Fridays they are on the station platform are all prepped for 'dress-down Friday', which means they don't wear suits but dress 'casually'. The problem is that the chinos, pink shirts, loafers etc are evidently every bit as regulated as the suits.

I wonder if a silver lining in this recession could be that we'll see an end to corporate bullshit. The management speak, the 'going forward', the corporate spin, the thought control that pretends it's for your benefit but really only wants you to give over the sweetest hours of your life to the bottom line that benefits those at the top - all of that has completely failed us. 

On Sunday morning I went on Jumoke Fashola's BBC London radio show on faith and ethics. (I don't tell friends beforehand about this sort of stuff in case I make a complete fool of myself.)

Jumoke's a gale of fun and laughter and slightly subversive high spirits. I liked her immensely the first time I went on. One of the advantages of doing an interview face to face is that you can pull faces and try to make the other laugh while he/she is talking, and we both took full advantage of this.

John Cornwell was before me being very interesting about Darwin and his gradual shift to atheism. He said that Darwin's favourite book, the one he took with him on the Beagle, was Milton's Paradise Lost.

Milton created a grand imaginative vision of spiritual cosmology - influenced by Boehme and Fludd -  just at the time that scientific materialism was beginning to replace idealism.  Secret History is intended as a snapshot of spiritual cosmolgy just as scientific materialism begins to fail.

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.