Vaccination Vacillations

It was a difficult choice – to be jabbed or not to be jabbed.  Once I finally made my choice, there was the next obstacle; should I make my decision public?

I decided yes – to both.  Many reading this will be mystified as to why it was such a difficult decision.  After all, for the vast majority of people on BOTH sides of the argument, it’s a ‘no brainer’.  Either they believe implicitly in the science and can’t wait to be vaccinated or they are convinced that all sorts of nasties are being injected into the arms of unwitting victims, which will have dire consequences.

I have friends on both sides of the fence.  Not since the English Civil War, I would imagine, has opinion been so divided and intractable.  Politely begging to differ is no longer an option.  Walking down the pavement in my town, and many others, I’d imagine, 30% of the population are masked and hooded, glaring furiously at anyone passing them and veering into the path of buses to avoid close contact with a human biohazard.  Another 30% jeer nastily if you step aside to let them pass and make a concerted effort to come as close as they can, ostentatiously hugging and kissing anyone they vaguely recognise.  That only leaves just over a third of the population who will nod or smile in a friendly manner and go about their essential business as best they can.

The trouble with me is that I make very little effort to ‘fit in’.  I ponder my decisions carefully, but doing what others do because that’s the line of least resistance has always seemed weak and rather a cop-out.

‘Aha,’ you may say. if you reside on that side of the fence, ‘So you are one of the subversives!  You’re a conspiracy theorist.’  Well no, actually.

‘Aha,’ you may say, if you are from the other side, ‘So you are one of us!  Not one of the sheeple.  You have seen the hidden agenda!’  Also no.

I was once accused by a friend in bright felted garments and dreds of being ‘not alternative enough to fit in’.  I ventured the suggestion that being ‘alternative’ seemed to me to imply not fitting in.  She shook her head sadly and told me I should at least wear some beads….

Still, back to the vaccine.  You see, I am not generally a huge fan of allopathic medicine.  This does not stem from any deep mistrust of the medical profession.  I take from them what works for me and go elsewhere if others can help more.

When my daughter was 8 or 9, she had severe stomach aches.  I took her to the doctor who asked many questions, prodded her a great deal and pronounced her quite healthy.  The pains continued.  In desperation  I then took her to a homeopath who asked many questions then gave her some tissue salts which cleared up the pains within days.  It was my first encounter with homeopathy, but certainly not my last.

When I had sciatica, which was excruciating, I again went to a doctor.  I gratefully accepted the physiotherapy appointment he offered but declined the painkillers and the second prescription which (he had the grace to blush) he admitted was to neutralise the side-effects from the painkillers.  I used the sheet of physio exercises and found an excellent acupuncturist.  Together they healed me.

For broken or dislocated bones, it’s doctors every time.  For most other ailments I usually elect for some kind of complementary treatment.  I’m a great believer  in energy healing and it has proved very effective for all manner of problems throughout my life.  It does have limitations though.  I noted that whilst radionics, for example, has been amazing at sorting out everything from allergies to breathlessness to digestive problems, it was not effective with a respiratory virus that laid me low the Christmas before last.  A relative had a similar issue with a viral disease.  It’s as if viruses somehow get through the net of energy healing.  I have only this experience as evidence, but – as I said – I make my own choices based on what works for me.

Three of my good friends have seen fit to spam me relentlessly with anti-vax propaganda.  Maybe they see me as ‘one of them’, or perhaps their evangelical zeal (Oh dear, how I HATE evangelism!) induces them to send it to everyone they know.  Perhaps they think they are ‘saving’ me.

I’ve read and watched some of it.  Most of the posters claim to be ‘spiritual’, although the tirades of sarcasm, scepticism and arrogance which invariably follow give me some cause to doubt that assertion.  I’ve never understood why spirituality seems so closely aligned with conspiracy theories.  Goes back to not being alternative enough, I suppose.

Then there’s the pro-vax propaganda; burbling Prime Minister, a train of look-alike Secretaries of State and the scientists who are now media personalities in their own right – JVT with his endearing long-winded metaphors that usually get lost in the middle, Sir Patrick with his headmasterly severity, Jenny Harries with her gentle, well-modulated points and Chris Whitty with his earnest, passionate appeals.

Both sides have statistics galore.  You can argue anything with statistics.  So which way to jump?  I finally decided to use a method of choice that would horrify the scientists and probably bemuse many of the conspiracists.  I took my trusty pendulum, tuned into the part of myself the scientists would deny existed and asked it questions.  Like I say, I believe in energy.  I believe that my body knows at a deep, spiritual level what is right for it and although my conflicting thoughts can get in the way of decision-making, this simple method is sensitive enough to pick up my body’s truth.

‘If I have the vaccination, will it be beneficial to my body?’  Pendulum swings sideways – NO.

‘If I have the vaccination, will it be harmful to my body?’  NO.

‘If I have the vaccination, will it lessen my chances of catching Covid-19?’  Pendulum swings front to back – YES.

So the decision was made.  Not beneficial per se, but effective in preventing me from catching a disease that my age, fitness levels and weight suggest could be serious.

I have lived completely alone throughout the pandemic.  Not so much as a goldfish to talk to.  Days on end with no human contact.  I have not left this divided little town for many months.  I have not seen grandchildren, children or my much-loved elderly aunt for over a year.  I have missed train rides, coffee or lunch with friends, bus trips around the beautiful Somerset countryside, trips to shows and museums…  I opted for the jab.

So thank you to all who have tried to help me towards my decision.  Thank you to the delightful, thoughtful and efficient nurses and stewards at the vaccination centre.  They gawped in amazement when I said I was not on any medication at all.  “What – NOTHING?” cried the nurse, re-checking my DOB.  Nope.  With the medical profession, I take from them what works for me and go elsewhere if others can help more.

The Curing

I feel safest with stories.  They soothe me.  And the old stories are the best of all.

Today I want to share an old story with you – one that came to me and was most anxious to be shared.  Even the synchronicities that drew this story to me tell a tale in themselves.

I live in England, where currently entire households in which anyone has a fever or a cough must self-isolate for 14 days.  When my grandchild developed both these symptoms, her mother was faced with trying to work from home and care for both children.  I live far away, but decided to have a daily one hour video talk session with the children, giving my daughter a chance to get some uninterrupted work time.  I’m an ex-teacher, so we play maths games, draw, read, write and learn together.  It’s a delightful time for all of us.

I went to my still fairly extensive children’s book collection (who can throw books away?) looking for stories that would interest a 5 year old and her 8 year old brother.  Almost at once my eyes fell upon Hugh Lipton and Niamh Sharkey’s beautiful ‘Tales of Wisdom & Wonder’.  It’s a glorious collection of folk tales from around the world.

On day 1, we read the first story, a delightfully silly tale of a monkey who demonstrates that we should be very careful what we ask for.

Last night I sat down to read the second story – a Cree tale called The Curing Fox – in order to re-familiarise myself with it.

The first sentence told of a little girl who became desperately ill with a high fever, dreadful cough and breathing difficulties.

Ah.  My initial instinct was to put this one aside.  Who knows what fears and nightmares the children are having as Covid-19 spreads through the world?  Then I thought deeper.  Why, of all the stories in my bookcase, had I been led to this one, at this time?  That almost imperceptible tingling that tells me synchronicity is drawing me in had appeared.  I read the story.

Mr Lipton tells it wonderfully, but here is the briefest summary:

The child’s anxious parents summon an ancient wise woman, who listens very carefully to the rattling in the girl’s chest.  She tells the couple that she hears from it that a small, sickly female fox is undertaking an arduous journey through the snow outside.  When the child coughs, the wise woman hears the sound of the fox’s paws breaking through the crust of the frozen snow.  The father offers to track and bring back the fox.  As he journeys, the wise woman is able to track his progress, and that of the starving fox, by observing the little girl’s illness; when she senses that the hunter has stopped for the night and lit a fire, the girl has a high fever.  Finally he catches the fox, cradles her in his arms and takes her back to the village.  The mother is told to feed the fox.  It then curls up and sleeps.  The child, too, falls into a deep sleep.  Eventually, both fox and girl awake at the same moment.  The parents are asked to feed the fox again and then release it.  The little girl watches from the doorway as the fox runs off.  As it disappears, so does her illness.  The wise woman asks them whether the fox cured the girl or she cured the fox.  The mother replies that the woman cured them both.  The old lady just smiles.

I sat and pondered the wisdom of that story.  Half awake and half asleep, I thought my way back into that First Nation culture and bank of knowledge that showed such subtle yet deep and abiding connectedness.  I wondered at the idea that the symptoms of an illness could, with the right level of focus, lead the wise to find and alleviate suffering elsewhere.  I marvelled that, in taking steps to alleviate that suffering, the illness itself would vanish.  Further and further I meditated my way into the meaning this story held for me.  I thought of the symptoms – the fever, the choking cough, the inability to breathe.  Clearly the girl stands for us in our present crisis.

And the fox?  What does she represent?

The words that floated into my heart were, “Think of the World’s cough.”

 

It was from the Cree that this prophecy came:

 

 

A Man Who Looks on Glass

All those decades ago, when I was in primary school and singing along to rather dreary hymns in assembly, the words of one verse hit me as fascinating.  I think it went more or less like this:

A man who looks on glass
On it may stay his eye,
Or if he pleaseth through it pass,
The Heavens to espy.

Quite why ‘the Heavens’ should be lurking behind each pane of glass this man looked on, I wasn’t sure, but that property of glass – the way we are able to focus on its surface or to peer right through it to what lies beyond – stayed lodged in my mind as one of those Interesting Things about the world.

One of my favourite stories as a child was Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There.  I could easily imagine her drawing-room mirror misting over, becoming treacle-like in consistency and Alice clambering excitedly into the looking-glass house beyond.  The fascination stayed with me, and when I settled recently to write a story, I decided to make one of the principal and most complex characters a glass maker.

Obviously a bit of research was in order.  I’d been to visit a glass works and watched in awe as glowing globs of molten glass were removed from the furnace on long pipes and blown into huge, wobbling bubbles, ready to be shaped into all manner of marvels.  I knew it was made from sand and soda and various other substances, but I wanted some detail on the alchemy involved.

This is what I discovered.  Maybe you already knew it.  Maybe you had the kind of science teacher who moved beyond the dogma of solids, liquids and gases and explained such wonders to you.  To me, though, it was a revelation…

Sand is heated up and becomes liquid.  It transforms into glass.  This is an irreversible chemical change.  When the molten glass is removed from the heat source, it begins to solidify, but it never quite does so.

That was the part that amazed me.  Glass is not a true solid!  It’s what is known as an amorphous solid, which means it is in the process of solidifying, but still has the properties of a very viscous liquid.  Scientists conjecture, it seems, about whether the cooled (and apparently solid-feeling) glass will ever complete that transformation – whether its molecules will every crystallise into a true solid.  The best guess seems to be that the process would take a very long time – longer than centuries.  Meanwhile, small groups of molecules within the glass are acting like parts of a solid, while others are still behaving as parts of a liquid.  They seem to slither and slide in and out of the two states without (if I can, for a moment, embue them with higher levels of sentience than we normally do) really making up their minds.

Now all that, I think, is rather astonishing.

For me, though, the most amazing part of my discovery is the way these characteristics mirror, if you’ll excuse the pun, the personality of my not-entirely-fictional glass maker.  The man I wanted to portray is a complex individual.  In many ways, he comes across as a normal, functional, middle-aged father.  There are facets of his behaviour, though, that entirely lack the solidity and dependability of such a person.  He is, in some respects, locked in the kind of volatility, fluctuating moods and emotional instability we would more normally associate with the most troubling aspects of adolescence.  If you can imagine the contents of a chrysalis, after the caterpillar’s molecules have liquified but before they have fully re-formed into the adult butterfly (a process I often used as an analogy for my poor, confused young pupils as they reached puberty and tried to fathom what was happening to themselves) that is the state of this character’s psyche.

Without knowing that such a state existed, I was writing about a man of amorphous solidity.  My character slithers, in a more or less involuntary manner, between thoughtful, rational behaviour and a devastating capriciousness and lack of clarity or consideration.  He brings down havoc and disaster upon himself and those around him and – even when all is lost – he is unable, for more than a few moments at a time, to take responsibility for all that has transpired.  Like those glass molecules, his thoughts waver and vaccilate constantly between states and refuse to settle.

How intriguing that my ever-present muse should lead me on this alchemical journey, in order to assist me in comprehending the complexities of the Glass Maker’s personality.

 

 

Who Can You Trust?

It’s bothering me, this question, and I feel it shouldn’t.

To explain why, I need to touch on some very personal stories.

When I was a student, I thought I had a boyfriend.  To all intents and purposes, I did.  He was a fellow student, but older than me and far wealthier.  We had a great time together and the relationship lasted two years.  He was in hall during the week, but each weekend went off, as I understood it, to visit his elderly mother.  Just before our final exams, he told me that in fact he had another girlfriend, whom he’d been living with at the weekends.  Now she was pregnant and he’d decided he would marry her.  He told me not to worry, as he was quite prepared to buy me a flat in North London and keep me as his mistress.  He actually seemed quite shocked when I told him where to stick his flat and stormed off.

Fast forward many years to the day I walked into a room of the home I shared with my husband of 30 years and found him on the phone to his lover, planning their next meeting.  I’d had not the remotest idea that this was happening under my nose.

In both cases, it wasn’t the betrayal that upset me as much as the ease with which my partners had led this double life and consistently and adeptly lied to me.  They both apologised and said they knew it was ‘wrong’, but that didn’t help.

I was chatting this through recently with a relative who had had a similar experience.

“I was at home with young children,” she said.  “I KNEW something was going on.  I found little notes in his pockets, but somehow he always managed to explain them away and make me feel bad for suspecting that he’d do such a thing.  He kept it up for two and a half years – a relationship with a woman at work.  They even planned a holiday together, with her feigning illness and having to be taken home from work by a colleague, while he was waiting at the love nest.  When it was finally discovered, he started trying to date his secretary instead.”

I’m not saying it is always men.  Another relative discovered that his girlfriend had been cheating on him for six months, while they shared and renovated their first home.

Now I’m watching another member of my family suffer similar torment.  For five years her partner has been caught up in a double life, lying and cheating and finally putting his family in mortal danger through his misdeeds.

Our stories are far from unique, I know.  Almost anyone reading this will know of, or have experienced similar horrors.  Some may even be living a double life, but somehow justifying it to themselves and feeling that it’s fine unless the partner finds out.

Despite all that, though, there are countless caring, trustworthy people in the world – people who, if they are no longer happy in a relationship, would have the courage to say so, rather than seeking solace elsewhere.

Because of my own beliefs, though, I’m not content to blame the erring partners.  I’m not even prepared to mutter the truism that no one is blameless in such a situation.

I believe we create our own lives.  I believe that events show up in them to teach us more about ourselves.  I believe that – at some level – my family and I invited these situations into our lives because, painful and heartbreaking as they are, they enable us to become stronger, wiser and more resilient.  They add to our Knowing.  Our experience adds to the Akasha which is all Knowing.

I still don’t know who to trust, so I keep very much to myself.

I still don’t know if trusting is something we should try to do.  We attempt to bind others to us with vows and promises, assurances and agreements, but such things are torn up and broken all the time.  We can’t hold and keep the love of another in our hands.

Perhaps we should just be our authentic selves at all times and trust Life/God/The Universe to help us to make our choices and move beyond such things.

I don’t know and, as I said, it’s bothering me.

Do you?

A Partridge in a Pear Tree

I know, I’ve been very quiet again lately.

It’s not that I haven’t been writing.  I have – and considerably more than usual.  It just isn’t ready to put here yet.  One day soon, though, I’ll be inundating this blog with the thoughts and ideas that have just about taken over my waking life in the past few weeks.  Maybe you should enjoy the peace while you have it…

Many years ago, a very talented psychic told me I would collect up all manner of information from all kinds of places, and one day I would put it all together in a new way, and this would be original and of interest to others.  At the time I laughed and told her I could scarcely remember where I’d put my keys, let alone recall great tracts of reading and learning.

She was right, though.  Somewhere in my mind (a place I now understand far better) they were all lurking.  I explained the process by which all these semi-forgotten snippets formed themselves into a coherent whole in my previous post: The Answer.  The question these words were answering can be found printed in green at the end of another fairly recent post: A Trail of Breadcrumbs.
OK, it isn’t exactly a question, but it implies one, and it’s one I’d been wondering about and trying to answer for many years before William summed it up so clearly.

So the information slotted itself together very easily.  The hard part has been trying to find ways of recording it in something approaching coherent text.  The different parts jump and fizz and turn cartwheels in my mind, while I’ve been trying to sequence them, so that one word follows the next and it makes sense to someone other than me.

I think I’ve done it, just about.  There are around eleven thousand words there and they seem to make sense.  So the next step is to pass them on to Will.  It was he, after all, who asked the question, and he will be my fiercest critic and most diligent proof reader.  There’s a useful synchronicity there, too; what do you give the man who claims to want nothing for Christmas (but does really, of course)?

I’ve packaged the information up into sections, which will be emailed to him throughout the Christmas holiday season, with ‘The First Day of Christmas’, ‘The Second Day of Christmas’ etc. in the subject line.  Hopefully, he’ll critique it and add more to it than he already has … and then I’ll be ready to share it with you.

Needless to say, in order to work out how people with autistic perception receive and process information led me to question how the rest of us do so.  How else could I understand the differences?  My journalling journey took me to places I never expected to visit, but I’m so very glad I did.  I found nuggets of truth lurking in the most incongruous places, so seeing a partridge roosting in a pear tree would no longer strike me as strange at all.

Wishing you all the happiest of festive seasons, in whatever way you celebrate this turning of the year, and I look forward to joining you again in 2018.

When My Two Worlds Collide

Summer is the time I connect with family.  Some come to stay with me, while I head off to stay with others.  It’s been a crazy few weeks of checking dates and train times, bustling about, packing and unpacking, making up beds and sorting menus.

That’s not the hard bit, though.  The hard bit is trying to live between my two worlds.  It’s been harder than ever this year.

My accustomed world is here – full of long, rambling, enlightening conversations with like-minded souls, either in person or on my computer.  We ponder the metaphysical and wonderful, the numinous and semi-visible, the psychic and arcane.  There are conversations over coffee about sacred geometry.  There are conversations over Whatsapp about probability.  There are articles about consciousness to read and references to check and ideas to share.  Even as the mundane carries on around me, my mind rarely strays far from this world.

In the other world there are grandchildren and aunts, cousins, sons and daughters.  We go out for meals, wander the grounds of stately homes, discuss jobs and houses, share memories and plans, sightsee and chatter.

I can manage both.  I enjoy both.  I need both.  But they are mutually exclusive.  I’ve learned – the hard way – to keep them well apart; yet this year they moved too close for comfort.

I was trying to work on both levels at once with an elderly relative.

This amazing lady has enjoyed excellent health and vitality for almost 90 years.  She still lives independently and works – a complex, computer-based job that requires a flexible mind and sharp intellect.  Just recently, though, she’s been in tremendous pain.  Her physiotherapist seemed unable to help.  The GP arranged blood tests and X-rays, shrugged and put her on 30 tablets a day (a terrifying mix of painkillers, along with all the pills to cancel out the side-effects of the others) and told her not to sit for more than 20 minutes at a time.  She’s 89!  She still had the pain.  She had to give up driving because of all the tablets and she was – understandably – at the end of her tether.

From my accustomed world, my response was to send her distant healing and to ask my friend Will (a splendid medical intuitive) what was causing the pain.  Armed with only her name and a rough geographical location, he correctly identified the affected area and told me the pain was caused by bones in her back ‘breaking down or weakening’ and that there was something wrong in the stomach or lower torso area which might or might not be linked to this.

In the other world, I arranged to go and spend some time staying with this relative, told her a friend’s mum had symptoms similar to hers and used that to share the diagnosis Will had given, and discussed not-too-wacky alternative treatments, such as acupuncture.

It all went well to start with.  Like me, she has a deep distrust of Western medicine’s way of papering over the cracks, so decided to cut down on the painkillers except for the ones that seemed to be helping slightly.  She made an appointment with an acupuncturist and demanded an appointment at a pain clinic.  Her results came back from the doctor.  Osteoarthritis.  All other results normal.  “Oh good,” she said, “I had been worried that it could be cancer, because I do have some digestive problems.”

Full marks to Will!

Then she looked very hard at me, with those piercing, alert eyes and said, “But what is it YOU are doing?  Ever since you arrived, I’ve felt so much better.  The pain is far less.  It’s getting better by the day.  I think you must have some sort of – magic.”

She wasn’t joking.  It wasn’t a trite remark.  She was puzzled and confused and she wanted to understand.

What was I supposed to say?  My family don’t do weird.  They don’t believe in energies, psychic phenomena, anything that can’t be seen, poked and physically examined.  I tried a bit of logical common sense:  ‘You probably feel more relaxed having someone else around the place.  Chatting with me takes your mind off the symptoms and so you’re not dwelling on them like you do when you’re alone.’
All true.  All acceptable.  But she didn’t accept it.

“Yes, maybe so,” she said impatiently, “But that’s not what I mean.  When you’re around me, I can feel something happening in my body and it’s really making a difference.  Explain that!”

 

So, feeling deeply uncomfortable, I explained aspects of my world to her.  I told her that, to my way of thinking, we are far more than our bodies and brains.  I told her I believed that when we get out of balance in some way – too tense or anxious or angry or lonely, for example – it can spill over into the body and cause physical symptoms.  I told her I believed that we can send healing energy to one another by using loving thoughts and clear intention, and that that was what I’d been doing in the days before I’d arrived and – in a more focused way – now that I was there.

She was very quiet for a very long time.

“And there’s more that you’re not telling me,” she finally said.  “There are other things you can do, aren’t there?”

I told her I’d probably said far more than I should.

“You know you’d have been burnt as a witch if you’d lived a couple of hundred years ago?”

I nodded and suddenly the tension was broken we both laughed.

“Well I don’t pretend to understand,” she sighed, “But please keep doing it.  It helps.”

So I do.

 

 

 

The Book of Caw

I was woken this morning – as I am almost every day – by Caw.  And I knew, suddenly, that the Book of Caw needs to be written.  Maybe by me, maybe by someone else.  Who can say?  All I know is that the image of The Book of Caw is lodged in my mind now and the only thing that will move it on is for me to start writing.

So what is Caw? I imagine you asking.  (And why are sentences – proper ones – so elusive this morning? I ask myself.  Probably because the words are coming from somewhere where punctuation doesn’t hold sway.  I’ve visited that somewhere quite a bit recently, which would explain a lot.)

OK.  An easy way out of the definition conundrum would be to say something like, ‘Caw is Oneness, or All That Is’.   That, though, is so all-encompassing as to be almost devoid of meaning for us – a bit like asking someone to imagine an infinite universe…  Fortunately, Caw can be explored in many ways, and each of them helps us to discover more of the truths behind the truism, and to apply them to what we know of our own existence.

Say the word aloud, and you will immediately have one of it’s aspects – Caw is core.  It lies at the very heart of every facet of existence.  It’s the point we come back to, after our little forays into the game of materiality.  We have Caw strength at the centre of our existence.  It’s unmoving, solid, steadfast and entirely dependable, yet it will flow with us, wherever we go.  (Yes, there’s a paradox there – the first of many.  Always think ‘and’ rather than ‘or’ with Caw.)

If it were an acronym, CAW could be formed from, perhaps, Consciousness Applying Will.  In that sense, it is placing intention into consciousness – or vice versa – in order to manifest or create.  That, after all, is how our miniverse here is fabricated.

Let’s stop metafizzing, briefly, and bring Caw into our familiar material world.  As I said at the start, Caw wakes me each morning.  It is the sound of the corvids – the rooks and jackdaws and magpies that restlessly circle  my cottage, squawking to one another, playing some complex aerial game of tag and scattering black feathers in my garden.  I won’t even begin to delve into the folklore that surrounds this family of birds, but it’s found all around the world.  They are mysterious, intelligent, cunning and wise.  Certainly not light and fluffy.  They have a gravitas that commands attention and respect, verging on fear at times.  Caw is all that.

Caw is the rook on the chessboard, too.  Sometimes hiding in the corner, biding its time; sometimes castling – not afraid to reveal itself in order to protect what is of the most value.  Then, when the time is right, striking suddenly – covering vast distances in a dead straight line to get to the core of the action.  Caw is that too.

Caw is gnosis, knowing, deep knowledge that comes from a point of insight and certainty.  It is not born of opinion or consideration.  It is not gradually acquired through study.  It is our direct link to the Akasha and it comes in instant flashes.  Once recognised, we know – absolutely and with utter certainty – that this is right.  It cannot be any other way.

That is in no way an exhaustive account of Caw.  Other aspects will occur to you, and they will all be valid, but I will let that serve as an introduction.

 

To work with Caw, we need to dispense with a few sacred cows.  We need to try to rid ourselves of:

• cause and effect
• common sense
• rationality

There is, of course, nothing wrong with any of them, except that they only work in 3D.  They only apply to the mechanistic model of the universe we built for ourselves with our cosmic construction set.

To work with Caw, we need to put aside that much-loved toy and move into reality.  It is Caw that will lead us there.

 

Trying to Re-Member

There’s a group I attend from time to time here in my town.  Each week they provide cups of every kind of herbal tea you can imagine, biscuits or cake, and a speaker.  The talks range over many areas and subjects, but they must always be positive.  That seems to be the only rule.

I’d never heard of that night’s speaker, but his subject was ‘The Eight Elements’ and partly because I’d been pondering on elements for quite a while and partly because he was speaking as a follower of Krishna – a Truth quite new to me – I decided to go along.

The gentleman stood calmly before us, looked around the room at the sea of faces and announced, with total certainty, “I’m not the only person in this room who has been to the breaking point.  I’m not alone in having reached a point in my life where everything I lived for, everything I believed, everything I cared about was swept away, leaving me lost, broken and utterly alone.”

All around the room, heads nodded slowly, solemnly, mine included.

The talk was excellent.  Krishna’s take on the elements was oddly familiar and linked in well with the Egyptian, Greek, Shamanic, Medieval and alchemical ideas I’d been reading and thinking about.  What I was left with above all, though, was that idea of the breaking point – the need to go through what feels at the time to be a crisis, a disaster, a destruction of all you’ve held dear.  It is the tower card in the tarot – the card I used to fear above all others, back in the days when my life was settled and sorted (although very far from perfect).

I thought of the many friends and family members I’ve seen hit that point, whether through a sudden incapacitating illness, a financial meltdown, a job loss, a relationship breakup or what’s commonly called a nervous breakdown.  Often – as in my own case – it’s a mixture of several of these.  Like the body of Osiris, we are broken up, hacked into pieces and scattered in the waters of Life.

There follows a time of the most awe-ful emptiness.  We shut down.  We exist from moment to moment, day to day, with no clear idea of how or why we are still functioning.  This is the time we need to hide away, to withdraw from everyone and everything, knowing at some instinctive level that we require peace, and that healing will eventually flow from this.

Despite the kindness and ministrations of others, there’s ultimately only one place that healing can come from.  It comes from within.  It comes from our soul-selves – the part of us that is, and has always been, whole and complete.  Slowly and painfully, we begin to re-member ourselves – to put ourselves back together.  This time, though, we will be different.  We will have shed the limiting beliefs that we are not complete without money/ health/ family/ possessions/ career/ home/ friends or whatever we relied upon for stability and identity in the past.  That’s not to say we won’t regain or rediscover some of these, but they will no longer take centre stage.

Now we will have re-membered who we truly are.  We will recognise that we are whole and complete in ourselves.  We are not – primarily – parent or employee, partner or owner.  We are infinite aspects of the great I AM and as such, we have no limits.

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore, trust the physician and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility.”

Kahlil Gibran: The Prophet

 

Ity – What is it without the Real?

True story:

Once when I was a teacher, I received a phone call from the father of a child I taught.  The man was clearly in a state of the most acute distress.  He told me that his wife had been diagnosed with incurable cancer, that she was about to undergo a double mastectomy but this would only prolong her life slightly.  He said he’d done his best to explain the situation to their children and asked whether I would keep a special eye on the little lad in my class and give him as much support as I could.  Naturally, I agreed and offered my sympathy.

A week later, I had a second phone call – from the man’s wife this time.  She told me they had been to see the consultant together.  She had said she wished to have the operation as a precautionary measure, since her mother, sister and several other female relatives had died from breast cancer.  The consultant had made it quite clear that she had no trace of the disease and was entirely healthy.  However he agreed to her request.  Her husband, she told me, had completely misunderstood the situation.  She apologised for the confusion caused by the call I’d received from him and emphasised that she was in perfect health.

Chatting the situation through later with a colleague who was an experienced psychiatrist, I asked how on earth two people, sitting in the same room and hearing the same words could come away with such diametrically different ideas of what had taken place.
“Oh it happens more often than you would believe,” she replied. “Everyone brings their own expectations to the table.  I’ve sat in more meetings than you can imagine where people are simply unable to see beyond their own preconceptions into anything approaching an objective reality.”

So do we do that?  Do we bend reality through the filters of our own experience and world view, so that we end up believing – totally and utterly – our own warped version of events?  It would seem so.  Yet after pondering this subject for many years, a new thought occurred to me.  Is there actually an objective ‘reality’ out there at all?  Is there some logical, rigidly defined Truth which we all recognise to a greater or lesser degree but can only see imperfectly?  What if there is only some wavering, constantly shifting state which we are not perceiving but creating with all those preconceptions and ideas?

It’s remarkably difficult to let go of the concept of reality.  We’ve been reared to believe that there is this solid, true world, one which religious leaders, politicians or scientists, maybe, are able to explain to us and translate for us.  We’ve been buffeted for centuries with the words of our ‘elders and betters’ who tell us what to believe – what is true.

Suddenly, though – just within our own short lifetimes – ALL of their truths have been gathered together in one place and we have been given almost unlimited access to the whole lot.  We press a couple of buttons on our devices and we have our very own comparison site.  We can see the inconsistencies, the bias, the spin.  Does this help us to see to the core?  Can we now, with all that information laid bare before us, peel away the layers of the onion?  Can we search for the truth at its centre?

Henrik Ibsen had his character Peer Gynt do exactly that.  Here’s what he discovered:

What an enormous number of swathings!
Isn’t the kernel soon coming to light?

(Pulls the whole onion to pieces.)

I’m blest if it is! To the innermost centre,
it’s nothing but swathings – each smaller and smaller.-
Nature is witty!

So if there’s no objective reality – no nub of truth at the centre – just what we create for ourselves, let’s create something fantastic.

 

 

Back on the Giants’ Shoulders

I hadn’t meant to clamber back up here – I’m not actually that good with heights – but a whole crowd more giants just came along and I can’t resist.  The view from this lofty location is amazing!

I’ll start aloft the shoulders of John Milton.  I first encountered him when I was about 15:  Paradise Lost, book something-or-the-other as an exam text.  Wild, rambling, epic 17th century poem!  I kind of forgave Milton for being a harsh, narrow-minded religious fundamentalist who bullied his daughters when I started to dig below the surface of his work.  For a start, his Adam was an insufferable prude, while Eve was as wet as washday.  Satan, on the other hand, was deliciously complex and rather likeable.  I decided that Milton, like many of his contemporaries who had survived Civil War torn England and its dangerous aftermath, had a public face and a private mind.  What clinched it for me though was when I decided to read the rest of Paradise Lost – the bit our teacher said we needn’t bother with.

Satan on his way to bring about the downfall of Adam. Gustave Doré’s illustration for Paradise Lost by John Milton. 

 

• The secrets of the hoary deep, a dark
• Illimitable ocean, without bound,
• Without dimension; where length, breadth, and height,
• And time, and place, are lost; where eldest night
• And chaos, ancestors of nature, hold
• Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise
• Of endless wars, and by confusion stand.
• For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four champions fierce,
• Strive here for mastery, and to battle bring
• Their embryon atoms

 

That description of  ‘outer space’, with all its seething, pulsing energy filled me with excitement.  It was so different to the sterile void of which our science teachers sought to convince us.  I decided this was the universe I preferred to inhabit – one where anything and everything could happen.

And so the scene was set.  I had my raw material.  All I needed now was to understand the process by which order could be imposed on the seething ether and those ’embrion atoms’ which held the potential to bring forth our cosmos.

A short pause while I wobble unsteadily and clamber onto the rather suave shoulders of Nikola Tesla.  His mind had been running along similar lines, but in an intellectual sphere way beyond my own.  Look on his words (from the New York Times, 1908), ye Mighty, and tremble…

“According to an adopted theory, every ponderable atom is differentiated from a tenuous fluid, filling all space merely by spinning motion, as a whirl of water in a calm lake. By being set in movement this fluid, the ether, becomes gross matter. Its movement arrested, the primary substance reverts to its normal state. It appears, then, possible for man through harnessed energy of the medium and suitable agencies for starting and stopping ether whirls to cause matter to form and disappear. At his command, almost without effort on his part, old worlds would vanish and new ones would spring into being.”

Right.  So that gives me the process.  Next I need to locate the ‘suitable agencies’ Tesla speaks of.  I’m drawn to some words from my gigantic friend William’s recently published book.  He makes an astounding claim which seems eerily close to Tesla’s, though coming from an unexpected direction:

An experienced and sufficiently enlightened user could use a pair of dowsing rods to achieve anything one desires.   The rods can harness power from crystals and ley lines as well as any other energy source including pure psychic energy. The rods can alter the subatomic structure of the universe. They can provide interaction with different dimensions. They can provide the user with unlimited knowledge. They can alter events occurring all around the universe. If a user has accumulated enough experience and skill with dowsing rods they could have influence over all of space and time.

Now two of my giants are promising limitless creative experience if this energy is harnessed by an ‘experienced and sufficiently enlightened user’.  There always seems to be a catch, doesn’t there?

Perhaps I need some hard scientific credentials here, so I’ll crawl across to the sturdy shoulders of Max Planck – just about the most solid and respectable theoretical physicist you could hope to find.  (I was in the same form at school as his great-nephew, as it happens.  It was bizarre – a little like finding yourself in the same class as Harry Potter on your first day at Hogwarts.  None of us could understand why the classroom door kept swinging open during our first week, as members of the teaching staff would poke their heads around it and hiss at our form tutor, “Which one is he?  Just had to take a look.”)

Anyhow, what does Herr Planck have to say on the matter of atoms and their creation?  He wrote this in Florence, in 1944, a few years before his death:

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much:  There is no matter as such.  All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together.  We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind.  This mind is the matrix of all matter.

Ah.  So we are closer still.  Imposed upon our seething mass of ether is a matrix – one which is conscious and intelligent.  Is this Consciousness some supreme creator or does it, potentially at least, emanate from ourselves?  Those who have read my book will know that I consider the two to be one and the same, at different fractal scales.  Just as Planck’s atoms are fractal solar systems, so are we fractal Source/All That Is.  It is consciousness which is the missing component in Milton’s chaotic ether.  It is consciousness which begins Tesla’s spinning motion or wields Will’s dowsing rods.

These ideas are familiar – astonishingly so.  They have been bombarding my mind via other sources for several weeks now.  Everywhere I look or listen, it seems, the revelations of my giants have echoes.

Has Atxero (for example) been clambering around atop these same giants, I wonder, or are we simply accessing the same ‘knowing’ within our all-seeing matrix?  In her latest, amazing blog post she speaks of

…an invisible energy moving through the universe in the wake of which everything comes into existence and everything spirals around onward …  If we consider that that invisible energy is Consciousness (like, mother of all consciousness) that is also an intention set in motion … so lets say the mind of the Universe had the urge to create something and in wake of this urge the Universe was created. (I am considering the Universe to be alive, complete with the soul and mind and body and the whole package, where each of the existing material bodies as even planets, galaxies or human bodies … just like we have cells in our body). That that invisible energy is the life force of the Universe.

So how, exactly, do we control it? I hear you ask.  How do we spin that ether and create in the way your giants have promised we can?

I think I have the answer.  I need to consider for a few days more, though, to sort the ideas into words.  So forgive me for leaving so suddenly.  All the information we need is here, but it’s been hiding in the one place scientists would never think of looking.

Can you find it? 🙂