I Will Return

          There is darkness through which I move.....vast planes of darkness which slide and intersect each other, that intersect with me.....yet we are one.....we are the Abyss.
          I am alone.....and I question endlessly, yet am content.....stars which are not, flow down and through my fingers and hands which I have not.
          There is energy and power.....overwhelming in their intensity.....yet I am safe; I am unconcerned.
          There is no light, yet I see. I am alone, yet I am not lonely. I am so young, yet have had my being forever. I know not, yet do not need to know, but I ask.....endlessly I ask.....and I live and move.
          I must return.....I must pass down the valley.....die into the world of the physical for a little while longer. And I must remember, for I will return to a where that is nowhere.....for I AM.

Is This God?

          This is not the post I had intended to write but, rather, the one I feel needs to be written. I have written in the past about the ego and the Higher Self and also a rather shadowy self that appears to be about a sense of I-ness. It is that which appears to be associated, or identified, with both the real or higher self and also the lower self or ego but never simultaneously. It is always an association or a state of 'either/or'. In the light of my recent return to my thoughts about physics, one might describe that association either in terms of particles or of waves. In short, the sense of I-ness shares much with the quantum uncertainty principle.
          When I consider the ego, it is more than simply a system associated with morality or with my persona. It is as if the ego has expanded to include the totality of my engagement with the realist world around me. Yet one feature of that engagement is its essential duality. I am the observer of that world, not an entity which is indissolubly part of that world. And I can enter that state at will.
          When I consider the Higher Self, I realise that that state is the only true me, the only true and real self in any meaningful way. Only in that state which seems to be offered to me, rather than my claiming it when and where I choose, can I experience anything that I choose to call God.
          In one of his books, "What Is God?" the lovely Prof. Jacob Needleman describes an occasion when a close relative has died, and young Jacob is sitting on a step with his father. His father looks up at the night sky and utters the words, "That is God". Since reading that book I have often wondered what experience lay behind those words. It seems to me, now, that it was a heightened experience by that part of one's being associated with what has been called the True Self in which duality has disappeared, or has been removed by something beyond consciousness, and in which one is at-one-ment with the universe. That experience cannot be defined: it is what it is.
          The clues and experiences have been cropping up throughout the second half of my life; I have written about them here on Gwynt; but they have become spread out, dispersed; they almost demand to be brought together and experienced as a totality. Yet I cannot do that right now. That experience of totality, that experience of being absorbed into God, is too big, too overpowering. It excites me to the depths of my being, but it also scares the hell out of me. And maybe that is precisely the point.

Movement But No Passing

          Over a period of one week at the end of the year 2005, whilst meditating on the vast spiritual reservoir "in which man lives and moves and has his being", [Acts of the Apostles 17:28] I made the following notes which, perhaps, are more relevant to my current thinking than to my faltering thoughts of those more distant days. I should add that the words I used were not mulled over, carefully thought out, but were recorded as they came spontaneously to mind. I suspect they were, therefore, more authentic and closer to the original experience than they would have been if my notes had been carefully constructed.

1.        "My spirit seems to be free to move where it will, like a wisp of smoke dancing on the surface of the deeps. Yet my world is constrained to move along a pre-ordained path, like a planet moving through a dimly-lit cosmos. I am subject to its spiritual laws. It is calm, alone, spheres within spheres."

2.        "I sense struggle, a longing. Something is trying to be heard, but I cannot hear what I see; it continually eludes me. Words seem frustratingly pointless, inadequate. The equal-armed cross hangs in the background, waiting."

3.       "It seems as if only my experience of my Higher Self, or God is truly real; all else is virtual, images. I move through life in a state of alone-ness, in the company of other 'alones'. This spiritual reservoir in which I move has both negative and positive aspects: the blind coexists with the aware. All opposites coexist and are one."

4.       "There is an image before me, now steady and unchanging. I see it during my waking hours: I awake in the night 'seeing' it. Below me a planet of water moves silently through the cosmos. A wisp of purple smoke dances on the surface of the waters; shadows glide below the surface. In the distance is the centre of my galaxy, bright like a cosmic sunset. All the while a silvery-white cross hangs in space. There is movement but no passing. There is serenity, timelessness."

5.       "The universe is a system of cohesive forces and includes all living creatures. What I perceive as real through my sense organs and brain is illusion because my perceptions are limited by the nature of my brain. Solidity then is illusory, being an effect produced by the repulsion of like atomic forces. What then am I? How can I really be aware?"

6.        "The foot of a Qabalistic Cross stands in the 'world of water' with its head engulfed by a white light, not the sun. I see a boat on a lake moving into the mist; a juxtapositioning of Glastonbury and Avalon; a coming together of spacetime and the spiritual."

7.         "I have been here before; my mind is tired but I am not bored. The images of the past six days have become transparent, and I am enveloped in a white mistiness which extends as far as I can sense. It feels like a 'Cloud of Unknowing' of an intensity I have never felt before. I have been beset by images I have struggled to hear, and at some point beyond my conscious awareness I sense something is happening."

          I have reproduced my words from that time in full, because there may well yet be something to refer back to which I may have missed.

          To continue with one of the points I made in my previous post, "A State of Stillness", it seems as if an experience on one level of meditation is a projection of the experience at a deeper level. The final projection is that of the consciously sensed world around us. World in this sense is everything outside the mind. Reversing the process means that the deeper one can travel in meditation, the further one moves away from projection and the closer one comes to reality, an experience that approaches absolute truth, yet one which cannot be ideated or described.
          No word, idea or image is the truth. They are fingers, as it were, which point towards the truth. It is a grave mistake, therefore, to so concentrate on the finger that one loses the direction in which the finger is pointing. Ultimately, I suppose there must be a state where no images can exist, and one is left staring into the face of God as the eagle stares into the face of the sun. I would be that eagle. Yet prior to that final state there is one last image, the experience of the Abyss.
          I have said elsewhere that God is not in the Abyss; God Is the Abyss. It is as if the Abyss is the fundamental psycho-spiritual continuum of life, and maybe of all existence, that lies outside time. God is that vast spiritual reservoir "in which we live and move and have our being. We are his offspring." That reservoir or continuum permeates everything and may have preceded everything. It impinges on our daily lives at every turn, whether or not we are aware of it or even believe in it. It is hidden in plain sight. It is so close that most of the time we do not even sense it; but if it should end then, I am certain, the life of the spirit, of the mind would end also.

A State of Stillness

          Reviewing some of my earlier posts drew me to the conclusion that projection may well be our normal and unavoidable way of thinking. Of course, this practice is rather frowned upon in certain circumstances by psychologists and psychiatrists. Nevertheless, it may be that we are stuck with this way of analysing our worlds, both inner and outer, if there is indeed any difference between the two. The problem is that we think and experience life in terms of symbolism.
          Thus when analysing my personal experience in, "I Am Only the Bearer" it emerged that an experience at the deepest level which I could access during meditation was projected onto a less deep level, until in the end these consecutive experiences were projected onto the realist world, which one often calls the 'real world' of consciousness. The problem is that in turning experience into symbols, the language of the unconscious mind, and thence into ideas we ultimately lose contact with the essence of the experience. What we are left with is something that is illusory and general and cut off, or removed, from the initial personal and particular experience.
          Unfortunately, in my opinion, we are all too often exhorted to act under the influence of the general and illusory conclusion, rather than stick with the initial and particular experience, which may lead us along a path of spiritual recovery and growth. That path is essentially non-egoistic, whilst the general activity is usually quite the opposite. Save the world? No, I am powerless to do that. Save myself? Now to that process I can have some input, and by God's grace have some success. [Success? ugh!].
          I find myself in a state of pregnant stillness at present, regardless of the political upheaval that is going on, and which is going to have a direct influence on my life. Somehow, I sense the need for a new assessment of my personal way forward. It is like standing in the eye of a hurricane, just waiting to get caught up in the winds of the spirit which will buffet me when the storm moves. [Where would I be without symbols?]
          If this post seems to be vague and disjointed, it is because that reflects my thoughts about my current inner life.