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.