Tag: the power within

ॐ, Dreams, Personal Development, Poetic Prose, Vis Viva - A Journey to Sirius

Vis Viva – Chapter #9 – Voices on the Wind

Eric says that after yesterday’s writing we should be a little more true to our predilection for dreaming and start to talk more of ephemera and the sort of things that differ from the day to day, well for most people. Just before I started writing I went outside to collect my thoughts out of the top left hand corner of my eye I saw a flash of cornflower blue and I allowed my eye to look up in the direction whence it came. My eyes followed the line up to the top of one of our yew trees as a large crow hopped onto the very crest of the tree. It waited there a while and then hopped back out of sight. Crows are couriers of power. This was a type of omen, because I was thinking about talking about dreaming and the silent acknowledgment of the crow agreed.

All today I have felt things jangling in a rather positive way in the web of life and my dreaming colour has come to me and into view a number of times, as it usually does when something relevant to me is going on. Tell this to someone in the church of reason and they may well reach for the diagnoses book. Such things though are a little beyond the scope of the normal human medical texts as yet.

The first time these types of phenomena begin to appear it can be both frightening and very easy to get obsessed by them. Now though I have had them for years and years; they no longer freak me out. The colour flashes are not physical plane colour flashes, in that if you were to take a picture with a conventional camera they would not be there. They appear in the perception as if you are seeing them with your eye; they are a flicker in the perceptual field that the brain recognises as seeing in the ocular sense. It clearly is not that though, it is something to do with the web of life, though, some form of oscillation. After monitoring this over a number of years I have found that the shade of colour often has information attached to it, some indication about what one should be doing.

Eric reminds me that we have as far as we can remember always had such things going on and that it was voices on the wind that we first really noticed. He is pretty sure that we have never ever spoken explicitly about this to anyone. These are perhaps the voices from Annwn, the other world of dreams, where everything is connected. They are of an ephemeral and floating kind, they hang haunting on the wind, just within and just beyond hearing. Like the colours one does not hear them with ears, one just hears them with consciousness. The power within registers the voices as a knowing the brain interprets as a hearing; different from insight, inner-sight and intuition, inner-tuition. The quality is very sound like in that it has tonal qualities and cadence, together with a sense of breathing to it. The feeling of breath is what brings the voices on to the wind and, in.

The world these days is a very noisy place and I don’t just mean all the mechanical noise that is around, the mobile phones and all that talking, talking, talking. Everywhere there appears to be a need for some background music sometimes tuned to Prozac station at the supermarket for all the desperate Stepford wives, other times to add some gaiety to the shop floor. That noise is in people’s heads. Go to any train station, fall silent and listen, listen to the incessant internal dialogue running round and around.

Eric says that one has to be quiet, very quiet to hear the voices in the wind and that it is very hard to do in the city. He reckons that if anyone really listens to the winds then they can turn off this internal dialogue and help learn how to listen with every fibre of being and this leads to a heightened state of awareness. Here, in that awareness, one can get a sense of the qualities and tones of the flow of the world, here then one can sense all the interconnectedness and that that tree and me are not that different. One can get a sense of the quantity of the universe and all its immensity, hear then one can get a sense of perspective. The silence beyond the clamour is where it is all at.

When I first heard those voices I thought they were nothing unusual, pretty ordinary and just took them as a day to day thing. Then I saw the film Betty Blue about a French woman who was a little crazy; “C’est seulement le vent, Betty”. After that I doubted whether it was such a good thing to hear these voices and tried to block them out. I found that singing helped a lot here. I lived in the city back then and it was on those late night walks back from the night bus stop when I used to hear them most. I used to get back from working in the club in the early hours of the morning. Even London is quiet then and the voices would come telling me about which plants were used for which ceremonies and that now that the hawthorn is blooming it is a good time for such and such. It was quite spooky, all alone, walking down those streets in North West London. After a while I relaxed about it, hadn’t one of my relatives been a gwrach? Perhaps then this was some lingering talent that I had inherited and I should not be afraid. Best not tell anybody though.

So the voices came and I listened to many, many winds; the soft gentle rustle as the yew trees play catch with the wind outside today, the haunting Aeolian scythe of wind in the telephone wires, the surf sparkled spray on an Atlantic day surging over the cliffs and the haunting melancholy of a late Spanish moor. The blotting paper wetness of mossy Welsh mist that creeps along a valley wearing a muffler and gloves and the timeless freezing fog of a Blumenthal forest, ancient and pregnant with snow.

Each wind has its own voice and mood. And those words they just kept coming, too. Sometimes it was a snippet of conversation from another land, or a pearl of wisdom. Sometimes it was a voice of trickery that scared me. I would catch a whiff of emotion too, borne on the wind, a tinge of fear here, a cloudburst or anger there. And my moods would match those of the wind, wild and windswept, stagnant and stifling. I learned to read the wind and its shift, both in me and not.

Eric says that the listening had paid dividends of a most peculiar nature. Now that I could listen people told me all sorts of things, things they never told anyone. He says that when people are truly deeply listened to it stirs something in them and acts like a magnet drawing out all those long held back words, it provides a wind to the sail of emotion and the timbre of their expression changes. Their stories come alive and vital. The silence acts as a void that draws and coaxes the first words out.

He reminds me how many times I have listened and for how long I have sat there and waited. He says that true listening is something that the world is bereft of these days. People do not take the time to make space and that what people are really afraid of is silence. He reckons a part of that is because it is for them the unknown and another part of it is that they know the seductiveness of silence and the power it has to make them lose their control. The precious doesn’t like this.

He says that listening can be very healing but reminds me that I have in the past carried that burden for many, many people and to my own detriment. He wonders if people remembered all the things they told me; they might be surprised at the level of disclosure. That is the good thing about introverts we joke; they keep it all in and safe. Yet it is all stored there.

So the voices and the colours are all phenomena experienced by the consciousness and are in some way related to things happening in the fabric of the web of life. The vis viva is animating it all and in heightened awareness the world we perceive can differ from the concrete day to day world which is shared as part of the common dream. These extra things are leaking through the concrete bastions the precious has set up and offer a hint at the other world journey. The other world is here too. It is not at another location, it is just that most of us don’t perceive it because the precious won’t let us.

The dream is fixed and until we wake up in the dream it is the only reality available to us. Yet that dream is Maya, it is Samsara and it is the folly of the precious that keeps it so.

When I stopped the world and saw that it was a dream, I knew I had begun to wake up to a separate reality that is every bit as real as the one that I thought I had been living in. To learn the ways of navigating this place pervaded by power is a work in progress, because that power is very, very real and it transcends the concrete reality of the world. It come before it and sets this dense physical plane in motion. It is the vis viva, that animates the power within and it is the power within that has chosen to experience the challenges of physical plane existence. After physical plane death the power within continues, it is no longer the power within per se; it has re-merged with the power without until such time as it has the next urge to incarnate.

The first step to waking up in the dream is to first of acknowledge that one possible hypothesis is that there is more to life than the “concrete” world, that perhaps that there are other realities and then to start building intent towards waking up in the dream. This is a neat trick because it placates the precious, miss-directs it, after all the precious is still in control because it is testing a hypothesis isn’t it?

What it doesn’t realise is that intent is way beyond the capacity of the precious to understand and because intent is related to true mind and not rationing rational mind; the precious likes the separative-ness of testing a hypothesis with perhaps a yes or no answer because there is an element of separating polarities at the level of true mind too and so it seems somehow familiar.

The next step is to build this intent by doing dreaming practice. Dreaming is best done, at least initially, in quiet with subdued lighting and no noise. The problem is that unless we have trained our bodies to relax properly and function well, the physical form is a source of noise. It doesn’t really matter how one gets one’s body under control, muscle relaxation techniques, martial arts and breathing all work. Then, the internal dialogue must be silenced. This can be done by focusing on a mantram, or visualising a yellow rose for example.

The noise of the precious needs stilled. The use of mantras has inherent in it a trap, the mantra becomes all. It is just a technique and nothing more than that. Working with the sound of Aum can help; it must not become all though, otherwise one cannot go further. When true calm comes the object of visualisation fades and then there is only blackness and silence. It is pretty hard to achieve and “noise” keeps breaking through. This is normal.

After some time practising; the darkness and quiet can be maintained for quite a while. Then one day specks of colour begin to pierce the darkness. Soon the “visual” field in inner space gets blotchy and expands into a rough edged ink blot; eventually the whole of the inner space can be filled with colour. This colour can and will change with time, it will settle down though. This then is how one gets into resonance with the power within and how one learns what part of the spectrum of the vis viva has incarnated. By staying in the colour things come, they are the guidance of your power within. You have learned to actively dream and sooner or later you will have the waking consciousness that the world of the precious is, but a dream. And that dream has inherent in it all the madness of human folly, the Maya and Samsara that cloaks the purpose of the power within and hence your true self. This is the initial act of waking up in the dream.

In parallel to active dreaming there is night time or passive dreaming. Everyone dreams and all one has to do is to remember the dream. This is a direct corollary for waking up in the dream, that is remembering the purpose of the power within and living true to the fate that one has set up for one self, in a sense manifesting the dream of the power within upon the physical plain. To do passive dreaming all one does is set one’s intent on remembering dreams. Sooner or later these can be remembered and written down; it is good to keep a notebook for these. These are the guidance of the power within that point at the next steps in unfolding fate. In time you will be fully conscious in the night time dreams, aware that you are dreaming.

As it is at night so it is in the day.

In time shifting into the dreaming colour can be done in the middle of Shinjuku station at rush hour. Eric says that it might be worth pointing out that when one is fully conscious whilst night dreaming, one can hear things going on in the physical world, be fully conscious of them and still be dreaming. He says that when fully operational in dreaming that consciousness can expand out over very large areas. He says that by listening to the wind and developing sensitivity to all sorts of things what in effect we are doing is training that sense of heightened awareness that the precious likes to keep quiet about. Deep down, you see, the precious knows that humans are capable of a lot more than they are ready to admit to and the precious is a jealous God, who needs constant worship.

The wind is calling now and whispering in my ear; time to finish for today and start again tomorrow.

Eric Rhosynglas

Quotations, Vis Viva - A Journey to Sirius

Vis Viva – Chapter #8 – In The Shadows.

Power always makes a cubic centimetre of chance available to a Warrior. The Warrior’s art is to be perennially fluid in order to pluck it.

Carlos Castaneda, “The Wheel of Time”, Penguin Books, Middlesex, England. ISBN 0 140 19604 8, page139.

Situations are essentially neutral, says Eric, it is up to us how we choose to perceive them. We can either become all self important and offended by them or see them as great possibilities for learning. In order to do this one has to be fluid and flow with an evolving situation. He reckons that if you let your intuition rather than your thinking guide you, then the flow of the universe conspires with you, in a helpful way. In this Chautauqua then, there has been fate and destiny and so much more already, that is not rational in the traditional sense and perhaps it is time to come back to the present for a while.

Yesterday evening I found myself waiting to have my nuclei flipped so that they could do a magnetic resonance image of my carotid arteries and my brain. They are looking for an explanation about why I lost consciousness in a meeting a few weeks back. Two nice gentle men and a lady ushered me into a lab like environment and asked me a series of questions to find out if I had any metal in my body. Then I lay for around about an hour, in a white plastic tunnel, trying not to move and so very aware of my breathing and, as soon as they advised me about swallowing, the build up of saliva in my mouth. I am quite large framed so the sides of the tunnel were very, very close. I could feel the cool plastic and the air, dry and artificial, being pumped over me. It was a space age meditation bed.

I was Harry Palmer in the Ipcress File as the machine whirred and buzzed all around me. The fields were switching the spin polarisation of my hydrogen nuclei. I wondered how this might be used for torture, specifically for a claustrophobic technophobe. I thought of how I had always hated enclosed spaces, perhaps the genetic legacy of those who come from a mining stock. I remembered how my grandfather had spoken of two feet seams and wondered just how he had managed to get the coal back from the face. How different this must be the clinical white and light, versus the dark dusty black hell he went to every day; and on how far I had come to lie still and not panic in such a space.

When I came out the ghostly spiral staircases of arteries twirled on the screen; that white ephemera was what carries the blood of this organism to my brain. Udon and soba, carrying the life force to my cortex. The operator moved the image around with his mouse rotating the arterial semaphore on the screen, some crazy French sixties art that might hold a clue, for me.

Standing up I was so very conscious of my size and now even today, no longer constrained, I feel in someway larger. Earlier in the day I had taken some of my blood and looked at it under a microscope. I watched the cells gather at the edge of the droplets, line up, elongate and clot. My blood, thicker than normal with a high red blood cell count, seemed to self organise right there on the slide. No power within directing it, they all knew what to do. They lined up as if to close a wound, they elongated and formed a barrier to the outside world and as time went on dried hard and fast. That stuff, there on the slide, is the same stuff as is in the white noodles. That stuff carries the oxygen that drives the factory of this organism.

Two days then to wait. Two days for a man on the other side of the world, to look at the images and let me know if all is OK. Two days to find out whether that dream of tumour has any reality on the physical plane. And, there is nothing that I can do about it, nothing.

So let’s continue with the Chautauqua. Eric and I have been mulling over stories quite a lot recently and he reminds me of the stories that I have told and that a lie told often enough becomes the truth. He says that people like stories, a narrative of a life so that they can make a sense of that life, so that they can bind you to that story. In effect people conspire with each other to build stories and present them to each other. People have his-story or her-story and that these are so much more self limiting than is easily imagined.

These stories tell us what is and isn’t appropriate to behave like within a given context and do not allow us to change. They keep us fixed and by focussing intent on the maintenance of these, they become stronger and more concretised. For example there are many stereo types and perhaps I could be one; a science academic for example, if I don’t behave as you might expect then you might get a little confused or even hoity-toity. Inherent in stereotype are expectations and discrimination. Eric says that we should point out that stereo has a feeling of both or two about it. In that if, because of lack of knowledge about me, you stereotype me as a nutty professor and then I act out the role of nutty professor, then we are acting in stereo. He says that stereotype comes a little way after archetype and both have some use in simplification and metaphor, yet these all limit.

His-story is something that we tell ourselves about our lives and each one has usually a small number of over-arching themes, which act as a synopsis for the outer presentation of a life, in a rather clever trick of self deceit. If I tell you my story often enough, you cannot help but relate to me in the context of that story, we then both conspire in the creating of a myth about a life and our interactions. Eric says that the majority of people get very uncomfortable when they can’t pin you down; at least to some extent and that they will go to massive perceptual lengths to make an interaction fit with the story related data they have on file, even to the extent of not seeing what is actually happening.

He reminds me of the fun we had when I first started eating steak in front of people after being such an evangelical, pain in the ass, vegan. From plastic shoes to medium rare was quite a leap both for me and others.

We all of us invest, sometimes quite heavily, in our personal his-story and continue to do so even when we know, deep down, that the bank is going to crash. We get more elaborate in our guise. As a child people always used to assume that I was shy, so I became shy. It was well practised and to an extent it suited me. It gave people an explanation why I always wanted time on my own. In time though it became a bit of a burden, people started to feel sorry for me. Their story and my story had caught up with me.

Eric points out that I have invested heavily in believing that there is such a thing as the Warrior’s path and this then in itself, is part of my personal history and if I truly practise the technique of not doing then I must not believe there is such a thing and that the whole shenanigan is illusion. The biggest theme of my personal history is that I am a little different from others and that somehow I don’t fit in with the world. This is my “precious”. It is a core story that I tell myself. I think that I first started telling myself this when I was six or seven.

I have tried and tried to fit in, yet I don’t seem to have the same needs and wants as others. Together we joke about the chameleon that blends with the background so as not so do the sore thumb. I did this to such an extent that I had no idea what the hell it was that I wanted or needed or desired. This too then is part of my personal his story; the karma chameleon searching for that ever elusive place where he might actually belong and fit. I thought I had it once.

Then, the seer said to me that I would loose everything that I loved. His perception about what I actually did love is retrospectively a little off the mark, perhaps though he knew at the moment of his utterance and it was what he actually meant when he said it. My apparent world then did fall apart.

Everyone has a precious and if you, in what ever circumstance, no longer share that precious and walk away, you have given yourself a stigma in the eyes of others. They cannot and will not understand your choice. People spend an inordinate amount of time building up a precious and assume that you must be doing the same. When you do the “sand castle” and bring it all down, they find it difficult to forgive you; you become the wastrel prodigal son blessed by gifts which when examined by you seemed hollow and are discarded. Those gifts were perhaps never truly given to you anyway, only loaned for another purpose, no one can really own anything.

In some cases the level of emotional black mail used to hinder one in an action that challenges the fabric of their precious world is high and people will hate you if you don’t buy it. On a recent course I gave for Ph.D. students, there was I, the ex-academic at a famous university, who has packed it all in, and done a Reggie Perrin, well almost. There they were aspiring towards admission into a higher degree of the arcane school of concrete thought. And they, they wanted me to still teach Chemical Kinetics.

My not “buying in” makes me heretic and as I have mentioned these are rarely welcome. The prodigal son is never truly welcome back at the ranch. The expat no longer really fits in when they go home. People can tell all sorts of stories once someone has gone, as long as the subject does not dare to come back and cause them to look closely at the facts by the means of his presence. In absence people can paint a more glorious rôle for them selves than they would dare do otherwise, inventing a new history with all the droit de seigneur of the victor to take advantage over the truth and, in so doing, tarnish it.

Now, I am pretty much away from all outside influences and there is perhaps a chance to not be the chameleon, to find that true authentic self where I do not need to please. For that also is a part of my his story, the one where I need to serve and please, to be a good boy and not upset the boat; though all my life I have in the end done this, upset the boat, even though I profess to the contrary. I have not been reason-able.

Eric reckons that there are two sure fire signs that people are trying to manipulate and that is requests to be helpful and to be reasonable. “Please be reasonable.” In an institutional context is an attempt to get one to buy into the norms of the institution and has behind it the threat of; “Look if you don’t do this you won’t be a part of the gang.” It is asking you to support someone or something else’s precious, to conspire with a personal, group or institutional history which is an outward laundered spin. Someone somewhere is making money, enhancing their reputation or whatever here; the unwashed clothes are kept well out of sight.

Eric reminds me of how I decided to leave the spin out company I co-founded; I threw them a curve ball. When we first started I had shares of a paper value of £2 million. The value of these was eroded through various investment rounds until it came to the last round. All the while various capital firms and people within the company were looking at things from a perspective of how to get as much wealth as possible from the company, and from a basis of fear and greed. I said that I wanted only my original £500 back and that the company had ceased for me to be an affair of the heart.

I said this just prior to a major fund raising, one of the major shareholders, me, had said that these shares had no value for him and that he no longer shared the values of the people running the company. In the end I met with the chairman and I settled for a larger amount. People were unwilling to believe what I did and why I walked away. It was the interaction with these people that was causing me to behave in a way that drained me and dragged me down, by having to watch my back all the time and use tactics similar to them, I was becoming like them and had begun to hate myself for it.

The promise of potential wealth hung over me as a cloud, preventing me from moving forward, that green field of sterling silver always there at the rainbows end as a back stop and I was vulnerable because of it. I let it go. I walked away. I was very unreasonable. It saved my life.

What then if the last vestiges of my precious are the concept that there is such a thing as the Warrior’s path and that for a short time I journeyed with those walking the same path. How much of what I have invested in all those choices would I have to let go of?

What if there is no Warrior’s path?

Eric says that people are very, very scared of asking big questions. The implications of truly big questions are truly big answers that change a whole way of being. People’s preciouses don’t like them to do that so they get the people to rig up all sorts of reasons why they can’t look at the precious. The first line of defence starts with that river in Egypt the Nile, or in other words denial. The precious tells us that we don’t have a precious at all, that we are rational deep thinking human beings.

Every one has a precious and in a strange way it is linked to self image and can act as a cornerstone to a life, an anchor in a sometimes turbulent sea. Even if people don’t really like their precious they cling to it, a familiar precious is so much more comfortable than no precious at all, just ask Gollum.

One of the many semi precious that I had was that people actually cared about me, bringing us sharply back to the 99% rule. I guess it has always been pretty difficult to get a grip on a fluxional person, the karma chameleon. It is a funny thing that I now place the responsibility for this on me. Why is that then?

What then are the big questions for me? I know them well and Eric reckons we should ask the I Ching about facing them.

So, to the I Ching!

“Please comment on facing directly my big questions.”

Chên below and Chên above; hence we have Chên, the arousing (Shock, Thunder).

There are no changing lines.

The commentary adds that the movement is so violent that it arouses terror.

The Judgement

Shock brings success
Shock comes – Oh!Oh!
Laughing words-Ha!Ha!
The shock terrifies for a hundred miles,
And he does not let fall the sacrificial spoon and chalice.

The Image

Thunder repeated: the image of shock
Thus in fear and trembling
The superior man sets his life in order
And examines himself.


I Ching or Book of Changes, Richard Wilhelm Translation, Arkana Penguin Group, Middlesex England, ISBN 0 140 019207 7, page 197.

Thus there is a sense of the superior man keeping calm amidst all of the storms and rage and bowing to the will of Heaven. This has the potential to unzip everything and change my personal history, for ever. I must face those big questions.

Eric Rhosynglas

Cause & Effect, Karma, personal, Personal Development, Quotations, Vis Viva - A Journey to Sirius

Karmeleon – Vis Viva Chapter 7

For a heterosexual man there are two things that can cause great fear and strike blows to the core, they are linked to his ability to function sexually. Those are to question his sexual orientation and the parentage of his children. These things strike deep at something in him, because perceived masculinity is so often linked to sexual performance.

In one sense one’s children are one’s legacy of sexual activity on the physical plane; in a more metaphorical sense when a man is being creative he fertilises the world through his actions hopefully sowing seeds of positive endeavour, his accomplishments.

The challenge for the cuckold to his sense of masculinity is immense particularly so if he discovers this many years down the line. He has in effect and affect been living a lie for most of his adult life. The statistics suggest that as many as one man in ten is unknowingly raising someone else’s child; in these days of multiple divorce and remarriage the raising of another man’s child is overt as well as covert.

In another sense a child can metaphorically re-present a man’s purpose and its nurturing. Eric reckons that a man nurtures with his heart, it is male love and male warmth which gives a child security to grow and to test the boundaries. He says that this is so important and the absence of this is what causes harm, unfortunately though this lack is self-propagating in that the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons, cold insecure men raise cold insecure boys.

Eric reckons that this phrase has other meanings than the genealogical sense and that it relates to fate and karma. He says that we should be careful about using the concept of fate and karma because these words have been bandied about by so many on the dharma trails from Katmandu to Goa and back again. He does believe that the quotation below from the works of Alice Bailey is a particularly good springboard from which to do a double twisting back somersault into the topic though.

The Cup of Karma

There is a cup held to the lips of those who drink, by four great Lords of Karma. The draught within that cup must all be drained, down to the nethermost drop, e’er it is possible to fill the cup with a purer, sweeter one. The seven Lords of cosmic Love await the hour of filling.

The cup is naught. The draught within distils forth drop by drop. It will not all be drained until the final hour wherein the Pilgrim takes the cup. He lifts it from the hand of those Who, bending, hold it to his lips. Until that day the cup is held, and in inner blind dismay the Pilgrim drinks. After that hour he lifts his head; he sees the light beyond; he takes the cup and, with a radiant joy, drains to the very dregs.

The contents of the cup are changed; the bitter now becomes the sweet; the fiery essence then is lost in cool, life-giving streams. The fire absorbed within has burned and scarred and seared. The draught now taken soothes the burns; it heals the scars and permeates the whole.

The Four bend down and see the work. They release the cup of Karma. The tender Lords of Cosmic Love then mix another draught, and – when the cup is empty seen (emptied by conscious will) – they pour within that which is needed now for broader, larger living. Until the cup has once been used, filled, drained, and seen as naught, it cannot safely hold within that which is later given.

But when to utter emptiness the Pilgrim drains the cup then to the world in torment now he turns. With cup in hand (drained once, filled again, and refused to selfish need) he tends the need of struggling men who tread the way with him. The draught of love, of sacred fire, of cool, health-giving stream he lifts not towards himself but holds it forth to others. Upon the road of weary man he becomes a Lord of Power – power gained through work accomplished, power reached through conscious will. Through the cup of Karma drained he gains the right to serve.

Look on, O Pilgrim, to the goal. See shining far ahead the glory that envelops and the light that naught can dim. Seize on the cup and swiftly drain, delay not for the pain. The empty cup, the steady hand, the firm and strong endeavour, lead to a moment’s agony and thence to radiant life.

Alice Bailey; “The Rays and The Initiations” Page 762, Lucis Publishing Company, New York. ISBN 0-85330-122-0

The vis viva then picks an aspect of awareness to animate, from time to time this awareness incarnates and the power within has the chance to eke out a physical plane existence and face the challenges therein. Because of the deeds and actions in previous incarnations the awareness of the power within has evolved and it chooses a circumstance, a fleeting moment in the evolution of space-time to incarnate such that it can live out the challenges as a fate, within the context of an overall destiny. Eric finds it interesting that the etymology of sin may have a root that is of the verb to be or être, that as a consequence of being in carnation sins result.

He also notes that fate has an air of fatality about it, a sense of death. Sin and Fate are together. They are existence and death, being and not-being and he reminds me that death is both the end of physical plane carnation and more generally transformation through death of the old. Here in the sense of old perceptions and ways of being.

He says that he doesn’t like these two words ( fate and karma) much and that challenges are better, because these are much less judgmental and finger pointy, they have less baggage. The power within sets things up for it to experience whilst in the form side of life, it chooses the circumstance of birth, the country of birth and the potential capacities and abilities. As a direct result there will be sin, or being, as the aspiration and intent of the power within seeks to further develop its awareness through the process of life. He says that a Warrior treats his death as an advisor because by keeping death present it encourages one to live in what he calls the eternal now and to act to the best of ones capacity and ability at any given time, he says that this is impeccability. So in this sense death is his fate and it is to transmute, transform and transfigure.

This transmutation then is when the power within recognises that it has gaps in its knowledge and goes about finding this missing knowledge, it sets itself up with challenges in order to learn. In a very simple sense, the first acts of transmutation are to find out what those challenges are and then welcome them, to literally live them bearing in mind that they are gifts and not tortures.

The next stage is transformation, which is changing the shape of a life so that finally the power within has the island of existence in roughly the shape it originally intended so as to live out its fate for a given lifetime. He reckons that most people have forgotten what it is that they are meant to be doing and live in a dream. All one has to do is to wake up in the dream and then get busy.

The Greek word hamartia (ἁμαρτία) is often translated as sin, this means miss the mark. If one is missing the mark in living out a life that is not in accord with fate then that is a sin, or transgression against the purpose of the vis viva and one’s own power within.

The nature of one’s challenges called forth in a given lifetime, are karma, there is no such thing as good karma or bad karma, only karma. There is not a direct and linear cause and effect here, karma is more cyclical than that, though there are sequences and when mixed with others con-sequence. Eric sees karma as much more of a pattern woven together with challenge threads and themes running through a life, the circumstance for which may be set up over a number of lifetimes, there are many twists and turns in this as the vis viva goes about its business of evolving awareness as a whole. It is difficult to account for the hubris of mankind against the backdrop of cosmic Manvantaras and Kalpas outlined in the Vedic scriptures.

If then as an aspirant for self discovery one drains the cup of Karma, one is actively taking part in the act of transformation by conscious will, by grasping the challenges in a life one makes way for a wider living both in a current life and those that follow.

Eric says that his fate must encompass things that challenge his sense of masculinity to the core and that in overcoming these he will be exploring masculinity. He says that by choosing a father who was emotionally distant and later physically distant during a traumatic period of his life; he had no one to learn from. In a very real sense then he was making it up as he went along. The ability to cope with extended periods of bullying has given him a sense of determination and self reliance which he can draw on in times of trouble. It is his opinion that if one looks back at the sort of challenges and themes that appear relatively early on in a life you can get a picture of some of the scope of a fate.

Eric says that I should now talk in first person about the events of my second year in boarding school; I am a little hesitant to provide full details. A boy asked me to do something and I guess it was and is not, that unusual a thing to ask, but we were caught in the act. He had asked me to play with his balls. We were hauled up in front of the housemaster and asked to account for ourselves. The other boy was quite clearly nervous because it was he that had asked. He asked me to cover for him and make something up so that he came out of it looking better. I could see that he was in trouble. So I took the blame for something that wasn’t really all that bad; though at the time it was catastrophe.

The whole school soon knew about it and so, “Ali-homo” was born. Can you imagine how young boys might chant that at each other and how after not very long a time this began to wear a little thin? As it happens I was put up a dorm in my second year and there the taunting continued en masse. So I waited and waited, in the end I ended up setting things up so that I fought with each boy in turn, when I had them on their own. This strategy seemed to work.

Ultimately, I got Morris, alone, and actually messed him up to such an extent that the housemaster warned me about exclusion. How strange to be bullied and then punished for fighting back. Needless to say I did not want to discuss this bullying with my parents, most especially my dad.

“How is school?”

“Just fine. Did you know I might be playing rugby for Colts next year?”

Later that year we were on a family holiday in the Kafue national park, this is a game reserve in Zambia. We were staying in some rondavels that were quite luxurious, close by the Kafue River. The Kafue River at Kwafala camp is very broad with some fast flowing water and many large islands. It was great. I could go fishing. We did various game drives and I got to go fishing in small boat with one of the guides. They liked doing this as, should we be lucky, they had some food for their families too. I can’t even remember his name but he was a small man and my parents have a picture of him somewhere.

We worked our way upstream across the fast flowing part to an area of more gentle flow going along the sides of a large island across an open expanse of water to the big reed bed. There we started fishing with spinners in search of bream and pike. Together we caught four bream and five pike. It was fantastic my best ever days fishing. The bream he caught were good sized around four pounds each and would be great to eat. As we rowed back he pointed to the signs of hippos making progress underwater, small rings of bubbles and said that is best to watch out for them. We got back and showed off our spoils, the other guides were excited as was my sister and the son of other guests at the camp. A trip was planned for the next day.

Then we had bream, fresh from the brai, magic, true magic.

The next day we set off, my sister, this other slightly younger boy, myself and three guides, the short man, Richard and a taller older man. The boat was quite full with all of us, the fishing tackle and the big slab of concrete that acted as anchor. We rowed across the fast flowing section and then to the more open space of water heading towards the fishing fields near the reeds.

As I am remembering all this, I stepped outside our house and a squadron of nine biplanes flew over head, making quite a noise. They are probably from the nearby RAF base and practising for an air show, harkening back to a time of white silk scarves and handlebar moustaches, crying tally-ho and let’s get after the Hun. Quite a contrast the English countryside to the depths of the African bush!

Then it happened, we saw the edges of some of those bubble rings and the edges of one by the side of the boat. Next thing we were all in the water and the boat had overturned. I was a good swimmer then but only eleven years old. The older man was close to me and he tried to get hold of me, I pushed him away. He tried again and I swam away. I saw him drift off in the current. He was drowning. Calling this back to memory is hard, because after the event I was wracked with guilt that perhaps I could have saved him, I had a bronze medallion life saving badge after all!!

I am crying slightly now at the thought of it all. Seeing someone drift away is not easy. We all swam to the boat; there were now five of us. Together we tried to right the boat and got it about halfway, it then bounced back and I was hit on the head. This made me a little dizzy. We tried again but that anchor was now holding the boat in place. I said to the guides that we weren’t really helping and that if we swam to the nearby island we would wait there whilst they tried righting the boat without hindrance. They sort of agreed but it was difficult to know who was in charge. So we swam towards the island. I remember thinking it strange that swimming was a lot harder in my new Clark’s Attackers, but that I might need my shoes later. As we neared the shore my sister and the other boy headed for a different landing point than mine. We got to the shore and hauled ourselves up onto land and into the bush.

We watched as they tried to right the boat a number of times, the sun now lowering across the water. They were getting tired. They gave up and came to join us on the island. Richard was the stronger swimmer of the two and headed towards where my sister had landed. The shorter man followed, my shorter route, splashing quite a lot as he swam. All of a sudden he was pulled under the water, he started thrashing about a little more wildly, surfaced once and then the water was silent. I knew what had happened; there are crocodiles in these parts. He had followed the path that I had taken just a few moments earlier. The four of us stood dumbstruck looking west at the empty river with the upturned boat and the now setting sun.

For an eternity we stood and stared. Richard seemed to be very, very far away. I said that we needed to do something because they could not hear us back at camp from here. We needed to let them know and that we must get moving soon as it would soon be dark. The only way was to make our way between the islands until such time as we were close enough to shout for help. So we began. Some of the islands were separated by shallow water, some were waist deep and others we had to swim a little in between.

So we did it, each entrance into the water tinged by the memory of what had just happened and the fear. I don’t to this day know whether the two other children knew what had happened, they were just glad to be on the move. We got to a small uncovered island about two hundred metres from camp, nearby the fast flowing section. We reckoned that there wouldn’t be hippos or crocs there and shouted across to the camp for help. We told them what had happened and it began; the ululation of an African woman at the loss of her man; such a haunting sound to accompany the swift and velvet fall of an African dusk.

There we were, then, cold and wet, in complete darkness on a small island in the middle of a game park, stranded. There was no other boat at the camp. The bush is alive at night. All we had for comfort was each other and the lights of the camp distant across the water and that terrible ululation. We heard that my father was going to drive to one of the other camps in search of a boat and that they would try to get to us, they had heard of a canoe and transporter some distance away.

I think soon after mid-night my father and the other boy’s father got in the canoe and made their way towards our shouts across the water to us with some food and clothing. It wasn’t an easy trip but it was with the current. It would not be wise to go back at night. They landed and we ate. We had a gun now. I remember that dawn very well, the mist rising off the river and that grey, grey stretching your arms and legs, yawning beginning to the day. We saw the canoe and were not quite as reassured as we once were. In the past a hippo had taken a bite out of it. We were ferried across and boy, were we glad. They took the thorn out of my sister’s foot and we were soon to leave. For some reason my mother was no longer keen on game parks. We would have to report the incident to the police and as we would reach the game park borders first, it was down to us to do that.

We got to the gate and went in to explain what had happened to the African policeman there. The dry mud brick hut was both gate house for the game park and police station. I had to give a statement. As I began to talk it was noticeable that the man could not really write. So I gave my first statement to the police in my scruffy handwriting all the while thinking that they might lock me up for not saving that man and thinking that it was weird that here I was writing, what were the grown ups doing why weren’t they doing all this? It was down to me I had to do it. Like a good public school boy I owned up. Nothing happened to me.

When we got back to Kabwe the story quickly did the rounds of the expat community and filtered down to the children. For a while we were quite famous locally, the grown ups though all had a shudder when they thought of it.

Eric says that it was my fate to be in that place at that time and to see that males who are the masculine expression of the vis viva cannot always be relied on and that I as a proto male would have to take charge from time to time. This was a part of my karma which left me with a great fear of swimming in open water and the sense that something unseen and terrible was lurking there. He reminds me that I nearly had a heart attack when that small fish followed me in Italy and that it took nearly twenty years before I could swim out of my depth in tropical waters.

He says that the burden of guilt for letting that man drown stayed with me for many years, unspoken, leaving me with a sense that I could have and should have, done more to save him.

Soon it was time to go back to school and I was dropped back into my original dorm. It was much better here and there was less bullying and conflict.

Personal Development, Poetic Prose, Quotations, Rāja yoga, Vis Viva - A Journey to Sirius, Vision, Yoga

Vis Viva – A Journey to Sirius Chapter 5

Chapter 5 Oh come to me….Beautiful Rain

A Fremen dies when he is too long from the desert. We call this the water sickness.

Frank Herbert, “Children of Dune” Gollancz
Orion Publishing Group, London. Page 127 ISBN 0 575 074906

Eric says that today we should talk about rain, beautiful rain. For today is not a day of fire and orange red suns, not yet. He says that we should wait for one of those spectacular sunsets before we talk of fire, today is a day of water. He suggests that before we get started I should open the door so that I can hear the rain and the birdsong because it will help me to remember that I am a being touched by the desert and the bush. My relationship with rain is different from the English. Only those who have lived with cloudless skies and scorching desert suns can love the rain as much as I do.

Today it is comfort rain, soft downy and close. The earth is drinking and all around things are growing, you can almost see them. It is getting heavier now and in the wet slabs of stone I see the shadow of a bird flying above and I look up to see a heron, its wing feathers slightly tatty around the edges and the sound of those wings is soft on the wind. He is taken to the wide rivers of Africa and the parchment creeks of the Australian desert. For his life has also been one of rivers and of mountains. He was born of stock from the foothills of Snowdon and taken as a child from this green and pleasant land, far away across the seas, to the Southern hemisphere. There he was marked by a different sun and saw panoply of stars that truly put the sky into, sky.

Eric says that there is an urban legend; that Eskimos have many words for snow and wonders why aren’t there quite as many for, rain? He says that when rain comes to him in his dreams he understands it as meaning the process of life and a reminder to be aware that the vis viva is always busy; that we should trust whatever it is that the power within has for us to do. He says that now we have got started on this Chautauqua he feels that the time is right for us to be doing it and that the I Ching has agreed, Sheng {Pushing Upward}, and he has noted the text there.

Today then he says that we should talk about relaxing into the process of life and that although this is linked to the journey motif what we should discuss is water and actions, those that yield and dissolve making life more fluid than sand. He says that action without condition is the means by which one walks the path with heart and that for him there can no longer be any other way.

Eric reckons that most people never truly listen to what others say, most lives are spent and he is sure that this is the right word, fighting for air time and clamouring for attention. I agree and am pretty sure that most people use words and phrases they have borrowed from others and spout truths which they themselves have never checked the validity of.

Life then is not about a reactive and hurried knee jerk to the world; a cause and effect, a reason and a justification. There is more than this. In order to be able to do this, what one needs to do is to, stop the world, to……….

Pause.

In a helter-skelter mad-dash dog-chasing-its-tail way there is, whether you believe it or not, still plenty of time to pause, step back and look at the process of life to get some clarity on what is actually going on and then to respond intelligently to what transpires. Yes one can always meet force with force, yet often to yield is so much more powerful, and here I mean power in the sense of learning and knowledge and not the other way. He says that most people have buttons that are easily pressed and initiate a knee jerk reaction which he calls a control drama.

These control dramas are there because the so-called rational mind likes to protect what it holds as sacrosanct behaviour patterns and thoughts, learned at mother’s knee. He reckons the only way that one can begin to unpick them is to first take an inventory of ones doings and then, don’t do them any more.

He rather liked Luke Rheinhart’s “The Dice Man” for this but doesn’t recommend that as a way of being. What he means is that once there is a little clarity about behaviours one can do an exciting experiment on oneself to find out where they all came from and get some freedom, by not responding in such a Pavlovian way.

He says that if there is intent to change one can initiate this in an intelligent way and that one of the best ways to do this is to be like water. That is to yield and dissolve and flow and eddy; to absorb and to treat everything for its potential as a gift of learning and new knowledge. Which as we have already discussed allows the power within to guide our development imbuing us with a vitality which is that capacity to live life to its full, so that the vis viva, imbues the power within to organise the form into living the challenges of physical plane existence to the max.

People have barbs, he says, and some of them are so emotionally charged that they wound, a few words spoken with malicious intent can damage as much, if not more than, a knife. They can cut people down. He reckons that it is the quality of the e-motion which is linked to the underlying intent, that has a sound and the sound is what damages. We will come back to colour and movement perhaps another day he says.

If one listens to both the face value of the words and the tonal balance of their delivery he reckons that you can learn quite a lot about what is actually going on. It is the battle of one-up-man-ship that most people try to exert over each other, that maintains a mis-guided sense of control over life and that this is the basis of the construct we appear to live in. Here competition is against and usually for some form of pecking order. Eric reminds me of Terry and how we knew that despite all his brouhaha and forceful manipulation what he feared most was a simple hug from another man.

He says that he finds it ironic that rational mind has inherent in it the quality of ratio and the quantity of ration. Hinting that it attempts to balance whilst limiting the scope of what it is considering. He says he much prefers the irrational as this is much less limited and full of possibilities; that the worst insult you could give him would be to call him rational. Rational is nearly always tied up to justification and presupposes right, that there is only one answer.

He reckons since we are now here we should look logic up on Wiki.

Logic is the philosophical study, or the formal science, of the principles of valid inference and demonstration. The word derives from Greek λογική (logike), fem. of λογικός (logikos), “possessed of reason, intellectual, dialectical, argumentative”, from λόγος (logos), “word, thought, idea, argument, account, reason, or principle”.

As he has mentioned people do not truly listen to each other and often, before a person has even half finished a sentence, others are preparing rejoinders, whether witty or otherwise. He says that in terms of quality, logic which derives from logos, has perhaps become disconnected from its true source, because the logos is the word or the very first sound echoing out of the void, the first thing which is becoming manifest as a vibration within the nothingness, there and then giving evidence of existence and non-existence. Before the first stirring there was only no-thing. In the act of stirring, awareness came into being as a separation. The first word is not quite ineffable and is so much more than the intellectual pissing contest that people think of as debate and conversation. Who then within the rations of the rational mind defines what is valid and what is right?

Eric says that until one has a working knowledge of the second attention one cannot appreciate the quality of words properly or get a feeling for what is left. This left side or feeling is perhaps heart and not mind. In a very real sense the ratio of rational is therefore incomplete in any case, because this left side knowing or inner tuition is left out of the equation. Thus the rational is therefore, if I may use a reasoning word, in a rather odd sense irrational as the referential framework is so limited; and limited to what is in effect and affect concrete thought. What people call rational is all air, mind and lacks. It is not water.

So the rain of this Chautauqua has taken us of down a side tributary of metaphysics and rhetoric in order to describe and discuss rationality. It has been raining now for hours and the pace of it varies. He says it is drawing us back to rivers and streams and to Annwn and perhaps the Celtic salmon of wisdom that features high in the other world journeys, the journeys into metaphor. For whilst the other world journeys beckon one can never step in the same river twice, the world moves on and we cannot step out of the wardrobe from Narnia into an unchanged world. Time’s arrow as perceived on the physical plane is real enough.

He reckons that if you choose you might see life as a river, perhaps sourced high in the broad mountains of mist or from a small limestone spring in the bucolic vale of a shire. Soon that river meets others and they influence each other flowing urgently and precociously over the mossy rocks of life or perhaps more largo over the broad and leafy floodplains. He reckons you can hear brooks chuckle if you listen carefully enough. These streams become rivers and flow towards the wide seas and oceans of life, where man perhaps makes a mark on the world. There the currents are stronger and deeper; within the depths are hidden treasure, perhaps of the abysmal and perhaps of long lost tropical isles where undiscovered pirate gold lies hidden beneath the sing-song dreamlike palms and hammocks.

On its path to the sea the rivers may come across beaver dams constructed by the auspices of the mind that stem the flow of developing consciousness and block it with the tyranny of fear. Perhaps from time to time the river disappears deep into a sink hole or becomes barren and dry, the flow of life vanishes into the desert of a temporary despair. Like the salmon of wisdom we all leave our redds to begin a process of transformation perhaps from parr to smolt and salmon, before we die returning to the source of our birth and as legend has it, reviewing the wisdom gained during our lives. Eric reckons that if we step back and pause to look at our lives as they happen and not afterwards, this magnificent journey is all the richer.

He says that the most important thing he learned during the days of his descent into the underworld of darkness, is to remember that life is a process. He says that no matter how bad things get and how impossible things seem because of rational mind, provided that you are still breathing, the world doesn’t actually end; and that a good night’s sleep nearly always brings a fresh perspective with the rising of the sun.

He says that back then, it really helped him to visualise his life as the course of a river and that rather than seeing footprints in the sand, he sees the moods and themes of the river that is the expression of the vis viva flowing and that it is the quality of flow that allows us to synchronise, synch-chron-ise with the universe, to be in time with it.

He says that when he is a little lost for direction in life he always asks himself what his river feels like, right here and right now. What has the rational mind beaver been doing that stops the flow, how must he be to break out of a corner. What then is needed to move the logs of consciousness that are blocking the flow? Or, isn’t it perhaps now time for a gentle eddy in life, to sit back in the late summer sunshine and let the mayflies dance upon him; to feel the fish turn and break the surface for a well earned meal.

When he finds a barrier in life he asks himself; what is he trying to force? He says that he tries not to force anything but he has a mind too and that desires. It is that force which depletes the vibrancy and makes his brain ache. Time then to dissolve all that is around into the river of his being and take that new knowledge, time to yield and change direction, time to wear slowly down through the matter of the mountain valley and not scrape as a rock filled glacier might; time to pause and eddy and reflect the sun and then because the rain is falling and this process feeds the river, onwards and to the sea.

Eric cautions that until one has lived in the desert of despair a river may seem just a river, he knows then that the rain is precious and it is the contrast that reveals potential. If there is too much water then a man gets complacent and that is what the Fremen call the water sickness, for without some challenge there is no contrast and it is these challenges that help us to be free and most of all, that is what he wants.