Author: jenniesredbook

“Frequently consider the connection of all things in the Universe. … Reflect upon
the multitude of bodily and mental events taking place in the same brief time,
simultaneously in every one of us and so you will not be surprised that many
more events, or rather all things that come to pass, exist simultaneously in the
one and entire unity, which we call the Universe. … We should not say ‘I am an
Athenian’ or ‘I am a Roman’ but ‘I am a Citizen of the Universe’.”

Marcus Aurelius

I realised some months ago that the conversation that has been the ‘anti-vaxxers vs vaxxers’ has shifted to ‘anti-maskers vs maskers’ domain of interaction. Both contain all the same elements of judgement and attempts at shaming that have become our standard go-to level of debate. Sadly it is becoming representative of the ever new ways of finding ourselves divided. I have attempted to look at what is underlying this phenomenon and what makes them similar, and this is my theory. I am not clearly right or clearly wrong, but it feels likely possible. Firstly, I recognise that in both cases it is not possible to enter into an open debate about the facts, whether it concerns what vaccines are doing to our more than adequate and strikingly beautiful immune system, or equally, that we all know that the masks we put on only serve a purpose if we are coughing and sneezing due to being ill ourselves. No-one can honestly believe that a pretty cloth mask or the most basic of masks used by us all is capable of doing anything other than cosmetic. And this is besides all the harms done psychologically: children who will not see a smile on a stranger’s face, hear communication happening around them, who will believe that the air is something to be afraid of and that living is a dangerous thing, and for all of the population living in fear of their own mortality and everywhere they look reminds them of this. And in most cases what may result is that someone, in return for lockdown, lives another year or two. It doesn’t feel like a fair exchange that the poor bear the brunt of this, as they do of everything we claim. It seems the most sensible thing for us all to do is a face-off with this new virus and allow those of us willing to do so to get on with it. We too matter in this equation and should have the right to do so. But sadly this probably won’t happen because governments are leaving us out of the business of governing the people, and they don’t intend to let us know what is going on, and what they are up to. They have decided it is their God–given right to make with us what they will, only it is because they are totally enamoured with Man’s godly likeness that they can achieve this.

I have no problem with those who feel that they have a higher risk of serious complications from Covid-19 and who choose to wear a mask. In fact, I encourage it. And if someone’s fear reaches an even higher level they can choose to stay within the home and be supported to do so. We cannot deny this virus its place in our current paradigm, and ultimately it is not an option to live out our lives in isolation—that is not living. We need to familiarise ourselves with the behaviour of bacteria and viruses and what our governments are doing with and to them without our knowledge and our consent. If the average child through to adulthood has 60 plus vaccinations, not counting the annual flu vaccines and more that keep being added to the schedule, it is going to become a necessity to be better informed because there are more viruses on the planet than there are stars in the universe. Viruses normally live in a balanced harmony with us because our immune system acts as a gatekeeper, a highly developed army making sure they remain behind their lines. Yes, there are always going to be environmental (most of our own making) or individual (often of our own making) events causing us to suffer serious illnesses and even death, including an epidemic, just like an insect or a forest can suffer or worse.

Many people think that childhood diseases are/were dangerous, when all children got them generation after generation. And yes, occasionally, a heart defect, a lack of proper nursing, famine or malnutrition, or some compromised immune system issue could well cause serious illness and death. But the undermining of the human immune systems for the sake of a few, with extreme repercussions for the future of the human body and its health, is wrong. There will always be early and tragic deaths for some of us through illness or accidents. When you look at the schedule of vaccines in the US as of 2017, it sounds perfectly normal for one of the leading lights, an anthropologist, Dr Heidi Larson, in the UN vaccination programme to ask the question, ‘as we have now moved humanity to a vaccine-induced dependency for immunity to diseases….’ Surely it raises questions, and certainly I, for one, am not happy about them ‘playing God’ with our bodies.

The first link is to Dr Heidi Larson speaking at the UN, and the second gives you an idea of the multitude of vaccinations children and adults are already receiving. A drop in the ocean when it compares to the number of viruses our immune systems need to be taught how to deal with when they enter the domain of our bodies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp-kw9s8CTU

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/11288-childhood-immunization-schedule

My theory is that the same two ‘niggles’ apply to both conversations, that of the ‘vaxxers’ and the ‘maskers’, and they are to do with a heightened fear of death, often because of a materialist and a non-spiritual view of the world, and therefore a sense that as people they do not matter. In both cases, these are self-generated states of being. I am always amazed at the assistance the universe offers to each of us with a road sign pointing in the right direction. One of the regular posts of recent times has been all lives matter in the context of the BLM movement coming from some quarters of the population, projecting this back out onto the population to still their own subconscious belief that the implication of black lives matter is that they don’t matter. And I am not saying that the BLM movement are without their own dogmatic issues. It is a state of mind to know that you matter, and can take years of soul searching to know this, and finally it is one that I now understand in the context of the bigger picture: everyone and everything matters as we are all one with the total consciousness of the universe, a theory that is fast becoming a fact as scientists gain a greater understanding of the physics of everything, although not really a new idea but one that has been promoted by mystics, shamans and philosophers since ancient times. Nothing happens without involving and impacting everything and everyone that exists in the world, and all actions serve a purpose individually and collectively, and therefore come with consequences that are unavoidable, even when those consequences go unattended for lifetimes and generations. The universe is a finite system and there is no opportunity for losses of matter or energy. This means that our consciousness lives on in one way or another after death. If that isn’t a good reason to know how much we and everything matters, I don’t know what is!

This is how my life plays out many times a day – events, words and meetings collide, constantly revealing deeper meanings to me. Another name for these deeper meanings, or synchronicities, are my beloved dots that I keep adding to my map of life. The map has been taking on some strange anomalies lately. Mmmm…  And I can never in this life time know whether I am holding it the right way up or not. The risk of free will.

My pug has colitis, and it is my fault, a mistake I could feel myself making at the time because I gave him the tip of the chicken wing when I knew it nearly killed my Oscar pug many years ago. I look always at why I walk myself into difficult situations knowingly, and sometimes I come up with answer. He is slowly healing, and I have to live with his pain – a good lesson for me in so many ways. Our other dog Zac, the island special, has mostly been patient with Kito’s unwillingness to join his games, but recently he has been attempting to herd him, and growling at him. This morning, when I had finished explaining my current shadow sense on life, and why he shouldn’t worry because the green trees and blue sky still look beautiful to me, I told Peter that in nature animals and particularly wolves and their wild descendants will hide their injuries and illnesses as long as they can from the pack, because if discovered the pack will attack them and possibly even kill them. This is because the pack’s welfare, (interesting – the good of all) depends on the health of all its members (or would this have more to do with getting herd immunity).

So, imagine my surprise (not) when I open an article, as always reached by diving into a wormhole, on reading the following:

“…This is intensified within the prison, where, if you get a death notice like one of the characters Kiki did, that his sister died, you cannot show any emotion that will invite people to take advantage of you. That emotion, for Kiki, was sadness. If you show sadness, you start crying, people will see that you’re vulnerable and will try to take advantage of you.”

I chose to find out more about James McCleary and his documentary, The Work, made by his son, because I happened to open a short video put up by Russell Brand on what he had learnt this week. And the reason for my interest was remembering my time of working in the education department of a high security men’s prison in the UK. I have never enjoyed work more than I did this, although working in a children’s home as a twenty-year-old comes close. At the time that I worked in the prison Elle, my daughter who died in 2016, was about 12 months old and her sister was seven. I was a young woman with no skills or tertiary education in any subject, never mind psychology, and not in a position to know how to help them. (The lady in charge of the education department saw something in my application that made her override the need for further qualifications.) I started by teaching cooking (not my greatest talent), then went on to art and literacy, and finally I developed my own life skills course which seemed to achieve results on the ‘opening up to discuss issues’ front. I look back and know that while I was well meaning and with good instincts, I was never the less out of my depth.  But the compassion I felt for the men, as opposed to pity and hence judgment, has been where I felt any success in supporting them lay. I have never forgotten one of their life stories. I am considered by some as illusional, delusional even, for my unusual take on people, life, spirit and the universe, and at times I have had to work hard to see my own relevance, but I have always had my main champions, my daughters and my husband, who I trust when they tell me that I am sane.

I look forward to watching this documentary. I hope that I can find it. I have always felt that there are ways to heal and help damaged and traumatised children and people but not the way we have been going about it in the past and in the main.

“…At first, it was a writing program. Patrick didn’t know anything about modern psychology at that point, but he knew that men had been sitting in circles for the last hundred thousand years around a fire talking. He said that he could at least do that. That’s what he did. He invited men to start talking. That’s what they did.”

What comes out of this article for me is the need, for those of us who are injured, to meet with a supporter on equal ground, as opposed to doctor/patient, psychologist/victim, psychiatrist/perpetrator or any hierarchical or judgmental paradigm because it will be met with resistance, and resistance prevents change. What Jung calls the ‘warrior archetype’ perhaps in action? ‘Who do you think you are to try to cross my boundaries, Mr Therapist?’ It is acknowledgement that is the key to open anyone up to a difficult conversation, and that can begin the act of self-healing.

“…It’s a general blanket term for all of the messy stuff that happens in a person’s life that they try to reframe so that they can behave differently. To put it in a box of group therapy sells it short. It really is empathy and compassion. It’s an impromptu session based off the strength of the truth that you tell. That connects with the person sitting next to you and the people in the circle. They’re throwing out whatever works, whatever they’ve experienced in the moment to try and help the individual that seems to be in the center, that is feeling whatever they’re feeling.”

While this article is about specifically helping men to find a way back into their hearts (also known as their anima), and learning to be kind and gentle with themselves and all that that entails, I don’t see that it precludes women from finding positive results in their relationships and lives through a similar construct, although there might well be some smaller variables. The following quote could easily be said for a woman or a mother who opens herself up to the scrutiny of others, and especially to her children or partner. And I disagree with anyone who says that he/she opens themselves at their own peril, but obviously there is one necessary precondition, the authenticity of the intent for opening oneself up.

“…My dad really opened himself up to scrutiny. That’s why he’s the biggest hero I have, because in that moment, his identity as a stern father figure crumbled and he invited us to criticize him. He said, “Are there things that I’m doing that are hurting our relationship? There are so many mistakes I have made. What are the mistakes that you think I’ve made? How can I be better?” He started doing that.”

I would love to have known as a young mother what life has finally taught me, but perhaps that is as is meant to be, but are the young willing to learn from our otherwise lost wisdom, as they used to in times past, sitting around in the shade of the great mother trees, with their children playing at their feet, while men sat around the fires at night having kept alert all day to keep their families and tribe safe from all dangers.

Jairus McCleary on ‘The Work,’ His Father, and the Hard Truth That Pain is Pain

PS. Carl Jung, the father of Synchronicity, again plays a role in this particular process of healing, and almost personally turns up inside this particular collision of events for me today.

PPS. The following are the four main archetypes that are deeply imbedded in all mythologies, and have been present through to the present – they are the king/queen, the warrior, the lover and the magician – but it is Jung who is considered to have developed them into identifiable and useable types into determining how all behave, and who is responsible for assigning emotions he describes as gateways into their psyches. They are as identifiable in communities and nations as in the individual, and probably equally in many of our systems, although I may have taken some liberties here.

Anger, and its opposite serenity, is the gateway into the warrior, and is about holding boundaries

Joy or despair is the gateway into the sovereign, the king/queen

Fear or calmness, serenity, is the gateway into the magician

Compassion and love and their opposites is the gateway into the lover

I can’t help noting how fear and the magician who, in his mischief and magic, turns things upside down, and fear ensues. Sounds familiar to me in this crisis of a virus.

I am sitting here at 4.30am writing because I cannot fall back to sleep. I wake up every night a few times (versions of this have been going on for over a decade now) as my body goes through a period of vibrations, and usually as soon as it stops, after 5-15 minutes, I go straight back to sleep. But occasionally I don’t. This is one of those nights as I find myself considering the worst and the best that may lie on the horizon and beyond. We are in for a lot of both, and somehow those of us that can help in some way must do what we can, for starters, by providing encouragement to ‘hang in there’ without giving out hollow hope, by spreading what money we have around no matter that it may be all we have left, by not pointing fingers and laying blame at nations, communities and individuals, for which the consequences could be grave and dark, and by trying not to jump to conclusions when nobody knows the answers to any of this. A proportion of every population is going to behave unreasonably, and worse, because of fears that they don’t have the experiences to know how to still, while others have fear because they know that they face very real health risks of not coming through this. And that is excluding the fear of an economic uncertainty like we have never faced before.

I can see, just by looking right at the green dots on the news feed of my Facebook page, that there are a lot of people struggling to sleep through the night. We are all going to have to dig deep into our psyches, and drag our higher selves up from the murky and unfamiliar depths. The really hard part may be the length of time that we will need to endure this pandemic and somehow manage to sustain some positivity. I suspect we shall be sorely tested for a long time. I don’t know whether to be super realistic, and not shy away from what is frightening about our global situation, or to see what is happening as a catalyst for the change I have wished and hoped for over recent years, a change that could save our oceans and forests, our bees and insects, well really, our whole natural world and thereby keep us safe in the process too. We have all heard David Attenborough, Greta Thunberg and many others, tell us that our current lifestyle is unsustainable, and while we have heard this and know it to be true, none of us could imagine how it was going to be possible to affect a ‘back track’. I can’t help considering whether this is an intervention from Gaia, giving us that ‘clap’ across the back of our heads as she tires of giving us little reminders to be careful. Or is it the collective consciousness giving back to us what many have been manifesting for some years now? Maybe it is nothing more than simply a random default position on what we have failed to prepare for as a result of overpopulation of the planet, along with bad farming practices, and a lack of care and foresight about where our consumerist and hedonistic desires would ultimately bring us to?

It does seem to me that we have been ‘carrying on as normal’ on borrowed time for many decades now. It is a century and a year since the last major pandemic, Spanish Flu. Could it be that this planet has more in common with the much-known-about Gaia model than the myth-less, godless and random solitary rock of life roaming selfishly through our galaxy in the loneliest universe one could ever imagine? I have had the growing point of view that we have been floating blindly and backwards in time, rather than progressing, for at least the last two millennia, with a few tribes who have always rejected our ways, and mystics, old and new, trying to warn us of the error of our ways. Over recent years I have come across many ‘mystics’ practicing in the scientific arenas who are available to us all if we care to find them—mostly lonely voices speaking to the already converted, but constantly reminding those of us hearing them that if we can manifest good intent in thought and in actions, it will eventually grow in the collective consciousness, and it may seed back to us creative ways to recreate a heavenly future on this, the planet we call Earth. But I can understand just how inconceivable this is, and I am one who believes this could be possible! Could we really change our ways without impetus to do so? I certainly couldn’t wish what appears to be our near future on any one of us, whoever or whatever we are.

Fireflies, a musical accompaniment for this blog, was written by Adam R. Young, and performed beautifully by Owl City.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psuRGfAaju4

I have dithered about whether I should publish this blog or not, but after ‘collecting’ the above performance from YouTube, and first seeing that it had nearly 340,000,000 views which is a wow number, I then noticed that it was put online on 15 December 2009. I am a sucker for time collisions especially those that score a ten!

On 13 December 2019, I posted a photo of a sunset on WhatsApp. That sunset, as I walked out of our backdoor, instantly took my breath away and filled me with a foreboding sense that the world was on fire. The next morning a year-old memory revealed that I had posted an identical experience on FB on the same day last year, 13 December 2018. Little did I know last year of what lay ahead for me personally. My beautiful, kind, endlessly intriguing Mad Hatter of a brother, who self-identified with what was truthful in the world, and for whom Jesus and Shiva shone brightly, going through his own existential psychotic crisis that appeared to be based in how he was going to take best care of himself into his future, amongst other personal deep routed battles. He will never be forgotten.

Synchronicity has been a friend to me throughout my life, and while all I say and write is born of my own mind, I also fully accept that I may get things wrong sometimes, but not intentionally.

In my view, we, all people living today, are in the midst of a societal existential crisis between good and evil. Whatever you call the struggle I don’t think one can deny it exists. This feels clear to me. We have ‘killed God’ and Nietzsche’s words ring in my ears. Without our gods, our souls have starved from a lack of true Love. And without love, all ethics and morality become bendable and expendable—we do not fear the ultimate recrimination from a higher source.

I cannot believe that Boris Johnson, Gove, Reese-Mogg and their acolytes can change the spots they were born with because, for some reason, they are not able to see beyond themselves—the mental condition we refer to as Narcissism comes to mind, again. In my view, they are representative of a group of sinister people gaining traction and power throughout our world. The connection to their souls has been lost, revealed by the regular smirks they struggle to keep hidden when speaking of what they do know not to be true, in order to get the support they need to swing the result in their direction. Where I hope we find ourselves is on the cusp of the ‘grand reveal’, and the alignments and support given to the Republican Party in the US and the Conservative Party in the UK couldn’t be lit brighter. But I think things will get worse before they get better. What we see now reveals our slippage down a muddy slope as we edge closer to the evils as delivered to us by great literature like George Orwell’s 1984 (the dangers that come from all extremism), and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (how evil can be hidden within a political movement disguised in the clothes of piety and morality and then sold to the people a something they should fight for). The Cabal of Evil sits centre stage in much of the world of politics today.  Will the much-talked-about awakening of our souls happen in time to save us all from terrible atrocities, and a devastated landscape as the lights go out on our planet? I can hear it said that why would people who also have families put us and the planet in harm’s way. This is because the members of the cabal, having lost connection with their hearts, and therefore devoid of compassion, cannot see the logical outcome of their plan as they continue to reap the benefits in the here and now. But as our Prime Minister’s family move away from him, it is equally likely that his children may not see eye-to-eye with him either. There will always be hope.

But it is hard to hold onto that hope when I fear dangers where others see only conspiracy theories. Evil is already reaching down deep into our society—governments who want to over-regulate the way we live our lives, who also want to regulate/control our World Wide Web, Black Ops, private armies, ‘pharmas’, weapon industries, chemical weapons, mass vaccinations, and who don’t care that thousands are dying from war and starvation, the depletion of our planet’s mineral reserves, the trashing of our oceans, massive extinctions of plants and animals, and finally, one of the most scary future landscapes, the rapid development of ‘machines of war’ (AI—I can’t help noting also that I watched the original Matrix again a few nights ago.). What use does the power machine have for the masses in the coming decades? They don’t need them to slave away for their benefit anymore. The fact that the great danger facing the world today is over population leads me to wonder why it is not being discussed by the media. I can remember how high this debate was on the world’s agenda in the 70’s. Then the global population was 3.68 billion, and today it has virtually doubled. Their predictions must have been surpassed. Now there is silence. And so too is there a silence regarding the 50% drop in male sperm and motility counts in the West over the last 60 years, and there is not a consensus from the world’s best scientists on why this is.

I am a proud to be a conspiracy theorist, but I am also discerning. Conspiracies can be good or bad according to available supporting data. No-one can deny that they dwell within the same rules that govern all else on this planet. Nothing functions outside of our world’s and our own dual natures. If we don’t challenge ourselves, our knowledge petrifies, and we die without progressing to become better versions of humankind. A trashed incarnation. To open our hearts and dig around in our psyches is the very least that the great and wise universe asks of us simple souls. I hope to be around for the emergence of The Alliance for Good.

Evil, like any earthly system, requires that people give their permission to those seeking to take control of power—something that has been understand forever on a religious and philosophical level. We saw this at work in the US where Trump was able to swing the vote against the Democrats by gaining the support of the poorest in the nation, the ‘Blue-collar workers’, normally referred to as the ‘working class’ in the UK. In many countries around the world the poorest communities believe that the Far Right and Nationalism, having almost given up on socialism, will give them a fair share of their country’s wealth and safeguard the workers’ rights, and there are always people ready and waiting to claim any ground to meet their addictions to power. Extremism has never worked out well for the people, whether you look left or right. Honestly, I will say that there is a lack of vision—that is, no depth contemplation, a form of naivety—on both sides of the divide, even though there are always many still-beating good hearts on all sides—but they rarely crave power in the same destructive way. The question begs to be heard—are ‘isms’ ever the answer? I can’t help feeling that we tribes need to give up all allegiances and concentrate on being better human beings. This way perhaps we could keep away from the seats of power begging to be filled. Perhaps then only will human beings have something longer than a few days’ lifecycle, like the 4th stage of the Firefly, on this 4.5 billion-year-old planet called Earth.

It is a long time since my last blog, and a lot has changed in a summer overtaken by unforeseen circumstances, and it is only after almost a year of lurching around that I feel the onset of space and time to think and write. I enjoy my moments of researching and writing for my blog space. I can dig a bit deeper and write a little braver than I would for a social space like FB.

As an explanation of the unusual choice of the word lurching I offer the following:  Earlier this year, I had another visit of my occasional mental carousel as I move from sleep through semi-lucidity to being fully awake, that uttered continuously, ‘things are going to lurch around for a while’. It will go away as soon as I take conscious note of it. I reported this as I always do to Peter and noted it in my journal. As I said to Peter, ‘lurch’ is not a word that I choose to use in normal daily conversation, and therefore it encouraged me to take its appearance seriously. This is very much how I work with myself these days. There needs to be the effect of the dual for me to take special note from an experience.

I have pondered and questioned a few other ideas that have come to me lately. And this one carries a recurring theme focus.  Occasionally I have been tempted to express my visions of the afterlife but when I do words fail me or it comes out garbled and sounds delusional—not a good look! I have noted over the years that when this happens on occasions it is because I am trying to speak of something that I should not attempt to voice. I am also learning that I should stay away from imaginings and drawing conclusions on matters that are outside of this my earthly life. This diverts my attention away from gaining the full impact of learning in this our 3D experience of life. Yet again I have learnt a lot from someone I loved purely and deeply, and the main theme of what I have learnt is the silent and unforgiving power of consequences in all our lives as we have exercised the limited free will that we have been given.

My hero, Leonard Cohen, taught me a lot about the importance of being rather than telling—a perfect message but not an easy one to follow. While his reticence to declare his thoughts on his personal spiritual beliefs frustrated me, I do understand that he realised a long time ago that to demystify his personal ‘logos’ would be to deny others the opportunity of embarking on a true self-driven journey of discovery around the Word and the Path.  In a similar way, if an artist explains a piece of work, as they are so often asked to do, the magic has gone from it—nothing to imagine and question because the story has been told. While I longed for some of LC’s ‘fruits of the loom’ knowledge that he had gained over his lifetime, and I would have given almost anything to have a conversation with him, I do realise he is, and was, right.  I can now find the information pertinent to my place of being, and to my questions, in the great body of work of work he has left us, and it all remains beautifully alive even though he has left our plane.

And getting back to consequences, I had a clear vision the other day which has lingered in my mind. It was that I was floating above a ‘map’ looking down at the path my life has taken. Rather than life being all down to fate that is imbedded randomly at birth, I understood that I was negotiating it for myself. But there is an element of Fate involved because the map had every option available to me already marked up, and it was just my choice as to which one I went for. I think of the Flower of Life as being that map, and the points of intersection are the decisions I make that affect the next trajectory. Deciding what is for supper doesn’t figure as Free Will. But in choosing an outcome to a major decision there are consequences that are pre-set until I find myself at a place where the next ethical or moral decision will come up, as displayed by the intersecting lines. At this point I have the opportunity to learn from recent consequences to either move back in the direction of the source of light, or not to learn from them, and continue my journey away from the light again. The further I end up taking myself away from the light predisposes me to having to always travel a tough journey back in order to less choppy waters of discomfort, discontent and ill will. Continuing to make choices that lead me away from the light puts me in danger of losing my soul altogether.

With regard to my newly discovered map that suits me for now, I note that on leaving the ‘source’ at its centre at birth, we have six directions that continue our trajectory away from source and four that keep us circling it while two deliver us back to source—a lot to think about, and then we are into the realm of multiples. I shall have to look deeper into the meaning of twelve! I have a suspicion though that I shall need to make the circle boundary into darkness a little larger, or I may find I have fallen off the edge of my own map!

He who laughs last laughs loudest.  It is either not a particularly compassionate saying, or it concerns the gawky one who needs extra time to get the joke.  The proverb originated in Tudor England, but for once, not from Shakespeare’s quill.  Apparently it comes from a play first performed in 1608 and goes like this:  Laugh on laugh on my freind. Hee laugheth best that laugheth to the end.  While sometimes there may be some justice in having the last laugh, there usually is more than a whiff of schadenfreude about it too—taking rather too much pleasure from another’s pain. The English word is ‘to gloat’, but it doesn’t quite reach the poetic heights of schadenfreude.

So I will not be rushing to have the last laugh myself, aware that arrogance is one of the worst sins in the world. Along with ignorance, almost all bad behaviour falls into line behind it.   But that would not be the only reason.  The fact that not one of us can be sufficiently sure of what we believe no matter how many out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, or direct contact with spirit entities we have had, there will always be doubt.  We may feel that we have received enough knowledge that alters our internal system of verification from faith to knowledge, but in the end it remains subjective and therefore  it can only qualify as personal Truths.  Naturally the same would apply to the belief in atheism for the same reason.  When one understands this fully one can equally call into question facts—they rarely stand up outside of our memories, excluding naturally that the sun, whether we can see it or not, rises each day, and once a month we get a full moon, and the such like.  All of us appreciate the ability of the brain to create hallucinations and false memories, mostly due to chemical inducements, whether natural or as added stimulants. Many of us have experienced those who appear to have left reality, not aware of who they are, perhaps because of dementia destroying their brain, or talking to spirits and ghosts, fearful of unseen dangers, or those who just enjoyed a temporary refrain from reality like the time I experienced a LSD trip where Gulliver’s ‘little people’ were getting on with their lives around me, oblivious of my presence.  It is the inability of my being able to say with 100% certainty that what I see, and what I believe I know, is The Truth, and that doesn’t exclude what I remember.  It is this that keeps me humble.  And yes, I know that it is easier to say this than to live in humility and gratitude, and the brain is not very good at showing us the way.  I have been practicing taking myself into my heart lately, and trying on these big ideas and theories, but still it is a work in progress although already there have been some interesting results.

But…well…hell…oh shit…just the one time!!  No, seriously, the following has constituted an epiphany for me, but what I love about this particular one is that it would have been massive if it had come to me all at once.  It has been more of a slow pot roast—a growing realisation as the different ingredients revealed themselves to me.   I am almost afraid to carry on writing.  I want so badly to do this thinking justice.  And I do hope that all my ramblings come together in the end.

As of about a couple of months ago, not long before my blog on lemons, I started paying more attention to what had really been a glib comment from me to begin with.  I was in awe of the fact that the whole universe, our greater world, our planet, and our small individual lives, are strewn with clues. Everything I see as a dot I now think of as a clue—a clue on the map that I would call the Ultimate Treasure Map.  And so I have moved on from the plan of my life to the plan of life of which I am a part.

A clue that has been jumping up and down saying, ‘look my way, look my way’, is revealed to us particularly in physics from Einstein and his contemporaries onwards.  I think the first half of the 20^th Century could be seen as a second Renaissance in the West.  People like Freud, Jung, Tesla, Nietschze (just made it onto the list), Einstein and Wolfgang Pauli, the modern artists including Picasso, Marcel Duchamp and Frida Kahlo, great writers including John Steinbeck and Lawrence Durrell, musicians including Mahler and Ella Fitzgerald, politicians like Jan Smuts, Georges Clemenceau and Theodore Roosevelt, and so the list of film makers, actors, the suffragettes, nursing pioneers and inventors goes on and on, and I am sorry for any sub-group I may have missed.

I know the following is a long quote from Albert Einstein, but it is highly relevant to this piece:

“Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.  In our endeavour to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch.  He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case.  If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations.  He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison.  But he certainly believes that, as his knowledge increases, his picture of reality will become simpler and simpler and will explain a wider and wider range of his sensuous impressions.  He may also believe in the existence of the ideal limit of knowledge and that it is approached by the human mind.  He may call this ideal limit the objective truth.”

Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics, 1938.

I am not sure when scientific experiments switched from proving the existence of something because the ‘something’ has now been directly observed, to proving something exists because the wake it leaves proves the theory.  Phew, I think I shall have to find a better way of saying that, although I believe that Einstein foresaw exactly this problem in the above quote.  I particularly love the role played in his analogy of being able to hear the ticking of Time!  This could stand as a clue for me.

A case in point is contained in this quote from Nassim Haramein:

“Neutrinos are sub-atomic particles that carry no charge and are so tiny that, when traveling through space, can pass right through the Earth undetected and not interact at all with the atoms that make up the Earth!  Neutrinos are so hard to detect at all that scientists have had to build elaborate devices to try and find direct evidence of them at all.”

A brief explanation of the discovery, a Nobel Prize winning journey for two scientists, can be read on this site:

https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-did-scientists-discover-the-neutrino-when-it-has-no-1725369059

But what is most interesting is that a neutrino itself will probably never be directly observed.  Their existence was proved by the confirmation of a mathematical equation that told scientists they should give off light five milliseconds apart, and this is how their existence was proved.  And again this keeps the physicists humble because it relies on faith.  While physics on the large scale, the Cosmos, and on the sub-atomic scale are not fully synchronised yet, although Haramein may disagree, they both seem to play out along similar lines.  We have learnt to accept that clues can form proof of existence of a world that we find hard to pin down.  But there also seems to be a feeling that the deeper and further we go, the more the road opens up before us.  But on another level, the answers that we are starting to form are getting simpler.  I think it should be getting clear by now that I am using physics as an analogy for faith knowledge.

In a recent Ted Talk where the astrophysicist, Prof. Sheperd Doeleman, talked of the recently received image of a black hole, I am reminded of Einstein’s analogy of the closed watch.  Here I mention something that really took my understanding of the universe to a new level.  Our understanding of gravity has moved on a lot since my days studying physics at school.  The sun’s mass is great, and impacts or curves the web/grid that is spacetime, and this then causes our planet to ‘fall’ into the curve that keeps us directed to a revolving path around the sun.  I know that there are still almost as many ‘unknowns’ with regard to gravity as ‘knowns’, but it is a start.

On this point I need to refer back to Indra’s Web/Net/Jewels or Pearls.  It was first noted in the Avatamsaka Sutra in the third century, and later is again described in the Huayan school of Chinese Buddhism:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each ‘eye’ of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.

Why I brought up this wondrous event of being able to view an image for the first time of a black hole in the greater universe is also because Prof Doeleman makes the comment that ‘the universe was trying to tell us all along what to do’.  It was because of how the mathematics, translated to the chosen object, kept on working out in their favour—clues and more clues.  He also goes on to say, “Black holes are the great mystery of our age.  That is where the quantum world and the gravitational world come together.  What’s inside is the singularity.” The singularity concept strikes me as the great holy grail of physics, and makes for some really interesting theories.  He later goes on to say, “That is because gravity is finally strong enough to compete with all the other forces.  But the universe has cloaked it in the ultimate invisibility cloak.” Again these words take me back to the idea of the closed watch.

I love the idea that in the not too distant future, and via the same process, we should get to see the black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way, and the image should be of equal quality.  While this first ever image is of a black hole from a different galaxy, it is a thousand times larger than ours, but it is also coincidently a thousand times further away!  But the words that struck me were ‘at the centre of our universe’. It turns out that most galaxies, perhaps all of any stature, have a supermassive black hole at their centre. Many physicists believe that they provide the gravitational pull that galaxies need to hold themselves together in the early stages of their creation.

Another thought, and while I know there is nothing original about it, but it fits in so poetically with all of the above.  The only reason we see anything is because of the photons (light) that bounce off all matter, and enter our eyes to leave data upside down on our retina, and then our brain interprets it so that we know what all matter looks like.  It gains its form within our cerebral experience of it.  Our eyes could be viewed as something of black holes with our irises providing the event horizons.  And another rogue thought—we will never be able truly to see into a black hole because no light can escape from one.  Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicted their existence, and slowly over time astronomers pieced bits of information together until finally X-ray emissions have now helped to pin-point black holes, and today we have the wondrous image of a highly energetic donut with something very mysterious at its centre.

Briefly, and returning to the name of my story, and the great but slowly forming epiphany that changed again my way of reading life and myself—The Fruit of the Rose—I have experienced today what I believe is one of my greater synchronistic experiences that pertains particularly to my getting to know more of who I am, and why I am.

A reminder of synchronicity:  When two wholly disconnected events clearly come together, and in their union they carry a significant meaning that each did not, or could not, on its own.

I am watching a new series called Time of the Sixth Sun, and early on someone describes the moment when his life changed. He believes that he experienced a profound realisation, an awakening, that opens up a whole new way of being, or the beginning of making that journey inwards that alters the focus of your life for ever.  It is a moment that in shamanic terms is called The Fruit of the Rose.  For me it instantly collided with a strong memory of how I connected to the mysterious and discreet Fruit of the Loom image that seemed to be on everyone’s t-shirts in my youth.  I can honestly say that it was  years later I saw them offered for sale in our shops.  I remember trying to fathom what it was about, and eventually I saw that the label inside also said Fruit of the Loom, and that therefore it was the brand name of a manufacturer, and I never thought about it again until this moment.  It seemed to disappear from my life as mysteriously as it appeared—one could say because it is only a clue—snooze you lose.  Apparently the original company was based in Bowling Alley, Kentucky, and a town where the high street is filled with skittles bearing the image of Fruit of the Loom pops into my mind.  It must surely be one of the most mysterious of brandings ever.  I can’t help being amused by the allusion to a connection between clues and skittles.

Look at some of the synonyms and definitions of the word ‘loom’.

Synonyms:  emerge, appear, become visible, come into view, take shape, materialise, reveal itself, appear indistinctly, come to light, take on a threatening shape

Definitions:  (n) for weaving tapestry, a textile machine for weaving yarn into a textile, (v) appear very large or occupy a commanding position

According to the documentary I am watching, The Fruit of the Rose represents:

What you planted in your own consciousness long before you ever came to earth…a reminder when the time was right, that you would awaken.

And it turns out that The Fruit of the Loom is my Fruit of the Rose—that is to say, my trigger.  Sweet!  Roses have always held a strong significance for my family and me, and there is nothing unusual in that, when you take a look at the mythologies and events that are represented by the rose.  Even more especially, Elle spent hours contemplating and meditating on the rose, and incorporated it into so much of her artwork and her notebooks.  More often it was a rose she picked from the beautiful Iceberg whitish yellow rose variety that I had chosen for our courtyard and around the fish pond in the home where we all spent our last happy years together. She tried on a few occasions to encourage me to do the same, but my head and my heart were not in union in those days, and I was definitely not ‘awake’—more like sleep walking towards the end of my days.  Stagnant could also describe those years.

I was drawn to this further quote from Einstein, and I can’t think of a better way to close off this piece.

“…It gave me great pleasure to tell you about the mysteries with which physics confronts us. As a human being, one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists. If such humility could be conveyed to everybody, the world of human activities would be more appealing.” 

— Albert Einstein

How did being given a lemon come to be considered a gift of a dud?  I was sitting looking at our amazingly fecund and quietly patient lemon tree the other day. It is standing there full of shiny and ripe fruit, not saying much, but just hanging onto its lemons for that glorious day when I decide I need one.  I realised something interesting about lemon trees.  They hold onto their ripe lemons forever, perhaps years, unlike the orange tree that continues to ripen its fruit—if they are left long enough they will rot and fall off the tree.  My lemon tree has one or two rotten lemons lying beneath its boughs, and they have been there a long time.  Under my orange tree lie putrid oranges that I regularly play ball with, although my dogs don’t see it as fun in the same way I do.

It got me thinking…if life gives you a lemon, make lemonade.  Where did that idea come from?  Why should a gift of a lemon make one feel that you have been given something that makes your life harder?  So I did what I do—I looked it up.  It turns out that the first known time this phrase took shape was in a 1915 obituary for a highly opportunistic man called Marshall Pinckney Wilder, born to a relatively well-to-do family in New York.  He soon became famous as a great storyteller and as a clairvoyant, going on to become a popular after dinner speaker. He was a generous tipper and did not play for cheap laughs, and turned down P. T. Barnum’s offer of making big money as an attraction.  In describing his monologues a local newspaper wrote the following:  “His pathos, his humor, his indescribable droll and uplifting optimism keeps bubbling forth all through the evening”. He was born with both a hunchback and dwarfism.  He would sign his books “Merrily yours”, and they all had the word ‘smile’ somewhere in their title. His obituary said, “He was a walking refutation of that dogmatic statement, mens sana in corpore sano.  His was a sound mind in an unsound body.  He proved the eternal paradox of things.  He cashed in on his disabilities.  He picked up the lemons that Fate had sent him and started a lemonade-stand.”

I now view the lemon most differently.  And we all know that too many sweet oranges are not good for us, especially for those who suffer from migraines and arthritis—they increase the acidity of the body.  But lemons, we are told, are better as they increase the body’s alkalinity. I still find it hard to get my head around this but I am assured this is so.

I love all the little clues that lie scattered around our world and its universe, just waiting to wink at us.  This one tells me that because something is sour and hard to enjoy, it is almost more likely to be where your salvation lies.  Don’t read a book by its cover!  The harder the medicine is to swallow the better it may be for us in the long run.  Answers to the big questions cannot come easily.  They may be where we least expect to find them.  We need to respect them, or they will be too easily forgotten. And so my digging in the dirt of life, around dark corners and way up above my head, keeps on yielding wonderful surprises.  Long may that be.

And as an aside–it gives me such pleasure that I found a green pip in a lemon that I cut open on the eve of Elle’s second death day.  It was green because it had aspirations to grow.  I planted it straight away in a little pot, and the next morning it was poking its head a centimetre above the soil.  I hope to see it grow into somewhat of a tree!

There is a pocket in my heart that will always be the House of Anger.

I allow myself this.

It suits me better than self-pity.

It is almost poetic if it wasn’t so forlorn that it now stands for all the angers that I never experienced prior to her death.

This anger goes much deeper and is much wider than any anger I could ever have raised or imagined.

I don’t and won’t live in conjunction with this anger, but I feel the hea(r)t from its flame and I let it draw me close as some unexpected trigger sets off a chain reaction.

I am not ever going to attempt to put out this fire.  It fuels me when my energy slips away.

It serves me well as a receptacle for my pain, and I need to know it is within my grasp forever and ever,

Amen.

Go to the ant thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.

Bible, Proverbs 6:6

Even the wishes of a small ant reach heaven.

Japanese saying

 Bugs & insects—what’s that about?

Elle

I am feeling more comfortable, so I thought I would stick my head up out of my flower bower for a moment or two.  Christmas and New Year are receding into the past, and I can feel that the ground is getting firmer under foot.  Here in my bower I can leave my courage at the threshold, drop my smile in the umbrella stand, kick off these boots that are made for walking, and give myself over to my memories.  I can forget my usefulness, estrange myself from kindnesses—but only until my guardian angel calls in to ask how long I intend to keep this up!

The smallest bug I have ever noticed just walked across my laptop screen.  It may well be my guardian angel.  There’s a thought.  Where has it come from and what might it be searching for?  I can’t imagine what it feeds on? How does something so small manage to live long enough to reproduce?  It paraded across my screen twice and now has disappeared.  It doesn’t know that I saw it!  I love the role bugs have come to play in my life ever since I answered Elle’s bug haiku.

That is an example of just the sort of slap to the back of the head I get when I spend too much time with that ever beguiling spirit, Self-pity!  Another thought—it is bugs who are apparently to blame for so much that goes wrong with us. That nasty cold you caught a while back, apparently that was a bug.  And isn’t it bugs who sneak into our computer programmes and cause all sorts of problems? For me, I shall always think of bugs as friendly and helpful little creatures who work hard to keep things on the straight and narrow for us humans, who offer us endless examples of the benefits of working together, and some might even say—without them humans will not survive.  And they never get any thanks for it either.  We are constantly looking for new ways to exterminate them.

Actually, I also popped up to say that one of my current favourites to listen to on YouTube is Terence McKenna.  You may think this is probably the final nail in the coffin of my sanity, and drives any chance of credibility straight out of the window.  But I find his enthusiasm and expansive thinking, his brilliant mind and mastery of language, exciting and thought provoking—definitely keen to find me some of that DMT! It is sad to think that we have left the most important jobs in our countries to the most boring and inadequate of human beings that we could find.  I doubt whether a Benjamin Franklin would get past the selection process today because of him being a polymath, and heaven forbid he should tower above the crowd! I find McKenna’s use of language mesmerising and utterly convincing, and his ideas to be extremely logical.  In my view, there is more logic in them than the list-ticking version of the reductionist scientists who would have us think that the universe and human life is a wonderful and extraordinary accident, although statistically, ironically, it doesn’t look at all possible.

He helps my mind create new pathways of thinking, to see new colours that help me read life in sharper focus. He gives me a new sense of feeling life rather than only perceiving it.  The best time to weigh in on him is always in the stillness of the nights I find.  In fact I have come to look forward to the possibilities of the night generally, whether in complete darkness or accompanied by the moonlight.  What will be revealed tonight, and where might I go in the hours of darkness that lie ahead? I have decided that it is time for me to come out of the closet.  It is not a massive closet—just my wee one. I have always had something of a secret ‘secret life’ that mostly revolved around thoughts and understandings that I thought better not to share.  Something Leonard Cohen and I have in common apparently, going by his song of that name. I didn’t need to make things any more difficult for myself than they already were.  I was a girl, with no completed higher education, no profession and what’s more, no desire for one either, and not too sure about whom I was, or where I was going, therefore best not to get too bold with philosophies on Life!  I think, with hindsight, that what I was doing quite well though was going some way towards learning the art of the yogi:  mindfulness—I found it relatively easy to empty my head for a period of time—and to be in the moment.  The number of times, as a young person, I was asked what on earth I was thinking about, still makes me chuckle.  People genuinely seemed to assume that I was deep in thought. I used to throw off moodily, “Oh, nothing really”, when in actual fact that is exactly what was going on—nothing! Eventually though I did start to do some deeper thinking, and learnt quite soon that much of what occupied my thoughts would be best kept to myself!  As my children grew into adults that filter seemed to lose its robustness, and soon I found myself sharing some of my unusual thinking with both of them.  Even though I have some regrets, I do wonder whether I was only doing what was required of me.  One of my main refrains in life is that there are to be no regrets—even swamps and perceived mires have their own unique and fruitful purpose.

The other day I was doing some research on Rene Descartes, a name I was familiar with but that was it.  I had a sense of what Cartesian thinking was, and it got to a point that I needed to find out more about him because of how often his name was coming up.  Descartes is often regarded as the first thinker to emphasise the use of reason and measurement to develop the natural sciences.

In a lecture that I had been listening to it was pointed out that a revelation came to him through three dreams that were delivered by an angel.  I couldn’t help thinking that it was somewhat ironic that out of a dream was born all future reductionist thinking.  Descartes was born a long time ago in 1596.  He was a deeply thoughtful man of faith, and I am sure he would be horrified to think that, along with Nietzsche, the two of them, almost singlehandedly, had ‘killed God’, although, in both cases, this would be a wrong assessment of their intent.  The revelation that was revealed to Descartes was that ‘the mastery of nature is to be achieved through numbers and measures’—and this has come to be the basis of all rational scientific investigation that has held to the present day, although its grip is beginning to slip.

Later, and following up on another lead—I think I had been reading about the awaking of the base chakra, or Kundalini—and I saw something that nearly had me laughing in the aisles—EHS, or exploding head syndrome.  It was finally named in 1988 but has been documented since 1876.  It tied in very neatly with Rene Descartes.  It is thought that, instead of a vision, it is most likely that his was a case of EHS.  The desire to adhere to what is rational, and to snuff out as delusional superstition all that cannot be reasoned or measured, repeatedly has become the bedrock of society today.  If not rational then not real!  We should view EHS as something pretty interesting, but instead it is described as a ‘sensory parasomnia’, or simply put, a sleep problem.  (I have included a description of EHS at the bottom of this piece.)

Another one of these ‘simple sleep problems’ is one I experience, called Proctalgia Fugax, or, as a doctor told me quite casually after my first episode, an anal panic attack.  I now assume that it was something he, too, had experienced because of the speed of the diagnosis.  Most people, including doctors I have mentioned it to, have never heard of it.  It is interesting because I remember thinking this doctor had something of the surfer dude hippy about him, giving me a sense that perhaps he had a more open mind.  Doctors and open minds, like lawyers, don’t often go together, and I can understand why.  I had my first attack about two years before Elle died, and perhaps had one or two more during that two-year period, but I have had many more since she died.  This is how Healthline describes it:

Proctalgia fugax is anal pain that doesn’t have a specific cause. This pain is usually caused by intense muscle spasms in or around the canal of the anus. It’s similar to another type of anal pain called levator ani syndrome. The pain is slightly different in levator ani syndrome, and may last days instead of minutes.

Anyone can experience proctalgia fugax. However, it doesn’t usually affect anyone prior to the start of puberty and seems to affect more women than men. It’s unclear why this is, or if it’s due to more women reporting the issue, as many people don’t do so.

It goes on to say, and I can confirm this, that it only ever happens at night.  Along with other experiences I have at night, I have come to look upon it as something of a painful guiding light albeit it at the back end, if you get my drift.  I now understand that my base chakra is awakening, and without much expectation, I am grateful for any help received!  As you can imagine, my nights have become a lot more animated, entertaining and informative, and as long as the periods without sleep don’t make my day times hard to get through, I shall continue to enjoy whatever they throw up, from carousels with words instead of horses on poles, to dreams and visions, and a voice that now and again intrudes on my thinking.  I have ways of requesting a cessation, or rest for myself.  Peter is going through his own night-time thought processes, and so whoever is first awakened quietly shuffles off to find another bed.

A preceding nightly accompaniment is what I have always called my ‘hot ones’.  For years now I have thought that they were the vestiges of the menopause, but the confusing part was that none of the doctors I questioned about them seemed to recognise what they were.  The way it goes is that I awaken for no apparent reason, and truly wide awake, and about two or three minutes later a heat starts rising up my spine and up into my head.  The heat is always strong and sometimes even feels unbearable.  Sometimes my brain seems to flicker or vibrate. My body is not hot to the touch, and I would describe what I experience as an electrical heat.  These days though the events are much more about shimmers and vibrations. When I tried to find out more about what I was experiencing always the doctors’ faces turn to disbelief.  I would quickly add that my mother had these in the last fifteen years of her life.  I have a vivid memory of the little bowl of flannels she kept on her bedside table.  I can see her now as she squeezed out their excess water, fold and place one behind her neck, and another would be for her forehead.  Perhaps it is hormonal, which is all her doctors and mine could come up with, but again these never happened to her, or to me, during the day—a bit like the inexplicable anal pain.  Perhaps her throat chakra was opening and her chi, prana or some eternal energy was beginning to flow.  My mother was certainly a changed person as she approached the last years of her life, and less the fearful servant to authority than she was as a younger woman.  She found me difficult to like as a child and a young person.  My thinking scared her because it strayed so far from the conventional—a place where she preferred to reside.  But we made up for it later when the need for the mother/child relationship had slipped away.  Perhaps it never felt normal to be my mother—one of those peculiarities of life of which another example exists.  Only when a moment comes up that connects, even remotely, Heather, my sister, and Kate, my daughter, I find myself calling whoever of the two is with me by the other’s name. It is a standing joke amongst us that only the Gods understand why this happens, but my theory, as usual, is that I am meant to look at the deeper meaning that this represents.  I have a few theories naturally!

The reason I have decided to write about all these nocturnal goings-on that spill over into my daytime creativity is because perhaps someone else may still be in the confused state that I was in two years ago.  In my case it took a catastrophic event to break open this egg.  I doubt whether I will be able to put all the pieces back together again, but I will do my very best at trying to at least see how this might work out. Elle, in the most gentle of ways, kept prompting me to turn away from my time wasting activities and negative energy, in other words, my stasis or stagnation, and to open myself again to more fruitful ways of engaging with the world, and hence the path that I am here to tread.   She would encourage me to find ways of meditating, and the one I remember best, and I can easily see her with a newly picked rose in her hand, would be to observe or even draw it. I am vigilant to unexpected and unconnected thoughts that arrive from nowhere in my mind.  I see that it is important to engage gently with the process of observing my awakening mind.  Too much haste could lead to an unhinging!  The more patient and still we are, the more likely we will catch the right end of the stick.  Where on earth does that saying come from?

A total aside, and never to miss a trick—I have been collecting sayings recently, and that one has now been added to my growing list.  Perhaps a good way of looking at this particular saying is that it illuminates the duality that holds our version of the world together.  A stick always has two ends.  If something doesn’t feel quite right when ‘caught’ then look to its opposite where perhaps you will find something more comfortable and easier to hold onto.  Ha—duality is the glue of life that stops its fragmentation by Time that is its energy or life force. How is that for a definition!  If we don’t have a yesterday, we have nowhere to put what has already happened, and without a tomorrow we have no way of knowing where we are heading towards today. 

And back to my reason for popping up from my bower.  In late 1999, McKenna described his thoughts concerning his impending death to an interviewer, Erik Davis:

“I always thought death would come on the freeway in a few horrifying moments, so you’d have no time to sort it out. Having months and months to look at it and think about it and talk to people and hear what they have to say, it’s a kind of blessing. It’s certainly an opportunity to grow up and get a grip and sort it all out. Just being told by an unsmiling guy in a white coat that you’re going to be dead in four months definitely turns on the lights. … It makes life rich and poignant. When it first happened, and I got these diagnoses, I could see the light of eternity, à la William Blake, shining through every leaf. I mean, a bug walking across the ground moved me to tears.”

I shall forever hold Terence McKenna in one of the many newly-discovered pockets in my heart for also noticing and loving bugs as Elle and I do.  Terence McKenna died on April 3, 2000, at the age of 53. I am sure his ethereal bower is one of endless amazement, lit up by colours way beyond the range of the seven we are familiar with, surrounded by beautiful young things all with flowers in their hair and twinkles in their eyes.  Definitely a place where bugs would feel most welcome.

EHS:  Individuals with exploding head syndrome hear or experience loud imagined noises as they are falling asleep or waking up, have a strong, often frightened emotional reaction to the sound, and do not report significant pain; around 10% of people also experience visual disturbances like perceiving visual static, lightning, or flashes of light. Some people may also experience heat, strange feelings in their torso, or a feeling of electrical tingling that ascends to the head before the auditory hallucinations occur. With the heightened arousal, people experience distress, confusion, myoclonic jerks, tachycardia, sweating, and the sensation that feels as if they have stopped breathing and have to make a deliberate effort to breathe again.

The pattern of the auditory hallucinations is variable. Some people report having a total of two or four attacks followed by a prolonged or total remission, having attacks over the course of a few weeks or months before the attacks spontaneously disappear, or the attacks may even recur irregularly every few days, weeks, or months for much of a lifetime.

Some individuals mistakenly believe that EHS episodes are not natural events, but are the effects of directed energy weapons that create an auditory effect. Thus, EHS has been worked into conspiracy theories, but there is no scientific evidence that EHS has non-natural origins.

“…the people at the top have no idea what is going on.  They need men with pony tails to come in every morning just to switch on the machines.  They are so in our hands.” 

Terence McKenna, mystic

Ah, the great Brexit divide!  There certainly are some ‘leavers’ that I can identify with because I like them. But that is as far as the communion goes—at the end of the day the majority of leavers are not seeing the bigger picture, and they yearn for simpler, safer and quieter times that can never return. Life will never again be warmly familiar as they would like a return to.  Many don’t see any upside for them in the new ways of the world, and they can’t get to grips with all the rapid and sometimes ruthless changes that seem to be happening all over the estranged land of their birth.  I see this too, but I can accept that it is an impossible mission to attempt to turn back the tide.  And when we do reminisce we tend to do this while looking through rose coloured spectacles.  I am not saying that those are the only reasons but I do think it is the greater swathe.  We also know that there are people on the far right with their own ignorant, ruthless and selfish agendas, while some see opportunities to seize more power and wealth for themselves and some unscrupulous compatriots.  Staying in, or remaining, may not be the clever option but it is certainly safer and a better one.  And we would do well to also remember that once we are over sixty years old the world is no longer ours to direct although we are perfectly entitled to continue to enjoy the fruits of our labours. We may even have earned the position of wise older citizen meaning that our opinion and leadership would be welcomed.  How can we ever forgive David Cameron, his advisers and trouble makers in the Conservative party for dropping the country into one of the worst crises ever? They have so much to answer for.

There is a lot wrong within the British queendom, but the problems go way beyond the UK borders—these are world-wide problems now. We have got ourselves lost in the darkness, and we are hurting because the only societal system we have ever known is breaking down—it has lost its ability to self-organise, the pendulum is out of sync, the patterns have lost their symmetry. Mostly this is sensed rather than understood, and fear causes us to turn away from others who have less than us, and therefore need to share our dwindling dinners and homes—immigration and free movement. But also when the person in front of us leads us into a swamp with lots of scary creatures lurking in the water we lose trust, and start flailing and thrashing in the hope that one of our feet (where the souls reside mostly) will find some solid ground, and we can get away from clear and present danger— distrust of politicians and experts.

It is a fact that may be difficult to swallow but true that an above-average number of the ‘remainers’ understand more of the world’s problems, are more comfortable reaching out around the globe to look for answers to our many problems, and also know that the more we get to know those in far flung places the more likely that we shall be able to hold onto a fragile peace. The rest of the remainers are the future generation who want to be part of the greater world family. They are happy to learn new languages and are quick to appreciate how much we can all gain by reaching out instead of erecting barriers to keep others out.

It is careless to throw the baby out with the bath water, and there has been plenty of that going on over the years since the Second World War. The education system is a good example of that but a different story. That is just what appears to be happening again in this whole Brexit debacle.  So let’s get working on ourselves. We can do this consciousness-raising thing that so many are talking about. If it works who knows what heights we could achieve.  I would love to think that the days of people living rough on the streets would be over. Surely this doesn’t need to happen in this day and age, and it is a problem that is getting bigger with every year that goes by. But throwing stones at the enemy, or burning down their homes, and turning our backs on those suffering more than us, never did achieve much in the long run.  Perhaps if we were more deeply knowledgeable of our histories we would be making better choices. Twelve thousand years of the modern era, and barely ready for high school!  We definitely haven’t been reading the right books.  Too much time spent at the fair ground on Love Island, it seems?

But I like to think that we already have The Knowledge somewhere deep in the recesses of the temple of our minds, probably in those side chapels in the cathedrals that I always preferred to the main space.  Is it just a case of pealing back the layers until we reach the kernel? Does The System really want to reveal itself to us as some mystics say? I believe that to be so.

Long live Gaia, our spirit host—if she dies we die, but that is not as likely as her giving up on us all, and then we are definitely lost.  So long as we keep asking the bigger questions, then tilt our heads slightly to more clearly hear the answers, we can keep stagnation, destruction and rot at bay. We have no excuses not to, and nothing to lose by at least trying to.  The worldwide web has brought us together, and together is how we can make a difference, and it can lead us to answers, sometimes too many, in fractions of seconds, and answers build knowledge and lead us to the next level of questions.

Let’s not be afraid of that second referendum but raise our voices in confidence to demand one from both sides.  Someone has to be big enough to sort out this problem. Confident that we surely now know how better to sift through the bullshit and the sustenance.  Then leave it to the under sixties to make the decision. And for God’s sake to trust that democracy is not so fragile that good sense can’t lead the way.  It won’t be easy, and there is likely to be trouble, but let’s garner some real self-belief for a change.  Under these circumstances I would accept the will of the people, because I would feel that everyone has had the opportunity to have the truths and lies flagged for them.  If this is to be the end of civilisation so be it.