Trust in that of God within you.

The anguish, also, is god –
    the desire for transcendence.
The search for unity
    of experience
links to the universal
    evolutionary
process of environ-
    mental adptation.
To each the choice of path:
    spirituality
or materialism?
    (The world needs both.)
But for the spirit-led
    life becomes
a constant alembic of learning,
    where we are heated
to burn away impurity,
    distilling the spirit
of transformation, whose ultimate
    goal isn't seen
in physical existence.

    Here my dear mother
claps her hands with joy.
    On earth she suffered
ending her days in pain:
    yet now she shines,
part of the constellation
    of love upholding
all material existence.
    The confusion
that was hers was mine:
    and now I share
in her clarity.
    What was physical
slowly burnt away
    leaving her essence.

So the life dynamic
    within each
spurs or dulls the evo-
    lutionary process.
If all the universe
    is one organic
whole, then every part’s
    contained within
a single entity.
    Thus we see
that the identity
    of All is One –
and One comprises All.
    Yet the harmonic
of the One transcends
    the All, a sublime
melody arcing above
    the orchestra,
defining all the music-
    making below it.
Within this ensemble
    discord and its
resolution are the
    light and shade
which give existence form:
    a little suffering
gives richness to delight.
    A night of anguish,
that final stepping stone
    to morning joy.
The cosmos within which
    we live and breathe
reveals an underlying
    intelligence,
surpassing human concepts
    of rationality –
as a great composer’s
    inspired designs
create the experiences
    enjoyed by millions,
with life far beyond
    their creator’s death.

Without the eye of faith
    noone can see
the ultimate destination
    of anyonelse’s
life trajectory.
    All that matters
is that we walk our own
    true path.
Sometimes that involves
    a walk in darkness.
Remember, the height of the building
    has to be matched
by the depth of its
    dark foundations.
Trust the architect
    who formed the world
to prepare the ideal fit
    for your contribution
to humanity
    now and forever.

When is a poem?

If a circle is not closed, what is it?
What is roundness when it is irregular?

There is always a gap between what we see and what we can describe.

Composing is wrestling what I hear onto paper –
with a similar gap. And into it flood my demons,
the voices that tell me I'm no good:
that the attempt to communicate is hopeless:
that what I write is, in any case, irrelevant.
In essence, that I'm a nowhere man,
making nowhere songs for nobody.

My creative powers are thus like a millimetric sperm
swimming on the world's egg, looking for an opening –
both aware that for fertilisation a loss of self-possession is required.
The intimacy of the process matched only by its impersonality.

My mission, which I chose to accept before I had any idea how hard it was to be,
to bring a certain vibration of spirit into the world,
a spiritual hum /om if you like – whose defining quality
lies in its unique apropriety to its environment and time.

Each room has a sympathetic resonant frequency.
Sounding the space requires that we identify it
and then glory cascades from the ceiling,
the walls disappear and we are in faery land.
So it is with humanity.
On hearing the right note we become our true selves,
and the barriers to all our possibilities disappear.
(Oh dear, how much the Judaeo-Christian concept of sin has to answer for!)

The challenge in each moment to Be Here Now –
when we would rather be anywherelse:
the past: the future: with someonelse:
anywhere but Here. Now.
And into this solitary unaloness we cram
the radio. the ipod, the committee meeting,
shopping – you name it.
Anything to be a busy body.
It's like living next to a spring
but drinking only bottled water.

The only thing that makes sense of life's chaos
is if we allow its spiritual harmonic to emerge
and attune to that note, realising its chord in our lives.
To find the sweet spot where everything makes sense,
and all our possible dreams come true in living reality
we need to study exactly where we are now.
The freeze frame - one 25th of a second.
There! That's it. Now I am truly present.

The challenge: can we unfreeze that frame
and live in the present 1500 times a minute,
90,000 times an hour?
Of course not. It doesnt work like that:
we have to take the dynamic of motion for granted,
allowing key frames to inform us
and trusting the bits in between.

Yet as an orchestra must tune to a common A,
so we must find our note by listening both
to human and spirit beings, detecting
the common note with sharpness of ear
if we are to play our single gong stroke
right in the world's gamelan.

Intunity is the perpetual now.
Now is a perpetual intunity.

And this, this circularity, is it a poem?
If it is not, what is it?

Freedom

Everywherelse I express myself conditionally, tailoring my utterances to the consciousness of my audience. Here alone I can express the fullness of my heart, my wild love of the being whose reality we tame with the word God. If there are gifts [charisma] then this is the greatest gift of all. This is the pearl without price. I am always looking for ways to bring this feeling into the world, and my recent sense of frustration is that my efforts seem to have borne so little fruit.

In my own mind a perfect harmony exists between the concept of a divine parent and the birth of hir child into time & space to be a catalyst within the art-work that is created matter. And moreover that then s/he would leave behind a constant echo, a wavelength suspended like mist in a valley, to whose vibration people could then attune. That seems to me such a beautiful & precious idea.

I see no conflict between the grace offered by this Christian concept of the supreme creator's engagement with hir creation, and the vedantic idea of the archetypes of religious experience lying on a spectrum between Vishnu, the imaginative perception of an ethical spirituality, and Shiva, the appetite-driven celebration of the cyclical life-force discernible throuout nature. These seem to me an accurate metaphor for the territory.

In all of this I see the activities of a loving parent who watches from a distance at hir children's maturation, and who know that true adulthood can only emerge if they have the freedom to make their own mistakes. I discern someone who longs to say 'please ask me – involve me in your life – call on my experience to guide you.'

This gives me confidence in my own humble offerings. My job, as I see it, is simply to set down what my inner consciousness shows me. It pleases me when people find personal meaning in what I create, and therein I feel a privilege to be part Christ's constant rebirth in the world – offering people spiritualy context, a way of orienting their lives, recalibrating their psychic gyroscopes.

As a young person I had the scarring experience of finding that composing what came naturally to me was meaningless to those around me. I was thus given an aversion-therapy where the more I produced my own music, the less it meant to anyonelse. I therefore retreated into producing what was guaranteed acceptance – for to me freedom meant a black hole of emptiness.

But part of my journey since 1991 has been to find how to reconcile the inner bleakness of autonomous creativity with the richness I experience spiritually. As to what is forming within me, I know little until it appears.

Song: Forgive & Forget

When you first start to walk the road, when you first start to roam,
you have no destination and no way home;
but as time and chance occur to each man,
so soon you develop some kind of a plan.
And as you grow wiser, and as you grow old,
you find time's a great healer, and so as you live
tho you cannot forget you may learn to forgive.

The hedges in autumn have a russety glow,
and the hedges in spring can be covered in snow;
but the hedges in summer are buried in rime,
for that is the season of rosemary & thyme –
and so make your hay in the good summertime,
for time's a great healer, and so as you live
tho you cannot forget you may learn to forgive.

So come you my dauters and take you good note,
you'll ne'er tell a man by the cut of his coat.
You must try them and test them, sure nothing's too hard,
for it's only by that means you see past their façade.
And maybe you'll love them, and maybe you won't;
but time's a great healer, and so as you live
tho you cannot forget you may learn to forgive.

Angels

I make it hard for you, don’t I?
Headstrong, impetuous, ego-led!
How can you wrap your loving
wings are such as me?

And yet it is from you that I
crave protection from
my folly, crave to know
the beings who inform you.

I do not welcome crises –
save for one reason only –
the times of greatest stress
are times of greatest grace.

Just as birds delight us
in the physical world –
so your tribes and types surround us
metaphysically –

each with its natural song.
Instead of flashing wings of
iridescent colour,
we are visited by sudden acts of kindness,

moments of dazzling love,
synchronicity,
cooperation – soul-food
abundant everywhere.

”But fear closes the windows
of the heart throu which
we enter to delight you,
even in troubling times.

“Breathe in and affirm:
‘Every change I welcome
makes me more the being
my birth prepared me for.’”

Holy, loving, wholly-
loving emanations
of the cosmic psyche,
tell us the age-old message

again in modern terms.
Visit our mortal weakness
with your angel-song of
constancy and service.

Let its bubbling melody
open and lift our ears
to the plane of simple truth,
the natural evolution

where we become who we
truly are, spirit-born
offspring of a knowing,
known, unknowable parent.

Bidden or unbidden,
recognise your angels’
wing beat, accept protection
for your openness.

Arc

In poems I record my passage across the trackless wastes
of night, where I receive such startling clarity –

as if the milky way were opened to invite me in,
and I, a child, enter Aladdin’s cave

where I am shown great wonders of the spirit that will not fit
into the two-dimensional suitcases

which language offers to convey experiences to others.
Noone knows I'm here or where I've been.

I feel a kinship with the madder Hebrew prophets, who dwelt
in deserts and lived on locusts and wild honey –

fierce and uncouth as they were, their inner ear was ever open.
So it was with early English hermits,

whose springside cells invited angels by their energy.
I do not know what all of this is ‘for’,

and yet I feel it charging some kind of cosmic battery.
In the silence of each vivid night

my voice projects across the void of time in ways it never
could with ideas tethered to modern age.

It's as if my task’s to walk the arc that travels outward
from our human certainties towards

divine uncertainty, where pregnant gods suspend the rules
and magic’s in the air. This glorious dance of

spirits, tho optically invisible, is joined by sacred
attunement to the subtle vibrations of light and joy.

It is a plane above the sphere of compromise that’s ruled
by non-materialistic reason, where

the laws of love create those self-refreshing structures which
in-form justice and truth and inner knowledge.


How easy in the night to know: how hard by day to do –
where perfect lines of thought must bend round others.

Voice is to audience, as language /image is to common sense:
melody to listeners, as genre to social tribe.

My task appears to be to smuggle out the sense I have of this
ultra-real world of spirit truth,

that it may flow like water where it will, and nourish those
who do not dam its purpose or dynamic.

The spirit speaks to all, but those with ears to hear are rare –
for most prefer to hear from human guides.

And so I make my mark on stones and trees with ill-formed tools,
not knowing whether what they signify

to me will have the same (or any) meaning to another.
Matching means to ends is a lifetime’s task.

How easy it would be if I were not constrained to bring
something of these precious gifts away with me.

In giving what I can to whom I may, I form another

link in the chain that stretches back to godhead.

Autumn Gold

 

I stood in autumn fields
where great warm thighs of hills
rose between wooded cwms
like earth-bound venuses
inviting the dying sun god,

For once my heart and soul
were joined in perfect accord
by an intense silence,
as a growing hedgerow
yearns in the sunlight.

The breath of foraging dogs
the loudest sound, apart from a
wren singing its heart out
on a distant ash.
From whom this gift of peace?

Whom do I praise and thank
for such extravagant beauty?
Can this truly be
the product of a random
feckless evolution?

Or have we failed to see
the nature of a spirit
unifying the sleepy
butterfly, the ancient
oak, the ocean’s power,

the milky way, and us?
 

Thank you – Being – with all
my heart for the unique
privilege of being
present at this inter-
section of time and space,
 

What is my place?

“Your place is not to go around doing things from your own initiative: it is to be in your place. There I can use you, nowherelse.”

Enantiodromia

Enantiodromia is when something morphs into its opposite.

I was struck afresh by the way in which the credal churches, but specifically medieval catholicism under whose shadow we all suffer to a degree, have corrupted the quality moral 'freshness' they s/ought to preserve. Last Sunday on BBCr3 I listened to a Catholic priest droning on in some basilica about the virtues of St Francis, and his values of poverty etc – I simply didnt know how he had the nerve, surrounded by the panoply and choral pomp which is the diametric opposite of what Francis preached. But of course that is the 'trick' of religion: if you can get people to believe something which is manifestly incongruent then they have as much invested in maintaining that belief as those promoting it.

Today in my Bible reading project I reached the Beatitudes and the teaching that follows them, which ties in extremely well with also dipping into Rumi. What Christ actually said remains as powerful and radical and left field as Rumi – both are talking of a love of inner truth, of connection to spirit/God that cannot ever been taken for granted in the kind of 'fact of life on the ground' way that a building creates – let alone one administered by a bunch of men in nighties (no matter how well-meaning).

No wonder the reformers throuout the ages have wanted to blow it up and smash the very stones that they see as creating an obstacle to true faith – and yet of course the stones still stand and appear to a faithless age (perhaps faith is only ever seen in retrospect?) as synonymous with the very quality it obscures. And now we have a vast 'heritage industry' which cares nothing for what Christ or anyonelse said, but solely concerns itself with the preservation of monuments to a dead faith. What hope for the living?

Do It

You are not alone:
draw on the love that surrounds you.

Invest in people, and love
will be your dividend.

You know what really matters:
do it with all your heart.

Noone is more important
than you in this plan I have

for bringing love into the world.
Simply go out there and do it.

Supreme Creative Energy

Evolution is love in action.
Love is evolution in practice.

Thou

To whom I cry I know not:
yet into that echoing dark
I raise my voice, asking
only for shelter against the
storm, and workman’s wages.

To whom I sing I know not:
yet my dancing heart
is fuller than a nest
of nightingangels
all the day long.

To whom I weep I know not:
yet my soul is sore
to see such cruelty,
such greed, such ignorance
of nature’s sacred laws.

To whom I plead I know not –
for justice, for respect
for all planetary life,
for compassionate restraint between nations
and for love between neibours.

O thou, thou listening space,
thou answer in the wind,
thou song in silence heard,
thou all-enclosing otherness,
honour my heart’s wishes.

Building

It wasnt until last week that I realised what a responsibility it is to build a completely new space. On the R is a picture of my old studio. It was a fairly ramshackle affair, built on the site of a greenhouse, whose refurbishment had been kindly borne by a delightful elderly pupil about 10 years ago.

For a couple of years it has been clear that rebuilding would need to take place, as the poor insulation had already had already taken its toll on my piano. Here is a picture of the interior in 2002 with my sister and late mother.

Hitherto all Ive ever done in terms of building might best be called intelligent conversion. Recently I dawned on me that what I am doing here will stand as an objective statement of who I was in the same way as my music – more conspicuous, perhaps, for who knows what fate that will enjoy?

I relish the responsibility, while realising that here, as in so much else, what we put on display is not our conscious intention, but our subconscious value system. At this stage I am greatly concerned about cost, but the whole process has been a great opportunity to engage (with) the energy of my guide Sai Baba.

Amor & Psyche

The Golden Ass of Apuleius is one of Marie-Louise von Franz's most insightful books. And in it her chapter explaining the tale of Amor & Psyche contains some of its finest passages.
p82
Love with its passion and pain becomes the urge toward individuation, which is why there is no real process of individuation without the experience of love, for love tortures and purifies the soul. Expressed differently, Eros presses the butterfly painfully against his chest, representing the soul being developed and tortured by the love god.
On one beautiful gem the goddess Psyche, with her hands behind her back, is being tied by the god to a column which ends in a sphere. One could say that this image expresses in a beautiful way the process of individuation. Eros tying Psyche to the column surmounted by a sphere, the symbol of totality which is realized by suffering. Sometimes one would like to run away from the person to whom one is tied, in order to run away from the dependence, but Eros forces us to become conscious through this tie. Love makes us dare everything and leads us thus to ourselves. Therefore one of Eros's main epithets, which he had in antiquity, was "purifier of the soul."
p90
What happens to the gods if this process of [incarnation] takes place? A relationship is never only a one-way thing, so the gods get pulled into the human realm and, in the counter-movement, the ego expands its conscious awareness. That is the process of the incarnation of a god. Actually … in the impulse towards individuation and integration [within a human individual] it is the god who wants to incarnate.
p107
[Eros] wakes up and gives her the greatest punishment this god can give: he leaves her. To be left by the god of love is really worse than anything else he could have done to her. Psyche now is completely in the dark, and now her real deeds begin with the long and agonizing search to find Eros again.
p113
… stages of unconscious harmony, like that in the story of Paradise, result in the stagnation of life, and naturally certain disharmonious or evil impulses are excluded.
Some people by a great mental and psychological effort will sacrifice the one pole of an essential conflict in the hope of establishing peace in their souls with the remainder. For instance, in the monastic life money and sex are cut out, and with them the source of innumerable conflicts, and by retiring from these difficulties the establishment of peace in the soul is sought. The whole Christian idea of inner peace is in this direction; that is, one first cuts out a certain aspect of evil which seems impossible to integrate, and then one tries artificially to establish harmony with the remainder. All over the world mankind has a tendency to go in this direction. It is probably inevitable, for one needs from time to time to be able to set aside an insoluble problem.
It is as though there were rest places where one has a moment of peace, though one has the dim feeling that the conflict is not solved and will reappear after a time. One can observe this in people who draw mandalas and in doing so leave a part outside. They put the dark things outside the border of the mandala and imagine that they have now reached a state of relative wholeness and totality. But in this way they exclude certain aspects, and they can be sure that this state will not last. Some of these left-out elements will break in and a new process of integration must begin.
At this point we have the essence of the whole novel, for all through it (though sometimes the author seems to be gripped by feeling) a mocking, skeptical tone creeps in, a devaluating judgment which works like the knife in Psyche's hand. When things go well, a devil whispers in our ears that it is "[only …]" a rational devaluation which destroys everything. In a woman it is generally the animus [inner masculine] who is the artist in this field, and in a man it is a certain aspect of the anima [inner feminine]. The more sensitive and delicate and untouchable a man's feeling is on one side, the more he tends to mock himself. The Swiss recognize this type of man in their poet Gottfried Keller, whose feeling, on the one side, was extremely delicate, while on the other he showed the typical mockery of an old bachelor. That was his defense against his own hypersensitivity.
p115
Venus then orders Psyche to sort out a quanity of different kinds of seeds during the night.
… this could have to do with the Eleusinian mysteries, for corn is the mystical substance which represents the mother goddess as the goddess of corn.
---
A chaotic host of seeds is, in a way, an image of the collective unconscious, which seems to be, at the same time, a single essence and a multiplicity of images and creative impulses. One could say that as long as the archetypes of the collective unconscious are not [activated] by a human being, they are not real. They only become a psychological reality if they are experienced by a human psyche. It is for this reason that the archetypes of the collective unconscious resemble a host of chaotically dormant 'seeds' inborn in every human being, which, if not activated throu contact with human consciousness, could … be regarded as nonexistent.
p116
In the tale Psyche cannot cope alone with the corn. But there is still something which can rescue her, for ants turn up and sort out the grain. The chaos of the unconscious always contains a relation to order as well. In talking about the unconscious one must always talk in paradoxes, and when we emphasize its chaotic aspect we know at the same time that the unconscious is not only chaos but it is also order. In the last analysis, only unconscious order can overcome unconscious disorder. Man cannot do anything but be attentive and make the utmost and, so to speak, hopeless effort, until order is established again by itself.
This is something which Christian theologians would call faith.
p118
So one can say that in the right way faith is a great achievement, or rather pistis; loyalty to the inner law. When this loyalty or feeling constellates, it calls forth the secret order which is the chaos of the unconscious.
---
Jung always said that truth does not speak with a loud voice. Its low but unsuppressible voice announces itself as a malaise, or a bad conscience, or whatever one may want to call it. Great quiet is needed in order to feel these small hints. When the unconscious begins to talk loudly and to manifest itself with car accidents and such happenings, then the situation is already very bad. But in the normal state it has been whispering softly for years, before the thunderclap comes …

Ray Wyre

In terms of someone willing to engage with his own darkness and use it as a medium to help others negotiate with their demons, Ray Wyre deserves a permanent memorial. Which in a way he has - in hundreds of changed lives.

The article contains an interesting example of how the unenlightened unconscious operates. Despite Wyre's manifest success rate in non-reoffending, both his residential clinics closed due to local paedophobia. As a society we project all our hatred onto paedophiles - they are the scapegoat for everyonelse's issues with sexual boundaries - & yet when someone demonstrates an effective way of dealing with the 'evil' he receives little or no collective support.

The same thing happened with (Quaker) prison shrink Bob Johnson 10 years ago. Michael Howard & others simply buried him because his successful therapeutic regime at Parkhurst did not fit their political agenda.

We all have our own issues with 'what we can get our heads around' within ourselves. And hence the level of integration to which we are willing /feel safe to go. I heard Ray Wyre interviewed In The Psychiatrist's Chair, & what really imprest me was his talk of how he prepared spiritually before & after sessions, so that in it he could be completely open & nonjudgmental yet also detox himself afterwards so as neither to become corrupted nor lose his vulernability.

That I thought was one truly wise man. I honour his passing.

Direct pointing to reality

Essentially the Jungian idea of wholeness /wellness /health /wholth expresses in psychological language what is also the philosophical substructure of all polytheistic traditions, namely that we become one by digesting & assimilating what is diverse – ie, that as we can accept antitheses (perceive the underlying unity of cognitive dissonances) we come to see the nature of existence.

On the inner path the reward for resolving one (existential) paradox is a bigger one(!)

One of our biggest hindrances to self-realisation /achievement of power-full integration is that we project those very hindrances onto an external reality – which /whom we suppose is itself the hindrance. Jung has a useful phrase 'the [personal] unconscious always first manifests in a hostile form.' IE, while our consciousness is a stranger to our unconscious it perceives the latter as something other: the more alienated we are from our true self, the more hostile we perceieve this otherness. Which explains Horror movies.

Part of the great game of a successful life is to engage with this inner otherness (which is sometimes called the shadow) so that by assimilating rather than rejecting what is unattractive about ourselves we actually release its inhibited power to integrate within the natural diversity of our personality.

Often when we achieve what we think of peace /stasis in life it is by blanking elements which disfigure our concept of it. IE by a philosophical trick we place them outside our charmed circle where all is light. Monotheists for instance think that by focusing exclusively on the 'saviour' they can consign all their unintegrated elements to a 'devil' for which /whom they do not have to take responsibility.

To achieve full personhood we have to acknowledge & accommodate within ourselves all that we dislike – so that we no longer have any illusions. To use an eco metaphor, we become our own compost. That way the flowers grower stronger and more vivid. In Von Franz's books she speaks of a recurrent experience as a therapist of finding that within every client there seems to be an inner otherness (manifesting particularly in dream) with whom the therapist can create the conditions for a self-healing dialog to take place, and that when this does it invariably produces a holistic self-realisation which Jungians call the [true] Self – but which in traditional language might be called the soul. Jungians call this journey individuation.

This is contemporary language for the nature of the perennial search for wisdom ['direct pointing to reality' as the Buddhists call it] which is embodied in every religious /philosophical tradition worth the name. Some people personalise this as G/god, others don't. Yet we can never achieve full inner awareness without the integration of the otherness-within-us. In other words the I (ego) has to explore, discover & befriend the not-I (id) so that we achieve a consciousness balanced between egoic awareness & intuitive 'alter-egoic' perception – & in the position we become equipt to unleash the magical powers entrusted to us. But, this is the fascinating double-lock on esoteric reality, they are only fully open to the human mind when the possessor of that mind has consciously & profoundly renounced the personal advantage that such power offers.

E Pluribus Unum

'From many, unity.'

Nobody could have lived a more scattered, scatty life than I. Yet as I wandered /wondered throu the different rooms of my personality I had a single purpose. To uncover the Christ in my life. It was as if by visiting each person within me I was excavating an aspect of the whole, what the Vedas call purusha or fully-achieved human. I sought unity within the diversity of my experiences.

If we are not seeking a unified awareness then all the diversity we experience has no context. It's like sitting on a train & seeing an unfamiliar countryside flash past the windows. It may be pretty but we have no identification with it and it is ultimately meaning-less for us, the memory is quickly erased.

I had the experience of working with a group of voice hearers. Two things struck me: 1) was that many young poets & authors would have traded a limb to 'hear voices': 2) the patients were tormented by experiences which had neither meaning nor context for them. Why was that? Sadly because, as far as I could discover, not one of them had this essential impulse to seek unity or intunity (a word I have coined to indicate a state of inner harmony). Buffeted about as they were by the vagaries & diversity of life they could only see it as random and appeared to lack any sense of an underlying unity, let alone the impulse to rendezvous with it.

The challenge is to distil the essence of life's many flavours until one's sense of them becomes visible as a quintessence.

The enigma within the riddle

Out of the chaos and muck order forms:
Out of randomness and misfortune fertility.

At the edge of society I clear a path,
but don't know where it could lead.
Following it, I come into my self, yet
my destination is anybody's guess.
I am drawn to it as to the distant
drumming by a waterfall.

Is this drumming
from a clearing in the land of the living
where families celebrate life's flow
and new partners find each other?
“I don't know what the ancients knew:
I only know what others know.”

Or is waterfall one of exquisite beauty
awaiting my solitary admiration –
a place apart for communion with spirits.
“I have no common knowledge:
yet am in tune with the ancients.”

Bringing together such temples in the jungle
and the wild celebration of being alive –
is the trick to be performed –
integrating the impulse to immortality
with the anarchic fullness of life.

If I express my heart I get no response.
I do not know whether people draw silent benefit,
or regard me as an idiot, not worth commenting?
It's safer to assume the second.

And so I make these public keys
to unlock whatever is hidden.
This dawn writing captures the life
which poetry distils, whose jewel is music
and whose children are my pupils.

In the midst of life ...

It is in the times when I am most under pressure that I feel the sovereign grace of Sai Baba.
At the moment I am caught in a vexatious circle with my bank trying to remortgage in order to rebuild my studio. I do not know the outcome, but I do completely trust my spirit helpers, that they will produce the right result whatever that is. It's a rerun of what happened 14 years ago. Which of us hasn't learn the lesson in the interim?

What do we value?

Looking at the billions spent on CERN researching the theology of quantum physics, reminds me of the jibe that there are 600 churches in New York City yet still noone knows the way to find their inner truth (/God).

The real question is 'what are we looking for?' If we think the missing element in our lives –the hunger to find meaning which we project onto some external entity– is to be found outside us then we will be looking for some 'god', or some external validation, to our inner anxiety.

If we were to remove the God-projection from our mental vocabulary, & start to think about contacting our inner 'live line' then we would start to ground ourselves in a reality that takes account of our true nature as the first dot on the paper from which all lines & designs must be drawn.

Life line

The word god is like a deep jam jar. After humans have extracted the contents to suit their taste/s, it has been given to the dogs. They have licked almost all the remaining nourishment out of it, except for a tantalising patina at the bottom where their tongues can't reach.

How then to communicate this sense of an inner liveness, of an intunity to the wellsprings of existence which animals know, but humans have to (re-)discover? Looking at my dog, observing life-forms growing around and considering the unceasing flow of springs, makes me think that the best description of the liveness which humans can know throu union with the intuitive otherness that is integral to consciousness is to describe it as a live line or life line. It is the spiritual equivalent of erectile tissue which is aroused by certain configurations of stimuli.

I have been seeking an expressive but neutral word to make the 'idea' of god comprehensible & live line or life line seems to work well.

Messiaen & Ray Charles

By the time I'd been at King's Canterbury a couple of years I had grown so alienated I'd retreated into my own world where I did little else except play the organ and occasionally get beaten for noncooperation. My active antipathy to sport meant that I was singled out for bullying in that hellish academy of barbarians.
Messiaen was my salvation. I had first encountered him throu Allan Wicks, who also taught me organ. All weekend long I'd practise on the crypt organ, and by the age of 15 I could play all Messiaen's then-published oeuvre.
I had evolved a burglary kit that included a cathedral key & a coat hanger to gain access to the main organ loft. Being insomniac, I would wait until everyone in my dorm was asleep and then leave by the fire exit from Meister Omers, adjacent to the Choir School /House, go to the cathedral & let rip for several hours. Amazingly, I was never challenged, and no enquiry was ever raised about the organ being played 'Phantom-like' at midnight.
I ran up awful music bills for my poor father at Forwoods. £60 a term when a term's boarding fees were only about £250. (Hard to believe now!) And he couldn't even pay that half the time. Psychologists will understand something of the (non-)relationship that this way of demanding my father's attention was intended to provoke. Unsuccessfully.

When I'd first begun to compose, around the age of 12, I received no encouragement. My voice /idiom developed spontaneously under the influence of Messiaen as I learnt to play his intensely mystical organ music. Therefore I had the youthful experience of finding that exposing what was intensely meaningful for me produced indifference in everyonelse, including my parents who probably thought that composition was a just phase I'd grow out of when I needed to get a job.
This brought me to a crisis, which was essentially one of my own authenticity /self-worth: the more I followed my calling, my creative daemon, the more isolated it made me. Since those sounds that seemed most real & vivid to me aroused to response, except embarrassment, where did reality lie? The final straw for me was when I could find noone at Kings, boy or master, willing to read throu Messiaen's La quattuour pour le fin du temps with me. I just thought 'well if I'm in a parallel universe' maybe there's another one I do belong in, and if it does Messiaen must be in it. So to Paris I prepared to go.
I knew my grandfather had taken out War Bonds in my name, and discovered they'd matured & could be cashed. So I did so during the holidays & returned to school with my passport in the Easter term 1963. I could speak intelligible french – about the only thing I learnt at Kings.
Having been to the Trinité twice to hear Messiaen improvise after High Mass -wonderfully- and then seen him descend from the organ loft into a small sea of fidgety organophiles I knew I should never be able to approach him. Who was I? A a kid on the edge of a breakdown with no credentials, nothing to offer, barely able to give an account of myself. How could tell him -in french- I needed him to save my life? And if my god were to spurn me I must necessarily embrace the devil of suicide with which I had flirted constantly for at least 3 years.

The end of it was, my money ran out and I returned to England with my tail between my legs - determined on one thing only, never to submit myself to the confederacy of dunces called education. Accordingly I started work at Gala Cosmetics as a sweeper. My salvation was to meet harpsichordist Jane Clark & her composer husband Stephen Dodgson, who took me into their home and made me into a musician and a human being.
But my time in Paris was productive in another way, for I saw Ray Charles on his first European tour. Never before had I seen this level of incandescence, and rarely have I encountered it since. Ray was so attuned to his music that as a performer he seemed to be without physical limits - pure spirit. Nothing I'd absorbed about ice-race spirituality at Canterbury prepared me for a sun-race spirituality that was earthy and vibrantly sexual. Achieving a spiritual fusion between these polar antitheses of musical being, the intensely literate and the intensely intuitive, has been guiding principle of my evolution as a composer, music producer and teacher – not a superficial idiomatic synthesis, but an exploration of the nature of the energy relationship between intentionality and sound.

Joyce Grenfell

I saw an excellent doc on tv about Joyce Grenfell last Sat. What I found fascinating about seeing her from 20-80 was that in everything she did there was an inner truthfulness, an inspirational quality that was a testimony to her faith. She was never malicious, tho she could be acid enough to show she was well aware of the dark side, yet always chose the light. She probably felt her talents were trivial, but to my mind her memorial is not her work, it is that she was true to her Self. Apparently many pro actors denigrated her 'amateurism' - but actually that was pure jealousy because she had 'it' - that vestal quality that comes from ‘intunity’.

Where I vibe with Grenfell is that like her I was never ‘professionalised’ by the education industry. Therefore what I write I write because I feel it compellingly important. It is of course a source of intense frustration that it is totally unimportant to the world at large: but I've learnt to understand that spiritually. I am motivated by my faith in Christ, and therefore the soundworld I (wish to) evoke reflects that belief system. The rest of the world (largely) isn't & therefore doesn’t respond to the vibe I'm into. I have come to accept that my task is not to ‘be conformed’ to the world’s values, but to respond principally to the truth I sense within me.
On the whole subject of inspiration, see http://msteer.co.uk/analytical/creativoxtext.html

Interestingly, music seems to be the one area where faith persists in our faithless world. Messiaen remained an undeviatingly devout Christian, and it was the mystical integrity of his soundworld that first gave me hope when I was at my lowest and lostest. Charles Ives put up with ridicule, obscurity & never heard his music performed, yet is now regarded as the father of 20thC US music thanks to the evangelism of Lenny Bernstein. He was an intensely inner-led Christian – who used his prodigious creative energy to found what is now the worldwide pensions industry because of his compassion for the elderly poor. There are numerous others I could tell you of: Stravinsky was a sincere Russian Orthodox: Schoenberg an observant Jew. Contemporary UK composer Jonathan Harvey is a devout Buddhist despite being as experimental as all get-out. Tavener’s Greek Orthodox faith is doubtless known to you. Duke Ellington wrote only religious music at the end of his life. Funkmeister Herbie Hancock is a practising Buddhist. The list is far longer.
Often, it is the intensity of someone’s mystical inner sound world that makes hir unafraid to be experimental – because the integrity of that world is validated by the spirituality of their world-view.
We each of us have a path to tread; and the issue –for the composer as much as for each human– is not to achieve great things in the world’s eye, it is to behave with an integrity and vision that balances one’s inner truth with the greater truth as one sees it. And to leave the results to God. Despite the great joy of the relationships in my life, that inner personal walk has often been wearisome & unrewarding, but what has always guided & inspired me is the confidence of hearing the Saviour’s greeting: “well done, thou good and faithful servant; enter thou into thy rest.”

Everyone has cultural preferences based on their personal world overview. For some of the reasons why western musical history has evolved see http://msteer.co.uk/analytical/jmtimbre4.html. Suffice it to say there is always an intimate, if circuitous, link between a person’s ‘intentional proprioception’ [their (non/) belief system about how the world is] & their aesthetic engagement/s. The difference is our individual human identity: the harmonics of those differences create genres and styles according to the number of people who experience their place in the world similarly.
How much easier my life would be if I didn’t ‘hear’ things & didn’t feel obliged to ‘externalise’ my inner world … but how infinitely poorer. The prophet Jeremiah said much the same thing but, I would say from reading him recently, never reconciled within himself the anger he experienced at having his (divine) vision rejected! What I or any composer write/s is a ‘negotiation’ between a collective perception (genre /idiom /style) and a personal inner voice.
All my life I have experimented with bringing the popular and the esoteric, the sacred and the profane, together. After many failed attempts, I see my latest experiments bearing fruit, and still regard this as my sacred vocation to bridge those worlds – to reconnect people brought up in the trivialising environment of electronic culture to the timeless depths of historical cultural continuity, while at the same time providing a contact point for those who exist in those depths to gain access to the energy latent in the surface tensions of modern media.

Writing about this is my way of clarifying my own intentions, of articulating to myself what I need to do further to manifest this reality. Our power as artists is that we create the future (‘unacknowledged legislators’ & all that) – so anyone who seeks to be artistically-conscious is required to be clarify their intentions that they may be vessels for ‘what is of God’ to enter the human dimension. That’s all I've sought to d0: it doesn’t make sense to ‘the world’ because they're not looking for those values. But it’s been an amazingly improbable journey. I've kept a record of it here because, far as I have been from any kind of acceptance to date, I know how the story ends (as certainly as I know Christ is my saviour) and therefore I wish what occurred in my life to be a matter of record, so that other people 'undergoing' what I have may see how salvation comes from holding to faith not from conforming to prevailing trends: and obversely to make clear to those who judge from the surface of my music (when it is finally heard as I intend) that my life was smooth & light-filled, just how dark the journey really was.
There is profound insight into the psychology of 20thC European culture to be gained from Dreaming With Open Eyes by Michael Tucker. He depicts a mainstream European culture that had become sterile & formulaic by the time of WW1 being swept aside by a shamanic irruption of the collective unconscious that had been repressed by Christian & post-Christian orthodoxies – not necessarily rejecting them in essence, but certainly rejecting them in their existing form/s.
There is, and will always be, a tension between the rational world of science & social order and the inner anarchy of the creative subconscious. This was first exposed in the rise of the Gothic movement paralleling that of early-modern science. Today we feel it more acutely because, under the impact of science, as a culture we have lost the ability to see meta-physically or meta-phorically, and can only see literally. [Hence the furious battle between Creationists & Dawkins-ites!]

Getting to the point

The main game of life needs to be finding our right relationship with the earth – which means finding both where /how we belong on earth but also where & with whom to make our stand – collectively & personally.
Our inner life dynamic & dreams guide us towards this – if we let them(!)
This process works best if we consciously unpack the content/s of our psyche & resolve its incongruities. Thus by encountering & attuning to our selves as creative artists we discover how to make a harmonic interaction with something within our subjectivity that is, if not objective, then at least carries within it an overtone or archetype of our true selves (regardless of whether this or we are constructive in attitude) that contributes a resonance to our work which then carries it beyond its immediate context.

Inspiration

The way it works (best) for me is when ideas come in dreams or the half-awake lucidity that follows. From studying my dreams over the last 20 years, I've learnt never to second-guess this process. I simply write down whatever I'm shown. This gives the ideas both a clear feeling-tone & an integrity, from which I find it reasonably easy to transcribe or scale them up in a way that preserve their essence. It doesn't necessarily mean everything I write is wonderful, but I find the results have an owned quality to them which is different from the brain-spun work I did earlier in my life.

Even where they attract no external interest I feel I have obeyed George Fox's injunction 'to (ac)quit my soul' - which he meant in the sense that if we utter what is shown to us without fear or favour, then the reception of that utterance is not our responsibility. It rests with the Powers That Be as to whether it evokes a direct response, or whether our function is to contribute to some evolutionary process that we may not understand at all.

This concept is part of both Christian and Vedic thought. The former says 'Deo dat augmentum' - God gives the increase: our reward is to play our part, the nature of its fruitfulness is 'in the lap of the gods' (to borrow a pagan phrase). The Vedanta says that it is the prerogative of Vishnu /Krishna to reward or withold.

All that is important for us as humans is to be truthful to the inner dynamic. The more we sync to it, the more harmonic synchronicity it produces.

Mantra

For years Ive been working with the mantra SamBhaVa. Those syllables came to me so long ago I don't even remember when, but probably more than 20 years ago – some time in the 90s. I certainly associate their reception with the inspiration of Sai Baba in my life at that time. And I continue to find it very heart-opening to chant them. 5 years ago I sensed a new one given to me.

The seed meaning of syllables is balance-devotional love-movement. That can be interpreted in several ways, but the one that spoke to me was the idea that the mantra's function was to 'balance the flow of love' in my life: ie, to help me get over the binge-bust responses of elation at times of inner connection and despair at its absence; and indeed to get over the idea of personal ownership of &/or identification with such emotions. One can argue whether it is the sole agency accomplishing this ;) but the fact that the chanter is constantly made mindful of the thought means that it percolates into hir wider consciousness.

Mantram (pl.) are very sacred, yet as intimate as a vest. (I was going to say 'pants' but you can see why I didnt!) In the Vedic tradition they are given by the guru /teacher to the chela /student as a uniquely personal gift. I was therefore suitably cautious about adopting SamBhaVa, yet it has served me well.

My adoption of another mantra came about in about 03 when I read Sogyal Rinpoche's Tibetan Book of Living & Dying. The founder of his Tibetan lineage was none other than Padma Sambhava, who gave his followers the mantra: Aum ah hum - vajra guru padma siddhi hum. Since then I have added that one. The meaning is eternal-I-am, diamond-teacher-consciousness-miraculous-am. IOW, the eternal is within me, educated by /to a shining & incisive consciousness I am /attract the miraculous.

Seemed good to me!

Going & Doing

When I wake in the early hours I follow after my mind, as it emerges fresh from sleep. In these moments it is reborn each day, with a love/energy that springs from the stars. I listen to what my dreamworld is telling me; and if /when specific people appear present I engage with them throu prayer – respectfully holding them on the altar of my heart and invoking light in their lives.

So it is that I send you love from the profoundest part of my heart. I make no claim to understand exactly where you are in yourself, but I am familiar with the terrain your creative life is now traversing, and so my purpose in writing is to reassure you that you are held in love, and that the turning you took is correct (provided you persist), and that it will bring rewards.

The advice I offer from experience is that the way /path is itself the purpose of your journey, not the goal you aim for, important as that is to motivate your progression. For it is in following the path that transformation occurs, not in reaching the goal. The goal you do reach, will almost certainly not be the one you were aiming for – but will be a greater fulfilment than you could have dreamt.

What is it to be?

We do not become truly human until we acknowledge the divine (undying) aspect of our personalities.

Finding your point of balance

Yesterday I had a solo harpsichord concert in London, and been practising for 3 hours a day during the final month. To do so is so ridiculously uneconomic in relation to the fee that even the phrase ‘pay to play’ pales into irrelevance.

What then is the reward? I think it is the gain/s in focus & self-awareness (during the learning process) & in self-confidence (from successful performance) – which are like the payoff a sports person gets from reaching peak condition & then pushing themselves even further to achieve a personal best.

The important life lesson for kids in music is even more valuable than sport & it’s this: a personal best does not involve you winning or losing in relation to other people (thus it is without an emotional downside, given adequate preparation) – what it does do is to put you in touch with the bedrock of your own psyche & help you to decipher your personal hand-eye-brain coordinates & the illusions /cultural mythology of how we all see, hear & respond which form the delusions or programming which govern most people's perception.

Where music is unique among the arts is that, once you’ve mastered your craft sufficiently to be able to hear yourself objectively, the sound you make offers instant feedback to keep you centred in the experience itself, and because, when you succeed, it is auditorily gratifying. Thereby a virtuous circle is created which validates your ego, and so reinforces your self-worth. One of my arguments against exams is that this ‘affirmation of human uniqueness’ is such an important discovery for each and every person to make by some means in their life, and one whose importance so far transcends ‘piano’, that creating conditions where a particular type of human (to wit those with an aptitude for music) can begin this long slow self-circling is the most valuable thing a music teacher can offer pupils. It’s an infinitely subtle & on-going evolutionary process and to mislead students into believing that the purpose of acquiring musical skill is defined by what can be measured in exams, or even as a shortcut to applause, is completely to misinform them about the re-creational possibilities music offers for refreshing their inner world in adulthood.

If you know yourself only in terms of other people’s valuation, then your well-being remains dependent on the opinion of others: but if by engaging with the confluence between intention & execution (which making music demands) you come to discover where /how your personal physical and psychological truths interact, you are thus led towards your human uniqueness – and from this all that is best human achievement springs, for this gives the individual a fulcrum to move the mass.

Unpacking the Box

I've come to believe that, aside from giving & receiving love, nothing we do during our time as human beings matters as much as our determination to open our hearts to identify with Life in its deepest sense – to tune our antennae to the vibe of coexistence with all life-forms on the planet.

This is impossible without a parallel journey into our own fear & darkness. The more we encounter & learn to love those aspects of our personality we would prefer to deny, the more this search for integration brings into a natural loving relationship with the world around us.

One of the goals of life must be fully to unpack our contents during our lifetime, so that we can leave the planet with no tasks left unfulfilled, no commissions undischarged, and no omissions un-made-up. Only then can we truly say that we have lived life to the full – for only then we done what we really came here for.

Until you allow yourself to fall (fall in love, fall into the hands of the living god) you cannot possibly know what great things are in store for you. Up until that point you believe that you (could) control your life – once you know you can't then the Great Dance can begin. Because our lives are subject to gravity we think that to lose control is to fall to destruction. It isn't. To fall apart is the beginning of being remade. It's the first step to learning that the conceptual world is not the whole of existence.

Let go & let God.

Go for Go(l)d

If we worship (acknowledge with awe) what is totally within us, we are also worshipping (acknowledging with awe) what is totally without us. Thus, one side of reaching our fullest development as a creative human must involve developing our wonder /love /self-respect for our gifts, while the other is to develop wonder /love /respect for the unknowable otherness which is integral to such gifts.
This alone sharpens our wits to receive (or recognise) the higher levels of the basic skill-insights given by one's genetic heredity.
Learning to praise this Otherness is indispensible to growth – for it is in giving thanks (even for the little that we have) that we are given thanks. The praise /thanks mechanism is itself an aspect of the organic (yes, orgasmic) pulsing by which all things are conceived and ultimately born. It is our privilege as humans to interact consciously with this process, and we reach our highest evolution when we engage our will in discovering what the truth of this 'otherness' is /means in our lives.

Blessing 2 U O Lord who call me in the early hours.

Running away from school

When I first began to compose, around the age of 12, I received no encouragement. Nevertheless, my voice /idiom developed spontaneously under the influence of Messiaen as I learnt to play his intensely mystical organ music. What I wrote, now lost, aroused no interest either among my peers or teachers, one of whom was Allan Wicks, the organist of Canterbury cathedral and Messiaen's principal British protagonist.
But for me it touched the core of my creative being – & therefore I had the youthful experience that exposing what had meaning for me produced indifference in everyone I knew – including my parents who probably thought that composition was another phase that I would grow out of. This was later to give me a serious compositional block, since the pain of the inability to communicate by means of my music created an effective aversion therapy! [In this picture taken during Choir School scout camp, I am parading beside Oz Clarke, now better known for his oenophilia.]
Eventually this brought me to a crisis, which was essentially a crisis of my own authenticity /self-worth: the more I followed my calling, my creative daemon, the more isolated it made me. Since those sounds that seemed most real & vivid to me aroused to response, except embarrassment, where did reality lie? I was already in a parallel universe with, apparently, no tangent to that of others.
I decided that the only person who could understand me was Messiaen himself; so to Paris I went. I think it was just after Easter term 1963. But then, so alienated did I feel, I dared not speak to him – for to meet rejection from my god would have spelt the extinction of my last remaining beacon of hope. And I couldn't risk that, by the same token that the rules of chess forbid exposing one's king to check. To hazard one's dominant principle-principal is to court annihilation.

Having been to the Trinité twice to hear Messiaen improvise after High Mass -wonderfully- and seen him descend from the organ loft into a small sea of fidgety organophiles I knew I should never be able to approach him. Who was I? A 16 yearold with no credentials, nothing to offer, and unable to give an account of myself. How could tell him -in french- I needed him to save my life? And if my god were to spurn me I must necessarily embrace the devil of suicide with which I had flirted constantly for at least 3 years.
The Australian concierge in the little hotel in the Rue Vaneau (7ème), where I stayed on the recommendation of someone I'd met on the boat train over, suggested I went to Brive la Gaillarde. So why not? There was nothing for me in Paris. 40 years later I felt a savage recognition reading Rilke's account of his experiences in Paris 60 years before mine. All that was light and warm in humanity was a closed book to me. A neat irony, then, to go to a place whose name spoke of gaiety. I wrote poetry there that still exists in some notebooks somewhere.
Eventually I ran out of road. I had no psychic energy to project my consciousness across the void towards that of other people, nor any experience that would predict success. After three and a half weeks I got in touch with my parents, & my father came out to see me.

We had one of the few times of closeness we were ever to enjoy. He was open to me as he was never to be again except when we came to bid farewell to my mother a week before her death. Sadly, it was a measure of his inability to see what I needed that he encouraged me to stay and find work. He meant well, to encourage my independence, but anyone with half an antenna could have seen I was incapable of fending for myself. I accompanied him back to Paris, half thinking to return, half simply wanting his company. The journey, for which we bought first class tickets thinking it would guarantee seats, not understanding the french reservation system, ate up nearly all my remaining funds, as Id bravely insisted on paying my own way. I was left without enough money to return to Brive, let alone to live on. My money would stretch only to a ticket to Orléans, which was not even on the mainline south.
Some memories have stuck with me from my chambre de mansarde (garret room) in the cheapest hotel I could find in Orléans under the distrustful eyes of the flophouse Madame as I awaited a remittance from my parents, which I was sore at having to request. Maybe the mordancy of these memories has stayed with me because of not having eaten for 3 days – seeing prosperous bourgeois avocats spilling out from the courthouse in search of a gallic lunch in the tree-lined cafés around the Palais de Justice, and my having NO idea what life would be like a member of a human race I thought I was never destined to join.
Another was walking aimlessly throu a fair, possibly that evening, under the dusty trees of the market place. I'd found a sou in my pocket & been able to purchase a chew, which served only to madden my hunger. I really didn't know how I could go on living under any circumstances, even with food inside me. The fair was truly charming in those days before amplification with real live accordionists & little bal musette cafés – that I couldn't afford to visit. At one of them a gaggle of jeunes mooched by counter including a really beautiful girl, perhaps no more than 2 years -yet a whole world- older than me, who was evidently bored with being the arm candy of some spotty hoodlum. She turned to follow me as I walked, her eyes a bridge to that other world which I had no idea how to cross.
No woman had ever paid that kind of attention to me, certainly not one with her credentials. I was shocked with delight, yet it only made my isolation more intense – what import could any contact between us possibly have?
The other experience which occupied those 5 hungry days was making friends with the organiste du choeur of Orléans cathedral. A lovely /lonely semi-alcoholic who lived in one room in 18thC squalor in an 18thC apartment house near the cathedral. He had once had a piece played on Radio France by Jean Françaix, & this was his sole topic of conversation! His job was to accompany the choir on the humble organ in the chancel. He had no contact with the titulaire, the capital O-Organist, who played the splendid Cavaillé-Colle grand orgues at the west end, whose duties were merely to play solo pieces at grand liturgical moments, and who disdained his earthly colleag (who had once had a piece played on Radio France by Jean Françaix)!

The end of it was, the money came, I went back to Brive, collected by belongings & came back to England with my tail between my legs.
What I believe sustained me throu this dark period, and indeed brought two remarkable people across my path, were the prayers of my paternal grandmother. My Granny 'Ginger' was a genuinely beautiful woman at every period of her life. Her wedding picture shows her with a butterfly on her hand: she told me it was a real butterfly which had flapt into the photographer's studio at the exact moment he was ready to snap, paused on her hand for the photo, & flown away. To a person with her faith, there was nothing remarkable about this - that was how miracles happened, just everyday occurrences, that we were to be truly grateful for, but not to get particularly excited about.
I've always felt that my meetings, not long after my return, with Jane Clark Dodgson and the other really significant person in helping me back to a halfway normal life, Roger Wild, the vicar whose organist I became at the age of 17, were due to my Granny upholding me in prayer.
Before taking the cloth, Roger had been MD of Wild Aero Engines, a small independent manufacturer with a history going back to Spitfire engines, and he had Lived with a capital L, before experiencing a christian conversion under Billy Graham, and gradually realising he had a vocation as a priest. He was a visionary man of god, who filled what had been an empty church by simply making a space where it was safe for people to find personal answers.

He later married Clancy and me; but was gathered to his fathers not long afterward.

Transcendence

All true art is a gift to the world that is beyond price. Constantly, at least once a year, I play throu Bach's complete 48 preludes & fugues. It brings me infinite & instant 'transport'. Such a thing
is beyond value. It & much other music has, for centuries, been a free gift to tens of millions of musicians.

Nature is full of such gifts. We we are truly awed by the richness that surrounds us then we can begin, but only begin, to understand the true depth of love – & when we have begun to feel the constancy and omnipresence of this love we have begun, but only begun, the process of attuning ourselves to the creator-spirit.

To experience this shower of love, one must cease to conceptualise, to see(k) 'reasons'. Love is - and its heart lies in an invisible cavity between words & wordlessness. To find the way to this is to find not merely 'shower of love' but also the show-er of love. It is both the (self-)discovery and reflexion of a perception of that entity which we can only name 'otherness', the unnameable, the 'not-I /not-us' which nonetheless encompasses the ego/I/us of humanity.

A time to embrace

What a privilege to wake and know that there is a power, a presence enveloping me. To say 'I can't believe my luck' would sum up my feelings. And yet what at last has come to me has been sought throu years of tears – pursued throu wilderness, flood and mud, over trackless wastes, across impassable glaciers, and beyond steep stony mountains. So in a way, the only aspect of 'luck' that comes into it, is the luck I invoked by my heartfelt search for meaning.

During years I could not find a friend I had only the love of my family to sustain me – and how rich that was. Only a very few other people even knew, let alone carred, that I was alive. Yet I felt /feel that the principal value in my time on earth was simply to be a witness to my own life – to make no assumptions about what should happen, but to record simply what I am shown, to accept being 'dumbed down' but to continue to testify even to dumbness and desolation. With the same attention I now record the pleroma, the sense of abundant life &/or stream of living water which now visits me.

I know I don't own this. It has been allowed me, as a harmonic is 'allowed' to a note when the correct physical laws are observed. And this is why the Beatitudes tell us we must hunger and thirst after righteousness. The Bible says 'seek and ye shall find'; but it might be better to express it as 'seek and ye shall be found.' What you thought you were looking for is not what will find you. The function of seeking is to open our selves to Life.

The next step is to trust (in) your inner-life dynamic, to believe that you do indeed contain the latent wisdom you now invoke. By trusting, we become trust-worthy; just as by loving we become love-able. By learning to walk straight in the darkness we attract the light we seek, and make ourselves worthy -indeed make ourselves value- that light, so that when it appears, in the fullness of time, we may handle it as we should. Imagine: if such a gift were given to the without suitable preparation would enlightenment result? The teaching of Maharishi (who died this week) detonated a consciousness-bomb in the 1960s: while a great number undoubtedly gained empowerment to pursue their enlightenment, many more entirely missed the point of departure and remained trapped in their earthbound conception/s.

How many wish to rise above the level of their earthbound neibours? How many wish to shed the veiling flesh and come to see with opened eyes the glorious spirit body each of us has, and to begin inhabiting it during their lifetime? It fascinates me how throuout history such wisdom constantly arises and is as constantly forgotten when fashions and meanings change, only to arise again in new forms in response to new situations and vocabularies.

I believe that Christ released into the atmosphere an original dynamic which can never be extinguished, despite the best efforts of his 'followers'(!) – yet I should not understand the half of his message without the illumination of his fellow light-worker Gautama Buddha or the perceptual-philosophical ground of Vedanta.

There are beautiful things happening all over the world right now. We can choose to side with them, or we can surrender ourselves to the embrace of chaos.

Love 1 - Love all

The words are simple –
They always are –
Love … Give …
Love yourself: give to others.

The energy within the holy 1 transforms the world, person by person:
embrace that integrative energy.

Our main task as humans is to unpack the baggage we brought with us,
so that at the end we can fly away, free spirits, released from the weight of unresolved elements within ourselves, no longer attached to material reality.

Until then, dance.
Dance with all your heart.
Dance with every thing.
Make your world dance.

Peace at last

This morning I felt absolutely resolved, as if the Promethean eagle had been given a day off from pecking out my liver. Two things have happened this week which have contributed to this.

One is that ColourMuse has finally gone live after a (re-)development phase that has lasted the best part of 5 months, during which I constantly believed it would be ready by the end of each of the intervening months(!) – which was an exquisite refinement of torture.

The other is that I visited the remarkable osteopath Clive Lindley-Jones for a second treatment, ostensibly for the RSI I have suffered from in my right arm for the best part of two decades. However CLJ's skills extend far beyond mere osteopathy. He also uses kinesiology and a range of other diagnostic tools to assist him in identifying weakness of muscle tone and points of inflammation or dis-ease. Even more remarkably, for a conventionally qualified practitioner, he sees the body in terms of its auric or electrical fields and fully recognises the validity of the ayurvedic system of chakras.

With extraordinary speed & professionalism CLJ was able to isolate certain 'culprit' muscles in the first session. In the second he gave me various conventional physical treatments, but it was the accompanying energy treatments involving the alignment of chakric extensions of my spine both above my head & below my sacrum which I could feel effecting a major change in my sense of physical integrity – ie, of being fully present in my body.

CLJ was frank from the beginning that he might not be able to restore full mobility to my right arm repetition since the problem was of such long standing – but I do feel I have at last met someone who is equipt with the extended range of skills & metaphysical perception necessary to treat the underlying causation.

I salute a maestro!

Time Changes

So. I lie here at 0445, thinking about what may come.

After so many years during which I lay awake in the darkness, uncertain or dreadful of the future, it comes as a pleasant surprise to find myself looking forward with clarity and anticipation. In a few days ColourMuse will go live. and then I shall be starting to develop it internationally as a mainstream piano teaching method. Win /lose /draw, it can only add value to my life.

When I compare my emotions on the launch of this with how I was around the time I launched my last major enterprise (CataList magazine) 15 years ago I see the measure of how I've developed within myself in what I'm 'given' to write in these sattvic hours. 15 years ago I was, mercifully, able to access an inner wisdom which guided me [preserved here in the earlier postings of this blog] & kept me more or less sane in a crazy time.

I feel that I no longer see this natural wisdom, which we all have, as coming from outside me, but I feel as if I've managed to integrate it within my consciousness. Which isn't the same thing as claimed to be an enlightened or omniscient being! Yes, in a way there's a loss. The bell-like clarity I had has gone, replaced by a more pervasive sense of clarity. So that's a plus. What existed as 'skyborne' inspiration has entered the loam of my soul.

Now, when I pray to that luminously unknowable certainty whom I sense within/without me, I do so in the sense of having a conversation – not with the desperation of someone battering on Heaven's firmly barred gates!