It radiates from every source. Galaxies. The stars. Our Sun. Fires, both natural – caused by lightning, volcanoes, spontaneous combustion.
And fires made by us, electrical and electronic.
Spectacular Aurora, fiery light from the Sun’s plasma in collision with atoms in Earth’s upper atmosphere.
Out of our sight from below, those rare, natural, elusive Sprites, blue jets and ELVES.
Bioluminescence (my favourite !) from fireflies, glow-worms, fungi, algae, sea and deep ocean creatures.
Light generated unexpectedly, sometimes even inexplicably, from tiny bubbles bombarded with ultrasound, such as during Sonoluminescence (SL). Light emitted by crystalline matter in triboluminescence. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboluminescence
Consider light reflected from our Moon.
Light reflects and scatters from every surface that receives radiated light.
Desert sands and seahorse-flecked waves under clear night skies.
Entire oceans and ice-capped mountain ranges under midday sun reflect and/or refract and sometimes even polarise received light.
Now consider this.
Light has always been light, from the early period in the young youth of the Universe, when light began its journey of escape.
All this light, this energy from all sources, travels and fills space in every direction all the time.
Imagine, if you will, a Universe with no eyes.
No eyes to capture and focus light, and no neural receptors to sense and interpret it.
Before the existence of and without the optical receptors of animate life, there is a Universe awash with light.
In this eyeless Universe is indiscernible form and there are no bounded shapes of any kind.
In fact, in this condition of complete absence of rational observers, no information beyond light’s natural energies, wavelengths, frequencies and amplitudes is conveyed by the omnipresent light.
Omnipresence without sentience has validity as existence, which could be thought of as an abstraction of pure innocence, but it is quantified first and only as undifferentiated.
I am reminded of the phrase in Genesis, “And the Earth was without form, and void”. This is the description of Earth before the Spirit of God moved, and before God said, “Let there be light”. The next event was, “God saw the light, that it was good”.
Precisely because we are differentiated, and because we have the innate ability to see that this is so, we have experience of animate life.
And all our love, gratitude, joys, and transcendent longings have their origin here.
Only see the light.
Light has always been light, even during the inception and babyhood of the Universe, before light could escape!
Light has it.
It all begins all the time.
It begins with every sentient being, with you, with me.
Electromagnetic energies, of which light visible to eyes is a small portion, are constituent with our human form. And these energies animate our humanity, as well as they flow us through the time-lines of our human existence.
So when I look out on the high street, village, or town, on the next gathering, waiting queue, audience, crowded beach, packed stadium, busfull, trainload or planeload of voyagers,
When I am filled with Hiraeth, I regard my own longing for the ineffable beauty of a heart known but not seen; a longed-for heart – deeply loved, but always over the horizon; a heart massively generous and overflowing with loving affection – but never in the same room as me.
Some days I may run, run, and I pick up speed and I begin to smile a secret smile to imagine the outline of my heart’s delight?
This chase is always shadows in the water.
What I am nevertheless aware of is the quality of my yearning – it is like golden flames.
When the flames come on strong and blind out my thoughts about the flames, I can allow myself to be still and observe myself aflame.
In such moments, when there is nothing standing between my passion and the experience of my passion, I see my heart is on fire with flames which consume nothing.
That my heart beats is abiding wonder.
My heartbeat continues to be perfectly sufficient for me to rise and fall; for my life to fall and rise.
The flames of my passion – exactly like the leaves on the tree – are their own reason for love to exist.
The physical universe has its own natural dignity in the general order of existence. That dignity deserves its own respect.
Reality is apparent through the detection of its magnificent spectrum of wavelengths.
Where reality ends and something else begins, possibly connected with quantum reality, or to do with the threshold of an important and blindingly beautiful stasis, is also a boundary which we are privileged to inhabit.
Nothing is black and white. Light is infinitely graduated.
So too Love.
Everything is just how it is. I come back again and again to realising that the Way of Being of whatever we attend to is entire and sufficient to itself. It is enough.
Everything is always perpetually and without exception enough.
This appreciation of Sufficiency is an expression of the way the universe loves its own witnessers. This is a love that holds and contains those gigantic primal energies science has been showing to us.
This is also the love which living organisms draw upon to go freely about their business of survival and reproduction.
The universe pours its love into all living entities, animate, inanimate, with sentience or not. It is a love which is an unending flow mirrored between the witnessers and the witnessed in equal and opposite union.
I think of this pervasive love as being like cycles of cause and effect on all possible dimensional scales and at every energy level.
There is a quality to this flow of love which is both innate and radiantly distributive, or outgoing. If this love can sense itself, it is the embodiment of a tranquility with no end.
Here is my picture of this tranquility. From those distant times in every galaxy when rocky objects began to orbit parent stars, their solid surfaces remain in a millennial continuum.
Throughout the universe there are rocky surfaces, unknown and unknowable, unconsidered and untouched by human artifact.
These rocks have no eyes to see, but their nobility is not blind.
This nobility has always existed as a starkly naked imperturbable virginity. It sings an unsung song of purest silence. As yet, not one tear has fallen on these hard places. This is the silence of an eternal home, whose roof and walls are set all about with stars that burn and shine.
The potent awareness of intense love is self sustaining. It enters my heart like perpetual motion, eternally safe! Intense love quenches every last residue of fear.
I sometimes like to call it EveryNow.
There is a final resting place for the restless mind. That place is a place of no-location. It is where safety is unconstrained by and unconcerned by time. It is a flowing source of giving. It is a not-there which is available instantly, whenever we as individuals need it.
Though we clearly feel it as being unboundaried, without limit, when our awareness is directed towards it, its quality of unconditional giving is always specific to our own heart at any given moment. Here we glimpse the uninterrupted, incorruptible unity in which everything, time, matter and energy, has its belonging.
“Feel the peace and beauty of connecting to your heart…”
🕯️Stand in the light of your own being
I am always of the belief that it is possible to walk “through” the Stargate portal of your pain and hurt and to have an insight that allows it all, every trace, to drop away so you can “let it be”. This is an insight into absolute love where fear is dissolved and loses its power completely.
You must know I have had the good fortune to pass through some form of Stargate. But to reach there, I had to have lived more than a handful of decades, be retired and released from the nine-to-five grind, and I had to undergo several epiphany experiences accompanied by some shining new true soulfriends.
Before you arrive in the presence of such a magic portal, it’s likely you’ll still need to arrive at more old journey destinations on the way, tear down clinging overgrown undergrowth, see yourself in the old places clearly and let their real significance carve deep grooves into your present you for the first time.
Only by marching onto these stepping stones of uncertainty are you going to have a chance to release the leaden weights and unseen shackles, so you can see them for the illusions they represent, and then walk tall, the walk of your life.
The structures that have become so vital to the security and safety of your self and to which you have devoted so much energy in their construction and maintenance, these are firmly planted defences.
You have become accustomed to handle them in a conscious, deliberate and deliberative way.
You have framed them in words. Although they are only words, like weights and shackles, these words could have taken on the shapes and forms of shackles and weights.
I know as fact you can always stand in the light of your own being at a moment’s notice.
You may be moved to seek help and find it with an intermediary.
You may find the light of your being quite unexpectedly homes in on you, with a beam like a searchlight from which there is no escape.
What can happen when the shocking, perplexing clear vision of the beauty of your own soul meets you in the face?
Either you are obliged to accept the plain truth of your angelic being, or you opt to refute the experience, telling yourself platitudes handed down to you from the bland phrasebook of socially acceptable conformity.
This encounter with the happening magnificence of your own being has not any words to enscribe, describe or circumscribe it. It is without doubt yours before question or answer.
You have already entered many times into wordless wonder of living. You know what it is of course. It is something that sometimes happens. In your day to day existence, you are far nearer the shimmering entrance portal than you can begin to imagine. Step through and be where the wonder of living is too intense for words.
And the space, the extremely real place, perhaps the only space which is real, and which lies ever glowing at a constant brightness (the ‘bright’ of peace and love), is the directly lived experience, the Now.
Now is not a mere moment. Now is every moment constructed from every possible previous combination of moments suffused to saturation with begininglessness and endlessness – it is EveryNow.
EveryNow exists completely without reference to a frame of words, or whether it is thought of, sought for, or is ignored willingly or negligently.
Blink, and you can find yourself in it.
It in you.
Just be ready. Ready for the invitation.
If you give any of this a modicum of credence, be ready. Your best tribute to it and to your innate beauty is to be ready. Listen up to your instincts of self preservation, to your inner certainty that you would truly like it to turn out to be a schmaltzy, rose-scented pink cloud, and continue to be ready.
The way to get close enough to the magic of EveryNow, so that it can guzzle you all up into its roseate field of rosy glory, is to be prepared and ready to take at face value its invitation card: Infinity.
Postscript
Sleep is as precious as wakefulness. Sleep is close to infinity. Sleep is a hallowed gift. Wrap it with respect, give yourself to it. Sleep well
I, five-pointed star creature, am a creature of thoughts. I think because I think. I am amused and bemused by the thoughts I listen to.
I receive parental and peer suggestion that encourage me to rely on my “powers of thought”.
I am later informed of the pointlessness of over-thinking, and later still I am warned about giving credence to the chattering “monkey” mind.
I am in truth another creature of the gardens of Eden, alike unto the sentient beings who share my air, earth, and water.
I am naturally attuned to the rhythms of light and dark, hunger and thirst.
I am another seeker after warmth and the supportive companionship of others like myself.
The time I spend in awareness of my own awareness is self absorbing and attractive.
Think! How much time do I devote to my physical comfort, to awareness of my bodily condition?
Stop! What feedback is my muscular framework giving me?
Ask! What if any noteworthy messages am I receiving from my soma, my joints and tendons, my fascia, the involuntary state of my breathwork?
I can do myself a simple and all-too-rare an honour by listening to myself, by conversing with my soma.
I, as five-pointed star creature, breathe and beat time to a clock of blood.
The form of this timepiece is as far from the assumed reality of my bird-like thought patterns as the ocean depths are from the jetstream.
Pause and see all these are interconnected.
It is when I am injured or unwell that I can see examples of the ungraspable timescales on which my body clock operates.
As I begin to recover, to recuperate, I cannot see any needle on a dial that moves towards wholeness or wellness. It becomes apparent with hindsight, and then only by an effort of will, that I can compare yesterday with today and observe minor changes for the better.
Happiness depends so much more than I have been led to believe on living, on carrying out the routines that sustain my bodily functions.
To tell myself I depend on one part or other of who I am – whether it is mind, body or spirit – is to miss the wood for the trees.
When the flow is seen to be where and what and who I am part of, that is when I can rest, take my ease, find comfort and be for the most part at peace with myself and with my fellows.
I am inclined to grasp at fleeting satisfactions, pleasures, successes, drownings. Howsoever tangible they are, they are passing moments in the greater flow.
A friend of mine was once part of the crew of one the two Greenpeace ocean going ships.
He and some friends were enjoying a quiet smoke on deck under the 360° calm stars.
They saw an Earth grazer – a large flame-trailing heavenly object falling across the black sky.
They all watched in silence as it neared the horizon.
Then they saw it!
Small and far, far away. Distinct, but utterly without sound. Illuminated by beyond-the-horizon Moonlight.
It was the huge feathery plume of water thrown up high by the force of the impact, as the meteor ended its lonely journey of thousands of millions of years in the southern Atlantic Ocean.
So many UK citizens carry on trusting their futures to decisions made by grey-suited elder males whose tastes in transport, education and health tend to be private, personal and privileged.
I ask myself what are the features of leadership in others which I am socially conditioned to admire, trust and respect?
In these times, in this society, where few people offer older citizens respect for old age, I ask myself what are the institutions, groups and individuals who instill in me recognition of admirable factors in people I meet?
I ask myself why do I respond like a programmed robot to superficially pleasing stimuli? Symmetrical, blemish-free features? Musical tone of voice? Staccato, stentorian, male voices of command and control?
Education from the earliest years onwards notably avoids equipping the population with ways to understand how to be Human, how to understand the huge extent to which our own humanity influences, drives, nourishes and sustains us.
As we pass through the mills of education, we can perfectly easily be refined and enriched by being alerted and sensitised to the needs of ourselves and our fellows in simple formal schoolroom scenarios.
It is a deplorably common experience for any shop assistant to suffer gratuitous rude, aggressive or dehumanising customer behaviour from the other side of the shop counter.
Early years education by role-play could give insights into the meaning of added-value to basic social interactions.
For an example in the retail world, we can learn how our understanding of our lack of awareness of the emotional and physical needs of the Other person in any given social interaction can be received as “damage” or as “gift”.
We can learn how those on whose services we rely continuously for our comfort and safety are deserving of our gratitude.
On the other side of this, we can learn to understand what happens when we indulge in violence of thought, words or actions.
We can learn how inappropriate, unconstructive and even damaging are our unfettered, uncomprehending, un-selfaware expressions of our gut reactions.
We can learn how to enhance our interpersonal skills with all service providers, and then in ever-widening circles of humanity, by substitution of frosty, impersonal, fear-based contact-avoidance with direct eye-contact, and the adoption of some of the very same positive customer-service skills taught, so late in their life-cycles, to adult recruits into the labour force.
What a world!
Office life, working life, political life transformed by ownership of self. Our lives no longer characterised to the point of sickness of spirit by abrogation of self-respect in favour of those into whose hands we submit our fate grudgingly and with a stifled heart.
Is it the fleeting face of loneliness I see between the laughter and the smiles?
Yes, let it have its day in the sun.
Plenty of time, oh, there’ll be time enough I say, one day to pine for the weeks spent without a hand to hold, after your life has reached an apotheosis and you have so many hands within arm’s reach of your love-filled heart.
There is no book nor physic to spirit away loneliness.
In an inevitable plurality of beings, loneliness is a fact of human arithmetic. It sleeps at the footstool like a stone lion with its eyes open!
Two things our bodies are not naturally made to tolerate.
One is to be afflicted by violence. While the other is to be afflicted by loneliness.
Steer your course oh so safely, dear Shining Soul, between this Scylla and that Charybdis.
“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,” says Julian of Norwich.
There are large helpings of power and strength in those words! You have sole responsibility to make them so.
You will go out tomorrow into the noisy crowds. And with you, you will carry an enormous cathedral-like and most noble silence.
And you will smile, because your silence is ‘grand’, and you know it is as full of hospitable welcome, as the urging daydreams of your distant distant descendents.
I truly wish my words may fill up your heart with love, dear Friend.
I remind you, you have set out courageous and have begun to confront dark barriers which old traumas and sorrows have solidified into blocks on your path.
Some of these horrid monoliths you have grown accustomed to carrying about with you wherever you go, wherever you are.
This is hard work, exhausting and lonely. There is no relief. The sad thing is, in the end, your beautiful lovable self can curl up and shrink out of sight.
And now I remind you that I still believe in Epiphany.
Being drenched by a spontaneous experience of this magnitude can take a person into a state of raised consciousness, regardless of unresolved internal obstacles.
Here is a place, a state of vibrant new awareness, where there is a continuous, powerful, conscious intuitive connection between oneself and the origin of all life.
This is a sudden inrush into the heart of life force – peace and love – from which all life springs and to which all life returns.
The heart floods with love. Very quickly the lovelight shows up the years, months and days lived in the shade.
Here is the source of a waterfall of Healing.
I liken this potential to enter into transformative awakening, this state of grace by an epiphany, to an arrival at a Portal, as depicted so graphically in ‘Stargate’, the sci-fi series.
However, there is a price to pay. No one steps through such a Portal casually. It takes courage and determination, sometimes born out of desperation and repeated suffering, to embark on such a rite of passage.
A person who has acknowledged and begun a journey of self-discovery, this person is unavoidably on course to rediscover the lovable, as well as the loving self.
The loving self I say, because you know you love and you have loved, and you can love. Giving such as this comes rather naturally.
Can you be loved so willingly in these familiar ways by your own self? In a nutshell, can you love yourself?
Can you “be love” ?
Some call the opening of a significant life journey a falling in love again with the self.
“Again” because the original self “is” love. The early human baby, to whom the future has no meaning, is all about present immediacy. This new being inhabits the space, the playground of love.
Here in this primal arena is also hunger, thirst, desire for security, in whatever order.
The reason (if such an abstraction has any meaning in the context of a newborn) why such primal needs excite us so much is simply that they sustain life.
This is life lived at no remove at all from the life instinct – the will to live, the will to continue to survive. This condition of mind is primitive, urgent, exciting.
And I say it is very beautiful. Indeed it is one of the openings into beauty.
Every sentient being on Earth – in the sea, on land, in the air – lives at this intense level.
Some time later, at the stage of independence, once the need is implanted as a result of whatever life circumstances, banal or dramatic, to discover some answers to Who, What, even Why I “am”, the path at your feet may become luminous and fertile with a rather mysterious sense of promise.
This feeling of being onto something exciting is present for the straightforward reason that there is a strong intuition that some kind of fulfilment is just round the corner.
The possibility of resolution becomes attainable, because you visualised it, called out to it, cried out for it.
All life is interconnected. All interconnections stem from one source. The source is terrific, powerful and overwhelmingly beautiful, and we hear this spoken by many from various directions from time imemorial.
In unity, Humanity has raised its face to this millennial truth. This is how it is.
Little wonder that having stepped out on the pilgrimage to self realisation, the ground begins to tremble, and the urge to continue is irresistible.
The stage is reached where only a hair trigger stimulus will be enough to slam the seeker into a brilliant way of seeing.
Or not!
Epiphany experiences are in rather short supply!
It may happen little by little. A person grows quietly into a new place of understanding and acceptance, with, “So that’s it.” With a few aha’s.
It may happen quickly, like a dam burst. There is no avoiding, no postponing, no ignoring the approach of light, the flowering of the vision of life in grand abundance, and, with this release, laughter and the deep sense of joy-in-residence.
I so truly wish these blessings on you with all my soul’s strength, my dear Friend.
For years I questioned how I can be in total comfort with myself? How can I be happy and my spirits be in balance?
Always these questions around introspection and self-enquiry for me.
After my very young inner child had successfully built grand defences against early trauma, the sea of companionship receded from me and I was on my own fortified island.
Marooned as the “me I call myself” long after my defences had ceased to serve their purpose, I was perpetually on an elusive quest to “catch” myself engaged fully in my most completely alive and revealing moments, at peace and in bliss.
So I feel to share again in gratitude and in simple celebration the mutual recognition of light and beauty in another, and the reflection in me.
Here, in another time of writing, is my pixel of truth as a member of humanity… ” So when I try to define my life’s force in words, or dance, or music, or art, it does not resist me, neither can it escape me, because it is me.
On rare exquisite occasions, my life-force can turn towards me and light me up with a smile of a beautiful person whose gaze I meet, and I am melted clean. “
I once put this on paper…” In the intervening time since I first wrote this, I have many times over been ‘melted clean’. Every time this minor miracle happens, my heart tells me, ‘Leap for joy! Loop the loop!’ until the last remnants of grime and sludge disappear from the windscreen of my pedestrian view. “
It is when I am no longer aware of it, and have not ‘reminded myself’ to tell myself that I am happy, that the quintessence of pleasure occurs. It occurs the way a bubbling freshwater spring upwells.
And here, for many years, and indeed for my first 66 years, submission to the joy of the moment – EveryNow – remained a pretty metaphor, an intriguing glimpse of other people’s existences, but never my own.
My route to arrival (in part) at EveryNow was through my furious and repeated focus over an extended period of years on these two puzzles.
What constitutes the bliss that so utterly takes “me” over? And where am “I” at the moment I vanish and become “become” bliss?
Again… what is the experience like to completely “be” someone else? Put in other words, what is it to fully present my own self with the pure distillation of the sentience of another living sentient creature?
By engaging myself in this roller-coaster thought-ride, centrifugal force may fling me off. It is just one of the many ways to lose myself and find the world.
If I care to think on it, this is the best endeavour of all of my powers of understanding and intuition set to the task of vanishing as being me, and to entering into the sacred presence of the essential essence of another. Another man, woman, tree, even a stone!
Less is so much more that it defies description!
And it is this lack of definitive Definitions, this willingness of mine to take the courage of my own spiked curiosity, in the absence of labelling intentions, that brings me to see there are two things which have meaningful existence: Peace and Love.
Love is the child of Light and Peace.
What makes all the foregoing worthwhile and valid? These two: Peace and Love. Peace and Love are qualities which together constitute my heart, my most sacred personal space.
And I have a simple practical way to find myself whenever I am in need, feel troubled, restless or lost.
The reality for me of the existence in me of Love and Peace is not just a chunk of factual knowledge that I can refer to.
Through thick and thin, illness, despair, literal clinical madness and the mayhem of chaos, I know for sure I need only look inwards.
I only need touch into this heart of mine with a smile in order to reignite my entire panoply of reasons to be alive and to continue to live.
Instantly I am driven to raise and praise these qualities and make them known and shared far and wide.
It’s been about sixty-six years. I see life as a Flow. We human beings have more in common with the Swarm of life, than with our individual goings and comings.
Even when outstanding individuals express monumental truths, the light emitted by them is momentary, because their expressions relate to core pillars of existence, and these are what everyone has in common with everything.
If one person sees a fragment of universal brilliance, and urgently shares it, it is not the person, but the starkly appearing light which grabs our attention.
If an artist shines a light on something, that thing is not spotlit, it is some extra thing of everything that is seen illuminated.
I read with fascination and admiration about journeys of awakening on Facebook, and I love to speak about matters of the heart with close friends.
I see more than ever theirs matches my own journey of exploration of ideas about the progress of the soul.
In particular, and most recently, the fundamental predominance of the Swarm, the Collective Spirit or Soul of humanity shows up.
Like the view of the rising of the Sun or Moon, when I as individual progress towards clear unobstructed vision of my place in the Cosmos, I see reflections and similarities in so many other eyes and minds and hearts all along the generations.
My sense is, when discovering threads of thought in common, I tread on shared steps on paths in common.
My sense is of a warm “welcome home” feeling that those puzzles I have independently struggled to understand are valid subjects to struggle with.
I may have passed decades questing for significance and meaningful truths together with myself, separate from the madding crowd, like a hermit, or a Pole Percher, because isolation had been mine for the first 66 years.
My vindication today is I realise that I climbed the mountain perhaps out of ignorance by the long hard route, yet I breathe in the same panoramic views at the summit, as those who were led there by the hand, or even those who rode there easy on cushioned palanquins!
I am a journeyman of old. These apprentices were shown the time-honoured methods, they picked up on the rules of thumb, they gained in skill at a patient pace measured in long Moon cycles.
After such deep cultivation of modus operandi, constructed by past generations in patient travail, and observed with reverential respect by these artisans and fertilised in the genererous company of craftspeople, their time became precious knowledge.
These workers produced their own examples of their crafts using their own dexterity, deftness, lightness of touch. Their learned and time-perfected skills also became a part of their way of life.
They neither boasted nor hid their extensive skills. They were inseparable from who they were. They got on with the job.
What’s my job?
I want to help show others how love, in its blessed power and tenderly disposed majesty, waits with all the patience of the arching sky, to be softly welcomed in.
I want to help show that this startling, monumental and terribly welcome love, when it becomes visible through the thinnest of thin veils, is always ready to hold hands with you in your heart of hearts.
I live to see the sunrise-smile moment of recognition when this love’s first greeting names itself and reveals itself as resident Peace at the core essence of you and of each one of us.
That epiphany moment when you just know darkness will never, can never return!
Blindly seek no stones where only jewels of love pertain. Intense love, though blind, removes every vestige of shade, doubt, fear.
And everywhere there is love.
The best to you on this day’s end, your day’s beginning, whoever, wherever you are on the planet
Your restless heart is your guide and your sentient compassion is the mover.
Only rebefriend your heart, and let your heart lead.
Not very long ago, I used to be eternally questing and questioning, investing the plain truth of the absolute with additional comprehensions and comparisons. I characterise this superficial dance of mine as ‘Living to love’.
I disagree with the popular saying, “Everything happens for a reason”. I see a satisfying completeness, a sighing release of tension, in, “Everything happens.”
Where Everything Happens, the mind is led away from knock, knock, knocking on closed doors. The heart awakes and is free to see No-Door, and goes right on through with the elegant grace of a non-chalant swan.
The more acceptance of the perfection of all that exists replaces desire for answers to existence, the more serenity, peaceful mind, quietude of subtle joys begin to take centre ground and are ready become endless fountains of nourishment and healing. As It Was in the Beginning, etc etc etc.
It took me most of the self-aware years of my life to begin to arrive here. I have ceased to seek new questions. I open the eyes of my eyes to the answers which precede all questions. Answers outnumber questions pretty much to extinguishment!
The ingredients of my understanding were always present. Only I would so enjoy observing them tumbling around! At this moment my washing machine is gurgling contentedly and doing exactly that!
There never is any preparation for the fact of death. When the shock of it affects our loved ones, family, friends, friends of friends or acquaintances, or those with whose names and influences we have grown up, death immediately shakes us to our very molecules.
In a strange way, because death is so extreme, so absolute, death can be trusted. This is a certainty to be grateful for.
Death never hides. It never pretends or is ambiguous. It is subject to no interpretation or comprehension other than by reference to itself alone.
That is what sets the fact of death apart from regular human business. There are no arguments, no halfway compromises. There is nothing else to do but to meet the fact of death with compassion and acceptance.
The only preparation we can offer to ourselves is to explore our innate compassion, to undertake the lengthy process of cultivation of self-love, leading to the humility of Acceptance.
Long years of making a friend of Acceptance may lessen the chaos of the shock when death visits. We can bring to our awareness over time what our natural compassionate impulses mean to us, and we can examine with care and attentiveness the sources, the origins of compassion.
It may seem of practical help to reflect on how the origins of compassion derive both their beginning and ending in death. There is a continuous cyclic flow of energy conservation, whose non-competitive, symbiotic motive forces span the axes of death and living compassion.
Respect is due in equal measure to death’s inevitability and to our ability to deepen our acceptance of death with compassion
What do I have to do to raise my happiness and attract more of it in my life?
I need do nothing new. I need to study nothing new.
When love is the lead emotion and passion has taken the steering wheel, words come into my mind the way sunshine pours down after grey rainclouds have blown away.
When in love, love and the ideas and words for love saturate my mind.
Words! The same words that we all hear in the lyrics of every single love song, classical or popular.
I don’t need to take poetry classes to find the words of love songs and love letters. The words of love they find me. My head is already full of love lyrics the way a greening meadow in March is full of jumping lambs.
What amazingly small amounts of effort does it take to bring to mind the places, events, sounds, sights, foods, scents, and the images of people who made me smile and gave me delight!
My time when goodness animates me is my most precious time.
Every moment of pleasantness, contentment, delight or even ecstacy with which I consciously fully flood my mind and heart can become a permanent star in my mental heaven.
Good times that fill up my attention, whether fleeting half-moments or long term joys, are as critically valuable to me as the droplets of nectar brought back by the honey-bee are crucial to the survival of the hive.
I know I have a mind full of Fixed Stars which will be there to guide me whenever I need them to fill my darker moments with light!
What a wealth of strength and support I can access – right there inside of me for the asking – when I go to the carefully stacked shelves in my storehouse of positive thoughts and recollections.
If I practice surrendering deep into my many tiny moments of everyday humdrum bliss, pretty soon it becomes entirely unnecessary to spend my time entertaining thoughts that are boring, miserable, painful, frustrating, distressing, ugly, fearful, or hate-filled.
When I prefer to shun bitter tastes, sights that sicken, random aggression, or when I step back from the edge of a drop, I am not alone, I am sharing my humanity with my self-preservation. But I go a step further. I extend natural self-protection, and boldly I reach deep into the heart of love.
The redirection of my full attention to anything at all that is positive is not just the simplest of methods to help me lead a life of grateful content. The practise of intense appreciation of the details of pleasure brings a steady acceleration of goodness into my daily reality.
Appreciation leads my hand to gratitude. And that impulse, considerately put into practice, leads to the equal balanced reaction – service.
I find myself rehearsing and repeating the words which describe thoughts of positive things.
I catch myself speaking with passion to my friends, and I choose all of the areas of meaning reserved for a lover, except for those specific key words.
I so enjoy letting my mind pick out with deliberate care vocabulary from the Lexicon of Positive and the Encyclopaedia of Love.
After all, it is supremely logical to want the best for the other person, and if love is at the root of my inspiration of the moment, my reason for engaging must be to show how love distills away all contradiction and quells the fears that inflame pain.
It is perfectly normal to smile under these influences. As my Mother used to tell me, to help me counter my adolescent tendency to dwell on my morose thoughts with a glum face, “Smile and the world smiles with you”.
I wrote the poem ‘Journey’, just as my heart was beginning to open in 2013. The lifelong search for meaning was both beginning and ending.
I have been knocking at an open door. I have been straining to hear echoes from my voice. I have woken up to drag my feet through the unexplained, inexplicable days with my eyes closed.
When an animal like a dog or a bird spots an object of interest, it will race to it. It takes no time out for risk assessment. It consults no preflight checklist, it undertakes no critical path analysis of its intention, and it generally measures its actions against its peer group behaviour not at all.
When “I”, Peter the Pilley, lean into “I” the animal, I have no use for the old and much-thumbed ‘Wiki of What-Ifs’. I can leave it to sit on the shelf in the library of my mind.
The naked flame has no label. The naked flame hurts. That’s all there is to it from my perspective.
My perspective!
Picture a tree in a woodland setting. Here is the label neatly printed, affixed to the trunk. It confirms beyond all doubt this entity’s identity, because it is written: TREE.
Turn away and look elsewhere. Millions of labels are attached to millions of objects, most with subtext and supplementary information.
The naked flame needs its label. Either I acquire it by burning myself, or it is given to me by admonition.
The World of Labels is acquired from our human beginnings. It is a useful and often necessary complement to my navigation. Labels can disappear entirely under the influence of a hallucinogen. Labels will reappear later to be where I am, only to hang around one step in front of me — as persistent and ingratiating self-appointed guides — ready with their irrefutables… “this is this” and “that is that”.
Desperation, frustration and plain old misery can arise if the world of labels is accepted unquestioned. Labels can cage the heart and trap the soul. I am talking about barriers tagged “What if” and “I can’t” and again “not now, some other time”.
It is in the years since the Year of my Life, 2013, that I have seen through the heaviness of damp woollen shrouds, all richly hung with labels. Gradually, as I see mirrored everywhere the living-beingness of things, I have experienced over and over the thrill of recognition.
I stop. I see here the waving antennæ of a single lacewing at rest. What is it? What is it sensing? What does it search for, sifting the sightless drifts of air for what signal? I stop and ask Lacewing.
I stop at a stone on the footpath. It is different, maybe in shape or colour. I stop and ask Stone where did you acquire your shape? What processes and over how long originated your stoniness?
There is a curious, unmistakable recognition of excitement aroused by pausing to enquire In this simple way, where no parent, schoolteacher, employer has shown, instructed or directed before.
There is an urgency in the attraction of this feeling. It is related to, but not exclusive of, the search for an ultimate meaning.
I wanted to repeat the thrill of seeing both myself and the lacewing’s mind disappear under the cross-examination of reading the Mirror of Thisness.
Gradually, over a long period of time, I made my choice. I chose to ask, to see if I can see the unseen in everything I walk past. The more I stop to examine the macrocosm in the microcosm of my immediate surroundings, the more I began to melt away as “I” observer.
The intensity of what is mirrored to me from the life-energies which surround me everywhere, of which in truth I myself am composed, is perfectly able (if I allow it) to blow me away.
Blown away like the seeds on a dandelion. Like the mist over a morning pond. Like drunk with the most intoxicating liquor ever brewed by the ancients of days, in millenia past!
I went for a walk in Roydon’s Wood, near Brockenhurst in the New Forest, one spring not long ago. The months of build-up of house moving stresses demanded release in some forest bathing.
I started going on methodical, mostly solo, backpack rambles in 1978. Till now, I must have covered many thousands of miles, almost all in the south of England.
This woodland walk was not like the others. It felt like it was my very first. The woods and the Big Green of the scenery were not specially different. I was. The intensity of the recognition of pleasure at finding myself at last alone among so many mature trees on a windless Spring day was so surprising that my identity as a social creature had shrunk away. I had become little more than a sensitive receiver and I was filled up with awe and joy.
As I walked, very slowly indeed, “I” experienced the magic of Not Being Here in all its wonder and beauty. I knew what was happening. My self-referential identity had dwindled to unimportant. I willingly gave myself up to the awe of the moment. I had no need at all to reach out and label.
There are many who need little, even no preparation, and who “get it”, this discipline of enquiry into Thisness.
For me, it has been decades of stumbling, falling down, failing, being rescued, not recognising received love, ferociously hating, self-sabotage, asleep-waking, when all I needed was simply to stop and open the eyes of my eyes. I guess years of meticulous study and self-disciplined enquiry could have brought about the reunion of my heart within my identity, but I always rebelled against training.
As it turns out, a time came at the start of 2013, when other people allowed their hearts to share their visibility with my own.
This happened at a time when my courage to understand matched my curiosity discover. The result was an emotional earthquake, an explosive event which removed the decades old protective layers I had placed around my heart.
Since that moment, I have been working to revere and celebrate the continuing discoveries. My EveryNow blog is one way to record these.
My heart is an opening heart. It is no different to your heart. No different to the heart of a stone on the footpath!
Only connect! In an inevitable plurality of beings, I allow myself to melt into Beingness. As often as possible, I melt away the walls of the mind. Let the sighing relief of simply being alive fully take over from the exacting exigencies of imposed imperatives.
The entirety of the potential of the universe is yours and mine, and it only asks to be asked for!
The View at 72+ 