Is it not the best of things to be seen fully clothed yet as entirely naked as newborn?
The brightness thereof overtops and shadow-shunts the sallow sight of self every, every time.
One day, it was the first full day of my life. I did not know it was, because I didn’t know my life was mine to know. And I did not know the knower of my life, though I did sense the curious presence of a newness so new, I could not yet know it was so near to me as to be within me.
Samuel Johnson’s dictum occurs to me. ‘When you’re tired of London, you’re tired of life’.
What the Great Fellow glossed over is that he assumed that we all receive life’s enjoyments as gifts from the external world – in his example it was London life.
Nowadays I can’t conceive of any momentary experience not enhanced by some sort of learning curve, all the way through my life to the end.
I ask you this.
What characterises a person who is constantly expecting to learn new things on the road, and is more often than not ambushed by the surprising amount of all the stuff available to learn on the way, provided that all senses are prepped and receptive?
One answer is a person such as this has to be in the condition of a serenely untroubled and always available openness. Also, there must be an absence of externally conditioned, self-obstructing barriers to a cat-like curiosity.
It is a wild, open, wide open alertness, a feral immediacy of awareness of sensory input, unfiltered by intellect, which is largely responsible for bringing me, my heart and my sacred spaces into contact with the EveryNow.
By now, after years of redirected attention to the minutiae of detail and to the absence of time in which details bathe, I have the capacity to hurl my awareness in there pretty much on demand.
I’m on foot, intent on my way to the bus stop, I’m looking intently out of a car window, I’m bicycling and I focus my intention on keeping upright, uninjured, staying alive.
These are some examples of the sweeping nature of the changes that I have been overtaken by these last few years, since 2013, the Year of my Life.
By self-discipline over a period of years, by making self-conscious choices in the words I choose and in what I choose to do, the most precious thing I seem have acquired is a lack!
I lack the overlay or inlay of concept, of internally verbalised labels at the point at which my senses interface with objects in the world. Think “cat”.
I have been regularly making choices – namely choosing in the first instant to tune in to the Thisness of things. The closer to Thisness, the more the love, and the more there is to love. My motivation to exercise this intensity of unblinkered enquiry has become habitual through a self-reinforcing positive feedback.
And how amazing is this “feedback” !
If I strive to melt Peter the Pilley away in order to let the fly, the flower, the star, the shining soul-light of my friend assume the entire arena of my awareness, what then?
What happens?
What is happening, with no reasons asked or given, no frown of reasoning, no intervening rationalisation obscuring the way, is that I am infused, like tea in boiling water, with love.
This is love, as axiomatic as the sun’s atomic heat, where the object of love and love itself blends into one and the same. Love and the object of love indistinguishably the same.
The essential truth, the nature, the living-beingness of everything is love. Oh, and peace-in-perpetual-motion as well, but more of that another time.
I picture myself in a place where I can access calm.
The picture is of an outdoor summer gathering. It’s a family festival of music making, circle dance, sacred chant, poetry, natural refreshments, compassion, companionship, and healing therapies for body and mind.
I picture marquees, coloured and plain, set in green parkland. My spirit is all levity, gratitude for ample abundance among friendly people of good intent.
Calm is important to my wellbeing. I believe in the calm induced by this welcome sunshine. I move to enter a wide opening into a dark and spacious marquee.
As I go in, no change happens. I am so calm like this, safe inside the lofty drapery of this tented space. Going out again I am all calmness when the sun shines on me.
My calm is mine to soak into my heart, here inside where I am calm me, and outside, where I am calm me.
The place where I found my will to surrender all of me into calm has lost its relevance. All I know is that my most sacred personal space, once empty, is full, is filled up and brimming with calm.
The charm of this peace with its home in my heart has the satisfaction of sweetness.
I picture where I am. I am inside where calm is and the sun is shaded. I am outside where the calm is and the sun shines. I choose to surrender to myself with sweet abandon in both places.
Calm is independent of location.
Describe to my eyes a smoke-ring.
My eyes see a toroidal shape. A doughnut. It is filled entirely with emptiness. My eyes notice this because it’s transparent. Like a bubble or smoke ring.
It curls around itself as it rises, making and remaking itself. Until, slowly, chaos disintegrates it. As it forgets its identity, I am returned, like a floating feather landing on earth, to my own.
My calm is a toroidal state. Its beauty, its fascination is that it is inside itself in mesmeric motion. Calm does not last. It is birthed in fragility. It withers because it exists unsupported at its centre – my centre.
The fractal nature of the intricate network which composes calm is subject in extremely sensitive ways to entropy.
Welcome Toroidal calm. Toroidal calm is the twin Sister-Brother of peace
Calm blesses my most sacred heart of hearts with positive energy from arrival to inevitable departure. Calm exists like a toroid, in light and in dark, in fullness and in emptiness wherever I am at, whatever I am doing, and for no apparent reason. Calm has no use for reason for its justification.
I go into and I go out of light and dark. Light and dark are flowing with the invitation of graceful infinite energy of calm. Just like a pretty ring of smoke, calm is ungraspable.
What is it that blinds me, eyes open, from seeing? Is it that first impression which wastefully draws my attention away from the place I will find the missing clue? Does my ape-brain delude me when it tugs me towards the big, the immediate, the blindingly obvious?
E=Mc² ! This is a wow-fact. Whose attention has not always been on the atom bomb fireball, the mushroom cloud, or the supernova diorama drama?
How many point nines on top of ninety-nine emphasise the percentage of emptiness over matter in an atom? Who’s not accepted the invitation to float in awe deep among the inner spaces within the confines of an atom’s planetary cloud?
Those tiny unconsidered scraps of matter in the atom are an expression of massive potential energy. Massive to near beyond comprehension.
I have fallen into the trap of seeing the fly on the wall, not the wall itself. These days if my attention is directed to a thing, I immediately search for its context. What is the thing embedded in? On what scale does it relate to all other things akin and not akin to itself?
For are not you and I, and all creation and all that is, made of this stuff that the wall is made of?
Is it time for us to show those unconsidered coalescences of matter a greater legitimacy, respect and attention, than to be noseying around in the spaces between the elementary particles. Do you align with particles? Do you feel more at home with space? What do you say?
Every single day, and specially when the day comes to an end, as it is about to in a few minutes for me, I am given an overwhelming sense of the utter magnificence of the privilege of just being one single alive person.
Millions that come before me are close enough to my head, that my ears hear their murmuration – if I wish.
Their voices are talking in thousands of dialects. The clatter of them creates a tapestry of fractal meanings I comprehend only with a visceral intuition.
What do they speak of? They speak of the billion ways to laugh out fear.
My breathey existence is here now, all but totally undetectable, invisible and inaudible under the skies beneath the arch of the Milky Way. This home galaxy observes in its majestic way. It leans in the opposite direction to me.
This is the silence of a hundred thousand Niagara Falls in my ears that no one can hear, not even me.
And am I one spark a-glow?
Am I deep at rest upon a planet-wide cradle of rock, air, water and magma?
Do I not circle and circle and swirl this my humanity with neither shield, nor sword – only love?
If it were true that we also did not care what the future may bring, we would not take notice of the cyclic nature of our existence, nor would we attribute enough importance to it to wish one another the best outcome that each would attempt to extract from that illusory place of wishfulness called the New Year.
I do care. I do take notice. And I attribute more urgency and importance even than do you yourself to your own successful outcomes in this twelvemonth starting.
We are all one, we share DNA, we survive the centuries and we thrive, not in turning our back on one another’s trials and tribulations, but because we wholeheartedly accept that we utterly depend on the successes of the myriad choices everyone makes that together form the networks of humanity which support me, you, everyone and everything.
The appreciation of the pure and mathematical fundamental principles which underlie the way living beings assume their form and ‘operate’ is one essential bridge towards a deeper understanding of my place in this experience of being alive.
At times I might veer off and begin to wonder, “Is Life math?”
Then I remember that neither one thing nor the other came first.
My consciousness arises from both.
In the moment I exist “EveryNow”, I am both alive and an ineffable part of life. I am both alive and I am being lived by life.
Who cannot be brimming with excitement at the unfolding potential of discovery where no two moments are alike, and the centre-stage constant is newness? This excitement is endless in the way of fractal endlessness.
It is the acknowledgement of, and the gratitude for the enjoyment of this very endlessness which is entirely sufficient and delightfully, finitely my own.
This is what gives rise to the chuckle of the enlightened.
I am as appreciative of this as it is humanly within my power. And I try to act accordingly.
Samuel Johnson’s dictum, When you’re tired of London, you’re tired of life, occurs to me.
What the Great Fellow glossed over is that he assumed we all receive life’s enjoyments as gifts from the external world – in his example it was London life.
Nowadays I can’t conceive of any momentary experience not enhanced by some sort of learning curve, all the way through my life to the end.
I ask you this.
What sort of person is it who constantly expects to learn new things on the road, and who is frequently ambushed by the surprising amount of stuff available to learn, provided that all senses are prepped and receptive?
One answer is it has to be a serenely untroubled and always available openness. It must be a lack of externally conditioned, self-obstructing barriers to a cat-like curiosity.
Have you noticed? When they both ramp up their attention, cats and artists have a thing in common: they narrow their eyes.
It is a feline, feral immediacy of sensory input, unfiltered by intellect, which is largely responsible for bringing me, my heart and my sacred spaces into contact with the EveryNow.
By now, after years of redirected attention to the minutiae of detail and to the absence of time in which details bathe, I have the capacity to hurl my awareness in there pretty much on demand.
Such is the sweeping nature of the changes that I have been overtaken by these last few years, since 2013, the Year of my Life.
By self-discipline, by making continual self-conscious choices over a period of years, I say the most precious thing I seem have acquired is a lack?
I lack the overlay or inlay of concept, of internally verbalised labels at the point at which my senses interface with objects in the world. Think cat.
I have been regularly applying choice. Namely, I choose in the first instant of sensory contact to tune in to the Thisness of things. My motivation to exercise this intensity of unblinkered enquiry has become habitual through a self-reinforcing positive feedback.
And how amazing is this “feedback” !
If I strive to melt Peter the Pilley away in order to let the fly, the flower, the star, the shining soul-light of my friend assume the entire arena of my awareness, then what?
What happens, with no reasoning, no intervening rationalisation obscuring the way, is that I am inescapably infused, like tea in boiling water, with love.
The essential truth, the nature, the living-beingness of everything is love. Oh, and peace-in-perpetual-motion as well, but more of that another time.
When I started my EveryNow blog in 2018, I began to reread and redraft every blog before publication to make as certain as I could they make sense to others and the ideas are offered naked and free of concealed meanings, obscure convoluted expressions, or other examples of my own muddled undisciplined thinking.
The application of this methodical analysis is pleasurable and stimulating, because results come thick and fast.
I tease out into the open the logical progression of my ideas, I replace fuzzy areas of meaning with highly precise alternative words or phrases. I turn passive verbs into the active voice. I use nouns in place of -ing suffixed gerunds. I simplify concatenated sentences by trying to reduce them to simpler shorter ones each with subject, verb, object. Shake-down like this lubricates meaning and clears understanding.
The main criteria I apply is to put myself in the ears and shoes of my readers. I test every phrase, sentence and sometimes every word against its possible receipt by me as if equipped with the ears and eyes of others.
I have good reason to take unusually potent delight in this role play.
Imagine me in my late teens and for most of my twenties. I was too self-conscious of the sound of my own voice, and even of my inner voice, to be able to comfortably remain in company or in companionship. As they left my mouth, the words I spoke returned not as an echo, but with an instant direct feedback. Words from me sounded disturbing, because I could only filter my understanding through my own understanding. I could not hear myself speak as others might hear me. If I imagined my words as they sounded to others, I would imagine a room full of heads swivel in my direction, effectively shutting me down.
I guess it might end up like this for a person in long-term solitary confinement. We are all of us first and foremost gregarious. The environments with the most damaging effects on our emotional and mental health are loneliness and physical pain. When there is only one voice to pay attention to, the inner voice compensates by taking precedence, because it substitutes itself for the lack of the company and conversation of other humans.
In my late twenties, various factors combined to reset to normality the harmonious and effective functioning balance of my attention between the significant and the trivial.
From the time around these healing, self-reconciling events, I can date the beginning of my reintegration with the world of life, love and productive work. I could say I rejoined society from which I had felt isolated, distanced, unable to comprehend. This marked the beginning of a sense of a gradually rising tide of joy and gratitude for life lived.
Before this it was living to love – amusing, mildly decorative, but shallow, ephemeral, lacking in lasting significance.
After this I was, and am, loving to live – broadly capable of sensing and reaching out into the search common to all human minds and hearts for spiritual, philosophical and essential meaning to the experience of being alive.
I see in this flower and in the faces of all flowers, condensations of nature’s beauty. I see clearly their powerful concentrated visible identities with no secondary or tertiary meaning or intention.
In the open flower is the face of existence, thisness, the Tao. With no axe to grind and no message to convey, the flower is composed in its entirety of the Gentleness of Being
I believe in the truth of what I see and say with all the fibre and iron will of my entire being.
And as I say it, I feel the absence of the intensity of my feelings as I am describing them, because my utterance, like the rose, is “I AM”, purely and simply, no more no less.
Without being asked, the pink flower contains all answers to more questions than exist in the known and unknown skies.
I can see in its impermanent magnificence the rose is a Library of Alexandria before that devastating fire
I remember so well playing in my red wool swim trunks among the “Stooks”.
This was in the lush arable Vale of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, where the locals called these fresh harvested corn bundles Stooks. With the Bucks burr, the vowel was lengthened into a sliding diphthong /əʊ/, like the vowel sound in “know”.
Our Hazel Cottage is listed in the Domesday Book [1086 AD]. Mud and wattle walls nearly a yard thick. A bread oven in one wall. A barn extension where a donkey was housed. Until the early 1960s, we, like the few other thatched cottage residents in this tiny No Through Road hamlet set around cow pasture, had no running water, no mains gas and no electricity.
Hazel Cottage, Sedrup Green, Hartwell, Bucks. Listed in the Domesday Book of 1086 AD
I was one little lad with sandals. The standing corn stubble scratched and made tiny bloody incisions in our ankles. We cheerfully ignored the discomfort.
Peter Pilley, Sedrup 1954
I and a couple of friends, children of the farm labourers, tried to heave these sheaves of sisal bound corn together to make a cosy “den”. It was hot work in the early 1950s summer. I must have been very young, because the stooks were almost too heavy to lift!
Gilly Osborne, Peter Pilley, Wendy Miller, ‘Splendid’ Graham. Sedrup Farm in the background
My mother was an accomplished painter in oils. Hanging on our wall today is her painting. I know that field well. I cherish it for its powerful childhood memories. It shows a field of such stooks after the huge great big noisy clattering harvester binder had passed.
The next group of farm workers would come with pitchforks to heft the stooks up onto a flatbed cart drawn by tractor.
Literally as happy as the day is long
At the impressionable age of 8, I was invited to climb up into the iron seat of a red painted Massey Ferguson diesel tractor. I was shown how to keep the clutch depressed while the engine was idling. On the shouted signal, I was to let the clutch engage to let the wagon crawl to reach the next group of stooks. I corrected myself after a couple of juddering stalls.
My being coopted as driver was not simply a benevolent treat. No one watched over me to see I did it right, or to be “nice” to a kiddie. I released an extra pair of hands to load more sheaves. I guess this was one way the local children got a taste of “real” farm work.
I remember to this day (after 69 years) it was supreme fun. The next time I would be driving a motor car would be around a field at school in 1963. My Mum, when she heard about it, became quite anxious after the event. When we kids came home for tea from frolicking in the corn fields, our Mums had to pick from our skin the tiny long thin black Harvest Bugs. The bugs were biters, though gentle ones.
Happy-go-lucky summer 1954 Hazel Cottage in the background
Sometimes we’d take home leftover lengths of baling twine. In 1965, I had my first car. It was an old Austin A40 in a shocking state. I named it Gertie. I bought it from a schoolfriend for a fiver. I was able to securely re-attach its faulty windscreen using a few yards of this excellent baling twine!
New Austin A40 – Mine was black, and an old banger
In the 1960s, the machines were Balers. They left heavy rectangular blocks of compacted straw strewn over the stubbly fields. They made up into impressive haystacks which looked like houses or castles.
My Dad and I in wellies‘Splendid’ Graham wicket-keeper. Wendy Miller fielding Peter. Her cottage in the background. A giant elm tree, too.
Haystacks composed of stooks were also huge. They had the charming look of an unkempt dog.
Haystack of stooks dwarfs Peter P
More recently, and less picturesque, corn is harvested and the straw is compressed into giant cylinder shapes. They are left covered completely in black polythene all solitary on their empty fields.
One lumen is approximately equal to the amount of light put out by one birthday candle that’s one foot away from you. My Huawei P30 Pro can take a clear photo of a scene lit by one lumen. This fact let’s me assume no scene is beyond its low light capability. Nothing is uncapturable.
When unlit outdoor darkness prevails, however, I return to recall my west Wales country nightwalk in November.
The effect of placing one foot in front of another in pitch dark is to strip away all conscious processing of visual input, and enter that un-modern, uncivilised, unlit, unvectored, primordial space.
Here all mental activity is reduced to one cause and two effects, just as it is for all life in survival mode. Base animal instinct reactions take over.
Alone in the dark countryside there is only either no trigger, or one trigger which releases an Either Or response. These bypass thought. These occupy 360 degrees of visceral attention – hairs raised, breath bated.
When I was walking round Ysbyty Ystwyth, the slightest sound carried this message. On it all military training is built. I rejoiced to recognise it as belonging to me and my kin from well before I ever was born! Clear and loud and deep in my body it is, “Either it eats me; or I eat it!”
Become animal then, I am returned to my origin, forever changed. Respect is due to the universal drivers of survival
Through a sequence of good luck, I salvaged and kept this Czech lead glass crystal doorknob during ten house moves and over 50 years.
It was fixed to my parents’ bedroom door. The slanting rays of the afternoon sun were diffracted into spectral rainbows, just as they are in my photo today.
I must have been 6 or 7 years old, when I stood facing these vivid primary colours for the first time. I was alone in the flat. I remember moving my head slowly to let these extreme pure colours, one after the other, into my eye and so directly into my receptive youngster’s brain.
The explosion of sensory overwhelm transformed into something I was able to understand much later as an elemental transcendental experience.
These colours, even to my ancient adult eyes today, appear to me like the stuff of supernatural science-fiction. They have an unearthly, exquisite beauty. At the same time, they are most observably real as well as incomprehensible, outlandish, utterly indescribable intensely private personal experiences.
I can easily date from that moment till now my perennial search for all and any transcendental experiences to this first childish encounter with the wonder of sunlight split into its constituent rainbow of colours.
Reason and reasoning set limits to the transmission of my experience of lived bliss.
The words and concepts academics use often stand like screens shielding the reader from an intuitive appreciation of non-duality, non-judgemental views, non-attachment, or unconditional love.
It has to be so, if they are to satisfy the questions people put to those who understand.
The bliss of existence in the full arc-light of its own being defies analysis. True, it yeilds a portion of its omnipresent magic to descriptions of what it is not.
in my EveryNow blog, I avoid cause and effect, question and answer, meaning extracted from hard fact. I mine for magic, not meaning.
The questions people ask of meaning are like cars run out of petrol overtaken long ago by answers which never needed questions to attain motion!
In EveryNow, if I am able, I play with the elementary particles of awe that whizz so fast, they look to produce a steely curtain.
As I invite closer and closer approach, it is seen only as a diaphanous veil of excited curiosity through which I invite the brave to walk, dressed in fool’s costume, with furled supersonic wings of angels
Photograph from the viewing port of Starship EveryNow taken at the Southbourne Overcliff path.
Who knows what who thinks they mean, when they glower at another and say “Go! Go back to where you came from!”
Where do “they” come from? Do “they” not come from there where they and we all are going?
We arise 🌱 we flower 7🥀 we melt away 🪐
Here is the beauty that can heal it all. We inescapably disappear into the same void out of which we all are spawned and towards which we are simply walking back home. We were sparingly scattered atoms and wave-particles which coalesced and reconstituted to form temporary shapes we call ourselves.
He or she who says, “Go back, get away, get lost!” is a slave to ignorance of the unity and of the single energetic origin of herself or himself.
My peace of mind and body washes me clean every time I remember the mind-boggling enormity of the place in which we all derive our living and being.
My photo is of a fragment of the Universe. Your home as much as mine.
While I am out and about on my own Chatting to Things is there magic to be found in an intimate meeting with a stone or a flower along life’s way?
There is a kind of self litmus test that I sometimes do when strolling out. It’s similar to seeing if the power monitor light is lit.
I look into my soma, and I check over how my body is responding to an appreciation of a curve of stem, the stimulating sight of a striation of petal, the pleasurable noise of a whirring flick of sparrow wings.
I ask, am I melting inside like a teenager in love? Does my next breath hardly dare to arrive? Do I obviously desire to smile without any initiating movement in my lips?
Sick or sweet, elevated, neutral, sullen or despondent, I am finding that Love is present EveryNow.
That is how it is. That is how I know it. I am ten times ten thousand per cent alive, just as is everything and everyone, sight unseen
The time is ripe to abolish singleton power. We had success for millenia when small scattered agricultural communities chose reliable people of trusted integrity to lead their decision making and to speak for all to neighbouring communities.
The time is overdue when systems of democratic process adopt flatter, more immediately accountable, group-rule management on behalf of the groups who place them in authority and who place their dependency in their hands.
One person one vote, Yes.
But “No” to handing total executive control to one person for howsoever short a time.
Human ingenuity and research and resourcefulness have developed and continue to develop amazing tools to provide for our comfort and health in ways that are sustainable.
Human frailty, fallibility and unpredictability under pressures of responsibility have proved and continue to prove terrifyingly catastrophic indicators of long term unhealthy development of worldwide humanity.
What benefit can any of these persons offer our descendents, if today we carry on allowing even a tiny number of ignorant and ill-intentioned leaders to do irreparable damage to our planet’s ecosystems on a planet-wide scale?
It’s okay to rebel. No complainant can carry legitimacy, if every one of us does not in everyday life think, do, say, or promote what brings about change for the general good
There are so many layers to the exercise of choice. I can choose! That is a first. I can choose to go. That’s an adventure beginning. I can choose to go with the flow, to disturb nothing when I arrive, to be one among the passing breezes.
And I can choose to know my footfall is noticed by no one and nothing at the shores of time, like my smile to myself in the dark just before sleep overtakes my sore heart!
It’s Zen-like. When I step back from the sharp end and I choose to grasp at nothing, with the careful and compassionate exercise of choice, in the end peace arrives.
Peace takes up residence at my head and feet. I know it’s present, because it loudly makes zero demands of space or time.
As I stand at the sandy shores of peace, do I know if I am the one who watches the ripples rippling? Am I the ripples? My heart cannot be doing with such questions, when it is rippling with love unending 🕊️
The View at 72+ 