Two days ago it gave me great pleasure to introduce you to Jose Diez Faixal’s extraordinary paper in ‘The Lyre not the Flute’. One thing I have reason to understand is the gnawing compulsion that follows a gift of vision, gnawing in his case for forty years. (In mine for a little longer) Finding a language in which to convey something that arches across creation, snakes deeply beneath superficial appearances, surfaces only for long enough to catch a glimpse before submerging, and runs contrary to all received opinion makes for a prolonged loneliness.
The labours of Sisyphus must roll vision against the collective gravity of opposition. ‘Who are you anyway?’ echoes in the mind, and enlarges because vision is a gift not unlike that described by Virgil Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. ( I fear the Greeks even when they come bearing gifts).
The Trojan Horse is an apt reference with the capacity to destroy the citadel of sanity.
The compulsion of an idea carries with it a sense of being unworthy for it and inadequate to find a language to do it honour. What makes it worse is the prevailing climate of hostility to anything that challenges orthodoxy, and the assumption that as ‘beneficiary’ of the idea the unfortunate visionary sets himself ‘above’ those he hopes to reach. Who would seek his place when the mockery, disparagement, cynicism, and open hatred is almost constant? Yet he is a Gurkha on Everest, burdened with an obligation to keep trying, if only to shift the load of responsibility, and set it down.
Jose Faixal admitted that he was not looking for what happened. ‘I was focused on vivential and theoretical research of non-dual Reality. I had no intention of proposing any evolutionary hypothesis. But intuition “fell from the sky” and I felt compelled to check its validity. I’ve been 35 years trying to make the testing with the scientific data that I found’.
It gave me such pleasure to walk with him a little way, and take his arm.
Can anyone understand what receiving a similar arm unexpectedly yesterday might have meant to me? Joe Linker’s response to Involution came late at night, unheralded, and like a fresh wind off the sea. Not just because he wrote what he did ‘this is a book to live with’ but because I sensed that he understood what saying it might mean to me. Such gifts come from the same place as the original ideas do.
Just when I had resolved to turn from it, and walk away, it gave a wave through him. ‘I might be Okay’
Here is Joe’s gift to me, and it might stretch to being shared. Today gratitude is impossible to express!
Involving “Involution,” a book by Philippa Rees
PHI lippa. Letters of Love 