Imagine yourself in the same place on the same day in late 2016. What was one of your greatest challenges or perceived obstacles in immersing in your Symphonic Activity this year?
No grail, no sword in stone, no clear path ahead. My dogged Quest has been mired in indecision. The final prompts to imagine the ‘Symphonic Creation’ that would raise the baton on January 1st has been met with silence. The orchestra is on strike, the chairs empty.
Why? When I thought I was doing so well-well… well enough. ( All the staging posts on Quest 2016- and work backwards) can be seen on my Odyssey site- since it seemed appropriate) This is more relevant to the journeys of others.
I wondered whether it was a wise reluctance to commit to what deep down I suspected might fail; or whether I had met a roadblock in all that collective resolve. My fellow travelers are conjuring up stunning websites, (that define them as a ‘brand- without doubt’) venturing onto ‘Departments of Hope’, holding joyful retreats on the sandy shores where sun shines. I truly envy this bright youth and wish them well. I truly do.Yet the belief that we create our reality might be tempered ( and legitimately) by age, fatigue, and having already created a ‘Symphonic Treatise’, the Book-That-Wrote-The- Life, and maybe I would be wise to pack it in, and set about clearing out the ‘might-be-useful-one-day’ both practically and metaphorically.
Rather than ask you to pick over half written plays, memoirs fading like dye in water, stories needing a quick burnish I am going to tell you why I only partly believe in the ‘create your own reality’ adage. This decision was prompted by a post on Synchronicity in which the writer, Viv Tuffnell, recounted something that seemed to validate her decision to leave the road more travelled, for the one less travelled, only to find a clear and explicit encouragement to keep going. I have linked to it in the post below.
Now, about roads utterly un-travelled I know quite a lot, and about synchronicities that accompany them. When I was deemed mad I understood that I looked as mad as any March hare. I knew I wasn’t but I did not blame those who thought I was. I had departed the shores of time and matter in which synchronicity only peeked like occasional violets through the stones of seasonal tramping and set full sail into the field of instantaneity, and reading thought before given words to wing it. Thought was event. A question that arose in the mind was answered immediately. There was only Now. Time and causality were a collective idea of partial understanding, created by the belief that matter was separate from consciousness. Hence the delays between them.
When you live in Now, what you understand is that Time is a kind of blindfold. It protects us from the consequences of thought, since we are not always in control of thought, it is a filter by which consequences can be assigned to others, the ‘field’, and we can be blithe, and semi-irresponsible. Without that you are naked as a babe breasting a drowning sea. To stay afloat I had to dance, and if you dance in the streets of London ( and you don’t carry leaflets for a vaudeville) you are clearly mad.
Why did I have to dance? To shut out the horror of ungoverned thought, the judgements , the hatred, the competitive, the ridicule, the savage glances, as easy to read as a billboard. Humanity exposed for what it is. In such a state it looked like a Goya painting or a Bruegel. Would you not shut it out? Is that insane? Nobody asked for an explanation and Bruegel wore a white coat.
Why am I telling you this? Because the ‘Power ( and peril) of Now’ or the episodes of synchronicity are believed to be a kind of ‘messaging’ that speaks to those ready for them, as though aligning right thought will bring the rewards that affirm it, a safe pointing finger. This new-age philosophy of ‘make your reality’ fails to take account of the ballast provided by other weighty contributors of unconsciousness and worse. This belief emphasizes an old/new virtue still governed by intention and will, whereas I know that letting go of intention and will and swimming in a tempestuous sea changes every moment of now. Events reflect the field of consciousness. Alive to the field, reading events is more a matter of integrating an ability to swim in a rolling tide, and avoid the rocks you can clearly see, or rest upon them. They do not sink below the surface or melt; they were not your creation.
If I have a quarrel with this belief in an imagined reality brought into being by a vivid application of focused intent, it is not that I believe it erroneous, but rather that it fails to understand that we are the recipients of a field, receivers as much as creators. Weaving a path needs to take account of that. We might be able to take the reins of ourselves, but the landscape has contours that shapes out path. The destination changes every moment.
Pieter Brueghel the Younger [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
“Cabezas en un paisaje” by Francisco Goya – http://www.elangelcaido.org/creacion/200412/200412cabezas.jpg. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cabezas_en_un_paisaje.jpg#/media/File:Cabezas_en_un_paisaje.jpg
PHI lippa. Letters of Love 
That lack, perceived as rejection, is rarely personal. I often forget that the worlds around us have their own agendas and struggles, and this forgetfulness tends to make me feel deflated, unnecessarily.
End of February then, if that’s your intuition 🙂
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As you say … It seems to be that what gives synchronicity its importance is the integration of the outer event with the inner co-ordinates, the inner state ‘reads’ the outer event in a way that another person, (or another moment) could not …
Some call it luck, but we recognise a true event inside when there’s a resonance between the personal and the universal will (for lack of better words.) This doesn’t mean, in my opinion, that we should stop banging on the closed door, it just means the door will only open when there’s this resonance. Frustrating …
Waves make a lovely metaphor, which is why surfing on top of a wave must be ever so exhilerating. I’ve been there, metaphorically speaking, a few times in my life and know what it feels like. I long for the sensation to return, of course 🙂 But it’s forever a matter of timing we can’t control.
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I read recently the seeming truth that urgent wanting, or dogged will is accompanied by the equally urgent admission of lack. I lack, I lack alas is answered by ‘sure you do, and have more of it!’ That makes sense to me, but perhaps I am arguing for a reason to hibernate until the end of February. If I wake the world may be different without me banging on the closed door of something I no longer remember!
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Thank you Philippa – the seas are always choppy and those moments of calm are to be cherished. As are the wow moments when there is no apparent cause for two events happening at the same time. And to re-cognise it as such. I have a problem with ‘mindfulness’ now hijacked as corporate business; or the new age value of now-ness and go with the flow. It is important to step out of the flow many times and put the anchor in, and step out of the boat and onto shore and put into action what needs being acted upon.
And, re the individual and the collective – each influences the other.
Well, that’s my 2 cents worth …maybe a ha’penny worth ..
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Thanks Susan. The prevalent imperative of ‘You make your life’ (by imagining it or post-it notes that summon the fates!) fails to see each of us in a flow largely determined, as much, by the climate ( physical and psychological) and by others. It has become imperative to believe this, and live by it- a new kind of jack-boot orthodoxy, even if accompanied by kisses.
I suppose I am instinctively averse to orthodoxy of all kinds so my tuppence worth is simply to throw a different dice into the pot!
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You bring up good questions Forcing ones will on the world is not the letting go and accepting the flow that is taught by some mystics. Personally, I do not think that swimming in a sea of change and letting yourself be washed along by the currents of events is any better than struggling hard to achieve your will, assuming you are lucky enough to have one. Both courses are, I think, problematic. Balance is always the key to happiness and success, yet the drama must continue and the dream must sooner of later meet with the dreamer.
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One of the dangers of venturing any opinion is the limits of language that, by selecting a momentary focus, seems to imply the exclusion of others. Then one finds oneself defending what never was definitive, or even emphatic! It seems to be that what gives synchronicity its importance is the integration of the outer event with the inner co-ordinates, the inner state ‘reads’ the outer event in a way that another person, (or another moment) could not. Rather than a ‘signal’ ( which is how it always appears because the ‘wow’ factor is undeniable) I perceive it as a moment of integration between the individual and the field of causality. It can never be contrived by will, but only recognised when it happens.
I wish I did not regret posting such thoughts. Perhaps I should take greater care- but then I would probably never venture a blog post!
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Precisely correct about new age philosophy missing much of the point. I have finished my book, Final proofing is happening this week. I will be happy to send you a copy. It is shorter than I thought it would be––just 120 pages––bur much more powerful than I expected.
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Congratulations Ken. I would be happy to receive a copy.I hope you find readers, appreciative readers. Re the Point, I think the habits of sustaining individuality as the central ‘creator’ infects, and prevents real acceptance of the collective, but maybe a kind of willful blindness is necessary just to keep living?
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