I found it very curious, really. We ('we' being my wife and I) were strolling near where the ferry joining the little Hebridean island with the Scottish mainland arrives ......... twice daily. Two young ladies were stood there, beside their modest display of leaflets and literature. Being the inquisitive type, my wife went over to take a look. 'No, no. Don't do that!' I screamed silently to myself, as she made to inspect the items on show. Hoping to catch news of a boat trip to watch seals and other wildlife at reduced prices, without doubt. One of the young ladies threw a smile in my wife's direction, and she realised. Moving swiftly away, she joined me as we continued to stroll in the morning sun.
Christians. Of the fundamentalist, evangelical, every-word-of-the-Bible-is-the-literal-word-of-God variety. This is the way and the only way; believe and be saved. Any other route in life and you're stuffed in hell. Literalism in a religious nutshell.
It was a sight that I found curious on two counts. First up, the islands of the Outer Hebrides, especially the northern ones, remain a lingering bastion of the religion of Biblical literalism. Sunday is the day of the Lord: no shopping, no drinking, no lots of other things. When a new Sunday ferry to the Scottish mainland was announced a few years back, local opposition was vehement. The word of the Good Book is followed here in a way unknown elsewhere in the British Isles. It is the last place on the planet that needs a couple of young ladies on the slipway spreading the message of the Bible to the newly-arrived.
Secondly, and more fascinating still, is this. Here are our goodly missionaries, telling all and sundry about sin, salvation, the Word, the Lord. Come to us and be saved! Yet just up the road - over the beds of flowers and grass, past the cows lazily chewing early lunch, across the dunes, to the white sand beaches and the infinite space of sea and sky - there you may well find him (by convention, we'll use 'he') -God.
God: a word and a notion that I have spent the past fifty years dismissing, denigrating, trashing. And with reason. What crimes, inhumanity, wanton viciousness, delusion, confusion, ignorance, perversion, have been done over the last two thousand years in the name of 'God'. Yet this is unmistakeably the word that comes to mind, and which seems best suited to the presence that can be felt in certain places on these magic isles. Be still, awake, quieten your ego and its habitual chatter. Open your heart and empty your mind. Relax into the eternal present and listen to the divine presence all around.
It is the mystical way, direct experience. Nothing else will do. It is one of the paradoxes, and one probably lost on the goodly Christian ladies at the jetty, that God, the divine, whatever, can be experienced only after one has left behind any ideas of God, the divine, or whatever. We also, may I suggest, need to leave behind any notion of the 'off-planet God' as John Lash terms it. Instead, again following John Lamb Lash and the Gnostics, we look to communication with Gaia-Sophia. Divinity ain't out there, literally in the heavens beyond. It's right here, in the belly of the Earth, if only we can develop eyes to see.
I recently experienced a most strange thing. It was as if I were two distinct minds simultaneously. Over the past year I have allowed an overly discursive, overly wanting-to-tie-things-up-and-understand kind of mind to calm down, to take a back seat on the bus. My thinking, and my experience as a whole, has become increasingly direct, down to earth and earthy. I feel better for all this; and it is a necessary prerequisite for that experience of divine presence such as I sensed on Berneray and North Uist. Anyhow, I was engaged in a moment of discussion where an abstract and abstracted mode of thinking unavoidably came into operation. To my surprise, I kind-of saw this abstract 'mind' separate from 'me', rising up into the air as a bubble. So there were two minds in operation at the same time: one, my natural, body-based mind; the other, this abstracted bubble of consciousness.
The experience led me to consider once more the Gnostics and the theory of archon intrusion. It is precisely this abstracted, let us say synthetic, mode of thinking that is the essence of archon infection. Maybe this was the archontic mind, the foreign installation, momentarily at work in a mind (mine) that has become increasingly free of archontic influence. The archontic mind is synthetic, non-organic, given to simulation, eternal fabrications and abstractions. Living in the body, in the senses, in direct experience, in constant mindfulness, is the key to ridding oneself of archontic influence, it would seem. Be authentic, and the archons have no choice but to flee. Their 'foreign installation' will at the least be de-activated, and fall into disuse. It's a weird idea, but the only one that touches upon my own weird, uninvited, experience of a few weeks back. 'Come to the Outer Hebrides. Direct experience of the divine. Send the mind parasites packing.' It's unlikely to appear in the tourist literature anytime soon, though.....
