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Friday 7 April 2017

A Pansy for Spring


The idea of 'Pansies' is not my own. It comes from D.H.Lawrence. It didn't originate with him, either. He took it from 'Pensees', thoughts in prose as written by Pascal or La Bruyere. Though in his case it was a collection of short poems to which he conferred the name. And in typical Lawrence style, he amplified on what he was talking about: "Each little piece is a thought; not a bare idea or an opinion or a didactic statement, but a true thought, which comes as much from the heart and the genitals as from the head" ('Introduction to Pansies' in 'The Complete Poems of D.H.Lawrence'). Elsewhere,
Lawrence describes 'real thought' thus: "Thought is a man in his wholeness wholly attending."

'Pansies' is my mood - at this moment at least. Over the past eight months or so I have done a fair wack of writing, exercised my faculty of discursive thought, following a number of threads which I have felt it necessary to follow.

This has all been good, and I have reaped benefit. But I sense a change. Conceptualising, that certain way of thinking, has its place, but should be allotted no more than its due. This was presaged in the Tarot (at this moment, half my readers raise their eyebrows skyward, shrug their shoulders, and go and make lunch. So be it....). A Full Moon reading in the middle of March spoke strongly and insistently of 'banishing a skill', letting go. And work, a project, broken, along with its attendant ambition. Then, New Moon at the end of the month: new cards, a reading bathed in feeling, and the power of the dream. No swords, the image of the mental plane.

Related to this is a feeling that I have been doing many different things - writing, reading, communicating, walking, planning, discussing, cleaning, and goodness knows what else. All of these things are good things: I have succeeded in concentrating my life and its purpose so that little extraneous matter remains. Yet still it all can seem a bit of a jumble. I strive to experience the overarching intent - or presence.

Self - Soul - Sun (the Divine) is one way that Neil Kramer describes the journey along the mystic path. I'll buy that. 'Self' in this instance is what I sometimes call ' the petty self'. It is concerned with the matters of the everyday. Many people never see beyond its incessant, inexhaustible demands. It has its place. 'Soul' is 'big picture you'. The concerns of Self are as dust to Soul: mortgages, pensions, jobs, money; security, happy marriages, health even. Or if Soul does address these issues, it is from a perspective that is competely different from that which everyday life approaches them with.

Soul simultaneously seems to look after you -  it can be the guardian angel - yet is ruthlessly indifferent to our cares, fears, anxieties. It is, I suppose, intermediate twixt everyday me and the divine. And in -isms like Christianism this miraculous inner gift gets projected onto the priesthood, the cardinals, archbishops and popes; a disavowal of our own inner wealth.

I concede that things have been a bit different since the severe illness I succumbed to just over two
years ago. During those weeks of enforced doing-nothing, my everyday mind had no choice but to simply shut down as well. Many facets of the petty self ceased to function, and in the ensuing silence (aside from the incessant din of coughing) something else came through. This 'something else' had made its presence known before, in fits, starts, and trickles for years if not decades. But now it decided to move centre stage. Soul, daimon, anima, guardian angel, call it what you will: its voice came through loud and clear. It was ready to communicate, to converse. And it became my little secret, our communication. Part of me was done with 'this world', the 'deep concerns of everyday life' as Castaneda ironically calls them in 'The Active Side of Infinity'. Channels were opened up which have steadfastly refused to shut down again - not completely at any rate.

There doesn't seem to be much of a place for the Self - Soul- Divine thing in Buddhism, at least not in its more exoteric forms, and in the ways that I learnt and practised it. In Buddhism there's samsara, which is a bit crap; and there's nirvana, which is all freedom, release, liberation. Except in its more developed forms of thinking, where it is pointed out that nirvana and samsara are two sides of the same coin. You can't have one without the other, so you might as well just relax and go eat breakfast.

In case any Buddhists should feel indignant at my portrayal of its teachings, yes I know, I've simplified and caricatured. And if you're feeling indignantt, that's part of your samsara, so get over it.....

Self - Soul - Divine is better sourced in the fragments, the bits and pieces, that have come down
through the various mystical traditions of the west. Somewhere in the middle of that series of programmes 'The Great Work' (readily viewable on Youtube), Georgia Lambert delineates the different levels of meditation. The practice of meditation, she says, culminates in the ability to 'Shut up and listen'. And learning to shut up and listen is one way to look at the theme of this pansy. Too much mental activity, too much discursive thought, and you're dead. Forget it. Too much internal noise and chatter, even about apparently 'important things', has to be treated as an indulgence to be chucked out. Lots of reading and writing goes out the window, too. We're doing something a bit different. We're tuning in to 'Soul Intuition', outside and beyond the ruminating mind. And 'Shut up and listen' has a different feeling to it than the Buddho-Hindu mantra 'Be Here Now'. Shut up and listen implies a fine-tuning, a marvellous opening to intuition, an active and intentional receptivity. Whereas in comparison, being here and now sounds a bit passive and stupid to me.

I am grateful to the compilers, translators, and interpreters of the western tradition fragments. Some of this material has spoken eloquently to me. In particular, in the context of this pansy, in valuing and validating emotional and intuitive experience in ways which nothing that my decades in Buddhism did. I have been able to breathe a deep sigh of relief at having aspects of my experience properly acknowledged by anyone other than myself, it seems for the first time.