Cairngorm Wild Camp

Broken, Wounded, Healing: a Trilogy for our Time - Part Three

Third Part: A Hebridean Overture

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.....


           

Broken, Wounded, Healing: A Trilogy for our Time - Part Two

Second Part: On the Cross in Glen Moriston

'The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.' Possibly a misquote from Daniel J. Boorstin, but the words say it perfectly anyhow.

Five hours after packing up my dew-drenched wild camp, I emerge onto a road a fair distance from my starting point. By now it is midday, and soon I am speeding through the countryside, transported homeward by bus. Turbines of the Millenium Windfarm - one of the villains in Part One - can be intermittently seen raking the skyline ahead. This is a vulgar industrial factory indeed, set upon a hilltop. To call it 'millenial' is misleading and mocking, a real insult to what Don Juan in 'Journey to Ixtlan' refers to as this stupendous, awesome, mysterious, and unfathomable world.

Leaving behind the higher mountains, we head down Glen Moriston. Once this was a picturesque and unspoilt gateway, linking Loch Ness with the high land to the west. No longer, alas. It has Millenium, of course. Further industrial debris is littered on either side of the road, and soon we pass beneath the recently-constructed giant 'Beauly - Denny power line'. Miles of enormous pylons marching along swathes cut through the trees and over the skyline. An unusual number of 'For Sale' signs are evident, displayed outside properties along the glen and all the way downhill to the little village of Invermoriston. It must surely be coincidence that people are wanting to move out in droves just as the pylons come marching in and the windfarms hit town. 'No Moriston Windfarm' banners are on show outside many of the properties hereabouts: the feelings of at least a section of the local population are clear.

This is an area under saturation bombing from the dark triffids of wind. Millenium is only a beginning, with a number of others either under consideration or already given the go-ahead. The people who live around are having their lives detroyed shamelessly. To the grey people in Holyrood as much as those in Westminster, they are bottom of the woodpile. Would the Archbishop of Canterbury get a 24/7 disco built on his doorstep? Probably not. It's just the same.

I have no patience, time, sympathy, or energy for anybody in favour of this kind of windfarm any more. Should they start bleating about climate change, energy security, and the rest, they must be either psychopathic, wilfully stupid, or pathologically lazy. People who spend half the day staring at a computer screen can surely take a few minutes to undertake a brief internet search on 'windfarm fraud', 'windfarm scam' or similar to pick up the paper trail. And if they fail to recognise the visceral necessity of the power of the land and the soul of the Earth, there's not much I can do about that.

'He died so that others may live'. The principle nowadays is the same, except that rural people sacrifice their lives that others may get rich, or may perpetuate their blind, bloody stupid ideologies.

I have never spoken to an inhabitant of Invermoriston, and may never do so. But their 'No Moriston Windfarm' website is well worth a visit. These are people really taking a stand for their individuality and authenticity against the ravages and plunderings of Empire. They have certainly done their homework, with their stance impeccable and uncompromising. No negotiations with E.ON, the plundering beast, they say. We don't want your windfarm; there is nothing to negotiate. Also, no 'community benefit'. For those who don't know, 'community benefit' is the euphemism applied to things like funding of village halls, reduced energy bills, offered up by energy companies as bribes in return for the right to desecrate. It used to happen to African and South American tribes with cans of coca-cola. It works precisely the same as prostitution: we pay for the right to defile. 'But the rural villages could really do with the money' come bleating the windfarm apologists. So does the single mum who sells her body on a street corner at night.

The gravy train may be nearing its end. While there is precious little good to say about Cameron and his cronies, we can at least be thankful that they are stopping this one. The political alternative would still be dishing out the cash until well after the pot had run dry, and there was a useless turbine on every hill and in every field in Britain.

In the face of adversity and the predation of Control come forth courage, strength; dare we say it, a reflection of the divine. The glens may weep, the hills are sad; yet their sorrows are short-lived. The travesties of Imperial humanity will be here and gone in the blink of an eye.

nomoristonwindfarm.org.uk