@RealSteveHolmes – – 40 years of exploring ideas and now for 20 more

14

For a change of mood, then, in case things are getting too heavy, let’s try conjuring up a little dream. It won’t be easy because we aren’t trying to recycle other people’s stale images and narratives within the restrictive meme and we’ve got an overbearing parental figure chiding us, demanding: “if you don’t like this system, then what would you put in it’s place?” and adding: “I never realised that you felt so little respect for me and how ungrateful you are…” As all parents do, and everyone acting like parents to control us: teachers, politicians, people at parties, friends whose internal structures you are challenging, their friends who invited you to dinner so they could see you perform and in whose company you are now trapped for three hours…

To which I respond thus: in my dream the purpose of conversation is pure, untainted by persuasive definitions, argumentation, challenges, spurious and covertly aggressive questions, patronising, ironical put-downs or the hard, cold, mortar fire of supposed facts and logics, all of which are nothing of the sort, by the way. Formal logic renders only the tautology meaningful and factoids are always superseded by better facticity next year, according to fashion and the evolution of their enclosing meme. All meaningful language is symbolic, in flux, experimental, a touch poetic and licensed. As in off the leash, almost certain to contain ambiguity and absolutely certain to include some paradox if it comes anywhere near speaking a truth, which will in itself change very soon and is not to be pinned down by the machine conversationalists of the intellectual meme group who can only ape academic method, which is all about destruction by challenge.

No, in my dream the purpose of conversation might, for example, only be to exchange useful information with no emotive content, for example. Sounds easy enough, yet it rarely happens if you listen to the voice tones. Admittedly, even in the Climate of Lie, something approaching this sometimes happens when nice people meet for the purpose of teaching and learning. So we can leave that one aside because it is common to both Step 1 and Step 2 worlds, that simple, clean, passing of information with no added manipulation, rare but possible.

Much more of a challenge to the average Mind is the truer, purer function that expresses the deepest wish of the human soul, which is to acknowledge, appreciate and rather than posses to pull alongside and make fellowship with those wonders and gifts that life notices about itself through us and for which we and maybe dolphins are the only conscious channels and celebrants… Within this experience nestle the companions of pure observation such as curiosity, exploration, appreciation, wonderment, happiness, playfulness, sensuality in all its forms, a kind of certainty that comes from feeling OK, the wonderful gifts of giving and receiving, the even more wonderful gift of having distance from your creaking Mind so that the soul may be experienced and the most wonderful gifts of all, namely love, sometimes ecstasy and even that warm, mystical, mysterious energy rising and spreading like the love of god would be if there were a god, the only existing word for which is kundalini. If you haven’t felt it, you can’t get it by trying; if you have felt it you’ll know that it’s a place you never expected to be, even for the short while it lasts and the following hours of wonderment.

Pure communication is, I believe, one possible doorway to the land where these feelings can exist in untainted form, received as a gift as you give yourself into the light with no thought of status or reward, no being wrong or being right, no attempt to influence or resist, no nagging sociological backdrop or grating emotional babble attached. It’s tough to get there but you don’t achieve it by being tough. It’s a real challenged to The Mind that’s running you, but you can’t do it by being grim and correct or chanting mantras devoid of humour. This new place is good fun, sometimes amusing in a harmless way that is not laughing at anyone else, potentially joyful, even abandoned, and the energy flow is going to be shocking when you first get there because the stress and strain and dis-ease that dog you normally are simply not going to be felt.

Oh, and since there are no lies in this garden because at that level of involvement of soul only truth telling is possible, you are finally going to know the absolute certainty that you never achieve with all your Climate of Lie attempts to manipulate life, only you won’t know it in triumph, as a success, you will only know it as a congenial twin to yourself, alongside you, where you is in a fascinating, oscillating, moment to moment migration, as by osmosis, between your conscious intellectual appreciation and your profound, poetic, bottomless and restful twin: your soul.

The Buddha famously discovered enlightenment by trying to stifle his own breath. Some people touch their soul in times of extreme pain, shock and loss. I have touched it in a time of deep grief and paralysing depression with an exhausted body, following the death of my wife from a long and painful illness. It was taking me an hour to mount the stairs and I was struggling for oxygen, not realising that my heart was under breaking strain, forced to pause and sit after every two steps and unable to remember what I did five minutes ago or even why I was stuck on the stairs. As I sat there, just about ready to die, I asked myself what was left of me with everything I used to be destroyed. No money left because I spent it all on caring for her. Hardly any friends left because they all ran away from the horror. No energy whatsoever, no appetite, no strength. No hope, no stratagems, no solutions, no methods even. And not that much sanity either, nor enough memory to complete even simply tasks. So what was left of me?

The image was of a toy gyroscope, like the one that fascinated me as a child, the one I used to spin on a small Eiffel Tower until it leaned at a crazy angle, the one that seemed to take on a life of its own once you set it spinning. That’s something like what I had left, a dynamo inside me, spinning at a dangerous tilt but still on the tower. That’s me, I realised; that is my soul and it is still alive and it can recover and it can lift me along with it, back to life.

The breakthrough we each need to make in order to recover our purity is something like that. Each person’s will be different. It may have an image like mine did or many images or it may just be a ball of bright light. We are talking about touching the unknowable and there are no rules but once you have this sense of self you will no longer be your status, your money, your work, your relationships, your faults, your perfections, your good taste, your clever jokes or what other people think of you. You will be you and it will be wonderful. And others like you or moving that way will recognise you and be drawn to your side and the differences will not matter. You will live in truth and love but there will be no religion perverting it. And you can retain your earthly foibles and tolerate yourself as you drink too much coffee, eat too much cheese, slightly overdo the wine, make slightly stupid jokes, spout daft opinions ‘cos you just can’t stop, think too much about sex and sometimes act on that in ways you don’t want to be ashamed of but have been. You’ll still be that asshole you’ve always been, in fact, but this time your soul is standing next to you and you know for certain that you are also something more than the idiot who lives at your house and walks in your shoes.

Roughly speaking, in answer to the sarcastic challenge of the sold out, this is where I would start to “put something in the place” of your lousy, meme-ridden world of lies and brutality.

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