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Call of Nature

When all that stands between you and a new experience is a thin veil of material, why hold back? Everything is different undressed. And with more Briton’s daring at last to admit they want nude sunbathing on their beaches, there is no excuse.

I first discovered the pleasure of undressing in public in the days when you could swim nude in the YMCA in London. It’s difficult to believe that removing a small area of cloth can revolutionise the thrill of water passing over your body. Perhaps the bits we keep covered most are hungering for sensory stimulus. I know mine were and still do.

Later I discovered a place in the heart of London where I could sunbathe and swim nude at Highgate Ponds. Though today it has commandeered by the gay group making it difficult to be there.

Then in the early 1960’s, back in the communal showers at the YMCA I began to uncover one of the few negatives attached to my new pleasure. Numerous men, previously unknown to me, approached and asked how and where I had managed to get sun-tanned “all over.” The answer was “By visiting Highgate Ponds,” where a small and much visited enclosure allowed London males to lavish their entirety in sunshine or/and fresh air. Having my `all over’ suntan admired was good for my self-esteem, but the following requests to wrestle, have my knee, hand or sun-bronzed wherever held, took a bit of getting used to.

Even so, the delight of slipping out of your house, wriggling free of the duties and thoughts of work, loosening and stepping out of the oughts and shoulds of social duties at street level, is ours when we meet the rest of the world unadorned. The artistes of undress do not carry with them a trailer full of technological equipment on their adventures into the nude. Nakedness is such a wonderful return to simplicity it is only those whose genes have become infected with a robot strain who insists on taking cliff-fronted shining music centres with them into the wild. (Written in the 1970’s.) I like to think most of us have something of the naked ape in us, if only we knew where to find it. After living without clothes on a beach for two or three days, cooking ones food on driftwood fires, sleeping on the soft sand and watching the stars appear as the blue sky shades into night, erases from your soul a lot of the things you previously felt were essential in the civilised world of microwave ovens and multi-channel TV.

Sometimes the two worlds meet each other incongruously though. Having pitched a tent in the midst of Saunton Sand-dunes, a favourite haunt of nature and naturists, I unwound with my wife and young son. On the second day I rose early and savoured the silent mists of morning while I looked for a spot to answer nature’s call. I squatted at peace over my hole in the sand, feeling the majesty of the lonely wild, with nothing on but the hair on my chest. Without warning a fully clothed male hiker, bristling with knapsack, billy-can and gear’ appeared around a sand dune. He stared open mouthed at me. After a moment of confusion, I bid him good morning. His astonishment vanished, he grunted a reply and lurched onward.

Personally, I don’t like organised nudity, sheltered from the rest of the world by high fences, membership fees, and club secretaries. I don’t want to dangle about playing tennis in the all-together, or wallow in the group strength of a dense population of naturists. Going it alone has more freedom and it can bring out the primitive in you. If you have ever dared to take off all on a beach which doesn’t sport dozens of other clothing escapees, you will understand what I mean. You will know that others will join you. Other naked apes who had been incognito will take off their clothes. Also, if you are a woman, there will be magical appearances of men who always have carefully averted eyes whenever you look at them. They will stand for hours apparently fascinated by the grey waves, or their little heads peering over sand dunes.

Your suntan will be enhanced by the light reflecting from their sunglasses and binoculars. If it is your girlfriend or wife who is at the centre of this silent army of averted eyes, the primitive emerges causing you to patrol your territory and glare or feel sudden passion and attention for your partner in face of so much competition. This is the aphrodisiac without peer.

Naked folk though, if you’re among them, never seem particularly erotic. Beautifully human, intimate and close, yes. So, when the wind blows warm I hope to see you – all of you.

Have I Lost My Mind?

We might ask the question here as to whether in such cases, as with stroke victims, consciousness has been lost, or is it that the special organs of awareness, perception and motor activity – the brain –  has simply been damaged?

The work of Karl Pribram, a neurophysiologist at Stanford University, gives further insight into this. His experience of working with fellow neurologist Lashley confronted him with an astounding phenomena. Lashley had trained rats to perform a variety of tasks, such as run a maze. Then he removed parts of their brains and re-tested them. He wanted to see what parts he would need to cut out to remove the memory of what had been learned. But no matter what portion of their brains he cut out, he could not remove their memories. Even with massive portions of their brains removed, their memories remained intact. Pribram found that a similar thing occurred with humans who had, perhaps through injury or illness, lost even massive parts of their brain. So Pribram felt that memory was not localised in the brain, but existed in what was probably a holographic form, where each part contains the whole.

Pribram was very attracted to the work of Bohm because of what Bohm had uncovered about non-locality. This because another way of thinking about non-locality is to see it like a hologram where every part of the universe has in it the whole. (David Joseph Bohm FRS was an American scientist who has been described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century and who contributed unorthodox ideas to quantum theory, neuropsychology and the philosophy of mind.)

So the proposal is that consciousness is what Bernard Rensch calls panprotopsychic. It means that consciousness is present in all matter in some form. If this is true it would mean that the form of consciousness we know as humans is potentially there in all matter, and as the process of life developed into greater complexity, with specialised organs of awareness, the potential could manifest. In doing so it would manifest at different levels as the complexity of form evolved.

It would also mean that all matter is mind, and mind only becomes focussed as personality because of the form and function of the body and brain. However, with the loss of body and brain, consciousness is not lost as it is basically the universe. Without the focussing action of the brain, the universe is sentient as an unfocussed immensity of mind, carrying in it all experience. From this viewpoint everything around us is mind, is a fundamental part of consciousness, and is part of the whole, but expressing as different qualities or functions. As such there can never be a mind body split, as they are one and the same. But as mind, from this standpoint, is all matter, there is no loss of what has been experienced as ones personal life. See You Are a Dual Being and – Out of Body Experiences

If consciousness is fundamental in all the matter and energy around us, and if that is the basis of our own awareness, focussed as it is on sense impressions via the brain, then experiences of extra sensory perception are no mystery. There is a threshold in us between what experiences we have gathered through our body, through our senses, and the Hugeness beyond our own sense of self. That Hugeness holds, in perhaps an unfocussed way, all experience. To know within the Hugeness what is happening to someone thousands of miles away is easy. And that Hugeness only knows experience in the three dimensional world of our body by generating a life form through the processes developed slowly over millions of years on this planet. We are its eyes ears and curiosity in the three dimensional world. See Answer to Critics

From this viewpoint there is only one Mind, and we are each small reflections of it, knowing the world and our life through its consciousness. The universe is sentient, and we are an expression of its awareness. To quote from my book Coincidences, “I needed to go to the toilet to pee, and this created many bubbles in the water. As I watched something caught my attention, for it seemed that each small bubble was an eye looking up at me. Wondering what this could mean I looked more closely, to see not eyes, but I’s. Each bubble had a tiny reflection of me in it. I was amused because there were dozens of tiny copies of me all looking up at me with their separate existence.

Consciousness is everywhere

I felt how true it was that each of us are like little bubbles, all in our own small sphere of experience. Then it struck me that although all of these tiny individuals appeared to have a separate identity, a separate body in space; and although they all had eyes with which they were looking at the world, they only had awareness out of my own consciousness. In fact they had no existence outside of me. Unknowingly they were all reflections of me.

Suddenly, and with some apprehension, I realised the meaning of this interesting fantasy that my unconscious had been communicating. I am a bubble. My personal awareness, although it seems distinct and separate, is in fact the reflection of one great consciousness pervading the universe. So who am I when my bubble bursts, as it must, and I return to my source? The fear I first felt has long melted. It has been replaced by joy as I have explored what it means to burst and return home.”

Krishnamurti, talking to Bohm said, “Humanity has totally lost the feeling of sacredness.”

History Of Ashram

In the late sixties what is now Ashram/The Wild Pear Centre was called ‘The Kingston Club’. Bill and Judy Mitchell owned the club, garage (that was originally on the ground floor) and Kingston House, they ran it as a private club taking in guests, but old age began to take its toll. The club and garage were then bought by a limited company formed by two school friends, Mike Tanner and Mike Golding, and their wives Alex and Betty. Initially they also rented part of Kingston House.

They ran the garage, mending cars, selling petrol (surely the only garage in the world where the petrol attendant sometimes wore an evening suit). Took in guests for bed & breakfast and evening meal and also opened the club to the public.

They were able to hold dinner dances for 120 people for groups such as The Conservative Party, The Liberal Party, The Football Club and The Catholic Society. It was ‘the’ place to be on a Saturday Night.

The stage and bar went through several positions and sizes, until the bar filled the street end of the dancehall. On different nights there would be Old Time Dancing, a Folk Club, Ballroom dancing, Rock Groups and Disco.

Eventually the strain of running the businesses with summer hours from 6.30am (early morning teas) to sometimes 4.00am, usually 2.00am, took its toll. Mike Tanner and his wife split up and Mike Golding’s wife became pregnant. It was decided to lease out the garage and club. As part of this deal Mike Tanner moved into The Hollies in Woodlands and within a few weeks Tony and Brenda Crisp with their family moved into The Pines – next door.

Tony, a writer, yoga teacher, dream expert had moved from Amersham in Bucks where, amongst other things he had developed a business selling esoteric books.

Mike, who had nothing to do, an income and somewhere to live, regularly borrowed books and became deeply interested in the philosophy connected with yoga.

The lessee was not as successful with the business and it reverted back to the two Mikes who decided to split the property between them, Mike Golding taking the garage, Mike Tanner the club. The garage was sold on and became a dairy bottling local milk run by Joe and Sheila Lakin who later bought Kingston House. The dairy later became a video shop and is now converted into an apartment.

The club was rented out to a different tenant, The Hollies was sold and Mike bought a building site at Morthoe living in a caravan and became the head lifeguard at Woolacombe beach.

This tenant eventually failed and Mike moved back into the club but did not run it as a business. By this time Mike had become a Samaritan where he met Sheila Johns who also had an interest in Yoga, he introduced Sheila to Tony.

Just before Christmas a client, who was a single mother with three children was made homeless. It was agreed since there appeared to be no other way of keeping the family together that they could move into some of the spare space in what was the Kingston Club. Once there was someone else living there it was not long before others moved in and a motley crew of ‘alternative types’ took up residence.

Sheila was made responsible for this client and when visiting one day mentioned to Mike that she was going to see Tony. He decided to go along as well and was surprised when Tony said, ‘Oh Mike has come too’. Mike had not realized that Shelagh and Tony had made an arrangement to work together. As it happened this was the beginning of the Seed Group, Relaxation Therapy, and LifeStream (Self Regulation). Looking back this was one of those unconscious, synchronistic, serendipitous moments that have reverberated through the lives of many, since the Seed Group required three to interact as seed, water and earth.

This work was fundamentally based on self-help. Jo May, writing about one of the techniques developed in the group says: “About eighteen years ago in a workshop I came across a small group structure called the Seed Group. The Seed Group was later developed by David Boadella into his form of working with small groups, and certainly up until a few years ago when I last had contact with him, formed the basis for his trainings in Biosynthesis. Tony Crisp’s Seed Group may also have been one of the first structures for working with people therapeutically in small groups.” The Seed Group was a means to enable a synthesis between physical, emotional and mental expressions via the body interrelating with others.

Another aspect of what happened at that time was the exploration of how the self-regulatory process innate in body and psyche could express if allowed. This work carried on through the seventies, and attracted much attention from people seeking personal growth. Thanks to an anonymous donation the hall was cleared of its former stage and bar, and was partitioned to form the Meditation Room. The ceiling was strong enough to be used as another level for sleeping.

During those years Mike also allowed the Kingston Club, now named Ashram, to become a commune. This had an open door policy and allowed anyone to come in, eat and stay without any obligation to pay. One could of course donate money or work, if one took a room then one agreed to make an agreed weekly donation. This open door system mixed with groups of people paying coming to courses on Yoga, Meditation, Reflexology, Dreams, Kinesiology and LifeStream led to many wonderful and bizarre moments.

Mike saw that many people had no home or family to which they could turn and understood how he had been helped by knowing that he was always accepted by his mother. By providing a space that people knew they could return to at any time, without judgement, with shelter and food available enabled some people to venture on and take chances that they may otherwise not have risked. The success of Ashram depended upon many people who gave their time and energy to maintain and help others less fortunate, their efforts are acknowledged.

There was a very casual attitude to dress which resulted in Wild Pear beach becoming recognized as a Naturalist Beach.

There was a great deal of concern in the village about some of the activities and animosity from the more rigid residents of Combe Martin, the feelings aroused at that time resonated long after Mike left and the commune was disbanded.

Mike and his partner Winifred had a baby, Santhé, born in Ashram. They then toured Canada, North and Central America leaving Ashram in the care of the residents and Zengo, who now is known as Buddha Maitraya, a Japanese teacher of Za Zen.

After their return another daughter was born there, Aisha, and this led Winifred to decide that she wanted a more stable environment for the two children. This was largely due to an influx of ‘New Age Travellers’ who had made it a more difficult environment to live in because of the violence, usually alcohol related, and bad language that developed.

Ashram or The Club, as some called it, lasted about 5 years without any major control. In this time, until the end, there were only two people asked to leave. There are many people who have had life changing experiences through having been there.

At the end of the seventies Mike sold it to Tony, who had then split up with his first wife Brenda, and was with his new partner, later wife, Hyone. The sale was concluded on July 17th 1978.

Tony and Hyone closed the doors to the commune and started the long process of renovating the rooms and the hall. When they took over the building it had been torn apart by the many people using it as a commune. A small coin meter served the whole building with electricity and the wiring needed replacing.

Some of the plumbing and gas fixtures consisted of garden hosepipe, and nowhere was tidy or really fit to live. Many cartloads of rubbish were carted away, including parts of motorbikes. The upstairs flat did not exist as it does today. There was a landing at the top of the stairs, leading to a long passage with four rooms off it. Tony and Hyone had an extension built to form a kitchen, built a bathroom, and took down the passage wall enclosing the first bedroom, making a living area.

What is now the downstairs kitchen was a ruin, full of junk. It had got so bad that the commune had deserted it and built a makeshift kitchen in the hall.

During these years Tony and Hyone made Ashram their home, living in the top flat. The rooms off the lower passage were gradually renovated, and were let out as self-contained accommodation. Gradually some of the hall was renovated and rewired, along with the building of the two toilets serving the hall.

Tony and Hyone ran some evening classes, but the large numbers of people attending courses during the early seventies never returned.

So in 1994 Tony and Hyone moved to Australia and sold Ashram to the present owners Juliana Brown and Richard Mowbray. It’s now called The Wildpear Centre.

Honour Your Father and Mother

I started by imagining taking my father into my being, and that led me to realise as something like a near death experiences, where a person lives there life and gradually only the best is left – and the best in him will be an asset that enlarges you as a person. This is why it says that you should honour your father and mother. It say this because they are so much a part of you, as my father was, that if you do not sort it out until you find the best in them you will be left crippled. So, it isn’t accepting their weakness but almost like digesting it so what is healthy can be built into you, and what is not can be passed out.

We cannot take out the treasure we have been bequeathed if we are not willing to meet our mother and father, if we cannot find our way through old angers and hates, and pains.  If we cannot see beyond the limitations on weaknesses of our times; if we cannot tap the enormous cultural heritage that has been given us; if we cannot reach beyond that into the spirit of things, then we cannot inherit that vast treasure we have inherited.  If a person cannot do that then they cannot bring that treasure to awareness; they will never know the details of it.  But to know it is there, to honor it, is important.

It is important to honour those great men and women who have dug into the rock face of life and uncovered the gems and truths that are part of our heritage today.

The gems and truths that have been mined out of the rock face of life are quite simple truths.  We so often forgets them.  We forget these simple truths, and rush looking for something more.  Looking for something more than we already have.  We already have something so enormous it is beyond most of us to grasp.  Are the entertainments of the world so wonderful?  Are the plastic joys that are offered us, that we have to pay for, so great?  Are cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, really the answer?  Are they really the life you are looking for?  Are they the life you know within yourself is there?  It might just be through a threshold, through a little discomfort, a little tolerance, a little love that you discovers that heritage.  Perhaps we need a little less self righteousness.  Maybe we need to be able to say occasionally, “Oh, I’m sorry, that was me being a pig.  I do it sometimes.”

Personal Unconscious

This is like living in a huge building in which a small part exists above the ground but a massive amount is below the surface.

The above ground most of us are well aware of where there is a sense of separate existence, with definite boundaries where one meets a lower level.

This meeting with a larger YOU is often for many people a great shock, because they have lived their life totally wrapped in the small world of their physical senses. The human personality – the You that you call yourself, with a name, is only a tiny thing. It is moved and tossed around by all manner of drives, ambitions, emotions, fears, temptations, worries, love and desire with its pains and hopes; it is something we take so seriously and get carried away into awful situations.

When we begin to meet the Hugeness that we are, we often react to it in our dreams or in waking with fear or panic. So we dream of being attacked by aliens or frightening creatures; or being swallowed by a whale or something huge, hit by a tsunami, or even possessed by evil entities. If we realise that they are things we have created through our own fear we will pass on.

First Underground Level

If you have never met this level before and dealt with the fears or panics held here, we will judge the world with its many other levels as a hell-hole and avoid any other exploration of it. That is because this is where we store all the hurts, truamas, fears and thought or desire we dare not allow ourselves to experience.

Example: I had also uncovered a somewhat less powerful move on the part of one of his female cousins. During his most teenage years, and while still an unwilling virgin myself, she had stood before him in a dressing gown, and under the pretext of demonstrating a rather rhythmic swimming motion, had let her gown fall open revealing her naked body.

He had naturally always remembered this event very clearly. But He had not realised her powerful influence until that moment. He had not realised how much he wanted to enter her and also how much he had repressed that desire for seventeen years. Even the youngest child is now bound to feel it is not the thing to lust for relatives in that way.

That is simply one aspect of what is repressed. We often have painful traumatic events from early childhood that we have no awareness of – except the cloud over our good feelings leading to a host of difficult emotional responses.

Another example:

I was myself, and dreamt I had spent a long time following clues in my search into the unconscious. One particular line of clues had led me to go through a door in the house in which I lived.

The door led to an area somewhat like a cellar or basement. It was certainly down some steps, but I felt more as if it were an almost secret place within the house rather than underneath it. It was dark, with no windows though, and was similar to being down deep. I was the detective following clues. To follow the clues I tried an experiment. I sat in this interior place facing a tunnel. It was maybe about five or six feet high. Where I sat was dimly lit, but the tunnel led into complete blackness and the unknown. I believe I repeated some keywords and looked into the tunnel.

I had neither warning nor expectation for what happened next. I was overwhelmed by terror, as if the very darkness of the tunnel was a living force of fear that entered me and consumed me. I screamed and screamed uncontrollably in reaction. Nevertheless, a part of me was observing what had happened, and was amazed and realised I had found something of great importance. Somehow I managed to turn my screaming self away from the tunnel. But on my right – it had appeared to be behind me – was another tunnel that brought about the same terror.

I managed to get to the door, open it and get back into the everyday part of the house. I also feel as if I have had many, many dreams involved in the house, that I have never brought to consciousness before.

The dream describes the terror that we run from and so hide in unconsciousness. Later in exploring his reactions the dreamer realised it was a huge trauma he had experienced during a surgical operation when was nine years old.

See Exploring a dream – To go beyond this first level see – Wider awareness

 

Dependence Attachments

What We Are Often Not Seeing

At the time I was working in a hotel kitchen. It was midday and the restaurant attached to the hotel was about to open. All of the preparations had been made so there was a lull as we were waiting for the doors to open and customers to enter. I was standing behind a countertop cleaning it, and about five or six metres away the elderly owner of the hotel was standing talking to a waitress. I think they were both in their 60s or the waitress might have been in her late fifties.

They were casually talking about the amount of custom there was for this time of year, and about the restaurant. At one point in my cleaning I glanced up to look at them. At that moment a radical shift took place in how I saw them. It seemed to me as if a new sensory organ had opened, one I had never experienced before. With this new sense each tiny movement the waitress and boss made exploded with information. Subtle changes in facial expression I had never perceived before were now visible and meaningful. It even seemed as if I could sense and see an enormous energy connection between the two at the solar plexus. And what I understood through this new sense was that the waitress and boss at some time had engaged in sex. I was in my 30’s at the time, and silly as it may seem, the idea that these two 60 year olds could have sex with each other had never entered my mind.

Along with this realisation came the vision of a great trunk of energy passing between them. Although on the surface their actions and speech were inconsequential, at the deeper level of energy exchange, very powerful communication was occurring. I understood from this that when two people have sex with each other they forge this link. Through it they send messages to each other perhaps without realising it. The link may last a lifetime.

I was so surprised and intrigued by what had happened I later asked the waitress if she’d had a sexual relationship with the boss. With only slight embarrassment she said it was true, they did have a sexual relationship.

Magic Movements

This is more of a meditation than an exercise but is important in mobilising inner feelings that lie behind movements. So, here is a way to begin. Wear loose clothes that are easy to move in, not tight ones in order to show of your figure.

1 – Stand in a comfortable balanced position with the hands in front of the chest, palms together and eyes closed.

2 – Imagine that as you breathe-in, the air is fanning a small glowing coal inside the chest. The incoming air makes the coal glow gently, and you breathe slowly and with awareness. This coal is just a symbol of the subtle pleasure sensations generated by slow purposeful inhalation.

3 – Let the hands indicate the amount of this glow or pleasure. Let them do this by moving apart, so if the pleasure is intense the hands reach wide. As you exhale and the glow fades, let the hands come together. But if there is little felt, then the hands remain unopened.

When you begin this meditation, do not be in a hurry to open the hands to let the feeling of pleasure radiate out. In fact, let the hands be as spontaneous in expressing what you feel as you can. It may be that your hands thereby move a great deal, or very little. If there is an urge to move the hands in other ways than suggested allowing that to happen.

4 – If you find your hands and arms respond then let a feeling or warmth or love flow out to everyone, and as they pull back feel as if you are drawing in what others give you in this subtle way.

5 – If you have managed that and felt it working in you, then and only then let your energy move upwards, and eventually downwards so you get the sideways movement flowing into the up and down energy flow. Let your being show you how.

But if you have not got anything from it persist until you do. Do it day after day until you can feel a response, and then work with it.

When I first did the meditation, I taught it in classes, and soon found that people got a lot of movement and pleasure from it. So, I began to explore it further by myself and found it went into a sort of dance. But it is about the Inner Fire, not about outer yoga postures or movement you make up, but a warmth and fire that moves you from within. I know many people feel that everything is about outer life, but this is a way to awaken your Inner Life.

What I found as the inner warmth or fire developed it started to not only reach out to others with the energy that was released – I imagined my warmth reaching out to others, and then I opened to receive energy and love from others. As this developed, I noticed that the flow started to want to rise up and I allowed my hands and arms allow it.

Of course, when the movements of opening, giving and receiving got into action, and the rising up, the next thing was it wanted to complete the cross. So, it became the warmth in me awakening and reaching out to others. Then the rising upwards to go beyond me, and then the descent of what was received from above. The arms were now dancing upwards, downwards and sideways in a wonderful flowing movement. I felt I was lifting energy up from my roots to the heavens like a plant drawing up nourishment from the earth and opening to the sun, and then from the heavens down to bless the earth – and of course spreading the wonder of it out and receiving back. And as this was happening my inner feelings spontaneously soared and lifted, received and gave with it, and were stimulated by it. I called it The Dance of Agni; or The Fire Dance.

Let it DANCE you.

 

Discovering Meditation

  “I’ve just come back from a weeks mediation with a Tibetan monk. It was great.”

“What was great about it?”

“He just gave of a feeling of peace.  He could sit for hours without moving.”

“Well, I’ve felt peace in a wood, and a lizard can sit still for hours too, what’s so special about that?”

“You’re just a sceptic.  You’d have to see this man to understand. He is always so calm and at peace all the time.”

“Maybe his Mum never let him run around and make a noise when he was a kid, and this quiet stuff has grown to be a bad habit.  Ask him to make a noise sometime, maybe he can’t.  Anyway, what’s all this meditation stuff for?”

This type of conversation must go on somewhere all the time, especially now meditation is so popular in the sceptical West.  We could let our sceptic speak on a bit more and voice some of our other questions by saying “Okay, so he sits there for hours, but what’s he doing on the inside?  He might be quietly and peacefully counting up the money people like you are paying him to do his trick of sitting still with a Mona Liza smile.  Did he tell you what the point of meditation was?  I don’t mean some mystic distant goal, but any practical benefits?”

Well, they are good questions.  What is all this meditation stuff for?  Is it a ‘trick’ used to impress others, or to escape the world into an abstract peace?  Or are there any practical benefits?

Let us not quote authorities, let us simply look around for ourselves.  Or at least, let me see if I can put a few observations -together which are not merely authoritative

The results of some forms of yoga are fairly obvious.  A doctor who was practising yoga told me he had observed several of his patients who used yoga postures over a period of three years. He noticed that the basic signs of physical ageing were reversed. He pointed out that most people begin to fold inwards as they age, walking with a stoop, and losing mobility of limbs and trunk.  The yoga postures led people to physically open out and increase mobility of the body.  That was why he practised the postures, he observed an actual physical change in his elderly patients.

The mind may seem a more abstract area to observe and the results of meditation less distinct.  Yet our consciousness and its experiences are an everyday fact to us. Whether we want to or not, we are involved in just as real a way with our thoughts and feelings as we are with our body.  Perhaps the involvement is even deeper for many.

Okay, our thoughts and emotions are as real to us and as powerfully influential as our hands and feet.  Maybe more so.  If you don’t believe it, look around.  The cars, furniture, buildings, books, clothes you see are all expressions of somebody’s ideas, plans and desires or feelings.  The reality of war which continually rages somewhere in the world is an expression of these intangible feelings and thoughts.  Social changes, changing fashions, the television and cinema scenes, are all expressions of this inner world of thought and feeling.  It is out of this inner world that everything uniquely human arises.  If an ape had this inner world, it too could write a book, build a church, drive a car; but lacking it none of these can it do.  That much we can observe.  The chimpanzees who have been taught human language, and so have gained that much of our inner world, begin to acquire human characteristics and abilities.

So what else can we observe about this inner world?  We can look at some of its commonly experienced functions.  For instance the most fundamental is simply awareness.  Not awareness of any particular thing, just awareness.  Or we could use the word consciousness.

Next we have awareness of certain things, such as –

a)    Awareness of our present situation and condition through our senses of sight, hearing etc.

b)    Awareness of past experience – memory.

c)    Awareness of our present internal condition of energy and mood, i.e. whether tired or energetic, whether happy or depressed.

d)    Awareness of manipulating memories, words, ideas in various ways which we call thought.

The four basic ways of thinking are deductive, inductive, intuitive and observative.  When we use deductive thought we might say – All the buses I have been on have expected me to pay a fare, therefore on this approaching bus a fare will have to be paid also.

Inductive thought would be – This robin I am watching is fighting off other robins from its territory.  From that I induce that all other robins do the same.

In deduction we reason from the general to the particular; induction is when we reason from the particular case to a generalisation.

Intuition is arriving at a conclusion without using other observations or memories or deductions or inductions to get there.  We might also call it lateral thinking, like de Bono. We achieve it when we step outside of the old pathways of thought, or old conclusions, so it can be very creative, or merely ridiculous.

Observative thought is when we find two pence in one pocket, five pence in another, and realise we have seven pence.  We do not need to reason, we only observe what exists.

e)    Awareness of states of consciousness, such as sleeping, dreaming, waking.

Having said these things about awareness, perhaps some of the questions can be considered.  For instance, “What is all this meditation stuff for?”

In some ways meditation is, for the mind, what the yoga postures are for the body.  We may have become stiff and immobile in the body and stretching changes this.  Mentally and emotionally we way become set in certain patterns of thought, emotional response and behaviour.  Some types of meditation ‘stretch’ us out of this inner rigidity.  It does this be setting us into completely different patterns of inner experience, just as the postures get us into positions we may not have used before.

In general, meditation is to mobilise and expand awareness.  In the grand sense it is to bring awareness to its most basic experience – awareness – that is, self awareness, without awareness of something other.

To quote Edgar Cayce – “Meditation brings an increase in vigor and improved health.  An expansion of consciousness is achieved, and with this expansion comes the realization that we are in eternity now.  The realization dawns that indeed there is no death.  The only real death is the separation in consciousness of the soul from God/our essential self.  When this has been overcome there is no death, for consciousness is continuous in whatever plane one manifests. “In my Father’s house are many mansions.” (John 14:2)  These “mansions” of God are levels of consciousness.  Where is consciousness?  Within the bodies we now occupy, wherever we are.   “For you are the temple of the living God; as God has said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them, and I will be their God, and  they shall be my people.” (2 Cor 6:16)

Through meditation, we may become aware of these other planes of consciousness as in dreams.  Therefore, whether we are on this earth, or in another dimension, the “house of the Lord” is the shell which we occupy.  For while God wills that no soul shall perish, He will not force man to seek Him.”

“Is it a trick used to impress others, or to escape the world into an abstract peace?”  Obviously it is.  For thousands of people, meditation is a means of shutting out life’s difficulties and existing in a nicely controlled, peaceful womb inside themselves.  Some yoga teachings mention bodiless awareness.  That is, awareness existing without consciousness of our body.  I recently had a letter from a man who experienced a flight of consciousness outside his body.  What interested me most was that it occurred – and he had sought it for years – only after he bad been attacked by thugs.  Lots of people who have told me about such times of inner experience, asked when it occurred, have described times of great shock or stress. See Dimensions of Human Experience

 To find such peace, ancient peoples and saints recommend fasting, penances, and other forms of stress.  This makes it appear likely there is some connection. The last defence against intolerable stress and pain in the world is inside us, in states of mind to meet our need.  When we cut ourself the body defences produce blood and infection fighting cells.  When we meet intolerable stress, our system produces visions or a sense of being away from the painful sensations to heal the damage; or more usefully releases the stressful emotions and thoughts. See People’s Experience of LifeStream – Opening to Life

But we can use water to burn us, cool us, or wash with.  Meditation can be used as a defence against stress, or as an advance into it and beyond it.  So let us ask the last question and explore it.  “Are there any practical benefits?”

Yes, there are,  There is as much benefit from exercising and improving the mental emotional body of experience we live in, as there is with the physical body.  If we consider some of the basic forms of meditation we will see this.

The forms of meditation are based on the different functions and states of awareness.  Some mediations exercise and improve these functions.  For instance as a) I listed – awareness of our present situation and condition through our senses.  The basic meditations based on this are –

1)    For a few minutes, while sitting, standing or walking, give as full attention as possible to what you are experiencing through your senses.  Do not just look, listen, feel, smell and taste, blankly.  Bring all your faculties to your impressions.  If there is a sound, what direction is it coming from, is it moving, what is making it, what can you tell from it?  If a taste, what can you taste, what things combine to make it, is it bitter or sweet?

2)    Explore individual senses.  Feel a variety of surfaces in different ways (i.e. with fingers, face, body, softly, by hitting, etc.).  Smell different things, people, rooms; look at objects and colours.

3)    Sitting or standing still, live in your senses, but without any attempt at evaluating, gaining information, or comparing.  Just look, listen, feel, without thinking or considering what is experienced.

4)    While sitting or standing, or confronting someone, switch from giving deep attention to your own thoughts, feelings and images to giving attention to your senses and what impressions are coming from outside.

These meditations help us to improve the ways we use and experience our senses, and to widen our range and approach.  We may be stuck in a thinking evaluating approach, and need to just look sometimes.  Also, we may not have learnt to cleanly switch from inner looking to outer looking.  Or else we hover and do not give full attention to either.  Also, some people are stuck in an outward looking awareness, and seldom really live in their own thoughts and feelings – or vice versa.

In b) I listed – awareness of past experience – memory.  meditations based on this are as follows.

1)    Sit where you will be undisturbed and from the present moment begin to remember backwards through your life.  This may take more than one session, so do it over a period of time.  If possible, do this with a partner, and instead of simply remembering, tell your partner your life, and then swap roles. It is probably best to work forwards if with a partner.

2)    There may be blank areas in your remembering, or you may remember events which were so powerful they deeply influenced the rest of your life, negatively or positively.  Choose a positive one to start with and alone or with a partner imagine yourself going through the experience again.  Go through it several times, each time concentrating on a different aspect – i.e. what you could see at the time – what heard, what smelt, what felt emotionally, what your body was doing.  Let yourself experience the sight, sound, emotion, as fully as possible. This may bring about great depths of feeling and experience, because memory is not just a word or image thing, memory is also emotional, physical and linked with a thousand associations and results.

3)    Each night we dream.  Perhaps we remember, perhaps not.  Sitting quietly, try to remember a dream.  If you have already remembered one on waking, try to remember another.

4)    If you easily remember dreams in that way, see if you can remember your sleep experience other that dreaming.

These meditations open up and improve our faculty of memory. The life remembrance helps us to see the sequence and development of ourselves, as we may never have looked at ourselves as a whole before.  The event remembrance helps to enrich our remembering because most of us only use memory partially.  Sight, smell, feelings and realisations of results of the event are not usually entered into deeply enough to extract the full understanding out of the event.  We can extract enormous amounts more of self understanding by re-playing these past events.

The last two meditations help to deepen our remembering into areas of self which are usually unconscious, therefore unknown to us.

As c) I listed – awareness of our present internal condition, of energy and mood.  Meditations based on this function are –

1)    While sitting, standing or walking – i.e. in any daily situation – bring attention to how you are feeling inside.  Notice whether you feel tired or alive with energy, or somewhere in between.  Notice your mood, whether calm, depressed, happy, disinterested, enthusiastic, withdrawn, etc.  Notice any body sensations.  Not just the pain from ones varicose veins, but perhaps the lump in the throat, tension of shoulders, or facial expression.

2)   While sitting upright but comfortable and with eyes closed, give as full attention as possible to the condition of one’s energy.  Notice whether tired, energetic, restless, confused, and go along with it.  In other words, if tired, accept your energy is low and relax the whole body until you feel your energy itself wishes to move.  That is, we often do things because duty, ideals, fear, hope, move us.  In this meditation we are waiting for our own energy and it’s enthusiasm to move up.  If the energy is restless, let yourself feel it without actually moving from the meditation.

3)    While undisturbed and sitting, notice your internal mood or emotion and give yourself permission to experience it deeply. It may be you are led to laugh or cry.  Or sometimes we say we do not feel anything inside.  If so, recognise that you are actually experiencing emotional emptiness or deadness, and let yourself feel that.

4)    Sit, with eyes closed, if possible with a partner, and give a moment to moment account of what is going on inside you, frankly.  Include thoughts, emotions, body sensations and energy conditions.

These meditations help us to get into contact with ourself.  It is amazing how many of us really are out of touch with our body and how it feels, what it is doing.  And the same applies to ones energy and feelings.  If we do not know how we feel about things, or bow we react to situations, but accept ready made social reactions and feelings, we are not really a person in our own right.  These meditations are the beginnings of correcting this situation.

In d) I listed various ways of thinking, and there is not space to give more than a sample of meditations or explanations here.

1)  Choose a problem or situation which confronts you, or one which occurred in the past.  State the problem in words or writing, in as few words as possible.  Now review past experience, information or ideas which apply to the problem. See if these offer a solution and state it, or state why not. Now carefully note how you feel about the problem.  Notice whether your solution is out of your thinking or your feelings.

2)    With the same problem now try playing with it.  Do not try to think it out, say any silly idea which comes.  Try approaching it in different emotional moods, depressed, confident, carefree, failure, success.  Notice the old ways you thought would solve the problem, and try in thought, completely different, even if seemingly impossible ways.

These two meditations are exercises in logical and intuitive thought, and learning to recognise what is thought and what emotion.  We must remember that logical thought proved heavier than aircraft could not fly, iron ships could not float, etc. Our past experience and information has led to certain conclusions which may have helped in the past, but might be hopeless in solving a present problem.  If we do not worship ideas, but recognise them as tools we use in problem solving, we can put down the old and seek new if need be.  Intuitive thought is the means whereby we step over the old patterns of thought and explore new ones.

In e) I listed – awareness of states on consciousness.  Meditations developed out of this are many.  Three classics are –

1)    While sitting, gradually, help the thoughts and feelings to subside without use of force.  Bring them to a still responsiveness.  That is, still, but ready to respond. Remain in the stillness without seeking or hoping for anything but the stillness.

2)    While sitting, mentally repeat the word OM (AUM) as you breathe out.  On the in-breath be silent as if listening. Repeat over and over, keeping aware of the breathing, the body and the state of listening.

3)    At first while sitting, but later at any time, ask the question – Who Am I?  That is – what is this that is born, lives, changes, and dies, and is there something which does not change?

These last meditations are sometimes considered less practical than the others, but this is not so.  Conscious, personal existence emerges daily from the unconscious, impersonal (we -are unaware of ourselves) level of being we know in sleep. Separating the two is like cutting a tree off from its roots. The flow of life energy, growth, pleasure, emerges from the dimness of our inner world we sink into in sleep.  The three meditations are all ways in which the conscious self becomes quiet and responsive to the flow from our roots of being.  This flow does not emerge from the root as rational thought.  We can observe it’s action in sleep in the form of dreams.  But even a dream is only a coat for the flow, which itself takes the form of urges, streaming feelings, impulse to exist and explore being.  And behind the stream of life impulse is simply awareness, what is.  If that flow is cut off, we are lifeless, loveless, and without enthusiasm in existing.  Helping to unblock the flow is to experience more of ourselves, and to become more alive.  The flow is not thought, and it is not will, or effort, so we cannot think or will more of ourselves into expression. The meditations quiet effort, just as sleep does, so the fundamental flow and experience or our being can exist in it’s own right.

The Seed Group

Introduction To The Seed Group

I love the Seed Group. It is an environment in which my deepest feelings, my best spiritual intuitions, my emotional intensity and my body, all have a chance to express. This meeting with myself has no chance to occur in most social settings. There are usually too many unspoken social taboos. There are also too many restraints we unconsciously put upon ourselves.

The Seed Group enables us to gently drop these taboos and restraints. This is because of the caring support given by other group members; but also because you can learn to trust your own internal process as you witness yourself or others meeting themselves so deeply and creatively.

WHAT MAKES IT WORK?

What we attempt to do in the group is to acknowledge and work with the internal process of self-regulation. This is what keeps our body and mind in balance throughout our life and growth. Self-regulation expresses in our everyday life as such ordinary but powerful spontaneous movements as sneezing, shivering, orgasm, breathing and laughing. In the psychological realm, self-regulation is experienced when we cry or release emotion, or when events from the past press to be felt and released, and also in dreaming. Spiritual experience also appears to be an aspect of this action as self-regulation moves toward expansion and growth.

To work effectively in the Seed Group we need to be ready to make an experiment regarding our own internal self-regulating process. We need to be ready to allow the simple spontaneous activities of our body and feelings more time and space to express. It helps if we are ready to let go of conscious intellectual control, or our striving for particular goals, and listen to what life in us wants to do. So, this is not a meditation aiming at a particular goal. See Without Seed

WHAT DO WE DO?

The group forms into working groupings of three to four people. Each person in turn becomes the ‘seed’. This means they are given the attention and support of the rest of their group. The ‘seed’ takes on a quiet open state of mind and body, possibly curling up on the floor while their supporters keep close physical contact. The aim is to give time and opportunity for the usually ignored urges in the body and feelings to emerge and be expressed. Of course some people may need to work alone.

Honouring simple movement and feelings is important in the Seed Group because all the processes and expressions of life in us show as the swing between movement and relaxation. The heartbeat, breathing, and the movement of the intestines are examples of this. Most emotions, such as crying or laughing, also involve strong physical movements. If we block expression of our basic living drives and feelings, we not only build up internal tension, but we also interfere with the delicate ways our being balances, heals and expresses itself. The wonderful freedom in the practice of the Seed Group reintroduces us to the ability of our being to heal, balance and reach for its own psychological growth. It does this through spontaneous movement and feelings.

So the ‘seed’ remains in a self observant state with the support of their group. The ‘seed’ does not attempt to produce anything consciously, but waits for their body and feelings to declare themselves, perhaps at first as tiny motivations to move, or as slight shifts in feelings. The ‘seed’ occasionally reports what they observe to their group, without making their sessions into a conversational exercise.

To work effectively with ones own deepest self is a learning process, perhaps like learning to swim. So one has to be patient, and there should be no attempt on the part of their group to coerce people to ‘get somewhere’.

WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN?

You might simply be quiet with your supporters for a period of time, with apparently nothing happening. In the Seed Group it is important to realise that as we are not seeking to get to a prearranged goal, whatever occurs while the you are the ‘seed’ IS what is happening. So if you felt bored while the ‘seed’, or felt you were pointlessly taking up other peoples time – THAT is what is happening – and should be acknowledged to your partners.

By learning to observe and allow these ordinary feeling and body states, they can develop to fuller and more powerful expression of the self-regulatory process – really a fuller expression of yourself. When this happens you will experience powerful spontaneous body movements which link with feelings and lead to insight into yourself. The process works at detoxifying body and mind. It does this by clearing out old habits of tension, past emotional traumas. As it achieves this work it moves to personal growth and creativity, opening spiritual experience of yourself as part of the Whole.

GIVING AND TAKING

This is not a commercial package in which you are paying to receive certain instruction, or be healed of your human problems. It is an environment offered you by a number of people who have given of themselves to form a supportive group in which there is an opportunity to meet yourself and others in depth. There are no clever formulas or instruction. No tricks. The Seed Group depends upon how much you can trust yourself and those around you. What you get from it depends upon what you bring to it, and how much you can receive from others in the way of love.

To be a part of the group means being patient with others as they learn to allow their own inner being to express. It also means opening to the support given to you, and allowing it to work its miracle as it softens tensions and attitudes that may have destroyed your own sense of well-being and spiritual awareness.

WHEN WHERE AND HOW MUCH

The seed groups mentioned below are all run on a donation basis. This means nobody is excluded. You simply donate what you can afford. As a group we do need donations to make this work however, and suggest a minimum of £5 per day, necessary to be able to rent a space big enough for the group to function in. This low price is possible because of several factors in the organisation of the group. These are:-

People bring their own food. This is usually shared, although people with special diets may need to keep their food separate. It is important that each person contributes something, and does not simply eat other peoples food. The group and its action is based on mutual support.

Nobody is employed to do the background work of cooking, washing up, etc. So once more, it is important NOT to let a few people do all the work. If you want a commercial group where you are not involved, you will need to pay sixty to two hundred and sixty or much more for a weekend.

Another explanation of the Seed Group

Meditation

The next phase of the meditation needs a particular setting. The meditation is a means of opening to all of the aspects of our being in a way we may not have done before. So we need a setting where we can give attention to what is occurring in our being; where we can explore our spontaneous responses and not be disturbed. The place needs to be warm enough to be comfortable in, and with a blanket or something soft underfoot. Clothing needs to be loose enough to move around in easily

When you are ready, stand in the middle of your blanket. If possible, feel thanks to nature and its processes for your existence – and toward fellow human beings for their shared work and thought. The meditation has now begun. From the feelings of thanks, turn your attention to the idea of a dried seed. It can be any sort of seed, but preferably the type you have already considered and maybe planted. But this time we are not thinking about the seed, just holding the idea of it gently in mind. We are leaving thought behind and exploring another way of experiencing.

Without trying to be completely rational or scientific, what might it feel like to be a seed? Does it feel like a seed to simply stand with arms by sides? Does it feel like a dried up seed with arms raised above ones head? Watching this subtle sense of what feels unlike or like the seed, experiment with body positions until you find a position which feels for you like an expression of a dried seed. There is no ‘right’ position, only what feels right for you.

Don’t struggle with this meditation – enjoy it. Once you feel reasonably satisfied with your position, imagine what a dried seed might feel like inside. Is it waiting, sleeping, unconscious? Whatever you imagine it to be, allow your own inner condition to be as nearly like it as you can. Then check over details. Do the limbs and head feel right for a dried seed? Can you allow yourself to dwell in the inner condition?

THE GROWING SEED

The next stage is very important, so do not move into it until you have satisfied yourself with these first stages. Next we move gently into what may be called imaginative, spontaneous, or intuitive meditation. To do this we allow our body and feelings to express, just as we have done so far in finding the position of the seed, but more flowingly now.

So, give your body and mind permission to express themselves freely and without prior consideration, in expressing the seed receiving rain in warm soil. The seed absorbs the moisture and the process of growth is triggered. The seed puts out root and stem and becomes a seedling, then progresses through its whole cycle of growth, blossoms, seeds, and dying.

When doing this meditation give yourself at least fifteen to thirty minutes to complete it. Unlike many forms of meditation this is without struggle, and usually the whole sequence of growth flows out of us as we allow our being the freedom to express.

And there are surprises in it too. Many people find the meditation has its own dynamic, and they can only grow to a certain stage, or the unfolding story throws up unplanned details. These details of how our own growth in the meditation occurs are relevant to our own life situation. For instance, finding it difficult to put down roots might point to your difficulty in staying in any one place, and so on.

The meditation is an exercise in allowing our own unconscious feelings and wisdom about ourself and life to express more freely. So it can usefully be practised regularly. I would not suggest every day for most people, but certainly once or twice a week. Each period of meditation will produce something slightly different, enlarging on or continuing the theme previously dealt with. Only a personal experience of this amazing ability to produce the new can convince one of the creativity we each have within us.

VARIATION FOR THE GROUP

There is another form of this seed meditation which is a great pleasure to use, and is helpful in developing a new ease and warmth in relationships. I have used it with a number of groups, and if it is led up to slowly and time given for people to feel their way in without a sense of rush or pressure, it leaves them feeling much more in contact with themselves and others.

This is basically the same as already described but done as a small group of three, four, or at the most, five. The members of the group need to have already experienced the seed meditation done individually before they attempt it as a group. This is not absolutely necessary, but it helps. It helps also if each person has at least once practised two other meditations – the Earth and Water meditation.

These are done in just the same way as the seed meditation. The instructions I usually give are as follows: Stand in a relaxed open manner, and hold in mind the idea or word ‘earth’ (or water). Just as you did with the seed meditation explore what postures and/or movements express for you the feelings and movements connected with the earth from which all growing things arise. Allow yourself to explore the meditations, letting spontaneous fantasy or movements to arise if they occur.

After the individuals have established themselves in these three (seed – earth – water) meditations they come together as a group and decide who is going to be the seed, and who earth and water. I usually suggest that when they are ready, the seed takes up their dried seed position and waits for the stimulus toward growth to arise out of the relationship with the persons in the role of earth and water. When and if this occurs, then the course of their meditation is the same as doing the seed alone, but with added dimensions. How, in terms of human relationship in the meditation, does the growing seed take up the water and minerals and lift them to the sun and build a form?

To the earth and water their meditation is similar but reversed. How do they penetrate with water and warmth, in human terms, the enfolded seed, to release its growth? And then, how to enter into the life forces of the plant as it unfolds?

It asks more of us

Some people are at first reticent or have never explored these possibilities in human relationships, unless perhaps they trained in drama or dance. If the meditation is entered into enthusiastically though, it becomes a learning and growing experience. The seed grows and releases warm feelings and pleasures in its own unfoldment that touch the earth and water and involve them in the drama of its own experience.

It is very rewarding and helpful for the group to share what they experienced after the meditation has finished. The actual meditation should be entirely non-verbal – although some groups are vocal in that they feel the expression of sounds, humming or emotive sound a part of their experience. But the sharing of the experience at the end is a release and completion of what went before. Then, the group can allow someone else to be the seed.

The seed meditation used in these ways is an extremely simple way of starting or developing one of the most important aspects of yoga -namely, allowing the emergence into consciousness of material from our wider awareness. It does this in a gentle way acceptable to a large number of people. This leads to a gradual expansion of consciousness as we touch more parts of our nature, bringing about spiritual growth.

We learn to work with the spontaneous process in us, active also in dreaming, which brings to consciousness parts of ourselves otherwise ignored. As we integrate piece after piece of our inner life we literally grow as a person. We absorb into our waking self more of our personal past, more of our heritage as a mammal and life process, more of the treasures of culture and spirit left us by humanity. Our life of spirit has begun.

Being a seed in a group gives us a social opportunity to receive a sort of powerful healing we seldom receive in our society – the healing of touch. Laying on of hands has always been recognised as a way of helping a tired or sick body back to health. Modern doctors and nurses are now recognising the importance of this. They are learning to hold patients’ hands, to be warm, to touch. In the seed meditation the earth and water can gently relax and open the seed with their touch. So the meditation is one of healing as well as growing.

The group meditation is of enormous help in learning to touch, to allow into ones own experience, a part of someone else’s inner life, and to help another human being begin the miraculous process of exploring the height, depth and music of their own being. So make yourself a seed bed and grow a little.

 

Utopia

This might be an attempt to escape from your difficulties or internal pains. But many dreams in which the person enters a wonderland are about finding their way to their own innate blissful self, an experience of their own wholeness.

Example: At first, I saw the image of a huge cathedral or church with a magnificent domed roof and I knew that I was in the house of God. I felt the utopia, I felt like I have never felt before, so very good, so excellent. I knew all things; I didn’t have to read the bible or any kind of teachings because the answers are all here in the presence of God. With each energy release the feeling was greater than all things, above all feelings, not sexual but immense and fantastic.

According to Plato, “In a utopia there is always a contrast, or a dilemma, between individual needs and public and social needs. It is this dilemma which often is a stimulus for looking into the future, in terms of opposition to the present”.

Vanish

Thoughts and feelings constantly appear and then disappear, sometimes never to be seen or captured again. This is the magical world of mind and emotion, where things emerge out of the vast world of the unconscious and vanish again. Therefore, vanishing suggests you are losing awareness of something. In this case it indicates something that is manipulated by or emerges from the unconscious. Unconscious – What Is It 

Person or animal that vanishes: Love for someone which has gone, or something we realised or learned which we have lost sight of. It could also be an independent part of you that you cannot yet direct.

In Jung’s book Man and His Symbols, Marie von Franz says, ‘Thus our dream life creates a meandering pattern in which individual strands or tendencies become visible, then vanish, then return again. If one watches this meandering design over a long period of time, one can observe a sort of hidden regulating or directing tendency at work, one can watch this at work by noting many dreams from the same individual over a period of time. When one does this ‘tendencies become visible, then vanish, then return again. …… one can observe a sort of hidden regulating or directing tendency at work, creating a slow, imperceptible process of psychic growth-the process of individuation.’ See Self-regulation

Example: ‘I have been a widower since Jan. 1979, having married in Oct. 1941. I continually dream I am in London where my business was. I am walking the streets with my wife and suddenly I see her ahead of me in a yellow raincoat and hat. I call her and try to catch up, but suddenly she vanishes. In spite of calling and searching I cannot find her.’ Douglas G.

This is a common theme dreamt by widowers or widows – disappearance of spouse. Douglas has ‘lost’ his wife. His dream shows the paradox of love after death of partner. He is struggling with his realisation that his partner might die. See Inner People

At a certain time of life women start unconsciously worrying about ‘losing their husband’. That is probably either because they know women live longer, or that you are unconsciously worried about your man. Women know men often die before them as women are longer lived, so they dream of a husband’s death as a way of getting used to the loss.

Person or animal who vanishes: Love for someone that has gone; something we realised or learned which we have lost sight of; an autonomous part of self which we cannot yet direct. See: autonomous complex.

Enlightenment Today

Today, enlightenment requires a lot more than it did in the past.  In the past people were a part of a tradition.  They were sheltered by it, enriched by it, and expressed it in their enlightenment.  Often the culture around them supported what they were doing and the direction they were taking.  Today’s enlightened person is in a different league.  They have, if they have truly reached that point, integrated all the great traditions of the past.  They have felt their essence and are a part of the essence.  That essence lives in them.  They are not particularly Jewish or Christian, but they are, at the same time, deeply Jewish, or Christian, Muslim or Buddhist.  They are a Zen monk.  They are a native American warrior or squaw.  They are all of those things, and that means they are moving beyond what’s there was in the past.  Yet it is the same wonderful ancient way, moving beyond forms, traversing the formless, melting back into the origin of things.  This is a very strange place to be because there is nowhere to go.  There is nowhere that I am not.  Yet I am still this skeleton.  I am still this old man, this Tony, with his penis and balls.  I am still that.  I still have arms to hold you with. I am still that.  I still have eyes to look at you through.  Why should that not be so?

Spirituality, in its best form does not mean unworldliness.  It means the insight into the world.  It means being more fully a part of it, creativity is a part of it.  It means being in possession of who you are, your being, your possibilities, you’re outreach.  The spiritual path means not being afraid.  It means daring to experience, not simply for the sake of experiencing, not simply having a screw for the sensation of it, but in a way to look at and digest what you experience.  It means  seeing what the experience means, what it holds in it and what part has in the scheme of things.

It is a mystery to me about feminism and homosexuality.  Why would one want to be any one thing?  I realize that in the world there are things to fight for, and that takes courage.  But in the end to simply maintain oneself as one thing, male or female, or homosexual or heterosexual, leads me to wonder why.  Why, when you have such a vast repertoire of possibilities.  Possibilities beyond one’s wildest dreams.  People mix the personality up with the spirit.  The personality is a mixture of different things.  A blending of different things.  That is the body thing, which has a long history of bodies stretching way, way back.  That brings to us certain qualities, certain possibilities, certain strengths or weaknesses.

Then there is the family line.  Well, that brings so many threads that are woven together.  Within those threads there will be outstanding influences, outstanding characteristics or drives in the family that you inherit.  There may be things of great weakness that you need to work with and redeem.  If you do that, then you will bring out the spirit of your ancestry, something that is unique and new in the world.  If you can find your way through you will bring that out.

There also many things that you inherit.  There is your cultural heritage, the land you were born in, the tribe that you are a part of.  You have qualities or strengths, and weaknesses from that.

A single cell, which is a seed from which all life forms evolved from, doesn’t become old or die because it is immortal, for it keeps dividing and doesn’t die. In dividing it constantly creates copies of itself, but as it does  so it gathers new experience, it changes what is copied, so becomes the ‘seed’ for multi-cellular organism. We all started from the original one cell, and we, you and I,  are the result of gathered experience.

No plant or creature grows from a dead seed, and each living seed carries within it all the past gathered from all its forebears. So, the seed in your mother’s womb is as old as and even older than human kind, and you carry that wisdom or memories in you. But in this life you developed a new brain, and the memories, education and programming you gathered this time are what you built your personality from, but beneath that is a very ancient self.

Finding this very ancient self, hidden as it is by all your personal thinking and opinions, you find you are free from all the painful emotions, suicidal urges and personal hurts. To explore it see Opening to Life

Then there is the spirit – the spirit.  That is represented in each culture by the national religion.  That is always, in each culture, a doorway to go beyond.  In each culture, religion is a doorway enabling us to go beyond forms.  It enables us to go beyond all that has existed in the influences of our life.  It opens the doorway to touch something that stands beyond – beyond the beyond.  And if we can bring something of that back into our everyday life, we are a genius.  We are a genius of life.  We are a genius of creativity.  We are a genius of love.  We are a genius of being a mother or father.  We bring, by touching what stands beyond, something new into being.  It is ever, ever, new.

We cannot take out the treasure we have been bequeathed if we are not willing to meet our mother and father, if we cannot find our way through old angers and hates, and pains.  If we cannot see beyond the limitations on weaknesses of our times; if we cannot tap the enormous cultural heritage that has been given us; if we cannot reach beyond that into the spirit of things, then we cannot inherit that vast treasure we have inherited.  If a person cannot do that then they cannot bring that treasure to awareness; they will never know the details of it.  But to know it is there, to honor it, is important.

It is important to honour those great men and women who have dug into the rock face of life and uncovered the gems and truths that are part of our heritage today.

The gems and truths that have been mined out of the rock face of life are quite simple truths.  We so often forgets them.  We forget these simple truths, and rush looking for something more.  Looking for something more than we already have.  We already have something so enormous it is beyond most of us to grasp.  Are the entertainments of the world so wonderful?  Are the plastic joys that are offered us, that we have to pay for, so great?  Are cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, really the answer?  Are they really the life you are looking for?  Are they the life you know within yourself is there?  It might just be through a threshold, through a little discomfort, a little tolerance, a little love that you discovers that heritage.  Perhapss we need a little less self righteousness.  Maybe we need to be able to say occasionally, “Oh, I’m sorry, that was me being a pig.  I do it sometimes.”

Everything works.  Everything gives itself.  Everything is a part of something else.  Everything is more than it appears and connects with everything else.  There is not a drop of rain that falls that is not an expression of the whole vast totality, that isn’t a fulfilment of the hugeness.  And if you are not willing to give yourself now, to get into the common struggle, the common life, the mining of the understanding and the creating of the world we live in, I just want to say, “ oh come on, you know what I’m talking about.  If you are not willing to do that now, life is going to take it from you.  It’s going to have you.  That is how things work.  Look around.  It’s going to eat you up and digest you whether you like it or not, so you might as well give yourself to it now.  Say to it, ‘Here I am!  Here I am, all of me.  Here are the good bits, the stupid bits, the lovable bits, and I don’t know what the hell bits these are.  They are all here.” Here I am.  Come on, make something of me.  Help me make something of myself.  Flow through me.

When you are talking to the life that is active in yourself, you are not talking to a blank wall.  It is living.  It feels.  It knows and it creates. How do you think you came about?  So, you are not pissing into the wind.  Or if you are, the wind knows where it is going, and it is part of something enormous.  Something immense.

Vitamins – Little Wonders

Vitamins are nutrients required by the body in small amounts, for a variety of essential processes.

Most vitamins cannot be made by the body, so need to be provided in the diet.

Vitamin D can be made by the body in the skin when it is exposed to sunlight.

Vitamins are grouped into fat-soluble vitamins and water-soluble vitamins.

Requirements for vitamins change across life stages.

Modern diets often cause vitamin deficiencies causing such effects as depression, neuralgia, irregular heartbeat, mental confusion and many other difficulties, Unfortunately the medical profession often treats the symptoms using drugs, and so the cause still exists.

To quickly go to particular vitamins click ok:

Vitamin A

Vitamin B

My Experiences With The Vitamin B Group

Vitamin C

Vitamin D

Vitamin E

Vitamin K

Vitamins and Miscarriage

Multivitaminsa and Minerals

 

  Vitamin A

The total vitamin A content of the diet (from both animal and plant sources) is normally expressed as retinol equivalents (RE).

Vitamin A is essential to the normal structure and function of the skin and mucous membranes such as in the eyes, lungs and digestive system. Therefore,  because it is what helps prevent or kill germs and viruses attacking the mucus membranes it is vital for vision, protection of lungs, throat, eyes and embryonic development, growth and cellular differentiation, and the immune system.

Deficiency

Vitamin A deficiency is a serious public health problem worldwide. It can lead to night blindness (impaired adaptation to low-intensity light) and an eye condition called xerophthalmia (dryness of the conjunctiva and cornea) and eventually total blindness. Marginal deficiency contributes to childhood susceptibility to infection, and therefore morbidity and mortality, in both developing and developed countries. Vitamin A deficiency is common in many developing countries especially among young children.

In the UK, frank deficiency is rare but low intakes are relatively common. For example, depending on age and sex between 6% and 20% of children have intakes that are unlikely to be adequate (below the Lower Reference Nutrient intake, LRNI). In adults, intakes tend to be higher although 16% of men aged 19-24 have intakes below the LRNI. In the UK, supplements containing 233µg of vitamin A are recommended for infants and young children from age 1 to 5 years (from 6 months for infants that receive breast milk as their main drink).

Toxicity

Excess retinol during pregnancy can increase the risk of birth defects. As a precautionary measure, women who are pregnant, or who might become pregnant, are advised not to consume high dose vitamin A supplements (>2800-3300 μg/day). Liver and liver products may contain a large amount of vitamin A, so these should also be avoided in pregnancy.

Large amounts of retinol can also cause liver and bone damage. To prevent adverse effects on bones, intakes above 1500 µgrams of retinol equivalents from food or supplements should be avoided. The Food Standards Agency advises that, as a precaution, regular consumers of liver (once a week or more) should not increase their intake of liver or take supplements containing retinol (for example, cod liver oil).

Food sources

Liver, whole milk, cheese, butter and many reduced fat spreads are dietary sources of retinol. Carrots, dark green leafy vegetables and orange-coloured fruits, e.g. mangoes and apricots are dietary sources of carotenoids. Vitamin A is also often voluntarily added to reduced fat spreads, as is vitamin D. Cod liver oil is a great source taken daily. 

My Experience With Vitamin A

In my thirties I suffered many ‘cold sores’ on my lips, also I had started wearing reading glasses. I read that when exposed to cold as when swimming in the sea or cold water, the body uses great amounts of vitamin A – also vitamin A, because it is used keeping healthy all of the mucous membranes, which  includes the mouth, the nose, digestive tract, the eyes and the skin, problems in those areas might be due to low intake of vitamin A. While is Australia I learnt that many of the native aborigines living inland suffered eye problems but the aborigines living along the coastline didn’t have eye problems. This was because those living along the coastline ate a lot of fish oils containing vitamin A. Taking fish oil, such as cod liver oil, my mouth ulcers and eyesight improved. So that now at 83 I do not need glasses even to read.

My mouth before taking vitamin A. Most links for mouth ulcers advertise treatment for symptoms, but vitamin A treats the cause. People do not realise that the diet of processed foods such as all white flour products, white rice and sugary drinks are often the cause of cancer and other diseases. I now take Cod liver Oil capsules daily at at 83 do not need glasses.

  Vitamins B

Example: I know what I am about to say will be taken as stupidity by people who suffer depression, but it is largely a matter of imprinted habits. Having suffered depression for years and having found a way out of the dark place, I know the route out. It is not a route for people who are in the habit of believing there is no cure, that drugs are the only way to deal with it, or suffer enormous fear about change or meeting new aspects of self. Some people actually believe that depression is normal, and so it is our real nature to be depressed. But having found my way out without antidepressants and am on stable ground – much more so that normal – I know that we are not destined to feel pain and despair. Life is not all about pain as Buddhism states. It is all about a stable emotional life and knowing how to transform oneself with so much to offer us. But it takes work and consistency to remove all the rubbish put into us, and to clear all the dark debris that is the cause of depression – debris that block the light of our being. See Opening to Life

Example: Since she was 11, Sara’s life had been a nightmare of mental and physical suffering. Her history included chronic insomnia, episodic loss of reality, attempted suicide by hanging, amnesia, partial seizures, nausea, vomiting and loss of periods. Her knees were so painful (X-rays showed poor cartilages) and her mind so disperceptive that she walked slowly with her feet wide apart like a peasant following a hand plough drawn by tired oxen. Psychiatrists at three different hospitals gave the dubious waste-basket labels of ‘schizophrenia’, ‘paranoid schizophrenia’ and ‘schizophrenia with convulsive disorder’. At times her left side went into spasms with foot clawed and fist doubled up. Both arm and leg had a wild flaying motion. Restraints were needed at these times. Psychotherapy was ineffective. Most tranquillisers accentuated the muscle symptoms. She tested positive for pyroluria and was given B6 and zinc. Urinary kryptopyrrole was at times as high as 1000mcg%, the normal range being less than 15. She was diagnosed as B6 and zinc deficient and treatment was started. Over three months her knees became normal, the depression subsided, as did the seizures, her periods returned, the nausea vanished and so did the abdominal pain. She has had no recurrence of her grave illness, finished college and now works in New York. She takes zinc and B6 daily. When under stress of any kind, she increases her intake of vitamin B6.

Perhaps the most significant discovery in the nutritional treatment of mental illness is that many depressed and mentally ill people are deficient in vitamin B6 and zinc. But this deficiency is no ordinary deficiency that is simply corrected by eating more foods that are rich in zinc and B6. It is connected with the abnormal production of Kryptopyrroles.

People with depression or other mental health disorders often have high levels of Kryptopyrroles in their urine when tested. Kryptopyrroles rob the body of vitamin B6 and zinc, causing these nutrients to be excreted in the urine, this results in a deficiency of B6 and zinc that requires supplementation to correct.

Symptoms of pyroluria – High Kryptopyrroles

• Disperceptions
• Depression
• Intolerance to some protein foods, drugs or alcohol
• Definite body odour and breath
• Morning nausea and constipation
• Difficulty remembering dreams
• Crowded upper front teeth.
• White spots on finger nails
• Pale skin which does not tolerate sunlight
• Frequent upper abdominal pain
• Frequent head colds and infections
• Stretch marks in the skin
• Irregular cycle or impotency
• Any of the above when stressed
• Belong to all-girl family with look-alike sisters
• A family history of mental illness
• A history of miscarried boys 

  My Experiences With The Vitamin B Group

I experienced neuralgia in the left side of my face and it spread down my left arm. It was so painful I couldn’t sleep for three nights. On the third night I was pacing up and down in the kitchen feeling desperate and searching my mind and I remembered reading years ago that a lack of vitamin B’s can lead to neuralgia. Apparently the nerves have a coating that can be eaten away when we lack the B vitamins, this exposes the nerve to attack causing pain. I realised I had an unused bottle of Brewers Yeast tablets and quickly opened it and took a handful of the tablets. But I then felt hungry for more and ate another handful, then another – Brewers Yeast is a food , not a drug, and so there was no harm in eating so many. In fact, in about a quarter hour the pain began to decrease and that night I slept soundly.

Sciatica has several causes but it is worth trying taking the Vitamin B’s because the sciatic nerve can also be exposed by lack of vitamin B.

I had been working hard building a balcony extension and been hammering to knock a door hole in a house with old thick walls. In doing that I had developed a pain in the centre of my chest that went straight through to my back. My doctor identified it as something Japanese doctors had defined as a nerve problem. As soon as he said that and suggested pain killers, I said, “It’s okay I’ve got it.” I went home and dosed myself with Brewers Yeast again. The pain disappeared. (Brewers Yeast contains Vitamins of the groups B1, B2, B3, B6, E, PP, choline). 

Vitamin C

The grandadddy of such instances might be vitamin C which is useful in both treatment and prevention of cancer. Also the fetus has a great deal more vitamin C in its body than the mother, suggesting that the unborn baby needs a great deal of it. Vitamin C, which I had been told aided healthy collagen formation – aiding firm flesh.

Edgar Cayce stated that vitamin C supplies ‘the necessary influences to the flexes of every nature throughout the body, whether of a muscular or tendon nature, or a heart reaction, or a kidney contraction, the batting of the eye or the supplying of the saliva and the muscular forces in the face.’ A deficiency caused ‘bad eliminations from the lack of coordination of the excretory functioning of the alimentary canal, as well as the heart, liver and lungs, through the expelling of these forces that are a structural portion of the body.’

Taking vitamin C can detoxify Lead; zinc counteracts cadmium; selenium counteracts mercury and aids the expulsion of such poisons out of ones body. Also if you bruise easily it shows that you capillaries have ruptured and you need more vitamin C to strengthen them. 

Vitamin D

Fat soluble. Acquired through sunlight or diet. (Ultraviolet sunrays act on the oils of the skin to produce the vitamin, which is then absorbed into the body.)  When taken orally, vitamin D is absorbed with fats through the intestinal walls.

Properly utilise calcium and phosphorus necessary for strong bones and teeth. Taken with vitamins A and C it can aid in preventing colds.  Help in treatment of conjunctivitis.  Aid in assimilating vitamin A.

DEFICIENCY disease:  Rickets, severe tooth decay, osteomalacia, senile osteoporosis.

Foods containing it: Fish liver oils such as cod liver oil, sardines, herring, salmon, tuna, milk and dairy products.  

Vitamin E

Fat soluble and stored in the liver, fatty tissues, heart, muscles, testes, uterus, blood, adrenal and pituitary glands. An active antioxidant, prevents oxidation of fat compounds as well as that of vitamin A, selenium, two sulphur amino acids, and some vitamin C. Enhances activity of vitamin A.

Keep you looking younger by retarding cellular ageing due to oxidation. Supply oxygen to the body to give you more endurance. Protect your lungs against air pollution by working with vitamin A. Prevent and dissolve blood clots. Alleviate fatigue.

Prevent thick scar formation externally (when applied topically-it can be absorbed through the skin) and internally. Accelerate healing of burns. Working as a diuretic, it can lower blood pressure. Aid in prevention of miscarriages. 

Vitamin K

Helps in preventing internal bleeding and haemorrhages. Aid in reducing excessive menstrual flow. Promote proper blood clotting. Yoghurt, alfalfa, egg yolk, safflower oil, soybean oil, fish liver oils, kelp, leafy green vegetables are good sources.

Excessive diarrhoea can be a symptom of vitamin-K defi­ciency, but before self-supplementing, see a doctor.

Yoghurt is your best defence against a vitamin-K defi­ciency. If you have nosebleeds often, try increasing your K and C through natural food sources. Alfalfa tablets might help. 

  Vitamins and Miscarriage

While living and working in Combe Martin, Devon, a young woman stopped me in the street saying that she had just been to the doctor because she had just started bleeding and the doctor told he she was miscarrying her baby and there was nothing could be done to stop it. In fact he told her to go to town and buy herself a new outfit of clothes to take her mind off it.

I believe she had talked to the man in the post office who had lost a lot of weight using my advice about his amazing weight lose using vitamins. So she asked me if her baby might be saved. I had never dealt with a miscarriage before but I knew that most people eat products made with white flour such as bread and white rice and eat a lot of white sugar so they lack enormous amounts of vitamin E and the B vitamins that are stripped by the refining process. So I suggested she took a strong vitamin E tablet, a good Vitamin and mineral capsule each day and at least 500 mlg of vitamin C daily. Because I knew that vitamin E is important in child bearing and preventing downs syndrome I suggested she took a strong dose. Also vitamin C strengthens the capillaries that if a person if not getting enough C vitamins the capillaries are weakened causing bleeding and bruising.

She came back a couple of weeks later and told me she had taken the vitamins and that the miscarriage had stopped. Looking at her I could see her hair was now a shinning crown upon her head, she looked radiant and later gave birth to a healthy boy. 

Multivitamin and Mineral Supplements

Multibionta – in USA $10.99 and UK £15 – PROBIOTIC NUTRIENTS.
Probiotic Nutrients are natural friendly bacteria, which exist inside the body and help to maintain a healthy digestive system. Working in harmony with the body, Multibionta also supports the immune system to help you cope with today’s hectic lifestyles.

Perfect Equation Multi-Vitamin, Mineral, Phyto-Nutrient Formula with CoQ-10: 120 Capsules – $28.95

Juno

Among other identities, she was known to many as Juno Sospita, the chief deity of Lanuvium, a city located in Latium southeast of Rome. She was the protector of one in confinement, often pictured wearing a goatskin, carrying a spear and shield. She was Juno Lucina, a word meaning light, the goddess of childbirth. No offering could be made at her temple unless all knots were untied because the presence of a belt could hinder the delivery of the woman’s child. Lastly, she was Juno Moneta, the moon goddess, who was a personage unique to Rome.

By whatever name she was known, Juno presided over every aspect of a woman’s life. She was the protector of legally married women. To others she was the goddess who made people remember, the goddess who alerted people. Her sacred geese were kept on the Capitoline and a legend is told that they gave warning to the Roman military under the leadership of Manlius Capitolinus when the invading Gauls tried to take Rome in 390 BCE. Eventually, she would have several sanctuaries constructed on her behalf; however, her primary temple or citadel was built on the Arx, the northern part of Capitoline Hill. This sanctuary was located next to the Roman mint; the word money comes from her name, Moneta.

The Matronalia

Like many gods or goddesses, she had her own festival, on March 1, called the Matronalia, which was a time of renewal and the awakening of nature. It was a day when husbands were expected to give presents to their wives. The day was supposedly in celebration of the birthday of her son Mars, the god of war. Strange as it may be, Jupiter was not Mars’s father; it was instead a magical flower. Some authors claim the festival actually celebrated the anniversary of the end of the Roman-Sabine War and honored the role women played. After the Sabine women had been kidnapped by Romulus, war began but the women restored harmony when they threw themselves between the warring factions.

Quotes From Lucid Dreaming