The Summer Within

When I was a young boy, a favourite uncle, who was quite old, said to me, “You always feel young, inside, you know…”

It’s a sentiment I’ve heard many times. I knew it to be true – from the look in the eyes of those who said it, despite the lines of time on their faces. But now, to experience it in my sixties, is sobering and refreshing at the same time.

In the Silent Eye, we put forward a method – really a journey – which takes each person on an individual path towards what we might call ‘a place of summer’ within themselves. The journey concentrates, initially, on what life and our choices have made of us. We look, with honesty… and sometimes grit, at what we have become. The desire for this may take place later in our lives, when the energy of youthful excess has had its hour upon our stage, but it doesn’t need to: it is appropriate at any time of life.

As children and then young people, we do not consider that the inner and outer ‘selves’ have different lives. If we are healthy, the energies flowing in the inner and outer seem to have the same exuberance. It is only as the decades pass, and aches, pains and stiffness sometimes penetrate our daily consciousness, that we begin to notice there is a two-state existence to our lives; that the inner, though often clouded by it, is not experiencing the limitations of the body in the way that the outer is…

There comes a point – somewhere in the middle of our lives, where health and flexibility can no longer be taken for granted; when deliberate, rather than spontaneous exercise needs to be done with discipline if we are to retain some degree of that youthful flexibility that makes ‘life worth living’.

This is when many become conscious of the inner life in a renewed way. In moments of deep sleep or other relaxation, they may touch on a glowing sense of presence within. This usually happens when the physical self is at rest, and the mental self is psychologically peaceful. The degree of outer and inner ‘quietness’ is important, for this feeling has a refined ‘glow’ of existence that is hard to define in words.

In these moments, we are experiencing our own soul; and the enormity and significance of this cannot be overstated. The sense of depth and calmness may be touched upon by poets, but is seldom described in ordinary writing – because it is so little known What we experience, here, lies beneath – and has always done so. Yet, it is not inferior, as ‘beneath’ usually denotes. This is beneath ‘as foundation’. Its power and lovingness exist in a deeply peaceful place, where it has been all our lives. This inner state is known in childhood, when the world seems ‘brighter’, but our rightful fascination with the outer is paramount to the consciousness that wants to ‘taste the world’, and the innate knowledge of the inner fades…

Touching this state, again, triggers certain responses. We don’t want to lose it, yet ordinary attempts to hold onto it will fail. To hold the contact with that presence that is so deeply ‘us’ – requires that we learn why we lost touch with it in the first place…

It is constantly changing, and, unless we understand the subtle currents that drive its changes, it will appear to float off on an inner, summer breeze.

Part of what the Silent Eye teaches is to understand, in a self-demonstrable way, what the soul is. In the simplest terms, it is our truth: absolute and unchallengeable once experienced. It came into this world, into our lives, before we – the personality of self – existed. Our personality has grown, in all its strengths and weaknesses, around the soul, like a suit of heavy armour around warm and beautiful flesh. This necessary journey was chosen by the soul for its development. When we die, the harvest of the life adds to the soul, and the armour returns ‘to the earth’.

The soul is made of something special. It is not subject to the ordinary laws that govern our lives. It is not subject to them because its existence pre-dates them. It is ‘bigger’ and more fundamental than those restrictions.

We don’t ordinarily ‘see’ the soul because it is closer to us than anything else. All our experiences are actually experienced in its substance, but our reactions to those experiences are of our ordinary, waking self. The inner peace, spoken of through mystical history, is the non-reactive response of the soul to life’s experiences, as it delights in oneness in the fullness of inner and outer life, combined.

The soul tries to speak to us every day, every minute and second of our waking and dreaming lives. But the noise of the world and our habitual turning away mean that it cannot be heard. Life is a ‘noisy’ place, and most of the noise is our reactive self.

The journey into that place of peaceful love and purpose belongs to us all. There doesn’t have to be a map – some people take it by storm. But a map helps on the journey. Few of us can find that beautiful home on our own simply because we’ve got used to not being there. Those who teach it are paying forward the love of they who taught them.

Like the flowers on the front of the bicycle in the opening image, we carry the soul within us always. It is us rather than we are it. This perspective is crucial…

We’ve just forgotten that the summer is always there… right in front of us.

©Stephen Tanham

Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.

The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.

Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.