How do our lives feel?
Do we walk free on an open landscape, protected only by our sturdy clothes and boots, yet guided by our sense of the sun’s position and the time of day? Or, despite our best efforts to be ‘up here’, are we still ‘carrying the world’ we sought to be free of?
We’ve all been in that position. Look at any group of walkers in these parts and you’ll see some contrasts: the convivial core may be chatting, and, to a degree, spoiling the peace for those around them. Still others will not be sporting the smiles you might expect, the landscape and sky not having touched them.
A few will have that sense of presence; of belonging exactly in this moment in which they find themselves – as far from that map in their waterproof pouches as they could be, and yet in perfect harmony with its learned guidance.
We can say that the mind is like a living map. Its superb functioning is actually there to create that mountain path in front of us. That there is ‘some-thing’ over which our bodies are walking is undeniable. Our organic future depends upon recognising this; our passage to adulthood marked by the taking onboard of our own safety – at least in a physical sense.
The man with the sad face is lost in this. His path is just another route over a wet and windy hill. He’s there because it’s good for him and his wife says he’s putting on weight. She’s bossy…but he’s up here, doing what she lovingly suggested. There is exercise in his world, but it’s mechanical. It’s duty filled with resentment. He’ll do it, but he’ll shown them by not enjoying it. Tough.. manly.
The noisy party are good-natured and genuinely happy to be here. Their smiling faces, reddened by the wind, reflect how they feel: hale and healthy. But the conversation they are having is the one they started in the motorway cafe enroute. It’s a stream of thought and speech that owes little to the beauty of the world they made the effort to be in: this hilltop, this path, this sky…
The quiet man out in front is smiling as he pulls his attention from the limitless sky and the fresh post-rain smell of the grass. He has walked these paths most of his life but he’s never been here. Every atom of this experience is new; every smell fresh; every cloud thinning to reveal the sun a revelation.
There is no need for him to be a ‘self’, indeed, were he to focus on himself as the recipient of all these ‘vibrations’, he would immediately lose the presence of that which he loves most of all.
So, fully in control of what needs to operate to protect him, with his mind functioning like the vast supercomputer it is to protect everything from heartbeat to balance to the the mechanics of his next stride over that icy pool…
He listens … and is the wind. He sees … and is the shifting brightness in its subtle beauty. He smells … and the nearby lake reaches out to caress him with its most delicate fragrance. And the entire surface of his skin works like a soft leather glove to transmit touch to him, rather than keeping it away.
For a second, there is a pause… and then the soft and gentle voice that is not his … at least not the ‘him’ of the working week, is there. In fact, it is not even a voice. Just a sense of things poetic being said.
And then there is simply no division at all. And the world to which they all belong, is both restored and meaningless.
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This is the orientation discourse for the SE-Explorations meeting on Sunday 15th January, 2023. If you would like to join us for 90 minutes of convivial mystical friendship, send an email to
Rivingtide@gmail.com
If you’re already on our invite list, you should automatically receive notification.
If not, and you’d like to be, please email us.
©Stephen Tanham 2023
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog