Life's Shadowy Halls

The being who arranges your destiny - the circumstances and conditions of life - is alive inside you. For the most part we're unaware of this and live our lives as if things just happen. To some extent we're just wanderers, moving through life's shadowy halls, hearing footsteps and jumping round to see if love has arrived yet. Love is the Arranger of life, and the force which brings change and growth. I look for it, in its various forms, or else experience myself as a ghost, haunting my own house alone.

But at a certain point the Arranger moves in - sees with my eyes and acts with my intent. That is the point at which the self or spirit - the being inside - takes control of its own destiny. Then it is able to ask the loved one - the soul or natural self - to step forth from the pillars where it has shaded its dreams and trembled.

Yet what the inner self has arranged needs limbs and strength to carry out its intentions, just as the sun, with dashes of light and color, brings brilliance to the world's breadth and length. The loved one, as a glowing image, fills the limbs with strength and allows what has been arranged,  in secret night, to spread out in the light of day.

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©landar 2011. All rights reserved

The Temple

Love raises the vaults and architraves of our lives over and over - not just once but repeatedly, to accommodate the many different lives we lead on earth. It's as simple as that - a temple houses our lives here and we come back to it each time we're born. I mean this literally - life is a temple we long to fill. You could say our different lives are its pillars, reaching up to the far-distant moment when it will be complete. Why don't we see this? Because we're too busy living life. The clock obstructs our vision.

Where do you find those other lives? You find them in the lost minutes, which hide like shadows or reflections behind the ordinary ones. And who do you see there? You see yourself as the wise child who experiences the world in its true nature. Only, it's so, so difficult to remain with that child. He or she is constantly being stolen away by forces which want to prevent our true development.

You also see those other lives through the eyes of love. 'Through your eyes I look into the heavens and see what priceless treasures lie there.' This makes it our task to reflect the inner being - the wise child - in each other. This means that we share the responsibility of raising that temple, through many lifetimes.

Are we too old and cynical to be that child again? The clock-self is. The eternal being who came down to earth again at the beginning of your life isn't. Neither is the being you are when you set foot on that worn doorstep into the life after death. Why else would you want to come back? The clock existence doesn't make it worthwhile. So:-

I would turn this page and write again

the poem that has never been heard -

the one where lives are filled with time's lost gold,

feet at rest on the worn doorstep of love.

Landar

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©landar 2011. All rights reserved

Cycles of Rebirth

We tend to think that youth turns the world's wheel - that it makes things happen, sets the agenda - while age controls, fossilizes and limits. This is to ignore the fact that when everything's been done that can be done, all experience gained, the self is still there, listening, wondering. It's beyond the question 'why' - it sits, as it were, like an old man at the edge of the world, humming his song beneath a lemon sky. In other words, the self is neither old not young but - eventually - takes up a position on the outer rim of experience in hope and expectation of something greater than age and youth. After all, the world - this wheel or globe - is by definition young. By virtue of its motion, every day is new. No two experiences can ever be the same. Yet something set it in motion - something keeps it in motion.

I suggest that that 'something' is of the same nature as the self which sits - in its maturity - at the edge of the world, where the night is as thick as cream. There is no telling what that darkness comprehends. Whereas life is short, the earth is finite and the universe has a beginning, the self with its ear pressed to the dark knows itself to be as ageless and timeless as what started the cycle moving. Therefore there is also the point at which life, the universe and experience has its ending. It's possible to imagine yourself in this way, as a silent point with the great wheels of existence circling around you. Where are youth and age then? In reality the ages pull youth to the earth with a thud, not just to gain experience, but in order to be, or to become what it already is. Thus, what the eastern religions describe as the cycles of rebirth - and you can take that in whatever way makes sense to you - really amounts to a process of pulling yourself forth from the darkness. I'm inclined to say that moments of enlightenment or awakening don't really exist - only the gradual establishing of what you are in your own nature. And what is the darkness? The greatest magnitude of light that can possibly be imagined.

Landar

©landar 2011. All rights reserved

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Hierophant and Neophyte

There comes a point in life when you realize that everything that's been given is not made to endure. The talents you were born with, the early loves, even your bodily wellness and strength - none of them have permanence. All of these things are contained in the word 'nature' - or 'Mother Nature' if you prefer - and sooner or later nature, the mother, will withdraw and perish. Symbolically, then, one is left creeping towards the tomb, questioning, questioning. Is there anything left for me? Do I have to wait until the end to find out why I was here? What was it for? The temptation, the overwhelming desire, is to prise open the lid a little bit and see what the body - already stretched out there - has to say. Is there anything that can raise it up? Because the raising has to happen now.

In the old days there was hierophant and neophyte. The hierophant, or officiating priest with his helpers, would put the neophyte, or prepared pupil, into a deathlike trance. He would be literally laid out there in the sarcophagus, dead to the outer world. And then the hierophant would lead him inwardly to an experience whereby the meaning of the cosmos was imprinted on him. And then, after three and a half days, he would be raised from the dead, a new man.

This ancient experience isn't open to us any more. We have to be hierophant and neophyte in our own self today. We have to cross the murmuring border between death and life on our own, often not knowing which is which. In a sense this means we have to push back the circumference of the known world and go beyond it. This is the great adventure of our time, our age of exploration, where freedom begins. But we have to accept the challenge of going beyond the physical. Science has mapped out - or is mapping out - every inch of the physical. The accepted wisdom is that the boundaries of this physical are the outer limits of existence. That death is the end. It takes a fling of courage to know that that is not true - the stubbornness of Columbus to go beyond the kings and queens who say 'no' until you find the one who says 'maybe'. And on the way there may be no sight of landfall, no creature to bring comfort.

So where does nature end? Does it end with the falling away of the 'given'? Or is there a limitless invisible to explore, in which nature becomes the very ship we set sail in? Questions, questions - with, thankfully, no fixed answer.

Landar

©landar 2011. All rights reserved

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Ask, Ask, Ask

 

We're in the tomb before we're in the tomb, and that's a fact. Human beings are the giants of the earth - we have reason, sensibility, pride, anger, vengeance and all the feelings under the sun - but with all that power and strength at our fingertips we are unable to prise open the lid and discover the secrets within. In a sense we are obliged to seal our last hope, like a pressed flower, in that cavernous space. We may search the world through for precious gems to line the lid, to let it sparkle and shine, but really nothing can alter the doom it contains. Everything made of earth has to go that way. I may stare my giant's stare at the tomb or try to break its stone with force of mind, but in the end I have to laugh at the fact that what its chamber hides is greater than the greatest of my kind. And what does it hide? My own body.

And this fact tumbles quite naturally into another. Why are there no answers? We live in an answerless universe with death all around us and can only peel one question after another from  our minds. Why is this? Is knowledge not the answer? Apparently, in the Garden of Eden, fruit from the Tree of Knowledge was forbidden. Surely, if the fruit was tasted, answers would come? Something did come: child-bearing, scratching in the earth for existence, death. What kind of question gives that for the answer? But it wasn't a question, it was innocence. Therefore, the answer to innocence is life. Here's a proposition then: if answers were consistent with human freedom, God would have had them hanging on every tree. But they're not - life is consistent with freedom. No one had to eat the apple.

Is there anything in this parable that deals with the question of suffering now, that sheds light on the big issue: death? No. Well, that's a pity. But I'm still asking. And I don't intend to ever stop. And the questions are going to become furnaces. They're going to burn like suns until, one day, the tomb is going to light up, and in my freedom I will see if there is anything - anything at all - that is capable of raising that body. That is my birthright as a human being - not to force my giant strength on the world, but to ask, ask, ask.

Landar

©landar 2011. All rights reserved

The Japanese Earthquake and the Book of Revelations

The apocalyptic scenes in Japan are reminiscent of the Book of Revelations. "The dragon took his stand on the sea-shore." Japan is the land of the 'dragon'. This is often portrayed pictorially. It is the country par excellence of expertise in all forms of technology. The sub-earthly processes utilized in nuclear power could be said to be quintessentially those of the dragon. "The dragon took his stand on the sea-shore." We see the ravaged eastern seaboard of Japan with its nuclear power-stations rearing up like diadems on the heads of the dragon. "Then out of the sea I saw a beast rising." The waves of the tsunami surge to shore like the terrifying heads of the beast. Surely the abyss has opened in the Pacific and breathed out this monster.

But the Book of Revelations reminds us that the dragon did not manage to seize his prey. The woman with the crown of stars was carried to safety. The earth swallowed the flood. The child she gave birth to was taken into heaven and preserved there. For that reason the dragon waited on the sea-shore in fury.

Is the child the future Being of Love who is destined to rule as eternal self in the human being? Is the woman with the crown of stars the Being of Wisdom who bears the child to term just as the 'dragon' wields its power in the world with greatest ferocity? Is the Beast the counter-image of the force of Love?

It would be abhorrent to minimize the suffering of the people of Japan in any way. But I believe their suffering is the world's suffering. It is almost impossible to wrest one's vision away from the scenes of the rushing torrents of tsunami water. But to look away is sometimes the best way to see clearly. Look towards another form of water: the pure spring of the Holy Spirit. This also contains the image of the mother and the child. I have a few words of meditation here which help. After absorbing yourself in them it is easier to cope with images of inundation, of apocalypse:

The Holy Spirit is the eternal spring of truth,

it is the well of youth and the fountain of life, from which we are all born.

Only the physical part of our being is born of the world.

The true self, the inner being, is one with the Holy Spirit and rises from it.

Landar

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