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The Study of Nothing

16/09/202516/09/2025 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

I am who I am and that is enough Bashar ‘You are God in human form’ You Tube

In many parts of the world there exists a tradition of ‘non-sense poetry’. In Victorian 19th-century England, one of the greatest exponents of this was Lewis Carroll.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

The joke was to move away from the expected in a manner that jolts the reader or listener into a ‘new perspective on the world’ – a journey through the looking glass.

Educators of the mind are appalled if any of this poetry is taken seriously. Scholarly academic method has, for many centuries, led the world of education. Any statements which are clearly not factual are denounced, and their originators flung from the metaphoric castle walls of academia. Nonsense is clearly only for kids.

In an ‘information age’ when artificial intelligence tries to explain all and everything, it struggles with spirituality. Ironically, spirituality requires a reversal of learning, of habitual, judgmental, invented, edited and prejudiced content from the past.

For the spiritual aspirant, this method of ‘removal’ or ‘overriding’ of established thought patterns is not new. In Sufism, there is a concept of ‘Ma’rifa’ which is an ‘attunement’ or intuitive understanding which manifests as the voice within. This is the product of the seclusion of the mind from attachments in general and a mastery of being a true observer of oneself and everything.

In Zen Buddhism the teacher aims to stop the student’s self-conscious attempts to learn ‘the Zen Way’ because Zen is no more than a drop of rain perched on the end of a leaf or the catching of an umbrella casually dropped.

Such ‘no thought’ is difficult to understand, which is reasonable from the point of view of a Westerner who relies on thinking to exist.

I think, therefore I am Rene Descartes

There is a third option available, which is somewhere between these two extremes of thinking and not thinking. That is, ‘resonating with thoughts which originate outside of oneself’. In a metaphor of the human mind as a computer, these are ‘downloads’. These not only affect the individual, but also the planet and ultimately, the entire Universe.

Humankind, we are told, is entering a new dimension of reality sometimes referred to as the ‘New Earth’. In July 23^rd 2025 the Schumann Resonances from the planet underwent an extreme event. All the vibrational frequencies between 4 and 40 Hz lit up on the geophysicist’s measuring instruments.

This level of disruption is a product of a bombardment of charged ions (the solar wind) from coronal mass ejections and the interaction with the Earth’s magnetosphere.

Such ‘energetic activity’ prompts the inquiry as to what type of energy? How is this ‘energy’ perceived by human beings if not through the five senses and seven main chakras?

Humans have always been responsive to the environment but we are limited in our minds by learnt behaviour. Prejudice, unconscious thought patterns and the desire to please others, a lack of mental adventure and repetition on past experiences known as ‘habit’, are strong inhibitors to experience the ‘paranormal’.

If the average person in the street was challenged regarding the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence and the imminent arrival of inter-dimensional beings, they would probably respond with derision.

In a growing minority of more open thinkers, however, there is a referral to ‘moving into a higher frequency’ and ‘learning how to resonate with vibrations’. Such ideas are, in my view, not a true description. Pseudo-scientific metaphors using references to ‘energy’ without first defining what sort of energy, is prone to criticism..

Nevertheless, I personally have observed signs of energies that are not electromagnetic, or magnetic or static electricity or gravity. Ancient buildings and megaliths across the planet and time, display a conscious manipulation of an unknown organic force known as Chi, Prana, Vril, Orgone and different names in many cultures.

*Electromagnetic Energy Focused in the Great Pyramid of Cheops, Giza picture: phys.org*

So it is not absurd to suggest that the human body collects, stores and emits a type of energy in a similar way to the planet. The vital life force of Chi is fundamental to the practice of Chinese acupuncture and is prescribed by many medically trained doctors.

The chakras are nodes positioned below, within and above the human body ‘. I am personally, not convinced that high frequencies have more value than low frequencies. In our perception of light and sound, we benefit from all frequencies, whether high or low. Likewise, our physical senses work simultaneously to provide a working representation of ‘reality’ to our brains. An analogy would be an orchestra producing an experience from a range of instruments tuned to low and high frequencies, from tubas to piccolos.

Perhaps the best advice is to surrender to the way things are. Surrender requires ‘unlearning’ and also attunement to everything outside of our small mental sphere, the brain. It is perhaps one of the greatest realisations encountered on the spiritual path and requires no preparation or knowledge, but rather a revealing of what was always there.

Whatever the future holds, the old world and our individual egos will resist change. When Jesus the Christ said that ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’, he was not suggesting Marxism or the World Economic Forum’s ‘you will own nothing and be happy’.

Rather, this is a spiritual maxim, advocating surrender, from which the benefits are the greatest gift of all.

‘….see what synchronicity brings you with the willingness to let go of all restrictions, all limitations, all assumptions and all insistences that in your unconscious, subconscious and conscious mind don’t actually serve you or align with the true vibration of your true ethereal, spiritual core…’

Bashar

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The Ki Key

13/07/202513/07/2025 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

The Hidden Energy of Life

Western science has many new discoveries to make. The key to unlock the unknown is the simple question; ‘what do we not understand?’

For example; ‘we do not understand energy that is not electromagnetic.’

Such energies must exist as biological energetic processes called ‘life’, have no explanation. We do not have to look far into history and the present day to find indicators of knowledge of another type of energy. In ancient India it was called Prana, in Ancient China – Chi and in Ancient Japan -Ki. In the West it was named ‘Orgone’ by Wilhelm Reich.

This biological energy is commonly linked to healing such as Acupuncture and Reiki but it’s uses are more varied than that.

If we start with the human body, we have evidence that the Ancient Egyptians regarded the body as a receiver of energy from the sun as shown in this image.

The Ankh is a symbol of life and is being held up to absorb the solar rays. Today we are familiar with aerials receiving radio and television in a similar manner.

This biological energy is mapped as pervading the entire human body by Acupuncture practionitioners. The cause of the healing was not understood beyond the concept of ‘Chi’ energy, but the effects were, and it is so effective, it is still in use today.

If we follow the idea of the solar energy as associated with a biological energy from the Cosmos, then the seven planets of ancient times, also affect life on earth through their energetic characteristics. In ancient Greece they were deified as minor gods or archetypes, whose influence as precise ‘qualities’, pervaded every aspect of individual and collective behaviour on Earth. Today we call this astrology.

The energy from the planets affects each of the seven life energy nexuses in the human body known in ancient India as Chakras. Our consciousness as human beings is firmly linked with the ‘heavens’ in this way; obeying the Hermetic principle of ‘as above so below, as below so above.’

The Ancient Chinese combined heaven and humans with the planet earth, represented by the pictogram similar to the capital letter E. The evidence for ‘Ki’ is greatest in the form of the ancient structures built all around the globe.

There is increasing interest in the ‘energetic’ characteristics of megastructures such as pyramids, temples, churches and cathedrals, earthworks, roads, earthworks, hill figures, artificial cave networks and megaliths. All across the ancient world these structures were intricately aligned with and connected to this subtle energy associated with the movements of the sun, moon and the planets, earth and water. Modern water diviners are sensitive to the energy associated with underground water and can tell the water’s volume, depth and speed accurately.

Pyramids are found on every continent of the world (including Antarctica) and it is likely they were connected as a global network to balance and share this subtle energy globally; including sharing information. The present ‘world wide web’ is an analogous modern version of the same form and function.

Examination of the physiology and anatomy of the earth shows that this subtle ‘earth energy’ is associated locally with faults and fissures, springs and wells, water falls which were recognised by local indigenous tribes and cultures as ‘sacred’ with supernatural powers.

They were places where the physical third dimension met other dimensions and acted as ‘portals’ for other entities to interact with humans. In ancient times this was more common as humans were conscious of these subtleties and gods such as Athena would appear in human form to give advice, as recorded in ancient Greek legends. These entities overlap with the experience of so called ‘extra terrestrials’ today; more likely inter-dimensional intelligences who have never left planet Earth.

There was and is a mechanical reality to the generation, manipulation and storage of this subtle energetic system. Pyramids, barrows, dolmens and stone circles are a few of the centres of power used to interconnect and store energy for many purposes such as healing and initiation. The burials that took place at the end of civilisations have been incorrectly focused upon by modern archaeologists. If evidence is needed consider relatively modern Gothic cathedrals which were built for the living, not the dead.

This subtle energy was recorded by the psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich and he named it ‘orgone’. He saw that it accumulated in the human body and was discharged in the orgasm. Orgone is attracted to orgone and does not dissipate like heat energy. Nature can be seen to operate in the same cycle of build-up and discharge. The most familiar would be the accumulation of negative and positive ions in the earth and atmosphere, and the electrostatic discharge of lightning.

The ancient megastructures worked in harmony with nature in this way to regulate the natural flow of energy through the landscape in the same way as a capacitor and resistor in an electric circuit.

Weight and the pressure it creates was known by ancient builders to amplify this subtle energy. In a similar manner, quartz and other crystals build up and discharge piezo-electricity when compressed. The lintels over the uprights at Stone Henge and the T-shape upright stones at Gobleki Tepe in Turkey, performed this function as do the pyramids. It is clear that temples in Ancient Egypt, Greece and Italy have too many columns just to support the roof. Their precise orientation to the magnetic flux of the planet, matching proportions with the golden mean and phi geometry of human body, indicate a primary function of sacred edifices as centres for healing, heightened awareness and initiation.

Finally, to experience this energy within one’s own body, there is a Yogic principle known as ‘kundalini’. This is depicted as a snake (or modern static wave form energy ) and is associated with the spinal column; also in wave form. In my view, the subtle energy which the Yogis call ‘prana’ is in a constant state of build up and discharge, before, throughout and after one’s life. There is no single ‘awakening’ moment when the Kundalini rises up the spine as is sometimes described. Rather the motion of the snake is as seen in nature as a perpetual ascension through the energetic nexuses (chakras). The accumulation purges and cleanses each chakra in turn until discharged naturally in sexual union or used for the process of ‘enlightenment’. For this reason and purpose, many mystics were and are, celibate.

The importance of subtlety of this primal ‘life energy’ awaits formal ‘discovery’ and scientific experimentation and explanation. We can be sure at this moment in history that human beings have forgotten what was once known and drove much of human spiritual evolution for thousands of years.

In my view, now is a good time to re-discover what we have lost, particularly as modern archaeology unearths new evidence almost daily. All that is necessary for archaeologists to advance their theories to another level, and replace ‘grave robbery’ with an understanding of esoteric energy; known once as key to the general advancement of human spirituality, but long ago forgotten.

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Whirled Without End

31/05/202531/05/2025 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

The beginning of now…

When we look at the art of ancient times it is striking how the world is represented in two dimensions. From the beautiful court scenes from Mogul India, Japanese and Chinese evocations of nature, the wall paintings of Egypt and Mayan and Aztec relief sculptures of Central America.

At the same time and for too long, the world was conceived as a flat plain. If you travelled too far you would fall off. It’s an understandable world view, yet the believers in this theory never questioned how deeply a well could be dug before a hole appeared.

This perceptual paradigm was founded in a vague adherence to the dominion of the Divine Male. The Old Testament God was a man – naturally. Animals marched into Noah’s perfectly measured Ark, 2×2 and cells have been splitting that way ever since.

Roman armies marched in two step time and in battles formed orderly squares allowing all round defence.

Sacred buildings were rigidly formal and measured, such as the Parthenon in Ancient Athens. The Ancient Egyptians were equally inspired by formal and exact right angled geometry.

This male principal permeated the theory of design and practice and in doing so formed a reliable and solid ground work for our modern era.

When I became a student of architecture the tutors ask us on our first day what we would bring to architecture. Somewhat naively and immodestly I said I would bring the curve back to architecture. Even headlights on cars in the 1970’s, headlamps on cars were changing from being round to square.

I had a feeling of a ‘brave new world’ which indeed has happened even if I had to let the brilliant Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid, steal my thunderbolts.

As a boy I used to cycle down to the south coast of England where the land meets the sea in tall chalk cliffs. Creeping along the grass to perch on the precipice to look down at the black pebble beaches far below, I was like a seer peeping over the edge of a flat world, into a third dimension.

Whether we see it or not, we are also now creeping warily into a fourth dimension represented by the principal of the ‘sacred feminine’.

This has nothing to with ‘Votes for Women’, a movement that swelled at the beginning of the nineteenth century perhaps as a natural protest against the male principled dominance of society since for ever. The First world war was perhaps, the last breath of that male principal. It briefly stopped the feminine protests and sent women to factories to build the instruments of war, but the corner had been turned. Women drove buses and ambulances and had tasted freedom from domesticity.

Mothers watched their sons march into the sunset, over the horizon and would never forgive the folly of the male Generals and politicians.

If you hold a ball in front of a child and ask, ‘where does this ball begin?’ the child will look at you as if you only have half a brain and explain that a ball has no beginning.

The question is a Koan and like all koans, challenges the rational, logical and formal pathways of thought.

Many dogmatic religious thinkers hold to the notion that the world could possibly end and proponents of this will present you with a date. Presently it is 13^th August 2025 ‘according to Nostradamus’ and this date will, no doubt, pass without incident just as did the Christian Calendar’s year 2000 BCE.

Learning about the sacred feminine is a ‘learning curve’ upon which we still struggle, like young penguins sliding ungracefully up the steep slopes of an iceberg.

Ask an Astrophysicist when the Universe began and they will generally reply based on the so called ‘Big Bang’ theory. Yet the question is as absurd as guessing when and how the Universe will end. Anticipating the common sense of children observing the universe, I would expect they will say it never began and will never end.

That is the beauty of the child’s mind. It still retains the influence of the Divine Mother, before it is sent to the (male) military styled regime of education.

Yet I feel the influence of the Divine Feminine is more influential in modern Western societies than ever before. Parliaments and Judge’s benches are becoming equally filled with women as men.

From Ancient India we are given the map of the idea of the cyclic Yugas; eras circling around 25,000 years in which the world is alternately destructive and creative.

In the view of many, the Age if Aquarius is happening now and introducing the Feminine Principal into all areas of life and knowledge. Exceptions abound of course, as the process is gradual and takes two steps back for each three forward.

The benefit for humankind will be to realise when the pendulum is suspended equally between the two Divine Genders. Modern Feminism becomes flawed when and if it tips the balance too far and unnaturally dominates the male principal.

In Ancient times there are a limited number of symbols that appear in wall paintings and petroglyphs literally, around the world. One of them is the spiral. This remains one of the most easy to comprehend illustrations of an idea that defies logic; infinity. A spiral apparently starts from nowhere and disappears into nowhere.

If something were an mass moving through a void, it would need a circular motion combined with a constant, weak tangental vector, nudging it ever off a circular orbit out of sight.

For a time in history, philosophers were perplexed with the puzzle in geometry of ‘squaring the circle’; famously illustrated by Leonardo de Vinci in his depiction of the ‘Vitruvian Man‘.

Yet in my view the spiral is a better symbolic representation of that state in matter and spirit, where the feminine is truly in harmony with the male.

In every aspect of nature, from the principals of the growth of the fractal tree and sea shores, to the spiralling movements of the moons, planets, stars, galaxies and universes, we can measure in observation the wonder of creation by two complementary Divine potter’s hands; one male, one female.

Humans were made from clay on the spinning potter’s wheel and the principal known as the anima mundi, is the final result of Divine genius – the Soul of the Whirled.

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The Faraday Way

15/01/202515/01/2025 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

Listening to a science programme on the Radio just now, I heard a amazing fact about Michael Faraday, the great early 19th century scientist. Apparently he was an ardent believer in God as well as a scientist. Unlike his contemporarys, he did not believe in molecular theory and the concept of the ‘atom’, which came from the ancient Greeks. He instead said that matter is where ‘lines of force meet’.

The other great scientist from whom much understanding of electricity today came, was Nicola Tesla in the late 19^th century. One of his most famous sayings is; “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”

These are not lightweight scientists. Most of our modern technology we owe to these two men.

The idea of ‘lines of force meeting’ immediately suggests the concept the ‘hologram’ although they were not known in Faraday’s time. Several beams or ‘layers’ of energetic force containing information that the human brain interprets as ‘an object’ is precisely what a hologram is. It is a huge leap but one made succinctly by Michael Talbot in his book, ‘The Holographic Universe’, to suggest that everything that we perceive as matter is a hologram.

Mystics have been saying for centuries that matter consists mainly of ‘nothing’ and modern physics now also states this as true. Some scientists are even questioning whether the electron, proton and neutron are just energy. This combined with the observations by astrophysicists that the Universe consists of 94% so called ‘dark matter’ suggests that we know little about what we sense to be most real, matter.

If one thinks of the ‘table of elements’ as a good proof of matter, then Faraday’s theory of there only being ‘lines of force’ does not contradict the possibility of chemical ‘elements’. Elements might simply be unique combinations of ‘lines of force’ which harmonise to produce the illusion of a ‘solid’.

Sound provides a more tangible analogy as it too is energy with fixed frequency and vibration coming together as single notes, or harmonic layers that produce unique chords when in combination.

But our brains are taught only to interpret the electrical signals from our five senses. From childhood we learn to see these patterns as a solid ‘reality’ but like all illusions, sometimes we miss notice the illusionists slight of hand and mastery of distraction.

For example, we might all have seen something in a flash which a few micro seconds later turns out to be not what we thought. It might be a leaf being blown across the road which a driver sees as a mouse or bird for a brief moment. Or a child’s kite flying high above that a walker mistake for a hovering bird of prey; even for a split second.

Such moments are ‘discontinuities’. The Ancient Celts understood this and certain places, such as the hills of Southern England known as the Downs, were described as ‘thin’, meaning localities where the boundary between ‘solid reality’ and ‘parallel dimensions’ create experiences of the metaphysical (beyond matter) realm. A church going shepherd, in the 19^th century is said to have seen a vision of Jesus above these hills in the sky, which would probably have been forgotten by now had not many in the local village seen the same vision and the newspaper article from the time still framed on a wall in Firle Church.

My point is simply that, if we can accept the suggestion that the Universe is simply ‘energy, frequency and vibration’ many of the ‘anomalies’ that modern science cannot explain, suddenly become easier to understand and even, accept as true.

We do not all have to become mystics to believe and practise this. What a shepherd can see we can all see. So can we all see what children saw in the village of Fatima in Portugal in 1917 – a vision of ‘Our Lady of Fatima’ – as did hundreds of the inhabitants of Fatima on several occasions.

Santa Hosemaria in Fatima, Portugal picture credit: Opus Dei

I was sitting in the waiting room this afternoon whilst my car was being serviced. I had been meditating, and it was with a single point of attention that I was eating an apple when the garage mechanic burst into the room. The conversation went like this;

‘You are eating sweets.’

‘No I am not.’

‘You are eating a sweet apple.’

‘Yes.’

We probably exchange brief moments of an imagined reality with others, more often than we think. The phenomena of what is called as ‘telepathy’ which I would suggest is more subtle that ‘reading the thoughts in others’.

In my view, two people can experience the same ‘energetic patterns’ at the same time. In the above example this was the feeling experience of ‘sweetness’ observed in a split second by two non-connected but open minds. The mechanic had not seen the apple, only received the feeling of ‘sweetness’.

Mothers will probably have had many examples of understanding a child’s needs without conversation; even and especially when the infant has not yet learnt to speak.

A mother and child are indeed a wonderful metaphor for the scientific understanding that Faraday believed, that everything is merely ‘lines of force’ meeting; something natural philosophers term ‘love’. Following this reasoning I would argue that this is why when humans follow (without expectation of reward), their highest excitement, then they will create the energetic Universe that will provide them with their highest reward. Most people’s highest excitement is simply known as love and with this vibration was and is created, the Universe – and is why it is said that; ‘God is love’.

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The Two Mary’s

30/11/202430/11/2024 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

Resolving the Unresolved

The greatest influence on me as a male child growing up in the 1950’s and 60’s was naturally, my mother. She was my a ‘perfect woman’. To Jungian psychologists, this is the ‘anima’ upon which is modelled the feminine aspect of the male psyche.

But there is also a hidden, darker side to the male’s anima. Ideally hidden from child’s view, it was available in films, newspapers and magazines more openly than it is today. There was a ‘sexual revolution’ going on in the teenage generation above me and all was sex, drugs and rock and roll. ‘Flower (femininity) power’ countered the male Patriarchal aggression of the two world wars. Women were ‘burning their bras’.

Psychologists might view this as a healthy revolt against conformity through open expression of emotion. The mind bending drug culture and sexual freedom of that generation erupted and continues to this day.

The dream goes back to the Garden of Eden and the myths of Christianity. Adam and Eve were exposed to their own nudity and felt shame for the first time; their mutual feelings of new found lust moved into era of ‘covering up’, but the fig leaf was nowhere near big enough. The characters in the Old Testament carried out a lot of begetting and smote-ing. The Ancient World was like the Wild West and it needed a Sheriff to calm things down – Moses.

In the New Testament, Jesus’s mother, Mary, had to be ‘free of original sin’ meaning starting afresh. But how could the mother of the new Christ reproduce without being associated with the shame and guilt of sex? The answer was simple, sophisticated and a mind bender; the mother of Christ is a virgin.

Another convenient proof – after the fact – was provided. Mary’s husband, Joseph, was too old to be a father; so confirming Mary’s ‘immaculateness’. In Renaissance paintings of the Virgin Mary, her guiltless face looks lovingly down upon the infant Jesus, suckling at her breast. All was neatly explained.

The problem is; femininity isn’t like that. There is more than a hint of ambiguity in the archetypal feminine, because it is dark as well as a light; a destroyer as well as a creator.

The church fathers cleverly wrote this contradiction into the script and they did it by depicting ‘Mary Magdalene’ as a prostitute. If Mary and Joseph didn’t ‘do it’, then Mary Magdalene certainly did and according to the Catholic Church, she did ‘it’ plenty. But we might regard this depiction of Mary Magdalene as suspect, not least because the word ‘prostitute’ does no appear in the Bible and because Magdalene or Magdala sported the uncompromising title; ‘The apostle of the Apostles’.

*Saint Mary Magdalene* by Bernadino Luini – Italy – 1524

How much should we go along with this dichotomy of femininity? Was Jesus in his later life, such a bad character as to keep company with a ‘fallen woman’? The fiction survived until 1969 when the Catholic church declared the Magdalene was not a prostitute after all. But was the damage to women in general irreparable? What were the consequences of this unjustified denouncement of womanhood – ergo the Divine Feminine – by the Patriarchy?

Most frustrating of all about the Magdalene lie is that there had always been another version of her in the Gnostic Gospels or Nag Hammadi Library of the Essenes. In ‘The Gospel of the Saviour’ Jesus describes her as ‘the woman who knows the All’. Jesus must have had many female disciples and it appears that he initiated Mary Magdalene to the highest level. In contrast, the male disciples come over in the Gospels asking dumb questions; you cannot raise the consciousness of those who are not ready – too much ego.

Even Simon Peter was in denial of his faith when asked. In my view Simon Peter, might have been nick named the ‘Rock’ by Jesus because he was spiritually calcified. The Roman Catholic Church in building itself upon the character of Simon Peter, has certainly reflected much of Peter’s stiffness through the centuries.

Mary Magdalene on the other hand was not bland and serves our understanding better as a complementary female counterpart to the male Christ figure. Her wisdom represents that part of the Divine feminine which men find hard to understand. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, she, ‘takes…aches…fakes…just like a woman…with her fog, her amphetamine and her pearls’.

Joan of Arc by Jean Auguste Dominque Ingres 1854

If a further example of the positive anima was needed, then the figure of ‘Joan of Arc’ serves well. She was a saintly virgin with the Creator speaking in one ear and King Charles VII in the other. Joan’s knightly armour represents the code of chivalry brought back by the male knights during the Crusades, a code that held women in the highest esteem and made men bend at the knees in their presence, literally and metaphorically. Joan of Arc was a gender reversed version of knightly chivalry and the reverence owed to perfect womanhood. As a Christ–like heroarchetype, she had to suffer an early martyrdom in the hands of the Judas figure – the traitorous Duke of Burgundy. The character of St. Joan, you might feel, is just too goody goody. She needs less fire and more earthiness, more representative of the daily and nightly amours of the common man and woman. In a word; balance.

A more healthy expression of gender roles and spirituality can be found in sculptures of Indian Temples. The depictions of Tantric sexual intercourse in the statues must have made the Victorian missionaries blush. This was not the ‘virginal’ forbidden fruit that created so much male hypocrisy in Victorian society; from Royalty to the gutter creepers. In India we see an understanding and embracing of the spiritual power of sexual energy and an aspiration to achieve immortality through it, for both parties.

*Hero Chamunda* – Tantra at the British Museum

The two versions of femininity could not be clearer. Whilst the creation of the Raj was believed to be a ‘civilising’ of India and it’s people, the reverse could have been true. The depiction of sacred male and female sexual energy was brought back to Victorian England between the covers of the Kama Sutra and Arthur Avalon’s, ‘Serpent Power’. But their enlightened texts failed to remove the curtains from the legs of pianos of society’s ‘well to do’. Such sexual repression, psychologists now know, creates destructive, unconscious fantasies in the male psyche. A contemporary expression of this was the so called ‘Jack the Ripper’ who murdered prostitutes in Victorian London as readily as the Church burnt ‘witches’ in Mediaeval Europe; probably for the same reasons.

In Jungian symbology, the negative anima in men is likened to a Vampire that sucks a man’s life blood and by implication, their very Soul; dangerous territory. The term for such a woman in 1930’s, 40 and 50’s was appropriately a ‘Vamp’. Her picture adorned many a barrack room wall. As an aside it is interesting that in the eponymous film, the God-fearing General George E. Patton angrily tore down a soldiers pin-up of Lorraine Bond with the words, ‘this is a barracks not a brothel!’

The evolution of the internet and instant ‘view in private’ pornography, has pushed images of the negative anima onto a new generation young, vulnerable males apparently without consideration of consequences. The pornography and sexual violence on view is far more mentally poisonous than those penny-slot machine Edwardian ladies undressing before voyeuristic butlers. The United Kingdom is currently considering a law to ban the under 16’s from social media, and Australia just dropped the idea.

In 1950’s Britain, the main stream media exploited the saucy postcard ‘seaside’ style of humour, ripe with sexual innuendo. In a sort of uniquely British way, sexual ‘goings on’ were laughed off socially as a bit of ‘slap and tickle’. The ‘Carry On’ films had audiences falling off their seats. Sex and gender jousts were fun and funny.

In this vane, Alec Guinness starred in a 1953 film called ‘Captain’s Paradise’. His character was the Captain of a ferry working between Gibraltar and Spanish enclaves in Morocco. The gag was that he had a wife and mistress with opposite and (for him) complementary characters. In Gibraltar his English middle class wife played by Celia Johnson, spent her days engaged in housework and domestic trivia, in preparation for her husband’s return. In the mid point of the ferry voyage, the Captain always turns his domestic wife’s photograph around in his cabin. Once the reverse side is a photo of his exotic lover played by Yvonne de Carlo. She is by nature a hedonistic, sexually alluring young woman who loves to drink and dance the nights away with her sea Captain. In the end it all goes wrong but the point is clear. Men idealise a particular woman who is a projection of both their negative and positive male anima.

It should be acknowledged that the female anima in the male psyche has an equivalent in women which Jung called the animus. The reader is invited to study this yin yang polarity. Let it be enough to know that the sacred dance in the affairs and affairs of men and women is one that can and should be, vital to their individual spiritual transcendence.

As a summing up and because I like an answer of any kind, I quote Joseph L. Henderson in ‘Man and His Symbols’ p. 157;

“Any of us can see, of course, that there is a conflict in our lives between adventure and discipline, or evil and virtue, or freedom and security. But these are only phrases we use to describe an ambivalence that troubles us, and to which we never seem able to find an answer.

There is an answer. There is a meeting point between containment and liberation, and we can find it in the rites of initiation that I have been discussing…

…Initiation is, essentially, a process that begins with a rite of submission, followed by a period of containment and then by a further rite of liberation. In this way every individual can reconcile the conflicting elements of his personality: He can strike a balance that makes him truly human, and truly the master of himself.”

In highlighting the two Mary’s the ‘unresolved’ feelings within males needs such resolution. The Christian religion includes these processes in it’s rites of passage; (submission – mass) reconciliation (confession) and liberation (priesthood) but few ‘initiates’ become masters of themselves because, in my view, St. Peter keeps the key to himself. No gnostics may enter!

For me, the ‘sea captain’ of within, cannot and should not, keep up the charade. The individual needs of the women who are subject to anima projection, rightly demand their own initiation path.

The unresolved in worldly affairs takes place in order to illuminate and help us work through the contradictions within us all.

This ‘fight’ – which scales down in simplest of terms to ‘evil and virtue’ – is indeed hard to reconcile and much of the world’s greatest literature and other forms of expression, unpeels this angst before our eyes.

May we all sail on calm seas.

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Earth and Ether

01/11/202402/11/2024 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

Part Two

‘There is little that cannot be explained in a few sentences;

sentences that may take a life time to understand.’

What is consciousness? Where is consiousness? Who is conscious of what?

The conscious ‘me’ is clearly gifted a material body but is my body me? Clearly not, but there is evidence that the opposite is true. People have clinically died and remained fully conscious outside of the body. To explain this phenomena, consciousness must exist in another medium and that we call ‘spirit’ or loosely in scientific terms, ‘energy’. What type of energy we will come to.

The concept of spirit outside of matter, is central to many world religions. The Christian priest will attend a person dying or conduct an exorcism and a Tibetan Buddhist will say prayers over a cadaver for several days. Curiously, religious representatives do not attend births. Perhaps this is because there is no agreed moment in gestation when spirit enters the foetus but certainly it does.

In this Ven diagram, is a simple representation of how matter and spirit lock together and what they share in common. Where matter and spirit overlap is a particular energy which modern science has not yet been able to detect and measure, but which has been described extensively across time and cultures as, ether Chi, Qi, Prana, Orgone, Vril, or when in the earth, the tellurgic current.

This invisible energy creates a portal, a zone where there is connection between both matter and spirit, which I shall term ‘ether’. The stronger the ether, the easier it is for consciousness to move between matter and spirit. There is no scientific proof for this other than that humanity throughout history has devoted vast amounts of time and resources to achieve just this effect in it’s magnificent structures and modes of worship.

Depiction of Spirit Entity at Altimira, Spain

Forty thousand years ago homo sapiens sapiens conducted Shamanic rituals in cave dwellings. They created their connection with the spirit world by painting on rock walls. Through these superbly representative paintings, spirit was able to enter the cave and infuse each sentient being with it’s presence. There is also a theory that important star constellations were also represented in these paintings. Cave dwellers would have developed a close relationship with star patterns and apparent movement of the night sky when viewing from the mouth of the cave; itself a domed observatory.

Chi is present in all nature and certain places and times amplify it’s power. This can stimulate ‘extra sensory perception’ in humans and a gateway into our material realm for non-corporeal beings. To this end, throughout history, most civilisations have used and enhanced Chi by building sacred buildings and using their unique qualities as ‘places of power’, to use a phrase from the Toltec Shaman, Don Juan in Carlos Castenada‘s books.

In Ancient Greece, elegant statues of gods were placed in Temples to invite the god to be present in the statue. When the monotheistic religions arrived such ‘idol worship’ was forbidden. This fear is a sure sign of how powerful early churches realised living gods occupying statues to be.

Ancient people’s, who today we would call a, seer, prophet, priest, magician, mason, water-diviner or Oracle, helped in the construction of sacred edifices of all kinds. Temples, obelisks, pyramids, causeways, megaliths, dolmens, wells or hill figures and many others can be found today all over the globe, often unseen or unrealised. Many modern authors have studied global alignments of such sacred monuments based on sacred geometry, alignments, distance and time.

Chi is accumulated and or channelled through these structures. Whilst later burials often occurred in or near them, their main function was generally ceremonial and as places of initiation. To amplify the Chi very similar techniques were used based on geometry, astral alignments and tellurgic currents; all of which have the combined effect of accumulating and focusing Chi on the human heart, right brain and pineal and pituitary glands.

Many historical and current researchers have documented and explain aspects of this sacred knowledge. Unfortunately, left brain biased archaeologists usually support only those theories based on matter, historical records and anthropology, without reference to the living spirit that was once sacred to ancient cultures.

My point in this essay is that by introducing the concept of an invisible but omni-present spirit into our understanding of the past, the relationship between our sensory experiences and our right brained, feeling based consciousness, becomes clear.

The more Chi is present both within and without of a human being, the more easily such a person can slip through the mirror into a world beyond. Consider Alice’s famous journey into the mirror and the inverted playing card world of dreams; where right is wrong and wrong is right. Never trust a flamingo.

Less flippantly we might examine how personal direction of thought is directed outward using personal power or Chi. It is the means through which prayer is sent; through the ethereal veil to ‘God’ or Universal ‘Mind’. Alice created her Wonderland by going within or ‘down the rabbit hole’.

Finally, we should appreciate spirit is able to pass through the veil towards humanity, boosted by Chi. A highly experienced ‘Dowser’ or ‘Water Diviner’ in Scotland for instance, describes grave yards as being places of concentrations of earth energy or Chi. This connects the earthly grave with the spirit world to which our consciousness is always connected. The common story of ‘ghosts’ inhabiting graveyards is a good example of the ‘twilight zone’ occupied by all sorts including the disembodied. The particularly time of year for this veil to thin is of course, ‘The Day of the Dead’ in Mexico and ‘All Hallows Eve’ in Christianity. The displays in shop windows of evil ecrutements for children is not something properly understood in my view.

Examples of portals for the spirit, exist in very old houses, natural features such as caverns, springs, geological features such as magmatic intrusions and dikes, towns and cities like Jerusalem.

What happens in such sacred sites and countries connects through grids and alignments to other countries and even around the world. For much of recorded history, the Holy Land played out a spiritual discourse, such as those narrated in the Old Testament and New. This global effect was so strong that the Crusades set out to ‘take’ Jerusalem for Christianity and suppress to the ‘infidel’. The history of these brutal Medieval wars is well known and yet continues to play out, often with the same disregard for the sanctity of life.

One might wonder what it is about this particular part of the globe that makes it a spiritually significant region for the monotheistic religions.

When the prophet Jesus the Christ is described in the Bible as ‘walking on water’, like many biblical narratives it has multiple meanings; some for the initiated and some not. Between the earthly and spiritual planes is what I have described as an ‘etheric’ plane. Ether similar or identical to Chi; it’s exact nature still defined by effect rather than cause.

It is said that Jesus ‘walked on water’ is a metaphor for the transition from the material into the etheric plane. The water represents ether and the body of Christ is his astral, not his physical body. Like much of spirituality, such things can be experienced and mastered during life; so as to ‘store treasure in Heaven’.

One of the functions of this ability to transcend our material bodies is to enable communication of the highest kind between spirit and mortals. Earth has been visited and given benign advice by angels and prophets many times in it’s history and these form the basis of mystery schools and mysticism but unfortunately much of the glory of such knowledge has historically and to this day, fallen victim of the self interest of religious leaders.

A left brain thought bias in the West leads many to consider only logically constructed thoughts, and yet some of the most important decisions we make in our lives originate in the right side of our brains. How we think is as important as what we think.

Finally, one must acknowledge that in the material world and it’s spiritual equivalent, there are tendencies to descend into chaos as well as to rise to perfection. The spirits that facilitate this amongst mankind are the angels and demons respectively. Through their benign and harmful machinations, human life has evolved into it’s present state of scientific materialism and atheism.

What is happening in this present time of uncertainty and human suffering is in my view, a product of ignoring the possibility and presence of non-material realms and those places and times that invite personal and collective ascension.