by Atticus Atlas | Mar 3, 2022 | About Reflection

“Well, this is how I’m feeling today. It felt a bit different yesterday. Never mind. I am now alone with myself. What do I think and feel?

“It feels true – and it is being true to myself.

“A thought: It also may be a being in touch with The Other when ‘the other’ is – at least in part – myself.

“A feeling: The tentacles or threads from within me that stretch outwards to the outside world are more liable to be soothed. It is a settled home for me – from which I all too often eject myself. It is my true North even if (a thought:) in the perspective of the world outside, I – we – are realised more in action or in narratives that overlook much of this essence of what we are about.

“A feeling: There is a wordless awareness of skin, a boundary of my-self. It is a self-absorbed stillness. It radiates with a slight ‘weightiness’ from the hub of my heart and with an un-heated sort of warmth in my head. It is like being outside of myself yet centred in myself.

“Gentle physical sensation predominates. As it should, in this session of calm reflection. I’m gravitating to what is pleasant. There is a lazy-ish feeling of contentment that I’ve got this far in my life and projects. In so far as I can identify the locus of my feelings, they seem to be more in my head – cranium? – as today they are of a logical variety though seem to have been more in the region of the chest when they were related to love or to angriness. It seems to me, here, that I’m deliberately ….. using my head. I do have a wish to distract my mind from unpleasantness. As I’m on a physically even keel, a flocculent, enveloping, generalised sensation seems to creep in. Its happy.

“An inside voice clings to a higher, nameless realm that may be watching down on me – a ‘realm’ that is part of me. Looking in at, or down on, myself it seems as if I accentuate the dominant sensations of my life at this general moment in time, a sort of general contentment in thinking of a particular stage that I have reached in my journey through life – or of my loved ones.

How to fuse in my mind my deeper feelings about those I love – what they mean to me and have always meant to me – with how to deal with matters in the relationship that crop up day by day? It is like a bystander seeing an aircraft flying overhead with thinking about what it would be like to be in the cockpit.

It is a bit different from some times when I’ve been walled out of contentedness by a concern or alarm at an obstacle in front of me that I must outface. That’s like a sensation of first night nerves that a theatre actor has – prompting better performances.

“Drat! What was that slight stinging sensation in my finger! So often, there is a particular physical sensation that distracts and so predominates when I’m trying to meditate. It is almost as if it does it deliberately! An itching finger, say, makes immersion in quiet self-contemplation problematic. Of course, if there is some really worrisome issue, it may manifest itself in a slightly febrile or jittery sensation. That’s appearing to be in the region of the chest.

“So, in what does this inner life consist if I try and look at it head on and define it?

“The mental mechanism for dealing with a question – a ‘questing’ – is mainly a logical process. It’s distinct from relaxing quietly to listen to one’s inner voice…OR is this my inner voice of the here and the right-now. It is a ‘conscious’ sort of question. The normal way of considering such questions is in deliberate cogitation – unless a habit is formed through which such questioning becomes a second nature – is like trying to unravel any knotty problem. A contemplation of my place in the whole scheme of the world is both conceptual and emotional.

“The problem of understanding ‘the intangible’ is not to be underestimated. How often have I had this thought!

“The logical question of what it is that animates me – what I am au fond – brings me up against what I’ve defined as ‘The Blur’ – ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ and the rest of the synonyms are so freighted with baggage and I really do not know what it is that I’m trying to identify save in a very general sense, in other words it is to me a Blur. That is the difficulty of putting into words what is going on in our inner life. And almost all the things that are so important to any of us seem to fit into this category. We turn our eyes away, or have them turned away, from the essence of what matters to us! Language has not developed to expound this knowingness of who we are, if indeed it ever could be so developed. So many intangibles defeat subtle and truly penetrating depiction in words. I suppose that one aspect of this is in part because of how communal thinking, in which we share, has developed. Maybe it is an illustration of the general resistance in society’s thinking to puffing up any one member of it – save as an exemplar of how members of society generally should feel. The pressure on what to think and what not to think is part of how language, culture and thoughts work. A Japanese person for instance, it can be said, thinks of himself more as a component part of his society than as an individualised person (hence the phenomenon of WW2 kamikaze, pilots etc).

“There I go again, thinking thoughts. I’m supposed to be meditating. But I AM meditating. And there is a feeling associated with these thoughts. I’m feeling as if I’m close to myself. I’m aware of myself in a familiar kind of a way, as a cosy relationship with someone I’ve always known. A slight weightiness in my chest perhaps but the language to describe my feeling about my feeling isn’t really helpful, save that I do myself know what I mean. It perhaps isn’t something I was designed to convey?

“The language to describe an atmosphere is not exactly rich. So… what are I to think, given that the tool of vocabulary is rough-hewn? ‘Gut feelings’ may be right but then we should feel them in …our own guts?

“What is wrong with putting thoughts as such, thought, on a pedestal? Why has feeling got to take over everything; surely one can have both thoughts and feelings and even if one wells out of the other that does not give one or the other a sort of superior status in the pecking order – the pecking order is after all also a human construct…It may seem a novel idea that a thought can rate in importance as high as a material entity but it has been thought about before…., leastways George Orwell was thought to be breaking new ground in his dystopian 1984 where Winston Smith was not allowed to die till cleansed of every last subversive idea….

“Now my thinking of yesterday all comes back to me, in one interwoven ball, so to speak. Is this what the mystics call mind-chatter? If so, what is so wrong with trying to get it clear in my head. It is clear through scientific findings that there is a powerful – perhaps an all-powerful – unseen world. It actuates the physical world. Initially (ie to former generations) invisible entities appear in branches of physics. There is a physical or DNA link between the body and the mind. Scientific work has been done on the locus of thoughts and feelings. Where is situated in the body the filament in a character that a given situation can light up? The fact that a ‘filament’ in a character is not visible or tangible is far from proof that it is not there. Has the ‘dictating’ spirit of a person a specific and material correlation in the body? Is the mental component primary or is it causal? Can character traits be passed across generations? ….. Must come back to that musing.

“More random thoughts follow…..It is easy enough to dismiss such ideas as random, but facile to do so surely, and the importance of ‘random’ developments anyway is another apparent finding of science in our time. The Duke of Marlborough and his descendant, Winston Churchill, also the Earl of Chatham and his son, William Pitt: they all saved the day for England in its hours of greatest peril. The person inclined to scoff at the science might jib: ‘Does the fact that the scions of just two families in four crises showed their true mettle imply that they possessed an inherited ‘Save Great Britain’ gene…?’ Is the dismissal of those who only believe in what they can see or touch to be taken as gospel?

“How do I know such apparent non-sequiturs are random? If, as some think, there is a power in the universe that guides us, and if time is circular, perhaps there is a purpose in what seems random but just is not clear to me at the moment, and this thought about the Churchill family may come into useful play in a situation that I’m just not seeing at the moment.

“Perhaps this is all rumination? But there is something free-ranging, something pleasant about it. I can think what I like. I am only accountable to perhaps my own conscience? I do not want to encourage wrong-headed tendencies in myself else they will grow normal to my way of thinking; and from that trouble can start…. No-one need read or see or hear what I’m thinking. My own private thoughts… Reflection often involves descending into its chosen subject matter from the vantage point of contemplating it ‘from above’. Most reflection is not of a purely abstract nature but has a grounding in some facet of our lives or daily concerns.

“So apart from my love-interest – and I’m not following in that track of thinking at the moment – DAMMIT THERE HAS JUST BEEN A KNOCK ON THE DOOR! CAN ONE NOT HAVE A MOMENT TO ONESELF! THINK ONE’S OWN THOUGHTS. SEE WHERE THEY LEAD. WATCH THEM.

“You know what ‘calmness’ is when someone disturbs it!

“Maybe sheer calm is a form of bliss – in the form we can understand. The prayers of old speak of the ‘blessed contentment’ that is a foretaste of the eternal sabbath…

“Where was I? Oh yes, just trying to wrap up into some form of digestible summary some vague but – to me, interesting – thoughts that have been flitting around in my head these past few days… OK, action time, back to the fully awake or conscious world, let’s try and get the conclusions down into the computer:”

****

Notes for the record of this session

‘Can we ‘come back to’ or revisit our past while we are embodied on earth? Some advances of science seem to open up a hypothetical possibility that we will be put in a position to Time Travel. If so, it seems an odds-on possibility that we will be only able to do this much as in the way that a spirit is said to visit earth; it is much as if we are obliged to follow the code of conduct required for a Playboy Bunny: ‘You can look but you can’t touch!’ One problem with the idea of glimpsing the sum total of what went on in the past is that there are unlikely to be no-go areas in the Re-Visit. Think of it: we all erect barriers around ourselves but the watchful sprites might see us in the toilet! Allegorical warnings abound. Remember that juicy apple on the Tree of Knowledge? Or Icarus with wings frazzled from flying too close to the sun! We can hanker too much after knowledge for our own good. If there was proof of an Afterlife -100% definite proof, with no ‘ifs or buts’ – then everything changes, including reasons for following any moral code; after all, there may be no escaping the way that we will be hauled before …a vision of how we acquitted ourselves while coiled up in this mortal coil.

The vast panorama of life and Beyond Life is but one pearl in the oyster of what we are licensed to think about if we are not being led by Teachers to have their teachings insinuated into our thoughts, right down into the private depths in our minds that we perhaps have not fully fathomed.

‘Meditation’ nowadays especially in an Eastern sense evokes inter alia a reaching into an Essence of the self and/or up to an Empyrean. This may be an all-encompassing Universal Soul.

If this is the case is such an indivisible entity nevertheless stratified to envelop more than one type or tier of the soul? Some people believe that there can be a soul of a tribe or a nation?

In considering such questions, and the related question of posing them in the right way, the speculative mind has found a groove that may take it away from one form of meditation into a realm whereby the deeper questions are like some sort of puzzle. There is a time to get one’s basic thinking done. One should not go round in circles. They can turn into prejudices and self-brainwashing. That idea sits side by side with the fact that one should think afresh and constantly be aware. We live in a mental world; and our being aware of our physical surroundings is only a part of it. The practice of constant re-evaluation and thinking for oneself is not a time-consuming one; the mentality fostered in the process of meditation can help us in many contexts in our lives. One’s mind can settle into a groove; the thoughts of a younger self, for instance, often are trotted out so that one accepts without new questions the verdicts of a younger generation on the old when one is old oneself, reinforcing the self-brain-washing.

Much of all this comes down to a simple precept: ‘Look before you leap’ rather than make avoidable mistakes.’

***

“Tomorrow, if I have a session of reflection. it may turn out to be utterly different from that of today.

Life is an adventure and there is no saying what we will be thinking or what will be happening tomorrow and all sensations to us mortals take place in our minds and so one might as well try and have an adventure that is safe, and in the mind.”