I Want To Write A Poem For You

I wrote this poem after the training weekend of Sexualty and Spirituality at the Institute of Psychosynthesis. It was a powerful experience that percolated within me for months after. The poem is an effor to capture that spark of inspiration, the moment of being moved, the feeling of bittersweetness. It’s about joy, about loss. It’s about sorrow, about solace.

I want to write a poem for you

Like Leonard for Marianne

To sing for your beauty and your wisdom

I blink…

And blush with shame

You are not my lover!

Are you…not?

What is it if not Love?

In your gaze, I leap towards wonder, meaning and transcendence

In your embrace, a forlorn trance

 Defiantly afresh

A sorrowing whisper, Bon Voyage

In this silence, deep and wide

A bigger ending unfolds

Ending of 2022

On the 30th December 2022, a cold and wet day in Scotland, I braved a walk on the beach of St Andrews with loved ones. As we were making our way towards the beach, the rain stopped. Cold fresh sea air filled our lungs. Suddenly I looked up and saw this beautiful rainbow displayed for us.

In that moment I remembered my angel card I drew during the winter solcetice retreat in Findhorn, twice I drew the same card - Simplicity.

I’m reminded, to look up and look around, to see all the beauty surrounding us. The kind of beauty that is so simple, effortless, and always available if I can allow myself access…

Here is wishing a 2023 led by Simplicity.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

- T.S. Eliot Little Gidding

Findhorn

I spent 5 days at Findhorn Foundation on Cluny Hill for a winter solcetice retreat. It was peaceful, gentle and a much needed space to switch from the busy doing to simply being. This is the room I spent most mornings reading and observing the sky. I found in the library ‘Selected Writings of Jung, Introduced by Anthony Storr’. It felt like my intimate time with Jung, a few hours each morning, to be stimulated, questioned, challenged and humoured by his brilliant mind.

The construction of a collectively suitable persona means a formidable concession to the external world, a genuine self-sacrifice which drives the ego straight into identification with the persona, so that people rally do exist who believe they are whatt they pretend to be. The ‘soullessness’ of such an attitude is, however, only apparent, for under no circumstances will the unconscious tolerate this shifting of the centre of gravity. When we examine such cases critically, we find that the excellence of the mask is compensated by the ‘private life’ going on behind it. The pious Drummond once lamented that ‘bad temper is the vice of the virtuous.’ Whoever builds up too good a persona for himself naturally has to pay for it with irritability. Bismarck had hysterical weeping fits, Wagner indulged in correspondence about the belts of silk dressing-gowns, Nietzsche wrote letters to his ‘dear lama’, Goethe held conversations with Eckermann, etc. But there are subtler things than the banal lapses of heroes. I once made the acquaintance of a very venerable personage - in fact, one might easily call him a saint. I stalked round him for three whole days, but never a mortal failing did I find in him. My feelings of inferiority grew ominous, and I was beginning to think seriously of how I might better myself. Then, on the fourth day, his wife came to consult me… Well, nothing of the sort has ever happened to me since. But this I did learn: that any man who becomes one with his persona can cheerfully let all disturbances manifest themselves through his wife without her noticing it, though she pays for her self-sacrifice with a bad neurosis.

Blossom

In a vast flower garden where thousands of exquisite flowers blossom season after season, you do not need to add another flower to make it look more beautiful. It appears already perfectly beautiful.

Yet, you will recognize that planting another flower adds something very precious to the entirety of the garden—the wholeness that is the garden.

This is what it means to make a difference in the world.

You make a difference in the world not because the world needs to be made different but because it is what happens when you blossom as a precious flower in the garden of the universe — as a conscious expression of Energy in the abundant perfection of the Kosmos.

You are a Singular Kosmic Destiny, the fulfilment of which is the difference you make in the world—and in the universe.

You make a difference.

Your life makes a difference.

Because of you and because of the difference you make, a corner of the world will be lit more radiantly than ever before.

That light, that radiance, is the substance of the universe that unfolds in the blossoming of your soul.

Let there be light in the world.   

Let there be YOU in the full glory of your Being.

- Kimura, Y.G.

How Self Loves

Alex Grey

I was watching a show on BBC Iplayer, Everything I Know About Love. The last scene in the last episode was a mother daughter dialogue. The mother said to the daughter:

I think you are looking for an extraordinary kind of love.

But I don’t think, for what is worth, you want to be loved in an extraordinary way.

I think what you want is to be loved plainly and quietly, without spectacle or anxiety…

One day as hard as it is to believe, things will be dramatic enough.

There will be sickness and breakdowns and bankruptcy…

there will be so much fucking cancer everywhere…

the world will feel like a war zone.

And you want the person you love to feel like peace.

I was really moved by that. I feel that is how Self loves us, plainly and quietly, without spectacle or anxiety, like peace.

My heart is very full, with gratitude for psychosynthesis, to lead me onto this path of healing, to discover the wholeness of my own being, to illuminate for me what it means to really open my heart to live, and to love.

Live the Questions

During a recent trip to Snowdonia, Wales, I brought with me a little book ‘Letters to a Young Poet’ by Rainer Maria Rilke. I have come across Rilke’s poems before so I decided to pick up this Penguin Classic to accompany me on my trip. During the day I was fully immersed in the vastness of nature, the mountainous landscape, beautiful lake, dramatic waterfalls… At night by the fire Rilke’s words touched my heart. It felt like he was speaking to the very depth of my soul.

You are so young, all still lies ahead of you, and I would like to ask you, as best I can, dear Sir, to be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distance day in the future.

What goes on in your innermost being is worth all your love.

Dibs in Search of Self

A dear friend of mine recommended this beautifully heart-warming story about a young boy Dibs, who comes from a wealthy and highly educated family but was never treated as an individual - always being weighed up alongside others. The book chronicles a series of play therapy, through which Dibs had come to acceptance of himself. Though play he had poured out his wounded, bruised feelings. There grew within him a new awareness of a selfhood, and a breathless discovery that he had within himself a stature and wisdom that expanded and contracted even as do the shadows that are influenced by the sun and the clouds. Slowly, tentatively, he discovered that the security of his world was not wholly outside himself, but that the stabilizing center he searched for with such intensity was deep down inside that self.

“Dibs had had his dark moments and had lived for a while in the shadows of life. But he had had the opportunity to move out of those dark moments and discover for himself that he could cope with the shadows and sunshine in his life.

Perhaps there is more understanding and beauty in life when the glaring sunlight is softened by the patterns of shadows. Perhaps there is more depth in a relationship that has weathered some storms. Experience that never disappoints or saddens or stirs up feeling is a bland experience with little challenge or variation in color. Perhaps when we experience confidence and faith and hope that we see materialize before our eyes this builds up within us a feeling of inner strength, courage, and security.”

Dibs’ story makes me think of the search of Self for each and every one of us. We all embark on a journey of discovering and connecting with our transcendent-immanent Self, our deepest truth, our heartfelt values.

As we experience the unfolding of our life, we often feel events are happening to us. On this roller coaster ride called life and we are bewildered and confused by the unceasing battle between our impulses, desires, principles and aspirations. We are on this road trip but forgot for what purpose we are making the journey. Chronic feeling of isolation, self-destructive behaviors, suicidal impulses are all psychological symptoms when we persistently identify with a feeling, a desire, an opinion, a role and we lack a unitary point of perspective.

Our healing begins by compassionately attending to our inner child of history from the place of the loving witness. As the empathic relationship deepens we realize that our true identity is not something we just have or are given, it is something we must manifest via our choices and expressions. The past is not fixed and unalterable. Its facts can be re-discovered, its values re-assessed, its meanings redefined in the context of newly gained scope of perception. Aldous Huxley articulates beautifully in <The Door of Perception Heaven and Hell> - by the memory of past sin, by imagined pleasure, by the bitter aftertaste of old wrongs and humiliation, by all the fears and hates and cravings…In spite of all the terror, all the bewilderment and confusion, the ultimate Reality remains unshakably itself and is of the same substance as the inner light of even the most cruelly tormented mind.

Beware of Arriving

It’s Christmas 2021. The world is still engulfed in a ‘global pandemic’ caused by a peculiar virus, the origin of which remains a mystery. My own family in Xi’an, China were just entering another strict lockdown. Our trip to my partner Daniel’s family in Scotland was cancelled. He has caught a chill and is sleeping a lot. It’s grey and wet most days and our flat is very quiet. The whole scene is very unholidaylike. After the initial disappointment of having to face a bit of a shitty Christmas, I decided to accept it and utilise this time of completely no need to be anywhere, see anyone or do anything to do some reading. That’s when I came across this gem, Paul Watzlawick’s book ‘The Situation Is Hopeless But Not Serious’. It is a small book consisting of 14 short essays, very easy to read, yet one of the most entertaining and thought-provoking book I’ve read for a long while.

It is a clever book, and a very funny book, full of metaphors, vignettes, innuendos and irony, which probably connected with me particularly given the gloom I was going through as described above. However don’t be fooled by its seeming light-heartedness. Behind every laughter there is a moment of sobering ponderation. Truth, often imparted with unbearable honesty. I find myself go back and savour the words for longer…

Here I’d like to some parts from Chapter Eight - Beware of Arriving (background note: this book is intended as a manual for the pursuit of unhappiness)

“It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive, says the wisdom of a Japanese proverb.

Oscar Wilde comes to mind with his famous and often plagiarized aphorism: There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it.

Arriving - by which is meant either literally or metaphorically reaching a destination - is generally taken to be an important criterion of success, power, recognition, and self-esteem. By the same token, failure or, especially, indolent drifting is considered a sign of stupidity, laziness, irresponsibility, or cowardice. ness, irresponsibility, or cowardice. But the road to success is troublesome, for it requires a great deal of effort and even the most intense effort may still fail. And who wants to go to this trouble? Thus instead of engaging in a “policy of small steps” toward a reasonable, reachable achievement, it is very useful to set oneself a goal that is admirably lofty. The advantages of this strategy should be immediately obvious to my readers. The Faustian striving for knowledge and mastery, the quest for the Blue Flower, the ascetic renunciation of life’s lower satisfactions, this carries a high degree of social approval and your mother’s admiration). And above all, if the goal is that high and distant, even the most stupid among us will understand that the road to that goal will be long and cumbersome, and that the travel will require extensive and time-consuming preparations. Therefore, who dares to blame us if we have not yet gotten started or if, once on our way, we get lost, march around in circles, or sit down for lengthy rests? If anything, history and literature are full of heroic examples of seekers who got lost in some labyrinth or tragically failed in the performance of some superhuman task, and who enable us lesser seekers to profit from their fateful glory.

Yet this is not the whole story. Even the arrival at the most sublime goal is fraught with a special danger, the common denominator of the quotations at the beginning of this chapter, namely, the disenchantment of successful arriving. The talented unhappiness expert knows of this danger, consciously or unconsciously. It would appear that the creator of our world has ordained the unattained goal to be so much more desirable, romantic and ecstatic than it turns out to be when we get there. Let’s not fool ourselves: The honeymoon prematurely loses its sweetness; upon arrival in the distant, exotic city the taxi driver tries to cheat us; the fully accomplished final examination creates little more than a host of additional, unexpected complications and responsibilities; and the alleged serenity of life after retirement is not half as ideal as it is made out to be. 

Nonsense, the more sanguine types among us will say: Whoever is willing to settle for such mild, anaemic ideals deserves to find himself empty-handed in the end. What, instead of the passionate affect that exceeds itself in the climax of its gratification? Or the holy rage that leads ty the intoxicating act of revenge for injuries suffered and to the restoration of universal justice? Who in the face of these gratifications could still speak of the “disenchantment” of arriving?

Unfortunately it does not quite seem to work out that way. And those who are not yet convinced should read what George Orwell has to say in his essay Revenge Is Sour. True, % contains some considerations of such profound decency and conciliatory wisdom that they are actually out of place in a manual for the pursuit of unhappiness. But I hope my readers will forgive me for quoting them all the same, if only because they are so pertinent to our topic.

In 1945, in his capacity of war correspondent, Orwell visited a prisoner-of-war camp in South Germany. He was shown around by a young Viennese Jew who was in charge of interrogations. As they came to a special section where high-ranking SS officers were detained, the young man delivered a fearful kick with his heavy army boot to the grotesquely swollen foot of one of the prisoners. The German officer had held a post corresponding to a general in the political branch of the SS. 

 It could be taken as quite certain that he had had charge of concentration camps and had presided over tortures and hangings. In short, he represented everything that we had been fighting against during the past five years... . 

It is absurd to blame any German or Austrian jew for getting his own back at the Nazis. Heaven knows what scores this particular man may have had to wipe out; very likely his whole family had been murdered; and, after all, even a wanton kick to a prisoner is a very tiny thing compared with the outrages committed by the Hitler régime. But what this scene, and much else that I saw in Germany, brought home to me was that the whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish day-dream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.  

Who would not have jumped for joy, in 1940, at the thought of seeing SS officers kicked and humiliated? But when the thing becomes possible, it is merely pathetic and disgusting. 

And then, in the same essay, Orwell tells how a few hours after the fall of Stuttgart he and a Belgian war correspondent entered the city. The Belgian—and who could blame him?--was even more anti-German than the avers’! Englishman or American.  

We had to enter by a small footbridge which the C mans had evidently made efforts to defend. A dead German soldier was lying supine at the foot of the steps. His face was a waxy yellow….

The Belgian averted his face as we went past. When we were well over the bridge he confided to me that this was the first time that he had seen a dead man. I suppose he was thirty-five years old, and for four years he had been doing war propaganda over the radio. 

This one “arrival’’ becomes a decisive experience for the Belgian. It completely changes his attitude toward the “Boches”:  

When he left, he gave the residue of the coffee we had brought with us to the Germans on whom we were billeted. A week earlier he would probably have been scandalised at the idea of giving coffee to a “Boche.” But his feelings, he told me, had undergone a change at the sight of “ce pauvre mort’ beside the bridge: it had suddenly brought home to him the meaning of war. And yet, if we had happened to enter the town by another route, he might have been spared the experience of seeing even one corpse out of the—perhaps—twenty million that the war had produced.

But back to our real subject. If not even revenge is sweet, how much less sweetness is there in arriving at a supposedly happy goal? Therefore: Beware of arriving. (And, incidentally, why did Sir Thomas More call that distant island of happiness Utopia, that is, Nowhere?) 

Berlin Wall

I was deeply touched reading Donald Winnicott’s essay Berlin Wall. “where if there is no wall there is war”… It makes me think of all the psychological walls we build up. Often hidden behind the defenses, bitterness and anger are our fragilities and inadequacies that were judged, shut down and distances. When we experience and witness the world full of upsets, disappointments, frustrations and pain, the insight and awareness of the painful choice of a ‘wall’ over a ‘war’ offers a hopefully compassionate understanding.

“The boundary between East and West Berlin is a man-built wall which must be ugly, because there is no meaning of the word ‘beauty’ which could be connected with the recognition that here, exactly at this spot, is the place where if there is no wall there is war. But the positive thing in favour of the Berlin Wall is the acknowledgement of the fact that human nature is not capable of a totality except in terms of the depressed mood and of the acknowledgement of conflict in the inner psychic reality of the individual, and of a willingness to postpone resolution of the conflict and to tolerate the uncomfortableness of the mood. Naturally, in terms of time one can see that there is an alternation between resolution of the conflict, which means war or conquest, and toleration of the state of strain, which means acceptance of a Berlin Wall or its equivalent.”

Gajendra

I recently came across a kirtan song about the ancient legend of Gajendra in Hinduism. (With roots in the Vedic tradition, a kirtan is a call-and-response style song or chant, set to music, wherein multiple singers recite or describe a legend, or express loving devotion to a deity, or discuss spiritual ideas). God Vishnu came down to earth to protect Gajendra, the elephant, from the clutches of a Crocodile. With Vishnu's help, Gajendra achieved moksha, or liberation from cycle of birth and death. The symbolic meaning of Gajendra moksha is that materialistic desires, ignorance and sins create an endless chain of karma in this world and are similar to a crocodile preying upon a helpless elephant stuck in a muddy pond. Humans are thus stuck in a continuous cycle of death and rebirth until the day when they can look beyond everything in this creation and connect with the transcendent.

As I’m listening to this song depicting the journal of our soul, I’m overwhelmed by a profound sense of longing and devotion to being in union with that Unlimited, Original, Sweet, Subtle, Deepest of the Deep, Seen by the Sages part of myself, a sensing, feeling, knowing, living organism. This is my prayer.

Underneath the golden sky
Fighting for a life time
But all my feet are slipping now
And I feel so tired
I thought that I would have the strength
But I'm so out of my element
So frozen in the moment with flowers all around

Let go, come and claim me as your own
From now on, I depend on you alone

Unlimited, original, sweet, subtle
Deepest of the deep
Seen by the sages
Om namo bhagavate vasudevaya (I bow down to the Lord who resides in the hearts of all beings)
Sit on the lotus of my heart
Let go, hold the flower in the air

Let go, this is my prayer

The Evening Star

Every spiritual practice in the world is related in some way with the practice of maintaining silence and meditative state of consciousness. The purpose of silence is a directed stillness, which receives rather than acts. There is richness in the standing still, the non-acting. It is not outer reality that silence reveals, but our own innerness. Entering into silence is like stepping into cool clear water. The dust and debris are quietly washed away and we are purified of our triviality. Then magically and quietly a spontaneous creative process can surface.

Turner (1830) in his painting The Evening Star magically captures these transitional moments in nature, the evening star first appears in daylight and is soon supplanted by the stronger light of the moon. It’s as if he has painted silence itself. Silence is a paradox, intensely ‘there’ and with equal intensity, ‘not there’. The passivity of silence is hard to explain, as in one respect it is intensely active. We hold ourselves in a condition of surrender. We choose not to initiate. Yet from this passivity arises creativity. The mysterious liberation from all worldly demands to enter into inner awareness of a deeper kind is exemplified in Turner’s scene, both alive and moving.

The Act of Willing

Maestro Daniel Barenboim in his masterclass of Beethoven told his students, ‘believe that you can do a crescendo on one note.’ The audience observed ‘physically it’s not possible but it sure sounded like it happened!’.

Explaining the illusion of sound, he told a story when at the age of 14 he was taken to play for the great Vladimir Horowitz. At the end of his play Horowitz said something he had never forgotten - ‘you know, you must always have the Will’.

In other words you must ‘imagine’ the piano is doing the crescendo and when you play the next note, that note has to be the result of your imaginary crescendo. You must have the Will to do the crescendo and if you have the Will, you will be able to bring all the knowledge you have about the laws of the sound to create the illusion. The technical knowledge of the sound can be taught but whether one can transcend the level of physics and enter into a burning intensity for the crescendo is up to one’s own Will. This ‘act of willing’ (Assagioli, 1984) is in closest relation to the Self and the most direct expression of the Self.