Cross to Eternity: Feeling the Nature of Being Time

Sydney New Years Eve, 1999

It was midday, June 26th 2016, and I was watching and listening to Malcolm Turnbull deliver a vision of the future, should the politics of humanity’s nervous system deliver a coalition government of the people, for the people, by the people, kinda, sorta. Well! You know what I mean. While strangely, sought of para-whimsically, just as Malcolm said the words “new economy,” I heard a white Cockatoo squawk ‘Wake up!’ Just beyond the window paining to be light, outside this Matthew Talbot hostel for homeless men, in the Sydney harbour side suburb of Woolloomooloo. Rationally speaking though, I did hear the glorious white bird screech, at that precise moment and simply added the wake up interpretation of mother nature’s intention, with my innate imagination. Just as the TV presentation of good vibration politics, involving a well voiced dog whistle call to a rhetoric is reality delusion, played rather loudly, curtsey of channel nine. And I saw with my eyes, a white font ‘breaking news’ proclamation, fashioned upon an appropriate red background, telling transfixed eyes; Turnbull speaks to party faithful. OMG! Have a little faith, Mary, Joseph and Jesus, just a little more faith. - Please!

While sitting beside me a homeless street philosopher’s eyes were mesmerised by the flickering images upon the transparent surface of his new age tablet. And perplexed by the shimmering perspex of superficial images, I gave him a gentle nudge and said, ‘listen, your the really smart device mate, not the machine.’ “Huh! I dunno mate,” he said with gummy half tooth smile, instantly resuming a postural adaptation towards those surface images, attracting his innate interest-excitement. Ah well, winners are grinner’s and losers can please themselves I suppose, I found myself thinking. Just as Malcolm, like Hilary Clinton over there, made his unashamed Brexit pitch to the well suited, well frocked and well booted, middle-class survival agenda of our beautiful Austral-Asia. While as the camera captured scene of applauding faithful, filled the TV screen, Hanna Arendt’s ‘banality of evil,’ phrase arose within this vicarious sense of reality, I’d learned to label my mind. Its the economy stupid, the economy, oh please God, save our mother-loving property prices and maintain the doctrine of denial, still feigning to be human, in this land of unique flora and fauna.

Or so I was musing for the innate purpose of retaining my embodied self-awareness and avoiding the temporal affliction of a proud, rhetoric is reality delusion. “Hasn’t he noticed that 21st century materialism is technology and that paradoxically, it makes life easier while removing the need for employment.” I'd said out loud to no one in peculiar, while simultaneously, a rather occult moment of personal synchronicity, saw Malcolm speak a pledge to face the ugly truth of domestic violence, just as I was writing a note about the God-awful truth of my own self-ignorance, which was the assumption that I knew myself, simply because I could speak, read and write, words. A synchronous temporal moment or loose emotional association, that, as I type, brings Gregory Bateson’s insightful words to mind: The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.

While just the day before, on the 26th of June, I'd been walking along George St, opposite the Sydney Town Hall, and felt my ears assaulted by the megaphone voice of right-wing propaganda, screeching for all non-white Aussies to go home. Over anxious “misogynists unite and pull yourselves together,” I’d felt like shouting towards this right-of-passage posturing, way we tend to defend ourselves against reality. Yet I kept me trap shut and turned tail towards Circular Quay, in order to immerse my sensory nature, within the good vibrations of Aboriginal culture. I headed for the Didge players, in hope of temporal resurrection, where I might rescue my soul from modernity’s insurrection, and open the seventh seal of my dissociated “head,” (2 eyes, 2 ears, 2 nostrils and 1 mouth). And sure enough, down by the waters edge, where ironically, the first fleet brought the dream of Elohim, in the cryptic words of the King James Bible, here to the shores of Dream Time culture. I found respite and repose, by allowing the gentle lap of water to commingle with past-present vibration, evoking a personal fall into the embodied nature of being time. For eyes closed, nervous system mediated, muscular tensions and vascular pressures began to attune my nature with mother nature, as spontaneous, in-voluntary breathing en-trained the neural path of heart-brain alignment, seeking a mind-body-spirit, temporal en-soul-meant. (Bit of a mouthful I know, although it is consistent with true mind-less, mindfulness, in the Eastern tradition, in my experience.)

And believe it or not, between the melodic sound of the Didgeridoo and my body’s memory of past always present, I hear the sweet words of an Enigma song commingle a tribal family dharma-wheel, matching heart-felt desire with reality vibration; “I'm reaching out for you. Lets hope one day. We'll rest in peace, on my rivers of belief.”1 So I stayed awhile and I silently prayed awhile, within what the internationally famous anarchist Noam Chomsky suggests, in his recent book, “What Kind of Creatures Are We,” is that very private dialogue we all hold with ourselves, which: (is by definition a generative grammar, and each language is what is called in technical terms an I-language—“I” standing for internal, individual, and in-tensional way that Galileo wondered at the “sublimity of mind” of the person who “dreamed of finding means to communicate his deepest thoughts to any other person… by the different arrangements of twenty characters upon a page,” an achievement “surpassing all stupendous inventions,” even those of “a Michelangelo, a Raphael, or a Titian,)2 using the potent words of another of my favorite songs.

Snow Patrol’s, Shut Your Eyes: “Learn to wear each other well. And when the worrying starts to hurt, and the world feels like grains of dirt, just close your eyes and tell. You can imagine this space. Your our secret space, as well.”3 An imaginative muse that mindfully seeks the here and now nature of being time, wherein one feels how: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand. And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand. And Eternity in an hour.” ―William Blake, Auguries of Innocence. Because standing there, eyes closed, I saw no external objects to pin with conceptual labels and an inner apocalypse of being time, spontaneously unfolded. Unfolded, in the way, Eastern wisdom concisely phrases a perfect temporal moment: “to a mind that is still the whole universe surrenders.” ―Chang Tzu. Probably because; “the body is the shore on an ocean of being,” as an old Sufi saying suggests.

And within that temporal moment I felt the immense melancholic power of the void, as: “The darkness drops again; but now I know. That twenty centuries of stony sleep. Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last. Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” —W. B. Yeats. Probably because: “the motor act is the cradle of the mind.” —Sir Charles Sherington, a wise man acknowledged as one of the fathers of modern day neurology. While there in a perfect act of temporal time, I felt the motor act, as the rhythmic motion of my heart and the tidal sensations of blood pressure, affect, within my bio-energetic, sensory nature. Surrendered to the nature of being time, beyond a desert of delusional denial, which forces a mirage of artificial categorization upon that nature of ultimate-reality, which over anxious Christians “project-transfer,” onto the three letter word God. And of course, quiet naturally, that insightfully spiritual moment dissolved and the spatial sounds of people, didgeridoo melody and noisy seagulls filled the void. And, “The darkness drops again?” In my waking need to simply affirm our common purpose of a rhetoric is reality nightmare, created by basic survival impulses. So embracing a left-hemisphere dominated motivation, I began away, only to be path-crossed by a sparkling eyed Aboriginal boy.

‘You like em sound, Guba-Man? — Why not buy a CD then, me true blue mate?’ A head-space motion of left- right orienting response, let him know my heart of mind intention. And I guess, feeling empty handed, he made one last ice-breaker attempt, at a pocket filling, wilfully wordy, “formulation.” (so many psychologists adore this word, don’t you know? Something to do with how they survive, I would guess.)

‘We times call it the big blow job, too! - Hope to create you smile, Mr stern-face white- fella.’ Which was a quiet hard temporal act to begrudge, so I told him that I knew his mob been blowing that thing for a millennium while and ended up doing the right thing. ‘First long-winded instrument in human creation, mate!’ He told me as I finally broke away, musing about politicians and dog-whistle calls to a rhetoric-is-reality, desert of delusion, still trekking towards Bethlehem. (House of Bread) And surprisingly, one might even say, serendipitously, that noisy white bird of paradise swooped overhead and squawked ‘ken... oath mate,’ just as a Kookaburra laughed, at the sight of all the deft-parrots walking. And what can a poor boy do in such freaky beaky, whimsical moments as these, except subscribe to the Jeanie Little school of philosophy and exclaim, ‘Oo-Ah!’ An impulsive exclamation which seeks to rescue my constricted subjectivity from its ivory tower of conceptualisation, and the constant lure of modernity’s objects of analogous self-interpretation. A dissociating objectification raised by the I think therefore I am, habit of memorised words. Those imperfect images of truth which tend to keep me hiding within my shell, as innate anxiety creates a subconscious sense that, “the world is out to beat you for a ride,” to paraphrase Supertramp’s more lyrical use of the good Word, form their brilliant music album; Crime of the Century. 4

And when picturing this whimsy of words within a reader’s own powerful subjectivity, I'm wondering if you have ever see the Aussie TV show, set against an iconic light-house background, who’s theme tune may spontaneously arise within your Calvary skull; “have you ever, ever felt like this, strange things happen, when your going round the twist.”5 Round the twist, was a great family show, which to appealed our innate sense of wonder, which is what I seek to do with the words “Calvary skull.” In order to ask readers to contemplate the notion that the world is experiencing a pressure for the return of an orphaned truth, about how we actually do being human? For, just as Australia’s politicians are calling for people to face the ugly truth about the endemic nature of domestic violence, what this essay is alluding to, is the shocking truth about humanity’s collective self-ignorance. The truth, that our common-sense assumption that words describe reality, is in fact, an existential delusion. A delusion created during infancy, when the sound of parental voices evokes the “formative causation and morphogenesis,” (to cite words from Rupert Sheldrake’s, New Science of Life6) of our subjective sense of reality.

While the words Calvary skull, begs readers to imagine that place in the time-space continuum, where history tells tales of crucifixion, so well sighted within the boundary of old Jerusalem. Where a one thief went to hell and one thief went to heaven story, is about the yoke of Christ’s Solar-Consciousness, upon your very own forehead. Please try to imagine, as John Lennon surely would, that the greatest story ever told, is so psychologically brilliant, that it hides the big secret of heaven’s stairway to eternity, right between our own eyes.

For the word Calvary, also carries a wise “esoteric” (an adjective: understood by or meant for only the select few who have special knowledge or interest; recondite: poetry full of esoteric allusions. belonging to the select few. private; Secret; confidential. (of a philosophical doctrine or the like) intended to be revealed only to the initiates of a group.), allusion to the temporal creation of reality, within our skull:

CALVARY. skull. A rocky hill north of Jerusalem where Christ was crucified. There was an old popular belief that Adam’s head was buried there; then, too, it was a mound-like eminence. For these reasons it was called the Skull (Latin, Calvaria; Aramaic, Golgotha). —Fireside Personal Study Bible - NABRE (Kindle Location 183794). Fireside Catholic Publishing. Kindle Edition.7

A reference I cite, from my personal reading for self-revelation journey, because of the curious fact that the Fireside Personal Study Bible, is the only copy of the Christian bible I’ve sighted, with such a reference section, devoted to people’s perception of the good word’s, original intentions. A copy of the Bible that I stumbled on, quiet by accident, while lodging at the Matthew Talbot for some seven months, after returning penniless and homeless, from three years studying Buddhism, in Thailand. While few people will have read C. G. Jung’s magnum opus book: Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy. Or sighted the words ADAM AND EVE in (Kindle Location 10101), or read section three of this herculean effort to understand the cryptic nature of esoteric wisdom, which describes the biblical story of Adam, within the existential context of spiritual adaptation:

The characterisation of Adam in early religious and philosophical writings as the personification of intelligence by virtue of his perfection and original righteousness is associated with the alchemical notion of the lapis philosophorum. The legend of Adam as the inventor of all the arts and professions through his diachronous knowledge is traced to Jewish tradition, which represents Adam as the first of eight incarnations of the true prophet, the last being Jesus.

This concept of the primordial seer is also observed to exist in ancient Chinese mythology; the light prophets appear in the Taoist series of the eight immortals, but in this particular legend the eighth saint is a girl. These serial configurations and others found in literature and philosophy are associated with the concept of concentric circles appearing in Herodotus and in Persian and Mithraic mysteries as well as in Christian symbolism. The nature of Adam as the first prophet, like that of Christ as the eighth, is seen as the male/female duality of the androgyne, in which Adam is the spirit and Eve the flesh.8

A spiritual orientation towards ultimate reality, which in my experience, transcends the self-objectifying delusion that the world is made of words. While, what truly defy’s an everyday, survival and spirituality paradox, is the unbelievable reality of prophecy. Prophecy, from our ancestors, who knew the nature of human reality so well, that the generational unfolding of our destiny, was in fact, quiet predictable. Predictable, through the “triune” nature of our nervous system and its politics of experience. With, the astonishingly insightful story of the crucifixion, telling the tail of our subconscious motivation, as the real-time nature of our survival oriented and antagonistically divided, sympathetic and parasympathic, branches of our autonomic nervous system. The peripheral system, or vegetative system as it was once known to Greek God’s of the inner vine, like Hermes, who experimentally explored how this innate system joins body to brain, in creating a body-mind-spirit, continuum of being time. An inner reality which so pains modernity’s rhetoric is reality delusion, that a thousand forms of addictive behaviour, like self-harming, manifests the unspoken voice of the body’s desire for release. While upon reading these seemingly heretical (no, political rhetoric is not reality) words, I can only ask people to contemplate a very simple existential question related to feeling the nature of being time. Being human, you walk and talk, yet can you articulate, “how” you do that? And can you accept the wise words of a brilliant body psychotherapist, Wilhelm Reich, who suggests that: “everyone is right in some way, it is merely a matter of “how.”

While, what this essay is hoping to convey, is the extra-ordinary possibility that we are in fact, standing on the threshold of a millennial, “ideation” dream come true. For I do believe, after a decade of intense study, that beyond the habituated nature of securing our daily bread, by acquiring knowledge about the myriad forms of “otherness” which helps us survive, the past century has uncovered and revealed, in the true sense of the biblical word, Apocalypse. The hidden nature of how we do, being human, and more importantly, why, as the existential psychiatrist R. D. Laing suggested: "we are all in a posthypnotic trance induced in early infancy." Because, as Laing also pointed out: “The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.” Which speaks to the way we simply take experience for granted and paradoxically, how, the more comfortable we feel inside our skin, the less likely we are to question the hidden nature of being human.

With my use of the word apocalypse, which popular imagination formulates into a negative “exoteric” (an adjective: suitable for or communicated to the general public. not belonging, limited, or pertaining to the inner or select circle, as of disciples or intimates. popular; simple; commonplace. pertaining to the outside; exterior; external), sense of global catastrophe, such as human inflicted climate change and economic collapse. Hopes to draw attention to our “allegoric” use of language, which paradoxically remains unchanged over millennia, in the way we describe our actual experience of life. And perhaps another excerpt form the Fireside Personal Study Bible, may give readers, pause for mind-less observation, (mind-less in the context of Eckhart Tolle’s first law of spiritual enlightenment, “you are not your mind.”) of the bodily sensations of being in the now, perception:

APOCALYPSE. to uncover, reveal. A style of writing common in Jewish circles in the centuries immediately preceding and following the life of Christ. Written at a time of persecution, in the style of a revelation made to a prophet, it is marked by the use of symbolic numbers, animals and other creatures. Written to those people familiar with the Bible and its symbols (i.e. Christians and Jews) its meaning is decipherable to its readers but not to outsiders. This, of course, is most useful during persecution since the code is known by the faithful but not by the persecutor. A prominent feature is its telescoping of past, present, and future events so that all three may be interpreted in the light of each other to give hope that God’s saving acts will always endure. (Fireside Personal Study Bible - NABRE (Kindle Locations 182727-182733).8

While this essay is written with a deep faith in human nature, as the universe evolved into a form which is perceiving and acting upon itself, for the purpose of survival. Written in the hope of evoking a desire for peak-realisation experience, in readers of these indignant pages. And it is dedicated to my working class Grandparents who lived their lives in Manchester, where my Grandmother began work in one those dark satanic mills of William Blake’s England, at the tender age of eleven. And from where my Grandfather would address enveloped words of lived wisdom, with an embarrassing twist of my David Bates, social category name; Master Bates. This essay is

Arthur Stace aka, Mr Eternity

also dedicated to a Sydney town legend, Arthur Malcom Stace (9 February 1885 – 30 July 1967), otherwise known as Mr Eternity, who was an Australian eccentric and soldier, a reformed alcoholic who converted to Christianity and spread his message by writing the word "Eternity" in copperplate writing with chalk on footpaths in and around Sydney, from Martin Place to Parramatta for about 35 years, from 1932 to 1967.

Stace was born in Redfern, New South Wales, in inner west Sydney on 9 February 1885. The fifth child of William Wood Stace, from Mauritius and Laura Stace (née Lewis), a child of alcoholics, he was brought up in poverty. In order to survive, he resorted to stealing bread and milk and searching for scraps of food in bins. By the age of 12, Stace, with virtually no formal schooling, and working in a coal mine had become a ward of the state. As a teenager, he became an alcoholic and was subsequently sent to jail at 15. Afterwards, he worked as a "cockatoo" or a look-out for a Two-up "school".9 Which I hope explains my interpretation of mother nature’s great intention’s, by using an iconic Aussie bird to call for humanity’s rhetoric is reality delusion, to begin its space-time continuum; dissolution.

Asking readers to seriously contemplate Socrates immortal question: “is the unexamined life worth living.” And, being human, you walk and talk, yet can you articulate, how you do that? And is the world really made of words, or is that just how you survive, in a “the meek shall inherit the earth, kinda, sorta, way? Questions which might seem to hold a peculiar pertinence in the wake of Britian’s Brexit referendum decision and remarks by our pretty polly; PRIME MINISTER: “This is a momentous and historic decision and we respect the wishes of the British people, expressed through this referendum. I want to say that Australians, I recognise, will be concerned by the uncertainty and instability in global markets, falls in currencies, including the Australian dollar and in equity markets.”10 OMG the concern, the concern, or “the humanity, the humanity,” to recall a famous sound bite from the Hindenburg disaster over in America.

While the “new economy” I see coming down the pipe, so to speak, is one of social capital who’s currency is the health and happiness of innate “affect,,” as the knowledge gleaned from a decade of the brain becomes exoteric, and we learn, from infancy on, how; “The attempt to regulate affect — to minimize unpleasant feelings and to maximize pleasant ones - is the driving force in human motivation.” —Alan N Schore. While, as I sit here, three streets below Kings Cross, listening to the enigmatic ABC TV theme tune, a moment of synchronicity, sees a Kookaburra laughs outside my window; Blah! Blah! Blah!


Seemingly, urging me to avoid the artificial distraction and conclude my “self-affectation,” creation of this essay, which, incidentally, began its journey more than three decades ago, on a Sunday night in February 1980, when I sought out the Rev Ted Noths, at the Wayside Chapel in Hughes St, just three streets away from where I now sit. Sought him out, to ask him if he thought I’d really been given a sign from God, earlier that morning. The memory of which makes me wonder how, I ended up here and now, and why the essence of our solar evolved consciousness is circular? Is it about the consequential nature of evolution and the mysterious “affect” of destiny, I wonder? For, as a baby-boomer, who lived through that peculiar decade, so fondly remembered as THE sixties. When, if I may say, the celebratory nature of a “joyous cosmology”11 (two words from a wonderful book by Alan Watts), transcended from saintly beatitudes to the Beatles, with the electrification, amplification of the human voice. And perhaps, readers may wish to ponder the difference between pretty-polly-speak, feigning to be seen as hard-head rationalism, and its Nanny State outcomes, and the more liberated use of words, by all the world’s creative types. And last but not least, I must pay tribute to my deceased father, who did posses me with a father-complex or father-archetype, to use C. G. Jung’s depth psychology terminology. And raised me with a strong sense of right and wrong and the existential need to display the courage of one’s convictions, while resisting the going along to get along, all too banal nature of evil. Or in the creative words of Jackson Browne, trying one’s best not to be a ‘Pretender,’ in this habituated paradox of Survival and Spirituality, where we are all, “caught between the longing for love and the struggle for the legal tender.”12

Right now though, as I type, its 6am, June 30th 2016, and I sit observing people on ABC TV’s, news breakfast utter the rhetorical words “common purpose,” knowing that soon the dawning of the light will see a glorious Aussie bird of paradise squawk; “Wake-Up! — You deft-parrots walking, wake up for the sake of life on earth and the nature of eternity,” allegorically speaking, of course. Just as the breaking news ticker tape boundary of convention, to our news time breakfast announces, “David Cameron tells Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to step down, ‘for heaven’s sake.’ As I type in order to beg readers to consider how: “The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not— which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams.” —C. G. Jung. While I guess the final thoughts from this peculiarly soft-headed mystic, should leave the last words about modernity’s subconscious, self-objectifying rhetoric is reality delusion, to my first reading for self-revelation mentor. Who studied well the mono-myth of our cultural journey, examining the nature of humanity’s mythology, musicology and innate creativity, so to speak:

Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is.

The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image. —Joseph Campbell

After-Words: At 13:45 on this very same day, I returned home after uploading a draft copy of this essay online and turning on the TV, the first sights that greet my eyes are images of an old Catalyst program on ABC TV; < www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/4194557.htm >WHERE BIRDSONG BEGAN: “We know Australian birds are special and the rest of the world does too. Songbirds like our lyrebird are the most amazing mimics on earth. Our parrots are incredibly smart and adaptable. Our pigeons eat fruit, move seeds and shape entire forests. But for most of the last century, scientists from the Northern Hemisphere assume that our birds are just a second-hand fauna, descended from theirs.” Words about smart parrots, which was a surprising experience in the context of writing this essay about waking up to the nature of being time. And a personal experience which begged me contemplate why, for decades I have intuitively felt that humanity is squaring the circle of time. Did the evolution of my own voice begin here? I found myself thinking, as I listened to; Tim Low: “The two groups of birds that overwhelmingly stand out for intelligence are the songbirds and the parrots and we know they both originated in Australia. It's just fascinating - we gave the world intelligent birds. And not only that. The fossil record and the genetic record would imply we had smart parrots and songbirds in Australia at least 10 or 20 - maybe longer - a million years before you had intelligent apes. So, in Australia, you would have had the most intelligent organisms in the world.”

Wow! I thought, as I recalled reading how the lyre, as the first stringed instrument made with a bridge, a bit like the way the throat bridges the body and the voice, I’ve often thought, since. And why does the most human hero of the Bible story, David play the lyre and gaze upon Bathsheba form his court balcony, as-if, mimicking the Sun casting a warm smile upon a heavenly consort? And why did Shakespeare reverse these entwined roles in Romeo and Juliet, placing the feminine nature, on high? And I can’t help but wonder; “That twenty centuries of stony sleep. Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last. Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” —W. B. Yeats. Am I, experiencing the nature of “I am that I am?” With the ultimate unity of life, begging me to wake up and realize the essential purpose of life.

And I do understand that for the vast majority of people, the very concept of occult phenomena, such as synchronicity or more poetically, serendipity, is anathema to the experienced perception of a cause and effect, reality. And I understand that for most people, the nature of being time, experienced by hyper-sensitive people like myself, is far too disruptive and disturbing to even contemplate. For it does destroy the self-protective nature of our nervous system conditioned, ego defence against the ultimate-reality, our naked flesh equips humanity with the innate ability to feel. I understand that the reality of being time and the embodied wisdom developed by our ancestors, has suffered a necessary period of “sleep,” as Yeats famous poem about the second coming, puts it. I also understand that for the majority of people, in Australia, the word Buddha is implicitly associated with an historical person who lived centuries ago, and therefore has no relevance to our current faith in a scientific deliverance from the greater good and greater evil, which has shaped human destiny.

Yet the word Buddha, like the words Calvary, Apocalypse and Bethlehem, has an esoteric (internal) as well as an exoteric (external) meaning. And no lesser spiritual light than Deepak Chopra, tells us that the trans-literal meaning of Buddha, is AWAKE. Not awake in the normal context of waking from sleep, but awake to the internal processes of conscious perception, which in my personal experience, was why I had to spend three years in Thailand, learning “how” to self-regulate the “force” of mother nature’s self-affecting madness, “mania.” And again, what this essay is attempting to convey, is the extra-ordinary possibility that we are, as a sentient species, awakening from the nightmare of history. That our conceptual, categorising sense of time, is currently being dissolved in a timely confluence of 21st century science and timeless spirituality. While again, all I can do to ask readers to suspend their natural disbelief, is to include another, food for thought, excerpt from my personal, peak-realisation journey:

Synchronicity is not a philosophical view but an empirical concept which postulates an intellectually necessary principle. This cannot be called either materialism or metaphysics. No serious investigator would assert that the nature of what is observed to exist, and of that which observes, namely the psyche, are known and recognized quantities. If the latest conclusions of science are coming nearer and nearer to a unitary idea of being, characterized by space and time on the one hand and by causality and synchronicity on the other, that has nothing to do with materialism. Rather it seems to show that there is some possibility of getting rid of the incommensurability between the observed and the observer. The result, in that case, would be a unity of being which would have to be expressed in terms of a new conceptual language— a “neutral language,” as W. Pauli once called it. Space, time, and causality, the triad of classical physics, would then be supplemented by the synchronicity factor and become a tetrad, a quaternio which makes possible a whole judgment:





Here synchronicity is to the three other principles as the one-dimensionality of time is to the three-dimensionality of space, or as the recalcitrant “Fourth” in the Timaeus, which, Plato says, can only be added “by force” to the other three. Just as the introduction of time as the fourth dimension in modern physics postulates an irrepresentable space-time continuum, so the idea of synchronicity with its inherent quality of meaning produces a picture of the world so irrepresentable as to be quite baffling. The advantage, however, of adding this concept is that it makes possible a view which includes the psychoid factor in our description and knowledge of nature— an a priori meaning or “equivalence.” —An excerpt from: Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (Kindle Locations 1751-1759), by C. G. Jung.13

Its now 4am, 3rd of July, 2016 and overnight the news of a probable “hung” parliament has filled the air, like Christ hanging upon a wooden cross, allegorically speaking of course. And I’m listening to a logical song about the tick of time: “when all the world’s asleep, the questions run so deep, for such a simple man. Won’t you please, please tell me what you’ve learned. I know it sounds observed. Won’t you please tell me “what” I am.” Supertramp - The Logical Song. Apologies to great song writers for subverting their “who I am,” with a question I first asked myself in March 2007, during a Gestalt therapy training program. A kinda, sorta, to be or not to be, question, if you know what I mean? And if life belongs, only to the strong, Alfie? Recalling the words of a very famous, Sixties song, then what prey tell, is the nature of love? Is life nought but a Greek tragedy I ponder, like: The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. A revenge tragedy by William Shakespeare, and it is one of his most well-known and oft-quoted plays. It is uncertain exactly when it was written, but scholars tend to place its composition between 1600 and the summer of 1602. "You come most carefully upon your hour. Not a mouse stirring. Our sometime sister, now our Queen.

Claudius: ...But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son —
Hamlet: A little more than kin, and less than kind.
Claudius: How is it that the clouds still hang on you?
Hamlet: Not so my lord; I am too much i' the sun.”14

And I wonder, wonder I do, what words would convince you, dear reader, to open the seventh seal and bring silence to the sky, where your thoughts do fly? Metaphorically, speaking, of course. Yet, as I sit just a short walk from the very place where the dream of Elohim was brought to the shores of a wondrous dream-time culture, and the home of the Lyre bird. If there are words in the preface to the 1611 translation of the The King James Version of the Holy Bible, which may bring food to your thoughts:

David was a worthy Prince, and no man to be compared to him for his first deeds, and yet for as worthy as act as ever he did (even for bringing back the Ark of God in solemnity) he was scorned and scoffed at by his own wife [2 Sam 6:16]. Solomon was greater than David, though not in virtue, yet in power: and by his power and wisdom he built a Temple to the Lord, such a one as was the glory of the land of Israel, and the wonder of the whole world. But was that his magnificence liked of by all? We doubt it. Otherwise, why do they lay it in his son’s dish, and call unto him for easing the burden, "Make", say they, "the grievous servitude of thy father, and his sore yoke, lighter?" [1 Kings 12:4] Be like he had charged them with some levies, and troubled them with some carriages; Hereupon they raise up a tragedy, and wish in their heart the Temple had never been built. So hard a thing it is to please all, even when we please God best, and do seek to approve ourselves to every ones conscience.15

Only ultimate-reality will tell the tale of the human body, as the true Temple of Time, of course. As I await the dawn call to “Wake up!” And hear that wondrous Kookaburra laugh, at all the deft-parrots talking. Laughing at the exiled truth of esoteric wisdom, which quiet naturally becomes muddled in a game of Chinese-whispers which can be replicated in any school playground anywhere on earth. In the same way, we see the rhetoric-is-reality delusion, played out during question time, on Australia's parliamentary floor. And believe it or not, as always, on my increasingly serendipitous journey, Supertramp’s “Crime of the Century,” song begins to play on my windows media player, object of eternity. “Who are these men of lust, greed and glory. Rip off the mask and lets see. Oh-No! What's the story? There's you and there's me.”

And can you; Adam & Eve it? Here within this generational game of thrones, towards eternity, within a great crown of thorns mystery? While again, the final words of this (himyokihim) call to wake up, should come from a master mythologist:

Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism

  and you know how reliable that is. And; If you want to change the world,

you have to change the metaphor. —Joseph Campbell

ESSAY NOTES:

1. Enigma, < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rivers_of_Belief >

2. Chomsky, N. 2016, "What Kind of Creatures Are We?," Columbia University Press, USA

3. Snow Patrol, < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Your_Eyes_(Snow_Patrol_song) >

4. Supertramp, < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_of_the_Century_(album) >

5. Round the Twist, < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_the_Twist >

6. Sheldrake, R. 2005, "New Science of Life," Icon Books, UK

7. Fireside Personal Study Bible - Kindle Edition. Fireside Catholic Publishing, USA

8. Jung, C. G. 1970, "Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy," Princeton University Press, USA

9. Mr Eternity, < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Stace >

10. Turnbull, M. 2016, < http://www.malcolmturnbull.com.au/media/remarks-on-brexit >

11. Watts, A. W. 2013, "The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness 2nd Edition," New World Library, USA

12. Bowne, J. < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pretender_(Jackson_Browne_song) >

13. Jung, C. G. 2006, “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle,” Routledge Publications, UK

14. Hamlet, < https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hamlet >

15. The King James Version of the Holy Bible, <http://www.davince.com/download/kjvbiblea.pdf >