The alive world is a place of intimate, luscious entanglement, a place as real and strong as bones. This world is hidden, precious and wild, inside everything. For me, I can’t get there unless I open the door inside myself – but when I do, I realise that the way in is also the way out, out into the wholeness, where in and out are one, and everything is close.
Most of my daily life I live inside forgetfulness – what door? I’ve discovered I need structure and support to experience the world suffused with this much aliveness. For years I fell messily through that magic door after scrabbling at the handle with slippery hands. It’s been a slow journey to find more intentional methods – to wash those slippery hands – clean up my act, make preparations to meet the exquisite participative process, always unfurling all around us.
The door can be opened through a practiced and delicate alchemy of concentration and surrender. It cannot be opened by brute force. Volition needs to take a back step and allow the subtle to guide.
What I name here the realm of aliveness some call the spirit world. That might sound contradictory until we delve into the origins of that word. In Latin, spiritus referred to both wind and breath or breathing, later expanding to encompass the sense of an animating principle or immaterial element of a person, alive or dead. Ghost, from the germanic gast, also meant breath. The door, we will discover, is as close as our own face.
For in breathing, the body expands to incorporate that beyond us. In-corporate: to unite into one body. That’s literally what happens with air when we breathe. The spirit world could mean all the swirling air, the invisible tendrilling between and within us all. But unless we return to that sense, there are reasons I avoid the term. Religion’s embroilment in power and control for millennia means that theological language can bring along baggage that is unhelpful. The spirit world to some suggests magical thinking, or the place of the dead, or heaven, or the unreal. None of which I seek to evoke.
Breath is a doorway. Not only its literal process; its role in settling the mind and enabling other sensing. What we can meet in this peaceful place are the patterns of life’s processes. We can all observe how life emerges from, and returns to, the invisible. Bodies emerge from microscopic cellular life and return, mostly, to air: these have always been our invisibles. Within the invisible dwells the pattern. Out of the invisible emerges the visible. Within everything visible, deep within, there’s also an invisible pattern. These patterns shape matter. These patterns, shaping matter, have brought life into the form of this body. From the long dance of pattern and matter has arisen this, the human experience of conscious self-awareness. And conscious self-awareness can see into the invisible, can see the pattern.
This is not straightforward. The patterns are tricky to perceive, not only because this way of seeing is beyond the cultural norm. To see them requires learning to look, more richly, into the world as presented to our senses while simultaneously turning in. Interior, innerness, depth – we tend to use these words metaphorically and miss their literal significance. deep inside the body and far below the head there are organs of fine and complex perception ; this is the key. Carrying this key we can explore the unknown inside of us. With this key we can unlock areas of the body and free their capacities.
Breathing deep, looking long, listening close, feeling in. These humble technologies can shatter the small box we’ve labelled reality. We might break ourselves open in the process. We might open ourselves into the process. Suddenly we find ourselves inside, inside life and how it patterns us.
These patterns, once seen and recognised for what they are, reorient us to a larger reality. Reality. This is exactly what I mean. Our perceptions gate the real, incredibly complex information that comes to us for very good reasons – too much information can overload our psyche. We must strengthen ourselves if we wish to increase our perceptual faculties.
How might we muscle up for this most subtle of labours? What etiquettes must be mastered to meet the intricacy that made us? How we might listen to and become changed in the encounter, and how, entangled and in love, do we acquire wisdom that accords with the real world? This moment in time is a sharp invitation to be with that world, the alive and spiralling world where there is no growth without death, no destruction without reconstruction, and no end to the mystery.
This work follows the body and the things the body contacts. We are animals, we are ancient, experiencing, evolving body-forms. Life has taught me to trust what the body signals, to honour pleasure and to respect pain, to take the time to decipher what these seek to say. Cognition, the known, is tiny compared to what is registered and responded to by this body. I seek to be with a vaster part of me.
Even if we are seemingly separated from nature, a human enclosed in walls, always we are breathing. Oxygen, the outbreath of plants, is involved in every moment of our lives. We are never not participant in an ecological act. To understand interconnection, to experience it consciously and cognitively, ritually and bodily, is now essential. Without it there is no possibility of accurate sense-making. We keep missing the vital thing, which is the wholeness of reality. This is, as etymology shows us, what holiness has always been. The holy is the feeling we have when we experience ourselves as ecology.
These ways of knowing have been labelled by reductionist science as mystical or magical, even delusional. The explosion of research into life sciences, into altered states and the brain has changed this. Among these researchers are those who, along with their mastery of science, are also grounded in ancient wisdom traditions. They are like skilful engineers who seek elegant solutions: they build beautiful bridges. They have brought clarity and compassion, maybe even brokered a truce, in the unwinnable war between science and spirituality.
Simplified interpretations of Plato, the patriarch of European philosophy, evoke two worlds, this one, and the other, heavenly one where the Forms (the patterns) lived. That influenced Christianity’s heaven, a place you can’t get to alive, and that notion is playing out in the most dangerous ways imaginable by world leaders steeped in unconscious Christianity and related fundamentalisms. That’s why it matters to strive to communicate this liminal material as clearly as possible, yet without reducing away the essence of this knowing, which is of intricate intelligence, inextricable entanglement, and subtle, subtle touch.
I’m fascinated at the blooming of these ways into new, fusion, or revived cultural practices. To bring Australia’s Dreaming into conversation with European Faerie, with Orthodox Christianity’s theosis, with Plato’s Forms, with Jung’s archetypal realm and contemporary science’s ecological systems thinking, the many ancient and emerging expressions of the underlying pattern of the world, is my way of making peace with my legacy and coming to terms with my place. Coming to terms, yes. Working with language, appreciating its roots, experiencing its strange agency as it interacts with the things I seek to describe:
Thick with confusion and frustration with wording what feels unwordable, on a cold, late autumn day, I tramped to the river in the rain. The river ran fast and high. Vapours rose from storm-pitted, frothing waters, mist gathered and swirled in a narrow band above the surface. I took off my raincoat and jeans, then I took off the rest, knowing no-one would pass by in pelting weather. I’m afraid of cold water. So it had to be quick or nerve would fail. I dove, a full immersion. I rose gasping, for the icy water had stole away my breath, and swam against the current back to the bank. I was in for mere seconds, but as I stood in the rain on the river’s edge I was filled with the delicious thrill of the chilled burn in the body, and a desire for more, so I leapt a second time, which is when the freeze bites into the brain, and the singing flesh sounds shriller. Body, alive and ringing, can I follow you to the brightness inside the unknown?
What do I mean by the strange agency of language? The images above: plunge, immerse. To go deep into an idea, first the animal had to find the nerve to dive in. Millions of years of bold splashing monkeys made exactly this kind of mind. Thought itself will be discovered as an evolution, an outcome of body-in-world. So to think deeply, look to world, arriving as image. For the image is irreducible. Such complexity and intensity cannot be caught by the cognitive. To stay loyal to the image is to stay with the body. It is to practice humility and not-knowing, stances essential if we are to be with the world as it actually is, not the pale and malleable thing the controlling mind would will it to be.
I’ve come to understand the task as something like this. Writing is its own strange initiation, incomplete until read. The reading, a welcome on the other side of the writing, is the return home, after the ordeal, hopefully bearing gifts of nourishment and renewal. I seek here to witness, to tend and to imagine amends, and to serve the community through the act of bringing words into the world.