It isn't what you know in your head, but what you've become that matters most... in backpacking as well as in life.
Belden Lane, Backpacking with the Saints
The Glasgow strath is truly a blessed place. Walking and/or cycling its gentle hills are a wonderful way to realize this. Not only is the weather perfect, pretty much all year round, for the human exercising his own locomotive force, but the air quality, the water quality, the Quality in general, is far above any other city I have had the good fortune to live in. My only complaint is that Scotland's forests and woods have all been circumcised quite badly (by sheep, deer and people), over the last few thousand years, leaving behind them only plantations and scraped earth. Yet, we are trying, to reconstitute these forests (at least we should be) so that one might in the words of Thoreau 'enter the universe through a forest wilderness'.
Up here, in the moorland above Lochwinnoch, there are no forests, but plenty of hills. Ladymuir plantation in the photo below is in a state of being harvested (most plantations have a lifespan of 30-40 years), and so is quite an unsightly picture, as most mass graves are. That being said, the views up here are spectacular, and in spite of the Muirshiel Visitor Centre being only a kilometre away, no-one really comes up here any more.
Looking south-eastish down towards Kaim Dam with Ladymuir Plantation on the left.
From the path to Windyhill looking north: The curiously sounding Craig of Todholes (left), Little Craig Minnan (centre) with Kilmacolm in far distance.
As regards the title ' Earth Phrenology' I've always though of these lumps and bumps, and the more acute mountains to the north, as part of the Earth's cerebellum, and thus part of our Mind. Indeed, it has always fascinated me how Mind constitutes itself, and how the land, the animals, and the elements are a part of that constitution. Mind expands - becomes more spacious - the more I come into these airy spacious realms, full of life and light. There is zero distortion, and plenty of open unadulterated space. Contemplation is thus a natural spontaneous event up here. One 'spaces out', and in so doing, ejects the small self. What is left behind is Mind, no more no less, a constitution of epic proportions, qualitatively open, and so light that one might say that one no longer walks or cycles, but levitates.
From the path to Windyhill looking north: The curiously sounding Craig of Todholes (left), Little Craig Minnan (centre) with Kilmacolm in far distance.
As regards the title ' Earth Phrenology' I've always though of these lumps and bumps, and the more acute mountains to the north, as part of the Earth's cerebellum, and thus part of our Mind. Indeed, it has always fascinated me how Mind constitutes itself, and how the land, the animals, and the elements are a part of that constitution. Mind expands - becomes more spacious - the more I come into these airy spacious realms, full of life and light. There is zero distortion, and plenty of open unadulterated space. Contemplation is thus a natural spontaneous event up here. One 'spaces out', and in so doing, ejects the small self. What is left behind is Mind, no more no less, a constitution of epic proportions, qualitatively open, and so light that one might say that one no longer walks or cycles, but levitates.
Looking across to Mistylaw (left) and Hill of Stake (right) from Windyhill.
The word phrenology actually means 'Knowledge of Mind' (or as I prefer to translate it, 'Discourse with Mind') and if we can escape its early 19th century connotations with pseudo-scientific neuroanatomy, we can see that perhaps its usage is better appropriated for reading not the head of an individual but reading 'everything': as in the Earth, the matricial planet that feeds, nurtures and shelters us, and knowing 'it' as part of ourselves not through the scientific approach (which seeks to separate you from 'it') but through a con-scientific approach and through conscience. It is this conscience that is consciousness tapping into Mind.
It is the world's loss of conscience that allows so many of man's actions to be played out as they are. His existential responsibilities have been diffused through the capitalist model. If man were a conscious being who was rooted in the land, and thus rooted in Mind - a conscientious being - he would not be doing most of the things he is doing now. He wouldn't be driving (allowing his self to be carried by an air-polluting, land-destroying machine), nor would he allow stupefying technologies to usurp his own powers, or bury his self in a box for forty of his most awake hours of the week, performing a task so monotonous and irrelevant to his biological being that after a decade he is effectively dead.
The word phrenology actually means 'Knowledge of Mind' (or as I prefer to translate it, 'Discourse with Mind') and if we can escape its early 19th century connotations with pseudo-scientific neuroanatomy, we can see that perhaps its usage is better appropriated for reading not the head of an individual but reading 'everything': as in the Earth, the matricial planet that feeds, nurtures and shelters us, and knowing 'it' as part of ourselves not through the scientific approach (which seeks to separate you from 'it') but through a con-scientific approach and through conscience. It is this conscience that is consciousness tapping into Mind.
It is the world's loss of conscience that allows so many of man's actions to be played out as they are. His existential responsibilities have been diffused through the capitalist model. If man were a conscious being who was rooted in the land, and thus rooted in Mind - a conscientious being - he would not be doing most of the things he is doing now. He wouldn't be driving (allowing his self to be carried by an air-polluting, land-destroying machine), nor would he allow stupefying technologies to usurp his own powers, or bury his self in a box for forty of his most awake hours of the week, performing a task so monotonous and irrelevant to his biological being that after a decade he is effectively dead.
Man was not built for boxes, if indeed you didn't know that already. Man did not evolve either in order to perform work that is not essential to his living. That this essentiality - this Discourse with Mind - has been redirected (perverted even) by the capitalist model so that irrelevant work does indeed become essential to living (for the money alone and not the work) is a big part of the problem. In other words, if man's work means nothing, then man means nothing.
This is probably one of the root causes of man's dislocation from the land, his animal brethren, and Mind. His work no longer grows him. And if your work does not grow you, then you do not flower, you do not fruit. Man's frugality has been castrated by the capitalist model for its lack of monetary generation. Yet, the generative powers of this frugality outwith the crass profit motive is formidable. The more one pares away, and the more one 'skives' (from the Old Norse word 'skifa', to cut, to strip away) from the toil that is imposed upon you, the more frugal one becomes. And the more frugal one becomes the lighter one becomes, not just physically, but existentially too. This frugality has everything to do with being in tune with one's essence. Man is a plant after all (the word clan actually comes from the Latin 'plantare' to plant, the 'p' later being changed to a 'c') who has roots that go way down. Yet, as an astute mind once wrote, man appears to be the only creature who resists his own flowering. This is because of the choices he makes: to toil (and not to work), to have (and not to be), to accrete (and not to grow).
Outwith this frugality and flourishing Man has become mindless. His discourse with Mind has been squeezed dry by superimposed tech and mechanical thinking. No longer an animal among animals, he no longer walks or levitates (flows or flowers), but is carried.
Conversely, the human, the man who has not lost touch with the soil, his own included, is an endangered species, hunted and preyed upon by men who wish to extract his labour power for more of the non-essential.
The miracle of Jesus walking on water, is the miracle of being human, of living lightly and frugally, of flowing and flourishing, of being at one with Nature.. Levitation, the Austrian 'water wizard' Viktor Schauberger wrote, was simply the ability to feel the cosmic flow through a paring away of life's non-essentials. In other words, all animals levitate, except those in captivity, injured or in ill-health. Yet man struggles to even understand what levitation is, outwith the fantastical.
For people living in an around Glasgow, with such access to ''Mind'', there really is no excuse any more for the brainless and the mindless amongst us..
The existential imperative is upon us:
Mind how ye go!
The gentle yet powerful Windyhill.
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