Is there a third possibility? (apart from sudden annihilation or gradual suffocation).
Yes. It is through a transcendent understanding of space.
William Corlett & John Moore, The Islamic Space
... the mind can only try to become attuned to it, to become quiet and space itself out, to become open and still, unworlded, knowing itself in the diamond country, in the ultimate unlettered light.
Ken White, excerpt from A High Blue Day on Scalpay
I went in search of myself.
Heraclitus
Space, the final frontier.....
and maybe it is.... maybe we have yet to realize 'space'.... to know what space is..... to really and truly see space.... maybe it is a boundary we have yet to cross, yet to dissipate.... maybe in all our scientific fervor we have compartmentalized space like everything else and thus lost a hold of the context in which space works. Maybe space is your 'God', maybe you are space.... and all this space is you.... Perhaps indeed there is no space, what you see is energy, the fluctuation of 'you' as a universal entity...
Whatever the case, and there may be, in all likelihood, no case at all, meditation upon space is at the foremost of my mind....
And what better place to meditate than the braes and moors above Kilpatrick, or for that matter the braes, fells, moors and hills all around the Glasgow Valley.
The Kilpatrick Braes shrouded in mist and cloud above the village of Kilpatrick and the Erskine Bridge.
I have been coming, religiously, into these wooded braes, moors and hills above Kilpatrick and Duntocher for over ten years now. I see it as a form of spiritual practice, a kenotic enterprise that rids the worldly self of its worldly attachments, leaving it pristine and visionary. The absence of distortion and interference - on a day like today, wet and windy (though not excessively), no-one comes up here, not even the birds - lends itself to a seeing mind that converses with itself as it goes. It's as if, what with the physical effort required to get up here, and the elemental openness that this 'up' affords, the mind is released from its contained shell, and begins to see connections that had hitherto passed it by. It is a 'religious' experience insofar as you are bound back (re+ligare, to bind back) to the unity that you have been separated from. Religion is not concerned with 'Gods', it is only concerned with 'you' and the re-union of the apparently separate with the one and only Ultimate Principle. As far as this is concerned, Religion is the anti-thesis (and/or anti-dote) to the Scientific worldview that has hijacked the world. Where religion (as a form of phenomenal geo-cosmography, or indeed, cosmic phenomenology) is an attempt to re-unite the tangle, the remit of science (the word science itself derives ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root skei- "to cut, to split"), is emphatically to un-tie. Where religion is concerned, clearly, with wholeness (or if you prefer 'holiness'), science is concerned with distinguishing, separating, and singling out. Furthermore, this wholeness (or holiness) is health (look no further than the etymologies of these words), and the separation dis-ease.
In short, religion is vision, science di-vision.
In a world where vision has been superceded by division, is it any wonder that there are constant conflicts and crises. As Ernst Schumacher asked in Small is Beautiful all those years ago, 'Might we not be justified in asking if there's something wrong with our education system if we are in a state of constant crisis? But our education system is not concerned with the enlightened and the 'religious', but with conscripting the unknowing pupil into a system of future financial pay-offs through the exploitation-cultivation of self, world, and, by extension, universe. This is not 'Education'! Education is, to quote the Czech Vaclav Havel, 'the ability to perceive connections between phenomena'. Uncovering, through a process of delicate attention, the pattern that connects 'you' to 'it'. And the only way you're going to do that is up here in the peace and serenity of the misty hills, where subtlety works its course, and the elements course through your working of the way. There's a reason why all the sages and prophets, at some point in their lives, enter the wilderness. Within the noise and distractions of the city and the peopled environment, it is nigh on impossible to find the exacting silence required to make such immense breakthroughs.
Up here, one does not feel alone, in the same way that Emily Dickinson did not feel alone: 'Alone I cannot be, for hosts do visit me', the hosts in question being other life forms, other processes at work, Nature at large and in miniature. Let's not forget that loneliness is a construct devised by man to explain his ignorance of the convivial world.
All is alive up here, especially when it is wet and windy. And this elementalness only adds to the vivacity of being. There is an immensity to the proceedings, in the sense that nothing can be pinned down, where one hills begins and another ends, where one stream ends and the river begins.... and so on. Man has fragmented his self-world so much that he as ended up accepting the fragments as Reality. But they are not.
They are not 'they'.
As Bachelard writes in his Poetics of Space: Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being' that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone.
Do not underestimate the power of solitude for its ability to commune and transmute. The true Spirit or inner power is the Mother of receptive awareness and motiveless attention. In order to know, the subject must identify with the object... project itself entirely into the process to be known, become changed into it through an intimacy of attention, then come back to itself, absorbing and integrating, forming a whole. It is this identification (Identity is not what you put on but what you take off), that reveals you and what is being considered as 'same'. These common processes unite us with each other as a species as well as uniting us with birds, rocks, the elements, and the stars.
All these idiosyncracies and perversions (where nature has been squeezed through the dam we have edified our selves with) is not what we are. It is the coat that we wear on top of who we are. What we are is beneath the coat, not the coat itself. Yet, in today's topsy-turvy society, where division takes precedence over vision, fashion takes precedence over nakedness, the coat is what people identify with. The result being existential confusion, conflicts of health, and overall psycho-physical degradation. This of course spins outwards and degrades the habitat that nourishes and shelters us, the animals that co-habit this planet with us, and even our own kith and kin.
At the foot of 'The Bastard', the 200m stretch of steep path rounding the shoulder of the braes up towards Loch Humphrey. No doubt, the physical exertion helps release the self from itself. The body, as Alan Watts reminds us, is the world.
At the top of 'The Bastard', where the sedges and grasses are as tall as a man!
Skidaddling down the sacred ridge of Boglairoch, with the Slacks summit just out of view to the right.
Greenside Reservoir almost invisible behind the mist and cloud. The universe was not born on a clear day!
Nearly mid-August and the heather, several varieties, are in full flow...
The angel Gabriel is a hillside, a waterfall, a seagull..... ssshhh.... Listen!
A Casteneda moment at Greenside Reservoir..... It's moments like these that resonate so deeply as to make you question everything that you have ever learned about the structure of Reality. At the moment, as I am penning the great existential manifesto The Gull Forecast, gulls are pretty significant. And to find this guy just chilling, doing what I am doing - getting away from the city, the wife, the kids, the noise - spacing out - is quite a moment of existential alignment....
As I remark in the forecast: you are a process, the gull is a process, you and the gull are the same...
When you realize this sameness, the deep underlying Nature that unites, when it pierces through your forehead like a diamond bullet, everything else pales beside it. The man made world seems pathetic in comparison, blind and wayward, continually going against and covering up this underlying Nature as if it were something to be ashamed of. But the real shame is 'man' and the world he has concocted for himself, this 'self' being not the underlying self but the overlying one: a manufactured self, rigid and hardened by so many cosmetics and varnishes.... to the point of heartlessness and unfeeling.
'Man', when it isn't short for mannequin, is short for abomination....
Remember that!
