11. ATMOSPHERES

What form have memories, and are they true? We have no way of telling. We can only say that they are real to us, because of the charge they carry. Sometimes they create a well of feeling so intense that we fearfully protect ourselves against them, and only visit their residual images in dreams. Atmospheres.

A man on a rainy day may stamp through the puddles, feeling only a nagging sense of pain that so many obstacles stand between him and his objective. Another may pause, and see within a single puddle an entire world, the billowing mud forming into new clouds, a different sky. In everything around us are associations, at once strange and familiar, which invest each object that we see, smell, or touch, with an emotional atmosphere. In certain places these atmospheres gather to such an intensity that they reveal worlds within worlds, an almost unbearable beauty. Like something forgotten yet remembered, atmospheres clothe our perceptions with the faint shadows of far greater things, such as a different colour within purple, an invisible movement in the leaves. This shifting, groundless wonderment is the process known as thought.

The basis of all thought is the association of atmosphere, and without emotion no thought is possible. Around everything which we perceive Is an emotional charge, without definition, but precise. Every sensory perception Is alive with feeling, and It is this feeling that bonds it with all similar perceptions, giving it associative identity.

Atmospheres have no limit. They have no outline. They interlink with each other in ways over which we have no control. We walk among clouds of associations which gather to an emotional Intensity in certain places and certain things. Every moment of perception contains a blueprint for the universe.

When thoughts have been created by the resonance of atmospheres, we are able to check and compare them with established templates of likelihood, rejecting the more remote associations which do not fit the pattern, and consigning them to our dreams. This limiting process is calied logic, and it enables us to function in a limitless world. Logic decides that a thought is one thing, and not another, and so allows clear decisions.

But to speak of ‘logical thought’ is nonsensical, because it confuses a checking process with a creative one. While logic is necessary for us to establish a ‘real’ differentiated world, it is, by its very nature, foolish. Because it works by setting limits, its knowledge is necessarily limited, and any system, such as mathematics, which sets out to be entirely logical, will be ultimately flawed, because it depends on limitation and exclusion, and is ultimately limited. The knowledge contained in atmospheres is without limit. However, until limits are set, this knowledge is not practical, and so these two continue, hand over hand.

It is a fallacy to suggest that there is such a thing as abstract thought. Even the tools of an abstract science, such as numbers, carry an atmosphere and an emotional charge. Numbers, like the notes in music, have become extremely powerful, because we have banished their atmospheres into the world of dreams. People say that emotions cloud our vision, but, like it or not, they are our vision. For each of us certain places, moments of memory, configurations of objects or sensations, expressions in the faces of others, and so on, open up a chain of atmospheric associations, which lead back to an unknowable source. A door opens, and with it comes the memory of all the similar doors that ever opened in our life, right back to the primal doors opening in the first light of childhood. But the source appears to be beyond childhood, because childhood experiences are of the same intensity, every bit as great as later ones.

As a baby in a pram, I was transfixed by the blossoms on a tree, so much so that my mother felt unable to move the pram for what seemed like an hour, without disturbing me. I have experienced blossom time since then, and the great surge of atmospheric association it can create, but I have no evidence that my reaction is more intense now, with the accretion of memories, than it was then. It appears that I was gazing through the blossoms, not merely back to the point of my birth, but beyond that point in time, toward the ultimate source where all atmospheres gather together in unimaginable intensity.

Looking back in ecstacy towards the source in this way emphasises the atmospheric association of all things. At the beginning of time all things are one, and all knowledge is contained in a single point. However, we need separation and articulation to present us with a reality which we can comprehend. As the point divides into its differentiated components, as it articulates, so our consciousness become able to operate logic and comparison, and arrive at understanding. For the conscious mind to continue to work, this process must be continuous. Continuous dissolution is the dynamic of the only universe we can comprehend. And only the dynamic can be said to exist, as the beginning and the end are necessarily projections of what is now. So logic follows vision, and then vision must follow logic, hand over hand.

12. THE ANGEL IN THE COUNTRY LANE

There came to me an Angel in a country lane, when I was most alone in the spring of summer, and weary. And he called to me, comforting, through the trees on either side, his call like the golden voice of a trumpet. It was a vision from the quiet rustic meditation of the day, and the kindness of the sunlight lent the revelation showers of majesty, and the drooping boughs, and the sad wine of the drunken distant fields, lent it deepest memory. I was weary, and in my heart the sun was frozen, and the birds were chiselled in the sky, but his presence was like a gathering of something known, and his widespread wings a balm of gentle green on all that cracked and bled within me. It seemed as if the air was filled with a gold and crimson fanfare of life, glistening as in snow, yet all the time I trod a country path in early summer, with grasshoppers and beetles and old horses-hooves, between flowery bushes of may.

We walked, he like an aged teacher and I his pupil, and wandered slowly along the country lane, and it was lined on either side with birch trees and rowan, and its clay was scoured with the ruts of many wheels, of hay-carts and tractors, all deeply moulded into the breast of the land. Above, it was open to the sky, but quiet and not especial, rising on a small familiar hill. Yet, despite all this, it seemed to me as I walked, that my path rose, with all the majesty and exhilaration of a mountain track, and I was climbing high between lofty conifers, and though the path, in fact, had no great slope, and I could see that it had not, and that it was whitened on either side with tiny may flowers and not with snow, it seemed to lead, dressed with all the magnificent pageant of nature, high up towards some unmeasured height, and there it was that the Angel spoke with me.

“The love of God comes as a remembrance, a gathering of deepest beauty in the day, a glowing land of memory in the night, and for a moment what was instinct in childhood becomes radiant with understanding. For love has no exclusion. Man struggles to live, and as he fights he and the world grow into iron. Love alone is the power which melts. You have felt its touch, and where it once has touched, however often clouded, it will not pass away, for you are still the same child which first awoke to the world. So, when you are most in pain, when you are most alone, you are most at one, for love has no exclusion.”

“The love of God comes as a remembrance,” so spoke the Angel in the country lane, and as he spoke I was as one lost that had been found. An inner light, as radiant sun upon a mountain peak, had transformed everything in my mind, and I would have cried out my joy in words, as my breath melted into the ocean of the sky, but that I was caught by the wonderful stillness which pervaded the whole world, an ageless peace. And in the clear silence, the quiet rapture of one great understanding, the Angel spoke to me once more, and he spoke of things my heart knew even then, though I struggle with them now, as I write. “Words are paintings in the air. Written words die upon the page. The experience gives all, and the deeper felt the more it speaks of love, for love has no exclusion.”

And as he spoke his voice faded into the silence of the day, and soon it began to rain, and I was in the country lane once more, with the moist clay beneath my feet. My mind fell to meditating mundane things, the grey starry water-drops which gathered on the thorns in the may, the curtains which the rain drew across the land, the number of tracks extant upon the path, and everything was fading, and doors were closing in all the trees around me.

Once again there was a gibbering in the earth. “Man,” it shrieked, “mankind has no infinity.” I longed to make answer, but could not, as if the rain had obscured my memory, and so I returned with a re-awoken, but a quiet heart, to the world of men. Anyone may find their mountain of revelation, but few can give, when they first return, of the summer jewels they gathered there.

13. DEVILS, SPRITES AND SPIRITS

The true Devil is not evil. He is impartial. Terrifying things are beautiful. Emptiness alone rules Hades.

The Horned Monster of the picture is merely the awakener to evil. The true evil is that which lies hidden.

Much time has been wasted in fear of the ghosts of other people, when the fear itself has been the Devil’s work.

A man stands in a churchyard, bent deep in thought, like a bowed crescent moon whose tips yearn to touch their reflection in the graves. The dark branches of the yew, the bells of drooping daffodils, the shadow of the gate, all bend downwards, but none will ever reach the crumbling earth. Here is the extremity of love, the world and the dream, the scene of deepest questioning.

And do the dead laugh? Do they play cards and wager with the images of the living? Do they run, shrieking, from their graves? This spirit of mockery is not of a human soul, nor can the dead be any but our friends, our closest friends, though they represent that part of us which lies furthest away, reflected in the shadow on the earth. The devils, they are dwellers of the half-light. They love the mists and shadows of deception, which gather round the sun. They are the fears, the little things which creep like a twilight growth, and warp the window through which we should see greater things. They creep, and offer satisfaction when the problem is unsolved, in the darkness where knowledge is dimmed, the sun does not shine, and fear is the regal enemy of love. Dragons rear their heads to terrify and shock the minds of men, but no Saint George was ever found to fight unspoken things, which crawl as slow as a disease.

Superstitions live, and still we fear the fantasy which walks the neighbour street, while we forget our resurrection, and such things as speak from the spirit of the earth.

A man may love himself, and if he loves himself enough, he must love all mankind, but a devil gives him half-love, which destroys both himself and mankind. Half-truths are the superstitions of the present age. Half-truths console with apathy the dwellers of the town. Half-truths stir with energy the mindless arguments of men. Half-truths, of late, have baked the blood of several million Jews. It is pitiful that the world is full of disciples!

Devils are dwellers of the half-light, and would have the whole world grey. But it is not so. The more the eye perceives, the stranger the shapes and colours grow, and the light is full of mystery.

“Awake, my people, awake! Hear the long clarion dawn-cry!
Who dares to look, unflinching, into the eye of the sun?

I do not deal in dreams. I do not offer freedom. There is no such thing as freedom, only the everlasting breaking free! But therein is a truth greater than the dream of freedom.

Awake, my people, awake.....

There is a stone in men’s hearts, which brings sleep to the land, and an end to hope. I see this stone of sleep, and it weighs like agony upon me, and I have rested too, and would sleep ever, and the empty winds will blow...

Yet, how deep the world cries ‘No, this cannot be!...
Awake, my people, awake, for the world is full of greater things than you have ever dreamed!”

14. ANIMALS AND FRIENDS

As afternoon was sinking by the weary oak, and darkness crept on to the green, I saw an old dog padding the rising turf. His eyes turned, and they were golden in the dying light, and they peered long and deep into mine, and our souls walked together in the evening. He was my only friend in this fading world. We ate the same fruits. We lay under the same sky. There is no division between the world of men and that of animals. Each must have fulfilment after the dream of his kind. All must watch the setting sun. All have felt, and love knows no exclusion.

The simple oak-apple carries a cure for cancer in the means that gives it birth, if men would only look, but their knowledge is fragile. Man the builder has walls of paper and clothes of frail thread, but he hungers and cries as the dogs do, and there is no dishonour there. The cow that lows in the deep night, the cat with the trailing paw, the judge who snores in his pillow, all are as one. If not there would needs be some exclusion, and love has no exclusion.

So it was that my soul walked bare beside my friend, the old dog, as afternoon was sinking by the weary oak, and lights of transfiguration danced among the grasses, while darkness crept into the green.

15. THE JOURNEY

I hear the Angel knocking at the outer door. I must answer his call, though it be to face the voice of emptiness in the wild. The world has many oracles, and perhaps, in my travels, I shall glimpse some, and bear witness. But all will change, and I will change, and much will die within me, new things be born. There is much to be remembered.

The Angel is knocking faintly at the outer door; the voice in the wild is shrieking down the wind; and I, with my two companions, must go out now, into the night.