Incidents 6-8/36: Unusual relational connections
6. The Third Ear Band concert uplifting
While at Oxford in the early 1970’s I experienced two memorably transformational events involving music. The first was an informal gathering in a hall with a group of extemporising musicians in which students were exploring their personal development through movement. About thirty had arrived, encouraged by the leading organisers simply to self-express in their embodied moves, externalising their inner responses as a musical presence filled the hall. The mood of the musicians changed spontaneously as they mutually responded in stretchable time. Most of the students, myself included, were up and exploring the feel of outer and inner coherence. After a while the musicians’ drifted into rhythms that I would describe as aggressive. A most unexpected event took hold of my inner world. It was as if a curtain was pulled back both ways, tearing apart a barrier that opened my mind to see a huge unbounded lake of burning anger within me. As I started to try expressing that in movement I was gripped also by a fear that I could not contain the unbounded nature of all that was seething within. The music seemed to increase in volume, and in almost a panic I decided to leave quickly, worrying that I might be overcome or destroyed by the intensity of this insight, perhaps even inflicting it on others. I walked back reflectively to my room, pondering the source of this experience, which was not difficult. This event began my becoming increasingly conscious of how traumatising my family home had been. Before coming away to university I had never actualized how unusually tense my family environment had surroundingly been. I had survived as a ‘coper’ by looking outwards, hiding the inner truth behind wit and humour or intense study, but keeping people at a distance. Now that I had insight, what was I to do with it?
An answer started at another musical event, a concert by the avant-garde and unique instrumental group Third Ear Band, which comprised violin, cello, oboe and percussion.
Being lost in their mysterious sound space was relaxing and inspiring. One piece called Lark Rising had a remarkable effect on me. As the strings and oboe unexpectedly lift, sliding to their upper registers, the lark rising above its nest to distract the attention of potential predators, my mind rose up also and opened suddenly and unexpectedly into a wide unlimited expanse of beauty, welcoming love, and belonging. I was in a different realm, the world left behind. I knew in every pore of my being that here, “I am in everything; and… everything is in me.” It was a peaceful rapture. It was healing, and the goal of healing, a goal that remained with me as I returned to this earth-bound environment, and looked around the audience wondering if others were experiencing the same, not sure how long or short a time I had been in that state. With that return also came the return of defensiveness against life’s connections that I had constructed. I thought, “I need a guide to teach me more about the significance of this experience.” But with that thought also recurred the problem I had now long struggled with. Whom could I trust? I was aware that cults were forming, and I couldn’t trust that the esoteric teachings of ancient secret societies were truly balanced, so I reverted to my former commitment to a life of prayer, as described at the beginning of Unusual Event 3 Between the Seconds of Your Mind. I would seek that pure relationship that I had formerly saved my life, which I shall describe in the eighth story here after an earthing in humanity in this next number seven.
7. Telepathic connection at the bridge in Norway
Between the second and third years at Oxford I had planned a motorcycle tour to Norway with my girlfriend, who later became my first wife. Sadly her finances were so poor that she had to drop out and work instead during the vacation. I decided to continue on the trip alone, turning it into another experience of self-exploration. It was on this trip that I learnt, through walking in the mountains and nearly dying on a glacier in an unexpected thunderstorm, how profoundly important relationships and relatedness are to life and wellbeing. It was not exactly loneliness as such, I was familiar with coping on my own, but I suppose that word would be a fair summary of what it means when recognizing that every awesome sight and experience I had would have been enriched and deepened by being able to talk with someone about its significance or joy. It was against that background that the remarkable event occurred which is fixed in my memory. I had managed to get back from the mountain where I had slipped on the glacier in the rain and broken my rucksack frame as it caught on a rock. I appeared at the hotel where I had parked my bike asking to dry out somewhere, only to be turned away as an undesirable looking character. Having dried out in their boiler room, which I had found around the back to be unlocked, I drove down to a nearby area of flat grass and pitched my tent beside a wide stream that tumbled away from the foot of a five metre high waterfall flowing under an old road bridge, carrying the rainwater away from the cwm below the glacier. Having made a warm meal I stretched out and felt the aches loosen and slept. The next morning, having washed in the shallows of the steam and breakfasted, I returned to the stream to wash my cooking utensils, crouching among the large pebbles and rocks at its edge. The noise of the waterfall was nearby. While looking down and concentrating on what I was doing, inside my head I heard a voice louder than the waterfall and clearly saying, “I’m just looking at all this beauty, but he is living as part of it.” I instantly without thought looked up to see a man leaning on the parapet of the bridge looking directly at me with an expression of envy in his eyes. Without a search, my eyes had locked directly into his, a mystery of movement as if the source was already known to my inner heart. We had connection, heart to heart. My visual recognition of the world fell away, although the sound of the waterfall boundaried the shared mental space that we both now occupied. I smiled and made a brief wave of the hand to which he responded in like manner, then walked on. This shared mental space, where two personal inner hearts exploring life had met, is the sacred space that people search for, like a temple in nature that had been stumbled upon and entered.
8. The light of life
The tensions in my home life arose primarily from my two older twin brothers (no sisters). The older, Robert, had brain damage at birth and grew to have a spastic partial hemiplegia on his left side, with grand mal fits. He was determined to keep up with everyone else, and went on to work in an office and even become a union representative there, but was always limited by the unpredictability of his seizures. The younger twin, David, from his earliest toddler life, was unpredictably violent, controlling and terrorising others. They were fighting twins, having competitions to see who could endure the most punches. David was a brilliant artist, and went on to Cambridge to study architecture, but sadly heavy use of marijuana turned him psychotic. He spent his life as a violent paranoid schizophrenic in mental hospitals or small residential units, where he terrorised people to obtain cigarettes. When he died, his hands were all broken up from where he had been punching walls to try to get rid of his hallucinations. He smoked himself to death, and at the end was on a respirator. The family turned to me as ‘the sensible one’ to make the decision whether or not to switch off the life support. I said that it was a kindness to do so, as nobody could know what horrors might be filling his mind as he lay there paralysed.
My parents had their own problems coping with all this tension and disappointment, and I honour them for staying together when over 90% of families split apart when there is severe disability among the children. Nevertheless, their coping strategies left me feeling that I had to ‘bring myself up’ and make my own decisions, finding my own way. I was not a ‘young carer’ as people are called these days. I was a survivor, making sure that I always had a means of transport for escape whenever things become too much. I coped by my intelligence and a strong sense of humour, but it was a smoke screen for the emotional and violent chaos that reigned in the background.
At the age of about 13 it did become too much. I remember deciding to commit suicide, and was sitting on the arm of an armchair in our lounge looking out of a window and working out how I would do it. I’m pleased now that I didn’t, because it would have been rather messy for others to have cleared up. Suddenly, the room filled with a glorious orange-golden light radiating from everything I looked at, my hands included. It filled the space with a glow that seemed to emanate from within everywhere, not shining on things like the external sunlight. It was beautiful. I looked, and looked, and something changed within me. It was hope appearing. I was seeing that there is beauty in the world. There is something worth living for, but our brains somehow screen it out as we put a surface on things and imagine they are solid. It was this experience that first set me off on a lifetime search, along with the others I am recording here, for how it is that we do not see this beauty all the time.
Of course, with my later training in medicine and the body’s molecular physiology, I know that people could discount this as merely the effect of endorphin chemicals rushing into my brain and bloodstream. But that worldview is one that is locked into its own reductionist cave where all of life is thought to be ‘just random material’, and the rest is ‘just imagination’.
This event’s transformative effect on my life, turning me into an envisioned personal agent choosing how to move in a material world, is the experiential truth that I NOW, decades later, mean when talking or writing about a physiology of light as the ground of all being. It is from this that all substance emerges in an unending process that unites simultaneously substantial material movements and our understanding of them. It is in this numinous light that organising principles guide emergent molecular physiology movements into the relationality of life. That’s what I mean by coming alive, or waking up.