If Stillness Needed An Emissary ~ Episode Six

If Stillness Needed An Emissary… would She choose me?

I have been wondering about this since we last spoke.

(Conversely: You might be wondering why She is a She but that would be a digression that I do not have the paragraph space for.)

My participation in this event, The Exquisites, is, for various reasons, fairly major: I am The Writer, the Wroughter of it all.

It is my Love of Stillness that makes it all happen.

And my goal, my aim, in the most Intransitive Sense, has been to interest a few of you, nay, lets be real:

Seduce Some of You into wanting Stillness.

And at the curious thing about being about to Hike Into Episode 6 is….

That I clearly have not been a Good Emissary.

And as I feel that this piece may be the marker for change in the few months, while I gather my cards and tie down my clothing, and more on this later, I want to, need to, For Her, clarify.

Stillness is Miraculous in that it is a Glorious and Brilliant Expansion of the Self.

And that can only happen when you put down the Horrific Thrall of and to Anxiety…..

You may not call that Stillness.

But I do.

And that is Why I Am Here.

And it seems She Chose Me as an Emissary, After All .

If you need a reminder of how to become still enough to play in these realms please go back to Episode One and revisit A dive, a dip, a trip.

We last discussed a question, do you recall?

You asked me to tell you what I have seen….. and in the asking I offered the possibility that you might have been joking. But here we meet again and it would seem that you are, were, not.

A poll, an ask, a request, if you like, was sent out: asking you Darling Reader, what you wanted to know of what I have seen.

The responses were varied, shy, sluggish, even.

Honestly, and please do not share on… there were no responses, at all. Not even a one.

And it seems to have become incumbent upon me, perhaps even forced upon me, to choose your view.

One of my favourite lines in a film, ever, is:

If you could see the things my eyes have seen… Rutger Hauer, gently dying, lying in the blinding rain: Blade Runner.

In deciding to Take the Baton and run for myself, as there was Zero forthcoming, I thought to begin with abstracted moments of your awakening to the fact there There is More, so Much More to be experienced that most of you, now in thrall to your internal stress and The Internet know, believe and can even see.

You are being strangled, suffocated, diminished and thrashed into an itsy-bitsy-teeny-tiny, minute version of yourselves. What you recognise and allow to be true has become rooted in Horror, Oppression and a relentless sense of offence, of being offended. Turgid thoughts grinding down your glimpses of reality.

You are indignation personified, spitting rage and judgement without any thought to the consequences of your fury and vitriol.

This itsy-bitsy-teeny-tiny, minute version of you is blinkered, distracted, blind to the Heavens, to the Natures, to the depths of all that can be seen, heard and felt and you are missing so much. I am so sorry that you cannot see, and seem to be terrified of:  The Landscape of The Here and Now

I am not a Guru

Tis true. ‘Twas never my plan and still now, it is not in the cards.

Think of me as sitting on the ground, just off a beaten path. It is dark and stormy but I am able to sit calmly and gently to play at cards. My dark clothes swirl and whip around me in the wind.

And I lean against a sign post, right there, here, slap bang in the middle of nowhere, in the stormy gloom, playing at cards.

You can notice, stop, peer up at the sign, then look curiously and perhaps even slightly irritatedly at me, wondering

What on Earth am I doing there and Why on Earth don’t the cards blow away in the dark and stormy light…. Yet my clothes never stop billowing.

Or you can keep walking, keep walking past both of us, all of us, me, the 56 cards and the signpost, utterly blissful in your ignorance, stumbling, slightly, as you send that totally urgent and completely meaningless WhatsApp message to a group who neither knows nor cares a jot or a fig about you stumbling around in the gloom.

If you did, or do, happen to stop and peer up at the sign….

It points to a large doorway. A portal, if you will. Do you will?

I am not The Guru, I really am not, and the cards do not foretell for you, they allow my mind to stay open, wide open, to all the possibilities of what you may see on the other side of the portal, cards gently being laid out, one by one on a gigantic web of possibilities.

The sign post says: It Is This Way….

A gigantic web of possibilities.

I am lucky.

I am lucky I am not a Guru, phew.

I am lucky I am 61.

I am lucky I have been wandering in full consciousness for 30 years.

I am lucky I started to See Things from a very early age and all the walls of What Should Be were shattered, destroyed and broken.

They were trashed, laid bare, removed and destroyed.

Until all the expectations of What Should Be were gone.

And all is I could see is what is. And all I could do was to see that The Emperors were Naked, The Cults were A Lie, nothing was what they said it would be, expectations were forever unmet, and I could see it all.

I am lucky.

And: It would seem that you are in need of some luck, and Voila! Here you are!

You stand in the Windy Gloom wondering what the Hell I am talking about and why my cards do not blow away.

I like that you are still here.

I think you need a short sharp shove into other worlds.

Feel my hand on your back and my leg tripping up your foot as you tumble forward and through the portal.

Immanence & Transcendence

The internal fire or the external abandonment. Or from the fire into the frying pan.

The Fire inside; this is our topic for today. I say, rather grandly as you pick yourself up and wipe the grime off your knees and palms.

The Fire Inside, that we sweep aside in our irritation and mad hunger, is the Kundalini, the internal Divine, the source of all. It is there, held waiting, deep within the core of our being, waiting to be fanned, lying in soft grey embers, gently pulsating, just waiting to be re-ignited by your desire, your lusty longing for the glorious Flames of Immanence: So forceful a state of being, all consuming in its Divinity.

The Fire of the Kundalini is the burning longing, the outpouring of love, the melting fervour of Love for the Divine. What we are capable of feeling within ourselves is the absolute marriage with how the Divine sees each one of us.

It is an entirely personal relationship with love: allowing, accepting, adoring and reflecting the Divine.

To want to find this Fire we need, first, to want to become still, present.

Here is the Crux, if you will, the Cross that you have to Bear, if you please: Do you Long for Stillness?

I keep asking. And no one answers me… in a funny way, I seem to quite like the silence.

We can long for the Kundalini to rise, as it so often does, in the apocryphal texts of the past. Fables and stories from long, long ago: stories of men who had powers, energy rising, the two serpents spiralling forever in an eternal bliss.

We can read these texts and feel we will never get there, never feel that…

That what? What is that? Those men, so very long ago, who knew this secret: who were they and what did they know, what were they gifted that we cannot have?

And now it is the 21st century, and we have been utterly seduced out of an internal relationship with ourselves into a bewildered state of Transcendence. We have utterly abandoned ourselves.

My hand is cupped to my ear and I lean in: What is it I hear you cry? Ah! That of course we have an internal relationship with ourselves! How ridiculous to think we have no connection! Our anxiety never shuts up! We do not have a moments peace away from the relentless, endless, vile & vicious chatter that charges through our minds 24/7.

Harrumph, The Fire of the Kundalini Rising? That is not for me, you say, disparagingly, that does not exist, it is apocryphal fire, we cannot do that now…..

We read the stories of old and brush them aside, striding towards our modern, latest, shiny phone.

Ah, yes….I whisper. But…. you cannot hear me over the exhaustingly loud mental chatter and the glorious images to be scrolled through on technology.

Ah! I cry! You have confused the frying pan for the fire! You have abandoned yourselves and reached for Transcendence. You believe that the sparkly pages of social media, the glossy phones, the violent binge-watching and gulping down chunks of the News will lead to salvation, to redemption, to some kind of relief, perhaps even absolution. And you turn to look at me, irritated…. 

I stand down, you have become silent now. I will whisper:

To escape the fire, the inner glory, the Eternal states of bliss, we have been seduced into believing that what we desperately long for is to endlessly swirl and dance in the pain of the past & the fear of the future. This is what you, we, are being sold. 

We have forgotten how passionately we can feel, deeply inside ourselves.

I notice your hand reaching for your phone, you have to check and see if there is something, anything, to take you away so you will not have to hear this, me. I will wait. I don’t move, I don’t judge, no sigh or leaning back, away from you, no raised eyebrow or shaming laugh. I wait. You consider your reflection in the screen.

I lean into you, my shoulder touches yours and my voice is low: there are two distinct worlds. One is an endless flirt, an endless seduction with no fulfilment, a constant sense of trying to climb inside something that keeps offering to make you feel better: the sexy screens at bus stops, on your desk, your bed, in your hand. 

You sigh. You know I say it as it is, an awful spell.

The other world is there, patiently waiting for you. Reappearing every day with the dawn, the birds’ gratitude, dawn light that keeps coming round and saying: find me, come to me, see me. See the light out here and recognise how you are me, you are a constant mirror of me. 

Once we allow ourselves to agree to find our way back to our essence, our core, The Holy Spirit within, we awaken to what is real, to the beauty of our experience here. In seeing, acknowledging, responding to and reflecting this beauty the embers are stirred. 

We can feel that our heart is on an altar within our chest. We awaken to the flaming heart, to the outpouring of love that emerges from the fire within. The passion that we enliven from the central core of our being allows us to stand perfect and still, to be consumed, to merge, reflect and become the Divine within. 

You look at me now, there is a light in your eyes. We smile. I know what you are going to ask me:

How do I find the passionate Desire for the Stillness?

To experience Carolyn Cowan in class or workshop please visit her website Credits: Text, video & concept – Carolyn Cowan. Director: Isadora Hugo. Video edit: Tom Vereker. Sound Mix: Tati Rabell, Layout: Sophie Budden.

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