A BLESSING OF SOLITUDE

A BLESSING OF SOLITUDE

May you recognize in your life the presence, power and light of your soul.

May you realize that you are never alone that your soul in its brightness and belonging connects you intimately with the rhythm of the universe.

May you have respect for your own individuality and difference.

May you realize that the shape of your soul is unique,

that you have a special destiny here

that behind the facade of your life there is something beautiful, good and eternal happening.

May you learn to see your self with the same delight, pride and expectation with which God sees you in every moment.

ONE OF THE GREATEST SINS IS THE UNLIVED LIFE

ONE OF THE GREATEST SINS IS THE UNLIVED LIFE

In the Western tradition we were taught many things about the nature of negativity and the nature of sin, but we were never told that one of the greatest sins is the unlived life. We are sent into the world to live to the full everything that awakens within us and everything that comes towards us. It is a lonely experience to be at the deathbed of someone who is full of regret; to hear him say how he would love another year to do the things his heart had always dreamed of but believed he could never do until he retired. He had always postponed the dream of his heart. There are many people who do not live the lives they desire. Many of the things that hold them back from inhabiting their destiny are false. These are only images in their minds. They are not real barriers at all. We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny.

We are so privileged to still have time. We have but the one life and it is a shame to limit it by fear and false barriers. Irenaeus, a wonderful philosopher and theologian in the second century, said: 'The glory of God is the human person fully alive.' It is lovely to imagine that real divinity is the presence in which all beauty, unity, creativity, darkness and negativity are harmonized. The divine has such passionate creativity and instinct for the fully inhabited life. If you allow you r nature to come alive, then everything will come into rhythm. If you live the life you love, you will receive shelter and blessings. Sometimes the great famine of blessing in and around us derives from the fact that we are not living the life we love, rather we are living the life that is expected of us. We have fallen out of rhythm with the secret signature and light of our own nature.

The shape of each soul is different. There is a secret destiny for each person. When you endevaour to repeat what others have done or force yourself into a preset mould, you betray your individuality. We need to return to the solitude within, to find again the dream that lies at the hearth of the soul. We need to feel the dream with the wonder of a child approaching a threshold of discovery. When we rediscover our childlike nature, we enter into a world of gentle possibility. Consequently, we will find ourselves more frequently at the place of ease, delight and celebration. The false burdens fall away. We come into rhythm with ourselves. Our clay shape gradually learns to walk beautifully on this magnificent earth.

TOWARDS A SPIRITUALITY OF NON-INTERFERENCE

TOWARDS A SPIRITUALITY OF NON-INTERFERENCE

On a farm you learn to respect nature, particularly for the wisdom of its dark underworld. When you sow things in the spring, you commit them to the darkness of the soil. The soil does its own work. It is destructive to interfere with the rhythm and wisdom of its darkness. You sow drills of potatoes on Tuesday and you are delighted with them. You meet someone on a Wednesday who says that you spread the potatoes too thickly, you will have no crop. You dig up the potatoes again and spread them more thinly. On the following Monday you meet an agricultural adviser who says this particular variety of seed potatoes needs to be spread close together. You dig them up again and set them closer to each other. If you keep scraping at the garden, you will never allow anything to grow. People in our hungry modern world are always scraping at the clay of their hearts. They have a new thought, a new plan, a new syndrome that now explains why they are the way they are. They have found an old memory that opens a new wound. They keep on relentlessly, again and again, scraping the clay away from their own hearts. In nature we do not see the trees, for instance, getting seriously involved in therapeutic analysis of their root systems or the whole stony world that they had to avoid on their way to the light. Each tree grows in two directions at once, into the darkness and out to the light, with as many branches and roots as it needs to embody its wild desires.

Negative introspeciton damages the soul. It holds many people trapped for years and years and, ironically, it never allows them to change. It is wise to allow the soul to carry on its secret work in the night side of your life. You might not see anything stirring for a long time. You might have only the slightest intimations of the secret growth that is happening within you, but these intimations are sufficient. We should be fulfilled and satisfied with them. You cannot dredge the depths of the soul with the meagre light of self-analysis. The inner world never reveals itself cheaply. Perhaps analysis is the wrong way to approach our inner dark.

We all have wounds; we need to attend to them and allow them to heal. Hegel's beautiful phrase is apposite here: 'Die Wunden des Geites heilen, ohne das Narben bleiben', the wounds of the spirit heal and leave no scars. There is a healing for each of our wounds, but this healing is waiting in the indirect, oblique, and non-analytic side of our nature. We need to be mindful of where we are damaged, then invite our deeper soul in its night world to heal this wounded tissue, renew us and bring us back into unity. If we approach our hurt indirectly and kindly, it will heal. Creative expectation brings you healing and renewal. If you could trust your soul, you would receive every blessing you require. Life itself is the great sacrament through which we are wounded and healed. If we live everything, life will be faithful to us.

THE SOUL ADORES UNITY

THE SOUL ADORES UNITY

When you decide to practise inner hospitality, the self-torment ceases. The abandoned, neglected and negative selves come into a seamless unity. The soul is wise and subtle; it recognizes that unity fosters belonging. The soul adores unity. What you separate the soul joins. As your experience extends and deepens, your memory becomes richer and more complex. Your soul is the priestess of memory, selecting, sifting and ultimately gathering your vanishing days towards presence. This liturgy of remembrance, literally re-membering, is always at work withing you. Human solitude is rich and endlessly creative.

The solitude of nature is mainly silent. This is expressed beautifully in the old Irish wisdom: 'castar na daoine ar a chéile ach ní chasta na sleibht ar a cheile,' - the mountains never meet, but people can always encounter each other. It is strange that two mountains can be side by side for millions of years and yet can never move closer to each other. Whereas two strangers can come down these mountains, meet in the valley and share the inner worlds they carry. This separation must be one of nature's loneliest experiences.

The ocean is one of the delights for the human eye. The seashore is a theatre of fluency. When the mind is entangled, it is nice to walk by the seashore, to let the rhythm of the ocean inside you. The ocean disentangles the netted mind. Everything loosens and comes back to itself. The false divisions are relieved, released and healed. Yet the ocean never actually sees itself. Even light that enables us to see everything cannot see itself; light is blind. In Haydn's The Creation it is the vocation of man and woman to celebrate and complete creation.

Our solitude is different. In contrast to nature and to the animal world, there is a mirror within the human mind. This mirror collects every reflection. Human solitude is so unsolitary. Deep human solitude is a place of great affinity and of tension. When you come into your solitude, you come into companionship with everything and everyone. When you extend yourself frenetically outwards, seeking refuge in your external image or role, you are going into exile. When you come patiently and silently home to your self, you come into unity and into belonging.

No-one but you can sense the eternity and depth concealed in your solitude. This is one of the lonely things about individuality. You only arrive at a sense of the eternal in you through confronting and outfacing your fears. The truly lonely element in loneliness is fear. No-one has access to the world you carry around within yoursel, you are its custodian and entrance. No-one else can see the world the way that you see it. Thus, it is impossible to ever compare two people with each other because each stands on such different ground. When you compare yourself to others, you are inviting envy into your consciousness; it can be a dangerous and destructive guest. This is always one of the great tensions in an awakened or spiritual life, namely, to find the rhythm of its unique language, perception and belonging. To remain faithful to your life requires commitment and vision that must be constantly renewed.

If you try to view yourself through the lenses that others offer you, all you will see are distortions; you own light and beauty will become blurred, awkward and ugly. Your sense of inner beauty has to remain a very private thing. The secret and the sacred are sisters. Our times suffer from such a loss of the sacred beacuse our respect for the secret has completely vanished. Our modern technology of information is one of the great destroyers of privacy. We need to shelter that which is deep and reserved within us. This is why there is such hunger in modern life for the language of the soul. The soul is a shy presence. The hunger for the language of the soul shows that the soul has been forced to recede to private areas, only there can it mind its own texture and rhythm. The modern world, by trumpeting the doctrine of self-sufficiency, has denied the soul and forced it to eke out its existence on the margins.

Maybe one of the ways to reconnect with your deeper soul life is to recover a sense of the soul's shyness. While shyness may be personally difficult, it is an attractive quality in a person. In an unexpected pieces of advice, Nietzsche says one of the best ways to make someone interested in you is to blush. The value of shyness, its mystery and reserve is alien to the brash immediacy of much modern encounter. If we are to connect with our inner life we need to learn not to grasp at the soul in a direct or confrontational way. In other words, the neon consciousness of much modern psychology and spirituality will always leave us in soul poverty.

CONTRADICTIONS AS TREASURES

CONTRADICTIONS AS TREASURES

One of the most interesting forms of complexity is contradiction. We need to rediscover contradiction as a creative force within the soul. Beginning with Aristotle, the Western thought tradition has outlawed contradiction as the presence of the impossible, and consequently, as an index of the false and the illogical. Hegel, alone, had the vision, subtlety and hospitality of reflection to acknowledge contradiction as the complex force of growth which disavows mere linear progress in order to awaken all the aggregate energies of an experience. It is the turbulence and conflict of their inner conversation which brings an integrity of transfiguration and not the mere replacement of one image, surface or system by another which so often passes for change. This perspective makes for a more complex notion of truth. It demands an ethic of authenticity which incorporates and goes beyond the simplistic intentions of mere sincerity.

We need to have greater patience with our sense of inner contradiction in order to allow its different dimensions to come into conversation within us. There is a secret light and vital energy in contradiction. Where there is energy, there is life and growth. Your ascetic solitude will allow your contradictions to emerge with clarity and force. If you remain faithful to this energy, you will gradually come to praticipate in a harmony which lies deeper than any contradiction. This will give you new courage to engage the depth, danger and darkness of your life.

It is startling how desperately we hold on to what makes us miserable. Our own woundedness becomes a source of perverse pleasure and fixes our identity. We do not want to be cured, for that would mean moving into the unknown. Often it seems we are destructively addicted to the negative. What we call the negative is usually the surface form of contradiction. If we maintain our misery at this surface level, we hold off the initially threatening but ultimately redemptive and healing transfiguration which comes through engaging our inner contradiction. We need to revalue what we consider to be negative. Rilke used to say that difficulty is one of the greatest friends of the soul. Our lives would be immeasurably enriched if we could but bring the same hospitality to meet the negative as we bring to the joyful and pleasurable. In avoiding the negative, we only encourage it to recur. We need a new way of understanding and integrating the negative. The negative is one of the closest friends of your destiny. It contains essential energies which you need and which you cannot find elsewhere. This is where art can be so illuminating. Art is full of intimations of the negative in ways that allow you to participate imaginatively in their possibility. The experience of art can help you build a creative friendship with the negative. When you stand before a painting by Kandinsky you enter the church of colour where the liturgy of contradiction is fluent and glorious. When you listen to Martha Argerich play Rachmaninov Three, you experience the liberation of contradictory forces which at every point threaten and test the magnificent symmetry of form which holds them.

You can only befriend the negative if you recognize that it is not destructive. It often seems that morality is the enemy of growth. We falsely understand moral rules as descriptions of the soul's direction and duty. Yet the best thinking in moral philosophy tells us that these rules are only signposts to alert us to the complex of values latent in or consequent upon our decisions. Moral rules encourage us to act with honour, compassion and justice. They can never be descriptions simply because each person and situation is so different. When we notice something immoral, we normally tend to be harsh with ourselves and employ moral surgery to remove it. In doing this we are only ensuring that it remains trapped within. We merely confirm our negative view of ourselves, and ignore our potential for growth. There is a strange paradox in the soul: if you try to avoid or remove the awkward quality, it will pursue you. In fact, the only effective way to still its unease is to transfigure it, let it become something creative and positive that contributes to who you are.

One encouraging aspect of the negative is its truthfulness. The negative does not lie. It will tell you clearly where you court absence rather than inhabit presence. On entering your solitude one of the first presences to announce itself is the negative. Nietzsche said that one of the best days in his life was the day that he rebaptized all his negative qualities as his best qualities. In this kind of baptism, rather than banishing what is at first glimpse unwelcome, you bring it home to unity with your life. This is the slow and difficult work of self-retrieval. Every person has certain qualities or presences in their heart which are awkward, disturbing and negative. One of your sacred duties is to exercise kindness towards them. In a sense, you are called to be a loving parent to your delinquent qualities. Your kindness will slowly poultice their negativity, alleviate their fear and help them to see that your soul is a home where there is no judgement or febrile hunger for a fixed and limited identity. The negative threatens us so powerfully precisely because it is an invitation to an art of compassion and self-enlargement which our small thinking utterly resists. Your vision is you home and your home should have many mansions to shelter your wild divinity. Such integration respects the multiplicity of selves within. It does not force them into a factitious unity, it allows them to cohere as one, each bringing its unique difference to complement the harmony.

This rhythm of self-retrieval invites your generosity and sense of risk, not merely internally, but also externally, at the interpersonal level. This is probably the uneasy territory of which Jesus spoke when he exhorted: 'Love you enemies.' We should be careful in our choice of 'adversaries'. An awakened soul should have only worthy 'adversaries' who reveal your negativity and challenge your possibility. To learn to love your adversaries is to earn a freedom that is beyond resentment and threat.

THE CROWD AT THE HEARTH OF THE SOUL

THE CROWD AT THE HEARTH OF THE SOUL

Individuality is never simple or one-dimensional. Often it seems as if there is a crowd within the individual heart. The Greeks believed that when you dreamed at night, the figures of your dreams were characters who left your body, went out into the world and undertook their own adventures; then returned before you awoke. At the deepest level of the human heart, there is no simple, singular self. Deep within there is a gallery of different selves. Each one of these figures expresses a different part of your nature. Sometimes they will come into contradiction and conflict with each other. If you only meet these contradictions on the surface level, this can start an inner feud that could haunt you all the days of your life. Frequently, you see people who are sorely divided. They are in a permanent war zone and have never managed to go deeper to the hearth of kinship where the two forces are not enemies, but reveal themselves as different sides of the one belonging.

We cannot embody in action the multiplicity of selves we encounter in our most inward meditations. But without a knowledge of these numberless selves our existence is severely diminished and our access to mystery is blocked. We are talking here of the imagination and its riches; too often we degrade imagination to a problem-solving technique.

We need to develop a new sense of the wonderful complexity of the self. We need thought models or patterns which are fair and appropriate to that complexity. When people discover their own complexity, they become afraid and with the hammers of second-hand thoughts they beat this rich internal landscape into a monoscape. They make themselves conform. They agree to fit in; they cease to be vivid presences, even to themselves.

SILENCE IS THE SISTER OF THE DIVINE

SILENCE IS THE SISTER OF THE DIVINE

Silence is the sister of the divine. Meister Eckhart said that there is nothing in the world that resembles God so much as silence. Silence is a great friend of the soul; it unveils the riches of solitude. It is very difficult to reach that quality of inner silence. You must make a space for it so that it may begin to work for you. In a certain sense, you do not need the whole armoury and vocabulary of therapies, psychologies, or spiritual programmes. If you have a trust in and an expectation of your own solitude, everything that you need to know will be revealed to you. These are some wonderful lines from the French poet, René Char: 'Intensity is silent, its image is not. I love everything that dazzles me and then accentuates the darkness within me.' Here is an image of silence as the force that discloses hidden depth.

One of the tasks of true friendship is to listen compassionately and creatively to the hidden silences. Often secrets are not revealed in words, they lie concealed in the silence between the words or in the depth of what is unsayable between two people. In modern life there is an immense rush to express. Sometimes the quality of what is expressed is superficial and immensely repetitive. A greater tolerance of silence is desirable, that fecund silence which is the source of our most resonant language. The depth and substance of a friendship mirrors itself in the quality and shelter of the silence between two people.

As you begin to befriend your inner silence, one of the first things you will notice is the superficial chatter on the surface level of your mind. Once you recognize this, the silence deepens. A distinction begins to emerge between the images that you have of your self and your own deeper nature. Sometimes much of the conflict in our spirituality has nothing to do with our deeper nature but rather with the false surface constructs we build. We then get caught in working out a grammar and geometry of how these surface images and positions relate to each other; meanwhile our deeper nature remains unattended.

ASCETIC SOLITUDE

ASCETIC SOLITUDE

Ascetic solitude is difficult. You withdraw from the world to get a clearer glimpse of who you are, what you are doing and where life is taking you. The people who do this in a very committed way are the contemplatives. When you visit someone at home, the door into the house, the threshold, is rich with the textures of presence from all the welcomes and valedictions that occur on that threshold. When you visit a cloister or contemplative convent, there is no-one to meet you at the door. You go in, ring a bell and the person arrives behind the grille to meet you. These are the special houses which hold the survivors of solitude. They have exiled themselves from the outside worship of the earth to risk themselves in the interior space where the sense have nothing to celebrate.

Ascetic solitude involves silence. And silence is one of the great victims of modern culture. We live in an intense and visually aggressive age; everything is drawn outwards towards the sensation of the image. Because culture is becoming ever more homogenized and universalist, image has such power. With the continued netting of everything, chosen images can immediately attain universality. There is an incredibly subtle and powerfully calculating industry of modern dislocation, where that which is deep and lives in the silence within us is completely ignored. The surfaces of our minds continue to be seduced by the power of images. There is a sinister eviction taking place; people's lives are being dragged outwards all the time. The inner world of the soul is suffering a great eviction from the landlord forces of advertising and external social reality. This outer exile really impoverishes us. One of the reasons so many people are suffering from stress is not that they are doing stressful things but that they allow so little time for silence. A fruitful solitude without silence and space is inconceivable.

Silence is one of the major thresholds in the world. The spirituality of the Desert Fathers deeply influenced Celtic spirituality. For these ascetics silence was the teacher: 'A certain brother came to the Abbot Moses in Scete seeking a word from him. And the old man said to him: “Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you all things.”' In the Celtic world there was always the recognition of the silent and the unknown as the closest companions of the human journey. Encounter and farewell which framed conversations were always blessings. Emer gives a lovely blessing to Cúchulainn in The Taín. She says, 'May your road be blessed,' literally, I drive around you in a chariot turning to the Right. This was the sun's direction and it attracted good fortune. Behind Celtic poetry and prayer, there is the sense that the words have emerged from a deep, reverential silence. This perspective of solitude and silence purified and intensified the encounter of two people in the anam-cara experience with powerful resonance.

Fundamentally, there is the great silence which meets language; all words come out of silence. Words which have a depth, resonance, healing and challenge are words that are loaded with ascetic silence. Language, which does not recognize its kinship with reality is banal, denotative and purely discursive. The language of poetry issues from and returns to silence. In modern culture, conversation is one of the casualties. Usually when you talk to people all you hear is surface narrative or the catalogue of therapy news. It is quite poignant to hear people describe themselves in therapy news. It is quite poignant to hear people decribe themselves in therms of the programme in which they are involved or the outer work which their role involves. Each person is the daily recipient of new thoughts and unexpected feelings. Yet, so often, in our social encounter and in the way we have grown used to describing ourselves, this finds no welcome or expression. This is disappointing in view of the fact that the deepest things that we have inherited have come down to us across the bridges of meaningful conversation. The Celtic tradition was primarily an oral tradition. The stories, poems and prayers lived for centuries in the memory and voice of the people. They were learned by heart. The companionship and presence of such a rich harvest of memory helped poeticize their perception and conversation. Without the presence of memory conversation becomes amnesic, repetitive and superficial. Perception is most powerful when it engages both memory and experience. This empowers conversation to become real exploration. Real conversation has an unpredictability, danger and resonance; it can take a turn anywhere and constantly borders on the unexpected and on the unknown. Real conversation is not a construct of the solitary ego; it creates community. So much of our modern talk is like a spider manically weaving a web of language outside of himself. Our parallel monologues with their staccato stutter only reinforce our isolation. There is so little patience for the silence from which words emerge or for the silence that is between words and withing them. When we forget or neglect this silence we empty our world of its secret and subtle presences. We can no longer converse with the dead or the absent.

THOUGHTS ARE OUR INNER SENSES

THOUGHTS ARE OUR INNER SENSES

Our life in the world comes to us in the shape of time. Consequently, our expectation is both a creative and constructive force. If you expect to find nothing within yourself but the repressed, abandoned and shameful elements of your past, or a haunted hunger, all you will find is emptiness and desperation. If you do not bring the kind eye of creative expectation to your inner world, you will never find anything there. The way you look at things is the most powerful force in shaping your life. In a vital sense, perception is reality.

Phenomenology has shown us that all consciousness is consciousness of something. The world is never simply there outside us. Our intentionality constructs it. For the most part we constract our world so naturally that we are unaware that we are doing this every moment. It seems that the same rhythm of construction works inwards. Our intentionality constructs the landscapes of our inner world. Maybe it is time now for a phenomenology of soul. The soul creates, shapes and peoples our inner life. The gateway to our deepest identity is not through mechanical analysis. We need to listen to the soul and articulate its wisdom in a poetic and mystical form. It is tempting to use the soul as merely another receptacle for our tired and frustrated analytical energies. It deserves to be remembered that from ancient times the soul had depth, danger and upredictability precisely because it was seen as the presence of the divine within us. If we cut the soul off from the holy, it becomes an innocuous cipher. To awaken the soul is also to travel to the frontier where experience bows down before the mysterium tremens et fascinans of Otherness.

There is such an intimate connection between the way we look at things and what we actually discover. If you can learn to look at your self and you life in a gentle, creative and adventurous way, you will be eternally surprised at what you find. In other words, we never meet anything totally or purely. We see everything through the lens of thought. The way that you think determines what you will actually discover. This is expressed wonderfully by Meister Eckhart: 'Thoughts are our inner senses.' We know that when our outer senses are impaired, this immediately diminishes the presence of the world to us. If your sight is poor the world becomes a blur. If your hearing is damaged a dull silence replaces what could be music or the voice of your beloved. In a similar way if your thoughts are impaired or if they are negative or diminished, then you will never discover anything rich or beautiful within your soul. If thoughts are our inner senses, and if we allow our thoughts to be impoverished and pale, then the riches of our inner world can never come to meet us. We have to imagine more courageously, if we are to greet creation more fully.

You relate to your inner world through thought. If these thoughts are nbot your own thoughts, then they are second-hand thoughts. Each of us needs to learn the unique language of our own soul. In that distinctive language we will discover a lens of thought to brighten and illuminate our inner world. Dostoevky said that many people live their lives without ever finding themselves in themselves. If you are afraid of your solitude, or if you only meet your solitude with entrenched or impoverished thought, you will never enter your own depth. It is a great point of growth in your life when you allow what is luminous within to awaken you. This may be the first time that you actually see your self as you are. The mystery of your presence can never be reduced to your role, actions, ego or image. You are an eternal essence; this is the ancient reason why you are here. To begin to get a glimpse of this essence is to come into harmony with your destiny and with the providence that always minds your days and ways. This process of self-discovery is not easy; it may involve suffering, doubt, dismay. But we must not shrink from the fullness of our being in order to reduce the pain.

BEAUTY LIKES NEGLECTED PLACES

BEAUTY LIKES NEGLECTED PLACES

Only in solitude can you discover a sense of your own beauty. The Divine Artist sent no-one here without the depth and light of divine beauty. This beauty is frequently concealed behind the dull facade of routine. Only in your solitude will you come upon your own beauty. In Connemara, where there are a lot of fishing villages, there is a phrase which says: 'is fanach an áit a gheobfá gliomach,' i.e. It is in the unexpected or neglected place that you will find the lobster. In the neglected crevices and corners of your evaded solitude, you will find the treasure that you have always sought elsewhere. Ezra Pound said something similar about beauty; beauty likes to keep away from the public glare. It likes to find a neglected or abandoned place, for it knows that it is only here it will meet the kind of light that respects its shape, dignity and nature. There is a deep beauty within each person. Modern culture is obsessed with cosmetic perfection. Beauty is standardized; it has become another product for sale. In its sense, beauty is the illumination of your soul.

There is a lantern in the soul which makes your solitude luminous. Solitude need not remain lonely. It can awaken to its luminous warmth. The soul redeems and transfigures everything because the soul is the divine space. When you inhabit your solitude fully and experience its outer extremes of isolation and abandonment, you will find at its heart there is neither loneliness nor emptiness but intimacy and shelter. In your solitude you are frequently nearer to the heart of belonging and kinship than you are in your social life or public world. At this level, memory is the great friend of solitude. The harvest of memory opens when solitude is ripe. This is captured succintly by Wordsworth in his response to the memory of the daffodils: 'Oft when on my couch I lie / In vacen or in pensive mood / They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude.'

Your persona, beliefs and role are in reality a technique or strategy for getting through the daily routine. When you are on your own, or when you wake in the middle of the night, the real knowing within you can surface. You come to feel the secret equilibrium of your soul. When you travel the inner distance and reach the divine, the outer distance vanishes. Ironically, your trusth in your inner belonging radically alters your outer belonging. Unless you find belonging in your solitude, your external longing remains needy and driven.

There is a wonderful welcome within. Meister Eckhart illuminates this point. He says that there is a place in the soul that neither space nor time nor flesh can touch. This is the eternal place within us. It would be a lovely gift to your self to go there often – to be nourished, strengthened and renewede. The deepest things that you need are not elsewhere. They are here and now in that circle of your own soul. Real friendship and holiness enables a person to frequently visit the hearth of his solitude; this benediction invites an approach to others in their blessedness.

THE DANCING MIND

THE DANCING MIND

There are many different kinds of solitude. There is the solitude of suffering when you go through darkness that is lonely, intense and terrible. Words become powerless to express your pain; what others hear from your words is so distant and different from what you are actually suffering. Everyone goes through that bleak time. Folk-consciousness always recognizes that, at such a time, you must be exceedingly gentle with yourself. I love the image of the field of corn in the autumn. When the wind catches the corn, it does not stand stiff and direct against the force of the wind; were it to do this, the wind would rit it asunder. No. The corn weaves with the wind, it bends low. And when the wind is gone, it weaves back and finds its own poise and balance again. There is also the lovely story of the wolf-spider; it never builds its web between two hard objects like two stones. If it did this, it would be rent by the wind. Instinctively, it builds its web between two blades of grass. When the wind comes, the web lowers with the grass until the wind has passed, then it comes back up and finds its point of balance and equilibrium again. These are beautiful images for a mind in rhythm with itself. We put terrible pressure on our minds when we tighten them or when we harden our views or beliefs; we lose all the softness and flexibility which makes for real shelter, belonging and protection. Sometimes the best way of caring for your soul is to make flexible again some of the views that harden and crystallize in your mind; for these alienate you from your own depth and beauty. Creativity seems to demand flexible and measured tension. In musical terms, the image of the violin is instructive here. If the strings are tuned too tightly or too loosely they snap. When the tuning is balanced, the violin can endure massive force and produce the most powerful and tender music.

TO BE NATURAL IS TO BE HOLY

TO BE NATURAL IS TO BE HOLY

In the west of Ireland many houses have open fires. At wintertime when you visit someone, you go through the bleak and cold landscape until you finally come in to the hearth, where the warmth and magic of the fire is waiting. A turf fire is an ancient presence. The turf comes out of the earth and carries the memory of trees and fields and long-gone times. It is strange to have the earth burning within the domesticity of the home. I love the image of the hearth as a place of home, a place of warmth and return.

In everyone's inner solitude there is that bright and warm hearth. The idea of the unconscious, even though it is a very profound and wonderful idea, has sometimes frightened people away from coming back to their own hearth. We falsely understand the subconscious as the cellar where all of our repression and self-damage is housed. We have imagined monsters down there out of our fear of ourselves. Yeats says, 'Man needs reckless courage to descend into the abyss of himself.' In actual fact these demons do not account for all the subconscious. The primal energy of our soul holds a wonderful warmth and welcome for us. One of the reason we were sent onto earth was to make this connection with ourselves, this inner friendship. The demons will haunt us if we remain afraid. All the classical mythical adventures externalize the demons. In battle with them the hero always grows, ascending to new levels of creativity and poise. Each inner demon holds a precious blessing which will heal and free you. To receive this gift, you have to lay aside your fear and take the risk of loss and change which every inner encounter offers.

The Celts had a wonderful understanding of the complexity of the psyche. They believed in various divine presences. Lugh was the god who was most venerated. He was god of light and giftedness. The Shining One. The ancient festival of Lunasa takes its name from him. The earth goddess was Anu, mother of fecundity. They also acknowledged the divine origin of negativity and darkness. There were three mother-goddesses of war: Morrígan, Nemain and Badb. These play a crucial role in the ancient epic, The Táin. Gods and goddesses were always linked to a place. Trees, wells and rivers were special places of divine presence, the ancient psyche was never as isolated and disconnected as the modern psyche. The Celts had an intuitive spirituality, informed by mindful, reverent attention to landscape. It was an outdoor spirituality impassioned by the erotic charge of the earth. The recovery of souls in our times is vital in healing our disconnection.

In theological or spiritual terms, we can understand this point of absolute non-connection with everything, as a sacred opening in the soul which can be filled by nothing external. Often all the possessions we have, the work we do, the beliefs we hold, are manic attempts to fill this opening, but they never stay in place. They always slip, and we are left more vulnerable and exposed than before. A time comes when you know that you can no longer wallpaper this void. Until you really listen to the call of this void, you will remain an inner fugitive, driven from refuge to refuge, always on the run with no place to call home. To be natural is to be holy; but it is very difficult to be natural. To be natural is to be at home with your own nature. If you are outside your self, always reaching beyond your self, you avoid the call of your own mystery. When you acknowledge the integrity of your solitude, and settle into its mystery, your relationships with others take on a new warmth, adventure and wonder.

Spirituality becomes suspect if it is merely an anaesthetic to still one's spiritual hunger. Such a spirituality is driven by the fear of loneliness. If you bring courage to your solitude, you learn that you do not need to be afraid. The phrase, do not be afraid, recurs three hundred and sixty-six times in the Bible. There is a welcome for you at the heart of your solitude. When you realize this, most of the fear that governs your life falls away. The moment your fear transfigures, you come into rhythm with your own self.

THE BODY IS IN THE SOUL

THE BODY IS IN THE SOUL

We must learn to trust the indirect side of our selves. Your soul is the oblique side of your mind and body. Western thought has tol us that the soul is in the body. The soul was thought to be confined to some special, small and refined region within the body. It was often imaged as white in colours. When a person died, the soul departed and the empty body collapsed. This version of the soul seems false. In fact, the more ancient way of looking at this question considers the relationship of soul to body in a converse way. The body is in the soul. Your soul reaches out further than your body and it simultaneously suffuses your body and your mind. Your soul has more refined antennae than your mind or ego. Trusting this more penumbral dimension brings us to new places in the human adventure. But we have to let go in order to be; we have to stop forcing our selves, or we will never enter our own belonging. There is something ancient at work in us creating novelty. In fact, there is very little needed in order to develop a real sense of your own spiritual individuality. One of the things that is absolutely essential is silence, the other is solitude.

Solitude is one of the most precious things in the human spirit. It is different from loneliness. When you are lonely, you become acutely conscious of your own separation. Solitude can be a homecoming to your own deepest belonging. One of the lovely things about us as individuals is the incommensurable in us. In each person there is a point of absolute nonconnection with everything else and with everyone. This is fascinating and frightening. It means that we cannon continue to seek outside ourselves for the things we need from within. The blessings for which we hunger are not to be found in other places or people. These gifts can only be given to you by your self. They are at home at the hearth of your soul.

THE BODY IS YOUR ONLY HOME

THE BODY IS YOUR ONLY HOME

It is mysterious that the human body is clay. The individual is the meeting place of the four elements. The person is a clay shape, living in the medium of air. Yet the fire of blood, thought and soul moves through the body. Its whole life and energy flows in the subtle circle of the water element. We have come up out of the depths of the earth. Consider the millions of continents of clay that will never have the opportunity to leave this underworld. This clay will never find a form to ascend and express itself in the world of light, but will live for ever in that unknown shadow world. In this regardm, the Celtic idea is very beautiful; it claims that the underworld is not a dark world but a world of spirit. There is an old belief in Ireland that the Tuatha Dé Dannan, the tribe of Celts banished from the surface of Ireland, now inhabited the underwolrd beneath the land. From there they conrolled the fecundity of the land above. Consequently, when a king was being crowned, he entered into a symbolic marriage with the goddess. His reign mediated between the visible landscape with its grass, crops and trees and the hidden subterranean world in which all is rooted. This balance was vital since the Celts were a rural, farming people. This mythological ans spiritual perspective has had an immense subconscious effect on how landscape is viewed in Ireland. Landscape is not matter nor merely nature, rather it enjoys a luminosity. Landscape is numinous. Each field has a different name and in each place something different happened. Landscape has a secret and silent memory, a narrative of presence where nothing is ever lost or forgotten. In Tom Murphy's play The Gigli Concert, the unnamed man loses his senses of landscape and loses the ability to connect with himself simultaneously.

The mystery of the Irish landscape is mirrored in all the stories and legends of different places. There are endless stories about ghosts and spirits. Near my home, a magic cat minds ancient gold in a big field. One finds an enthralling weave of stories about the independence and structure of the spiritual world. The human body has come out of this underworld. Consequently, in your body, clay is finding a form and shape which it never found before. Just as it is an immense privilege for your clay to have come up into the lightm it is also a great responsibility.

In your clay body things are coming to expression and to light that were never known before, presences that never came to light or shape in any other individual. To paraphrase Heidegger, man is a sheperd of being, we could say: man is a shepherd of clay. You represent an unknown world that begs you to bring it to voice. Often the joy you feel does not belong to your individual biography but to the clay out of which you are formed. At other times, you will find sorrow moving through you, like a dark mist over a landscape. This sorrow is dark enough to paralyse you. It is a mistake to interfere with this movement of feeling. It is more appropriate to recognize that this emotion belongs more to your clay than to your mind. It is wise to let this weather of feeling pass; it is on its way elsewhere. We so easily forget that our clay has a memory which preceded our minds, a life ot its own before it took our present form. Regardless of how modern we seem, we still remain ancient, sisters and brothers of the one clay. In each of us a different part of the mystery becomes luminous. To truly be and become your self, you need the ancient radience of others.

Essentially, we belong beautifully to nature. The body knows this belonging and desires it. It does not exile us either spiritually or emotionally. The human body is at home on the earth. It is probably some splinter in the mind which is the sore root of so much of our exile. This tension between clay and mind is the source of all creativity. It is the tension in us between the ancient and the new, the known and the unknown. Only the imagination is native to this rhythm. It alone can navigate in the sublime interim where the lineaments of these differing inner forces touch. The imagination is committed to the justice of wholeness. It will not choose one side in an inner conflict and repress or banish the other, it will endeavour to initiate a profound conversation between them in order that something original can be born. The imagination loves symbols because it recognizes that inner divinity can only find expression in symbolic form. The symbol never gives itself completely to the light. It invites thought precisely because it resides at the threshold of darkness. Through the imagination, the soul creates and constructs your depth experience. Imagination is the most reverent mirror of the inner world.

Individuality need not be lonely or isolated. Cicero said so beautifully, 'Nunquam minus solus quam cum solus.' One can come into harmony with one's individuality, if it is viewed as a profound expression or sacrament of the ancient clay. When there is a real awakening in love and friendshipk, this sense of the clay within can dawn. If you knew the beloved's body well enough, you could imagine where his or her clay had lain before it came to form in him or her. You could sense the blend of different tonalities in his or her clay: maybe some clay comes from beside a calm lake, some from places where nature was exposed and lonely, and more from secluded and reserved places. We never know how many places of nature meet within the human body. Landscape is not all external, it has crept inside the soul. Human presence is infused with landscape.

This profound and numinous presence of nature is brought out in the poem by Amairgen, chief poet of the Milesians, as he steps ashore to take possession of the land on behalf of his people:

I am the wind which breathes upon the sea,

I am the wave of the ocean,

I am the murmur of the billows -

I am the ox of the seven combats,

I am the vulture upon the rocks,

I am a beam of the sun,

I am the fairest of plants,

I am the wild boar in valour,

I am the salmon in the water,

I am a lake in the plain,

I am a world of knowledge,

I am the point of the lance of battle,

I am the God who created the fire in the head.

(ed. P. Murray)

This is traditionally believed to be the first poem ever composed in Ireland. All of the elements of the poem have numinous associations in early Irish literature. There is no dualism here. All is one. This ancent poem pre-empts and reverses the lonely helplessness of Descartes' 'Cogito ergo sum', I think therefore I am. For Amairgen, I am because everything else is. I am in everything and everything is in me. This magnificent hymn to presence outlines the ontological depth and unity of the anam-cara experience.

The Celtic world developed a profound sense of the complexity of the individual. Often the places within us where conflict arises are places where different parts of our clay memory come together; the energy here may at times be unrefined, raw or difficult. The recognition of our clay nature can bring us a more ancient harmony. It can return us to the ancient rhythm which we inhabited before consciousness made us separate. This is one of the lovely things about the soul. The soul is in the middle ground between the separation of the air and the belonging of the earth. Your soul mediates between your body and your mind; it shelters the two and holds them together. In this primal sense the soul is imaginative.

THERE IS NO SPIRITUAL PROGRAMME

THERE IS NO SPIRITUAL PROGRAMME

In our time there is much obsession with spiritual programmes. Such spiritual programmes tend to be very linear. The spiritual life is imagined as a journey with a sequence of stages. Each stage has its own methodology, negativity and possibilities. Such a programme often becomes an end in itself. It weights our natural presence against us. Such a programme can divide and separate us from what is most intimately ours. The past is forsaken as unredeemed, the present is used as the fulcrum to a future that bodes holiness, integration or perfection. When time is reduced to linear progress, it is emptied of presence. Meister Eckhart radically revises the whole notion of spiritual programmes. He says that there is no such thing as a spiritual journey. If a little shocking, this is refreshing. If there were a spiritual journey, it would be only a quarter-inch long, though many miles deep. It woulod be a swerve into rhythm with your deeper nature and presence. The wisdom here is so consoling. You do not have to go away outside your self to come into real conversation with your soul and with the mysteries of the spiritual world. The eternal is at home – within you.

The eternal is not elsewhere; it is not distant. There is nothing as near as the eternal. This is captured in the lovely Celtic phrase: tá tír na n-óg ar chul an ti – tír álainn trina chéile, i.e. The land of eternal yourth is behind the house, a beatuiful land fluent within itself. The eternal world and the mortal world are not parallel, rather they are fused. The beautiful Gaelic phrase, fighte fuaighte, i.e. 'woven into and through each other', captures this.

Behind the facade of our normal lives eternal destiny is shaping our days and our ways. The awakening of the humans spirit is a homecoming. Yet, ironically, our sense of familiarity ofthen militates against our homecoming. When we are familiar with something, we lose the energy, edge and excitement of it. Hegel said, 'Das Bekannte uberhaupt ist darum, weil es bekannt ist, nicht erkannt,' i.e. Generally, the familiar, preciseley because it is familiar, is not known. This is a powerful sentence. Behind the facade of the familiar, strange things await us. This is true of our homes, the place where we live and, indeed, of those with whom we live. Friendships and relationships suffer immense numbing through the mechanism of familiarization. We reduice the wildness and mystery of person and landscape to the external, familiar image. Yet the familiar is merely a facade. Familiarity enables us to tame, control and ultimately forget the mystery. We make our peace with the surface as image and we stay away from the otherness and fecund turbulence of the unknown which it masks. Familiarity is one of the most subtle and pervasive forms of human alienation.

In a book of conversations with P. A. Mendoza, the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez when asked about his thrity-year relationship with his wife Mercedes, said, 'I know her so well now that I have not the slightest idea who she really is.'

For Márquez, familiarity is an invitation to adventure and mystery, Conversely, the people close to us have sometimes become so familiar that they become lost in a distance which no longer invites or surprises. Familiarity can be quiet death, an arrangement which permits the routine to continue without offering any new challange or nourishment.

This hapens also with our experience of place. I remember my first evening in Tübingen. I was to spend more than four years there working on Hegel, but that first evening Tübingen was utterly strange and unknown to me. I remember thinking: look very carefully at Tübingen this evening because you will never see it in the same way. And thios was true. After a week there I knew the way to the lecture halls and seminar rooms, the canteen and library. After I had mapped out my routes through this strange territory, it became familiar and soon I did not see it for itself anymore.

People have difficulty awakening to their inner world, especially when their lives have become overly familiar to them. They find it hard to discover something new, interesting or adventurous in their numbed lives. Yet everything we need for our journey has already been given to us. Consequently, there is great strangeness in the shadowed light of our soul world. We should become more conversant with our reserved soul light. The first step in awakening to your inner life and to the depth and promise of your solitude would be to consider yourself for a little while a stranger to your own deepest depths. To decide to view yourself as a complete stranger, someone who has just stepped ashore in your life, is a liberating exercise. This meditation helps to break the numbing stranglehold of complacency and familiarity. Gradually, you begin to sense the mystery and magic of yourself. You realize that you are not the helpless owner of a deadened life, but rather a temporary guest gifted with blessings and possibilities you could neither invent nor earn.

TO TRANSFIGURE THE EGO - TO LIBERATE THE SOUL

TO TRANSFIGURE THE EGO – TO LIBERATE THE SOUL

Sometimes our spiritual programmes take us far away from our inner belonging. We become addicted to the methods and programmes of psychology and religion. We become so deperate to learn how to be that our lives pass, and we neglect the practice of being.

One of the lovely things in the Celtic mind was its sense of spontaneity. Spontaneity is one of the greatest spiritual gifts. To be spontaneous is to escape the cage of the ego by trusting that which is beyond the self. One of the greatest enemies of spiritual belonging is the ego. The ego does not reflect the real shape of one's individuality. The ego is the false self born out of fear and defensiveness. The ego is a protective crust that we draw around our affections. It is created out of timidity, the failure to trust the Other and to respect our own otherness. One of the greatest conflicts in life is the conflict between the ego and the soul. The ego is threatened, competitive and stressed, whereas the soul is draen more towards surprise, spontaneity, the new and the fresh. Real soul presence has humour and irony and no obsessive self-seriousness. It avoids what is weary, worn or repetitive. The image of the well breaking out of the hard, crusted ground is an illuminating image for the freshness that can suddently dawn within the heart that remains open to experience.

Freud and Jung illuminated the vast complexity of the soul. A person is no simple one-dimensional self. There is a labyrinth within the soul. What we think and desire often comes into conflict with what we do. Below the surface of our conscious awareness a vast unknown rootage determines our actions. The mythic story of the earth and the gods whispers within us. We become aware of the patterns of blindness and obsession which unknowingly drive us. We find ourselves so often returning to the same empty places which diminish and impoverish our essence. All psychic activity is at first unconscious; this is the realm of concealed wishes. The unconscious is a powerful and continuous presence. Every life lives out of and struggles with this inner night; it casts its challenging and fecund shadow over everything we do and think and feel. We are earthen vessels that hold the reasure. Yet aspects of the treasure are darker and more dangerous than we allow ourselves to imagine. When the unconscious becomes illuminated its darker forces no longer hold us prisoner. This work of freedom is slow and unpredictable; yet it is precisely at this threshold that each individual is the custodian and subject of their own transfiguration. Outside us, society functions in an external way, its collective eye does not know interiority, it sees only through the lens of image, impression and function.

THE CELTIC UNDERWORLD AS RESONANCE

THE CELTIC UNDERWORLD AS RESONANCE

I often think that the inner world is like a landscape. Here, in our limestone landscape, there are endless surprises. It is lovely to be on top of a mountain and to discover a spring well gushing forth from beneath the heavy rocks. Such a well has a long biography of darkness and silence. It comes from the heart of the mountain where no human eye has ever gazed. The surprise of the well suggests the archaic resources of consciousness awakening within us. With a sudden freshness, new springs come alive within.

The silence of landscape conceals vast presence. Place is not simply location. A place is a profound individuality. Its surface texture of grass and stone is blessed by rain, wind and light. With complete attention landscape celebrates the liturgy of the seasons, giving itself unreservedly to the passion of the goddess. The shape of a landscape is an ancient and silent form of consciousness. Mountains are huge contemplatives. Rivers and streams offer voice; they are the tears of the earth’s joy and despair. The earth is full of soul.

Plotinus in The Enneads speaks of ‘the souls’ care for the universe’: ‘this All is one universally comprehensive living being, encircling all the living beings within it, and having a soul, one soul which extends to all its members in the degree of participant membership held by each’.

Civilizations has tamed place. Ground is levelled to build homes and cities. Roads, streets and floors are level so that we may walk and travel easily. Left to itself the curvature of the landscape invites presence and the loyalty of stillness. In the distraction of the traveller and the temporary its ancient thereness goes unnoticed. Humans only know the passing night. Below the surface of landscape the earth lives in the eternal night, the dark and ancient cradle of all origin.

It is no wonder that in the Celtic world wells were sacred places. The wells were seen as threshold places between the deeper, dark, unknown, subterranean world and the outer world of light and form. The land of Ireland was understood in ancient times as the body of the goddess. Wells were reverenced as special apertures through which divinity flowed forth. Manannán mac Lir said: ‘No-one will have knowledge who does not have a drink from the well.’ Even to this day, people still visit sacred springs. They walk several rounds of the well, travelling in a clockwise direction, and often leave votive offerings. Different wells are thought to hold different kinds of healing.

When a well awakens in the mind, new possibilities begin to flow; you find within you self a depth and excitement which you never knew you had. This art of awakening is suggested by the Irish writer James Stephens who saw the only barrier as our readiness. We often remain exiles, left outside the rich world of the soul simply because we are not ready. Our task is to refine our hearts and minds. There is so much blessing and beauty near us which is destined for us, and yet it cannot enter our lives, because we are not ready to receive it. The handle is on the inside of the door; only we can open it. Our lack of readiness is often caused by blindness, fear and lack of self-appreciation. When we are ready, we will be blessed. At that moment the door of the heart becomes the gate of heaven. Shakespeare expressed this beautifully in King Lear: ‘Men must endure/ Their going hence, even as their coming hither:/ Ripeness is all.’

TO BE BORN IS TO BE CHOSEN

TO BE BORN IS TO BE CHOSEN

To be born is to be chosen. No-one is here by accident. Each one of us was sent here for a special destiny. Often the deeper meaning of a fact emerges when it is read in a spiritual way. When you consider the moment of conception, there are endless possibilities. Yet in most cases, only one child is conceived. This seems to suggest that a certain selectivity is already at work. This selectivity intimates a sheltering providence which dreamed you, created you and always minds you. You were not consulted on the major question which shape your destiny: when you were to be born; where you would be born; to whom you would be born. Imagine the difference it would have made to your life had you been born into the house next door. Your identity was not offered for your choosing. In other words, a special destiny was prepared for you. But you were also given freedom and creativity to go beyond the given, to make a new set of relationships and to forge an ever new identity, inclusive of the old but not limited to it. This is the secret pulse of growth, quietly at work behind the outer façade of your life. Destiny sets the outer frame of experience and life; freedom finds and fills it inner form.

For millions of years, before you arrived here, the dream of your individuality was carefully prepared. You were sent to a shape of destiny in which you would be able to express the special gift you bring to the world. Sometimes this gift may involve suffering and pain that can neither be accounted for nor explained. There is a unique destiny for each person. Each one of us has something to do here that can be done by no-one else. If someone else could fulfil your destiny, then they would be in your place, and you would not be here. It is in the depths of your life that you will discover the invisible necessity which has brought you here. When you begin to decipher this, your gift and giftedness come alive. Your heart quickens and the urgency of living rekindles your creativity.

If you can awaken this sense of destiny, you come into rhythm with your life. You fall out of rhythm when you renege on your potential and talent, when you settle for the mediocre as a refuge from the call. When you lose rhythm your life becomes wearyingly deliberate or anonymously automatic. Rhythm is the secret key to balance and belonging. This will not collapse into false contentment or passivity. It is the rhythm of a dynamic equilibrium, a readiness of spirit, a poise which is not self-centred. This sense of rhythm is ancient. All life came out of the ocean; each one of us comes out of the waters of the womb; the ebb and flow of the tides is alive in the ebb and flow of our breathing. When you are in rhythm with your nature nothing destructive can touch you. Providence is at one with you; it minds you and brings you to your new horizons. To be spiritual is to be in rhythm.

THE DANGER OF NEON VISION

THE DANGER OF NEON VISION

There is an unprecedented spiritual hunger in our times. More and more people are awakening to the inner world. A thirst and hunger for the eternal is coming alive in their souls; this is a new form of consciousness. Yet one of the damaging aspects of this spiritual hunger is the way it sees everything in such a severe and insistent light. The light of modern consciousness is not gentle or reverent; it lacks graciousness in the presence of mystery; it wants to unriddle and control the unknown. Modern consciousness is similar to the harsh and brilliant white light of a hospital operating theatre. This neon light is too direct and clear to befriend the shadowed world of the soul. It is not hospitable to what is reserved and hidden. The Celtic mind had a wonderful respect for the mystery and depth of the individual soul.

The Celts recognized that the shape of each soul is different; the spiritual clothing one person wears can never fit the soul of another. It is interesting that the word revelation comes from re-valere, literally, to veil again. The world of the soul is glimpsed through the opening in a veil which closes again. There is no direct, permanent or public access to the divine. Each destiny has a unique curvature which must find its own spiritual belonging and direction. Individuality is the only gateway to spiritual potential and blessing.

When the spiritual search is too intense and hungry, the soul stays hidden. The soul was never meant to be seen completely. It is more at home in a light that is hospitable to shadow. Before electricity, people used candlelight at night. This is ideal light to befriend the darkness, it gently opens up caverns in the darkness and prompts the imagination into activity. The candle allows the darkness to keep its secrets. There is shadow and colour within every candle flame. Candlelight perception is the most respectful and appropriate form of light with which to approach the inner world. It does not force our tormented transparency upon the mystery. The glimpse is sufficient. Candlelight perception has the finesse and reverence appropriate to the mystery and autonomy of soul. Such perception is at home at the threshold. It neither needs nor desires to invade the temenos where the divine live.

In our times, the language of psychology is used to approach the soul. Psychology is a wonderful science. In many ways it has been the explorer who in heroic adventure discovered the unchartered inner world. In our culture of sensate immediacy, much psychology has abandoned the fecundity and reverence of myth and stands under the strain of neon consciousness, powerless to retrieve or open the depth and density of the world of soul. Celtic mysticism recognizes that rather than trying to expose the soul or offer it our fragile care, we should let the soul find us and care for us. Celtic mysticism is tender to the senses and devoid of spiritual aggression. The stories, poetry and prayer of the Celts finds expression in a language which is obviously pre-discursive. It is a language of lyrical and reverential observation. Often it is reminiscent of the purity of the Japanese haiku. It bypasses the knottedness of narcissistic, self-reflexive language to create a lucid shape of words through which the numinous depths of nature and divinity can glisten. Celtic spirituality recognizes wisdom and the slow light which can guard and deepen your life. When your soul awakens, your destiny becomes urgent with creativity.

Though destiny reveals itself slowly and partially, we sense its intention in the human countenance. I have always been fascinated by human presence in a landscape. When you walk in the mountains and meet another person, you become acutely aware of the human face as an icon cast against the wilderness of nature. The face is a threshold where a world looks out and a world looks in on itself. The face brings these two worlds together. Behind each human face, there is a hidden world which no-one can see. The beauty of the spiritual is its depth of inner friendship which can totally change everything you touch, see and feel. In a sense, the face is where the individual soul becomes obliquely visible. Yet the soul remains fugitive because the face cannot express directly everything we intuit and feel. Nevertheless, with age and memory the face gradually mirrors the journey of the soul. The older the face, the richer its mirroring.

THE WORLD OF THE SOUL IS SECRET

CHAPTER 3

SOLITUDE IS LUMINOUS

THE WORLD OF THE SOUL IS SECRET

I was born in a limestone valley. To live in a valley is to enjoy a private sky. All around, life is famed by the horizon. The horizon shelters life, yet constantly calls the eye to new frontiers and possibilities. The mystery of this landscape is further intensified by the presence of the ocean. For millions of years, an ancient conversation has continued between the chorus of the ocean and the silence of the stone.

No two stone shapes in this landscape are the same. Each stone has a different face. Often the angle of the light falls gently enough to bring out the shy presence of each stone. Here, it feels as if a wild, surrealistic God laid down the whole landscape. These stones, ever patient, ever still, continue to praise the silence of time. The Irish landscape is full of memory; it holds the ruins and traces of ancient civilization. There is a curvature in the landscape, a colour and shape that constantly frustrates the eye anxious for symmetry or linear simplicity. The poet, W. B. Yeats, in referring to this landscape, speaks of ‘… that stern colour and that delicate line that are our secret discipline’. Every few miles of road the landscape changes; it always surprises, offering ever new vistas which surprise the eye and call the imagination. This landscape has a wild, yet serene complexity. In a sense, this reflects the nature of Celtic consciousness.

The Celtic mind was never drawn to the single line; it avoided ways of seeing and being which seek satisfaction in certainty. The Celtic mind had a wonderful respect for the mystery of the circle and the spiral. The circle is one of the oldest and most powerful symbols. The world is a circle; the sun and moon are too. Even time itself has a circular nature; the day and the year build to a circle. At its most intimate level so is the life of each individual. The circle never gives itself completely to the eye or to the mind, but offers a trusting hospitality to that which is complex and mysterious; it embraces depth and height together. The circle never reduces the mystery to a single direction or preference. Patience with this reserve is one of the profound recognitions of the Celtic mind. The world of the soul is secret. The secret and the sacred are sisters. When the secret is not respected, the sacred vanishes. Consequently, reflection should not shine too severe or aggressive a light in on the world of the soul. The light in Celtic consciousness is a penumbral light.