Pukaki 1
I wonder how many of us spend time exploring ourselves and why we do things. I wonder how many of us spend time looking at our own journey and the direction our life has taken.
I think things begin to change when we look beneath the surface and especially when we realise that in a way we are icebergs drifting on the Ocean of the Infinite, with most of who we really are below the waterline. We like to think we are who we experience, that the daytime, when we are consumed by living, defining and achieving our goals is reality.
Time and again I have heard people exhorted to live in the real world, that they do not know what that is. I have heard people being told to ” get real” or to” get with the program”. As a teacher I would have to grit my teeth as I was clearly told that schoolteachers led a cloistered and protected life, that they did not live in the “real” world. In this instance the real world was the commercial world, the world of business and employment. The subtext was that living in a world where there was a “real” fear of being dismissed and that performance was in some way related to fear was “real”. As a teacher apparently I and my colleagues could (apparently) not be dismissed and therefore were both underperforming and living in a state of continual fantasy. Having 13 weeks holiday a year was “unreal” and further proof of our underperformance. As any teacher knows, those times are about recovery, about taking ourselves back , about lining the ducks in a row before we step up to the mark again.
What I have to realise of late is that most of these commands were related to that individual’s concept of reality, that it was about power and taking power. What I have come to realise is that they were attempting to expand their own concept of reality to include others. Why, I began to ask, would they do that? Why would one person attempt to impose his/her own reality on another? Ask and I suspect you would hear them insist that it was obvious, that reality was a commonly agreed concept. How could it be otherwise? Everybody knows what reality is…..
But then I look closer, what I begin to see is fear. Methinks he protesteth too much, to plagiarise the Bard. What we have here is fear and illusion. The more insistent the speaker becomes about my participating in the real world, the more I am aware of being drawn into another’s fear, a fear on their part, usually subconscious, that in fact their reality may be an illusion. For all of us wonder, at some level on the iceberg we are, about the nature of reality, of truth and illusion. We may not voice it or indeed experience it in conscious thought, but experience it we do. And often we seek to avoid the potentially uncomfortable nature of that experience by industry or the pursuit of achievement, of trophies we can line up on the wall of our lives.
I have watched people doing this very thing. I have heard it referred to, here in New Zealand, as the 3B Syndrome; that is, Beemer(BMW), Bach (holiday home), and Boat. The individual in question aims to generate sufficient income to afford a new BMW, and works tirelessly to get one, believing that will satisfy an inner hunger and fear, born perhaps of a sense of lack as a child (although there are many other reasons). The prize is claimed and then after a few weeks, the thrill wears off. The hunger returns, so the next goal is defined and achieved. Perhaps the holiday home is by the ocean. Friends and relatives will be invited to come and share the” achievement”. This is “real-ly” nice. Pride, ego and sense of achievement mix, to form a really poisonous cocktail. Then the high wears off, and it is onwards, looking to the boat to fill the need. But the desire never ends, the hunger can never be satisfied. There is a reason for this.
Beneath the surface, down where the iceberg drifts underwater in the current, the subconscious is at work. The surface meltdown is the external manifestation of a subconscious desire. Down in the middle zone is a perceived lack, often born of something overheard or experienced in childhood. Down in the middle zone is disappointment. But, down in the engine room, where the real energy is working , is the stuff of true reality, of a place closer to the Infinite. Bumping up against the mass of a parental iceberg has caused a deformity, a blip in the underwater form. This affects how it drifts in the current and how it responds.
But beneath this, deeper still, at the base of the iceberg, down in the deep teal blue of the Ocean, is where the true direction, the real intention, comes, where the soul is busy effecting its purpose, where what it has chosen is manifesting.
The iceberg is under its own orders after all. Nothing happening to it is subject to external influence and external affluence. It is making its own way and creating situations which will achieve its own and higher purpose.
There are thus three zones to the iceberg. Firstly there is the surface mind, the ego, which lives from day to day, oblivious and self-concerned. The ego knows what it needs for the moment. It reacts instinctively, intuitively. It knows only about self-protection, about self-gratification. It lives in Illusion Time.
Then there is the middle zone. it lives in a wider Time Space, where cause and effect and being experienced at a deeper level. Here the need to grow can be felt, albeit unconsciously. The unconscious mind is working to create situations where the soul can learn. It is shifting the current under the surface and charting the direction the surface mind takes.
But at the base of the bulb which is the iceberg is the soul. Buried deep within and beyond time, a part of the Universal Mind, it seeks its own development. It does this by getting the subconscious to manifest change, to create situations which encourage and facilitate its own development. It is at the root of what happens on the surface. It has a direct line to and from God.
The soul is always at work, tireless and immune to Time. It lives its own journey, welling up and bringing about change on the surface.
So to this photograph.
I was passing the Tekapo B Header Pond, a place I have photographed many times over the years. The water from the canals reaches a carefully-contrived circular space, where it circles, turns, makes up its mind, then rushes down the penstocks, through the turbines, and emerges gleefully into Lake Pukaki.
We drooped down the hill and followed this joy south. Then , as we rounded a corner, the light had become resolute, perfect.
As I looked back up the lake, I felt the need to make a photograph. Something in the scene, in the colour of the water and the shadows upon it suggested a metaphor, a moment of recognition. It was as if I saw a singular and undeniable truth. There, in the scene before me was a moment where the pictorial held all the meaning, where it brought to me all I had learned and come to understand.
As I looked up and photographed the lake, I saw the journey we all make, either consciously or unwittingly.
Like icebergs, we live most of our lives on the surface, believing that what we experience is real. We hold to the thought that Death is final, permanent. To believe anything else is far more fearsome. It involves accepting that things are not as they seem, that we are part of a river, flowing behind a wall we only dimly understand or of which we are only dimly aware.
But it is not. In the foreground is our subconscious, usually hazily perceived and incomprehensible. Beneath that, deep down in the milky density of our miscomprehension, is our soul, tied inexorably to the true reality of our Being. It knows all, it influences all. It IS.
What happens to us externally, in the “real” world is an illusory manifestation, the province of soul, moving our subconscious to generate events and circumstances which will affect us and therefore affect what is learnt by the soul and what helps its own devellopment . We must in no way believe that what is happening in our surface lives is real. It is all Illusion. It is all set and influenced from below.
We may head toward the mountains in the distance, but the quality of our journey will be a script written by our soul, tied directly to God, which has the final say. And it will begin in the foreground, in the here and now.
Whatever that is.
As I looked, I saw an Infinite Moment and therefore an in infinite Truth. it was mirrored by the calm reflection of the lake. The soft blues were trying to communicate with me, to allow the Truth to be more manifest. It was as if, for a moment, I stared into an endlessly deep well, which offered me a lidless stare into the Infinite, the place for which every soul thirsts.
In the distance were the mountains, the destination of ego. But the mission of Soul hovered in the foreground, in the milky film of the Present and Correct.
For a moment I was able to see Reality.
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