Mystics, poets, philosophers, elders, thinkers, artists, writers and madmen have been trying to describe the ultimate mystery of pure experience since the beginning of time, some better than others. Meaning, purpose and wisdom can be found in the symbols in our great spiritual traditions and religions too. And all around lies the awesome truth we all share, hidden in plain sight beyond meaning or measure, sometimes referred to as the open secret. Can we agree that the essence of experience is beyond notions of space, time, and individual self? That there is no meaning, except, perhaps to “know God”, if you will? Experience experiences itself in the centre of pure consciousness. Here we are, living life as language-grounded human subjects, what Deligny calls our “thought-out-project”, bound by the straight jacket of birth and death, filled with scientific pursuit for a particle of God, greed, war, and abuse of nature, the Daily Mirror and the regulatory, constricting norms that condition our access to personal and social existence. Humour me. Overwhelmingly tragic comedy of the planet aside, consciousness is, well, just conscious. Consciousness is the special and unique essence of everything, it gives rise to birth, death, me, you, us, them.
Writing one’s own story is a selfish affair but while still in my youth, I took the path of the seeker, to find the ultimate truth, at whatever cost. It was a path from innocent wonder and confusion to a truth, a realisation found through a path of sacrifice, pain and devastation. So, how can I engage in reflective writing, when the aim for so long has been to die to a separate ‘I’? In making this intention to die, I create a beautiful and terrible paradox. I write these words and try to make sense or make meaning out of life and the story arises anew, the power in the pure experience fades, which is partly why my autobiography has so far taken me a decade to write. I myself am soon gone, yet these pages remain, in essence, a false narrative. But here is my life, my thoughts, the pen as it glides and these fingers pressing keys. We must choose something to work hard at to get the results we want, or something hard may choose us. You are my reader, my listener, and to you I dedicate these aching fingers and these words.
When I set out on the path of self-discovery, I made the commitment to become as fully conscious as I could. I knew not why I was here, despite asking, I had grown the intense conviction that I wanted to see myself, and all of myself, and the whole of the world, objectively, from the outside, by whatever means. I perpetually asked if it’s possible. My goal was to increase my awareness to a point of transcendence over the sense of a separate self, to reach what we know as God-consciousness.
I want to be silent.
We are suspicious and afraid of our own silence. In our busy lives it’s too easy to continue to speak for its own sake, rather than being reflective and silent. Our minds continue in their task of perpetually looking for something or someone to calculate and formulate and quantify, using the senses then reflecting outward, avoiding looking at the uncomfortable questions deeper within.
People talk everywhere - at school, on TV, in shops, on buses, in pubs and restaurants. Everywhere in our homogenised and so-clever society, people are talking, talking, talking over one another and at each other, producing a cacophony of voices with their protests, debates, fights-for-rights, false-democracies and oppression, where silence is a weapon.
Normative society is stifling and boring and confusing. Cities are full of insane ants running round in polluted streets. Millions of people wanting to live together in so much noise! I know too well silence is a radical stance, but as demonstrated by a young student in one of my private art classes who wrote on her personal mandala, “I am really not good with words”, my drive is to give others at least the opportunity and right to be silent for a while, to allow for a deeper, truer voice to emerge, to bring us back to a state of unity with life, with creation itself. But I cannot recommend the relentless inner search for deeper and deeper meaning, at least not alone. Aside from the fact my father accused me of ‘too much naval gazing’ and the establishment labelling me as autistic, the proverbial rabbit hole is bottomless and has many dark corners. We are naturally suspicious and afraid of our own silence. We need other, not othering.
However, the search for the deepest communion is what led me to want to explore the heart of dialogue. Dialogue isn’t people talking. Dialogue is from two Greek words, dia (through) and legein (word), which is more about meaning-making. Sensory, neural, cognitive and social input, when experienced at inappropriate speeds and amounts can result in frightening and immobilising experience in autistic people. In Autism Dialogue, originally a group approach I developed to address the fragmentation in this particular field (since being informed by the establishment I was of this persuasion), one of the practices is to slow down the pace of the conversation and reduce the input from the environment. Another is to suspend our assumptions. Canadian artist Erin Manning attempted to address autistic perception as ‘the direct perception of the forming of experience’ (2018), which correlates with lack of filtering and relatively ‘slow’ processing speeds in autism. Our Autism Dialogues have seen good early results and indicate there could be impact on much wider scale, transferable to other areas where there are issues with meaning and fragmentation…
Words can get in the way of true meaning-making conversation. Dialogue attempts to engage directly with consciousness. Renowned quantum scientist-philosopher Professor David Bohm knew this and in the 1980’s advocated for a language with more emphasis on the verb, a rheo-mode, saying ours is far too noun-based and it leads to fragmentation of thought, consciousness and logically, societies. Bohm proposed a whole theory of the Implicate Order, which, by a cosmic process of unfolding and enfolding, treats the totality of existence as an unbroken whole and recognises consciousness as always coming into being. Our sacred wisdom traditions and indigenous peoples have always reflected this and Bohm, truly a modern mystic, way ahead of his time, was honoured by the Dalai Lama and Krishnamurti. He recounts the story of when he was a child jumping stones across a river and how pondering on the inner workings of this act was the start of his enquiry into the flow of thought and experience. Try it. Stop your flow of thinking right now and become aware that everything in this moment has never happened before and never will again.
You’re in the Flow.
Western science and the anthropocentric mindset aims to dismantle the miracle of interbeing and eternal unfolding-enfolding of life, but it cannot, for ‘science’ is also another manifestation of that life. ‘Science’ is already at once the observer, the observed and the observing, leading us finally to consciousness, which has already come into being as soon as ‘discovered’. Quantum theorists will always grapple and draw long sums on blackboards. Our perception and understanding of the world is viewed through desperately fragmented wastelands of so-called knowledge, advanced by our esteemed universities and upon which society’s policies so precariously sit.
Bohm’s wholistic view of the universe is in radical opposition to the mechanistic science of Newton and Aristotle and as far from Cartesian reductionism as any science could be. It is finally being recognised among the scientific community that once ousted him for being too radical. He knew that when we lose authenticity and openness to the fact that everything is ultimately part of the whole, things go very wrong.
We talk about fairer societies with rights and education for all and use words like belonging, diversity and inclusion. Fight for your right when it’s threatened, but make sure you truly know it’s yours. Human belonging is fundamental to life, but we can’t really belong anywhere (or promote it) if we don’t even know who we are or where or how we are situated (or meant to be) ourselves to begin with. Otherwise, the world would be a very different place. Countless billions are born into the a world seemingly teetering on the brink of disaster. As early as five, I sensed something was behind what was being presented. I went on to be a highly distracted, enthusiast of life, an atypical learner and a mischievous disruptor. Perhaps I was I already doomed to be the idiot traitor, a nowhere man, nationless, bereft of life. Nowadays, despite our fabulous NHS informing me I meet the criteria, I settle for a dual citizenship of being aut-curious.
As a dialogue facilitator, I’m on everyone’s side.
In practice, Dialogue as advocated by Bohm and colleagues, allows multiple perspectives to co-exist in the same space of enquiry and understanding, slowing down normative modes of interaction into more of an evolving, unified flow. Active participation is generated and people develop an open mindset, learning to genuinely embrace diversity and respectfully engage with a range of viewpoints. Through transformational learning with each other, everyone develops curiosity and connects in deep and powerful ways. This is the basis of community, where creativity and love and expression of beauty is the supreme guiding principle. In co-creative Dialogue, thought and language are the paints and brushes and the space between, the canvas. In Dialogue work in education, through direct encounters with those who are different to themselves, students are empowered to overcome prejudice, and are armoured against those whose narrative seeks to divide. They acquire a range of skills, while simultaneously developing greater confidence and self-esteem as their opinions are engaged with respectfully.
We understand things through words and we also make words, we are the meaning-makers of our words. At the core of dialogue is participatory meaning-creating and sense-making and at its core is pure conscious awareness. Pure dialogue is conscious co-creating. Dialogue is a name for the ultimate divine principle, as it is the creativity of the Absolute, and at the heart of that creativity is communication and communion. Mikhail Bakhtin referred to our true inter-relating as the sacred space.
Long before I met my Sheikh, who would guide me to the depths of communion, in the mystical buzz of youth, I’d come across various spiritual paths and practices. Friends and I whispered about enlightenment and in these halcyon days, the union of hearts and communication was often perfect as unspoiled childhood consciousness still prevailed, protected by rebellion. We could dialogue about what we were experiencing; a state of unity with all that is, right now, beyond form and beyond names. We held and owned our own space and silences.
There isn’t a lot more to say, because I don’t remember it and because, as I said, conversation wasn’t and still isn’t that important to me. Dialogue is though.
Thanks for listening.