Coiling In

Life Dimensions #7: Profound Spirals

I’ve journeyed through the ‘vertical axis’ - body-heart-mind - and the ‘horizontal axis’ - past-present-future - but there are other Dimensions to explore in this life. Such as the route inside, into the depths. All the previous meditations on these topics you can read under ‘Life Dimensions’. (Also, if you’re following my recent cultural reflections through Iberia and beyond, the latest omnibus episode of the podcast shared thoughts from Portugal and northern Spain, a trip this June - and into July - with my daughter Zorya. Next installment coming soon!)

So often in this ‘in-carnation’ our attention is actually drawn out into the sensory busyness of the world. And it’s exciting out there, or shocking, or overstimulating, or exhausting, or scrollably distracting in other ways. Sometimes we just need to rest though, even if we’re in motion. To remember the silence between the noisy chatter. Though also, even principally, because the silence isn’t actually all that silent, when you get down to observing on the micro-level.

This is another kind of fascination in itself though. The ‘inside’ under our smooth surfaces that we thought was too boring to distract us turns out to be full of distracting possibility when modern tools come into the mix. As do the deep oceans, with their previously unknown lifeforms hidden beneath the calm surface. It took a little closer investigation to figure out there were lanternfish there. Perhaps they weren’t, before we started needing to find something there. And our microbiome is perhaps even more surprising, under the microscope. Billions of other beings existing upon us in one way or another, before Horton ever heard a Who. DNA, the tiniest potent package of living information we’ve uncovered as yet. Like quarks and electrons, unleashing nuclear potential. The infinite mysterious magical multiverses of our bodies, which may well line up to look like something we can analyse, only when we turn up with tools with which to analyse.

So many fields of modern human investigation have taken things deeper in, finding citrus notes in coffees or slight modifications in wine tastes with a little more oak soaking. Without going inward, into the discipline, some would say we can’t have sophisticated tastes, can’t deepen our understanding. Though some of these circular knowledge fields have undoubtedly trapped us: if we go too deep into established norms and not enough into trusting our judgement we get situations where sommeliers, for all their training, have less wine wisdom than previously thought. Or academics, dropping deep into referencing their own closest colleagues and buddies, end up making inwardly spiralling mistakes. Such as when the Classicists and Egyptologists did, creating an ‘Aryan’ paradigm of the past that a scholar from a different field had to blow out of the water remarkably recently and still a little controversially in some places, though I think he speaks methodically backed-up common sense (Martin Bernal in “Black Athena”).

Perhaps little of the above is really about dropping in. Because how much of it involves the wisdom of the body? I’ve taken different perspectives on this dimensional journey: like grounding in the body, getting present, watching the monkey mind rather than being swept up by it, and multiple other moments of stepping off the treadmill. These are all useful precursors if we really want to drop in. What we call yoga is of course usually the body exercises aimed at getting us present enough for the inward journey. Towards the hum. Yoking ourselves to that inner force, that voice behind the chatter. Using inner tools, drawn from that mysterious inner magic of the body-heart-mind continuum, rather than pens or microscopes.

Inevitably dropping in means deceleration too. Only by slowing down our busyness can we appreciate how subtler forces are moving in us. For that, the easiest starting point is closing the eyes, for external visuals can take us far out very fast. Giving time over to internal sensations is a clear support on a macro level too. Empathy has been shown to be stronger in those with a strong sense of their own inner landscape. It is always a mystery too though: we may not have labels for what these sensations represent. It’s like rewinding to the inner source of thought: the experience before pictures and syllables emerge, a strange space where it’s not clear who’s thinking, examined by those early scientists we call Indian rishis.

Except that maybe that deep consciousness is also the reminder that there’s something beyond it all. The further in we go, the further out we can reach towards spirit and divinity, towards the infinitely huge God-force of the heavens: this has been the paradoxical story for meditators through the ages. When we’re exhorted to “Know Thyself” it’s not in relation to our Instagram story. It’s that magical something about us that we get to when we strip away at the crusty layers of personality and personal history.

So this inwards movement is not dissimilar to stripping paint layers, getting down to the original statement on the wall. Perhaps it will help us find our blueprint, we hope and wonder. Locked up in the Akashic records, perhaps. “Akasha” in Sanskrit gives originally a sense of vast space, outside the four classic elements and the world they’ve made. Except that now quantum physics has made us aware that nearly everything that we think is matter, material, is actually “empty space” when we dive into subatomic worlds. Mind the Gap, as it were. Pure potentiality. As we go in, we get closer to the holy Zero, nearer the Nothing. And there’s so much there already. (The big joke is that the materialists focus in on everything being just Matter, when in fact that derives etymologically from the idea that it’s all Mother).

When we feel these tiny subtle ripples in the field we can sense a bit more intuitively what our purpose might be, what we’re being led towards, and the attraction of this is that it’s on a miniature scale. It’s not like turning to the sky and asking God to show off, which would be a foolhardy way to approach the divine. It’s going in, towards the deep seat of Consciousness. The great secret that governments and capitalists can’t control, unless perhaps Elon gets to stick weird metal in all our brains to break the circuit.

The inward turning doesn’t usually go in a straight line at a fixed speed. This is quantum too: there’s an inner dance, an off-beat trajectory to follow that seems to spiral, which of course it does: we kind of know that if we just shut off and charge for the centre, the centre will move. There’s actually a zillion possible locations in there for it to shift to, and we have to glide in with guidance and trust and sensitivity to ourselves. At the micro level there are whole cities under the skin that covers our organs, all of which are quietly conversing all the time, even when we’re totally switched off and deeply asleep.

At the same time, the centre is everywhere all at once, if we approach with an honouring of each location. Each tiny moment, every point of contact, contains the beginning and end of universes; worth giving our attention, worth learning its story. A fractal appreciation. As sound rises in pitch it vibrates faster: giving us two possibilities. One is the frantic high-octane hum of the overheating friction-building machine. The other is the piccolo hummingbird organic melody, wings beating out an Om so fast that we don’t notice they’re even moving until we slow down.

The inward journey also takes us towards recognition of the miraculous. Human realms of knowledge and reason are, as usual, our hubristic attempts to replicate the vast fields of wisdom in nature. A single cell is often more attuned to multiple forces and beings around it than our rushing allows us to grasp. The slow down allows us to sense these signals, and the mystery thereby becomes a little more differentiated. More realms beneath the surface are exposed, revealed, released to our sight, and often we’re involuntarily forced to take a breath, a gasp as we realize the magic at work, the brilliance we can’t explain. Time to go even slower. And there’s such relief in doing so: in just letting go into a richer relation with within.

Oh, how self-indulgent! How self-absorbed! Part of our modern culture doesn’t like this idea much because it fears us sealing ourselves off hermetically, into little individualist packages that contribute nothing to the whole; pure consumers, which other rather demonic parts of our culture are frantically working to turn us all into. Privacy is a double-edged modern phenomenon, far removed from the tribe, or even from the open plan castle keep, where we had to make love next to a thousand other snoring and farting seigneurial retainers. The dystopian suggestion is that by withdrawing inside we will shrivel up, finding ourselves lonely and meaningless, obsessed idiots. (Literally: “idiot” derives from the Greek word for privacy). Navel gazing, as the modern idiom has it. And perhaps this is something we need to watch for: as with all the dimensions of life, there’s a fluid balance to find here, a dance with the outer life.

Here’s the magical paradox, right here as I walk this labyrinth looking for answers. The classical labyrinth is something we take our whole body to, is a path forward that we walk in the external world. Yet it’s very distinctly a spiral in, and as we walk it, a mirroring process happens inside. The labyrinthine spiral is full of folds, moving back on itself like the folds of our brain, and with every fold there’s more surface to cross. It’s like that zoomed-in coastline map: initially it might look like we can calculate the distance around the island, but as we get a closer and closer look, until we’re making another slight turn at every quark, every spinning electron whose position changes in every nanosecond, the lengths we can go to grow and grow, and the time it can all take likewise expands. And the answer comes, from all this folding and unfolding, when we’ve released ourselves into the inner mystery. Trusting that Ariadne’s thread will get us out again.

Just as quantum physics has different rules and speeds to the conventional physics we see around us in standard 3D perception (where tables are more table than space, a limited but sometimes useful viewpoint); so the ocean itself points to forces that are different the more interior we go – the more we get close to the ‘floor’ of the earth’s crust, which is also the edge of a rich mantle none of us can see. Surface currents chatter at rapid rates, interacting hour to hour with the winds, the clouds, the rapidity of the seaweed, the impossible speed of ocean animals. Full of recognisable life. Deeper currents flow slowly, unruffled, taking years to carry the water to all parts of the great earth-sea-being. And perhaps even the things we see as rocks are liquid from the right depth and speed. The mantle is, after all, always in an invisible motion; the continents breathe apart and together again over great aeons, a rib cage for the spice inside. All of which our own bodies reflect: for the old wisdom has it that as within, so without. Yoga finds the gods acting, vibrating, pulsing, churning within our body-maps. And animals, and trees, and other forces of nature and the cosmos. Spend long enough with anything and it softens into something richer and fuller, even our navels around which the universe gyrates. Although there are also diamonds made from peanut butter to counteract that thought: pressure squeezes us into hardness, and it’s an interesting challenge to go in, go deep, and stay soft.

Rhythm is a part of this: a pulse that is constantly at play, whether we notice it or not, in all the dancing of our insides. When we bring it out again into music, it has been conjured into something new. That seed-time of going within helps. Surely whales give birth to new songs only after they have spent deep contemplative time. In the temple, from whence come the new templates. Going in and switching off from the world is obviously at its most rhythmic in the cycle of the day, when we drop into sleep itself. Like my cat, curled, coiled, comfortable, inwardly recharging to spring out again later, and certainly not bothered by monkey-mind anxieties. Sometimes felines are seen as feminine, as yin, cosy and soft, though we know their nine-life yang side too, effortlessly springing beyond the conventionally possible. Recharge is the secret. Secrets are discovered by going in, too. There’s a part of the human curiosity that curious cats don’t bother with: they just know it’s worth going there, whereas we wonder: what lies in the depths, in the tunnel, down the rabbit hole? And of greater concern, will we ever get out again? In is the usual punishment, after all. We remove people’s freedom and stick them inside, behind walls and bars; the ultimate temporary solution for criminals, elderly relatives, and the ones who ‘don’t fit in’ to the outer world. Though as Madiba showed us, you can get a lot done in there. For some the retreat has indeed been permanent though: they’ve ended up dying in prison, from where our bodies are reabsorbed by the earth, the inside from where we came.

The mother-womb is inside, a place of incubation, of gentle brewing that allows delicate formative forces to get on with things. It’s a retreat. Which these days has very different connotations to prison. Somehow retreating, going backwards and retracing the steps that took us too far out, has become a lovely word we associate with ‘getting away from it all’. Of course it’s not that, any more than the womb was: the womb is a fabulous place to be, when we need to be there, a place of plugging in to the cosmic juice as channelled through our mother. It’s got that contained, oo sound to it, a holding, and as we grow up we have to learn to recreate that for ourselves: the big lesson of our journey through incarnation is how to find a balance, where we can float in our own cocoon. Recognising that we have the inner resources, if we stop a moment, because we are awake.

Funny how we often go on retreat to places that are far away from home though. Is that because our homes these days are so full of external distractions that they don’t feel as home/womb as they could? The real dropping in needs, very often, what we call “nature”. The wild messy peace that allows us to breathe in fresh air just like our mama used to make. So we can find that centre in the chaos, and trust that other kinds of wisdom are coming down the great umbilical chord. Sometimes we call wisdom ‘nourishment’, a very physical manifestation of all that, if we have the ability to absorb. Real absorption takes a kind of shell, a kind of buffering so that things don’t just all get leached out at once. There’s a limit to how much we can take in in one go, and what doesn’t go in, must go out.

So there’s an inward dance to this incarnation, that I certainly enjoy taking. Deep stuff is, as many languages would have it, profound. However, many of the inspiring ideas I’ve had personally have happened in moments that have been dual: inwardly quiet, and outwardly blazing. Moments on stage that have been like lightning has struck, but where did it come from? If we have gone in enough, it may well come from without. As many a Zen paradox would no doubt have it. Though what do I know? I can’t even hear the language spoken by my personal bacteria. I am, however, striving towards that, with every deepening belly-breath.