Boxing Up 2009
It’s been quite a Year. As feisty as any I’ve ever lived. It’s had as many highs as its had everything else in between. Would I have lived it any differently? You know, I might have if I’d thought to at the time. Here at Penneylaneonline I believe that mindStyle matters. Not simply ‘what’ you think but ‘HOW’ you think.
MindStyle today, to me, is realising that my BEST life might just be found in an unattended moment. In those moments, I’m sometimes presented with a feeling or feelings of impending revelation, an epiphany that is mine, and mine alone where ‘doors are about to be opened, mists dispersed, veils withdrawn and secrets disclosed’. Do you ever feel that?
This Indescribable Awe
Charles Kingsley once said, ‘I am oppressed now and then with an innate feeling that everything I see has a meaning, if I could but understand it. And this feeling of being surrounded with truths which I cannot grasp amounts to an indescribable awe sometimes.’ I get him, I really do.
Kingsley was an English clergyman, university professor, historian, and novelist, particularly associated with the West Country and north-east Hampshire. He founded the Chester Society for Natural Science, Literature and Art which played an important part in the establishment of the Grosvenor Museum.
He’s described as having a ‘restless excitable temperament’. I understand this temperament, particularly the restless bit. Perhaps it’s a God-thing. It was Augustine who once said, “”Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee, O Lord.”
When Jacquetta Hawkes (daughter of Nobel Prize-winning scientist, Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins) watched a caravan of camels swaying down the Wadi with the Mediterranean like a bar of silver in the distance, she said, ‘the moonlight had ceased to be a physical thing and now represented a state of illumination in her own mind .. it seemed that her thoughts and feelings had been given an extraordinary clarity and truth’.
It’s Boxing Day and I’m driving back to Waipukurau. The roads are ‘crowded’ by New Zealand standards because it’s Race Day in Whanganui. The only day of the year the city cemetery comes alive to the sound of screaming high octane motorcycle street racing. This year is the 58th annual running of this nationally recognised street circuit event.
We pass hundreds of bikes rolling into the city, their black-leathered riders an interesting mix. I allow my mind to find its way back to quieter thoughts and eventually as the miles run out behind us the mosquito-like buzzings of motorcycles on their way to Whanganui become silent.
This Noetic Quality
Sometimes I feel these ‘unattended moments’ in my life have a ‘noetic’ quality about them. Having ‘knowledge or insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect is one of the four necessary characteristics of an experience (together with ineffability, transcience and passivity) which reasonably allow me to call them ‘mystical’.
“Noetic sciences are explorations into the nature and potentials of consciousness using multiple ways of knowing—including intuition, feeling, reason, and the senses. Noetic sciences explore the ‘inner cosmos’ of the mind (consciousness, soul, spirit) and how it relates to the ‘outer cosmos’ of the physical world.”
As I once more round the open arm sweep of the road beneath Pukeora Hill, I feel like I’m ‘home’. And finally all the years of living away have their rightful place in my experiences, valuable and memorable. The hills around and the trees. It’s a completely unattended moment of clarity. I’m home.
