a warrior's mood . . . .

 

One of my earliest memories, is being gripped by pictures of ancient Greek warriors. My Mum took me to the British Museum when I was about six or seven and I saw there stone friezes of Greek warriors fighting and a real warrior’s helmet dating from 400BC  - and I was hooked. For the next ten years I absorbed as much as I could and although I was interested in all of ancient Greece, it was the warriors, the Hoplites, that remained the driving core emotionally.

 

The intensity of the interest lessened as I got swept away in my teenage years and the 60’s counterculture. When I went to Greece for the first time as a young man, the interest came flooding back as I walked through ruined temples. It remains with me now 45 years after its onset.

 

The obsession pre-existed the triggers, catalyst not cause.  The interest in the objects came from the feeling released. The feeling was not caused by the objects.  I may have been fascinated by pictures and statues but it was not these objects themselves that caught my attention. It was the feeling they released. The main feeling that these objects released was wrapped in recognition.  Not Deja Vue, not that kind of hazy recognition.  It was a stronger, deeper and very complicated feeling that on closer inspection was many feelings all bound up together. It originally presented as one feeling but later was revealed to be a ‘suite’ of feelings.

 

There were many strands to this suite of feelings but some way into my Holding practice with this subject, I had identified these main ones initially, (not in order of importance or intensity):

 

·        Little boy excitement at soldiers and battles

·        The standard sexual theme that underpins a lot of male violence, laden with some homo-erotic content, an arena for macho posturing

·        The terrible beauty and stark functionality of the weapons

·        The first time I held a real sword, it felt as if I had held it all my life, it felt natural

·        The helmet as a transformative object, ‘wear it, become different’, perhaps revealing a desire and/or need to be different

·        This difference was also an identifier, both and arrogant “showing off” and defence against others

·        A sense of belonging

·        Some kind of admiration and earthy respect

·        A simplified arena for male competition, (unlike the complex alliances of the playground).

·        The expectations of authority seemed clear and unambiguous in Ancient Greece, back then it was ‘go out, fight and die’; now it is “do all this school learning, to get exams, to get a safe future and then earn lots of money”.

 

And other feelings I still could not name . . . . . .

 

The more I looked at the feelings the more I realised what I did not know. I had a complex list of feelings which ebbed and flowed.  But . . . . . why Ancient Greece? I was also interested in Aztecs, the American Civil War and Medieval knights, which were popular with other boys too (no one else around me was interested in Ancient Greece). My interest in these other areas and history in general, was strong but the feeling around Ancient Greece was of an altogether different quality. It was obsessive, piercing, irrational and hauntingly captivating.  At times it was physical too, I experienced physical sensations in my body. Why Greece? I intensified my watching and Holding . . . .

 

At the end of the day, there is a deep core set of feelings, that I still collate into a single feeling, that I cannot put into words. It is a very subtle combination of admiration, recognition and regret. It took a long time to tease out what the driver of this feeling was, why it was so haunting and powerful. It crept up on me slowly, over many years, it was a feeling carrying a strong sense of something undone, something not finished.

 

The temptation to put this feeling down to a past life experience, was overwhelming. Yet, somehow, that did not feel right. At first, I went with reincarnation because this seemed to explain the feeling, why the feeling was too strong, disproportionate, too familiar, too intimate.   I was aware of different past life theories and thought one of them must surely fit.   To approach how this was resolved for me, I need to digress for a while.

 

Other experiences had led me to see that there are no past lives which are “ours” in a possessive sense. I cannot “have” a past life, because there is no single, central unified “me” in this life, so it cannot move from one life to another. This matter is fundamental to how we “think” about spiritual issues. In Christian and Moslem teachings, there is a central unified soul, created by God, that resides in a body and leaves that body at death. Similarly, in Hinduism there is a soul, though it is mostly seen as uncreated and eternal, this moves from body to body and the type of incarnation is the result of Karma - that is, ‘what you do effects who you become’. Shamanism has no central teaching but the concept of a central unified soul is found there too; the Shaman’s soul goes on a spirit journey, it leaves and returns to the Shaman’s body. The Shaman visits souls who have died and live in other worlds. Buddhism has a different yet related approach to reincarnation.

 

Mostly, Buddhists do not refer to a soul, and do not describe such a thing as travelling from one body to the next. Yet they do hold that ‘what you do effects who you become’, that being, the accumulated thoughts and actions of a life, “held” at the moment of death, effect the type of life you have next.   So not an owned soul, but “something” travels from life to life. Some schools of Buddhism, (Dzogchen from Tibet, Cha’an from China and Zen from Japan) hint at what might happen, that being, the soul or individual identity is an appearance, perhaps an illusion, concealing a deeper reality.  Zen teaching hints at the deeper reality by describing something called “small mind” (our localised sense of identity) and “Big Mind” (something present everywhere that cannot be grasped by “small mind” but can nonetheless be experienced directly). So in Buddhism, nothing actually travels from life to life because whatever it is, is always already there.

 

From this (and other sources) an idea can be gleaned. This idea is supported by my own experiences but I do not expect (or indeed encourage) anyone to just accept that. The best outcome is to find out for yourself, to directly experience this, rather than accept mine (or anyone’s’) ideas. (How we can directly experience these things is dealt with elsewhere, see links at the end of this piece).

 

My looking enabled some direct experiences and these pointed to a core feeling.  I could not describe that feeling. Language could not capture it or convey it. The feeling was not always present but the memory of its event was potent and stable, so I began to use that.  I cannot actually remember what a mango tastes like; I remember the act of eating and remember that it was good. These two things “frame” the memory of the taste. Could I frame this feeling in some similar way? If you have never eaten a mango, then you cannot be made to experience it. You can get a hint of it, perhaps by saying, the flavour is like a cross between apple and orange, the texture like a peach. Looking for “frames” for this feeling quickly brought me to new ground. Frames emerged bringing with them a new helper, which I described as “Resonance”. (I give it a capital “R” because of its importance to Praxis).

 

A guitar has six strings; strike one string and the others, even thought they were not struck, will vibrate and make a sound as well. (Defined thus: “Acoustics : Intensification and prolongation of sound, especially of a musical tone, produced by sympathetic vibration”.) Framing was the act of comparing the newly emerged feeling with others more well known. At first, there were none but when I looked more closely in one area, deeper psychological predispositions, emotional Resonance occurred. I will not go into details here but it transpired that this newly emerged feeling was a kind of need.

 

I spent a long time looking at what kind of need it was. It was a need to finish something. I needed to do something.  My obsession with Ancient Greece was that kind of need.   A quality of this need gave me a clue. It felt quite “young”. Then it got more weird because I felt very old, as old as the rocks in the ground, but this feeling was “young”. Then I saw that the origins of the feeling may have been  “young” but I had had this feeling a very long time. I got more and more confused because, this might point to a past life after all, yet other very solid experiences showed me there were no past lives.  Eventually, a resolution came . . . . .

 

Using Holding and focussing on the newly emerged need, I saw that I could try shifting the emphasis, by not exclusively Holding the “what” and “why” (what is this feeling, why Ancient Greece?)  I added “when” to the pot. The mood of the newly emerged need, being “young” then gave me a huge clue. Something opened up in me, as a little lad standing in front of those images. It was not the fact of the images, it was the act of reception. I was the fallow field and the images the sowed seeds.  Does this mean that, if that fertile moment ripe for pollinating had happened whilst I was standing in front of the Aztec statues, would my life obsession have been an Aztec one instead of Ancient Greece?  Yes.  But this does not lessen the beauty of this whole thing. A diamond sparkles just as brightly whether you know of its compressed carbon nature or not.

 

“When”, thus opened the door to a greater understanding of the feeling. We think of developmental stages in childhood as being gradual but I know that some, at least, may be very rapid.  Years of Constancy have confirmed this and not just for child development. These moments can happen at other times in life. Something inside us opens and a feeling emerges. This deeper feeling then becomes a driver if it attaches to something.  Whether we see it or not, it operates ”underneath”, informing ideas and actions that float above it like a cork bobbing on an ocean swell.

 

What is at the heart of my Ancient Greek feeling? I had got close enough to establish that it was a need, a need to finish something. Much more looking revealed that it was a need to grow. Growing up may be driven by biology but there is an emotional aspect to it; developing is something we can choose to do.   Growing here is not just about stepping into the footsteps of how we define adulthood, it’s the whole nature of our relationship with our world.  Something happened while I stood staring at the statues in the British Museum.  What I am sure is a normal developmental occurrence with a beginning and an ending, did not quite get closed off.  It did not end ‘properly’.  A residual element was left, looping in my brain.  In terms of growing being a process of adaptation to the life around us, this was a maladaption, albeit one of beauty and poignancy.    Alternatively, our key childhood experiences are not lost, just deeply buried.

 

So not a past life in Ancient Greece. Or was there ?. . . . . . . The images at the British Museum sank into me during a moment of heightened developmental receptivity. After years of Constancy another deeper feeling emerged, a Resonance.    Not my past life in Greece, but perhasp a resonance with our collective past lives in Greece.

 

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footnote

Whilst Holding is a useful short-term technique, Constancy is a better core practice because it does not use the ideas, the opposing pairs of concepts, or anything  -  it just gets straight down to business and “looks directly”, looking constantly!