Back from Spiritualist College
Dec. 6th, 2004 11:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
smokingbootWell, that was interesting.
The whole thing has been a bit of a surprise, from the original gift to the course itself. I met people and had almost-adventures. I may even have learned stuff. The Arthur Findlay College is old, rebuilt in the 19th Century from beginnings in 1430-something, when it belonged to the De Veres. The earl and his son lost their heads, but Henry VIII gave the estate back to the family out of the clutches of the earl of Suffolk/Norfolk/I can't remember. It ended up as the property of Thomas Middleton who funded some of Raleigh's gaddings about, got rebuilt, used as a hospital in one of the wars and finally was left to the National Spiritualist Union by Arthur Findlay.The grounds are beautiful in the gentle way of English gardens in winter, all horses and bare trees and late blown roses. And the house is very interested to see people.
The chums who had bought this course as a gift for me also attended, of course. They had got themselves a double en suite room. I had been told that I would be sharing a dorm with three others, not brilliant but bearable. Then I met the room, a feast of canary coloured bald walls and 1960s washstand, and the three other beds in it - three other beds that remained empty, in a room occupied solely by myself at the top of the house throughout the course. I was alone in the yellow, my peace made no easier by a certain scampish tutor who described 204 as 'The room where we've had the trouble,' and mentioned certain problems with lights and lampshades. Hah hah, I said, and circumnavigated the whole problem of an overactive imagination by simply not sleeping at all.
The next morning came breakfast. Dear LJ, did you, like me, think that trance meant abstemious fasting in order to put the body into readiness for moving beyond the physical? Maybe in other lands. Good old fashioned Victorian inspired trance work apparently derives from scaring you out of your wits all night and then assaulting you with copious amounts of Ingerlish breakfast, sausages and bacon and beans and toms and mushrooms and fried bread and yoghurt and cereal and fruit and coffee and tea.
I was astonished by our morning sessions, run by the principal of the college, where we were put through extensive and excellent meditation practice by the gentleman who obviously understood what he was doing. There was yogic and tantric derived teaching here, appropriately infused with western mysticism. Lazy as I am, I know this stuff well enough to recognise when it is being applied expertly and powerfully, too powerfully for the inhabitant of the yellow room, who, under the influence of a massive breakfast and no kip, fell into an altered state almost immediately and enhanced the meditations of all around with gentle snores. Occasionally I would jerk and spasm, nudge my neighbour and kick the chair in front of me before sinking into irresistable slumber. Impressive start.
The question of food continued to dog me throughout the week, though fortunately I only fell asleep the once. Trying to get into deep trance to a background of British stodge is not easy - let's face it, on a diet of roast lamb, yorkshire pud and spotted dick you can consider yourself earthed. And yet, things did happen and they were memorable and interesting, to me at least.
The last night was particularly interesting. On most nights there were demonstrations of different kinds of mediumship, and that night we were as ever, told to watch for differences around the medium. Well, some phenomena were easy to see by all, namely a strange quivering in the air, like a heat haze or something. The demo went on, it was very interesting, we went to bed, I returned to the yellow room, where I had reached sufficient confidence to sleep with only my bedside lamp on. The lightbulb blew. There were four other lamps, none would work with the converter, so I changed the converter. It was then I noticed, almost idly, that around the curtains and the furthermost light, was the same phenomenon as had occurred in the room with the medium, the same thickening in the air. The light was dimming and brightening and - one anomaly that only occurred to me last night when describing this to someone else - I thought it was on.
Now, let me get this straight in my head. I was in a dorm room with two overhead lights, both switched on by one switch near the door. There were four bedside lamps. I had the overhead light on while I was pootling with the lamp, got it working and then turned the light off. And yet in my memory, the furthest overhead light was on, as I say, and changing in brightness. But this cannot be right, as the main light switch was off, so the illusion of being on must have been coming from the one light in the room, my now working bedside lamp. I was tired, so what the hell, nothing to take seriously.
Whatever it was, I watched the quivering with growing concern, and totally failed my scooby-doo exams by not investigating at all. Instead, I told the spirits of the place to please leave as they were scaring me. When nothing happened, instead of cursing the dodgy electrics I pulled out the inner arsenal of the unreconstructed pagan and told it/them to fuck off in the name of [insert as appropriate] angry at being buzzed by cheeky invisible inhabitants, plus I removed the palpable atmosfear by switching on the overhead light. The quivering stopped or I couldn't see it, and I spent the night fitful and sleepless in the glare. In the morning I checked the window. Condensation was all over the inside, trees looming outside in deep mist, so maybe the weather affected the windows/glass/curtains in some way anyone with basics in physics might understand. Or maybe the evening's offering of fish and chips followed by a cheesecake mighty enough to brick someone over the head down the old East End played its part.
There was the ghost. I saw him, not physically, but in my mind's eye, wandering around the gallery, a gent with white hair and blue eyes, very urbane, took care of his clothes. Later I found a portrait of him, tucked away near a lift, and checked out who he was: the old Manager of the House who had died burned in his car leaving the college one night. There was nothing spooky as such about this due to the way in which I saw him so though I was a bit scared when I saw the picture, it was not the physical fear that makes you shake and run. I don't fear my mind because I know it's a mad bastard. It's the physical world I have problems with.
There were many pictures in the place, some striking, some not. One in particular that I recall was some kind of pen and ink printed thing, very 18th/19th century looking of a whole bunch of people in what may have been a court or a theatre, a place where people sit down in galleries. There was a small round hole in it, as though, among all the faces there, one had been cut out. I still intend to find out more about that, but I had so little time, and it was a very small thing.
Time now to turn to the thoughts of others, my colleagues on the course, how enriched they made me feel. One afternoon, approached by the nearest thing to an attractive man in the college, Yannis (OK, there was one other, a guy who cleaned the toilets; he always seemed to be doing this just as I needed to use them. He began to regard me with the suspicion one saves for those cats who wait for you to clean a place up thoroughly before spraying copiously all over it.)
I was flattered as his dark eyes and huge nose bent towards me saying, 'Debbie, I just had to tell you...I could not say this in front of the others because I did not want to embarrass you but when you were in trance you were so beeeyoootiful, so beeyootiful, your skin...and your face and your hair... your cheeks so beeyootifull...I don't mean like now obviously...nothing like it, totally different of course, I mean really beeeyootifull...' Cheers, Yannis, I thought, as I reeled away from the realisation that I am at my most desireable when catatonic. It's all that damn thinking that's ruined me - and then I bumped into James, our incomprehensible celtic/north country/outerspace psychic whose visions are so obtuse even he can't understand them.
'yerlookinarightbobbydazzlerthismornininyerbluetopdebbie...ilovetaewatchyewalk...''
'Why thank you James,' at least someone thinks I'm attractive when in control of my faculties, I smiled to myself.
'Ayeyecantellalotboutapersonfraethewaytheywalk.Nowyersislikeislike...yeknawtheytwaalcoholics?'
'I'm sorry?'
'Yeknawtheytwaalcoholicsan'thetvset?' At this point I realised that everyone who had ever hated me had performed a ritual and sold their souls to Shub-Niggurath just to get me into this conversation; I might be here for some time.
'I don't know, I'm afraid, and I'm late for - '
'Naenaedon'tgorunninawa'.It'stheytwaalcoholicsatEdinburghyeknawthefestivalantheygetonstagedrunkan'theythrawatvsetoffstagemarvellousstuffreallyyedon'tseestufflikethatanymore...anthat'swhatyerwalkmakesmethinkof...'
'Alcoholics?' Not one but two.
'Nawnawyersillygerelthestageitsyerwalkyecantellalotboutapersonfraetherrwalk...'
I have truncated the conversation for ease of brain, but it lasted a while, until I used that wonderful walk to best effect and ran away to the loo, where the good looking toilet cleaner watched me through narrowed eyes.
And of the course itself? Well, the matter of trance is a thorny one, not because it can't happen - it can and does - and not because people cannot speak through it. It is a question of who/what is speaking. I have mentioned the loa before, and have neither time nor room here to go into the traditions of India, the American tribes, the oracles of Greece, the Siberian shamen, the seidr of the Vikings...trance exists all right.
But Spiritualism is the Christian grandparent of channelling and it goes no further than the belief that everything comes from the one and that trust and love is all you need. Perhaps it is right. Maybe that is the deepest thing of all. And yet, there is no analysis without doubt.
Are these beings speaking through people truly other beings, or, at the depths of the self, is this roleplay, masks within masks, the subconscious welling up with its own wisdom or otherwise? I have known enough Emma Bovary wannabees to know it's a possibility, that the wisdom from beyond can just be the clamourings of opinion and prejudice at the deepest level - or even the richness of the depths. De profundis clamo ad te. Hmm. Really? Who is listening? Could the depths of the soul and the heights of heaven be the same thing?
Consider the devils of Loudon...how real were these demons? Such notable princes of hell as Asmodeus and Leviathan, who could induce the poor inhabitants of the nunnery into blaspheming and lewd cavortings, and yet were limited to the atrocious latin grammar* of their helpless vessels. The local priest, Urban Grandier was tried, tortured and burned alive for this stuff.
Mediumship/trance/channelling is worthless if it is just to verify the comfortable, the knowing from within ensuring that one feels good about oneself, one's past, one's tradition, or to remove oneself from responsibility for one's beliefs and desires. I am suspicious of its vulnerability to abuse. It could be used as just another tool for ego. But then, what can't be? Don't get me wrong, I like ego. Mine's great! It has its place in defence of self respect, in the show ring, on the stage. Three cheers for ego! But it isn't the whole story - make it so, and the miserable fate of Urban Grandier recurrs over and over again. I suspect the nuns of Loudon didn't need a fried priest to cease their possession - my 21st century spurious judgement is that they needed sex and attention. When we let ego take over from the real, we burn poor suckers like Grandier every day. And because we blame the wrong culprit in the first place, our problems don't ease. It's not the outsider who did it. What is it Rorscharch says in The Watchmen? 'There's only us.'
I don't know if this is true, and a week is no time at all to make a judgement, so I can't. I did not see much ego on the course at all. There was no prejudice, no desire to use power or be Teacher/Healer/Guide/Impressive person. Nor was there some weird vaccuum of over-humility and cultism. It was all a bit ordinary, a bit British and very well meaning.
And did I get anything personal, myself? Yes, a great deal, a very enriching experience. It has done me considerable good. But as to what I learnt for myself, well, that is private, and stays with me. I am glad I went, yellow walls, jam roly-poly and all.
And I am glad to be back. I love my love, my friends, my kittens and my home. Time to work.
*like the example I have just had to correct!
The whole thing has been a bit of a surprise, from the original gift to the course itself. I met people and had almost-adventures. I may even have learned stuff. The Arthur Findlay College is old, rebuilt in the 19th Century from beginnings in 1430-something, when it belonged to the De Veres. The earl and his son lost their heads, but Henry VIII gave the estate back to the family out of the clutches of the earl of Suffolk/Norfolk/I can't remember. It ended up as the property of Thomas Middleton who funded some of Raleigh's gaddings about, got rebuilt, used as a hospital in one of the wars and finally was left to the National Spiritualist Union by Arthur Findlay.The grounds are beautiful in the gentle way of English gardens in winter, all horses and bare trees and late blown roses. And the house is very interested to see people.
The chums who had bought this course as a gift for me also attended, of course. They had got themselves a double en suite room. I had been told that I would be sharing a dorm with three others, not brilliant but bearable. Then I met the room, a feast of canary coloured bald walls and 1960s washstand, and the three other beds in it - three other beds that remained empty, in a room occupied solely by myself at the top of the house throughout the course. I was alone in the yellow, my peace made no easier by a certain scampish tutor who described 204 as 'The room where we've had the trouble,' and mentioned certain problems with lights and lampshades. Hah hah, I said, and circumnavigated the whole problem of an overactive imagination by simply not sleeping at all.
The next morning came breakfast. Dear LJ, did you, like me, think that trance meant abstemious fasting in order to put the body into readiness for moving beyond the physical? Maybe in other lands. Good old fashioned Victorian inspired trance work apparently derives from scaring you out of your wits all night and then assaulting you with copious amounts of Ingerlish breakfast, sausages and bacon and beans and toms and mushrooms and fried bread and yoghurt and cereal and fruit and coffee and tea.
I was astonished by our morning sessions, run by the principal of the college, where we were put through extensive and excellent meditation practice by the gentleman who obviously understood what he was doing. There was yogic and tantric derived teaching here, appropriately infused with western mysticism. Lazy as I am, I know this stuff well enough to recognise when it is being applied expertly and powerfully, too powerfully for the inhabitant of the yellow room, who, under the influence of a massive breakfast and no kip, fell into an altered state almost immediately and enhanced the meditations of all around with gentle snores. Occasionally I would jerk and spasm, nudge my neighbour and kick the chair in front of me before sinking into irresistable slumber. Impressive start.
The question of food continued to dog me throughout the week, though fortunately I only fell asleep the once. Trying to get into deep trance to a background of British stodge is not easy - let's face it, on a diet of roast lamb, yorkshire pud and spotted dick you can consider yourself earthed. And yet, things did happen and they were memorable and interesting, to me at least.
The last night was particularly interesting. On most nights there were demonstrations of different kinds of mediumship, and that night we were as ever, told to watch for differences around the medium. Well, some phenomena were easy to see by all, namely a strange quivering in the air, like a heat haze or something. The demo went on, it was very interesting, we went to bed, I returned to the yellow room, where I had reached sufficient confidence to sleep with only my bedside lamp on. The lightbulb blew. There were four other lamps, none would work with the converter, so I changed the converter. It was then I noticed, almost idly, that around the curtains and the furthermost light, was the same phenomenon as had occurred in the room with the medium, the same thickening in the air. The light was dimming and brightening and - one anomaly that only occurred to me last night when describing this to someone else - I thought it was on.
Now, let me get this straight in my head. I was in a dorm room with two overhead lights, both switched on by one switch near the door. There were four bedside lamps. I had the overhead light on while I was pootling with the lamp, got it working and then turned the light off. And yet in my memory, the furthest overhead light was on, as I say, and changing in brightness. But this cannot be right, as the main light switch was off, so the illusion of being on must have been coming from the one light in the room, my now working bedside lamp. I was tired, so what the hell, nothing to take seriously.
Whatever it was, I watched the quivering with growing concern, and totally failed my scooby-doo exams by not investigating at all. Instead, I told the spirits of the place to please leave as they were scaring me. When nothing happened, instead of cursing the dodgy electrics I pulled out the inner arsenal of the unreconstructed pagan and told it/them to fuck off in the name of [insert as appropriate] angry at being buzzed by cheeky invisible inhabitants, plus I removed the palpable atmosfear by switching on the overhead light. The quivering stopped or I couldn't see it, and I spent the night fitful and sleepless in the glare. In the morning I checked the window. Condensation was all over the inside, trees looming outside in deep mist, so maybe the weather affected the windows/glass/curtains in some way anyone with basics in physics might understand. Or maybe the evening's offering of fish and chips followed by a cheesecake mighty enough to brick someone over the head down the old East End played its part.
There was the ghost. I saw him, not physically, but in my mind's eye, wandering around the gallery, a gent with white hair and blue eyes, very urbane, took care of his clothes. Later I found a portrait of him, tucked away near a lift, and checked out who he was: the old Manager of the House who had died burned in his car leaving the college one night. There was nothing spooky as such about this due to the way in which I saw him so though I was a bit scared when I saw the picture, it was not the physical fear that makes you shake and run. I don't fear my mind because I know it's a mad bastard. It's the physical world I have problems with.
There were many pictures in the place, some striking, some not. One in particular that I recall was some kind of pen and ink printed thing, very 18th/19th century looking of a whole bunch of people in what may have been a court or a theatre, a place where people sit down in galleries. There was a small round hole in it, as though, among all the faces there, one had been cut out. I still intend to find out more about that, but I had so little time, and it was a very small thing.
Time now to turn to the thoughts of others, my colleagues on the course, how enriched they made me feel. One afternoon, approached by the nearest thing to an attractive man in the college, Yannis (OK, there was one other, a guy who cleaned the toilets; he always seemed to be doing this just as I needed to use them. He began to regard me with the suspicion one saves for those cats who wait for you to clean a place up thoroughly before spraying copiously all over it.)
I was flattered as his dark eyes and huge nose bent towards me saying, 'Debbie, I just had to tell you...I could not say this in front of the others because I did not want to embarrass you but when you were in trance you were so beeeyoootiful, so beeyootiful, your skin...and your face and your hair... your cheeks so beeyootifull...I don't mean like now obviously...nothing like it, totally different of course, I mean really beeeyootifull...' Cheers, Yannis, I thought, as I reeled away from the realisation that I am at my most desireable when catatonic. It's all that damn thinking that's ruined me - and then I bumped into James, our incomprehensible celtic/north country/outerspace psychic whose visions are so obtuse even he can't understand them.
'yerlookinarightbobbydazzlerthismornininyerbluetopdebbie...ilovetaewatchyewalk...''
'Why thank you James,' at least someone thinks I'm attractive when in control of my faculties, I smiled to myself.
'Ayeyecantellalotboutapersonfraethewaytheywalk.Nowyersislikeislike...yeknawtheytwaalcoholics?'
'I'm sorry?'
'Yeknawtheytwaalcoholicsan'thetvset?' At this point I realised that everyone who had ever hated me had performed a ritual and sold their souls to Shub-Niggurath just to get me into this conversation; I might be here for some time.
'I don't know, I'm afraid, and I'm late for - '
'Naenaedon'tgorunninawa'.It'stheytwaalcoholicsatEdinburghyeknawthefestivalantheygetonstagedrunkan'theythrawatvsetoffstagemarvellousstuffreallyyedon'tseestufflikethatanymore...anthat'swhatyerwalkmakesmethinkof...'
'Alcoholics?' Not one but two.
'Nawnawyersillygerelthestageitsyerwalkyecantellalotboutapersonfraetherrwalk...'
I have truncated the conversation for ease of brain, but it lasted a while, until I used that wonderful walk to best effect and ran away to the loo, where the good looking toilet cleaner watched me through narrowed eyes.
And of the course itself? Well, the matter of trance is a thorny one, not because it can't happen - it can and does - and not because people cannot speak through it. It is a question of who/what is speaking. I have mentioned the loa before, and have neither time nor room here to go into the traditions of India, the American tribes, the oracles of Greece, the Siberian shamen, the seidr of the Vikings...trance exists all right.
But Spiritualism is the Christian grandparent of channelling and it goes no further than the belief that everything comes from the one and that trust and love is all you need. Perhaps it is right. Maybe that is the deepest thing of all. And yet, there is no analysis without doubt.
Are these beings speaking through people truly other beings, or, at the depths of the self, is this roleplay, masks within masks, the subconscious welling up with its own wisdom or otherwise? I have known enough Emma Bovary wannabees to know it's a possibility, that the wisdom from beyond can just be the clamourings of opinion and prejudice at the deepest level - or even the richness of the depths. De profundis clamo ad te. Hmm. Really? Who is listening? Could the depths of the soul and the heights of heaven be the same thing?
Consider the devils of Loudon...how real were these demons? Such notable princes of hell as Asmodeus and Leviathan, who could induce the poor inhabitants of the nunnery into blaspheming and lewd cavortings, and yet were limited to the atrocious latin grammar* of their helpless vessels. The local priest, Urban Grandier was tried, tortured and burned alive for this stuff.
Mediumship/trance/channelling is worthless if it is just to verify the comfortable, the knowing from within ensuring that one feels good about oneself, one's past, one's tradition, or to remove oneself from responsibility for one's beliefs and desires. I am suspicious of its vulnerability to abuse. It could be used as just another tool for ego. But then, what can't be? Don't get me wrong, I like ego. Mine's great! It has its place in defence of self respect, in the show ring, on the stage. Three cheers for ego! But it isn't the whole story - make it so, and the miserable fate of Urban Grandier recurrs over and over again. I suspect the nuns of Loudon didn't need a fried priest to cease their possession - my 21st century spurious judgement is that they needed sex and attention. When we let ego take over from the real, we burn poor suckers like Grandier every day. And because we blame the wrong culprit in the first place, our problems don't ease. It's not the outsider who did it. What is it Rorscharch says in The Watchmen? 'There's only us.'
I don't know if this is true, and a week is no time at all to make a judgement, so I can't. I did not see much ego on the course at all. There was no prejudice, no desire to use power or be Teacher/Healer/Guide/Impressive person. Nor was there some weird vaccuum of over-humility and cultism. It was all a bit ordinary, a bit British and very well meaning.
And did I get anything personal, myself? Yes, a great deal, a very enriching experience. It has done me considerable good. But as to what I learnt for myself, well, that is private, and stays with me. I am glad I went, yellow walls, jam roly-poly and all.
And I am glad to be back. I love my love, my friends, my kittens and my home. Time to work.
*like the example I have just had to correct!
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no subject
Date: 2004-12-06 12:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-06 10:13 pm (UTC)Here's hoping we can get something together in 2005. On a purely social level, now that Larians is better, he hopes to drop you a mail re dates etc. Here's to meeting up soon!
no subject
Date: 2004-12-07 03:10 am (UTC)The trouble with trust, and it can be quite subtle, is that it's not the same as gullibility. Though there is a link or perhaps just a fine line.
"my 21st century spurious judgement is that they needed sex and attention."
I suspect this to be true. I've seen it reenacted recently in another context. Complete with metaphorical burning of the priest :-)
no subject
Date: 2004-12-07 06:26 pm (UTC)