Tessellations , livre ebook

Troubador Publishing Ltd - Lucy Oliver

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64 pages

English

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Tessellations : Patterns of Life and Death in the Company of a Master is an unusual and fascinating account which interweaves memoir, biography, wisdom teaching and metaphysical philosophy to present a rare illustration of how an oral tradition of Knowledge can be transmitted in modern Britain under the guidance of an extraordinary Sage. This book is the first direct and personal account of over forty years under the direction of this inspiring authentic Teacher, who insisted on obscurity while he lived. As the text reveals, life around such an individual is never dull.Through anecdote and lively description, it embodies and brings to life some founding principles of spiritual teaching, removing some of the mystique and superstition which have encrusted traditional esoteric work. It also fills in the background to the author's The Meditator's Guidebook which is a classic of the meditation genre for its clear and profound approach to meditation from the same lineage of oral transmission and was originally published over 30 years ago.A captivating, affectionate, and utterly factual account of the man who is the closest thing to a Master that I have ever met." - Richard Smoley, Author and Editor of Quest JournalAn invitation into thinking and feeling on a higher level, refined, real, with an internal tempo spacious and still." - Anne Egseth, Author and Integral Coach

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	07 mars 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781838597757
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0424€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Copyright © 2020 Lucy Oliver

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 9781838597757

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover illustration: Tessellation by Michael Frenda

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In dedication to the long lineage of the Common Life.
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Prelude - Letter from an Amnesiac

Chapter 1 - A Portrait
If I had an idea how a truly wise individual might appear, it would not have survived the encounter with the subject of these reminiscences, who confounded any conventional expectations of the Great Teacher, but quietly laid a foundation for the re-formulation of authentic esoteric philosophy.

Chapter 2 - Background
Of the three elements weaving through my recollections, this section focuses mainly on the collective or community aspect of inner work, and reflects the need for effort, change, and active engagement in ordinary life.

Chapter 3 - Antecedents
Facets of my own background and story, looking to identify those elements which drew me to this sort of inner pursuit. The quest for true identity.

Chapter 4 - Leaf
Meditation is widely accepted as an essential tool for personal change and transformation, but there are many variants. A look at the nature of meditation, and how we practised it.

Chapter 5 - Backbone
Working in a group was fundamental to our method, but often challenging. Can digital interactions replace the traditional working group?

Chapter 6 - Lines
When asked to explain the origins of our approach and training I always have a problem. There is no authorized version to reach for in the case of an esoteric and oral lineage. And how does a Way of Knowledge fit with other contemporary consciousness work?

Chapter 7 - Being
What is the soul? Prayer, meditation and contemplative experience as three aspects of developing Being and Knowledge. An evolutionary model of human growth based on the traditional eight-stage octave principle.

Chapter 8 - Play
Ritual training. In Hindu mythology all creation is seen as play, ‘Lila’, the joyful, spontaneous interaction between the Absolute and the empirical world of His creation. We took our play seriously too.

Chapter 9 - Temples
The Lord is in his Holy Temple; let all the world keep silence
before him’
Sacred space and Temple symbolism, and the inner Temple.
War, suffering and sacrifice, and a look to the future.

Chapter 10 - Gazelles
Polarity and sexuality. An esoteric understanding of Polarity as a dynamic in consciousness, and sex.

Chapter 11 - End
What practical clues I could find for unlocking the Gates of Life and Death.

Chapter 12 - Initiation
The value of initiations. Some thoughts about the future of Religion, myth and metaphysics.

Epilogue
Postlude - Worm – Dragon – Angel
Appendix I
Appendix II
Appendix III
Preface
This is a book for core seekers.
The illustrations and incidents of an ordinary life and a
non-ordinary life are teaching cores.
Read fast, it will entertain.
Read slowly, the seeds of knowing will take root.
Take your time.
Introduction
It was in late 1970’s London that I first heard I heard a voice from the darkness 1 . I didn’t know it then, but it was a voice springing from an oral tradition of Knowledge which has run like a thread through the religious history of the West, surfacing here and there, sometimes in a conventionally religious setting, but in our age no longer needing to shelter in any particular religious context.
Hearing that voice initiated for me a metaphysical, spiritual and esoteric journey, ‘esoteric’ in the sense of ‘inner’, deeply veiled and needing to be revealed. My account of that training is personal— glimpses through the veils—but the glimpses will contain as much information as I can insert about the path I have followed, with others, under the tutelage of a wise and remarkable man, our Psychopomp (guide of souls). We simply called him Glyn.
Glyn’s teaching and formulations were resolutely based on first principles , the simplicity at the root of phenomena, and on number, which is a lineage dating at least from Pythagoras. To those who could see it, he was a Man of Knowledge, but he was determined to be anonymous, and discouraged any seeds of incipient guru worship. There are few photos of him at any age, and he lived a reclusive existence in a West London flat until his death at the age of 78. I thought I had a photo containing a small figure at the edge of one of our public Turning performances, but when I dug the photos out and pored over with a magnifying glass after his death, either that particular photo had slipped between the worlds, or he had faded himself off the film surface!
The lineage has its roots way back in the West; the transmission oral—that is, from person to person, an interaction and communication through living fields of being. An interesting question for a digital age is to ask how relevant is person-to-person oral transmission when you can have a super-abundance of teachings delivered right to your favourite arm-chair with a mere touch of the finger-tips? What factors make mere words connect ? What can protect a seeker from plunging into a sea of information and accumulating a spiritual junk-heap consisting of the best bits of every teaching? What methods or tools are needed to forge a soul from this junk-yard of Infinity? With what faculty does one recognize Truth, or sift gold from psychological debris?
The spirit, we are told, hovers over the Deep. But can personal ‘fields’ of being interact through screens? How can the kind of contact controlled by the flick of a button be rooted in a deep level of Field, of the kind which facilitates ‘transmission’ of truth? These are new questions, new avenues to be explored, tested and validated. We are at the beginning of a new spiritual epoch.
But what is meant by ‘spiritual’? Nowadays it covers all kinds of technologically and pharmacologically assisted experimentation and aspiration, divorced from any ‘religious’ background. A thoughtful person might say “I’m not a religious person, but I am spiritual”, and a declared secular or agnostic thinker may use traditionally spiritual practices like meditation purely to assist thinking with clarity and focus, or for the emotional rewards. Many of the teachings which are easily available and called ‘spiritual’, are essentially about health, therapy, or self-development. The boundaries have become blurred, so it is timely to see if there are root principles which will open up the true depths in any formulation.
The path presented in this book begins with a portrait of the man whose grasp of the Reality I sought to know was beyond anything I had encountered before or have encountered since. He weaves in and out of this account as my view of a being I could not entirely comprehend. There were aspects through which Glyn related to others which were strange to me, and I have not done justice to those Glyns. I knew I could not get his measure, and was often puzzled and slightly awed in the presence of interactions and atmospheres which were bypassing me, even as I sat there and tried to take part. However, I hope that the Glyn of this narrative would be recognisable as an accurate portrayal by those who took part in the collective activities which he initiated over nearly forty years.
The second element in my narrative is the collective background of individuals who came together for so many years to study, formulate and grow with a common purpose, namely, to be educated in all aspects of developing Knowledge and Being. An esoteric education implied de-cluttering essential principle from the padding of millennia formed by custom, interpretation and ethnic accretions, and had to include clear structured thinking as well as emotional understanding, self-discipline, and grounding in the body and in everyday life.
Our training began under Glyn’s idiosyncratic direction, but he was determined that we were all individuals and all equal; there was to be no group-think or moulding to fit some ideal. Inevitably, unavoidably perhaps, this in itself became a moulding, which succeeded only too well. “You’re all Bigheads,” he’d say. We took this as a term of endearment—precisely proving the point! But at the same time, anyone who appeared to be gaining personal power or authority would likely be referred to in his conversation as “Old Buggerlugs there”, as if, just at that moment, the name was escaping him… .
The accounts which make up the bulk of this book began life as a long-running correspondence between myself and Alice, a friend who had re-located to Washington DC. She had never met the subject of these memoirs, the person of Glyn, but had absorbed something of the teaching and methodology he established, and incorporated this parti