The poem
I was in my first year at Oxford University studying medicine and nurturing a strong desire to understand the mind-body connection. As mentioned before, I was an unusual student, preferring to ride my motorbike rather than a pushbike, and as much on a spiritual search as an intellectual one. I had not realised how unusual and traumatising my family background had been until I met this university city’s new and wide range of population – seekers after truth and profit and glory, some well-established in academic posts, others as aspiring students, and yet others as resentful ‘town’. I had spent eight months in Kenya as a voluntary teacher, and was also suffering from culture shock on return having seen life in the raw there. My motorbike was a place of safety for me, giving me the independence to escape the tensions of my family. I was a solo rider, not a gang member. I was on a search for truth, but could not trust anyone’s guidance, having had spiritual experiences before (including the rope ladder incident – 1/36), but which my attempts to connect with church had resulted in disappointment. The leaders I spoke with seemed unable to understand or welcome these experiences as pointing to a higher truth. They only warned me about spiritual deception and that I should not seek the power of occult knowledge, but rather comply with the Church’s teaching. But how could I, when that teaching seemed not to acknowledge the utter power and glory to transform life that I had already experienced?
I therefore had decided to resolve my confusion by making an experiment of my life. I had been exploring divination using the I Ching, the book having an introduction by Carl Jung on the psychology of the Chinese Masters who wrote or constructed its method. In my 400 year old room at Oxford I decided that, if there were a higher order to life than the visible world, then I did not need sticks or coins to access it, but should find a way to engage directly with it prayerfully, through a sincere and searching inner heart. I decided to set aside the divinatory approach, and live prayerfully for a year reading the Bible as if it revealed truth, seeking inspiration from that source rather than through other people’s interpretations and teachings from it. It was an experiment. I had a scientific interest in my own life and mind. I had planned that at the end of the year I would decide whether or not to return to my agnostic search depending upon whether or not it had made any difference to my life experience.
I remember starting that year with a specific prayerful plea as I embarked on what seemed to me a risky step of abandoning ‘good sense’. But I needed to know! I prayed bringing heart and mind together, “God, if you are true, you know that I need to understand you.” To my utter surprise, and indeed shock, I instantly felt a reply somewhere within my heart and mind as an inner voice saying clearly, “You will understand, but first you must let go of your understanding and let me give you experiences to think about.”
I was instantly stopped in my mental tracks! I already had an experience to think about! How could I have a response like that? It felt like a relationship.
Thus encouraged, but still not abandoning reflective reasoning, I started to live inspirationally in a prayerful ‘walk’ through my world and studies. Relationships generally started to improve. I was loosening up in my responsiveness and enjoying things rather than anticipating that situations would always ‘explode’ as they did at home. I occasionally wrote poetry to capture my inner state, and one day felt a prayerful inspiration that led me to jot down this poem:
Angles turn,
And lines forgive criss-crossing of the mind,
For here in the world there is beauty
Such as always found
Between the seconds of your mind.
Having completed that, and feeling satisfied that it captured something important and relevant although I was not clear exactly what, I felt a sudden impulse with an impelling thought that I needed to take that poem with me and go for a ride on the bike. It was cold but dry, so I put on a jacket and folded the poem into its inner pocket, than put on my overjacket and scarf and set off, gloved up as usual. Prayerfully seeking inspiration about where to go, I found myself heading towards one of the more industrial suburbs until, once again that inner prompt like a voice but not a voice said, “It is done.” I pulled off the road, parked, and started walking up and down the wide pavement expecting to meet someone who needed to receive the poem. But nobody passed by. Deciding to be prepared, I reached inside my jacket to take out the poem and keep it in hand. No poem! I searched in every pocket. Took off the overjacket in the street; searched again. Retraced my ride, looking carefully at the road. Went back to my room and searched everywhere. No poem! It had gone… somewhere. I reasoned that this was another material event that did not fit within the scientific materialist framework of space and time. Something unusual was happening, and it would be relational (I had worked that out by then). Someone, somewhere, will have picked up that poem, and it will have meant something to them.
The actualizing of potential as life
Satisfied with that, life went on. Over the following decades I developed a neuropsychology model of how informational processing in the cerebral cortex could construct a mental framework of space, time, and substantial reality in which other experiences could become orientated. These Kantian categories are imposed by the higher brain on the potential chaos of neural communications that could otherwise swarm through a dysregulated brain. I had become interested in how people perceive their relational dynamics, and in the medical causes of disorientation that disrupts relatedness, such as drug and alcohol misuse, brain injuries, dementia, neural diseases, and social anxiety states or mental stress overload. But also how dreaming and day dreaming are mental states that are not orientated in that framework, but can nevertheless contain truly relational information in meaningful imagery; and how the orientating system is so robust that, after sleep, its socialising capacity can be rapidly restored. If there is to be life-enhancing interaction, it had to be a simple, robust, but nevertheless complex informational system that is genetically replicated in all human and animal brains, if for nothing else then for finding food, nurturing growth, and reproduction.
Along with this intellectual search, I had settled in my spiritual search into an appreciation of Celtic Christian spirituality. It focuses the mind on participating in the rhythms of nature, hospitality, prayer and community, which means it is famously exploratory, seeking the renewal of life from within, rather than criticism of behaviour and its external regulation. It is inclusive of those searching, not exclusive of others according to their beliefs. Celtic spirituality revolves around love in its two modes of joy and grief, both of which are needed to renew healthy connection and mutual responsiveness when facing the challenges of life. The early Celts were semi-nomadic across Europe and the Middle East from about 1000 BCE (Gaelic Ireland, Gaul, Iberian Galicia, the Galatians in Anatolia). They developed an iconic representation of the movement of life that they believed lay behind, and unites, all that seems constant in the world. It is the three-cornered icon known now by its Latin equivalent name, the triquetra, which has potential half-spins in opposite directions.
Those readers who know my other work will recognise that I have found how this icon of integrated movement and relatedness powerfully explains the principles of organisation that I believe are ongoing between the brain’s three sensory association areas and our action planning frontal cortex. This is where we unwittingly generate our impressions of being orientated in space, and time, and our experience of reality as materially solid.
When life’s movements conversationally connect, as represented in the double triquetra’s shared informational flow, consciousness unfolds with a potentially infinite range of qualities. The word’s Latin root is con-scire, conscious, to know with another. Each of us is an ecology for the other. Mind is relational, historical, and anticipatory.
It was only later, when I started trying to make 3D models of these triquetral ‘spins’, that I had a sudden realisation. Here I was, struggling with pipe cleaners, then wire loops, then computer generated 3D printed models shaping them into informational networks (life itself!), when at some point I remembered the poem, between the seconds of your mind. I had kept a copy of it, although it is emblazoned in my memory, and read it again, as above.
Here in my hands were lines criss-crossing. There were the spaces between them, in which the utter reality of our spiritual relatedness is alive and moving between those seconds that our minds are formulating.
Realisation dawned.
The poem had indeed been delivered, but decades later, actualizing for you now as a living process in you as readers of this and all my other work, in which I try to show the beauty of this depth of truth and reality, bursting forth as life is with the potential for renewal both here in the world and in the relational reality beyond space and time and the material substance in which our brains wrap up our daily lived experiences.
