I love diversity. Difference inspires meetings. I am filled with awe at how every human being has unique facial features and fingerprints and voice and values. The fact that even penguins recognise their unique mate after several months’ separation, and kiss with their beaks is simply mind-boggling. The numerous unusual experiences I am recording publicly (which break the scientific materialist rules of space-time-substance) have convinced me that life has a depth of beauty in diversity that we should enjoy exploring, even if there is suffering. So, I did exactly that. I went meeting and listening to people who differed from me, and grew wiser along the way.
I explored vastly diverse spiritual traditions before settling into Celtic Christianity (occultism, Zen, hedonistic humanism, asceticism). I then also explored why disputing factions had broken Christianity, and all the Abrahamic family of religions, into disagreeing fragments over the last two millennia.
That was how I made a life-enhancing discovery that may enrich your life now also.
An icon is a door to the reality behind; a symbol represents an idea
I learnt what an icon means… by listening to people in the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition. I also learnt how close Celtic Christianity is to the Eastern view of reality, and how that now changes my view of matter. It’s very timely, because the scientific materialism of the last three centuries in the West is collapsing into a quantum field theory of vibrational waves, and that fits with icons…
The Celts stretched their domains at one time from the Middle East (Galatia), through Europe (Gaul, and Iberian Galicia), into Britain, Scotland and Ireland (Gaelic), so it is not really surprising that there is a coherence with the Eastern tendency to think about life in more fluid terms than the rationalising Western Europeans. The rationalising West thinks by experimenting on parts to manipulate them better, and then tries to work out how these parts fit together to make ‘a whole’. The Eastern mind takes hands off, and experiences wholeness first, then tries to work out how diversity arises within that wholeness, and the significance for life of these fleeting differences.
So, in Eastern Orthodox ways of living, an icon is a material representation of a human experience or presence that becomes a doorway through which people engage more deeply into a wider wholeness of reality. It is a way of remembering the depth of life in which we all participate. A row of icons of ‘saints’ is like a photo album of our relatives and friends, reminding us that we have some pretty impressive characters in our extended family. The image here is of a triunity of Holy Persons inviting us to join a meal with them. Have you ever kissed a photo of a loved one? That photo was an icon.
The Westernised mind has difficulty understanding icons. Historically the mindset of manipulating things, valuing objects rather than participating in processes, contributed to the split between the Eastern and Western (Roman Catholic and Protestant) Churches. The Westernised mind prefers ideas about how parts fit together. But these ideas are difficult to communicate clearly enough to make others believe the same ‘things’ that you do. So, the Westernised mind needs to use symbols instead to represent these ideas.
But they are only ideas. Symbols to not reveal the reality of wholeness on the move. Icons invite us to participate in a living reality behind all that we see and feel and hold and love.
Matter becomes iconic in Celtic remembering, and now in New Science also
Celtic spirituality in the Christian way of living focuses on participating in the cycles of nature, celebrating life and its potential for growth and renewal in the relational mix of respectful community and hospitality. It is very earthed, seeing the material world as itself iconic of the life and intelligence of a loving Creator God, in whom we live and move and have our being. But we forget very easily. We need prompts to remember, so that we shape our embodied lives in ways that we too become living icons of a deeper grace and truth.
So, earthed matter itself, including every molecule of our living embodiment, becomes sacred in this way of seeing the wholeness of life. Matter itself points through to this deeper reality that is bursting with potential for actualization. This wholeness of reality needs a clear channel of consciousness to re-member, to join, when we feel its call move our inner hearts to connect.
Curiously, that is also a fair description of how the new energy physics called ‘quantum gravity’ sees matter now. Every subatomic particle is actualizing from a field of vibrational waves, with probabilities of movement that shape life as a whole. Each part(icle) is a continuous re-creation in process, not an object. ‘It’ is an unfolding holograph along an apparent course or track of appearances that actualizes when intra-actively ‘measured’ (or observed). Its emerging path over time summarises the state of wholeness at each locality, repatterning all the relational changes along the way. This repatterning includes our presence. We are participators in the whole. Each particle thus becomes an icon of that wholeness in movement for us.
At this level, no-one is a mere observer of life. We participate in life though every molecule of our embodiment. Each of us thus becomes iconic of the wider life for each other. We access this wholeness first through our inner heart’s awareness, through the clear, uncluttered consciousness as we, for a time, take our hands off manipulating our local worlds. Then through that inner clarity, in time, we as icons can be inspired to move and join its peaceful dance. We all thus potentially contribute our uniquely diverse features into wholeness.
Westernised symbolism
So what’s the problem? In our present computer age an icon most commonly means a ‘brand image’ on a screen. This is indeed a doorway that also opens when clicked to activate a specific application hidden behind. A whole ‘world’ of possibilities and purposes reveals itself on passing ‘through’ that screen icon. A simple choice to click… and your relationality and powers open out suddenly and easily, without suffering, into the digital functionality that you feel good engaging with.
But allow yourself a gap in time… to pause and think and feel the reality in your hand.
It is a digital world of 0’s and 1’s that you enter through there. Its monsters are the algorithms that note your every click and preference, narrowing the potential for the unexpected to add its colour to life, all in the name of feeding and addicting you to what you want. This virtual reality is mathematical. Maths is entirely symbolic. Every equation points only to ideas, someone else’s ideas. The maths behind much of physics strikes out any tendency towards infinity or zero, containing the virtual reality into something that can be manipulated, namely your life.
Rehumanizing and actualizing adaptability
Wholeness diversifies its united features into the dance. This dance in analogue togetherness at a heart level adapts realistically as life’s circumstances change. In the coming times of change, people will need to learn the conversational skills to talk in trust groups at the right depth of personal values if the potential dance of grace and truth is to be actualized from behind our embodied lives. This capacity to relate at heart, and to agree values-based action plans for local adaptability, is the skill needed to survive the emergent crisis that is beginning to shake the world.
These skills can be learnt. One way is to connect via TriquetraLife.substack.com and relatedness.net, and by joining the monthly Trust Group discussion webinars based on the Emotional Logic method of healthy adaptability, and on the understanding of worldviews explained in Clearing a Way: Unveiling the Mental Tricks that Hide Reality.
I also wrote a book about the fragmentation of the Church as an example of all types of relational fragmentation. It unfolds within my testimonial story of how the Emotional Logic method developed through the therapeutic community that my wife and I ran for twenty years, and my medical practice. That method of emotional awareness is a way to name personal values, and God’s values, in any situation of change. It could help to reverse the fragmentation problem. It is called Building Bridges of Grace, and is available on Kindle or in hardback from the online bookshop at relatedness.net/shop/.
