Chapter 5
We decided to move to Wales so that Pauline could be near
her mother, for the last of her sons to leave home was getting married. An
elderly Quaker gave us temporary accommodation in his house. After this we went
through the Council system for the homeless, and eventually obtained a
comfortable and well maintained Council flat in Penarth, with a view across the
bay to Cardiff. I obtained a temporary
job with the Cardiff City Council, and then a permanent job as telephonist with
the Chief Prosecuting Solicitor’s Department. The switchboard was not busy, and
I had leisure to read widely, including St Teresa again, and Plato. I completed
my Degree with the Open University, consisting mostly of Arts modules, but also
some Mathematics and Computing. This retrieved the failure at Bangor, and was
highly stimulating for itself. I was introduced to the world of Mozart’s
operas. I also used this time to prepare parts for a recorder consort which I
led. We had recorders of all sizes from descant to bass, with only one player
to a part, so we could create serious music. A highlight of this experience was
to play the five part canonic fantasia by Byrd in public.
I undertook a major campaign of thought at this time. I put on mental scraps of paper everything that I had heard or read concerning God, both plausible and implausible, and, taking the concept of God as Father as the initial given fact, shuffled all these mental scraps together to see what was consistent and what was inconsistent, and then what was consistent with the consistent things and so on. It took some years, but eventually, I realised that the last piece had silently fitted into place. Plato’s theory of Forms provided a tool of superb precision. The nature of Forms may be illustrated by the description of the Form of beauty in the Symposium:
“A beauty whose nature is marvellous…This beauty is first of all eternal; it neither comes into being nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes; next it is not beautiful in part and ugly in part, nor beautiful at one time and ugly at another, nor beautiful in this relation and ugly in that, nor beautiful here and ugly there, as varying according to its beholders; nor again will this beauty appear…like the beauty of a face or hands or anything else corporeal, or like the beauty of a thought or a science, or like a beauty which has its seat in something other than itself, be it a living thing or the earth or the sky or anything else whatever; [but] as absolute, existing alone with itself, unique, eternal, and all other beautiful things as partaking of it, yet in such a manner that, while they come into being and pass away, it neither undergoes any increase or diminution, nor suffers any change.”
A simpler Form, but a Form nevertheless is the Form of two, by virtue of participation in which two objects are connected in a duality. This too is unique, eternal, exists by itself.
Straight away it can be seen that Forms can either overlap or contain other Forms by a process identical with the vine principle. A triangle participates in the Form of triangle, which is contained in the Form of polygon, which is contained in the Form of plane figures, which is contained in the Form of multi-dimensional figures, which is contained in the Form of shape. Because a horse is alive, the form of horse must overlap the Form of life, or be contained by it. A little thought will show that the Forms which contain simpler Forms are more comprehensive and less numerous than the Forms which are contained.
St Teresa’s cosmology is in seven levels.(1) This is consistent with the body, soul and spirit model. Levels one and two as I see it (2) correspond with the body and its life, levels three to six are operations of the soul. Level three is the level of the beautiful garden of my youth, or the level of most dreams, and the place described again and again in near-death-experiences. Level four is where the heart operates. It is my body at this level which grew when I met Pauline. Level five is not so much discursive thought, as the realm of concepts, illuminated by feeling and information from higher levels. The intellect is a tool for expressing these in verbal form. It does not generate ideas of itself. Level six is the beatific vision. Here the person is aware of the attributes of God, and is powerfully affected by them, not overawed, but agog, moved, surprised, aware that the splendour is living and present, not made of hard gold. The natural response is to adore and worship. Level seven is union.
Returning to our Forms, travelling in the direction of greater comprehensiveness, the Forms become fewer and fewer. In the end there must only be one Form. Is this simply an intellectual construct? Is it rather a matter, I do not say entity, of the utmost splendour? Does the beauty of beautiful things exist? Does the Form of beauty exist therefore? Of course it does. What is more, it must be in some sense more real than the beauty which exists by participation in it. So is the last Form only a concept, or more? Yes of course. And that is a level seven insight.
All things exist by participation in the last Form, except presumably the last Form itself, so that is why the question “Does God exist?” is a contradiction in terms.
Is our last Form sufficient? It contains everything. It is realistic, by definition perceivable in part by observing all that is seen, felt or thought, and is open ended, so that any new insight is not excluded by preconceptions, but our perception of the Form expands to encompass the new observation. We can then throw the angry tyrant who usurped the name God into the bin.
And supposing that the Trinity exists, the structure is really easy to discover. The Persons are Forms which participate fully in the last Form, except for the unity.
Since there are Forms of personhood and of intellect and of act, these must be contained in the last Form. Everything that has a specific character has it by participation in a Form and so in the last Form. Evil does not have character of its own, but is an absence of that which does have character. In a very real sense it does not exist. How then did evil come about? It seems impossible that it should be a Form, or that it could have created itself.
It seems that we have here a whodunit with only one suspect. The last Form must have deliberately withdrawn in some sense in order to allow for evil to occur, because there was nothing else to start with. It probably required omnipotence to do it. Another withdrawal gave rise to the multiplicity of lesser Forms. It is not correct to say that any level is evil, or that any level is more evil than any other level. Much hurt has been caused by this. The fact is, evil can be encountered at any level, except the seventh. We can talk of a multi-dimensional world, defining a dimension fairly strictly as an entity that can have various values, so that it can be represented as a line. There are at least three spatial dimensions, length, breadth and height, and there is the dimension of level, which we can say has various values from one to seven. One writer called this “throughth.” This is not a spatial dimension. All the levels can be experienced at any point. Then there is possibly the degree of absence of character at any level, which is called evil, and there is time, not a point, not a line segment probably, but an entire line or plane or solid. There are other dimensions where possible events exist which were not chosen, but which have to exist for there to have been a choice, and for what Jane Roberts’ Seth calls probable selves.
Why should the Last Form have created evil? Mel Calman produced a book of cartoons full of level seven insights, called “My God”. In one cartoon, God is sitting on a cloud looking rather woebegone. He says “I’m lonely.” In another cartoon he is frowning into a bible and saying “I’ve been misquoted.” In the next cartoon he is peering at a mirror with a delighted expression. He says “I believe in you.”
Of course he is lonely. He is the only one there, or was. He did really well to say “I”, as that is a word that belongs to a person, or a being, not to being itself. A person has boundaries, and self consciousness that derives from interactions with other persons and things outside himself. The last Form has no outside. Moreover, love is a giving of yourself to another, and receiving the other back. If there are no others, God cannot love. The mirror is us, and the whole creation. This is how it worked: First of all he had to create an outside. As everything that is good, real or true is in the last Form, that means he had to create evil. That meant he now had a boundary and was a self. Then if he were to see himself, he had to step into the evil, that is, to stand outside himself in order to look at himself. Or he had to create an equal, standing apart from Himself, to gaze at, and love and as in a mirror to see what he is like. Of course since God is God in his own right, the equal could not simply be created as God, but had to start small and grow into God by using its own choices, and so create itself. Choosing between good things is pleasant, but does not produce the growth required regrettably, at least when one is young. It is when the created being chooses to maintain its character in a surrounding of lack of character that growth occurs. Presumably the greater the surrounding lack of character the greater the opportunity for growth. If the lack of character is total, the growth into God may be total.
At the time I thought that the crucifixion was an example of this process, and that therefore I had understood what it was. I don’t think so any more, firstly because I now know, which I didn’t then, that after a point souls can advance without experiencing pain but only different sorts of pleasure, and Jesus was no doubt well beyond this point, and secondly because I have myself had an experience of total loneliness as I describe below, chapter 6, looking out over Cardiff, and the experience was not painful.
Another theory of the crucifixion is that Jesus took all the evil that the world could throw at him and absorbed it like a sponge and didn’t give it out again, and so made a way of neutralising it. Another theory is that it was a casual example of cruelty with no meaning, or of the priestly caste protecting its own. I cannot accept that Jesus believed that sacrifice was necessary, because he said “Abba”. I therefore do not believe that he offered himself as a sacrifice. One tradition says that another man was crucified in his place, who did believe in sacrifice and the fulfilling of scripture and who could not be persuaded otherwise.
Assuming that this process is correctly described, Jesus and the others grew and grow and will grow, to participate more and more fully in the Form of the Second Person, which is the equal. The love that is between the Originator and the Second Person is the Holy Spirit. Fortunately, as I discovered later, we do not have to do all this growing in one lifetime. We have as many as we need.
I felt the need to visualise Jesus in a new way. If I rejected the sacrifice of blood, and the oh-so-forgiving images in stained glass windows up and down the land, I did not reject my adolescent experience that he is present and available to any who call upon him. I dreamt that I saw him dressed in jeans, sitting on a barrel. He was a young man in perfect health, smiling, interested, and his whole manner said “I am available to any who call upon me.” He made no demands.
Years and decades passed. I was anxious about sinking into a characterless middle way of life, so I prayed either to have agony or ecstasy, but not the middle. This prayer was ruthlessly ignored, and I spent long years in the middle. I did indeed begin to fall asleep, as I feared, and was occasionally woken by others. I said to a nun in Porthcawl that the perfect life was not for me. She said “No?” Also there was Joel Goldsmith’s book The Infinite Way. In the preface it says that he had found something of great value, and that in this book I would find it. I liked this presumption. I liked the book.
Talking of prayer, I came to realise that the heart is a powerhouse. It is not a question of anxiously making petitions to another being who may or may not grant them. Rather: what is in the heart happens. My stepson is dyslexic, and we took him to a place where prayer was made, and we prayed that he should be able to read. We wanted him to be independent, and to earn his own living. He attended Llanover Hall Arts centre, and produced some heartfelt pictures and sculpture. In due course he obtained a job as a stonemason. He carved the cross on the presbytery gable at Llandaff Cathedral. He is still dyslexic.
Pauline wanted to go to church regularly, and I came too, remembering the benefit of regular worship from Church Hostel in the way of objectivity, and the evening out of fluctuating feelings. We went to a simple said eucharist at Llandaff Cathedral. You went, you worshipped, for there was worship in that service, and you came away again. We went for years, and nobody spoke. After a gap we went back for a flower festival, and one person greeted Pauline like a long lost friend and said “Where have you been?” There was fellowship, therefore, of a particularly inward kind. One winter we skidded on ice and damaged the car, and for that reason and because we wanted more overt fellowship, to talk with others about our experiences and listen to their experiences, we joined the local church nearest our flat. For a while I was delighted with it for it seemed warm and intimate, but the fellowship we were seeking did not materialise. I obtained an organist’s post at St Dochdwy’s, Llandough, with a beautiful single manual organ by Father Willis. I had the intention of using this instrument to communicate to others the joy I had within me. I stayed there for several years. I had just enough technique at the start, and learned my craft, including the pedals, while I was in post. It was returning from an organ practise there at a late stage in the mental enquiry described above that I heard an inner voice asking “Do you think it was easy to create evil?” I think this was a helper. We all have them.
I made contemplative prayer in the Roman Catholic cathedral. I felt a bit like Strephon in Iolanthe, where because he was half a fairy, he could creep through a keyhole, but found this not to be much use as his legs were left kicking behind. I seemed to reach high levels with disturbing facility, but only with faculties that seemed divorced from daily living. I wanted somehow to lift the whole seemingly shambolic assembly of levels, not just one or two. I took to heart Max Ehrmann’s piece called “Desiderata”, which says beyond a wholesome discipline to be gentle with yourself. The discipline I used was simply to want consistently to work rightly on all levels, and to reject without anger any spurious emotion or thought. If that were every minute of every day for a decade or two, so be it. The gentleness was not to worry about failures or progress, or sins.
The process of marriage continued. This concerns another’s story, and so is private, but I will share one incident. With the long middling years, we were communicating middling well. I was listening to the great serenade K 361 for thirteen instruments by Mozart. It was a fine performance and I was deeply absorbed. Pauline, frustrated by the shortcomings in our communication turned off the radio. I turned it on again. This was followed by a fight over the volume control. Pauline knew she was being bad. Eventually by some mysterious means we started talking easily and at a deeper level than we had used for years.
It is obvious that the Form of femininity resides within the last Form. I had at one stage deliberately wiped all existing images of God by putting up another image, which was simply a blank. What was left of course was “Abba”, but I thought I should like to produce a feminine image of God. What would God be like as feminine? I had no images to go on. I went to the Catholic cathedral, and prayed to St Teresa for help.
Most movingly, the Goddess was smaller than me, as is natural, and slender. Her face was bronze coloured. Her hair was dark. She presented herself as aged about 30, and was beautiful. Her demeanour was altogether unassertive. She wanted nothing from me. She was wise, so very wise. She would never demand my attention, but would be there whenever I wanted to speak to her. I have often spoken to her, and asked her for help, especially if I had a delicate business to transact, and she has always given what I asked.
One of the means I used to try and be aware of the upper levels was to keep a dream diary. This gave useful insight into the working of the middle levels, but failed as regards the upper levels, so I discontinued it. The last dream in the sequence, number 840, was recorded on 10 October 1991. The following dream was recorded as an isolated phenomenon due to its outstanding quality, on 29 August 1998. The long run of middling years, and some seriously unpleasant experiences with hooligans and bullying bosses, must have sapped my belief in free will, which is the basis of the whole theory outlined above. I recorded that I was feeling that I had no rôle, and empty, but that I had made a decision the previous night that, as it says in Desiderata, “whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.” Note also that it was in the holiday time, when more energy than usual is available for thoughts and feelings to take wing.
Dream: I am sitting on a seat near the back of a single decker bus, on the right hand side. On the back seat, just behind me is a gentle dark skinned young woman, perhaps Indian, late 20s, early 30s. We are talking. I say that our free will is very limited. She asks me if I believe in life after death. I say that for most of my life (i.e. since Bangor) I have believed this with an intensity akin to knowing. She asks me why I say that our free will is limited. At this point a big fleshy-faced man near the front of the bus on the left starts talking across me. I don’t, as I usually do, shut up, but overbear him. I say heatedly that I am trying to put a difficult or big or complex idea into words, or to articulate an idea – bring it to conceptual form. He shuts up. The girl is pleased that I overrode the interrupting man. So I explain about free will being limited. How we are pushed around by every Hitler there is. She says “Never mind about the tyrants of Northern Europe.” I say these tyrants are everywhere. We just have to take the blast of their bombs.
I wake and realise that in her passivity, beauty, gentleness and wisdom she is a showing of my Goddess. I also realise that I was unduly pessimistic about free will: We can choose to switch off or to co-operate in any situation, bombs or no bombs, so our free will is a good deal less limited than I said. The freedom of others, whether to blow me up or to mug me or to steal my car is a given. It doesn’t in fact diminish me in the slightest.
I suspect that everything that happens to us has a reason and a place in our long history. No bombs are faced casually, as if we did not count for anything. I am absolutely certain that we count for everything. I will return to this theme in the "Christianity Refreshed" page.
In some dreams the bodies at level three and above go travelling, and you have a more or less distorted account of the experiences. I said above how I wanted to reach the higher levels through dreams. I kept going in dreams to a lovely library. It was so picturesque that it verged on the quaint, yet it was clearly a very effective place in which to study. Eventually a man asked me “What do you want to learn?” I said I did not know. He said “Do not come again until you do.” In some flying dreams I am flying through gatherings of people as though they were having a party. I want to impress them with my skill in flying. I realise that to them either I am invisible, or a tiresome juvenile.
My Goddess is obviously real in my experience, but I thought it as well to produce another image, say a tall and fair haired Goddess, who is not conditioned by me in any way. She is the Great Goddess. I have not defined her, as she has to be absolutely comprehensive.
A friend who was a Quaker lent me a book by Gina Cerminara about Edgar Cayce, “Many Mansions”, and I saw on the cover that this dealt with healing and reincarnation. I wanted to read about healing, and was set to scoff about reincarnation, but when I saw the great dignity that the doctrine ascribes to human souls, how it makes immortality intrinsic to the soul, or rather Spirit as I discovered later, and not to any religion, how the soul is responsible for its own state, how Karma works to correct mistakes, and how well it fitted with my theory, it seemed self-evidently true. As no church had given me this truth, and as I had been impressed with some of Conan Doyle’s writing, to the great consternation of my friends I started going to a Spiritualist church, to see what else was said, and to read everything about levels and reincarnation that I could get my hands on. They needn’t have worried. The services fell into the same pattern that was causing me problems in the established church, of one person standing in the front, with everyone else passive, and not the work of a living body, where everyone has a vital part to play. Clairvoyance was given, and people were often much moved. This was not a way of experiencing the upper levels. I joined a circle. Surely this would be a body. Surely here I could operate on the upper levels. I attended regularly for years. Here I had experience of guides, which was good and true. One of them said concerning my intellectual enquiry about the atonement that is was good on the basis of the information available to me. The aim of the circle seemed to be to produce people who could stand up in front of a church and give clairvoyance, that is, to be a mouthpiece for other entities, and to prove survival of death. But I wanted to say my own things, I did not want to stand up in front of a church, and I did not need to prove survival of death, so I left, not having experienced the upper levels, but much of interest on level three. My last visit was in May 1989.
Here I will go back in time and resume the account of my external life, including the gruelling experiences mentioned above. We were perpetually short of money. We had some compensation from an accident in Oxford where I was knocked off my motorcycle, which was very useful in setting up our life together, but I was not earning enough for us both. Pauline did some supply teaching, but got all the remedials and no job. I saw her many times collapsed on the settee utterly drained, and knew that this could not continue. Years and years of financial pressure can be dispiriting. We slid helplessly into debt. The Chief prosecuting Solicitor’s department was drafted into the new Crown Prosecution Service in 1986. Here I saw the value of computers in performing large numbers of simple tasks, and started to learn how to operate personal computers, and started to create applications in software. A lot of the time was middling, some was positively enjoyable due to the creativity of designing applications in software, looking after the computers and helping others in their use. Some of the time was darkened by bullying supervisors. I wonder how it is that I was unable to withstand them. Mercifully I was knocked down by a car and spent some months in hospital. On my return to work I had to face the bullies again. Eventually I was off sick with depression. One by one the bullies left, and that solved the problem. I am not particularly concerned with seeking to acquire power to withstand bullies. The aim I had in Bangor, to grow spiritually, has been my aim ever since. The compensation from that accident set us on our feet again financially, for a while.
One extraordinarily attractive aspect of this time was the appearance of recordings by first rate choirs such as the Clerkes of Oxenford, the Tallis Scholars, the Sixteen, and latterly the Cardinall’s Musick. Here was Tudor music in abundance, much of which was new to me. I listened and listened, and followed in scores. The sixteenth century was contemporary in my experience. Bach was avant-garde, and early music was anything before Taverner. As my experience grew, so the Eton Choirbook, Carver, Ludford and Fayrfax became “contemporary”, not “early.” In short I acquired a really high quality education in Tudor Church Music, and recovered a thread that had effectively been lost when my voice broke. For many years I conducted a choir, sharing my discoveries with them, and occasionally with audiences. One high point was singing Byrd’s four part mass by candle light under the barrel vault of Ewenny Priory. Another was when we sang Sweelinck’s Hodie Christus Natus Est, and one person in the audience literally gasped with the beauty of the music. I also sang for many years with a high quality choir under the auspices of the Continuing Education department of the University. Imagine the total delight of singing a six part mass by Ludford ourselves, in Newland church in the Forest of Dean. A soprano gave me a lift, and so I was able to sample the many excellent beers available.
We had been happy for many years in our flat overlooking Cardiff Bay. Then a small number of hooligans on the estate started to make life really unpleasant. Our car was broken into, and driven away, but was recovered. Another car was turned upside down and set on fire. Another had its windows broken. We were given a car by a friend, and this was stolen within one week and set on fire. Another was stolen and broken up for parts. I had trouble with forgiveness here. There is the infringement of rights to property, there is the threat to our financial position, there is the anonymity, and there is the disruption of our chosen lifestyle. Not all of this was due to the local hooligans, but the starting of fires in our stairwell was, and the frequent use of the stairs by them and by their dogs as a lavatory. I kept a shovel by the front door ready. I retched every time I had to use it. It must have been entertaining for them. My stepdaughter came to visit by car. They could not bear it that there were two cars associated with our flat, so they daubed her car with excrement. Eventually we obtained a transfer to a nearby village. We had a large garden, our first, which was like a meadow when we came, but we created something deeply pleasurable.
A friend gave me an hypnotic regression in two sessions. A story emerged of a monk who lived, not in a monastery with a cloister, refectory, dormitory, chapter house and cruciform church, but in a large house. He loved another monk with all his passion. The others told him he should not have particular friendships, but what he felt was so vivid he didn’t listen to them. He thought they were fools. They didn’t know what was real. The other monk fell ill and died. He felt agony at this loss with the same intensity that he had felt love. He lived to be an old man, wrapped up in his own tiny world of thoughts. He wondered ruefully if they had been right to say that he should not have particular friendships. He felt unable to rouse himself to join in what the others were doing, because nothing could have the meaningfulness of his earlier experience. He died easily and unlamented. Taken forward in time, the next image was of a boy skipping around in a field. It was like a breath of fresh air. That was all he had to do. I didn’t get the impression that he lived long after this. Clearly this was a story that concerned the heart closely. I wanted next to see if I could explore the upper levels by this means, but got nowhere. It seems that hypnotic regression is not for satisfying curiosity, but to give information that may be useful in the present life.
I now want to bring my story up to date as regards church. After Llandough I had a ramshackle three manual organ in St Saviour’s Cardiff, followed by a beautiful two manual instrument in excellent condition in the Methodist church in Dinas Powys. I was attracted to Methodism not only by the organ, but by John Wesley’s doctrine of entire sanctification and the class system, whereby members meet together to discuss their experiences. I found that the doctrine was not mentioned and that the class system was operated more in theory than in practice, but the singing was glorious. I felt that I was giving out and receiving back. I started to master some pieces by Bach. After some years, I was asked to sing for a service at Llandaff Cathedral. I realised that this was something I could do regularly, so I became a Lay Clerk. Eventually I gave up organ playing altogether. It was the long sermons that spoiled the experience. I said to myself that on any reasonable computation I have lived more than half my life. Do I really want to spend the rest of it writhing with boredom listening to sermons? Four strands came together at Llandaff, that is, church music, singing, a beautiful Cathedral building, and being a necessary part of a body, even though it was a musical rather than a spiritual body. In many ways I felt I had come home. To misquote Ps 84 slightly: Even the singers have a home at thine altars, who stand ever praising thee, My King and my God.
We attended Charismatic Renewal days in Brecon Cathedral, and elsewhere. We also attended a group which called themselves Gnostics. They talked of the Essence, which corresponds with level seven, and of egos, which are constructions that get in the way of progress. They also talked of the inner mother. I told them of my Goddess.
I had a remarkable Charismatic Renewal week in Carmarthen with Roman Catholics in 1986. There were excellent addresses on issues of spirituality by Pat Collins, and quiet joyous worship. Throughout the week we could feel something building up. At the end of the week it was released in a great wave of worship. Their rules, to their expressed intense disappointment, did not allow those who were not Catholics to share communion. We were welcome to come for a blessing. We had separate eucharists in a room on the campus, at times which did not clash with other events. At one of these, every Catholic who was there attended and came up for a blessing. It was incredibly moving. At one renewal day, I was sharing in a powerful experience of worship such as is apt to occur on these days, and it was real, and shared, with no divisions. When they started the eucharist, which was not shared, it felt not real. I felt that God will not submit to the outpouring of his grace being delayed until men can agree with each other. He will give his grace: if not in the eucharist, then outside it. At the same time the eucharist is drained of meaning.
Once, not long after we moved to Wales, we were on holiday in Haverfordwest, and talking with the vicar there about the eucharist, and he spoke in deep distress about how some nonconformists treated elements that were not consumed. He said they told him they gave them to the birds. I asked myself if they really were committing sacrilege, and saw that they were not. On the other hand, did I believe that a high church person adoring before a tabernacle was committing idolatry? No I did not. He was worshipping Christ in the consecrated wafer. I had to abandon the idea that the eucharist was one specific thing, and to see that it was what each person made of it. The next question was “What do I make of it?” The answer was “Not a lot.” It had lost its cultic, sacrificial significance some time ago, in my mind at least. It might have had significance as part of a living fellowship, to express the common life, but I had not experienced such fellowship.
Later I went with a friend who is a vicar’s wife, to a singing day in Trelleck. She spoke with great intimacy of the eucharist, saying it did not mean much to her. She had expressed what I had been feeling for some time. Later in that memorable day, sitting in the churchyard, I said how I believed that God was fully present in every place. Didn’t that mean he was fully present, now, in this churchyard? How is it that I could not feel him at all? That of course related to the long, long standing desire to experience the upper levels that I have written about so exhaustively. Returning to the eucharist: when I was in hospital after being knocked down by a car, a priest came with his wafer to give me communion. He thought he would bestow upon me an inestimable benefit, nothing less than Christ himself. Using his language but not his thought, I said Christ was already here with me. He said doubtfully, “In some sense, perhaps.” I said “In every sense” and sent him away. For some reason my system tenaciously resisted giving up the eucharist, even in the face of all these thoughts and experiences. I might add that for a time when listening to a fine mass setting, I felt what I once felt long ago in eucharist services. Two dreams were necessary before I was clear of it. In one I was at a meal of bread and wine. I thought that this was rather an odd menu. I wondered whether the bread would be better with butter on it, or whether that would spoil the taste of the wine. It was only when I woke that I realised the significance of bread and wine, and realised that in the dream it had had no extra significance whatsoever. The other dream finished the job. Some of the language is revolting, but so is that of the eucharist. The straightforward innocent face presumably refers to the innocence of Christians who mean only good by the eucharist. A piece of background information was that I met with the friend mentioned above and her husband on the previous day. He had joked about someone reacting in horror to a high church service: “…and they use real blood.” I said this had such sinister overtones as to be truly funny.
Dream 811. 17 January 1989: I am at a party with a sizeable crowd. I go out of the building and down some steps, with a pair of revelling young women behind me. A man says we might not like to go down there. I make to go on, but I realise that he wants us to go away. A baby is being born. I catch a glimpse of the mother’s sweating limbs. I do go, and persuade the two revellers to go too. When we are back at the surface, the man says he will have to drink the baby’s blood. I say words to try and soothe him away from this revolting necessity. He has an open, straightforward, innocent face. I ask N (in reality an unorthodox Catholic from work) why he wants to do this. She says a baby has clean karma, and he can have it by this means. I say that according to the theory of reincarnation, the baby by no means has clean karma.
Comment: You cannot latch on to another person’s excellence by any means.
Another factor in the demise of the eucharist in my estimation was the simple fact that I had given it careful thought for a long time, and for all my thinking, and feeling too, had found nothing. I began to see this as evidence in itself. Shall we say that there is a great mystery in the eucharist which is too deep for human understanding, well, it is too deep for human understanding, isn’t it? That is to say, there is nothing to concern us, and nothing for a priestly caste to confer upon us.
I cannot see that there is a coherent story behind my experiences of the eucharist, but I have written accurately of what it felt like at different times. In particular, I felt great hunger for it, then nothing, and then I find I felt a great deal, but in a different sense, then I became disenchanted, although it had always had unacceptable elements, and found that it was deeply rooted in my soul, needing dreams to dislodge it. Later as you will see, I was given a simple, workable meaning for it, but as an act of communal worship, with no inward significance. Anything once real in it is now experienced in different ways. Nothing is lost.
1. St Teresa uses her seven categories in a different way from that adopted here.
2. I have used the work of many other writers in this analysis, for example Shirley Maclaine's Going Within.
I undertook a major campaign of thought at this time. I put on mental scraps of paper everything that I had heard or read concerning God, both plausible and implausible, and, taking the concept of God as Father as the initial given fact, shuffled all these mental scraps together to see what was consistent and what was inconsistent, and then what was consistent with the consistent things and so on. It took some years, but eventually, I realised that the last piece had silently fitted into place. Plato’s theory of Forms provided a tool of superb precision. The nature of Forms may be illustrated by the description of the Form of beauty in the Symposium:
“A beauty whose nature is marvellous…This beauty is first of all eternal; it neither comes into being nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes; next it is not beautiful in part and ugly in part, nor beautiful at one time and ugly at another, nor beautiful in this relation and ugly in that, nor beautiful here and ugly there, as varying according to its beholders; nor again will this beauty appear…like the beauty of a face or hands or anything else corporeal, or like the beauty of a thought or a science, or like a beauty which has its seat in something other than itself, be it a living thing or the earth or the sky or anything else whatever; [but] as absolute, existing alone with itself, unique, eternal, and all other beautiful things as partaking of it, yet in such a manner that, while they come into being and pass away, it neither undergoes any increase or diminution, nor suffers any change.”
A simpler Form, but a Form nevertheless is the Form of two, by virtue of participation in which two objects are connected in a duality. This too is unique, eternal, exists by itself.
Straight away it can be seen that Forms can either overlap or contain other Forms by a process identical with the vine principle. A triangle participates in the Form of triangle, which is contained in the Form of polygon, which is contained in the Form of plane figures, which is contained in the Form of multi-dimensional figures, which is contained in the Form of shape. Because a horse is alive, the form of horse must overlap the Form of life, or be contained by it. A little thought will show that the Forms which contain simpler Forms are more comprehensive and less numerous than the Forms which are contained.
St Teresa’s cosmology is in seven levels.(1) This is consistent with the body, soul and spirit model. Levels one and two as I see it (2) correspond with the body and its life, levels three to six are operations of the soul. Level three is the level of the beautiful garden of my youth, or the level of most dreams, and the place described again and again in near-death-experiences. Level four is where the heart operates. It is my body at this level which grew when I met Pauline. Level five is not so much discursive thought, as the realm of concepts, illuminated by feeling and information from higher levels. The intellect is a tool for expressing these in verbal form. It does not generate ideas of itself. Level six is the beatific vision. Here the person is aware of the attributes of God, and is powerfully affected by them, not overawed, but agog, moved, surprised, aware that the splendour is living and present, not made of hard gold. The natural response is to adore and worship. Level seven is union.
Returning to our Forms, travelling in the direction of greater comprehensiveness, the Forms become fewer and fewer. In the end there must only be one Form. Is this simply an intellectual construct? Is it rather a matter, I do not say entity, of the utmost splendour? Does the beauty of beautiful things exist? Does the Form of beauty exist therefore? Of course it does. What is more, it must be in some sense more real than the beauty which exists by participation in it. So is the last Form only a concept, or more? Yes of course. And that is a level seven insight.
All things exist by participation in the last Form, except presumably the last Form itself, so that is why the question “Does God exist?” is a contradiction in terms.
Is our last Form sufficient? It contains everything. It is realistic, by definition perceivable in part by observing all that is seen, felt or thought, and is open ended, so that any new insight is not excluded by preconceptions, but our perception of the Form expands to encompass the new observation. We can then throw the angry tyrant who usurped the name God into the bin.
And supposing that the Trinity exists, the structure is really easy to discover. The Persons are Forms which participate fully in the last Form, except for the unity.
Since there are Forms of personhood and of intellect and of act, these must be contained in the last Form. Everything that has a specific character has it by participation in a Form and so in the last Form. Evil does not have character of its own, but is an absence of that which does have character. In a very real sense it does not exist. How then did evil come about? It seems impossible that it should be a Form, or that it could have created itself.
It seems that we have here a whodunit with only one suspect. The last Form must have deliberately withdrawn in some sense in order to allow for evil to occur, because there was nothing else to start with. It probably required omnipotence to do it. Another withdrawal gave rise to the multiplicity of lesser Forms. It is not correct to say that any level is evil, or that any level is more evil than any other level. Much hurt has been caused by this. The fact is, evil can be encountered at any level, except the seventh. We can talk of a multi-dimensional world, defining a dimension fairly strictly as an entity that can have various values, so that it can be represented as a line. There are at least three spatial dimensions, length, breadth and height, and there is the dimension of level, which we can say has various values from one to seven. One writer called this “throughth.” This is not a spatial dimension. All the levels can be experienced at any point. Then there is possibly the degree of absence of character at any level, which is called evil, and there is time, not a point, not a line segment probably, but an entire line or plane or solid. There are other dimensions where possible events exist which were not chosen, but which have to exist for there to have been a choice, and for what Jane Roberts’ Seth calls probable selves.
Why should the Last Form have created evil? Mel Calman produced a book of cartoons full of level seven insights, called “My God”. In one cartoon, God is sitting on a cloud looking rather woebegone. He says “I’m lonely.” In another cartoon he is frowning into a bible and saying “I’ve been misquoted.” In the next cartoon he is peering at a mirror with a delighted expression. He says “I believe in you.”
Of course he is lonely. He is the only one there, or was. He did really well to say “I”, as that is a word that belongs to a person, or a being, not to being itself. A person has boundaries, and self consciousness that derives from interactions with other persons and things outside himself. The last Form has no outside. Moreover, love is a giving of yourself to another, and receiving the other back. If there are no others, God cannot love. The mirror is us, and the whole creation. This is how it worked: First of all he had to create an outside. As everything that is good, real or true is in the last Form, that means he had to create evil. That meant he now had a boundary and was a self. Then if he were to see himself, he had to step into the evil, that is, to stand outside himself in order to look at himself. Or he had to create an equal, standing apart from Himself, to gaze at, and love and as in a mirror to see what he is like. Of course since God is God in his own right, the equal could not simply be created as God, but had to start small and grow into God by using its own choices, and so create itself. Choosing between good things is pleasant, but does not produce the growth required regrettably, at least when one is young. It is when the created being chooses to maintain its character in a surrounding of lack of character that growth occurs. Presumably the greater the surrounding lack of character the greater the opportunity for growth. If the lack of character is total, the growth into God may be total.
At the time I thought that the crucifixion was an example of this process, and that therefore I had understood what it was. I don’t think so any more, firstly because I now know, which I didn’t then, that after a point souls can advance without experiencing pain but only different sorts of pleasure, and Jesus was no doubt well beyond this point, and secondly because I have myself had an experience of total loneliness as I describe below, chapter 6, looking out over Cardiff, and the experience was not painful.
Another theory of the crucifixion is that Jesus took all the evil that the world could throw at him and absorbed it like a sponge and didn’t give it out again, and so made a way of neutralising it. Another theory is that it was a casual example of cruelty with no meaning, or of the priestly caste protecting its own. I cannot accept that Jesus believed that sacrifice was necessary, because he said “Abba”. I therefore do not believe that he offered himself as a sacrifice. One tradition says that another man was crucified in his place, who did believe in sacrifice and the fulfilling of scripture and who could not be persuaded otherwise.
Assuming that this process is correctly described, Jesus and the others grew and grow and will grow, to participate more and more fully in the Form of the Second Person, which is the equal. The love that is between the Originator and the Second Person is the Holy Spirit. Fortunately, as I discovered later, we do not have to do all this growing in one lifetime. We have as many as we need.
I felt the need to visualise Jesus in a new way. If I rejected the sacrifice of blood, and the oh-so-forgiving images in stained glass windows up and down the land, I did not reject my adolescent experience that he is present and available to any who call upon him. I dreamt that I saw him dressed in jeans, sitting on a barrel. He was a young man in perfect health, smiling, interested, and his whole manner said “I am available to any who call upon me.” He made no demands.
Years and decades passed. I was anxious about sinking into a characterless middle way of life, so I prayed either to have agony or ecstasy, but not the middle. This prayer was ruthlessly ignored, and I spent long years in the middle. I did indeed begin to fall asleep, as I feared, and was occasionally woken by others. I said to a nun in Porthcawl that the perfect life was not for me. She said “No?” Also there was Joel Goldsmith’s book The Infinite Way. In the preface it says that he had found something of great value, and that in this book I would find it. I liked this presumption. I liked the book.
Talking of prayer, I came to realise that the heart is a powerhouse. It is not a question of anxiously making petitions to another being who may or may not grant them. Rather: what is in the heart happens. My stepson is dyslexic, and we took him to a place where prayer was made, and we prayed that he should be able to read. We wanted him to be independent, and to earn his own living. He attended Llanover Hall Arts centre, and produced some heartfelt pictures and sculpture. In due course he obtained a job as a stonemason. He carved the cross on the presbytery gable at Llandaff Cathedral. He is still dyslexic.
Pauline wanted to go to church regularly, and I came too, remembering the benefit of regular worship from Church Hostel in the way of objectivity, and the evening out of fluctuating feelings. We went to a simple said eucharist at Llandaff Cathedral. You went, you worshipped, for there was worship in that service, and you came away again. We went for years, and nobody spoke. After a gap we went back for a flower festival, and one person greeted Pauline like a long lost friend and said “Where have you been?” There was fellowship, therefore, of a particularly inward kind. One winter we skidded on ice and damaged the car, and for that reason and because we wanted more overt fellowship, to talk with others about our experiences and listen to their experiences, we joined the local church nearest our flat. For a while I was delighted with it for it seemed warm and intimate, but the fellowship we were seeking did not materialise. I obtained an organist’s post at St Dochdwy’s, Llandough, with a beautiful single manual organ by Father Willis. I had the intention of using this instrument to communicate to others the joy I had within me. I stayed there for several years. I had just enough technique at the start, and learned my craft, including the pedals, while I was in post. It was returning from an organ practise there at a late stage in the mental enquiry described above that I heard an inner voice asking “Do you think it was easy to create evil?” I think this was a helper. We all have them.
I made contemplative prayer in the Roman Catholic cathedral. I felt a bit like Strephon in Iolanthe, where because he was half a fairy, he could creep through a keyhole, but found this not to be much use as his legs were left kicking behind. I seemed to reach high levels with disturbing facility, but only with faculties that seemed divorced from daily living. I wanted somehow to lift the whole seemingly shambolic assembly of levels, not just one or two. I took to heart Max Ehrmann’s piece called “Desiderata”, which says beyond a wholesome discipline to be gentle with yourself. The discipline I used was simply to want consistently to work rightly on all levels, and to reject without anger any spurious emotion or thought. If that were every minute of every day for a decade or two, so be it. The gentleness was not to worry about failures or progress, or sins.
The process of marriage continued. This concerns another’s story, and so is private, but I will share one incident. With the long middling years, we were communicating middling well. I was listening to the great serenade K 361 for thirteen instruments by Mozart. It was a fine performance and I was deeply absorbed. Pauline, frustrated by the shortcomings in our communication turned off the radio. I turned it on again. This was followed by a fight over the volume control. Pauline knew she was being bad. Eventually by some mysterious means we started talking easily and at a deeper level than we had used for years.
It is obvious that the Form of femininity resides within the last Form. I had at one stage deliberately wiped all existing images of God by putting up another image, which was simply a blank. What was left of course was “Abba”, but I thought I should like to produce a feminine image of God. What would God be like as feminine? I had no images to go on. I went to the Catholic cathedral, and prayed to St Teresa for help.
Most movingly, the Goddess was smaller than me, as is natural, and slender. Her face was bronze coloured. Her hair was dark. She presented herself as aged about 30, and was beautiful. Her demeanour was altogether unassertive. She wanted nothing from me. She was wise, so very wise. She would never demand my attention, but would be there whenever I wanted to speak to her. I have often spoken to her, and asked her for help, especially if I had a delicate business to transact, and she has always given what I asked.
One of the means I used to try and be aware of the upper levels was to keep a dream diary. This gave useful insight into the working of the middle levels, but failed as regards the upper levels, so I discontinued it. The last dream in the sequence, number 840, was recorded on 10 October 1991. The following dream was recorded as an isolated phenomenon due to its outstanding quality, on 29 August 1998. The long run of middling years, and some seriously unpleasant experiences with hooligans and bullying bosses, must have sapped my belief in free will, which is the basis of the whole theory outlined above. I recorded that I was feeling that I had no rôle, and empty, but that I had made a decision the previous night that, as it says in Desiderata, “whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.” Note also that it was in the holiday time, when more energy than usual is available for thoughts and feelings to take wing.
Dream: I am sitting on a seat near the back of a single decker bus, on the right hand side. On the back seat, just behind me is a gentle dark skinned young woman, perhaps Indian, late 20s, early 30s. We are talking. I say that our free will is very limited. She asks me if I believe in life after death. I say that for most of my life (i.e. since Bangor) I have believed this with an intensity akin to knowing. She asks me why I say that our free will is limited. At this point a big fleshy-faced man near the front of the bus on the left starts talking across me. I don’t, as I usually do, shut up, but overbear him. I say heatedly that I am trying to put a difficult or big or complex idea into words, or to articulate an idea – bring it to conceptual form. He shuts up. The girl is pleased that I overrode the interrupting man. So I explain about free will being limited. How we are pushed around by every Hitler there is. She says “Never mind about the tyrants of Northern Europe.” I say these tyrants are everywhere. We just have to take the blast of their bombs.
I wake and realise that in her passivity, beauty, gentleness and wisdom she is a showing of my Goddess. I also realise that I was unduly pessimistic about free will: We can choose to switch off or to co-operate in any situation, bombs or no bombs, so our free will is a good deal less limited than I said. The freedom of others, whether to blow me up or to mug me or to steal my car is a given. It doesn’t in fact diminish me in the slightest.
I suspect that everything that happens to us has a reason and a place in our long history. No bombs are faced casually, as if we did not count for anything. I am absolutely certain that we count for everything. I will return to this theme in the "Christianity Refreshed" page.
In some dreams the bodies at level three and above go travelling, and you have a more or less distorted account of the experiences. I said above how I wanted to reach the higher levels through dreams. I kept going in dreams to a lovely library. It was so picturesque that it verged on the quaint, yet it was clearly a very effective place in which to study. Eventually a man asked me “What do you want to learn?” I said I did not know. He said “Do not come again until you do.” In some flying dreams I am flying through gatherings of people as though they were having a party. I want to impress them with my skill in flying. I realise that to them either I am invisible, or a tiresome juvenile.
My Goddess is obviously real in my experience, but I thought it as well to produce another image, say a tall and fair haired Goddess, who is not conditioned by me in any way. She is the Great Goddess. I have not defined her, as she has to be absolutely comprehensive.
A friend who was a Quaker lent me a book by Gina Cerminara about Edgar Cayce, “Many Mansions”, and I saw on the cover that this dealt with healing and reincarnation. I wanted to read about healing, and was set to scoff about reincarnation, but when I saw the great dignity that the doctrine ascribes to human souls, how it makes immortality intrinsic to the soul, or rather Spirit as I discovered later, and not to any religion, how the soul is responsible for its own state, how Karma works to correct mistakes, and how well it fitted with my theory, it seemed self-evidently true. As no church had given me this truth, and as I had been impressed with some of Conan Doyle’s writing, to the great consternation of my friends I started going to a Spiritualist church, to see what else was said, and to read everything about levels and reincarnation that I could get my hands on. They needn’t have worried. The services fell into the same pattern that was causing me problems in the established church, of one person standing in the front, with everyone else passive, and not the work of a living body, where everyone has a vital part to play. Clairvoyance was given, and people were often much moved. This was not a way of experiencing the upper levels. I joined a circle. Surely this would be a body. Surely here I could operate on the upper levels. I attended regularly for years. Here I had experience of guides, which was good and true. One of them said concerning my intellectual enquiry about the atonement that is was good on the basis of the information available to me. The aim of the circle seemed to be to produce people who could stand up in front of a church and give clairvoyance, that is, to be a mouthpiece for other entities, and to prove survival of death. But I wanted to say my own things, I did not want to stand up in front of a church, and I did not need to prove survival of death, so I left, not having experienced the upper levels, but much of interest on level three. My last visit was in May 1989.
Here I will go back in time and resume the account of my external life, including the gruelling experiences mentioned above. We were perpetually short of money. We had some compensation from an accident in Oxford where I was knocked off my motorcycle, which was very useful in setting up our life together, but I was not earning enough for us both. Pauline did some supply teaching, but got all the remedials and no job. I saw her many times collapsed on the settee utterly drained, and knew that this could not continue. Years and years of financial pressure can be dispiriting. We slid helplessly into debt. The Chief prosecuting Solicitor’s department was drafted into the new Crown Prosecution Service in 1986. Here I saw the value of computers in performing large numbers of simple tasks, and started to learn how to operate personal computers, and started to create applications in software. A lot of the time was middling, some was positively enjoyable due to the creativity of designing applications in software, looking after the computers and helping others in their use. Some of the time was darkened by bullying supervisors. I wonder how it is that I was unable to withstand them. Mercifully I was knocked down by a car and spent some months in hospital. On my return to work I had to face the bullies again. Eventually I was off sick with depression. One by one the bullies left, and that solved the problem. I am not particularly concerned with seeking to acquire power to withstand bullies. The aim I had in Bangor, to grow spiritually, has been my aim ever since. The compensation from that accident set us on our feet again financially, for a while.
One extraordinarily attractive aspect of this time was the appearance of recordings by first rate choirs such as the Clerkes of Oxenford, the Tallis Scholars, the Sixteen, and latterly the Cardinall’s Musick. Here was Tudor music in abundance, much of which was new to me. I listened and listened, and followed in scores. The sixteenth century was contemporary in my experience. Bach was avant-garde, and early music was anything before Taverner. As my experience grew, so the Eton Choirbook, Carver, Ludford and Fayrfax became “contemporary”, not “early.” In short I acquired a really high quality education in Tudor Church Music, and recovered a thread that had effectively been lost when my voice broke. For many years I conducted a choir, sharing my discoveries with them, and occasionally with audiences. One high point was singing Byrd’s four part mass by candle light under the barrel vault of Ewenny Priory. Another was when we sang Sweelinck’s Hodie Christus Natus Est, and one person in the audience literally gasped with the beauty of the music. I also sang for many years with a high quality choir under the auspices of the Continuing Education department of the University. Imagine the total delight of singing a six part mass by Ludford ourselves, in Newland church in the Forest of Dean. A soprano gave me a lift, and so I was able to sample the many excellent beers available.
We had been happy for many years in our flat overlooking Cardiff Bay. Then a small number of hooligans on the estate started to make life really unpleasant. Our car was broken into, and driven away, but was recovered. Another car was turned upside down and set on fire. Another had its windows broken. We were given a car by a friend, and this was stolen within one week and set on fire. Another was stolen and broken up for parts. I had trouble with forgiveness here. There is the infringement of rights to property, there is the threat to our financial position, there is the anonymity, and there is the disruption of our chosen lifestyle. Not all of this was due to the local hooligans, but the starting of fires in our stairwell was, and the frequent use of the stairs by them and by their dogs as a lavatory. I kept a shovel by the front door ready. I retched every time I had to use it. It must have been entertaining for them. My stepdaughter came to visit by car. They could not bear it that there were two cars associated with our flat, so they daubed her car with excrement. Eventually we obtained a transfer to a nearby village. We had a large garden, our first, which was like a meadow when we came, but we created something deeply pleasurable.
A friend gave me an hypnotic regression in two sessions. A story emerged of a monk who lived, not in a monastery with a cloister, refectory, dormitory, chapter house and cruciform church, but in a large house. He loved another monk with all his passion. The others told him he should not have particular friendships, but what he felt was so vivid he didn’t listen to them. He thought they were fools. They didn’t know what was real. The other monk fell ill and died. He felt agony at this loss with the same intensity that he had felt love. He lived to be an old man, wrapped up in his own tiny world of thoughts. He wondered ruefully if they had been right to say that he should not have particular friendships. He felt unable to rouse himself to join in what the others were doing, because nothing could have the meaningfulness of his earlier experience. He died easily and unlamented. Taken forward in time, the next image was of a boy skipping around in a field. It was like a breath of fresh air. That was all he had to do. I didn’t get the impression that he lived long after this. Clearly this was a story that concerned the heart closely. I wanted next to see if I could explore the upper levels by this means, but got nowhere. It seems that hypnotic regression is not for satisfying curiosity, but to give information that may be useful in the present life.
I now want to bring my story up to date as regards church. After Llandough I had a ramshackle three manual organ in St Saviour’s Cardiff, followed by a beautiful two manual instrument in excellent condition in the Methodist church in Dinas Powys. I was attracted to Methodism not only by the organ, but by John Wesley’s doctrine of entire sanctification and the class system, whereby members meet together to discuss their experiences. I found that the doctrine was not mentioned and that the class system was operated more in theory than in practice, but the singing was glorious. I felt that I was giving out and receiving back. I started to master some pieces by Bach. After some years, I was asked to sing for a service at Llandaff Cathedral. I realised that this was something I could do regularly, so I became a Lay Clerk. Eventually I gave up organ playing altogether. It was the long sermons that spoiled the experience. I said to myself that on any reasonable computation I have lived more than half my life. Do I really want to spend the rest of it writhing with boredom listening to sermons? Four strands came together at Llandaff, that is, church music, singing, a beautiful Cathedral building, and being a necessary part of a body, even though it was a musical rather than a spiritual body. In many ways I felt I had come home. To misquote Ps 84 slightly: Even the singers have a home at thine altars, who stand ever praising thee, My King and my God.
We attended Charismatic Renewal days in Brecon Cathedral, and elsewhere. We also attended a group which called themselves Gnostics. They talked of the Essence, which corresponds with level seven, and of egos, which are constructions that get in the way of progress. They also talked of the inner mother. I told them of my Goddess.
I had a remarkable Charismatic Renewal week in Carmarthen with Roman Catholics in 1986. There were excellent addresses on issues of spirituality by Pat Collins, and quiet joyous worship. Throughout the week we could feel something building up. At the end of the week it was released in a great wave of worship. Their rules, to their expressed intense disappointment, did not allow those who were not Catholics to share communion. We were welcome to come for a blessing. We had separate eucharists in a room on the campus, at times which did not clash with other events. At one of these, every Catholic who was there attended and came up for a blessing. It was incredibly moving. At one renewal day, I was sharing in a powerful experience of worship such as is apt to occur on these days, and it was real, and shared, with no divisions. When they started the eucharist, which was not shared, it felt not real. I felt that God will not submit to the outpouring of his grace being delayed until men can agree with each other. He will give his grace: if not in the eucharist, then outside it. At the same time the eucharist is drained of meaning.
Once, not long after we moved to Wales, we were on holiday in Haverfordwest, and talking with the vicar there about the eucharist, and he spoke in deep distress about how some nonconformists treated elements that were not consumed. He said they told him they gave them to the birds. I asked myself if they really were committing sacrilege, and saw that they were not. On the other hand, did I believe that a high church person adoring before a tabernacle was committing idolatry? No I did not. He was worshipping Christ in the consecrated wafer. I had to abandon the idea that the eucharist was one specific thing, and to see that it was what each person made of it. The next question was “What do I make of it?” The answer was “Not a lot.” It had lost its cultic, sacrificial significance some time ago, in my mind at least. It might have had significance as part of a living fellowship, to express the common life, but I had not experienced such fellowship.
Later I went with a friend who is a vicar’s wife, to a singing day in Trelleck. She spoke with great intimacy of the eucharist, saying it did not mean much to her. She had expressed what I had been feeling for some time. Later in that memorable day, sitting in the churchyard, I said how I believed that God was fully present in every place. Didn’t that mean he was fully present, now, in this churchyard? How is it that I could not feel him at all? That of course related to the long, long standing desire to experience the upper levels that I have written about so exhaustively. Returning to the eucharist: when I was in hospital after being knocked down by a car, a priest came with his wafer to give me communion. He thought he would bestow upon me an inestimable benefit, nothing less than Christ himself. Using his language but not his thought, I said Christ was already here with me. He said doubtfully, “In some sense, perhaps.” I said “In every sense” and sent him away. For some reason my system tenaciously resisted giving up the eucharist, even in the face of all these thoughts and experiences. I might add that for a time when listening to a fine mass setting, I felt what I once felt long ago in eucharist services. Two dreams were necessary before I was clear of it. In one I was at a meal of bread and wine. I thought that this was rather an odd menu. I wondered whether the bread would be better with butter on it, or whether that would spoil the taste of the wine. It was only when I woke that I realised the significance of bread and wine, and realised that in the dream it had had no extra significance whatsoever. The other dream finished the job. Some of the language is revolting, but so is that of the eucharist. The straightforward innocent face presumably refers to the innocence of Christians who mean only good by the eucharist. A piece of background information was that I met with the friend mentioned above and her husband on the previous day. He had joked about someone reacting in horror to a high church service: “…and they use real blood.” I said this had such sinister overtones as to be truly funny.
Dream 811. 17 January 1989: I am at a party with a sizeable crowd. I go out of the building and down some steps, with a pair of revelling young women behind me. A man says we might not like to go down there. I make to go on, but I realise that he wants us to go away. A baby is being born. I catch a glimpse of the mother’s sweating limbs. I do go, and persuade the two revellers to go too. When we are back at the surface, the man says he will have to drink the baby’s blood. I say words to try and soothe him away from this revolting necessity. He has an open, straightforward, innocent face. I ask N (in reality an unorthodox Catholic from work) why he wants to do this. She says a baby has clean karma, and he can have it by this means. I say that according to the theory of reincarnation, the baby by no means has clean karma.
Comment: You cannot latch on to another person’s excellence by any means.
Another factor in the demise of the eucharist in my estimation was the simple fact that I had given it careful thought for a long time, and for all my thinking, and feeling too, had found nothing. I began to see this as evidence in itself. Shall we say that there is a great mystery in the eucharist which is too deep for human understanding, well, it is too deep for human understanding, isn’t it? That is to say, there is nothing to concern us, and nothing for a priestly caste to confer upon us.
I cannot see that there is a coherent story behind my experiences of the eucharist, but I have written accurately of what it felt like at different times. In particular, I felt great hunger for it, then nothing, and then I find I felt a great deal, but in a different sense, then I became disenchanted, although it had always had unacceptable elements, and found that it was deeply rooted in my soul, needing dreams to dislodge it. Later as you will see, I was given a simple, workable meaning for it, but as an act of communal worship, with no inward significance. Anything once real in it is now experienced in different ways. Nothing is lost.
1. St Teresa uses her seven categories in a different way from that adopted here.
2. I have used the work of many other writers in this analysis, for example Shirley Maclaine's Going Within.