SHACK 1029 SO FORLORN

Forlorn Photography

I have experienced being forlorn often. Sometimes in a crowd, with friends and family and of course by myself.

When I lived in Minorca in the back of beyond so to speak, the quietness and isolation was like a suffocating blanket. One evening I was determined to come home and I decided to go to a gate where a field used to be enclosed by fences, so this gate like me stood alone in the once fenced field.

As I stood in a lonely heavy mood I leaned on the gate and could just barely see Algiers and it was about 217 nautical miles and I looked at the faint outline and I felt more isolated. I could not speak Spanish, my nearest neighbours were two miles away and so the suffocation and heaviness engulfed me.

I got more morose and then suddenly out of nowhere a sort of click and switch happened and it seemed the precursor for this was a sort of desperation, I decided somehow within me, not so consciously as if I should not think or indulge in ways out and compromises but to face and let go in my 'head' so to speak and surrender. I surrendered and gave in, how I do not know, perhaps because of meditation when I had just stared at the oppression and not desperately trying to escape the anticipated ogre it just evaporated and somehow I had the understanding, perhaps intuitively, that this was just a mind thing, a mind feeling translated into the body as depression or being flat and unwelcome.

I was beginning and still am to realise how subtle these feelings can creep, prowl, sneak in and silently like a snake slither into the conscious awareness. The spider that is there when it appears to have caught your attention and looking at it, it scuttles away as if its senses your fear and startled waves or vibes and flees before it is caught.  

These innuendoes are seemingly so real and can be so powerful as to overwhelm one that they usurp one's sense of well being and self and they take over as one's reality.

Once one can see through them by not giving them attention or energy, certainly not pushing them down, distracting oneself with some cop out, nor encouraging them in order to analyse and find the reason in the past where perhaps abuse and trauma laid hold of the unconscious and planted the seed there, BUT just to look with interest and attention with no wish or thought, just watch, look without bias, attention without intention.

One then may see the substance of this feeling in thought form or sensation and realise its nature, yes it is just a thought and because it has no real lasting energy, only that which I give it, its foundations and staying power diminish. Just acknowledging that this emotion, this drag down as it were, seemed to spontaneously evaporate, disappear and vanish into thin air so to speak, was a testimony of the 'nothingness' the non substance and the validity and so perceived reality and credence of thought. Mere smoke and haze without a solid foundation only an assumed one by inculcation. 

Then I realised it is the thought, the emotion, the brainwashing that had conditioned me to feel I am alone in Minorca without a leg to stand on, I missed the crowds at the football matches, the shouting, the tobacco smoke, the comraderies, my work, my mates, family and Uncle Tom Cobley and all, such was conditioning, yes it may be true that if stayed around longer I would be or get used to this life and be reconditioned, yet my stay would  not be long enough.

What I learned and only now coming to terms with and having written about so much and presented in workshops is that When One sees through not by logic or intellectual understanding which I already knew, but by realising that the change from life in the UK and in Spain and isolated were but inculcated brainwashed established apparent real and here to stay they were my foundation and raison d'etre, my very belief for living and I was suffering withdrawal symptoms.

The lesson only becomes a real, if anything is real, that the feelings I felt at that gate before the 'break through' as it were, was the energetic magnetic containment field, a sort of a CD / DVD library and encompassed by a cloud of energy as sum of the total beliefs, agendas and experiences.

Furthermore I realised the actual psychosomatic interface between thought, emotion and physical feelings and how they interrelated, the picture thought, the emotions thereof and the peptide chemicals produced in the brain to the body as the neural peptide cascade as in psychoneuroimmunology (PNI). So real were the feeling of longing that I felt physically wiped out and sick to the stomach.

It has taken since the mid seventies for me to feel and not think all this, so hard is my brainwashing, so impactful, so inculcated my conditioning, the pounding into the brain these beliefs, the countless workshop presentations, the healing in one to one sessions, my journeys and stays in communities and the contrasts with being an electrician then Forensics and then my 1967 stuff, my NDE, Koan and quantum stuff gave me contrasts and contradictions that bemused and befuddled me that the hard impacted glue of the ego in one hand beseeching me to be conditioned in no matter what for as long as it was in total charge and the lure of the peace through those early experiences caused a dichotomy and a chasm so vast that there appeared at times two very real and opposed beings in me and this life has given me the chance through its ups and downs to see through the false and be in that, that lies behind conditioning.

The miracle of realising this as a mere fly on the windscreen and I realised intuitively and spontaneously, that this feeling was just that I had no real substance as such only as I gave it ah la my beliefs and all that and by THE EVERY FACT I managed to stay and look, persisted in this looking AND if this looking attentively without agenda, just fixing this gaze at the feeling, fully feeling it, fully recognising it in every aspect almost to destroying me as it were. THAT intent without any conditioning WAS LIKE A LASER burning through the thought form and witnessing it evaporate, it left me in peace and a joy, I felt free of all conditioning and brain washing and I enjoyed my stay in Minorca.

I felt I could switch to be anything I wished without remorse or withdrawal and strangely enough I did not wish to be anything but a traveller though life and enjoying the scenarios and as of today May 22nd 2021 and 82 and 5 months and having a real shock yesterday with a reoccurring health symptom, food problems and really stiff joints and mobility problems I will have the lessons above to remind me to look attentively and not let remaining old patterns of conditioning take hold not by supressing them by acknowledging them for what they are and if possible lift the curtain that hides my joy and serenity.

SHACK   

 A nautical mile is based on the circumference of the earth, and is equal to one minute of latitude. It is slightly more than a statute (land measured) mile (1 nautical mile = 1.1508 statute miles ). Nautical miles are used for charting and navigating.toms.  

  The island is known for its collection of megalithic stone monuments: navetes, taules and talaiots, which indicate very early prehistoric human activity. Some of the earliest culture on Menorca was influenced by other Mediterranean cultures, including the Greek Minoans of ancient Crete (see also Gymnesian Islands). For example, the use of inverted plastered timber columns at Knossos is thought to have influenced early peoples of Menorca in imitating this practice.^[2]

The end of the Punic wars saw an increase in piracy in the western Mediterranean. The Roman occupation of Hispania had meant a growth of maritime trade between the Iberian and Italian peninsulas. Pirates took advantage of the strategic location of the Balearic Islands to raid Roman commerce, using both Menorca and Majorca as bases. In reaction to this, the Romans invaded Menorca. By 123 BC both islands were fully under Roman control, later being incorporated into the province of Hispania Citerior.

In 13 BC Roman emperor Augustus reorganised the provincial system and the Balearic Islands became part of the Tarraconensis imperial province. The ancient town of Mago was transformed from a Carthaginian town to a Roman town.^[3]