It is strange!
Only recently I have been contemplating the prospect of retirement from my lecturing job (perhaps leaving a couple of years early). Then paradoxically having adjusted to that prospect I have begun to actually enjoy - perhaps for the first time - what I have been trying to do all these years.
No doubt some of this is due to the characteristic release of tension following the resolution of any major issue in life.
However in my case it probably relates more to the unfolding of a new period in - what I have long referred to as - the spiritual life.
I am now beginning to see how strongly immersed I have been - indeed for all my adult life - in the depths of the unconscious. This has certainly enabled a certain kind of development entailing direct experience of many specialised intuitive states; however it has also proven remarkably restrictive and at various times incredibly stressful. Though valuable in enabling the development of new holistic mathematical understanding (as my true vocation) I have felt through nearly all that time as if trapped in a dark dungeon scarcely able to move or breathe and with little prospect of a dawning light. This has endured - with some very short intermissions - for the past 45 years (commencing in earnest at about 17).
This morning when I was listening to the radio I had that strange experience as if awakening from a long sleep.
An item on the "Morning Ireland" related to a poetry book "Soundings" a Leaving Cert Anthology of poetry that had been introduced in 1969 (lasting till 2000).
This came as news to me as I had never heard of Soundings (with my own Leaving Cert predating its introduction).
It was as then as if I was magically transported back to my first year in College (prior to the subsequent darkness) to experience it anew in a very faint though expansive light.
Recently I have found that I have been steadily losing interest in any further codification of stages of development.
And perhaps this is the real lesson that is slowly emerging is that in the end even the most carefully refined rational classifications we can make are but a hindrance which need to be surrendered. Only then can one truly emerge in true peace and relaxation into that eternal light that was always present but somehow remained hidden while attempting to still cling to more flimsy phenomenal expressions of its existence.
Only recently I have been contemplating the prospect of retirement from my lecturing job (perhaps leaving a couple of years early). Then paradoxically having adjusted to that prospect I have begun to actually enjoy - perhaps for the first time - what I have been trying to do all these years.
No doubt some of this is due to the characteristic release of tension following the resolution of any major issue in life.
However in my case it probably relates more to the unfolding of a new period in - what I have long referred to as - the spiritual life.
I am now beginning to see how strongly immersed I have been - indeed for all my adult life - in the depths of the unconscious. This has certainly enabled a certain kind of development entailing direct experience of many specialised intuitive states; however it has also proven remarkably restrictive and at various times incredibly stressful. Though valuable in enabling the development of new holistic mathematical understanding (as my true vocation) I have felt through nearly all that time as if trapped in a dark dungeon scarcely able to move or breathe and with little prospect of a dawning light. This has endured - with some very short intermissions - for the past 45 years (commencing in earnest at about 17).
This morning when I was listening to the radio I had that strange experience as if awakening from a long sleep.
An item on the "Morning Ireland" related to a poetry book "Soundings" a Leaving Cert Anthology of poetry that had been introduced in 1969 (lasting till 2000).
This came as news to me as I had never heard of Soundings (with my own Leaving Cert predating its introduction).
It was as then as if I was magically transported back to my first year in College (prior to the subsequent darkness) to experience it anew in a very faint though expansive light.
Recently I have found that I have been steadily losing interest in any further codification of stages of development.
And perhaps this is the real lesson that is slowly emerging is that in the end even the most carefully refined rational classifications we can make are but a hindrance which need to be surrendered. Only then can one truly emerge in true peace and relaxation into that eternal light that was always present but somehow remained hidden while attempting to still cling to more flimsy phenomenal expressions of its existence.
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