Psi

How difficult to create a psi-conducive atmosphere, an environment to relax in, to reflect, to gaze across the hills and trees and to enter a state of purposeful disconnectedness - in order to connect!

Candles and lanterns to be moved and lit, window seats to be adjusted, forgotten passwords to be searched for and remembered, finally almost too dark to see the keyboard and - so many specks on the lenses of my reading-glasses! A friend coming in an hour and my thoughts unassembled...

And yet it is a perfect moment, early evening, to write. I feel like Gilbert White in the eighteenth century, a simple clergyman in the parish of Selborne, setting out his thoughts on the willow wrens he noticed might be three different species. Or Jung, writing out a lecture he would soon give on the subject of Nietzsche, or Ballard, in his Shepperton semi, writing longhand then typing up The Drowned World or the Atrocity Exhibition.

Irritated by the word "magic" in my recent post about learning styles and creativity, I went back to the origin of the idea and re-read parts of Serena Roney-Dougal's classic Where Science and Magic Meet. I had a sleep this afternoon, a late siesta, and it so removed the grogginess and irritation in my brain that I felt like an angel on waking. And it is in that spirit that I set myself up here at my kitchen table, with the view out over the old cemetery and the rain-soaked hills leading out of Beith - (beth, the birch) - to Lochwinnoch and the north.

Magic - it's the ancient earth-knowledge of the Irish and highland Scots, the British of Wales and of England. It's the second sight, just as much as the ajna chakra or third eye; it is Wicca, or witchcraft; it is parapsychology, or psi; it is "the hidden variables" which may be will and consciousness; it is bridging the bicameral brain, forging links with our polarities of masculine and feminine, of right and left, above and below; it is the roots of religion and ritual, and other elements and relationships we find in the cosmic web - our electromagnetic earth and its - our - nature.

My highest thoughts and aspirations are energised by these thoughts - my ideas about the architecture of consciousness, the archaeology of consciousness, the whole theory of psychosystemics which I have not yet written about, are all here. But it is not acceptable, even less so now that in the hopeful days of this wonderful book, to talk of magic, to try to weave magic into the fabric of training courses and coaching for performance and psychodynamic counselling - is it? All the things I am occupied with today, this week, this month, as I set up my own practice in a culture which is even harder than it was in 1991 - even more calcified, post-banking crisis, global recession, food banks in the UK and me out of a job with the rest of them.

And yet I have time to craft something, to make something good. I can't say if I will be accepted, if my practice will feed me. But I remember that my Celtic Calendar, inspired by The White Goddess of Robert Graves, is the central (i)mage of my system and the font of all my training, coaching and counselling models. It is my belief system in a nutshell, in colour, in leaves, branches and fruits, in birds, death, and geometry, rebirth and seasonal cycles. It has always been thus - God is in the garden.

The psyche-system is the ghost in the machine, it is the soul or spirit in the body.
It is ensouled structures; it is the structure of the soul, read another way.
The interface of spirit on structures, and the impact of structures on spirit.
What it's like to be human in an organisation, and how the organisation affects me.
Being myself, and finding my place in the scheme of things.
Being, and doing.
Spiritual life in a physical world.
Holiness, and business.

I've been reflecting on these things for a very long time!