Finding Me & You: an exploration of consciousness

Introduction

In 1990, at the age of 39, I wrote and self-published a 24-page booklet titled Seeking for the Lost Mind – A Brief Introduction to the Principles of the Royal Ancient Mind School. The first part of the title is from a fourth century BC Chinese book, the Mencius: When men's fowls and dogs are lost, they know how to seek for them again, but they lose their mind and they know not how to seek for it. The great end of learning is nothing else but to seek for the lost mind. The Royal Ancient element of the name of the school is derived largely from a favorite passage of spiritual guidance: Possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart, that thine may be a sovereignty ancient, imperishable and everlasting.

The booklet gives what I believed were qualities were of an enlightened mind – detachment, reason (analytic thought), correctness (justice), altruism, humility (evanescence), long-suffering persistence, and silence. Socrates and Confucius are presented as exemplars of my way, and the booklet largely contains quotations from the Analects, the Mencius and the Platonic dialogues.

In the preceding couple of years, the discovery of Socrates and Confucius had been a revelation to me. At last, I had found philosophers I could immediately understand and love. They had opened me up, made my mind wider and clearer, more rational. I could learn much more from the founders of the great religions, but Confucius and Socrates were nearer to my human station than they, and their schools were – it seemed to me then and still does – way stations that should not be bypassed on my path of ascent. Had not – after all – the theologians of both Christendom and Islam turned, via Plato, to Socrates when developing their philosophies? And had not Confucianism been the deepest current of thought in North-East Asia for more than two millennia?

When I wrote the booklet, I had been living in Dunedin (pop. ca. 128,000) in the far south of New Zealand for about a year. I had gone there after spending 10 years in Central Otago, the picturesque but relatively barren and unpopulated (pop. density lower than Mongolia's in a land area just a little smaller than Taiwan) interior of the province, of which Dunedin, on the coast, is the main city. In Central Otago, I had worked as a seasonal horticultural worker and then as a full-time gardener and groundsman, but deeper goals to think and write had not been entirely unfulfilled.

Before going to down to the coast, I had managed to write some poetry and a 70-page novella, and through a copy of a Penguin edition of The Last Days of Socrates, I had made an initial contact with Socrates. (The book has Apology, Crito and Phaedo, the dialogues which deal most directly with the days of Socrates' trial and execution and provide the nearest representations in Plato's oeuvre of the actual Socrates.)

Most of the poetry speaks about my rather unremarkable day-to-day life.

(i)

Across the brown raspberry field, sunlit yellow

straw

and hay bales

are stacked long and high

under a green pine row

roaring like the sea in a strong north wind

against a blue sky.

Loss is the distance

between me and the brilliance.

(ii)

Like loves

and prayers

small birds scatter from country

dirt

into the vastness

of the pine-row

windbreak.

A collection of 101 little verses –The Emperor Foon – modeled roughly on the Japanese haiku, drew little from my daily life. It is a cartoonish attempt to give the entire life story of an oriental emperor I had found within myself during the 80s. I had published Foon in 1989, and then a little while later after shifting to Dunedin and discovering Confucius, I had realized that Confucius – mysteriously – had been a central inspiration of the story.

"The Way is correctness

in all activities

and attitudes – so!"

"All suffering results

from lack of correctness in these things.

Just so!"

Much later, I was to find other unexpected presences, too: there is an influence from the Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra, also literature I had not read when I wrote the verses.

"To myself I neither am, nor am not -

yet I serve,"

said the Great Sage.

My work has no end,

Thus I can neither not exist

Nor exist. Ah!"

The novella is called The Image Makers and it carries an epigraph by one of the characters, a Japanese artist called Ushi:

I am told of naked feet running

in snow and disguise my own

intimate knowledge.

It is the story of a young drop-out's sojourn in Central Otago, and it draws from my lived experience. It starts with Wellingtonian Bill Harding drifting away from his post-graduate English literature studies. He finds himself reading Zen poetry and Jack Kerouac's novels. He grows solitary and morose.

Then, after a night of reading On the Road, he went to see his sister, the steady wife of a Meat Board executive, at her Karori house. He told her he was going to drop out. He'd had a gutful and didn't see the point anymore.

"Have you told Mum and Dad?" Sharon asked, changing baby Sally's nappies.

"No."

"They'll be disappointed."

"I suppose."

The novella ends with the young man, alone, sitting down to write a story. And what story does he tell? The story he tells is the one that has just been told: the story ends back at the beginning. I had sent the book to one publisher, and after a few weeks it had come back with a polite note, rejected. I have never sent it to another.

The years in Central Otago had produced another result, too. In the barren and rocky interior, the foundation stones of the Royal Ancient Mind School had been laid. What was the first stone? It was stone itself: a meditation on stones or rocks. During a stressful time, visualizing being a rock had come to me as a way of stilling my mind and retreating even further from the world. After that, it had occurred to me that I could teach others the technique, and soon the visualization of the rock had become a nucleus about which a meditation school might be constructed.

So it was that I had arrived in Dunedin in 1989 intent upon propagating lessons I had learned. Seeking for the Lost Mind is a product of this intention. I also produced a cassette tape (1991) with meditation exercises and thoughts about empowerment. The blurb says: Follow Your OWN Star is about empowerment based on meditative stillness. The message is clear and comprehensive, combining the scientific and the spiritual, the ancient and the modern, the Eastern and the Western in a single unique whole. Material about overcoming negative defense mechanisms of the ego (Freud) and about self actualization (Maslow), shows that I was working modern humanistic ideas into a broader metaphysic.

For some months, I taught my ideas in WEA (Workers' Education Association) classes, and I would have continued to teach there, but WEA closed up shop in Dunedin, and I moved on to take graduate studies in education at Otago University, leaving my infant school behind. The 90s were spent at the university, both studying and teaching. In 1999, I finally completed a theoretical human development thesis and was awarded a PhD. The following year, I went to South Korea to teach English, and I stayed there for almost 12 years.

I didn't forget the vision that I had come away from Central Otago with though; indeed, as the years went by and my understanding of mind increased, I thought more and more about returning to it.

When I came back from Korea in 2012, it seemed the time had come to give the vision serious attention again. To that end, I decided that an effective way to introduce my understanding of mind would be to write about my own mental/spiritual development. I intended the book to be autobiographic, focusing particularly on inner development, without being a comprehensive autobiography.

This book is that book. The names of many people and a few places have been changed, and the narrative ocasionally deviates a little from factual accuracy. This is for the sake of peace and propriety. I concur with Confucius, exemplar of propriety, where he said, Things that have had their course, it is needless to remonstrate about; things that are past, it is needless to blame.

1. Elsie's diary

I am not aware that anyone said that there was anything auspicious about my birth on Thursday, July 21, 1949. In the little blue diary of my paternal aunt Elsie (who was unable to bear children), my arrival is just another event of that day. Hector and I went to town at 10:30, she says. Had dinner at Grant St & afternoon tea at Patricia. Hector is her husband, an Ohawe (a locality in South Taranaki, New Zealand) dairy farmer; a few kilometers south of Ohawe, town is Hawera (pop. ca. 10,000).

straight, plain and sober

Hector was a wire-rimmed

Methodist

a child

staying on his farm,

I came upon a bull-whip

in the cow yard

meat-hooks on rafters

I have no information about Grant Street or Patricia.

We went out to Erinlea in evening, the diary continues. Erinlea is the name given by my grandparents to their 100 acre (about 40.5 hectares or 700 football fields: enough grazing land for about 80 cows in those days) dairy farm at Manaia (about 13 kilometers north of Hawera; pop. less than 1,000). Bankrupt in Northern Ireland, my grandparents had migrated with their four children (my father, the third child, and the second of three sons, was 11) to New Zealand during the Great Depression.

We called my grandfather Mandad and my grandmother Mama because that was what they had been called by my eldest brother Bill – four years my senior – when he was an infant. The most valuable possession they arrived in New Zealand with was a bank cheque for 100 pounds given by Mama's family to her in case of emergency. That with this sum plus a little more the bankruptcy could have been discharged indicates that Mandad was not held in high regard among his in-laws. (The cheque was never cashed; Bill inherited it.) Mandad's first job was on an isolated sheep station in the Turakina Valley near Whanganui, but after a few years he was able to buy the farm he named Erinlea – Irish Field.

The name Johnston is Scottish, and even in Northern Ireland today the Johnstons remember their connection to the high-ranking but rather rough-and-tumble Clan Johnston, motto Nunquam Non Paratus (Never Unprepared), of around Dumfries on the Scottish borders from where many had been exiled to the Irish province of Ulster from the early 17th century.

Curiously, my mother's family came to New Zealand from the town of Dumfries. They were not landowners but from a lower social stratum. My maternal grandfather was a coal mine farrier, and when he and his young wife's family migrated to New Zealand soon after WW1, they went to live in the coal mining town of Denniston, 600 meters above sea level on the rainy West Coast of the South Island. My mother's maternal Uncle Dan once told me it had rained for three months straight when they arrived, and his mother, my great-grandmother, had wept and wanted to go home.

From a wartime photo of grandfather Hugh I used to have, I saw that I looked like him. Growing up, we were told that he had died because of the effects of mustard gas poisoning received during trench warfare, but Uncle Dan told me the death was due to a broken heart following the death of his young wife. Again, there are two stories of what she died of. In the early version, she died because of an ear abscess. Uncle Dan said she had died of a brain tumor.

My mother and her two older brothers – three little orphans – were raised by their grandmother (the woman who had cried), and they all eventually moved to Nelson. My mother was working there as a trainee psychiatric nurse during WW2 when she met my father, an air force mechanic, at nearby Blenheim, one summer day on Tahunanui Beach. She was 19 and he 28, and they married soon afterwards.

Fay has 3rd son & Beryl has son, says Elsie. Fay is my mother, I am the third son, Beryl is Beryl Washer and her son is John Washer. My mother and father, then a farm worker, lived a few miles up the road from Erinlea, at Kapuni, (pop. less than 50; the Washers were also farmers). Not long after I was born, and before I can remember, my family moved down the road to Erinlea to farm it with Mandad. When I was about 10, Mandad and Mama retired to Hawera, and we had the farm to ourselves.

Else concludes: Rain during evening. 13 eggs. Her hens had laid 13 eggs.

And that is all there is for that day. From subsequent entries, I learn that a few days later, my eldest brother went to stay with Elsie and Hector. That would have been to lighten the burden of my mother.

there was no rain

on the second and third days.

on the third, Hector and Wes,

their worker, manured

the big paddock.

in the afternoon, Wes went

to hockey,

Hector got the wood etc.

Elsie did usual things.

by then, my brother Bill, four,

was with them. the hens laid

13 eggs.

it rained the next evening.

I am grateful to Elsie that she kept a diary: it is the only written account that includes my birth (that I am aware of). I should have been able to learn the time of my birth from the hospital I arrived in, but Kaponga's (pop. less than 500) Cottage Hospital (Hebron – Kaponga Maternity Home) closed in 1986, and I don't know what happened to the records.

Many years later, I asked my mother the time of my birth, and without much reflection she said five in the morning. But she had given birth to seven babies (the second had died at birth), and I felt that she might have gotten the time wrong. It was, at least, a time that has been rounded to the nearest hour, and I – fancifully – thought the actual time must have been in the eighth hour of the morning – seven something. After all, all I had been born in the seventh month and there were seven sevens in 49. And seven was an auspicious number.

2. all flesh is grass

MAN that is borne of a woman hathe but a shorte tyme to lyve, and is full of miserye: he commeth up, and is cut doune lyke a floure, he flyeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one staye. In the middest of life we be in death...

- The Book of Common Prayer 1559

another time

I took you

to a farmhouse

at the bottom

of the Pacific

set between a cliffed coast

and a mountain

conical almost

as Fuji

we saw a boy

inside

silenced

by the thrash

of rain

on the iron roof

I know a little more about my early days. My mother told me I cried a lot, and I was toilet trained at 12 months, very early. Aunt Elsie said that unlike my two older brothers, I could be trusted in Elsie's bedroom with her jewelry and other feminine stuff. I was never a sissy, however: I grew into a strong farm kid who played rugby, fought in the school grounds, did all bad and good the things that boys in my world did.

My childhood was, I suppose, rather ordinary and comfortable. Yet I can also never think of a time free of the pain of existence. Knowledge of the pain of existence comes with us into consciousness: it is there from the beginning; it is heard in our earliest crying.

Suffering and death stalk us. I was told rather often when I was a child of when I had almost died – the story of the time my father saved my life. It happened before I can remember. One evening, I put part of a broken spanner into my mouth, and it became lodged in my windpipe. My face was blue when my parents spotted me. My father turned my upside down and slapped my back, but that didn't work. He poked a finger down my throat. And again. Nothing.

I can't get it, he told my mother.

You must! she cried. Try again!

And out it came, with a lot of blood and gristle, my mother told me when I was old enough to understand.

Did you take me to the doctor?

No ... we just sat with you that night.

A second childhood encounter with death by choking is one I can remember. How old was I? Somewhere between eight and ten I guess. I was with my primary school class at the swimming baths in Manaia – Patterson Memorial & Centennial Baths. There were three pools – one for toddlers, one for learners, and a big pool, shallow at one end and deep at the other. We were occupying the shallow end, but I jumped in just outside of the shallowest part and immediately disappeared below the surface. A very big boy – Dennis Cranky Clark – saw me drowning, so he waded out to me, and carried me back into the shallow area. No one made much of it: Cranky smiled broadly, and the teacher, with a rather mild look of reproof and relief, said something like, You were lucky this time.

Within the culture and society I was born into and grew