Iain Atkinson

This is the inane selfreferentiality of writing, that the first “blog” piece, the written record of what I have to say (or so it feels to me as I write), should be about writing such a blog, and the second should be about the form of the writing.

What is a blog? This is distinctly different from the form that my grandfather’s writing took. His were type-writer produced notes for family. Mine here on WordPress are so revolutionarily different.

The difference can be located in the idea of preparation. My grandfather prepared and organized his thoughts carefully before typing them up. As such, his writing can appear as a form of the record of thought. Thought can appear in its modern form as immaterial substance, located in the subject whose individual response to the world happens in remove from the world, then enters the world in action, or is recorded.

I, however, distinctly have the feeling and knowledge of writing without preparation. I would like to share that feeling in form and in content. I hope it comes across in the form of the short and artless sentences written here. In content, let me describe it: The feeling is that I have to write. My life, life, the Lord, you are so infinitely precious that I must describe you. I open this tab on wordpress with hardly any inkling about what I will write, but in the feeling and knowledge that I have to write. I know that this imperative is bequeathed to me through the callings of my ancestors. It rings in my ears through the biblical phrase “a voice says to me cry” (Isaiah 40) – to the extent that I feel like Isaiah reincarnate – as a voice says to me “write”.

I am not without the concept of record or recording. For example, in the preciousness of life, I would like to record events, seemingly in the feeling of ‘”lest they be forgotten”. Here’s an event I would like to record: a precious canal holiday with a lovely family Maggie and I got to know right at the end of our time in New York. They were a couple with a toddler who lived in Chinatown. She had gone on a canal holiday in the UK as a girl and wanted to recreate it with her daughter. So early on in our time back in the UK, before Amos’ birth, the five of us spent 3 or 4 nights on a canal somewhere near Milton Keynes.

I remember sheep and ducks and mist and yearning. I remember walking down the aisle of a Tesco gathering supplies before we got on the boat, feeling an extraordinary sense of uncanniness, like Tesco was a gas chamber, or an olive grove in ancient Egypt, or everywhere and nowhere. But my favourite memory, the one I’d like to record “lest it be forgotten”, I think happened after the holiday was over and our friends had returned to the States. They reported to us that their 2 or 3 year old daughter had said of me that “Iain has a magic carpet, but his delight is not in his carpet, his delight is in the whole world”. This touched me deeply. I felt so seen by this girl. I wonder, dear soul, if you will ever read these words.

I could smile with Maggie when she shared these words with me, they indicated an affection that summed everything up. But I couldn’t communicate to Maggie nor acknowledge with her how spot on accurate this seer’s words were. I do have a magic carpet. I have the simple faith to travel in spirit. As I fall asleep, I say to my soul “let me stand on the junction of Kingsland and Hackney road”, and there I am. I know well all the thoughts “this is just an imagination”, “how can I know if the events that I’m imagining happening there now are really happening?” and I’m well aware of all the circulating memories and projections that constitute the fulfilment of my intention, but in the midst of it I know that I am indeed there. How could I not be? If I say “let me be there”, then I certainly am there. This is my magic carpet.

But I do not delight in it. I have not practiced it. I have no real desire to hone it as an ability or art. I cannot report to you the license plates of the cars that drove down Kingsland road last night, and I don’t care to be able to. I stand on that crossroads for a few minutes, and I breath deeply the air. I play a role of reconciliation in the spirit, I remember seeing Gamaliel’s angel in the sky over that junction once before, I recall so many stirring emotions felt there in the past, and know in this recalling and reconciliation a true “being-there” of my spirit and a true spiritual function of integration that occurs, and I breathe once or twice, and I return home to the heart.

My delight is in the whole world. Only in delighting so and in flitting around between memories, impressions, thoughts, and multiple places, could I develop the knowledge of spiritually being in a given place. I would go so far as to say that one cannot travel on a magic carpet unless one’s delight is in the whole world. As I type this I know it to be not exactly true – I believe that by sarificing one’s body to demons it is possible. So, dear reader, who has no time to be so sacrificing their body, instead simply delight in the whole world (learn from, e.g. Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations), and you will fly high on my magic carpet.

To have been seen by this toddler seer, by her innocence, the true and only innocence, is one of my favourite memories ever. I want to record it for you. For whom? And having recorded it, where does my claim about writing today standing beyond “recording” stand?

The modern mind prescinds from reality, fancies itself to take up a point of view on reality, and then speaks back into or acts upon reality. This is how it fancies itself, and this moreover really happens! The modern mind steps beyond the material world by joining with the thought of the creator, and steps into the time before matter. But there is an incompleteness and failure of recognition of the Lord in this pattern of thought. The living God, Christ, has died, and the functional God, the one given power as god while God has surrendered his life unto death, is the great dragon.

To be sure, the modern mind developed a materialist view of thought and brains. But this is always tied up with its colonialist view, and it is always the other, the examined mind, which is matter in motion, and the examining mind holds the nice detached position of the anthropologist and the perfect scientist. The scientific mind and method is nicely removed from the mess of the world, which is faith ultimately, by its secularity. This is epitomized, given apotheosis, in the failure of scientists to think their own thinking about quantum mechanics. They say (some loosely see it this way) that QM displays the role of consciousness in the world, as observing a system actively changes it – so in this thought they think that they think the role of thought in the world and the being of thought in material existence – but in reality there is no definition of observation in this theory. QM includes no definition of observation. “Observation” remains an a priori thought. It is a complete presupposition of scientific thinking epitomized in QM that there can be a system that is then observed – that system and observation can be separately thought.

In distinction, a postmodern thinking is the examining mind itself examined and found to be, though perfectly prescinded from the world and one with the creator, nevertheless already surrendered to the world and materially conditioned. There is no observer beyond the system. Beyond the system cannot be thought, except in this thought about how it cannot be thought, here is revealed another system of postmodern thought. I recall that Derrida wrote “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” and Leahy writes something like “beyond beyond text is text”.

Incidentally, when it comes to QM, the thinking that observation is another system that must be accounted for as systems are accounted for, leads, as far as I consider logical and coherent – in other words unless the modern mind rears its head which is always does – to the so called Everrett view, which nevertheless says nothing particularly coherent about the actual and possible worlds. It says possible worlds are actual, which I suppose is paradoxically true enough. I see no one coming along to speak philosophical or theological or poetic sense in the midst of QM confusion yet.

Leaving QM aside, the point is as simple as this: thought has a history. That’s how simply the thinking that is now occurring is put in Leahy’s Novitas Mundi. The feeling of an honest thinker straddles this paradox: (1) my thinking has already been thought, every element of it comes from the past. (2) my thinking is absolutely new and present. What is excluded from this clarity is the sense that I hold a thought that is burgeoning newness, the beginning of a novelty, here as a seed in my head if only it could grow in being written down.

I feel that I can only feel I have thoughts worth recording if I am blind to the history of those thoughts. I feel I can only feel I have thoughts worth sharing (as my thoughts, as my position, my philosophy, etc) if I ignore the fact that they aren’t mine. In the world of thought, mineness is a lie, personality a great cultural misshap, an idiotic mistake, the demonic lie itself. So the great thinking such as one finds in Leahy’s books isn’t referred to a person or their ideas. It is thought itself, truly the thought of the creator, truly before and prescinded from creation, yet utterly surrendered to the text, the system, the matrix, creation.

I have writing projects on the go. The are ideas I want to share. But the feeling is of prophetic onus. As described in my Meditating on Mark, I feel I carry an apocalyptic prophetic anointing that is not quite a prophetic message or idea. The ideas for my remaining writing projects are rooted in this anointing and onus. Put in ancient terms, I only want to share what God says to me – I don’t want to share my own thoughts. Put more naturally and newly, I only want to write what comes naturally to say.

In the midst of these long creative projects, I want to write a blog. In case lightning strikes me down, I’d like to get a few things said and off my chest. But I have no idea what those are. I’d like to speak. I’d like to have a go at the creative process. I’d like to stare at a blank screen, I’d like to stare into the void, at the blank page that is as blank as my first Oxford tute when I actually thought and took no notice of the deranged world to which I was being taught to speak – when I wrote a 10 page essay of 2 sentence paragraphs – I’d like to look at that blank page again and think and feel the weight of my chest and let my fingers move and see what comes out.

“Here is a blog”, I think, “what must I write”, I ask? A voice says to me “write”, and what shall I write? “Here is writing, here is a blog, here’s why I am writing and what I’m writing”. So that’s what a blog is, and why it’s different from the philology my grandfather wrote in form and content.

I’d like you to climb aboard my magic carpet, which is not magic and isn’t mine. The Lord once said to me that I would have an angelic encounter one night. I received it in faith, faith received it in me, and I waited. I expected an extraordinary out-of-body encounter with a person-like being, but experienced something weirder. First, I experienced a dream that was a commentary on my expectation. I was sat by a river at which many people were crossing a bridge, back and forth. A beautiful woman stood on the other side, off to the side of the road, looking upwards and holding hands open in prayer. She was Mary, overseeing the passing of people across the bridge of embodiment. I sat wondering about it all. A scruffy man with a white beard sat below me – further down the slope of the riverbank – and handed me some papers. They were a draft of a book he had written and he asked me to organize them and to comment on them. I asked him, as if incidentally, whether out-of-body experience is possible. He said: “One, no it’s not; two, it’s not a good idea; and three, oh maybe it is – I don’t know”.

Over the course of that day, I interpreted the details of the dream. I was reflecting on what out-of-body experience meant, and whether I wanted to pursue it. It was shown to me that the voice of “reason” which can’t decide whether to say it’s not possible or it’s not a good idea had no idea what it was saying. But there seemed to me a nugget of truth in there: it’s not possible to step outside the body. Some kind of body crosses the bridge. Mary is the matrix out of which some kind of body steps. But my experience got weirder.

That next night I led a team of Street Pastors on patrol. We stopped by one homeless man who was quiet and sweet. As I knelt down to talk with him, looking down slightly at his one eye and white beard, he suddenly struck me as the man from the dream. I decided to ask him, apropos of nothing, whether he was a writer. He said, yes I am! He had written a draft of a book, he told me, about his spiritual experiences of the underworld. I asked him whether he still had such experiences, to which he answered no, he had asked God to take them away, which God had done. There was a felt incongruity between my inner awe and outer lack of having anything to say. In retrospect it would’ve been nice to ask to read his writing. But as it went I simply said a blessing over him and led my team on our way. The experience was left as a blessing to me and and answer to prayer.

My out-of-body experience (the dream) was a premonition of a beautiful bodily meeting, a kneeling on cold concrete outside Tesco, the stroking of a dog, the handing over of socks, the holding up of a hand as I prayed a blessing. However, I was left with renewed confidence to pursue “out-of-body” travel.

As I said, when I think of the crossroads of Kingsland and Hackney road, I am there. The same is true of you. You don’t seem to be there, but you are. And you are there in body. Your body bears a quantum entanglement to that place. You are located there. You observe it in a way that affects the system. I know it would be nice to either feel like your observation is entirely detached, or like it fails to be observation by being imagination, but even if you have no idea where those roads are, your body is there.

Kingsland Road connects Shoreditch to Dalston. Hackney Road connects Old Street to Hackney, sort of. Where they meet, they also meet the north end of Shoreditch High Street, where St. Leonard’s church is. Amos was born a stone’s throw from here, making his middle name particularly apt. My boy, your body is rooted there in a unique way.

To travel in spirit, just do it. Let faith find it in you. To lead you and encourage you, ask mother Mary about it, and trust her voice and her simple smiling replies. She oversees so much, indeed everything, but specifically the materiality that she is. She is the place in which spirit incarnates, so where your spirit dis- or re-incarnates she sees.

I don’t write to record, or to remember what would otherwise be forgotten. I write to give new creative potentialities to existing realities and thoughts. These words stitched – corded – together in such a seemingly haphazard way constitute a magic carpet on which we can all learn to fly.