Iain Atkinson

May my consciousness be removed from attachment to my body

May my body-consciousness be expanded

My my body’s precious self-consciousness be relaxed

As when I sleep, and my body is blessed, yet my awareness is transported, let it be now, though I am awake.

Dear precious body, you are loved and blessed. Nothing is wrong with your being self-aware, and self-attached in many ligaments and sinews and organs, in many ways and modes and modalities. Now, dear body, be relaxed. Loose your grip on yourself and you will be loosed in the grip yourself has on you.

Dear heart, my heart, which is the world, receive the glory of God. I am the seat of the world receiving the true king. I envision Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine giving glory to Christ. I envision environmental crisis giving glory to God. I envision the power of the Chinese communist party giving glory to Jesus. I envision the world worshipping the Trinity. I envision the pouring out of the Holy Spirit. I envision the reconciliation of the world in only a few childrens’ songs. Jesus loves me, this I know. Lord, I lift your name on high. You hold the whole world in your hands.

In the temples at the side of my head, may Jesus be honoured.

What is pain? I feel a tension in my temples.

Pain is self-referenence. My mind, my brain, looks to my temples and wonders what’s happening there. How can it wonder what the pain is if it is the pain? Can pain be there for it to look at in wonder if it is that pain?

But suppose it creates that pain retroactively? The origin is the final intention to create the body. It looks back in time and creates the effects of its self-reference, which is pain. Pain is retroactively limited self-consciousness.

So as time goes on, pain is diminished. History is the unfolding of self-consciousness, the healing of pain, and the glorification of the origin which is the end, Christ enthroned.

As I meditate, many thoughts flit by. Many feelings are called to rememberance. But I am happy to sit and let my hands type, listening to Sunmisola Agbebi and Yinka Okeleye’s 2022 Christmas worship session as I am, all the while knowing the words I have spoken to be having their effect. In other words, sitting here with my headphones on, this Tuesday afternoon, taking sick hours as Maggie sleeps, and as Amos is in the buggy with his godmother, I meditate.

This is meditation: to wait. What is meditation but the measurement of time. The consciousness of history passing and pain unfolding?

In watching the pain in my temples unfold, my breath deepens.

I feel as if this is a waymarker on my meditative journey recently, that I breathe very deeply. I take literally the longest, deepst inhales that I can. There is self-reference and self-consciousness locked in the reactive instincts at the expansion of my diaphragm. So to breathe deeply is to meet the anxiousness of my diaphragm and to lovingly challenge it.

Why speak of self-consciousness here? It’s as if my brain-mind looks down my spine at my diaphragm down there. The nervous system stretching down my spine is mutual awareness. My brain is aware of my chakras down my spine and vice-versa. My chakras are felt. I have an inner awareness and feeling of throat, heart, solar plexus, groin, gut, etc., and all their mutual relationsips.

I do not conceive of shapes, colours, or theories about chakras – but I have an inner understanding, an inner awareness of who I am in this body. And who am I? I am certainly this body. I am every part of this body in awareness of the rest of it. Body is awareness. Body is an organization of mutual awarenesses, effecting growth and health in their parts.

My groin oscillates, my temples swell, my heart rests, my hands type. My toes tickle, my gut tenses slightly, my teeth chatter.

I began to let my teeth chatter as I met stress in my tensed jaw. It is now a common manifestation of my sitting to meditate. Really, it happens a lot. I also would go for cold walks in New York, letting myself meet that pain and challenge. I have been a little inspired by Wim Hoff, and by Tibetan secret fire teaching, and I let myself get cold. My teeth chatter.

Amos has woken up with his godmum, but they’re still out. Surely I will “return” to the normal world from this little writing meditative session. But these words will still be there, ringing in my ears. There is return but no return, and it all returns over and over. There is no point distinguishing.

I am liberation itself. The journey is done. I make these affirmations and ask to see them. I saw myself smiling. I ask to see Mary Magdalene and do so. I ask to have my consciousness expanded up to the galaxy. I sense that the name of the archangel Michael lives in our name “Milky Way”. I sense that the angels are happy with our Anglo-Saxon language, and with the river after which its first part is, I think, named. I sense the mathematical aspect, the geometry of the arcs and angles in the heavenly hosts. Many thoughts of shapes and measurements and architectures flit through my mind. My temples burn. I let tension in my upper spine relax, with micro-yawns and small head tilts. There is an assertive release of energy from bottom to top, from hips to head, and my head rocks.

I skip a song to Taylor Swift’s Antihero. I remember the great yearning of being on a plane to the UK and listening to Rage’s Wake Up, just as./ before the words “wake up” play in Antihero. Oh Lord, let there be awakening on earth.

To track how thoughts move in spirals and circles is important in meditation. Watch how they all add up. It’s as if every period of this writing rehearses everything written so far. My mind quickly revisits all previous sentences and asks what should be thought next. The effect of this watching is to see that thoughts add up to emotions and emotions to physical states. In meditation, the line between spirit and matter is gently erased.

My yearning for the world’s awakening is its awakening. This yearning is what children will experience as an accomplishment. I imagine it felt in kids in Times Square watching a ball drop in the 2050s. A new year is coming – what next? The environment hangs in the balance – our very species’ survival hangs in the balance. It will soon be felt by society at large as much as it was by Greta when she skipped school, and then certainly by every young child, and it will be felt as a gift. How beautiful we human beings and our humble earth are.

A Christian friend told me recently he was praying for revival. Revival means restoration and resurrection, restoring the church to some previous state of life. That’s nice enough. But to which previous state should it be returned? No – it should be absolutely made entirely new. But indeed it already has. The church is Greenpeace, is Oxfam, is Compassion, is the homeless population of Waterloo station, is the water lapping at the shore of the Thames. The end has come. Yes, let’s pray for it again and again, let’s yearn for it again, but experience this yearning as the accomplishment.

I look up at purple orchids bought for Maggie and me by a fifteen year old who doesn’t know where his parents are. He sat on this sofa and cried. Surely we yearn and rightly. The words “love brought weight to this heart of mine” ring in my ears (Old Sea Brigade).

So: let the church be revived, yes. But let human bodies be resurrected in mass awakening to the preciousness of life. Let a new gospel be spoken that reconstitutes the humanity of the planet. These orchids are purple with yearning. I once fixed my eyes on them in meditation, recalling the orchid in David Hockey’s Mt Fuji which we own and love, and experienced heaven’s glory alight upon this living room in the evening. A subtle light shone around, everything exhibited the penumbra of its being, its not knowing exactly where it ends and where something new begins, the light of a thing remembering what it should be, the glory of God in all things, the glory all things give to God.

I breathe deeply. O God, receive glory. Please don’t let my words amount to nothing. Amounting to nothing, let them give you glory. May I be nothing to meet you who are nothingness.

A subtle, massaging vibration strokes the skin on the back of my head, to the right.

I once had a dream that I saw some houses in some trees. Reflecting on it, I had the dreamy feeling that these treehouses were in the Amazon, and that Mary Magdalene lived in them. Oh Lord, Oh Lord. The Amazon. Trees. Oh Lord. Oh beauty who saw the Lord resurrected. Let me live with you, live with me in this letting, let me show here and write a word that sees you living in the trees with us. A fire burns in my legs and groin. Will the Amazon burn and burn? Oh Lord, save us. Christ, have mercy upon us.

I am determined

I am indeterminate

I called Mossy’s godmother, and am now sitting with his egg-shaker listening to Beatenburg’s Ithaca.