Many years ago I read a novel by C.S.Forester called "Randall and the River of Time" (not related to the graphic above).It wasn't a great novel and an excoriating Time Magazine review from the 1950s had this say of the book:
The channel emptied into a small river and that's where I ended up. As I looked upstream I saw a huge wall of water bearing down on me and was momentarily alarmed. However, the place in the river where I was floating was quite calm, there was no strong current and I was close to some rocks that I could use to climb out if I needed to. The danger from the wall of water seemed to evaporate with that observation. That's the dream and I woke up at that point, making a mental note to remember it in the morning.
It would seem that I have come from the safe haven of a swimming pool and that I am in a little tributary of a river that probably flows into a larger river that may finally empty into the ocean. 'm clearly a long way from "the Limitless Ocean of love, bliss, knowledge and goodness" that Meher Baba describes. The swimming pool is a good metaphor for the limited and predictable, mental-emotional life that I've been living for quite some time now. My movement from this shalllow, concrete-based pool to a small river that has some depth to it seems positive, as does losing the watch. I never wear a wrist-watch but holding one, as I was doing in the dream, indicates an attachment to time and thus mind that can only exist in time. Letting go of the watch and accepting its loss suggests detachment from the mind's dominance.
In his book, "The Power of Now", Tolle talks of the mind's chronic attachment to memory (the past) and anticipation (the future). I thought that combining these two words together to form a neologism "memantic" is a good way to describe the sort of consciousness that dwells in the past or future and never in the present moment. I'm still largely absorbed in this "memantic" consciousness but having moments of lucidity. I like the word because it rhymes with "semantic" and memantic consciousness is certainly obsessed with words. These words replace the real experience so that when I look at a tree, I'm not really seeing the tree. I have a mental label that I put on the tree but that label derives from the past and totally obscures the living reality of the tree. The final part of the word "antic" reminds us of the antics that the monkey mind gets up to its attempts to distract us from the stillness that it hates.
On page 5 of Randall and the River of Time, the hero stands, in the year 1917, at the crossing of two trenches in France, and wonders which way to go. At that point Hero Charles Randall and Author C. S. Forester make their big mistake: the hero turns left. Had he turned right, Randall would have been neatly dispatched in a German raid on a British strongpoint. Author Forester, whose Captain Horatio Hornblower is one of the best historical romances in the language, would thus have been spared the shame of scattering Hornblower's wake with a fictional mess for the gulls; and poor Randall would have been spared a life that is not much better than death, anyway.Well I liked the book's title which is why I picked it up in the first place. The river of time imagery connects to my previous post in which I observed that my stream of thoughts and emotions had emptied into the ocean and that I was now bobbing about on its surface. I was of course getting a little big-headed and a dream that I had last night put things in perspective. In this dream, I was in a large, shallow, concrete swimming pool and I was holding a metallic wrist-watch. There was a channel flowing out of the pool and I allowed myself to be carried into it. I let go of the watch, thinking that it would not be lost but easily retrieved because the channel was shallow with a concrete base and the water was not flowing too swiftly. Quickly however, the current became stronger and the base turned to sand and pebbles. I suddenly realised that I had no hope of ever retrieving the watch.
The channel emptied into a small river and that's where I ended up. As I looked upstream I saw a huge wall of water bearing down on me and was momentarily alarmed. However, the place in the river where I was floating was quite calm, there was no strong current and I was close to some rocks that I could use to climb out if I needed to. The danger from the wall of water seemed to evaporate with that observation. That's the dream and I woke up at that point, making a mental note to remember it in the morning.
It would seem that I have come from the safe haven of a swimming pool and that I am in a little tributary of a river that probably flows into a larger river that may finally empty into the ocean. 'm clearly a long way from "the Limitless Ocean of love, bliss, knowledge and goodness" that Meher Baba describes. The swimming pool is a good metaphor for the limited and predictable, mental-emotional life that I've been living for quite some time now. My movement from this shalllow, concrete-based pool to a small river that has some depth to it seems positive, as does losing the watch. I never wear a wrist-watch but holding one, as I was doing in the dream, indicates an attachment to time and thus mind that can only exist in time. Letting go of the watch and accepting its loss suggests detachment from the mind's dominance.
In his book, "The Power of Now", Tolle talks of the mind's chronic attachment to memory (the past) and anticipation (the future). I thought that combining these two words together to form a neologism "memantic" is a good way to describe the sort of consciousness that dwells in the past or future and never in the present moment. I'm still largely absorbed in this "memantic" consciousness but having moments of lucidity. I like the word because it rhymes with "semantic" and memantic consciousness is certainly obsessed with words. These words replace the real experience so that when I look at a tree, I'm not really seeing the tree. I have a mental label that I put on the tree but that label derives from the past and totally obscures the living reality of the tree. The final part of the word "antic" reminds us of the antics that the monkey mind gets up to its attempts to distract us from the stillness that it hates.
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