Fragment 12.2: Hear and

We do it the same way now as we did in my grandmother's day, and in the days before that when her grandmother was a little girl. There are fewer of us now, and fewer still who remember or who heard the stories from anyone who did; remembering is so important, but we only have what we have so we make do. It's harder, but we can make it work the old way. If we work hard at it. If we're careful. If we can silence our deep selves for long enough. That's what is hardest these days. Now, at this time, when so much is focused on the individual, and on the most transient aspects of individuality, most people don't know how to find the deep self. Most people don't even know it exists, much less how to find it. How to hold it, how to keep it still, how to force it to listen, is a skill that doesn't come easy even for us who have grown up with the knowledge of it, for whom it was never a mystery. For most, how a person can hold in awareness awareness itself-- well, it doesn't work, does it? The observer can't step outside themselves and become the observed, not without becoming another observer. Put that way, I can see it-- it does seem mysterious. Mystical even. But for us, we've always known that we are already outside ourselves. This individuality, this centre for transient aspects, that this could count as a personhood... well, for us, that is a mystery.

We do it now in the old way. It is not the only way, it is just the one most familiar to us, to those of us who remember the most. Probably, hopefully, those who come after me will have different ways, better suited to their situations. It doesn't do to ritualise these things. History is littered with the artefacts of forgetting those whom ritual serves, of people into servants of ritual. We don't make that mistake. Or at least, we try not to. But what we need to do, to keep it alive, requires community, and we're short enough on numbers that it's a stretch to call us a community. We're practically down to a clique. But we have what we have. We are what we are. We do as well as we can. And if we must serve the old way, at least we know that it is our choice, and we know why we choose to.

We begin with the song, as always. When the song is ready we listen. We make what we hear into words. We commit the words to paper, to fix them, and we render the paper to scraps, to unburden them. Then we cast them to the wind, or to whatever we can use to perform the function of a wind. When all that is done, we call the words back. Held still, darkened, the deep self cannot interfere. When we are done, we have the message. Then it's up to us to do with it what we can.

Most would probably call this divination. They are wrong. Divination is random. Divination looks for commands in things that have no mind to command. Divination asks for answers out of nowhere. Divination is irrational. This isn't divination. And we don't look for orders or answers. Our effort, our focus, is on finding something within the rational that is already present, already in mind, but not present to mind. We look for that and turn it into a message that we can then use as a further focus. It's not an exact science, and it would not be true to say that we never turn up nonsense, or something entirely useless. Or worse, harmful. But we're not diviners. We don't go into this blindly. We know exactly where the message comes from, and we know we're incomplete, fallible. Limited. We try to know our limits. We work hard on that. So we know to temper our responses. Such a small thing. But so much benefit derives from a little sensible restraint. The opposite... well. It doesn't bear thinking about, but it doesn't need thinking about. Look around you.

But even in awareness of our limitedness, sometimes we get something that surprises us, but that can't be ignored. Something we know makes sense, but we don't know how to wrap ourselves around the sense of it. That is what happens now, when we do it the same way it as we did in my grandmother's day, and in the days before that when her grandmother was a little girl. The message we get is clear enough. But how, and to what, we apply it, not at all.

It could bring us all down.

It could bring you all down.

It could be the only way anyone survives.

The message is this:

Stop.