Twinkling of an I in the Eye of the Self

By Marcus M Cornelius

Twinkling is an autobiography with a difference: it is not mainly an account of the outer life of a person. It reveals the emergence of the increasing influence of the inner self, and does so much as an image is revealed when a photo is being slowly developed, which image, necessarily, at the start of the process is barely visible. What emerges is the story of the growing importance of the influence of the Self. And because the life concerned was, from an early adult stage, most significantly changed by the presence in it of the effect and guidance of the latihan of Subud (Susila Budhi Dharma), the book relates how that influence began, how it developed and how it moved a life towards its fulfilment, frequently in ways that were completely unexpected. Of course, confusion and the tension between competing alternatives are always at our disposal. What is always at our disposal as well, though it is harder to perceive in amongst all the confusion, is the clarity and wisdom that can inform and guide the development of our Self in what is, after all, a one-off performance. Twinkling is one story of how that clarity and wisdom can be perceived and how it can be allowed to express itself, in ways more rewarding than what we often regard as success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781491761229

Marcus M Cornelius

MARCUS M. CORNELIUS: graduated from Exeter University (UK), was awarded a Creative Writing Scholarship at Syracuse University (USA), and for seven years was a professor at Hokuriku University (Japan). His other occupations have included many years as a bookseller, and some time as a singer - music has always been the most reliable of friends - and freelance writing and arts management in Australia. i-Universe published his first book, Out of Nowhere - the musical life of Warne Marsh, as well as the first three of eight completed volumes of Sopolyrimu (songs, poems and lyrics for music) and the first four books of the five-part Note for Note (Another Pentateuch). Marcus is now working on a prose work to be called D-tours, the last hundred years, and a book of poetic prose to be called keepers takers. He now lives in Triana (Sevilla) where he feels very much at home. Further details of his work and responses to it can be found at www.marcusmcornelius.net.

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Twinkling of an I in the Eye of the Self

Copyright © 2015 Marcus Cornelius.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-6123-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-6122-9 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 3/2/2015

Contents

Introduction Before the Launch

1 Coming in to Land

2 Moulding first impressions

3 To church or not to church

4 Thirst for the spring - a little sip

5 Thirst for the spring - a big sip

6 A Dream Come True

7 The Opening

8 Another continent

9 Sun Rising

10 Down-under and Out and Up

11 Odyssey

12 Birds have to learn to fly too

13 Snap

14 Ready or not

15 Turning up & tuning in

This book is dedicated to Bapak Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo, to my parents, Megan Elizabeth Anderson and Donald Ernest Popham Cornelius, my two sisters, Margaret Harrison and Mary Griffiths, to my children, Risman, Latifah, Hassana, Iwan, Dexter, and their mother Harlinah, and to Bevan and Amaliah, and their mother Gaea, and to all those people, known and unknown, dead or alive, who have contributed, knowingly or not, to assisting in and enhancing my existence.

May we meet again, in finer circumstances than this Earth can provide.

Para

Consuelo de la Haza Claro

Gracias, gracias por todo

Introduction

Before the Launch

The stages of my emerging and what each stage contained reminds me, in broad brush, of a set of Russian Dolls. Each one is smaller than the one by which it is contained, but in essence it is exactly the same in all but size and what it can contain. Each one is hidden by the other, and the final one contains all earlier versions, without which the largest doll would be empty. This image is, of course, inadequate because, in life, there are no sharply defined separations between one phase and the subsequent one. The newborn contains the form of the final version of our Self, as the acorn contains the mature oak. And the two states, acorn and oak, share another aspect: both in our first form and in our final form, we find ourselves apparently helpless, utterly vulnerable and fully exposed, again, to the embracing totality of what we know not.

The journey, of which this book is partial evidence, included two marriages of fifteen years each, and the blessing of seven children - four sons and three daughters. However, the story of those marriages, and the children they were blessed with, does not form a part of this book. A marriage has two sides and to share the story of a marriage and make it honest and balanced would need both sides of the story to be told, and that is not possible. Only life itself knows the truth.

∞

1

Coming in to Land

The launch was not from here to eternity but from eternity to here, from elsewhere to this specific jewel, the blue dot, the jungle and climate and the friction of the clatter and bang. The transformation was extremely fast, as fast as light, but the descent towards the surface of the earth slowed the change down as the form adapted to and accepted and grew within the transformation, in the transcendental distillation of essences containing the invisible, within which was the very nucleus from which would issue the map and the journey to be accomplished in plain sight.

On the surface of this blue dot, amongst billions of other temporary inhabitants, were two specific people who had been here for a while and who by then had become capable of managing their day-to-day affairs. It was to these two people that the unborn would be committed. They had largely forgotten the journey from elsewhere that they had each made some indeterminate changes of form ago. Each of them was still living in the household of two other specific people who were inexorably moving through transformations towards remembering, if not in any detail, that there is a before- as certainly as there is an after-the-event. The core energy of a form expends itself until it is spent or is interrupted by some other form of contradicting and negating violence or decay. The two of them worked, which is to say that they performed tasks primarily for someone else. It could have been substantially and fatally worse, so they counted their blessings. Life is short. And the evidence of that was staring them both in the face, as it had been staring in the face of their generation and the generation before them and the generations before that. But the evidence now was more brutal and intense. And the outside vibrations around the world at large were having an influence on all of those who were and would be coming in to land on this world that had become inhospitable and lurching on a scale not seen before. People carried on bringing more people to the surface, faster than they could return the spent ones below it. Times are tough.

But some time ago, shortly before both of these two specific people had become capable of managing their day to day affairs, an event had taken place on another small patch of the world’s surface (Indonesia), an event which was diametrically apposed to the inhospitable lurching and the clatter and bang, and very few other people knew, even though a young country girl and her two cousins, in yet another part of the world far away (Portugal) and some years before the event, had received word from Our Lady in Fatima that such an event was a fact waiting to happen. The girl who had been chosen to hear Our Lady deliver her message had done what she could to make sure that the Catholic Church, specifically, and specifically the head of the Catholic Church, understood that Our Lady had been very clear that her last message to the girl was to be made public but not until 1960. What happened after that was not within her control. It is not an accurate description but we could say that, with the transpiration of this forewarned event, Nature was in the process of restoring equilibrium even while equilibrium was under serious threat and would come under even more serious threat than that. The event referred to by Our Lady happened to a young Indonesian man when he was out walking late one evening, getting a breath of fresh air after hours of studying book-keeping, undertaken to improve his situation amongst the clatter and bang and maintain equilibrium between his physical and his spiritual modes of existing. Over time, that event would have consequences which might perhaps prove more healing than the damage done by mass horrors of world war that were about to overshadow it, a shadow lengthened by the Indonesian struggle to overthrow their Dutch colonial masters.

(The paragraph above contains an example of how the real world and the world of Self are connected. Before today I had never written the word ‘Fatima’. I have said it from time to time, but I have never written it. While I was in the middle of writing the paragraph above, at the end of the sentence with the word Fatima in it, I decided to have a break and go to a chemist to pick up some medication. This was my first visit to a chemist in Spain, where I had been led to live a few months prior. I got to the chemist, negotiated the purchase of the medication, and brought the paper bag home. Once back home, I put the medication where it belonged and was in the act of throwing the paper bag away when I noticed the writing on it: the chemist was called ‘Farmacia de Nuestra Señora de Fatima’. That was the first time I had read the word Fatima on a paper bag.)

Anyone born around the turning of the 19th century into the 20th century, and anyone alive for the first three decades of the 20th century would have experienced the First World War and the Depression, first-hand or indirectly. Anyone still alive in the middle of the fifth decade of the 20th century would have experienced the Second World War. A considerable portion of the human population at the time would have experienced all three major events. Civilisation was a wall with huge cracks in it, on foundations that were being ruthlessly undermined. And amidst that process, ordinary people carried on with what they could do, to resist or not to resist, and to survive or to make a sacrifice if they had to.

In amongst all of this global upheaval and the local continuity of the daily necessities of being alive and staying alive, these two specific people, through whom I would be given my existence, had their lives painted into a general landscape, over much of which they had no control at all, and into a specific landscape of their own microcosm over which they, jointly and severally, had a more direct and personal influence, although outside influences are never much further away than internal influences. Outside influences do not recognise barriers such as a front door or privacy.

The female of the specific couple worked for a trading company, keeping the ledgers. Her name was Megan Elizabeth Anderson, known as Meg. The male of the specific couple was almost an accountant, only ‘almost’ because he was still ‘articled’ and not yet Chartered, and through his work he met Meg. His name was longer than hers: Donald Ernest Popham Cornelius, Popham being his mother’s family name, and he was known as Don. Both of them had been born in Plymouth, Devon, England, from where the pilgrim fathers set sail and Drake before them, and the sea was in the blood of both. Both of them came from families who were holding on to the importance of a balanced life, the material and the spiritual, but they were very different families. The maternal family was of the Plymouth Brethren, though they were not dour. That side concentrated on the lightness of being naturally kind and of good humour and observing the principles without making a grand show of it, preferably making no show at all, rather than emphasizing the effort, despite the griefs they had borne and were yet to bear. Theirs had been an adventurous history not limited to the shores of England. The paternal family was of the ‘free church’, Wesleyan Methodist, and were regulars with good strong voices and if not dour then tending to the dry, concentrating on the required effort but nevertheless actively compassionate. This difference in approach might well have been partly a result of the number of the children for which effort was required: there were ten of them, of whom Don was the youngest; his oldest brother and sister were old enough to have been his parents. The ancestors on that side of the family could also be traced beyond the shores of England but they had been firmly established in Plymouth for over a century.

The prime qualities that both families had in common were sincerity and the capacity to work through difficulties without complaint, but the maternal was more intuitive while the paternal was more practically inclined: one took more account of the fruit of the effort, and the other was more mindful of the effort itself. One could say that one side was happier talking about the wine, while the other side would give pride of place to what it took to make the wine. Perhaps as a result, relationships between members of the maternal family were warmer and less heavy handed than the relationships between members of the paternal family which tended to be fraught or a little distanced, and, sometimes, harsh. On the one side it was important not to make a song and dance of things, and on the other side it was important to take things seriously and never give up. They would both remember to count their blessings, and with grief pressing as close as it was in both families and from several directions at once, counting one’s blessings was a daily reality and a reprieve of sorts. It was an absorbing chemistry, this blend of the free spirit and the free church.

In his 11th year Don had ridden his bicycle, as he loved to do but on a day forbidden to do so by his father. On that day he was knocked down by a truck and, because the driver did not know he had hit anything, the boy was left for dead, and death would have been certain had not someone passed by and found him. By the time his body was in hospital, the doctors were willing to let him die: there was, they said, nothing they could do. His mother, however, was of a different opinion, and after several critical operations had been carried out, she cared for him at home. He had lost his memory entirely, down to his name, and the years of youth up to that point simply did not exist. He had also lost the use of his right arm which would wither and hang loosely, muscles and nerves useless. His mother schooled him to the point where he could rejoin the other children of his age and within five years he had re-learned everything he had forgotten, even though he had no idea that he had forgotten it. He had wanted to become a lawyer, but his mother decided that would be too stressful and guided him to become an accountant. Accordingly, having achieved real success with his studies, he became an articled clerk and worked his way towards becoming a chartered accountant.

The fathers of both parts of this couple had been working class men, employed in ship-building in the government dockyards, a way of life from which these two younger ones had been spared, thanks not only to their own efforts but to their parents’ efforts, and changes in how the world worked. They both loved music, an inherited love. Don had a powerful voice, sang in choirs and had started on the violin, but, given that life had scotched that plan, he taught himself to play piano one handed, inspired perhaps by one of his brothers who had been a gifted organist but who drowned in the first year of the war that was shaking the walls, in the first ship to be sunk by the German navy. His wife had also learned piano but her love of music flourished when she had access to a radio - the Plymouth Brethren were not allowed to have radios, because of which childhood deprivation the relatively new device would become a prime accessory in the family home she had started to make. During the war, it was useful to have a radio: one could find out both what in the hell was going on and what was going on in hell and maybe also hear an echo of a kinder space. Times were tough and life could be very short-lived. And if music was a shared and healing influence for both of them, so too was the healing power of laughter, with good humour being more important than any differences in approach to life the two families might have had.

The couple had known each other for several years and though Don had made a marriage proposal, Meg only accepted once he had fully qualified. They finally married in the year War started shaking the walls yet again, for the second time in 25 years, and a month after Don’s brother had been killed at sea. A year or so later they had their first child, a daughter, by which time they were living in a small but comfortable suburban house in Bristol, a city which was being devastated by German air-raids. Times were very hard. Meg’s older sister, Alice, a much-loved teacher, had had to stop teaching because she was suffering with cancer, cared for by her mother and father at home until she died in 1942. Her brother was in the Royal Air Force and would spend most of the war overseas.

Don had been excused service in the forces due to his physical condition and was working for the Ministry of Food. Somewhat amazingly he had overcome many of the limitations of the consequences of what had happened to him in his 11th year, but would spend the rest of his life living to exceed the limitations that remained. Meg was yet to go through the challenge that would last the rest of her life, but before that she would have appendicitis. Times were hard and merely being alive was a reason to be grateful, and the act of putting someone else’s life before your own was something that many people knew about and had reason to be grateful for. It is good to treasure what is most precious especially when it is most vulnerable and exposed to dangers that can appear random and strike without any warning. This is true not the least because the act of treasuring provides a space, and protects a space, in which love is active and healthy, while so much of the face of the earth had been infected by the total absence of love in a body more sick than healthy.

∞

It was early 1943. Meg was pregnant and near term and all was well until things changed and then they were not quite so well as they had been a short time before. She did not feel comfortable and she discovered that was because she had appendicitis, which seriously altered the situation. The doctors explained what her options were: the appendix would need to be removed before it ruptured; because of the stage of the pregnancy and the state of the appendix, if the appendix was removed before the birth, there was a real risk that the baby would die in the process; and if the appendix was not removed prior to the birth, there was a real risk that she would die during the birth. In brief, she heard, it was possibly a choice between her life or the child’s.

The child was born safely on May 4th. Immediately after the birth, Meg had her appendix removed, and, while she recovered, the child was nursed by relatives. The child was a boy, half the average birth-weight, and kind of drip-fed from a pipette tube, so many CCs at a time. In a major way, both the mother and the child had been given the best of both worlds: it had been touch and go but they were both alive, and both had been spared a sacrifice. Often one cannot choose the sacrifices life is going to ask for, and yet the willingness to make the sacrifice is often its own reward.

∞

On many nights, German aircraft were in the sky dropping bombs on the city of Bristol. Down below them, invisible, in the family’s small but comfortable suburban house there was a broom cupboard under the stairs. Meg was back home with her two children. When dangerous stuff is falling from the sky at night, you can’t see it coming. The best you can do is turn out the lights and go where you are moved to go and stay there, alone or with others, until the dangerous stuff has stopped falling. Meg was moved to stay at home when the sirens wailed the alarm and the stuff started falling. She arranged the two children in the middle of the broom cupboard, one a few months old and the other now three years old, and crouched over them, her body forming a roof over them. If the house collapsed, the wooden stairs under which they sheltered would provide some protection, and if the stairway collapsed then the rubble would fall across her back. If she collapsed, it was just possible that she would not suffocate the children under her own weight. She stayed crouched like that until the noise had stopped and the sirens wailed again, that long sustained wail that meant it was time to get out of the broom cupboard and see what was left of the street and who was left living on it.

Having spent the first two years of his unconscious life vulnerable to German Luftwaffe attacks, it was interesting that the first foreign country the boy would visit would be Germany, and such is the mystery of life that the full content of the months spent there, and who the months were spent with, did not become apparent until forty seven years later, and it did not become apparent through any effort to have it made apparent. That would happen simply and only because he felt the need, at a later date, to return and say ‘thank you’. Life takes time to evolve and takes patience to accept and value, and the acceptance is not always as clean or as willing as one is sometimes tempted to believe.

∞

The power of a pronoun

The core of a life is the Self. That life contains many capacities and energies, and those capacities and energies are not always in harmony or in willing and cooperative agreement with the Self. Each person has the capacity to think, feel, understand, imagine, and each one contains energies that we need in order to be fully alive in this world, and the energies are necessarily of this world, from the coarsest to the finest, from the power of matter to the power of intuition and love and wisdom. The Self, in the best of all possible worlds, is the guiding master of these capacities and energies, which become tools, nothing more and nothing less. When all these capacities and energies are in willing and cooperative harmony with the Self and the Self is in willing and cooperative harmony with the Source of All, there is the very real state of ‘We’, as apposed to ‘I’. In the sense of ‘I’ there is the feeling of a lesser part of the Self dominating, so as to exclude the possible reality of the harmonic ‘we’. There have been significant phases of my life where the sense of ‘I’ has dominated, and, in the narrative, ‘I’ is used to express that separation. In other phases, there has been - as there is in this perhaps final phase of our physical existence - a very compelling sense of a willing and cooperative harmony of the capacities and energies for the use of which the Self is responsible, in order to fulfill its purpose here in this world. At times in the narrative, it has been helpful to use ‘he’, in order to arrive at a clearer objectivity than the possessive ‘I’ can achieve.

∞

If it is interesting that it took forty seven years to realise the content of the short trip to Germany in 1959, it is even more interesting that it took almost a whole life to realise the exact nature of the experience of one’s life being spun through the channel of the two people chosen to spin it, consciously or not. That realisation happened sixty-seven years after the event of birth, when one was given to understand and ‘see’ how life is spun through the parents. Life takes time to evolve and takes patience to accept and value. And patience, like any other quality or frailty one contains, is going to be tested to breaking point, which breaking point brings one to another understanding and another level or quality of patience, and so the story keeps transforming, and the personal universe expands after the big bang of birth, if one can put it like that.

Both our parents were cremated, which we found emotionally distressing, and so there is no physical place to go back to and say ‘thank you’. However, the real place where they are to be found is in the essential human quality of their existence, and that will always remain ‘buried’ in the depths of our inner heart. They did what they were asked to do, and did so with a palpable and self-effacing grace, often with extreme difficulty but without complaint. They were wonderful proof that it is the beauty of the spirit that gives beauty to the form, no matter how misshapen or how perfectly proportioned that form might be, and that the form, ultimately, is irrelevant.

∞

2

Moulding first impressions

There could not possibly be a greater contrast than the contrast between the environment in which we started to emerge as a distinct person and the environment which had so disrupted the world for the three years either side of our arrival, between what we emerged to find ourselves looking at and what many of those around us had had to witness and be affected by. Many thousands of people not very far away were still having nightmares, every night, still fearing the worst. This awareness of another manner of the world’s state which was carried in memory by most of those around us was of course, for the time being, absolutely unknown to us: we started to know a different world, without the influence in our present consciousness of what the world had been like only two or three years in the past. That past world for us did not exist, at least not for several years, and even then only by hear-say and hints, and always retreating into the distance while, in a subtle but pervasive way, seeping into the present that is now.

It is not very dissimilar, as far as contrasts are concerned, to the difference between the experience of the child who is born and the experience of the mother who gave birth to that child. The one has no recollection of being within the other, and the other has no concept of what it was like for the child to be within her. But the two parents and the child have one thing indisputably and fundamentally in common, which is not appearances or personality: none of the three have any present knowledge of the actual process of becoming that began in a split second of conception. In that sense, and excluding saints, we arrive here as complete equals: completely ignorant. We also arrive dependent, having done nothing in order to arrive here, and, most significantly, with everything provided. It is in the forgetting of that equality, that commonness, that we start to cause trouble, for our self and, perhaps more problematical, for others, because those others potentially include, of course, everyone, and not just everyone alive at the time but for many generations down the line. The tentacles of who we are and how we live are far reaching.

The parents look upon the child and see innocence, a world they have at least partially lost. The world has the power to corrupt, and through forgetting our equality and commonness we certainly will be corrupted, and if we forget absolutely, then we will become corrupted absolutely and when that happens there are no limits to the harm that can and will be done; because we are then no longer human, we are things and if we have become a thing, there is nothing of greater value to the thing we have become than that thing in and of itself. But, for the time being, in the earliest days, the parent looks upon the child and sees innocence which, for the time being, may be refreshing since the child represents another chance, a fresh set of possibilities, a reminder. And then the parents set about creating an environment for the child, an environment more influenced by the reminder or more influenced by the forgetting. And in the environment in which we slowly surfaced into a state of awareness if not consciousness, we were, and still are, extremely fortunate for the reminders.

Our initial four years are an absolute blank as is the case with almost every new arrival. The process of living can be so symmetrical: we emerge from a blank and are withdrawn into a blank, as far as consciousness of this world is concerned. We exist completely vulnerable and, generally, are unaware of this permanent state of vulnerability. In our case, the first memory we have is of being lost. We had heard girls shouting and had gone to find out where the noise was coming from and got lost in the process. Having a first memory that is the image of the self lost might seem to be not such a wonderful memory, but for us it is gently comical. We were completely lost, absolutely without any bearings that told us where we were in the world about us, completely helpless, and very seriously upset about that. In fact we were barely out of sight of the familiar limits of our world which was continuing its existence only a matter of a few meters away. So close and yet so far. However, we were not in fact lost. We had become unaware of how close safety was. Big difference. And so we will write that anew: our first memory is the image of the self unaware of how close to safety it was. Looked at another way, we started out by wandering away from our worldly base camp, on the long journey that led ever closer to the safety of the inner base-camp. The process of living can be so symmetrical even while, from the viewpoint of the mind and emotions, it can appear to be a total and inglorious mess, a shambles largely out of focus, the lens confused by the depth of field, peripheral vision, background noise and static.

There is the child emerging and the moulding pressure of the influences of the local world seeking to shape him. But the child naturally seeks its own shape - and even trees and snowflakes, not to mention warts, do the same thing - and so the child resists the moulding as far as possible, or as far as the inner need to seek its unique shape insists. With any luck, a child will be allowed to discover his world in its own way.

∞

The family had moved from Bristol and set up home in a house in Bedford. He had no idea what year it was supposed to be but it was 1948 and Israel was a new nation state and very shortly Indonesia would be an independent state as well. He had no idea that the family had moved house but they had. He didn’t know anyone but that didn’t matter since he was not mindful that he didn’t know anyone. He knew the family and that was enough, for the time being. At first there was his elder sister and then there was a younger sister, a baby at the time of his recognising that he wasn’t in the same place he had been in, until, somehow, everything reappeared in a different context in a town with a different name. It seemed bigger, but in fact it was smaller; it seemed bigger because he was more conscious of space, and there was a lot of space, new space.

One new space was school, a space he did not like very much. There were too many other children, and, besides, there were these ugly bars, black iron bars between the street and the school, bars far too high to risk climbing and the space between the bars too narrow to squeeze through, to keep the children in and to make sure they didn’t get out until some apparently random hour of the day when the bigger people there, teachers, decided they had had enough and, looking tired, let the children out. He felt stuck in there, mysteriously without the power to wander freely. What puzzled him was that no one had actually asked him if he wanted to spend so much time in there because he was really quite content entertaining himself at home. If he had been asked, the answer would have been very simple: No. He figured out that the teachers were tired because it takes a lot of effort to keep children behind bars for so much of the day when they would all have been perfectly happy not to have been kept inside, except perhaps when it was raining or lunch time. There were some days when turning up at the school was not required, but he never really knew when those days were coming around again, but they always did and that was just as well. Other equally mysterious times were those long periods of days when no one had to turn up, but those times always came to an end, which was regrettable.

Next door lived another boy. They might have been the same age but that didn’t cross his mind. He knew that this boy next door did not go to the same school because he never saw him behind the bars, and anyhow it wasn’t important. The two of them started to spend all their time together. This was an excellent arrangement because he did not have a brother and the friend’s brother was much bigger and had bigger friends than the two smaller ones could ever hope to play with. He was very lucky because the house had three stories, so high that he couldn’t see the top of it without getting a stiff neck, and he had his own room, and a garden that was as big as for ever, and with big trees and grass. Even more appealing was the park that was down the end of the very long road, a park where there was definitely more grass than in the garden and an enormous number of trees many of which were even bigger than the three-storey house, and a pond, and a playground, and paths going everywhere and for more than for ever. It took a while to get over the surprise of being able to find the way out and get home again. He and his friend always went there together, in some kind of deal they had had to make with their parents. There were four influences that were always successful in getting the two of them back home again: tiredness, darkness, rain and hunger. Had it not been for those four things, they might have lived in the park, which was