It’s Part of Who I Am

The conversations Peace and I had together during 2011 and 2012 often contained her words “some things cannot be explained” and perhaps she was right. Indeed, I notice in the books that surround me in my study many different words are used to explain the same thing. Towards the end of 2013 Peace and I had a discussion – well, more a question and answer session – about the use of words for describing spiritual matters. This was the period that, with hindsight, I realise she seemed to be going deeper to respond to my questions. She made the statement that “God is”. Immediately, I tried to draw her out with my questions. She must have been so fed up with me and my interrogations, particularly in the last months, but she always co-operated without any fuss. This time I asked her to explain exactly what she meant by “God is”. I teased her with “is it the trees, the plants or what?” She responded with the usual, “some things can’t be explained” and then added “there is a wordless realm.” That made an impact on me yet I persisted with “what is God?” She answered, “This is where the mind shuts down. I know what I mean when I say ‘God is’ but I can’t put it into words.” When I asked her if it was a feeling, she said “it goes deeper than feeling – it is the absolute in human terminology.” These are lovely words from my mother although I am still wondering exactly what she meant by “God is”. I ask myself, if I can explain these ‘things’ in a more easily understood manner. At this stage I do not know. Recently I heard an interview on the radio with an Australian writer who suggested that it was the role of a writer to make the incomprehensible comprehensible. He was speaking from a position within our rational world of ideas and words. An attempt to explore spiritual matters can lead to what looks like irrational thinking – even sophistry. Zen Buddhism’s answer to these explanatory difficulties is, as Suzuki tells us, “No depending on words”. It is obvious that Peace comes from training in this tradition when she wrote in the front of one of her books in 2005, “If there are words that’s NOT IT”. I am still going to try and put into words what she says cannot. My mother has shown us that the spiritual path is not so easy. I am still wondering why it had to take her so long. In my latest reading, Jessie Crum’s little book, The Art of Inner Listening which Peace gave me in the 1980s, I learn for the first time where in the Bible can be found the actual words telling all who read them that ‘the Kingdom of God is within you’. The full text is found at Luke 17, verses 20-21. I turn to my mother’s bible and of course she has the words marked. This is the first time I look through the big bible she left me and I don’t know why, but I am surprised to see her markings here although I must say there are no notes and in comparison to her other books very few markings and no underlining. Peace knew her bible – she had studied it for her diploma in religious teaching and more than this, throughout the years, even as a Buddhist, she continued to quote from it. She would have read the words from the Gospel of Luke when she turned to the Christian Church in 1955 but obviously had no way of understanding them. All those different paths to find ‘the Kingdom of god within’, or ‘IT’ as she sometimes said, and I am still wondering why so many paths. Perhaps, so that she could show us how difficult it can be. Did she have so much to learn? No more than anyone else, surely. I stop and think about this sentence. I have mentioned elsewhere that she had a tendency to be rigid in her thinking and could be quite obsessive and one-eyed about issues that claimed her attention. Perhaps she was not as open to new ideas as some and required constant reminders about who she was and the possibilities she had. Yet when I turn to the front of that most favoured book by Father de Caussade there, alongside another note dated 2005, she has written a sentence taken from Jean-Yves Leloup’s The Gospel of Thomas. It says, “The butterfly does not come into being by crushing the caterpillar; instead the latter must be allowed to grow in order to reach the threshold of mutation, of passage into another form – the butterfly”. I have looked at this verse often and admired the beautiful words but now realise that it helps to summarise how my mother must have seen her passage through those 50 years of searching. Almost like the very slow unfurling of a leaf. And at last – and only now – do I see and understand the process she went through. Krishnamurti put forward the idea that the move from one institution or group to another is like going from one prison to another. The exact words he spoke at a public talk he gave in 1955 were, “we may break away from one pattern and take on another, give up Christianity and become a communist, leave Catholicism and join some equally tyrannical group, thinking that we are evolving, growing towards reality. On the contrary, it is merely an exchange of prisons”. When I first read these words I thought that they explained exactly how Peace went through those years of searching – from one prison to another. Now I am prepared to see it a little differently. I understand the slow development she went through. In groups such as those of Gurdjieff, Co-Freemasonry and ‘A Course In Miracles’ she learnt about herself and developed and matured as an individual human being. Different groups provided her with the different lessons she needed to learn. At the time she might not have known exactly what she was doing, but do it she did. In 2001 she told us about this aspect of her life. She wrote in her journal, “To see life as one’s teacher is a great step forward. I did not even see that till I came across it one day while reading at the T.S. Library”. In June 2012 she reiterated for me what she saw as one’s life purpose, “It is the growth of a human being. It is a learning curve.” As I delve deeper into my mother’s story I am beginning to realise that, slowly, my own understanding of both Peace and what she demonstrates is evolving. Also, I have started to fully comprehend that this journey I am taking with my mother is my journey as well. It is my learning curve. After the talk with my mother’s friend Anne just a few weeks ago I wrote about how I was then feeling about Peace and her life. I asked myself, “What now do I make of my mother”? My response was, “I think she had difficulties facing up to this life and everything it threw at her. So her life could be seen as going from one prison to another. Whenever she hit trouble – off she went to another prison. However I prefer to see her as learning about all these other ways of thinking. A deluded daughter! Or is it a scholar providing alternative ways of seeing a life”? This paragraph is inserted as I rethink because it is an honest reflection at a time when I was in doubt about continuing to write. Perhaps more importantly, it suggests how difficult it is to truly know.