So my google map “what if” had been a nagging that required to be followed, my walk to my area X had been an adventure of free entertainment, healthful exercise and a capture of a new pronounced hunch that now upon the ponder of a few words had me scrambling into my mental archives of all that I have ever studied over the last few decades looking to find a thread, to find a hidden nuance of meaning, a possible feeling of solving the mystery of life and creation, or just another day dreaming.
I remember the last thing my Grandma said before she kicked the bucket “ hey how far do you reckon I can kick this bucket”
Chapter Fore
On and on the walk home unfolded, and in the captive meditation of bush walking there is no escape from the meditation and contemplation at hand. You just need to go with the flow and see where it goes. Says I following the flow of the gentle stream flowing through the rocks, and of course where this physical flow of water goes is actually to my home. The gentle security of knowing that if I simply follow this flow 'tis home I will go. No need to spend any thought power on figuring if I am going the right way. The reflective symbolic flow that was the momentum behind my present contemplation was on the other hand, a flow I was needing to follow to see where it goes. At this stage I knew not/knot where it was going but to some similar sense of home I was hoping.
The captive space provided by bush walking delivers the necessary no escape from the meditation needed to get to the bottom of certain ponders. Like I said before I have been with my mind for a life time now and have come to know how to work with the seeming autonomous, tricky nature of that which is my mind. So often in my normal day to day life I notice that my busy mind can race ahead of itself. It gets so far ahead of itself that itself is left behind separated from the abstract projections of the racing mind and prone to be lost by itself in some tangent or distraction. So here on this walk home in the captivity of this type of meditation contemplation process beyond all the possible should s, could s and would s normally being negotiated I can not get ahead of myself. I in this walk home along this boulder y creek, mostly hidden beneath the trees I am symbolically not able to get ahead of myself I am where I am on the path home and that is where I am.
Now despite my figuratively not being able to get ahead of myself there is this ongoing, never ending dynamic tension that is sort of like the bickering of Tweedledee and Tweedledum from “Alice in Wonderland”. The very familiar two sides of my mind throwing notions at each other and not stopping till there is some degree of conclusion and then immediately move on to the very next notion. The notion flow can have a rational flow, where the notions seem to be obviously connected one to another in some way. But also there is what I have called my meta-rational flow which is not necessarily immediately rational in its connection, but somewhere down the track some other piece of the particular puzzle arrives and magically the meta-rational arrival of some thought will show its deep rooted relevance.
The management strategy, for coping with my “tweedle-verse” - and that being my ongoing Tweedledee-Tweedledum inner banter, I had stumbled upon from my extensive reading – some where it was said that there are generally two types of minds upon the planet from a species perspective. The eastern mind and the western mind. The eastern mind is served by the meditation techniques we are all familiar with that we have been taught from the Eastern Masters. The sitting in cross legged, straight spine, still, silent approach to emptying the mind, to close down the chatter, to sense a gravitation to ones natural center and allow oneself to fall with it. The process of seeking to touch the still, silent, invisible, empty no thing-ness that exists beneath all or any form, and the consequent contemplation that issues from that touch.
The Western mind is a different creature according to the wise observation I had read all those years ago. The western mind prefers to be occupied, to be sewn into a process, to be actively participating with something that does not require enormous mental challenge. Take driving your car for instance, that realization that you are further along the road than you had been paying attention too is the flow I endeavor to describe. For those with a western sort of mind accordingly do well to structure their meditation as the focus into repetitive work, digging, raking, or crafting, machine operation and of course bush walking.
So the captivity of needing to get home, the relatively challenging path of following a bouldery creek, all contribute to the desired setting necessary for the western mind to activate the meditation to contemplation process. Here I was in the flow of my processing that which I had not really expected. Which when you have followed a particular hunch the fruit of which is to reach an outcome of some sort. In this particular case my wild fancy of needing to go to some obscure place in the scrub, to touch base with some perceived anomaly on a google map had led to that which I had not expected.
The simplest outcome would have been to go, find nothing of consequence, discharge the “what if” and return to normal life. But now that I had found that scrap of paper with those few cryptic words my entire Tweedle-verse, my own personal inner universe of the tensional bickering’s of my own Tweedledee-and-Tweedledum-ness had found fertile amplification. It is sort of good and bad at the same time when this type of unfolding happens in my head. I have experienced it all many times in my life adventure and have learned to flow with it all. But there is no escape from it, I have found that I have to simply keep on thinking and thinking it out until it is all thought out, what ever it might be that my tweedle-verse is needing to process.
My life of looking at my own mind, of exploring as much psychology, philosophy, meta-physics etcetera: of exploring different meditation techniques had proved to grant me a workable management strategy so I can continue to cope with the never-ending-ness of my mental processing. The other consequence to the exploring and reading lots of psychology, philosophy etc and exploring meditation techniques was that it actually fed the monster I was endeavoring to tame. It seems the better I get at knowing more about my mind the bigger and stronger it continues to get. A funny sort of catch 22.
Still here I am walking toward home, and what I have determined so far is the fruit of this whole epic is I am now with what I have come to call my Hunch Hunch. This totally unexpected outcome of my venture. Where I was pondering wild fancies of a possible secret military installation, or some strange alien portal in the top of some ridge, or maybe a hidden enclave of strange folk. But what I got was my already ethereal mutterings now on steroids.
The whole thinking process of wondering should I pay attention to the silly little things I notice in life. Like my very own perception that there is some strange anomaly upon a google earth map, that I would be moved enough by it to go to the effort to do a strenuous two day bush walk to satisfy my curiosity and then now find myself in a mind-scape that has me a little overwhelmed to be honest, but at the same time excited by the implications that those few cryptic words have upon all that which is being carried in my endlessly busy mind.
The dreams of this morning, the stumble across the overhanging cave like camp spot, the noticing of the old shirt against the back wall, the finding of the bit of paper and those few words were now eating into my mind and developing tendrils of relevance to things I have been thinking for years. Relevance to mechanics of psychology I have read and pondered but have yet to piece together as a bigger picture.
Even though I had yet dedicated much focus upon trying to figure out the words of the message, their arrival into my awareness, there having been delivered as a form to be absorbed by my unconscious mind was beginning to make me observe that by themselves these few words were affecting into me and I was naming it all my Hunch Hunch.
This hunch hunch was becoming something in me, it was clothed in the few words -Find it All in the Shadows- Its developing tendrils of relevance were seeming to me to be like some mystical golden thread which had arrived to magically sew together beads for a necklace. The beads were the isolated ponders of other hunches I had experienced over my many years of