I had quit my job to rekindle the fire which had smoldered for two years in an absence of free time. Raindrops made a strange face at the window. I was free again.
It was decided. A trip to the stone circles of North East Scotland. I packed for a two-week retreat in Aberdeenshire. I wanted to investigate a style of monument peculiar to the lower lying territories of the Grampian Mountain range. I was sure the time would be well spent, somehow. I later discovered that in order to be sensitised to the nature of things, time must be destroyed so that everything expresses meaning in the instant. This happens more naturally when you can stand free of worry.
I was glad I had been possessed with the urge to visit “the Grand Momma” Old Keig en route from the airport as it proceeded to snow for two days, making my retreat authentic. As I stood by the recumbent stone at Old Keig, situated on a terrace with far views to the mountains, it seemed obvious why people chose this spot. The circle felt small in comparison with the view. This was all about marking the spot in which to observe the landscape; the world; the cosmos; reality; time itself. I was gloriously alone. I had to decide whether my days would be spent sightseeing or meditating upon a single recumbent. These big horizons seemed important.
I was certain that the stone circles marked a turning point in mankind’s evolution; the point when the land would become ours; when in the minds of many, the affairs and needs of men were the dominant reality; when the meaning inherent in the universe played second fiddle. I started to think about the relationship between the two “flanking” upright stones and the formidable “recumbent” lodged between them. Surfaces are even, unnaturally flat and smooth; some stones were shaped as sharp as teeth. Others more like whales. Was the arrangement supposed to be seen as a wall or doorway, or a row of teeth? It looked so iconic. I had read that most recumbents were aligned with the South so that the moon rose over the stone between the flankers. Was the moon important? Or was it merely a way to represent the passing of time?
A few days later, I saw what appeared to be a wall behind some old oaks, except it was not a wall. There was no mortar, no gaps between the stones. Just one continuous smooth surface, higher than a person but shaped like a pebble, to confuse the senses and alter perception. The people knew that this thing that could not be named was a portal and that its tentacles reached into the Other World wherein all reality and truth was to be found in this altered state of perception. This truth could not be told; only experienced. Maybe this was why all religion used altered perception; otherwise how could people’s attention be held on the divine?
A jet thundered above the hills as I ate my sandwich, rearing up vertically into the dark blue heavens just as abominable UFOs had done in my dreams, a symbol of our terrifying exploitation of natural energies. At that moment a plot came to me which, it would turn out, require another six-year hiatus to become this second chapter in this story.
In the Neolithic (roughly 5,000 years ago), a spell was cast before the God of the North, that would break the bond between Man and Nature so that Man could develop his civilisation in isolation to the rest of creation, harnessing the planet’s resources while stepping out of its confines. Set in the dim aftermath of a cataclysmic event referred to as the “Panic”, the protagonist Kirk Tough has a vision of the dark magic which took place millennia ago and senses that time can be reversed to this very moment of separation. A series of connections between past and present lead him to conclude that the dimensions of space and time are at any moment part of a collapsible waveform emanating from everything at once.
30th February 2017, 18:00. Notes from Kirk Tough's Grampian Revelations. "I sit in front of the Holiest Temple of them all, now swallowed up into the earth, silent and eerie. Waters spring from either side of here, and like a serpent's tongue, join and begin their bubbling descent toward the valley. I meditate, open my eyes and see the icy blue Other World, where every pebble, every spec in the infinite cosmos is divine. The vision disappears but I am certain - all matter, all life, all energy, has in its fabric the divine that we cannot see, lest our minds be blown from astonishment.”
Kirk can tell when he is on the right track following a vision. The journey skips forward, and another location is revealed. Kirk is visited by a spirit voice known as Loch Kinold. Kirk believes Loch can help him find the place where the spell was cast that split man from nature, and help him reverse the spell. The story is told from the first person. Occasionally, the voice of Loch narrates. Kirk must travel in order to find the portal. He visits places that he intuitively believes will lead him there.
I figured that the meaning of the stone circles would reveal the next notable turn in the plot, whether it was writing as Kirk Tough or myself. I somehow felt our lives would run in parallel anyway, or even merge.
That night, I dreamt of a stone circle. It sat at the top of a barren, conical hill below a heavy grey sky. There was no language to describe the scene at the time. I could not speak, nor did I know any words, and time ceased to exist. At that moment, the reality of the silent moment was stirred in me, a moment of pure meaning. But being human, a word suddenly came from my subconscious, which perfectly described this state. It had barely formed when it vanished from my memory, leaving no trace whatsoever. One thing did stick though – the subtext of the dream was “STOP TRYING”.
The “Panic” was a very brief anomaly in human evolution. While tribalism and groupthink remained the most popular means of surviving almost any threat, it was the Self – the soul, the subject, the person – that finally gave way to panic, collapsing under the accumulated weight of Identity, which turned out to be an illusion. 5.5 seconds. That’s how long the Panic had lasted. Roughly the same time in which it had eventually been possible for some people to run 100 meters. Those people tried to run from the Panic. But without knowing, they were just running on the spot. After that everything went quiet and voices dropped into whispers.
During the Panic, all identities vanished as if by the removal of a critical piece of operating code. Some people did not panic and some found unexpected relief. Buddhists noticed their awakened state. People who had been asleep or under sedation during the initial shockwave awoke to 5.5 seconds of universal reality, existential crisis, and then silence.
It should also be said that animal and plant life – along with many other forms of sentience which had not become so reliant on their own taxonomies of identity, were unaffected. Interestingly, several significant AIs and even an air traffic control system, developed critical instabilities. We will return to the Panic later in this story.
On my return home from Scotland, flying back into London I could see how the machinery of progress had condensed everything; space, time, energy, even meaning. The city’s purpose and existence were the same thing, form and function expressed. Endlessly forming from the constant movement, each light going somewhere, doing something amidst the fibres, neurons and clusters. A super-brain created from the fusion of curiosity and chaos. I was overwhelmed by the contrast to the previous two weeks.
The city confirmed my fundamental insight from the retreat. That meaning is intrinsic in reality; the same thing. Does meaning need a conscious mind to perceive it, or does it exist in its own right? Does the city exist outside of my mind? Does the city carry meaning? You could say that a meaning is simply a purpose, a function. A thing happening. We make connections with some of these happenings in our own neural networks but most of the time we attend to the things we have learnt to attend to.
The neural network of man’s externalised mind is imprinted on the modern landscape like a dark, soulless, tarmac covered supercomputer. The mind of nature now exists at the margins or our awareness, labelled, mapped, measured, tapped, drilled, channeled through. It is still there, because man’s supercomputer mind can never replace nature’s mind, but nature’s mind can be forgotten to man. This is the purpose of the stone circle, to remind man of the mind of nature.
Returning to his mission, Kirk Tough knew that somewhere in the internalised neural network of consciousness is a program that can escape from its operating system and exist in perfect black and white infinity. The program would be found in consciousness itself and would reverse man’s ongoing separation from nature by offering the perspective of complete reality from which it is impossible to return with the illusion of a separate ego-self. Had Kirk conducted an early attempt to free this program from consciousness, which led to the Panic?
8th August 2013, 18:00. Notes from Kirk Tough's diary. “I have discovered that there are two principles governing our connection to the universe and they are entangled. The first principle is attention and the second is identification. Our attention is both the process and the source of our experience of the universe and our free will. Identification is the creation of meaning from information, and is an extension of free will. This gives us our capacity to attach abstract reasoning, at the heart of our evolutionary advantage, to everything we perceive, even the very idea of ourselves and everything we do, in the quest for success and affirmation.
I am about to set in motion a process which I hope will bring back into harmony these two principles, with which we are so entangled”
31st October 2013, 21:00. Notes from Kirk Tough's Diary. “The fundamental ingredient of magic is belief. The history of our species’ advance and ascendance over all others has been one of belief. Self-belief. Belief in fate, destiny, justice, the Divine, in stories, feats of industry, sacrifice, love. In magic; the magic that makes everything possible – existence. Using the power of belief to materialise reality I am calling on all those visions that have hereto manifested before me to reveal how to stop identification”.
Phil Lynott’s familiar face looked at me and I hoped that somewhere he might be happy to have been given the part of Kirk, a Vagabond of the Western World. I suspected that Lynott, a respected songwriter and poet in his time, would also comment on any problems with the storyline. I chuckled at the conceit. I wondered who might turn up to play the part of Loch. “…Oh I meant I’ll play the part of Loch” Phil interrupted. “...Oh just fucking merge them, there were too many fucking characters anyway” he continued. Was Phil stoned? “All the prejudice is true!” Phil replied.