On the Tutelary Daimon

essay and verse

ON THE TUTELARY DAIMON

Meditation – in the sense of sitting practice, not rumination over concepts – is difficult for me. In fact, merely attempting two minutes of intentionally sitting and not moving is physically torturous. The spasms in my neck begin almost immediately, and consequent, the visual distortions (my eyes become blurred, and their focus is pulled around in a looping pattern, that, if anyone saw me, would probably give the impression that I’m on drugs, or possessed).

It’s a blow to the ego in itself to realise that you can’t even do the basics without severe and painful exertion. However, I have a teacher, someone who, more than anyone I have ever encountered, seems to me to be the apparition of a truly spiritual guide, whose teaching is to do just that. And so I have to keep giving it a shot.

What happens after I have tried to meditate is interesting though. What happens is that I get vivid dreams, dreams which stay with me throughout the following day. Occasionally featured in these dreams is the vision of the great vault of a night sky, and the sense – the palpable, intense knowledge that I am in the presence of divinity (or at least a divinity).

That feeling is neither pleasant, nor particularly unpleasant; it’s not some exhilarating sense of awe, nor is it a looming dread. It’s more of an understanding of ‘my’, the dream-self’s, total inferiority and vulnerability beneath this formidable power that is fixing me with a penetrating gaze. There is a sense of distinction, a sharp discontinuity and difference of power between me and the presence above.

However, since it is undeniably occurring within the sphere of my own mind, it is also clear that there is an underlying unity between us, in spite of the perceived imbalance of power.

Indeed, that great other, internal to my own mind, is a representation of what I really am; not me, the so-called individual, but what is prior to the individual; the archetypal form, or what might be, in the telling of the great Platonist philosopher, Plotinus, the undescended part of the soul, acting as the tutelary deity/daimon, abiding in the realm of pure Being.

This ‘part’, is in fact the real(er) presence of the soul, in contrast to this protrusion into the unreal realm of constant change- the waking body called Ross and subject to suffering and confusion (and irritating YouTube adds for chainsaw cleaning gadgets, and promotions for a daft online grift, posing as a university, based on the teachings of a whiney Canadian probable psyop).

It might be that, it might not. In any case, the complex of and interrelationship within an apparent hierarchy of powers, contained in one sphere of vision, the dream realm, is itself revealing of how what is in apparent opposition can also be a unity, and what is thought a unity – the individual self – can be regarded as a complex of opposition.

And now it’s July and time for a bit of a break.

TUTELAGE

Of the god of light and shade

he queried “why my lot conceive?-

alighting on this stage, and made

at weary odds with all perceived?

***

along with pains and histories

enduring to the fall of night,

and then, domains of mystery-

my halls, when gone alluring sight!”

***

But answered they “o mind, you are

a part of us, and need to learn;

without confusion, never free

to doubt illusion, nor return”