Books For A Silent Hour
Reading can lift our vibration when life wants to pull us down
There is a unity underlying all things that we now have the chance to realize. This is the priceless opportunity wrought by dreadful times, the coming together of human beings through what we share.
As this great wave of suffering washes over the world and bleaches everything to bare bone, what we truly are is revealed. To immerse ourselves in what Jung called the Self, we need to have deep roots into the unconscious — at least a foothold. For when the ego is dominated by consciousness, instead of being a bridge between conscious and unconscious selves, it leaves us bobbing on the surface of life, superficial and vulnerable to the wave.
Many are drowning and will drown in this second flood. One way to help return you to this sense of unity is to read those books — not just the words but the spaces in-between — that can remind you of who and what you are. You are not the wave but the ocean which contains all.
I would like to suggest everyone reads something that helps. I recommend Siddhartha by Herman Hesse whose words can both comfort and lay siege to doubt and worry. Please pass on those books that return you to your own essence. As a writer, this is how I can help.
In some ways, it is a book about death — the death of experience, as ascetic, merchant, lover, gambler, father — until the eponymous hero realizes his oneness with all and stops holding to any fixed identity for his satisfaction.
“From that hour Siddhartha ceased to fight against his destiny. There shone in his face the serenity of knowledge, of one who is no longer confronted with conflict of desires, who has found salvation, who is in harmony with the stream of events, with the stream of life, full of sympathy and compassion, surrendering himself to the stream, belonging to the unity of things.”
After a lifetime of tribulations and trials — the human journey — Hesse, in one of many moments of magical poetry, describes his hero’s realization:
His wound blossomed, his suffering was shining, his self had flown into the oneness.
When we embrace both pain and pleasure in a natural synthesis, we move beyond duality and find ourselves standing on solid ground.
Stung by a scorpion, the Indian sage Aurobindo simply said, ‘Ah! A kiss from my beloved.’ This is the attitude we can all aspire to, although of course we will not all reach it in a single lifetime. It is now time to remember the long game:
‘Our story is much older than its years, its datedness is not to be measured in days, nor the burden of age weighing upon it to be counted by orbits around the sun; in a word, it does not actually owe its pastness to time.’ Thomas Mann
My other choices might be The God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, Men and The Waters Of Life by Michael Meade, Soulcraft by Bill Plotkin, We, The Psychology of Romantic Love by Robert A Johnson, Anam Cara by John O’Donohue, a few among many. Please leave your own book choice in the comments.
Sometimes, it is only with hindsight that things make sense. I suspect there are many people just now who are able to re-imagine the losses of their past as preparation for this time and those to come. Those who cannot deal with loss, transformation and the shedding of identity — at least the false or adapted self they set up to protect them from past wounding — will likely struggle. Personally, I am now seeing the stripping away of people, places and things which I experienced from the age of two left me with an inner strength, despite huge vulnerability, to be ok with long stretches of solitude, simple pleasures and the disappearance and possible ending of external goals. It is time for faith, trust, right action where needed, loving thy neighbour — even if just online — and a deep swerve within. The soul has always been awaiting our return.
© Simon Heathcote
