A Bonnetful of Bees

Scene: On Monaro.
Dramatis Personae
Shock-headed blackfellow,
Boy, (on a pony).
Snowflakes are falling
Gentle and slow.
Youngster says, “Frying Pan,
What makes it snow?”
Frying Pan, confident,
makes the reply–
“Shake ‘im big flour bag
Up in the sky!”
“What! When there’s miles of it?
Surely that’s brag.
Who is there strong enough
Shake such a bag?”
“What parson tellin’ you,
Ole Mr Dodd,
Tell you in Sunday School?
Big pfeller God!
Him drive ‘im bullock dray,
Then thunder go;
Him shake ‘im flour bag–
Tumble down snow!”

(A.B. Patterson)

Even when the above was written, there was an emerging awareness of the sophistication of aboriginal theology, though there were few white Australians ever admitted to its secrets. Even so, it pleased Patterson’s audience to read of this simple and ignorant “shock headed blackfellow.”

I preface these notes with the poem because in a number of ways I relate to Frying Pan. I am setting out to forge a systematic personal theology and I am arrogant enough to attempt it without formal training, or even an understanding of what many fine intellects and spirits have achieved before me.

What is more, I am writing of my own spiritual experience. I am writing about phenomena that are personal and real to me. It seems to me pointless to speculate on matters that I cannot yet relate to my own experience. Like the notional Frying Pan, the limits of my experience will be obvious.

-o0o- (more…)

In the development of language, logic, law, science and ethics, etc man has evolved for himself tools which enable him to describe, locate, and organise the various elements of his world and thereby take charge of that environment, and to organise his relationships with the world around him to his advantage, but these tools reflect and work only in a perceived world of separate objects, a multiplicity. That is what language, logic, law etc have evolved to do: organise discrete objects and events.

Knowledge of a unitive existence eludes him while he persists in trying to access or formulate it using language, logic, etc. There are no separate elements to organise. Knowledge arrives and is contained non-verbally, preverbally, and one must learn to access it and store it in ways that are totally unprecedented in the rest of our experience.

We must give away pretty much our entire experience of the world as we have it, and of ourselves in that separate world—we must, perhaps, be born again—if we are to grow in mystical knowledge as we have previously grown in knowledge of our world of multiplicity. And as with “ordinary” language, the more use we make of it, the more subtle becomes the quality of the information available.