The Nietzschean ‘Void’ is haunting me today. As it’s mixed with many other spaces, feelings, senses and cognitive chains. The pain of Kierkegaard, the truths of Schopenhauer, the multiple deaths of self in Camus’ work. Within all chaos there is a secret order, the awareness and appreciation of the Anima, or Nixie. The hand binds to your ankle and draws you down in lust and hedonism. It’s like being drawn down or called by a sound and feelings that fall over you like an upwelling subconscious tide.

I can hear you are asking me so I will answer the question. What was the literature that opened the scar today and allowed you to become the embodiment of your own research. How was it that you became the Scar? The answer is:

 ‘The archetypes and the collective unconscious (Carl Jung 1959)’. I feel I have been reading the deeper texts that underpin social humanity and the further reaches of human nature for a large part of my life. Well, I have been reading to live since I realised that I had value and literature helped me support that position. I learnt the language of the oppressors but found references of my own. This is very much my ethos or Epistemological stance as a facilitator in higher education. To help free the learner to the position of enquiry and set them the task of satisfying their own questions born internal. Not so much a learning outcome, more a learner outcome.

The work of Jung works on multiple levels for me, much like the cloud of knowing, or the perspectives of Paul Brunton, the internal doors of Martin Laird, the water ways of Vasudeva in his conversations with Siddhartha, the aspirations and hopes of Sir Ken Robinson, The myths and truths of Gabor Mate and the present ideology of Russell Edward Brand. These thoughts and positions are vital but remain fragments of knowing, never touching a deeper truth. Those spaces are saved for the moments where Ego is receding, and the grip is felt again from the Siren, Anima or Nixie. In lustful delight I am pulled below the surface. I take a deep breath and as the water rises over my broken but accepting form.

Chuang-Tzu “The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror; it grasps nothing, it refuses nothing. It receives but does not keep”.

I am happily aware of the movement and the vitality of movement. I have no fear of the deep and the nature of the upside down as the importance it has is the offering of interpretation in the social normalisation issues we face now and seem entrenched for our children’s futures. This is the part I cannot abide and will look to challenge. With the hope of nurturing spaces of educational value and trust. Places of freedom not bound by expectation and assessment but more so bound in love acceptance and agreement.

There is a moment within the work of Jung, where he describes a valley and a lake. The lake is a depiction of the rising mass consciousness within society. The suggestion being that as the symbols and archetypes within our society fail and age the discomfort of the subconscious rises. This for me was a perfect reflection of what is being seen across health education and more so politics. Within my profession as a Trauma nurse specialist, creative Researcher, playwright, author and poet. I can feel that there is a deep and almost desperate panic to try to SOLVE the problems within society. As Ian McGilchrist, Gabor Mate, Isabel Menzies Lyth, Kafka, Van Gogh the list of associated whispers is limitless. The gold that binds them is….

A new view…. one that is being spoken by many modern-day musicians, thinkers, children, it’s the collective conscience of the Neurodiverse. It’s the songs of hope sung by the marginalised and dissociated. It’s the dreams and aspirations born within the right mind and it’s one that is other, abnormal, chaos, noise, ill-timed, socially inappropriate. It’s within the comedians view as he painfully exposes the audience to a truth, they laugh but would not dare to share.

These small moments are like a master welder of the synapses. A neurosurgeon with the ability to touch and influence one single synaptic gap. Like a small touch of gold to the cognitive appreciation of the true self realised. As if the reader is gifted the red thread of consciousness, but not as an external coming to know but more an internal principial awareness like it is wrapped along the myelin sheath, like the art of a silken tapestry. This is as Nietzsche described and Jung also reflects the position of the ‘medicine man’ an immortal being, an enlightener able to puncture and navigate the chaos of the world, offering light to the positions of abject darkness. Within Richard Skinner’s book ‘Echoes of Eckhart’ (1998) these moments of clarity, Brunton-esque glimpses are formed into poetic notes. These are not notes of music or breath these are principial notes of the divine. An entire lifetime is brought to a place of present legacy and value in simply knowing that this is both the object and the way:

Something

Is standing in the way.

Meister Eckhart Examines it.

The something looks suspiciously like

himself

This light is rested and embodied by the candle at the centre of the table that has been sat within my mind. ‘The table of consciousness’ and the musical notes of trust and trauma. But again, the question really that needs to be asked is: Who, if anyone is listening?

This is the link (below) for the next part of the #Hobopoet adventures into the world of unknowing. The play is being supported by the amazing free-range arts collective Home | Free Range (freerangecanterbury.org)

THE TABLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS — Kickstarter

As the link suggests:

 ‘The Table of consciousness’ is a play taken directly from my research. As a dyslexic creative I needed to paint a picture with the Art the data and the words of the poetic nursing heart. This play is a synthesis of the research data the underpinning philosophies and the lived experiences of the student nurses and me. We form our identity from the fragments of pottery left around us after trauma.

My blogs are my home. The home of the Hobopoet. The home for the Wandering lambs and the poetic nursing heart

Thomas Delahunt BSc MSc FHEA 

Doctoral Candidate 

Dyslexic Academic

TimesHEA winner 2019

Author of ‘The Wandering Lamb’

(https://bookshop.canterbury.ac.uk/the-wandering-lamb-signed-copy_9781838293222