Weather vane
I was lying outside on the deck on Saturday, enjoying the warm sunshine. My chair was tilted, with my face pointing upwards towards the sky. Off to the left, through my partly closed eyes, I noticed the weather vane was missing. All that remained was the spear upon which it sits. The weather vane is situated at the top of a beam that supports the surrounding trellis. Although incomplete, with the north, south, east, west bit that generally lies beneath the swinging section, missing, the rooster still manages to change direction with the different winds. My immediate thought was that it must have fallen off and as I sat up to check out the situation, I realised the rooster was still there. The wind was coming from the exact direction that made the vane look invisible. What I had thought was the spear holding it, was in fact the narrow section of the bird, as if viewing from the rear. The vane had played tricks on my brain. Not only that, there isn’t a spear that it sits on, rather a large nail stuck into one end of the beam. In that brief moment I’d noticed the vane missing, my mind had decided that what I was seeing had to be the bit the vane usually sat on, once again playing tricks on me.
They say the mind always has to make sense of a situation, that if one sees something that is unusual for our world, for example, the brain will always try and give it a logical explanation. That is exactly what happened in my case. As I was only seeing something that looked like a small spear, the brain decided that would have to be the bit on which the vane sat – that was the most logical explanation it could come up with.
It made me wonder just how much escapes us in our daily lives, with our brains wanting to give us comfortable explanations for all that we see. Interestingly, as I write this, Stephen and I have just heard three cracks coming from the kitchen, the sound similar to one of a mouse trap going off. I ignored the first, thinking Stephen was responsible for it. He wasn’t. We both went into the kitchen following the second and third to investigate but could find nothing amiss. My thought was perhaps a light had blown but they all still work and the mouse traps have not been set off either. I hope it is not wiring in the ceiling but there is no electrical smell to support this thought.
I can see here, my mind trying to find a logical explanation for what we heard. We waited in the kitchen following the third crack, hoping for a fourth to identify exactly where the sound came from and possibly, what caused it. There have been no more.
In my meditations, I see all kinds of things. I have long since given up finding explanations and as I explained in The Collective Us, I have learnt to just describe what I see, rather than trying to say what some of these images are or why I have seen them. That seems to work. I remember the early days of my spiritual development and seeing the Pegasus horse or the elementals in my meditations, thinking they were all make-believe. It wasn’t until later that I realised that I was crossing into the dimensions where these beings exist.
However, in our world, here on earth, the brain needs to be in control. Whilst it allows me to see all sorts of things during meditation, it still needs to find a logical explanation for all that happens on its watch.