True Story Pt I
Where to begin? I have to write this in a linear way but really its about 2 different realities, one which is in fact the only reality which has no qualities at all, we’ll call it R1 and the other in which time and space and all the opposites are seen R2.
My great great grandfather was Charles Darwin, in my generation we are about 450. I don’t usually namedrop but it’s kind of relevant, my story is really about how I have realised that R1 and R2 are the same thing, in fact that awareness has no Inside or Outside, and that this realisation has been given to me via matter. What is matter? Never mind. What is mind? It doesn't matter. Though some wonderful inner experiences have played their part. Also there can be no experience more fulfilling than life itself, however it presents itself.
From the ages of 5 to about 10 or 12, I regularly had an experience in which I would suddenly find myself as small as the most minute microbe and as large as the entire universe, at the same time (R1); I always knew it was kind of important, though I didn’t know what was going on either, I named it ‘the big littles’ to myself but I never talked about it. I have since met 2 or 3 people who have known that experience too, so I think it maybe fairly common. Jumping the years until age 16, I would be cycling home at night at about 11 PM, and I would see quite often a couple in the doorway of a big department store, the man very tall, with a short woman. I never knew who they were. Then, just before my 17th birthday, my brother who had been let out of a rehab centre for his 21st birthday decided to hold a party; he said a little begrudgingly that I could come. My parents had gone away, so at about 8 in the evening I knocked on his bedroom door and there were maybe 6 people in the room, 4 sitting on the bed, one of them was Andrew, and we just exchanged one look and that was it! Love at first site you can say. He is, of course, the tall man in the doorway (R1). The first time we met again after that night, we started a conversation about true reality that has been going on for 50 years. R2 +R1.
A year later we were travelling in Ireland and we ended up staying at a castle in co Wexford [sic] owned by some cousins of mine, the same castle that was used for the film of Barry Lyndon, directed by Kubrick. We were there for 3 months, my relations there had started a religion called ‘the Temple of Isis’ so they are well into all kinds of psychic phenomena. One evening I sat in the Library, a bit tired, and I just shut my eyes, and BOOM, I was suddenly aware of a huge eye that was staring at me from all sides 360°. I was at the same time in the centre of this eye and the periphery, that is to say, I was looking through it and being looked at by it (R1), at the same time. I was completely transfixed, but had no idea what was happening, it lasted for 30 mins or so, then I got up and just carried on.
The next year Andrew and my brother William and a few other friends from Cambridge all decided to go to India, as they had met Maharaj Charan Singh, who was the central point of Rhada Satsang Beas. I joined them 3 months later, having been convinced of the truth of his teaching. I recognised in his eyes the same look as in the eye that I saw in Ireland, the only thing that confused me was, that he (Charan Singh) (R1) had 2 eyes and my eye was definitely singular!
Andrew and I got married the next spring, and shortly afterwards moved up to an isolated cottage in the Yorkshire Dales, 2 daughters followed in quick succession, and life was idyllic. Andrew was working on his P.H.D. at home, so to give me a break he would take care of the children a couple of times a week. Then I started to paint, just for my own pleasure. After that, two more children arrived and when the youngest daughter started school I didn’t know what to do. The other mothers that I knew got a job, but we lived miles from anywhere and I had no qualifications at all, so I was asking myself this question one day when meeting them from school and the answer came like a very clear voice which said ‘you Paint’. Andrew was happy with that, and it meant that I could be there for the kids when they came back from school and generally around if one of them was off sick. The obvious place to start with the painting for me seemed to be to paint a cow that was standing outside my window, it began there and continued in that way for the next 10 or 15 years, that is to say, making an image of the aspect of my life that was manifesting at the time, After some years I wanted to show my work somewhere, and the obvious place was Lancaster Town Hall, as all I had to do was ask.
That happened, and it was fine, but it was obvious to me that no one ever went to see it so I needed to find a larger public. London was too scary, and I had no idea how to go about it, so at a friends suggestion I decided to go to Edinburgh, which was only a three hour drive, so with my oldest daughter (who was about 11) we set off for an adventure. By following a chain of serendipitous clues, we ended up at Richard Di Marcos gallery (he was involved in the Edinburgh festival). He sold a painting that very weekend, and we went home happy. Later, he put me in touch with a gallery on Bond St., London, who sold my work for the next 10 or 15 years, I earned as much as if I had worked at the local Spar shop, which justified me continuing.
Jumping forward about 20 years, the children were now at university, and had all more or less started independent lives. We moved to the south of France. Charan Singh died, and appointed a successor, part of his teaching is that at Initiation an unbroken link is established with the Guru, and after concentrating all ones attention at the eye centre, one would be conscious of his presence, so I thought ‘no problem then’, but I could find nothing, meditation had become a kind of duty, and now in France I was more and more aware of the separation with ‘normal’ people, I had always found that part difficult. One night I realised that this path did not hold the truth for me any longer and though I still loved Charan Singh I just wasn’t able to do as he asked, and I was sure that the truth must be right here, right now, and not difficult to find. I had no idea how to find it, but to continue with Sant Mat seemed like a sham. So probably a bit too emphatically I left, and upset a lot of people. I realised that just the act of meditating was actually distancing me from something that was already present (I read this later in a book by Papaji).
The next 10 years, I happily broke all the rules, and found that the universe didn’t collapse all around me! I was still painting and around the same time I found that the style I had evolved and that I had been successful with, had become clichéd and added to the fact that we had moved to France, I lost the whole career that I had built up. I carried on painting but I knew I had to find another way that was not taking an Image that was in my head and copying it, but more immediate and more connected to the material (paint).
I had a period of about 5 years where I had to reevaluate my way of painting and I was beginning to find a new way to work, and I had just begun to discover where my painting was going next. I had a couple of exhibitions in France and had found a new gallery in London, which sold a few paintings. An old friend showed my work to a gallery in the West End, and they loved what I was doing and took me on as a permanent artist. I showed with them every 2 years for the next 14 years and they sold most of my production. It was a full time job, which fulfilled a need I had to be a proper successful artist, and I really enjoyed the confidence that gave me and found that the more I pleased myself (in terms of colour, subject and ways of applying paint) the more it pleased others, who were buying my work for a lot of money. Then Andrew got an email from his long time friend Roger Waters, (Pink Floyd) inviting us to Brazil where there was going to be a performance of an opera he had written, in Manaos, he bought us business class tickets! We were to fly from Heathrow, and a week before we left I went to visit my old mother who was living in Devon. One morning she showed me a small article in the Times newspaper written by a man who had just returned from the Amazon, describing his visit to a group of people living deep in the jungle who practiced an Afrobrazilian religion, involving shamanism. From his small description I found the places he mentioned in my mothers Atlas, and as Andrew and I didn’t have a program in Brazil (apart from Rogers opera), we decided to go there. It involved a real jungle voyage and some interesting people at the end of it. Somehow we got there and straight away I trusted these people, they were all very shiny and we were allowed to participate in the ceremony, which they called ‘the work’. So there we are, all dressed up, me in a long white dress, and Andrew in a shirt and tie! We knew by then that this would involve Ayahuasca. The afternoon before the ceremony I had another vision (R1). You know it’s a vision when it’s incredibly clear and has a very important and urgent feeling with it. The vision was of my father who had been dead for 15 years or so, standing in front of a shining path holding out his hands. I know, quite corny, but it was very strong emotionally and that, coupled with the fact that it had been my mother who pointed this whole thing out to me in the Times, was reassuring.
Andrew took his dose, but went to sit outside the roof (they said if you go out you are not working). Then I took mine, and it really started, I have never felt so bad in my entire life. I couldn’t escape, hallucinogenic patterns everywhere inside and outside. There was one Columbian girl who said to me, “Don’t worry, just stay here and take some more!” I thought, You must be joking! but as I had no alternative, I took her advice and stayed under the roof and did a basic Chi Gong movement which helped. Anyway, she was right and by the morning everything had found its place and there was a wonderful unity (R1).
It was like 40 years of meditation in one night. After that, we only had one more week as it had taken so long to get there, we spent the rest of the time discovering the village and the people. Very soon after we got back to France, Andrew had to go to New York. So I was left on my own at home, I decided to follow up a branch of this community in Cataluyna, I found them and wrote in my bad Spanish. They invited me to a ceremony that weekend. I set off in our old camper van, and followed the instructions as best I could until I reached a place where 5 dirt roads met, in a forest completely deserted, and then I was lost, so I sat in my van and thought ‘Oh well! I’ll just have to go home’, then all of a sudden, a little red car arrived, stopped, and the driver said, ‘Follow me’, so I did for 16 kilometres till we arrived at an ancient house and chapel high up in the Pyrenees where there were about 20 people gathered. The night that followed was magic, both the physical location and the whole ceremony. When visiting Charan Singh’s Ashram in the 70s and 80s I would often see Indian ladies experiencing something in his presence, and that night I knew and understood what that was (R1). This was why, in the 70s, I had known that LSD was not for me, and never touched it, after that night I went once a month to Spain to take part in the work. every time I went, it was as if all impediments magically cleared away and I could leave unnoticed for 2 days, also every time it was in a different location, never obvious, and in winter I would set off at 5 PM and it was already dark and I always was lost, as if being physically lost was part of the ceremony. It was never a problem.
The painting was changing in parallel with all this of course, I noticed that more and more, before beginning a new painting I would be seized with a terrible lost feeling, complete panic in fact, and the only remedy was to just sit with it as it rendered me incapable of doing anything. Then somehow I would make a mark of some kind, and then little by little, that mark would evolve and something would emerge, that bad feeling could also hit anytime out off the blue, I remember it one time sitting on a bus in Manhattan. After 3 years of going regularly to Cataluyna, my inner voice said, ‘That’s enough of that now you’re on your own’. That was 4 years ago.
It would have been very easy to continue as It opened so many doors for me, I visited all the regions of the mind, and what an amazing and impressive and beautiful machine that is. What Ayahuasca did for me was to allow me to get outside my mind and look closely at it as a detached observer, and in doing that came the self evident knowledge that I was not it. That was 4 years ago. Since then, though less dramatic, the realisations have not stopped, and they are often shown to me via the painting.
During that time I was still showing with the West End Gallery, and they were doing very well for me. But with success comes, if you’re not careful, a kind of settling down and complacency, in that people loved my work, and they didn’t want it to change, so if I branched out too much they didn’t buy it, so if I wanted the money, (which of course I loved) I had to keep reproducing in the style which they and the gallery owner liked and could understand. Finally I could hold back no longer. I had to fulfill my own need to explore where I could go with the painting, so for the last 2 shows I did with that gallery, as well as other shows, I was working on huge unsellable canvases, completely abstract. One day I was suddenly seized with a desire to make 3D forms, out of the blue and they materialised as six Goddesses, life-size, made from plaster and chicken wire, so not very weather proof. I made them very quickly, and without thinking, it was if they just had to be born. Along with the big paintings I made a few feeble attempts to find a gallery that would be interested in selling them, but had no success, everything I tried to do in that respect failed for different reasons.
d to be the an extension of the way I made the paintings, that is they just appear, there is absolutely no stress or tension about it, therefore when the right space showed itself to me, I would put them there, it is important that there are no problems involved. One day there were by chance 15 people that I hardly knew in the studio all together, one of them, a small Frenchwoman, approached me and said that she had a message for me. and could we go somewhere quiet so that she could tell me what it was. We went to another room, and she went into a trance and was making strange sounds that could not physically have come from her. After 20 mins or so, she came back to herself and said she wanted to translate the message, which was that the Goddesses wanted to thank me for making them. And that at that moment I was like a radio receiving messages, and I had all the stations on at once so it was very tiring for me, but that soon there would be only one station playing. I had never seen this woman before or since.
A couple of years later, the goddesses were still in my studio, they took up quite a lot of space, and I was wondering what to do with them. A friend said ‘you need to find them a sacred place’, later that day I suddenly knew where that was. About 10 kilometres from my house there is a ruined catholic seminary; it’s huge, and has been empty for about 30 years. It has a chapel that is on the point of collapsing, full of piles of rubble, but still has stained glass windows. It’s forbidden to go into the place, as it’s dangerous and it’s ineffectually fenced off, but of course has been broken into many times and has graffiti everywhere.
It has a wonderful, fragile and mysterious atmosphere and, given all its magnificent decay, was obviously the perfect place for the goddesses and paintings. Some anonymous painter had been there and painted a vast head where the altar would have been, and that part was still undercover, so that’s where we took them. That was in April 2016. I was very happy to think of them there, with the bats and foxes sniffing them, and thought that they would stay until the place collapsed on top of them, but 3 months later I went there and they had disappeared completely.
I had plans to make other work in some of the other rooms, so I did it anyway, and just left it there. I couldn’t have found a more perfect setting for the paintings, despite the fact that very few people actually saw them in place while they were there. The paintings were only there for a day; 3 months later, the chapel did collapse.
When I decided not to make any effort at all to get the work out, and just wait, I had to of course accept the possibility that nothing at all would happen. Not so easy when my whole life (R2) has lead me to this point (R1) it has been about total acceptance of what IS, not what I think I want!
The way I see it now in (R2) is like this. (RI) (Open intelligence) is the Love from which all manifestation flows, and R2 (Data) is manifestation which believes itself to be independent. My whole journey has been to know this. that it was and will be and can only ever be a manifestation of love. That there is no difference between (R1 and R2,) it’s a bit like if you have 2 lenses one is looking in and the other out, and our job is to get them into focus. When that happens it becomes obvious that there is only one place where that can happen, and that place is right here, and only one instant too, and that is right now. In fact, nothing else exists.
Maybe it’s that we have to know truth from both sides, and that only happens by losing ourselves completely in all aspects of it, then we see that EVERYTHING IS JUST RIGHT as it is. That I am at the centre and the periphery of all manifestation, and that all beings share this unique position. Hallelujah.
It takes One to know One.
Lucy Raverat 2017