Immediately after collecting the rock for its return to Scotland in 2005
and while working briefly with the people of Digby
Neck in their fight against another quarrying enterprise, Alastair
McIntosh had 3 powerful, nightmarish dreams, which he related as the essence
was being created. Each dream was depicted in a manner which was extreme,
shocking, and while each dream had personal relevance for Alastair
at that time, the themes also appeared to speak very clearly to the nature
of the rock's energy.
Three is, of course, one of the prime numbers sacred to the Celtic goddess
Bhrighde in her triple aspect as maiden, mother and crone. Many of
the numbers associated with Bhrighde are still regarded as lucky or unlucky
and they are often multiples of three. Some of them are 3,
5, 7, 9, 13, 15, 18,
19, 21, 42 and 72. In pre-Refomation times, Mount Roineabhal was part
of the parish of Kilbride – Cill Bhrighde – the church
of St Bride. The fight to save the mountain from the threat of destruction
took 13 years, with the highest profile landmarks in the battle occuring
3 years (the start of the public inquiry) and 9 years (the public inquiry
report's submission to the Scottish Executive and Lafarge's 'human rights'
legal challenge) after it began. Stone Eagle's abuse was revealed 7 years
after he took the summit rock into sanctuary, and it was also 7 years
from that time that the dream fragments which initiated my own involvement
in the story occured.
Lane End Down, near Winchester, Hampshire. 10th
July 2005. (Photo © Steve
Alexander)
As mentioned in the story of the essence, the two public inquiry landmarks
were characterised by the quality of being pushy with unconventional points
of view in an attempt to turn the apparent prevailing tide of opinion.
Alastair McIntosh's use of theological argument at the public inquiry
won many (and crucial) hearts in the face of a concluding report that
came down in favour of the quarry, and ultimately won the day. Lafarge
won their court case and established their 'human rights' in the face
of planning refusal by the Scottish Executive and nearly succeeded in
overturning that decision. The pattern is reminiscent of the Chinese yin-yang
symbol. This alternation between the poles of opinion
spiralling through all the layers of hierarchy involved between the irreconcilable
opposing factions typifies the entire 13 year course of the proceedings.
But what is especially and critically notable about both these landmark
arguments is that they each went out on a limb to appeal to heart,
rather than head, and the entire saga was ultimately resolved by bringing
the headless summit of the opposing hierarchy (the trio
of Lafarge vice-presidents) to the headless mountain. (And in
my own small part of the story I had also followed my heart rather than
my head.)
In many ways this seems to be the heart of the story, the wisdom at the
core of the symbolism it contains. Acting without head – ie. with
heart – is the means to resolution, graphically depicted in one
of Alastair McIntosh's dreams ("..what seems awful now is really
the hope") and the sensation of the ripping open of the chest cavity
to expose the heart experienced in the proving. And as the summit rock
was sitting in Alastair's house in Govan en route between Nova Scotia
and its rightful place, an interesting synchronicity occured in the fields
of southern England. A very graphic depiction of the medieval 'morning
star', a highly effective head-whacking implement; apparently –
from the debris surrounding it – in the act of whacking.
The continual to and fro between two polarities so evident in the rock's
story is also typical of the bigger picture – the entire history
of the relationship between the northwest Highlands of Scotland and Nova
Scotia. It's even reflected in the regions' national flags, which are
the inverse of each other. People from Scotland, forcibly removed from
their land by landlords (who were often incomers from England) during
the infamous Highland Clearances, emigrated across the Atlantic and similarly
displaced First Nation peoples from their land. The exploited
became exploiters. And still it goes on. Now, instead
of people being directly displaced by people, peoples on both sides of
the Atlantic are threatened by faceless anonymous corporations (albeit
ones with 'human rights') whose aim is to displace the very ground itself,
grinding it down into roadstone to pave the ways for others, equally faceless,
equally anonymous, to displace themselves upon.
But the alternating polarities in the story don't just ping-pong between
opposing camps. They spiral on down into single individuals. Would-be
exploiters become saviours (the Redland chief executive who moved to WWF
UK), and would-be saviours turn out to be exploiters (Stone Eagle). Until
finally there is no longer any movement. The polarities
are seen to co-exist simultaneously and consciously,
almost incomprehensibly stark and extreme, in the man who was both Warrior
Chief and Sacred Peace Pipe Carrier; in the goddess who is at once the
goddess of healing and the patron of war. It's extraordinarily poetic.
The duality inherent in us all. The two legs we stand on. The complex
interwoven layers of bi-directional energies, warp and weft, in each and
every one of us. It comes back to Stone Eagle's message about cultural
healing. About the way in which good and evil are interwoven in
us all – the warrior of violence who is also, at some transcendent
level, a spiritual warrior.
Yet this is all about the number 2, not 3. Something must be missing.
It was at this point that the picture was invaded, firstly by Bosnians
who initially appeared several times in proving dreams and then via the
synchronicity of the deaths of former British Foreign Secretary Robin
Cook and ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, both hugely instrumental in uncovering
the Bosnian genocide, within a day of each other. Cook's death on the
summit of a mountain in the NW Highlands of Scotland had extraordinary
poignancy in the context of the proving, seeming to demand that some attention
be given to the significance and relevance of all the Bosnian references.
Apart from conveying a similar feeling to one of Alastair McIntosh's dreams,
I hadn't a clue what it was all about and had to go and study the
Bosnian
War to bring it into focus. The situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina is
one of a tripartite division of ethnicity between Serbs,
Croats and Bosniaks, all of whom had co-existed peacefully as part of
the Yugoslav Republic, but who, when the possibility of independence was
raised, turned on each other in a bitter and bloody conflict in attempts
to preempt potential infringements by each on another's perceived physical
and cultural territory. Although the fighting is over, deep divisions
and bitterness remain. In this situation there is no clear "right"
or "wrong": no side's claims have any obvious merit over another's
and all sides were accused of atrocities, despite the Serbian actions
receiving most attention. (This ambivalence and focus on what constitutes
identity is reflected in the dream in
which the prover is first shot at, and then welcomed by the Bosnian community,
but not as herself, as someone else. The arrival of the frivolous pink
Cadillac seems to be a comment on the illusory nature and ultimate unimportance
of the issue of identity.) In such a context, the perspective on inter-racial
conflict becomes less obviously dualistic. What emerges instead is an
image of a country self-destructing at the mere spectre of a potential
threat to an idealised notion of independent and separate identity, showing
very clearly that such pursuits lead only to fragmentation and collapse.
The second invaders were the Vikings, who found their way into the story
through the tripartite division of the anorthosite pluton of which Roineabhal
was originally part. Their symbolic depiction in popular consciousness
as archetypal raiders and pillagers underlines the fact that the patterns
of this story have been, and are still, seen the world over, over and
over since life first began. The same patterns can be observed between
species in any ecosystem you care to examine. The mutually exploitative
co-dependent inter-species equilibrium is upset by new species who invade
the territory, shattering the conception of how things are and/or 'should'
be. Resisting or being unable to adapt to the redefined nutritive cycle
of the invaded ecosystem risks exhaustion and possibly extinction without
the ability to draw on energy from another source. This process was very
precisely depicted in the successive imagery of Alastair McIntosh's three
dreams. It's the process of evolution, pure and simple. Whether it's good
or bad or right or wrong depends only on which side you're looking at
it from, which is rooted in the fundamental nature of dualism, the cornerstone
of our experience of existence (though not of existence itself).
So what makes this story in any way exceptional or different? The answer,
of course, is nothing. What this rock and its story achieves in the perfection
of its poetry is to tell it as it is, without value judgement, and in
doing so, reveal the inner third dimension to the outer dualistic impasse,
allowing us to triangulate, to find our way. It takes
by the horns the dilemma which Alastair McIntosh summed up in his words
"And that’s the difficulty with spiritual activism.
It means running with the handicap of whatever your own limp might be
plus, typically, that of whoever’s running with you. What’s
more, it usually means running on empty."
This dilemma is what precipitates the Zen whack on the side of the head
– the metaphorical decapitation. Because as the myth of the 'wounded
healer' teaches, our 'limp' is simultaneously our key to redemption and
our greatest talent. It's our passion: both crucifixion and inspiration.
It's the poison that heals, the Phoenix's fire. And running on empty is
not an option, leastways not if you want to keep running. Spiritual activism
is as much about inner work as outer: about using the experience of outer
life as a mirror to the inner state, reflecting on the prima materia of
our own particular limp. And in a continual alchemical process of potentisation
– solve et coagula, solve et coagula – forge it into the Philosopher's
Stone, the rock on which we build our inner church to commune with the
entirety of existence.
The healing of a fragmented conception of existence enables the doing
of the work without attachment (the mirror reflects everything and takes
on nothing), channeling and directing the abundant energies inherent in
the situation without using up our own. As esoteric knowledge in a number
of traditions attests, this can only be done through heart and mind combined,
not the mind alone. The mind divides the world up into fragments: self
and other, black and white, subject and object, heart and mind, body and
soul, living and non-living, God and man, Christianity, Buddhism, Psychology,
Alchemy, Mythology, Shamanism, Viking, Gael, Mi'Kmaq, Serb, Croat, Bosniak
... which, if it's not too careful, each start to take on the appearance
of having autonomous and separate existence. Seeing the world as fragmented,
and its own domain as limited to individuality, the mind can only exist
on its own wits and resources. In contrast, heart-centred awareness only
experiences oneness, connection; ultimately with the entirety of existence.
It has access to all the energy there is, but of itself has no intelligence
or will to direct it. The marriage of heart and mind is what healing is
all about.
It is this inner process of healing, making whole, that the
essence of the summit rock of Mount Roineabhal appears to address. (Its
astrological chart underlines this by displaying
an extraordinarily uncommon degree of integration.) The
essence seems to catalyse conscious awareness of our inherent dualism,
bringing insight to the source of our problems, healing the fragmented
conception of ourselves and our environment, replacing judgement with
discernment and understanding, and freeing awareness from the mind's continual
flip-flop to and fro to see that the simultaneous co-existence of opposing
polarities within us is the normal state of the mind, and that
what is good or bad or right or wrong can be determined by something as
arbitrary as which side of the fence we find ourselves on when we fall
out of bed in the morning and is, in fact, largely illusory. It balances
yin and yang by restoring the yin matrix to equal value with the yang
(see chart). It reveals the larger truth beyond,
the one seen from the eagle's eye view. It helps complete the triangle,
effectively giving us an invisible third leg to stand on – a considerably
more stable configuration than just two. It entails working with our deepest
Wound; going right into the heart of it, which is as much the heart of
darkness as it is the heart of light ... “During the darkest moments
in your life, you'll find that even your shadow is gone.” This is
not a process for the faint-hearted. Neither for the weak-willed because
it is all too too easy to become distracted and fragmented
again. As one prover wrote, "I am continuing with the essence and
it's rough, but in a very good getting down to basics way [...] The different
thing about this essence's effect is it tears into and down my carefully
compartmentalized emotional boxes that I constructed to shelter myself
from the actual pain of my life and situation."
This is real spiritual activist medicine, because it reveals that health
lies in realising that it's our fragmentary conception of existence that
is the root of our dis-ease. It is indeed a most holy and sacred thing,
because holy and healthy are, in the last analysis, the same thing. Both
are derived from the same Old English root word 'hale' meaning 'whole'.
"I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together"
and even "I am He as you are He as you are me and we are all together."
It wasn't until I'd come to this stage that I started to think about
Stone Eagle again. It was so easy to marginalise him after the revelation
of his abuse. To somehow distance him from the story in which he'd played
such a central role. Our culture tends to vilify fallen heroes, but that
vilification has more to do with our tendency to make heroes of men in
the first place, such that when they reveal themselves as mere men –
which is all they ever were – we're hugely disappointed. Yet this
goes further still, because the crime he was guilty of is among the most
reprehensible acts a human being can commit towards another. It's extreme,
shocking – the signature of the energy again. It
was then that I realised that he is still playing a central role. In the
admission of his crimes against another individual, the atonement (at-one-ment),
and the healing process he is undertaking in the house of his tribe's
erstwhile enemies (who have made him a keeper of a sacred healing mask
– no ordinary honour), he continues to exemplify what this energy
is about. Alastair said to me that he found it enormously hard to comprehend
how Sulian had been able to maintain the compartmentalisation that allowed
him, with all that he knew, to perpetrate and live with this abuse of
another, yet in truth we most of us have areas of our lives that are so
deeply fragmented that they persist in virtual autonomy.
Mount Roineabhal, whether in the guise of her entirety (to those who
were inspired to save her), her summit rock (to those that became its
guardians) or its essence (to those who've taken it) has already demonstrated
enormous power to facilitate not just the healing of individuals, but
communities as well. Whether you attribute that power to the mountain,
the rock it's made from, or to the goddess who's parish it used to stand
in matters not in some ways. What matters is, as Art Solomon, Ojibway
Elder of the Waseskun
Healing Lodge says of their work there, "There is a timing to
everything, just like a giant wheel that is turning. Everything happens
at its own appropriate time. That is the only way it happens. No matter
how much we have tried in the past to bring things together, as little
as we knew about them, they could not happen. We are doing what we are
doing here because it is the time for it. One of the things that we seem
not to notice or take account of is that the spirit people are helping
us. We still have to do the work, but they are helping us. [...] That
is why things are happening now. They couldn't have happened before, not
in the way they are happening today."
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