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As long as you dont have a tingling spread between any two insides of a pair of fingers ... you should be right I get that ... and tinglings where you describe in the neck - but I have a cervical vertebra with a bur that is digging into that nerve in my spinal column .... I have to probe it myself, hold one finger against it and with the other hand twist my head : 'crack' ! . Perhaps a small 'crick' in the neck while you were sleeping caused the feeling and the feeling caused a dream to be constructed around it. ~ Like the one I had about that idiot workman outside my window that kept ringing a bell ..., turns out I slept through the alarm (not that my boss believed me )

I think someone or something is doing some energy work on me this morning, During the experience, the time frame was in the middle of the night, 2am to 3am. The actual time frame, my time frame, was 5am to 6am. What happened? Basically, I woke up at 4am and went back to sleep. I had a mundane dream about my distance uncle. Nothing extraordinary. Then, within the dream, I woke up and to realize that something was probing or massaging the back of my skull and down to the bottom of my neck. Like someone was using a set of fingers oscillating the energy points in those regions. It didn't hurt. The oscillation was accompanied by two distinct and acute vibrational sounds, a lower one and a very high pitch tone. The high pitch tone sounded like some techno, space age, mantra music. The lower tone sounds like some regular beat. This lasted for about a minute or 2, maybe. I didn't know what was going on and I assumed I was being probed by aliens. Hehehehhe. I didn't move since I didn't want to alarm anyone, including myself. I felt the entire experience was taking place in the middle of the night but when the experience stopped, it was 6am in the morning. I turned around and to check the room to see if anything has changed. Nothing of course. I am pretty sure someone or something is doing some energy work on me. Not sure about the benefits of it, enhancing the oscillation in the back of the skull and the lower neck region energy points. It felt like there was a worm wiggling in between the back of my skull and the lower neck region.

Chasing reality is like running in a dream. You run and run, but can't get anywhere. Same thing may be happening in cosmology and quantum physics. That's why I like to think we are living in dreams, and those dreams could be all that exists. Imagine you were a physicist in a dream, trying to find out the secrets of reality. What kind of results would you get in that dream? Probably absurd results, with nothing really to hold on. Just like in this reality.

I'll take a shot at counting the sparrows here, its something I enjoy anyways. Bed imagery is fairly universal, and especially in this case (as in most dreams) with the double meaning of a "resting place". Rest in this sense could even be a reference to nirvana or the eternal ever renewing moment - the source, or origin of experience - the true "home" of awareness. In your case, the bed was missing from your family situation, indicating your recognition of the restless nature of social manipulations, and your non-identification with learned associations - even if it is at a subconscious level. You will have to answer this yourself, as to whether the character of your sister was actually a representation of her - or instead a mask of sorts for something else, in other words a symbol that evokes certain feelings so that you will understand what the energy is doing. So this part requires more introspection on your part because it could also indicate some sort of familial issues are affecting something - and you experience it as an amplified situation in the dream so you can relate to how it might affect things.

You do not need a teacher and the world has many waking up right now who have "done nothing in this life" in terms of traditional viewable practice, but it is easy to become well established in fear along all sorts of lines and hiding in all sorts of proclivities within which you defend yourself and cage yourself. Group dynamics and a teacher can be a great benifit on all things - and the obvious is to help disengage from the blind spots mentioned above. All that said - truely understanding that your body is a great vehicle that can with your help as spirit soar beyond your wildest dreams. Learn to dream and see in your minds eye - exercise your thinking skills - learn about diet - and set aside competition. Fear nothing including the humility to foster a healthy relationship with your body - don't override it, shame it and beat it with a whip. Breath in the whole world as you.

Is a lot easier if you have some real emotional and psychological issues because your entire path would be guided by those issues and the resolutions of those issues. There are Taoist immortals. They will appear to you when the time comes. After all, many immortals appear to the realized cultivators in their sambhogakaya forms (dream visitations) to transmit their teachings. If you see nothing is wrong with yourself and the world you are living in.....well, your path is going to be not so extraordinary. You may become one of those new age practitioners who dabble with some Eastern philosophy and religion and once in a while you may impress few like-minded practitioners. Hehehe.......

Well, not needed since I experienced events not knowing why or how...until I did some research into the subjects. Only recently I read up on the Tibetan Dream Yoga and to really understand the concept of a Clear Light Mind. Yeah, for the OP, emptiness is the Clear Light Mind. Take the concept literally.....emptiness IS luminosity. You can google "Clear Light Mind."

Is not a statement. Is one of my experiences. Ever woke up to a samadhi and followed by the Clear Light appearance, early in the morning? Only during sleep your mind consciousness is gone and your dream world or your mind is solely guided by karmic forces. When these karmic forces have been resolved for whatever reasons, your mind would naturally be emptied and in its pure essence. Clear Light will emerge and you may experience a huge influx of Chi flowing throughout your entire body.

Hahah...are you Muslim??? My dear friend, I have a precognitive dream about the new existential threat the Israelis are currently facing. You can say I am almost Jewish and how else I could have some Karmic affinity to the Jews. Hahaha......A Jew and not a Jew? A mere semantic. LOL..... Just remember that this is Tao Bum. Some of us have "special insights" about the world beyond your traditional worldview.

Back in 97-98 I was smoking a joint out of my bedroom window (quit smoking now), and i noticed a fox was staring up at me from the street. It's eyes seemed to penetrate something within me and my eyes started to burn. Didn't think much of it until recently. On the night of the millennium, i remember walking in a park and seeing foxes dancing with each other under the moonlight... there was something really magical in a way about it. About 8 years ago, i started hearing foxes every time i tried to pray. This was after a couple of strong experiences with Spirit/God and an encounter with someone quite special during which i made a promise which i subsequently broke. Now years later i'm suddenly seeing the word fox or a photo of a fox, or actual foxes everywhere i go. Sometimes i force myself awake out of a profound dream which i don't remember only to hear loud fox cries. And recently the past few days while practicing stm neigong, i hear the foxes outside on the street. Really don't know what to make of it all. A friend suggested it might be a spirit guide, i'm not sure because i don't know much about them, only a little about power animals. But i've seen the numerology to the number 666 is FOX. There is more to it, but i can't write it on a public forum... except that i sometimes see fox imagery as i'm falling asleep. Any idea? Peace.

As for what Chunyi's goals are - he said his dream is to go back to do long cave meditation as that was the best time of his life when he went into heaven during his 2 month non-stop full lotus cave meditation. So he has I guess talked about taking advanced students to China for cave meditation but at least when he is older he will probably retire to long term meditation like that - and then he can probably regrow his hair back, etc. haha. He said he knows of masters in the mountains of China who have the golden aura - meaning creating the yang shen immortality. And yes Chunyi did quote from the Taoist Yoga book - when I had the book with me in his class - it was in my bag so I never had it out in the open to see physically. But he quoted from it when he said he had just done a very deep small universe meditation and he say falling snow in the sky. This was during the summer but that quote is a specific step in the training right before you create a yang spirit in its initial form. Basically at that level of the practice it says if you don't act on it then you miss your chance. So I agree that for now Chunyi is focused on doing healing work but then as he said he plans to live to be very old - so then will continue doing the alchemy training.

A lot of times, I feel that some of the dream wisdom I have been receiving is way over my head. I have been reading up on the Tibetan Dream Yoga and it explained a lot about how my path was entirely transmitted through dreams alone. Anyway, I had this dream few months ago and is way over my head... So, in this dream, I found that my mother and sister redecorated my room. They moved things around. I was upset, very upset. I was very agitated and demanded my room to be restored as before. So, I began to move stuff around and to discover that my bed was missing. My room has no bed. Yeah, the beginning was kind of mundane. The second part is way over my head. In the dream, I finally found my bed but instead I saw a Buddhist abbot monk standing there and praying. He has curly hair and his hair by the middle of the crown area is point up. He looked Indo European. He wasn't Chinese and Indian or Hindu. He was standing by my bed and praying. Then,underneath the bed, a casket was rolled out. Half of the casket was open and I didn't see a corpse. Instead, I saw a clock without handles. A clock without handles inside a casket.... In the dream, I was trying to understand what was going on. Then, the monk turned towards me and smiled. He gave me a music box. When I opened it, I heard some mantra music and the sound was very acute. It resonated inside me. I was dumbfounded and looking at the monk. He then turned around and disappeared. Now, I went outside to another room. I saw my mother and told her that a monk gave me a gift. A real gift I told her and I also realized that they would never believe me if I told them about the monk I saw. However, I had the mantra music box as a proof. His gift actualized in my dream world. I felt that he actually gave me something real in the dream. Now, I went back to my room and saw my sister messing with my altar. Apparently, now, I saw an altar next to this casket. I saw white candles and some Chinese characters written on it. Apparently, it was my casket and it was my funeral I was in but.....there was no corpse inside the casket. Again, I was very upset about my sister because she was ruining something. Now, in my real life, I and my sister never got along. We were never close and we fought a lot as kids. Well, that's another story. Now, I have been having a lot of these dreams of clarity. In these dreams, now, I can really hear characters speaking to me. In the past, I would assume I know their intentions and very rarely they would convey their messages to me using words. Usually some symbols and they assume I must know what I must do in these dreams.

Moderately prosperous society (Chinese: 小康社会; pinyin: xiǎokāngshehui) is a Chinese term, originally of Confucian origin, used to describe a society composed of a functional middle-class. The term is most well known in recent years as used by Chinese leader Hu Jintao when referring to economic policies meant to realize a more equal distribution of wealth. In the usages (tifa) of Xi Jinping, the term "China Dream" or "Chinese Dream" has gained somewhat greater prominence. Origins[edit]It has been loosely translated as a "basically well-off" society in which the people are able to live relatively comfortably, albeit ordinarily. The term was first used in Classic of Poetry written as early as 3000 years ago Pope Francis on Twitter: "When a society lacks God, even ... https://twitter.com/pontifex/status/514334822253481984 Sep 23, 2014 - When a society lacks God, even prosperity is joined by a terrible spiritual poverty.

move to the last 3 paragraphs if you want brevity hello, i’ve avoided posting at places like this [though i’ve read posts] until now as i’ve been looking for wisdom around me and have thought/been able to deal with the crises that have emerged so far on my own. of course, finding an actual teacher has not been easy, with all the misunderstanding of kundalini in seekers and its relative prevalence. plus good teachers don’t seem to take on many pupils. okay, i’ll try to keep this precise and incisive. i will address the questions through a life history. male, 22 now apparently depressed for life [increasingly] and have always been very emotional/energetic [when young only] and philosophical, attempting to understand possible psychological influences now that the time is right for understanding kundalini woke up a little bit when i first felt emotion [ever] for 1 second at 19 in romance of an apparent true nature. at the same time i had an experience of entering a rainbow elevator and entering another dimension where a prototypical alien head radiated rainbow energy into my mind. still don’t know how to interpret that. soon after lack of emotions/processing of the self-caused failure of that romance due to inaction [the most positive event in my life so far] and rashness led to entering what has been technically described in all the traditions as the lowest level of hell [i had been to apparent visionary hell many times before, but not as bad or lucid] through a prolonged extreme seizure that grasped onto the unprocessed psychological baggage [mouth foaming/eyes all over the place, paralysis but conscious at times, perception of extreme dehydration and suffocation, etc]. this left me feeling like my mind was broken/something intangible was missing to which i still don’t really understand. i had broken my leg badly and whatnot but this confirmed that psycho-spiritual pain accesses a brain faculty that can go rampant in a way no external or emotional-biological pain can match. probably. later kundalini experiences have seemed to confirm this, which is why i am posting - the most recent one. this event spurred extremely healthy diet, and beginning meditation. eventually diet would evolve into my own version of super nutrition, which again will fade out into less concerted but more ethical yet still healthy eating once i normalize. sometime in here i had an apparently ‘channeling’ experience after i entered my 8th cakra for the first time where it felt like my crown cakra was the top of a hill with a radio antenna where i perceived so many thoughts as sort of a mental-tactile manifestation of non-sensory meaning that emerged from this background [non-perceptual] television screen fuzz. this was managed easily. eventually a doctor in the nuclear family suspected i was depressed as it/mental illness runs in the entire genealogy on both sides. first drug worked euthymically for a week, then full initial-stage of stage 1 [body/cells having sex with itself] kundalini appeared in the course of 5 minutes with my first ever real sensation of my body [depersonalization being the clinical heading for anhedonia/energy/emotional blunting] followed up by the creating-destroying involution of meaning Mystery as i looked at the exact same object and simultaneously realized was the same object i had looked at as a kid when i first felt kundalini. the strange thing is when i was that kid i remember looking at that fountain and thinking ‘this moment will become relevant to me later in life and i will know it when it happens.’ i do this every now and then. this was my first hint at the understanding of intuition, memory, deja vu, and the true nature of time. that was so cool. experiences got much better and much worse. meditation was enhanced, i would see my fully developed golden third eye and smell amrita simultaneously, astral project every now and then, eventually feel real emotions, think in more simultenaity, feel the beginnings of peace, need a little less sleep, etc etc. with a little more time, downside was i would wake up as if mentally prodded in the time between 2-4 am and seemingly perceive many small demons around my first experience of my aura fiending for my soul. i was not physically paralyzed, so this probably wasn’t primarily clinical sleep things like paralysis. essentially, this felt like a minor version of the seizure experience, where my soul felt torn apart by demons pulling it apart while it exploded with fire of pure pain from the inside. but i could resist this time. no one so far really understands this, obviously, and until the recent experience, the point of this post, i fluctuated between spiritualizing and psychologizing the demons of this particular experience. anyway i appeared to learn how to deal with that [my 3rd chakra was slowly developing as i got used to my emotions] while feeling like i would go insane due to the pain in the moment, the shock after waking up, the lack of understanding around me, and the fear of going to sleep. then i got much better at self control and further refined diet and i began to push/pull the bright clear kundalini up the spine and fill up the chakras, getting as far as the crystalline jewels of manipura and the first emergence of real kundalini energy, while lakshmi and saraswati nadis filled up. i could tell my crown was not open, so i started on it and opened it in 6 mos. with manipura, it was nauseatingly pleasurable, as the kundalini began to take on the crown-like shimmery reflective crystalline aspect before the heart showed itself. i never got to the heart, as an external factor caused a mixed mania, after which my brain was never as firm, and i progressively became depressed and dissociated from my body and more in tune with my crown chakra [opening it fully], eventually causing me to spontaneously get sucked up into my 8th chakra and float above my body controlling it like a puppet with strings. this went away, and the next day i woke up with a new sensation as if i was being pulled out of my crown chakra into my 8th but because of the body dissociation due to depression this was perceived as my nervous system being ripped out of me – an imbalance of body-mind. this felt like a variation of the pain of the demons, but without the idea of demons being present. this lasted for many weeks and absolutely nothing helped, and i felt like i would either go insane or kill myself. i couldnt really tell anyone as they’d just be annoyingly minimizing-consoling [friends], blame me [teachers], or not believe/not understand [family]. i was in the fetal position, sweating, shaking, all day trying not to scream [i was at school, supposed to get ready for finals] and trying to make myself pass out. all i could think was ‘why is this happening,’ as part of the 4 same initial thoughts [what is going on, what did i do to deserve this, how is this possible] i felt when kundalini first appeared in earnest. irony is important philosophically.. at that point i called the dr. and got clonazepam and it went away immediately. i wish i remember how i got to the store like that.. ok, so then i had a clear light experience where i saw my nadis and floated up into light, which was a fuller manifestation of what i’d had before kundalini fully appeared. that was pretty cool, but i had fear [depressed] and retreated – the defining theme of my reaction to the most emotionally significant moments of unknown change throughout my life. then i think at that point chitrini filled up. still depressed at this point, but meditating and doing yoga and japa more and more... depsite the body-mind dyssychrony, due to a desire to facilitate what was happening anyways. and it helped the depression. then i felt the front nadis all connect from ajna to svadisthana in an intricate web-like fashion. then i had a dream of kali, which was horrible. then there was some dream where i passed thru sushumna through brahma and burst into the 8th cakra. scary. then i saw the moon send energy into ajna. then i saw ganesha’s white elephant. this made me seriously wonder about hinduism. then i began to experience emerald-purple tripur sundari in ajna as i did more japa. i was exploring the strange dream space of bindu visarga. then the kicker, my heart opened up all of a sudden into the hridayakasha and i fully left my body/self/reason and experienced ecstatic vibrational love in the fiery vajra heart of mystery void. due to the depression and over-rationality, my rational faculty manifested and the experience didn’t last long. but, this laid the experiential foundation for true faith, and i am now left with attempting to notice and accept the mystery of the unanswerable questions that the experience brings up. i saw the experiential counterpoint to the philosophical mysteries i love. ok, then i began to have a mild version of the rod entering my spine and perceiving something mental i can only describe as the fuller manifestation of the manipura energy combined with this tactile-mental manifestation of pure colorful sensory perception. this was good, like a follow up but not fully developed manifestation of the heart experience. then i woke up one day and my entire body was vibrating with the ecstatic heart. again a further follow up, but this lasted only 1 day due to external/not endogenous factors that interacted with the depression. then another external substance made me manic, and everything went down again. sooo there have been good times since then, but pretty inconsistent. i see now that while you do have to inculcate things while depressed, it’s more about lifestyle stuff and consistency and attitude/tendencies. many perceptual things don’t transfer, and can only be learned during the euthymic and moreso the heightened state. unfortunately the personality tendencies of the depression have been ingrained, the worst outcome possible, as kundalini only makes this harder to deal with. but it’s definitely possible/happening to move past it. ok ok finally, i have found something that works, but as i get better the negative experiences [demon] are returning. unfortunately mystical philosophy is more mood-contingent than some hyper-rational western philosophy, which is wonderful, but it means the conclusions we come to sometimes take forever to be teased out from mood fluctuations, as is the nature of the history of philosophy, the more self-aware philosophy. those two are very similar. i believe kundalini pleasure states are effective for bringing up traumas [beyond just oh my body’s shaking and i feel emotions and energy blockages, but the content of actual spontaneous flashback-like mysterious emotional processing in the granthis/elsewhere], but this despair has shown me the true nature of memory as the seat of worldly consciousness that allows us to fully process the pain so that the bliss can be transformed into the neutral mind. i wasn’t able to do this the first time around, but i have learned a little by now. funny enough, the first time around i realized i would only be able to do this effectively if i was thrown back into depression for a while. well.... okay so the actual question: i had a dream last night after i restarted yoga and meditation for the first time in many months. i was with my mother and searched ‘kundalini flowers’ or something on google and clicked first page. at the top was a horizontal picture with flowers on the right ¾ and a big ass demon face on the left. my mother saw it and immediately was like ‘WHY DO YOU HAVE TO LOOK AT THINGS LIKE THAT!?!?’ well i hadnt taken a close look, and i’ve heard not to look such things in the eyes.. but being that i am increasingly noticing the subtleties of the eyes as emotion and Being, and communication as creative spontaneous expansion of the self.. so i looked at the eyes closely and saw a depth of evil i have never seen before [in any of the prior demon experiences] – it was a depth and firmness of soul i can only equate to divinity as consciousness and existence [but without the power of Bliss] but with such intense hatred of pure desire to joyously torture. true evil, the essence of evil, something i philosophically [socially, pragmatically] had deconstructed but theologically believed in. this was not a dream. i tried to be firm and use a few cakras, but i am too weak and havent accepted myself through the pure presence of the moment, so i could tell i clearly failed and would be violently murdered if this was real. it was like it was saying ‘i am waiting for you, if you mess up, or i will come for you anyways’ and i realized if i am to continue with this kundalini i must become unimaginably stronger. i am certain this was a very powerful demon, a very high order demon... or even satan itself. by far the most frightening thing i’ve ever experienced.. worse than hell. i may have at one point asked the universe to ‘give me all it’s got.’ i am rash at the times when it’s least useful..and i try to control it in all the wrong moments [mistrust due to my rashness], as i learn from experience [i don’t think anyone has the capacity to have all knowledge of experience to be able to act purely on theory/advice without being dogmatic, unless they are a perfected creature upon birth]. my concern is, when previous similar stuff happened i was either able to make it somehow, or have faith that kundalini would progress at a slow pace for me to be able to not only integrate, but more importantly, get strong enough to deal with those extremely increasingly negative situations [let alone accept the strange neutral but not pleasurable ones that constitute transition phases]. i have no idea what will happen, and i’m not sure if i’m getting stronger at the right rate to be able to do this. i am having past traumas reprocessed automatically in a deeper degree as i get better/kundalini can work, but i feel like, as usual, my mind is racing ahead. this is not just a matter of simple grounding, or other menial mitigation techniques.. i have no idea what this is. i have only experienced absolute euthymia once in my life, and that was for 45 minutes. it was a familiar deep peace that emerged consistently when i meditated a lot during depression before the heart opening and follow up experiences, and i was able to interact with people effectively, but there was no sense of pleasure or emotions. it’s sort of possible it would have emerged with time as had happened before... but also before after 1 week exactly it blossomed into kundalini, not just normal emotions. obviously i can’t predict anything related to that. unfortunately this can be interpreted as over-identification with the heightened state, but having been depressed for my entire life, and only having experienced a sense of self and emotions [in a healthy way] through such experiences, how can you really blame me. i realize it is possible that finding self through a normal/boring state would teach me things i need as a prerequisite, and stuff i’ve read seems to imply that, not to mention old style yogic progression of practice. i mean the people who are born with experiences and become ascetics – how do they develop a sense of self, or do they really have it fully developed at birth? but obviously, none of that still doesn’t really answer anything – should i shoot for something i may not get [euthymia] [and abandon the one medication that works] that potentially may not be necessary [euthymia] with the risk of never entering the heightened state again [i value creativity and true compassion, not to mention the depth of self that only such states can give] in order to help deal with these increasingly extreme experiences? advice?

I can tell you my personal experiences as well. I do not wish to recount for students or others who I have taught. Their experiences should be relayed by them alone. I was afflicted with Childhood Fibromyalgia (A very sever case which I am in only .5% of the population deal with), scoliosis and chronic Myafacial syndrome. I can live a fairly active life, caring for my parents, training twice a day and teaching 7 days a week despite dealing with these issues. This does not also account for all the injuries I have received over the years, including crushing my T-11 while working. Am I fully cured? No. I will be. If there is a specific timeline for success in being fully healed I do not know what that is. I am no longer interested in someone else's perception of how fast something should work. That is their issue. I however have been working with others as well with great success. I do Field Healing on my Mother who has a Tumour on her Pituitary gland and I have volunteered for energy work at the Cross Cancer institute here in Edmonton. An MRI from 2011 and another in 2012 had shown 60% shrinkage of her Tumour. Something the Doctors were baffled with. I remember when they were viewing the images in the Hospital. They were so amazed they had called in other surgeons to view it for themselves. They had never, NEVER seen that happen before. Dr. Broad, My Moms Surgeon had 45 years experience up to that point. Every couple of days I do Qigong in the room with my parents and work directly on my Mom. So, I can honestly say it has made a significant positive changes in our lives. EDIT: I did not account for all experiences, this is just a very very quick run down of the last 25 years. I did not include dream experiences or and "Unique" waking elements as well. I should also note I have been a Practitioner of Flying Phoenix since 1994. I have been doing the Hunyuan and Yi Chuan for only a year, but with great success and I enjoy it immensely.

Thanks for the video Infinity . all you statements above are very true. In the 5th dimension, as it compares to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd and 4th for example. Is dream like . It can be a good dream or a bad dream depending on which direction you travel up or down the double vortex. Its the top of the top or the bottom of the bottom and there is no 6th . Some scentitst say theres a parallel universe? yes and no . its one univrse that has duality within it. But there most certainly is upwards and downwards direction there is yang direction and yin . Together they make 1. In order for there to be a beginning at 1 there must be an end and it ends at 5 . its a legal matter that has its origin at 1, The 5th IS Total freedom of choice . Ive got my foot in its door right now but im limited by the negativity of the 3rd dimension There is no freedom more free that total freedom of choice. You can have what ever , when ever , how ever and with who ever . The universe is yours to do with what you please. Its your universe , you create it , change it , bend it and vanish it . TOTAL freedom of choice. and its all govered by the basic set of duality Its true heaven and true paradise. now you go the other direction down ? lets not go there. YIKES !!!! in the lower vortex there in much pain and in the upper votex there is much pleasure . The lower votext sees the truth as lies and lies as lies the upper see lies as truth and truth as truth and . Hence the phenonina of me and you and Brian and SW Id love to use your black and white avatar too. ? Can you host a gif image of the double vortex so I can link it here ? Holla!! at cha boyee Anyone else have questions or comments? is there a better way to determine whats yang and whats yin ?

Life is a dream in conciousness. :-) You can be the butterfly or you it's all you! See: http://thetaobums.com/topic/37370-enlightenment-as-i-understand-it/

Duality does breakdown into a singularity or totality, I am I, or it did for me and it's still slightly breakdown still as my awareness is still growing. If you do the exercise you will find your self more and more in the present moment and your SELF getting more and more positive. Try it. However I see it as I have written above not as a case of just doing pairs, although it is too as long as you do all the positive or negatives in the same column or as many as you can get!! (VERY IMPORTANT!) My understanding is when you put positive and negative in two columns what your doing is making a list and then reading it to make sure its correct and it becomes glaringly obvious to your subconscious TRUE self that the LEFT POSITIVE column is all true and the right is all false. This can not be argued with and you become all POSITIVE and you realise that you are - read down the LEFT column and see what you are: Positive>< Negative Reality><illusion Love><hate Truth><fiction Understanding><no understanding Calm><agitation Now>< Then Here><There Self><No self Time><no time Space><no space Etc.. And it's true! It's that simple. Buddha said. 'What you think is what you are' or what you think you are is what you are. Nothing gets added or taken away you simply are yourself now and you cannot argue with your self because my friend you are 100% POSITIVE it's true! And this positivity goes round and round gaining more positivity constantly expanding. Loving more and more and more. And you qi vibrational frequency keeps going high and higher and higher exponentially. The more you are in the NOW as days go past things become aligned and the NOW gets bigger and time collapses and you start getting knowings. When you are 100% positive you know! And gradually you start to know the future and other things too. You have to try it that is all I can say. I cannot make you enlightened only YOU can. Reality is not something other than what is HERE and NOW in front of your eyes right!? How can it be anything other than that? And when you understand that you get more insight into the reality which is consciousness! And you understand space and time don't exist. And you can go anywhere anytime. Only started doing this last night! It's getting very very interesting folks I can tell you! :-) Anyone who has experienced a lucid dream has done this. Life is a dream in conciousness. :-) TaoMaster may seem like he is mad but he has truthfully expanded enormously, beyond my or your comprehension at our present vibrational level. Best of luck...

Not for me ... the other night, in a dream, I was telling the people in my dream that I had a dream and in that dream within the dream I urged myself to remember it was a dream, then, when telling the dream people in my dream that I remembered my dream within a dream was real I suddenly realised and told them 'this is a dream too' . But I do agree with you that the unconscious exists. I think we are conscious in a dream , some dreams, we react and respond to things in the dream, it is some type of consciousness - we are 'aware' of things happening to us (even if they are 'imagined'). My unconscious seems to function best when I am fully awake. It chugs away in there and spits out results into my consciousness. If I stop and refocus and shine the light of my consciousness 'in there' I can then consciously observe, to an extent, its workings and connections and how it spits out results ... but its awfully quantumly complex (to my consciousness) .... best just to shut the lid and ignore it and leave it up to its job (like an old Mk II Jaguar motor - how on earth did they get all that ... in there ? ! ).

Having the 'ago' in the 'now' is having the past in the present. Since all we perceive is the present moment even the past is coiled up in the now. But wanting to have it thus is not the point. Since wanting denotes the lack of something and if we have the present moment and the past instantly then we lack nothing since the future is only the dream of possible inter-realtions of the things in the now yet to come.

Wait a minute! What is being used when you are sleeping and having a dream? Not you conscious mind because during the dream you are not aware that you are dreaming. Yes, there is only one brain. There is the conscious aspect of it and the unconscious aspect of it.

No problem, but I never quoted from a Wikipedia page. Which page are you talking about? I am looking forward to reading your perspective on these topics Because I disagree with the idea that Kether should be considered 'the One'. My studies have led me to believe that Kether doesn't exist individually in Atziluth, it needs the tension through Binah and Chokmah in order to maintain itself. One reason Kether is considered so incomprehensible by Qabalists is because it is a gateway between the force of Ohr Ain Soph, and the form it's molded into by the Unmoved Mover called Ain Soph. There really isn't anything there besides the vortex of the tzimtzum before 'Kether' splits apart to further manifestation. All manifestation is the result of a Trinity. Otherwise Ain Soph's dream of Kether dissolves back into what I would more rightly consider 'the One' of Ohr Ain Soph (Limitless Light), and then back into the 'sleeping dreamer' Ain Soph (Unmoved Mover/Limitlessness/the One/Small Face/YHVH/etc.), and finally back to Ain (the NOT/Vast Face/). This idea explains the hermetic Axiom of Maria: "One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth." I agree with this perspective, the motion of the Unmoved Mover/Unchanged Changer is always inwards.

I like the feather in the wind analogy. When we talk about Dao, its sort of like our waking conceptualised view of reality, it's ok and helpful to discuss it as a form of fun and perhaps further understanding in words. To be one with IT, as you hinted at, is to drop everything and just be. More like a dream state than waking reality. That's why it can never be spoken of, at that stage there are no words or any ideas to compare it to. It just flows, and you with it In this sense, thoughts are indistinguishable from Yin and Yang, whereas Dao comes before these forces arise. The state of just being in harmony with whatever may be. Floating like your feather on the breath of the wind.

Hi new guy Perhaps that is because of the way Waite approached things generally? His writings seem long winded, convoluted, full of excessive verbiage , pompous, concealing ... As far as it being childish, I think that is in the artist's style and execution. She may have been prudish, but I do get that from Waite's writing as well , concealing ? ... especially the text. It is a great example of Victorian English gentleman's occultism (care to join me in the library for a gin and tonic while we discuss Wallis Budge ? ) One thing I have noticed about it. Many people seem to like the pictorial images on the small cards as it helps them to discern or associate a meaning ... a very specific meaning and a more 'fortune telling' type of meaning: "You are about to go on a journey, strife and contention with others, you will wake up from a bad dream, in dispair and think; "Whatever on earth was I thinking when I chose this horrible wallpaper ? " Which brings me to a whole big question about this I would like to open up What do 'youse guys' think about the difference between; Symbol interpretation and symbol association ? In the R W tarot deck ? (and , if you want to throw it in too; the difference in reading it makes with a deck that has a symbolic or abstract set of minor cards as opposed to ones like RW that depicts a specific scenic image ? )

I've been saving this story for several weeks now, until all the agitated energies of Christmas, New Year’s, the family gatherings and mini-feuds,… have all had a chance to subside. I've always found that in contrast, the space which reveals itself after all this ‘social dust’ has settled is a much quieter, clearer, more introspective place to be in. It’s mid January, the deepest part of winter. Everything in nature, all the plant world and most of our fellow animal inhabitants … are all conserving energy in slow, ‘tick-over’ mode. So, often my mind gets attracted to a different style of story – like the one below. It too, is slower. It was written at a time when the people’s view of the world and of human and societal relationships, were radically different than they are today. “A Pattern of Islands” was written almost exactly a hundred years ago, just before the First World War – the war which ended forever a world where half a dozen European imperialist countries battled each other to carve up virtually every country in the world into one of their empires. Today, few people are able to look back on that era without experiencing a 'slightly guilty' sense of shame. Yet from another, more detached, purely historical point of view, it was simply another phase of history no different than the Greek, Roman, Persian, or Ottoman Empires. Not intrinsically any more or less interesting than the times of Genghis Khan, or the settling of the American West or Australia, (both of which processes depended on first overpowering, then destroying, the native cultures which had lived in those areas for millenia beforehand). Nevertheless, despite the shocking cultural genocide our ancestors so freely engaged in, undeniably there was exactly the same range of people and personality types in those times as there are now. There were equally as many kind and highly admirable human beings out walking in the streets as there are now. They just happened to be born at a time when, one hundred years later, a future generation would heartily disapprove of them. Yet, can we who by chance find ourselves alive now in this ever-moving window of time, truly imagine ourselves to be free from the possibility of being held in a similar, (or even worse) regard by those who will be looking back at us a century further on ? Anyway, this an autobiographical story written by an exceptionally kind-hearted young man who happened to be born in the very last days of empire, and who went off to serve his country and fellow men in a post that turned out to be almost the embodiment of many people’s dreams: a cluster of remote, tropical, Polynesian islands. The book that these few opening chapters are taken from, I feel is an absolute gem. Simply by decoding the record left behind by Arthur Grimble’s words on paper, we are able to transport ourselves to a romantic world and time vastly different from our own – yet one which is seen through the eyes of a person who is surprisingly, not very far removed from our own nature. He too, was a fellow lover of humanity. * * * OLD MAN OF THE COLONIAL OFFICE I was nominated to a cadetship in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Protectorate at the end of 1913. The cult of the great god Jingo was as yet far from dead. Most English households of the day took it for granted that nobody could be always right, or ever quite right, except an Englishman. The Almighty was beyond doubt Anglo-Saxon, and the popular conception of Empire resultantly simple. Dominion over palm and pine (or whatever else happened to be noticeably far-flung) was the heaven-conferred privilege of the Bulldog Breed. Kipling had said so. The colonial possessions, as everyone so frankly called them, were properties to be administered, first and last, for the prestige of the little lazy isle where the trumpet-orchids blew. Kindly administered, naturally - nobody but the most frightful bounder could possibly question our sincerity about that - but firmly too, my boy, firmly too, lest the school-children of Empire forgot who were the prefects and who the fags. Your uncles – meaning every man Jack of your father's generation, uncle or not, who cared to take you by the ear - all said you'd never be a leader if you weakened on that point. It was terrifying, the way they put it, for Stalky represented their ideal of dauntless youth, and you loathed Stalky with his Company as much as you feared him; but you were a docile young man, and, as his devotees talked, you felt the seeds of your unworthiness sprouting into shameful view through every crack in your character. The Colonial Office spoke more guardedly than your uncles. It began by saying that, as a cadet officer, you were going to be on probation for three years. To win confirmation as a member of the permanent administrative staff, you would have to pass within that time certain field-examinations in law and native language. This seemed plain and fair enough, but then came the rider. I forget how it was conveyed, whether in print or by word of mouth; but the gist of it was that you could hardly hope to be taken on as a permanent officer unless, over and above getting through your examinations, you could manage to convince your official chiefs overseas that you possessed qualities of leadership. The abysmal question left haunting you was - did the Colonial Office mean leadership in the same sense as Kipling and your uncles? If it did, and if you were anything like me, you were scuppered. I was a tallish, pinkish, long-nosed young man, fantastically thin-legged and dolefully mild of manner. Nobody could conceivably have looked, sounded or felt less like a leader of any sort than I did at the age of twenty-five. Apart from my dislike of the genus Stalky, I think the only positive things about me were a consuming hunger for sea-travel and a disastrous determination to write sonnets. The sonnet-writing had been encouraged by Arthur Christopher Benson at Cambridge; the wanderlust had started to gnaw at my vitals at school, when I read that essay of Froude's, “England's Forgotten Worthies" - especially the part of it that pictured how Humphrey Gilbert met his end in the ten-ton "frigate" Squirrel, sitting abaft with a book in his hand, "giving signs of joy" to his fellow-adventurers in the Golden Hinde and roaring at them through the wild Atlantic gale that engulfed him, "We are as near heaven by sea as by land", so often as they approached within hearing. I tried at Cambridge to cram some of my feelings about that, and the sea's lure in general, into a sonnet of dubious form: She called them with the voices of far lands And with the flute-like whispering of reeds, With scents of coral where the tide recedes, With thunderous echoes of deserted strands. She babbled the barbaric lilt of tongues Heard brokenly in dreams; she strung the light Of swarthy-smouldering gems across the night; She wrung their hearts with haunting of strange songs. She witched them with her ancient sorceries And lo! they knew the terrible joy of ships Gone questing where the moon's last footstep is, And stars hold passionless converse overhead While mariners are drawn with writhen lips Down, down, deep down, among her voiceless dead. Arthur Benson was pained at the rhyme-pattern of the octave, but said the thing sounded sincere and showed promise. I was unwise enough to bring his kindly letter to the notice of some of my uncles. They only said he ought to have known better; after all, he had had every chance, dammit, as the son of an Archbishop ! So, Benson, as a moral prop, was out. But I had acquired at school and Cambridge some kind of competence at cricket and other sports, which kept them always hoping for the best. When I became, first secretary, and then, in the normal course, captain of my college cricket XI, they began to believe I really might be on my way to vertebrate life. But they could not have been more deeply mistaken. As secretary, I invariably took orders from the captain; as captain, I invariably took orders from the secretary, while the team invariably played the game as if neither of us was there. The worst of it was, I loved it. If ever I had previously entertained a notion that I might enjoy ordering people around, that experience certainly disabused me of it. The fear of being packed home from the Gilbert and Ellice Islands in disgrace, after three years of probation, for having failed to become the kind of leader my uncles wanted me to be, began to give me nightmares. A moment came when I felt that the instant sack for some honest admission of my own ineptitude would be easier to bear than that long-drawn-out ignominy. In any case, I decided, someone at the top ought to be warned of my desperate resolve never to become like Stalky. It sounded rather fine, and lonely, and stubborn, put like that; but I fear I didn't live up to the height of it. I did, indeed, secure an interview at the Colonial Office, but my nearest approach to stubbornness with the quiet old gentleman who received me there was to confess, with a gulp in my throat, that the imaginary picture of myself in the act of meting out imperial kindness-but-firmness to anybody, anywhere in the world, made me sweat with shame. The quiet old gentleman was Mr. Johnson, a Chief Clerk in the department which handled the affairs of Fiji and the Western Pacific High Commission. That discreet title of his (abandoned today in favour of Principal and Secretary) gave no hint of the enormous penetrating Power of his official word. In the Western and Central Pacific alone, his modest whisper from behind the throne of authority had power to affect the destinies of scores of races in hundreds of islands scattered over millions of square miles of ocean. I was led to him on a bleak afternoon of February 1914, high up in the gloomy Downing Street warren that housed the whole Colonial Office staff of those days. The air of his cavernous room enfolded me with the chill of a mortuary as I entered. He was a spare little man with a tenuous sandy beard and heavily tufted eyebrows of the same colour. He stood before the fire, slightly bent in the middle like a monkey-nut, combing his beard with one fragile hand and elevating the tails of his cut-away coat with the other, as he listened to my story. I can see him still, considering me over his glasses with the owlish yet not unkindly stare of an undertaker considering a corpse. (Senior officials in the Colonial Office don't wear beards today, but they still cultivate that way of looking at you.) When I was done, he went on staring a bit; then he heaved a quiet sigh, ambled over to a bookcase, pottered there breathing hard for a long while (I think now he must have been laughing), and eventually hauled out a big atlas, which he carried to his desk. "Let us see, now," he murmured, settling into his chair, "let us see .. . yes . . . let us go on a voyage of discovery together. Where . . . precisely . . . are the Gilbert and Ellice Islands ? If you will believe me, I have often been curious to know." He started whipping over the pages of the atlas; I could do nothing but goggle at him while he pursued his humiliating research. "Ah !" he chirruped at last, "here we have them: five hundred miles of islands lost in the wide Pacific. Remote . . . I forbear, in tenderness for your feelings, from saying anything so Kiplingesque as far-flung. Do we agree to say remote and not far-flung ?" He cocked his wicked little eye at me. I made sounds in my throat, and he went on at once, "Remote . . . yes . . . and romantic . . . romantic ! Eastwards as far as ship can sail . . . up against the gateways of the dawn . . . coconut- palms, but of course ,not pines, ha-ha ! . . . the lagoon islands, the Line Islands, Stevenson's islands ! Do we accept palms, not pines ? Do we stake our lives on Stevenson, not Kipling? Do we insist upon the dominion of romance, not the romance of dominion ? I should appreciate your answer." I joyfully accepted Stevenson and ruled Kipling out (except, of course, for Puck of Pook's Hill and Kim, and the Long Trail, and others too numerous to mention) ; but my callowness squirmed shamefully at romance. He became suddenly acid at that: "Come, come! You owe perhaps more to your romanticism than you imagine - your appointment as a cadet, for example." The truth was, according to him, that I had been the only candidate to ask for the job in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. But for that . . . if, in fact, I had been up against the least competition . . . well . . . who could say ? As I, for one, could not, he leaned back in his chair and fired a final question at me: "I may take it, may I not, that, despite certain doubts which you entertain about the imperialism of Mr. Kipling and . . . hm. . . a great many of your betters, you still nurse your laudable wish to go to the Central Pacific ?" I replied yes, sir, certainly, sir, but how was I going to tackle this thing about leadership, sir. He peered at me incredulously, rose at once, and lifted his coat-tails again at the fire, as if I had chilled whatever it was. "I had imagined," he confided in a thin voice to the ceiling, "that I had already - and with considerable finesse - managed to put all that in its right perspective for this queer young man." "However," he continued, after a long and, to me, frightful silence, "let us dot our i's and cross our t's. The deplorable thing about your romanticism is that you display it as a halo around your own head. You seem to think that, when you arrive in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, the entire population will forthwith stop work to stand with bated breath awaiting your apotheosis as a leader among them." The blend of venomous truth and ghastly unfairness in this bit deep into my young soul; I opened my mouth to protest, but he overrode me: "You permit me to proceed ? Thank you. Now, believe me, your egocentric surmise is grotesquely incorrect. You will encounter out there a number of busy men interested primarily in only one thing about you, namely, your ability to learn and obey orders. These will severely deplore any premature motion of your own to order them - or, in fact, anybody else - about. They will expect you to do as you are told – neither more nor less - and to do it intelligently. In the process of learning how to obey orders with intelligence and good cheer, you may, we hope, succeed in picking up some first, crude notions about the true nature of leadership. I say 'we hope' because that is the gamble we, in the Colonial Office, have taken on you. Kindly do your best to justify it." Though his tone had been as cutting as his words, the flicker of a smile had escaped once or twice, as if by permission, through his beard. I got the notion that the smiles meant, “You incredible young ass ! Can’t you see, this is the way round to put it to your uncles ?" But when I gave him back a timid grin, he asked me sharply why. I answered sheepishly that he had eased my mind, because truly, truly I didn't want to go ordering anybody round any more than he wanted me to. At that, his manner changed again to one of sprightly good humour. He began to tell me a whole lot of things about a cadet’s training in the field (or, at least, the training he thought I was destined to get in the Central Pacific) that nobody else had ever hinted at. As I understood the burden of it, it was that I would spend my first year or so of probation on Ocean Island, the administrative capital of the protectorate, where I would be passed from department to department of the public service to learn in successive order, from a series of rugged but benevolent Heads (all. of whom quite possibly harboured a hidden passion for the writings of R.L.S.), the basic functions of the Secretariat, the Treasury, the Magistrate's Court, the Customs, the Works Department, the Police, the post Office, and the prisons organization. I don't know what magic he used - he certainly never spoke above a chirp ; but he managed to make that arid list of departmental names roll from his lips like the shouting of golden trumpets upon my ear. I had a vision as he spoke: the halo he had mentioned burst into sudden glory around my head. . . . . . . It was dawn. I was hurrying, loaded with papers of the utmost import, through the corridors of a vast white office building set on an eminence above a sapphire ocean. I had been toiling all night with the Chief Secretary, the Treasurer, the Magistrate, the Collector of Customs, the Commissioner of Works, the Chief of Police, the Postmaster General, and the Keeper of the Prison. The job was done ! I had pulled them all through. Just in time ! There in the bay below lay a ship with steam up, waiting for final orders. I opened a door. A man with a face like a sword - my beloved Chief, the Resident Commissioner himself—sat tense and stern-eyed at his desk. His features softened swiftly as he saw me: "Ah . . . you, Grimble . . . at last !" He eagerly scanned my papers: "Good man . . . good man! It's all there. I knew I could trust you. 'Where shall I sign ? … God, how tired I am !" "Sign here, sir. . . I'll see to everything else … leave it all to me.'' My voice was very quiet, quiet but firm . . . … and remember this,"-broke in the voice of Mr. Johnson, "a cadet is a nonentity." The vision fled. The reedy voice persisted: "A cadet washes bottles for those who are themselves merely junior bottle-washers. Or so he should assess his own importance, pending his confirmation as a permanent officer." He must have seen something die in my face, for he added at once, "Not that this should unduly discourage you. All Civil Servants, of whatever seniority, are bottle-washers of one degree or another. They have to learn humility. Omar Khayyam doubtless had some over-ambitious official of his own epoch chiefly in mind when he wrote 'and think that, while thou art, thou art but what thou shalt be, NOTHING: thou shalt not be less.' Sane advice, especially for cadets ! Nevertheless, you would do well to behave, in the presence of your seniors, with considerably less contempt for high office than Omar seems to have felt. Your approach to your Resident Commissioner, for example, should preferably suggest the attitude of one who humbly aspires to 'pluck down, proud clod, the neck of God'." Who was I, to question the rightness of this advice? I certainly felt no disposition to do so then (I don't remember having felt any since) and, as he showed no further wish to pursue the topic, I passed to another that had been on my mind. A marriage had been arranged. My pay as a cadet would be £3oo a year, plus free furnished quarters. Did he think a young married couple could live passably well on that at Ocean Island ? I pulled out a written list of questions about the local cost of living. At the word "marriage" he started forward with a charming smile, light-stepping as a faun, whisked the paper from my hand, laid it on the mantelpiece, and turned back to face me: "Ah …romance . . . romance again," he breathed, "a young couple … hull-down on the trail of rapture . . . the islands of desire . . ' but there is method, too . . . let us look before we leap . . . the cost of living ! A businesslike approach. Very proper. Well. . . now. . . hmm . . . yes . . . my personal conjecture is that you should find the emoluments adequate for your needs, provided always, of course, that you neither jointly nor severally acquire the habit of consuming vast daily quantities of champagne and caviar. Remember, for the rest . . . in your wilderness . . . how the ravens fed Elijah . . . or was it Elisha ?" And that was that about the cost of living. I was too timid to recover my list from the mantelpiece. Thus finally primed in the Colonial Office for exploding as a bottle-washer upon the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, I sailed with Olivia from England on March 6th, 1914. PACIFIC TRAMP We reached Australia in a liner designed for the delight of passengers; we wallowed out of Sydney harbour, towards the end of April, in a craft of more romantic dedication. She was Burns, Philp and Company's steamship Moresby, a typical Pacific tramp of those days - 1,3oo tons register, thirty-three years old, but still A1 at Lloyd's and still game to plug her stinking way at the rate of six knots through any weather to any palm-green shore where pearl-shell or beche-de-mer, shark-fins or copra were to be picked up. By the time we met her, her battered hull, surviving god-knows-how-many hurricanes at sea and casualties by reef or shoal, had puffed with unconquerable patience across three-quarters of a million miles of empty ocean (by the captain's reckoning) and pushed its grimy nose through every remotest archipelago of the Pacific. The captain, a minute Cockney as way-worn but steadfast as his ship, would talk to us for hours about her achievements, his brown eyes tender with love; but the chief of all her virtues for him was her iron hull. "Look at those lovely plates!" he would exclaim, pointing to the incredibly buckled decks, "all bent to hell, but not a leak in 'em anywhere! Because why? They're beautiful soft iron, not this-here cheap steel. She can knock her way into lagoons through horse's heads-and coral mushrooms . . . crack-crack, like that, port and starboard, the dear old what-not, just taking a few more dunts in her old bottom but never springing a blanky leak anywhere." A sweet old lady she was, he always finished up, a sweet old lady. She must have been, in her fashion, for the memory of her still tugs somehow at my heart; but she had not been designed for the comfort of landlubbers like us, nor had her business occasions sweetened the smell of her for our kind of noses. She reeked of dead shark, putrid oyster and rancid copra from stem to stern of her aged body, and the ruinous wooden hutch on the forward well-deck where we tried to sleep was undoubtedly the chief concentrating-point of all her odours. Then, too, there were the cockroaches. Those three-and-a-half-inch monsters, fattened on the oily refuse that clotted every crevice of the holds, swarmed up at night into our bunks, looking for a change of diet. Pacific cockroaches eat feet. They would willingly devour any other exposed part of the human body, for that matter, if one let them; but the tickle of a dozen or so on a hand or face usually wakes a sleeper before they can get down to a meal. A foot, though, is a different proposition; the thick skin on the sole is insensitive, and the victim feels nothing until they have gnawed that down to the quick. When he does wake, the ball and heel have been stripped pink, and he hobbles for the next week or so, to the exquisite enjoyment of all true sailormen and shell-backs. I know, because it happened to me in the Moresby. It was then that I heard for the first time that side-splitting joke, so gloatingly reiterated by shell-backs for the comfort of greenhorns: "Take it easy, son: it's only the first ten years in the islands that's hell !" We did learn later to accept cockroaches as domestic pets (or almost) for, in the Gilbert Islands, whenever foul weather threatened, whole rustling clouds of them would come flying into the house for refuge. Once lodged, they stayed for weeks; so we decided at last to count them in as an essential ingredient of Pacific romance - it was either that, or die of daily horror – and our only incurable pedantry about them in the long run was to keep them, if or when possible, out of the soup. It was fortunate, nevertheless, that we did not reach this stage of civilization in the Moresby, because, but for our first maniac terror of the brutes, we might never have slept on deck. The captain had strong ideas about the propriety of such a thing for a young woman. Nothing but our most haggard entreaties persuaded him to let us, at last, drag our mattresses up to the boat-deck amidships. Once we were there, however, he gave us a tarpaulin sheet for extra cover against rain squalls. We needed it a lot at first, but the weather cleared as we slid past the Santa Cruz group; and then we found out what it was to lie at night overleaned by nothing but a firmament of flaming stars - for the tropic stars did fame for us, just as the travel books had promised. The nights were amethyst clear and cool. Eddies of warm air, loaded with earth scents and jungle dreams from islands beyond sight, enmeshed us and were gone again. The swing of the old ship was so quiet, she seemed to be poised moveless while the stars themselves were rocking to the croon of the bow-wave, back and forth above her mastheads, as we lay tranced with watching. There were Gilbertese deck-hands in the crew, copper-skinned boys, thick muscled and short in the leg but as active as cats in the rigging. They were shy with strangers, stern-featured and remote-looking when they worked alone. We thought them dour folk until we saw them get together. That was somewhere on the edge of the tropics, when the trousers and jerseys that had veiled the glorious moulding of their bodies had been discarded for the belted waist-cloths, trimmed to the knee, of ordinary island wear. They had been called to the forecastle-head to heave an anchor inboard for cleaning. We saw them cluster in silence, a group of bronze statues by the cat-heads, while the boatswain's mate, an Ocean Islander, interpreted the first mate's talk. There was hardly a move and never the hint of a smile among them until the officer walked away. We wondered why he had left them standing so unresponsive there; but "you watch 'em" said the captain. Magically, as he spoke, the tough masks relaxed and were turned with grins towards one man of their number - not their official leader, the boatswain's mate, but a massive, towering fellow, who still stood utterly smileless. The captain said he was their licensed wag: it was up to him and nobody else on board to start things humming. He had his joke all ready cooked up behind those brooding eyes. It was a crack, as we heard later, of the most joyous ribaldry about the ancestry of anchors; he delivered himself of it in a high feminine shriek, tottering towards the side in perfect simulation of senility. The air suddenly rang with answering laughter; the crew leapt alive; the anchor came aboard in no time to the accompaniment of hoots and horse-play. When the job was finished, they stood around holding hands and chattering for a while, to look at what they had done, like satisfied children or artists well pleased with their handiwork. Then, one by one, they drifted off to their separate tasks, each wrapped again in the cloak of his austere silence. One evening, we heard them singing on the forecastle-head. We could make out, from where we listened, a circle of sitting shapes, their torsos stippled in black against the night sky. Their heads and shoulders were bowed, their voices muted; the queer inflections of their chant were cadenced, even for our alien ears, with grief beyond bearing. We knew it could not be one of the ancient island sagas of war or wonder-voyage that we had read about. We were to hear many of those later, triumphally intoned, in the packed meeting-houses of the Gilberts; but this was a new song and a sad song made by one of the crew for love of his cruel lady. I got the words of it from Teburea, the boatswain's mate, before we left the ship. He wrote them down for me and I still have the paper; here is the ungarnished translation of them: I am sore-hearted for you, Do not make me kill myself How great is my frustration Because you give me no reward! I am sad, I am sad, But I can hide my sadness from you, If you will only say that one day Perhaps I shall have my reward. Teburea told me that the suffering poet could not, for shame of seeming boastful, himself join in the singing. His part was to teach his song to friends who loved him, and sit weeping in their circle while they sang it for him. They too wept as they sang, Teburea said, because they knew their tears would make their friend a little happy, and because the words were very beautiful, and because all of them were sick for their own sweethearts, over there across the sea to eastward. Or perhaps, if they were not sick for sweethearts, they wanted to see their father and mother again. "Me sick, too, for my old man," Teburea finished simply (I know now that he meant his adoptive grandfather), "he love me too much; me love him too much, too," and walked away. It began to dawn on me then that, beyond the teeming romance that lies in the differences between men - the diversity of their homes, the multitude of their ways of life, the dividing strangeness of their faces and tongues, the thousand-fold mysteries of their origins - there lies the still profounder romance of their kinship with each other, a kinship that springs from the immutable constancy of man's need to share laughter and friendship, poetry and love in common. A man may travel a long road, and suffer much loneliness, before he makes that discovery. Some, groping along dark byways, never have the good fortune to stumble upon it. But I was luckier than most. The islands I had chosen blindly, for the only reason that they were romantically remote, were peopled by a race who, despite the old savagery of their wars and the grimness born of their endless battle with the sea, were princes in laughter and friendship, poetry and love. Something in the simple way Teburea had spoken of that love song and the singing of it gave me a sudden inkling of things to come. I felt in my bones I was going to a place that, for all its remoteness, would prove to be no strange land for me. ISLAND OF DUST AND DREAMS We raised Ocean Island, via Solomon Island ports, on the morning of our seventeenth day out of Sydney. It was one of those burning days of the doldrums, when the sea is glassy but not still. The solemn swells that came pulsing up out of the south were unruffled by any breath of wind, but the huge heave of them told of storms far away. The ship swung dizzily from valley to burnished mountain-crest and back again to shining valley as she laboured her way up to the island. We heard the boom of the breakers from miles offshore as they crashed upon the reef. It was a sound new to our ears, a note of majesty once heard, forever remembered. It seemed unbelievable that the sweep of that thunderous attack could fail to engulf the tiny lump of land - not 2,ooo acres of it in all - so forlornly crouched between the vastitudes of sky and sea. The shudder of Ocean Island's narrow reef to the shock of the surf is familiar to people who live there. The old fishermen who used to dwell in the waterside villages would whisper to each other, when they felt it, "Behold, Tabakea moves a little !" Tabakea was the great turtle at the bottom of the sea, who balanced on his back the thin column of rock that carried their home like a coral mushroom-head on its top. One day, they believed, Tabakea would move too much, and Baanaba (The Rock-Land - that was their name for it) would topple over and be engulfed in the roaring waters. But the thought did not trouble them mightily, for they knew that their hero ancestor, the far-voyager, the all-conquering warrior and lover, Au-of-the-Rising-Sun, who had pinned Tabakea down when his people had made the place their home, would see them safely through the end. Every new dawn was his repeated guarantee of that. So, when someone whispered, "Tabakea moves a little", it was enough to answer, "The Sun rises !" for everyone to be comforted again. And, awaiting the end, they treated the imprisoned giant as a friend and helper, as was only proper, because he too was an ancestor; the Turtle had been the god of the men whom the People of Au had overwhelmed, and so also the god of their widows and daughters. These had been taken to wife by the womanless invading horde for the raising of a new stock on Baanaba. But their subjection had not made them false to the faith of their fathers; their constancy saw to it that the children they bore to the invaders should inherit the cult of the Turtle not less than the cult of the conquering Sun-hero. Though Au remained the triumphant Lord of Heaven (Tau-karawa, the Holder-of-the-Skies), Tabakea sidled his way through the nurseries at sea-level, so to speak, into the daily life of the people. He became Tau-marawa, the Holder-of-the-Ocean. It was to him that the new generation turned to Pray for good fishing, and, above all, for safe goings and comings through the dangers of Baanaba's terrible reef. The fishermen's notion that the land was perched on a column of rock was not so very wide of the truth. Ocean Island is nothing but the tip of a vast pinnacle upthrust out of the depths. At two cables' lengths out from the reef in Home Bay, there is a little ledge a hundred fathoms down, over which ships can- tie up in fine weather to colossal buoys that carry the world's deepest moorings. Only a bare half-dozen cables' lengths farther to seaward, the bottom has plunged to nearly two thousand fathoms. In other words, the hundred-fathom mooring-ground is a mere niche by the pinnacle's crest, chipped out of a two-mile precipice that soars almost sheer from the ocean's abysses. It may be not even a niche, but a cornice of reef-coral overhanging the black deeps. If that be so, it follows that the island's cliffs have slipped six hundred feet lower today than once they stood, for the polyp that builds reef-coral is a creature of the light - its extreme living depth is within one hundred and twenty feet of the surface. It is sure, it any case, that the towering pinnacle has been the plaything of vast movements in the ocean's depths. Aeons ago, its crest must have lain under water, yet just near enough to the top for the reef-building polyps to live there, for it was capped in that age with a platform of coral rock. Perhaps, when the reef broke surface after countless centuries of growth, the grinding of the surf for countless further centuries of disintegration formed a bank of coral sand upon it; or perhaps there was simply a sudden upheaval of the peak to tremendous heights above the sea. Whichever it was, that solitary perch in the midst of the mighty waters became the sanctuary of unnumbered sea birds. There were so many of them, and they stayed for so long, that their droppings covered the coral platform with a bed of guano forty feet deep and tens of millions of tons heavy. That was the age of birds; it was ended by a subsidence; the island disappeared, and the age of fishes began. One relic that remains for man out of the era of engulfment is the fossil tooth of a shark so enormous that a motor lorry could be driven through its reconstructed jaws. The heaped bird-droppings, overlaid by the rich refuse of the depths, suffered a sea-change from guano into phosphate of lime. Then again the ocean's bed was convulsed, and the coral platform with its load of precious phosphate was pushed three hundred feet above the water. It did not sink again. Now generations of polyps got to work to build a cornice of reef around the island's foot; birds flew in from places afar bearing seeds in their feathers; the land was covered in scrub that rotted, and grew, and rotted again, to form a topsoil of black earth; a forest of great calophyllum trees appeared on the heights. Maybe it was not so very many millions of years after the last upheaval that seafaring men - the People of Tabakea, the People of Au, and who knows what other land-hungry swarms before them - arrived and built their villages above the south-west facing bay. Only a few score centuries more were to pass from then until the Pacific Islands Trading Company, scouring the archipelagos for cargoes of guano, chanced upon the vast deposit saved on Ocean Island out of the gulfs of time. The Company, never a very rich concern, was tottering towards financial collapse in the late eighteen-nineties. Its old ship, the Ocean Queen, sailing out of Melbourne, Australia, had helped to rake all the known guano-islands of the Western Pacific clean of their deposits by that time; persistent search had failed to discover any worthwhile new sources; a day came when the directors knew that a single speculative voyage would probably land them in the bankruptcy court. They decided to go out of business before worse happened. It was a bleak look-out for everyone at the table. They called in young Albert Ellis, the super-cargo of the Ocean Queen, and broke the gloomy news to him. But Albert had a bright bee in his bonnet. Their sad looks only made it buzz the louder. "'Wait a minute ... wait a minute !" he shouted, dashed out of the room and returned at a run carrying in his hand a queer-looking chunk of putty-coloured rock. Everyone recognized it. He had used it for several years to prop open the door of his office. "This," he said, "was given me by a friend, who picked it up at Ocean Island. I believe. . . ." "Yes, yes," they cut him short wearily, "you needn't go on." He had said the same thing before, a dozen, a hundred times. He believed the rock might have phosphate of lime in it. But they believed otherwise. They were so certain he was wrong, nobody had ever even thought of having the thing analysed. They scoffed at his plea for an analysis now, at the eleventh hour. "Fortune doesn't play fairy-godmother tricks these days, boy," they said: "Now drop it and hop it." But he was not to be put off this time. He could ill afford to pay for an analysis himself, but he rode his hunch and took the rock to an expert. A week or so later, he stalked into the directors' room again and reported what he had done. "I'm not asking for a refund of the fee," he told the astonished board, "because I think you're going to raise my pay quite soon." "My poor boy," answered the fatherly managing director, "you shall certainly have your money back. Foolish as you were, you acted in our interests and you shan't lose by it. But we can't raise your pay. The firm is closing down." "Oh-no-it's-not!" shouted the irrepressible Albert. "You just take a look at this report," and slapped the paper on the table. The analyst had recorded a ninety per cent phosphoric acid reaction to his tests. The rock was made of the purest phosphate of lime yet discovered in a natural state by man. On the strength of that report, a Melbourne bank granted an overdraft that enabled the Company to send the Ocean Queen prospecting up to Ocean Island. She returned, her holds crammed with the putty-coloured rock, bought piecemeal from the Baanabans in exchange for tobacco, beads, knives, prints, and calico. The profits from this first yield paid for a better-fitted second voyage; and so on; the business never looked back. The Pacific Islands Trading Company became the millionaire Pacific Phosphate Company; this, in its turn, was converted into the British Phosphate Company, which again, a few years later, became the British Phosphate Commissioners, a nationalized industry owned jointly by the governments of Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Albert Ellis finished his career as Sir Albert, a Knight of the Order of the British Empire and Phosphate Commissioner for New Zealand. The romance of the Company, however, was far from being the first point to strike us as the old Moresby brought us lurching into Home Bay. What stood out initially was a dreadful, corrugated-iron factory building above the water-front, from which enormous clouds of dust were being thrown sky-high. It was the crushing-mill of the Company, busy pulverizing its daily quota of a thousand tom of phosphate rock for the export market. The dust it flung up drifted heavily down the still air, to load all the greenery of the island's flank with a grey pall. Its belchings seemed to us as grossly out of place as a series of eructations in the face of the infinite. Yet the major impertinence was ours; the unmannerly monster we saw before us was helping to keep a million acres of pasture-land green in Australia and New Zealand; and, but for its disfiguring industry on Ocean Island, there would have been little enough revenue to maintain services for the thirty thousand Gilbertese and Ellice folk who lived by their bright lagoons in the atolls to east and south. But, though the first shock of our disappointment was tempered by no such mature reflections, we did not have to stand nursing our peevishness for long; a boat was riding the mighty procession of swells a mile offshore, awaiting our arrival. The ship swung to give it a lee, and Methven came aboard. Stuartson Collard Methven was the Officer-in-Charge of Police, Ocean Island. It was not his business, as such, to board ships for the Customs, or the Post Office, or anybody else. But there were Ellice Islanders in the police force, and no race in that ocean of sea-princes ever produced a more superb breed of surf-riders than theirs. So it was a hand-picked crew of Ellice Island policemen who manned the Government's boat for every purpose, and where they went Methven went too, in whatever weather. That is the sort of man he really was; he and his wife Ruby were to be our very dear friends a little later; but he was not actually bursting with bonhomie that day. The mails from the Moresby were, of course, worth coming our for, but the idea of hoiking ashore a curio called a cadet – a phenomenon until then most happily unknown in the Central Pacific - and his wife (heaven pity her whoever she might be), and their frightful luggage scratching the boat's beautiful paintwork to hell . . . well, I ask you, he said. We know he said it, because Ruby told us so in due course, and anyhow, we saw it sticking out of every angular Scottish inch of his six-foot-three, as he walked up to us like a one-man procession in resplendent ducks. "I am Methven," he opened, and added after a pause, "the Police Officer," with the courteous grimness of an executioner announcing his functions. "If you are the new What's-It from England, I'm to take you ashore, Will you please introduce me to your wife, . . . Thank you. . . . And is that your dunnage down there?" When I explained that there was still a big box to come from the baggage room, he exclaimed, "Oh, my God !" in a high, shaken whisper, and walked away to give some orders. On his return, he said, "I suppose you've seen to the Way Bill," and when I asked what the Way Bill was, he whispered "Oh, my God !" again, falsetto, but allowed me to gather that the thing was a kind of receipt for the mails, which I should have saved him the trouble of signing. So I went and did it at once, and that was my very first official gesture in the service of His Majesty overseas. I felt the job had been done with considerable éclat until Methven asked me if I had counted the mail-bags I had signed for. When I said I hadn't, he exclaimed "Oh, my God !" yet again, but this time on a bass note strangled with suffering. The top end of a Jacob's ladder hung over a ship's side is the only part of it made fast to anything. It follows that, when the ship rolls towards that side, the bottom end swings gaily out over the depths, only to crash back against the plates when the roll is reversed. The terror of the landsman at the bottom end is the greater or less in proportion to the extravagance of the rolling. Olivia was near the bottom when the prize-winning outward swing happened. The accompanying downward plunge caused an uprush of air beneath her skirts which lifted them over her head. Skirts were worn voluminous in those days; Olivia's got so firmly entangled with her hat that the downward draught caused by the following upward rush failed to dislodge them. She groped her way blind after that, through a series of sick swings and crashes, until her questing feet found no more steps to step upon, and she was left dangling in the void by her hands only, for somebody to do something about. It was Methven who did it. He grabbed at one of her wild legs as they swung out at him, and gave a good strong jerk. She came apart from the ladder like plucked fruit, and hurtled down upon him. I saw him crumple under the impact and collapse beneath her in the stern sheets. His only remark when I got into the boat was that women ought to be careful to wear bloomers for occasions of that sort in the Pacific. I agreed with him cravenly. Olivia either did not hear him or was past caring, for she was being sick into the deep blue waters. The swells got steeper where the bottom rose towards the reef. As their racing slopes snatched up our stern and tossed it high, the oarsmen fought to keep pace with the forward 'scend of them, and the boat drove on, impossibly tilted, into valleys that forever fed away from under the plunging bows. But the bronze giant at the steer-oar stood easily poised on the tiny locker-deck behind us. His bare feet braced against the gunwales, he swung in lovely rhythm to the heave and thrust of the seas upon his oar, and sang aloud for the joy of his mastery as he brought the boat swooping like a gull towards the boat harbour. His voice cut across the crashing diapason of the surf with the gay challenge of a clarion. When we came to the very edge of the reef - so near it seemed nothing could stop our onrush into the maelstrom - he called of a sudden, "Easy !" The crew lay on their oars and waited. The passage into the boat harbour, a narrow channel blasted through the reef was a few lengths ahead, its entrance wide open to the giant seas. The lesser surfs were breaking short of the entrance, and the back-suck from the brimming basin - we could hear it snarling - fought their furious invasion to make a hell's cauldron of the passage. No boat could live in that raging battle of waters. The only safe way in was to ride on the crest of a wave so big that it would sweep the boat well down the passage before being undercut by the back-suck. We lay rearing and plunging while the steersman picked his wave. It came, house-high: "Pull !" he yelled as its forefoot lifted the stern. 'We shot forward; the crest swung us towering; the crew spent their last ounce of strength to hold it; we held it – we were riding Leviathan - we were flying - we were halfway down the passage. The crest began to topple and foam overside. The wave hollowed itself for breaking, and the boat's nose was pushed out into the void over its forefoot. There was a sizzling downward rush through ruin as it collapsed; the sea came boiling in over the gunwales ; the life went out of the boat; we were labouring, half waterlogged. But we were safe in the still water of the boat harbour. Methven had sat bolt upright through all this, with a look of petrified correctitude upon his countenance. It somehow emanated from his total silence that the people of his clan regarded the demeanour of a royal mummy as the only proper one to adopt in the presence of the sea's contemptible nonsenses. Nevertheless, we supposed he actually had noticed something a bit out of the ordinary that day, because he did turn to the happily smiling steersman and murmur, "Nice work, Sergeant Kaipati, very nice indeed !" before we tottered up the steps of the boat jetty. From the boat jetty we climbed again, up the steep incline of a narrow-gauge cable-way which handled all the Company's imports in those times. The first terrace in the island's westward slopes was at the top. There stood the Company's trade-store and office. Strung out farther to the left, above the curve of Home Bay, were the electric power house, the machine shop, the crushing mills, the drying plant, the cold storage works, and the locations of the thousand or so Gilbert Islanders, Ellice Islanders and Japanese who worked under indenture as mechanics or boatmen, carpenters or miners for the Company. The bungalows of the European staff -forty or fifty of them maybe - straggled up the hillside above, pleasantly scattered among trees. But along the fragrant quarter-mile of factory buildings and workshops, hardly a green thing was to be seen. We passed through the brazen heat and clamour of it ridiculously perched upon minute flat-cars furnished with benches far too high for safety. These were pushed by poles in the manner of punts - but at breakneck speed - along a narrow-gauge railway line. The benches were built to suit the length of Methven's legs, but not ours. He was propelled ahead of us alone, sitting purchased by his heels, whatsoever the angle or velocity of his car, as firm and majestic as a monument of Caledonia. We rocketed after him together, legs flying, and clutching at each other despairingly for lack of any other hold. Fat, apricot-coloured children near the line laughed with delight as we went whizzing by. I mention the journey because it was the occasion of my first considered resolve upon a matter of dignity in the service of His Majesty. I decided that, if it was given me to survive, I would have the height of at least one bench lowered, so as to accommodate it to the length of my own particular legs, not Methven's. But the pace slowed as we took the slight gradient beyond the locations; suddenly, too, we were out of the torrid glare and running in the latticed shade of palms. The din of machinery was magically snuffed out as we rounded a bend; the dwellings of a Baanaban village over-arched by palms came in sight on the seaward slopes below us. We caught glimpses, through twined shadow and sunlight, of crimson and cream hibiscus, of thatches raised on corner-posts, of neatly matted floors beneath them, of bronze bodies in brightly coloured loin-cloths. We heard the chatter of laughing women and the shouts of children across a murmur of surf that rose muted through the trees. Scents of gardenia and frangipani floated up to us mixed with savours of cooking. The grim civilisation of Home Bay lay forgotten, as though a thousand miles away. The village was gone again in half a minute, but its spell stayed with us. We felt we had passed, in that flash of time, through a miraculous gateway opened for us into the real, the homely heart of the Pacific. We reached the government siding and got down from our cars. A hundred yards up-hill from there, we came upon a squalid-looking wooden bungalow, without side-verandahs, perched among rocks. The rear edge of its floor squatted up against the hillside; the front edge was propped, visibly sagging, on concrete stilts. Part of the space between the stilts had been boxed in, and the hutch so formed, said Methven, was the Post Office. On the top side of the floor were all the other offices of the Headquarters Administration of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Protectorate, a total of three rooms. A typewriter had been installed in one of them. Nobody yet knew how to use it. It awaited introduction to me, but the pleasure would have to be delayed until Monday, as this was Saturday afternoon. So this was the vast white office building with corridors, etcetera, of my vision in London. But no - Methven must be pulling my leg. How could all those departments that Mr. Johnson had reeled off -the Secretariat, the Magistracy, the Treasury, the Customs, the Public Works, the Police Administration, the Prisons organization, not to speak of the Resident Commissioner's personal group of Secretaries and so forth – I mean to say, I said how could so many senior officers with their senior assistants, their junior assistants and all their respective clerical staff possibly be crowded together into three little rooms ? It clearly pleased Methven to answer that one. This wasn't a rabbit-warren like the Colonial Office, he explained. People worked here. There was first the Old Man (in other words, the Resident Commissioner) who operated as his own Chief Secretary, Private Secretary, District Officer and Magistrate, except, of course, when his wife interfered. The Secretariat, as I had called it, consisted of a Clerk. Presumably, when I spoke of the Treasurer, I meant the Accountant, who comprised the entire financial personnel, besides being the Postmaster General, the Collector of Customs, the staff of Landing Waiters, the Immigration Officer, and what-not-else of the kind. That made three Europeans, then came himself: he, as Police Officer, was in charge of the Prisons too, and, as the prisons supplied a labour force, it followed that he also functioned as Superintendent of Public Works, Chief Sanitary Inspector, Conservator of the Water Supply, and manager of about a million other things that pertained to the upkeep and welfare of the government station. Fifth, there was myself who (as everybody hoped) would be fairly divided between all of them from the word go, and not merely collared as a private slave by the Old Man. I gathered from his tone that there was a good deal of local feeling about that. We learned, further, as we trudged past the Police Barracks and Prison, up the steep mile to the Residency, that the rest of the Protectorate's European staff consisted of a doctor employed on Ocean Island by the Company, but subsidized by the Government for public health duties; another doctor in charge of a government hospital in Tarawa, 25o miles to eastward; and four District Officers scattered singly, at distances ranging from three to five hundred miles away from us, up and down the chain of the Gilbert and Ellice groups. It came to me then that, however else we might be maintaining dominion over palm and pine in this particular corner of the Empire, we certainly were not doing it by weight of numbers. This, in some strange way, easily compensated for the loss of my dream-office teeming with busy bureaucrats. And, besides, there was the music of the lovely island-names that had rolled from Methven's tongue -Butaritari, Tarawa, Abemama, Funafuti - Abemama above all, where Stevenson had lived a while and written. I mentioned his piece on the Gilbert Islands to Methven; "Never seen it," he replied (Oh, sprightly shade of Mr. Johnson !). "Here's the cricket field and there's the Residency straight ahead." 'We had reached an open plateau overlooking the tremendous emptiness of the ocean to South and West. The northern edge of the cricket ground lay cool beneath a green bank fringed with coconut-palms. Behind the palms stood the Residency, a pleasant white bungalow, backed by a towering forest of calophyllum trees. A slim white-clad figure was waiting for us at the top of the broad front steps. "That's the Old Man," said Methven: "he won't ask you to tea. Come and have some with us when he's finished with you." His voice was warm of a sudden, but he left us to go forward alone. OLD MAN OF OCEAN ISLAND Edward Carlyon Eliot, the Resident Commissioner, was struggling at the time of our arrival to improve the conditions that governed the mining of phosphate on Ocean Island. His aims were to secure for the Baanaban villagers an increase of the tonnage-royalties paid into a trust fund for their phosphate and to set up guards against the premature encroachment of the diggings upon their villages. He won his fight eventually in the teeth of much official misunderstanding. Fifteen years later, as Resident Commissioner myself, I was called to add a little to the foundations he had laid, and others added more after me. But it was mainly due to his courage and foresight between 1913 and 1920 that the Baanabans of 1945 found themselves in a position to buy an exquisite new home for themselves in the Fiji group and to migrate there in their own good time. I was greatly fortunate to have him as my first chief, for he was a personification of the protective spirit which did inspire the best servants of autocracy with benevolence in the field, whatever may be said today about the system of their allegiance. He was healthy for me in another way, too, though the pleasure of it was at the time not so obvious. The prospect of having a cadet to lick into shape did not entrance him. There were reasons for this. His parents had not been rich and, as a youth, he had been obliged to forgo for the sake of a brilliant elder brother in the Diplomatic Service a number of things that it hurt him to miss, including his hope of a university education. I never heard him complain of it, but the handicaps he had suffered and the very success with which he had overcome them had affected his attitude towards beginners. He had started his own official career, while still in his teens, as a clerk of the fifth grade in the civil service of a Caribbean colony. From that "back-stairs entrance to the Colonial Administrative Service," as he bitterly chose to call it, he had fought his way up by the time he was forty-one to be Resident Commissioner of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. His achievement had shown him that a university degree was by no means an essential preliminary to getting on in his profession, which was all to the good; but it had also left him with a basic contempt for beginnings less difficult than his own. His generosity, so ready in other directions, was not predisposed in favour of young men like myself, who came out from Downing Street (so he said) with reach-me-down official futures all ready packed in our suitcases. Another neat thing he used to shoot off about my species was that we thought we had been despatched across the starlit foam with special warrants in our pockets to dispense celestial wisdom direct from the Colonial Office to the benighted inhabitants of the Empire. As a matter of fact, there was a good deal more in this than an ironic twist of phrase. We were not at that time sent out trained in advance for liaison-work in the field, as cadets are trained today. Nor were the senior administrative officers in the Colonies who had themselves started as cadets always careful to bludgeon us into habits of co-operation with other departments. On the contrary. The result was the spread of a poisonous kind of snobbery throughout the administrative branch, which encouraged its members, young and old, to regard themselves as unquestionably superior, clay for clay, to the members of other branches. The internal frictions engendered by this attitude militated heavily against the effectiveness of inter-departmental collaboration in the field, often to the incalculable cost of colonial populations. A good many years were to pass before a system of pre-service training designed to avoid these evils came into being. But pending that kind of improvement from the Downing Street end, my Resident Commissioner was certainly taking no chances with the likes of me. He did not, of course, cram everything down my throat at our first talk; nor, as far as I know, had he any prepared series of deflationary utterances laid up in pickle for my education over the weeks and months to come. He proceeded, rather, by the catastrophic method. His most instructive sallies - I mean the ones that sank in deepest - always leapt out of him impromptu under the goad of my many stupidities. Nevertheless, he did give me quite an insight into his feelings on the day of our arrival. While Mrs. Eliot talked to Olivia on the front verandah, he took me into his office and sat me before his desk. He was a neat, slim man of medium height with the very black hair and rather Phoenician features one sometimes sees in Cornwall. His slightly close-set dark eyes, overhung by thick, straight brows that almost met above the narrow nose, were as watchful and veiled as a poker player's. He had a habit of twitching his toothbrush moustache and sniffing twice, staccato, from time to time as he examined people or things. Going with his saturnine looks, it always struck me as strangely sinister. I remember he asked me first if I played cricket. When I said I liked it, he replied, "'Well, that's one good thing, anyhow !" in a way that left me wondering what next. I did not have to conjecture long. He went on, with irritation in his voice, "You know, Grimble, you ought not to have been sent here really. This isn't the sort of place for a cadet. I didn't ask the Colonial Office for one. I asked for an experienced man - someone who knew about men and affairs." There wasn't much I could say to that. I sat sweating while he gave me his ideas about the right man for the job. What he wanted was someone who had knocked around . . . not an official . . . preferably a fellow who had done a bit of trading and planting somewhere. A sahib, naturally . . . right kind of breeding, right kind of school . . . all that. But definitely not a cub from a university. Above all, not a heaven-born selection from the Colonial Office. I forget what I replied to this (if anything), but I recollect asking him if I could get lessons in Gilbertese from someone on the island, and the request seemed to brighten him for a little. He said the Government would pay the official interpreter to teach me. He turned gloomy again, though, in the course of wondering how the Colonial Office thought he was going to train me in other ways. He supposed he would have to take me to sessions of the Magistrate's Court and the Native Court, for one thing; and then I could learn a bit about correspondence from the clerk at head office, and book-keeping from the accountant, and police and prisons stuff from Methven, and so forth and so on. They could doubtless teach me a few odds and ends not yet revealed to either Cambridge or the Colonial Office; and outside the Government staff there were, of course, plenty of other people on the island aching to teach me what was truly what. I remember that his last words gave me another of those sudden visions I used to get. It was not as sanguine as the one I had had with Mr. Johnson. I saw myself standing (for some peculiar reason) on the sun-smitten railway line above the crushing mills, hemmed in by a circle of Company's men with hairy forearms and noble looks enhanced by the walrus moustaches of my uncles. They held themselves erect in silence, arms folded, looking at me with contempt in their eyes for my gross ignorance of everything a real man should know. As a matter of fact, I could not have been more mistaken about the Company's staff. Olivia and I were to find out almost at once that our ignorance could not have fallen among friendlier neighbours; only the vision was depressing in its moment. But for all that, there was a lot of comfort, too, in what Mr. Eliot had said. He obviously had no ambition to collar me as his private slave; I wasn't to suffer the strain of continuous proximity to the deity, and there wasn't going to be any fighting over my body. What with the relief of this thought, plus the fulfilment of Mr. Johnson's promise that I would start off as a washer of bottles for bottle-washers, plus the happy spell our first sight of a Baanaban village had laid upon both of us, I left the Residency reflectively, perhaps, and somehow not game to tell Olivia quite all the Old Man had said, or the way he had said it, but by and large a reasonably happy young man. *