On golden moments

My mother used to talk of "golden moments". They tended to be times when we were together as a family. Often involved food, now I come to think of it. I certainly have moments like that - with the family and with friends. Also moments with one other person, mother friend, lover. And moments with animals or with "place". I've felt it walking through London and Moscow and Rio as well as when looking at sunsets or harvest moons.

What I think now is that golden moments are flags, not warning flags, but celebratory ones - they are moments of integration, of the emergent third. The moment is greater than the sum of its parts (pizza, wine, a patio table, six people). What that is is a recognition of something more than connection, in the sense that the term is bandied about, but holism. A seeing through the phenomena toward the noumena. An experience of "duration" to use Henri Bergson's term. It's when mind lets go of the limiting constructs of ego, subject/object divides, individualism and instead flows with the moment-by-moment becoming of life as it really is.

I think the idea of a "golden moment" is readily graspable in a conventional sense. But if you ruminate on it, the feeling state of those moments is outside the ordinary. The feeling state is the whole point. The feeling state is the intuition of a deeper reality in which we are at-home-together (we - birds and beasts and trees and rocks and rivers and pizzas and patio tables) and entangled into a broader becoming.

To put it in these terms is to make a claim for a reality that is other than the accepted. It's a reality I have always had one foot in. The foot that makes me seem quirky, odd, out-there. The other foot is in the accepted (acceptable) reality of bills and cars and work and money and being polite and wet weather gear.

This is to say that I am in the borderland. I inhabit both. Most of the time, that does not seem to be a good thing. Instead of embracing the different lenses, I set theses two perspectives on reality against each other. It is a battleground. And I want it to be a demilitarised zone.

So I decided that this would be the subject for my session with Nina (Jungian Coach). There was a kind of synchronicity as the night before the session, I had a dream which I remembered in the morning - which sprang into my mind as I looked ahead to the meeting with Nina. I seldom recall my dreams these days. In the dream, I was meant to go to a party and I didn't want to go. I went in and wasn't happy so I decided that I didn't have to be there and could leave. I stormed out and then felt like I had made a scene and after all, was the party so bad? And I didn't feel happy outside the party either. Then I was pouring gold from a crucible, liquid gold, into something and I was slapdash and spilling it. The person said this was wasteful but i was confident I could collect it. I scooped some from the carpet with my hands, it soft of allowed itself to be collected. But some remained in the hairs of the carpet. I looked closely and saw that the gold had formed threads around the tufts in the carpet and I could untangle it and collect it up, like yarn. This I did. Then, I had to put the threads back into the crucible to refill it.

In the session, we explored the dream, using a "conversation" with gold.

I was arguing that I thought that entanglement and connection was important and so why was I untangling the strands? The message was that as a limited being, a human, the gold of the world, which is entangled with being, is experienced in these pure moments - and you have to work to sense fully these golden moments. Once you have them, in mind and feeling, instead of holding them to yourself, you release them back into the collective.

We understand the world in fragments, but we have to allow the fragments to return to replenish the whole. Nothing belongs to us.

My task, to take the message from the dream, is to truly live these experiences, drawing them into strands, and then share them back to replenish the source.

Whatever that means.

Of course, the regular spur for golden moments is this guy.