The Wardrobe

I have passed through the Doors of The Wardrobe and I do not intend to return.

I have joined William Blake and the countless others throughout history who entered another reality, and determined to live there.

I was first captivated by Narnia aged 7 and my love of Aslan’s land has never wavered.

If ever there was a vision of perfection, then CS Lewis captured it. He wrote the bible, painted the definitive allegory of Elysium.

I should have stayed in Narnia from childhood, but like Eustace perhaps, a few lessons had to be learned first.

It is a pity that those lessons, so clearly laid out for me aged 7, took 60 years to absorb, but that is so often the way in life. I have ended up right back where I started, where so many journeys end up.

That is the way of the universe. Everything cyclical, our lives included.

My way has become increasingly clear to me. My weltanschauung almost complete. I had not realised it would be the task of a lifetime, but so it transpired. From dust to dust, ashes to ashes but in between the beginning and the end we have a puzzle to solve. A job to do. A realisation to craft and hone until we are satisfied with the result.

Most of us are like the dwarfs sitting in the donkey’s stable at the end of time. They refuse to believe, they sit in darkness and filth and cannot see the reality which surrounds them. They are like so many of us who cannot see that our needs are few and who continue the brutal competition for more and “better”.

I have no need to preach, no desire to pretend goodness or badness. I am and I see what I am. I am alive and I see what life is.

Revelation, I suppose, differs according to the receiver. I have received revelation, but from within. Some of course would claim they had found god, or he them. As did Lewis.

I make no such claim.

I have found something related but suspect that it is innate in all of us. In a sense we are god, or could become him or it. If we could but see our way out of the stink of the stable, if we could but see that the Last Battle is one we must conduct against ourselves.

I have almost lost track of why or when my desire to enter the Wardrobe began, but I suspect it was way back then, when I first learned of it. Something was deeply right with Digory Kirke. He had stood at the beginning of the world and heard it sung into existence.

Like Susan Pevensie, I grew up and that is when the trouble began. I became an adult and put away childish things. I should have kept the toys out of the cupboard and never put them away.

So in a sense I have reverted to childhood, not through the frailty of advanced age, but by having discovered once again the truth to be found on the other side of that wardrobe door. Tucked away as it is in a beautiful country house in the gentle English countryside.

To enter those doors is to rediscover lost innocence. To cast aside what so many seem to think they want and to revert to a life of simplicity and quiet thought.

To renounce conflict and desire and to realise just how little is needed.

Some mornings (and mornings seem to be best) I have quite literally entered another dimension. Not physically, but in mind. And after enough of such mornings, I have found my psyche ever more prone to remain on the other side of the Wardrobe Door.

In a very literal sense my very reality has become different.

I make no extravagant claims. I do not have magic powers nor the ability to affect external physical reality. And yet, after a lifetime of severe internal suffering, I have discovered that in a sense I am a creator.

We are what we think, we will our own fate. And so I think of Narnia, I walk through that door.

One wet afternoon, I disappear up to a lost bedroom at the back of an old and magical house, to escape the housekeeper who is conducting a guided tour of this fine and ancient dwelling.

I hear voices approaching, even at this remote end of the house, and so I slip into the wardrobe. My face brushes against unfashionable mink as I make my way to the back to hide.

I feel an icy coldness and put on one of the coats. Soon, to my surprise, I feel crisp white snow underfoot and see an old fashioned Edwardian lamppost shining in the middle of a remote snow clad forest.

I have arrived at a place I should never have left.

When I awake from my reverie, I find I am still in that quiet forest. In days gone by I might have shaken off the mood, the images. Re-entered the adult world of Susan Pevensie. Strayed from my natural inclinations and wandered back into a different and altogether less pleasant place, where all that matters is survival and brute competition.

No longer.

And yet, as in the fable, so in life. There is always “further up, and further in”. Reality is a series of concentric circles, a Russian Doll, an onion.

Each inner circle is of greater circumference than it’s predecessor. Each doll bigger than that which encased it, each layer of the onion bigger than the last.

The journey can never end – the progression goes ever on.

Each day brings new revelations, new joys. And sadness, while still there, takes a back seat.

And all of this comes for free – you do not have to pay for it or sit under the feet of another. A path will emerge for those who seek it in earnest. The buying and selling of spiritual treasure has always been a sign of trumpery, and so it remains.

A long an arduous path but in the end we all get there.