Home by the sea

• 10 June, 2023
• culture
• mindfulness

However before we go any further I'd also like to point out that I'm pairing this blog post with another blog post titled 'Where there is Ego, there is fear'. This means that we're not trying to interpret what Tony Banks was thinking when he wrote the song, but as I did with Jeff Lynne's lyrics previously, I'm going to use the lyrics of this song to do some time-binding and give you a context for some mystical insight and awareness.

What we're going to be looking at today is the common habit of trying to figure out the future by examining the past, which many people do rather than the mindful thing of just chilling and going with the flow with an open mind. Are you ready? Got yourself some tea or a coffee? Are you comfortable? Okay let's begin...

From the lyrics in the opening verse you get the impression that a burglary or robbery is taking place in someone's home. But this is a mystical song about ghosts and typical for Genesis and their songs, you have to listen to it a few times to even begin to penetrate the depths of what the song is about. This song is just as deeply mystical as the other two songs we've looked at, 'Stairway to Heaven' and ELO's 'Can't Get It Outta My Head', but the difference is the message is not as explicit as it was in 'Stairway to Heaven'.

Even in this opening verse there's a point being made and it's being made implicitly. This means that it's not obvious. I'm not going to reveal it to you at this stage because that will spoil the quality of the songwriting here.

But the one thing I'd like to point out is that there is no attempt to teach anyone anything in this song. You could say the same about Jeff Lynne's 'Can't Get It Outta My Head'. John Lennon's 'Imagine' also came out in 1971, and was a powerful political message wrapped up in a beautiful piano-based melody. But where it failed is that it attempted to teach, and just like religion when you try to teach mysticism to people you often end up with followers or critics. Often when it comes to mystical subjects less is more. Consider that 'Small Axe' by Lee Scratch Perry and Bob Marley contains a very similar message to John Lennon's 'Imagine' and is arguably just as popular. But 'Small Axe' is about corporate power and organized crime. It was never intended to be an anthem for peace and love.

But enough of me waffling here. Let's move on to the next verse and refrain.

There you have it. You're there, listening to a Genesis song, and then out of nowhere, suddenly they drop you in it. It takes some genius to write a song which starts out as a burglary but which ends up with the burglar being caught by the previous 'ghostly' inhabitants of the house. But see Genesis could be pure fantasy, I offer 'A trick of the tail' as an example. They could be stark and abstract for example 'Dodo'. They could be deeply mystical, for example 'Ripples' which is about impermanence. Then you have the songs with profound social commentary, such as 'Man on the corner', about homelessness, mental illness, and social exclusion.

There's quite a lot to unpack here, so I'm going to focus on what I believe is a thesis or point of the song.

In my partnering post 'Where there is Ego, there is fear' I make the point that where there is Ego there is fear, and anxiety, and insecurity. Your Ego was developed by you - reinforced by a lot of social and mental conditioning - and is a position of compromise between your innermost desires and thoughts and feelings on the one hand, and on the other how well you can mitigate the more powerful societal forces around you, or how well you fit in and conform to role expectations, images, and so on imposed on you by others.

This song is generally about a hard truth in life. You're never ever going to completely fit in with everyone - it's not possible. But on the other side you're also never going to be completely free. This means that just as trauma is a necessary part of life, then so too is fear and anxiety, simply because the foundation on which you have based your Ego is insecure. Your Ego is a concept, it's not real, it's an image, or a snapshot of who you are. This gives you two more problems which you have to deal with.

This is where I need to own up to something which I haven't made as clear as I might have in this blog. Karma is unique and individual and just like truth is relative to both perception and perspective, but see so too is trauma. You can take say a dozen people who experienced an abusive childhood and I guarantee you each of those dozen people will have a unique story and experience to tell you. What is abuse is generally socially and culturally defined. Back in the 1970's beating your child with a belt or even a cane or paddle was considered good parenting. Today beating your kid is considered child abuse. But what is trauma or traumatizing as an experience, and what is karma and just process, also isn't clear. Please keep this in mind when the subject is domestic abuse and you think the abused partner should not have put themselves in that situation. Sure there are red flags, but see when you're in that specific situation or in that specific relationship making that abuse call is not as simple or straightforward as you might think it is.

Referring back to the song 'Home by the sea' what you have here is an excellent metaphor. This is truly first class songwriting.

This is something I try to emphasize a lot in my mystical work. You are unique and individual as a human being only in a physical sense, i.e. across the three physical dimensions of life. You're individual in terms of your physical body. You're individual in terms of thoughts, emotions and feelings, outside of social and mental conditioning and how you respond to that. You're also individual in terms of the energy you project outwards. The process of individuation is important only in terms of working through your karma and recovering from trauma. This is something completely different from individualism, which is the lie that you are free to do as you wish but are responsible for your choices and decisions. You are not free, you are never completely free because you are born, you are manifesting as a physical body. You are totally and completely committed to your environment both in natural terms (this planet) and also the society and culture you were born into.

Do you understand now the predicament you find yourself in? 'Home by the sea' is all about this predicament.

So having set the scene for the metaphor, we come to a bridge, and some lyrics which are neither verse nor refrain. This is where we need to dig deeper to get what this song is about and what the band seem to be trying to communicate. Or at least what you can get from this song.

Nothing here is explicit. It's all implicit, so you have to listen to the words and make your own inferences. Here you might wonder, as I did, whether the house has always been empty and the ghosts were those who previously had burgled the house. This is one possibility. Another possibility is that the ghosts were the former residents who have now trapped the thief, so there is now no escape. There are other possibilities. But the outcome is the same. The thief is no longer free and there is no escape.

This is where we need to get into some serious soul talk. Quite a lot of people in mysticism, mindfulness, and spiritual circles have the opinion that mindfulness can only come at the expense of Ego. This is nonsense. Ignore such people. They're playing the same shell games as you are, and as I am (because let's not forget I'm also playing the same shell games as you, albeit by my own rules). I know that I have said and written in the past that it's sometimes necessary to drop the Ego in life. But here I feel I need to give you a metaphor - your Ego is like a coat. Now there are times in your life when you need to wear a coat, but you don't wear a coat all the time, do you? It's the exact same deal with your Ego.

In order to survive in society and our culture, you need an Ego. Without an Ego in society you will very quickly become toast. But see you also need your humanity - which is what this Genesis song is driving at - you need to connect to your environment, to other people, and form alliances, bonds and friendships. In order to share your humanity and make those connections, there are times when you need to drop your Ego and learn to trust other people on a much deeper level.

Sadhana

What this song is about is 'sadhana', which is a Sanskrit word which means 'discipline'. I'm not referring to punishment, or control, but the skill, ability and awareness to be able to live your life as you. Through the eastern tradition this is the point of yoga, which means connection, or unity. In Buddhism it's 'dharma', meaning way or path, in Taoism it is the Dao. In the West through religion it is faith, but most people confuse faith and dogma so it ends up as ideology and work, which is how sadhana manifests into reality for many people. Take someone's work away from them, or take away their belief system, and most people will lose their sadhana and ability to live.

But see trying to develop sadhana or mindfulness through yoga, meditation or a system such as Buddhism or Taoism is not as simple or straightforward as some will have you believe. There's five basic levels to yoga, and on top of that many other levels. Buddhism is similar. You start out with the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, only to learn that there are Three Marks of Existence, Five Basic Defilements and many other lists. You need a teacher or a guru simply because it's virtually impossible to practise yoga or Buddhism through self-study and your journey can only be as good as your teacher. The whole point of a good teacher of Buddhism or yoga is to get students to do stuff and run around in circles pointlessly over and over and over again.

This is how it works. You have to try harder and harder to do the same things, and so you end up needing more and more effort just to stay in the same place. You reach a point when it starts becoming senseless because you went into Buddhism or yoga for the wrong reasons, and so your Buddhism or yoga became an Ego trip, a shell game, and in trying to control your mind and your thoughts you end up in conflict either with your environment or with your original Ego, because you created a new 'higher' Ego to deal with your original Ego. As much as you try to resolve your past karma, you end up creating new karma. So you end up realizing that no method, be it Buddhism, yoga, Taoism or Vedanta is going to get you the results you'd been hoping for.

The simple truth is there is no way of liberating yourself because you are trying to liberate yourself from your memory and your past, i.e. the fundamental basis of your physical existence. If you don't know who you really are, then how are you going to know what enlightenment actually is? Your knowledge of yourself is based on your Ego, which is a concept, and enlightenment is another concept. Yoga is a concept. Buddhism is a concept. All concepts are fake. None them are really real like this planet, this universe and your life. All you are doing is trying to develop a better Ego through these methods. You'#re trying to get one up in life over others and this planet and it's never going to work.

Now it's important to pay some attention to the third verse of 'Home by the sea' because there's quite a profound message being put out here.

Now I believe that there is a very profound message here and it's one which has been repeated in other Genesis songs. There's at least three songs with a similar message on their 'Abacab' album, which is one of my favourite Genesis albums. There's 'Man on the corner' and also 'Me and Sarah Jane', and then there's the title track Abacab. In fact all three of these songs from the 'Abacab' album expand on the message in 'Home by the sea' in some way.

You see in developing an Ego you're caught up in a trap of your own making. You see you could - if your life has been traumatic enough - blame your parents for having you. But they had nothing to do with your Ego. You created your Ego all by yourself. While you may not have chose to be born into the life that you're living now, you do have a certain autonomy and some degree of choice over how you respond to your environment and circumstances. Even a plant or a tree has autonomy and some ability to respond to its environment.

You see here's the thing.... you cannot liberate yourself from your Ego and karma, because you don't have the level of conscious awareness or mystical insight to succeed. Chances are neither does anyone else. This includes me. I've been been playing the mystical or spiritual game for 40 years and I still haven't managed to liberate myself, let alone anyone else. I'm still as dysfunctional and messed up in my late 50's as I was as a teenager and I'm not afraid to admit it.

All you can do is be aware of yourself as you are, accept yourself totally, accept other people totally - without any judgment - and pay attention to your environment. See everything for what it really is and not what you believe it is. If you can put together a story or narrative to share your life experience with other people, embracing both your humanity and all your emotional baggage, then you should no longer have any problems.

Now this is where we come to the end of the song, but to further emphasize the point I'm making I've added an image of a woman meditating. Pay attention to the line 'let us relive our lives in what we tell you'. Life is all about relationship. Karmic process is literally creativity and interaction. Think about your life experiences. They're not unique or individual on their own as experiences. We all fall in love. We all experience happiness, sadness, sorrow, anger, joy and fear. But see what makes our experiences of life so unique and so highly individual is the relationship between ourselves, our environment, and other people in this incarnation.

You see the way you live your life probably hasn't varied that much from incarnation to incarnation. When you're young you're probably too wrapped up in your Ego and jumping through societal hoops to get the badges of Good Model Citizenry and Widespread Social Respectability through education, work, family and so on. But see once you hit your 50's your capacity to make change diminishes and whatever life you end up with when you turn 55 is likely the kind of life you're going to be living until you die. This is when you're going to need a narrative or life story through which you can live, and this is the point, I believe, of the 'Home by the sea' song.

If you could summarize the whole 'Home by the sea' song into a single image my choice would be The Hanged Man from the Tarot. Some people might see this as fate or destiny, but The Hanged Man is literally karma, because karma is both action and memory, and by your 40's and 50's you have built up sufficient karma for it to determine the rest of your life.

Now cast your mind back (if you're a regular reader of my blog) back to 'Satanic Led Zeppelin?' when we were going through the song 'Stairway to Heaven'. Can you make out a similar message? Did you watch the video on Youtube of the man trying to convince you that Led Zeppelin were all satanists and Devil worshippers promoting evil through their songs? Can you see now how out of step that guy was?

The environment creates, the individual organism grows

You see there's a mystical principle here. Subjecting self to other doesn't work, because it goes against this mystical principle. You are already spirit, and through spirit you re also the universe but manifesting as energy through an individual human body. You are no different from the spirits and ghosts in the 'Home by the sea'. Whether you believe this or not is your decision, but this is the reality of who you are. 'As we relive our lives in what we tell you' is a fairly straightforward reference to the way of the ancestors or way of the elders.

What is this way of the elders or way of the ancestors? It's the principle of subjecting other to self. The basis of living existence is a conscious relationship with an environment. If you are conscious and are able to perceive an environment, then you are living. You impart wisdom to others not by teaching or explaining but by having a story to tell. My ability to teach is not, in my eyes, a great skill or a talent. It's a habit which I'm trying to break. Nobody likes to be taught anything, but I believe we all appreciate someone telling a story and sharing insight and wisdom.

But see there's a difference between living and thinking about life. If all you're doing is going over the past, over and over again, and you get too caught up in nostalgia or tradition, then you will become trapped by your karma and memory and are seeking escape from the trap you set yourself. But if you are living, and past memory is just a reference point, and you have a story through which you can connect to others and you're open to new experiences, then you're actually living and moving somewhere. See it's the acceptance, the story, the narrative and the connection to environment and other through which you are living.