The Walled Garden

Near to where I live there’s a place called ‘The Walled Garden’. The garden has often been used in allegory to describe a mythic paradise on earth. In our western myth of creation, man and woman were cast out of the Garden of Eden to create a new world order in revolt to the divine nature of our eternal origins. The wall is the enclave of ignorance which now surrounds the simplicity of the earth. This is the structure of the world, which is everything that can be named, described and known in existence.

The garden represents all that we love about the sensory earth. It’s the freshness of the morning breeze, the sweetness of birdsong, the fragrance of the rose and the beauty of people when they are being the spontaneity of life in the flesh. But how often is the wall erected to defend some position or attitude as a way of upholding the right to be unhappy and discontented? The garden is a place of harmony where everything serves the needs of something else. This is our true nature as beings of the earth and which is why it’s so pleasing to find something of value to serve in existence. But when we take an attitude, which is the basis of emotion, the barriers go up and light turns to a shadow of gloom.

Woman has erected a wall around her garden which now surrounds her deepest centre of love. She may be articulate, confident and liberated in the eyes of the world, but the walled perimeter is there as her false protector in love. The wall consists of the past pain and traumas of previous relationships and the absorption of the negativity of a loveless world. To exist in the world, the female consciousness is mostly downgraded to a coarser vibration so that woman can make sense and participate in this alien environment.

A woman often senses love to be her very nature, which it is. But such is her desire to unite fully with the inner beauty of her formless love that she often extends out into the screen of existence at the slightest suggestion that love has manifested in form. This rarely goes as planned, with the result of more construction work to strengthen the rigidity of the wall. Or alternatively, she resides within the formal aspect of her garden and feigns disinterest should love or the suggestion of any intimacy with another come her way.

In a man, the walled garden is made of a denser material, which fixes him more rigidly to the substance of the objective world. The male wall consists of his acquired knowledge, such as business, politics, technology, hobbies, together with his opinions about all manner of things. The walled garden of man is his mental structure of his place in the echelons of existence. It has no reality outside of his identification with his knowing feeling self. Unbeknown to him, the self can only know what it has experienced in time; the self has no knowledge of the timeless realm. Since time is an abstract concept and not real time at all, there’s no truth in anything that’s accomplished or achieved in the world. The universe and everything in it is a projection of reality in sense. What man assumes to be reality is an amorphous invention of the mind that disappears at the demise of the physical body.

It’s impossible to dismantle the walls of the garden by force, except through a spiritual initiative which is to literally pass through the seemingly impregnable matter. The bricks are globules of past which have solidified as hardened formations of emotion now attached to the flesh. Each time an individual overcomes the reactionary emotional self through holding to the good which has no opposite, the structure of the wall is loosened to some degree. The walled garden is our self-made spiritual centre. Energetically preserved within the masonry are the challenges that must be faced in future time as events and circumstances in the living life. As the outer life is tidied up and the speed of intelligence reaches the velocity of consciousness, the wall becomes virtually transparent and no longer an impediment to paradise on earth.