I :

1. There is a brown dachshund in my line of vision wearing a little beige mac. It is being led by its owners down the street towards the park.
2. This suggests that my project, to translate a Hidden Treasure (a hitherto unrevealed text), augurs well. A dachshund is the ideal form of sniffer-dog to help a Revealer, its senses being so developed and so grounded that its luminous mind can travel as far as the lamp-post in Narnia.
3. As a response to the original text this is only partly translation. I have embellished my limited grasp of its meaning with what may, like the Treasure itself, serve to baffle and excite.
4. The Treasure is addressed to the profoundly ignorant yet spiritually talented. A stage in their development is to contact their emotions. Song and dance will ensue amongst the stolid.
5. Thus much awoken, the Seeker will have just enough light to begin to see through the Eye of Truth, though their vision will still at regular intervals be clouded, like a lighthouse keeper’s.
6. Apostunity: a chance for the Treasure to let a disciple know they are forgiven, and even remembered kindly.

HIDDEN TREASURE II

1. Beware placing accommodation to comfort above accommodation to daily effort. There is no camp-ground, spiritually speaking: The biblical flood at the point where the dove returns empty to the ark was a collective peak of spiritual receptivity. Once the olive branch was tendered, a slow decline into the oblivion of sofas and pizzas was inevitable.
2. A Wayfarer may get stouter, but suffer from a reverse dysmorphia, blind to what a mirror reflects. Bah, humbug! affixed to that mirror may help them to meditate on their lack of empathy with their mirror’s motives.
3. We are told that the blocked spiritual aspirant can sometimes carry a former-life or karmic trauma that has led to a partial aphasia. The Revealer compares the Treasure’s early life-experience to that of a superstar isolated on the point of a pinnacle of planetary fame: crazy as paving; lonely as Satan.
4. Furthermore, having begun the assault on the Python of Habit, the Supplicant is exhorted to shun the Cobra of Fantasy. The plasticity of mind and tissue-thaw of deep-freeze energies will be something to watch, apparently.
5. In this world, things are as they are. Do not expect a knight on a gleaming palfrey to charge forth righting all its discomforts and wrongs. Learn what the world is. Then learn what it could be, and rely on that to guide you. Though you call yourself fool in your heart, that zero conceived in nothingness reaches out to infinity.
6. The conditioning power of the pleasure principle. Remember the woman in the bed in the asylum who shouted ‘strawberries!’ nine times every ten minutes? What does the word-jam of her mind say about yours?

HIDDEN TREASURE III

1. It is so easy to equate spirituality with a pleasurable, but ticklish, virtuous cerebration. The Treasure alerts the watchful to the dangers of workaholism: the addictive flavour and texture of adrenaline, not unlike a cross between mackerel-paste and millet. 
2. You think you know what someone means? They have every right to reply *!*!*? 
3. The energy streams that traditionally flow through our  bodies’ eleven meridians, on ancient scrolls combine to appear as a bird-headed god               confined within a soap-box. The takeaway here is that Beautiful  Boundaries make Nicer Neighbours, I think.
4. What is the aerodynamic solution to the Zen koan mens sana in corpore sano?
5. It was thought that nuns from Wynthorne Abbey, under Sister Justina, succumbed to a fever during which they laboured under a mass conviction: namely, that their souls had departed their bodies but would return on the feast of St Justus of Trieste. Sister Justina is remembered for her prayer Thou my shadow and my light, as referenced in the song Oddly, this happens from the album It’s raining fish by the Pelican Crossings. The Treasure casts doubt on the legend’s authenticity.
6. What gets in your eyes, spiritually speaking? The parable of the Mote and the Beam is one example. I of course reply that, like Manuel, I know nuuffing about the horse.²
7. When all gross physical manifestations of anxiety have been placated, what remains is context for a gradual extinction of an overstroked habitual memory of oneself that has been held to one’s cheek or nose all one’s life, like Linus’ blanket³.

HIDDEN TREASURE IV

1. The unpredictability principle is built on a schema that reminds the Revealer of Donovan’s mountain. ⁴ The practitioner is at first unpredictable (being unintegrated), moving to predictable (integrated). Finally, the practitioner is spontaneous (unpredictable again), being fearless. All bets are off as to the outcome of begging them for a rosette for a show rabbit – though politeness, foundation of ethics, should ensure respect for a terse reply.
2. Walt Whitman was not named by his mother after Walter Raleigh as is sometimes supposed, but after his father, Walter.
3. Great Peace can sometimes arise on close attendance to the first of three marks that characterise existence for Buddhists, to wit, that it is a) Snatched b) Splotched and c) Swatched.⁵
4. Could be a lament that the music of the potato-field-on-the-shoulder Misery Memoir has a moribund quality compared to the symphonic verve of the Joyful Mysteries.⁶
5. Bitter or scornful laughter may arise in the adept in response to the attempted manipulations of others. How does this differ from the Awareness that holds both parties to the communication closely and attentively in its hairy palms?

HIDDEN TREASURE V

1. To practise discretion is to have access to every shade in the full range of Windsor and Newton’s Overmind⁷
2. The laughing sky will see the two of us / washed into rinds by rotting winter rains.⁸
3. It is pleasing how well the phrase leek and potato sounds in the vernacular, particularly if recited into an empty ceramic vessel. Not a suggestion, more a pensée.
4. Everything you ignore, deny or postpone stands behind and over you, wings archly hunched – as ready as your guardian angel’s for any sign from you of a following wind. You could create one by standing up.
5. The habit of devaluing what one fails to achieve can become a nasty little arrogance. Another habit is that of understanding that what one aimed for and failed at (e.g. the great horticultural adornment) could be lovingly accepted as pure fact (that daisy chain is a load of chaff). The second habit should be cultivated, and distinguished from its lookalike cousin.
6. Within the famous title ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ is encoded the linear development of the intrapersonal psyche.⁹
7. Why is a Chamber-Pot like a Constellation? It comes out at night. Time after time.
8. The letter R in English sounds as an awestruck and delighted ‘Ah!’ followed by a microscopic incipient snarl. These characteristics can be meditated upon as the unconscious conflictual foundation of depression, and used to overcome the malady.
9. The Treasure’s single prophecy predicts no human being will ever sufficiently understand or accurately expound the meaning of its texts.

HIDDEN TREASURE VI

1. Once again ahead of its time, the Treasure seems to apprehend the inadvisability of mixing sodium with hypertension.
2. Welcome to my (Transylvanian Butch) world!
3. Some reptiles are called ‘sit-and-wait’ predators. Part of their education is therefore to attend to a) how to sit and b) how long to wait. After postural and temporal inhibition, the dance they perform upon eating is most memorable. Spiritual progress can proceed along similar lines.
4. Is Peace a Fire? If that be the case, then Truth is a Kiln. Daisy-chains are far too flimsy and, well, unbeautiful, to survive its ‘bone-dry alcoves’.¹⁰
5. A giant magnet can be an emblem for the Death that inexorably draws all creation into its fond embrace. I knew someone whose pocket got stuck to a bus driver’s cabin after her brother lent her a magnet to test illegal anti-radar aircraft paint.
6. What brings you into the present? Really present, really into? A direct line to the Divine may arise when the image of a red wheelbarrow, a green wellington, a yellow sou’wester etc. etc. hit the retina like Christmas lights hit October.
7. The Viola d’Amore’s outstanding idiosyncrasy is its set of ‘sympathetic’ strings. Extant examples show too a carved scroll, with Cupid blindfolded by what looks like a New College muffler. Blind man’s buff, rather than random archery practice?
8. I will not, not ever, NEVER, rescue you. How much I might or might not want to has nothing to do with it. I have things to do, people to see, places to go. I feel your pain.
9. Beauty and haecceity are in the eye. So, BEHOLD, then! No time to queue!

HIDDEN TREASURE VII

1. If your rest is not your rest now, then when? When it is conjoined with peace?
2. The pain of prophetic vision lies not so much in pathos as powerlessness.
3. Goldilocks Makes a Daisy Chain, The Musical flopped before the theatre went dark, flopped before the first night. It flopped even before it was conceived in the minds of its co-writers. It actually flopped the afternoon Goldilocks decided on a daisy chain.
4. How do you know if ‘The Promises’ will come true? Kinder if the answer were a closely-guarded secret, and not, as all awesome answers actually are, an open one…
5. to surrender to the shock of the end. To the shock of all endings: flour, milk, eggs; the love of your life; the bitter threaded stalks we call daisy chains.
6. Net personal worth £500, manageable health, employment. Result: happiness. Net personal worth £500, poor health, time off sick. Result: misery. Plus, dependence on the Welfare State. Net worth of the Welfare State? A red wheelbarrow.¹¹
7. The books you can’t bear, the shirts you don’t wear, the friend who won’t call, the ice-cream scoop too small, the lover who never makes love, Give Them Up!
8. I seriously have no idea where this case came from, Guv’nor.
9. Your Grace, I mean.
10. And what of my beard? Huh?

That lost world you are so upset about, Ham, to me is one magnificent memory among many,

said Noah.

Notes

1. The ‘million-petalled flower / Of being here’: from Philip Larkin’s The Old Fools
2. Manuel from Fawlty Towers, played by Andrew Sachs. The episode was called Communication Problems.
3. After Linusvan Pelt, a small boy who carries a blanket for comfort in the comic strip Peanuts by Charles M Schulz.
4. Donovan’s Mountain : the song ‘First There Is a Mountain’ by singer-songwriter Donovan (1967)
5. The three marks that characterise conditioned existence for a Buddhist are 1. Impermanence 2. Unsatisfactoriness and 3. Insubstantiality (no fixed self-identity).
6. The Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary are a set of five meditations that celebrate key events in the lives of Jesus and his mother Mary.
7. Overmind : an interstellar hive mind that dominates the Milky Way Galaxy in the novel Childhood’s Endby Arthur C Clark. Other sci fi works have also used the term.
8. From Wallace Stevens’ Le Monocle de mon Oncle
9. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy : 1974 novel by John le Carré
10. Its ‘bone dry alcoves’ : from Seamus Heaney’s To a Dutch Potter in Ireland (The Spirit Level, 1996)