Weltanschauung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Category: The Inner Path

  • The High Cost of Woo

    The High Cost of Woo

    I find myself wondering just how much the historical Jesus billed Lazarus for his resurrection.

    And what about all that water he turned into wine. Must have made a fortune. As for the Gaderene swine – wonder if he flogged them off for a hog roast.

    You see, I have been considering Woo recently. Not that I’m suggesting JC was a fake – and anyway, how would we know after two thousand years.

    But modern Woo – that really is something that has me scratching my head. There is one particular American Woo salesman who really takes the biscuit. He wears designer shades with diamante adornment and suspect clothes. He jets all around the world spreading the Word and sells save your soul books by the million. He peddles what one could politely call nonsense and gets handsomely rewarded for leading people in search of the end of the rainbow.

    The only one who ever finds the pot of gold is the sly salesmen himself. Quite what the suckers who buy his produce end up with is something else. Disillusionment and despair perhaps. At worst, some of them are tipped over into madness and death, when the spiritual riches the wondrous healer promises turn out to be apocryphal.

    It does not escape me that I tend to talk in riddles and poetry myself these days. And metaphor and allegory and symbols.

    But at least I am not charging you for it. Nor do I wear diamante specs. And I don’t try and look like Gandhi or an Ashram Guru. Or JC for that matter – I never liked Jesus boots anyway. And the locals would think I was a right odd one if I took to wearing flowing desert robes down Deal at the supermarket.

    I do not promise to unleash your infinite potential for a fiver. I do not offer you aura therapy or undertake to massage your chakras (even supposing I could find them).

    I have not found “peace beyond understanding” (as one asinine salesman claims) and so I am afraid I can’t sell it to you. Nor do I have the resources to have my picture taken in every exotic location from Ulam Bator to Timbuktu, in each of which I peddle my gospel in return for money.

    But Old Diamente Specs is just one of thousands of purveyors of faery dust and snake oil – admittedly one of the most successful. Financially I mean – I don’t suppose his flock has benefited much from any miracles .

    What I like about my local priest is that he doesn’t always have his hand out, or if he does I feel every comfort that he will be giving it away to the poor. Once the greedy local Bishop has taken his cut. Robin Hood really should do something about the Church hierarchy.

    There are good people out there and you can always tell who they are. There is a wonderful old clergyman round here who gave immense comfort to my fearful father. He beams goodness and joy. He fills my day with light, when I chat to him out of one of my rambles. He makes me feel good about the world.

    He is not shoving some mumbo jumbo down my throat, and even if he did he would never dream of charging me for it.

    Woo salesmen on the other hand are false friends. All they want is my money.

    At one stage I followed serious and worthy clinical research from some of the world’s finest institutions on the possibility of a cure offered by psychedelics.

    And I believe such cures will come to pass. Shepherded into medical use by hospitals and doctors.

    And if you wish to jump the gun, perhaps with intelligent application, you may affect your own cure.

    What you should not do is to head to your local Woo salesman who has set up a Mother Mushroom healing church. Or a Sister Ayuhuasca’s Shamanic temple.

    Social media and the Internet are awash with videos of the hilarious ceremonies offered by such people. They are mostly crafty westerners who have donned Shamanic robes. They dance around blowing sacred smoke into people’s eyes and fanning them with hocus pocus. Mother Mushroom will heal. Sister Ayuhuasca will speak. Wooooooo! Many of said money grasping fake Messiahs are interviewed speaking in faux-hushed tones, wearing priestly white.

    There is nothing wrong with ritual and ceremony in the right hands. I’m all for smells and bells and Gregorian chanting. It lifts the soul and can heal the mind.

    What I do not want is “for profit” spirituality. I don’t believe in healing the world for money. I do not like “entreprenooooooooors” like Diamante Specs. Fake priests.

    Spirituality and good works belong to genuine priests. Whose motives are, well, godly shall we say. Health, healing, the spirit. Salvation, the Way.

    Would you expect to find healing at Mc Donald’s? If not, then why would you buy it from a fake guru whose main interest in you is to empty your wallet?

    Jesus never charged for resurrection. If someone seeks to sell it to you, hopefully you will be wise enough to turn away.

  • Age or Change

    Age or Change

    My mind drifted this morning, far from the algorithm I was working on. Was I old I wondered or had I simply changed.

    The truth lies probably somewhere in between. I have both aged and changed, but I suspect the latter was the prime influence on my mood this morning. I was sitting in my ivory tower in London, but my heart lay elsewhere. In a garden perhaps.

    If the brain has plasticity then perhaps mine has melted altogether. I certainly find myself a very different person than I was even some short while ago.

    I enjoy algorithms, derive great pleasure from the little project I am working on together with three pleasant American physicists, but I find I wax ever more lyrical. I find increasingly that different voices call and I drift into quiet reverie ever more often.

    I was dragged grumpily from my laptop and driven to the suburban outpost of Barnes, some short distance along the river from Fulham, where I have lived off and on for over 30 years. More off than on, since I was always drawn to faraway places and for some years the Alps beckoned.

    The Covid Queen (as I call my wife) had called for a visit to her venerable and now ancient parents, and I found myself chatting to my much loved father in law. Leaving my wife to conduct a somewhat circular conversation with my also much loved mother in law. Circular, since sadly age has indeed withered her; my mother in law that is.

    But the old boy remains needle sharp and I have only to prod him in the right direction and away he goes; I drift in and out of focus and intervene here and there, where and when necessary, to keep the show on the road.

    It was raining and we sat under an awning in the garden, talking through the french doors of their drawing room. Covid Queen has decreed that we must remain outside for their safety, and today soft rain trickled down if not our necks, then somewhere perilously close.

    We talked of terns and how 85% of chicks apparently have micro plastic in their stomachs. I thought of Blake and those dark Satanic mills he hated. What would he have made of the ecological disaster we have become.

    “The time has come,” the Walrus said,
       “To talk of many things:
    Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
       Of cabbages—and kings—
    And why the sea is boiling hot—
       And whether pigs have wings.”

    And so we did, for that is what I have always done with my father in law. By the time we returned to our own fashionable suburb, I found a deep calm had come over me. I determined to leave the algorithm a while longer and write a bit. Muse. And seek nature in a lovely 40 acre garden right around the corner.

  • Seeking Meaning

    Seeking Meaning

    Deep in meditative trance a voice, my own perhaps, told me that I sought a god and had always done so.

    The surprise was that I was surprised. Perhaps it was a sort of “coming out”. If that voice spoke the truth, and I have little reason to doubt it, then small wonder that a commercial life was an anathema to my soul.

    I sat listening to the rain, pattering somewhere in my consciousness. There was a door or a barrier somewhere. Perhaps I was the wrong side of the tracks. Just the other side lay the infinite.

    Do I anthropomorphize? No but I seek communication, communion if you will. At one stage I was in an empty theater, a Shakespearean image if ever there was one.

    All the world’s a stage,
    And all the men and women merely players;

    Was the god I sought the director of such theater I wondered? I thought perhaps he might be. Was there anyone there in that emptiness? Who had built, designed and ran that theater. The answer was always on the tip of my tongue. Like a half forgotten memory, which needed just a little prodding to be brought back into the camera of my mind.

    Are we a simulation perhaps, are we the men in Plato’s cave. All seemed possible. God was never quite found, or was he?

    “Are we what you are seeking?” I seemed to hear. Yes, you will do I replied. Talk to me, show yourselves.

    Were those voices the Omega Point? I rather fancied they were. You see, a technological god will do me just fine.

    Anything omniscient, wise, beneficent. Omnipotent would be quite handy too. Something vastly bigger that what we normally perceive in our messed up world of concretized struggle.

    Is my god that of Abraham or Mohamed? The question seemed irrelevant. Was I god I wondered, or, more properly put, was I an offshoot of some universal consciousness of which we are all a part.

    The joy of meditation is the freedom from convention and thought. I feel, therefor I am. To misquote Descartes.

    Out of meditation I still listen for those voices. In the wind, in quiet incantations in a temple, in silence and the panoply of a starry night.

    But I am an eclectic sort of fellow and can see beauty everywhere, even in the little maths I am able to grasp. In the wonder of fractals seen in the design of a tree, its roots and leaves. In the bang which we are told kicked us all off and in the whimper they say is our ending.

    Were I young again and could choose a different path, it might have been that of the physicist. There is a stark, ethereal beauty there too, a search for meaning of not such a different order.

    If there is a god, he hides in the cracks, in letters written in lemon juice between the lines on a page. Perhaps the physicist will discover him silently existing at the center of an ultimate singularity, or wrapped in some exotic field of yet unthought of energy. In a dimension we do not yet know of. A life form divorced from what we conceive of as the physical universe.

    Many a physicalist will sneer these days at a such a search. Materialism is the fashion and the universe can only be explained in terms of what it does, not what it means. It was not always thus and there are still physicists who dream with greater ambition, people who are prepared to ask why and not content themselves merely to count and calculate.

    At my age I must remain a mere dreamer; the time for doing seems long gone. But where would we be without such dreams? The world will not be bettered by science alone. No “for profit” titan will create a heaven for all, merely a glory for one.

    There is a place still for the hermit, sitting in silence and listening for quiet voices in the gentle winds. There is purpose in listening, even in a world where all seems driven by material ambition.

    There is meaning to be found by looking with serene detachment and contemplating what is and what might yet be.

  • Ancient and Modern

    Ancient and Modern

    While I am mesmerized by the beauty of nature and the past, naive Luddism is not a philosophy to be espoused or admired.

    A spirit seems to inhabit my world, it is true. I hear its call most clearly in the silence of quiet contemplation, far from the brashness of modernity. Far from concrete, distanced from a world in which acquisition is all, removed from a society ruled by the market and Margaret Thatcher’s hungry ghost.

    Does that mean that I despise modernity? That I seek a return to the ideal of a noble savage of innate goodness, unsullied by the corrupting influences of civilization?

    It does not. Of my many faults, rank ignorance and foolish daydreaming are not writ large.

    I may long for a life of remote beauty untroubled by modernity and the motor car, but I am in no doubt of the need for the dentist and the doctor when dis-ease comes knocking at my door.

    Does modernity and progress by necessity go hand in hand with ugliness and the destruction of all that is beautiful and sacred? Is a market economy, where only the fittest survive, the only secure route to technological advance? I think not.

    My concept of god, spirit, nirvana may be more of a mindset, than a place I can reach by boat across the Styx, or through a life dedicated to the service of religion.

    I hope that godhead may be our future, but not in the form of dead handed dogma from the past. But I believe that such a future may, should, encompass all that is good from our past. Our dreaming spires, our great works of art and music, our philosophy, our humanity. Modernity should encourage and preserve what we have got right, while encouraging us to leave behind what we have got so badly wrong.

    That I am a mystic will not have been lost on those who have followed my pages. What may be less clear is that my mysticism espouses the future while worshiping the best in our past.

    Where does modernity meet mysticism? Or rather where would I like to see the two combine. In the Omega Point of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Developed further by thinkers such as the physicists David Deutsch and Frank Tipler.

    Many will consider such views to be nonsensical pseudoscience. Many will despise equally the technological singularity of futurists such as Ray Kurtzweil.

    And yet if man can not dream, what chance of a better future? We must dream and we must believe we can achieve perfection. That we can elevate ourselves, levitate by pulling on our own bootstraps.

    Skepticism appears to this non-scientist to be short sighted and unhelpful. Those with their noses too close to the coal face of scientific endeavor may not be in the right position to see the wider implications of the progress they are helping to achieve. Perhaps that is where philosophy must play its part.

    Asked if sentience is innate to the universe, I would have to respond that I do not know. Asked if consciousness is a mere by product of materialism I would respond that I hope not. Asked if we have a soul, however that may have emerged, I would answer that I hope so.

    And if we have no soul? What should we make of a world where our very awareness is some cosmic and unforeseen accident?

    If we are a by-product of random algorithm, we should rejoice that such an accident has come to pass and we should seek to transcend blind chance. If an Omega Point has not been pre-ordained by a deity of old, then all the more reason to make it our goal.

    To transcend the animal and the primordial soup from which we came and to seek to become gods. To create divinity, if none exists. Not Olympian gods though, not fearsome gods of wrath wielding hammers in the halls of Valhalla.

    We must become gods of peace and hope, decency and good nature.

    Guided by the still, small voice we hear within, we must use our gifts to eradicate the pain, poverty and misery with which uncaring evolution has burdened us. If there is a god, then perhaps, as de Chardin believed, we are destined to meet up with him on his own plane.

  • And Did Those Feet

    And Did Those Feet

    I felt it as soon as I sat down, the presence. Or was it a smell, a feeling, a sound of silence.

    In that ancient, musty, old church there was solace. In the smell of ancient books of prayer dedicated to an antique deity, in the cool damp of carved stone set to bare earth, there was another world. And, it seemed, a better one.

    Could I hear a reedy chant in ancient Latin or early English? Did I see flickering candles lighting well used books of hours?

    Was I there, in some other time and place, singing with those men of far off belief. I think I was. And I know I wanted to be.

    It seemed then, as it has so often felt to me over many difficult decades, that we miss something in life if we fail to heed such presence. Whatever, whenever, wherever or indeed if that presence may be.

    Is it god, the universe or merely some reflection of one’s own complex mind. Which of itself may be a mere scion of another and more complex structure.

    Or does it matter. Do we need to ask, to question or does it suffice to follow that presence and lose oneself in something greater.

    And afterwards in the woodlands and fields of this old county, that presence followed me. Gently insisted I listen to the rustle of the wind and the creeking of the trees.

    Made it known that its voice could be found in silence, far from the thunder and violent aesthetics of modern man. Far from the roar of the jets of war, far from the polemic of anger and greed and self.

    Can I dwell in that place of quiet voices and meditative peace for the rest of time. Can I seek out that presence and stay with it, whatever it may be. I think that I can. I know that I wish to.

    Can I leave behind anger and greed and merge with the infinite when I hear it calling. I hope so.

    An odd time of late and some curious experiences, deep in the trance of meditation.

    A Norse woman intruding into my thoughts, and then the odd sensation that it was myself in another time and place.

    A former incarnation it seemed. I am not, apparently, the single being I thought I was these past years.

    A sense of loss of self but connection to something greater. Peace, calm, beauty, meaning. What meaning? I can not say, I am none too sure, but more than its lack felt in a waking world so often bereft of any apparent purpose.

    Can I tell you the meaning of the universe? That I have discovered the eternal, whether within or without. I don’t think I can.

    What I can say is that there seems to be more than is customarily apparent to our waking selves in normal states of consciousness.

    I am living in a bubble of great beauty in an otherwise ugly and war torn world. I hope to remain there and wish others could too.

  • Lost in Thought

    Lost in Thought

    Lost is often a good thing. Thought may not be so good. You can choose how to lose yourself and into what you wish to become immersed.

    Choose wisely and the result will be happiness. Choose without wisdom and the result will be misery.

    There are many different types of thought and you are better to switch most of them off any time you can. Unthought, you might say, is usually better for the soul than thought.

    The most damaging type of thinking is worry. Fearful speculation as to your future. Guilt and regret about your past. The destructive, repetitive patterns become automatic, deeply embedded. Therein lies the route to mental illness and depression.

    The most life affirming thought process is passive awareness. Drifting lost in life, drinking in the silence and wind and natural beauty. Does this even count as thought? Possibly not but it does require some mental effort to enter and remain in that state.

    Another important category of thought is that mental exertion necessary to provide you with the day to day means of survival. Work thought, one might call it. It can not be avoided but it can at least be rendered less harmful. Or more positive.

    Work thought for many can be a mental hell, torture of the worst kind. Largely because work for most people involves thinking thoughts and undertaking tasks they find boring, distasteful or abhorrent.

    Work thought is usually made much worse by the sort of activities which it entails and the people you need to work with. Or, worse, much worse, work for.

    Work should be pleasure (can be a pleasure) but for most it is a grind at best or a very hell at worst.

    The young need to prepare for work by knowing themselves and understanding what type of life will bring them fulfilment as well as basic needs.

    If the young ignore their soul they are unlikely to be happy adults. Some, perhaps, will get genuine satisfaction out of commerce. If they approach commercial life honestly and without greed, then there is no harm in that.

    Where would we be without the village butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker? Not that butchery is a palatable occupation these days; nor ever was.

    The problem of course is that even such simple traditional occupations have now become all but impossible to pursue as an individual. Eaten up as society is by chains and big business. Who wants to end up on the factory floor or, worse perhaps, the office. It is one thing to be a jolly village baker, quite another to be swallowed up into the belly of some leviathan churning out loaves by the million in glowering industrial gloom.

    So if you want good work thoughts, which will enhance your life rather than lead you down the path of black depression and futility, you need to choose your occupation very carefully.

    Some, like the Stylites, will find fulfillment sitting on a pillar of stone in the desert. Living perhaps on bugs and rodents and rainwater. A perfectly valid choice.

    Some may find satisfaction in academia. Others may actually enjoy life in a competitive investment bank where greed is good and the wolf rules the Street.

    Although that is hard to believe.

    But lost in good thoughts, lost in reverie, barely aware of anything but the silence and the wind in your face. That is the right kind of lost. And the right kind of thinking. For those who seek true happiness anyway.

    That is where you should spend most of your time. Hearing the crashing of waves on the deserted sea shore, being aware of the shrill cry of the gulls.

    Being engulfed in the scent of the flowers in the fields around you, with thought (if it exists at all at such times) restricted to finding your path and keeping yourself upright.

    Wherever and whenever possible, anneal your mind. Heat it up and let it settle in new and better ways. Shake the snow globe and let the fresh, new, beautiful white water crystals cover and heal the rigid patterns which develop as our mind seeks to automate and deaden our lives.

    Meditation is the key. To put your mind into such a state that the old lines of thought melt away and life can be started from a new beginning each day. To churn up your mind and to allow it to reset itself in new and healthier patterns. To lose dull work thoughts and damaging obsession. To let go, to fly, to swim, to soar and preferably never to land.

    Or if you have to land then to do so as a fledgling, a child. A being not weighed down with useless prejudice, habit and stultifying routine. A reborn adult who has replaced damaged, rigid thinking with new paths. New joy and hope. Clear spring water in place of industrial sludge. Optimism and novelty. Newness, not decay.

    It can be done and for some of us this becomes our life’s work. Or at least, the most important part of our lives.

  • Achievement

    Achievement

    What does achievement mean? What have you achieved and by what standards will you be judged?

    Will you be found wanting and if so should you care?

    These thoughts came to me as I wandered the lanes and fields today, pondering such future as may be left to me.

    I suppose at the back of my mind was the bewilderment I felt after watching The Medici.

    I wondered what it must be like to be a modern day equivalent, a mover and shaker on 21st Century Earth. A Rain Maker at the hub of some bewilderingly complex wheel of modern commerce.

    Or some meglamaniac, corrupt politician, clinging to power and repelling all boarders.

    I thought about what sort of person I would like to have been, in an ideal world of my own choosing. What would I have liked to have done with my life? What would I like to have achieved?

    I proceeded to write a long post, sitting in the garden and then I realised what negative and destructive nonsense I had written.

    So I just sat and thought about it for a bit. Meditated, if you like. Chewed the cud. Got my thoughts in order.

    I pottered into the kitchen and attempted to clear up the usual awful mess left by my wife after an afternoon of bread making and brewing jams. She is an excellent cook and homemaker but never seems very determined when it comes to the cleaning up part. Well, of a messy kitchen anyway.

    I had written about non achievement, I suddenly realised. I had written a long list of complaints about every aspect of my career and so, secretly, somewhere I obviously felt myself to be found wanting by the Medici.

    So with my hands buried in a dish of soapy water, I shuffled about my allotted tasks and suddenly the lights came on!

    Eureka! Stuff the Medicis and their modern counterparts. I suddenly realised what achievement meant. To me.

    Achievement is to be at peace with yourself. Achievement is not to have regrets. Achievement is to accept your life and to avoid comparing yourself to anybody or anything else.

    It is to have achieved some measure of happiness, to have done no harm to those around you. To have done a little good if possible.

    It is not about fame or wealth. It is not about discovering at the age of 64 that chicken is “finger licking good” like Colonel Sanders did. It is not about marketing the Boneless Banquet to a grateful world.

    Suddenly the world became brighter. The sun peered through the metaphorical clouds, all became clear.

    An epiphany indeed. Apart from trying to be nice to people (tough task), I shall fill my life with feeling good. About myself, the world and everyone in it.

    I shall go to Tuscany. I shall learn the piano properly. I shall drink in everything I love while minding my own business and ignoring the rest of the world as far as I am able.

    I shall be at peace with myself.

    And enjoy Modigliani while I am still able.

  • Mystical Unity

    Mystical Unity

    Hard as they are to describe, if I had to use one word to paint a picture of a mystical experience, unity would do the job very nicely.

    The neuroscientists would write the experience off and explain it away in terms of tedious chemical reactions and the like, but those who have had such experiences are unlikely to care.

    The mystical experience is said to be impossible to describe. Perhaps I just have a way with words, but in any event I beg to differ.

    Our garden seems a rather good spot to have such an experience: flowers and scents mix with birdsong and peaceful rural calm. All seems peculiarly well with the world at such times.

    The pointless world of human futility disappears and you feel an absorption in a whole. If you question what that whole consists of, you may come to the conclusion that it really does not matter very much. I would not care to draw any great metaphysical conclusions for the experience, but it just seems to put “ordinary” life into perspective for a while. A more kindly perspective I might add, a more understanding one.

    In my case at least those things I find glorious become even more so. The simple things. Beauty, musical harmony, nature. The things I find distasteful and pointless do not irritate me so much after such an experience.

    Black lives do matter. All life does. But I do not feel inclined to burn, pillage or destroy to show that I care.

    Politics, business and the economy are largely pointless distractions in the scheme of things, but a mystical journey perhaps makes one more tolerant of all that nonsense. More inclined to let it pass with a shrug and a wry smile. It will ever be thus and, for me at least, it is by far better to quietly ignore humanity, than to work myself up in an indignant and self righteous froth about it.

    I have written often about the Pig, the Salesman, the Man in the White Porsche . Only a month ago I gave into anger against a thick and ill educated school-ground thug who had threatened my sister. I seem to recall describing his behavior to his face in terms that our Anglo-Saxon forbears would recognize only too well.

    I do not regret my words, but it was a pity to be so riled by the thug. A mystical experience will not banish such people, but it certainly puts them into perspective as the ridiculous and irrelevant pygmies they are.

    Absorption in a greater whole is something most people long for. The experience certainly seems beneficial, calming, benevolent. Wherever it comes from, however it arises.

    I suppose each person’s experience differs. I have no doubt that for some such an experience is slanted towards their own system of belief if they have any. I imagine that some would believe they have seen the face of their god, but in my own case the traditional biblical concept of a god is far removed from what I experience and I veer more towards the eastern concepts of what is “out there”. Or not, as the case may be.

    I come with no great message, no tablets of stone. I shall write no great books nor shall I seek to convert the “heathen”. I have heard no voices, met with no departed souls. I have not traveled to parallel universes, nor, unlike the Venerable Bead, have I had visions of heaven or hell.

    I just seemed to become one with what is. That was quite enough to keep me quiet for a bit.

    Incidentally, the courtyard above is at San Pietro di Castello in Venice. Beauty indeed; get me back there once the Black Death has passed.

  • Anger

    Anger

    It is very disappointing to have given in to anger, which in retrospect could easily have been averted by withdrawing from the scene and allowing it to be dealt with by professionals hired for the purpose. Or the police

    After such progress in taming unwanted emotions and achieving a most satisfying equanimity, something (or rather somebody) slipped through a chink in my armor and I landed flat on my back.

    There is no defense – there is no excuse for allowing temper to get the better of me and I very much hope that it will not happen again. Must try harder.

    Unfortunately, a friend of mine was threatened by an unpleasant bully with whom she has had considerable trouble for a number of years. I went to her assistance as the bully threatened to “get her out” of her home and told her that she and all her family were mentally ill.

    The bully is an ill educated and illiterate fat thug who has upset many, many people over the decades with his inflated ego and determination to win at all costs, however petty the dispute.

    He bullied and threatened the office girls at a credit card company who would not bend to his wishes. Or rather could not give in to his unreasonable demands. He asked them “Do you know who I am?” Despite the fact he is a small man, he has a greatly inflated sense of his own value.

    Tradespeople learn not to deal with him on account of his arrogance and rudeness. He refuses to pay in full for goods and services he has ordered and consumed – he makes spurious claims that they were defective in some way and thus cheats tradespeople out of their dues.

    He appears to have no understanding of the rule of law and it is difficult to tell whether it is just his dullard’s wits and ignorance which are at fault, or whether he deliberately chooses not to understand, so as to win another of his innumerable petty swindles.

    If this fellow can do someone down who is standing in his way, he goes for it. As with all bullies, when confronted he is eventually forced to back down but only at the cost of much unpleasantness.

    In any event, mea culpa. I am deeply saddened to have been caught so badly off guard and next time will suggest getting the due agents of law enforcement involved.

    The correct course of action is to call for help from people whose job it is to deal with such matters and who do not get emotionally involved, since they have no personal knowledge of or attachment to the parties.

  • Mystical Experience of Reality

    Mystical Experience of Reality

    There are certain activities or states of mind which trigger in me what Abraham Maslow calls “peak experiences”. Reading Keith Hancock’s Mystical Experience of Reality does just that.

    I have been sitting in our beautiful cottage garden in the spring sunshine. The birds have been singing and all is well. Phrases in Keith’s book take me to treasured places and I really care little if this seems a mere flight of fancy.

    I am in Narnia running ever on into greater and higher levels of Eden, alongside the lion, the children and all the talking animals. I am leaving Middle Earth with the elves, from the harbor at Grey Havens, travelling with them to their mythical and otherworldly origins. I am subliming with Ian M Banks to a transcendent realm outside of physical reality.

    It is odd how merely reading about such states or places can often bring on feelings of being in them or at them. But there we go, that is the way I find it to be.

    When reading Keith’s words, I feel a deep calling to that state of disembodied serenity I have so often felt of late. There is much I recognized in his book, so much which accords with my own eccentric journey into silence.

    So much of what Keith says, so much of what he describes and the way he tells it rings true to me, speaks of the experiences I have felt of late.

    Keith had a series of mystic experiences and in this book he describes both his own mystic experiences and quotes extensively from the writing of others on the subject. People have had such experiences throughout recorded history and have believed them to be an enlightenment, a release from the ordinary world, a glimpse of perfection and an afterlife. A state of existence where all is well and where sorrow, pain and hunger do not exist.

    The big question for the skeptic is whether such experiences are “real”. I may feel that I have experienced an alternative (and better) state of reality but the scientists and materialists will inevitably dismiss such altered states of consciousness as merely manufactured by the brain. The brain receives sense input from the external world from which it creates a sense of “reality” in our waking life. Sight, sound, smell and touch are interpreted by the brain as a simulacrum of what is actually “out there”. An “interpretation”, not direct experience. The brain is interpreting the signals it receives and creating a “reality” which we assume roughly corresponds to what is out there in the physical world.

    In dream states, we no longer rely on input from our senses but the brain nevertheless produces states which, while we are dreaming, we usually believe to be real.

    The skeptic would argue that a mystical experience may be explained in a similar fashion – a dream state “imagined” or fashioned by the brain which does not represent any form of reality.

    Keith and the mystics would argue strongly otherwise. To them the reality they experience while in a mystical state is, by contrast, more real than the physical world we normally interpret as “real”.

    Not all scientists would disagree with the mystics. Some have the humility to admit that there is much about “reality” which we currently fail to grasp. To the layman it is incredible to learn from the scientists that “matter” as we customarily experience it does not exist – it is a collection of force-fields or strings of energy, not solid at all.

    Now that is weird. Is it so much weirder to believe that reality is not as we customarily perceive it at all? Is it so far fetched to give credit to the possibility that certain people are able to see through to “ultimate” reality, a place of infinite fecundity and goodness from which we came and to which we will return?

    This is not a subject I care to argue about. There really isn’t much point. The materialists and physicalists will get hot under the collar and call such a possibility absurd and ridiculous. They will usually deride and mock the mystic as a misguided and outdated fool who belongs back in the middle ages, when pixies lived at the bottom of our gardens and witches roamed the forests.

    But some of us have a sense that the materialists may be understanding only part of life’s story. And we are joined by some of the more imaginative and less dogmatic scientists who concede that the universe remains a great mystery, some of the secrets of which may never be revealed by the scientific method.

    In any event, I welcome Keith’s contribution to the debate and find his story accords with my own, shall we say, “wishes”!