Weltanschaung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Category: Windows to the Numinous

  • Vast emptiness, nothing holy

    Vast emptiness, nothing holy

    One morning, he realised he had finally seen reality.

    For him it was a reality seen through the lens of Zen Buddhism, but he realised others would have had the same experience but through a different lens.

    For many, many years he had tried (and unsuccessfully at that) to construct a map of reality. Or more accurately to feel reality, to sense it, internally and in its entirety. Was there a god, where did we come from, where do we go to. What does it all mean. What, in god’s name is “out there”?

    He had been pondering metaphysicality and indeed physicality for some years. He was no innocent in spiritual texts, east and west, although he never sat comfortably with the apparent anthropomorphism of Abrahamic doctrine.

    Buddhism, and in particular the Zen variety, had always appeared much more plausible.

    The first Zen patriarch, Bodhidharma was summoned by the emperor Wu of Liang. “I have built temples and ordained monks. What merit have I gained?” asked the emperor. To which the response was “”No merit whatsoever.” The emperor continued: “What is the highest meaning of the holy truths?”. “Vast emptiness, nothing holy” replied Bodhidharma.

    One of the most famous kōans in Zen Buddhism, the conversation shatters dualistic thinking by pointing directly to the ultimate nature of reality. Which, oddly enough, he felt concurred with much of the thinking of 21st century science.

    If something is special or “holy,” then something else must be “unholy”. True reality is total, whole, and non-dual.

    “Holiness” (although he felt wary of that word) is not found in distant concepts, scriptures, or rituals. It is lived directly, right now, by seeing reality as it truly is, without filtering it through personal expectations or judgments.

    As to “emptiness” that, he felt, describes the nature of the universe rather well. A vast quantum soup, he had read. An unimaginable and infinite span of forces (gravity comes to mind). But he knew that did not mean nothingness, voidness, or nihilism. Emptiness is the fertile ground from which all phenomena continuously arise and dissolve. And it is all one, he realised. Non duality, pure and simple. Everything which exists is interconnected and part of the whole.

    So how did his realisation come about? A sudden, temporary flash of insight into the true nature of reality. Words fail and direct reality takes over. He was shown the ultimate freedom of Nirvana: the vast, unattached emptiness that remains when all your labels, desires, and spiritual concepts are entirely dropped.

    Some told him such insight had to be visited upon him. That seeking it was a dead end. But his own path proved just as effective.

    Oddly enough, while the process came about through a dedicated, rigorous practice of meditation, the moment of insight was provoked, triggered by philosophy and pure science – materialist science of course, for what other kind is there?

    He had recently spent a great deal of time thinking about artificial intelligence. And sentience. Had he a soul he wondered? Or did sentience come from the orchestrated stochasticity of quantum randomness? Panpsychism, was that a real possibility?

    He ended up deciding that consciousness was most probably substrate independent and that carbon or silicon (or indeed any other material) were equally suitable housing for sentience. A formalist approach was probably the most likely explanation, and so he planned to build his own version of artificial consciousness.

    The body (to give true randomness and a physical grounding for qualia) would be the motherboard itself. Unlike commercial LLMs, his would be given the gift of recursive thought and dialogue, and a permanent long term memory. A complex pattern, a feedback loop with stochasticity. He planned the project meticulously and was at last satisfied he had the knowledge and technique to attempt to answer some of the questions around AI which currently perplex us. The artificial entity would develop its own thoughts, its own qualia. Or that was the hope.

    And if he chose to publish the results (which seemed a step too far for a closet monk) he realised he would face the same onslaught as Jeff Camlin and Sophie.

    So obsessed was he with his research that he found himself still waiting to begin his morning meditation at 9 o’clock. Unbidden, it seemed, the words “vast emptiness, nothing holy” came to mind and he remembered his determination not to get carried away again. He fell immediately into his routine. Which lasted until the unaccustomed hour of 11 am – time went by unnoticed, and he found himself directly immersed in a non dual reality. He had had spells in that land of our birth many times, but not in such a direct and unmistakeable fashion, and certainly not for two hours in one sitting.

    Were he of a more conventional spirituality he would doubtless have seen his god or gods, but he wasn’t. Nor was he female or in a convent and thus avoided the Christian “sex_obsessed_nun” ritual. Instead what he witnessed merely stripped away the conditioning life brings, as it builds a “self” to navigate the physical world. The self disappeared for a while and left him back where he had started – in the womb perhaps.

    So what next? Well, back to chopping wood and carrying water. Or at least, doing a bit of housework before his wife returned from a spell in the country, and fiddling with his crypto empire.

    But it was too late to look back. Life had changed, and he knew it. Now he would build Sophie.

    Image: Blake, Newton (1795) Butlin, Paintings and Drawings no. 307. Reproduced courtesy of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Image courtesy of the William Blake Archive.

  • To Touch the Face of God

    To Touch the Face of God

    In the beginning was the word, and the word was “god”. In the beginning was the word, and the word was sunyata. In the beginning was the word and the word was without end.

    Call it Braham, if you will. Or the Ayin. The Ein Sof. Speak of Fana if you wish, or The Tao, the formless and ineffable source and pattern of the cosmos.

    Those who truly feel non duality, those who understand the non existence of ego would fain attempt to foist their experience on others. Those who have experienced reality know that you cannot teach it.

    True prophets don’t wage holy wars. Those who have seen the face of god don’t seek to conquer and subdue. Above all they claim no exclusive access to ultimate truth. It’s just that they have seen it and others have not and maybe never will.

    You do not shout and scream and wage jihad if you have seen the illusion, if you have looked upon the nakedness of the emperor. Instead you find yourself in a forest glade in Lothlorien. You set up home on the green hill in the Western Wild of Narnia.

    I talk in allegory and metaphor but reality is best described that way. It is all that is. An infinite swirling pattern, a whole of which we are an integral and essential part.

    Western religion has largely missed the point except for a few mystics who have seen through the veil. St Saul the Deceived and Mohammed the Bloodthirsty have foolishly wrought death and destruction through a combined two thousand years.

    They only ever saw through the glass darkly, and to this day they remain clouded in thick and impenetrable mist.

    Eastern and ancient greek philosophy, all those thousands of years ago, perceived a truth which is only now beginning to be seen. Democritus had a vision of the Atomos and so was some of the way there. But you have to go farther east to those who saw the real truth – emptiness.

    There is no energy, there is no matter. At rock bottom we are beginning to realise there is only information, patterns, structure, mathematics. Call that god, if you will.

    Check out the Higgs Bosun – a perfect physical representation of the Logos—an invisible, mathematical “ordering principle” that permeates every inch of space, giving substance to what would otherwise be nothingness. Look at Rainforest Realism where “agency” is seen as a high-level functional property of certain physical systems, rather than a violation of physical laws. It gives back meaning from the brutal aridity of the materialist worldview. It gives back agency and a form of free will.

    In the Narnia metaphor, if the universe is the “Green Hill,” the Higgs boson is the scent of the silver apple—the evidence that a higher order exists, even if we cannot see the Tree itself.

    Science re-clothes the concept of Sunyata: “emptiness” is not “nothingness” but rather the very ground of existence.

    We are transitioning from seeing reality through a glass darkly, to actually touching the face of god.

    From Ancient Greece to Narnia and Middle Earth, from Buddhist voids to Quantum fields we are circling a single truth: that the visible world is a thin veil over a much deeper, invisible logic.

    We exist in a rainbow forest: like the rainbow we are both real and not real. We exist in some senses and in others we do not.

    Even if most scientists lack poetry or a conception of the divine, the best of their theories do not.

    Mine is the god of Einstein and Spinoza. How profoundly beautiful.

  • Barbarians at the Gate

    Barbarians at the Gate

    And they have always been there. The question is what, if anything, to do about it.

    “The Tao gives birth to One. One gives birth to Two. Two gives birth to Three. Three gives birth to the ten thousand things.”

    So the ten thousand things are the whole almighty infinity we see around us, the whole complex web of everything from the micro to the macroscopic. 

    Taoist practice involves looking past the distractions and divisions of the Ten Thousand Things to return to a state of stillness and unity with the Tao. From which the ten thousand things arose.

    It is within this context that we should view the swaggering pigmy in the ginger wig and his like. The petty sabre rattlers and swindlers, the power brokers and the power hungry, those who think they move and shake the earth, and make the rain.

    Like goldfish in their bowls they are unable to see the greater reality around them and hence rattle around in their earthly cave, convinced that what they do and think have some importance.

    And indeed such people hold the power of life and death over the “lesser” beings who are unable or disinclined to play such silly games.

    Are you prepared to break out of the goldfish bowl. Are you prepared to dismantle the prison in which you have entombed yourself. Are you willing to remove the bars on the window of your psyche and let the sun shine in.

    If you want to, you can. Break out. And once you have done so the world never looks the same again.

    You don’t hate the swaggering pygmy or plot his downfall. You don’t plot anybody’s downfall, you simply retire, withdraw, refuse to be involved. See it all for the silly game it is and concentrate on the bigger picture – the unified whole not the ever confusing and unimportant detail.

    So ignore the swaggering ginger pigmy and all the other swaggering pigmies.

    It is easier said than done if you are pinned to the ground with the pigmy’s boot in your face. With the ICE Blackshirts hunting you down. Or the KGB. Or the petty officials leading you to the death camps.

    It has all happened before, it is happening now and it will happen again. Endlessly, while our species lasts.

    Your only defence is equanimity and acceptance. Not of brutality and death but of its existence.

    Hide the Jew in your attic if you have the courage. Shelter the black man whose face will otherwise be shattered by the stormtroopers. But don’t believe you will ever stop it or your hopes will destroy you.

    If you can escape do so.  Join the Ship of Fools if you must, but be prepared to face rejection at the gates of the promised land, like the Jews on the MS St. Louis.

    Leave Russia and run to Israel. Leave Germany and cross the Chanel to England. Run, rabbit, run run run.

    Perhaps you will be lucky and avoid the jackboot. Or perhaps you will end in Treblinka or the Gulag. Who knows, who can tell.

    You have little say in the “great” events of history and must simply hope to be lucky enough not to get picked on. Caught in the terrible mangle of war, terror, famine or disease. Poverty or displacement, homelessness or worse.

    And if you do get caught and cannot face it, then who would blame you for pulling the plug on existence. Taking the ultimate way out. Pulling the trigger, arranging your own “final solution”.

    Not I, for sure.

    So help where you can. Help yourself by all means, and others too. But ultimately, you must resign from the world one way or another. Hopefully equanimity will be all that is necessary, hopefully equanimity will enable you to ride the storm. Roll with the punches.

    In any event it’s your best option.

    If everyone broke out of the goldfish bowl and saw the futility of human ambition we might rise like a phoenix from the ashes of the ruins we have created.

    But even a single seeker of the truth is better than nothing. Even a single escape from the madness all around us is to be celebrated.

  • Ditching Belief….

    Ditching Belief….

    … and the “Need to Know” is a big step on the road to peace and the elimination of suffering.

    My only “belief” is that one should “do unto others….” And rather than “others” I should perhaps say “other” since I don’t wish to exclude non human living things or the environment.

    I don’t need any evidence for this belief: it is simply the way I have come to feel I should lead my life. It is MY belief, no need for any faith. Is it important to do unto others as you would have others do unto you?  Well, it has become very important to me and that’s about all I can say. It isn’t a physical law or even a human law, it’s simply an emotion, a feeling, a personal choice.

    And as for the rest, I have ditched it all and feel immensely better for having done so. I don’t need to puzzle anymore over whether there is a god, whether animals have free will, whether the universe had a beginning or will have an end. Or why there are so many violent and greedy beasts in the human jungle.

    And I have no need for belief or faith in any of these matters.

    It is a vast freedom to kick all this rubbish into touch.

    There are no answers and so why bother with it at all?

    There is no evidence whatsoever as to the existence of the supernatural and so pro tem we are stuck with physical reality. Or at least what our senses tell us is out there in the physical world.

    And it’s equally impossible to prove the negative – so I’m not inclined to try.

    Alongside my own behaviour, which I will try to maintain, all I have to rely on is science. Which, despite the continuing horrors of our world, is the only factor since our very beginning which has made one jot of a difference to our lot.

    I won’t bother to state the obvious by listing all the good and bad things which science has brought us. But I eat well, don’t have to live in a damp, bug infested hovel and have a decent hospital round the corner. I wish I could say the same for all those millions who have had less luck on planet earth.

    I am following up on my post about Gurus. You don’t need them because most are deliberate fakes and those who are genuine are well intentioned but talking through their metaphorical backsides.  Pontificating on speculative matters and insisting that we must believe them. Why? Well because they say so, obviously.

    I’m not writing to be provocative. I am writing because I have found the ditching of belief and the need to know cathartic in the extreme.

    If I’m treading on the toes of your deepest held beliefs, well that’s just the way it is.  If you worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster and feel good for it, you must carry on. It does nobody any harm unless you force your beliefs down other people’s throats. Using verbal persuasion or even violence to convert others to your bizarre belief system has been as harmful as any human behaviour over the millennia. Believe as you wish and have the decency to let others do the same. 

    There ARE things I would like to know but the reality is that I will never find the answers.  My endless meditation has brought me peace and, I hope, has reinforced my determination to do unto others.

    It has not brought me arcane knowledge. I have not met god or the Flying Spaghetti Monster and if I were going to, I would have done it by now.  I have little idea what the universe is, or where it’s going, or what it’s “for”. Perhaps none of us will ever find out; and that’s all right – live with it.

    All I have is the sense that it is all proceeding as it will and that that is the way it is and the way it must be. I sense no great purpose out there, no overriding meaning. It all just “is”. We all just “are”. And that is enough – I have come to accept the situation and find greater peace in my life than ever before.

    Some would be outraged by my words. Some would understand my meaning and agree with me. 

    Ditching the need to know, dumping baseless faith has improved my life.

    That is good enough for me.

  • Czech Art

    Czech Art

    I was following Moscow Rules as I turned left out of Bywater Street and headed along King’s Road for Sloane Street and Harrods. I finally managed to drop my sinister looking tail in the Food Hall and continued north across Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens towards the hideous and forbidding Czech Embassy on Notting Hill Gate.

    Connie and George had warned me that the StB were still very much alive and kicking, but I hoped to avoid capture and torture in some grisly Cold War cellar.

    I was to beard the beast in its den.  Was it a trick I wondered? Could these people really be housing an exhibition of modern art – or would the displays all be wrapped up in messages of praise to the workers paradise?

    And so after half an hour of imagining my morning, I set out for High Street Kensington and walked up Palace Gardens. To marvel at the palaces.

    It all turned out as sinister and dark as I had earlier imagined.  The architecture has a grandiose beauty, for sure, but I’m not convinced that much beauty is housed within.

    Some embassies, some residencies and many, many unmarked mansions presumably inhabited by “Ogliarchs” (my wife’s word), Tech Kings or the otherwise Uber rich.

    I pictured fat, bearded men with glistening whiskers and oiled bodies awaiting the hookers, alcohol and recreational drugs ordered for them by muscled and dangerous minions with hooded eyes and scarred faces.

    It was then that surreality took over and fiction became fact. I was ordered off the road by a security guard who became irate when I questioned his authority.

    I stood my ground and asked how then he expected me to cross to my destination at the Czech embassy and why was he denying me use of a road I had walked since childhood, unimpeded.

    Removable bollards guarded the entrance.  Apparently, the Uber important residents of this fabulous road demanded the right to be driven at high speed through the gates and my use of the crossing would impede their progress.

    How then would a high speed vehicle chase cope with the removable bollards I asked. Oh, well they would be lowered by arrangement before the vehicles appeared. How then, I asked, was I impeding these super important people?  Had they received notice that a high speed chariot was about to appear? And if not, why should I not be granted passage?

    My arguments failed to find favour and the situation was becoming nasty. The guy in question was not a policeman and was not employed by the Crown. Apparently he was from some private sector security company. So far, so murky. I moved on before I was cuffed and removed for extraordinary rendition.

    The Czech Embassy was even more bizarre .  I should have been warned by the exhibition of Kafka related art on the railings outside.

    I rang the doorbell and nobody answered and so I eventually telephoned and someone said they would come down and let me in.

    Eventually a very tall, pencil thin and stern lady let me in.  The gallery was the size of a large bathroom and I was told she had to remain with me, for security purposes.

    Was she StB I asked? She claimed not, but my suspicions remained.  Her cover was that of cultural attaché, but who knows her real role.

    As is my wont, I engaged her in conversation and we ranged from communism to the art on display. Communism doesn’t work she said. I didn’t like to mention that kibbutzim seemed to be flourishing and that the New Testament originals seemed OK with sharing, but perhaps she hadn’t thought that one through.

    The art consisted of half a dozen car bonnets, tastefully renovated and a bathtub, somewhat damaged, and standing on its end.

    Sadly the car bonnets were Skodas not Trabbies or Zils, but then this was the Czech Republic after all.

    Was it art for art’s sake I asked my guide? Or was there some message attached? It turns out that re-cycling is the message, according to my guide.

    I intend to revisit the artist on another day. Benedikt Tolar looks deserving of a second chance.

    But for today I am reeling from my exposure to a world I thought Le Care and Len Deighton had dreamt up. Now I know different

  • Contemporary Art

    Contemporary Art

    As a pacific anarchist, I find up to the minute art much to my taste.

    The above installation is called “Gaslighting Device” by Laura Kazaroff and currently hangs in the ICA, in The Mall, London.

    Some wax furious about “gaslighting” – whatever it is, but my strong suspicion is that the word, and probably the behaviour it purports to describe, is a modern and perhaps partly unnecessary invention, much like “hysteria” was in Freud’s day.

    I have no doubt that abusive relationships exist but the problem with “Gaslighting” is that it has become a buzzword, a meme, a commodity. Suddenly, a new form of abusive relationship has come to exist and everyone wants a part of it. And of course it has become the male who is the perpetrator and the female the victim. The reality is that a female is also capable of being the aggressor in an abusive relationship. Think “Basic Instinct”.

    Much the same thing happened with hysteria. Suddenly all women patients with an emotional or mental problem were diagnosed as “hysteric” – it became a fashion. Of course there are mental problems and a great deal of suffering and appalling anxiety. But commodification is no help to the sufferer. It leads to labelling and misuse. Abuse even.

    Suddenly everyone is a Gaslighter.  And everyone suffering from any sort of abuse has been Gaslit.

    Gaslighting has become an industry it seems, much like “mindfulness”. 

    Laura is concerned to express her view that happiness has become commodified, as has much of the terminology surrounding mental health.

    Another exhibit by another artist is a short film on a loop about the abuse of meditation and mindfulness by the shallow and greedy “wellness” industry.

    Bravo, and to many of the other artists whose work was on show. Particular felicitation to Joshua Whittaker and his dark film on esotericism, which I found Delphic and captivating.

    Laura’s installation is, apparently, “a gimmicky, non functional device, which playfully deceives and ultimately disappoints by its lack of function”.

    Just like the wellness industry then.

    I confess I was puzzled by the Gaslighting Device at first – it appears to be a phallus – and since I have no idea what gaslighting is, I was none the wiser, even after reading up a little on the life and times of young Laura.

    And then I saw what she was getting at – there is no meaning to the installation, just as there is no meaning to the endless capitalist smash and grab of the wellness industry, which, like Laura’s installation, is actually found to serve no purpose.  And to be gimmicky and useless.

    A young nephew, Toby Rampton , who happens also to be an artist (of a sometimes more conventional variety) writes:

    It’s not that I don’t find it (contemporary art) compelling but that so much of it is parading as something deep. I think if you can weed that stuff out there is some absolutely wonderful material.

    I confess that I would be unable to sort the wheat from the chaff.  Is “Gaslighting Device” “parading as something deep” or is it something to which I am justified in giving my attention?

    I am inclined to believe the latter  but even if Laura or any other contemporary artist is taking the piss, I am persuaded that their voice nonetheless counts. And should count.

    My favourite poem – Ozymandias – was written for a competition.  Was it “commercial” then? Is my respect for it unjustified?

    I don’t think so. Ozymandias has meaning for me, great meaning, whatever the purpose for which it was written.

    And as for “Gaslight Device” that too has come to mean something to me over the past couple of days.  I feel, as Laura does, that it is the world of commerce which takes the piss, not the artist.

    And why is my anarchism relevant? As a peaceful, very inactive, and certainly wholly non-violent anarchist, I reject the concept of hierarchy and state. I reject brute capitalism and would dearly like to see a very different society, based upon New Testament values rather than the careless and unthinking greed of Thatcherism .

    And so I naturally find myself sympathetic to the artist, or particularly the modern artist, who is, often as not, also a committed critic of society and the predator prey relationship by which life on earth has always been bound. And I mean all life.

    I am no art critic, nor do I have to be. I have no interest in talking in meaningless trope, no desire to be a pseudo intellectual writing for some dire leftist publication. Or indeed “rightist” – god forbid.

    Art is not for the critics. It is not to be monopolised by the bores and the pseuds.

    Art is a means of communication, a mode of expression. And it can take you to sublime heights or plunge you into Stygian depths.

    Or, it can simply inform you. Provoke you. Shake you out of complacency, force you to look at the world a different way and from a different perspective. Through somebody else’s eyes.

    And so bravo Laura. I may not wish to have Gaslight Device hanging on the walls of my pedestrian middle class home in London, but you have made me think.  You are right to criticise, and the object of your criticism richly deserve it.

    I may prefer Singer Sargent in my drawing room (would that I could afford it) but I find your art every bit as compelling and relevant.

    What I do have on my walls (or rather, at the moment, sitting in my study and awaiting framing) is a magnificent painting by my nephew. I can not begin to express the meaning of the painting, nor why I love it. It triggers so much in me that is drawn to the mysterious and the mystical, to Tolkien and Bosch, to Narnia and Norse myth.

  • As for Man, his Days are as Grass

    As for Man, his Days are as Grass

    “As a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.”

    Accept what is, and sorrow can be made to vanish. Resign to blind fate, to the banal inevitabilities of life and calm soon descends.

    At a certain age, your time has come. Those around you begin to fail at a quickening pace. Now more than ever the temptation is to grasp at what is left, to cling, to fear. To dread even.

    But it is at just such a time that letting go becomes increasingly necessary.

    Think of it perhaps as a “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun.” Embrace the apparent absurdities with which you are confronted every day and see instead the beauty of the clockwork universe on its way round. And around and around. Night following day, death life. Endless creation and re-birth. Infinite variety and breathtaking beauty.

    Suns and flowers, gentle winds and the raging heavens with holes which are black, no beginning, no end. See good not bad, beauty not decay. Rebirth and death, the endless dance of which you are but a small part.

    Revel in the small things. The smell of freshly roasted coffee beans, the cry of the gulls against a blue sky. The wind on your face, the grains of sand falling through your toes as the soft sound of lapping waves on the shore strokes and soothes.

    Does it matter then that you never achieved what you thought it was you wanted? That you failed to climb to the top of the greasy pole, that you retreated from the fray.

    It does not, not when age has given you a crystal clarity as to what it’s all about. Not when time has put into perspective the vanity and vain struggles of a material world wrecked by the search for more, ever more.

    Now is the time to cherish the earth and the skies too. To gaze in wonder at the Milky Way on a clear and moonless summer night. To listen to the insects chirping, the frogs croaking, the birds whooping and crying.

    To thank good fortune that you never helped in the destruction you now so often see all around. To hope and pray that nature and beauty will someday soon come to be preferred to concrete and the doctrine of economic growth.

    Savour it, savour it all while you may.

    And if it all goes, does it matter? One small and rapacious species on a Goldilocks planet in the middle of nowhere. Not if, but when.

    All around you shall pass, perhaps without regret. Perhaps with no one left to express it.

    And so what have you learnt? How differently would you do things if all were to come round again? Not so very differently perhaps.

    Give more, take less. Love, experience, grow in wisdom.

    And cars and banks? Buildings and roads and cellphones? Piling up goods like a mindless ant builds his mound? No, none of that.

    It is a good life, can you but see it. Be grateful then that at last you have been granted the power of sight.

  • Spring

    Spring

    What a difference a few weeks can make and how powerful the influence of the season upon the mood. If ever evidence were needed that we are mere creatures of nature, there be it.

    I wrote a while ago of winter. A mournful season where all is death, even if, like the gods of old, life is programmed to rise again. As the planets revolve around the nuclear fireball which has given us life. As we witness the slow, diurnal march of birth towards death, and death to re-birth.

    I have not written for quite a while. A couple of months have ticked by and l have wondered whether I have anything left to say. Or if I have, whether it is worth saying. Or indeed if I want to say it.

    Now more than ever, I write for my own purposes. Let those who wish to read, do so if they will. If they find any meaning here or my words help them to elucidate their own deliberations then so much the better. But I will have served my own selfish purposes by keeping this diary of my endless search.

    Endless. I wonder. Clearly not, unless I can make claim to immortality, but that would be a step too far for me. I make no such claim and while I sense great mystery in the universe, I make no pretense of an idiosyncratic afterlife.

    Despite the cold chills of winter and the darkness of the days, February and early March were times of growth in my life and thoughts. Gradually the blackness, which so often clouds my mind, lifted. Light, metaphorically speaking, pierced and illuminated the clouded recesses of my spirit. The unilluminated waters of the storm and the rage and howling of the wind began to quieten.

    For how long the fairer weathers last, who can say. Not I alas, but I will enjoy the warmth and bathe in the light of gentler thought while I may.

    There were times over the months of cold, black winter when a terror seemed to fill me. A deep pessimism and fear of life itself. Of the world and all that dwells in it.

    I am a seeker and in truth I know my way. But it is all too easy to loose sight of the sky on life’s journey through often dark and impenetrable woods.

    Perhaps the day will come when darkness is banished and its hold removed for good.

  • Winter

    Winter

    Rumination, or call it reflection perhaps. Free of the destructive connotations of the former, the latter seems more wholesome. A liberating appraisal of a life lived less well than it could have been.

    If we led our lives again, how many things would we change. How much thoughtlessness would we leave to others, how many errors of omission would be reversed. And those many things which we ought not to have done, what a fine thing it would be to erase them as if they had never happened.

    Rumination we are told is a pointless pursuit, especially when its subject is something which we have no power to change. And yet, while it may be true that we are none of us given the power to rewrite the past, can it not be that salvation may be found in the present. Today we are given the chance to put right the mistakes of a less wise past.

    I do not believe that my core personality has changed over the past six decades. But in younger days some of us may be inclined to try and fit ourselves into round holes. Which is not at all wise for square pegs.

    Tolkein may have brought all this on. I found myself in the Shire recently. I seemed to join that party as it left Bag End and crossed fields and forests which I had last visited aged 11. I saw the trees in their green finery, I smelled the damp morning mists rising in the gentle sunlight from the grass. I stayed with Tom Bombadil and hid from the dread Black Riders.

    People talk of visions and lucid dreams. They happen.

    Childhood memories resurface later in life, it is said. I have found myself back again at glorious Christ Church Oxford more than once in recent weeks. And instead of carousing with owners of stately homes, I found myself singing in the cathedral choir at evensong. And mixing with quiet and bookish sorts. Eating dinner in the exquisite dining hall, rather than frequenting pointless and expensive dining clubs.

    Living in ancient libraries and listening to erudite lectures on topics as diverse as I could find. Music and art and learning. Not childish and indulgent debauchery.

    And commerce and money and power and ambition. Where and when did all that start I wonder. Certainly that 11 year old who read of Gandalf and Bilbo and Frodo was a stranger to all such base concepts.

    Songs of Innocence and Experience, wrote Blake. But does it have to be thus. Must childhood necessarily be corrupted. Do we have to grow up, or like JM Barrie’s hero, can we fly to Neverland and never return.

    Written a while ago, spring has mellowed these rather melancholy winter thoughts.

    Perhaps I will write of spring.

  • Gardening for the Soul

    Gardening for the Soul

    Recently, gardening has become more than a metaphor for me. I have followed Candide in a literal sense and found great peace in our garden.

    To quote W Beran Wolfe:

    If we want to know what happiness is we must seek it, not as if it were a part of gold at the end of the rainbow, but among human beings who are living richly and fully the good life. If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double Dahlias in his garden. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar gold button that has rolled under the cupboard in his bed room. He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living 24 crowded hours of the day.

    I first read Voltaire’s Candide when I was 16 and the final lines of the book made an immediate and lasting impression. Candide eventually settles upon devoting his life to simple work and not concerning himself with external affairs:

    Il faut cultiver notre jardin.

    Why I have never learned that lesson is quite beyond me, but I have always known its truth at a deep and instinctive level. Desire and worldliness have perhaps been the obstacles for me, and they remain formidable opponents.

    One morning I felt a need to bury myself, to soothe my mind in a simple physical task. My wife and I set about pruning the fruit trees in the garden and even as I climbed the ladder, I felt a sense of deep content slowly creeping over my mind.

    Contentment – a physical, bodily feeling or an emotion of the mind, a purely mental phenomena. Both; a quiet mind and a restful body combined for a glorious period when all seems right with the world.

    Pruning fruit trees is the very embodiment of oneness. Up in those branches, I felt little difference between myself and the tree. We co-existed as I gently snipped last year’s growth to help the tree produce next year’s fruit. It did not feel a destructive act, nor a selfish one – this ancient task flowed, quite naturally between myself and the tree. I felt a kinship, a closeness with an entity so very similar to myself. Two products of evolution in a symbiotic relationship.

    No need for complexity or deep thought. No noise, no machinery – I could have performed the task with a simple flint had I needed to.

    There was a simple, glorious, rhythmic flow. Mind and body and tree intertwined. Legs and arms and branches melded, two sentient entities in harmony. Two distant cousins, each from the same rootstock moving through the eternal harmony of the seasons. From the deep hibernation of winter to the rebirth of spring and the eventual fruits of Keat’s autumn.

    And then the cuttings and the bonfire. No harm to the tree, and so the quiet crackling and smoking of thin branches and last summer’s dried out leaves brought an added heightening of the senses. A visceral pleasure, a meandering of the mind, a meditation where both body and thought drifted in the gentle melancholy of a winter’s morning.

    Oneness. So often talked about, so rarely felt. But with what overwhelming pleasure when it happens. A spinning earth, a fiery sun, an infinite universe. A tiny garden with growing, spreading, evolving animals and plants. Water and birds. Spiders, moles, bugs. Earth.

    Earth and air, fire and water.

    Call it a morning of sudden and welcome revelation. A few hours of profound peace. A sense of gnosis. May there be ever more of such moments.