Weltanschaung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Tag: Enlightenment

  • A Meditative Road to Enlightenment

    A Meditative Road to Enlightenment

    Is it too immodest to suggest that one may have found a path?

    Before I write so much as another word, I must repeat my by now familiar and much used disclaimer. I make no claim to goodness, I am merely a traveller who seems to be making some progress along a much desired road.

    It is hard to fathom what set me on my way. Have I always been mercurial and if so is it the often black side of my moods which made me take my first steps? Have I always sought an escape from a world which seemed (and still at times seems) overwhelming, hostile and incomprehensible?

    I don’t know. All I know is that however the urge arose, I have spent my life seeking something other than what my normal senses tell me is out there, and hence the long journey through religion, philosophy and science to find answers.

    And now at last to committed, regular and serious meditation.

    I can not and will not claim that meditation has provided me with unassailable “truth”, however much it can feel that way in the depths of trance. I am unable to tell you whether there is or is not a god or gods, or when the universe began or will end. I can provide you with no definitive answers on the nature of mind or the existence or otherwise of free will. I can not tell you whether we live in a clockwork universe or whether randomness and uncertainty provide just enough room for a future to be unknown rather than determined.

    Nor can I tell you that meditation is a definitive and certain cure for the melancholy which affects so many millions of people living out their short and small lives on this mysterious little planet.

    What I can tell you, with no trace of hyperbole or exaggeration, is that meditation is a useful and perhaps essential tool for anyone seeking wisdom, a better life. For someone who recognises that while the answers may not all be readily apparent and may never be, quiet contemplation gets you as far as it is possible to go. In terms of balancing your life and finding deeper meaning in a physical universe.

    If it does not make you “good” it does at least encourage you to become “better”.

    And what, for me, does the word “enlightenment” suggest? What do I look for in my search for enlightenment and am I getting there?

    While I would like to see a greater non-physical reality, a godlike power for the good, I have more often seen a vision of what physical reality could look like in the here and now, if we chose to make it so. Equality for all life, an end to poverty, greed and violence. Co-operation, decency, sharing. Care for the planet and its flora and fauna, an end to the virus of human expansion. A focus on happiness rather than the eternal search for more.

    And what of the non material? What of the search for divine revelation, nirvana, moksha, call it what you will. It is there, of that I have no doubt. What it is, I can only speculate, guess, intuit. A vastly expanded consciousness of a type we can only now dimly envisage. Good, bad or indifferent? Perhaps those terms cease to have meaning at that stage; I wonder.

    And practically speaking? How does such a search manifest itself? What do you actually do on a day to day basis in an attempt to ban ignorance and self and let in wisdom and the Good?

    If I led my life again it would be as a full time secular monk, holed up somewhere remote. Living simply and spending my life in reflection.

    And in retirement (when I can tear myself away from my absurd algorithms) that is how I try to lead my life in the here and now.

    My meditation has progressed, developed. Some might call it obsession but more accurately it has become a daily necessity, something I am unable, and certainly unwilling, to do without.

    Each morning I devote two hours to my practice. Mornings seem far the best time for me, since later in the day I tend to drift off in sleep. In the mornings I soon find myself in a cloud of unknowing. A place of fecund emptiness and complete peace. What do I see, what do I feel at such times? Difficult to express really but most days simply good things. Feelings. No particular rhyme or reason, no pattern of thought, simply a contended emptiness where all seems well. And mostly continues to seem well for the rest of the day.

    And then some physical exercise which continues and increases those feelings. And some gentle tinkering at the piano on most days. A few simple classical pieces, the beauty of Bach or Handel or Chopin.

    And that is my life – would that it had always been that way, but better late than never. Always time to turn the page, abandon foolish ways and prejudice.

    And the end? Well it is nigh, of course. But it holds no terror. Hieronymus Bosch was wrong, Dante Alighieri misguided. I do not dream as Gerontius or dread what is to come. A re-absorption in some greater consciousness perhaps or maybe a simple ceasing to be.

    But here and now I determine to live better, to be better and to let what may come arrive in its own good time.

    Illustration: Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose by John Singer Sargent

  • Enlightenment

    Enlightenment

    What is this fabled state of being he wondered. After many years of contemplation, he thought perhaps he might know.

    Is it black or white, true or false, binary or analogue? Wholly on, or altogether off? Or can one claim partial enlightenment, that one has gone some of the way?

    What bold and dramatic claims surround this condition. There was an Age of Enlightenment we are told, but our current age is apparently not so blessed. Saints, gurus and mystics untold are described, or worse, far worse, describe themselves as enlightened. What, one might enquire, is meant by so bold a claim.

    Is light a metaphor? Or do photons thrown out by a raging inferno in distant space have some real part to play in this curious state of being.

    Both perhaps. There are no absolutes it this curious universe, despite the physicists’ assurance that mere matter is all. .

    Enlightenment, he was convinced, was a complex and continuing process, not a blinding flash.

    Perhaps there were those who had sat upon a pinnacle of rock or underneath a tree, in ages gone by, and achieved in some brief instant of time a transformation so absolute that their very nature switched immediately from dark to light. From apathetic banality to saintliness. From a state of ignorance to blissful awareness.

    But somehow he doubted it.

    His own internal landscape veered towards the binary. Periods of intense dark would be succeeded by times when the light of the sun would reappear and pessimism would be replaced, if not by outright optimism, then at least by the conviction that somewhere, not so very far away, lay uplands which basked forever in light. Where a soft wind and gentle luminosity played gently upon alpine meadow and the dizzy white height of towering mountains rose towards a sky forever blue and kindly.

    And yet change had happened, although his metamorphosis had been halting and sporadic, spread over many decades. Slowly still, but with some faint hint of acceleration, pieces of the puzzle appeared to be drifting almost imperceptibly into their designated place.

    Mystery remained – perhaps it always would and yet a clarity began to materialize.

    He had no problem with seeking to improve human life (although it had to be said that these efforts, in his case, had ever been more by thought than by action), but would prefer to seek the betterment of sentient species in general.

    The very search for enlightenment greatly “improves” human life although that is not perhaps the object of mysticism but a side effect.

    He came to believe that gnosis can come by incremental steps and as a result of one’s own efforts. Or at least that had been, and continues to be, his own experience. It had also been his circumstance, that while his inner search had improved his worldly “behavior” it had not (thankfully, perhaps, following St Augustine’s plea) made him any kind of “saint”. Whatever that word is taken to mean.

    And so he had come to a gentle and perhaps slightly melancholic acceptance of life and the way he believed the universe to be. Perhaps his worldview was best reflected by the Book of Ecclesiastes, or the Tao te Ching.

    In any event, meditation and many years of searching lead him (in his more placid moods) to a serene understanding of the way life “is”.

    While wishing for change, he suspected it would occur not through mere human will or in accordance with any individual effort.

    But over eons of time and in accordance with the unseen patterns of the universe itself.

    In which he found his own conception of “god”. And thus, at times, a sense of profound peace.

  • A Funny Old Monk

    A Funny Old Monk

    My 26 year old son is clearly a perceptive fellow and he hit the nail on the head when describing his father as “a funny old monk”.

    I have been monkish since childhood but my journey really began after spitting out convention 30 years ago and disappearing into a black hole.

    Wandering lost over the past 30 years, I began my explorations by reading the mystics. William James was a profound influence as was Evelyn Underhill. Followed by so many others.

    I have not read any of that stuff in more recent years. I have lived by experience more than words. Years living in the mountains of Switzerland and on the bleak beaches of Northern France. Snowboarding and skiing and long, long wild walks in the wind and the elements. Practicing everything I could usefully lay my hands on from hypnosis to meditation, from music to strenuous physical exercise.

    Days spent in contemplation in the churches of renaissance Venice and elsewhere. An endless search for the divine, for meaning in a storm of deafening and meaningless noise. Years spent wearing the dark lens of pessimism, despite the beauty all around me.

    But today I was struck in the deepest and most profound manner by a post on Mystical Experiences of Reality by my friend Keith Hancock.

    He referred to a paper called “Spirituality and the Transformation of Consciousness” by Merv Dickinson.

    Just reading the paper was enough to give me the sort of experience described as “peak” by Abraham Maslow. I recognized each and every word in that paper. Mr Dickinson could have written it just for me.

    I will leave you to read the paper for yourselves should you so choose, but it was startling to see my own life over the past 30 years described with such unerring accuracy.

    Let me make one thing clear: I do not confuse my journey in any sense with a descent into “goodness”. Or, worse, an ascent. I have never had any desire to be Mother Teresa, since, firstly I have never much fancied a sex change and secondly I just don’t believe the world works in that way. I’m sure the old biddy did a splendid job with the needy in Calcutta and that her canonization was richly deserved. But no amount of Mother Teresa clones will make much difference to an unenlightened world. Or to the world’s poor and needy.

    What I believe will (or would) make a difference is a shift in perception. A radical and widespread alteration of consciousness.

    Dickinson puts it this way. Consciousness has two orthogonal planes: run of the mill “anthill” consciousness which we all develop during childhood and adolescence and then the sort of gnosis one perceives during those moments of enlightenment, when the nature of reality seems to become clear to us.

    If we are lucky, we may get occasional glimpses through the veil. As we progress in life, some of us who are seeking an altered perception find we are granted increasing access to that other way of being. We begin to feel we are living at an intersection between the two modes of consciousness and it becomes easier to look upon the world and its ways in a kinder and more benign fashion.

    It also becomes far easier to be kind to ourselves as we increasingly feel that we have discovered the way. That we no longer need to ask the “Questions”. The black lens of pessimism is replaced by an altogether rosier and more optimistic hue.

    Because, it really is a kind of blindness the way some of us are forced to live. Throughout much of the history of this blog I have taken a rather despairing view of the human ant heap, but I see now that any condemnation of our behavior was naive and wrong.

    We can’t help it – it just “is”. Mostly, we can not see beyond the day to day struggle for existence. We behave the way we do through knowing no better. We evolved to survive and that is what ordinary consciousness teaches us to do, come what may. So that most of us are determined to “climb the greasy pole” at any cost, as Benjamin Disraeli so aptly put it when he was elected as Prime Minister.

    Those who are granted a glimpse through the curtain to a different reality can see that it need not be always thus. But that until the majority of us can see that different reality, no amount of Mother Teresa lookalikes will manage to turn this place into a heaven on earth. My hope is that day may arrive.

    Looking back to the beginning of my long, long journey I can see that I was a man in a hurry. Reality was not to be served up on a dinner plate. Not to me at any rate, although I was always puzzled that it happened that way to some. My friend Keith for instance with his spontaneous revelations. And those who received sudden conversion on the road to Damascus or elsewhere. After considering a koan or two perhaps.

    No amount of reading, none of my practices really achieved very much over the years. Partly perhaps because I was still consumed by the pursuit of wealth. My climb up the greasy pole.

    Very recently the scales seemed to fall from my eyes much more regularly. It has been rather like an ascent through the Stygian gloom of heavy cloud cover into glorious clear blue skies and sunlight. Carried there by my own wings rather than the metal sarcophagus of modern air travel.

    I think it has been partly because I have given in, or given up perhaps. I think the endless isolation has undoubtedly helped, intensified as it has been this year. The atmosphere of apocalypse has been cathartic and educational.

    I am increasingly inclined to let go. And I am increasingly able to do just that. I am more often to be found at that crossroad, that junction between the two orthogonal modes of being.

    It is a comfortable place to be. I think I will remain there.

    Oh and by the way, I’m the weird old chap on the left. The equally weird nutter on the right was someone we met at the Norman keep in Dover one day. Claimed he lived there and that the date was sometime in 1100. My son found it hard to tell the difference between us.

  • Travel Broadens the Mind

    Travel Broadens the Mind

    A day in Rye in East Sussex does not sound every-man’s idea of excitement but it is change which is important to the psyche, not distance traveled.

    Sameness can be a deadening influence in life, even if your days and the place you live happen to be pleasing.

    Its always a tough call these days to get up and go, even if the destination is only an hour or so away. But the very making of the effort is in itself a novelty and thus beneficial. New roads, new vistas. New pubs and churches and coffee shops.

    Not for me now, day long hikes in the mountains; or not very often anyway. But pleasure can just as easily be found on your own door step, without having to brave sniffer dogs and gender neutral concentration camp guards at what pass as airports.

    As my son would say “CBA”. For those unfamiliar with the language of modern English youth, the acronym translates as “Can’t Be Arsed”. CBA to travel that is.

    A chum invited me to go to the Caribbean recently, to the island of Bequia. Nice as it looked, the prospect became less inviting when I realized the length of the flight to Bermuda. Even less enticing was the additional short leg to Bequia. Probably much like travel in China 30 years ago, where your companions tended to be chickens and other livestock. I wonder if it is still like that on the short hop up to Canton? Or whatever they call the place these days.

    In any event, real travel is just too utterly uncivilized for me, now that I have become a grumpy old man, broadening though I am sure it still is.

    So I have become less adventurous and Rye seemed enough of a slog this cold and sunny winter’s day.

    The effort was worth it though. The fine English church was just that – fine and English, with stained glass by Burne-Jones and Benson. A good organist to boot it seems, though I could find no opinion on the choir.

    In the right mood these glorious old streets can soothe, elevate. What is it about the past that is so attractive to the imagination?

    Certainty I suspect. I would disagree with LP Hartly – it is the future not the past which is a foreign country. It is in the future where people do things differently; in those old cobbled streets they have done their bit and so far as we know, the past is immutable.

    Perhaps a comfort in antiquity is all part of the human quest for permanence in a universe where the only constant is change. The certainty is illusory of course, but part of the solace of visiting the ancient, is the pretense that it is not. The mental sleight of mind which allows us to deceive ourselves that all was and is right in this ancient town and that here safety is to be found. Refuge from the buzzing world of real people and all their fierce and urgent emotions.

    I try these days to let go. Let go of annoyance, anger, ambition even. And the trip was interesting in that respect also. The journey was, to be frank, frightful. As is usual with GPS, we were taken on an eccentric and curious route. Down narrow country lanes fit for donkeys but where, nonetheless, The Man in the White Porsche still presumes to strut his stuff. The Man in the White Van also. And the Travelling Salesman and the Mother in a Hurry.

    What I noticed, by and large, was anger, arrogance, impatience and aggression. All of which I let pass.

    It’s odd when you decide to let the world pass you by. Curiously therapeutic but hard to believe that that was once you. The impatient and mindless younger man, convinced that the road was his and everything that therein is.

    Is it part of enlightenment perhaps? The once important becomes absurdly irrelevant to you once you see through the veil of the blinkered lives that we have condemned ourselves to live.

    Hence all the greater my joy in meeting the Contented Craftsman – who by his own admission has only just realized that Queen Victoria is no longer on the throne.