Weltanschaung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Tag: Experience

  • Unspoken, Unwritten, Unthought

    Unspoken, Unwritten, Unthought

    The happiest mind may be the empty mind. The mind of pure experience. Empty of thought but full of life itself.

    Perhaps an oak tree has such a mind, growing in silent nature in a forest far away from man. Perhaps the bird has it, circling with its wings above the forest.

    Man does not have an empty mind but he should seek one if he desires freedom and contentment. The mind of a happy child becomes sullied, trammeled with course habit as he enters an adult world where the mind becomes a tool to survive at all costs.

    The work of an adult seeking peace is to regain the purity of childhood, but better it by discarding the baser emotions which even a child must own to.

    The intellect does not give peace. Not unless it is largely used in the search for tranquility rather than the pursuit of possessions and status. The work of a scientist may well give insight into why base elements gave rise to our world and ourselves. A philosopher may ponder matters which science can not yet reach.

    And yet it is doubtful that such intellect can ever provide the thinker with unity with the world around him or a sense that all is well. With him or the world. To the contrary, he may see himself as separate and superior.

    How much less can the business man enjoy peace when his sole aim is competition. Not co-operation, but competition. To defeat his competitors. What a joyless goal. As with the politician, who in most cases seeks power and aggrandizement not peace for all and the common good.

    Consciousness is a great gift, some say, and yet used badly it can only be a cause of great suffering.

    If consciousness can be said to equate to the self then its absence is a greater joy than its presence. As so many have noted through the millennia, the ego is endlessly restive, endlessly acquisitive. Looking to the past with regret, worrying about the future.

    A man who recognizes the truth of this must seek for a way to navigate his life using his mind to achieve better balance with the universe, and integration rather than separation.

    Words that are spoken and give pain are words which should not have been uttered. It is better that thoughts remain unthought than that they lead to a life of unhappiness.

    In practical terms such realisations, if taken seriously, will lead inevitably to some measure of withdrawal from the world which most humans inhabit.

    The path of unthought leads away from factories and offices. Away from airports and motorways. From pollution and commuting. From pointless consumerism and the shackles of the mortgage and the credit card.

    How can humanity survive by inaction and unthought? How can man better himself by retaining an empty mind?

    It is a matter of degree and attitude. It is a matter of direction and intent.

    An empty mind need not always be devoid of thought but such thought should not be heavy with acquisitive intent. Such thought should focus on the beauty and sanctity of life. How to preserve our planet and our universe. How to provide for our modest needs without causing suffering, misery and despoilation.

    Such thoughts are likely to bring peace and calm purpose to the mind. A far cry from the usual reward of unfulfilled and insatiable desire.

    How such a mode of life may be practiced in the 21st century is probably not that much more of a conundrum than it would have been in any other era.

    The urban jungle is not so very different from any setting in man’s history. The same problems have always been there. The same problems remain.

    The provision of food and shelter, the need for survival.

    Not easy tasks for the man determined to banish thought. And yet harmful thought can be minimised and much thought switched off completely.

    On a personal basis it is open to us to opt for a quieter life.

    There are those who say that silence is to be found in among great confusion and noise. That it is mind over matter. Maybe so and all the better for that. All the easier for a man who can retain his soul in the midst of the chaos of modern life.

    However it is to be achieved, the man who can leave most matters unspoken, unwritten and unthought is likely to sail on calm waters.

    The answer must surely be to practice emptiness wherever and whenever we can. And to switch on our powers of thought only when strictly necessary to provide ourselves with what we need to survive.

    To restrict ourselves to producing only what is essential and not what we think we want. To forget about keeping up with our neighbor. To ditch snobbery and recognize that while we may appear better off in some fashion than our neighbor, the reality is that we are the same set of elements from the periodic table.

    To understand that if we ditched all pretension and wasteful consumerism, if we and lived a quieter and simpler life we would make a better world.

    It can only be achieved person by person. If ever.

    But the rewards to the individual are substantial even if society at large continues in its well trodden path.

  • William Blake – The Lamb and The Tyger

    William Blake – The Lamb and The Tyger

    The Lamb and the Tyger. Songs of Innocence and Experience

    I decided to read and record two poems from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. I chose the Lamb from the Songs of Innocence and its counterpart the Tyger from the Songs of Experience.

    I have enjoyed Blake for many years, although perhaps “been fascinated by” might be more accurate. I have never been altogether too sure whether Blake is to be enjoyed or endured. A man of often terrifying vision.

    I have given a little of my own interpretation of these contrasting poems, and I hope that this causes no difficulty, neither upsets others’ notions of what these works signify. My interpretation is, needless to say, my own.

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  • The Limits of Reasoning

    The Limits of Reasoning

    “What Am I” is the most important question we can ask and yet the answer may have to be discovered not by reasoning but by experience.

    I was thumbing through back issues of John’s Consciousness, struck by his often beautiful reflections on existence. They seem to have taken a rather melancholy turn of late and I was reminded of Tennyson’s poem “Crossing the Bar” by his most recent post The Fading of The Light.

    “Professional” philosophy is so often full of pompous and jargon filled junk.  As John pointed out, philosophy steps in where science is unable to tread and hence need not be dominated by those who make a living from it. You, me, any of us are as likely to come up with a plausible answer to the question “Why” as the most earnest professional bore.  And indeed we should do just that – there are few if any answers or facts provided by science as to where we come from or why we exist, so we are all as qualified to speculate as the most prominent physicist.  And probably better qualified than the armchair pseuds who talk in riddles and get paid for it.

    It seems to me that we may be stuck, metaphorically speaking, inside a fish bowl.  Even the brightest fish with the most advanced consciousness would have difficulty in conceiving what life on dry land is like (the “experience” of life on dry land) since he is unable to visit it. We by contrast, while not amphibian, are nonetheless able to conceive in our imaginations what life as a fish might be like since we can splash around in the sea. We can put on breathing equipment, we can descend to the depths, we can embrace the silence and the currents. We can swim with the fish.

    And so it is with consciousness.  We are stuck within our own brains, we can see only what our sensory equipment will let us see. What our limited brains let us imagine.

    Take the concept of dimensions in space and time.  Is it string theory which tells us there may be eleven dimensions and not the four we are used to?  Our brains have difficulty in letting us sense the meaning of eleven dimensions. From our four dimensional fish bowl we do not have the experience or indeed the equipment to visualize or fully engage in the experience of eleven dimensions.

    I have always yearned for a sense of transcendence.  I have always wanted it described to me, or,  better to experience it.  To some extent we have all glimpsed it. It can sometimes be felt in the gaps; in silence, in beauty. In peace.

    Certainly that is why I have always been so engaged with the more intelligent examples of science fiction and faerie stories.

    Where exactly do the civilizations of Iain M Banks sublime to? What do they sublime to? What was Tom Bombadil or Gandalf and where did their powers come from?

    Banks and Tolkien describe places and states we would like to enter. And of course so do the truly awful and destructive religions of the world.  I suppose you have to give some understanding to the religious nutters who commit foul atrocities  – but quite why they think they will be rewarded for so doing by houris and paradise is beyond me.  But the motive is perhaps the same – the seeking of transcendence.  Transcendence through murder and unspeakable cruelty in the service of a monstrous and non existent deity.

    I can not rationally envisage infinity. I can not reason my way around the concept of what is out there from my absurdly small mole hill by the sea side on a crumbling planet in a wispy spiral of the Milky Way.

    Perhaps therefor there is something to be said for expanding our consciousness in the way generations of mystics have done for countless aeons.  We are told that the Buddha achieved enlightenment and omniscience through meditation. Christian nutcases seem to have achieved the same through starvation, isolation and general physical misery.  Although given that they came up with very different interpretations of reality, one side must have got it wrong.

    Where does that leave the modern seeker? How best should we peer through the doors of perception?

    For those of us with enough patience and time perhaps meditation is the answer. It seems to have done the trick for tubby old Siddhartha.  Better his route than that of the miserable followers of the one god. I never did go for flagellation and misery.

    Or perhaps the answers lie in psychoactive drugs. Whoever wrote Revelations had to have been high on something. Mind you, if ever there was an accurate definition of a “bad trip”, there you have it.

    Joking aside, truth may well be found in getting “out of our skulls”.  By altering our minds we may perhaps be able to break out of the fishbowl. To live in the 11th Dimension. I really don’t see any other way.

     

  • Supermarket Phobia

    Supermarket Phobia

    While the modern shopping experience ranks low on my list of existential anxieties, it nonetheless merits mention as one of life’s minor annoyances.

    A visit to discount supermarket Lidl today reminded me how glad I am to have a wife who appears only too willing (and indeed able) to cope with such an ordeal.

    Was it the fact I could not find a one pound coin for the shopping trolley which put me off balance?

    Possibly, and the alternative was a sort of rubber bumper car affair which apparently didn’t require renting. It was free it seemed.

    But my troubles had begun long before that. I’m on my own in the country and things were getting desperate or I would never have been stupid enough to venture out to the shops. The cupboard was bare and help was far off – the capable part of this marriage doesn’t arrive until Friday.

    I might have managed if I had gone “down Deal” and visited a more traditional grocer, baker and dairy. But (equally scary) I had to visit B&Q at an out of town business park in a windswept corner of the county, perching by a motorway somewhere near Dover.

    B&Q was scary enough. But it had staff! Yes, real people I could talk to, communicate with, pass the time of day.  A jolly little soul kindly pointed me to the bubblewrap counter which had eluded me for half an hour and all was well.  So only half an hour wasted so far.

    The trouble started when I headed for Tesco and bumped into a road closed sign. With some relief I patted myself on the back and headed into somewhere called Lidl.  I was vaguely aware of having been dragged round a Lidl in southern Spain.  Anyway, I’m sure I would have found Tescos equally distressing.

    All seemed to be going vaguely well until I wanted long life milk. I even managed to weigh out some loose tomatoes, not a task I manage with any degree of fluidity at the best of times.

    Anyway, I dragged the rubber bumper car endlessly round the aisles looking for milk. None to be found and no-one to help. Apparently having no staff keeps costs down and food prices low. All well and good for a gladiator like my wife. My god can she wheel a shopping trolley!

    The task was beyond me. They may have had the item, perhaps not. I shall never know. I shall never willingly return to the scene of my humiliation.

    As usual my distress increased when yet again I failed to manage the automated checkout. Alarm bells rang and from somewhere deep in the bowels of the ship an employee appeared and rescued me. Never have I managed, not once, not in any shop, an automated checkout. Some things in life just elude me.

    Having scaled what I took to be the penultimate peek I sheepishly trundled off with the rubber bumper car shopping trolley thingy. I was almost there. The humiliating and deeply perplexing experience was about to end.

    Little did I know the rubber bumper car trolley thing wasn’t allowed in the car-park. Wasn’t allowed outside the shop. Well why would I know?

    Shamefaced, I waited for a shifty lad to appear from some underground cavern and explain to me my unwitting error.

    A shopping trip which would have taken a seasoned pro like my wife half an hour took me over two.

    Apparently there are clinics which can help people like me.

  • A Time to Live

    A Time to Live

    There comes a time when you have had enough of “learning” and feel a deep need for “experience”.

    I seem to have dipped my toes into every exotic corner of human endeavor over the decades and probably have a pretty good feel for what is out there.

    “Out there” in the sense of human learning, intellect, endeavor.  Philosophy, psychology, religion, physics.  Biology, chemistry, law and finance. Computers and artificial intelligence. The vastness of human knowledge in the 21st Century means that we can only have a glancing appreciation of each such subject, nonetheless this enough to make us aware, to know that others know.  Even if our own knowledge of other’s specializations can only be skin deep.

    I have not needed to know where every sparrow fell.  But I have needed to know what we know; in general terms.

    I now feel a deep need to know what we do not know. We are like goldfish in a bowl: our limited senses and intellect must surely shield us from much of what is truly out there in reality. If there is such a thing as reality. If reality is not created by our own thoughts.

    My mind is choc a bloc with everything from the nature of time to magic mushrooms. From my conviction in the futility of conventional religion to my faltering attempts to code machine learning algorithms.

    A time comes perhaps when you should turn to the experiential and leave, for a while at least, the intellectual.

    If the adult brain has plasticity, then I want proof.  I can write without effort and so I will carry on. But with an obsessive mind unable to multitask, further intellectual research has to be dropped while I find out for myself whether I can “change my mind”.

    Recently for instance I have been “experiencing” art without thinking about it.  Sitting in front of the London Mustaba or Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast to see what they have to say to me, while taking care not to dig to deep into what such works say to others. Not to dig, as I am won’t, into the intellectual; to eschew the learned historians of art in favor of my own raw feelings.

    It is time to “feel” the universe for myself. To cease to see it through the words of others and to experience it directly.

  • The Doors of Perception

    The Doors of Perception

    If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.

    William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

    Is it so strange that a deep interest in science should be combined with an equally deep desire for mysticism and transcendance?

    I think not; the two can be seen as two sides of the same coin.  Reality seen both from the intellect and from the senses. A yearning for transcendance.  Some would say a desire to escape from the base reality.   Which is all that is accessible to most of us in a “normal” state of mind.

    Both science and mysticism offer us infinity. Infinite space and power. Infinite universes and time. Teleportation, downloading the mind into another form of matter, eternal life, time travel. Science is not ashamed to speculate on such matters. To an ancient people, we would appear as gods. In the far future, or in a distant corner of the multiverse, there exists intelligence with powers which even we would consider godlike.

    The mind allows us to travel to such places and such times. To witness infinity,  to feel the mind of “god”.

    These days, few rational men believe in traditional religious systems.  And yet through the ages the mystics have had glimpses of some alternate truth, some reality which in our ordinary minds is denied to us.

    Science struggles to explain consciousness and yet some scientists tell us that consciousness is a law of nature all of its own. That consciousness “is”.

    Not that consciousness is an emergent property of physical elements.  But that consciousness is a law of physics itself.  Universal consciousness, consciousness as the very “self” of the universe.

    So listen to how the mystics describe their experiences.

    Meister Eckhart:

    “To the quiet mind all things are possible. What is a quiet mind? A quiet mind is one which nothing weighs on, nothing worries, which, free from ties and from all self-seeking, is wholly merged into the will of God and dead to its own.”

    Alan Watts:

    “What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.”

    Siddhartha:

    “The mind is everything. What you think you become.”

    Both science and contemplation seek knowledge.  Self knowledge, truths, the “truth”.

    Science uses instruments and machinery and conducts experiments. Science seeks truth through the intellect.

    The quiet mind seeks experience directly.  To feel the truth, to experience it.

    Neither should be disparaged. Both should be embraced. Neither is complete without the other.