Weltanschaung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Tag: Faith

  • 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.

  • Transcendence

    Transcendence

    In the middle of the night I drift back to the simplicity of my childhood faith.  The Saxon church where we sang the Psalms of David, the kind old schoolmaster who listened to our readings of those wonderful old books of the new and old testaments.

    I seek the divine and it finds me in the dark hours before dawn. In peace and darkness, when no bird sings and no human yet sullies the new day.

    Are these moments when I find myself on the road to Damascus, or have I never left it.

    Our world seems increasingly without a soul and as traditional faith falls off into the abyss, it is hard to find anything to replace it.

    Many won’t see the necessity, most will be blinded by the glitz of social media, the bragging hype of the AI barons, the never ending push for more of the material in a world which seems to encompass only the physical.

    But equally I suspect most, even if only at some deep subliminal level, will feel a chill emptiness and long for more. Purpose, meaning, a worthwhile goal. Happiness, goodness, joy.

    Transcendence is to be found, it is not a mirage. Peace is to be uncovered here on earth, not just in a possibly mythical afterlife.

    God is to be encountered, anywhere and everywhere. If you look hard enough and broadly. If you realise that god is not to be contained, defined. Not to be found in a book or a building. Not even in a piece of ethereal music.

    The Buddhist in his Himalayan cave, the Dervish in his ecstatic dance. The monk in his Zen garden, the Sikh, the Zoroastrian, the simple gardener, the ploughman – each and everyone can see through the mist which separates us from meaning and happiness. The dark and often seemingly impenetrable curtain which hides from us a greater and better reality beyond.

    For some, the divine is not supernatural, not an entity or person separate from what is to be seen all around us. For some god is moksha or nirvana – a state of mind, a way of being.

    A mysticism, certainly  but one which is obtainable in the here and now, and for every one of us.

    The doors of perception are not hard to find, if you keep looking. If you practice hard enough. If you drop pretension and vanity and see yourself and the world for what it is rather than what we have always assumed it to be.

    The good books of religion are pointers, a valuable starting place. We would be a poorer species without them. Most describe the first supreme necessity to climb out of the pit of darkness: decency and right thinking. Right behaviour. Right actions. Such simple stuff and yet so hard to achieve, it seems. And yet how can we hope to find peace in ourselves, transcendence from the terrors and miseries which have always seemed germain to earthly existence, unless we first embrace peace towards others.

    Nothing supernatural there. Nothing our pure materialist could quarrel with.

    And then right livelihood. We don’t all have to be priests. There is goodness and decency in baking, in driving taxis or delivery vans. Even bankers and lawyers are under no obligation to be evil.

    The problem of course is the love of money. Or more accurately the worship of the material over what could loosely be described as the spiritual. A word I have never been comfortable with, but which seems to get me where I need to go.

    Cooperation and decency – replace competition with sharing and helping and caring. What a ghastly word, caring. And yet once again, it gets me where I want to go.

    If we put away tooth and claw and build a society where no-one is in fear of homelessness and hunger and poverty, we would all be on the path to transcendence.

    Perhaps it will happen, perhaps it won’t, but I am in no doubt it is the right path.

    And so a better society, a kinder one has to be the first step. And it will not be handed down to us on tablets of stone.

    If he did rise on the third day, he never came back to finish the job. And so that is something we must do for ourselves.

    I have never sought god in a conventional setting. I have never sought a conventional god. If it is there, it is within us, all of us. If it is there, it is. If it is there everyone and everything make up it’s parts from electromagnetism to the very particles we are made of.

    For me, god is a state of mind. A determination to do better, to be better. To leave behind a way of life found unsatisfactory and to move to one based on a better premise.

    State of mind, a very serious proposition. Not something to be taken lightly, dismissed.

    Endless thought and still, quiet meditation change the mind. Change the state of mind. From a state of ignorance greater wisdom can emerge. And change your life.

    Perhaps that is why the Buddha’s were said to come back, to teach, to show the way. From the mere beast to a form of consciousness better able to rise over what can come to seem a base mundanity. Or indeed what is a base mundanity – endless violence, endless self interest.

    Through silent contemplation another reality seems to emerge and a peace begins to settle. Away from the ten thousand things, a transcendence beckons, a better way to be.  To glimpse it reveals another dimension. One of mind. Not a separate reality but a way to see this reality in all its glory and to be happy with it.

    Perhaps some day everyone will see it. Perhaps some day, in some sense, the promise of so many religions will come to be.  In the meantime, an inner peace can be found. Perhaps it can spread.

  • Dune!

    Dune!

    Another day another messiah. Another day another superhero. Superheroes are a consistent feature of the human imagination, human need, human longing.

    Back in the second century AD the inflated claims of Christianity, as we know it today from the canonical version of the Bible, had not become established.

    Jesus as a superhero was by no means fixed in character or powers in those days.

    In the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a child disperses water that Jesus has collected. Jesus kills this child. At age one he curses another boy, which causes the child’s body to wither into a corpse.

    In other “gnostic gospels”, Jesus has somebody else crucified in his stead, impregnates the “virgin” Mary, and sells his own twin into slavery.

    Two thousand years ago, man had not invented science fiction. At that date man thought space was a physical canopy above the earth, and so early Superhero authors had to set their tall stories on the earth, since the earth was all they knew.

    Why do you like Dune, why did Herbert concoct the story, why were the books and films so successful?

    The subconscious is a strange thing – perhaps you too have a desire for “super-heroism” to be true. Even if not, many of us clearly find something about Dune amuses us, attracts us, interests us. 

    And so now to “truth”. Eventually, the early Christian Church bigots kicked out all the inconvenient gospels and said the only true version of their super-hero Jesus “Christ” was contained in what we now call the Bible. In that version JC is a real good guy and certainly did not impregnate his own mother or kill others out of sheer spite or anger.

    Do superheroes “really” exist? The Church believes so. Others may take a more balanced view: no, I do not believe that JC or any other superhero exists or ever has existed.

    But our longing for something beyond the physical world we can prod and measure does have some justification in reality. In the sense I have so often spoken about. That the world is far more mysterious than we pygmies can yet imagine and that while there may be no “god” as such, perhaps we have the power to become “godlike”. There certainly seems to be godlike power out there somewhere. To me at least.

    That has always been my take on the matter.

    And Dune? What is it? On one level it is simply a fun story, an amusement. On another level it takes on a very much more significant shape which can sometimes have very severe consequences. ”Good” ideas, like communism have a plethora of Superheroes but usually have horrendous consequences. The communist Superheroes far outdid the Nazis in terms of mass slaughter. The desire for a Superhero was of course also cruelly exploited by the Nazis who seemed to offer a paradise, a way out for a Germany impoverished by Versailles, Weimar and hyper inflation. Hitler and his cronies were worshipped before it all went disastrously wrong.

    Christians twisted a good folk tale into what has often been an instrument of hideous cruelty and murder, and so have other religions which shall remain nameless. Lest I receive a bomb through my letter box or have my head cut off by an insane extremist. Lest I receive a police visit for hatred or prejudice of some sort or another against what is fast becoming an unassailable orthodoxy.

    So Dune and stories like it point out tantalising images of possible, imaginary utopias. Which we have always sought.

    If I wax lyrical as usual, you will understand that this is a topic of great interest to me. Since I believe the issues go far far wider than one story, one book, one attempt to explain our world and to explore possibly better places or incarnations.

  • Puzzle’s Stable

    Puzzle’s Stable

    We live in Puzzle’s Stable and regardless of what we are told or read or experience, we can not recognize the paradise which surrounds us. Or did, once upon a time.

    We have plundered and ravaged the planet we live on. We have cut down the forests and plants we need to produce the very air we breathe. We have decimated most of the species which once roamed the earth, and we treat the meek of our own kind as fodder for our canons forcing them into killing fields at worst , and at best force feeding them worthless goods at inflated prices. Regardless of the fact that this same consumer worked, often for a pittance, to produce those same objects of useless vanity.

    We have covered the planet with brute ugliness, we have poisoned its skies and its waters with deadly chemicals and industrial rubble. We have created weapons capable of destroying worlds and we use them with glee.

    If we treat our home and its fauna and flora in this way, we reserve worse for our own kind. Those who have tooth and nail slash and burn their way to the top and kill and maim to remain there. Such people seize the planet’s resources, relegating the rest of us to impoverished peasants with no land of our own to feed off.

    Such people force us to fight their battles to our own death. In the name of greed and power and lust. The plutocracy build temples to their own glory, they buy super yachts and private jets. Their friend the tyrant does the same through different means with the same end result. The church of technocracy has come to replace the robber barons. They pretend to be saving the world with robots and AI and phallic moon rockets, but they are the mere successors to the same violent thugs who came before them.

    So what of Puzzle’s Stable?

    The dwarves sat in darkness, they could not see the light. They sat in paradise but could smell only the ordure of a stable, they could taste only straw. They were greedy, stupid, arrogant, selfish, cruel, disloyal. The dwarves are for the dwarves. Their world had an infinitely benign creator, but it was beyond even his power to make them see the wonderful place they had arrived at as it really was.

    And so it is with our world, whether you believe in a creator or not. We have taken paradise and created Gehenna.

    I have spoken much recently of “revelation”. I am embarrassed to use the word in some contexts, much as I am loathe to speak of love. And yet there are senses in which it can be employed so as to give no offence to today’s Church of Science, to today’s believers in a sad physicalist universe.

    For those who do not choose to believe in anything they can not prod or measure or melt in a crucible, it may be defined as “something revealed or disclosed, especially a striking disclosure, as of something not before realized”. Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Einstein had such revelations. As have so many other men in white coats, or outfits more suited to their era.

    To those who may feel that reality comprises something greater than mere matter or energy, revelation may serve the same purpose but the “revealing” may be disclosed elsewhere than in a laboratory or a particle accelerator.

    A friend asked me the other day why I always express doubt. Have I seen reality or not? Has revelation convinced me that something or someone is out there, beyond the fields of force which we are told builds our world?

    I answered that I express doubt for different reasons but that in fact I felt none. Doubt makes me sound less eccentric, less a part of the awful pattern of religion which has and continues to cause such dreadful carnage in our world.

    I feel and have always felt drawn to what some would consider the divine.  Although I prefer to use the term loosely.  Non materialistic causation of some sort. A force or power behind all that we see with agency of its own.

    From childhood I have worshipped the god of Narnia. In adulthood I have included other interpretations, representations of the divine.

    All this I have documented elsewhere on these interminable pages.

    Throughout my life I have sought divine agency, evidence of it. Of a reality other than what we see in our day to day existence.

    I have been at home only in mystery, in the must of ancient churches, in the hypnotic music of chant.

    And so yes, I do believe,  I have no doubt that reality is assuredly not just quarks and photons, weak and strong nuclear or electro magnetic forces.

    And it has come to the point that I couldn’t give a damn what people think of me or my eccentricity. And so I will be unequivocal.

    I feel and see things which others of a more prosaic mindset do not.  I have always had that shiver running up my spine when I listen to Mozart’s Vespers or stare at Poussin or Giotto. When I see a kite wheel in a leaden sky or watch an Atlantic wave crash mercilessly on a remote rocky beach.

    Beauty is real and can not be explained by mathematics or placed over a Bunsen Burner. Well, unless you are a Jesuit and consider witches deserve it.

    I have never felt such a very strong pull until quite recently.  It has become almost overwhelming. Age perhaps, a step further towards death and the ultimate truth have hastened my quest.

    In any event I refuse to apologise for it and am perfectly happy with what daily and deep internal searching is telling me.

    Just as muscle gains strength with use, so it seems with contemplation. 

    When I began this post I became waylaid in a sadness for this world I thought I had contained.  What use are such tirades again injustice and human bestiality.

    Over supper I regained my composure and took up my pen in a more useful frame of mind.

    Humanity has very probably dealt itself out of the equation and if so, I will not mourn it’s demise. There is more than humanity and if we do survive I hope we are severely cut down to size and are persuaded to change our ways.

    But I do not believe in an anthropocentric reality. However much I appreciate the culture of the Abrahamic myth, I do not agree with their basic premise.  God did not create man at the centre of the universe. To hold sway over all else. Man created his own idea of a god who in turn created man. And some have been incestuously worshipping that concept for a long time.

    Reality is stranger and more compelling, kinder and better than the human clones we have worshipped for generations.

    My footing becomes surer as I tread my path. I will continue to beat my drum. I will stray further and more often into realms most think do not exist.

    And one day, that is where I will stay.

  • A Great and Mighty Wonder

    A Great and Mighty Wonder

    Few would dispute that an extraordinary mystery lies at the heart of our reality. But that enigma is interpreted in a multitude of different ways.

    Many will not be familiar with the words of St. Germanus or the music of Praetorius. To God on high be glory and peace on earth to men, he proclaimed, lauding the virgin birth of the infant Jesus by Mary, a first century Jewish woman from Nazareth.

    To Christians, that birth is the great and mighty wonder. At the centre of their universe.

    Other cultures view our world through a different lens and interpret the riddle in another way.

    All such traditions are, as the Buddhists might say, fingers pointing to the moon. Attempts to capture that central reality, not the mystery itself.

    Science too is one such “finger” and the Buddhists in particular have been keen to allow their views and beliefs to be informed by this method of investigating reality.

    For many years I have been intrigued by science. At its very core, reality is empty of all but energy we are told. Not even science can tell us what that energy is or how it got there.

    Whether that energy has purpose or consciousness is an intriguing question. What it “means” if anything is another.

    As a non scientist I have nonetheless been intrigued by what science is revealing and how it seems that all material reality can be bent to our will. And yet there is a hollowness in pure reductionism, which scientists seem unable or unwilling to fill. In addition I am of an age where even the rapid pace of scientific discovery is too slow. I am unlikely to see a theory of everything in my lifetime.

    And a reductionist “theory of everything” would be a sad and empty thing, unendowed as it would doubtless be with any existential content.

    And so back to faith, or faiths. My only faith is the belief in something rather than nothing and the firm conviction that consciousness plays a central role in reality. And further that our animal consciousness can and may evolve into something “godlike”, should we take the trouble to examine ourselves and choose our goal wisely.

    God was made in man’s image.

    Our faith, our religion has always sought explanation and a better way of living. An existence beyond the bestial, where all is calm, all is bright.

    And to that extent I am and always have been deeply “religious”. A mystic who seeks a reality beyond the mundane and thoughtless brutality of animal existence. A believer in a great and mighty wonder.

    I believe that we can and should rise to godhood. It is our choice and hopefully our destiny to put aside greed, violence and every other venal aspect of animal existence and, aided by science, create a very different world.

    A world such as faith has always imagined.

    For thousands of years religious terrorists have used and abused the beauty, the central mystery of reality for their own purposes and I will have no part in it.

    Christian and most other faiths have amassed great wealth and committed appalling atrocity in the name of their “god”. They have forcibly converted the heathen, they have committed genocide. They have insisted on their rightness, and the wrongness of everyone else who has the effrontery to think or believe differently.

    None of that destroys the truth of a great and mighty wonder. It merely shows how humanity can and does twist and corrupt the best of ideas in search of power and possessions.

    But yes, I am a Christian. A “cultural” Christian whose entire life has been enriched and enhanced by the magic of the better bits of the New Testament. And indeed the Old. Whose very language and pattern of thought have been deeply influenced by the idiom of Christianity. Whose life has been enhanced and made richer by the music, language, art and architecture of 2000 years of this admirable but ultimately flawed effort to explain the unexplainable.

    To those who might say I am not a Christian I would say fie. At heart, Christianity is but one attempt to explain the central mystery and I value what it has to say. As myth, as parable, as a finger pointing to the moon.

    I am a Christian because I believe in a better world. Because I believe in a central mystery so beautifully described by so many different faiths. I am a Christian because I can see that it is meet and right to invent a good god and to seek to become that beneficence.

    I am a Buddhist. A Muslim, a Jew, a Taoist, a Hindu and a Shintoist. I am every faith that seeks a better world and evolution towards the divine.

    And to those who would reject me, I understand. I do not seek to convert you, I am not right nor you wrong.

    Of any whose faith sees a great and good mystery at the heart of reality and who seeks to emulate it, to move towards it, I claim kinship. And towards those of no faith who nonetheless renounce the way our world has so often been, and who seek something better, I claim kinship also.

    Life is a struggle, of that there is no doubt. It is an uphill battle to smile every day in the face of adversity. To be pleasant to those around you. To be good tempered and well behaved. To resist greed and base materialism.

    We must seek reality, whatever and wherever it is. We must move on if we can, upwards and away from our past.

    We must seek the central mystery.

    I need my faiths, all of them.

    Illustration: William Blake – an illustration for Milton’s poem “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”

  • Credo

    Credo

    Too often have I pronounced upon that in which I do not believe.

    Better by far to renounce negativity and to declare instead that in which I do believe.

    I was told over the weekend that I am a believer by someone who has been kind enough to read much of what I have written over the past few years and who knows that I have often struggled with impenetrable blackness.

    We were talking more probably of belief in meditation, rather than faith in general. And yet for me meditation is an inextricable part of the route towards meaning. It always has been but of late I have been more diligent in my practice.

    I have been puzzled by the trend towards Mc Mindfulness in our secular age. It may “work” for some, yet I find its emptiness an arid detraction from what for me is without doubt a search of more serious intent.

    The truth is that I have always been a mystic. Somebody in search of the face of god, reality or meaning. I have never been one to follow anybody’s path but my own, and most of those with more conventional faith may well question my beliefs and practices. And yet if they read me correctly, they will see that our paths are not so different. Nor our core credence. In uno deum may not be for me, but for those who really look, the paths of mystics east and west are identical, as are their objects and goals.

    And so, Credo. But in what?

    Well firstly I have come to believe in the efficacy of meditation to heal both body and mind.

    My long time guru John Butler uses such techniques on his own behalf and that of clients to undergo surgical operations without the use of anesthetics. He expresses a conviction that the mind governs the body in a far more powerful fashion than most believe. And hence can procure much of what is needed in a physiological and indeed spiritual sense to secure and comfort both mind and body.

    I have never seen meditation as a mere tool for medical use, but rather as a guiding light to navigate through doubt and darkness and to arrive at a state of gnosis.

    How grand this sounds (pompous perhaps) but as always I use language in a poetic and metaphorical sense to convey my meaning. Perhaps because a bald and more prosaic description can not get across the strength of my feelings or indeed what it is that I do feel, that I do believe. Language can be a poor tool to describe the indescribable but try one must – it is the tool we have at our disposal to convey inner thoughts and meanings which are not readily susceptible to an exactitude of words.

    I know that there will be some who read this post and will strongly disagree with most of what I believe, but to such people I would say these are my beliefs and they can not in any sense be said therefore to be wrong. For me, for my own subjective reality. Yes, you may not share them or indeed like them. Your reality may take on a different hue to mine or you may be a materialist who denies any possibility at all of a god or of meaning or purpose in this universe.

    I can respect all such views, honestly held. And would expect therefor that people should respect mine. I have no desire to argue. Equally I have no desire whatsoever to persuade or convert or proselytize.

    I believe that god is within. Or, if you so choose, reality, Brahmin, nirvana, call it what you will. I believe with utmost conviction that those who seek quietly within themselves, whatever their race, colour or creed, come to a somewhat similar conclusion. Or at least such people would not take objection to my own feelings on the matter.

    I do not need to read or consult books of learning or faith. Time spent in quiet repose gives me such answers as I need. Other of course will have different needs, other requirements. They will have strong conviction in revelation, in an external force who gives tablets of stone or dictates books of law to his prophets and disciples. But at heart they are unlikely to come up with answers so very different to my own.

    What is it that I discover within? Above all that there is meaning, a goal and that we should head towards it.

    De Chardin’s Omega Point. Frank Tipler’s if you prefer a less ornate version.

    And that despite the views of the materialists, there is right and wrong – at least so far as sentient beings are concerned. We think, we feel, we are. Consciousness has emerged (never mind where from) and it is a nonsense to deny its reality. Whatever it may turn out to be.

    So there you have it. I believe. I may struggle to live up to my beliefs (are there any who do not?). I may not serve the poor or give comfort to the oppressed, but I stand in admiration and support of those who do. I believe that I know the difference between right and wrong and as far as I am able I will try to head towards the former and away from the latter.

    Credo.

    I believe there is meaning.

  • Doubt and Daemons

    Doubt and Daemons

    While some may appear to lead a life unperturbed by fear and doubt, many are driven by forces less benign.

    Who knows the answers to questions I have spent my life asking. Some believe, fervently even, that they have found terra firma in an ever shifting universe. Others see only an uncaring cosmos which, wondrous as it undoubtedly is, leaves us to make our own meaning, since none is provided out of the box.

    With ever increasing conviction, I believe that the ancient philosophies of the east have the answers. At heart, the infinity we see around us just “is”. And always has been. Live with that, says the Tao. Do not battle the forces which surround you, row your boat gently down the stream.

    Buddhism seems to go a step further. Recognize, it says, your own non-existence. Accept that your “self” is a mere illusion and abandon all attachments that your senses crave. Much like Susan Blackmore or Daniel Dennett might tell us, consciousness is not what it seems.

    I do not believe that this absolves us of responsibilities, nor that it necessarily precludes enjoyment of the material world. Hard as enjoyment is for some of us to find. Nothing obliges us to act in any particular way (“good or “bad”), and I find it increasingly hard to concede that moral absolutes exist in objective reality. And yet we can proclaim our own rights and wrongs, our own morality. We can and must create our own meaning.

    If we do not exist, then in a very real sense we have created a seeming existence out of nothing. For there is indeed “something that it is like” to be human.

    Perhaps we too are creators then. Spawned by inert matter and blind mathematical evolution , we seem to have “emerged”. In a phrase used and abused by science and philosophy alike, we appear to be more than the sum of our parts.

    And in that, a certain beauty may be found, hope even.

    My hedonic set point is below average and yet I see how, as creators, that might be changed. For me, for all. If we arose from nothing, then we became quite something.

    We became beings able to alter our own circumstances. To better ourselves. To develop societies and morals, fire and farmed food.

    And yet, it is said, we do not exist. Perhaps clarification is called for. We exist to the extent that we feel emotions, we have senses. Pain and pleasure perhaps being the most obvious. Anger, greed and lust belonging to the least desirable of those qualia.

    We exist to the extent we have memory, necessary no doubt to be able to navigate our way around a complex physical environment. We exist to the extent that we are aware of ourselves and our world, even if we do not grasp its true nature.

    Now there is duality, if ever that word had meaning. A duality of existence and non-existence.

    We are like a flowing river perhaps, or a candle flame, little more. A physical process which just happens to have evolved a way of being aware of itself and its surroundings. A material interaction commonly known as “life” which on its own, means little else other than biological self re-production.

    None of that is to say that we can not become more. The birth of life from inert matter is a miracle which may be bettered. Bettered by ourselves, bootstrapping ourselves from the level of the beast to a technological prowess undreamt of even decades ago.

    There, then, lies my optimism in bleaker moments.

    In the power of the mind to elevate and improve ourselves. To paint glorious works of art, to build structures of exquisite beauty. To think wondrous thoughts, to write great novels and ethereal music.

    To cure all ills, to provide a world where scarcity becomes a dim memory. Where money becomes an arcane memory.

    Those then are my dreams, my better moments. Where beauty and hope is to be found.

    In the patter of gentle rain, in the pounding of waves on a beach. In the gentle Norman chapel, and the light of stained glass. In the trance of Tchaikovsky, Handle and William Byrd.

    We may not exist in the way we might suppose we do. But we have created something out of nothing. Black horror as well as paradisiacal beauty.

    I dream of more of the latter and less of the former.

  • My kind of God

    My kind of God

    I have been profoundly moved by religion my entire life. I have always believed in the “Good” even though I may not always have done it.

    Sitting in quiet meditation I hear the sound of plainsong whether or not it is there. I long for peace, for a better place and better times. A time and place where there is no want but only happiness. Where there is infinite wisdom and none suffer.

    If that sounds like the heaven of the Christians or the Nirvana of the Buddhists, then that should not seem so surprising. In a hostile universe, how many of us over how many thousands of years must have yearned for such wonders, as war and plague raged around them. As they struggle to force food from the barren earth during the seven years of biblical famine.

    And so we conjure gods to assuage our fears. To send us manna from heaven. To vanquish our foes and knock down the walls of Jericho.

    To give us peace. To put our minds in a place of pure ecstasy where we feel nothing but joy and security, wrapped like a baby curled up in swaddling clothes. Or in the comfort of the womb.

    And such states can sometimes be reached although they are difficult to maintain. How very often have I felt that sense of warm certainty, where my mind and body seem to have ascended to a better plane. Where I appear to have broken through to a deeper realm somewhere outside the physical universe in which I normally dwell.

    That is what I have sought all my life. Ascension, transcendence. Sublimation – a transition from the physical ream to some place of safety and unimaginable beauty.

    I am a seeker and yet I get so often distracted from my path. Only a couple of days ago I bemoaned the parlous state of our world and expressed a wish for post scarcity to cure all our ills. But I veered dangerously into the world of politics and dissension and that is something a seeker must avoid. No good is to be found there, no field of joy.

    As my fried Keith has so often said, humanity is an irrelevance and will pass like so many grains of sand scattered in the wind. We will be unlamented, our passing unnoticed in this reality of infinite space and time and possibility.

    But sentience, mind. There may true reality perhaps be found. Or so I hope. So, in my better moods, I believe.

    Will I sound childish and absurd if I own up to watching Star Trek since childhood? Will I be laughed at when I express a profound joy I experienced when watching this latest generation of bold travelers on Netflix last night? Perhaps, but I care little.

    Sugary as it may be, the series portrays the Good and that is how and where I want to live. A bunch of men and women roam the universe and put it right. Gods by another name, although less powerful by far than the Minds of Ian Bank’s Culture. Let alone his Elders – those who have sublimed to some non physical and better realm.

    How did I feel when I wrote Post Scarcity? Sad, depressed, negative and hopeless. Is peace ever obtained by conventional means? Will I feel more peaceful or make the world a better place by campaigning with the Greens to save the whales? Or by joining Amnesty International to campaign for political prisoners?

    I think not alas.

    To engage in the bitter struggles of the human world serves little purpose.

    Where on this mortal plane should a seeker position himself? Where in this veil of tears should he dwell?

    Within, deep within. Even as I write those words I feel a warmth spreading through my veins. My kind of god – simply the sort of feeling you meet when you go inwards. When you dwell on what is good and refuse to engage with what is bad.

  • 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.

  • Faith and Doubt

    Faith and Doubt

    Most of us have developed a worldview but I wonder how many of us let doubt destroy it?

    I suppose weltanschauungen must differ widely from person to person, but my guess is we all have one, even if unacknowledged.

    Business titans presumably have a firm belief in amassing great wealth, dictators in the holding of absolute power and the religious in their respective savior.  Adolf expressed his own peculiar weltanschauung in Mein Kampf.  Wonder if he ever had any doubts as he watched smoke rising from the gas chambers.

    How does doubt creep in? I have to say I have no understanding of many worldviews and so it would be wrong of me to comment on behalf of others:

    Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.

    In my own case, at heart I could best describe myself as some sort of idealist, in the philosophical sense.

    I believe in Spinoza’s god: “the sum of the natural and physical laws of the universe”.  Further more I believe in free will and the primacy of the mind.

    I also believe that certain moral codes are absolute and even if not written in nature, are the natural outcome of intelligence or consciousness. I can not accept that there is no such thing as good or evil; perhaps by definition consciousness or the mind defines such concepts, creates them.

    How then does doubt creep in? Well it doesn’t very often and certainly not as regards ethics. I think the trick is to take that route chosen by Blaise Pascal.

    The seventeenth Century French philosopher asked what the rational choice would be when asked to wager on the existence or non existence of god:

    Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.

    If you bet against god, your behavior would be illogical: you would be betting against an eternal life of happiness for the possibility of gaining nothing. We can not prove god’s existence nor can we disprove it so we may as well assume he exists and behave accordingly.

    So I am betting on an idealist universe since to do otherwise would affect my worldview adversely.  And thus affect my happiness and well-being.

    Why am I thinking about faith and doubt today?

    Because of the preponderance of materialism in the philosophy of mind. There is no evidence for the idealist’s position but mercifully, there is none against it either. If you insist on quoting Russell’s Flying Teapot, then I will have to grant that you have a point.

    But I will not let that dent my faith that there is something behind the universe other than dull, dead, lifeless matter. Call it an energy, if you will. A force, a field.

    Modern scientists are all too keen to promote a universe without ultimate meaning.  They have spent a lifetime measuring and poking and not enough time asking “why?”.

    Too many scientists ask only what is there and how it behaves but not how it got there or what it means. Nobody seems interested in the intrinsic nature of matter – only in its behavior.

    So if you are having doubts that life has any meaning, stick to your view that it does and that one day we may find the proof. Even if you are wrong at least your life may be a happy one.

    Illustration: a copy of the painting of François II Quesnel, which was made for Gérard Edelinck en 1691[réf. nécessaire]. – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12193020