Weltanschaung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Tag: Meditation

  • The Path of Slowness

    The Path of Slowness

    Slowness seems to become an ever more important part of my life. It is the opposite of rushing and busyness and activity for its own sake. It is a vital ingredient, in my case at least, in encouraging me along the path I wish to follow.

    There is something about quiet deliberation which takes my mind and my body into the stream of life, into the flow. Not the life of acquisition, power or human ambition but by contrast a withdrawal therefrom and an immersion into silent contemplation. Which is where the true stream is to be found.

    If you were to ask me “of what?” then I would be hard pressed to answer exactly what it is that I contemplate. Contemplation for me is more a case of simply being in a state of receptivity to come what may. It is not an active seeking, it is a listening. It is not thought, it is an absence of thought.

    I am in the middle of some exercise; or rather, taking a tea break. Few would agree to calling my afternoon’s activity exercise. Perhaps it is the sort of activity confined to the sloth.

    Our afternoon walk was rained off. We had bundled out only to be turned back by tumultuous rain and loud thunder. I wandered out instead to our crumbling summer house in the garden and set to for some serious Pilates. Joseph Hubert would doubtless disown me, but it became a sort of meditation. Holding the limbs, stretching, taking a long, long time about it. The result was both physical and mental. The physical effect was pleasing – a slow burning in the muscles, a satisfying glow. The mental effect was calming and boosted by the natural drugs which exercise brings with it.

    Altogether a most satisfactory effort.

    Some people, I am sure, zone out after or during their marathon or peddling at speed up and down the mountains along the Tour de France.

    My form of exercise has become a slower and more deliberate one. More of a meditation in the way that Thich Nhat Hanh talks of walking.

    After some thirty years of seeking, it seems I may at last have found. Something. I said only half jokingly to a friend that perhaps my moods have improved so dramatically because I have given up, given in. But maybe there is more truth to that than I realized.

    If you are naturally of a contemplative turn of mind there can be little more damaging and destructive than living in the world we humans customarily inhabit. It is so often said that our desires can never be fulfilled but the truth of that statement is so little understood.

    My own disappearance into slowness (or do I mean slothfulness?) has not involved donning a loincloth and sitting in the lotus position by the Ganges. I have undertaken no great works of piety. Nor has it included (nor will it) the wearing of brightly colored robes and the incantation of esoteric Eastern words. I have not undertaken works of great charity. My journey has not involved gathering a crowd around me to whom I can impart such profound thoughts as I have been able to collect. While raking in a fortune from my misguided disciples.

    My journey has simply involved saying “enough”. And not feeling guilty about having “enough”. Enough at least to retreat, metaphorically, far from the beaten track. An off grid wilderness in the heart of the increasingly suburban South East coast.

    The retreat and the slowness, the silence and the emptiness have taken all sorts of forms and become ever more important to me.

    Once upon a time I sought wisdom in books or the words of others. Only this morning I was reading Plotinus and thinking about Jung. But only casually; long gone are the days when I would comb such authors for answers, the truth or the way.

    I have determined that the way is only inward and that by travelling within one discovers the universe to be a sort of giant Russian Doll. Or, in more modern terms, a Tardis.

    I am no longer given to great philosophical or mystical expositions. I am pleased that Plotinus seems to have discovered the Plot, and I glad he discovered the Way. But I do not wish to read 1,000 pages of his thoughts or anyone else’s. I do not wish to make up my own great treatise. I have no desire to discover how many angels can dance on a pinhead or to give the answer to those breathlessly waiting.

    In days gone by I may have taken the time of day from Thomas Aquinas. I sat upon the Cloud of Unknowing and nodded in the direction of St John of the Cross and his miserable Dark Night.

    Somehow, these days that seems counter productive. And unnecessary.

    No one can inform you better than yourself. You are unlikely to come across any wisdom greater than that which comes to you as you withdraw from the nonsense and sit quietly to listen.

    If any of this sounds arrogant, that is not my intention at all. I have spent some two years writing this blog for myself and slowly a light has dimly penetrated the gloom. It has been a helpful process.

    Largely it has involved a casting off, a throwing out. If I look back at what I have written over the last two years I can see a notable and important decrease in anger and frustration as the months passed by. And I can see that my scope has narrowed down to what I am seeking.

    I no longer feel moved to write about injustice, corruption, politics or the human condition. It all sucks and I’m sorry for that.

    Do I sense that there is another world? An ultimate “reality”? Have I had glimpses of it? Perhaps so or perhaps my increasingly optimistic outlook is merely a matter of my withdrawal from so many aspects of life which I find distasteful, vulgar, damaging and unpleasant.

    Have I found real and lasting peace or do I sit at the top of a roller coaster waiting for a terrifying descent into Stygian gloom? I hope the former but if the latter I suspect I would, if not welcome it as an old friend, then at least laugh at its ephemeral nature and look forward to its passing.

  • Depression – Mind or Matter?

    Depression – Mind or Matter?

    The state of depression is easy enough to describe but it is doubtful whether mere words manage to convey the depth of the misery to one who has never suffered from it.

    States of mere sadness, boredom or lethargy are very common but the depths of depression go much further. It is a state where no pleasure is to be found, no happiness. It is a state where no sky is blue, no sunlight dappled or golden. It is a state where cynicism is the overriding emotion felt and every aspect of life seems absurd and futile. It is a state where taste and smell lose their meaning, where things ordinarily enjoyed become pointless and sterile.

    Enough. There are some of you who will be only too well aware of what I am talking about. Others who will mistakenly imagine that their occasional sadness gives them an understanding of the condition.

    It is all too tempting when in the grip of such a state of mind to go to ground. To cut off. Not to write or read. Or eat or drink. Certainly there will be little pleasure in any such activity.

    And yet perhaps these are exactly the times one should write, and think. Not to drag others down into the grey abyss of your mood but to reflect, constructively, on what depression means and whether there might be a way out. A cure.

    What is “mind”? The answer is not at all obviousness. We have very little idea what consciousness is, how it arose, or how it relates to physics and what we believe to be the laws of nature.  In days gone by, dualism was all the rage.  Rene Descartes and his followers believed (and some still believe) that mind and body are entirely separate.  That the mind (the soul some would call it) is merely housed in the physical body but does not result from it. Does not arise or emerge from mere physical phenomena or laws.

    Monists believe that mind and matter are all one, but there is a “hard problem” with such a view as pointed out by philosopher David Chalmers and others.  Exactly how is it that mental properties can arise out of complex relationships between physical matter? Can consciousness arise from matter? How?

    The panpsychists believe that consciousness is a law of nature. Like gravity or the weak nuclear force or electricity. It just “is”. It exists in all matter in varying states of sophistication, of which the human brain is at the top of the heap. So far as we know. Consciousness in human terms arises where sufficient complexity exists and the human brain is nothing if not complex. Rocks and nematode worms have consciousness but of a lesser form than we humans.

    Some scientists believe that consciousness, the “mind”, emerges from physics. That physics and physics alone can explain mind; that there is nothing else. Other scientists and philosophers believe that the basic physical constituents of the universe have mental properties – in other words that consciousness just “is” as already mentioned.

    How does any of this help the poor fool stuck at the bottom of the abyss?

    Well in my view it does not really matter whether you believe in “emergence” or panpsychism. One day no doubt we will ascertain which view is correct; or than the answer lays somewhere else entirely.

    And one day we will be able to adjust our moods with precision. Not with the blunt instrument of drugs but by genetic engineering. We will be able to shift our place along the pain pleasure axis by accurate and sure design.

    In the meantime it is all trial and error. You won’t be able to think your way out of the abyss. You can tell yourself that it does not exist but that will be of little help when you are stuck down at the bottom.  What you can do is to acknowledge it and to acknowledge that the mood is transient, even if chronic. It will not always be that intense. It will pass. And there is some merit in argument – along the lines “my life is fine, I have no reason to feel this way”.  CBT some call it. Meditation – well it may help some a little. As might exercise.

    But of course none of these “remedies” are an instant or permanent cure.

    Over the years I have managed to develop a more philosophical approach.  In earlier days before I even recognised what the mood was, I assumed it was entirely due to external circumstances and could be eradicated by physical and external means.  Hence I moved from job to job and from country to country in search of happiness. In search of the philosopher’s stone, the “Way”, the “answer”, No 42.

    These days I have to try and put my head down. To recognise that this state of mind merely exists. That unless medical or genetic research gets its skates on I’m stuck with it.  At least I am lucky enough to be in a position to let it pass, to let it flow over me. It would be wholly impossible for me to do a “job” or to lead a life which any would consider “normal”.  I have had the good luck to avoid “jobs” and people for almost 30 years and intend to do so for the next 30.

    This is not a matter of pride but of necessity. And my life has not been entirely useless or entirely wasted.  There is value in thought and in expressing thought. There is value in writing and in comparing notes with others.

    So yes, these days I usually simply take the day off when the Black Dog barks at my door. Or the week. Or the month. I realise that none of it is my “fault”. That the state of mind we call depression just “is” and that for the moment all one can really is to hang on by one’s fingernails.

    But that will change. A way will be found to alter our minds, wherever or whatever those minds spring from.  And there is no harm in experimenting with the latest techniques or thinking about ways the answer will emerge.

    Today is a bad day. It has been a bad week. And yet one part of my mind is still functioning and lucid. And telling me to write these past few days off. And the next few days if necessary. And to keep studying and thinking even from the bottom of the pit.

     

  • Mindfulness vs. Physiology

    Mindfulness vs. Physiology

    Much is made these days of the concept of “mindfulness”.  It is the cure-all of the new age. Depressed? Mindfulness of your moods, letting go, will cure you. Poverty, illness, famine, death, disease will all bow to the mindful modern man.

    To a large extent it is wishful thinking. Mind-less bollox, if you will pardon my vulgarity.

    I was much captured by the concept as part of my endless search for answers some 20 years ago. The original Buddhist texts, the Tao, Zen and the whole gamut of wishful thinking captivated me. I was about to be transported to Nirvana. Except I wasn’t.

    There is nothing wrong per se with mindfulness but to imagine it will raise a victorious flag over the flaws and imperfections of a disastrous genetic inheritance is pure nonsense.

    Mindfulness does have it place. I try to be aware of my moods and my behavior.  I try to correct and govern my worst excesses.  I know that poverty, cruelty, disease are wrong; I mean well and would like to eradicate them. I know that racial and any other form of prejudice against the rest of the poor sods on planet earth is wrong.

    Despite my intense irritation with the busybodies and mealy mouthed fools who push political correctness, they are right in part and I do my very best to embrace brown, yellow, gay, red, blue, whatever it is I am supposed to welcome as “diversity”.

    And yet despite heroic efforts I can not alter the very bedrock of my personality. I can not help my intense irritability and frequent bad moods. I can not help my obsessions with the supposed wrong doings of others when all I have to do is ignore them and mind my own business.

    I can not rid myself of sometimes overwhelming depression by being mindful of it. Bollox. It just doesn’t work.

    I would like to be better, kinder, more enthusiastic, more successful, less curmudgeonly.  I would like to save the world, be a light unto the gentiles, lead the rest of my days wandering the paths of righteousness. But I won’t.

    I was born with a certain physiology and there is only so much I can do to moderate it.  I might try magic mushrooms or the latest unction promoted by the press but in the end utopia can only be achieved if we can change our very nature.

    Until such time I will not listen to some foolish though well meaning clown who tells me that mindfulness will save the universe. It will not.

  • Consider the Lilies of the Field…

    Consider the Lilies of the Field…

    …how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin…Behold the birds of the heaven, that they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns…

    I have often wanted to be a tree. Preferably an oak; preferably in some far flung province inaccessible to man.

    I have spent some weeks in meditation. Not on my knees or my backside. Not in some temple or man made edifice.

    But in simple existence, simple awareness of the passing days, the season, the comings and goings of the world.  To feel the summer breeze, the gentle waving of leaves and branches. The dawn chorus, the cooing of pigeon. Waves, sky, hot and cold. Rain and dry. Beauty in nature and in art.

    And then I spoiled it, I let the serpent into Eden, I picked the apple.  I stopped my flow, I ceased to let the world wind over and around me and I sought, once again, toil and the world of commerce.

    It was an error to open my computer, a grave mistake to enter the dark caverns of the world wide web, the dark satanic mills of finance.

    Would there have been any way of earning my daily bread which would have enabled the poetry to continue to flow? Or does “the world” always have to entail disillusion and anxiety, irritability and bad temper?

    I have been observing my moods carefully recently for a number of reasons, not the least my interest in experimenting with micro-dosing to expand the doors of my perception.

    For weeks I have been walking, wandering aimlessly, enjoying pure existence. A sparrow, if you like, or an oak tree or Ent.  I have observed as I have wandered.  And I have let go, let all things pass.  My mind has taken very different paths, my thoughts have expanded. The predominant feeling has been one of pure harmless joy; an innocence combined with a great enrichment of the imagination. An expansion of my mind without even the necessity of a hallucinogenic door opener.

    I then I blew it. I knocked on the dark doors of commerce; I spent some hours looking at financial arbitrage. I revisited the squalor of money and finance, of greed and business.

    I became less observant but before the glass darkened too thoroughly, before the mirror became too opaque, I was able to notice what it was doing to me.  Irritability was the main evil and a far decreased ability to take pleasure in what was around me.

    So I have switched it all off again; for a few weeks at least. Will I return to it when I am back in my study? Can it be done without irritation?  Can I learn to combine commerce with a joy in life?

    I will have to try. And if I can not, I must switch off commerce for good. Close down the mill and head for the hills. Live in a green and pleasant land.

  • Dvorak – Stabat Mater

    Dvorak – Stabat Mater

    Performing choral music must qualify as one of the most healing and meditative pastimes you can undertake.  To perform well requires iron discipline and endless practice but becomes easier over the years with familiarity.

    It is something I did with great enjoyment as a child chorister but to return to it much later in life required great effort.  After 7 or 8 years, perhaps I have achieved something of the fluency I once possessed as a treble.

    One of the many joys is to study new music and find surprising beauty in places you had so far ignored or dismissed.

    For many years I had worked on the assumption that anything written east of Berlin was cacophonous and horrible. I have been proved wrong time and again in recent years, and currently Dvorak’s Stabat Mater has shown me once again that opening oneself to new experience refreshes the soul.

    Elsewhere I wrote of the importance of doing different things, even if it is only a question of putting your butter and marmalade on different sides of the toast.

    Music is a classic case of needing to resist the temptation to stick with what you know, and to venture beyond your comfort zone.

    To me Dvorak is somewhat bohemian, exotic; the Stabat Mater, to my ignorant mind, has a flavour of gypsy rhythm.

    I found the piece quite challenging.  Some time signatures I had not done too often, some of the rhythms required concentraton.

    The effort is worthwhile.  With greater exposure over the weeks, I came to find great beauty in the music. Quiet, soft passages, rising crescendos of sound, roars and quiet contemplation, passion and sorrow.  Often with a dance like quality such as “Tui nati vulnerati”.

    My favourite section is the Eia Mater.

    Eia mater, fons amoris, me sentire vim doloris, fac ut tecum lugeam.

    Alas, mother, fountain of love, let me feel the force of your grief, so that I may bemoan with you.

  • A Meditation on Death

    A Meditation on Death

    To witness death is a right of passage which comes to most if not all of us.  It is a sobering and undoubtedly sad experience but not, perhaps, without its redemption.  To suffer death comes, in the end, to us all.

    As children to witness death can be at its worst. God knows what it must be like for the child soldiers of Africa or the victims of genocide.

    In the last 70 years in Western Europe death for most of us has often been a more peaceful affair.  It is still deeply moving. It still provokes intense thought and wonder. It can often entail grief and great sadness.  But at least death in the West, whether from disease or old age, has mostly been decoupled from the senseless brutality of meaningless violence.

    For the scientist, birth is a coming together of atoms in a collection which results in consciousness. Death is the mere redistribution of those atoms back to where they came from – the world and universe all around us.

    For the religious there can be comfort in death – the existence of an immortal soul, the promise of a resurrection or a heaven. When Marx referred to religion as opiate he was in some senses very accurate. It can give comfort and strength in the extreme to the true believer.

    To the rest of us it is perhaps down to developing our own philosophy – our own view of how and why conscious life comes and goes. Or perhaps for some of us the realisation that there is no “why” just “how”.

    And the “how” can itself give a comfort and great beauty – the sheer wonder of the natural world. The endless cycles of birth and rebirth, of the planets round a sun, of the beauty of the seasons.  Of the birth and death of planets and suns and galaxies. The endless dance. The coming and going of the very universe itself.

    To have lived a good life is all that matters in the end.  A life where, if you did not manage to achieve great good, you at least did no great harm. A life where you gave and received love.  A life of the little things. The joy of children, the wisdom of later life.  The beauty you saw around you and the contribution you made to the dance.

  • Peace which the World Cannot Give?

    Peace which the World Cannot Give?

    Can we find peace in this world despite what the Book of Common Prayer says?  The beautiful words of Evening Prayer have a Collect for Peace:

    O God, from whom all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works do proceed; Give unto thy servants that peace which the world cannot give; that our hearts may be set to obey thy commandments, and also that by thee, we, being defended from the fear of our enemies, may pass our time in rest and quietness; through the merits of Jesus Christ our Saviour. Amen.

    I look to the beauty of evensong as a guide to the way I would like to lead my life and while I prefer to seek my answers in science and meditation, and despite a profound belief in atheism, I can not help but come back to the profound beauty of the religion of my childhood when I am in a contemplative mood.

    It is possible to find profound peace in this world in the moment although soon enough the stark realities come crowding back in.  Illness, poverty, violence to name but a few evils we face as a species.

    Aesthetically you will find moments of true peace in the contemplation of beauty but to extend and merge that into your life over time seems to require rather greater effort.

    I have always found the metaphor of the garden helpful: “we must cultivate our garden” as Voltaire said.  In a literal sense great peace can be found in nature and work on the land, hence our obsession with Gardens of Eden: the walled garden, the monastic herb garden, the enclosed and safe and natural.

    But we can not rely on a divinity for happiness.  Physics and and its emergent disciplines are what we must rely on, together with education and an awareness of the necessity to move from brutal competition to co-operation and equality.

  • Meditation is not Just for Christmas

    Meditation is not Just for Christmas

    Meditation is not (or need not be) any sort of religious devotion. But it must become a way of life if it is to be of any help to you. It need not require sitting for endless hours on a agonisingly uncomfortable three legged stool or painfully cross legged on a small cushion in an ascetic monastery.  Although no doubt that would benefit me enormously!

    Perhaps Thich Nhat Hanh’s approach is the most helpful.  Quiet, peace, tranquility and time are a necessary part of it for most of us, although the real devotees claim to be able to maintain calm in the middle of a storm of modernity – sitting in Piccadilly circus, on a bus, or at the Ginza crossing. Lucky them.

    It seems to me that it must become so much more than all of that – it must pervade every aspect of your life and govern every action you take and every word you speak if you are to make true progress. Nirvana need not be a “snuffing out”, a meditative way of life need not result in quietism.  But it must be active rather than passive.

    It’s no good being a hypocrite or speaking with a forked tongue.  That will spoil any sense of peace and no amount of “meditation” will perfect the soul until and unless we can dispense with sarcasm, wit, polemic and criticism.

    I wrote an article earlier today on the awful debates in the House of Commons.  And suddenly realised I was veering back towards destructive (self destructive) criticism of the sort which has corroded my persona for far too long. Why be critical when I know I am every bit as foul on occasions as the animals which inhabit that particular zoo?

    Unless we can snuff out anger, jealousy, greed and pride we may as well whistle in the wind for “peace on earth” let alone peace in our own minds.

    So no, meditation is not just for Christmas. It is a long, arduous and sometimes tedious journey – no wonder the Eastern philosophers need re-incarnation. One lifetime certainly seems too short to get anywhere near eudaimonia let alone moksha.

  • Depression and Determinism – can we Change our Mind?

    Depression and Determinism – can we Change our Mind?

    Depression and determinism: can we influence our moods, can we “change our mind”? We don’t know. There are many opinions but no answers.

    Melancholy has been with us since the beginning and has been written about over many millennia.  Hippocrates of Kos and Galen of Pergamon had much to say on the subject. Closer to our own time, Samuel Johnson wrote of the “Black Dog” in the 18th Century and Winston Churchill popularised the term in the 20th.

    There is no better introduction to the science of animal behaviour than the lucid, entertaining and informative lectures of Dr Robert Sapolsky, professor of biology and neuroscience at Stanford University.

    Sapolsky believes we do not have free will:

    For me, the single most important question is how to construct a society that is just, safe, peaceful – all those good things – when people finally accept that there is no free will.

    Many scientists, the recent and much loved Stephen Hawking included, believe that we live in a deterministic universe where all unravels in accordance with cause and effect (karma perhaps).

    Is there no cure then? Can we not “change our minds”?

    Much has been made of meditation and awareness in recent years as a coping mechanism – and indeed an awareness and acceptance of the condition are crucial.

    Much has been written of the importance of diet and exercise.

    Drugs companies have struggled for years to find chemicals that work effectively.  The latest research has veered back towards hallucinogenic drugs found in the natural world such as psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and DMT ( ayahuasca ).

    Those suffering from depression would be wise to avoid the question of determinism altogether: we do not know whether we can truly “change our minds”.

    Perhaps a cure will eventually be found, but in the meantime a portfolio of remedies may perhaps alleviate the symptoms.