Weltanschaung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Tag: Perception

  • To Concentrate on “Good Things”

    To Concentrate on “Good Things”

    How much better you feel when you focus on the good and ignore the bad.

    Is it wrong of me to categorize things in this way? Can there be said to be “good” and “bad” in any objective sense? Some would argue not but I choose to ignore their reasoning and their conclusion.

    In my subjective consciousness there is good and there is bad. I have been told that there is good going on in the world and that I should look for it. I am convinced that to do so is to help cast off the black lens of accidie. That to don rose tinted spectacles is an important part of changing one’s mind. In other words (physiology allowing) many of us should be capable of brightening up our lives by altering the way we perceive the world.

    I tend to concentrate on the negative, to see only blackness and dark whereas what I should be doing is searching for light, for warmth.

    Yes, in many ways the world is a shitty place and we are a shitty species. But it isn’t really our fault. We have evolved in a brutishly simple way – to survive. Is this any more our fault than the violent nature of the lion or the fox?

    Lettersquash argues nobody has deliberately created the evil Matrix in which we live and that there are no grand conspiracy theories which accurately reflect our society and our lives. There is no evil capitalist plot, no one is determined to screw the planet or its population. It is just that most if not all of us act purely out of self interest. And I feel he is right.

    So cast away the concept of “fault” (and evil, if you so choose) and look for people who are doing good things. People who are nice, and wholesome and worthy.

    I am told by my friend John that there are good things going on in the world. When I spoke of the horrors of the UK and US penal system he pointed out the enlightenment taking place in Greenland and Scandinavia. There you have it – look to the good and not to the bad. Although we should try and convert the latter into the former. Even if we do not believe in absolutes of good and evil, most us can recognize what is wrong when we spot it.

    I have been reading another blog recently and am coming to see where Keith is coming from. It isn’t god out there, just reality. Which is equally wonderful and just needs to be found. As he says, it is not “mystical” if it is real and I am coming to believe that perhaps his reality is “real”.

    What prompted this latest nonsense of mine? I have been spending a few days in splendid isolation down in the country and as usual the silence speaks to me. I hope that perhaps my perception is changing slightly, that maybe I am beginning to look through the mirror slightly less darkly.

    I am prompted to think of the little friends I call Gilbert and George. I had Gilbert and her mother staying for a couple of days and there is nothing better to promote enlightenment than a lovely and intelligent young woman. Beautiful of mind, so far as I can tell. Good through and through like her sister George. Or at least so far as I can tell.

    I call them Gilbert and George because ever since they could talk they have finished each other’s sentences and looked at each other before speaking.

    I have never heard Gilbert or George speak ill of anyone or anything. Which is especially odd since they have had to put up with their wilfully difficult and odd uncle all their lives. Perhaps I am a cross they feel they have to bear.

    I have always naughtily provoked these two into blushing but now they are both young adults I have to try harder. In an attempt to bring a rosy hue to Gilbert’s cheeks I recommended she watched Fleabag. Much to my amazement both Gilbert and George had watched every episode in both series.

    That’s called growing up I guess but it has not spoiled the girls or their charm.

    It is not surprising I turned out a miserable old fucker. I blame my family in part, although they never intentionally set out to wreck my life.

    But with the odd exception they were all warped and damaged in some way. I have long pondered nature and nurture and both have certainly played their role in forging the bars of my cage.

    My parents argued incessantly and unpleasantly. It was deeply disturbing. My mother raged at her mother and her siblings; I don’t think there was ever a family lunch when one of them didn’t storm out in a temper . One of my relatives was nicknamed “Moanie”. As far as my mother was concerned the rest of the world was “common” and unworthy. She or (perhaps they – my parents ) fell out with all their siblings and so we became deprived of cousins as time moved on.

    Surviving relatives still bicker and worse. Divorce and unhappiness has plagued various of them.

    Leaving aside the undoubted genetic component, these people could choose to behave otherwise but do not.

    So I must battle to cast off the deep black goggles I am so prone to sport.

    Our reality is what we choose to make it.

  • 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.

  • Will the meek inherit the earth?

    Will the meek inherit the earth?

    For some years I have assumed that far from inheriting the earth, the meek will be trampled underfoot.  I am beginning to wonder whether I am mistaken.

    Blessed are the meek:for they shall inherit the earth.

    The phrase always struck me as peculiarly stupid, even if the sentiment itself and the Sermon are beautiful.

    My wife is meek. Well, usually. Almost always actually. She is the sort of irritating little soul who always lets people push in front of her in a queue.  Who assumes the land is full of milk and honey and that most people around here are not vicious thugs but jolly nice chaps.  If she can’t inherit her place at the traffic lights, what hope has she for the wider world?

    And yet it has struck me very forcibly recently that you can “inherit the earth”, in a sense, by meekness. Or by being relaxed and laid back.

    Who cares about the queue at the PC World repair desk?  Or the fact that one old biddy and one rather ferocious middle aged woman jumped the queue right in front of your nose?

    Quite contrary to my usual impatience and sense of frustration, I very deliberately decided to smile through the incident. I didn’t go so far as to say nothing but I  politely said that actually I had been waiting an hour, but that the agressive lady was welcome to my place if she felt the need.

    I had already told the old biddy to go ahead since (a) she was an old biddy and (b) I thought she was going to be quick. She wasn’t!

    But here is the point. I felt calm, relaxed, able to smile. My heart rate did not rise. I did not become aggressive or shout at the shop assistants.

    I felt good. It was a bright sunny morning and I had enjoyed my walk to the shop. I enjoyed the walk back too.

    I have spent some time recently doing my best to change my life. Not outwardly but inwardly.

    Not I fear out of any sense of altruism, but because it makes me feel better. To do new things, to see life in a different light. To act out of character. To re-wire my tired and often glum brain.

    And it seems to be working so far.  Perhaps my behaviour has been calm and unruffled rather than meek. But I reckon the calm may actually inherit the earth.

    A damascene conversion perhaps.  A sudden, unshakeable conviction that meekness is one of the “doors of perception”.

  • Corrosive, Obsessive Hatred

    Corrosive, Obsessive Hatred

    How can people not see what their untrammelled hatred does to themselves and those around them? How can they give into it day after day so that it obscures both their very reason and destroys their lives?

    I must forget my obsession with the science and philosophy of determinism and free will, and assume for the moment that we are indeed able to choose our behaviour if we wish and if we can see any necessity for so doing.

    I must also admit I may not be in the ideal position to talk about such matters, since I have no reason to feel hatred and I don’t think I ever have.  At least for more than a few fleeting moments.

    I am what the Americans would call a “WASP” – a white anglo saxon protestant. The Brits would classify me as a typical upper middle class Londoner, well enough off and lucky enough in the genetic lottery of birth.

    So I may not be ideally qualified to understand corrosive, obsessive hatred.  I have never suffered torture or political oppression, never had my extremities removed by the steel arms of a vicious and backward desert theocracy.  Isis has never reached my pleasant ivory tower and Idi Amin has never eaten my relatives.

    But in my own, generally calm and privileged environment, I have nonetheless seen what damage hatred can cause. And indeed money is no cure for despair or misery – as we have seen in the unhappy recent history of our Royal Family.

    There is a particular woman I know who has gone overboard in recent years; she has destroyed her life and her family by hatred and yet as is so often the way, she insists it is others who have wronged her and will accept none of the blame. Nor will she change or even see the need to change.

    For her own sake if only she would heed the words so often spoken to her in kindness by all and sundry including counsellors, family and paid advisors she could transform a very hell into a veritable heaven.

    She is the maker of her own prison, she has built the very walls which have trapped and enslaved her.  She is the wife of an exceptionally wealthy banker; they live in luxury in London and in thousands of rolling acres in the countryside.  Their children have been well educated at the finest public schools and the family is surrounded by staff and lackeys to cater to their every whim.  No doubt like prince Charles, they could, if they so chose, have a maid put toothpaste on their toothbrushes and another maid run their bath.

    The husband has unfortunately never been faithful and many are his “conquests”. Filipino maids, girlfriends in every port, county wives of the great and the good in their beautiful English shire.  It’s all rather Edwardian really. Or I think the french still live like that, don’t they? A pampered wife wanting for no material comfort and a philandering husband who plunders and swashbuckles as he chooses.

    Well women have a choice. Many choose to let their husband out on a long rein.  It appears that marriages can work in that way.  Edward VII’s Mrs Keppel and a stream of others were tolerated by a long suffering Princess Alexandra of Denmark.

    If you refuse to tolerate such misbehaviour or you can not, then separate.  Live your own life, start again, take up a career or a new one, re-marry, have some fun, travel.

    Few are lucky enough to have your resources!

    But please, do not chose the route of hatred and bitterness. Do not drive your own children away from you by your temper and your anger. Do not split your family and blame your siblings. Accept help, go to counseling but listen to what your counselors tell you. Do not throw their well meant help back at them. Do not assume everyone around you means you harm and ill. That everyone is threatening you and trying to swindle you.

    There comes a time when however close you once were, your friends and family have to back away for their own health, happiness and sanity.  They can not enter a reality they know is yours and of your making. A solipsistic nightmare.