Weltanschaung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Tag: Slowness

  • 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.

  • Travel Broadens the Mind

    Travel Broadens the Mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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