Weltanschaung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Tag: Soul

  • Offal and the Cosmic Vulva

    Offal and the Cosmic Vulva

    Anish Kapoor

    The “art” of sensory assault. What is it? What is he? Does it matter? Does he?

    After visiting Kenwood House, I came away loathing the pallid sycophancy of Reynolds and Gainsborough and the sterile, static patterns of Robert Adam.  I was much looking forward to my introduction to Kapoor.  I had read the blurb produced by the Hayward Gallery and realised that the exhibition might likely satisfy my proclivity for other worldliness and the doors of perception.

    I was not disappointed. Vast organs of a decidedly sexual orientation hung on the walls, entries to an alternate reality through a visceral reproductive organ from this. Lyra’s Subtle Knife was also to be seen, tearing a great gash in the membrane separating the regions of the multiverse.

    It was not comfortable to stare into the abyss time and again, to see the blackness of infinity and to be minded of the ephemeral nature of myself and all that surrounded me. The entrance to Hades was everywhere, exits nowhere to be found. Deep black holes which might  have gone on for ever, or might by contrast have been a simple dead end. End being the operative word.

    A giant, gory black and red volcano retched down from the ceiling, surrounded by great shining round bags of jelly, or blood.  Discombobulated by this vision of hell, I stumbled on to  great plastic body bags of blood, offal, fat and severed muscle in another room (or abattoir). Maybe the end product of one of the many cults of religious nutters which plague our world.

    The lake of Gehenna, the ghastly sordidity of Revelation and St John the Madman. Or some terror dreamt up by those other charming gents from the Middle East who, over the course of the second millennium and beyond, have murdered and rampaged their way through the world to rival the finest of our psychotic dictators.

    My host was a learned and earnest guide, and my thanks to him. He recognised I would relish the challenge and for some days and nights the images have lived with me.

    To my shame I had never heard of the “artist” and imagined in my ignorance that he must be a great prophet: perhaps his god had given him all this vision. Perhaps his object was to show us the light, the truth, the way. Armageddon was, for him, the way forward perhaps? Instead of leading to the return of  a crucified Judean preacher, something far more terrible awaits. Not eternal life or resurrection but a vast cosmic gash leading to ever greater horror.

    I am a persuaded anarchist. I metaphorically urinate on the society we have created as a species – most especially on Trump, the latest incarnation of naked greed and beastliness.

    Kapoor must be a kindred spirit! A light unto the Gentiles! A guide for our age, a man for a better world!  Surely all this blood and gore was allegory! A cry for peace and love and human dignity!

    Sadly it seems not. Instead of despising the establishment, he seems to court it. He fills his vast wealth bags and is apparently worth upwards of $200,000,000. Like most gurus, he appears to pedal one thing and practices quite another.

    Or am I being unjust? He seems to throw quite a bit of cash at good causes. But somehow he seems to be all about business rather than art.

    I found myself thinking of that Indian fellow who proffered salvation to the Beatles. Modesty, meditation and humility – but he ended up collaring enormous wealth and string of yellow Rolls Royce. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who charged people a packet to learn meditation. When all that’s actually necessary can be written on the back of a packet of Capstans.

    Am I too cynical perhaps? Art, religion, meditation: they don’t sit comfortably in my mind alongside great wealth and an elevated position.

    And yet they have always done so. What a paradoxical farce.

  • 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.

  • Beyond

    Beyond

    The urge to write seems to be a purge, to be taken from time to time to express what it is one believes one has learnt. To be cleansed and purified in mind by the art of manifesting in words the inner workings of one’s soul.

    I have come out. Not in the sense of some base sexuality but in a declaration to myself that I believe in something rather than nothing. That I believe in mind or rather, perhaps, the “soul”.

    Transcendence, what a word. To witness an existence beyond the normal or physical level. How they laugh, the materialists, how they scorn belief in anything that can not be measured, weighed or dissected by man.

    And yet it happens, it is there and to those who have glimpsed such states (even if rarely or from afar) it seems obvious that the world’s ills stem in a large part from our species’ unwillingness or inability to see beyond the dark and brutal struggle for physical survival on a rocky outcrop in the middle of nowhere.

    A young organ scholar professed to me his disbelief in the Christian faith and I to him but we both met somewhere on that magical field of transcendence. The western choral tradition is, for some, an avenue to beyond. It provides a glimpse, a view through a mirror darkly, of another world altogether.

    Aspiciens a longe we sang, set to the music of Palestrina.

    I look from afar:
    and lo, I see the power of God coming,
    and a cloud covering the whole earth.

    It was a dark and cold winter’s night and the ancient church was lit by candles. Family and friends were there, and the Matin Responsory reached them from a few unseen, unaccompanied voices hidden from sight in the South Transept of this lovely building. Would that we sang with the perfection of the Gesualdo Six but perhaps our efforts made our case well enough.

    In that place, at that time, nothing else existed. Wrapped in beauty, nothing else mattered. Power and wealth, greed and struggle seemed laughable and the route to paradise so clearly marked.

    I do not seek to convert, nor ever will. There is no-thing to which I cling, in any doctrinaire sense. No-thing to which I would direct our unhappy and misguided species.

    But with ever increasing clarity I know.

    I know what is not.

    Much, so much of what we do and think and believe is “not”. And yet what we could become is so very different.

    In those quiet moments, in that ethereal place beyond the mundane I know what is. And I know that it is something rather than nothing.

  • 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.

  • An Introduction

    An Introduction

    I am starting a podcast and those who are in the know tell me I must introduce myself. So here goes.

    The Podcast can be found under the following heading and subheading:

    Weltanschauung – A Search for the Soul

    ….in the following directories: iTunes, Spotify, Pocketcasts

    Here is the Spotify link. You can use Spotify for free.

    For Pocketcasts you need to download the app on your phone and do a search: the phone app is free.

    Here is the link for iTunes . You can use iTunes for free.

  • Blogging – A Window onto the Soul

    Blogging – A Window onto the Soul

    I was struck today, looking at my collection of Blog “Tags”, just how much they reveal about my character and obsessions.

    If you look at the “Tag Cloud” in the footer to this post, you will see the topics which have most interested me these past two years.

    Of course it is not an exact science, but I found it rather revealing. Depression and happiness are the clear winner,s followed by some obviously and closely related topics: peace, mood, qualia, consciousness.

    And how about “Stock Market”? While it features prominently, it is not something I have written about much recently. It is true that I have recently spent weeks drafting a new trading algorithm (with enjoyment I might add) but writing about markets is not something that lights up my day in the same way as contemplating happiness or trying to beat gloom.

    Happily I have been on a roll recently – for the time being the beast is tamed, but who knows if and when a downturn into the murky waters of the Styx may next come.

    Many of my other well trodden themes are also closely related to my big number tags. The whole spirituality gig is clearly a major part of my personality and so “Book of Common Prayer” looms large as do the topics “Meditation” and “Mysticism”.  Reality and silence also feature quite highly but I find it interesting to note that actual “religion” in the form of dogma barely features at all. Christianity, Buddhism and Islam are more notable by their absence than their inclusion. As I have often stressed, man made god in his own image rather than the reverse, whereas to me at least “spirituality” is something inbuilt and natural in many of us. A yearning for transcendence and meaning.

    If I wanted to tread the boards of psychoanalysis (which I assuredly do not) then I suppose these tendencies of mine could be usefully placed alongside dreams and rorschach tests, to reveal the murky depths of my damaged mind.

    As it is, I no longer feel the need for third party interpretation of my peculiarities, and self observation is a tool of far greater use to me than the therapists’ couch. True, there are rare occasions I feel so weary that chatting seems an attractive option, but after so many years of staring up my own fundamental orifice, I do not believe there is much either they or I could add.

    In a circular way this brings me back to something I wrote a year or so ago about the purpose of a blog, the motivation for writing when few will want to listen to my meandering drivel.

    As I said then and repeat now, I write to explain myself, not to my audience but to my own mind.

    Yesterday’s post on ignoring the past is a good example. I do not claim I felt dismal retreading a childhood journey, and witnessing the somewhat dark memories that were brought to the surface, but writing down my feelings last night was very healing.

    I have no right to complain and little to grumble about and yet I have found aspects of family life and dynamics deeply destructive and disturbing over the years. To write about my feelings was, therefore, a catharsis. It was getting real with myself. This is my interpretation of what happened and this is how it has made me feel all these years.

    I no longer intend to feel that way.

    I must be ready to drop those useless worries, those sometimes sad memories of childhood and move on.

    Repetition may be dull but it serves its purpose. Say it to yourself often enough and gradually with practice it becomes a habit. With a bit of vigilance and self discipline one can begin to put these thoughts aside as they arise.

    All of this may sound like the spoilt whining of someone who has actually been more blessed than most. There has, in reality, been little lacking in my life.

    And yet if we are to prove useful to ourselves and those around us, we must never cease to question ourselves, our thoughts, actions and deeds.

    If there are things in our past we would rather not repeat (whatever the reason) then we must remain aware. Self aware. So that what sounds like self obsession may in fact more charitably (and accurately) be described as making every effort to stay on track. Not only for yourself but for all those around you.

    Without constant introspection, I at least would be in danger of behaving in a fashion my better self would not admire.

    And I think other Tags on my website also emphasize a constant desire to be wary of falling into less admirable patterns of behavior.  Conflict, class, evil, purpose, other people, hypocrisy.

    So, yes, a blog can be a window onto the soul. It can help greatly (or so I find) in reminding me when I stray from the path of reasonable and decent behavior.

    Once I notice, with a bit of luck, I may be able to stagger back onto the path of decency and kindness.

  • In, and out of the Silence

    In, and out of the Silence

    Can or should you remain in a state or place of “silence” or must or ought you return to the world?

    My friend John has just written an interesting article on the “Allure of Sanctuary“.  He talks in wonderful terms of a place of safety.

    Sanctuary, John says, may constitute both a safe physical location but equally importantly “it may simply require achieving a peaceful and calm state of mind”.

    At the same time John envisages a return to the world:

    Something important to remember, though, is that we cannot forget, even when we are in that place, that it’s not supposed to be a total disconnect from the WHOLE world, because every moment as a living being takes place in THIS world. It is mainly up to us to figure out how much is too much, and to what degree our disengagement must achieve in order to be useful and productive.

    I replied to this as follows:

    I guess there are worlds and there are worlds. Some are a pleasure to return to: a choir practice the other night at the Norman church I am sitting in at this very moment for instance. Despite the bickering the other night, it is the sort of world I can benefit from and enjoy. Then there is the world of business or politics both of which I find alien and distasteful ~ those are not worlds I wish to re-enter if I can help it. I like people, I like chatting, singing with them, having a quiet lunch. But somehow when money is at stake, or indeed so many other things which people feel strongly about, the whole atmosphere changes. And at that point I have to run back to the silence. I think it is partly an aging thing – a weariness for a world of cut and thrust one has come to find valueless.

    I know where John is coming from. Physically speaking of course we can not disconnect from the world in its entirety. We are physical beings, we are fueled by food and water without which we can not survive.  We break and we wear: we may need penicillin or the mending of a broken bone.

    And yet mentally speaking, metaphorically speaking, there are worlds to which I do not intend to return.

    Another pen, friend Keith, gave me some valuable advice recently.  Again, he was no doubt speaking in allegorical terms for the most part but I suspect there was also a physical and practical element to his advice. His advice was to let go. Simply that. And I have taken it to heart, although I already knew its rightness.

    It may well be that I am in one of those periods of calm, when the entire world seems to make sense to me. When I feel sure at some deep level that ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’

    But for whatever reason and whether temporary or otherwise, I have made some very important mental shifts recently. Seismic shifts and long may they endure.

    Have I retired to a place of sanctuary and will I or should I re-enter the world at some stage?

    To those questions I answer “yes” and “no” respectively.

    But I sense that John is right when he talks of being “useful and productive”.   It is just that I do not believe I need to re-enter the “world” to achieve those objectives.  And I do not intend to.

    Over the past few weeks I seem to have discovered a subtly different way of being. It is not that I despise the world or anyone in it. It just that I do not want to be part of “commerce” or “politics”. I do not want to argue with people, I do not want to engage in conflict of any sort.

    The world I am willing to be part of is chatting to the old lady down the road who has just lost her husband. Talking to another elderly lady in the dusk on the outskirts of the village this evening. Just to engage in a detached and pleasant way with those I find around me.

    And I think that in a very real sense John that by writing, you are in the world. You are contributing something  “useful and productive”. I have certainly found your writings to be thus. And I am sure others will have done so too.

     

  • Psalm 42- Where is Now Thy God?

    Psalm 42- Where is Now Thy God?

    Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks, so longeth my soul after thee O God.

    Thank god for England, and for English country churches. For their jolly vicars, the kindly church wardens and those who “do” the flowers and dust the flagstone floors.

    For the organists and choirs and the village ladies in their funny hats and sensible shoes. England, this England.

    We shall miss it when it has gone, all this. When our heritage has been stolen by the greedy developers and our churches have been converted to flats, or worse, bingo halls.

    Get there while you still can. While the barbarians yet beat at our doors, held off but by the thinnest of lines; go and sit in a quiet shrine and contemplate the infinite. Or, if you prefer, the cosmos and our place in it. Or any manner of things. But go while it lasts and pick up a book of Psalms.

    Better still, read it out loud while there is nobody about on a blustery May day and see how our ancestors lamented, wailed and gnashed their teeth in oh, so modern a fashion.

    Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul, and why are you so disquieted within me?

    Like all the Psalms of David, this quiet and beautiful piece of poetry has been recited in synagogue and church for thousands of years. It has been chanted in plainsong, it has been sung in magnificent polyphony. It has been accompanied by the organ and the orchestra. It has been set to music by Felix Mendelssohn and many others.

    Wie der Hirsch schreit….Was betrübst du dich, meine Seele?

    How modern is the writer’s lament. Help me, do not desert me in my hour of need. Why is my heart so heavy, my soul so burdened. Who was he this poet? Where was he?

    A Jew in a foreign land it is said, unable to worship his god in the temple in Jerusalem. Exiled perhaps. Wandering aimlessly in sadness, a captive or slave longing for his freedom and his home. By the rivers of Babylon.

    Am I a closet believer a friend asked me today? No I don’t think so. I just appreciate sentiment, beauty wherever it is to be found. And performance, yes that too. To speak these verses as they were meant, to bring out their meaning. To sing the psalm to the glorious setting by Mendelssohn.

    And yet some part of me shares those sentiments. Those longings.

    Where is Now Thy God?

  • What is the Purpose of Poetry?

    What is the Purpose of Poetry?

    Does poetry have a purpose? If so, then what?

    I noticed today that by far the majority of WordPresss bloggers who have been kind enough to like or follow my blog are poets. It set me thinking.

    Why on earth would a poet want to read anything I write? Then I realized that perhaps my goal and that of a poet are in fact the same. And that therefore there may not be so much difference between my prose and their poetry.

    My URL is “zenothestoic”. The title of my Blog is ” Weltanschauung ” – a Search for the Soul. According to Wikipedia:

    Weltanschauung is a concept fundamental to German philosophy and epistemology and refers to a wide world perception. Additionally, it refers to the framework of ideas and beliefs forming a global description through which an individual, group or culture watches and interprets the world and interacts with it.

    In a sense I have been writing “poetry” or at least writing prose but in a style which resembles somewhat the style of poetry.

    So if I have been writing poetry, to what end?

    Well I think the title of my Blog probably gives my game away. The purpose of my poetry (or prose, if you insist) is to help me understand the world and my place in it. Exactly the same purpose underlies my flirtatious dalliance with religion, art and music.

    And I suspect in essence poets (real poets) write poems for much the same reason. Including those who wrote the beautiful Book of Psalms.

    There is poetry even in science. When I read Richard Dawkin’s “Unweaving the Rainbow” I saw his sense of wonder and compared it, strangely, with that of a mystic or a poet.

    Because Dawkins believes he deals with science. And he does. But from science he gets much the same sense of wonder, much the same sense of pantheistic mystery as I might get from reading the Psalms aloud in a windswept and empty Norman church in the middle of the Shires.

    Science is wonder. Yes, science seeks rather more practical applications for its answers but it nonetheless receives a sense of awe from its subject matter – the universe, its origins and its “purpose”. Or its workings, in any event.

    So in a sense I see the same “use” and “purpose” in many different fields.

    In my case, poetry helps me to see and experience wonder. Even a war poem can help me to understand life, to broaden my horizons while confirming my view that life should not be about war. Or indeed hatred or any of our destructive emotions.

    My old Sweet etcetera is a case in point. What an absurdity, that war; any war. And foolish relatives at home taking pride in their son’s death and misery in the trenches.

    So for me the purpose of poetry is both to free and to focus my mind, if that makes any sense to you. A poem can make my mind soar like a mystic to dance in the sheer beauty of creation. But at the same time it can reaffirm the absurdity of most of what we humans wrongly consider important.

    Without poetry, art and music we would be dead souls, condemned to wander in the dark.