Is this the road to hell?

The way of the material man is the conversion of material into money. It’s a process that inevitably leads us away from nature, towards the building of cities. Cities shun nature, while absorbing vast quantities of people, fossil fuels and water, and from these nutrients they grow. And as they grow, they eject filth. The way of the material man is thus ill-suited to the presence of the natural world and the sooner it is consumed entirely the better. As for the filth, it’s fine so long as it’s not on his own doorstep.

In the city, mankind is organized for commerce, exploiters and exploited living in handy proximity. The accumulation of money is then the measure of a man’s success, that one man’s shoes are worth more than another man’s car. Nature, soul, spirit, indeed the whole of metaphysics is dismissed as an obsession of the weird. This is an old story, one often told, but in which the happy-endings we crave seem less and less plausible.

Meanwhile, the rubbish of the city spills outwards from its bounds, scattered by its itinerant emissaries along the leafy byways and the ferny dells whose misfortune it is to lie an easy drive away. Supermarket carrier bags are snagged in the boughs of trees. There, they are torn season by season into the filthy grey battle-banners of further urbanization.

But not everyone is drawn to cities. Indeed, they’ve always horrified me. To my eye there is something dead about them, no matter how lively they might appear on the surface. I have drawn the ire of city folk for saying such things. But the cities are such vibrant places, I’m told. They are centres of culture, indeed the very epicentres of governance and civilization. Would you find the Elgin Marbles, or a Van Gough on display in a provincial village library? Would you find the seat of a nation’s power residing in the village old folk’s hut?

I counter that the cities also deaden the sensibilities. They deny easy reconnection with the natural world. Instead, they attempt to assimilate it, while colouring it as grey as the city environment. No stars are visible from its streets, and the skylark does not sing its praises. Cities cradle violence. They incubate neuroses and paranoia. And in the city’s virulent graffiti there is the metaphor of a poor, lonesome dog chewing raw its own paws for entertainment.

So, the country lanes, within easy driving distance of cities, are hung with bags of dog muck, ubiquitous markers of urban neuroses, centred upon the interests of the self. The lay-bys are strewn with nitrous oxide cartridges, each one a lamentable attempt at gaining fleeting release, but which colours only more warmly the urban way and forgives the jettison of another load of McTrash out the car window. As for the hanging of the prophylactic’s hurried orgasm on the barbed wire’s thorns,… well,… the least said on that one the better, but I guess by now you know where I’m going with all of this.

Year by year, it’s harder to say hell isn’t where we’re heading. And while this may indeed be so, the material man cares nothing, and has not the nous to understand the poisoned haiku of a beer-can in the hedge. Yes, we all need money to live, but money is also imaginary, and it imprisons us. It has us valuing the wrong things. A man of soul will admire the oak for its expression, and it having known so many generations. A man of money will cut it down and have it sawn as planks to sell. The man of soul feels its loss, the man of money looks for another oak to fell. Which one is the fool? The man of soul seeks the ineffable, the magical in a landscape. The man of money puts a fence around it, builds a hotel and a golf course.

The country boy under siege turns to philosophy. He risks New Age quackery, and dallies with paganism. He takes up meditation, studies Buddhism, Daoism, indeed any bloody “ism” that does not champion the material. He asks: How does a Zen master view the city’s inexorable sprawl? The all knowing Google machine answers: “Where to buy the city’s inexorable sprawl”; “who owns the city’s inexorable sprawl”; “how to market the city’s inexorable sprawl”. And then, even less helpfully, “where to find a Zen Master?” and “what is Zen?”

I suppose if we take the longer view, it doesn’t matter. Civilizations come and go. Ours will be no different. A thousand years from now, I imagine an archaeologist scraping layers of mud from the outline of my house. And he will add my leavings to the average assessment of the broader culture, and the times I lived in. He will assume I was a material man, for what evidence will there be to the contrary?

We are all the product of an age and a zeitgeist. So, as Chris Rea sings, this might well indeed be The Road to Hell, and no bother, for there never was a golden age. Blink and we’re all gone. More than that, we never existed in the first place. Walk up and down the room, and where are your footprints? As for the search for the bucolic, that route without a single bag of dog muck to mark the way, it’s a fantasy born of too romantic a vision of the world, while real human beings just aren’t like that. All of which means of course, it’s me who’s the freak.

I’d advise the urban folk please to follow the countryside code, except the latest version reads like it was focus-grouped by weekend Welly wearers only, not deliberated upon by countrymen with any serious intent to protect. Perhaps Chris Rea would have included that line in the song, except he couldn’t find a decent rhyme for Welly. So I tell them to read Richard Jeffries’ instead. “The Story of my Heart” will do. Or “The Amateur Poacher”. His world isn’t something any of us will ever know, but perhaps in realizing what it is we’ve already lost, we’ll hesitate to further desecrate what very little there is left.

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Shouting at the radio

I’m not seeing the world in much depth at the moment. I know this because I’m growing once more prone to irritation, to entanglement in emotional snares. I should be old enough and wise enough to avoid such things by now, but instead seem at times set to become one of those grumpy old guys who shouts at the radio.Hopefully I can avoid this fate but the signs are not promising. I shouted at the radio last night, on the long, sticky commute home, then again at the TV, at the po faced presenter announcing with barely subdued glee the latest bit of grim news, of why we should be afraid, that the sky is falling and the world is going to hell. And all that.

So I took a walk, a circuit from home that included a large bite out of the Lancashire plain. It was a humid evening after heavy rain, the tracks just drying out. There were muddy puddles to splash through, and the meadows steamed sleepily, slugs and snails making their glistening trails as they slid ponderously about their business, unconcerned by the stupidity of men or the quest for wholeness.

I met one other person, a woman walking her dog. As we approached each other from opposite directions, I looked at her, intending to give her a polite smile, (to be translated as “I’m harmless”), but she was otherwise engaged, talking animatedly into her ‘phone. I noted how her dog shuffled along with a reluctant gait and what appeared to me to be a dejected expression, as if the poor beast lacked attention and had long given up expecting any. I reeled the smile back in, did not bother to say hello, and carried on my way.

The plain is not an overly stimulating place, no sense of Wow in the scenery, just a gridwork of straight tracks, laid down in the long ago, and always disappearing into the distance like an artist’s simplistic study in perspective. The tracks are flanked by deep, almost defensive ditchworks, also thorny hedgerows barring access to the vast meadows beyond, where they grow wheat, potatoes, carrots, oilseed, sprouts, barley, cabbage, and weeds. But for all this seasonal vegetal variety, the view is unchanging, the only real interest being in the sky which is at times a wide and ever moving canvas of delight.

Last night it was beautifully animated, the dusky hour rendering broody contrasts in colour and a full pallet: vanilla, tobacco, washday white, murky grey and steely blue. The atmosphere was dynamic, displaying the whole geography book of cloud types – the low and creeping, the exuberantly puffy, and the ominously towering, and I could see heavy showers slanting down as they swept the horizon. We lacked only lightning bolts to complete the story.

It being a circular walk, I met the woman again some thirty minutes later, still talking into her ‘phone. I did not bother to look this time, but kept my eyes alternately on the track, and on the sky.The dog’s spirits had not rallied much. In its weary glance I caught a twinkle of past memories, of balls tossed, of splashing shoulder deep in ponds to fetch sticks, of having ears fondled and belly tickled, tongue lolling at the simple pleasures of a dog’s life. But such things were a long time ago, I suspect.

There were just two of us out that night, but only one of us had noticed the sky, and the fact of my wry observation of this fact told me I wasn’t really seeing it in much depth either. What was it to me that the woman had spent the whole time talking on her ‘phone instead of being simply “present” in the world? What was it to me she might have seen more in that night’s episode of East Enders, or Corrie, or Emmerdale, than in that glorious dome of sky? Why could she not have talked instead to her dog? Made him happy instead of trailing him along like just another dull task in hand? What was any of that to do with me?

Ah, but when we are out of sorts and irritated by what we see as the apparent shortcomings of others, I find it is usually something in ourselves that’s crying out for attention. And is depression of the spirit not always presaged by the black dog that’s given up on expecting to be noticed?

Reading back into my diary, peeling away the years, I feel a greater depth in my words a decade ago than now, and fear more recent times have fetched me up in shallow waters. But then again I find passages that suggest I have always felt this way, that an aversion to shallowness is one of the permanently bounding conditions of my psyche, the other being a paradoxical fear of drowning in waters that are out of my depth. So I oscillate between the two, reaching back into the past for that mythical hoard of depth and wisdom, and fearing tomorrow for its inevitable loss.

It was a shame though, I mean that the woman missed that beautiful sky. Feeling my own presence beneath its dome, I was granted sufficient grace to return home in less of a mood for shouting at the radio.

How often though we hurry by, lost in the world of our thoughts, or caught up reacting to the thoughts of others. The whole of human society is made up of the things we either think or have thought into being, and much of human thinking is prone to fault, yet still it consumes us; we think that to think is the most cherished of all human gifts. By contrast, the world does not think at all. It just is, and this lends it a stillness which, if we can only transcend thinking for a moment, allows to to see ourselves in the wider context, in the third person so to speak, as a portal of life, unique and sparkly-small beneath that simple dome of sky.

There are those who live to move and shape society by influencing thought, but I am not one of them – at least no longer. I accept this may be a fault, that there may be things, thoughts I possess, that might be of benefit to the world, but in the world of thought, influence must be won, fought for, talked for animatedly like the woman on her phone. And I am not a talker, not a fighter. I am too remote, withdrawn from the world, and by ambition set only to become more withdrawn, an ever greater space between myself and the noise of thought and the glitter of the ten thousand things.

Being nobody, going nowhere – the Buddhist meditation. I am nothing. Our only purpose in life is our awakening to that sobering revelation, or if we already suspect it, then to its acceptance, that life is a journey to nowhere if it does not lead eventually into silence, into the realisation of nothingness. But this is not the nothingness of a dead thing, but the emptiness of pure presence and one has only to experience the most fleeting moment to feel also the joy in it and to know viscerally, this is a direction that is intrinsically true and worth the years of nurturing.

I do hope that poor dog cheered up when it got home.

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Qigong and Tai Chi – and the trouble with energy medicine.

Tai Chi has been around for a while in the west, Yang style appearing among the Chinese diaspora in the USA as early as the 1940’s. Qigong methods, although much older in origin, appeared more recently in the West, from the 1990’s. As a health system, both are practiced with a slow, mindful intent. The breath is measured and deep. They’re supposed to work, we’re told, by manipulating “chi”.

The literature talks of “chi” as a form of subtle energy that flows around the body. If chi is abundant and free flowing we are healthy. If chi is low or blocked, we become sick. This is where acupuncture comes in, being supposedly a more direct way of intervening in the body’s energy system, unblocking chi and improving its flow by needling a network of points in the subsurface tissues. Claims for the efficacy of Chinese “energy medicine” are impressive, though the research papers thus far translated are said by Western pundits to be of a poor quality, lacking the “blinded” trials and large scale studies one would normally expect. This makes it hard to differentiate between genuine efficacy and placebo. The best we can say is the results, though interesting, are thus far inconclusive. There may be something in it, there may not.

Those researchers who are most sympathetically inclined are at their best when seeking to explain things without using the “Chi” word. They speak instead of oxygen and glucose and bio-chemical energy. These processes are well understood and fit into the more mechanistic western paradigm. From this perspective it’s all about breathing and movement. This boosts the vascular and lymphatic systems, which increases the available energy for healing, for general health, and a sense of well-being. There’s no need to bring “chi” into it. Any claimants who fail this test and insist on using the “chi” word to paper over the cracks of a more rational analysis, risk an ignominious labelling as charlatans, cranks or crackpots. This would include most self proclaimed Qigong Masters, “healers” and unaffiliated researchers of energy medicine operating today.

The problem for me, as a practitioner of Tai Chi and Qigong, as well as an interested student of its background and science, is that it feels like there’s more going on than blood and lymph circulation. It feels like the nervous system is becoming highly active when we practice, that there is an “electrical” component. There is tingling, feelings of fullness, of electricity moving through the body. These are subjective sensations and could be anything, but, as far as I know, they are unique to Qigong and Tai Chi, and I would like to understand them better. However, in my last post on this subject I described having reached the stage where I was persuaded to abandon further enquiry along these lines, having found the literature far too obtuse and contradictory to make any headway with it at all.

I was happy instead to side with the work of Douglas Kendall et al, who present an alternative and convincing body of work that rebuts the Chinese concept of “chi” altogether, exposing it as a kind of Western mistranslation, that what the Chinese actually meant was something else entirely and more closely akin to Western concepts in the first place, though predating them by a few thousand years. Yes, Qigong and Tai Chi work, but not as a result of anything spooky, says Kendall. It’s purely physiological. Adopting this position we find ourselves on safer ground, but as a practitioner it also feels like an unsatisfactory retreat.

There is another large body of work by researchers who represent a hundred year long tradition of energy medicine, this one entirely western. It proposes an electromagnetic “energy body” as a pre-requsite for life, rather than as a by-product, and claims that in maintaining the health of the energy body, we maintain the health of the physical body. This work has many correlations with the concept of “chi” and is generally supportive of the eastern energy system. It began in the early part of the twentieth century, and has rumbled on in various backwaters ever since. It’s very interesting, but delving into it as I have been doing recently doesn’t help to clarify things at all.

As far as I can make out the work has been sidelined by the mainstream because no one has been able to reproduce the key experiments under the rigour of contemporary controls. What surrounds it in fact is the odour of something a bit fishy. It lurks in the shadows rather than under the illumination of a universal revelation. Its commentators are restricted to You Tube, where they appear shoulder to shoulder with the crazy cat videos. This does little for their reputation, but neither has it stopped them from going on to brazenly market gadgets for plugging into the “energy body” – the purpose being to “boost” or “repair” it, thereby arresting the onset of sickness, old age and death. Modern, western energy medicine promises us the elixir of immortality via gadgets with flashing lights. What’s not to like about it?

Now, I’m sure there is a kernel of truth in it, that the electromagnetic field of the body is indeed an integral part of its function. Robert Becker (Body Electric) has done most to establish the foundations of it, showing us how regeneration of tissues and bones following injury are all presaged by fluctuations in the body’s electrical potentials. Injuries that are reluctant to heal can indeed be encouraged to do so by artificially boosting the electrical potentials by external means. This much has been proven and accepted by the mainstream, but it’s a long way from the claims of latter day gurus.

Becker’s work seems not to have led anywhere in more recent times, except as footnotes in a greater mythology whose adherents are to be found quoting and misquoting him. Sadly, I’m unable to find any evidence of reliable science built upon the foundations of his work, and all the contemporary pundits are after is simply selling us stuff.

Energy medicine is not taught at “respectable” universities. Medical students do not emerge with a vocabulary that includes “energy bodies”, “the etheric” or “auras”. They do not talk of the electro magnetic elixirs of immortality. Progress in coming to any firm conclusions about all this stuff therefore is slow, and the answers seem as far away as ever. Is this because researchers are held back for want of funds and fear of ridicule? or is it because the research has already adequately established there is nothing in it but quackery?

So, amidst all this fog where does that leave the humble and more rational practitioners of Qigong, and Tai Chi? Well, in terms of the “energy body”, we’re going to be on shaky ground for a long time to come and must be circumspect in all our dealings with it. We must recognise that whenever we speak of bioelectricity as a more western friendly correlate of “chi” we are still entering a controversial field. We risk deluding ourselves and misleading others when we speak of it, so we’re better holding our tongues. That said, I do find it useful to think of an energy body when practising. Indeed any sensation of the body registered by the mind is the result of processes going on in the nervous system and therefore “energetic” in nature. But to develop a more acute awareness of it is one thing, to extrapolate from it all manner of dubious claims is quite another.

More about Tai Chi and Qigong, in practise, next time.

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Darkness within darkness

The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name
The unnamable is the eternally real
Naming is the origin of all things
Free from desire, we realise the mystery
Caught in desire, we see only the manifestations
Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source
The source is called darkness
Darkness within darkness
The gateway to all understanding

So runs the first chapter of the Dao De Jing, the seminal text of spiritual and philosophical Daoism. Although attributed by legend to the archetypal  and possibly mythical white-bearded sage figure Lao-tse, its true authorship is still debated. What is not in doubt is its antiquity – the earliest surviving versions thus far uncovered dating to around 300-400 BC, while tradition dates it much earlier to around 500-600 BC. In archeological terms its existence provides evidence of a remarkable awakening of a deeply spiritual, philosophical and self-reflective human consciousness – an awakening that seems to have taken place across many cultures, both east and west, around the same time.

The  Dao De Jing  is also a troubling text – just eighty one short, enigmatic verses that have been translated and interpreted in different ways. The above quote is from the opening of the Stephen Mitchell version which, although frowned upon by some scholars of Daoism, remains popular – perhaps, like the Dao de Jing itself – for holding more to the heart, than to the letter of an idea.

At first glance, the Dao De Jing reads like nonsense, and many of us will discard it as being too enigmatic for its own good. It’s only as we deepen psychologically and spiritually that more of the text begins to make sense. As children of a material and rigorously rational paradigm, we prefer our lessons delivered in plain words, our descriptions of reality literal, and our proofs of phenomenon to be demonstrated with an irrefutable logic. But the Dao De Jing suggests the ultimate nature of reality simply isn’t like that. This makes describing it in literal terms impossible, so the text uses paradox to provoke, twist and even to paralyse the mind into a logical impasse from which the meaning arises of its own accord, not as words but as visceral insights.

The unnamable is the eternally real. What’s eternally real is beyond language.  We know what it is, but not its nature. It is the ground of being, it is the gap in the perceivable quanta of the manifest world, but if we try to define it or even imagine it,  we limit our understanding to what we can perceive with the inadequate apparatus of the logical, thinking mind. It’s better then to have no mind, no convictions about the eternally real than any mind at all.

This is not to say the eternally real cannot be experienced. We are, after all, part of the ultimate nature of reality ourselves, our minds holographic reductions of a greater conscious whole. It’s through the mind therefore we can tune in, if we can first of all tune out the mind’s more daily preoccupations with material things or rational thoughts – for what we think about things is paradoxically our biggest hurdle to understanding any-thing at all.

If we can use our minds this way, and by a process of mindfulness seek nothing but the stillness in every moment, we might eventually glimpse the darkness of our immaterial self, and in so doing realise we can only be experiencing this self from the perspective of a deeper blackness, a more authentic all-encompassing formlessness that seems both self and no-self.

Impossible to define in intellectual terms this no-thing-ness is experienced as a sense of oneness, familiar and comforting as a passionate lover’s embrace. And with it comes the reminder this exquisite state is our most natural state, our own ground of being. It is who and what we really are – and we have merely forgotten it for a while, temporarily lost as we all are, in the world of forms.

Self in no self. Darkness within darkness.

The gateway to all understanding.

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Letting go

I talked last night about letting go of our anxieties and I’m conscious now of  making it sound easier than it really is. If we are born with a personality that is prone to anxiety, depression, or any other form of psychological turbulence, ” letting go” is more of a lifetime’s work than something that can be taught in a one off session – it’s part of who we are, and we’ll never be described as “normal” in the clinical sense, but then who is normal? On the upside, with hindsight, for a writer, it gives us a lot of interesting material to work with – though it might not feel like it at the time.

Of course, we can be brought quickly back onto the straight and narrow with the aid of drugs like SSRI’s. These alter the way we experience emotion, and can be quite powerful, but speaking as a layman, they also have their downsides. If your depression is so deep you’re literally at risk of razor blades in the bathroom, then SSRI’s can save your life, so we shouldn’t be too squeamish about taking them. Equally though, I know people who are stuck on them and for no reason I can see, other than they’re not aware of  any other option.

I spent a short time on SSRI’s myself, following a stressful transition in both my work and personal life, back in the nineties. This was a decade when they seemed to be handing them out like sweets. Prozac in particular was hailed as the new wonder drug – a substance that would render things like depression and anxiety a thing of the past. Well, Prozac’s still with us, but so are things like depression and anxiety.

Before taking Prozac, I was jumping at shadows, I was anxious about things stretching way into the future, things that might never happen. I’d break out sweating for no reason, I’d get dizzy behind the wheel of a car, mainly because my neck was so tightly screwed up I was shutting off the circulation to my brain – and I’d only to be trapped in a room full of people before I was imagining I was going to faint – probably for the same reason.

On reflection I recognize the root cause of my anxieties was not wanting to be where I was. But my societal duties and my apparent life’s path – including the basic need to go out and earn a living – insisted I endure situations I found absurd, not only that, but situations in which I was obliged to act and speak as if I thought everything was “normal”, that I’d somehow bought-in to the collective delusion. You can only do that for so long before your unconscious erupts on a volcanic scale, laying waste to your life, prompting you to rise phoenix-like from the ashes, hopefully on a more psychically sincere path. If you can’t do that, there’s a chance it’ll simply pull the plug on you and find a more willing companion next time around.

On Prozac, however, fitting in was no longer a problem. I also discovered astonishing levels of self confidence. A bomb could have gone off and I would not have moved, except to brush the dust from my shoulders. If the boss had shouted at me, I would have felt confident enough to tell him what I thought, then wee on his desk. A wonder-drug? Yes, and with good reason; my early days on Prozac were a revelation!

However, I lasted only a short while before the side effects kicked in. I found myself unable to sleep. I remember I didn’t sleep for a whole week, and that put me into a darker hole than I’d been in in the first place. You can get tablets for insomnia of course, and I was offered them as a quick fix, but I decided to make a break at this point and began the long road to becoming a closet hippy instead. Twenty five years later, I still wear a conventional collar and tie to work, and I draw a salary that’s been uninterrupted by time off for “stress”. But there’s a yin-yang pendant and a tree of life next to my skin, and my wisest confidant is a book called the I Ching.

This wasn’t an easy transition.

I was 28, a self styled mathematician and a physicist, having just completed 10 years of studies. To my mind, if you couldn’t plot its trajectory, or describe its behaviour with differential equations, “it” didn’t exist. I was rational, and a materialist. Many tread that path their whole lives, carving out impressive careers for themselves. Not me. It took a while for me to realise the stuff I’d learned was already a hundred years out of date, and that while there were many aspects of life you could explore, extrapolate and interpolate with the calculus of Isaac Newton, there were others it wouldn’t touch. The mind was one of them. For that you needed to get weird. Even Newton knew this, and wasn’t afraid to get weird himself.

So I got weird.

I started on the body with Yoga, then on the mind with Jung, then on both body and mind with Tai Chi and Qigong. For the spirit, I circled Daoism, Buddhism, then came back to Jung again – it was he who taught me there can be no dichotomy between psyche and spirit. I walked, I read, and I wrote. I’ve been doing that for 25 years, and I’ve still no idea what I’m talking about, but I’ve never since felt the dark depths of despair that SSRI’s dumped me in. I’ve since faced far more stressful situations, without a serious wobble, so I must be doing something right. As for certainty though, you can forget it – about the only thing I know for sure in all of this is that what’s real is not always what you can plot on a graph.

As Jung said, what’s real is simply what works.

And it changes, all the time. What’s right for you now may not work in another year or two. You have to keep pace with your changing psyche. As Jung also said: All true things must change, and what does not change, cannot be true.

It might not sound like much of a cure – a quarter of a century of faltering steps along an essentially intangible mystical path, but reality was transformed for me once I took those first steps, and I feel the world has in all that time been coloured a more vivid shade of life than it ever would have been on SSRI’s.

A critical look at the dynamics of human interaction on a global scale reveals the disturbing fact that the world has evolved into a profoundly sick beast, that we live out daily the madness of the collective unconscious, pretty much as you can see it lived among the inmates of any institution for the seriously disturbed. And we participate in it because we have no choice – we’re all imprisoned by the essentially delusional values of money, and status, and even things like national or religious identities.

SSRI’s make us conveniently forgetful of this madness, allowing us to go on living in the world, but in ways that are making us increasingly ill. For the mystic to live in such a world, and see it as he does, does not make for comfortable viewing, but it at least grants him the ability to rise above the bullshit, to see it for what it is, and to maintain his psychical integrity rather than being negatively influenced and dragged down into the depths of hell by it.

But how do you let go? How does the office worker, the teacher, the health care professional,… all of them oppressed by organisational structures based upon delusional understandings of the human psyche, and metered by the dollar,… how do they let their anxieties go?

Well, the transcendental path is the only one I know, and your journey starts when you can deal with any negative materialistic reactions you might have to that word: Transcendental. The next step is looking that word up, understanding what it means to you, and then realising what a big word it is.

But the bottom line in all of this is it’s a personal journey. You can seek help, talk to people, read books, research the internet. But at some point you have to take charge of your own psychical destiny, and do something about it. Don’t worry that your actions might seem weird, because then you’re falling into another common trap – that of living your life through the eyes of someone else, someone always critical and questioning of your rational grip, of your right to be whomever you want to be. We’ve all done this. Recognising it, again, is one of the first steps to being free of it.

I could talk about meditation, Yoga, Tai Chi, Jungian Psychology, non literal reality, the Romantic movement, looking for meaning in our dreams, guided imagination – as I have done at at various times in this blog, and shall do so again,… but none of these things may be right for you, so just find what works, and get on with it.

Come to think of it, I haven’t talked about meditation.

I may do that next.

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Feels pretty much like being alive to me.

Exploring duality on Darwen Moor

I drove up to the Royal Arms at Tockholes today and stretched my legs on Darwen Moor. My ancestors were weavers and mill-workers in this area, and would have been intimately acquainted with the ancient byways that criss cross these rather bleak hills. How can I describe Darwen Moor? Technically it’s an upland plateau, though more poetically I can’t help thinking of it as a dour blend of gritstone, peat and heather – black as a hag’s teeth in winter. And there’s a tower.

I needed the air. And I needed my ancestors.

A dull daily commute, followed by pastimes that center upon the contemplation of one’s navel can lead to some very insulated ways of thinking, particularly when we start probing the nature of reality. Many an unfortunate hippy has passed this way, picked up on the Buddhist idea of “Maya”, misinterpreted it, and concluded that the world we think of as real is just an illusion, that attachment to it is the biggest delusion we can fall foul of, and that the more valid experience is a total retreat into an imaginary inner world, aided, if necessary, by powerful hallucinogens.

But we need to be careful.

Personally, I prefer the notion that having a keen and clear-headed handle on the ways of the physical world is far from delusional, if only because our mortal contract insists we spend so much time learning the ropes here in the first place. I like the Daoist view which describes us as being caught with our feet in both camps, that we exist partially both in the inner and the outer world, and that we can’t make sense of either without paying due attention to both.

So, it does you good to get out once in a while, to climb the muddy trails up into the clouds, far above the towns and cities, if for no other reason than to remind yourself of your mortal nature by the feel of the wind on your face. If I had a more thrill-seeking personality I’d probably take up skydiving or base-jumping. As it is a walk in the hills is usually sufficient to re-calibrate and ground my sense of reality.

Temperatures have been getting down to below freezing here and the visitor center carpark at the Royal Arms was slick with ice. As I picked up the trail, I found the ground hard with frost and the paths, normally glutinous mud and stagnant pools of water, were rendered difficult with long stretches like rivers of ice. My instep crampons would have been useful, but I’d left them at home because this is only Darwen Moor after all, not Helvellyn, though the winter weather has been known to kill people up here. I decided to chance it anyway, trusting to luck there’d be enough clear stretches to get me to the tower and back without breaking a leg. I find walking boots are useless in conditions like this, hard soled and slippery as hell, needing the addition of steel spikes to bite. The fell runners were faring far better in their soft soled trainers. I cringed at the sight of their bare legs. It was cold. Biting cold.

As I walked, I was thinking about a passage in the story I’m currently writing. The heroine, Adrienne, has survived a near fatal car accident that’s left her haunted, not least by a classic near death experience – tunnel of light, meeting dead relatives and all that. The hero, Phil, is a survivor of a different kind of accident – a helicopter crash at sea that left him traumatized  having been tossed in a rubber boat for three days in a storm, thinking he was going to drown. He suffered hallucinations towards the end, and ever since has experienced lucid dreams and an uncanny intuition apparently guided by imaginary conversations with his great great grandfather. (Don’t ask me where I get this stuff from)

Anyway, when these two meet, their chatter inevitably circles around the meaning and the nature of reality as they try to make sense of their experiences, as well as dealing with the psychological damage from which they’re still both still suffering. At one point, Phil is wondering if they’re not both actually dead, that neither of them in fact survived their accidents, and that what they think is real life is actually some kind of strange mutual lucid dream experience, or a kind of purgatory. And how would they know otherwise? But Adrienne isn’t impressed and retorts that she knows what “dead” feels like,…

“and it’s a whole lot better than this, Phil. No, this feels pretty much like being alive to me.”

So,…

Ice on the ascent. You slip – best case, you bruise your gluteus maximus. Worst, you go over a crag and break your neck. But crags are few on Darwen Moor, and the way is relatively easy, plus they’re a hardy lot round here and I had plenty of company on the way up, most of them moving faster than me – not just hardy walker types, but rosy cheeked families out for a bit of a blow. I seemed to be testing every step, or paused fiddling with my camera, while my overtakers tramped gleefully on, passing me with a neighbourly “Ow do.” Maybe I should get out more. Maybe I should should swap my shamefully underused Brashers for a pair of cheap soft soled boots from the discount store, and simply learn to walk again?

It’s not a long hike to the tower from the Royal Arms, only a couple of miles, and well worth it. It’s one of the most impressive follies in the district, built in 1898, and a magnet for generations of walkers. Unlike many such structures these days, it isn’t fenced off and boarded up. You can still climb up it, and in spite of being in one of the bleakest spots in the West Pennines, it shoulders the weather well. With a little TLC over the years, it’s maintained its structural integrity, and bourne the occasional insults of vandals good naturedly. From inside, via a spiral stone staircase, you can access a mid level viewing balcony. If you’ve the nerve for it, you can press on to the top. The stone stairway ends just short of the top where you then climb a short section of iron spiral steps, to emerge through a doorway in the upper, glazed, pergola-like dome. This gives access to the upper turret, raised some eighty feet above the moor. The views from here are breathtaking, but I’m no good with exposed heights and usually need a braver companion to goad me into making the ascent.

The tower has lost its glazed dome twice, once in 1947 in a gale, and again more recently in 2010. The latest impressive replacement was built by a local engineering company and was lowered gingerly into place by helicopter back in January this year.

Ostensibly built to celebrate the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria, the tower also celebrates the victory of local people who regained their rights of access to the ancient trails hereabouts, and which had been blocked by the absentee landlord who was more concerned with rearing grouse for the guns of the monied classes. It was an unfortunate fact that much of the British uplands were once denied to the local population until the mass-trespass movements began the long process of winning those uplands back. The most famous of these was on Derbyshire’s Kinder Scout in 1932, but it all began here over Darwen in the 1890’s. It’s a sad fact however that access wasn’t enshrined in law until the Countryside and Rights of Way act in 2000, over a hundred years later. The moral is you don’t need to be a sage to appreciate the restorative nature of the uplands. Spend your working week doing 12 hours shifts on a loom down in a smokey town and you’ll appreciate it well enough.

I didn’t climb the tower today. I was feeling a bit done in to be honest, plus the light was going and there was sleet in the air. And, all right, I’m chicken.

Fear – rational or otherwise – and conflict, also the wind biting your nose, and the ever present risk of a slip, of physical injury. Yes,… like Adrienne says: Feels pretty much like being alive to me.

Yet I know the Buddhists have a point about Maya. I glimpsed it once in a brief moment of staggering awareness – that at a certain level of perception what we see and experience in the world is a mental construct, that there’s no difference between who we think we are, and what we see in the world. We are indeed “that“. But adopting this philosophical stance doesn’t make things any easier for us at the operating level of reality. We have no choice but to go with the world as we see and feel it, being bound by physical rules that restrict our ability to mentally manipulate our realities, rules that render us fragile in a world that can seem brutally impassive, rules that mean when we trap our finger in the car door, it hurts, and when we find ourselves on an ice-bound trail in the British uplands, we’re going to have to watch our step.

But this kind of thinking raises a paradox that haunts me: If I am what I’m looking at, then who are you? Since there’s nothing special about me, you must also be what you’re looking at, and if we’re both looking at the same thing, then at some unimaginable level we are the same, you and I.

I’m afraid my rather dull abilities as a philosopher won’t carry me beyond this point – how we can be both separate and unique expressions of spirit, yet also be the same. How can I look at the world, and at the same time construct it, yet do so in such a way that it makes perfect sense to you, as your world makes sense to me? There are many expressions of philosophical duality but this one beats the hell out of me. So I find myself slithering over the moors on contemplative walks, admiring the views, taking photographs and occasionally talking to myself.

Still, it’s better than fretting about the gas bill, or the price of petrol.

I made it back from the tower without incident, the only downside to the day being that the visitor center cafe was closing, and I didn’t get my bacon butty.

Damn.

Goodnight all.

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The Garden Buddha

Some time ago now, my good lady was a guest at a church service in London. The sermon, she said, with a mischievous twinkle, would have interested me because it began with the showing of two pictures, side by side, one of Christ nailed to the cross, and the other of the Buddha, serenely floating on a cloud. However, this was not an example of ecumenical harmony  – indeed it was quite the opposite. The illustrations were used to show how Christ was very much involved in life, quite literally nailed up and suffering on account of it, that this was what life was all about: being in the thick of things, and really suffering. As for the other fellow, well just look at him: floating about serenely, eyes closed, completely out of it. How involved is that? One is living with suffering, the other is avoiding life by retreating into a sort of cloud-cuckoo land.

Now, I was a little surprised by this as I’d imagined the various religious genres were less prone to taking a pop at one another these days, though I suppose of all the non-christian religious icons that might have been chosen for such undeserved denigration, Buddha is probably the one least likely to have taken offence.

Anyway, for a moment, I found myself feeling quite cross, which was surely what my good lady, had playfully intended. I was cross because the vicar or the speaker, or whoever this person was had obviously missed the point and was demonstrating only their ignorance of Buddhism. Moreover, as a spiritual leader, they really should have known better than to speak in such an ill-informed way about another tradition. Surely, no one understands the nature of suffering, its reality, and its causes, more than the Buddhists! Also if it’s possible by analysis to root out the causes of suffering, eliminate it as much as is possible, and live a happier, more peaceful life as a result, as the Buddhists suggest we can, then what’s wrong with that? How could the speaker not have understood this? I mean, it was ridiculous! It was a cheap shot, playing to an audience of the already converted. How antiquated! How perfectly,….. medieval!

Then as if he’d been sitting up on the back row of the theatre of my mind, I heard Buddha break out into an enormous belly laugh, not at news of the sermon, but at me, at my crossness. I saw the joke, and laughed too, laughed at myself. You let it go. You recognise the snare, you disentangle yourself from it before it’s had time to do you any damage, and you move on.

I’ve been studying Buddhist and Taoist philosophies now for about a decade,  looking for parallels in  various western humanist ideas, and trying to apply the stuff I’ve picked up in both my basic approach to living, and also in trying to understand life a little better. I’ve had a small statue of the Buddha in a corner of my garden for several years,  but this is more on account of his role as a cultural icon, than a religious one  – I bought him from a garden centre. I’ve certainly never considered myself to be a Buddhist, because I always reckoned there was so much more involved than I probably had time for, and I wasn’t sure I really “got” Buddhism that well anyway. I have some books, I explore meditation, I sometimes seek out the Dalai Lama on You Tube, but it doesn’t make you a Buddhist, does it? I mean, I don’t want to be pinned down, and labelled as anything really. I’m not that familiar with the Buddha’s Dhammapada, and find myself more naturally drawn to Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. Also, it has to be said, I rather like the idea of Lao Tzu putting all his wisdom into those wonderfully enigmatic verses, before disappearing into the sunset with a dancing girl, and leaving us all to it. (at least that’s what I heard)

For a moment though, after Buddha laughed, I realised I understood more about Buddhism than I’d perhaps given myself credit for. It crystallised, and in the letting go of my childish pique, I became a  Buddhist – at least for the moment – if not actually a real one, then perhaps a sincere garden one, one who has gained much spiritual,  psychological and philosophical mileage from reading the ideas of a character, who, in modern times has sneaked into the West in disguise as this cultural icon, rather than an overtly religious one.

Conversely, I failed to understand why picture of the suffering Christ was spiritually superior.  Perhaps someone can enlighten me? To suffer is to live? I don’t think the Buddhists would argue with that one, but there seemed to be a suggestion that it was somehow more virtuous to suffer, and unrealistic to seek an end to suffering – that indeed this could only be achieved by retreating from the world into a kind of meditative bubble in which we might as well not be alive at all.

But meditation is not an escape. We do not hide in our meditation – indeed, psychologically speaking, the opposite seems the case to me, most of us only able to get by in our day-to-day lives by hiding all sorts of things from ourselves, all the time. There is nothing more fantastical therefore, than the perception of reality many of us weave for ourselves. Meditation, on the other hand, gives us a chance to step aside from the illusion. In meditation we seek to achieve nothing at all for a while. We just stop. And if we stop often enough, the mind begins to simmer down a bit, and eventually, when we’re not meditating, we begin to see things differently, and react to situations differently, because a part of the mind that was subdued before, has the chance to get a word in edgeways now. Meditation then, is not sitting on a cloud and hiding from reality. It’s about establishing for yourself a subtly different view of what that reality is.

Our actual life is no different. We still suffer. We have the same disappointments, shocks and upsets as before. Family and friends pass away unexpectedly, we still get ill, crash our car, lose our wallet, the doorbell rings in the middle of our tea and there’s some evangelist trying to convert us to their particular brand of religious extremism, our computer gets a virus, and we break our wristwatch. Then there are more subtle  forms of suffering that one might call self-inflicted, and are  caused simply by the way we view the world through the distorted lens of our attitudes, beliefs and prejudices.

Buddhism then does not change the things life throws at you. It just makes you see them differently, so you suffer less emotional damage as a result. And of course seeing things differently dissolves our unhelpful attitudes and our petty prejudices, so that self inflicted suffering, at least, ought to be attainable by all but the most benighted of souls.

The Buddhists say we suffer in life because we’re attached to it – not just to life, but to the details that make up our lives. Things can never really be the way we want, they say, because things just don’t last. They are impermanent, yet we try to fool ourselves into thinking everything’s going to last for ever, and that certain things are valuable enough to be worth pursuing at any cost – money, fame, material goods, or even less tangible things like love, health, happiness, or the respect of others. The pursuit of anything gives rise to feelings of passion, excitement and greed but once we have attained something our desire for it vanishes, to be replaced by the fear of its possible loss. Its loss is inevitable, eventually: whatever it is, it won’t last, but we still cling to it.

What can we do then? Well, according to the Buddhist method, if we can accept our troubles are caused by our desires, then naturally we can reduce our troubles by desiring things less, by recognising more the impermanent nature of the world around us and the things in it, and getting less worked up by unhelpful ambitions to hang onto things for ever, be they stuff, states of mind or even just ideas about the way things are. If we can find a way of looking at life dispassionately, if we can recognise the impermanent nature of things, and be less inclined towards attachment, that is the secret of a happier life. Happiness therefore is not hanging on against the odds – it is letting go. The pursuit of happiness is inherently self defeating and the secret is that the giving up of one’s ambitions to be happy, leads to the greatest happiness of all.

As with all the things I witter on about, they should not be looked upon as self-evident truths, or beliefs that I wish to force down the throats of others. They are merely the things I think, and, in the words of the writer Flannery O’Conner, I tend to write in order to see what it is that I think. And I have been led to think this way because I find that if I apply these thoughts, I feel a little better, and fancy I can sometimes see a little further than the end of my nose  – which is really the best any of us have to go on.

To live is to suffer, sure, but the idea that it is good to suffer any more than we have to sounds more like self-indulgence to me.

Michael Graeme

www.mgraeme.ic24.net

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