People and Ideas

Featured

Posted on September 30, 2026 by gigglinginthegutter

I have always been fascinated by the way ideas travel through people. A thought begins in one mind, is taken up by another, and is carried into a new setting where it changes shape. Something is preserved, but something unexpected is added. The result is not a straight line of influence, but a web: people, books, conversations and disciplines crossing one another until a new pattern becomes visible.

I have noted elsewhere how Martin Buber’s ideas about dialogue were taken up by the physicist David Bohm. Buber’s central insight was that human beings are formed in relationship: we do not simply meet the world as detached observers, but are shaped by the encounters we enter into. It is within the “between” that meaning originates. Bohm brought this relational philosophy into conversation with modern physics and with his own concern for collective thought. At MIT, and through later dialogue groups, these ideas helped inspire new ways of thinking about systems, ecology, organisations and creativity. In this way, ideas from an Austrian mystical philosopher flowed through a small nexus of thinkers—David Bohm, Peter Senge, and Donella Meadows—to help found both the field of ecological economics and the culture of enormous learning organisations like Microsoft and Google.

What interests me in this example is not only the ideas themselves, but the role played by an individual who becomes a point of connection. Bohm acted as a kind of nexus: someone able to hold together an almost mystical philosophy of relationship, the scientific imagination of relativity and quantum theory, and the practical need for groups to think together. Through him, ideas crossed boundaries that might otherwise have remained separate.

David Bohm

Wholeness and the Implicate Order; On Dialogue

Maurice Merleau-Ponty offers another example of this same pattern. He drew from philosophy, especially Husserl’s phenomenology and Sartre’s existentialism; from psychology, especially Kurt Koffka’s Gestalt theory; from art; and from evolutionary thought, including Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s vision of emergence. His work can be read as an attempt to show how meaning arises not inside a sealed individual mind, but in the living relationship between body, world and others.

Merleau-Ponty’s early book, The Structure of Behaviour, was inspired by Gestalt psychology with its insistence that a whole cannot be reduced to its separate parts. His major work, Phenomenology of Perception, developed this insight further. Perception, he argued, is not a camera-like recording of the world by a disembodied mind. It is embodied. We encounter the world through movement, touch, habit, gesture and attention. We do not stand outside the world looking in; we belong to it, and it continually shapes the way we see.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Structure of Behaviour; Phenomenology of Perception; Invisible and Invisible

This is where Merleau-Ponty comes close to Buber. For both thinkers, meaning is relational. It is not made by an isolated subject and then projected onto a passive world. It emerges in the space between: self and other, body and environment, perceiver and perceived. The scientific revolution of relativity may have helped prepare the ground for this shift, because it made it harder to imagine reality as something viewed from nowhere. Relationship, position and perspective had become central even in the hard sciences.

In his final, unfinished book, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty pushed this thought further. He used the phrase “the flesh of the world” to suggest that we and the world are not two separate substances facing each other across a gap. We are made of the same fabric. To see is also to be visible; to touch is also to be touchable. In every act of perception there is a crossing-over, or what he called a chiasm: I meet the world, and the world meets me.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The Phenomenon of Man

Teilhard de Chardin deepens this thread through his account of evolution as emergence. Although he and Merleau-Ponty never met, Merleau-Ponty discussed evolution in his lectures at the Collège de France and quoted Teilhard’s phrase that “man came silently into the world”. Both thinkers resisted a simple split between matter and spirit. Instead, they saw meaning appearing through thresholds: the physical world giving rise to chemistry, chemistry to life, life to consciousness, and consciousness to the subsequent evolution of ideas.

The common thread, then, is relationship. Ideas do not move by abstraction alone. They move through people who are alive to more than one world and able to bring those worlds into contact. Buber, Bohm, Merleau-Ponty and Teilhard each, in different ways, point beyond the isolated individual toward a more dynamic picture: meaning arises in the space between things. It is made in encounter, in perception, in dialogue, in evolution. A person becomes a nexus when they can recognise this space between, enter it with enthusiasm, and help others see what might be born there.

…. Next post: Creative Cost (the other side of encounter)

In. Sight

Posted on October 2, 2026 by gigglinginthegutter

I hear that as many images have been captured in the past 6 months, as have been taken in the history of humanity to-date (paintings, drawings, films, photos etc).

There are also increasing numbers of people missing whole longed-for events because they are bound up with capturing them on their mobile phones. Unlike our grandparents we have a constant record of our past. It is re-presented to us on Facebook and by friends and family alike.

What effect is the fixing of our image having on our psyche and soul?

(It’s not a rhetorical question).

What was the life of our senses like maybe 100 years ago, and indeed for all of the development of our species until that point?

Our world would have been smelly. We each have our pheromones and scent, which are now covered, deodorised and washed away. Then, there would have been a rich scent-scape. Smell is a sense that is strongly associated with emotion. The nerves in the nose are a direct extension of the brain and feed in to the limbic system, our emotional brain. That’s why particular smells evoke such vivid memories and sensations. We now live in a relatively odour-free environment (a non-scence world?) and what smell there is from bottles rather than bodies. What difference does that make to our development?

Our world would also have been full of natural noise, and probably less of it. Birdsong, people arguing, the clip clop of horses in the street, the sound of wind in trees. (Oh yes, and sounds of pain and anguish from the diseased and dying).

Then of course, we lived hugger-mugger and would (I think?) have been constantly in- touching – literally rather than “by phone, “by text” etc…

..and our visual sense would have been present and alive rather than past and fixed. We would, I think, have perceived ourselves through the eyes of others rather than through mirrors and photos. Yes, we aged, but without the constant record and reminder of it.

We would, in short have been much more fully present. Here, now, alive, available to each other human to human. We would not have been waiting for the e-mail, the text, and the call. We would not have had some part of our mind in another place or another time.

We’re increasingly going backward into the future, with our eyes fixed on the rear view mirror, rather than on the road ahead or with the passengers in the car with us.

Which fixes us as materialists. The material, physical world is always in the past. Literally (see Whitehead, Process and Reality). It does not exists in the present, but is crystallised out by our free will from the stuff and limitless potential that is the future. As quantum physicists have shown again and again – everything is potential until observed. It is the act of observation that crystallises out the particular phsyical world – and by then its already in the past. As our ancestors put it, we are the sisters of Wyrd, spinning fate at the foot of the Tree Ygrdrassl.

The past, the material, is dead and done. Let’s live in the present, with each other, and look to the future.

The cost of creativity

Posted on October 1, 2026 by gigglinginthegutter

Humans are fundamentally creative; it is in our nature to originate.This requires us to live close to boundaries.That’s hard, painful because edges are unsafe. They are the source of the unknown – not just because of what lies beyond the boundary – but mostly because of what new forces are stirred up at the tidal line where systems interact.

There is a condition known by psychoanalyists as claustroagrophobia. This is a type of psychosis when a person lives on the shoulder of many societies. Claustrophobic if immersed at the centre of a group, agrophobic if excluded. It seems to me that many great thinkers may have expressed this as a quality, rather than a problem – oscillating between sociability and introversion, living even in this way at the boundary between the external and internal world.

The reward for this stressful unsafe existence? Certainly not money or security. It is the glistening fish of a truly new idea – hooked and netted out of the maelstrom and whirlpool of the meeting of many worlds.

When we create something unique and original – whether written, composed, painted, or thought – it is hard work. Analagous to giving birth.

“This is the eternal source of art: a man is faced by a form whihc desires to be made through him into a work. This form is no offspring of his soul, but is an appearance which steps up to it and demands of it the effective power. The man is concerned iwth an act of his being. If he carries it through, if he speaks the primary word out of his being to the form which appears, then the effective power streams out, and the work arises. The act includes a sacrifice and a risk. This is the sacrifice; the endless possibility that is offered up on the alter FJLof form. For everything which just this moment in play ran through the perspective must be obliterated; nothin of that may penetrate the work. The exclusiveness of what is facing it demands that it be so. This is the risk: the primary word can only be spoken with the whole being. He who gives himself to it may withhold nothing of himself. The work does not suffer me.. to turn aside and relax in the world of It; but it commands. If I do not serve JLit aright it is broken, or it breaks me.”

Martin Buber Ich und Du

Next: Sight and insight

Dusein (we are brother and sister, you and I)

Posted on September 29, 2026 by gigglinginthegutter

Heidegger’s existentialism centres on “Dasein,” or being, which he describes as something we are “thrown” into. I find Martin Buber’s view more compelling: in Ich und Du—I and Thou—meaning arises through relationship. Buber contrasts the distance of addressing others as “Sie” with the deeper relatedness of encountering them as “Du,” or “Thou.” For me, the essence of existence lies not in Dasein, but in what we might call Dusein : being with Thou.

Our brother whose heart be heaven

(Our sister, our father, mother)

Hallowed be thy pain

Our kingdoms come

When will is one

On earth as it is in heaven

…

lead us out of that isolation

Which delivers each to evil

Tae a Wife

Posted on September 28, 2026 by gigglinginthegutter

She used to like Scotties
But now she loves Pugs
What does that say of her journey?

From pugnacious aye-right
To soft scottish sky-bright
Unfolding from surly to girlie

Meaning and the Number 2

Posted on September 27, 2026 by gigglinginthegutter

This is why, for me, the mystic number is 2.

The Question of Meaning

“Meaning is the essential feature of consciousness…” David Bohm

The first question for me is this: “Is there meaning?” This is, of course, just another way of phrasing “Why?” or “Is there purpose at all?” Surely this underlies all of living for each of us. Sometimes we confront it; sometimes we avoid it — but it is always there. Since we are inside existence, and have no rational external reference point, there can be no purely rational answer. Personally, though, it seems obvious to me that the answer is yes; but that is, in the end, an article of faith, albeit one underpinned by all of the extraordinary “coincidences” in physics that make life possible.

Let’s then take the existence of meaning as a truth. Where does it lie?

Meaning Beyond the Ego

“The dust inbreathed was a house, the wall, the wainscot, and the mouse” T. S. Eliot

It seems to me that purpose is not to be found in what Freud thought of as the “self” or Ego. This is entirely different from Jung’s definition of Self — which is much more interesting. “I”, that is, all of our “I”s, will dissolve as bodies die. At that point, their molecules will be taken up into infinite new forms, just as the body I currently inhabit is made up of atoms that have been part of infinite others — including all of those I have known: my mother, father, brothers, wife, and so on.

Nor do I believe that meaning lies solely within the material world. In fact, the more science uncovers of the “how” of quantum mechanics, the less concrete materiality really appears.

It seems to me that the frantic search for meaning within things — dialectical materialism — is a dead end, or at least a distraction. On the other hand, the material world must surely be a part of meaning. But part of what?

Meaning as Part of a Whole

“We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Part of a whole. All is one. Indeed, that is what “universe” means: one thing. Another way of looking at it could be that meaning is found in process — the flow of matter and energy. Perhaps: “the whole flow of energy and matter.” How, though, do we break that down into something we can get our arms around, or understand?

Maybe another way of looking at it is that the material is part of something else, partnered with… mind? Spirit? Antimatter?

Relation as the Site of Meaning

“The relation to the Thou is direct. No system of ideas, no foreknowledge, and no fancy intervene between I and Thou. The memory itself is transformed, as it plunges out of its isolation into the unity of the whole” Martin Buber

That, for me, is where Martin Buber and David Bohm come in. They each talk about meaning as lying within “relation” or “dialogue”: what lies “between”. Buber’s amazing semi-poetic meditation, I and Thou (Ich und Du), has been transformative for me. I would encourage everyone to read at least the first two pages, where he defines the “primary words” as I-It and I-Thou, as opposed to I, Thou, or It alone.

I therefore have two building blocks in my search. First: there is meaning. Second: the place to look for it is relationship.

Why Two Matters

“Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence” William Blake

And that is where number arises for me. If meaning lies in relation, then relation requires more than undivided oneness. It requires distinction, edge, and encounter: something that can meet something other than itself.

My daughter, as a teenager, told me she thought that an incredibly important concept was “boundary”, and I have been assimilating that ever since. Without boundary, nothing can be known. You need the “other” to understand yourself.

I wrote this some years ago.

“From zero to hero, the world is born with the appearance of 1. The archetypal boundary is right there in the change from nothing to all. But one is one, and all alone, and ever more shall be so. From 1 to 2, consciousness is possible: granularity and separation. We can understand existence because we have edge: a within and a without. Quantum mechanics shows that everything exists only as a cloud of possibility — until observed. It is the act of knowing that crystallises reality out of potential. Deliberately to mix language: it is witness that causes wavefunction collapse. It is consciousness that creates reality, and that is only possible when edge is born with the advent of the number 2. Duality appears to be a fundamental property of existence. Energy is the flip side of matter (E=mc²); everything is wave and particle simultaneously. Yin is nothing without yang. Ich and Du embrace, and the world unfolds.”

That is why, for me, the “mystic number” is 2. With it comes a consciousness of existence, and the possibility of relation and dialogue, which Buber and Bohm so eloquently place at the core of meaning.

So I return to the first question: is there meaning? For me, yes. It is not found in the isolated self, nor in material things alone, but in relation. And relation becomes possible only where there is boundary, distinction, and encounter.

That is why, for me, the mystic number is 2.

The Clyde

Posted on September 26, 2026 by gigglinginthegutter

After my mother died in 1996 we found a discovered a little book of hers. Her father had learned to sail on HMS Conway with the poet John Masefield. I found a fragment written by her in his style and I have adapted and extended it to describe the journey of the river Clyde. , This is in your honour Mum x

The Clyde

Up-bubbling in the mountains

As stream of silver hue

Over bright pebbles rippling

As fresh as morning dew:

She thunders over boulders

In clouds of rainbow spray

Through dear, green meadows winding

Inviting on the way

All horses, birds and creatures

To come and bathe and drink;

With highland cows who, munching

Crop flowers at the brink;

While fishes dart, and gleaming

Like moonbeams gone astray

They dive and leap and glitter

And in the water play.

But the Irish sea approaches

To turn her waters grey;

Haunts of men come into sight

And night is merged with day

For in the air there hangs

A heavy pall of smoke

The scent of salt and sweat

And coasters carrying coke

But she flows on regardless;

Her glory has not gone

For in the starlit evening

When gloomy day is done

Her wide and silent waters

Flow through a coloured maze

Of winking lights that dazzle

A million tinted rays

Men line with dock her banksides

This is the dear-green place

That they have built around her

The haunt of lowland race

But she remains majestic

Indifferent as to praise

And she will last when over are

St Giles and Mungo’s days

Finding Our Selves

Posted on September 25, 2026 by gigglinginthegutter

Mandalas, a way of experiencing our collective unconscious?

The Collective Unconscious

Carl Jung first described the “collective unconscious” as a deeper layer beneath the individual unconscious: a shared psychic foundation that connects human beings across time. I see it as a kind of pooling between us, both now and in the past, and possibly as one gateway to a larger shared life beyond the fragility of the mind and material consciousness.

This wider reality might be understood through traditions such as Hinduism’s Brahman or Buddhism’s Nirvana: a state that can sometimes be glimpsed through meditation, prayer, love, nature, or moments of profound connection.

Archetypes, Mandalas, and Shared Images

The collective unconscious seems to speak through symbols, especially archetypes and mandalas.

Archetypes are powerful shared images that help explain why certain stories and films resonate so deeply. The monster in the dark of horror films, or the ecstasy of union and community in Avatar, draw on images we seem to recognise instinctively.
Mandalas reflect patterns of wholeness and perfection. To me, they seem closely related to the beautiful fractals of chaos theory: intricate structures that suggest an underlying order within existence.

Connection Beyond the Individual Mind

Perhaps it is only the particular mind—this temporary form of consciousness—that dies. If that separate self is, in some sense, an illusion, then connecting with the shared stream of unconscious life allows us to taste something of immortality even now.

We may touch this shared stream through prayer, meditation, closeness with loved ones, communion with nature, or even through the collective dream-world of cinema.

In that sense, perhaps the movies are right. Whatever name we give it, something like Avatar may be what awaits. May the Force be with us.

Fear and Avoidance

Posted on September 24, 2026 by gigglinginthegutter

“Nel mezz del camin di nostra vita mi ritrovai in un selva oscura, que la diritta via era oscura” Dante

(In the middle of life I found myself in a dark wood with no obvious way out)

We believe in our thoughts, and in where they lead. The basis of reality? Yet, in fact, neuroscience shows that thinking arises from our feelings. These colour all of what we consider to be “rational”. There is a range of emotions, but at least for me the most influential is fear.

Terror leads to avoidance. We turn away from the unknown. What is obscure remains so because of our apprehensions. Consequently, unlike joy, disgust, or sadness, fear must be integrated so that we can open our eyes to a whole reality. I have found that one way to do this is to dive right in: by imagining the dreaded outcome—by plumbing the depths. At least in my experience, the fear then evaporates and new worlds open.

The first half of my life was spent with an avoided existential angst: literally a fear of non-existence. But the grief of losing my mother forced me to look into what I thought of as an abyss. I found that death is both the antithesis and the defining framework of life, just as the reverse is true. The fear of death is a surface that reflects our ego; it is no more than a narcissistic mirror at the boundary of the ocean of existence. Its reflective nature of avoidance forms a barrier to real truths. Avoidance comes from a terror which belongs to our ego. But ego itself is an illusion. Our true selves arise with and are part of eternal relationship: between each other, nature and the divine.

When probed honestly, our fear reveals itself to be a chimera—a mere confection of the ego. It is by swimming naked in the infinite sea of potential meaninglessness that the true love which underlies existence is felt, holding us eternally. At least that’s my experience, when I summon the courage and step outside my thoughts. There is glory, joy and relief in knowing, in those moments, that we belong to “All that is”: the Word existing beyond time.

The other side of fear?

Posted on September 23, 2026 by gigglinginthegutter