I read science at University with a final year specialisation in vertebrate evolution. I believe. There is meaning, and that is to be found in connection. Life and love are two sides of a coin. I'm a practicing Christian, but I'm not convinced about the Church (es). I'm particularly interested in quantum physics and what new discoveries tell us about reality and the meaning of life. For me at least, they point to a deeper meaning rather than the opposite. I'm also a musician - though as with my spiritual life I practice intermittently and struggle with manifest imperfection.
I have been deeply influenced by Martin Buber, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Karl Jung, Wolfgang Pauli, Niels Bohr, Alfred Einstein, Professor Owen Chadwick, my family and friends, Jesus Christ and the Dalai Lama.
Since nothing can be proved we owe it to each other to listen as deeply as possible, rather than to preach. If reality is indeed within connection, then it's the intensity of the act of conversation that is important rather than conversion to a particular point of view.
What about you?
“We are spiritual beings having a human experience”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was an evolutionary biologist and catholic priest. In the days before the internet he predicted that we would find new ways to share our consciousness and knowledge. Perhaps the AI that we dread is part of this process of shared universal consciousness? In the 1950’s he was already intensely aware of the need to work together for the sake of the earth. As he put it..
“The age of nations has passed. Now, unless we wish to perish, we must shake off our old prejudices and build the Earth. The more scientifically I regard the world, the less can I see any possible biological future for it except in the active consciousness of its unity”
I believe that the current state of Israel is a tragedy that could have been avoided; and a wasted opportunity.There was (and is?) an alternative. This was set out by Martin Buber, whose book “I and Thou” set up the Philosophy of Relation. He opposed the views of Weizmann and Ben Gurion. Essentially his vision was for the cooperative development of respectful, peaceful, equal and creative society between Jews and Arabs.
In 1925 he co-founded Brith Shalom – The Covenant of Peace – which set out this vision. He fled Austria and Germany during the Nazi holocaust, but persisted with this message. In his 1947 tract “Questions and Answers. The Jewish Settlement of Palestine” he directly addressed the potential for conflict and advocated a path of peace, respect and deep listening. He deplored Jewish terrorism (for instance the attack on the King David Hotel). His vision was for restriction of Jewish immigration, a mutually interdependent society with a common economy for all – Arabs and Jew alike, and the creative growth of a new nation by the efforts and for the benefit of all.
He saw the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea as a melting pot. Where peoples and cultures could meet and thrive creatively. Where East, West, South and North could come together. A nexus. This view was perhaps natural to his family. They were Hasidic Jews from melting pot of the Polish-Lithuanian Common Wealth. The country that was once the largest in Europe and which stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea with cultural centres in Poland and Ukraine.
A history of thought and listening and in many languages. Martin Buber spoke and read German, Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Greek and Dutch.
It is a tragedy for the world that this path was not followed.
”I said to my soul be still, and let the darkness come upon you; which shall be the darkness of God” TS Eliot East Coker
Eliot is discussing the essence of surrender, and what is to be gained from it. As he points out, “we all go into the dark”, because “in order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not”. Movement implies loss.
But all is change, which accelerates every day. There is no security in clinging on to the familiar.
The physicist and philosopher David Bohm searched for what he calls “the ground”. God, by another name surely. He concludes that this “ground” is a flux, or movement – and that what we perceive as solid – including matter and time – is simply because we are in an eddy – as in a river by the bank the water can appear calm and still.
In that case surrender into what we truly are – is more than acceptance and movement through darkness. It is having the courage to fall into that river. It is flux that is constant. After all even our seemingly fixed bodies are a stream of ever flowing atoms and molecules. We are not separate. We are that flow. It is our seeking for certainty in the material that is our delusion.
“We are all linked by a fabric of unseen connections. This fabric is constantly changing and evolving. This field is directly structured and influenced by our behavior and by our understanding.” David Bohm
This extraordinary man was a physicist who worked at Princeton with Albert Einstein. Einstein called him his “intellectual son”. He connected physics to philosophy through his extraordinary work on the implicate-explicate universe. He saw that these two ways of being and seeing the universe mirrored the writing of Martin Buber, who started the philosophy of dialogue with his book “I and Thou”. David Bohm was intensely concerned with bringing society back to creative cooperation and away from ever increasing polarisation and conflict.
He proposed a form of dialogue, called Bohmian Dialogue, which took Buber’s ideas and applied them to society. Essentially it is a form of deep listening between people in a group, from which arises newly emergent and creative shared meaning.
He took this to MIT (Massachussetts Institute of Technology), where he was deeply influential on figures such as Peter Senge and Donella Meadows. Peter Senge set up the MIT Dialogue Project, which in turn has been enormously influential in the creation of learning organisations such as Microsoft and Google. Donella Meadows was a founder of systems thinking and the movement toward ecological economics.
He famously worked with Krishnamurti on links between eastern and western thinking and the implication for meaning. Last but by no means least he worked in London with Basil Hiley and Sir Roger Penrose on black holes and consciousness, with links to panpsychism.
Walking with psychotherapists. Here’s what I found. Dialogue is a way to align feeling and thinking – within us and between us. Try walking with someone in nature. You don’t need to say anything even. You’ll be surprised. I was..
I’d love to know what you think.
This is the first of three short videos which discussthe power of dialogue, with original research amongst psychoanalysts. There are two more over the next two days. What do you think? I’d love to hear!
There is a love which underlies our individual lives. Love which forms the very fabric or the world, which is waiting to hold us – together. Waiting, waiting for us to stop competing one with the other and to realise that we are not alone. Underlying and beyond rivalry is a commonwealth of security and joy. Let us look to that..
I am convinced of the one-ness of the universe, and our continuing eternal changing place in it. It is indivisible.
Why then are we born into this existence – thrown into it – with a boundary all around us?. Leastways, as tiny babies we don’t feel separate from our mother; yet alone-ness is the harsh lesson of “growing up”. Separated. Divided from others, and with a yearning to reach out for love and comfort across the boundary of our ego. To touch others and so re-experience the joy of connection and integration. This is fleeting though, at least for those of us who are not able to escape the prison of our embodied ego.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty gave us an insight. In early works (The Structure of Behaviour, The Phenomenology of Perception) he considered our embodiment as the way we become ourselves in the world. Reflecting that world whilst also creating it through that process of mirroring.
In his last work – the Visible and Invisible – he took embodiment further still. It take this to be a concept of the “flesh” (chaire) of all that is within which this mutual reflective creative process occurs.
I don’t understand the fine detail of what this all means, and I’d love to hear the views of others. However, it does seem to me that here is a kernel of the mystery. Perhaps rather than Visible and Invisible it could be – Divisible yet Indivisible?
I was lucky because I had a stable loving family and 3 elder siblings
Misfortune
Alas, my siblings were all brothers, I was sent to a boys boarding school and so never understood girls. I thought they were were out of reach. On a pedestal and an object of physical desire.
(I didn’t realise that the urgent need was for real relationship).
My Mum was one of five sisters, so also was a little out of tune with little boys and girls and reality…
Miss Fortune
Isn’t it brilliant then that my wife and daughter and son (a gentle-man) have helped me.
If you keep hoping then good news finds you, Thank you Miss Fortune.
