Tag Archives: giggling in the gutter

On Marriage

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On Marriage

We here, this day, invite love into time

Green force sourced fire which desiring uncurls

To summer’s meadow-ripened fragrant thyme

And rose pinkèd dawn whence joy hence unfurls

Though roses thorn do bear our troubled strife

Their pointing pricks through enhancing to chance

Each day alway to be best of our life

Capturing rapturing flowing to dance

Dancing that flowers between us to speech

Translating through grace mere you into Thou,

Thou art my all in all though each from each

Sparki-kindled kiss created through

Which meeting’s meaning our worlds unfold,

In weight and height and time love’s story’s told.

Legislating for Minorities: A Threat to Democracy?

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We focus on legislating for minorities. This serves to divide; since these are treated as separate groups. How does this fit with democracy, which surely is rule by the majority?

A just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you’d be willing to enter it in a random place.” John Rawls

One of the problems is that there is a loosening hold on shared values wherein society protects and honours all, especially the weakest and those furthest from some “norm”. Without such fundamental shared morality then we are left as a nation of “isms” – racism, sexism and the like. A place where those who are left out have no choice but to band together and fight – as a separate group.

Europe’s moral code, and hence America’s, was founded in Christianity. This no longer serves to bind us, but is there a secular equivalent to “love your neighbour as yourself”? John Rawls put forward this idea.

“A just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you’d be willing to enter it in a random place.” John Rawls

What a wonderful ideal. A society and politics I would follow and fight for…

Self and Reincarnation

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I understand that the “illusion of self” is a central tenet of Buddhism? It seems to me that this (the self) is an appearance of stability and boundary that arises out of continuous flow. This is borrowed directly from David Bohm ( “Wholeness and the Implicate Order”). John Dewey put it like this ;“The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action” .

Why then, and on what basis do Buddhists conceive of re-incarnation. What is being re-incarnated? No soul, no self. What then keeps coming back? This seems to me to be a fundamental inconsistency which arises out of focus on boundary rather than wholeness.

Surely, if self is an illusion – then this is a release from self, itself?! Indeed a release from death. What is not there in the first place cannot presumably cease thereafter?

Teilhard de Chardin would have it that all of matter is evolving toward consciousness. Separately he has it that there will be an “Omega Point” where each realises that we are all-in-all to each other – and that all energy is Love and God.

In that case surely our “self” is an illusion. We are already part of what Martin Buber would call the “eternal Thou”. We only have to realise it. Put another way, for Buber our “I” does not exist except in relation to “Thou” – with a reality of “I-Thou” that opens us to our relationship with the “eternal Thou” (I think I have that right?). In that case our “self” doesn’t exist. Indeed ignoring the “Thou” only gets you to a kind of Freudian thinking – “I-It” materialism –  the self-reflective dead end of narcissism.

So. I am attracted to Buddhism, but don’t buy their take on reincarnation; or at least I don’t understand it. More work to be done!

Laughing on the Far Side of Fear

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Just push

Much of my life has been haunted and shaped by fear. I don’t believe I am unique in this?

I have found an answer that works – at least for me. I made the decision to confront my anxieties and terrors. I faced the possibility of meaninglessness and existential angst. To push into it, rather than pulling away…

I kept a diary during the process, with some excerpts below. I found that as I considered them fears vanished. Like nettles, they don’t hurt when held tightly; they simply fade away. Is existence meaningless? For me, that idea is now just odd. It no longer makes sense.

It turns out that this is an old discovery, Quoting TS. Eliot “dark, dark, dark.. we all go into the dark” yet “in my end is my beginning”

Extracts from my diary

“Consideration of any “thing” entails full exploration of its meaning, including all contexts and antonyms.

Fear is a context that shades meaning of each “thing”.

The unknown arises because  fear prevents its consideration.

Therefore fear, unlike joy, disgust or sadness, has to be subsumed in order that the unknown “thing” can be considered. That is, it must be seen as context, separately from the “thing”.

This perspective is achieved by accepting the worst feared outcome, by plumbing the depth of possibility.

Death is an antonym of, and also a context of life. The opposite is also true.

Fear of death is a surface reflecting our ego. It is a narcissistic mirror at the boundary of the ocean of existence. It’s reflective property is a barrier to our consideration of existence.

Fear of death prevents the conscious consideration of a deeper monster – existential angst – whereby we fear utter meaningless of infinite non-existence.

When existential angst is plumbed it is found to be a chimera, a confection of our ego; however it must be confronted and experienced for this this truth to be released.

It is by swimming naked in the infinite sea of potential meaningless that meaning emerges.

It is through integration with nothing that number and all “things” are realised.

It is through this mechanism that death is dissolved through a wider perspective, so that the joy of unification with “all that is” is glimpsed as the truth. “All that is” is synomymous with “the word existing beyond time”.

Some do not have to travel this path to truth. They are most often securely attached and live confidently (with trust). This is most often a gift from their parent, who held them in maternal reverie through their perilous crossing to the world of “things”. They are blessed

Carl Jung, balance and individuation

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One of Jung’s (many!) insights was the drive to find balance from which to individuate; to grow fully into our potential. Balance is dynamic, and between different dimensions within each of us, and between us. Three of these dimensions have been popularised by Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isobel Myers with the Myers-Briggs Personality Test and Typology. These are , Thinking-Feeling and Sensing-Intuition.

Carl Jung. Dynamic Balance and Individuation
These are discussed in Jung’s book – “Psychological Types”. However Jung saw these as fluid states rather than ways of categorising people. He did not agree with Briggs and Myers. Rather weare, each of us, a complex of each of the 16 MBTI typologies.

It is balance between these states that we should seek as we change and grow. If we express too much of one aspect, this sets up a force pulling us toward the other. For instance if we spend too much time extroverted then we develop a need to spend time alone ( and vice versa). As Jung says:

”Identification with one particular function at once produces a tension of opposites. The more compulsive the one-sidedness, and the more untamed the libido which streams off to one side, the more daemonic it becomes” Carl Jung on Psychological Types

It is not that we all should aim for some kind of grey average at the centre of each of the dimensions. Rather, the opposite. Jung saw our whole purpose as what he called “individuation”; within which there is a search for increasingly anuthentic expression of our true Self. This involves bringing to consciousness knowledge of that which is within us, and its connection to the transpersonal. This is anything but some kind of dumbing down. Indeed..

“A conscious capacity for one-sidedness is a sign of the highest culture, but involuntary one-sidedness, i.e., the inability to be anything but one-sided, is a sign of barbarism” Carl Jung, Collected Works

Perspective on loss

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With time comes loss, and its companion. Grief. Suppose this is just an illusion? Imagine a different perspective if you will. Suppose that time is, as in the words of TS Eliot “eternally present”, and that to be conscious is to be outside time. This is not some crazy notion, indeed Einstein showed that time and space are one – space-time, and that time is relative. For instance as you go faster, so time slows. Many phsyicists and philosophers also subscribe to “panpsychism”, which holds that all of the universe and all matter and energy is conscious. Reality is just more than we normally perceive it to be..

If then all time is then eternally present, then it is our experience which designates it as a flow. It is one perspective amongst many.

I prefer the reality. Every moment is eternal. So then, my brother and my mother and father are still with me at tea in the sunshine of my childhood garden. Always, and no less true than this particular moment sitting alone in a park in a foreign northern city.

Without time – outside time – in our shared consciousness all of these fragments are with me in our treasure house and library.

This is a point of view that also calls me to live fully and lovingly, since also the ripple of my unkind actions remain. Always.

Dialogue, Love and Joy

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The great existentialist philosopher – Martin Buber – speaks about dialogue and distinguishes it from love. I have included some quotes at the end of this note from his 1929 essay “Zwiesprache” (Dialogue) below, together with a short note about Buber and Jesus.

Here is my thought

Genuine dialogue is about meeting, arising from mutual awareness. This can happen even as two stranges glance at each other in passing. Perhaps this is what Jesus meant by “Love thy neighbour as thyself”; that is, become as fully aware of and in sympathy with your neighbour as you are with yourself. This perhaps also applies to Jesus’ second injunction about how we should love God (with all our heart).

Are these two commandments a call to dialogue?; so that we become fully aware of, and turned toward our neighbour. This is something one could then practice, something similar to mindfulness. I have always wondered how you could just conjour up “love” as a feeling, an affect. There are so many of us now who do NOT love ourselves. How then can we ‘love another as ourself”?

Whereas perhaps we can more easily practice becoming fully aware of our neighbour. That might indeed be the road to love; a Love which is the joy that I believe underlies all creation.

As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin says

“Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God”.

Buber quotes

Three types of dialogue. In his 1929 essay Buber describes dialogue as genuine meeting with full awareness. He developed this later (I and Thou,1937) into a whole philosophy of relation; where all meaning is contained in the relationship between (zwischen) people and the “other”. Here is the first quote:

“There is genuine dialogue – no matter whether spoken or silent – where each of the participants really has in mind the other or others in their present and particular being and turns to them with the intention of establishing a living mutual relation between himself and them. There is technical dialogue, which is prompted solely by the need for objective understanding. And there is monologue disguised as dialogue, in which two or more men, meeting in space, speak each with himself in strangely tortuous and circuitous ways and yet imagine they have escaped the torment of being thrown back on their own resources.”

Dialogue and love. In the second quote he distinguishes between dialogue and love:

“I know no one in any time who has succeeded in loving every man he met. Even Jesus obviously loved of “sinners” only the loose, lovable sinners, sinners against the Law; not those who were settled and loyal to their inheritance and sinned against him and his message. Yet to the latter as to the former he stood in a direct relation. Dialogic is not be identified with love. But love without dialogic, without real outgoing to the other, reaching to the other, and company in with the other, the love remaining with itself – this is called Lucifer”

Buber, Zionism and Jesus. Buber was an intellectual Hasidic Jew. He was a lifelong Zionist, but who strongly disagreed with how the new state was constituted. He thus refused to become the first president of Israel. He “favored a binational state that encompassed and honored both Jewish and Arab ethnicities, and centred on mutual love and respect. He believed that Jesus was the greatest of all Jews and that his message was the flower of judaism. He describes Jesus thus:

“from my youth onwards I have found in Jesus my great brother”

T

Liberal Love

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Liberal societies are healthy streams. Free flowing, oft times turbulent – but with a clarity and purity of involvement and liquid cohesion.


These are though under threat from two directions – Capitalism above, and Nationalism below.

Capitalism freezes flow and movemeent; cutting communities off from the clear air and creating false inward reflections and strange refracted images from the external world (where others are walking on the icy outer surface).


And below, Nationalism – the stirring of the rotting sediment of dead fears. Racism, an appeal to the worst archetypes of the other. Muddying and reducing visibility, so that all are trapped in isolation and separation.


How do we keep the liberal stream flowing, with our eye on the common good of shared humanity?

Whatever your faith – look to wisdom from our ancestors.

“ Love your neighbour as your self” Christ

“those who worship Me with love and devotion are very close to Me, and I am also very close to them” Bhagavad-Gita

Narcissism and Loneliness

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Narcissism. A lonely place.

Research discussed in Psychology Today from 2017 indicates that narcissism appears to be linked to reduced emotional empathy and feelings of loneliness. (Link to article below). It seems, if I understand it properly, that this all flows from a state called “borderline personality organisation”, where our sense of self is unstable or threatened. I take it that this leads then to narcissism as a kind of retreat or defensive mechanism.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/experimentations/201711/why-we-might-feel-lonely-around-narcissism

This is an odd thought for this day which celebrates and reflects the ultimate act of emotional empathy and love and connection. I wonder why I was drawn to that article. No matter. Happy Easter! X

Little Gidding

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“All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” Little Gidding TS Eliot

A meditation on the meaning of time and the timeless. Imagine that time is a mirage, and that we already exist eternally and are infinitely connected. Our ego traps us into believing that we are separate, that all is material and that – heaven help us – we are the centre of everything. I can occasionally step outside my “self” – and there lies peace and belonging and joy.

You?