Change, Fear and Hope

Posted on December 5, 2025 by gigglinginthegutter

All is always in flux. Change is really all that is permanent. We have two attitudes to this. In one, we are backward looking. We want to slow or stop change, to live in the past. This leads to life full of fear. We are nonetheless dragged along with the movement of all that is. I guess there is another approach, which is to bury our head and anaesthetise ourself. Drink, drugs, materialism..

The other approach is to dive in to the flow and look forward with hope, expecting good. This does require us to abandon and live at least partly outside our ego – becoming willingly identified with all others. Effectively to love our neighbour as ourselves.

None of us, certainly not me, find this easy. But it seems to me that this is at least an aspiration..

Dialogue, Love and Joy

Posted on February 22, 2025 by gigglinginthegutter

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”

Liberal Love

Posted on April 10, 2023 by gigglinginthegutter

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

Little Gidding

Posted on April 7, 2023 by gigglinginthegutter

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?

Dry Salvages

Posted on April 6, 2023 by gigglinginthegutter

“The distant rote in the granite teeth, and the wailing warning from the approaching headland are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner rounded Howard’s, and the seagull; And under the oppression of the silent fog the tolling bell measures time, not our time, rung by the unhurried ground swell” Dry Salvages TS Eliot

“No man is an island, entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, a part of the main….therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee” For Whom the Bell Tolls John Donne

“Time and the bell have buried the day, the black cloud carries the sun away…After the kingfisher’s wing has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still at the still point of the turning world” Burnt Norton TS Eliot

East Coker

Posted on April 4, 2023 by gigglinginthegutter

In my end is my beginning.

“Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning” TS Eliot

Burnt Norton

Posted on April 3, 2023 by gigglinginthegutter

“The still point of the turning world. That is where the dance is..” TS Eliot

“what exists is uncreated and imperishable for it is whole and unchanging and complete. It was not or nor shall be different since it is now, all at once, one and continuous”
Parmenides

Thou, my love

Posted on April 1, 2023 by gigglinginthegutter

The Jewish existentialist Martin Buber said “To man the world is two-fold .. the attitude of man is two-fold .. the one primary word is the combination I-Thou, the other is the combination I-It”.

I-thou is a relationship of inner to inner, an authentic encounter that is the touchstone of existence. (I-thou creating “our”).

Of course, Buber wrote in German and Du has currency in contrast to Sie or Es, whereas in English we now reserve intimate addressing for our relationship with God. How ironic!

In our English language how can we now mark the transition in relationships between the formality of “you are” and the caress of “thou art”? And when and why did we lose the rich language of intimacy?

Surely thou-ness was clear in the minds of the scholars constructing the King James Bible in 1611. Perhaps the slow death of this way of celebrating friendship is linked to the four hundred year rise of materialism since the reformation?

Perhaps as the smoke clears and we see the I-It debris left by capitalism and atheism a new expression of thou-ness will appear.

Let us pray so.

Collective Unconsciousness

Posted on March 26, 2023 by gigglinginthegutter

Carl Jung first wrote about the “collective unconscious”. This lies below and as a foundation of our own individual unconscious. It is a pooling between us, now and in the past. It is also one gateway (I believe) to the shared life beyond the fragility of our mind in the life – our material consciousness – the Brahman of Hinduism or Nirvana of Buddhism, that can be glimpsed through meditation.

The collective unconscious speaks in a language both of archetypes and mandalas. Archetypes are the powerful shared images which make so many movies effective for instance the monster in the dark of horror films and the ecstasy of union and community of Avatar. Mandalas reflect perfection in images and seem, at least to me to be linked to the beautiful fractals of chaos theory that underlay existence. (look at free fractal apps on your iPhone for a direct view of reality!).

It is only our mind, this particular consciousness that dies, this is anyway an illusion. If we can connect to the shared stream of unconsciousness now , then we already experience our immortality. Through prayer, meditation, connection with our loved ones or nature – even the cinema. After all, the movies are right, forget what people call it.

May the Force be with us.

Conjugating Being

Posted on March 25, 2023 by gigglinginthegutter

Yin, Yang – or Jung’s concept of Anima and Animus – striving for dynamic balance. Eliot’s “still point of the turning world. There the dance is..”

I like the concept of conjugation in relation to establishing this balance, as in Buber’s “I & Thou” – moving onward to an existential “We”.

Animus .. the male aspect of the female psyche, as the Anima is the female aspect of male psyche. Hence:

Animo, Animas.. Animamus.

Feminism is one of the phrases of conjugation; rebalancing centuries of dominance of male. Perhaps though the intense work is inside each of us, balancing our Anima and Animus to release our emergent self?

gigglinginthegutter

love life

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