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We set God up, to knock Him down

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Now we seek to destroy Him…

I was reading a passage by Donald Winnicott about the development of self. How the infant initially believes they are omnipotent and needs to seek to destroy their mother, as a test of their capacity to be held.

Isn’t it probable that God is not male, or parental at all? Hindus have a far older belief system and think about spirituality entire differently. We – Christians, Muslims and Jews alike – have created an archetypal father figure; which many now revile. But maybe it is necessary for us on this journey that we try to destroy God, and it is in the ever-loving survival of our destruction – that we finally perceive His (or Her) loving reality? Perhaps revealed as something different from the father figure we set up?

What Winnicott said

Donald Winnicott (paediatrician and psychoanalyst) studied the development of the Self within the child. He found that an infant is reliant on a “good-enough” mother (he was writing in the ’40’s, ’50s and ’60’s) to reveal to the infant that their feelings are real. Initially an infant believes he/she is omnipotent. He/she does not know there is a Not-Me. The reality of the loving mother as an “external object” is established by her survival of the child’s attempt to destroy her – and doing this whilst continuing to love. It is a parent’s fundamental role in allowing their child to develop a sense of the their reality in relation to all-else that they provide a “holding” environment within which the child can develop. In Winnicott’s words.. “The self is first made real through recognition, the object is first made real through aggressive destruction; and this of course, makes experience of the object feel real to the self. The object is placed outside omnipotent control by being destroyed while, in fact surviving the destruction”. In an illustrative dialogue about the process “The subject says to the object: ‘I have destroyed you’, and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says: ‘Hullo, object!’ ‘ I destroyed you.’ ‘ I love you. You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you. While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy’ ” (The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications 1969). “Shall I say that, for a child to be brought up so that he can discover the deepest part of his nature, someone has to be defied, and even at times hated, without there being a danger of a complete break in the relationship” (Home Again 1945).

Dream relationships

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Intimacy can be a nightmare. Or dreamy. Which is it to be? It’s within our gift. To ourselves.

They want to take. Do I give?

Maybe. Probably, but do they understand that you are giving, and what they’re taking? It shouldn’t just be giving in. Just  It seems to me that this is how it works. I have my own image of who I am. You, my beloved, have your idea of what is “me”; it’s quite different from mine. When we started out on our journey together –  you needed me to be that person. Remember all of the friction back then? It was all around my idea of me and your idea of me. (Oh, and the versa of course. In fact probably more so!. So many years later our ideas and images of me have jostled toward each other. Giving and taking.

Mirror, mirror, you’re my all

It was a bit gritty sometimes, but looking back; thank you. Without your idea of me – I wouldn’t have become this facet of me-ness. You have been my  mirror; which seemed to be distorted at first. Not so much giving and taking; more pushing and pulling; cajoling, believing, shining a light.

Here’s what I think. All  the  versions of self  – are all dreams. Stories.. There is no real thing called me. Except perhaps the sum total of everyone’s idea of me. So can I change? As easily as changing channels. I can become how you see me, or how I’d like to be – just by thinking it.

Four in a bed

Really  there are (at least) four people in our relationship. Me (according to me). Me (as you imagine me). You (who you are, to you). You (as I need and imagine you to be).

And we dance, don’t we. So many steps and pirouettes and sore toes.; but it’s the stuff that’s kept us going through the years. Holding our our gaze. An emergent quartet. That’s us.

We have trodden on each others toes  quite often; but thank you for staying on the floor with me.

Think of all the fabulous stories that could be told. If we stuck, rather than twisted – when our dream of ourself is confronted. We’ve all walked out from friendships and marriages; all to preserve a fantasy of one particular me-ness or you-ness. Give, but don’t give in. Take, but not to cause heart ache.

Is there life after death?

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Doesn’t it feel like everyone is trying to sell you something on this one? As if they “need it”, that they gain if they convert you. There are so many evangelists. The worst in my view are the atheist humanist materialists – because they pretend that their beliefs are backed by science. Non. Sense. There is no unarguable rational line.

So where can you get to, using common sense?

First. What do we mean by the terms in the question. Leaving “life” and “death” till tomorrow – let’s start with “after”.

You can’t have an after unless you have time; and what we know from Einstein is that space and time are one thing. (So is matter and energy). So really the question should be phrased “is there life outside space time”. Suddenly there’s a new complexion – and a whole explosions of thoughts. My only point is this. It would be brilliant surely for each of us to set aside our entrenched positions, reach out and explore all of this together.

.. and in that exploration – David Bohm’s “Dialoguing” – we might just find love and joy in the connecting.

(I don’t know if anyone reads this stuff, but I’ll ramble on tomorrow about why (I think) we don’t die anyway.)

Unknotting nottiness

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I hold to one-ness, to boundary intensifying connection. I reject the primacy of ego and materialism and the loneliness and fear of death to which they condemn.

Humanity is in a blind alley. We are here because we have followed two whopping lies.

Here’s the first (courtesy of Sigmund Freud).

You are not me.

You-Me. Yes to that – there is boundary – it is the edge between us that allows us to experience each other. It’s the little word not that causes all the problems. You are not me. Distinction, separation, contrast. The birth of Freud’s concept of ego.

And this nott-iness is perculiarly modern and western. After all the Hindu – Namaste means something like “I bow to the divine in you”. Our culture – European and American – is also rooted in “community”. Together, we are one. Do our achievements in the west not stand on the foundations of all of the tribes, families, villages, congregations, parliaments, colleges, schools, classes of the past? The individuals who we remember – the Shakespeares, Napoleons, Eliots, Einsteins, Washingtons, Elizabeth Reginas – were they not the flowering and expressions of their age. They did not appear singular and without context.

And here’s the second great lie (thanks to Marx and Engels)

All is matter.

Dialectic materialism. There is no such thing as spirit; no concept of purpose or any “other”. Without a yardstick against which to measure moral compass what is there? Self-referential humanism and its close cousin narcissism.

From these two ideas – “ego” and the exclusive worship of “matter” has sprung the western “triumph” of atheism, the advance of capitalism and the fragmentation of society.

I hold to one-ness, to boundary intensifying connection. I reject the primacy of ego and materialism and the loneliness and fear of death to which they condemn.

When my body dissolves, then the molecules will become part of new patterns. So too will my other essence. My soul. The fragment of spirit that animates this collection of atoms. As Rupert Brooke puts it.. “a pulse in the eternal mind, no less”.

Or perhaps

Let us go gentle into that good light,

Old age should turn to brave the close of day;       

Courage guag’d against the flighting of its wight

God only knows

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It is all, let’s admit, unprovable. All – reality, God, no-God, meaning, purpose etc. That’s because there is no independent starting point, no external (to the Universe) objective truth. That is, there may well be – but it isn’t available to us as humans and to our thinking minds. That being so – all is conjecture and belief. I have been irritated by the messaging from materialists and atheists that tries to claim that “science” dis-proves God. They are trying to manipulate, and they do – or should – know better. However, as atheists can’t prove Un-God, neither can other religions prove God.

However there is the small matter of probability, and it seems to me highly unlikely that there is no God. This does not speak to what God might be. Declaring my hand, I do believe in God as personal and loving – but that is belief. However, if God were defined as “that which came before” or ” the ultimate cause outside existence”, then it seems to me overwhelmingly likely that God exists.

Cosmologists agree that the chain of events that have led to this existence are not random. The likelihood that the Universe – with it’s 26 physical constants (eg the exact speed of light etc) – is a random event is vanishingly small. Think of it –  from the “Big Bang” through rapid inflation of the Universe, pausing every now and then just long enough to create stars, the elements, the conditions for life and then an aware and self-conscious mankind. At every stage, if the “laws” of physics were just fractionally different – we wouldn’t be here. You only have to read the discoveries of science – and wipe away the slant that materialists would like to put on them..

In the face of this mountain of evidence that the Universe is not random, atheists and materialists hold up a model of Multiple Universes. This is their line of defence against God, or at least a God as I defined earlier. They do this because they can then say that in an infinity of Universes there would be one that had just the right conditions for awareness and life – and we think that’s special because we happen to be in it. Let me pause here simply to contrast probabilities. All agree that this Universe is infinetly unlikely. Which is more probable? Either that there is a creative impulse that set up the Universe (I define this as God), or that infinite Universes arises all the time and we happen to keep on track with the only one where awareness is possible? Leave aside the question of what was the creative impulse behind setting up the infinite Universes.

The Multiple Universes theory is  the “alternative” explanation to the Copenhagen Interpretation of the observer effect which has been proven in Quantum Mechanics. (There is a third, a kind of fudge called Environmental Decoherence – but that anyway relies on the Universe being singular and everything in it relative).

Revisiting what these theories attempt to address. Experiments show that everything exists (at least at the quantum level) as possibility – until observed. It is the act of observation that collapses possibility into a single reality. This isn’t contentious, simply fact established by experiment time and time again. (For me this leads to the critical role of consciousness, us, as reality engines. We crystallise out reality by our observation.).

” Before observation, a particle is in a superposition state of all possible values. During measurement, what causes the reduction of this state to a single value?” (Hidden in Plain Sight: The fundamental link between relativity and quantum mechanics. Andrew Thomas). Einstein famously could not refute the conclusions of these quantum experiments, but couldn’t accept them because he couldn’t explain them – “What I am really interested in is whether God could have the world in a different way; that is, whether the necessity of logical simplicity leaves any freedom at all”.

The Many Worlds Interpretation states that all the time the world is splitting into infinite Universes. Therefore the collapse of superposition into one state of reality is not caused by the observer, it is that the observer is also splitting infinitely. There is a logical problem with this however. To work – the “observer” has to be in a state of superposition before the observation (so that it can continue to split infinitely as supposedly does the “observed”. Yet the observer is not, the observer is in a single well-defined state.

So, for what it’s worth. This is why I believe that Un-God is overwhelmingly Un-likely. There is one Universe (Uni-verse!). It is agreed by all scientists that it is almost inconceivably un-likely that the conditions within this Universe leading to conscious life is random. It it’s simplest if God is defined as the primal cause, then God exists.

God, then at least as “the Word existing beyond Time and Space”. An implication of this logic is that, here and now, the nature of God is un-knowable (since we exist IN Time and Space). The nature of God, then, and not the existence of God is a matter of belief.

For me anyway…

 

Poem in October

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Dylan Thomas

For reading click here .. poem in october – dylan thomas

“the mussel pooled and heron Priested shore”

It was my thirtieth year to heaven

Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood

And the mussel pooled and the heron

Priested shore

The morning beckon

With water praying and call of seagull and rook

And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall

Myself to set foot

That second

In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-

Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name

Above the farms and the white horses

And I rose

In rainy autumn

And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.

High tide and the heron dived when I took the road

Over the border

And the gates

Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling

Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling

Blackbirds and the sun of October

Summery

On the hill’s shoulder,

Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly

Come in the morning where I wandered and listened

To the rain wringing

Wind blow cold

In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour

And over the sea wet church the size of a snail

With its horns through mist and the castle

Brown as owls

But all the gardens

Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales

Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.

There could I marvel

My birthday

Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country

And down the other air and the blue altered sky

Streamed again a wonder of summer

With apples

Pears and red currants

And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s

Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother

Through the parables

Of sun light

And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy

That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.

These were the woods the river and sea

Where a boy

In the listening

Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy

To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.

And the mystery

Sang alive

Still in the water and singingbirds.

And there could I marvel my birthday

Away but the weather turned around. And the true

Joy of the long dead child sang burning

In the sun.

It was my thirtieth

Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon

Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.

O may my heart’s truth

Still be sung

On this high hill in a year’s turning.

In reality, we’re all entangled

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“William Blake says the body is ‘that portion of soul discerned by the five senses”

Marion Woodman, Conscious Femininity: Interviews With Marion Woodman (Studies in Jungian Psychology By Jungian Analysts, 58)

Quantum mechanics tells us that there is no such thing as a completely isolated object: objects are connected. The impression of separateness is just an illusion. It is possible for a particle to interact with another particle in such a way that the two particles form a single entangled quantum state. What this means is that the state of one particle is dependent on the state of the other in some way. Because of this dependency, it is a mistake to consider either particle in isolation from the other. Rather, we should combine the states and treat the result – both particles – as a single, entangled system. …. What this reveals is that our human perception of objects being separated is not a match with the physical reality of the situation.

“The relationships between particles and the entire Universe are interacting with each other through their inward and outward waves. Thus they become joined into one ensemble of waves which determines the behavior of the individual particles. The simplest example is Mach’s Principle, which proposed (1890) that all the matter of the Universe determines the Law of Inertia (f=ma)”

(The Eightfold Way of The Universe. Milo Wolff).

Nursing, thin red line o’eroes

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In 1890 Rudyard Kipling wrote his poem “Tommy” – reading and words below. 130 years ago soldiers were the cannon fodder, heroes when the nation needed them – discarded and rejected when the fighting was over.

It strikes me that nursing, and all the staff of our NHS are the modern day equivalent. If you substitute Tommy – the soldier with Nurse, Porter, Doctor – in the poem you get a similar sense?

We must not forget their service, as we did with the injured soldiers in the 1890’s and since.

For reading click here …tommy – rudyard kipling

Tommy – Rudyard Kipling

I went into a public-‘ouse to get a pint o’ beer,

The publican ‘e up an’ sez, “We serve no red-coats here.”

The girls be’ind the bar they laughed an’ giggled fit to die,

I outs into the street again an’ to myself sez I:

O it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, go away”;

But it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins”, when the band begins to play,

The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,

O it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins”, when the band begins to play.

I went into a theatre as sober as could be,

They gave a drunk civilian room, but ‘adn’t none for me;

They sent me to the gallery or round the music-‘alls,

But when it comes to fightin’, Lord! they’ll shove me in the stalls!

For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, wait outside”;

But it’s “Special train for Atkins” when the trooper’s on the tide,

The troopship’s on the tide, my boys, the troopship’s on the tide,

O it’s “Special train for Atkins” when the trooper’s on the tide.

Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep

Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap;

An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiers when they’re goin’ large a bit

Is five times better business than paradin’ in full kit.

Then it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, ‘ow’s yer soul?”

But it’s “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll,

The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,

O it’s “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll.

We aren’t no thin red ‘eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards too,

But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;

An’ if sometimes our conduck isn’t all your fancy paints,

Why, single men in barricks don’t grow into plaster saints;

While it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, fall be’ind”,

But it’s “Please to walk in front, sir”, when there’s trouble in the wind,

There’s trouble in the wind, my boys, there’s trouble in the wind,

O it’s “Please to walk in front, sir”, when there’s trouble in the wind.

You talk o’ better food for us, an’ schools, an’ fires, an’ all:

We’ll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.

Don’t mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face

The Widow’s Uniform is not the soldier-man’s disgrace.

For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!”

But it’s “Saviour of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot;

An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;

An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool — you bet that Tommy sees!

Cholera Camp extract

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Rudyard Kipling

“Twould make a monkey cough to see our way o’ doin’ things —
Lieutenants takin’ companies an’ captains takin’ wings,
An’ Lances actin’ Sergeants — eight file to obey —
For we’ve lots o’ quick promotion on ten deaths a day!”