A motivation for writing this piece is a misgiving that, given life can be so mystifying, how much is helpfully reducible to prose?
Apart from that question – the answer to which might render the exercise futile – some substantive subjects considered relate to our shared humanity, concepts by which lives are lived, misunderstandings in language and our individuality.
This piece tends to the view that common sense and personal experience can yield insights more helpful than rigorous argumentation, a viewpoint buttressed by quotes from leading thinkers.
🎼 ’We’re here because we’re here, because we’re here!’
Englishmen of old – especially if about to mount a charge in the Light Brigade – were encouraged in the following way.
‘Ours not to reason why
Ours just to do and die!’
Remember the ditty usually sung in raucous refrain when ‘the boys’ get together:
‘Why was he born so beautiful 🎸🥁 ?
Why was he born at all….!’
Well, why WERE we born? How many of us bother to ask it of ourselves.
Big questions about why we’re here can tend to slither down to a B-list of posers in Anglo-Saxon culture, way down the pecking order of priorities over which to mull unless one is orientally orientated, a professional Philosopher, a barrack room lawyer or …just want to poke fun at someone.
In the beginning (almost) was Plato: ‘Philosophy begins in wonder.’
If we think we’re up to date in our thinking, there is a good chance that we have been pipped at the post several centuries ago. ‘Philosophy’ was in its infancy when Plato signposted a path but we can just as easily say: ‘Hmmm! Life is an awfully strange can of worms or wonders.’ Separated by time and cultural tides, we are of the same clay as was Plato. ‘He was a man for all that!’ Some of us – if we’ve pretensions to be sentient let alone cerebral – hanker to get to the bottom of profound Mystery, or at any rate what bottom we can delve down to.
Deep down, most of us ARE wondering about many of the deeper questions – but not always in a context that relates to fundamental questions about life. We don’t always put some of the big questions directly to ourselves and find answers without realising their application to fundamentals. We absorb a truth perhaps in a subconscious way.
In the Institute of Reflection under Personal Credos people are asked, without much time to think, what for them is important in life. Almost everyone has an idea of how to answer the question. Almost everyone says something different from the other interviewees. It was churning away in their thoughts if not brought out into the light.
Contemplation
Let’s contemplate for a moment or two what contemplation entails and its purpose.
Contemplation primarily is a cerebral activity. It may take into account emotion but primarily it is about judiciousness, a mental stance. One also can think in the course of activity, true. The difference between the good and the run-of-the-mill sportsman lies in an ability to think well on one’s feet. A step in time as well as a stitch ‘may save nine’.
Take a step back, mentally, relax, concentrate on your thinking side. It can include your emotional side. Hold up to the light and coddle ideas or feelings swirling around in your thoughts. So much so far for a Socratic method in conversation through which, sometimes via circuitous ways rather than casuistry, we can approach to the main point, perhaps surprising ourselves, and tease out relevant truths en route.
It helps to get into the right frame of mind. The next paragraph is left blank… It is the equivalent in non-print of a short space of reflective silence with which a session of meditation sometimes starts.
Let’s try to approach Truth. Okay, this quest may tun out to be the only Truth that we can reach.
The ancients may not have put things better than you and I – though often they did so – but, like the friends to whom we often feel closest, they got in there first. Cue in Plato:
‘In philosophy we can be lazily relaxed in both mind and body, and this endangers our well-being. Laziness or mind is a threat to proper philosophising.’
Socrates said with what may seem like unction: ‘the unexamined life is not worth living.’ Surely one does not have to go quite as far as that? There are plenty of achievers who never ask themselves why they are doing what they are doing. It is enough to say that one ought to think carefully about what one is doing.
We don’t want to reinvent the wheel, especially in a square shape. It is often as well to think about what is said by those who think things logically through to a reductio ad absurdum. It is comforting to know that there are professionals on the case. It is in any case not easy to think anything up on this subject that is genuinely ‘new’.
A digression, with apology to professional academics: Philosophy should not be the sole province of ‘the philosopher’. We all have a claim on it. ‘Philosophy’ is a Big Word which can be off-putting. Professional philosophers, true, tend to have a more rigorous or literary way of putting problems and supposed conclusions. If only they see eye to eye with one another! Dress it up as one will, the lack of possibility of our getting to the bottom of some of the Deep Mysteries can be encapsulated by a fellow who says that he simply doesn’t know the answers. It comes to the roughly same thing in the end. In asking the Big Questions the answer may lie in our deeper natures. These natures are within all of us. The quest for truth is nor fuelled by a knowledge of algebra or a familiarity with truths inherent in differential equations. Philosophers have thought deeply about the very things that concern you and me. Some try and go one better; they disguise what they propound in such complexity – Immanuel Kant comes to mind – that we hardly know what they are talking about. Trying to work it out only too easily becomes a substitute for actually thinking about the point at issue. We do not have to agree with Bertrand Russell that: ‘the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.’
A general truth reached through common sense rather than an involved thesis can be the best lamp of truth.
Is familiarity with general culture – which the French are more likely to value than Anglo-Saxons – sufficient without being a specialist in the big questions
Exhaustive efforts to get to the bottom of it all may be applauded but, conversely, there is no call to be too clever. The intelligent thing sometimes is not to go all out to be intelligent. . One wants to be right, not clever. A display of erudition may distract from the shortest and best path to… ANSWERS.
Apart from anything else, there is less chance of a pitfall along a less winding path. Official Philosophy can usurp the quest to the point where the point of the exercise – to understand as much as is possible – is overlooked. It is the right perspective that we are after. The process of following up of every last ramification, consideration of every possible outcome of thought or action, may be best left to the highest power computer. When mere man attempts it, the chance of overlooking an inconvenient jigsaw piece and so disturbing an entire mosaic ramifies
Arrival at the right decision is often a matter of one’s ‘guts’ being in the right place. Understanding oneself is as much of a challenge as understanding any other specific issue. Fog can be cast by the tendency of philosophers, politicians, and indeed most people, not to know where to draw the line and to follow things through too far to what seems a logical conclusion. Physicists by contrast can have a handle on this phenomenon which is encountered in many contexts; they realise that at a certain point the law of gravity, say, that holds good on earth, no longer holds good. There is a glass ceiling set above what we can hope realistically to attain.
We engage with other people; their ideas filtering through our thinking to the point when we lay claim to authorship of our plagiarisms. We should not slough off responsibility for knowing and understanding for ourselves. Or be too slavish in swallowing the dicta of others, thinking them our own thoughts? Let’s dress this idea up in the borrowed robes of Kant: ‘Sapere aude’ (‘have the guts to think for oneself’.)
If there are no answers, one should be content at least to have discovered that much as that, in its way, is an answer. It is easy to see that we may well not be equipped through our limited physical senses or mental apparatuses to understand properly all answers to the Great Riddle of Life. It could form a part of this Riddle that we are ‘programmed’ to be unable to understand what makes us fundamentally tick. …If so, it would seem to be a sensible part – assuming, that is, we were ‘designed’ by a higher Power rather than having just sprung up as a consequence of physical conditions. If we knew for an absolute fact with full proof, say, what could be our fate in an Afterlife, this knowledge would affect the whole way we live our lives. Is this an indication that some form of ‘Designer’ had a hand in the human make-up?
How individual are we?
Should we fight shy of pursuing a thought about ourselves to its logical conclusion, as going a bridge too far (See below point about physicists knowing better than most where to draw the line)?
It may all seem so obvious as to be not worth thinking about, but when one does try to think about it, obviousness seems to regress in a series of distorting mirrors.
Our thinking, by contrast, is the way we notice it, shroud it i words and concepts that we cannot really understand in all their different manifestations. But WHAT is it?
What is our essence?
What, or who, am ‘I’?
Don’t we know ourselves? Don’t we know, ourselves?
What if anything makes me different from everyone else?
Much of what we observe – in both senses of the word – or are likely to observe is about ourselves, not the ‘I’.
Speculation ‘about us’ distracts from seeing and understanding our essential selves.
We are aware, but do not fully see, the ‘eye’, or ‘I’, that is attempting the seeing, and being the awareness, just as the eye cannot see itself. That awareness is different from the consciousness that is producing these thoughts, and what, from depths in our being, produces an intellectualisation of what is going on.
We are looking at ourselves, in this context, as if we are inspecting a phenomenon ‘out there’. An outside eye looking in on a problem – a third party, in a sense – is usually if not always advisable, on the principle including that of ‘a man who would advise himself has a fool for a client!’
We are communal beings, in one sense. Simone Weil writes: ‘A man alone in the world would be paralysed by the vanity of all his projects…but man is not alone.’
Everything we write about ourselves is what we think about ourselves, in communal language, with concepts we have taken into ourselves, that have been taken into what is ‘there’. It is a brew admixed with dreams, hopes and history, all in a sort of mishmash, however neatly we tabulate it, that helps make up our consciousness, with bodily sensations thrown in. We can feel more confident in clubbing together.
The less we stop to think for ourselves, the more we unquestioningly take on ideas of those around us, the more we are a representative and less individualised part of our community.
Some people may be more gregarious than others but much springs from the areas outside conscious ‘thinking’. We know what it is to experience need, material or emotional, and see that need, as well as more esoteric emotions, draws us near to someone for reasons beside ‘Deep calling unto Deep’ or ‘Like being attracted to Like’.
Is there some communal mind, some way in which we are all a part of the wider society in which we live? Jewish people have the idea that reincarnation takes place within the tribe. Is there an ‘England’ such as envisaged by Laurence Binyon?
‘…England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit…’
Language was invented before we were born. Our disposition makes us gravitate to one another. Predisposition makes us feel at one with our tribe or herd. Words of wisdom, prescriptions freighted with truth, expressions of mood or natural reactions, that we hear are seemingly designed for us all. It is rather as if people are speaking to us from inside our own head. Or so it can sound. So much of what we hear and read in psychological ways has a direct relevance and resonance for us. In turn – unless we post a sentinel in our mind sternly charged to watch what escapes our lips – we can talk to others as if talking to our own selves.
So many sayings that come to mind are borrowed from elsewhere if put together in a unique way, or at least tone, and in some perhaps only slightly differentiated way, by each person. If I can be seen as an individual from outside, how do I know that I feel any different from anyone else, let alone that that I am special? This is one of the ways in which we are undifferentiated, with most of us having the same wish to feel distinct as a person.
IF we are the ‘same’ as one another, that may be a comment on the ambiguity of the word ‘same’. It does not mean that we are ‘one and the same’? ‘Same’ may mean ‘identical’, or not. Language, as is so often the case, can mask truth.
We want to be individuals despite our wish to ‘belong’. Winston Churchill said that ‘we are all worms’ and got round his problem of ego, or belief in his manifest destiny, by describing himself as a glowworm.
If the ideas that I have were all generated by others I may have a new synthesis, perhaps, but that is a form of words and doesn’t seem to get at what is actuating me.
The effect on our thinking is only clear up to a point. We usually know it when we experience, say, grief, or love. We can sometimes detect when in the throes of such feeling a slight ache in the region of our hearts; or when we, rarely enough hopefully, are prey to fury and can ‘see red’; is that inner vision or a counterpart of blood rising behind our eyes in what seems to us a mist? I feel sensation in my body, even when at my quietest. Do you? We are observing what is going on but as to understanding it, that is an elusive kettle of fish.
It is the sensation of who we are that, arguably and in large part, demarcates us as individuals. Part of it is ascribable to the sensations in our body. Part of it is the thoughts we have. How to describe it? Is it a thing that could or should be rendered into words? ‘Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and to the Lord that which is His.
Most of us think, probably rightly, that we are individuals in our own sentient right. An accentuation or a slight difference here and there does not seem to satisfactorily account for genuine individuality. As A.A. Milne (1882-1956) wrote: ‘The things that make me different are the things that make me.’
Maybe we were ‘thinkers’ at the very start but then life overlaid this tendency?
Different experiences act on ‘that which is given’ but no similarity in description can guarantee that you or I feel exactly the same way. Perhaps the minor differences that separate your inmost reactions from mine are the hallmark of individuality? If so, we are the same as one another for most if not necessarily all purposes.
Digression: People inject their own prejudices into objective sounding words. This en passant happens with institutions as well; the language of communiqués, apparently arrived at with a deliberation said to characterise an English court of law, often mask the agendas of contributors. The truth may not be the whole truth even if it is nothing but the truth. Even lawyers attained to this understanding though their focus was not on metaphysical subjects. As said above, by roundabout routes can we reach right thinking.
In a more attenuated and spiritual way, do we take the line of Romana Mahashe ‘You will recover your true nature as unconditioned life, if the idea I am the body dies’. Is the bedrock of our individuality devoid of physicality, much as in the opening lines of John Wyndham’s ‘Consider Her Ways’ ?:
‘There was nothing but myself. I hung in a timeless, spaceless, forceless void that was neither light, nor dark. I had entity, but no form; awareness, but no senses; mind, but no memory. I wondered, is this…this nothingness – my soul? And it seemed that I had wondered that always, and should go on wondering it for ever…’
To Bishop Berkeley, an ‘Immaterialist’, ‘Reality’ consisted of ‘spirits, minds, souls with notions and perceptions’ as well as sensations like taste and sound.
Peter Cave writes: ‘Are all to be explained by neurological changes within, If so, are we not betting that electrical impulses and chemical signals being so patterned that when we engage with shapes on paper and sounds from mouths, we encounter things that ‘make sense’?
Mr and Mrs Average are what we are in terms of the mental and physical apparatus that is a birthright or ‘a given’. We might do our best to improve on the model but even an ability and will to do so is to some extent part of the ‘given’, the bodies as well as the minds grafted into us before we had choice in the matter – though some say that, for instance, one chooses one’s parents, a claim in one simple sentence that embodies a huge amount of underlying philosophy whether or not verbalised.
Some aspects of our being appear to us as quintessentially identifiable with who we feel and think – below the level of how we normally present ourselves to others, or to even ourselves. They might not be, for the most part, the obvious circumstantial indicators of our self-image. A certain way of lying in bed, for instance, may induce in someone the homely feeling that this is our True North; the way we lay abed as a child. It is like a homecoming to ourselves, whatever the world can throw at us. Or it may be that we crank up and identify with our physical attributes to so great a degree that we see our physique as integral to our self-perspective, an extension and a part of ‘who we really are’. We may see advantageous or disadvantageous physiques which ‘came with the package’ as being such a key to our persona that we identify ourselves fully with them or alternatively we may rise above the chance gifts. Raquel Welsh, the sultry sex bomb, spoke of the blossoming of her bosom, so tantalising to testosterone-fuelled manhood, as when ‘the equipment’ arrived. Was it ‘her’ or that which she could usefully employ? People for the most part seem not to reflect on this conundrum and so it is more likely to become an integral part of their psyche.
That idea can have a ring to it that personal experience rather than logic might make persuasive? One might feel, say, that the energies or life force of those who loved us when they were alive are engaged with us on an ongoing basis, as from a powering source, even if they are not physically here? There can be things that we have ‘known’ within us that predate the reasons for thinking that way?
Digression: The fact that we cannot see or reach certain concepts does not mean that they do not exist. Bertrand Russell’s hypothesised teapot that orbits the sun might have been too small to be seen but ‘Absence of evidence’ does not mean ‘Evidence of absence.’
Have we lost touch with deeper nature through an overlay of ‘sophisticated’ culture?
A stern Cartesian thinker who only holds with what we can see and touch may have little to with what is below.
Past thinkers, even if without the tools of knowledge at modern disposal, could anticipate such counter-intuitive situations as where past, present and future are mixed up. The chorus in Oedipus at Colonus singled out for blessing those who have never been born.
Some who make a study of particularly Eastern traditions believe that we return after life on earth to a universal spirit that is aside from corporeal identity altogether.
Lao Tsu in the 6th or 5th century BC felt that human beings do not stand apart from the natural surroundings. Nature is one unified whole. A few differences in language, but the basic idea is much the same.
Why must remote tribal people be in closer touch than urban man with their nature, as some people assume? They do have the time and opportunity to commune with Nature and no need to grapple with our computerised society. They may be closer to one aspect of their nature than us. Does that make their nature more authentic than ours, more recognisably at one with Nature? The spirituality of a Western spiritual retreat from the everyday world by those who see a need for it may reflect about what is going on in the deeps of our nature as much as living one’s life in Nature. It may be begging the question to say that the insights of Tribal Man unlike those of Urban Man are not blurred by the decoy of rational thought. Rationality is part of man’s nature as well. An ‘outsight’ – to coin a neologism – is not to weigh all human abilities in the balance. How far does the concentration of a ‘tribal man’ on what is ‘within him’ – according to reports that he may see it with the plant-based aids that after experiment over long periods of time are said to produce inner truth, They may stopper his properly accessing realms of, say, his own personalised inspiration and creativity? There are two views on that. The world of the mystic and the tribalist, both less affected by ‘rationalist thinking’, may have much in common. Some people in the West go on drugs to find themselves or take Allen Ginsberg’s advice: ‘Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.’
Digression: Some people into cultist meditation, especially if they are following a wish rather than being suited by temperament to the objective – may try too hard to reach enlightenment. The mere fact of trying to attain a Nirvana-like state in such a way may lead them to overlook what is in front of their eyes.
If one tries to uplift oneself to realms ethereal, can one plausibly believe that one somehow can shed the physical apparatus that makes one hum along in life all but unconscious of a billion ‘piston-hammers’ that makes the bodily ‘machine’ tick?
There are those who think that, when we are in deep and dreamless sleep, we are part of a shared identity rather than individualised vessels. Are we individual on the surface but can be ‘likened to different glass jars that are all lit from the same sun’, as Roy Maunder thinks. Is this metaphor valid and, if so, are we individualised only by the different shapes of the ‘jar’?
One answer is to the question of who we are, au fond, is that we are in essentially in that zone, that sub-conscious, that wellspring, which is driving us – a fertile zone in which are creativities and imagination. We cannot explain these abilities and have to rest content with their parallels or explanations in spheres like physics and biology.
Wherein lies the root, or root cause, of our impulsions? Can we know what it is, other than seeing it is there? Knowledge, and knowing, are different. The observer of oneself, which is oneself, is not all of oneself. What is the trigger within the author of this piece that has loosed off these words? It presumably has been working all the time, cocked for action. At any moment, though not conscious of it per se directly, but aware as if a third party might be aware, it is clear that there is a vast hinterland of memories, etc. We ‘know’ the exhilaration of doing what we are born to do. In a less obtrusive way, we feel we know when something seems right to us.
It is said that in poetry is a kernel of what we are in a spiritual sense. Allusiveness is all; a poet might get closer to what is our essence. In the realm of vague longings and feelings, here is Shelley, in Adonais:
The One remains, the many change and pass,
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earths shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many colour’d glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity.
The elliptical or allusive way we come by our knowledge of these matters was overtly stated by Kierkegaard: ‘the most important truths cannot be communicated directly.’
Lao Tsu says: ‘I do not know its name. I call it Tao.’ There was an apocryphal hippy who with much effort and high hopes went to Tibet to meet a wise seer, only to be told life is ‘like a fountain’. This story has many variants; life for instance can be ‘like a big fish’. The formula implies that the secret of life is clothed in enigma but of great depth. Maybe the simple fact is that we don’t like to admit where the boundary of language ends and the world of deep meaning begins? Neither ‘existence’ nor ‘essence’ can be pinned down meaningfully other than in the form of a roundabout linguistic way.
Here are some lines from Hemal Jayasuriya that can be found in the Institute of Reflection.
In the evening sky. Dining Philosophers get up
Restlessly stride up and down corridors, loiter
Around, unable to know the deeps
Of Mind and Consciousness driving them, now, for
Two thousand years.
Where is the area spiritually within us where the happening is taking place?
How can we think afresh, or clearly, about the core of our being?
We are multi-dimensional and, if so, there can be more than one heart in the makeup of what we are.
There is this potential within us that we know is there and is only activated at certain times under certain stimuli. It is the doing of it, the results of seed growth, not the seed itself, the vast hinterland, about which we are particularly conscious.
What is it that conveys an ‘essence’?
A recording of a few words, or an ornament, or a garment might call to mind the essence of a personality, that part of a ‘soul’ that encapsulates a perception of someone from the perspective of an onlooker. It may be the feeling that is remembered as opposed to a particular event or episode.
We here run into a related problem courtesy of recent hypothesising: the ‘observer is part of the observed’. It is theory instanced by Schrӧdinger’s Cat, and whether it is alive or dead depending whether its cage is opened up for inspection.
Some would argue that all this proves is that Herr Schrӧdinger is an optimist.
G.E. Moore, with an aim of pinning things down to reality, looked askance at the idealism of his lecturer, McTaggart, who believed in ‘time being unreal’.
“Are you telling me. Jack, that I didn’t have my breakfast before I had my lunch?”
What could G.E. Moore say to the quantum physicist of today who maintains that time is an illusion tailor-made for man, no doubt an excellent framework for human experience but not reality, objectively speaking, other than as seen by much of humankind. On this reading, the future and past may be imbedded in the present.
It is not just a matter of thinking …thoughts. When to totally go along with feelings, intuition or a hunch? Most theories sit better through being considered. When does a trance or brown study – by any other name – stop, and true inspiration begin?
What do we see pr what will we find ‘in’ ourselves? Is it that which we would wish to face?
What can we think we can be sure about?
Many of the ideas to which we cleave can be junked so as to ground our thinking on that about which we can be pretty much sure. We aim for certainty but it so often is a crying for the moon. Spoiled children are told that ‘I want, doesn’t get!’ There is much to be said for being sure, provided one can be sure about what we think is sure, even if invariably there are exceptions to the rule. It’s like people who tell you: ‘I know what you mean’. What they mean is that they think that they understand, an error that merits the rejoinder: ‘I wish I was as sure of any one thing as you are of everything!’
Nothing need be sacred to a man who takes the bold path of questing after truth, none of the sanctities of religion, or morality, or…you name it.
G.E. Moore, the Cambridge philosopher, and others of his feather made a positive fetish about trying to establish that about which we can be sure. Is there an ironical Deity ‘up there’ mocking their labours. Here is Descartes on much the same point:
‘I was struck by the large number of falsehoods I accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realised that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the fundamentals if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.’
There are enough ‘deities’ competing for our loyalty.
Concepts are at one of the hearts of the matter.
The language of rationality can only go so far, it seems. Probing deeper mysteries was not its’ primary purpose. It presumably evolved partly to help enable man to face challenges of a practical nature rather than plumb the mysterious deeps.
Concepts can be are tried and tested but circumstances can be new can upend them. There is hardly a concept that is not subject to challenge. We need concepts even if wrong as a starting point. We can get rid of them after due thought, as a ladder can be thrown down after use.
There is no prescription for how to comport ourselves in the world, let alone a mental construct that seems on view which can takes us to a clear understanding about the underlying substance that makes us walk, talk and think. In the Old Testament, even the Deity only appears in a cloud.
There is rarely a ‘one size fits all’ straitjacket. Why presuming on anything much being 100% right or 100% wrong. A driver in our way of thinking is a misplaced ‘binary approach’; as in he is ‘a good actor’; she is ‘a bad politician’. We know and we too easily forget that almost always there is a grey area.
If we are a Jain, say, we may think long and hard before treading on a bee. All life, to us, is sacred. What about a Jain who believes in the transmigration of souls from some previous incarnation? One might be treading on the earthly reincarnation of Hitler and feel that he deserves the crunch! There is no end of suchlike examples: if, say, you believe like William Blackstone that ‘it is better than ten guilty men go free than one innocent suffer’, it may land you in hot water with utilitarians. Is Jeremy Bentham’s ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number’ a rule of thumb for the best society? That way, the mire beckons.
The same words can be used to describe each of our experiences but that does not prove that you and I undergo the same sensations. Our own lives assign different weights and meanings to even the simplest concepts.
People speak of ‘Daddy’, say, but the word can mean something so different to an abused child than to loved ones.
How to define our need to share with one another?
Try defining that strand, or indeed any other strand, within our psychic being! We can be sure of what it is, and that it is ‘there’, and our shared nature enables us to see it in others, but …try defining it. We fight shy of trying to define this oddity, knowing in advance that it will defy our best efforts to do so even though we take it as read. It helps blind us to the oddity of a phenomenon that is, once again, a familiar part of our thinking.
A caution: Proceed with care if we have confidence in our opinions. We can stand tall on our judgments but, equally, the heavy weight of public censure may make us liable to feelings of doubt when doing so. Careful thought can damp the tide of our insecurity, and back up our opinions with ‘Strength through carefulness’.
A digression: Given this common humanity of ours, we might take pride in Artificial Intelligence? True, it might be subject to misuse, like all inventions. It has come out of communal endeavour. Picture the relief we might feel on an alien planet faced by some monster of the outer deep on beholding a robot riding to our rescue.
Familiarity breeds contempt
There can be a great deal of truth in platitudes, wise old saws but, by familiarity, we tend to skate over their valuable insights. ‘Familiarity breeds contempt!’ We are so familiar with ourselves, as well as platitudes, that we are inclined to treat our very being with irreverence. The truth does not have to dazzle. It may be homely.
Familiarity with oddness makes oddness familiar. It is a perspective of Gurdjieff in ‘Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson’. The protagonist struggles with the bizarreness of most human customs. How would they look to an extraterrestrial parachuted onto planet earth without the baggage of hand-me-downs in conventions and concepts, sayings and mantras, by which we live our lives?
Is there one truth or system that is sufficient to explain the Mystery?
The philosopher, Avicenna, who lived in Bukhara in the tenth century, sought a way of unifying all our explanations of the world. And Schopenhauer later wrote:
‘To repeat the whole nature of the world abstractly, universally and distinctly in concepts, and thus to store up, as it were, a reflected image of it in permanent concepts always at the command of reason; this and nothing else is philosophy.’
This theory – the uncharitable might say – begins in seriousness but can end in the farce implied in the title of Julian Barnes’ ‘A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters’.
To reiterate: There can be more than one heart in the makeup of what we are, and what is. We are multi-dimensional.
We build on what we have experienced. Experience and heredity, nature and nurture, chronologically come first. It is ground much forked over by philosophers. Jean-Paul Sartre put it: ‘Existence precedes essence’, an approach also of Joseph Hume:
‘What can we make of our belief that physical objects exist when we lack experiences? What can we make of the continuing self?
What is the ‘I’, the self, when I have memories of what ‘I’ did?’
Our existence is ‘who we are’ is a starting point from which much follows.
What does that really tell us? Is it a neat form of words with which we swaddle what is an unknowable riddle to give us the comfort that we have somehow penetrated to the nub of a question when in reality we have only defined that which it isn’t.
Some philosophers like Hanah Arendt start from a basic truth: we are what we are.
Inheritance determines our actions and thinking, alongside choices we have made and the lessons we have been taught. A check list of influences helps us form a neat table of what we are but it is only representational. It does not get to the bottom of it. One of the reasons that we would like to know more about these matters is that words may satisfy an impulse within us toward …neatness. Neatness and the wish for freedom are among categories in a framework, or labels, that cover a polyglot of jostling ideas. It may be salutary to make a list of the ‘drives’ within us that fuel our curiosity about such matters, but it would still just be ‘about’ what makes us tick.
We quaff the bromide of words and, philosophers aside, even don’t always ask of them that they are as precise, let alone helpful, as they seem. Further, an answer may be more of a question; a ‘solution’ more tangled that the initial conundrum. Language here might mirror the confusing world in which we live.
From whatever point of the compass one approaches this riddle of who we are, and how much of an individual any of us are, we come up against the same sort of buffer.
Everything may be subordinated to the passion or the thinking of the moment, or our dominant characteristic at a given time. I am aware of the compulsion under which I act. It is allied to my state of awareness. What lies behind all this?
It is reminiscent of the tightrope that devout Christians can walk when considering whether salvation might be the due of a non-Christian who acts in a Christian way.
Philosophy comes in many guises
Having the right attitude to life is a basic sine qua non.
Philosophy is everywhere if you keep your eyes open.
As seen, we do not have to have tested all arguments and counter-arguments and their ramifications to arrive at the right path. A concentration on it as a chosen subject may render one less inclined to look for philosophy in other mediums.
It is often the ideas behind the action that have been the prime mover in progress, or at least change. In ‘Making the Weather’, Sir Vernon Bogdanor analyses the effect that six politicians had on the Britain’s body politic, none of whom held the highest offices of state. The idea can be found in Shelley’s view of ‘poets being the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. There is a chapter in ‘In a Dangerous Field’, the story of the European-Atlantic Group, where the speeches of illustrious politicians are filleted for their philosophies in life. Nuggets are buried in discourses about politics. Here is General John Galvin talking about NATO in 1987:
‘I remind you of the words of the Greek philosopher, Heraclites; ’An invisible bond is stronger than a visible one.’
Iris Murdoch and Simone de Beauvoir have their place in the world of philosophy but thought of themselves primarily as novelists.
We are entitled to ask ourselves the key questions in life and to arrive at our best conclusions. We are entitled to revisit our prejudices. We may have made up our minds but we should always keep an open mind. Carruthers, in Childers’ novel, had made up his mind about the mother-in-law of his friend but then, on considering his view, saw her in a different light though she was acting much as he had always known her:
‘I saw strength (where before I had seen) obstinacy, courage (where before I had seen) recklessness.’
Knowledge that we do not fully know, in the deepest sense, so much, is at the root of some of the earliest thinking. A seemly humility is rightly enjoined on us. Peter Cave – whose work ‘How to Think Like a Philosopher’ is a major text for the thinking in this piece – observes:
‘Sometimes we may know things that we did not know we knew. In both cases there is value in reflecting, thinking further, and even trying things out.’
We understand things in a way that we do not fully comprehend.
The Obvious or the Known sometimes repays thinking about.
Are we closer to uncovering anything meaningful if we consider the following words of Wittgenstein?
‘The solution of the riddle of life is that space and time lie outside space and time.’
It might seem that a truth has been speared, a riddle solved, allowing us to feel satisfied on a cursory glance. Or is it a clever-clever formula, a catch-all label, for an idea that is fundamentally beyond us, especially given that Wittgenstein was writing before people in the main drew conclusions from the opacities of quantum science? Does his ‘solution’ guide us to a purportedly safe harbour in any but the sense Alice B. Toklas had in mind: ‘When you have got there, there is no there there!’
Are we being drawn into little more than a semantic game that even players do not see that they are playing? Bertrand Russell once said of Wittgenstein’s philosophy that it ‘became at best a slight help to lexicographer.’ We are given no end of words, analogies. In Alan Jay Lerner’s My Fair Lady a lady unrequited in love sings: ‘All I get is words, words, words! …SHOW me!’ In that ditty what in part miffs this lady, played by Julie Andrews, is the English attitude of not showing emotion that goes hand-in-hand with a typical British reticence about giving tongue to deeper thought.
Is there, on the other hand, something wise abut Wittgenstein’s formula? We should ideally arrive at an understanding in our own way, having first acquired sufficient of the facts on which to make some sort of judgement. Speculation about the eternal verities, in terms of purpose, is primarily a quest for an understanding rather than an academic discipline. If so, perhaps we can rest content with justifiable generality.
Sometimes, bypassing bright perceptive thinking, consciousness allows nuggets or gristle to drop into our deeps. We absorb them into that deep reservoir or library in our minds which consciousness is constantly referencing. They become part of us. Perhaps not the very deepest part.
A digression: So much that is brought out into the light had its growth in the dark. The so-called Dark Ages in Europe are now being seen in some quarters as the fomenting ground of all that came later. In cosmological terms, Robert Hazen writing recently for the Templeton Foundation, is among scientists who are proponents of ‘Evolution before life’. This refers to ‘a universal chemical evolution that spans billions of years and comprises all possible space in the universe. This hypothesis argues that life emerged gradually as molecules evolved from simplicity to complexity, undergoing selections until reaching biological functions.’
Perhaps what might helpfully scratch at the surface of the question is some sort of explanation of why we might not be able to answer the question. We’ll ‘feel better’ if we can understand something at least of why we can’t understand.
What can we learn about ourselves from the animal world?
Animals display many of the same drives as people. A mouse shows signs of cardiac arrest on being tossed about by a dog; look at the pleasure evinced by a purring cat, observe an insect struggling to be free of a spiders’ web; missing most obviously in a ‘lower animal’ is the self-conscious ability to talk. Mouse, cat and insect know what is going on but do not rationalise, so we presume, as do we. Perhaps we are only one notch further up on an Awareness scale; we too know what is ‘going on’ but do not have sufficiently sophisticated linguistic tools to describe it?
Experiments seem to show that when chimpanzees in the northern hemisphere have learned a trick taught them by animal behaviourists, then chimps in the southern hemisphere suddenly show a tendency to perform the same trick. This argues for there being a Communal Mind into which we can all tap. It lessens any claim we might make as regards our uniqueness, save in a relatively superficial sense.
‘We all have different pieces of that infinite puzzle called reality and we should put them together to make sense of it.’
The Lord is said to have regard for the meanest of creatures: ‘the fall of a sparrow is a significant event.’ It is an example of how the scriptures – in metaphor at least – have a reality in a sphere of morality as well as eternality. Humankind produced by enlarge much the same read-out on the fundamentals of life as well as the small change of everyday interactions whenever it has been situated. In the ancient world, without means of communication across the globe, humankind reaches out towards a sublime Being, a creator albeit imperfectly understanding this Source.
The itch to resolve the question about the riddle/s of life is still there.
Perhaps Plato had the right metaphor in his image of the cave inside which sits an immured dweller who can never get out. He sees the wavery silhouette of flames on the wall but doesn’t actually know what is fire. It is all very fine to take pot guesses at it but a soupçon of humility is in order before jumping to hard and fast conclusions.
Even saying that we might have ‘lost touch’ with our deepest roots or selves, or our view on these questions, may be a hand-me-down from what we have read or heard.
No one knows a person better than he knows himself – ‘to understand a man you have to walk a mile in his moccasins’ – but that does not mean he knows himself well or that we can capture inmost thoughts in a neat set of precepts. This is despite apparently a near universal wish to have a framework to cover our sense of selfhood and to find our way around this strange labyrinth that is the world. It is a far cry from the rationalist way of getting through our quotidian lives.
So many philosophers, divines and ordinary people seek to explain the profound mystery by reference to a Power Above, whether it may be one of the prophets of traditional religion or New Age views exalting ‘Nature’ or ‘Energy’. In Spinoza, reality is fundamentally derived from God but also Nature. Einstein, once asked if he believed in God, responded that he ‘believed in Spinoza’s God’. The Great Architect of the Universe’, in Masonic terminology, has many guises. How are we to do other than worship in our own way through acceptable allegory; the Buddhist under the Sri Lankan Bo Tree may never have heard of Christ; an Eskimo in his igloo may be ignorant of Buddha. How and why are they responsible for backsliding from a true Faith when so much does not have rationality as its fundamental bedrock?
You may be a mere human but, as is said in ‘Desiderata’:
‘You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars. You have a right to be here.’
In the words of Kant: ‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe the more often and steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within me.’
We start with a gaze at the heavens.
What thoughts surround you if you contemplate the vastness and peculiarity of the universe? Is it more facts supplied by the researchers, or a handle on the mystery of it all?
In ‘The Machine Stops’ by H.G. Wells, a dweller in one of the identical homes that cover the globe must leave home – not a normal thing to do in the story – and fly to the other side of the world. In the course of this flight, a mountain range is seen through the plane’s porthole. After a cursory gaze the traveller asks for the blinds to be drawn, commenting “I’m not getting any ideas!” Is it new ideas that should come to mind, or a sense of wonder at the immensities of an alien landscape? We surely won’t be able to understand the panorama to the extent that it yields up the secrets of the universe – but some ideas are bound to present themselves.
We cannot be a part of anything that is not in the universe. There are billions of cells in each of us, more than all the plants and stars in the cosmos, scientists say. A vast blow-up picture of the smallest nano cells of matter within us reveal coral-like plants waving gently as if in the sea; save that they are in ordered, almost geometric lines or files. There is nothing recognisably ‘human’ there.
All this immensity and the tininess by comparison of myself! But, then, a planet cast adrift in a colossal firmament is also tiny. A world unto itself it may be but everything is relative. Two ways of looking at the situation, neither exclusive. A planet to itself may seem vast, and so, too, you and I. We are worlds unto ourselves
We ‘stand on the shoulders of the Greats’. How much we have learned from the scientific community! An accumulation of facts has served us well; we know for instance that the earth is not at the centre of the solar system let alone the universe. We have an inkling of how much there is still to discover, for instance the import of Dark Matter. But the great mystery at the heart of it all remains. The fact that we don’t have final conclusions and may or may not ever have them doesn’t mean that the questing should stop. As some thinkers and believers in the Afterlife might say: ‘While there is death, there is hope.’
A speculation: Are we mini replicas, hologrammatic, of the universe? If so, we might as well train a microscope at ourselves rather than a Webb or Hubble telescope at the further reaches of the physical universe if we want to see into the essence that is behind it. If we want to know what Being created us, we can consult our own thinking. Yet we do not even know what is our own essence. We can describe the biological system of inception but that does not mean we understand it from within.
Is this just an analogy to help us try and make sense of a world which we are unable to do because we have not been granted the apparatus of sufficient outreach by the five senses? Even the next world without the hindrance of our limited physical apparatus might have us stumped, to go by a Wittgenstein dictum: ‘Is this eternal life not as enigmatic as our present one?’
Scientists test theories, shake phials, perform mathematical prodigies, a metaphoric towel round their eggheads, awe-inspiring work, grounded in reality. We are still back to ‘What is ‘reality’? We are reliant on allusion, if not illusion; we must hang our hat on ellipsis rather than a solid hat stand. Some scientists see it. NASA didn’t send up a poet to the moon simply to rid planet earth of a noodle-head! We wish to understand more of the mystery yet, how even to define the mystery?
We can say of the Bard that he didn’t exalt his homily up far enough into the vaults of the cosmos when putting into Hamlet’s mouth: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’
Lucretius, in the1st century, might stand in contention for coming up with that cod aphorism:
‘Look back at the eternity that has passed before we were born and mark how utterly it counts to us as nothing. This is a mirror that Nature holds up to us, in which we may see the time that shall be after we are dead. Is there anything terrifying in the sight – anything depressing – anything that is not more restful and the soundest sleep?’
Why think about philosophy? A practical purpose of philosophy: How should we live our lives.
Some would say that this question is the only useful purpose of philosophy.
I may believe my chosen formulae, my vade mecum in life, but the processes of critical thinking can kick in. I am left, if I am honest – an acid test – with a belief that I can conclude that none, or not much, of it is factual. It is all a matter for probability not certainty. In this, the underlying mystery is like so much in life. One feels that even Hamlet’s ‘Horatio’ could mock anyone for supposing that they meaningfully can think of the explanation about such a grandiose spectacle as even what actuates the humblest creature on earth.
Raphael painted ‘The School of Athens’; central are Plato, his arm pointing upwards, symbolically at the heavens, with Aristotle whose arm is pointing toward us, suggestive of our earthly concerns.
Aristotle is one philosopher who was concerned about how we live lives. There are many pointers from the Ivory Towers, but whether of Babel or Academe, they often are not on the same hymn sheet.
As one contemplates from one’s lofty eerie…
….NO! That is not the right start.
One would do better to adopt the Socratic approach, that of a ‘gadfly’ which challenges prevailing assumptions in the hope that the best ideas survive a stinging.
A brief look at some of the concepts we are inclined to take as a sort of gospel
In novels there is often philosophising if one is flexed to sniff it out. An example of a by-way that can reveal truths is a throwaway line in ‘The Riddle of the Sands’, an early twentieth century novel by Erskine Childers. Among all the rubric on nautical knowhow and the derring-do of an enthusiastic patriot there is a shaft of illumination like ‘the patient fates have crooked methods.’ Who knows what road will lead to the right destination?
‘Though the change was radical its full growth was slow. It was here and now that it took its birth.’
To thoroughly enjoy a good meal, one needs not just food but a good appetite; in law one does not need just the Actus reus for a crime to be committed but also the Mens rea. Erskine Childers’ character, Carruthers, sees that what he needs is the right mind-set to endure roughing it on a storm-tossed little boat and actively sets to work to encourage it:
Bernie Cornfield in the ‘seventies would encourage ‘Lombards’ – an acronym for ‘Loads of Money but a right dickhead’ – with the exhortation: ‘Do you sincerely want to be rich?’ An advertiser would ‘fail to feel his flaccid genitals stir’ – to employ a phrase used by an oversexed theatrical producer when turning down a script – at the challenge of ‘Do you sincerely want to be rounded?’ But a rounded person is more likely to have the right perspective on his life than his or her more angularly shaped cousin.
It is probably a good rule of thumb to think ‘why not make the best decisions and reach the best conclusions that we can at whatever stage in life we have reached?’ What can haunt us is a regret that we sis not give the alternatives genuine consideration. Josephine at 99 says in ‘Personal Credos’ in the Institute of Reflection: ‘When the rain comes it is no good wishing for it to stop, one should accept it.’ Unschooled in English erudition, she had a deep understanding. She said that one should aim to get ‘a taste’ of things. She got to the pith. She did not need to intellectually buttress her theory by ‘Quietism’. Its definition according to Wikipedia:
‘Philosophers believe that philosophy has no positive thesis to contribute; rather, it defuses confusions in the linguistic and conceptual frameworks of other subjects, including non-quietist philosophy. For quietists, advancing knowledge or settling debates (particularly those between realists and non-realists) is not the job of philosophy, rather philosophy should liberate the mind by diagnosing confusing concepts.’
Josephine may not have read Schopenhauer but her thinking was straight.
Who knows what inscrutable purposes if any there may be in our fates? Terrible, or so it seems, to think Abraham Lincoln’s life was cut short by an assassin’s bullet. Only now, with advanced medical techniques, do we know that he was not destined to be long for this life, given his underlying medical conditions such as venereal disease. Would President Kennedy have retained his ‘Camelot’ reputation if his life had not been cut short? What damage could Princess Di have inflicted on the Royal family if she had cemented her tie to the El Fayed family? Would John Lennon have remained a revered Beatle if he had been vouchsafed the time to persevere in his commentating on the Middle East? And so on…
To accept what comes and to not rail unnecessarily against it; we should accept that which we cannot affect – after having first made sure that indeed is the case. Thinking through what we can think about is a key way to get our thinking – from which action springs – in order.
How sure can we be of hand-me-down set of precepts by which we live our lives?
The overarching concepts by which society is ordered.
A few examples only can be cited here I relation to a question that would take up the shelves of several libraries to do it justice.
Let us look at Machiavelli:
How often has a country leader soothed a conscience by reference to the fact that a ‘Prince’ can have no truck with ordinary norms of behaviour. Affairs of State require hard-headed grappling with realities. This shibboleth should be challenged. Why has morality no part to play in a State as it does elsewhere? Brickbats flung at politicians are often on grounds of insensibility to ordinary codes of decency but seem to have little traction save as benchmarks to which expedience might require a nod in their direction. In the short term, dishonesty may pay off but what of the longer view? No one has yet seen fit to write a history with right-thinking morality as the touchstone of evaluation of statesmen’s records. This is a field day awaiting a historian, if he can be found. Dr Johnson might have thought that ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’ but his was a minority view in the days of ‘My country, right or wrong.’ It still is thought of as a comment on decent patriotism rather than a comment about scoundrels. Founding examples had much effect on generations of followers. Machiavelli would have had high praise for success, little aware of long shadows cast through history.
Examples of how morality should be the same for leaders as for the led:
Peter the Great of Russia is thought great. He enlarged the territory of his empire. Did a man or woman in his vast realms became the happier for it, aside from his venal cronies? More incriminating is the fact Peter had his very own private torture chamber constructed in every new Palace that he built. The horror of it! Look at Russia today. His example seems to have permeated through the air the body politic there breathes, with cowed acceptance of repression and misrule.
Take Afghanistan, the ‘graveyard of Empires’. Clever, brave Afghans massacred the entire 20,000 strong garrison of British troops in 1842, the worst defeat suffered by the British army that century. Is that so? How clever and brave were the Afghans? They gave Governor MacNaughton free conduct through the Kyber Pass if the British laid down their arms. His troops were sitting ducks, picked off one by one from behind cover. A reversal of the honour code, to put it mildly. What sort of a country is Afghanistan today under the Taliban? Decent mores of conduct have been blasted by behaviour that won its independence. To repeat, an ‘example seems to have permeated through the air the body politic breathes’. Would it not have been better in the long run to set greater store by gentlemanly conduct?
The same goes for religions. The founder of Christianity was meek and mild – save if affronted by Pharisees at the Temple. His example coloured his followers’ behaviour. Buddha gave away his Kingdom, arguably outdoing in Christian conduct even Jesus Christ who in material terms had nothing much to give away. Buddhist and Hindu temples sit side by side and no discord arises between the two Faiths. And then, what is the picture of life where followers of the successful warrior, the Prophet hold swat?
This is hardly the place to start an inspection of what all the philosophers have had to say about how to live lives but one or two further examples may give pause for thought – and a Pause for Thought is one of the goals of reflection.
Take John Stuart Mill, in the words of Peter Cave:
‘Utilitarianism is consequentialist: ultimately what I morally ought to do depends on the eventual outcomes and the morally desirable outcomes are those of the greatest happiness of the greatest number.’
Whither led the happiness of the greatest number? Sshhh! One does not want to decry capitalism in these pages.
We are in favour of giving people free speech. Has Soren Kierkegaard a valid point to make when he says:
‘People demand free speech as a compensation for free thought, which they never use.’
Which are the nostrums to which we choose to cleave?
Listen to any sermon in church on Sunday and then on Monday at the office; ask how much in common do the prescriptions overlap if one is seeking to become a CEO. One might be forgiven for thinking that the CEO would do better than study a charter for sociopaths.
Or take two of the best-known prescriptions of how to live one’s life, ‘Desiderata’ and Kipling’s ‘If’. Read separately they make such sense. Compared, one might be left wondering how one can keep hold of two poles so apart.
The fact that we can choose how to live our lives doesn’t mean we can take pot luck or that we are rightly excused the opportunity we all have, to greater or lesser extent, of getting it as right as we can.
I’m going into a session of Reflection. Best to discard what is sometimes described as ‘chimp talk’, namely ideas tumbling over themselves in our thinking.
On looking over what is written below, I’m struck at how many of the ideas are only a recapitulation of what has been going on in my mind, things I’ve been thinking about, as are detailed in the above piece.
Maybe, rather like language, one is expecting a to freeze a moment in time, rather like a photo. This may be something to do with the way we like to neatly order experiences so that there can be a static record, to which one can return, even though life as it is lived is more fluid, dynamic. Can we freeze an essence of a thought-process or sensation in time? What is on paper will be lifeless unless we care to breathe into it our memory of this moment. If nothing else, it must be representational; the actual experience won’t be relived unless a mood takes one in that direction.
Fluidity congeals fast enough. A flash of inspiration, once taken up, takes its place in the bank of memory and goals and loses its ‘abracadabra’ effect.
I’m trying to analyse the flow of my experience right now as if a I’m a third party looking on or, ideally, looking in. The brain activity sits easily enough with my mood. Is that a gentle fizz I feel in my cranium as I’m alive to what is going on or is it imagination, a wish-fulfilment born of expectation?
I’m not in pain nor bored, and while this thought occurs to me, I recall that Schopenhauer thought that: ’The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.’ Memory must be playing a part in my thinking.
How did the wish to pin down this Contemplation to a record of it originate? Was it, originally, do with a wish for self-protection? One needs to be flexed for what an outsider might say to one. Lin Yutan is good on the way that the overcrowded Chinese live their lives in constant awareness, maybe apprehension, of what others around them think.
This is a moment of peace, where I can, as far as possible, consult my own thoughts and needs. Perhaps though I am half-‘speaking’ to an anonymous reader of these lines? It is not just myself that is in the frame of what is going on. Now – again, is it imagination? – I feel as if the blood is coursing through my veins. This tells me that I’m alert to the moment.
Odds and ends of past thinking, and scraps of information, keep occurring to me. Are they relevant to my observing myself quietly? The remark of Roy’s father, for instance, that ‘there is something about me that never changed’ throughout his life. It rings true. But even back then when I was a little boy, I could have some of the disturbing sensations that lay waiting if triggered by certain circumstances. This feeling that I have, now, is the same feeling of being the individual ‘me’ that I have always had when I have moments to myself, and allowed myself to contemplate my life. Maybe this is a playing out of an idea that I had when as a little boy I had a photo taken of myself that I thought then would be with me later in life and I could look back on my younger self. My feeling now when I look at this photo is that I can remember clearly what I was thinking back then, a grown-up thought. To an observer I look like just another little boy.
One of the touchstones of my personal belief system – a constant refrain, perhaps self-brain-washing – is that what goes seemingly wrong at the time may, in reality, be for the best after all.
This oasis of peace, it is reassuring. I rediscover for myself a quiet bedrock of my nature to which I gravitate. That is how I’d like to think of it.
The fact that it is the middle of the night may help, tiredness closing down hyper-activeness. All in all, this period is a relief to me. There is no need to try and decouple myself from who I am and aim for some Empyrean in which I can ‘levitate’.
It is the twilight zone when ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ – again a phrase that I absorbed at some time in the past gives the point to my general idea. There’s a poem by Winnifred Emma May, known as Patience Strong, about the quiet period after a lifetime’s struggle.
SHIP OF HOPE
May the winds of fortune blow
Your dream-ship safely home,
O’er the hidden rocks that lie
Beneath the rolling foam.
Laden with the things for which you’ve
Waited, worked and tried.
May you ship of Hope come home
Upon the evening tide
It is outside of myself, my sensation and feeling at this moment, but not too far outside myself. This period is within grasp without training, and it is natural.
This quiet period is enough for me to be armed against the all but sharp or inconvenient disturbances. The feeling of being satisfied enters into the mix; this is a relief, and applies equally to this moment when I can be free of expectations especially by others and, taking a long view, look back briefly at what I have done in my life. I can think of what I achieved, and that which was in me to accomplish, and say without pride but with pleasure that I did it. It reminds me what Mrs Thatcher once said: ‘The most satisfying feeling is at the end of a day when I have had everything to do, and I’ve done it.’
There is this drive within me – and all of us? – towards neatness and order. Admixed in this is the wish to round things up. Order was one of the lodestars for Descartes who aimed to create a well-ordered mind, a tranquillity, overcoming the mind’s illnesses. ‘There are pleasures in contemplating the truth, there can be contentment once we realise that we have psychological freedom to overcome any distresses.’ (NB This quotation was added after the writing up was finished.)
It is as if I’m writing and thinking of an extension of myself, rather than myself as such, rather like a motorist can engage gears and so on without consciously telling himself to perform this or that function.
This is my True North, I think at the moment, a time when I am most myself. If everything goes pear-shaped in my life, I will be able to think that there was a moment, one that might return, when I could be at peace with myself. Josephine would say: ‘Today we eat!’, a comment on being satisfied and that one can be content.
It won’t be long, no doubt, before I’m back to my more normal mode of being flexed for what might happen from the world outside. In this we have more in common with the animal world that we often care to think; animals are constantly alert for something that might come in and disturb their restfulness. Look at a bird, always active, yet a creature that has a nest. Part of my current feeling is that of cosiness. I feel embosomed as if in a blanket though I’m sitting up. It calls to mind a video or film I once saw of a sweet, comforting homestead, and then …a monster appears. But right now, I feel cosy and know what it is to feel cosy though it is a feeling that I cannot describe in the way I can put my thoughts and language to paper.
I’d like the security of knowing that I have at least put to paper as authentically as I can the thought and feeling of this quiet period. It is partly the satisfaction of having written up a description so that it won’t be lost to one, a script to which one can return.
Another impulsion is that I feel the wish to report what is going on in my mind at this moment. For who? It doesn’t seem to matter except that it is for myself, and to tell myself that there are safe berths in this life. It is like being in the eye of the storm – save that it isn’t a storm, unless one looks on all of our lifetime in that light.
All of what I have written was waiting ‘there’ in me, ready to be unearthed.
We like to build a home, a nest, which is another urge, an urge to construct. Julia (a friend) once said that there are two types of people, builders and the destroyers. If that is so, I doubt whether the destroyer type could be enjoying such a moment as this as much as I do. He would want to up and ‘doing’. The building I’m here constructing is of ideas, then ideas come in and feed off the first ideas till, eventually, I can get to write this piece.
This, I venture to think, has been brain activity supported by a balanced mood
