What of YOUR truth?  What of your still, quiet inner mind?  You reflect before even starting to meditate ‘on’ anything.  Everything comes from reflection, even for the quick-minded types.  We reflect – whether or not taking time to do so – even in making a choice of a particular dish in a menu.  Your life as it is and your daily round has sprung from reflection, if camouflaged by the name of feelings or intuitions or certainties of what your life is about.  Your conclusions about the ‘how’s’ and ‘whys’ of your life, career and relationships may not have come to you in a flash or in a spell of hard thinking with the proverbial towel round your head but the process of reflection has been going on all the time.  Even if you saw the light in a dream, and followed wither it led you, you ‘chose’ it.

Reflection sets us free to speculate on …anything.  Why try to still that little voice in our minds that allows us to reflect on …whatever we wish?

The vast panorama of life and Beyond Life is but one pearl in the oyster of what we are licensed to think about if we are not being led by Teachers to have their teachings insinuated into our thoughts, right down into the private depths in our minds that we perhaps have not fully fathomed.

‘Meditation’ nowadays especially in an Eastern sense evokes inter alia a reaching into an Essence of the self and/or up to an Empyrean. This may be an all-encompassing Universal Soul.  Is there an explanation why the pronoun ‘I’ and the word ‘eye’ sound the same?   Finding yourself includes Observing Yourself.  Self-observation is the beginning of progress, says Buddha.  Who is to say that when we seek the Empyrean we should be looking closer to home; it may be in ourselves.  Surely, if so, we should get to know ourselves as well as possible.

The subconscious goes on its own way, sending up messages to the conscious mind. In any case is there a demarcation zone between conscious and subconscious self?  The division may largely be for a conceptual framework to make understanding easier.  The subconscious self however might have been that which was there first of all and then got overlaid by increasing ‘layers’ of the conscious mind.

Reflection is usually tied in with self-narrative. It is a vantage point from which we view our lives; a point mid-way (approximately) between the fluidity of life as it lived and a static observer-point above the fray. We take a mental snapshot of ourselves ‘frozen in time’. We stop for a moment and consider what we do and what we are and what we feel and peer into ourselves.

It often does not do to enquire too deeply into the exactness of what we believe however curious we are and however fascinating it is.  The more we think in terms of generalities the less prone are we to be inaccurate.  If we have the capacity to think it is our right to wonder why we have been vouchsafed this capacity.  There is advantage in becoming more conscious or self-aware of the strangeness that is involved in human life.  It can make our journey on earth seem more wonderful and this may even be more important than an arrival at…we know not whither.

Reflection is free-flowing; less prone to advance in orderly steps.  Digressions are par for the course.  The mind can frolic whither it will and this is hardly a path to shun unless it is strewn with brambles.  What nugget might lie in a by-way?   Or a cow-pat!  Anyone who is up for meditating – ‘reflecting’ – can consider any theme from the most sublime or romantic down to the mundane.  In such a form of meditation, one can think about loved ones for instance; one is licensed to imagine what life would be like without them, call to mind their image or their personality.  It can lead to a truer appreciation of them.  Such insights often can be brought more into the open in a mode of contemplation.  Insight can alter attitude.  Openness to reflection can foster it.   Reflection itself is valuable and also the way in which one reflects that counts.

Thought is needed about most things in life.   We want to avoid a wild goose chase.  Think about that!  Wild geese could have got it right after all and may not be what you think by taking them at face value!   Wild geese are well organised and they show commendable community spirit; their flight paths cover enormous distances in an aerodynamic V-shaped formation to a destination known in advance, with their wings beating in a way to uplift all the flock; they allow for a tired lead goose to fall back with a fresher one at the spearhead. If a goose drops out exhausted, two stay alongside it down to ground level remaining with it for as long as it takes to be of help to the stricken bird.

Think of all that the next time someone wants to lead you on what seems like a wild goose chase; at the least you might query the imagery.

We can dance our days away in a pot purri of often contradictory codes.  They can combine plagiarism that is often unconscious with arrogance in making assumptions about which one is insufficiently self-aware.  We fling ourselves into what we have been flung into, flag-bearers for our totems. The basic truth of it all might just not be visible to the naked eye.   Why not look into it; face it fair and square.  We wish to feel that what we think is consistent with our goals and, by doing so we may compound the illusions by which we live.  It can be the saddest thing discovering this too late in life.

‘Homespun Philosophy’ does not have an aura associated with Great Thinkers even if can be about Universals. It has no iconic champion in literature as it does in sculpture where Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’ is portrayed as deep in thought.

The seeker after truth as a type had his day in the Agora of ancient Greece rather than in our modern world, but why is this so when moderns have so much new and exciting to get speculative teeth into?

There is hardly a thought that any of us can have that is entirely original.  What may be original is the order in which we think these thoughts, the weight or importance we assign to them, and the feelings associated with them.  What may emerge from our own synthesis of them may surprise us.

The pleasure and usefulness of picking the fruit, of thinking over things of consequence, of reflecting, and becoming a more rounded person in the process has few enough accredited Masters of Ceremony to cry ‘Roll up! Roll up!’  It is time to redress the balance.

_____

More Reflections on Reflection

Know thyself.  These were the words inscribed almost as a warning in the pronaos of the Temple of Apollo in Delphi.  Plato transmitted this phrase via his dialogues.  He suggested the importance of looking inwards before making any decisions or taking any steps forward.   Centuries have passed but people still find themselves pretty helpless when it comes to self-knowledge.  Our society continues to act without reflecting first …it blames others for its failures, and continues to behave without integrity.   NB  Bold font not in the wording quoted from:

  https://exploringyourmind.com/ 

(a) From humble beginnings

Some of the things that arguably go wrong in our lives are on account of not taking the time to think sufficiently – reflect – about them. Results follow from fine-tuning attitudes.  Action precedes from thought. From microbial lifeforms do acorns grow, and from acorns, oak trees grow. One does not have to be an Einstein to see it but his example is instructive. He wondered how life might look to a traveller on a beam of life. His cogitation about the reality that we normally perceive without questioning it resulted in his upending the apparently solid edifice of Euclidian geometry.

(b)  Distractions from Reflection

The claims of reflection for its’ own useful sake are blanketed out by the pressure of busy lives, habit, and because attention is not drawn to it being a worthwhile occupation.

There are all too many diversions from the charms of reflection per se, for instance:

          Philosophy – with a capital ‘P’ – is in a Tower of Ivory, its academic drawbridge raised to prevent most seekers after its truths crossing the moat to its higher learning. The subject’s very intellectuality may distract from its being understood by everyman.  Eternal verities surely do not cower in the tresses of hair-splitters nor do they need souped-up cerebral power to pierce through the labyrinth which brilliant men erect around them.  Philosophy, arguably the natural habitat for those who wish to reflect on life, but also is shunted off in popular perception into a sort of ‘metaphysics’ which seems outdated.  Philosophy is a classical canon.  There is a premium on acquiring a corpus of knowledge that often does not grant a free rein for the experimental thinking of an inspired and original amateur.  Its internal disputations and variegated focus – which largely stem from personal choice rather than straightforward rationality – does not put a premium on the encouraging of originality or a form of truth that is tailor-made for the individual student.   It can seem impertinent to challenge Authority.  

          Psychotherapists of various stripes, multiplying as never before, deal with mental malaises but rarely zero in on too much normal emotion short of outright trauma as needing their nostrums.  Emotion merely recollected in tranquillity, for instance, is no big deal.   Life coaches can get you where you want to go and where you want to go tends to concern this life.  Science may need brain power but often working out its significance in terms of a philosophy of life may need common sense.

        Many people’s fascination with what matters in this world is topped up by their daily fix of the news of the day.  Newsfeeds add little edifying value to deep understanding of life save for a stock of facts, many soon forgotten. The last time the Ideas Men hit the headlines – as opposed to honourable exceptions in many TV programmes – was when Bertrand Russell led a CND protest demo.  TV Programmes like Mastermind or Brain of Britain exemplify how a title can conceal the truth about the content.   ‘A Memory Game’ doesn’t trip off the tongue with a PR ring suitable to pull in the viewers.

          There is much in media and literature that appeals to those of a reflective disposition but, overall, influences nudging people to veer off into side-tracks are ubiquitous and insidious.  Thinkers may be placed on a pedestal but signposts do not usually point in their direction unless they are statues.  Novelists and playwrights do depict deep truths but tend to do it en passant.   They can sneak in a reflection or two on ‘why we are here’ and ‘what to do about it’ but it usually it is tangential to ladling out their entertainment.  Sagacity is all very well in its place – which is in business.  Pensées – digestible, pithy, categorizable – came into their own as Thoughts when they were popularised by Blaise Pascale and now re-emerge as acceptable when they are sound-bites.  And there we have it! The fruits of reflection are all very fine if they are shrunk to sound-bite size.

The fact of the matter is that there are so many tempting ways to stop thinking things through for oneself.

(c) Some advantages of Reflection as a habit of mind

There is little enough coaching for a habit of mind – reflection for its own sake – despite how much it helps get a handle on issues confronting us all. True, this is increasingly recognised. Reflection is just done – so many suppose – in the process of doing other things, acquiring facts and views on which a rational person anyway should be not be spoon-fed but come to his own conclusions.

There is much that is useful in cultivating the habit of reflection.  Applied Mathematics does not preclude the study of Pure Mathematics even if it is abstracted from a focus on any particular mathematical problem.  It is a way of thinking that helps in all manner of contexts…

Open-mindedness is fostered by reflection. Rigidity of mind, being single-minded, has its limits and those who do not bend with the wind are more likely to be blown down.  The weighing up of options before becoming single-minded while retaining an open mind in case fresh evidence may justify rethinking.  It is a mark of both common sense and intelligence.

Questioning, rationalisation, synthesis of ideas, are all among the habits of mind involved in the mix of careful thinking.  One business woman quoted in Eve and Adam Through the Looking Glass (see The Theory on this website) attributes her success to the fact that daily she takes half an hour to quietly consider the challenges facing her.

The wish for reflection is half the battle; once one has taken it on board as a personal and worthwhile wish, undertaken for its own sake, it can become a second nature, a form of maturity.

If reflecting is what we want to do, we are entitled to do as we wish.  There is nothing difficult in it other than fence with an idea. True, how to deal with any intangible is not necessarily easy.

The recent period of the pandemic has engendered some reconsideration about the way we live our lives. Some of the goals of a consumer society that were tantamount as a sort of religion to many people have been re-evaluated.

If we are grounded in our lives, the thoughts that come to us during such moments of reflection are more apt to go to the core of what we need to be doing in life.

Awareness of thoughts and feelings – holding them up for inspection – develops them. and …they may feel watched.  How will we think about what we do when not in the middle of what we do?  A call for a justification of this or that idea may prompt a re-think. One considers what one is doing from outside dealing specifically with the situation in which one is, perhaps from a standpoint that one imagines one will think about it when recollected in tranquillity.

A cleansing and cooling afterglow follows from reflection.  A traditional English way is just to ‘do it and not to make a fuss about it’. It is a form of unconscious cerebration.  In these touchy-feely days of splurge and instantaneous reactions and when more and more rats are running the race, it is time to retreat to first principles.  Why airbrush them out of thought processes just when trying to find ourselves. We should make time and space for our inner voice. The leisured lifestyle may be a thing of the past for most of us but let us not forego all of its benefits which include caring for ourselves.

Here is Dickens writing in Great Expectations:

‘Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before – more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle. / So subdued I was by those tears, and by their breaking out again in the course of the quiet walk…, and still reflected for my comfort … while I was occupied with these deliberations…’

In reflection our perspective on other people can be brought to bear on oneself without the excitement of situational or emotional melodrama but as others might see us, in our natural fall-back position. It is closer to history than to politics; it is judgemental rather than engaged. It is an altered perspective of ours on ourselves. Finding ourselves can be like ‘finding’ other people as there is much that we do not know about ourselves.  Thinking out the motives of others may be a way for us to consider the game of life.  And so with ourselves.  It is an idea when playing chess to walk round the board and see it from the standpoint of the opponent. It can be a useful surprise to come at it from a different perspective.

A thought often is freighted with emotionality. It is a matter of choice, a skill that comes of practice – unless one is the victim of one’s own mind – as to how far to allow emotion to creep into and overwhelm lucidity.  Quietness in thinking allows greater control.

If one is calm at the start of a session of reflection then what might surface in one’s mind is a realisation of which emotions are the deep ones and which are more like froth or even scum on the surface.  A wish to rid oneself as far as possible of emotion which overcomes rational thought can enter into the attraction of reflection, a wish not to be too much at the mercy of possibly festering emotions.

Our ‘self’ – for each of us – has a consistency through time.  Today we may have virtually the same feeling or sensation as previously experienced, a thread marking out an individuality.  It is sometimes in later life that one re-identifies with the feelings or goals that one had when young.  They were there all along but they were buried. Natural sympathies came of raw rather than over-sophisticated feelings and relationships. We forget too much too easily if we do not remind ourselves of what we were and are about.

In a quiet period of reflection, one may suppose that this feeling is much the same for everyone. One has a sense of one’s being – a consciousness of one’s consciousness. This sensation is not transferrable to anyone else however similarly it is described by others. The recognition by others of what you experience owes its resonance more to what they feel than because they introspect into your mind. This at least is very often so. Our thoughts are private, inner; protected, particularly if we wish, by our carapace, the bounds of our own bodies and minds.

A habit of encouraging a calmness of mind is often the best way to deal with problems rather than acting on impulse which all too often results in repenting at leisure.  A wish to ‘go back to nature’ speaks to much the same urge for serenity.  Reflecting like writing is usually a solitary occupation.  Thinking, quietly, calmly and undisturbed, with the aid sometimes of whatever ‘props’ are to hand, is a study of life coloured from a wider palette than that of the ‘everyday’.  We have that nature within us. The kernel of our inner calm is a part of our nature from which, for so much of the time, we are in flight. Much of our busy life may require an antidote and this may take the form of going back to the peace of nature.

(d) Reflection and Personality – higher and lower nature

To return to that higgledy piggledy cascade of emotions and musings that sometimes can hound us if we try to clear our minds:  most of us know our own ‘non-stop gramophone record’ of mind-chatter well, the feelings of deep love or hate, or of preoccupation, the faces that arise out of our thoughts when alone, the ideas that will keep on and on at us.  What are the sensations that we experience on trying to ‘see ourselves as we really are’ without all the mind-clutter?  It can be put into words in ways that we all recognise but that does not mean any particular reaction is the same for everyone. Why junk all of this as being just circumstantial baggage in the way of knowing ourselves, as some gurus tell us to do?  Is it a ‘messiness’ or is it the feeling that we are not fully in control of our thinking at which we jib?  Does this ‘jumble’ distract us from being who we really are?  It might be the opposite.  It can be that we should not put our conscious mind in control rather than listen to what is going on in our subconscious.

Your subconscious mind may be the true guide to what you are really feeling.  How does a person know to wake up at an hour that is the required time to get up?  How come that one can try hard to remember a name and fail and then, at a moment least expected the name comes to one?  How else to explain the placebo effect?   Something is going on all the time just below the level that you are completely aware of it.  Maybe you should listen that clamour of voices and thoughts and emotions more – and go on to analyse more which are truly fit for your purposes?  Why deny one’s nature?  Much of the clutter silting up our minds can be dispensed with, no doubt, but as regards the animal-like side of our nature the fact is …that it is us.  ‘Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.’ Virginia Woolf said. Nature is ‘red in tooth and claw’ and we are part of nature. Recent experiments in nano-science and its results in terms of philosophy show us that there is another side to our nature, a co-operative side. Microscopic cellular life within us co-operates in order to survive, so why go only on Darwin’s views concerning a survival of the fittest We could have worked that out for ourselves if we reflected on it as opposed to accepted hand-me-down ‘Truths’. The next step may be to work out how this can impact on the sort of society that may work best. All of this and more can be thought through by a process of reflection, if we but give ourselves the time and the license to do it.

Reflection should aid awareness of a part of the mind that usually is least susceptible to challenge from conscious reaction. Much reflection concerns conclusions brought into the light of day, allowing second thoughts about conclusions that sometimes seem to form of themselves. Ideas can be espied in the deep, unruffled pool of our minds or in the grip of emotion and are as if ‘churned out of a tossing sea’ by disturbing the sediment.

A tendency in Meditation is to see so-called lower nature, physical fulfilment, as rather beneath us. The notion in places is at odds with that of ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’. At the least, we can learn from supposedly more primitive beings.  This is nowadays increasingly understood.

(e) Ways in which Reflection can positively affect the development of personality

Reflection can encourage sensitivity.  We preen ourselves as being of a higher order than animals.  In the Hindu pantheon animals are sacred, Animal Rights campaigners please note. Some emotions may be more real to animals than they are to humans. A creature living fully in the moment with emotions unfiltered through the medium of man’s brain may experience emotion in a more raw, pure, form. Animals have much the same emotions as men as instanced in their maternal instinct. This need not be a mere academic idea; if it is felt it has greater effect. The guts, courage and sensitivities of beasts may be more impressive to a naturalist than to a worker in a slaughter house but there is much to be said for appreciating more the wonders of the fauna of our world and occasionally cast more than a purblind eye to the pigeons that wing their way through our cities.  Each of them has a life of its own and has attributes that outweigh a propensity to excrete onto the statues in Trafalgar Square, occasioning council cleaners many manhours in scrubbing down Nelson and the lions. Mao Zedong declared war on the birds in his Beijing and the faithful went forth, armed with guns, to slaughter them in droves. The effects, long term of this policy, might politely be termed deleterious.  Nature has a way of defending its own; the mill of justice may grind slow but it grinds sure.  Our attitude to our planet is a large case in point and there is reason enough to be changing it.

The idea of the wonderful, extraordinary world in which we live is more than cerebral appreciation; genuine feeling to accompany the idea counts.  A mindset that tends toward kindness and induces compassion is a useful by-product of thinking about feelings. In a tale that speaks to the heart rather than the cerebral processes: the late Rosemary Cockayne once astonished strangers by knocking at their front door asking for water for a thirsty rat. On the request being met, a knot of bystanders gathered to gape at the spectacle on the pavement of the gasping rodent gurgling down ambrosial liquid bemusedly provided in a saucer. The rat expired but its emotions happily replete in its final moments were obvious to all witnessing them on that paving stone bier.

Even the dull and the ignorant / they too have their story

– Desiderata

Should we give our nature its’ head where possible?  It is a subject on which to reflect; emotion previsioned as opposed to recollected in tranquillity? The aptitude or interest for reflection does not presuppose that the conclusion drawn during a spell of reflection might take its colouring from its quietude. The idea of Ecstasy, or ‘Ex-tasy’, comes in part from an idea of the ancient world, for instance the cult of Dionisius, affording a license to stand outside of one’s ‘normal’ self in cathartic release. It was a tacit admission that there is something antipathetic about the shackles of society.

We arguably may profit from taking time out to let our hair down in an orgiastic free-for-all – swig wine, do whatever an imagination conjures up in the way of debauchery. It can free one up to find ‘the animal’ within without the filter of stern consciousness. It is arguably an essential part of who we truly are.  Why try always to tie it into the steadier emotions?  Why not from time to time and within reason detach from the rational, the steady – the ‘Apollo’ as the Greeks put it – and tune into the so-called ‘lower nature’, our wilder shores. Is it that we cannot be ‘trusted’ to know when to stop?  By who?  The One who made us that way?

Its all right letting yourself go so long as you can let yourself back

– Mick Jagger

The fact that we need to know when to stop does not mean that we must not start. It may be that pleasure gives us a belief that life is worthwhile so it keeps us going for higher purposes. An inner release of some of the springs of our nature tunes our engine, no matter that this may be of a physical order. It can release a contentment of soul from which ‘higher’ thinking is better placed to take flight. Mankind is endowed with pleasure centres; a starting point of debate therefore can be ‘why downgrade what we were given’? As with our unappreciation of much in other contexts that is a ‘given’, maybe it is in this area that we make a mistake in assessment? Physicality is a bedrock for much spirituality. Physical wellbeing – let alone the choices we make in life about almost everything that matters to us and to others – spring from the same actuating source, spirit or inspiration or what you will. The fact that it is blurred at the point of original inception, opaque in many ways to a study of it, does not prevent us training a telescope into those clouds. The scales can fall from our eyes even if there still a mist over what they see.

We are grounded physically in ourselves, a primary factor in our mental backdrop. As the philosopher Gurdjieff says: 

‘It is only by grounding our awareness in the living sensation of our bodies that the “I AM” of our real presence can awaken’.

This is all mainly about simple common sense.  There is no need to wheel on the academics or lawyer.  Imagine for instance a debate or a verbal spat between an advocate against a libertarian: the first states ‘One should not let hair down as the approved linear shape for hair is vertical’ and his opponent counters for the right to ‘let it all hang out’.  Who is objectively right?

(f)  Getting in tune with oneself

If one is disposed to wander down Memory Lane it can help to trigger memories to be in the same place as where the memories were laid down. Again, when preparing for an exam, it can help to imbed facts in memory if they are studied in different places.  Alzheimer’s attacks memory and this aspect implies memory has a physical locus. Thought processes originally were connected with requirements of physical mobility – a need for movement. Much imagery of spirituality, astral travelling or levitation where one ‘sees’ oneself beneath oneself contain physical surroundings. The higher form is born of a lower form and retains its connection as a part of who we are. We may travel in our minds in a sort of vacuum but tend to bring ourselves down to earth.

We have been letting reflections run away with us and perhaps therein lies the point.

Rumination is like pleasure taken in a stroll as opposed to a ramble let alone a forced march.  Reflection is not always cogitation. Intuition is given encouragement to flower. We may have taken in more of the scenery than might otherwise have been the case in the process.

Reflections can be a leisurely conversation with yourself as opposed to with friends. Stray ideas that may be of use can surface in company and they can do so in private.

In this preamble only the surface of the subject is scratched.  There is much that can come to us or can be read for instance in the theory in Eve and Adam Through the Looking Glass on this website if but we care to reflect on’t.

What celebrated people say about reflection

People think about reflection even if their thoughts are not docketed in a single mainstream ‘subject’.  It may not be easy to find a category on a bookshelf entitled ‘What people think about reflection’.  That is a comment on the communal focus of conscious minds.  The fact of the matter may be different.  People like a publicly celebrated authority figure to dress up worthwhile sayings but in truth we all can have our say in our democratic times and we can all learn from each other.  That said, many are the thoughts and sayings of celebrated people about aspects of reflection….:

Reflection doesn’t take anything away from decisiveness, from being a person of action.  In fact it generates the inner toughness that you need to be an effective person of action. Think of leadership as the sum of two vectors, competence (your specialty, your skills your know-how) and your and authenticity (your identity, your character, your attitude)

– Peter Koestenbaum

Ultimately knowledge in martial art means simply self-knowledge. It can become intelligible only in the vigorous and constant process of self-inquiry and self-discovery. – Bruce Lee’s our mind which forces our self to do positive activities and also negative activities. So first learn to control your mind then automatically you will start doing positive activities which will result in a discussion of different great ideas.

– Zeesham Talib

We can … go beyond mere opinions and so-called common sense conclusions.  One must learn to be a skilful scientist and not accept anything at all.  Everything must be seen though one’s own microscope and one has to reach one’s own conclusions in one’s own way.  Until we do that there is no saviour, no guru, no blessings and no guidance could be of any help

– Chögyam Trungpa

The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness, and “consciousness” cannot evolve unconsciously. The evolution of man is the evolution of his will and “will” cannot evolve involuntarily.

– Gurdjieff

If you feel drawn to solitude, give yourself complete permission to go in that direction. We need silence and beauty to re-connect with the spiritual side of ourselves. The world is a noisy place, as is the mind. The spiritual journey is not about developing more and more beliefs and opinions. Rather, it is about shedding away our beliefs and preconceived notions about reality in order to have the True Nature of things revealed to us. This requires radical self-honesty and humility. The truly wise understand the limitations of the intellect and seek to go beyond it rather than refining it.

– Beau Norton (PerfectlyatPeace.com)

Develop the heart. Too much energy in your country is spent in developing the mind instead of the mind instead of the heart. Develop the heart.

– Dalai Lama

We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.

– Blaise Pascal  

To refuse to recognise any part of reality is to confuse our vision of the whole, and to make ourselves incapable of the redemptory action which the world requires.

– Dame Rebecca West

If you are losing your leisure, look out!… it may be that you are losing your soul.

– Virginia Woolf

In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate.

– Rene Descartes

The above quotations and many more could feature in an Anthology on Reflection but the subject to date, crux as it is to all of us, has not been thought fit for such attention.