ATTITUDES OF MIND and FEELING
THAT CAN BE ENHANCED BY OCCIDENTAL MEDITATION
TRAITS, ACTUATING PRINCIPLES, PERSPECTIVES AND ATTITUDES
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The check list below ticks a few boxes about slight changes of thinking that with effort and placing emphasis on the advantages of reflection we may induce in ourselves, and which can be of value in any number of situations.
Many truths are not in their nature complex, and common sense can pierce through reams of recondite research. The intelligent course can be via an ‘unintelligent’ line.
The beauty, the genius is not to write a 5 cent idea in a ten dollar sentence. It’s to put a ten dollar idea in a 5 cent sentence.
• Clarence Thomas
Note on above saying: The earliest strong match according to ‘Quote Investigator’ appeared in a 1901 autobiography by Charles Stewart. As a child in London, Stewart listened to the conversation of dinner guests such as history scholar Henry Thomas Buckle who would sometimes discourse engagingly for twenty minutes on a topic. His thoughts and conversation were always on a high level, and I recollect a saying of his, which not only greatly impressed me at the time, but which I have ever since cherished as a test of the mental calibre of friends and acquaintances. Buckle said, in his dogmatic way: “Men and women range themselves into three classes or orders of intelligence; you can tell the lowest class by their habit of always talking about persons; the next by the fact that their habit is always to converse about things; the highest by their preference for the discussion of ideas.
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(a) FINDING YOURSELF: Being truer to ourselves
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread
• Proverb
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
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If a person faces his motives of why he does what he does it may change some of his decision-making.
‘Know Thyself’: This process of reflecting could be about being comfortable in your own skin and with your life rather than trying to get out of the earthly plane into some etherial realm, as with some forms of Meditation.
As with much science, the sheer amount of observing then cataloguing that goes on tends to be understated. We discover what is there, including in ourselves, rather than create it, even if detective work is painstaking. We look-see for ourselves. The basic stuff might just be lieing around, visible to the naked eye, true, but taking a microscope to it might just tell you something that hadn’t occurred to you.
When standing back from one’s life with a perspective other than that of the everyday, our lives can seem more remarkable. Finding a personal True North, re-aligning the personal gyroscope, and involving going back to First Principles is partly a voyage of discovery, partly a voyage of re-discovery. It is often the case in later life that one re-identifies with the feelings and goals that one had when very young. They were there all along, but 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 are about. It can be that one tries to forget one’s past, or identify completely with a carefully crafted persona – it seems that according to a friend or biographer that Marion Robert Morrison ‘became’ in his mind ‘the Duke’, John Wayne – but being true to oneself is different from living up to our public image even to the degree with which we identify with it.
Is there a distinction to be made between how we generally shape our lives, and how we live day by day? A bird can perch on a ledge then fly up to a chimney pot; is its every flitter according to its basic rives – to find food, to find a mate, to nest, to follow the flock, or is there some half-way house such that certain hoppings or whatever are random, generally only needed to keep the bird’s ‘apparatus’, its wings and so forth, in good nick, while other movements dictated by need? ‘There is a destiny that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we will?’
Many of us do not ask ourselves, not really QUEST, who and why we are; but some of us think that is what we do. Authorities and convictions of others are a-plenty. Each of us, almost all the time, dances our days away to precepts from our very own Vade Mecum, that in fact can be a pot purri of often contradictory codes by which we live our lives in a sort of unconscious plagiarism and arrogance. We fling ourselves into what we have been flung into, flag-bearers for our totems.
Today there is a vogue for ‘finding oneself’. It is one further indication that it is accepted that there is a type of mind that naturally tends towards reflection. It is a thing we may want to do more, were it not downplayed in our culture; not to be so much admired as, say, the man of action. In almost the next breath we are told what we should find in meditation. This is not necessarily an easy thing to discover but why assume it is not worth the candle to put in the effort to getting to see what one really is happiest in doing and thinking? Reflection can be a path to self-tailored Nirvana in terms of the minutiae of our lives or in life generally.
These illustrations are not the whole story but it contains an element of truth
Buddhists enjoin thinking about each mouthful of food we eat, where it comes from, the labour that brought it to your plate, the taste, considerations can be overlooked in the heat of conversation or from habit.
During the recent period of Covid, and the increased time for taking stockof our lives, there has been a spate of thinking that looks askance at much of what had been taken for granted before, for instance with regard to the spiral towards consumerism. People sometimes have been wooed from placing too much stress on material accumulation. It heavily depends on circumstances but many now have opened their eyes to many of life’s ‘little’ pleasures that they previously took for granted and see as more to be valued.
Do we really know better what is right for oneself and therefore, us? Challenging the presumptions behind people’s thinking is an adventure one knows not whither it will lead.
There are plenty of new ways of looking at life that take a modern approach, it being often overlooked how there are trends surrounding us that are not on tablets of stone. The norm for a Victorian ,ight have been the stiff upper lip, or the imperative of duty, whereas today it may be doing well in of the rat race, or whatever.
‘Outdated’ ideas need not be junked, lock stock and barrel. Fashions can come round again – Buddha enjoined on followers that they must determine for themselves their own path. The challenge is to honestly tax ourselves with finding our own truth, free of pressure from pulpits, political platforms or wiseacres. It is made easier these days through a greater buffet of life styles from which to choose. In reflection, we are more open to consider carefully this range. There is no dictating Voice for one and all, but several voices clamouring to persuade. It amounts almost to a civic duty that is not recognised or encouraged to switch off these siren megaphones.
Each of our accomplishments on earth do not signify to others as they do to oneself. They are in the mind of a player. not an onlooker, narrating to himself. An Authority figure to whom a metaphoric forelock is tugged has human drives from the same ‘Petri Dish’ as ours. That does not mean that any individual is as good as any other but there is the sheer fact of our own automomy that is at the fore. The ideas of sects, society et al can come to seem like a proof of the persuasiveness of a way of life. We are liable to follow the thoughts of others, taking them on board as our own without full introspection or guarantees.
If you are already prepared to think hard about your beliefs, this process should start from the bottom and grow. It could be a life-changer. People may be surprised by what they discover if they listen to themselves.
The idea of ‘finding oneself’ presents a difficulty that is not usually considered in depth no matter how worthy the chosen guides or gurus. We wish to feel that what we think is consistent with our own goals. By doing so, we may pull wool over our eyes and, making a virtue of what we think we are doing, compound an illusion by which we live. It can be the saddest thing discovering this too late in life. Finding ourselves can be a process like ‘finding’ other people – there is so much that we simply do not know about ourselves or others; we like to make things manageable, simplify our verdicts. We want to get at ‘the’ truth when even finding ‘a’ truth is filtered through our own thoughts.
A focus of meditation can be concentrated on others as well as ourselves, as a way to find out about ourselves. Always care is needed. This is a practical question about personality and behaviour, not one that requires making assumptions, sometimes held, about how there is a universal soul in which we are all an indivisible part and to which we ultimately will return. ‘Horses for courses’: that sort of metaphysical speculation has its place, which is different from considering the practical questions of the world in which we find ourselves.
We should be sure as we can be of what we are about if we are to get it right. There can be a predominating trait in oneself or others that permeates a whole persona but that is all the more reason for a careful observation of oneself, and others. Not only can there usually be a predominating trait that is seen as of critical importance – unless one is a chameleon – there is a signature refrain in the mind; ask someone to talk about their philosophy, say, of life and there is often a centralised theme, or a small number of related themes, on which they elaborate.
(b) Observing yourself
Part of an attraction in reflection, as with Meditation, is a wish deep down to rise, free, and be observers, including being observers of ourselves.
On this reading, it is distinct from any focussed interest in the esoteric, for instance our ‘essence’. There is a pleasure in ‘floating above’ daily concerns, an interest-value akin to levitation, in seeing ourselves ‘down there’ without going all the way, and with all of the spiritual or philosophic ramifications, enjoined on us with some types of Meditation. There is no need to over-dignify what we are doing. By observing ourselves, we are better enabled to rise above the concerns that transfix us, the better to see the wood from the trees. We can uplift from the here and now and see ourselves from a higher perspective.
At another end of the scale, the way that we create our own life stories and narratives for our, and other people’s, reactions is part of what makes self-observation of interest to most people. We can better fine-tune our stories if we think about them.
Self-observation is the beginning of progress, says Buddha
Is there an explanation of why the pronoun ‘I’ and the word ‘eye’ are the same? A tendency to like being observers of ourselves is partly due to temperament. People always on the go, always in company, throwing themselves into life – often without heed of consequence – action coming foremost, are perhaps not as inclined to question themselves. It may be that they think there is no need to think about what they already know. Religions can try to counteract this notion, as in a Confessional. It presumes that we have ‘better selves’ to which we instinctively gravitate given half a chance.
A caveat. This may be signify a drift towards undue optimism. There is evidence that sociopaths, hypocrites, the delusional, sadists, are not bothered by conscience, and so may not be so susceptible to being in tune with their better selves.
We can train ourselves to reach a higher level by dint of practice. A ‘higher’ level need not be reaching for the stars but a reach deeper into ourselves. Perhaps, indeed, it is much the same thing? Why deny one’s origins as opposed to tapering them in the right direction or, as a start, getting rid of the clutter in our minds?
(c) Our animalistic and natural nature vis-a-vis our cerebral side
It is only by grounding our awareness in the living sensation of our bodies that the “I AM” our real presence can awaken.
• Gurdjieff
Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.
• Virginia Woolf
If you are losing your leisure, look out!… it may be that you are losing your soul.
• Virginia Woolf
Mrs Woolf did not follow that up that remark by saying, in the way of her class in her day: ‘Anyone for tennis?’ Her pensée has a more far-reaching sense. It was approval at just doing, so being, what we like to be. A tendency in much Meditation in general, and spirituality, is that our so-called lower nature, physical fulfilment, is seen as rather beneath us and somehow wrong. The notion in places is at odds with that of ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’.
Nature is ‘red in tooth and claw’; we are beings of a higher order than the animals; we use our minds as well as our instincts; ‘to attain spirituality we should free ourselves of our brutish drives’; Princess Anne’s comment “Human nature? Aren’t we on this earth to rise above it!” – all these ideas, in this context, are unacknowledged, weasel-worded scorn at a part of …what we are! Maybe the guts and courage of beasts and their sensitivities might be of a tougher order than that of human beings but our nature is of the animal world and the attempt to find out who we are should take account of it.
It is ‘special pleading’ no doubt of an arrogant order for mankind to say of his emotions that they are superior to those of the animal kingdom. That said, in the HinduPantheon animals are sacred. Humanity can clothe emotions in fine sentiment, true, top up its conception of them, and about feelings generally, with an imaginative dimension – partly because we are able to project their course in the future whereas it seems that animals are glued much more to the present. But that aspect of their thinking might make their emotions even more real to them than they are to us. Hardly a charming thought for man to feel that the receptors for pain, or the nerve ndings or fear, are more developed in man than in beasts – it is surprising that vegetarians have not made more of an effort to establish this? As to the emotions themselves in general, it could well be that some or all animals are in thrall to a greater, more powerful charge, of emotion that man. A creature living fully in the moment, its emotions unfiltered through the medium of man-like brain, may experience an emotion in a more raw, pure, form that a man. It certainly seems that they may have the same emotions as humanity. See for instance how developed and unselfish is the maternal instinct in animals.
Example: a lady by name of Rosemary Cockayne astonished strangers when 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 a gasping rodent gurgling down ambrosial liquid from the bemusedly provided saucer. True the rat then expired but the emotions it experienced, happily replete in its final moments. were obvious to all witnessing its last throes on that paving stone bier.
Turnng more to the ‘natural’ side of our nature:
The idea of Ecstasy, or ‘Ex-tasy’, comes in part from an idea of the ancient world, for instance in 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 can be something antipathetic in the shackling of society, by letting rip in an orgiastic free-for-all, swigging wine and whatever else an imagination conjures up in the way of debauchery. It frees one up to find ‘the animal’ within, without the filter of stern consciousness. This is an essential part of that which we truly are. Why deny it? Why seek to try and tie it into the more steady emotions? Why not, at least from time to time and within reason, detach from the rational, the steady, the ‘Apollo’ as the Greeks put it, to tune into the so-called ‘lower nature’. It may be higher or all-permeating – how do we know which ‘direction’ heaven might lie? – but it happens that we are made that way. The case needs to be made out. One anticipates a diverting set-piece debate with a whey-faced advocate stating that ‘the approved linear shape for hair is vertical thus one should not let hair down’ against some Rabelasian free-thinker demanding the right to ‘let it all hang out’. It would be a matter that largely comes down to that of presentation that human society cannot or can survive suchlike high jinks without crumbling; it is not proposed to argue that toss here. If there is a case for a Dionesian Disneyland, one place to consider it carefully would be in a place devoted to an objective study of the mores of society. It would be inter-disciplinary presumably, with history, sociology and the like featuring as compost, but where common sense is acknowledged as the decision-taking factor. It could take into account man’s nature, how societies in general best flourish, not just that of the presently conceived order of society: an institute for thinkers. Let a jury decide whether we should raise a glass to rasiing a glass?
A cathartic YIPPEE moment does not have to be one in which we plan our life or render under the lord that which is His due, but a moment in which we render to ‘the Caesar’ within us that which is his due. It is about an arguably justified balance of mind. The fact that we need to know when to stop does not mean that we must not start. It may be that very pleasure that provides us with the belief that life is worth while, keeps us going, for higher purposes. A joy, an inner release of some of the springs of our nature, tunes our engine no matter that it be of a physical order; it can free up a contentment of soul from which ‘higher’ thinking is better placed to take flight.
In another way as well, an ‘orgiastic’ tendency is like Reflection. Attainment of a blissful state may come unawares, or by doing that which seems to us personally as likely to produce this effect, or through a spur that is in line with our deep personal wishes; but opening up one’s mind to the possibilities of a joy, as opposed to killjoy, is more likely to usher in such experiences precisely at times when one is not indulging deliberately in the activity. We become more receptive to it. We bring it on.
This all may be essentially an unstructured – ‘messy’ if one will – way of acting but it is according to the dictates of nature and we are not designed in a geometric shape. no matter how convenient our modelling tools are to explain it.
A man is not a disembodied creature, a physical machine to house the ‘eternal’ for a short span – (‘Case yet to be proven, M’lud’) we may be that as well – but we are not, as a matter of fact, those things alone, and nothing but those things. The fact that we may be able to stand outside ourselves and calmly consider our urges does not mean that they are not there; it is quite the reverse. If we are interested in such questions that do concern all of us, we should cultivate the habit of mind, and give ourselves the opportunity, to consider and reflect on them.
This all brings us to a recommended state of mind in which we can do the reflection.
Most of us know our own ‘non-stop gramophone record’ of mind-chatter only too well, the feelings of deep love or hate, or of preoccupation, the faces that rise up out of our thoughts when alone, the ideas that will keep on at us. Why should we try and junk it all as being just so much circumstantial baggage in the way of knowing ourselves, as gurus tell us? The gurus can be right but in another way our sensations and emotions and memories are part of who we are and how we have gotten to where we are. They are a part of us even if not the whole part. Why must it be given to us to play The Deity to ourselves and look down – in both senses – on who we are? Moderation in all things usually is the best policy. There would seem no absolute demand from some Higher Authority to denude oneself of arguably essential aspects of our unique personality. It is only a hypothesis that our individual souls are all but undifferentiated. Why debunk an accumulation of one’s experience on this earth? We base many of our conclusions on our experience of life and people. Some of it can drag us down but any inner negativity can be embraced by trying to find a unique path to our sense of balance. This is individually arrived at in the way that is right personally for each of us. It is down to us to make the best of it, as with anything else. People can do whatever turns them on through a personal choice; why be deprived of our entitlement to choose for ourselves? It is likely that turning a blind eye to it all paves the way to an independent, individual self-realisation? That does not mean that some urges cannot be checked in some situations but the idea surely from which to resile is that they are only too likely to be wrong per se.
Note: This itemisation of outcomes of Reflection is necessarily general in nature
(d) Calmness and De-stressing
(Left) Card by John Moffat for Rosemary Cockayne and (Right) Isabelle and the pot of Basil – Waterhouse
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives might be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
– Wendell Berry
‘Getting away from it all’ takes many forms and has a purpose in common. Meditation or reflection is a way of de-stressing and, by doing so, getting things that concern one into a more manageable perspective. The habit of calmness turns down the heat and allow in more light and to arise from the arena mentally positioned in calmer airs above zones of scrabble, and see from that vantage point what the actors, yourself included, are doing.
Thinking out the motives of others may not be so customary or automatic a way for us to consider the game of life any more than it is than, when playing chess, to walk round the board and see it from the standpoint of the other person. It can be a surprise to come at it from a different perspective, and habituate oneself to see oneself from a side of our nature that is not intimately engaged in a situation, or as others see one; a way of thinking anew about almost anything. The small buds of thinking that can lead the unwary astray can be lopped off before they reach straggle growth. Calmness of mind is often the best way rather than acting on impulse, at speed, repenting at leisure.
Hippies – using the gesture of a ‘V’ sign with two forefingers – used to say ‘Relax, man! …be cool, take it easy!’ It was partly a comment on the uptight world from which they were trying to escape. It has been observed that one can think loftier thoughts when in a cathedral. A wish to ‘go back to nature’ speaks to much the same urge for uplifting serenity. Thinking, quietly, calmly and undisturbed, with the aid sometimes of whatever ‘props’ are to hand is the thing, yet this can be dismissed if it is proposed to do so from an armchair, say, as being in ‘a brown study’ – it is the thinking process in itself that may well be the helpful mindset, a study of life, one coloured from a wider palette than that of the ‘everyday’, that is to the fore in the useful, intrinsic purposes of this attitude. There is no harm in using whatever is helpful along this path.
Mental reserves that can reach upward to this advantageous state are usually the stronger if more available readily at any time from within oneself, without a need of turning to props in whatever form or however pleasurable. In this, a de-stressing is a component, a form of ‘getting rid of the clutter before one can rebuild’.
A comparison or overlap of Reflection with Meditation need not be over-categorical. Breathing exercises and posture can put one in the mood for reflection as much as Meditation. But perhaps gentle music or a joss stick can help acknowledging the start of reflection heightening subliminally its importance? Such a ruse does not have to be of an order that implies an elevation of the soul, sometimes with a hint of the exotic or adventurous thrown in, an idea permeating some guru-approved Meditation but a mere acknowledgement that in a daily timetable time can be legitimately set aside for calm reflection. TV programmes do not morph into one another without some border thrown up, an advertising jingle or other kind of lead-in, the better to prepare our brains for a slightly different form of exercise than that in which they have just been engaged.
The kernel of our inner calm is also a part of our nature from which, for so much of the time, we are in flight, an antidote to which is going back to the peace of nature. We have that nature within us.
(e) Freedom and outfacing challenges
The most unhappy man is he who is ambitious beyond the scope of his abilities and better judgement.
• Count Metternich
Why do we need an excuse for doing what we wish, and thinking what we want?
People like to feel that they are independent and in charge of their own destinies and that they are free agents. Who opts to be boxed in? The more towards ‘autonomous’ we get, the free-er we are likely to feel; the less hidebound by thinking being done by others for us. Again, it is a matter of degree. A hankering, like that of the proverbial cowboy for the wide open range, may not be for everyone, speculate as one may about secret fears, or jealousy; others might prefer to huddle indoors, snug as a bug in a rug. There may be ‘none so deaf as those who do not want to hear’ but how far does inner man ‘not want to hear’ as opposed to telling himself and others that he does not want to hear?
It is not just about an illusion that we may wish to cherish. There are practical, positive results that come of being master of oneself. A personal view about this permeates one’s world. In business, say, colleagues can be difficult. The encouragement of the habit of reflection, in which a strategy or tacts are well planned, may have the practical purpose of helping induce a more reasonable approach in those we who we have to deal and, as a result, less at their mercy. It may give the added inner strength needed to outface them
Digression: Freedom is one of the ‘Petri Dish’ urges. (see above). To those who argue that there is no ‘free will’, it can be countered – with such hesitation as may be called for in case those that argue this point have studied the subject in orthodox philosophy – that it may be the case in one context that ‘no free will’ is posited, but that does not preclude free will in another. A thing can be more than one thing at the same time. The same proton, it appears from science, can be in two places at the same time. As said above, Dr Johnson can kick his table to see its solidity while the analyst of sub-particles physics can point out the random nature of its sub-atomic elements – both can be right.
Thinking carefully about how to overcome obstacles for instance to making money or anything related: a careful form of counteracting the current tendency that comes in part from the new high-speed forms of communication to react too quickly to questions, and get things done with a greater efficiency.
Reflecting quietly for half an hour every morning is a recipe for success of a business woman who attributes her success to it.
It is arguable that we can be likened to an elephant lumbering along a straight and narrow path with a mahout astride its neck twitching it slightly this way and that. Room for manoeuvre may be more constricted than we care to admit but that does not mean that there is no room for manouvre.
We are likely to be more free if we reflect on how to loosen cords around us.
(f) Patience
We are told to hold our temper so treat this as a prescription for conduct. Is it right in every context? Often it is the right approach to ease off the throttle. Each situation can be considered on its own merits. What of the situation in battle where one army is outnumbered ten to one and ‘a madman has the strength of ten’; a soldier may consciously decide that anger is the best policy? The cathartic moment of the charge may meet the need of that crossroads not intellectual rumination.
A cardinal principle in Christianity is to ‘turn the other cheek.’ ‘Revenge is mine saith the Lord.’ We thereby are fortified in our effort to be meek and mild rather than lash out when we perhaps feel this to be our natural reaction. According to the Hindu way, however, the advice given by Krishna to Arjuna was that evil should be fought to stop it proliferating.
A habit of mind that is slightly at odds with our incessant plunge into activity, our busy lives and the pressure that is summed up, in Yorkshire-speak, as that is best to be ‘up and doing’, is the difference only of a small space. It is the difference, one might say, of having ‘A musing time’ rather than ‘an amusing time’. A tiny, unnoticed difference is a little like someone who is hiding in a crowd; the sheer amount of choice masks the chance of finding him. It is an intent; It is a brake against knee-jerk reaction to a technically-enhanced, inter-connected society that has ideas pouring in from all sides. It is looking before a-leaping.
Knowledge and thought can be brought to bear on each situation. A careful way of considering any particular issue before deciding what to do may not be such a bad thing. There is hardly an end of situations to which this approach cannot be applied. Professor Bronowski in his TV series, Civilisation. said that ‘the happiest man is the one who can speak with a full heart and a full mind at the same time.’
(g) Self-reliance
The question here is for each of us is to find our own unique voice.
You are your own guru.
A Guru from whose teaching you have drunk your fill is no longer necessary for you.
A common approach these days is to go to someone else for help in times of difficulty. The self-reliance enjoined of previous times, especially in Great Britain (as it was) and Japan, nowadays frequently gives way to tea-leaf reading of various stripes, shrinks, and so forth; it is another reason why reflection is not seen so much as a path to self-healing. Why not try to face ourselves, fair and square? If we fail in the attempt, so be it, but is it not a worthwhile exercise? Something may come out of it even if it is not exactly what is intended. The exercise may allow in a more independent approach to life, a variant of ‘The medium is the message’. If you can honestly face yourself you are bound to know a great deal more wherein lies your exact problem; if you can deal with it yourself, thinking about how to do so, it is likely to foster in you the tendency of self-reliance..
(h) Compassion, and empathy
One secret of winning at chess is to walk round the table to see the board from the standpoint of the opponent.
Enhanced sensitivity can come of reflection: every creature looks out on the world from its own viewpoint, using ‘apparatus’ that was not of its own creating and with emotions as real to it as to …YOU. The inner life and sensitivities of a gazelle may be more real to it than that of the lion that eats it, even if the way of the world, currently, may be to admire the latter more than the former. Greater sensitivity may be born of fear than aggressivity. Tolerance is to be felt, not just as a concept to which we pay lip-service.
No creature on earth from the humblest insect, could help being born, as we all know: the question is of how deeply we realise it. The more deeply we take such an idea on board, think about it, the more compassionate towards a perspective of others we are likely to have. This can be a boon both for ourselves and for society, empathy being a quality increasingly praised in todays’ touchy-feely world.
It is often too easy to let compassion go by the board; in France it is seen as the duty of the government to look after its citizenry with each person having equilavlent rights. This may be commendable but reflection should tell people that there is an individual onus to help one’s fellows that cannot easily be sloughed off onto a system to absolve one’s conscience from failing to give direct aid.
(i) Open-mindedness
This is a cornerstone of the whole process. Borrow from that which is of use to you no matter if it comes from a belief-system different from yours, or think out your own way. Rigidity of mind, in the sense of being single-minded, has its advantages but it has its limits and those who do not bend with the wind are more likely to be blown down. In ju-jitsu, the weight of an opponent can be used to trip him up; charging headlong with thought into the fray is not usually the best policy; weighing up options before becoming single-minded is no doubt better, while retaining an open mind in case fresh evidence may justify rethinking. It is a mark of both common sense and intelligence.
The specialist subject In a forum to promote practical wisdom is that of deriving the right lessons from life experience including the experience of others and the past. It helps towards a balanced attitude.
The results of societies less tolerant than ours, the blood feuds over generations, the oppressive governments, should do much to persuade people of being open to ideas that are not theirs. In England it used to be said that a man ‘should fight to the death for the right of someone to have opinions that were the opposite of his’, a lesson from the past that Brits are in danger of forgetting and to which we could be more open, with advantages to one and all.
We rework narratives about the past in the light of a new generation’s ideas, journalists sometimes admitting that they wish to implant their ideas into the hearts and minds of readers. Few allowances are made for the different imperatives of other eras. ‘Ends’ could trump ‘means’. Gladstone might thunder with ‘muscular Christianity’ that ‘the Turks should clear bag and baggages from the provinces they have desecrated and profaned’ but the rougher sorts like Jamieson came into their own to get things done while the good guys on the Home Front like Wilberforce tempered some jagged edges of imperialism. The ideas of the current school of journalism take root, become part of the furniture of communal thinking. But we should not take their ideas as our own unless we reflect on them, question them. The Chinese venerate the elderly; perhaps that attitude could be among the next of our cultural borrowings? Tap the sager folk, the older generation, for their accumulated wisdom. Where is the harm in being open to ideas of the past, while acknowledging the mistakes. When younger, there has been less of an opportunity to accumulate evidence about alternatives in life; as with a man, so with a nation.
There are no end of metaphysical questions and it is folly to pretend that our responses to them have no bearing on how we live our lives. Are we to go through life as representatives of ‘the swarm’? Are we the all but unconscious playthings of ideas swirling around our birthplaces or society? ‘Flies to wanton boys are we to the gods!’?
There may be much to learn from the more distant past that modern fashion tends to discount There are no end of examples of how things were done differently in the past and equally no doubt that society of today has advanced in many ways but it does not mean that we do everything better and in particular some of the old prescriptions for conduct may be taking more seriously than we do;reject them by all means but at least first consider them on their own merits, not as mere totems now discarded by the general trend..
Our perspective, the way we live our lives, what people accomplish for good or ill tends to be what matters in the future. We may be representatives of a community owing loyalty to our own race and creed but much of our legacy is for strangers, even if they are our descendants. It is best to let us do our bit towards getting it right in ‘a compact’, in Burke’s words, ‘..between the dead, the present generation, and those yet unborn.’ The moving goalpost of history and of our short careers may cast a backward glow on what we do that we did not anticipate. Our king-term judges are as yet unseen and if there is erring thinking going on, the truth eventually will out.
The right ideas, principles and mantras, often repeated, as opposed to the canards that too often go the rounds unquestioned, may help create the right environment for dispassionate evaluation of issues.
Below are a few examples where an open-minded attitude towards the past could induce advantageous rethinking about some of our ways of doing things – though any of the ideas in this list may not find acceptance in terms of appropriateness for our methods of today:
• In the days of the Chinese emperors, learned people were those in line for promotion and today it might be said, as an example, that the Chinese approach is less liable to the pitfalls of short-term policy-making that are arguably endemic in the West.
• It is no longer fashionable to believe in Thomas Carlisle’s ‘Great Man theory of history’ but an ideal for which to strive is to have in power a right-minded, disinterested man of action, as in days of Ancient Rome, and with experience from which to draw on a repository of practical wisdom. Leadership qualities are not generally writ large on CVs and it is this factor, allied to good judgement, that can make the critical difference to the way an institution is headed.
• Applicants for high-pressure commercial jobs often are expected to have psychological testing but such a principle, useful in commerce, is not a thing that we see is applied to our leaders.
• Not all politicians are venal as elements in the media might have some readers believe. All are human beings liable as any of us to err and some are in politics to do their best. And what applies to politics applies in general.
• Can the man in the street make any difference to what goes on in high places? Much hot air is expended, many roses are destined to flower unseen in the desert, any chance word or deed may result in any disproportionate outcome but in general it helps to have the ear of someone who can make a difference. Churchill put it well in saying ‘We are all worms but I do believe that I am a glow-worm!’
• As ever, it is drawing the right lessons from the past as opposed to accepting a received version of events and grafting it straight on to different circumstances. Joseph Goebbels said ‘tell a lie often enough and it will be believed!’; the same pensée could apply to right thinking.
• Sir Freddie Ayer founded the philosophical school of ‘logical positivism’ in Oxford in the 1930s. Sir Freddie had the corpus of his work to draw upon. He once was asked what was to be the advised attitude of a logical positivist in daily life. His response was to ‘await someone saying something and then say what is wrong with it.’
• An author like Evelyn Waugh downgraded his emotion or his ideas and say how the language in which they were clothed was all-important, and he produced in the process memorable prose.
• Voice projection is taught in drama school though elocution seems of lessening popular appeal given the old British class system is in decline, it not being understood that the ‘upper class’ accent evolved partly so as to convey the snap of authority. ‘Oratory’, a subject for aspirant politicos in the ancient world, has dropped off the curriculum for ever and a day. It does not figure in the proliferating handbooks on how to influence people or how to project a case well even if marketing wiles are in the ascendant.
The impoverishment of a rich language, a priceless gift, passes all but unnoticed. The evidence of how far this has gone is to be seen in literature as well as in speeches. In France, today, authors still talk about the language they use but in England words are used now to get to the point, convey an idea. True, a contra argument is that substance counts above a chosen impression. Stark, clear English is no doubt often the best way to make a point and even Latin changed over the centuries of the Roman Empire but how many barbs that todays’ politicians fling at one another will be remembered a century from now?
It incidentally could go to extremes, as for instance Disraeli castigating Gladstone as: ‘A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself‘.
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Above are instances of CHARACTER TRAINING for oneself, below are some:
CEREBRAL ADVANTAGES THAT CAN COME FROM REFLECTION
(a) COMMON SENSE
From now on a breach of common sense will be regarded as a breach of rules
• Miss Gibbins – Headmistress, St Mary’s Calne school
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People can say that they have understood the sense in what you are telling them but if they have not the basic understandings of what you are saying but only the apparent agreement in shared concepts that can appear through the imprecision of language, then they are telling the truth as far as they see it, but they are wrong.
Common Sense and the right way of thinking lies at the root of so much problem solving. Often enough it is the degree of learning – of acquiring a too many facts in situation that are not exactly on all fours with that being confronted – that gets in the way of going directly to a common sense solution.
It is common sense that tells us that we are better off having a happy positive attitude to life even if this sometimes involves making a choice as to our basic attitude. We may set against a basic general dread of what we think may be a dystopian world, one invariably overlaid by a specific dread of precise happenings coming to pass, as against the wonder of for instance atmosphere we can sensitise ourselves to experiencing and the fascinating strangeness of the world.
(b) Rationalisation and Scepticism
You are never too old to learn something stupid
• A paraprosdokian
George Orwell coined the term ‘quackspeak’ for those who parrot ideas without any real engagement of their minds (‘short clipped words of unmistakable meaning which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker’s mind’) If he had a point, there is also ‘duckthink’.
Action starts in thought; a good precept, for instance, for those facing challenges is to adopt the formula: ‘One thing at a time / Consideration / Decision / Action’. It can help to handle exigencies whether with big challenges of trying to put right as far as possible things deficient in ourselves and our society or in matters of daily life in which we get bogged down.
Rationalisation of emotion and consideration of all the issues goes towards what used to be termed ‘a cool head’, much prized in military thinking. Englishmen had a bias against what was downgraded as ‘intellectuality’. They tended to pride themselves on what was dignified as ‘unconscious cerebration’. It was said to take place whilst horse riding. Some attenuated resonance of this idea, however passé, permeates the basic thinking of many of us; a shadowy background of a cultural attitude.
Stupidities are more evident if one is flexed to challenge ‘received wisdom’ which is more ‘received’ than wise.
Sometimes intelligence or good arguments are harnessed to stupid ideas so that the language of their defence is convincing or high-flown. People deceive themselves and therefore others. Sometimes people stand tall on a stance of being even-handed and objective; but it is a presumption in both senses of the world: the ‘magisterial’ fall-back position that it must be ‘six of one and half a dozen of the other’ and the phrase, to ‘see both sides’, implies this in advance. But one side can be right and another wrong; one side right about the things that deeply matter. It as well to be on guard against decoys in thinking and believing and, so, acting in error. A ‘horse led to water might drink’ and ‘some of what glisters may be gold’.
We condemn or applaud on a basis often to be questioned. It is understandable to want to avoid a wild goose chase. Thought may be needed to see if the wild goose got it right. It could be you, floating in a sea of prejudice of which you are unconscious and contrary to your ideas of your better self, who is the Goosey-goosey gander.
Wild Geese are well organised, show commendable community spirit and are not stick-in-the-muds. Their flight paths cover enormous distances and are in an aerodynamic V-shaped formation to a destination known in advance, 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 staying with it for as long as it takes to be of help to the stricken bird.
Some games or studies like chess or philosophy are promoted for training in ability to rationalise – and a closely related activity, hard to categorise, of ‘Thinking about…’ a discipline is, if successful, a way of navigating successfully the pitfalls of life. It is not just a byproduct of schoolroom study of many subjects, but the target, whether or not it is seen as such, and more could be made of this primary purpose.
If people could stop to re-evaluate what they are doing, how much angst might be spared! How to console a man who spent his life working for a cause like Communism only to find at the end of his days that Stalin might have been a monster! To take a controversial example closer to home, Brexit. This is not to take sides in the debate but only, here, to observe that if a politician has spent years working in the European Parliament it is only to be expected that he is unlikely to want to think that he has been wasting his life. Will he have the objective perspective that is ideal to evaluate Brexit? No one wishes to waste time and energy in some cause or course in life that too late we discover is not in our best interests. If we wish to avoid the manifold snares and delusions in life and go after things truly worthwhile for us or our societies, we would hardly opt knowingly to go on a Wild Goose Chase. Yet too often that is what we do.
Moral of the tale: ‘Give a goose a bad name but don’t be too quick to hang him – save at Christmas!’
(c) Synthesis in thinking
A thought welling up in the mind is part of a continuum of thoughts, each thought having struck one before, and can appear as fresh-minted as largely new thoughts. Thought or thoughts invariably are a synthesis, with only a part, if that, being original. We can consciously try and slough off the ballast of the past, not be steeped in it, up to a given moment, and that can impart a degree, maybe a small degree, of freshness, allowing oneself to be not so dependent on one’s past. But reflection, allowing the passage of time to go by, new contexts can impart new slants to solving problems. The synthesis of different thoughts from different contexts is something to which a habit of reflection is prone, those ideas which, pursuing our own subject, we may overlook. ‘What ye of England know ye if only England ye know?’
Examples:
• Historians can speculate on causes of the success of the Roman Empire, their comfort zone being historiography and history, sometimes archaeology. What thesis enters on the subject by reference to pre-history?
• The intermarriage of neanderthal man with homo sapiens was most marked on the globe – some 5% of genes in common – in the Italian peninsular. From this fact it tendentiously could be argued that the enhanced muscularity and aggressiveness of the fighting men in the Roman legions came from primordial origins.
• Natural forces that explain the course of history now go towards explaining the fall of Cleopatra and her long dynasty. True she backed the wrong Roman, Mark Anthony, but of more vital impact, explaining her dilemma over distribution of grain to the Romans rather than to her hungry people, recently has been laid at the door of the 300 preceding years of devastating volcanic activity in Egypt.
This is an idea whose time may have come and today the increasing inter-disciplinary trend in universities is a corollary of seeing in synthesis a tool of thinking.
(d) Inspiration
Inspiration does not start out of ‘nowhere’. Its start can be slow, as illustrated by the joke: ‘I worked 40 years to be an overnight success!’
Give inspiration the maximum chance to surface, with brain and powers of cogitation harnessed to cozsing it even during sleep.
(e) Strategy and Tactics
Of that which one cannot speak, thereof one should be silent.
• Wittengenstein
If we know that we are absent-minded, we can consciously train ourselves to watch our step. A mire into which people can flounder usually is not clearly signposted; it behoves us all to watch our steps. Advice to those who wish to sidestep life’s snares is to ‘study the situation’. All situations being different, there is no handbook for the specifics of what confronts one, only guidelines which can lose some of their efficacy by being treated as rules …..as in the valuable precepts above attributed to Paulo Forum.
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CHANGES that may come about in
IDEAS UNDERPINNING OUR BELIEFS or vice versa
VALUE SYSTEMS….as opposed to BELIEF SYSTEMS
Imagine a world without the various religions or without the familiar overarching political systems such as Communism, Democracy, ghthe labels of ‘Left’, ‘Right’ and so on, or a world into which baddies like Marx and Hitler or, for the matter of that, the good guys, had not been born. Was the course in history resulting from their lives inevitable? How do we know what the world would have been without their having existed? What can we say for sure about an alternative past – and therefore present and future – that did not, has not, and will not happen? The most we opine is that, on balance of probability, it would be different.
There is a case study comprising all of world history of what works, and what does not work. A Thinker, untrammelled by boundaries in a particular field of study and surveying the whole panorama of world history is at more liberty to draw deductions, however controversial, from its lessons
Accurate recounting of events and motives is what should matter above all to historians, or so we like to think. The moment a historian sets himself up as judgemental it imports into the equation values which not everyone shares. Historians tend not to regard themselves as sociologists, out to learn such of history’s lessons as possible. It is ‘not in their period’ to consider as a comment on historical or biblical truths for instance the pre-christian society of the islands of Tonga, which naturalists such as David Attenborough say was co-operative, mutually affectionate, hard-working and productive. Does that society, therefore, have any prescriptions for behaviour that we might find of use?
People on an ad hoc basis tend to draw certain conclusions about what has gone on in the past but there is not a formalised corpus of leaning devoted specifically to this question. If there was to be an Institute for the Study of Lessons of World History – a productive way, it may be supposed, if set up up with vision of helping students think for themselves – here are some potential examination questions, a list which could of course be extended ad infinitum.:
• Youths festooned with tattoos today might share more values with upstanding Assyrian citizenry of 8000 years ago than generally supposed. If so, does this trend have any pointers deducible as to current cultural trends?
• The godless dictators of the twentieth century are cited as exemplars of the perils of letting secularism run riot; the record of mullahs of Iran give pointers to what happens when religion rules the roost. Perhaps other forces or trends or causes were at work as a result of which these examples are merely symptoms not the cause of a deeper malaise?
• The Roman Empire before Constantine is a case study of advanced civilisation where Christianity is not an official religion. 700,000 gladiators expired in agony in the arena to entertain millions of sadists untrammelled by conscience, and crucifixion was an approved form of judicial execution, yet the Roman empire was a roaring success. Sophists alive at the time might debate ‘Those whom the gods would destroy, do they first make mad!’. They would think it axiomatic that the gods exemplified man’s dubious characteristics and not just, as today, his best qualities. Why would they be wrong to ask such questions?
• Is there is a parallel in relation to the dangers of over-egged veneration of holy writ as in Iran today with the USA constitution where its proper interpretation by jurists is advised, as far as possible, to be as if through the lens’ of its drafters.
• ‘Is History a good friend but a bad mistress?’
And then to the questions such as:
We endow our deities with qualities that we admire or that are thought to be useful for us on earth; but, in one sense, that of allegory – see the ‘Petri Dish’ in the appendix – it may be in essence a form of truth? What if our deities were emblematical of Nature and they had the qualities of Nature as well as the qualities of humans, much as in the way that the Greeks of old imagined of them? This would include an idea now coming full circle that the qualities that may be ‘on high’ are indeed our qualities: such attributes as found in love, sadism, irony et al, feelings that we may prefer not to envisage characterising or hailing from our ideal of the masters or the architects of the universe
Was is it about the endemic Belief Systems that justify their universal existence?
Exam Question:
‘What matters are Value Systems rather than Belief Systems: Discuss.’
Answer of examinee: ‘We hang values on our beliefs as on pegs in our mental frameworks. Ipso facto a belief-system is a glorified form of window-dressing.
Marks: Beta minus.
In the margin of the exam paper is scrawled the expletive: ‘UGH!’
Comment by the more conscientious type of examiner:
‘This is far too brief as an answer. Candidate failed to address such factors as the boost of Belief Systems to confidence of people in religions or political systems. He is silent on the point of whether it is our values and codes of morality that are au fond the pivot of our behaviour. He fails to float such riddles as ‘whether it might matter to a deity if history found as in scripture did not impress a man who likes to question what he reads’. The examinee does not talk about how man’s natual impulses, his need to identify with a tribe or cult, his need for Authority figures, his wish for certainty, and so forth, before going on to consider if these are factors to argue for Value-Systems, as opposed to Belief-systems. Are they, or are they not, a bedrock ot Belief-systems. However much man needs his beliefs, the candidate does not look at whether these needs might adulterate the accouracy of historical and political tenets. Taking religion as an example of a Belief-system, the candidate does not trail the idea: ‘How do we know if any Deity of any religion might not prize a practitioner of its values more highly if he was not schooled in its tenets?’
Recommendation in the margin of the examination paper: The ghost of Lenin can think that he has one more recruit for his army of ‘useful idiots’ despite the fact that the candidate is fundamentally right.
In an Institute for the Study of Lessons of World History, it is to be hoped that examiners have more of a vestige of charity in their approach.
PROBABILITY vis-a-vis CERTAINTY
I may be wrong, and often am, but I am never doubt!
• Sir George Jessel to Lord Coleridge
•
Sir George Jessel 1824 – 1883)
The use of a bon mot, and a citation of self-confident Authority, as so often, blindsides the listener to a basic problem in an attitude:
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Man’s Achilles Heel is his sense of certainty. That said, a heel is not a thing apart and it is just as well that men, on some showings, exemplify other attributes of Achilles.
If the word ‘perhaps’ is perhaps the most underrated word in the language, that is not so in this piece of writing.
The presumption of certainty goes deep. As said above, every sentence that we utter or think has an unvoiced corollary which is: ‘I am right to say (or think) this!’. If it were not so, we would not make the statement unless deliberately lying.’
The ‘exception that proves the rule’ is that ‘It is only the tentative about which anyone can be certain’ though there may be exceptions to exceptions. We have little justification to be certain about almost anything else – be it our place in the world, our ability to control our destinies, the behaviour of others, what event will turn out to be for the best, and so on. As things stand, the idea of ‘speculation’ has a connotation of riskiness. At best, we are entitled to talk only of probabilities. We cannot be 100% certain of our own motivations still less that which it is not given to us to know about any human let alone non-human plane.
Beguiling arguments in favour of what is undue confidence come in many guises: it may be that we are prompted to be as certain as we often are because of the influence of forces we do not understand, Guardian Angels even, or we may be predisposed to think this way from originally prehistoric imperatives, or because the world cannot go on as it does if we import into every decision we make an element of doubt. As the Bard put it in Hamlet, much necessary decisive action can be ‘…sicklie’d o’er with the pale cast of thought!’. The word ‘sicklie’d’ sometimes results from a sick lie.
A person certain of his ground can be right, in one sense, to be positive. We may like to follow such a one, or be him or her. That is beside the point as we may have good reasons for accepting a decision, fear or credulousness for instance being in play. The key issue at stake is not if there is an extraneous reason for believing a proposition, or following orders, but only if a given belief is justified on its own terms. It is not whether or not we like to think that we live our lives as the arbiters of our own destiny, comforting as that might be, but whether this is accurate…..?
The Unexpected, the Unfair, is a part of the world we are in. We may try to guard again it though we should have little realistic choice but to see things as they are. A Fool’s Paradise is a lovely place to live but one must expect fools for company as well as an uncertain future. Perhaps in some ways we are all in one. Even where certainty seems most justified, accidents and surprises can throw the best laid plans of mice – a rodent not known generally for its strategic planning ability – and of men. We do not know of all repercussions, immediate let alone eventual, of our actions so ‘should be careful of what we wish for’ lest the wish be granted.
Example – the fable of ‘the Zen Master’. In one version, a 14 year old boy in a village in China many years ago was given a bicycle. His parents were delighted for him but disconcerted at the Jeremiah-like reaction of a Zen Master on their telling him of the happy event. It was: “We will see!” Two years later the boy fell off the bicycle and shattered his leg so badly that it was unlikely he could walk again. On hearing of the parental upset, the Zen Master’s gnomic utterance was as previously: “We will see!” Two years later, war was declared. Amid enthusiastic patriotism all the boy’s peers marched gladly off to do battle but this boy could not go, unfit for duty as he was. He was so upset and yet, once again, the view of the Zen Master who seems to have known only three words, trotted out in unvarying order, was: “We will see!” The next time he saw the parents they were on a high; all the other young men had been killed but their son was alive. We know what the Zen Master had to tell them! The story continues until its Delphic point is drilled home – or admirers stop visiting him, knowing in advance what he has to say.
It is a common enough notion without putting the idea into words that there are ‘forces’ beyond those of logic or planning that determine fate. Napoleon said, on being asked what qualities he most sought when appointing his Generals: “I look for the lucky ones!” The illusion of control is all-powerful and has its practical purpose but, even so, there is the residual and understandable belief that, as ‘King Lear’ said: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport!’. This is before questions that are fundamental such as: ‘How much of ‘oneself’ did one, oneself, unaided, bring into being?’ Genes? Physical appearance? Accident of birth; family; locale, etc? We know all this and then overlook or forget it. Edgar, in King Lear, swanking that “I would have been that I am / had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardising!” begs the question with a tautology. In his person speaks a familiar type of self-confident control freak. There is no real onus on anyone to accept his preening or that of his ilk other than that it often is convenient to do so.
People’s personalities largely are perceived as of a piece in an assumption born of a belief in internal consistency neatly topped up with laziness of mind. People often can suppose that their being good at one thing or admired for it means that in another sphere their knowhow or capacity is much the same.
There can be relative certainty in actions to be undertaken but that very certainty may be enhanced if it is correctly evaluated before such action is taken, such that readiness is at a peak and with foreseeable precautions taken to rule out all but the unknown.
We can only do our best. As said above, we never know the alternative future that did not happen. Three cheers for the tentative! …And may Achilles go with you! And with all respect to Margaret Thatcher who, asked by Sir Geoffrey Clifton Brown if there was anything different in office that in hindsight she might have done differently, replied: “No; I think we got all of it right!” History will be the judge of that… though by what god-given right?
THE THRESHOLD POINT
Quentin Crisp records in ‘The Naked Civil Srvant’ that after four years of remaining untouched the dust in his apartment did not increase in level. Most of us, having got onto a track, do not know when to stop. One study shows that ‘While money can buy happiness to an extent, after 49 lakhs (approx) per year, increased income does little to boost happiness’ yet on we strive on the Rat Race accumulating to the point when it makes little difference….
How often is the idea stated that there must be one law for everyone. As said above, perhaps there may be situations where the exception proves the rule? The means chosen are not the same as the ends in view, and ends sometimes can be justified?
It is clear what are the thorns that bestrew taking a path of uncertainty in the law but rulings of judges anyway are not known in advance. In a suggestion here for refreshed thinking is the principle itself unchallengeable? (See piece on English law, below). In our mental frameworks – and, pious thinking, in even legal thought – there could be a principle that states: ‘At a certain point, this framework system may no longer apply.’
Many ‘in-built’ concepts derive from observation of how the world works as we see it, and from atavistic sources, and from Nature. The science of the workings of Nature increasingly surprises us – the forces of, say, gravity, do not apply after a certain point. Our remote ancestors would be as men amazed to see how we live. The predictability of events and the feeling of certainty in gauging them is a will-o’-the-wisp, detected by seers of antiquity when inspecting entrails to read the future and …by us for much the same underlying reasons, different as are the foms of the runes in reading them.
What is at issue here can be seen as a slight variation in one aspect of a peripherical consideration. That said, this re-setting of a basic view about certainty can, where circumstances fit, generate controversy or reap unforeseen repercussions. In some cases, pace purists, it is as well to keep an open mind and not be hidebound by rules that were made to fit circumstances that do not apply in some given situations. Each case, arguably, has a claim to be considered at least partly on its own merits.
***.
WHAT PEOPLE SAY ABOUT REFLECTION
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
It’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.
– Zeeshan 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 by major practitioners. But why should it be in some mill to thresh the subtle one-liners of celebrities? Reflection is something we all do and which we could do more of, to good effect.
We can combat a bias against reflection in our culture and indeed make a virtue of reflecting. We may be ‘broody’ but that, too, is frowned on. It is defined as being ‘engaged in or showing deep thought about something that makes one sad, angry, or worried.’ A hen clucking over her brood is no doubt a jolly decent mama to them. Why, again, should we be on the defensive if we are ruminating? Because cows ‘ruminate’? A dictionary definition is ‘thinking carefully over something, ponder it, meditate on it’ or a ‘kind of deep, meditative thought that is often deemed quite a worthy activity’. We can easily think of ruminants as ‘chewing the cud’. And so forth: why should we be said to be ‘in a brown study’ if we are thinking by ourselves? We may better describe it as being ‘in a rainbow study’!
Anthony Newton, a retired solicitor, writes that in his teenage years that he:
‘…developed the habit of staring into the middle distance without any apparent thought and unseeing. What was I doing? What if anything was going through my mind? The very simple answer was nothing, consciously. Somehow I was able to clear my mind and detach myself…’.
Mr Newton’s daydreaming enabled him to see things with greater clarity.
Here is a text exchange with Anja Gohde, a successful film investment adviser and business lady:
‘Meditation is often thought to be about rising ‘to the stars’, the empyrean. Well, the direction is right – namely ‘up’ – but do we have to aim quite so high. The eagle-eye is better, often, that the worm’s eye view….’
‘How very true. Yes, I try to reflect on a regular basis about my life and what I do and what the impact of my words and action has on other people or why I am reacting and feeling the way I do.’
On the one hand thought is a barrier to direct appreciation of a subject; on the other hand, it may make clearer what is perceived so that there is no misunderstanding as to its nature? Doing what you enjoy doing can be enhanced consciously appreciating it.
People, it is true, often like a picture and a thumbnail CV to give an idea of the person who comes up with an idea. The picture on the right below conveys the right impression of Anja whatever she looks like and what she does in life. The point is that it is her ideas not her circumstances that matter.
Reflection on Reflection
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Reflection as an academic subject
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In a session of Reflection
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Western vis-a-vis Eastern Meditation
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Practical Wisdom
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A Virtual Institute for Reflection
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