Hope and hopelessness – Lent 2025: Day 31

Physical and cognitive decline, infirmity and death – that's on the menu for everyone. And despite this, we can be happy. Why? What is it that ultimately gives us hope? What is it that stops us from sliding into existential despair? 

Unlike every other life form on our planet, we have the ability to imagine the future. On the basis of observation, we can extrapolate how the cycle of life looks and how it will look. We can picture, even on a glorious spring day such as today – bright sunshine, brilliant blue sky, 22°C outside as I write, trees starting to unfurl new leaves – that by late November, it will be grim; sleet, leaden skies, temperature just above freezing, long dark nights. But then come next April, we'll once again see days such as today.

It's always worth noting the Rabbinical saying: if you're having a bad day today, remember there will be better ones; and if you're enjoying a good day, remember there will be bad ones. Yet seasons, and days good and bad, are cyclical; something to be toggled through. Biological life, however, is binary – it's either on or off. Alive or dead.

Positive expectations have a positive role in medicine. Belief in the power of hope helps healing outcomes; clinical studies have shown that all other factors being equal, patients who hope to recover are more likely to do so than patients mired in hopelessness. Mind over matter, belief in the power of belief – the placebo effect is powerful; while science has yet to explain how it works, it is real, and it can produce measurable physiological changes.

Hope generates fortitude, the power to carry on in the face of adversity. I could see that in my father in his last years. Accepting his situation, yet striving to get on with it, until the very end.

But what about consciousness? Is its existence also binary? Will it be snuffed out with death? And here we have experience hope in its most profound form. Dismiss the notion of survival of consciousness as a false hope, and it no longer works its spell. It's hope that keeps us keeping on, in the expectation that the soul – in one way or another – survives body death. But is it just hope – or will hope morph into knowing? Into gnosis? Personally, I feel it. In small but regular experiences (I had one today on my walk) which suggest to me that this is true.

Materialism, ultimately, denies us the greatest hope – that of being part of an eternal whole, being upon a journey of spiritual evolution, along with the Universe as it unfolds. 

Lent 2024: Day 31
Time and Spirituality

Lent 2023, Day 31
Science vs. the Paranormal

Lent 2022: Day 31
Consciousness – fundamental and universal?

Lent 2021: Day 31
I'm better than you – no, really, I am!

Lent 2020: Day 31
Divine Inspiration

Getting On With It (Pt II) – Lent 2025: Day 30

We all know (or should know!) that work expands to fill the time available for it. This is Parkinson's Law, dating back to 1955). However, as we will also know from experience, that if you wait until the last minute to do the work, it only takes a minute. This is the Stock-Sanford corollary to Parkinson's law. But what if there's no deadline? What if you don't do it – what if you just push it (whatever it is) further on into the future? You can't Get On With It if you've not defined what it is.

Tasks that repeat, projects that don't.

What can you put off until tomorrow, or the next day, or the week or month after that? In other words, when is it OK to procrastinate, and when are you absolutely obliged to get on with it? What's the driver? What motivates you? What will happen if you don't do it at all? Or if you fail in your attempt? The one filter through which to pass these questions is: will it help me fulfil my human potential?

I am minded of the kitchen in Withnail and I. The moment when you finally realise that something must be done. A situation that can no longer go on. It's never this bad in my kitchen, by the way. Every evening, I switch on the immersion heater, wait for the water to heat up, and wash the dishes in between doing weights exercises. However, whilst I don't mind washing dishes and pans, I can't say I'm a fan of washing cutlery. And so, if nothing else, the cutlery tends pile up from one day to the next, in the sink, in an empty (large) yogurt container. Or two yogurt containers. [One solution to this is to reduce the number of knives, forks and spoons I deploy. Just the one set, used in rotation, rather than dirtying new ones and letting them accumulate before washing 25 to 30 in one go.]

Mentally juggling the tasks ahead of me, I ponder which ones are most important and in what order I should tackle them, and what the consequences of not doing them are. The worst that could happen is that I simply end up shifting the tasks on into the future. There's cleaning the house (usually, this can wait). There's blogging. The daily stroll (two hours typically). And books I want to read. And my exercises. 

Time should be measured by entropy, not seconds, minutes and years. The process of order turning into chaos. Wasting time means letting chaotic processes unfold.

{{ czas chce nas skrzywdzić }} – 'time wants to harm us'.

I'm not one for being pro-active. Sure, I react; when prodded, I respond. What drives me still, though, is not material. It is mystical; metaphysical. I do believe in an overarching Cosmic Purpose. So much of what happens to us in our lives, the major junctions at which we take this turn or that, are determined by chance. We think we have control over our destinies, and yet looking back we can see how much was preordained. 

How much we do, how much we achieve – this is determined by our strength of will. How much we push over into the future, rather than doing today. But then on the other hand, avoiding stress is important to living longer. Don't get too worked up over work. If your procrastination leads to levels of stress that you can't cope with, then either learn to let go, or work on reducing the amount of time you waste on the inconsequential. 

Lent 2025: Day 30
The Divine in your life

Lent 2023, Day 30
God/No God

Lent 2022: Day 30
Let the Spirit guide you!

Lent 2021: Day 30
On being perceptive

Lent 2020: Day 30
Time - religion and metaphysics

Getting On With It (Pt I) – Lent 2025: Day 29

The biological containers that carry our consciousness have a finite timespan allocated to them. Predetermined by genetics and by environment to some degree, and to some degree by will, our lives are like flying in a glider. Carried aloft by thermal currents, each flight is bound to end sometime. The question is – how long we can stay airborne? And what we can do while up there? The answers are related to many factors, some of which are under our control, others not at all.

Why do we live? Is life just a meaningless random thing that happened? 

Or – as my own intuition instructs me to ask – is there a purpose? Just pondering that question, "why am I here," it immediately feels to me that yes, there is a reason, no, this is not an accident.

So if there is a purpose – what should we be doing with our lives? 

I'd answer that question in three words – fulfil your potential. Others might say, "Have fun. Buy toys. Seek pleasure." Others might say: "Push yourself ever higher up the status hierarchy." Seek wealth to convert into power, power to convert into wealth. Others yet might have never even asked themselves the question.

Fulfilling your potential means finding the balance. Know your strengths and weaknesses, and make the most of those strengths. Be aware of your weaknesses – but don't beat yourself up trying to fix them. Perfection is an unattainable goal. Improvement in small, measurable steps is a more realistic doctrine by which to live one's life.

My weakness? I am inconsistent. I can be lazy; goofing off when I should be getting on with it. I am all too easily distracted (always have been). The challenge for me, therefore, is getting on with it consistently – staying focused.

Getting on with it? So important. But getting on with what?

It was easier when I was young. I was guided – by parents, by teachers, by media role models. Study, get a job, find a partner, procreate, reach a position of financial comfort. But then what? Take it easy? Retire as early as possible to play golf? 

More and more people across the Western world are inheriting wealth*, which secures their financial future at an early age. Rather than struggle to get onto the property ladder, they find themselves decently housed at an early age, without a mortgage, and their choice now is either to drive hard to "realise my potential", or "take it easy, man". Freed from the pressure of finding a career that pays well, the New Inheritocracy can pursue their passions in jobs that pay less but which can let them realise their potential. But the downside is a society of slackers, who, without passions, just drift and vegetate, or chase empty pleasures, their potential unfulfilled. 

Getting On With It is about drive. We all have different levels of drive, and what we attach it too is all important. Philanthropy, charity, scientific research, ecological activism – or simply the acquisition of wealth, power, prestige. Or across the board – acclaim. The Ego's need for adulation. Finding one's true cause can boost drive, a moment of realisation of one's purpose in life. With me, again, I see that inconsistency. A framework is required, an external target. Setting myself the goal, for the sixth Lent in a row, to come up with daily Lent-focused blog posts helps to jog me along. I must stop wasting time and Get On With It. But beyond Lent, my daily ritual of completing my health-and-exercise spreadsheet (into the 12th year now!) keeps me on the straight and narrow.

* There are two excellent articles about the New Inheritocracy in the 1 March 2025 edition of The Economist, behind a paywall, but well worth accessing.

Lent 2024: Day 29
Altruism and consciousness

Lent 2023, Day 29
Artificial Intelligence creates a religion

Lent 2022: Day 29
Meditations on travel

Lent 2021: Day 29
The ups and downs of life

Lent 2020: Day 29
Prophetic

Death, dreams and memories – Lent 2025: Day 28

"...To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause..."

Shakespeare's Hamlet compares death to sleep, concerned that even in death, we'll still be dreaming – and those dreams will continue to haunt us. And so is it as our consciousness passes from one incarnation to another? To me, it was long clear that William Shakespeare was an Old Soul; a consciousness that had passed through many human containers before becoming an Elizabethan playwright. His intuitive understanding of memories of past existence is clearly stated in these lines.

We wake each morning, sometimes remembering the night's dreams, sometimes not. (Having a bedside notebook to jot down key points is a valuable aide memoire.) There's no doubt that you had that dream. But was that you that had that dream your ego, or your consciousness? A blend, I would argue. One way to see what's what in your dream is to sift through the contents bearing in mind this quote from Mark Belchner, from his book The Dream Frontier. Dr Belchner says that "dreams don't lie". "Our dreams are not concerned with disguise and censorship. They are our most honest communications, perhaps the only human communication in which we cannot lie. We can lie about our dreams, but not in our dreams." I divide my dreams into the humdrum, the routine ones that merely clear out partially digested or incomplete thoughts, and the Big Dreams (as Freud called them). These don't contain disjunctive cognition, where people, places and times blend and where logic evaporates. The Big Dreams are consistent in terms of place, time and action (the Three Unities of Greek theatre), and bring back events from your consciousness' past existence.

Not only can we not lie in our dreams, we cannot lie in our qualia memories. Sharp and precise, though fleeting and ephemeral. We call these phenomena déjà vus; flashbacks, which triggered or unbidden bring back a moment of conscious experience that we have had before. 

Below: how Google's Imagen 3.0 imagines a past-life flashback. Personally, I have always found them to be pleasant; an old familiarity returning to me, with a tang of nostalgia, a sense that I am never to return there. But not unsettling – nothing like these expressions.

Having experienced this all my life, I have trained myself to pinpoint the moment in childhood from which those qualia memories were from. The A40 road to South Wales, Chessington Zoo on a primary-school trip; a family visit to Winchester Cathedral. I can feel their echoes, conforming to the experience I felt at the time, before melting away. [I have been compiling the most-oftenly encountered current-life flashbacks for several years now on this blog.]

Rarer, though entirely consistent and persistent, are the 'past-life' flashbacks and dreams, that confirm to me the reality of previous incarnations. They feel the same as the current-life ones; the same mechanism, the same flavour of 'pleasance' mixed with 'longing to return'. They strongly suggest to me a continuity of consciousness that spans beyond our biological lifetime. But quite how this 'works' (to use a mechanistic term) is still beyond me. Are we to dress metaphysical phenomena in scientific terms ('consciousness borne aloft on a field of neutrinos') or are they ultimately ineffable?

Lent 2024: Day 28
Ego, Consciousness and the Environment

Lent 2023, Day 28
Can the future affect our past?

Lent 2022: Day 28
Understanding the Infinite and the Eternal

Lent 2021: Day 28
Higher life forms, imagined

Lent 2020: Day 28
The Secret and the Hidden

End of Time II – Lent 2025: Day 27

Science, for all its emphasis on the objective and the empirical, struggles to answer the fundamental questions about the nature of reality. If 100 years ago, physicists believed they were just several months and a couple of equations away from literally knowing everything, the intervening century had introduced more and more doubt. Today, competing theories regarding the beginning and the end of the Universe differ wildly (before the 1920s, an eternally static universe was generally assumed). 

Any theory that envisages a start-point (once, there was absolutely nothing, and in the far future, there will again be absolutely nothing) should introduce a first-cause that kicked everything off, and some interpretation of the eternal oblivion that will follow. Cyclical theories fudge this question by suggesting that there was never a 'nothing' and the next 'something' will arise from the end of the current 'something'.

Now – let's work with the notion of some overarching Big 'C' Consciousness that's behind, outside of and yet within all of Creation – a purpose, a teleology, a destination, a reason. Big 'C' Consciousness willed the Universe into existence, giving it its laws and its direction. [Physicalists would deny this, saying there's no need for such a construct. But then neither their position nor mine is falsifiable; thus both camps are resting their worldviews on belief.]

I see it this way: small 'c' consciousness evolves from the bottom all the way up, with the intention of a final merging into Big 'C' Consciousness. Atoms are aware of their existence; but have they will? Quantum mechanics does not negate that. A big step up in the evolution of consciousness was abiogenesis – that mysterious leap from non-life to life. A further big step up was the emergence of sentient life, we humans, capable of meta-consciousness – conscious of being conscious. 

But – what's next? Beings that are increasingly angelic? Living in a higher level of consciousness still?

Below: Imagen 3.0, asked to illustrate biological and spiritual evolution. Prophetic? Or a distillation of a billion online images?

I believe that our consciousness shall pass through a myriad of containers, each evolving, learning, observing, rising in understanding, improving ethically, before finally uniting as one in the One.

At the End of Time, or sooner? Religions seem to be in a bit of hurry to reach that end point. Eternal bliss in Heaven after one biological life reasonably well lived. Or after a handful of reincarnations. To me, that's too simple. An admission ticket too cheaply priced. We have imperfections to iron out; improvement comes slowly. One life at a time. 

And how does it all end? And where – on this planet, on some other star system? In this galaxy, or some distant one?And for how long does that end state – that Omega Point – last? I feel as knowledgeable as a cat trying to understand electricity. But the questions need to be asked, and discussed. Hypothesis – thesis – antithesis – synthesis.

Lent 2024: Day 27
Personality and Belief

Lent 2023, Day 27
Being Positive is more than just being Optimistic

Lent 2022: Day 27
God and Nationalism

Lent 2021: Day 27
Consciousness in other creatures

Lent 2020: Day 27
The Physical and the Metaphysical

The End of Time – Lent 2025: Day 26

Science has no clear answer as to how the Universe (this Universe?) will end. In a Big Crunch (galaxies collapsing into their black holes which then go on to swallow one another in an ever contracting universe that ends up in a singularity)? Or in Heat Death – galaxies flung further and further apart by dark energy at an ever-accelerating pace, over time losing all contact with each other, and then, one by one, their stars go out? And atoms stop spinning until there's nothing with which to measure time? Or in a Big Rip (dark energy becomes stronger and stronger, eventually tearing apart galaxies and indeed all matter)? Or in Vacuum Decay, when the stability of the vacuum of space suddenly decays into a lower energy state, resulting in a bubble of lower-energy vacuum expanding at the speed of light through the universe, destroying everything in its path? We don't know.

Below: Google Gemini Imagen 3.0, prompted to illustrate the four competing theories of how the Universe will end.

And when will this all happen? The first three are due in around 10¹⁰⁰ to 10¹²⁰ years from now, so no immediate worry. Unless it's vacuum decay, which could happen at any time. Though even if it started a billion light years away, it would take a billion years to reach us. And given that we're some  46.5 billion light years in any direction from the edge of the observable universe, we seem to be statistically quite safe.

[Well before then, the Sun's increasing luminosity will make life on Earth impossible somewhere between a billion and 1.2 billion years' time; humanity will need to evolve and move on. This is around 3,000 times longer than Homo sapiens has existed as a species, so there's no great rush.]

But will the end of the Universe (however it happens) mean the beginning of a new one? Certainly, proponents of the Big Crunch theory suggest that after everything comes together in a singularity, it immediately kicks off the next Big Bang. And so on, ad infinitum. Sir Roger Penrose's Conformal Cyclic Cosmology posits that once the last atom ceases to vibrate at the universe's heat death, time runs to an end; without time there is no space – and from that begins, yes, the next Big Bang. So two of the models foresee a universe of infinite duration, with new ones arising from the ashes of the previous ones. Two don't. They envisage a total annihilation of all matter.

But what would happen to consciousness, both small-'c' and the large-'C' ,when space-time runs out? Will we be safely gathered in? Will we be saved? I shall speculate on this tomorrow.

Lent 2024: Day 26
Understanding the esoteric
(In which I dream of the Random Number Veneration Generator)

Lent 2023, Day 26
The Ghost in the Machine

Lent 2022: Day 26
The End of Times

Lent 2021: Day 26
Physical Immortality

Lent 2020: Day 26
Intimations of Immortality

Words, music, memories and other mind-altering drugs – Lent 2025: Day 25

Smash, rip, incinerate, crush, suffocate, destroy, annihilate, mourn, despair. [Now read again.]

Has reading this list of verbs changed your mood? Feeling a little more... anxious? Now, how about these –

Flourish, embrace, inspire, open, cherish, rejuvenate, love, marvel, celebrate, hope. [Now re-read.]

– Have these words returned you to a better place?

The simple act of casting your eyes over shapes on a screen – characters or graphemes – that we recognise as letters, placed together to form words, can cause either the levels of cortisol or of dopamine to rise within your body. When released into a living organism, chemical substances that produce a biological effect are, pharmacologically speaking, drugs. Hormones. Signalling molecules that affect the body, produced endogenously. We have been conditioned to respond accordingly. It's what makes great poets great; wringing emotion out of language.

With music, the effect is more powerful. Music plays a significant role in our emotions and moods. Uppers and downers. Specific sequences of notes, tempo, key (major/minor), volume, trance-inducing beat; music has a powerful array of tools at its disposal to alter our mindset.

And so it is for memories. Memories can be of events or of qualia. Events – embarrassing, awkward, painful memories tend to stick around. Summoning them can prompt cortisol release. But qualia memories – memories not of what you did, but what you felt – tend to be more likely to set off a dopamine release. Tiny quantities, but noticeable. Quick to dissipate, but very real.

Below: words, music, memories – pictured by Google Gemini Imagen 3.0

English romantic poet William Wordsworth describes in Daffodils (1804) this experience of a qualia memory flashback, prompted by his memories from a walk along the shore of Lake Ullswater in the Lake District, when he saw a long line of daffodils, "Fluttering and dancing in the breeze." The last stanza runs thus:

"For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

That is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils."

Qualia memory events can have powerful pharmacological effects, like words and music.

Tonight the clocks go forward. For the next week I'll be getting through the day with a sense of guilt that an extra hour of daylight has passed and I've done nothing with it.

Lent 2025: Day 25
Dealing with Evil

Lent 2023, Day 25
Intuition and Dreaming

Lent 2022: Day 25
Writing It All Down

Lent 2021: Day 25
Faith and Knowledge

Lent 2020: Day 25
Chances, complacency and gratitude

Reality – as we perceive it, and as it is – Lent 2025: Day 24

Into the second half of Lent, downhill towards Easter. Going nicely. Today, I want to turn my attention to what we consider to be our 'reality'. Solid things, people, places, arranged in space and time – we feel we know exactly what reality is. We can sense it all around! But do we truly understand?

We can all agree that everything's made out of molecules, which in turn are made out of atoms. Yet none of us have ever seen an atom – even nuclear physicists will only have seen something that's a representation of an atom. Yet within those atoms exist smaller particles; electrons forming a probability cloud around a nucleus, which scientific consensus assures us is made of protons and neutrons, each made of up quarks and down quarks, though how that works (gauge bosons, gluons, leptons, whatever) is way beyond the understanding of all but the most dedicated specialist. So we end up take the Standard Model on trust, rather like in early times, mediaeval people would take the existence of Jesus Christ as the only begotten son of God on trust. 

Below: how Google Gemini's Imagen 3.0 pictures the sub-atomic (not very accurately, but try illustrating a cloud of probability) and the pangalactic.

We scarcely give any thought to the fact that the chairs we sit on consist of atoms that are essentially empty space. And yet they are. A hydrogen atom is about 99.9999999999996% empty space. If the nucleus were the size of a pea, the atom would be about the size of the dome of St Paul's Cathedral. Looking out over a landscape we're seeing fields and forests, fences, clouds and sky – what we're really gazing at is unimaginable numbers of atoms.

And the planet on which we live is whizzing around our local star, one of between 100 billion and 400 billion stars in our local galaxy. Which is just one of 200 billion to 2,000 billion (or two trillion) galaxies in the observable universe.

Just as we are unable to grasp the subatomic nature of reality, we cannot grasp the galactic scale either. Yes, we can recite the numbers, how very tiny and how very huge they are, but our imaginations struggle. 

You may try to deny the reality of reality, but to do so would be to question the physicalist model agreed upon by science. No rational thinker in the Middle Ages would question the existence of God either.

As human beings, we have evolved in the meso-scale; that is where we are; what lies above and below is of no evolutionary consequence to us. Finding food, finding a mate, avoiding predators. If you can do that, you are biologically fit. 

Cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman argues that in the same way as our laptop screens show us, via a graphic user interface, icons, words and images so that we can operate our devices, which are essentially voltages running through silicon, we relate to the world around us via a 3D graphic user interface in our mind. This interface, says Prof. Hoffman, evolved to perceive reality in a way that works best in evolution. Escaping tigers is more useful than seeing inside of an atom or scanning distant galaxies. Natural selection selected the optimal model for us to interface with reality.

Yet despite this, we cannot deny the existence of the subatomic or the innards of a black hole.

I would posit that much the same can be said about the reality of consciousness; all we know of it is what we experience at our own subjective level – qualia; units of the awareness of being. You know what it feels like to be you; you can imagine what it may be like to be me, but we'd both struggle to imagine consciousness at the subatomic or the cosmic level.

We can but intuit; reaching up to try to understand the nature of the Divine Consciousness is akin to gazing at the heavens without a telescope. 

Lent 2024: Day 24
The Ego Alone

Lent 2023, Day 24
We are all Sentinelese? 

Lent 2022: Day 24
Memory, identity and reincarnation

Lent 2021: Day 24
Reconciling science and spirituality

Lent 2020: Day 24
Refutation (II)