Lent 2026: day 28 – a case study in reincarnation

How does reincarnation 'work'? I put the word 'work' in quote marks because it suggests a mechanism, a process. To me, It doesn't feel that way. It's more ethereal. Whilst I have experienced a lifetime of what I call 'past-life flashbacks' and 'past-life dreams', I've long stopped looking for names, dates or precise locations. Such a search is futile, and indeed spurious. "Please, accept the mystery." I'm happy with a vague feeling, a familiar sense of the returning qualia. Dreams, I find, offer greater historical and geographical precision. Even so, pinning down a former biological container for my consciousness somehow does not feel to be the right thing to do. So much room for wishful thinking and other cognitive biases. 

Are we destined never to know names, dates, precise locations? That's what I think. But there are well-documented cases suggesting that it is possible. One of the most compelling cases I've come across of a 'past-life memory' corroborated by historical facts is that of James Leininger, born in 1998.

Starting around the age of two, the boy began having recurring nightmares of a plane crash. From his accounts of the dreams, his parents, Bruce and Andrea, pieced together a story far too detailed for a child of his age to invent. James provided specific information that his parents later verified in military archives; he identified the plane as an F4U Corsair and a ship called the Natoma. Research confirmed an escort carrier named the USS Natoma Bay. James mentioned a friend named 'Jack Larsen'. Bruce Leininger eventually tracked down the real Jack Larsen, who had indeed flown with the Natoma Bay squadron during WWII. James described his plane being hit in the engine by the Japanese, catching fire, and crashing into the sea near Iwo Jima. 

Bruce Leininger identified a pilot as James Huston Jr. from squadron VCS-81 on the USS Natoma Bay. The details align; Huston was the only pilot from that squadron killed during the battle of Iwo Jima. His plane was hit in the engine, caught fire, and crashed into the sea, just as the child had described in his nightmares. As James grew older, he met with James Huston’s surviving sister, Anne. After speaking with the boy and hearing his specific memories of their childhood home and family, she became convinced that James was the reincarnation of her brother.

Sceptics suggest suggestibility (where a child absorbs information from a documentary or book and later forgets the source), but the Leiningers maintained that James had had no exposure to WWII history or flight simulators before the nightmares began. By the age of eight, James’s memories began to fade, (common in these types of cases), and by on reaching his teenage years, he reported that the vivid memories had almost entirely faded, leaving him with only an interest in aviation.

I used ChatGPT to examine the veracity of the details. 

Squadron name was not strictly correct (VCS-81 flew floatplane scouts like the Vought Kingfisher from cruisers). There was, however, a squadron VC-81, which did indeed fly from the carrier USS Natoma Bay. But the big disparity between what James Leininger reported as a two-year-old and historical fact is that VC-81 did not fly F4U Corsairs; instead, the squadron flew FM2 Wildcat fighters.

Below: F4U Corsair (left) compared to FM2 Wildcat (right). Google Gemini Nano Banana 2 images. Note the significant difference in the wings and overall size.

Any naval-aviation historian will immediately tell you that escort carriers like the Natoma Bay were too small for F4U Corsairs to fly from. The Natoma Bay was, however, present at Iwo Jima and its squadron heavily involved in ground-attack missions supporting the US Marines' invasion. 

Asking ChatGPT about losses incurred by VC-81 at Iwo Jima, I got this:

"Confirmed loss: Lt. (jg) James M. Huston, Jr. Aircraft: FM-2 Wildcat. Mission type: Strike on shipping at Chichi Jima. Outcome: Aircraft hit in engine (likely AA fire), crashed into the sea. No wreckage recovered. Huston was the only pilot from Natoma Bay (VC-81) killed during the Iwo Jima operation."

I present this case in detail because it is unusual and represents, in my view, an atypical scenario. Striving to identify a real individual is something I don't personally feel comfortable with; while I have put together a 'past-life narrative' of my own, it was not in childhood, but over decades. The 'past-life' feelings have stayed consistent in terms of flashbacks and what I call my canonical dreams; they have not faded.

Another major difference between what I feel and the Leininger case is the time between lives. I sense an immediate overlap; the flavour America of the mid-1950s being so clear to me, so compelling. Death and rebirth within months, or even an overlap. Yet more than half a century passed between the death of James Huston Jr. and the birth of James Leininger. 

Finally – if James Leininger could experience this – why can't more of us? Why don't we hear of more such cases? It suggest that reincarnation is an extremely rare phenomenon.

So many questions...

More tomorrow!

Lent 2025: day 28
Death, dreams and memories

Lent 2024: day 28
Ego, Consciousness and the Environment

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

Lent 2023, 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

Lent 2026: day 27 – life after death

The conventional view held by most people today is that as brain activity ceases on biological death – that's it. Game over, Player One. The afterlife is seen as a historical notion, a religious construct that had been created for the purpose of social control, and as sop to the bereaved. 

Yet the conviction that there's no such thing as a afterlife is a modern thing. No one in Europe in the Middle Ages held that view. On the contrary – mediaeval Europeans would have been haggling with their parish priest over how many years they can shave off their time in Purgatory before being allowed into Heaven. To them, the afterlife was a real as the next harvest.

The sophisticated modern mind scoffs. "How easy it was to brainwash illiterate simpletons!"

But has not the sophisticated modern mind been brainwashed too? Through the seductively rational arguments of logic, science and materialist reductionism?

Reality, I believe, is more nuanced; it is not binary.

How do I see the afterlife then? I see it as being as real as one's childhood. We no longer live in our childhood, but we we retain memories of it. Those memories colour and flavour who we are. Those memories come back to us in flashbacks, some vivid, some less so – qualia memories. Some you can summon. Some are triggered (by smells, by music, etc). Some come to us unbidden. Yet there's no atom in our brains that was there ten years ago, let alone decades ago. Molecules, proteins, cells, restructure, recycle, die, grow – and yet memories persist. The neuronal structures of our brains remain the same, but my analogy is of these being bookcases in a library, and memories being books.

Survival of awareness after biological death hinges on one concept – that of non-local consciousness. In our lives, we have nothing but fleeting glimpses of this phenomenon. Déjà vus, precognitions, dreams, synchronicities, telepathically shared thoughts; these are hard to pin down, and impossible to rationalise satisfactorily within the framework of our prevailing scientific paradigm.

But if you place consciousness at the centre of Cosmic reality, as its fundamental property, everything clicks into place. Consciousness is one thing you can be certain of. You are currently aware of the moment? That cocktail of sensory inputs that creates consciousness leads you to conclude that you are alive. Qualia moments, registered in your memory.

And now – a thought experiment. One by one, close off your sensory inputs. No vision, no sound, no smell or taste, no feeling (your bum on your chair). What happens in your mind? Dreams, apparitions, memories will replace the awareness that stems from inputs, from the five senses, and will do so until the sensory inputs are restored.

I have no clue as to explain in scientific terms where consciousness 'goes' after bodily death, nor where it is 'stored', nor how it is 'transferred' to another location (heaven? A subsequent body?). All I know is the frequent experience of a sense of familiarity; the memories of qualia once experienced elsewhere and elsewhen.

I feel this in the form of 'congruent qualia'. Yes, sensory inputs are required as triggers. The wind blowing into my face as I walk towards a warm sun. Lying on the lawn and gazing up at white clouds dotting a blue summer sky. The sound of waves lapping on a beach. Snowflakes falling as Christmas shoppers bustle between brightly-lit storefronts. [Four qualia, illustrated by ChatGPT] 

Earlier today, I was getting these congruent qualia feelings in my garden as I clear the ground under the apple-trees and prune back dead vegetation. Again, bright sunlight, and that experience of exomnesia. It feels so familiar. From some other time, from some other place.

It is not a strong phenomenon but it is ever-present; it feels real to me, as real as my memories of childhood, familiar and comforting. Childhood lives on in memories; past lives live on in weaker memories, intangible; a fleeting sensation, a melting snowflake. It passes quickly, but if you are sensitive to it, you are left with a pleasant feeling, and a sense that there's more to eternity than just one allotted lifespan.

I have no proof, but I feel that with each successive life, the certainty becomes greater, the detail clearer. 

We want to know, "OK – it's a mystery – but how does this work?" What are the vectors that convey consciousness from body to body? Will we ever fully know? Will we inch closer to an answer? Or are we destined never to know?

One way or another, I am convinced that consciousness is not snuffed out with bodily death.

More tomorrow as the fourth week of Lent comes to an end.

Lent 2025: day 27
End of Time II

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

Lent 2026: day 26 – dream of a future life

My scheduled Lenten blog posting is interrupted once more by a vivid dream from which I have just woken up. I am a five-year-old boy, with a twin (non-identical) sister. Our parents are extremely wealthy and live in what feels like Tasmania or New Zealand. Southern Hemisphere, Anglophone, temperate climate. We live on a vast estate, built in the style of a faux Edwardian country house with plenty of outbuildings. Architecturally, it reminds me of a cross between Banbury market place and Bicester outlet shopping village, but all of this is owned by one family. (I cannot tell whether this is inherited wealth or whether our father was a newly minted tech billionaire). 

My sister and I have tutors. We are being inculcated into the knowledge that our destiny is to become part of a group that rules over mankind with the goal of making the world a better place for mankind, and indeed, for the planetary ecosystem. A heavy burden for small children to be aware of.

It is the second half of the 21st century and global depopulation has become a challenge, though resource scarcity is now no longer a worry. My sister and I have everything of the best quality. We have just got new wellingtons to wear in the garden, having outgrown our old ones. They come from Sweden or Norway and the label, the guarantee and information card is in a Scandinavian language which gives my sister great amusement to read out aloud. 

It is meditation time. We sit cross legged on the ground, and a tutor begins the session. We are told to stop giggling, to calm ourselves, and to focus on the future.

We are constantly reminded by our tutors of our mission. We must stay in the background, working anonymously to influence global outcomes. We must stay humble; we must understand how societies function and strive to improve them. This seems daunting to small children. We are assured that our immense family wealth is needed to make the world better, to reduce human suffering, to prevent the degradation of the environment. We are constantly told this story. This is why our family wealth shouldn't be taxed and why it is our duty to hold on to as much as possible.

********

How did we get here? My sister and I knew each other from our past lives, in 20th century England. One day, as ageless entities, neither young nor old, we meet in the lobby of an impressive corporate HQ building, very modern and well appointed. It could be London, Paris or New York. We are immediately ushered up a short flight of steps into a claustrophobically small lift, barely large enough for two passengers. The golden doors slide shut and the lift starts to rise. I fear that this could be a trap. The lift reaches the top, and the scene described above begins to unfold...

The fact that we know each other in this life is somehow important to our mission in the next, the dream informs me.

As five-year-olds, we are saddled with the knowledge of the great weight of duty and responsibility that lies ahead of us. Could we not have more carefree lives like other children that we briefly see from our car as we are whisked from one compound to another? No. This is meant to be.

Of course, now I have opened this particular box and observed what's inside, thus collapsing the wave function, this particular outcome has been rendered void in this timeline. In an adjacent parallel universe, however, it remains a possibility...

Three weeks to Easter Sunday.

Lent 2025: day 26
The End of Time

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

Lent 2026: day 25 – death (and life thereafter)

Hope. When it comes to the survival of consciousness after biological death, that's what we have. But is it all we have? I would argue we also have insights gained from reports of near-death experiences (NDEs) as well as first-hand intuition, which suggest that there's a reality to this.

The consciousness that moves upon the face of the Earth is not to be extinguished. 

Last April, as I was lying on the operating table in the middle of my heart attack, I had the profound – and most calming – intuition that should I slip away, I am ready for death and fear it not. Though with no idea of what would follow my physical demise.

Unlike matter, subject to entropy, consciousness evolves; in alignment, I would argue, with the unfolding of the Cosmos. We observe, we are curious, we learn. Too much to take in during a single lifetime. The journey from Zero to One is eternal; our consciousnesses are not even midway on that journey. 

Consciousness is, I believe, the fundamental property of the Universe; from consciousness derives matter and energy, space and time. Our individual small 'c' consciousnesses, in the here-and-now, are participating in something far greater than that spanned by the life on the individual biological container that currently houses that small 'c' consciousness.

I feel certain that consciousness survives the demise of the physical container in which it's housed for this lifetime. The real question for me is how does this work in practice? Does consciousness migrate to a new body? Human or some other life form? On our world, in our timeline, or somewhere else? When? Straight away, or after a certain period (Christian purgatory)? Or does individual consciousness merge with the Big 'C' Collective Consciousness (the Christian notion of  'being seated at the right hand of God' in heaven, or the Hindu and Buddhist notion of nirvana)?

Both Buddhism and Hinduism hold reincarnation to be a fact. Whilst Buddhism sees individual consciousness merging into  an Eternal Whole, Hinduism sees spiritual evolution as a series of bodily reincarnations (saṃsāra), with lessons learned along the ascent to a final merger into the Big 'C' consciousness.

My personal experience with exomnesia, anomalous qualia-memory events and past-life dreams suggest the Hindu interpretation , with an endless series of reincarnations into new containers, new human lives, new lessons, new learnings. But then, my strong intuition that "all who seek God shall find God in their own way" suggests a myriad paths to that ultimate oneness...

Today, I attended the funeral of Peter Hauke, another West London boy whom I knew for over 50 years, who died last month, aged 64. I have so much to be grateful to Peter; above all, Peter was instrumental in my move to Poland. One day in 1995, he popped by my house to ask if I'd be interested in doing some consulting work for the mobile-telephony company he was working for in Warsaw at the time. I jumped at the chance, and within two years I had been offered a full-time job in Poland. Peter taught me many practical things, from how to order a tidy Excel spreadsheet to the right way to sharpen a scythe. He has helped me out on my działka – the very chair I'm sitting on was a housewarming gift from him. A natural educator and serial entrepreneur, Peter had the character of an Ancient Greek logician and an Enlightenment natural philosopher. His consciousness, I am certain, abides.

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

Lent 2024: 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

Lent 2026: day 24 – hope

Things change; that is a constant. But are they changing for the better but for the worse? Right now, the world is asking – will the eventual outcome of the war in Iran be positive or negative? The answer is granular; the answer will be found in the lives of the hundred million or so people that it affects directly, and the billions that it effects indirectly. Most of these human beings will one day look back at how events since 28 February 2026 have have influenced the way their lives have subsequently unfolded.

Does hope help? Psychopaths, sociopaths or a crazy end-times religious maniacs excepted, most people tend to hope for the best. But can that hope – can those prayers – actually translate into positive outcomes, or should we abandon hope and accept that what will be will be? 

This is about setting those sliders between Doing Something and fatalism. Well do I remember the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine four years ago. After the shock and the uncertainty, the world simply got used to it. "Do wszystkiego można się przyzwyczaić," as my late father used to say ("You can get used to everything"). We can; we are resilient. We live in hope.

Ukraine, supported financially and in materiel (to a greater or lesser extent) by Western democracies, is holding Russia to a draw; the war is costing Russia heavily. But who would have expected it to drag on for so long? We hoped for a coup in Moscow. We hoped Putin would be killed or just die. We hoped that successive Ukrainian offensives would push the occupiers out of its sovereign territory. None of that happened. We hope the Iranian people will throw off the shackles of the murderous regime that tramples on its personal freedoms and stifles their economic wellbeing in the name of religious fundamentalism.

Peace and freedom are good things to hope for, for others as well as for ourselves. 

Collectively, we are learning. Some societies learning faster than others.

Brexit, the Iranian revolution of 1979 – people hoping that an imperfect world will get better if they leave the EU or overthrow the Shah. Their hopes manipulated by those determined to get their chance to rule and impose their worldview on millions. [The fundamentalist regime ruling Iran for the past 47 years stands as proof that religion and government should never mix.]

This is a hopeful time of year. The past two weeks have seen winter chased away, mainly sunny days, brightness and a sense that nature of starting to wake up. Here amid the orchards, there is the ever-present anxiety that a late frost might yet come along and damage the crop. "The hope that springs eternal/Springs right up your behind" – Ian Dury, This Is What We Find (1979)

If we live in hope, we should be prepared to wait; things tend to get better with time. Align with the Cosmic Purpose. 

And this leads to the Biggest Question there is – survival of consciousness after biological death.

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

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)

Lent 2026: day 23 – change

Today marks the halfway point of Lent. Twenty-three days gone, another 23 to Easter Sunday. Time to reflect on the passage of time, and what time brings along with it – change. My 68 years on earth have seen change – technological and social – happening at a pace that sometimes is frightening. 

My earliest memories were of a drab suburban world, childhood spent in front of a black-and-white, 405-line TV set that seemed miraculous to my parents' generation. I was born on the day space travel began (with the launch of Sputnik I), a week before and a week after the two largest nuclear accidents up to that time. There were few cars in the streets (eight times fewer than on UK roads today). There were 12 pennies to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound; food (and sweets) were sold in pounds and ounces. Clothing was drab. Things were of poor quality, pieces of wood or gaspipe held together with Jubilee clips, splints in your hands. In the skies over West London, piston-engined propeller airlines flew into London Airport (as Heathrow as known then). 

Change, Hanwell London W7, 1960 and today, as visualised by Google Gemini's Nano Banana 2. The flavour is there, but the architecture too grand; the parade of shops was two, not three stories high.

Change came in leaps. I remember sometime in the mid-60s my father bringing home an analogue calculator (ANITA) and the glow of the red diodes. It filled a quarter of the dining-room table. This was the future! Fifteen years later, my father had an Amstrad computer (MS DOS) and was working on spreadsheets, I could not yet see the sense. In 1990, at work, I initiated a project to introduce desk-top publishing to the magazine I edited back then. Apple Macs, black-and-white screens the size of large TVs that cost as much as a family car. This was the future! Then came the Internet (with a capital I back then), linking computers into a global network through dial-up modems. This was around the time we moved to Poland. 

Oh, the changes taking place here! Cash machines, mobile telephones, hypermarkets, joining NATO and the EU – everything changing for the better, and at pace. Life is becoming more convenient for people – online banking, online government services, social-media connectivity 24/7. And now, we are rapidly entering the age of AI. And the Polish economy has been one of the fast-growing in the world, what's not to like?

Adapting to the change that's happening all around us is a an important skill. The maladapted become disorientated, frustrated, and prone to poor choices at the ballot box.

Maybe we should look at the downsides of change? In the UK, a general sense of stasis, marasm; urban decay, perceptions of 'uncontrolled migration'. But in Poland? The threat of Russia, mainly. And climate change. The economy, meanwhile, is growing nicely... A golden age in Polish history?

The change that I've been describing is all in the physical realm. But what of consciousness? Does this change? 

Many qualia experiences and qualia memories are coloured by the Spirit of the Age; the music, the art, the fashions; nostalgic longings for the once-familiar are predicated by change. Our digital age means we can reproduce or even synthesise many aspects of the past on demand. A piece of music or some TV show that conjures up my childhood? There it is on YouTube. Or groups discussing bygone Ealing on Facebook. I can scratch that long-felt itch for life in mid-century America online with ease.

But strip away the markers of the passage of time. Qualia that come from timeless experiences; walking along a shoreline, toes in the waves; is this the 21st century or three thousand years ago? A cloudless night sky with full moon from a hilltop far from any town or city. Is that what it would have felt like to the earliest hominids? 

The role of consciousness is to observe; to witness the unfolding at its own scale. The ant sees the Cosmos as its scale, we see that same Cosmos at our scale. The ant is subjectively at the epicentre of its own Universe, as is each one of us. The ant also observes change – day changing to night, that twig that wasn't there yesterday, the rivulets of water pouring into its nest during a summer thunderstorm. 

Imagine a Consciousness scaled up as ours is scaled up from that of an ant. Imagine perceiving change on a scale of galaxies over billions of years.

Matter breaks down (entropy), but consciousness abides (syntropy). Adaptation to change is a biological necessity. Awareness of change as a flow, as a characteristic of the unfolding Universe, is crucial to spiritual evolution. Live a spiritually conscious life, and the change that affects the physical world ceases to be a bother to you. 

Tomorrow: living in hope, or living in alignment with the flow?

Lent 2025: day 23
The Tao of Doing Less 

Lent 2024: day 23
The True Self – The Individual vs the Collective

Lent 2023: day 24
The Spirituality of Cosmic Life

Lent 2022: day 23
Matter and materialism

Lent 2021: day 23
Near-death experiences and the Afterlife

Lent 2020: day 23
Refutation I

Lent 2026: day 22 – a life measured in spiritual challenges

Spiritual challenges? Surely, spirituality is something you either feel or you don't? Something more profound than mere religious ritual and doctrine... The spiritual search should not stand as a challenge; surely it comes naturally? And yet, in our materialist, physicalist-reductionist world, having a spiritual worldview can be a challenge...

As a child, I felt that spiritual realm in moments of transcendence, as the sun streamed in through the living-room windows, highlighting motes of dust in the air. Or experiencing that strange sense of familiarity from another time and another place upon looking at a picture in a book. As a child, however, I was unable to define it. Church-based religion offered an inadequate explanation of what I felt spiritually. 

As an adolescent I  came to reject religion as overly dogmatic, claiming to know all the answers. However, as a parent, I reconsidered religion, this time more instrumentally, as something socially useful in the process of raising young children. Today, I have become critical of all religions for the way they all tend to co-opt the innate human yearning for the numinous, the metaphysical, the infinite and eternal for the purposes of social control. 

And so we come to a fork in the road. Accept religion and outsource your spiritual curiosity to an institution that claims to have all the answers. Reject religion and there is the danger of falling into the abyss of materialist consumptionism, narcissism and status obsession. Wanting external affirmation for your ego.

There is an alternative that neither submits to dogma or materialism, and it is based on affirmation of the experience that no one can deny – the experience of consciousness.

I do have a core sense, a deep intuition, that there is more to reality than matter and ego, that consciousness is fundamental, that our subjective experience of being alive and sentient is at the heart of  everything, and that this experience is somehow connected to the whole of creation. This intuition is gaining definition as I get older, though the older I get the further away it seems. The journey to complete understanding will take a myriad of lifetimes. That very notion is a challenge.

As biological entities, we are insignificant on the Cosmic scale of time (13.8 billion years) and space (90+ billion light years). However, as observing consciousnesses (or souls), we are – each and every one of us – subjectively the epicentre of the Universe. 

Grasping this paradox is a fundamental spiritual challenge. Casting aside the Ego, as it becomes less necessary to project oneself upon the human status hierarchy, while maintaining the sense of self as a curious, observing awareness requires focus. [Why am I writing this? For the ego-satisfaction of page-view metrics? Or for the discipline of staying focused on reaching a tighter definition of what I really hold to be true?]

The more vociferously any religion insists that it – and only it – holds ultimate truth, and all unbelievers are damned, the more I shun it. I am deeply wedded to the insight I received a few summers ago that everyone who seeks God shall find God in their own way.

Many do not seek God; fine. I am not attempting to change their minds, though I'm more than happy to enter into a discussion on spiritual matters with them should they wish to converse. A spiritual challenge. Others are on their own pathway to God, different to mine; perhaps it is a pathway that lies within the framework of an established religion. Fine! Again, I will not attempt to change their mind. In spiritual conversations with them I focus on a search for common ground, seeking that which unites us spiritually, rather than digging up doctrinal divisions.

Assuming that you too are on a path to spiritual growth, to enlightenment, to a deeper understanding of reality, to greater wisdom – should you consider your journey to be a challenge? Or a series of challenges? Or does it all come naturally, with ease?

Moments of connectedness with the infinite and eternal. Moments when you feel consciously plugged into the Cosmos. Moments of awareness that you belong to far more than just your physical body. My challenge is to seek such moments, notice them when they happen, and learn from them, and grow from them; Lent helps me focus my mind.

Lent 2025: day 25
Say farewell to materialism

Lent 2024: day 22
Ego vs. Consciousness – the Individual vs the Collective (Pt II)

Lent 2023: day 22
God, Aliens and the Unfolding Universe

Lent 2022: day 22
The Good Lord and the Environment

Lent 2021: day 22
Muscle Memory, Mindfulness and Metaphysics

Lent 2020: day 22
Repeatable Metaphysical Experiences

Lent 2026: day 21 – a life measured in physical challenges

Reaching the end of Lent's third week and feeling that I've been too easy on myself. I'm finding the physical challenges of giving up meat, alcohol and salt snacks a doddle. I'm not feeling any sense of struggle. I'm not having to fight the temptation to open that bottle of cider in the fridge or to have a glass of port. There's no temptation to buy a hamburger or fry some steak. After all, this is my 35th Lent in a row, and so the practice has become habitual, instinctive almost, and something that I've come to associate with the season. 

Long ago, when I began taking Lent seriously, giving up confectionery, cakes, biscuits, desserts and sugary carbonated drinks used to be a thing, but over the decades, these have all disappeared from my day-to-day diet. I miss them not – and so avoiding them during Lent as I do at all other times of the year has long ceased to be any kind of challenge. Outside of Lent, I will occasionally eat cake or dessert for the sake of social politeness, but this category of foodstuffs does not enter my shopping cart at all. I whizz past the confectionery and cake/biscuit aisles in the supermarket without giving them a glance. 

So avoiding sugar is a challenge overcome. Like learning to read or learning to drive, I've learnt to avoid sugar. And with each passing year, giving up alcohol for Lent is getting easier and easier. The widespread appearance of zero-alcohol beers, wines and even spirits, in Poland's shops and restaurants is a boon during Lent (and indeed, a cold zero beer swigged back on a long walk is preferable to one that gives you a buzz when it's hot).

However, I do not intend to drop alcohol altogether. Conviviality garrulousness in social occasions enhances quality of life. Entering the altered state of consciousness, consciously, with purpose, is a positive thing.

My daily exercise-and-walking regime, now conducted every day since 1 January 2014, was something originally instituted during a Lent a long time ago, and was gradually spun out over the whole year. So again, in terms of physical activity, Lent isn't a challenge – it's no different to any other time of year. However, since my heart attack  (which occurred last Lent!), I have ceased to do pull-ups, press-ups, sit-ups and weights, as these put too much strain on my heart. 

Overall, the observance of Lent has introduced more and more healthy things into my routine; both the will not to do something unhealthy and the will to do something healthy have been trained and put into year-round practice.

So should I be setting myself tougher physical challenges? Probably not. I have lived without caffeine for Lent twice, but brain-cracking headaches put me off taking that any further. One strong cup of coffee first thing in the morning, the year round, is good for me (with the very occasional social cup now and then). I have also gone vegan for Lent twice, but that also proved too tough to continue in subsequent years. So my Lenten diet includes dairy products and fish/seafood. And this I find easy; though it will be nice to have a big juicy steak when it's all over. Exercises? If I come across something valuable (plank, back extensions and bird-dog stretches are relatively recent additions), I intend to add the exercise into my daily routine, though from the next New Year.

Absolutely crucial to all this my use of spreadsheet and gamification. The aim is for me to beat the younger me. More paces, holding the plank longer, more portions of fresh fruit & veg, and (slightly) less alcohol than last year. That's my long-term challenge. Lent is a boost, a spur. But why am I not challenging myself more during Lent? I am, but with a different focus.

The ultimate physical challenge we all face is ageing. Do we accept the challenge fully, grudgingly, or do we deny that ageing affects us? Or postpone even thinking about it until old age has caught up with us good and proper? I do see ageing as a challenge; it's rather like going on a very long bicycle ride. You need to know where you're going, train beforehand, have the right equipment, talk to those who've done it – but above all, have the right mindset.

I view life as a succession of challenges. The reason my Lents are becoming less focused on physical challenges is because I'm taking up the spiritual challenge of Lent with increasing seriousness.

Lent 2025: day 21
Gender and spirituality

Lent 2024: day 21
The individual vs. the collective

Lent 2023, day 21
Intuition, Inspiration and Creativity

Lent 2022: day 21
The perennial question – how much spirituality do we need?

Lent 2021: day 21
Where is your soul from?

Lent 2020: day 21
Finding a symbol for your religion