Lent 2026: day 41 – in touch with the intangible

Early morning walks on an empty stomach (but after a strong black coffee, no sugar), are for me among those moments of repeatable joy, especially when the sun is shining through. There's a buzz in my head, a slight giddiness, not at all unpleasant, a mildly altered state. Walking through the forest, catching sight of a hare or deer, absence of traffic or indeed anybody, awareness of the seasons, a connection with nature. Gratitude; connectedness; a grounding in base reality, touching the sense of life.

Who or what is God? Certainly, God is not a person. God is by nature indefinable to our human minds. We are not to fully know God until the moment of ultimate unity.

As I walk this morning, I find myself considering a test for the ego: would you wish another incarnation as a human, or would you rather rush through to that ultimate union with Brahman, with The One, with God? 

To be honest, I feel I'd like another crack at life as a human (though next time with more wisdom, resulting from spiritual evolution). I'd like to carry on with and within the cycle of samsara (birth, death, and rebirth). For the sake of curiosity. Knowing that within one lifetime, there can never be closure.

No rush, just a slow, patient, continuous improvement based on series of learnings, reaching higher and higher levels of metaphysical insight. Life after life after life. In tangible, physical, biological form. Consciously guided wetware.

Does this suggest that my ego, far from being switched off or even dimmed, is still interested in manifesting itself in future bodies? Reluctantly, I have to answer 'yes'.

Do I need another adventure, or do I just want one? What do I wish for my next incarnation? This is where the narrative arc of the ego needs to align with the Purpose of the Cosmos for optimal results. The best answer is: "I wish to continue learning, to continue in spiritual growth, and to receive with simplicity whatever biology I am born into."

And here I return to a fundamental thought I've often harboured since youth: had my parents not met, my consciousness would still be here, on earth, in biological form – just not the biological form that I currently inhabit. Everything that I'd have in common with that hypothetical person, essentially awareness, metaphysical will, and those qualia memories – familiar flashes of exomnesia harking back to a previous existence – is rooted in consciousness. Everything that's different – DNA, upbringing, environment – is rooted in biology. 

The intangible, the ineffable, feels so far off, but I do believe that spiritual evolution brings us closer to at least having some vague idea of life is for, why something exists rather than nothing, the true nature of reality – and the true nature of God,

Lent 2024: day 41
More Questions than Answers (Pt II)

Lent 2023, day 41
The End of Times

Lent 2022: day 41
A Better Future

Lent 2021: day 41
The Holiest of Holies

Lent 2026: day 40 – is God is knowable or unknowable?

 For Marek

What can we say of God with certainty? That God is good, that God is love? Or, that because of God's ineffable nature, and because of the limitations of human reasoning and language, God is entirely unknowable? We humans seem destined never to understand God through our human reason, through logic, through scientific method. The metaphysical lies forever beyond our grasp.

What, though, of our physical world? Will we even get to understand that? This is has been the pursuit of science since the late 17th century. Since then, mankind has built up an ever-more complete grasp of the immutable laws that govern everything from the inner workings of an atom to an expanding Cosmos full of galaxies, and on the basis of that knowledge, had developed technologies that have vastly improved the quality of our lives.

While our scientific knowledge has grown exponentially, we are still a long way off from knowing it all.

In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking posits three possibilities for a grand unified theory of everything that will satisfy our ultimate curiosity about the Universe:

1. There is a theory of everything “which we will someday discover”.

2. There is no theory of everything, “just an infinite sequence of theories” that describe reality with ever-greater degrees of accuracy, but never ultimately ties up all the loose ends, much like Zeno's paradox of only ever getting halfway to your destination.

3. There is no theory of everything – “events cannot be predicted beyond a certain extent”. Hawking stops himself from going further and stating the possibility that the Universe might be fundamentally unknowable.

So I would add a fourth possibility: it is not for us, Homo sapiens, to ever come up with a workable theory of everything. Our brains are just too puny to get to grips with the complexity of an unfolding Universe. Not only is the metaphysical beyond our grasp, but the physical is too. Maybe Homo superior will get there, maybe not.

All that is certain to us is conscious experience and our intuitions relating from that experience. Gnosis. Knowledge through experience rather than knowledge through learning. The one thing I do know for sure is that I am conscious. Indeed, I am conscious of being conscious. This is the fundamental base substrate of my subjective reality. Aware of being aware, I am! 

"Are you a Trinitarian or a Unitarian?" "Do you believe in Transubstantiation or  Consubstantiation?" Thousands perished for replying with the 'wrong' answer. But ultimately, do nuances of dogma matter at all?  Does God even care what we understand God to be?

This is why I find religious fundamentalism of all sorts intolerable; fundamentalists proclaim certainty of that which by definition is unknowable. Divine inspiration can only take us so far. We can merely be aware that those who seek God are on a quest for knowledge that is ultimately doomed never to succeed. In this lifetime.

"Jesus said : "Let him who seeks cease not seeking until he finds"." – From the [Gnostic] Gospel of Thomas, 1:2.

Lent 2025: day 40
The nature of the past

Lent 2024: day 40
More questions than answers (Pt I)

Lent 2024, Day 40
How we lead our lives

Lent 2022: Day 40
Fasting and Temptation

Lent 2021: Day 40
Medicine, Mindfulness and Miracles

Lent 2020: Day 40
Coercion, Persuasion, Conversion and Faith

Lent 2026: day 39 – on Original Sin

What is Original Sin? To many, it's become some old dogma cooked up by early Christian theologians to justify the whole schtick about why mankind needs salvation. 

In my personal theology, I consider original sin not in terms of vague inherited guilt, nor as an primordial act of disobedience, but as something far more immediate and recognisable. 

I take original sin to be anger.

Classical theology, rooted in the Augustinian tradition, frames original sin as 'disordered will' – the conscious turning away from the good towards the self. My lived experience suggests something else, something more visceral. The disorder does not present itself as 'will'. It is a reaction to external stimulus, instantaneous override of good judgment and the ability to calculate long-term consequences.

By 'anger' I mean that hair-trigger orientation that reacts before it understands. Losing one's temper, when instinct overpowers intellect, and 'flight or fight' kicks in. The collapse of the wave function into 'I' vs 'Adversary'. [If you need a frame of reference here, think road-rage. Google Gemini image]

Anger inhabits a space that is biological, moral and existential. It is innate. It is triggered by perceived threat. It carries with it an implicit judgment – this should not be happening! I am right! The moron driver of the black SUV is clearly in the wrong! And anger compels immediate action, from incoherent shouting to drawing a .38 revolver. In an instant, anger simplifies the world into opponent and self, wrong and right, offence and response.

Anger is not just one sin among many. It is baked into the operating system. Once anger is engaged, perception narrows, ambiguity collapses, and the other becomes the foe. Time shortens – there's no 'cooling-off period', no 'counting to ten', no space for reflection, only reaction. Lashing out. The self consolidates, defined by nothing else than what it is resisting. Anger is already a form of violence, even before any violent action – or even in the absence of violent action.

The Old Testament is full of references to a wrathful Lord. [This supports my contention – and that of the Gnostics – that the Old Testament God was an imposter, the Demiurge, the creator of the material world, and nothing to do with the almighty God of Love as preached by Jesus.] However, the New Testament rarely mentions anger. A rare reference: the Epistle of James 1:19-20: "Let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath: For the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God". All four Gospels tell of Jesus's Cleansing of the Temple, but in none of the four accounts does Jesus display any outright anger at the moneychangers, other than possibly overturning their tables (mentioned in Matthew 21:12 and Mark 11:15).

Anger always requires a trigger; it does not arise out of nothing. Anger is where the system 'kicks off' into an altered state. From the neurocognitive perspective, anger is immediate, subcortical and energetically mobilising. While the idea of the 'reptile brain' (a reptilian complex at the heart of the brain, surrounded by paleomammalian and neomammalian layers) has long been disproved, there is a grain of truth here. Bypassing deliberation, anger is evolutionarily useful in a threat-filled environment, but maladaptive in a world of complex social relations. In theological language, one might say that our base nature is not evil, but misaligned – optimised for an environment that we are no longer living in.

The implications of this maladaptation is important. Original Sin here is not primarily rule-breaking or rejecting God. It is misperception under the influence of anger, a form of behaviour caused by loss of self-control. Ethics becomes less about compliance and more about the discipline of not allowing reptilian first reaction to define our reality. Also of huge importance is the speed with which we can right ourselves after being hit by a wave of anger, how quickly our consciousness, our intuition and our intellect can return once more to dominate our behaviour.

'Salvation' in the context of anger is that recovery of self (literally, "I was beside myself with anger"). Loss of control is temporary; the mind returns to the space between stimulus and response.

'Sin' in the context of anger is no longer a static condition, but a feedback loop. Anger generates anger. Reaction provokes reaction. Strike calls for counter-strike! Yet response to egregious behaviour directed against one should always be appropriate and proportionate to the infraction, and that calls for analysis, not mindless lashing out. Ultimately, anger can be mollified, its causes mitigated (like, drive less, avoid cities and motorways), but the trigger mechanism is always there, in your head.

AFTERTHOUGHT: After writing the above, I went for a walk. In the other part of Jakubowizna, a large aggressive dog suddenly started barking at me from behind a wooden fence, at a distance of about  a metre and half. My instant response was to shout a stream of obscene Polish words at the hound. Fortunately, there was no one in the front garden to witness this and to think me mad. A few paces further along the pavement, I had returned to my usual disposition, albeit shaken up a bit.

Lent 2024: day 39 
The Magic Power of Gratitude

Lent 2023, day 39
Peace of Mind

Lent 2022: day 39
Animal spirits, animal consciousness

Lent 2021: day 39
Praise the Sun God

Lent 2020: day 39
Don't let misfortune catch you unaware!

Lent 2026: day 38 – do animals have souls?

Czester and Scrapper went to the vets today for the snip – a far less invasive operation than what poor Wenusia had to endure. It's eight pm, they've just had their first (small) meal of the day, and they both seem in fine form. Still, I felt guilty that the two boys were being deprived of their sexual potential. Fatherhood is no longer a reason for them to live. Why do cats live? What do they live for? Who do they live for? We keep cats as pets, and it is for our convenience that we get them sterilised. We humans manage their reproduction. Companion animals are cared for, fed and sheltered, but wildlife – hunting and culling excepted – self-regulates, existing as it does at the fringes of human civilisations. Deer, hare, boar, we see them from time to time; their lives are perilous but fully agential. Living in instinct and intuition. And aware of their existence.

Whenever I look into the eyes of any of my cats for any length of time, we end up staring at each other, exchanging slow blinks. We may not know what each of us is thinking, but I am aware that I am looking into the eyes of a conscious creature, just as self-aware as I am. A being that is as central to the universe as I feel that I am.

I absolutely refuse to speculate on the possibility of cross-species reincarnation, for I have never had any experiences that could possibly inform me of such. But I do feel that my cats have that small 'c' consciousness which I possess, and that their feline bodies are indeed containers for consciousness. Or souls.

Our relationship with our pets, is more simple than the complexities of inter-human relationships. The feelings we have for our pets, fondness, love even, expect no reciprocity. The ego doesn't get in the way, no trying to show who's boss. Just acceptance of who we are.

Dogs, having lived in the presence of humans for much longer than cats, have evolved facial muscles that can form expressions to which humans can ascribe emotions. Cats can't do this (yet!), rendering their faces more enigmatic to their human owners. Yet cats' inner experience cannot be denied. That feline mind is forever occupied by something. It is paying attention; it is there in the present.

But does the cat have metacognition – is it aware of being aware? Probably not. I'd posit that metacognition requires a substrate of higher intelligence in parallel with the substrate required for consciousness. But this lack of consciousness of being conscious does not negate the presence of consciousness in animals.

In 2012, the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness (2012) concluded that many non-human animals, including cats and dogs, possess the neurological substrates necessary for consciousness. This landmark scientific statement challenged the long-held view that consciousness is unique to humans, and has since influenced global animal welfare policies.

Take a strictly Darwinian view of animals and their purpose is solely to survive and reproduce. But spend time getting to know cats and you will see that there's more to them than that. There's a soul in there, and that soul is also on the eternal journey from Zero to One.

Lent 2025: day 38
A Lenten interruption (heart attack)

Lent 2024: day 38
Neither a follower nor a leader be

Lent 2023, day 38
Go with the flow, or swim against the tide

Lent 2022: day 38
When I was a child, I understood as a child

Lent 2021: day 38
Will we ever understand what's inside the atom?

Lent 2020: Day 38
Religion, Society and the Individual

Lent 2026: day 37 – diverse minds, diverse souls?

I base my theological worldview on the ground truth that consciousness is primary. I can declare with absolute certainty that no one other than myself can experience what it is to be me. My life is my own. It is built upon memory, my memories of myriad qualia going back to early childhood. Not memories of events, which are prone to fail, degrade or twist, but memories of feelings, conscious experience, awareness. Memories that resurface, either bidden, triggered (typically by smell or sound), or that pop into my stream of consciousness spontaneously. Congruent familiarities. And that, dear reader, is the essence of me.

And yet no man is an island. Cooperation has made Homo sapiens an unparalleled evolutionary success. Yes, as members of the species, we are all different, neurologically different, each with our own blend of strengths and talents. In the material world, we all have to cooperate to get by, working as a plethora of professions and service providers woven together into societies.

Today I want to ask what role does neurodiversity play in the way we respond to the metaphysical? Does our neurodiversity lead to diverse ways to define and find God? How do neurological differences affect our spirituality? After all, they affect our social, cognitive and emotional functions. But our faith in a supreme being – or belief in the lack thereof? And those of faith – how does it manifest itself in our lives? How do we conduct our search for meaning and purpose in life? How does it affect the relationship between our consciousness and our ego?

Some minds have an innate tendency to systemise how they see reality, with a preference for internally consistent frameworks. They crave order and neatness. Other minds, however, are stronger on loose associative thinking, and are able to detect novel patterns or connections across domains.

Just looking at the above pair of mind-types in the context of metaphysics, the first suggests a preference for ritual and doctrinal clarity; the second for imaginative immersion and symbolic/transcendent interpretations. In other words, I am postulating that some mind-types might innately seek exoteric faiths that set out their truths based on the received word.  For other mind-types, however, esoteric traditions are more attractive – engagement in a search for truth based on subjective experience. Here, I'd place exoteric faith as an equal and opposite to reductionist-materialist atheism: you base the faith on the Word of God or your atheism on the certainty of Science. No place in either for fluffy, woolly notions of first-person subjective experience of the Numinous.

Metaphysics – aspects of reality above or beyond the physical, the material –  is by its very nature underdetermined. Neurodiversity affects how people tolerate that lack of definition. Some minds have a high need for certainty, and are uncomfortable with ill-defined concepts unless formalised. They will strive to collapse metaphysics into clear doctrine. The Nicene Creed which I mentioned two days ago is a good example – the certainty-seeking mind aligns with religion as social control. Other mind-types have a much higher ambiguity tolerance, and are comfortable with paradox (something can be both true and not true at the same time), and are able to sustain open-ended philosophical tension.

We all have but the mind we were born with. But we can ask for more – we can learn, observe, extend our curiosity. Frequency and intensity of experiences vary from mind to mind. This imprints upon the consciousness in different ways. Ultimately, we must strive to understand ourselves, our biologies, our minds – and then to engage in open dialogue if we genuinely seek metaphysical enlightenment, to progress on the journey from Zero to One.

Lent 2024: day 37
Observer or participant?

Lent 2023, day 37
The Inner Hug: Contact with the Eternal

Lent 2022: day 37
Take it easy - or get rigorous?

Lent 2021: day 37
Dream insights into past lives

Lent 2020: day 37
Further thoughts on Reincarnation

Lent 2026: day 36 – time and the soul

The Ancient Greeks distinguished between elapsed time, perceived time and eternity.

Let's begin with chronos (χρόνος) – measurable, sequential time. This is the closest to elapsed time in the modern scientific sense. Chronos is quantitative, continuous, divisible time, progressing in a linear fashion from past through present into the future, measurable in years, seasons, months, weeks, days and hours. Chronos was used for tracking celestial cycles in astronomy, for marking events in history, and for everyday scheduling. Chronos is not an independent entity, but a measure of change, without change, there is no time to count. This aligns with modern physics – time is a parameter that indexes change in a system, in particular, entropy – the time it takes for example for an ice cube to melt, for milk to dissolve into coffee or a strawberry to decay into mush. The inexorable progression from order into disorder.

Then we have kairos (καιρός) – qualitative, experienced time. It cannot be measured with a clock; it is felt, not counted. This corresponds to the notions of perceived or opportune time. Kairos is not something to be quantified; it is entirely context-dependent. It can feel fast or slow. Floyd Dixon puts it like this: "We was having so much fun/Didn't know it was half past one/Turned round to have one more/Looked at the clock and it was half past four." On the other hand, after holding the plank posture for four minutes, the fifth minute takes what feels like an hour to pass. Kairos is also the moment when something ought to happen. In Greek rhetoric it was the right moment to present the clinching argument. In warfare, the decisive instant to strike. As such, kairos is linked in meaning to opportunity or decision – and the intuition to act. I would put this as the moment of aligned flows; when your flow and the Cosmic flow are congruent. It is the 'now-or-never' moment; the 'sliding-door' moment. Kairos maps directly onto modern psychological notions of subjective time dilation/ compression, flow states and the emotional weighting of moments.

And finally, the Greeks had the notion of Aion (αἰών) – eternal or cyclical time. This is unbounded time, associated with the lifespan of the cosmos. Aion is not sequential in the everyday sense, but is often cyclical or timeless, associated with permanence or totality. Plato defines chronos as “a moving image of aion”. Sir Roger Penrose uses the term Aeon to describe one cycle of endless Big Bangs, cosmic expansions and heat-deaths, from one Big Bang to the next. When the last atom ceases to vibrate, there is no vibration, nothing with which to measure time. Time ceases. Without time, there is no space. And at that instant, the next Big Bang pops up. An eternity of aeons. 

And so – where in time is the soul? Seeing 'soul' and 'consciousness' as the same concept but from different historical ages, I would consider the soul as belonging to the aion, the biological body as  belonging to chronos, and consciously experiencing kairos. Passing through the aeon, chronologically. One lifetime at a time.

********

This Sunday, the clocks go forward. The realm of chronos, the quantifiable. Yet what we experience is not an arbitrary hour on the clock, but is predicated by our biological reaction to the sun's rising and setting, and all points in between – our circadian rhythm. On Sunday morning, the sun will rise at 06:17, an hour and two minutes later than on Saturday. We will be robbed of an hour's sleep – and this has health implications (hospital admissions for heart attacks spike by 24% in the week after the time change – it was this time last year that my heart attack occurred). 

So to prepare for the spring time change, I have been going to bed early (as early as 9pm) for the past four evenings, and waking up shortly after 5am, in other words before sunrise, which today was at 05:27. 

The early start is wonderful. I witness the sun rising through the forest next door, and set off for an early pre-breakfast stroll. Early spring, so the young day is full of the year's coiled potential, still waiting to burst open. On an empty stomach (just the one black coffee!) I feel light-headed, alert and alive. An altered state. Quite something! It's sunny, though with a chill wind from the south, a wonderful feeling to be alive and soaking up the qualia. 

Kairos suggests that it's later than it is; my early-to-bed, early-to-rise pre-time-change regime has gifted me an additional hour and half of daylight that I could have wasted by waking at seven am. On Saturday night, I go to bed at 9pm and wake up at 6am, having had a normal eight hours' sleep.

In the balance between chronos and kairos lies the balance between quantity and quality.

Lent 2024: day 36
After death, what's next? (Pt III)

Lent 2023: day 36
Money and metaphysics

Lent 2022: day 36
Losing sight of God

Lent 2021: Day 36
One life is not enough

Lent 2020: Day 36
Accounting for talent

Lent 2026: day 35 – religion and social control

I am not sold on the idea of organised religions for two reasons. The first is that I firmly believe, I intuit, that everyone who seeks God shall find God in their own way. There are therefore as many paths to God as people who seek God. This is one of my primary principles regarding human spirituality. I believe that in essence faith is experiential rather than book-taught – esoteric rather than exoteric.

The second reason is that I see religions as all too often straying in their remit from the spiritual into the temporal realm. The temptation for spiritual leaders to appropriate humans' innate longing for the numinous, – the sense of awe – for the purpose of social control is too great. "Believe in what you are told to believe, live according to our precepts, and you will be rewarded in the afterlife" is a simple yet persuasive narrative.

In The Republic, written around 375 BC, Plato (through his narrator, Socrates), engages in his famous mind-experiment of devising the perfect state. Having set up a hypothetical community of mutually interdependent craftsmen (farmers, builders and weavers), which is expanded to include merchants, artists, tutors and warriors, it becomes clear to Socrates and his interlocutors that some form of social control would be required to ensure that the unjust do not end up dominating the just. Socrates postulates the sort of religion that a just state would require to keep  the morale of its citizens high. He is critical of Homer and other authors who portray the gods as morally dubious, and so, introduces censorship to his republic. Strict control of cultural narratives is therefore essential: stories about the gods must be controlled, because they shape the character of the populace. “We must first supervise the storytellers. If they tell a fine story, we approve it; if not, we reject it.” Children absorb stories before they can reason; myths must be filtered at source. The state decides what is acceptable. Plato is saying that rulers need to have systematic control of cultural input.

Seven centuries later, in 325 AD, the Roman Emperor Constantine – who had converted to Christianity eight years earlier – convened the Council of Nicaea, summoning 200 bishops from around Christendom to Nicaea (in modern-day Turkey) to hammer out what it was exactly that Christians believed in. After all, he reasoned, if this is to become the official religion of the Roman Empire, it's important to know what it stands for. And thus was hammered out the Nicene Creed, an imperially approved statement of what the Church believes (and by omission what it doesn't). Of course, this wasn't the end of the matter; debate would rage on for centuries – about the nature of the Holy Trinity in particular – but it was a crucial step in establishing Christianity as a global religion, rather than a loose collection of squabbling cults.

Theological debate in the service of empire-building, the Council of Nicaea highlights how the needs of church and state can overlap. And so they did for the best part of a millennium and a half. The Enlightenment led to a clear separation of secular governments from church authorities; the 'divine right' to rule was over. Theocracies are on the retreat (with a few stubborn exceptions).

Is church-going in general decline in the West because people can see through the social control aspects of religions? Has atheism – based on the notion that there's no God because everything is composed of matter – led to societies losing control? In balance, no. Secular laws by and large work effectively, keep trouble-makers in society from causing too much harm to the rest of us.

I have written about the rising numbers of people identifying themselves as 'Spiritual But Not Religious' (SBNR) in the US, as church-going and religious affiliation is falling. In Europe, this is reflected in the term 'believing but not belonging', with many people retaining spiritual beliefs, but disengaging from church participation and doctrine. And there are also the 'Religious But Not Spiritual', who go to church out of a sense of tradition, duty and order, without feeling any spiritual calling. 

I would posit that a fixed proportion of society has some kind of a spiritual calling; for some, there is the need to belong to a faith community and engage in regular spiritual practice (church-going); for others – this number is increasing as the former decreases – a self-authored worldview with an emphasis on spiritual experiences rather than pre-packaged teachings is preferred.

How will this look in the future? I suspect that the SBNRs will continue to grow in number, and this will be seen in a proliferation of YouTube channels and social-media accounts; a whole new stream of people searching for God in their own way.

Lent 2024: day 35
After death what's next? (Pt II)

Lent 2023: day 35
Into the Afterlife (Pt III)

Lent 2022: day 35
Altered states - caffeine and alcohol

Lent 2021: day 35
The science of coincidence

Lent 2020: day 35
Soul and Body

Lent 2026: day 34 – qualia, sensitivity and attention

Sunrise is getting earlier and earlier in the run up to next Sunday's time change. I woke up this morning at quarter past five*, fed the cats, then caught the sun rising through the trees of the forest next door. Some thin clouds in the sky, but the red orb shines through branches touched by a light overnight frost. Scrapper and Czester, sitting on the window sill, framed this picture. 

A sense of bliss becomes me. All is well. I give thanks. I give thanks for noticing the sunrise, and for being able to revel in it for a moment. After all, this dawn could have been overcast and dull. Qualia like this are to live for.

Our daily lives are a progress through a constant cloud of potential qualia, some of which come to our attention; most, however, pass by without notice. Unremarkable. What collapses the wave function to trigger a memorable qualia experience? Vivid sensory inputs? Or is it more emotional? Is paying attention the answer? 

If so, I have only really started paying mindful attention to what's around me in recent years – yet my mind is crammed with memories from childhood, youth and earlier adult years. 

What selects for the experiences we note, and those we subconsciously overlook? The warmth of the sun on my face on a bright spring day like today, a subtly changing cloudscape, the buzzing of an early bee around my front door, the crunch of dry twigs underfoot. These experiences are the qualia that form the raw texture of reality.

However, at any given moment, there are far more of them available to experience than we are capable of being aware of. The world does not present itself to us in neatly lined-up row of sensations to sample one after the other. We live in a sensation-rich environment, abundant and random, that at times can feel almost overwhelming. 

What we define as 'our experience' is but a thin selection of all possible experiences that could potentially be experienced. So how do we allocate the finite resource of our awareness? Is it something that requires our active effort (attention)? Or is it something passive (sensitivity)?  Something we are born with to a lesser or greater degree? Is it something, that applying discipline to it, we can intensify? Should we sift through this firehose of sensory inputs looking for anything in particular?

One thing I learnt from my father is the importance of observation; to be observant, to notice, to be aware of detail. Attention can be trained, disciplined, refined. But as with talents, it is based on something that's already present. And that is sensitivity. Great artists have it, it opens their doors to perception.

Left to itself, attention drifts. It is captured by novelty, by movement, by threat, by desire, by commerce. It loops through familiar concerns. It returns, again and again, to whatever has most successfully hooked it in the past. In this sense, much of what we attend to is not chosen consciously at all, but inherited – from biology, from culture, from advertising, from habit.

What we notice, what strikes our inward eye to imprint itself on our long-term memory, accumulates over time to shape our inner life, and indeed to shape who we are. And with death, as consciousness passes on, I feel that the strongest of those qualia memories will resurface at some future time in another biological container.

A short walk before sunset; the air is getting chilly. Birdsong. A rising razor-crescent moon. The cats chasing each other down the drive. Qualia. And during the walk, a pleasant and familiar past-life flashback. Short, not particularly intense, but enough to provide me with continuity and assurance.

* While I mitigate seasonal affective disorder in autumn by ignoring the time change and going to bed at the same time relative to the sun, in spring, a different strategy is called for. In preparation for the spring time change, I start to go to bed one hour earlier relative to sunset, so when the clocks go forward at the end of March, I can wake up at the new hour and be up around sunrise.

Lent 2024: day 34
After death – what's next? (Pt I)

Lent 2023: day 34
Into the Afterlife (Pt II)

Lent 2022: day 34
A search for purpose

Lent 2021: day 34
The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson

Lent 2020; day 34
What goes round, comes around