One autumn evening in 1970, I'm walking home from school up Argyle Road. A boy on a bicycle, riding the other way, sees me and swerves over to say hello. It's Raymond - my best friend from primary school. I pretend not to know him, to have forgotten him despite the fact we were still going to school together a little over a year earlier. But I had moved to the posher environs of Cleveland Park, and went to a grammar school, while Raymond still lived round the corner from our old house in Hanwell and went to a secondary modern school, having failed the 11+ exams. I shrugged my shoulders in feigned surprise at this odd encounter and went on my way.
The guilt did not go away - I still feel a sense of profound shame about this incident. I caught up with Ray online some 30 years later - a chance to atone. He was very big about it, saying that if that's one of the worst things I'd done in my life, I can't be that bad a person. And yet that shame about my behaviour that day - triggered by a mixture of snooty hauteur and on-spectrum introversion - haunts me to this day.
Hardly a sin in the eyes of the Church, certainly not an offence - but something that for me was an act of thorough unpleasantness. Over my life there's been a catalogue of others; thoughtless words, poor judgment; things I have failed to do - or say; avoidance of difficult but necessary decisions and conversations. These are my sins, sins in my book because of the embarrassment I cause myself by just thinking about them all those years later. If there is karma for one's sins, for me it takes the form of painful cringing when recalling them.
Science suggests that in our bodies, there is not one atom present that was there, within us, seven (some say nine) years earlier. Our bodies are constantly recycling molecules, and as we age we do so with atoms that were not part of us when we were younger. Yet our memories are with us still, passed on, somehow, from atom to atom, memories of bad things we did as children, bad enough to stay with us and remind themselves across our lifespan.
The present 'me' is a continuation of the old 'me', and those embarrassing or shameful memories are part of that link. This defines the human soul. As we wake each morning, we return to consciousness with our past a toolbag of useful experiences to be put to use in the future. And yet those uncomfortable memories of something I did as a child or as a youth or young man pop up, often unbidden, in train of thoughts. This mental/spiritual continuity spanning decades suggests to me the presence of a supernatural - supernatural as in something more than the scientifically definable at work.
Prising apart the ego from the consciousness, the biology from the spirit, the baggage of our past from the promise of the future is all important. The body dies; with it die the sins of the ego. The purity of consciousness survives - how it survives is beyond our understanding - it does so purged of these sins.
I shall return to the notion of consciousness fleeting through myriad biological bodies on its path to God in later posts in this Lenten series, starting with an introduction to my thoughts on reincarnation, tomorrow.
This time last year:
Build Your Own Religion
This time five years ago:
God, Creation and the Fine-Tuned Universe
This time six years ago:
The infinitely long path from Zero to One
This time eight years ago:
Images of God
This time nine years ago:
City-centre living, Warsaw-style
This time ten years ago:
Communist plaque on Zygmunt's Column
This time 12 years ago:
Three weeks into Lent
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