On Death.

All Hallows' Eve, the time in the liturgical year dedicated to remembering the dead. My mother died on this day eight years ago, my father died on 29 October four years ago. I am also minded at this time of the boys from my Polish scout troop (3. Londyńska Drużyna Harcerska Błękitna Trójka), all born within a few years of me, who have already died, way too young. 

How we cope with the concept of death depends totally on our worldview. Those who would class themselves as rational materialists, holding that there is nothing but matter, and that death is a final snuffing out, would, I imagine, have a harder time coping than those who sense greater forces at play.

My worldview is based on the assumption that consciousness is the fundamental property of the Universe; spacetime and matter are emergent properties of consciousness - not the other way around. This is grounded in interpretations of quantum mechanic, which posit that consciousness is necessary for the collapse of the wave function - that until a conscious observer looks at the outcome, a photon is both a wave and a particle. When the Universe began, it required a consciousness to observe it, I would intuit.

My assumption is that consciousness survives death, though stripped of the ego and other biological markers. Consciousness returns into the panpsychic unity of everything; and from here, my personal subjective experience would suggest a new bodily incarnation that will also glimpse past lives through flashbacks and dreams. These are just strong, frequent and familiar enough to make me sense that this represents the continuation of consciousness beyond biological death.

Now, most of us remember our childhood and our adolescent years, despite the fact that our brains are made up of entirely new material to that which lived out those memories. In a similar way, my life-long flashbacks and dreams give me reason to believe that such anomalous memories were first experienced by my consciousness but in another biological vessel.

Near-death experiences are frequently reported by people who have returned from clinical death (including by my mother after her first heart attack); these NDEs also serve to suggest that slipping from biological life is a pleasant experience. Yet for many near-death experiencers, it is vastly more; a view beyond the veil.

Even if you are of the materialist mindset, you can still take comfort from the fact that after bodily death, after the moment that the vital life-force leaves the biological entity it had inhabited - not a single atom stops its motion. Yes, complex molecules will eventually breakdown as the body decays or is cremated, but bear in mind the lifetime of the hydrogen atom (posited to be 10¹⁶⁰ years). Which is 54 orders of magnitude further in the future than the heat-death of the Universe (a mere 10¹⁰⁶ years away), so no worries. there. And given that 63% of all the atoms in your body are hydrogen, that's nearly two thirds of them that will see out the end of the Cosmos. Not bad, eh? Even materialists must concede that they will be survived by atoms - can those be vectors carrying consciousness forward? 

Panpsychists will hold that consciousness evolves, it orchestrates, gaining in complexity - so I am ready to believe (though I cannot prove) that future incarnations of my consciousness will be more aware, more understanding, and I'd even say morally improved (if we can equate God with Good). Biological evolution is a scientific certainty - I would posit that spiritual evolution is real, through the continuous cycle of rebirth of our eternal consciousness as it slips into yet another body as it passes by, along the eternal journey from Zero to One.

As I get older and wiser, my fear of death as an absolute snuffing out, followed by a nothingness that I cannot even experience, is fading. The actual state of death scares me not - it's just getting there - the frailties of old age, the indignity of disease, especially dementia. That is frightening. Exercise and diet are all-important to maintain health as long as possible.

This time two years ago:
Improvements on the Radom line

This three years ago:
Rural rights of way, revisited

This time four years ago:

Cause of death

This time five years ago:
Opole in the late-October sunshine

This time six years ago:
Work begins in earnest on the Karczunkowska viaduct

This time eight years ago:
Sublime autumn day in Jeziorki

This time nine years ago:
CitytoCity, MalltoMall

This time ten years ago:
(Internet) Radio Days

This time 11 years ago:
Another office move

This time 12 years ago:
Manufacturing a City of Culture

This time 13 years ago:
My thousandth post

This time 14 years ago:
Closure of ul. Poloneza

This time 15 years ago:
Scenes from a suburban petrol station

October's benign end

With the exception of one day when the temperature just before dawn neared zero, it's been a warm October - yesterday's daytime high was 18C. On my walk, it was warm enough to cause me to stop, remove my jacket and shirt to take off the t-shirt under them before dressing again. Today has also been clement with a 17C high. Checking my electricity use on the działka, I see that not having to heat the house for nearly all of October means that I am nicely on target from getting energy costs down to zero (balanced with output from my solar panels).

So - let's get out and about and revel in the splendour of the autumn sun... Below: the sun is low in the afternoon sky, between the trees of the forest north-east of Dąbrowa Duża.

Below: the road from Machcin II towards Dąbrowa Duża and Rososz beyond.

Below: the road from Adamów Rososki to Machcin II.

Below: mushroom time - the gatherers are out in force, but here are the toadstools that no one picks.

Canonical Prospect of Jakubowizna - the row of birches where the orchards give way to the forest.

And back at home - beautiful colours.

"Doo-doo-doo, lookin' out my back door" - the forest next door from the rear balcony.

Fingers crossed for more fine autumnal weather.

This time last year:
Disclosure day tomorrow?
[More like 26 July 2023!]

This time two years ago:
Coping with time change (go to bed an hour earlier!)

This time three years ago:
A sustainable food system for rural Poland

This time four years ago:
Sifting through a life

This time six years ago:
Throwing It All Away

This time seven years ago:
Hammer of Darkness falls on us again

This time eight years ago:
The working week with the clocks gone back

This time ten years:
Slowly on the mend after calf injury

This time 11 years ago:
Thorunium the Gothick

This time 12 years ago:
Łódź Widzew or Widź Łódzew 

This time 14 years ago:
A touch of frost in the garden

Cross-country train-travel tales

It would seem simple enough - to get from Chynów to Rzeszów without having to go up to Warsaw, then down to Kraków, then across to Rzeszów. I consult rozklad-pkp.pl. Indeed - there is an alternative - I could go Chynów-Radom-Lublin-Rzeszów. Not bad. Except I'd have to waste a hour and half waiting in Radom for the Lublin train and over two hours in Lublin waiting for the Rzeszów train. 

And then, by accident while waiting for a train home on Wednesday, I glanced at a printed timetable on the platform at Piaseczno station... I could get from Warka all the way down to Przeworsk, and from there it's just a short hop on a local train to Rzeszów. And I'd be there three hours earlier. And the ticket is cheaper - so why isn't the PKP website showing such a possibility?

And so, having bought my tickets online, I leave home at quarter past six, catch the local 06:31 Koleje Mazowieckie train from Chynów to Warka (on time), then jump on the Witos InterCity service from Warsaw to Przemyśl, due in Warka at 07:03. All good. Below: here is the Witos drawing into Warka station, three minutes late, having left W-wa Gdańska at 06:16. The train is just three carriages long.

Is there a catch? Well, two, catches actually. The first is that he old-school loco-hauled rolling stock (clean, I must say) lacks a buffet car. So sandwiches, fruit, and a thermos of tea from home were needed for the journey. Not a proper alternative to a lunch cooked on the train and served with a craft ale. The second is that the track modernisation works between Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski and Sandomierz, meant to have been finished in early September, are still ongoing - which mean a replacement bus service between those two towns. 

The train passes through Radom, then swings round Skarżysko-Kamienna, diverting off the main line to Kielce and Kraków to head south-east. Below: view from the back carriage of the junction outside Skarżysko-Kamienna. The main station is off to the left, the line to Radom and Warsaw off to the right.

Below: the Witos ends the first part of its journey - everyone out! Many passengers were Ukrainians heading home with heavy bags - dragging them over the footbridge wasn't convenient.

Below: the front of Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski station, with the second bus being prepared for departure (photo taken from the first bus which has just pulled out). 

Below: crossing the Vistula by (railway replacement service) bus. Lovely moody landscape.

Over the Vistula, in the industrial part of Sandomierz well away from its charming old town and castle, lies its railway station. And here, our two railway replacement buses arrived, an hour or so after leaving Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski. Below: another loco-hauled set - this time with just two carriages - waiting for passengers to make their way from the buses. 

The rest of the journey passed without hitch, though progress was slow - the standard of track is well below that now enjoyed by the Warsaw-Radom line. I popped out at Przeworsk to have a look around (a pretty nondescript town, to be honest), and then returned to the station for onward travel to Rzeszów. Below: the town hall; the modernised square is already starting to look drab and the public free wifi doesn't work.

Below: a big centrally-funded project in progress at the moment involves stopping the town sliding down the escarpment. Here, the job is done, but there's still much building work going on behind me and round the corner in the distance. 

Interestingly, Przeworsk has a narrow-guage railway station next to the main line one, though this is tourist-traffic only, and out of seasons runs Sundays only.

Another little rail bonus in Przeworsk is this Ol49 steam loco, standing outside the main-line station.

I return to Przeworsk station to catch a Podkarpacka Kolej Aglomeracyjna train a few stops west into Rzeszów. Just over half an hour's journey and I arrived at my destination. In good time for our event. Alighting from the train at Rzeszów Główny, I find that the station is still in the midst of renovation work, just as it was a year ago and four years ago. Will it never end?

Once the connection between Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski and Sandomierz is complete, the journey will be quicker and more convenient - but will PKP's online timetable apps be smart enough to suggest this route in future? The Witos (Warsaw-Przemyśl calling at Warka) service opens up new possibilities of exploring the south-east corner of Poland - into the Bieszczady by train.

This time two years ago:
Mother of Invention

This time three years ago:
Autumnal lockdown walk

This time four years ago:

End of the warm and sunny part of autumn 

This time five years ago:
Remont of Metro bridge over Puławska

This time six years ago:
We are what we read, what we watch, what we listen to

This time ten years ago:
Extraordinarily warm autumn

This time 11 years ago:
On behalf of the work-shy community

This time 12 years ago:
Classic truck cavalcade

This time 13 years ago
Suburban back-roads clogged with commuters

This time 14 years ago:
Autumn gold, Łazienkowski Park

This time 15 years ago:
Quintessential autumnal Jeziorki

An autumn day in Warsaw

To town to moderate a panel discussion about packaging waste at the British Embassy, so off the beaten track (with the current rail diversions, Warsaw's new embassy district is even harder to reach by public transport than usual). Train to W-wa Służewiec, tram to Metro Wierzbno, Metro to Politechnika, and then a pleasant walk from there. 

I notice that the old Hungarian trade office on ulica Szwoleżerów 10 has been fenced off. Fearing it may under threat of demolition, I walked around the perimeter and saw a notice saying that it is about to be modernised. Great - it's a wonderful piece of post-war Modernism and deserves a second life. Poking my lens through a gap in the fence, I snap the building. At the moment, it wouldn't look out of place in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

Built in the early 1970s, the building functioned as a showcase for Hungarian products (which I suspect were in as short supply on the Polish market in communist times as they were back home). It fulfilled this role until 2012, when it was closed. It was listed in 2016, preventing it from being demolished - a likely fate given the number of embassies that have sprung up in close proximity to this building. The British, Indian, Japanese, Spanish, South Korean and Netherlands embassies are all clustered around here, and were all built in the 21st century.

The walk back from the British Embassy to catch a tram back to W-wa Służewiec took me up ul. Agrykola, a lovely car-free thoroughfare running down the Vistula escarpment, with the Łazienki Palace park to the left.

Below: a favourite prospect of central Warsaw, from Aleja Niepodległości as it crosses ul. Wawelska.

Public transport functioning flawlessly - my tram (visible in the photo above), gets me to W-wa Służewiec in good time to catch the Radomiak fast train to Chynów - the journey from takes all of 22 minutes!

This time last year:
The end of the apple harvest
[Still going strong this year!]

This time two years ago:
Ignoring the UFO phenomenon?

This time three years ago:

A tipping point in history, but who's tipping it?

This time four years ago:
Poznań by night

This time six years ago:
West of Warsaw's central axis

This time ten years ago:
Plac Unii shopping centre opens

This time 12 years ago:
Visceral and Permanent, Part II 

This time 13 years ago:
Autumn colours, locally

This time 14 years ago:
Edinburgh

Flashbacks multiply as autumn sun wanes

The morning sun in a pure blue sky blazes, inducing flashback after flashback to that old anomalous familiarity. Reading a magazine on the train, catching sight of an attractive woman on the platform - the spirit of mid-century America as experience by a man in his thirties returns. And back in Jakubowizna in the evening for a sunset stroll, this canonical prospect, side-lit from the west, carries me away.

And a further flashback - prosperous farmhouses surrounded by arable land. Familiar, pleasant, instantly recognisable - but not from distant Hanwell nor Perivale, nothing to do with the endless streets of terraced 1930s and Victorian houses and traffic jams among which I grew up.

Below: a landscape that triggers a present-life flashback, this time to Stella-Plage in northern France, and precisely to what is now the junction of Chemin du Baillarquet and Rue des Iris; although back in the 1970s, these chemins vicinaux were unnamed, unasphalted and undeveloped. 

Tomorrow looks like rain, and the next day, and the weekend, and right through to next Thursday, but no frost forecast. Sunny October must inevitably yield to damp, grey October, though knowing the Polish climate, some nice surprises can still turn up. As it is, I have yet to switch on the heating, daytime temperatures inside my house haven't yet fallen to anywhere near uncomfortable (at 18C I shall activate under-floor heating, but at 19.5C all that's needed is a thin jumper over my shirt and some press-ups, squats, weights or plank to warm myself up. Last autumn - well, late summer actually! I already had to put on the heating on 19 September. 

Changing seasons are strong flashback triggers. One I look forward to is the first evening frost - leaving the office in town with temperatures below zero, and the anticipation of Christmas...

This time last year:
I dream of telepathy

This time three years ago:
S7 update, around what's now Węzeł Zamienie

This time four years ago:
Marchin' again

This time five years ago:

Ealing and West Ealing memories

This time eight years ago:
The autumn sublime in Jeziorki

This time ten years ago:
Enduring Ealing - Victorian and Edwardian klimats

This time 11 years ago:
Krokowa, Poland's former northern borderlands

This time 16 years ago:
Aerial photograph of Central London

Another canonical past-life dream

Early hours of Monday 16 October

And lo! did I dream... The year is 1939 or 1940; America (Kentucky? Ohio? West Virginia? Maryland? Pennsylvania?), a racetrack. Horse racing. I was standing alone, on the outside, not allowed in, as I was almost grown-up, but missing a year or two. Betting and alcohol. The grandstands were in a modern  building, with turnstile entry. There was a noisy crowd milling around outside. Dusk. The track and the plaza around the entrance and parking lot were floodlit with harsh lighting. Billboards, lit from above. Criss-crossed diagonal white wood. An amplified, urgent, male voice announced the runners and riders and betting prices for the next race, though it was muffled and distorted and I couldn't hear it clearly.  The wet ground littered with discarded betting slips. I'd manage to get me a bottle of beer - Rolling Rock. I wanted to get in, just so I could boast to my buddies that I had got in. But I wasn't going to get allowed in - and I knew it. Guy on the turnstile knew it too. So I just stood there, sipping beer, wasting time, between the grandstand and the parking lot as people - mostly men, moved around, entering and leaving the racetrack. It had started to rain and was getting cold.

As soon as I'd identified this as a canonical past-life dream [I have added it to the list, here, in chronological order], it changed. Suddenly, yet still under the influence of the beer, I was reversing a 1970s Jaguar XJ6, in British Racing Green, across a field near Henley-on-Thames; I scraped the offside rear wheel arch against a fence. The car belonged to a friend, Krysia (or her dad, can't recall). I got out to look - the scratch was too deep to ignore. I'd have to tell her. I got back in, annoyed with myself, though now I was inside the rear of a large, empty furniture truck, driving it backwards without any windows, trying to do a U-turn in reverse, navigating just with my memory of the field, this time hopefully without scraping the fence... Except the field was now in Chynów...

This latter part of the dream is normal, displaying features common to dreams; disjunctive cognitions, anxiety, things going wrong, something nice spoilt. The first part though, displays the three unities of time, place and action - there was no disjunctive cognition, none of that bizarre juxtapositions of commonplace objects and locations. This is a level of realism rarely encountered in the dream state, which I identify as a portal into potentially a past life - a relatively rare manifestation of non-local consciousness.

[Another, though entirely unconnected experience which I'll share here. On my walk just after dusk, beyond the orchards, coming out of the forest near Machcin II, I hear what I took to be a dog in the trees to my left. Then I heard some snorting. Across the heathland to my right, I saw the vague silhouettes of several animals - dogs again, I thought at first; turns out they were wild boar. Behind me and in front of me, to my left and my right. At least seven. First time I'd ever encountered them around Chynów!]

This time last year:
Cottagecore - a manifesto

This time two years ago
Ego, Consciousness and Soul

This time three years ago:
Samopoczucie, Joy and the Sublime Aesthetic

This time five years ago:
Autumn, with a railway theme

This time six years ago:
A few words about coincidence

This time nine years ago:
Hello, pork pie [my week-long pork-pie diet]

This time 11 years ago:
The meaning of class - in England, in Poland

This time 12 years ago: 
First frost 

This time 16 years ago:
First frost 
[again, as last year, no frost forecast for at least the next seven days]

Woodpecker comes a-knocking

I heard an insistent tapping outside my kitchen window last week. Grabbing my camera, I ran outside and caught sight of a woodpecker flying away from the side wall of my house. The bird settled on the electricity pylon that runs through my garden. I identified it as a male great spotted woodpecker (dzięcioł duży) - dendrocopus major. 

Below: I'm looking at it, and it looks back at me - guiltily. Look closely at its beak - it's covered with grey Styrofoam beads, which also fleck its plumage.

Below: the male of the species has a small red patch at the back of its head. Interesting fact about woodpeckers - they have a 'tongue-bone' that runs from their tongue (used to extract grubs and insects from trees) right around the back of their skull, to cushion the brain from the impact of repeated hammering on trees - or indeed stuccoed Styrofoam insulation.

Below - the hole made under the eaves. Question - should I leave it for woodpeckers to nest in, or should I fill it in with squirts of expanding spray foam (isocyanate and polyol resin)? Is it better to live together in symbiosis with Mr and Mrs Woodpecker and their brood - or let them know that this aggression will not stand? Note the mess left by the Styrofoam, held onto the wall by static electricity. Rain will wash it off, but I need to sweep it up to stop it polluting the soil. It takes this stuff 500 years to biodegrade. Pairing begins in December, eggs are laid from late April to June, the fledglings depart three weeks after hatching, and the woodpeckers tend not to return to the same nests a second time.

Below: further inspection of my property shows another hole, slightly larger, made near the top of the garage wall. Again - fill or leave? (behind the 20cm of Styrofoam there's a brick wall, which cannot be compromised by beaks nor damp.) Dendrocopus major is a protected species in Poland.

Below: the autumnal migrations begin. Snapped yesterday, 14 October, a flock of geese - heading west over Grobice.

Below: taken on 8 October, at a higher altitude and with shorter lens, a formation of cranes, making their characteristic klangor. Also flying west, rather than south, as one would expect.

This time six years ago:
To sleep perchance to dream

This time ten years ago:
Liverpool's waterfront 

How much spirituality do I need? Here's the answer...

This is a question I've asked numerous times in my Lenten series of blog posts over the years. Today, while walking through the forest to Rososz, the answer came to me.

"I need at least enough spirituality to inoculate myself against the doubts that materialist reductionism tries to cast upon my belief in the primacy of consciousness." 

The doubts that creep in, creating anxiety and that mind is no more than the product of matter, rather than matter being a product of mind. 

Consciousness, I would posit, is fundamental. It is non-local; it is everywhere - a substrate of the Universe, upon which awareness of life pops up here and there. Consciousness is the cause of space and time, not an emergent property of evolution, to be found only in warm-blooded creatures, as some neurologists would argue.

So how can we inoculate ourselves against doubt? Meditation, seeking intuitions, listening to other seekers who have trod this path, who have asked the same questions we ask - and who can answer them to our satisfaction. Thinkers who have had similar intuitions.

Spirituality should not be reserved for a certain day of the week, nor a certain time of that day - positive thoughts are needed to keep doubt and the attendant anxiety and fear creep up on us and overturn those positive intuitions that make us feel joy and gratitude for the conscious life. 

Sceptics try to prove that there's nothing more to the Universe than matter, demanding empirical answers to the question "how does consciousness explain matter", while being unable to provide empirical answers to the question "how does matter explain consciousness".

There is nothing wrong with empirical enquiry, testing a hypothesis rigorously. But there is also intuition, a powerful and under-appreciated human ability to understand something before we have run the calculations.

Intuitions can the thought of the cosmic non-local consciousness speaking directly to you - but only if you are open to it - but how to you square that with empirical evidence, and quash that nagging doubt that this is nothing more than the cognitive bias named wishful thinking?

Doubts that are ultimately destructive, leading to a downward spiral of hopelessness. So - how much spirituality do we need? The bare minimum is "enough to keep us from slipping into negative thought." More than that, and spirituality begins to bring joy and purpose to life. 

Below: as I set out for my walk this morning. 

Beautiful weather, though it began to cloud over in the early afternoon and then the rain came. But around lunchtime, the top temperature hit 24C. On the działka, I still haven't had cause to switch on the heating - last year I already started heating on 19 September. [UPDATE 22 October 2023: I switch on the heating as the temperature inside falls below 19C.]

By a serendipitous synchronicity, just after publishing this post, the YouTube algorithm recommended me this debate, which beautifully illustrates my point. Panpsychist Philip Goff vs physicalist Sean Carroll. I must say, Prof Carroll won this debate, though for me personally, he won it by superior debating skill rather than by strength of argument. I am not swayed by his conviction that the core theory of physics ("which you can put on a T-shirt") settles the argument. He himself knows that dark matter and dark energy might fit that theory, but cannot be explained or described in terms that make sense. But at the end of the day, limiting consciousness to neuronal firings in the brain simply feels wrong to me. My intuition kicks out against it. Carroll has no access to my experience of consciousness and his attempt to describe what's going on within my consciousness just doesn't square with what I feel.

 

This time five years ago:
Whoops! Clumsy

This time seven years ago:
Mystical experiences at 37,000ft

This time eight years ago:
The staggeringly high cost of tax collection in Poland

This time 12 years ago 
One stop beyond

This time 13 years ago:
Who am I? (Kim ja jestem?)

This time 14 years ago:
First snow, 2009. Ghastly!

This time 15 years ago:
Train links to town improving

This time 16 years ago:
A beautiful Sunday, south of Warsaw

Why Poland can no longer afford PiS

I won't be voting for PiS - I want this party out of government. It is bad for Poland. Kaczyński's party is modelled on the one political system, the one political party that he knew from his younger days - the Polish United Workers Party - PZPR - the communist party. A one-party system, where the party ran the state and all its institutions. From the judiciary to the media, from the economy to the organs of internal and external security.

PiS has blurred the crucial line between state and party to the detriment of Poland.

Here's the Kaczyński model: put your party's loyalists into key positions in state-controlled enterprises, state regulators and media and use these to further the party's power.

Example:

Rhetoric: "PiS cares about the cost of living - under a PiS government, petrol prices will be lower."

Practice: A week before the election, state-owned PKN Orlen is instructed to cut the retail price of fuel at the pumps, leading to shortages, and photos on social media of military tanker trucks at PKN Orlen stations bringing fuel from army stockpiles to fill up the empty reservoirs.

Response: Private-sector competitors (BP, Shell etc) would expect the state monopoly regulator, UOKiK, to intervene at such blatant infringement of competition law. But UOKiK is run by party placemen - so no reaction.

These interventions cost money. Buying the electorate costs money. Pensioners are being bribed with 13th and 14th monthly payments. "Oh hooray!" they all cheer as they receive their bonuses. But the result is that Poland's inflation is now 8.2% (in the Eurozone, it is 4.3%). Remember, inflation acts exactly like a tax, but one that hurts the poorest in society the most. Economists forecast that it will stick around 6% for most of next year, as a result of all of the ill-judged spending (or electoral bribes as they can also be called). 

Rhetoric: "PiS cares about the cost of mortgage loans - under a PiS government, interest rates will be lower"

Practice: Six weeks before the election, the central bank cuts the base rate by 0.75%, then gets another one (of 0.25%) in two weeks before the election.

Comment: Monetary policy steered by party-placemen on the monetary policy committee meant that Poland started raising rates too late in the cycle and is now cutting them too soon. 

Result: As mentioned above, Poland will have 6% inflation well into 2024, hurting the poorest.

The PiS government's flagship project, 500+, was aimed at boosting Polish demographics; universal child support. In that respect it has failed dismally. In 2014, 391,000 Poles were born - last year, despite the handouts, that number had fallen to 304,000. Over a fifth less children born each year during the time PiS has been in power. So if it's not working - shovel more money at it - in the election year, so now it's 800+. 

The EU is far from perfect. It's still dominated by Germany and France, and it has long been losing competitiveness to the US and China. But as we can see from the UK's dismal fall from grace - leaving the EU is a disastrous policy. What Poland should be doing is professional-level diplomacy, pulling together a coalition of Baltic and Scandinavian nations, the Netherlands and Ireland, to act as a counterbalance to the Paris-Berlin axis. But no. Carping, obstructing and heckling is what 'awkward Poland' is seen to be doing. The EU won't throw Poland out, but it is currently blocking funds earmarked for Polish energy and transport infrastructure projects. 

With a full-scale war going on across borders, many foreign investors looking at Poland have backed off after doing some risk assessment. Another risk is that, with all the euro-sceptic rhetoric coming from the government, Poland will one day vote to leave. Those who remember the UK between 2010 and 2016 will have a comparison to draw upon. Poland needs a stable and predictable environment for business, which leads me to my next big gripe with the PiS government - the way laws are formulated and passed. In a hurry, without consultations and sloppily, requiring amendments as soon as they enter force. 

Using the mechanism of the ustawa poselska (parliamentarians' bill), PiS deputies cobble together legislation and push it through Sejm in a matter of hours if necessary. This is hated by business, especially when these laws concern taxes, the labour code, or other regulations, because not enough time is given to prepare for the changes, and the changes themselves are messy and often incoherent. 

By messing up the business environment, entrepreneurs are thinking twice about investing in their own businesses. The investment-to-GDP ratio has fallen to 16% from 20% at the end of the last government's term of office. And then we had PiS criticising the government that the ratio was 20% and not 25%! [It had once nearly touched 25% in 2006, as a result of the massive influx of foreign direct investment in the wake of Poland's EU accession.]

My biggest gripe with PiS also applies to the Tories in the UK and the Republicans in the US - parties  now operating on the 'closed' end of the spectrum - 'closed' as opposed to 'open'. Hierarchical decision-making rather than building broad consensus. Looking for groups of scapegoats to drive wedges into society over. Erasing nuance. Generating fear and loathing instead. This is no way to do politics.

Like the EU, Donald Tusk & Co are not perfect. But they will be better than a stale, eight-year-old government merely run for the sake of remaining in power, using public money and the public media to retain that power. It is time for Kaczyński & Co to go.

This time last year:
A slower, drabber, greener, more local way of life might yet save us all

This time two years ago:
Warka's bi-weekly market

This time three years ago:
How's your samopoczucie?

This time four years ago:

Pavement for Karczunkowska? What's next?
[Still scheduled for 2025-26]

This time seven years ago
On relevance and irrelevance

This time nine years ago:
Poland gets anglicised as Britain gets polonised

This time ten years ago:
Ale, architecture and city politics

This time 11 years ago:
The pros and cons of roadside acoustic screens

This time 12 years ago:
Moaning about trains again
[have you noticed how rare such moans are today?]

This time 14 years ago:
Warsaw street names - Dolna, Polna, Rolna, Wolna, Smolna. Lost?

This time 15 years ago:
Ditches, landscapes, autumn

This time 16 years ago:
Golden autumn in Łazienki park

"Praise the Lord" - thoughts about gratitude

Christianity teaches its adherents to praise God. But does God even need our praise? The Creator of all things visible and invisible requires the fawning adoration of one species in a universe of hundreds of billions of galaxies, each of hundreds of billions of stars? What's all that about? 

Our fragile egos need praise. Narcissists - they thrive on it. Just look at Trump playing to his admiring audiences. And religions project that very human behavioural trait, that cognitive bias, that if powerful men require praise, so does God. An understandable mistake to make if you consider God to be anthropomorphic. But in the incomprehensible vastness of the Cosmos, this is just plain wrong. 

"Praise be to God" as a spontaneous exclamation when the outcome of some stochastic process happens to go in our favour suggest that 'praise' and 'thanks' may be interchangeable. But gratitude is more important than praise. To whom are we thankful? God the Reason, God the Purpose, God the Destination. You either intuit God or you don't; God cannot be proved or disproved objectively - subjectively, however, you just know.

The opposite of gratitude is often not an outright manifestation of ingratitude, but the result of complacency, forgetfulness and lack of empathy. Someone does us a good turn, and we overlook it, forget to say 'thank you'. Does this count as a slap in the face of our benefactor? Only if the benefactor has a fragile ego and takes it that way, taking umbrage ore even bearing a grudge about it. But even if our benefactor isn't ego-focused, and discounts our forgetfulness as just that - one thing's certain - don't count on that good turn being repeated.

So it is with luck. Just a conscious, heartfelt, thought of gratitude to God the Reason (etc see above) whenever you suddenly become aware of your good fortune is all it takes. We walk upon the edge of chaos each day; gratitude and awareness can ward off misfortune. Stay conscious!

A final thought - imagine waking up one morning to the feeling "Hey! I'm healthy! Nothing bothers me today! That's great! Should I feel grateful? NAH! That's just the way things go! A randomly generated euphoric state, that's all it is!" That, I posit, would be enough to upset God... The word 'ignorant' has strayed from its original meaning – someone who ignores. Ignore not, then, intuitions of gratitude; ponder over them; live them.

This time last year:

Too busy running around and making cider!
[Sadly none this year - trees bore no fruit.]

This time two years ago:
All together, saving our planet

This time five years ago:
W-wa Zachodnia Platform 8 to reopen

This time six years ago:
Learning to fly (swan pics)

This time eight years ago:
Scotland's answer to the Hoover Building

This time ten years ago:
In which I don't vote in the mayoral referendum, thus helping to save HG-W's job

This time 11 years ago:
Gorgeous cars from Czechoslovakia

This time 12 years ago:
Donald Tusk and Co. get re-elected 

This time 13 years ago:
Poland's wonderful bread

This time 14 years ago:
An October Friday in Warsaw

The Ego, the Soul and the Individual: thoughts occasioned by my 66th birthday

As I age, the flame of my ego turns down from a 7 to a 3; then on towards a 1 before being inexorably extinguished. Yet the flame of my consciousness grows in strength from year to year, as does my understanding of the world. And with them I grow in wisdom.

To what extent are we egos, and to what extent souls*?

The body is the vehicle that contains both. Which one controls your vehicle? 

Two contrasting statements to ponder then:

1. "We live, as we dream - alone" - Joseph Conrad, from Heart of Darkness

2. {{ I am part of the continuous whole }} - an intuition I felt while walking in Jeziorki one day, probably sometime around 2004-5.

How to square the two? Are we individuals, or members of a collective? I have written about the existence in childhood of the conscious mądry Michaś and ego-driven głupi Michaś, and how the latter won control over the former in adolescence to rule uncontested until mądry Michał finally emerged victorious over the course of the past decade.

I can associate with both of those two statements above. Solitude is a comfort for those deep of soul. An ego alone is trapped - there's no audience to show off in front of. Or anyone to boss around. But the wise consciousness has no need to conform to the will of other egos, or to try to impose. You may wish to ascribe this to my 'low hierarchy status', a life lived upon a lower rung of the Ladder of Authority. That diagnosis, dear reader, is a mirage - an affect of the materialist worldview.

Yet the continuous whole - the cosmic consciousness - underlies space and time. Indeed, consciousness spawned space and time; space and time are the products of consciousness, and not the other way around. Increasing numbers of theoretical physicists and philosophers are now getting this.

To the materialist, there is only matter - there's no such thing as 'soul'. Consciousness is merely an epiphenomenon - a by-product of biological evolution, something found only within the brains of higher-order animals on our planet.

Whatever your worldview, the matter that is your body is subject - as is all matter - to entropy. 

Entropy. The second law of thermodynamics. Decay. The destiny of all matter is to break back down into a state of random atoms. The material wonders of this world, brought about by complexity, are short-lived; finite. To the materialist, who scorns the very notion of a soul, who considers consciousness to be a constructed illusion that lies beyond empirical measurement, the process of ageing is tragic. One's youth fades, and all that there's to look forward to is decay.

But Consciousness abides. It was there at the beginning of all things; it will be there after their end. And it is present everywhere. It survives matter. Grasp this, and ageing, and what comes after death, hold no fear.

In my own place, I am comfortable.

I can see now that I have been a slow learner (due to laziness? Lack of focus? Attention deficit?), but  I am a broad learner, a generalist, not a specialist. I am still learning. The constant chipping away at a rough-hewn block of stone from which emerges an exquisitely detailed sculpture. Our digital age has brought a wealth of knowledge to humanity - I wonder to what extent we're aware of that? Wikipedia, for example, is stupendous in terms of what it offers us all - for free! Plus the endless streams of podcasts, YouTube videos and TED talks covering every area of human knowledge - and our ability to plug into all that knowledge on the go via a smartphone. Ignorance is no longer the default state, but a conscious "can't be arsed to find out" choice. Curiosity, then, becomes the most important human quality after kindness.

[Kindness - cooperation and empathy - is the default setting of the winning strategy of the Prisoner's Dilemma - get on with your fellow humans all the time except after such occasions when they defect on you first (never, ever, be the first to defect!) - then retaliate and continue doing so - forcefully - until they relent, and then immediately return to cooperation. Should they defect again, retaliate again.]

Today, a year after reaching the Polish state-pension age, I have reached the UK state-pension age. I no longer need to work, but shall continue doing so for as long as it brings me fulfilment and sense of purpose. I should say 'slow down' to myself, but this is the busy time of year, with event after event galloping onward toward Christmas, it's not easy! I have long said that I shall work until Poland overtakes the UK in terms of GDP per capita (at purchasing-power parity). The gap between the two economies is narrowing each year (around 20% at the moment; it stood at around 40% ten years ago).

Below: back to the metaphysical. Prof Bruce Greyson from the University of Virginia, is one of the pre-eminent researchers in near-death experiences. In this YouTube video from 2012, he presents this slide, which I think squares with what a spiritual approach to life yields anyway, without the need to face death head-on. However, many of the subjects of his research had their near-death experiences at an earlier age than 66, so these may accelerate a change of worldview that might have occurred more slowly otherwise.

*I use the words 'soul' and 'consciousness' interchangeably, according to context, sometimes maybe using 'spirit'.

This time last year:
In which I reach the Age of Maturity

This time two years ago:
Golden Autumn, Golden Years

This time three years ago:
Last embers of summer

This time four years ago:
It's that Day of the Year again!

This time five years ago:

Decline and growth

This time six years ago:
Health at 60

This time eight years ago:
In search of vectors for migrating consciousness

This time nine years ago:
Slipping from late summer to early autumn

This time ten years ago:
Turning 56

This time 11 years ago: 
Turning 55 

This time 12 years ago:
Turning 54

This time 13 years ago:
Turning 53

This time 16 years ago:
Turning 50

Marching again

I find it impossible how government agencies can claim honestly that number of citizens taking part in today's march was around 200,000. This is the fourth major march I have take part in (the one on 4 June in Warsaw and the two anti-Brexit marches in London in March and October 2019) and today's felt the biggest. I joined from the south around twenty minutes before the midday start; already the whole area around Rondo Dmowskiego was rammed rigid. 

Below: 12 noon, the speeches start. After the speeches, the march will begin, headed north.

After listening to the key speeches, but before the march sets off, I figured that I was in the wrong place, so I dived into the subway under the roundabout - coming out on the northern side, I could see the crowds were thicker still. So trying to get ahead of the march, I took the Metro one stop north to Świętokrzyska. The trains were running at intervals of as little as 1 minute 20 seconds!

From here I walked the route along aleja Jana Pawła II. Both sides of the wide avenue were thronged with flag-waving people - not marching - yet. But column would move very slowly; not so much a march as a shuffle. So I had time to pop into legendary bar Jaś i Małgosia (where my aunt Jadzia worked back in the 1970s!) for a swift IPA. Suitable refreshed, I found I was still way ahead of the front of the march. 

Moving on to Rondo Radosława, the final destination, I took up position in the middle of tram tracks, looking south along al. JP II, watching a slow-motion human tsunami bearing down on where I was standing. 

Below: a rather impressionist image from my phone at 20x zoom...

...and a more conventional photo from my camera. Bear in mind that the crowd was thinnest on the tram tracks, given the ballast being less comfortable to walk on that asphalt or pavement.

Below: the march reaches the end - time for a few more speeches (interestingly, mentions of women's rights drew the most applause), and the national anthem at the end. Then off to catch the train back to Chynów, which was rush-hour full.

However, by the time the train had reached Piaseczno and Zalesie Górne, the flag-bearing passengers were thinning out. In Chynów, PiS banners on fences and walls outnumber PSL banners by three to one and KO banners are nowhere to be seen. It will be a tough race in two weeks' time.

This time last year:
Levels of Detail

This time two years ago:
Droga donikąd by Józef Mackiewicz

This time three years ago:
Words that pop into the mind, unbidden
[This morning's word: contumely]

This time five years ago:
Hops there for the taking

This time six years ago:
Two weeks and two days of travel

This time seven years ago:
Final end to a local landmark

This time 12 years ago:
Independence Day

This time 13 years:
Out and about in Jeziorki

This time 14 years ago:
Funeral of Lt. Cmdr. Tadeusz Lesisz

This time 15 years ago:
Puławska by night