Do we become more spiritual as we grow older? Lent 2024, Day 16

Looking back over my blog, which has been running almost 17 years now, I can see a definite rise in the frequency with which I post on the topic of human spirituality. That label was applied to just two posts from 2008 (out of 280). Last year, it was 79 (including 46 across the duration of Lent). 

Does this indicate a shifting worldview? Looking for comfort to assuage a subconscious fear of the oblivion of biological death? A need, a calling, a desire for the numinous? All three? Let me sift through in this post.

It's not just me. Church pews tend to be occupied by the elderly rather than by the young.

I remember a TV show from the 1960s called All Our Yesterdays, hosted by Brian Inglis, which featured newsreel footage from the run-up to WW2 and the war itself. His catchphrase, "Twenty-five years ago this week..." prefaced news headlines from the time, which he discussed. The show came to an end in 1972, as it ran into post-war austerity which no longer drew the viewers that wartime footage did. Anyway, Brian Inglis - a serious, respected journalist and historian, then turned his attention to the paranormal. Reading about this (probably in my parents' Daily Telegraph), I concluded that old age and fear of death had prompted him to seek the paranormal as a crutch. Yet... at the time, he was ten years younger then than I am today!

Another Brian – physicist Brian Josephson – professor emeritus of physics at the University of Cambridge, known for his work on superconductivity and quantum tunnelling, won the Nobel Prize in 1973. Then he turned his attention the relationship between quantum mechanics and consciousness, and the synthesis of science and Eastern mysticism (quantum mysticism), thus drawing criticism from the scientific mainstream. Prof. Josephson is still alive, aged 84; and there are fairly recent interviews with him on YouTube in which he talks about extra-sensory perception and the unity of mind and matter. This, from a Nobel Prize winner in Physics.

Pim van Lommel, a Dutch cardiologist, born in 1943, is known his studies of near-death experiences covering hundreds of survivors of cardiac arrests. This work led to him writing Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience, published in 2007 to become a best seller. However, Dr van Lommel's work drew widespread criticism from the medical profession; they said it was pseudoscience, full of misunderstandings and misinterpretations. He is also around on YouTube (and worth a watch).

The fact that these men followed their intuition in face of public ridicule, having achieved success in their field, suggests that the draw of the unknown and the power of their curiosity can be greater than simply wishing a quiet retirement or mainstream popularity.

The rabbinical injunction not to study the Kabbalah until one reaches the age of 40 makes sense. Truly appreciating the esoteric requires a mature mind. Coming back to the seven stages of life, there are times when the key thing is to put bread on the family table, raise children, pay off the mortgage – getting on with it is all. With small children round the house, it's not a time for spending in quiet contemplation of the metaphysical. That time shall come. And once it does, those dreams and visions kept quiet from one's earliest days, need to be explored. They cannot be ignored.

Everyone who seeks God shall find God in their own way. For some, regular churchgoing will suffice. It provides fellowship, sense of community, the order and stability of tradition; I can understand the draw of such a way of life far more than spending money on status symbols. That stage of life, the social self, should disappear in the rear-view mirror as one moves towards acquiring wisdom, enlightenment and transcendence.

If your intuition takes to you explore unconventional areas of research that you hold to be the right direction on your path toward the numinous, then so be it. Physicalism, or reductionist materialism, is but an alternative point of view, and not the ultimate reality of the Cosmos. Shrug off the nay-sayers.

Time might feel like it's not on our side as we tread this path, which seems to stretch out further and further upon the horizon; the longer one travels, the further ahead into the distance the destination seems to disappear. The chart below shows that the perception of time should be slowing down, not speeding up the older we get. For a ten-year-old, one year is 10% of their total life experience; for a 50-year-old, it's but 2%. But over the next 50 years, it will only halve. Each passing year should only feel slightly shorter than the past one, once you hit middle age. Yet subjectively, it feels like this graph has been flipped horizontally.

Once living a comfortable life, seek not a life of luxury – dedicate it instead to a search for meaning, purpose, wisdom, enlightenment and transcendence. 

The reward is joyous.

Lent 2023, Day 16
Intuition – is it magical?

Lent 2022: Day 16
The difficulties of focusing on the spiritual

Lent 2021: Day 16
This planet is my home, today and tomorrow

Lent 2020: Day 16
My metaphysical journey, as I see it

Aligning Prayer with Cosmic Purpose: Lent 2024, Day 15

Prayer has had a tough time. The phrase "thoughts and prayers" has become devalued in the mouths of American politicians after yet another mass shooting leaves dozens of schoolchildren dead; it's a word used by email scammers out to catch trusting and naïve people. Prayer is dismissed as a form of magical thinking, hoping for a physical effect (stopping mass shootings) without a physical cause (appropriate legislation).

Can we summon something into reality by thinking about it?

Physicalist science would say "of course not."

Religions would have you say "of course you can."

I'd say: "It depends." It depends on what it is you're praying for. I'd offer a synonym for prayer – willing. As in, "I am willing something to happen/not to happen". And if what you are willing to happen aligns with the Vast Eternal Plan, then I'd posit it has more chance of happening than if it didn't. 

If you pray for a Lamborghini so that you can show off to everyone, that's less likely to come to pass as the result of your metaphysical intervention than if you pray for a worthy outcome.

Yet we have prayed for peace – the slaughter in Ukraine continues with no prospect of peace. We have prayed for Rysiek's health – he died despite the intensive and heartfelt prayer of many friends. Prayer doesn't work, some may argue, and in bleak moments it feels that way.

Nevertheless pray, or will, I do. Daily. Waking up, brushing my teeth, out on a walk, as I drop off to sleep. Expressions of gratitude, for health, for life, for things not sliding into chaos, are a part of my daily routine; I am conscious of being grateful and offer the experience of gratitude as a form of prayer, which confirms alignment with the Purpose. Gratitude is the bedrock. 

Our lives, our world, teeters ever on the edge of chaos, and prayer, based on awareness of just how precarious life is, can keep us upright, walking the narrow way, and not tumbling over that edge. 

The metaphysics of will? I'd see it grounded in the mystery of quantum uncertainty. We don't know the outcome of a quantum measurement until we consciously observe it and the uncertainty collapses to a concrete state. But can we will the outcome? Science is split. Physicalists and reductionist materialists would say absolutely not. Random events are occurring within the atom, but an external mind cannot affect whether the outcome is A or B. Yet there's a growing number of scientists open to the reality of mind over matter; they try to capture this experimentally, the results show a weak but consistent effect that's both statistically significant and above chance.

And here comes the next split. Is the power of mind over matter available to everyone? Or to anyone who's been trained, who's using the appropriate protocols (initiated into the occult, for instance)? Or are only a small handful of humans gifted with special powers such as the ability to foretell the future, forestall disaster, heal others at a distance or view remote locations? Large-scale experiments into psi phenomena do show a group of outliers who have better results than the average participant (better able to predict who out of four random callers will ring the phone next, for example).

There's no consensus on this one yet. Perhaps never. 

My view is – if you will such abilities, if you are open to such possibilities, you will have far more likelihood to deploy them successfully. Like intuition, the ability to "petition the Lord with prayer" is something that becomes more available to you the more attention you pay to it. Don't ask for too much; be aware of those small miracles that do come true, and be thankful for them.

Dismiss the power of prayer, of course, and it never make itself more available to you. Materialists convinced they live in a material world of physical cause and physical effect are unlikely to pray. And that includes the 10% of Americans who define themselves as 'Religious But Not Spiritual'.

Accepting that the Cosmic Purpose is to tend towards the Good, prayer should be aligned with the Good. Prayers for health, for wisdom, for hope, for confidence, for good cheer, for peace, love and understanding...

Lent 2023, Day 15
Intuition and instinct

Lent 2022: Day 15

Religious belief, practice, inquiry and experience

Lent 2021: Day 15
The Afterlife - Faith and Doubt

Lent 2020: Day 15
Rites and Rituals

Emergence and Complexity vs Entropy and Chaos: Good vs Evil? Lent 2024, Day 14

The question of good and evil in the world has been challenging philosophers since the beginning of recorded history; how can a good God allow so much suffering? How do I understand good and evil? 

I had a go at answering this question exactly nine years ago (discovered by chance when I linked the dream-inspired short story I posted earlier today to it). I can see where my thinking on the question remains similar, and where it differs.

The death of Rysiek from cancer – a good man with a healthy lifestyle and no vices, leaving three young children, just before Christmas – clarified the way I perceive God, as I wrote late last year, 

What's changed little is that I see the Universe, and God, as a work in progress; an unfolding. Back in 2015, I wrote: "If the Universe is evolving spiritually towards perfection, it suggests that it is not, a yet, perfect; nor will it be perfect for many eons to come." I stand by that today. God is neither omnipotent, nor omniscient, nor omnipresent – but will be. The word here not only as the future tense of 'is', but in the meaning of intending something to happen. God intends to be. A teleological direction.

Also unchanged in my theology is the rejection of the idea that if there's a good God, there must also be an equal and opposite force of evil – Satan, the Devil. 

Today I am more inclined to see good and evil in terms of emergence and entropy. 

Let's start with entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Entropy can be defined as a measure of the disorder present in a system, or how spread out and dissipated energy is in a process or system, energy that can no longer be used to do work. Organised structures break down. Leave a strawberry on your kitchen table long enough and it will turn to mush as the cells that form it break down. Leave an ice cube on your kitchen table at room temperature and it will soon melt into a pool of water that will eventually evaporate. From order to disorder. The Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates an increase in entropy over time. The Universe is considered by many cosmologists to end in heat death, as one by one, the stars go out and the atoms that form matter cease of hold together. All the energy ends up homogeneously distributed; no more work can be extracted from any source. So that's entropy. It is entropy that dictates the direction of the arrow of time. That strawberry can never reconstitute itself from mush; at room temperature the water vapour that once was an ice cube will never go back to being an ice cube.

Yet despite that tendency for things to wind down, things are emerging. New life arises. New complexities evolve. After the Big Bang, we could have had a uniform Universe, with nothing in it other than randomly scattered hydrogen atoms. But no – we have an unfolding Universe of stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters; here on our planet we can see life all around us. We humans are developing ever-more complex societies; life is evolving everywhere in response to natural selection and the changing environment.

Good and evil. Consider the body of a dead Russian soldier, blown up by a shell while sent to attack well-prepared Ukrainian positions. What was once a sentient biological entity is now a collection of decomposing cells. Complexity that had emerged to live and breath and reproduce has been turned into useless matter, unable to do anything. Entropy. The man who sent this soldier to his death, to increase entropy in the system, the man who orders guided missile attacks on residential areas of Ukrainian cities, to kill, to maim – this is evil.

Consider the onset of spring (the past two days have been lovely in Jakubowizna). Warmth and sunlight, first butterflies, birdsong, tiny buds emerging on twigs, squirrels chasing each other in the high branches – emergence. Life from what had been for months cold, hard, dead earth. Emergence and complexity. Good.

Coming back to teleology – does complexity serve a purpose, or is it merely an accidental byproduct of random interactions? I intuitively believe that it does serve a purpose, and isn't random. That's for us to recognise, and be grateful for.

I wrote back in 2009 about the way our lives are forever balanced on the edge of chaos; we could consciously stay upright and keep moving on, or we could complacently put a foot wrong and tumble over the precipice. That constant dance between emergence and entropy can be seen in the inherent dynamism of existence; new complexity emerges all the time from seemingly chance interactions. And all complex life eventually succumbs to the ever-present tendency towards disorder. Our bodies die. Every living thing dies. But they leave a trace. And there's more to the Universe than biological life – there is consciousness, and there is the conscious will.

More tomorrow.

Lent 2023, Day 14
The appeal of mystic traditions

Lent 2022: Day 14
Between Serendipity and Proactiveness

Lent 2021: Day 14
Prayer

Lent 2020: Day 14
Choose the music for your religion

Mikorski's Trainset – a short story

 [Based on a dream I had on the morning of Wednesday 27 February 2024. Note to railway enthusiasts – this isn't a work of fiction, nor is it a work of history. It's the retelling of a dream; I've done zero research on the topic, so please – no comments saying that this or that isn't authentic.]

Mieczysław Mikorski (1889-1970) was the engineer-general of Polish state railways (PKP) before World War II, a position he held from 1936 to the outbreak of war. Deported by the NKVD to the far north of Russia in 1940, he was put to work by the Soviets on designing and building a railway network inside the Arctic Circle. He was released as part of the 'amnesty' negotiated between Churchill and Stalin after the Nazi invasion of the USSR, though after his wife and both daughters died of typhoid fever, a tragedy that stayed with him always.

In the Middle East with General Anders' army, Mikorski's talents were deployed by Allied forces there and later in Italy; he was engaged with the Royal Engineers supervising the laying of narrow-gauge tracks laid up towards the front lines to deliver ammunition and supplies. He was promoted and decorated. He ended up in London after the war, on a decent War Office pension, and with the gold coins he'd smuggled in from Egypt, he managed to buy himself a large apartment on the second floor in Hepton Mansions, just off Kensington High Street.

Unable to find suitable full-time employment because of his age, he accepted work as a waiter in an exclusive French restaurant in Knightsbridge. He was perfect at the job. With some customers, he'd silently and efficiently take orders and deliver the meals and the wine; with others, he shine with affected bonhomie and wit. The tips were always significant. British aristocrats loved his pre-war mannerisms; he became a permanent fixture at the restaurant.

One Christmas, walking home, he passed the shop window of Derry & Tom's, and paused to look at a model railway, a miniature steam engine pulling carriages across a snowy model landscape. The next day, he popped in and spent an inordinate amount buying track, a transformer, a couple of engines, some passenger carriages and goods wagons.

He was hooked. This was the first day of the rest of his life. 

Mikorski's flat consisted of a kitchen, bathroom, two bedrooms, one large, one small, a large sitting room and an equally large dining room. Over the years, the three large rooms became filled with three large model railway layouts. The three represented the major projects on which he was working in 1939; the development of the port of Gdynia, the rebuilding of the railway junction at Kępno, near the German border, and the modernisation of Wilno station. Mikorski didn't recognise the post-war Polish borders, and his work, he believed, would be useful to Poland after Stalin dies and his homeland would once again be free.

Mikorski was a stickler for accuracy. After a while, the 'toy trains', as he called them, were of no value to him; immersing himself in the hobbyists' literature, he'd order precision high-end models from the best manufacturers, particularly from Switzerland. Money no object. He'd photograph his growing layouts with an Exakta camera, sending the prints to fellow enthusiasts worldwide with whom he would correspond. His photos and articles would end up in small-circulation mimeographed newsletters, eagerly subscribed to by wealthy railway modellers from Tokyo to Cape Town. Not particularly good with his own modelling skills, Mikorski formed a small group of model-makers whose talents matched his demanding requirements for precision in HO/OO scale, and to them he'd outsource the actual crafting of model buildings and landscape elements, as well as the rolling stock that he'd design himself.

Post-war London had several interesting private model-train layouts; one such was located at the headquarters of the railwaymen's trade union, used for labour tribunal cases. Signal boxes, points, junctions and sidings were accurately modelled here to demonstrate to the members of the tribunal the exact circumstances surrounding the incident that led to the unfair dismissal of a driver or signalman. Mikorski, via his well-connected network, had a chance to see this layout several times, which left a strong impression on him.

Over the years, Mikorski's flat filled out with models of locomotives hauling passenger express trains or shunting rakes of goods wagons. Visitors were 'by appointment only' and rare; a great treat for a knowledgeable and enthusiastic father bringing his son to see something absolutely exclusive. Rank-and-file hobbyists with their Hornby-Triang Dublo sets wouldn't appreciate the extreme commitment and precision that had gone into these layouts. Mikorski had his standards. A total of 450 square feet of his apartment were given over to his passion.

And over the years, the layouts would evolve. Keeping up with the latest trends, Mikorski replaced steam motive power with electric and diesel locos; these he would design these himself – or imagine himself ordering real rolling stock from America, France or Britain (never West Germany!) for a free Poland. He would also design liveries for such engines in PKP service, and have model-makers paint the little trains for him to his exact specifications. By 1955, his vision of a free Poland's state railway network consisted of modern electric locos and comfortable carriages, whisking passengers from Warsaw to Lwów or Wilno in a couple of hours, and freight trains connecting the coalfields of Upper Silesia and the industrial district around Kielce to the port of Gdynia, and thence on to global markets.

Mikorski also took seriously his post as Minister of Railways in the Polish Government-in-Exile, a post he held for many years despite the comings and goings of the various Presidents and Prime Ministers of the Second Republic. Whenever railways were on the government's agenda, he'd invite the various ministers and secretaries of state to his flat for long lectures about the needs for modern infrastructure, demonstrated with live action in 1/76th scale, followed by vodka and herring in his (rather cramped) kitchen.

He died in December 1970 of a heart attack following news of the protests against Poland's communist leadership that broke out in the coastal cities; the emotion was too much for him. An executor's sale followed. Because the layouts could not be removed nor sold in situ, the models were carefully removed and boxed and auctioned off in small lots; and thus ended the story of Mikorski's trainset. And my dream. 

Back to Lenten posting later today.

This time five years ago:
Heathrow then and now

This time eight years ago:
Radom line modernisation will change the face of Jeziorki

This time nine years ago:
How do we perceive good and evil?

This time ten years ago:
Civilisation and a civil society

This time 12 years ago:
Strong, late-winter sunshine

This time 13 years ago:
Jeziorki's wetlands freeze over

This time 15 years ago
Kensington, a London village

This time 15 years ago:
Lenten recipies

This time 16 years ago:
A walk through Sadyba

Aesthetics, metaphysics and ethics: Lent 2024, Day 13

[Inspired again by Marek, who asked:]

"Metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics. Are they separate fields? Do they overlap? Is there a hierarchy? Are they the same thing? How much of metaphysics is based on aesthetic 'intuition' ?"

I believe the foundation stone is aesthetics; preferences and familiarities. What you like, what's acceptable or tolerable, and what you dislike. In my case, I had formed a strong set of aesthetic preferences by the time I was a teenager.

As I wrote in my notebook on Friday, 2 February of this year:

"An aesthetic that has been turning slowly into a theology. Via consciousness – qualia"

Having covered my childhood metaphysical memories in yesterday's post, the question is how did this evolve into a quest with spiritual dimensions? The journey has taken decades and is far from over.

Essentially, the idea has been to try to nail down this anomalous memory phenomenon that I've noticed since early childhood, and what it could mean. Since early on when writing on this blog, I've used the label reincarnation? with a question mark as I don't wish to be conclusive; as yet I don't know. Nothing more than a notion, backed up by a lifetime's experiences.

Why am I continually drawn to a time and place outside my own lifetime? I'm sure I'm not alone in this feeling. The purely aesthetic response is unweakened over time, although the America that I feel and the America of today have diverged greatly.

There is a link; it is a metaphysical link; an effect without a physical cause (I could not have been in America in the 1930s or 1940s). I have considered physical vectors that could influence neuronal activity from one body another body (see this post from October 2015), but since then I've rather tended to reject a physicalist approach (brain-waves, atoms, bacteria in the gut biome) in favour of a metaphysical one. 

A key question here would be – does it make any difference if a dead body is buried or cremated? I mentioned the case of the famous Polish writer, whose daughter found a plum tree growing on the plot of his grave; decades later, the tree gave fruit, nourished by minerals from his decomposed remains. That would be a physical vector; eat the plum, and ingest atoms that were once inside the author. Could they convey fragments of his consciousness? I'd now posit that consciousness is non-local in nature and doesn't need a physical carrier. But these are early days! Much more to uncover during the forthcoming years.

And now we come on to ethics – and the notion that the Universe is powered by a loving Purpose that is unfolding in the direction of Good, of Love. The theology that I have constructed posits a Universe moving from Zero toward One, the one being unity, All in God, God in All, a moment of total fulfilment, the ultimate triumph of Good. The journey, however, is eternally long and beset with reversals of fortune; two steps forward, one step back.

My brother asked me to consider a Venn diagram with the overlaps between aesthetics, metaphysics and ethics; I see it rather has a pyramid with ethics as the peak; Marek would see that pyramid as having steeper sides and a flat top that could be built upon. Excellent! Maybe there's an even higher purpose than ethics...

Tomorrow: emergence and complexity vs entropy and chaos.

Lent 2023, Day 13
High Church and Low: Religious Styles and Personality

Lent 2022: Day 13
Comfort and Luxury, Consciousness and Ego

Lent 2021: Day 13
Comfort and Luxury - knowing when to stop

Lent 2020: Day 13
Holy buildings and the sense of the mystical

Metaphysical memories of, and from, childhood: Lent 2024, Day 12

In the Joscha Bach/Lex Fridman interview I referred to two days ago, Dr Bach talks about deconstructing qualia. He mentions an experiment; stare at your face in a mirror for a long time, many minutes, and after  a while that image so familiar to you starts to break down into geometries, colour, pattern.

This reminded me of something that happened to me in childhood, maybe aged nine or ten; in school learning about London from a geography textbook. The teacher talked on, but I found myself staring at the letters that formed the word 'London'. L-O-N... D-O-N. Where I was born, where I lived, where I was from. It was always London or Londyn, familiar, comforting; but all of a sudden, it was L-O-N... D-O-N. What is 'LON'? Who is 'DON'? Why does L-O-N... D-O-N look and sound and feel so strange?

This was a formative experience. It caused me to deconstruct other familiar words, starting with my name. Michael. MY-c'l. Michał. MEE - hau. The familiar transformed, broken down into fundamental particles, syllables, letters, sounds, characters. Shapes on a page. And familiarity disappears, replaced by strangeness.

Another transcendental experience – being in trouble in school. And yet, detached from the scene, almost out of body, everything is ultimately... fine. Intuition; and a consciousness separate from the ego and biological self.

Childhood skies – another thing. In the back garden at Croft Gardens, summer holidays in the early 1960s, one of those days when it was neither cloudless (rare) or fully overcast (often), but a contrasting sky of billowing white clouds against azure. Staring up at them, I'd notice that feeling of anomalous memories from another time and another place. My mind became unshackled from the here and now; there was, is, and will be Something Greater. To this day, the sight of such a sky will trigger a metaphysical response – qualia memories.

Such was my sky today; between Dąbrowa Duża and Machcin

A recurring memory (or set of memories) from childhood relates to when we lived, briefly, near Newport, South Wales when I was around three. Much I recall, but this one relates to the journey there, along the A40 (this was before the M4 was built); the old road would wind through small towns and villages – and in Herefordshire and Gloucestershire – orchards. Walking around Jakubowizna, those memories come back strongly, but they also remind me that as a small child, the sight of those orchards set off anomalous memories of strong familiarity, those from where I knew not.

Many of my primary-school classroom flashbacks I now realise were triggered by the illustrations in the Janet and John books we learnt to read from. These were essentially anglicised versions of the American Alice and Jerry books, using the same illustrations. Two of them, called Days in the Sun, and The Five and Half Club, I still have; my mother would have read them with me at home as well; pencilled on a page of the former is the date 13.6.63, which meant I was five years and eight months old when I would have read it. The story is set on a ranch on the Great Plains, far from the Hanwell in which I was growing up, but the illustrations were instantly familiar. "I've been here!" I felt. 

I mentioned to our teacher (Miss Debonnaire?) a picture that had caught my attention; a boy on horseback against the prairie and a big sky. She said that she'd been to America and the skies there looked quite different to our English sky. Bigger.

Here's an image (below) that really resonated with me; little did I know that this train was the iconic Burlington Zephyr streamliner, one of the first diesel passenger trains in America. And there's that sky again.

I have written a bit more about the aesthetics and preferences of familiarity in this post from 2017. Indeed, those aesthetics guided my development, that interest in America going back to childhood. One TV show I recall (BBC Radio Times archive says it ran from June to October 1963) was McHale's Navy, with Ernest Borgnine, a comedy set on a Pacific island in WW2. That also had a strong air of familiarity about it, the uniforms, the military base, the equipment. Again, I was five at the time.

[While on the subject of my childhood and potential past-life recollection, this is a strange memory that I feel must be shared here.]

The America of the 1930s, '40s and '50s was always there in my imagination; my aesthetic tastes guided by that era, whether it be Airfix kits of American military aircraft of the period, black-and-white Film Noir movies, Art Deco in its American form, morphing into Mid-Century Modern, the music, the novels... It all clicked, familiar, comforting, yet puzzling. And all this led me to do American studies at university.

From aesthetics to metaphysics? More soon.

Lent 2023: Day 12
Obstacles on the Path to Growth

Lent 2022: Day 12
Understanding our Universe and our physical reality

Lent 2021: Day 12
Chance and Luck: can we will an outcome?

Lent 2020: Day 12
Find your own Holy Places

Spirituality vs. the Scientific Method: Lent 2024, Day 11

[A response to Marek]

I wrote yesterday “Science instinctively has a problem with the metaphysical” – my brother replied: "It’s fairer to say that science’s problem with the metaphysical is epistemological and methodological, and that individuals who claim to practice the scientific method have biases."

Very much so. I used the sentence as a shorthand, but today I shall go into Marek's observation in greater detail.

Coincidentally, yesterday, out of curiosity, I looked up the etymology of the word 'doctor' in both the academic and medical sense. The root is docere, the Latin for 'to teach'. In the pre-scientific world, medical knowledge and religious teaching were closely linked; monks and physicians often served as healers and religious authorities. Divine intervention was an intrinsic part of the healing process. (Indeed, during medieval times, many Jewish physicians were also rabbis). London's famous teaching hospital, Barts (Bartholomew's Hospital), for instance, was founded by the Augustinian Friars in 1123. The words 'hospital', 'hostel' and 'hotel' all derive their etymology from the same route (the dropped 's' replaced by the circumflex over the 'o' as in the French spelling of hôtel. With a root in the Latin hospes (meaning both 'guest' and 'host'), early mediaeval hospitals (hôtels de Dieu) provided hospitality to guests – pilgrims – and patients – alike. 

{{ Suddenly 'Paracelsus' pops up in my stream of consciousness. On we go, thus guided. }} 

From Wikipedia: [the Swiss physician Paracelsus 1493-1541] "was a pioneer in several aspects of the 'medical revolution' of the Renaissance, emphasising the value of observation in combination with received wisdom. He is credited as the 'father of toxicology'." Furthermore: "Paracelsus's approach to science was heavily influenced by his religious beliefs. He believed that science and religion were inseparable, and scientific discoveries were direct messages from God. Thus, he believed it was mankind's divine duty to uncover and understand all of God's message. Paracelsus also believed that the virtues that make up natural objects are not natural, but supernatural, and existed in God before the creation of the Universe." Bingo. A man I could see eye to eye with.

It was entirely normal to marry the natural with the supernatural before the scientific revolution brought on by Isaac Newton. (It must be said, however, that Newton was a deeply spiritual man, who spent as much of his life pursuing theological and occult interests as in developing the groundwork for rational science.) The Enlightenment chased away mediaeval superstitions and the notion of magical thinking – physical effect without physical cause. 

With the development of the scientific method, hypotheses could be put to the test and objectively proved or disproved. Over time, the scientific method evolved as a way to explain reality, becoming a powerful tool driving the industrial revolution and two centuries later, the information revolution.

The key epistemological concepts underpinning the scientific method are:

• Observation: gathering objective data from experiments or survey.
• Hypothesis: a proposed explanation for an observed phenomenon, based on existing knowledge and observations.
• Falsifiability: hypotheses should be set out in a way that allows them to be potentially disproven by observations.
• Experimentation: testing the hypothesis under controlled conditions to gather data and evaluate its validity.
• Inductive reasoning: drawing conclusions from observations, while acknowledging the limitations of generalisation.
• Replication: repeating experiments to ensure results are reliable and not due to chance or error.
• Peer review: scrutiny by other scientists to assess the validity of experiments, data, and conclusions (list summoned up via Google Gemini).

Guided by these concepts, many rational scientific minds have come to reject all aspects of the metaphysical, dismissing attempts to classify and explain them as pseudoscience. (Debunking is an interesting subset of online trolling these days!) 

Yet scientific empiricism has its limits. Above all, there is increasing awareness in the scientific community that there are many things that science cannot currently explain, and the more it looks into these, the harder they become to explain. I've written about these before; the most important ones are the nature of consciousness, the origin of the Universe, fine-tuning, the origins of life, squaring gravity with the Standard Model, and the nature of dark energy and dark matter. A rejection of a metaphysical approach here might ultimately prove to be wrong.

The most fundamental questions about the nature of reality boil down to subjective and objective reality, and here the notion of the observer, so important in quantum mechanics, plays an important role. Does a tree falling over in a forest make a sound if there's no one to hear it? Would the Universe exist if there was no consciousness to experience it? Is there some greater purpose to the evolution of consciousness than biological advantage, survival of the fittest and adaptation to the environment?

The inability of the scientific method to bring itself to bear upon first-person subjective experience of my own consciousness is to me where I'd draw the line. When a rationalist or physicalist (or reductive materialist, call them what you will), tries to explain away the phenomenon of anomalous qualia memory that I've experienced since childhood as 'misfiring of neurons' or 'memories of a film you once saw', I find such explanations hollow and lacking in substance; they just doesn't square with how it feels to have these subjective experiences.

They are what lie at the heart of my personal spiritual (or indeed metaphysical) quest; they inform me intuitively to concepts such as non-local consciousness that defies physical concepts of time and space.

Lent 2023, Day 11
Personalities and Disorders

Lent 2022: Day 11
Aliens, Angels and Daemons

Lent 2021: Day 11
The Ego, Consciousness and Spiritual Evolution

Lent 2020: Day 11
Dreams and the Afterlife

{{We are born to recognise the answer}} – words from knowwhere: Lent 2024, Day ten

I wake up after a good night's sleep. As I do so, the following words flow into my mind: {{We are born to recognise the answer.}} The words came through clearly, calmly – and entirely unbidden, unconnected to anything I'd been thinking before. (Over the past year, I have started to use double curly brackets {{ }} around such intuitions that spontaneously come to mind seemingly from knowwhere – like this misspelling, which I just spontaneously typed!)

So, we are born to recognise the answer. 

Intuition and purpose. Note 'recognise' – not 'understand'. Recognition doesn't carry the same degree of intellectual digestion as understanding. I can recognise something for what it is, not necessarily fully understanding it. Taking this to the ultimate questions of life, survival of consciousness, our place in the Cosmos – there's a suggestion here that while we may try to achieve understanding of our human condition, we may never truly do so, yet recognising it is our (second person plural) destiny. It is the purpose of our birth. And note: 'the answer' is singular – the one answer, not answers in general.

Both recognition and understanding involve the processing information by the mind, but they do so in different ways and to different extents:

I asked Google Gemini to summarise the difference between these two words more fully:

Recognise:

• Focuses on identification: you recognise something when you place it within your existing knowledge, matching it to something already present in your mental database.
• Doesn't require deep comprehension or full knowledge: you can recognise a song without knowing all the lyrics or recognising a face without knowing the person's name.

Understand:

• Goes beyond identification: grasping something's meaning or significance. More than just a superficial connection – a deeper interpretation.
• Requires analysis, explanation and prior knowledge: you understand a scientific theory when you grasp its principles; you understand a news article within the historical and social context, not just as isolated facts.

Key differences:

• Depth of processing: recognition is surface-level, while understanding goes deeper.
• Need for additional information: recognition often works with limited information, while understanding often requires more context.

A further insight came to me minutes later as I made my coffee. We recognise the presence of the metaphysical, but we don't understand it. Perhaps the unseen, immeasurable, forces, such as consciousness, dark energy, dark matter (even dark dimensions) are by their very nature ineffable, beyond our human mind to understand from the standpoint of our stage of evolution (both  biological and spiritual) I wrote about the futility of using scientific enquiry to nail down paranormal phenomena in this post from 2021. 

Science instinctively has a problem with the metaphysical, the paranormal and the supernatural because there's no theoretical framework to explain how it happens in terms that science is willing to accept. 

Multiple experiments do point to a weak, irregular, yet definite effect of mind over matter, strong enough to be defined as statistically significant – indeed, as statistically significant as the discovery of the Higgs boson amid the all the data coming from billions of observations of neutrons colliding in the Large Hadron Collider. Whilst there were acres of blackboard calculations underpinning the existence of the Higgs boson decades before it was actually discovered – there's exactly zero solid scientific theory behind the phenomenon of mind affecting matter, or non-local consciousness effects such as precognition or remote viewing.

 Science doesn't understand it, and so tries to deny it. But – in our lives, we do get the briefest flashes that we recognise as being manifestations of the metaphysical. And into that category, I'd place the appearance of that sentence {{ We are born to recognise the answer }} into my stream of consciousness an hour and half ago as I was waking up this morning.

Lent 2023, Day ten
Spirituality and neurodiversity

Lent 2022: Day ten
Where was God in Auschwitz?

Lent 2021: Day ten
The Sins that cannot be Purged

Lent 2020: Day ten
Those who have created their own religion

Stages of Life – where are you? Lent 2024, Day nine

This annual Lenten series of blog posts allows me to catch up with the big thoughts that have shaped my spiritual thinking over the past year. One of the biggest that have influenced me since last Easter is the notion of of the seven stages of human life, as discussed by German AI researcher and cognitive scientist Joscha Bach, in the third and latest of his series of conversations on Lex Fridman's excellent podcasts. 

Dr Bach derives this from a concept by the psychologist Robert Kegan: “Our self-reflexive mind is not just gradually accumulating ideas about itself; it progresses in distinct stages, of which there are seven. Stage one, reactive survival (infant). Stage two, personal self (young child). Stage three, social self (adolescence, domesticated adult). Stage four is rational agency (self-direction). Stage five is self-authoring, that’s full adult. You’ve achieved wisdom, but there are two more stages. Stage six is enlightenment, stage seven is transcendence."

[The transcript of the full Stages of Life chapter of the conversation is linked here; if you want to watch it on YouTube, the link is here.]

What resonated with me is Dr Bach's assertion that for most people (he quotes Robert Kegan as saying it's 85% of the population), development stops at the third stage. The ego won't let go; rather than moving on into full adulthood and developing in wisdom, social pressure to assert one's position within the status hierarchy proves to be too strong. And materialism – both the notion that everything is matter, and as the ideology of consumerism – stifles growth. Wanting a bigger house or newer car or promotion to a C-suite job – that's what's driving too many people today, and not a personal quest for truth, meaning or realising one's potential as a human.

Looking at the seven, I puzzle over the difference between self-direction and self-authoring; I also ponder (as well may you, dear reader!) over where I currently find myself. This would place me at between the fourth and fifth stage, with enlightenment and transcendence still to come!

This is a rough but useful map, and it also helps explain why so many people are just not interested in existential or metaphysical questions – they are too busy working on ensuring their egos are clad in all the material trappings that social success calls for these days.

I am a slow learner, hampered by attention deficit and a wandering mind, I am very much the generalist rather than the specialist, although there's a range of subjects into which I am into moderately. In the few I was into since childhood, the facts memorised are vast in number (cars, aircraft etc), but the understanding their context (historic, social, scientific/engineering) came relatively recently.

Watching brilliant scientific minds on YouTube explaining difficult concepts makes me aware of how much time I wasted as a student, goofing off to indulge in instant gratification rather than apply myself to knowledge and understanding. But slowly, I feel I am making progress; this blog bears witness to that progress over the past 16 years.

The road ahead is still long; true enlightenment and transcendence lie beyond my current understanding. That alone is reason to want to go on.

Lent 2023, Day nine
Physical reality and the metaphysical

Lent 2022: Day nine
Precognition and willing the future

Lent 2021: Day nine
Original Sin - yes, it exists

Lent 2020: Day nine
Can praying bring luck?

Spirituality for Our (New) Age (Pt III): Lent 2024, Day eight

What's New Age spirituality all about? An eclectic post-war synthesis of eastern and indigenous belief systems woven in with more recent teachings such as Theosophy, itself based based on esoteric and occult traditions. New Age is not so much a religion, then, as a zeitgeist, a loose spiritual twist to the counterculture that swept through the Western world in the second half of the 20th century. With no single leader-figure, no holy text or agreed theology, it was less of a movement and more of a soup in which dozens of ingredients found themselves.

Though the term 'New Age' has fallen out of favour (Google Books' Ngram Viewer shows usage of the term peaking around the turn of the millennium), many of its features are still around. The continued rise of 'spiritual but not religious' (SBNRs) as a name one could self-apply suggests that the concept of a spiritual pick'n'mix remains attractive in the free market of ideas. 

Humans are still drawn to the numinous, but increasingly reject the regimentation of organised religion, with many preferring the network to the hierarchy.

New Age hasn't got itself together in the way that early Christianity did – establishing its central set of beliefs, rites and rituals, deciding on the canonical texts, casting out heretical thought (such as the Gnostics) and formulating itself into a robust religious system that could last millennia. Having said that, it did take Christianity over 300 years to reach that stage. 

The New Age was said to be the Age of Aquarius, though astrologers remain divided as to when it would begin (from the 15th to the 24th or even 36th century). Though the second half of the 20th century does find a consensus. And here I will cite the lyrics of Aquarius by Fifth Dimension:

"When the moon is in the Seventh House, and Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets, and love will steer the stars
This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius/Age of Aquarius
Harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions, golden living dreams of visions,
Mystic crystal revelation/And the mind's true liberation."

You get the picture – wishful thinking, well-meaning twaddle. Yet this song, from the hit musical, Hair, was one of the most popular songs of 1969. Today, however, the words no longer seem to resonate. The hope of the hippy age has been extinguished by the divisive atmosphere created to a large extent by the social media, amplifying discontent brought on by globalisation and the tech revolution.

So what features did New Age spirituality possess? 

Although focused very much on the self, there was a dismissal of individual salvation. New Age is more about vague notions of collective Cosmic consciousness – "are we are all one or something?" Communes never took off; the West was too comfortable on its sofas in centrally heated or air-conditioned houses watching TV.

I have been put off New Age by its very vagueness, by it's imprecision ('Quantum Healing' from people who probably couldn't explain the difference between the Copenhagen interpretation and the Many-worlds interpretation); the number of folk making a living selling New Age merch, and its lack of intellectual rigour. And it's very likely that the SBNRs feel the same way, hence SBNR on the rise, while New Age is in decline. 

Yet from time to time something New Age'y passes by me and does resonate; an idea that feels roughly right but one that needs a lot more thought to turn it into something more appealing. Typically, it's around couching the narrative in the precise language of philosophy and science rather than waffle and slogan. 

Certainly the topic of reincarnation is one brought to the fore on with New Age. A central belief in Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as in many animist faiths, it never figured in the mainstream of the Abrahamic religions which have almost exclusively shaped mainstream Western thought up to the mid-20th century. Whilst I am deeply interested in it, and convinced that there's some reality to this phenomenon, I am put off by the typical New Age treatment which comes across as artifice and lacking in authenticity. Products of imagination rather than of anomalous qualia memories (exomnesia or xenomnesia). Serious academic research by the late Ian Stevenson or Bruce Greyson from the University of Virginia, or James Matlock, or  is something I can latch on to; stories about "my past life as a Russian ballet dancer killed by the Nazis" don't.

The need for meaningful spiritual experience, and the form they take, is very much an individual matter. ("Everyone who seeks God shall find God in their own way," as I have stated.) Everyone has a different threshold of evidence that needs to be met for some belief to become accepted.

[I awoke this morning from a brief but vivid and very beautiful dream; a golden meadow bathed in strong morning sunlight, full of bright flowers. I take a really close-up look at one, strongly saturated yellow; the detail, the complexity is stunning. The power of the works of nature. Waking up, I open the blinds – outside, it's grey and dull, the light is weak and there are no flowers.] 

Tomorrow: from New Age to the Seven Ages.

Lent 2023: Day eight
A Universe into which life fits exactly

Lent 2022: Day eight
Body and Soul

Lent 2021: Day eight
Guilty of feeling guilty

Lent 2020: Day eight
Salvation - or peace of mind?

Spirituality for Our (New) Age (Pt II): Lent 2024, Day seven

I was raised in the Catholic faith; my childhood memories of church alternate between the Polish church in Hammersmith, Św. Andrzeja Boboli, and the local Catholic church, Our Lady and St. Joseph's Church in Hanwell. The latter was almost as Irish as Boboli was Polish; a modernist shrine to pre-war Poland. St Joseph's stood in contrast (until its demolition in 1963 and replacement with an entirely new structure) dark and traditional. Candles in racks (of two lengths, 3d and 6d) lit the interior. Statues of the saints, a larger one of Jesus exposing His bleeding heart; life-like crucifixes and paintings of the martyrs spoke to this child of tortures and pain. Boboli had been acquired by the Polish community in the early 1960s, it too had a strong element of martyrology – not of the saints of ecclesiastical history, but of my parents' and grandparents' generation in Katyń and Gulags and labour camps of the USSR. At this time, I attended a state primary school in Hanwell, on Oaklands Road. The hymns and prayers at school assembly were Church of England; a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II hung in the assembly hall. Though by the mid-1960s, a third of my class were migrants or children of migrants, the school offered one flavour of faith, the established one.

So the religious context into which I was raised was a mixture of various strands of Christianity. Common to all was the figure of Jesus Christ, the Holy Family, the Bible, the Ten Commandments, the notion of heaven and hell, and the promise of life everlasting at the right hand of God for those who had led a righteous life.

Notions of other religions in my childhood worldview included Judaism (through the Old Testament and my parents' occasional mentions of Jews in pre-war Poland, and the Holocaust), a vague awareness of Islam and – most exotic, Hinduism. I had a friend at primary school, Ashok, whom I'd visit to stick together Airfix kits. In his parents' house on Melbourne Road, there would be postcards of blue-skinned Hindu deities – elephant-headed gods, that sort of thing. Off the scale of weirdness to me as a seven-year old. Buddhism, however, did not figure in my worldview, it was not something I'd encountered other than in geography textbooks.

I first became aware of Oriental mysticism via the Beatles. Though never a fan of their music, the Beatles provided a significant chunk of the soundtrack to my childhood, bracketing my early memories of their tunes sung in the infants' playground through to the band falling apart as I started secondary school and my family's move from Hanwell to West Ealing. When the Beatles travelled to India to study meditation in early 1968, the media coverage in Britain was huge. It was a first unveiling – and explanation – of Hindu mysticism to the British mainstream. The sound of the sitar and tabla began to osmose into Western pop music. And words such as karma, mantra, guru and yoga entered the everyday English language.

East and West had hitherto been at a cultural distance, despite the British Empire; in America, the contact was also largely a post-war phenomenon. The occupation of Japan and the Korean War introduced many young American servicemen to a world utterly different to the one in which they had been raised. A decade or so before the hippie counterculture took off, the beatniks had been taking their cues from Zen Buddhism, learned about from popularisers such as Alan Watts. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, popular on Western campuses in the 1960s and '70s, written in 1922, served to open up to a mass audience across the West the lives and beliefs of Hindus after its first translation into English in 1951. 

Watts spoke about 'Beat Zen' and 'Square Zen', reflecting the approach of the beatniks (Kerouac's Dharma Bums, for example) to the more highbrow adaptations by American academics.

Since those post-war years, globalisation, the movement of people and ideas around the world, has made the tenets of oriental religions available to all those who want to learn. The innate belief in the superiority of one's own culture – an important foundation of the British Empire – has given way to a broader set of generally accepted notions, imported from beyond the Christian tradition.

Woven into the New Age movement, Eastern mysticism and Native American shamanic traditions today sit more easily in the Western mainstream as it appropriates, blends and goes global, in search of common ground and interconnectedness among all humans.

Tomorrow I shall dip into New Age thinking and its various strands, and how that has influenced spiritual understanding.

Lent 2023, Day seven
A Universe hand-crafted for us all

Lent 2022, Day seven
Monism, dualism and non-dualism

Lent 2021, Day seven
How much spirituality do we need in our lives?

Lent 2020, Day seven
Build your own Religion - the Trappings of Faith

Spirituality for Our (New) Age (Pt I): Lent 2024, Day Six

The horrors of the First and Second World Wars left organised religion in the West in a bad shape. Plagued by existential doubts, churchgoers began drifting away from their congregations. Even in America, untouched by enemy bombs, this held true. In 1945, 76% of American adults were members of a church, synagogue or mosque; by 2020 that figure had fallen to 47%. From over three-quarters to under a half.

This drift towards secularisation was also the result of literal and figurative materialism; chasing money and possessions rather than seeking spiritual fulfilment in a Universe believed by mainstream science to consist solely of matter. A brand new '57 Chevy had become more important that God.

But with over half of America's population having turned its back on churches and churchgoing, a good many folk continue to hanker after the numinous. In a poll published by Pew in December 2023, 22% of the US public claim to be unaffiliated with any religion, yet identify as being spiritual in some way. ('Spiritual but not religious', or SBNR.) That's more than the 21% who don’t think of themselves as spiritual or religious, or hold spirituality or religion as very important in their lives. The rest – those that still consider religion important to them – square with that 47% in the Gallup survey above. However, probed further, the religious were asked whether they considered themselves as 'spiritual'. Of that group, 10% described themselves as religious but not spiritual, the sort of people who attend church out of a sense of tradition, duty, and order – but feel no innate divine calling. 

I want to focus on that 22%, the SBNRs. Incidentally, Pew's 2012 survey had that number at 18%; that's an increase of over one fifth in just over one decade. [I am taking the US as a proxy for what's been happening across the Western world in general, obviously each country has its own specific set of characteristics. Decline in churchgoing is also evident in countries that until recently were devoutly Catholic, such as Spain, Ireland or Poland.] SBNRism is on the rise!

We live in an increasingly fragmented age, centred around the self; self-help, self-realisation, self-reliance, self-diagnosis – tech-driven individualism. Community has become less important; participation in religious ritual with one's fellows holds less attraction. Individuals bridle against the laws and restrictions imposed by organised religions upon their faithful. "Who is some priest/rabbi/imam to tell me what I can or cannot do with my life?"

And so SBNRs who wish to seek their own personal paths to Enlightenment and Transcendence tend to do so alone, unsupported by any congregation, without any guidelines or tenets. However, in this day and age, it is easier than ever to find interesting and useful content online with which to develop your thinking. All manner of esoteric teachings are readily accessible, and a curious, though critical, mind can find many seeds yielding new thoughts that lead to genuine spiritual growth.

Coming back to the social transformation in the decades that followed WW2, the generational change that saw the baby-boomers coming of age in the late-1960s, was most profound. The hippies who sought love and peace at that time scorned organised religion, yet felt spiritually connected with the Cosmos – and psychedelic drugs played a part in that shift. I'd argue that the gulf between my parents' generation, who had experienced the full horrors of WW2, and my generation is far greater than than between my generation and my children's generation.

The New Age movement – if one can call it that, for it is so eclectic, so difficult to define – does somehow capture the spirit of our spiritual age. The stereotype of a Californian woman wearing a dress emblazoned with Native American motifs, swinging a healing crystal and chanting a Hindu mantra as she channels a 12th century Tibetan monk, puts the phrase into one neat picture. And as soon as I encounter text like "that's the hour-angle of the vernal equinox" on a website proclaiming some mystical wisdom or other, I click the Close button in the top left corner.

If there's a New Age, there must have been an Old Age; one of tradition and continuity, of orthodoxy, of unquestioning obedience to religious authorities; on this New Age turned its back. But it also turned its back on rationalism, empiricism and the scientific method. However, once science embraced the baked-in uncertainty of quantum mechanics, a whole new lexicon of pseudoscientific psychobabble became available to New Agers. The 'q' word could become a prefix to any given esoteric concept. (I stick to quantum luck.) 

Having said that, physicalist science doesn't have all the answers – and only the most hide-bound reductive materialist will still claim that. Consciousness remains a deep mystery to science. Dark energy and dark matter – ditto. The past 40 years of particle physics has yielded little more than confirming the existence of the Higgs boson. What's beyond the Standard Model? Don't know. What was before Big Bang? Don't know that either.

With science riddled with so many gaps – gaps that scientists didn't even know existed 100 years ago – it becomes relatively easy to fill them with supposition and woo-woo.

Part II tomorrow – how the West met the East and a new spirituality was born.

Lent 2023 Day Six
The role of consciousness in human spirituality

Lent 2022: Day six
Do you believe in life after death?

Lent 2021: Day six
How should we see God?

Lent 2020: Day six
Build your own religion – the tenets

Believers and the Unbelievers – Lent 2024, Day five

We humans like to define, to divide, to draw up differences – who's with us, who's against us; who are our friends, who are our enemies (and who are our enemy's enemies). Politicians have picked upon this instinct to divide and rule, as have religious leaders.

Believers and atheists, the moral and the immoral, the just and the unjust, individualists and conformists, traditionalists and modernisers, centralisers and devolutionists. The Thirty Years' War resulted in up of a quarter of the population of western Europe being killed or starving to death. While all involved believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ, some of them believed that the communion wafer of which they partook was His actual body, whilst others that it merely symbolised Christ's body. And that theological nuance was enough to cost several million lives.

So where do I draw the dividing line in terms of worldviews?

For me, it is physicalism v. spirituality. Those who have given it any thought will hold that either everything in this Universe is composed of matter, and we humans are nothing but matter, and consciousness is mere illusion; or we consider consciousness (aka the soul) is primary and there's more to reality than the physical world. Then of course there are those who haven't considered this question at all. And then there are those who hold neither view, but are examining the arguments before reaching a view.

I have been led towards the non-physicalist viewpoint, both by scientific and philosophical inquiry, and by personal intuition and my own subjective conscious experiences, which I hold to be primary.

Do I wish to cast judgment on physicalists or 'don't-know-haven't-thought-about-its'? No. Minds change over time. (I will be writing about that in a forthcoming Lenten blog post.) 

So – do I see eye to eye with those who follow a religion? 

Not really. We might agree that there's more to the Universe than mere matter, we might agree on the existence of an overarching purpose and tendency towards goodness that can be called divine – but that's about all that we can agree on, unless we get deep and metaphysical and rise above literal interpretation of holy texts. 

I am not fixed in my faith; I seek, I modify and improve my worldview over time; I am not bound by doctrines. I seek neither a spiritual leader nor spiritual followers; rather fellow-seekers with whom I can discuss and argue and question and fine-tune my spiritual thinking. 

This annual blog cycle forms a set of milestones for me to look back upon and consider how my thinking has evolved. Some things become clearer over time, with contemplation, meditation and intuition, others more nuanced – and then there are questions that might one day be answered. Claiming certainty in matters spiritual is a fallacious endeavour.

Religions offer certainty to people looking for ready answers. Humanity's best philosophers can posit elegant theories that attract adherents, but I feel that as a species, we are still far away from understanding reality. Maybe there are eight billion separate subjective realities rather than one objective reality?

Having internally agreed their own tenets and doctrines, religions will by their nature create insiders and outsiders. Vehement divisions between people of different faiths ensue; followers of this book will see followers of that book as their enemy. But are they active followers who have seen the light and believe ardently in their religion's tenets to the exclusion of others? Or are they merely adherents of the faith into which they were born? Once an Iraqi Sunni or Northern Ireland Protestant, always one? So who is your enemy? The Shi'ite or the Catholic. Why are they your enemies? Do they threaten you materially or spiritually? Where is God when the terrorist places the bomb in the mosque or the chapel?

Religious leaders who condemn believers in different faiths or adherents of different denominations to the fieriest pits of hell for not accepting some obscure dogma are as repugnant to me as those reductive materialists who laugh at those seeking to understand the nature of reality in metaphysical terms. 

We should seek common ground, we should seek highest common factors – that on which we can all agree. But that's difficult when the other seeks merely to mock or even eradicate you and your way of thinking.

Lent 2023 day five

Reality, the New God

Lent 2022: day five
The Ego and Evil

Lent 2021: day five
Science, materialism and God

Lent 2020: day five
Monism and Dualism

Metaphysical powers – woo-woo or fact? Lent 2024, Day four

"A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, unless acted upon by a force" – Newton's First Law of Motion (1687). Now, that mug on your table – try moving it without exerting any force upon it. Just by thought alone. You can't do it? Neither can I. If we could, that would literally be magic, i.e. physical effect without physical force. 

But metaphysical force? Altering physical outcomes in the material world with the mind? With consciousness. Foreseeing the future and forestalling future calamities. Healing without drugs or surgery. Environmental effects – summoning rainfall by chanting, for example. Sounds like a bunch of baloney. Especially when some pseudoscientific claptrap is attached to it.

And yet, since the development of quantum physics, Newtonian laws no longer hold true at the sub-atomic scale. 

If the half-life of the isotope Radium-228 is five years and nine months, it's only a probability – not a certainty – that over this time, half of the atoms in a lump of that stuff will have decayed into Actinium-228. Exactly how much, physicists can't say, but 50% is most probable over those five years and nine months. Observe a single atom of that isotope, and that decay could happen within the next second, or it could happen in ten years' time.

Einstein bridled at the notion that the process of nuclear decay could be random. "God does not play dice," he said, being uncomfortable with the probabilistic nature of subatomic physics, preferring Newtonian determinism.

Yet this very uncertainty has become the launch-pad, the theoretical underpinning for modern parapsychology. If photons can be both particles and waves until a conscious observer observes them, thus collapsing the wave function, then can the conscious observer also alter quantum outcomes? Now this starts to be interesting. If so – and this is a huge leap into the unknown – can we measure the effect of mind on matter?

Experiments into the paranormal – psi phenomena – are cheap to conduct, but mainstream science won't go there, mostly for fear of scorn. But some studies do end up with results that are 'above chance'. Yes, the debunkers will debunk, casting aspersions of the methodology and motives of the experimenters. A cold bucket of ridicule will do the trick whenever falsification of results can't be proven. But over time, a consistent picture is emerging – of a consistent, though very weak, effect that is visibly above chance.

Imagine tossing a coin 100 times, and willing the outcome to be heads, and the outcome is that 51 times it indeed comes out heads, just as you'd willed it, and 49 are tails, defying your will. Does that tell you anything? Probably not. However, if you get a thousand people to conduct those 100 coin-tosses, always willing heads, and in the overwhelming majority of the thousand runs of 100 tosses, you get 51 (or more) heads – then this becomes statistically significant. That's the proposition made by Prof Etzel Cardeña in his peer-reviewed meta-analytic study of psychic abilities, The experimental evidence for parapsychological phenomena: A review. published in 2018 by American Psychologist, a mainstream publication.

The difference, in the eyes of science, is that whilst the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012 was underpinned by calculations positing its existence, no one has the slightest idea how these psi phenomena work. 

When the CIA's Project Stargate considered an analysis of no-shows on passenger flights that crashed, the airlines refused to participate, citing customer privacy and commercial secrecy as their excuse. Anecdotally, it seems that there has been a small but consistent increase in people who didn't board a fatal flight because of a premonition, or just fate.

Two long-term researchers into parapsychology, Rupert Sheldrake and Dean Radin, have persisted over the decades trying to prove the reality of psi phenomena despite being labelled 'pseudoscientists' by some of their colleagues. [Incidentally, it's worth reading these men's Wikipedia entries – not only the actual pages, but also the View history tab which shows the persistence with which sceptics/debunkers patrol Wikipedia to ensure scientific orthodoxy prevails.]

Modern science knows it hasn't got all the answers. A hundred years ago, physicists were far more certain than they are today. More and more avenues of enquiry result in dead ends (string theory) or demand philosophical rather than scientific explanation (fine-tuning).

I'm not stating that Rupert Sheldrake and Dean Radin are right, but my intuition is that they are not wrong. There's far more to their claims than the debunkers can debunk; I feel that this is very much the right avenue for science to explore.

But with a caveat – what if psi doesn't want to be discovered? What if it doesn't feel that the time is right for these metaphysical powers to be gifted to the human population yet?

Lent 2023: Day four
The nature of reality, Pt III

Lent 2022: Day four
The Ego: what is it good for?

Lent 2021: Day four
Would the Universe exist without God"

Lent 2020: Day four
Conscious Life after Death

On spiritual evolution – Lent 2024, Day three

Science has brought us great benefits, be it in healthcare, comfortable living, freedom from want, and physical and informational communication that eradicates distance. 

But that same science has also removed the magic from our lives. Because science works, there's no more need for spirituality. "God is dead", as Nietzsche put it in 1885. Who needs God if you have steam engines, telegraphy, weaving machines, newspapers and hygiene? And since Nietzsche died, everything newer that has come to materially enrich our lives, from the automobile to central heating and the refrigerator.

If there is no God, then what replaces God is matter. If it's all there is, we worship it, chase it, and define human success in terms of who accumulates the most of it, or its proxy, cash.

Matter has squeezed out the metaphysical, the supernatural, the paranormal. Everything is cause and effect. Billiard balls rolling across the baize knocking each other into corner pockets. There can be, argue rationalists, no effect without a cause. Magic, being defined as being a physical effect (a glass sliding across a table on its own, or a brain receiving information from the future) without a physical cause. No magic, no God, no life eternal.

But ponder for a second – to what extent was the life of pre-Columban Native American tribes qualitatively worse than the lives of citizens living in the suburbs of Minnesota, Omaha, Wichita or Milwaukee after those indigenous peoples were swept from the Great Plains? Yes, cars, hospitals, supermarkets, department stores – but also depression, hypertension, cancers, substance abuse and anxiety. Caused by a disconnect between the human spirit and the Cosmos, which was not the case for Native Americans, who were bound to the Earth and the sky in a mystical connection. The rain dance, performed by Navajo and Hopi peoples, is an excellent example. [Rain modification rituals were common around the world in shamanic traditions.]

I recently considered an alternative scenario for human development in which spiritual rather than material progress defines human evolution. (I would stress here 'spiritual' rather than 'theological' or 'religious'.)

Let's imagine for a second that the development of agriculture never happened (about 12,000 years ago), but that we humans continued to exist purely as hunter-gatherers, as we had done ever since Homo sapiens emerged as a distinct species some 400,000 years ago. Without agricultural settlements, nomadic tribes would have continued to roam, as they did across the Great Plains, with their shamanic practices developing in sophistication and effectiveness over time. 

Given not 12,000 years, but say another 120,000 years of human evolution in hunter-gatherer form. Why not a million years? Never settling down, continuing to roam the savanna, the veldt, the steppes and the plains, evolution might have selected not for the ability to dominate other humans, but for the ability to see into the future or to alter the physical environment. And with cooperation proving evolutionarily more useful than conflict, would natural selection have preferred the ethical to the Machiavellian? Open to intuition, developing in precognition, remote viewing, weather modification, ability to heal – evolving powers of mind over matter?

These abilities might be weak and found rarely in mere handfuls of gifted individuals – but just imagine evolutionary selection on the basis of psychic powers. Tribes feted shamans who could lead them to good hunting grounds and lands rich in berries, mushrooms and edible roots. Tapping into a deeper, non-local consciousness, aligning ones' needs with those of the environment and Cosmos, developing that power of mind over matter over millennia –

And then – and only then – develop agriculture, settlement, cities, industry, technology, space exploration... with a higher awareness, pin-sharp intuition, guidance from above as it were – angelic beings, but with naturally, not technologically, derived magic abilities.

But …what if they are here …already?

Lent 2023: Day three
The Nature of Reality, Pt II

Lent 2022: Day three
Gratitude and Consciousness

Lent 2021: Day three
Would the Universe exist without us?

Lent 2020: Day three
Define your Deity

How much spirituality do we need? Lent 2024, Day Two

A perennial question I have asked over the years is "how much spirituality do we need?" Is going to a church, synagogue, mosque or temple once every seven days enough? Is the practice of daily prayer enough? How often, to what extent, should we try to engage with God?

Recently, I feel I have intuited an answer that resolves this question for me. 

But first, what is spirituality?

I would define it as one's subjective awareness of the numinous (that which evokes a sense of the mystical, sublime, or transcendent; awe-inspiring); being aware of the existence of a metaphysical dimension outside of our material, empirically deductible world; and sensing an ultimate purpose which could be called divine. 

This spiritual dimension to life often calls through to us by way of intuition – but only if we are open to it. And we need to be able to distinguish true intuition from wishful thinking. On the other hand, we also need to be able to distinguish true intuition from the negating voice of reductive rationalism, "oh, it's just an illusion". 

If you do actively seek the divine, and have had a lifetime of spiritual experiences, no matter how weak in intensity or low in frequency, yet have identified them as such, then you'll know what I am talking about. If you haven't, and seek not God – well, each to their own (normal blogging resumes in April).

So, those who feel a calling – how much spirituality do we need? Last October, while walking in a nearby forest, the answer came to me, unbidden.

"I need enough spirituality with which to inoculate myself against the doubts that reductive materialism tries to cast upon my belief in the primacy of consciousness." 

Since childhood, I have had faith, at first of a religious nature. As a teenager, I rejected the baggage of Roman Catholicism while maintaining a belief in a spiritual dimension to life. It waxed and waned as I grew older and busied myself with a career and raising a family, but it was always there in the background, waiting for the moment when it could surface fully. 

Currently, the existential questions to do with God, the Cosmos and the true nature of reality are the most important drivers in my life, far more important than material considerations. It is sufficient for me to life in material comfort; I seek not luxury, preferring an ascetic lifestyle that allows me to focus on spiritual questions. And this brings me joy, peace of mind and sense of purpose – to more fully unravel the great mysteries of existence.

I am immured to the blandishments of reductive materialism. All the sceptics, debunkers, atheists and materialists who dismiss the spiritual dimension to human life as being a delusion are basing that idea on the assumption that Science Has All The Answers. Clearly, it hasn't. Human knowledge has moved a long way since the 1920s when physicists believed they were only a handful of equations away from understanding everything. Today, debates at the leading edge of science about the nature of dark energy and dark matter (and indeed dark dimensions), about the cosmological constants and the fine-tuned Universe, indeed, about consciousness itself, suggest that those who try to shout down and shut down discussions of spirituality as 'pseudoscience' and 'woo-woo' are not really following the debates.

And this leads me to suggest that an understanding of our spirituality must be grounded in some kind of understanding of science – in particular, physics, cosmology and biology. Reality is far different to that with which we have contact in our day-to-day lives. Curiosity and observation are important characteristics, tools with which we can help make sense of it all.

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 does indeed starts to bring joy and purpose to life. 

Lent 2024: Day two
The Nature of Reality Pt. I

Lent 2022: Day two
Objective/Subjective, Ego and Consciousness.

Lent 2021: Day two  
Your life: a miracle? Or something that just happened?

Lent 2020: Day two
The Physical and the Metaphysical; the Natural and the Supernatural