Hope and hopelessness – Lent 2025: Day 31

Physical and cognitive decline, infirmity and death – that's on the menu for everyone. And despite this, we can be happy. Why? What is it that ultimately gives us hope? What is it that stops us from sliding into existential despair? 

Unlike every other life form on our planet, we have the ability to imagine the future. On the basis of observation, we can extrapolate how the cycle of life looks and how it will look. We can picture, even on a glorious spring day such as today – bright sunshine, brilliant blue sky, 22°C outside as I write, trees starting to unfurl new leaves – that by late November, it will be grim; sleet, leaden skies, temperature just above freezing, long dark nights. But then come next April, we'll once again see days such as today.

It's always worth noting the Rabbinical saying: if you're having a bad day today, remember there will be better ones; and if you're enjoying a good day, remember there will be bad ones. Yet seasons, and days good and bad, are cyclical; something to be toggled through. Biological life, however, is binary – it's either on or off. Alive or dead.

Positive expectations have a positive role in medicine. Belief in the power of hope helps healing outcomes; clinical studies have shown that all other factors being equal, patients who hope to recover are more likely to do so than patients mired in hopelessness. Mind over matter, belief in the power of belief – the placebo effect is powerful; while science has yet to explain how it works, it is real, and it can produce measurable physiological changes.

Hope generates fortitude, the power to carry on in the face of adversity. I could see that in my father in his last years. Accepting his situation, yet striving to get on with it, until the very end.

But what about consciousness? Is its existence also binary? Will it be snuffed out with death? And here we have experience hope in its most profound form. Dismiss the notion of survival of consciousness as a false hope, and it no longer works its spell. It's hope that keeps us keeping on, in the expectation that the soul – in one way or another – survives body death. But is it just hope – or will hope morph into knowing? Into gnosis? Personally, I feel it. In small but regular experiences (I had one today on my walk) which suggest to me that this is true.

Materialism, ultimately, denies us the greatest hope – that of being part of an eternal whole, being upon a journey of spiritual evolution, along with the Universe as it unfolds. 

Lent 2024: Day 31
Time and Spirituality

Lent 2023, Day 31
Science vs. the Paranormal

Lent 2022: Day 31
Consciousness – fundamental and universal?

Lent 2021: Day 31
I'm better than you – no, really, I am!

Lent 2020: Day 31
Divine Inspiration

Getting On With It (Pt II) – Lent 2025: Day 30

We all know (or should know!) that work expands to fill the time available for it. This is Parkinson's Law, dating back to 1955). However, as we will also know from experience, that if you wait until the last minute to do the work, it only takes a minute. This is the Stock-Sanford corollary to Parkinson's law. But what if there's no deadline? What if you don't do it – what if you just push it (whatever it is) further on into the future? You can't Get On With It if you've not defined what it is.

Tasks that repeat, projects that don't.

What can you put off until tomorrow, or the next day, or the week or month after that? In other words, when is it OK to procrastinate, and when are you absolutely obliged to get on with it? What's the driver? What motivates you? What will happen if you don't do it at all? Or if you fail in your attempt? The one filter through which to pass these questions is: will it help me fulfil my human potential?

I am minded of the kitchen in Withnail and I. The moment when you finally realise that something must be done. A situation that can no longer go on. It's never this bad in my kitchen, by the way. Every evening, I switch on the immersion heater, wait for the water to heat up, and wash the dishes in between doing weights exercises. However, whilst I don't mind washing dishes and pans, I can't say I'm a fan of washing cutlery. And so, if nothing else, the cutlery tends pile up from one day to the next, in the sink, in an empty (large) yogurt container. Or two yogurt containers. [One solution to this is to reduce the number of knives, forks and spoons I deploy. Just the one set, used in rotation, rather than dirtying new ones and letting them accumulate before washing 25 to 30 in one go.]

Mentally juggling the tasks ahead of me, I ponder which ones are most important and in what order I should tackle them, and what the consequences of not doing them are. The worst that could happen is that I simply end up shifting the tasks on into the future. There's cleaning the house (usually, this can wait). There's blogging. The daily stroll (two hours typically). And books I want to read. And my exercises. 

Time should be measured by entropy, not seconds, minutes and years. The process of order turning into chaos. Wasting time means letting chaotic processes unfold.

{{ czas chce nas skrzywdzić }} – 'time wants to harm us'.

I'm not one for being pro-active. Sure, I react; when prodded, I respond. What drives me still, though, is not material. It is mystical; metaphysical. I do believe in an overarching Cosmic Purpose. So much of what happens to us in our lives, the major junctions at which we take this turn or that, are determined by chance. We think we have control over our destinies, and yet looking back we can see how much was preordained. 

How much we do, how much we achieve – this is determined by our strength of will. How much we push over into the future, rather than doing today. But then on the other hand, avoiding stress is important to living longer. Don't get too worked up over work. If your procrastination leads to levels of stress that you can't cope with, then either learn to let go, or work on reducing the amount of time you waste on the inconsequential. 

Lent 2025: Day 30
The Divine in your life

Lent 2023, Day 30
God/No God

Lent 2022: Day 30
Let the Spirit guide you!

Lent 2021: Day 30
On being perceptive

Lent 2020: Day 30
Time - religion and metaphysics

Getting On With It (Pt I) – Lent 2025: Day 29

The biological containers that carry our consciousness have a finite timespan allocated to them. Predetermined by genetics and by environment to some degree, and to some degree by will, our lives are like flying in a glider. Carried aloft by thermal currents, each flight is bound to end sometime. The question is – how long we can stay airborne? And what we can do while up there? The answers are related to many factors, some of which are under our control, others not at all.

Why do we live? Is life just a meaningless random thing that happened? 

Or – as my own intuition instructs me to ask – is there a purpose? Just pondering that question, "why am I here," it immediately feels to me that yes, there is a reason, no, this is not an accident.

So if there is a purpose – what should we be doing with our lives? 

I'd answer that question in three words – fulfil your potential. Others might say, "Have fun. Buy toys. Seek pleasure." Others might say: "Push yourself ever higher up the status hierarchy." Seek wealth to convert into power, power to convert into wealth. Others yet might have never even asked themselves the question.

Fulfilling your potential means finding the balance. Know your strengths and weaknesses, and make the most of those strengths. Be aware of your weaknesses – but don't beat yourself up trying to fix them. Perfection is an unattainable goal. Improvement in small, measurable steps is a more realistic doctrine by which to live one's life.

My weakness? I am inconsistent. I can be lazy; goofing off when I should be getting on with it. I am all too easily distracted (always have been). The challenge for me, therefore, is getting on with it consistently – staying focused.

Getting on with it? So important. But getting on with what?

It was easier when I was young. I was guided – by parents, by teachers, by media role models. Study, get a job, find a partner, procreate, reach a position of financial comfort. But then what? Take it easy? Retire as early as possible to play golf? 

More and more people across the Western world are inheriting wealth*, which secures their financial future at an early age. Rather than struggle to get onto the property ladder, they find themselves decently housed at an early age, without a mortgage, and their choice now is either to drive hard to "realise my potential", or "take it easy, man". Freed from the pressure of finding a career that pays well, the New Inheritocracy can pursue their passions in jobs that pay less but which can let them realise their potential. But the downside is a society of slackers, who, without passions, just drift and vegetate, or chase empty pleasures, their potential unfulfilled. 

Getting On With It is about drive. We all have different levels of drive, and what we attach it too is all important. Philanthropy, charity, scientific research, ecological activism – or simply the acquisition of wealth, power, prestige. Or across the board – acclaim. The Ego's need for adulation. Finding one's true cause can boost drive, a moment of realisation of one's purpose in life. With me, again, I see that inconsistency. A framework is required, an external target. Setting myself the goal, for the sixth Lent in a row, to come up with daily Lent-focused blog posts helps to jog me along. I must stop wasting time and Get On With It. But beyond Lent, my daily ritual of completing my health-and-exercise spreadsheet (into the 12th year now!) keeps me on the straight and narrow.

* There are two excellent articles about the New Inheritocracy in the 1 March 2025 edition of The Economist, behind a paywall, but well worth accessing.

Lent 2024: Day 29
Altruism and consciousness

Lent 2023, Day 29
Artificial Intelligence creates a religion

Lent 2022: Day 29
Meditations on travel

Lent 2021: Day 29
The ups and downs of life

Lent 2020: Day 29
Prophetic

Death, dreams and memories – Lent 2025: Day 28

"...To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause..."

Shakespeare's Hamlet compares death to sleep, concerned that even in death, we'll still be dreaming – and those dreams will continue to haunt us. And so is it as our consciousness passes from one incarnation to another? To me, it was long clear that William Shakespeare was an Old Soul; a consciousness that had passed through many human containers before becoming an Elizabethan playwright. His intuitive understanding of memories of past existence is clearly stated in these lines.

We wake each morning, sometimes remembering the night's dreams, sometimes not. (Having a bedside notebook to jot down key points is a valuable aide memoire.) There's no doubt that you had that dream. But was that you that had that dream your ego, or your consciousness? A blend, I would argue. One way to see what's what in your dream is to sift through the contents bearing in mind this quote from Mark Belchner, from his book The Dream Frontier. Dr Belchner says that "dreams don't lie". "Our dreams are not concerned with disguise and censorship. They are our most honest communications, perhaps the only human communication in which we cannot lie. We can lie about our dreams, but not in our dreams." I divide my dreams into the humdrum, the routine ones that merely clear out partially digested or incomplete thoughts, and the Big Dreams (as Freud called them). These don't contain disjunctive cognition, where people, places and times blend and where logic evaporates. The Big Dreams are consistent in terms of place, time and action (the Three Unities of Greek theatre), and bring back events from your consciousness' past existence.

Not only can we not lie in our dreams, we cannot lie in our qualia memories. Sharp and precise, though fleeting and ephemeral. We call these phenomena déjà vus; flashbacks, which triggered or unbidden bring back a moment of conscious experience that we have had before. 

Below: how Google's Imagen 3.0 imagines a past-life flashback. Personally, I have always found them to be pleasant; an old familiarity returning to me, with a tang of nostalgia, a sense that I am never to return there. But not unsettling – nothing like these expressions.

Having experienced this all my life, I have trained myself to pinpoint the moment in childhood from which those qualia memories were from. The A40 road to South Wales, Chessington Zoo on a primary-school trip; a family visit to Winchester Cathedral. I can feel their echoes, conforming to the experience I felt at the time, before melting away. [I have been compiling the most-oftenly encountered current-life flashbacks for several years now on this blog.]

Rarer, though entirely consistent and persistent, are the 'past-life' flashbacks and dreams, that confirm to me the reality of previous incarnations. They feel the same as the current-life ones; the same mechanism, the same flavour of 'pleasance' mixed with 'longing to return'. They strongly suggest to me a continuity of consciousness that spans beyond our biological lifetime. But quite how this 'works' (to use a mechanistic term) is still beyond me. Are we to dress metaphysical phenomena in scientific terms ('consciousness borne aloft on a field of neutrinos') or are they ultimately ineffable?

Lent 2024: Day 28
Ego, Consciousness and the Environment

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

Lent 2022: Day 28
Understanding the Infinite and the Eternal

Lent 2021: Day 28
Higher life forms, imagined

Lent 2020: Day 28
The Secret and the Hidden

End of Time II – Lent 2025: Day 27

Science, for all its emphasis on the objective and the empirical, struggles to answer the fundamental questions about the nature of reality. If 100 years ago, physicists believed they were just several months and a couple of equations away from literally knowing everything, the intervening century had introduced more and more doubt. Today, competing theories regarding the beginning and the end of the Universe differ wildly (before the 1920s, an eternally static universe was generally assumed). 

Any theory that envisages a start-point (once, there was absolutely nothing, and in the far future, there will again be absolutely nothing) should introduce a first-cause that kicked everything off, and some interpretation of the eternal oblivion that will follow. Cyclical theories fudge this question by suggesting that there was never a 'nothing' and the next 'something' will arise from the end of the current 'something'.

Now – let's work with the notion of some overarching Big 'C' Consciousness that's behind, outside of and yet within all of Creation – a purpose, a teleology, a destination, a reason. Big 'C' Consciousness willed the Universe into existence, giving it its laws and its direction. [Physicalists would deny this, saying there's no need for such a construct. But then neither their position nor mine is falsifiable; thus both camps are resting their worldviews on belief.]

I see it this way: small 'c' consciousness evolves from the bottom all the way up, with the intention of a final merging into Big 'C' Consciousness. Atoms are aware of their existence; but have they will? Quantum mechanics does not negate that. A big step up in the evolution of consciousness was abiogenesis – that mysterious leap from non-life to life. A further big step up was the emergence of sentient life, we humans, capable of meta-consciousness – conscious of being conscious. 

But – what's next? Beings that are increasingly angelic? Living in a higher level of consciousness still?

Below: Imagen 3.0, asked to illustrate biological and spiritual evolution. Prophetic? Or a distillation of a billion online images?

I believe that our consciousness shall pass through a myriad of containers, each evolving, learning, observing, rising in understanding, improving ethically, before finally uniting as one in the One.

At the End of Time, or sooner? Religions seem to be in a bit of hurry to reach that end point. Eternal bliss in Heaven after one biological life reasonably well lived. Or after a handful of reincarnations. To me, that's too simple. An admission ticket too cheaply priced. We have imperfections to iron out; improvement comes slowly. One life at a time. 

And how does it all end? And where – on this planet, on some other star system? In this galaxy, or some distant one?And for how long does that end state – that Omega Point – last? I feel as knowledgeable as a cat trying to understand electricity. But the questions need to be asked, and discussed. Hypothesis – thesis – antithesis – synthesis.

Lent 2024: Day 27
Personality and Belief

Lent 2023, Day 27
Being Positive is more than just being Optimistic

Lent 2022: Day 27
God and Nationalism

Lent 2021: Day 27
Consciousness in other creatures

Lent 2020: Day 27
The Physical and the Metaphysical

The End of Time – Lent 2025: Day 26

Science has no clear answer as to how the Universe (this Universe?) will end. In a Big Crunch (galaxies collapsing into their black holes which then go on to swallow one another in an ever contracting universe that ends up in a singularity)? Or in Heat Death – galaxies flung further and further apart by dark energy at an ever-accelerating pace, over time losing all contact with each other, and then, one by one, their stars go out? And atoms stop spinning until there's nothing with which to measure time? Or in a Big Rip (dark energy becomes stronger and stronger, eventually tearing apart galaxies and indeed all matter)? Or in Vacuum Decay, when the stability of the vacuum of space suddenly decays into a lower energy state, resulting in a bubble of lower-energy vacuum expanding at the speed of light through the universe, destroying everything in its path? We don't know.

Below: Google Gemini Imagen 3.0, prompted to illustrate the four competing theories of how the Universe will end.

And when will this all happen? The first three are due in around 10¹⁰⁰ to 10¹²⁰ years from now, so no immediate worry. Unless it's vacuum decay, which could happen at any time. Though even if it started a billion light years away, it would take a billion years to reach us. And given that we're some  46.5 billion light years in any direction from the edge of the observable universe, we seem to be statistically quite safe.

[Well before then, the Sun's increasing luminosity will make life on Earth impossible somewhere between a billion and 1.2 billion years' time; humanity will need to evolve and move on. This is around 3,000 times longer than Homo sapiens has existed as a species, so there's no great rush.]

But will the end of the Universe (however it happens) mean the beginning of a new one? Certainly, proponents of the Big Crunch theory suggest that after everything comes together in a singularity, it immediately kicks off the next Big Bang. And so on, ad infinitum. Sir Roger Penrose's Conformal Cyclic Cosmology posits that once the last atom ceases to vibrate at the universe's heat death, time runs to an end; without time there is no space – and from that begins, yes, the next Big Bang. So two of the models foresee a universe of infinite duration, with new ones arising from the ashes of the previous ones. Two don't. They envisage a total annihilation of all matter.

But what would happen to consciousness, both small-'c' and the large-'C' ,when space-time runs out? Will we be safely gathered in? Will we be saved? I shall speculate on this tomorrow.

Lent 2024: Day 26
Understanding the esoteric
(In which I dream of the Random Number Veneration Generator)

Lent 2023, Day 26
The Ghost in the Machine

Lent 2022: Day 26
The End of Times

Lent 2021: Day 26
Physical Immortality

Lent 2020: Day 26
Intimations of Immortality

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

Smash, rip, incinerate, crush, suffocate, destroy, annihilate, mourn, despair. [Now read again.]

Has reading this list of verbs changed your mood? Feeling a little more... anxious? Now, how about these –

Flourish, embrace, inspire, open, cherish, rejuvenate, love, marvel, celebrate, hope. [Now re-read.]

– Have these words returned you to a better place?

The simple act of casting your eyes over shapes on a screen – characters or graphemes – that we recognise as letters, placed together to form words, can cause either the levels of cortisol or of dopamine to rise within your body. When released into a living organism, chemical substances that produce a biological effect are, pharmacologically speaking, drugs. Hormones. Signalling molecules that affect the body, produced endogenously. We have been conditioned to respond accordingly. It's what makes great poets great; wringing emotion out of language.

With music, the effect is more powerful. Music plays a significant role in our emotions and moods. Uppers and downers. Specific sequences of notes, tempo, key (major/minor), volume, trance-inducing beat; music has a powerful array of tools at its disposal to alter our mindset.

And so it is for memories. Memories can be of events or of qualia. Events – embarrassing, awkward, painful memories tend to stick around. Summoning them can prompt cortisol release. But qualia memories – memories not of what you did, but what you felt – tend to be more likely to set off a dopamine release. Tiny quantities, but noticeable. Quick to dissipate, but very real.

Below: words, music, memories – pictured by Google Gemini Imagen 3.0

English romantic poet William Wordsworth describes in Daffodils (1804) this experience of a qualia memory flashback, prompted by his memories from a walk along the shore of Lake Ullswater in the Lake District, when he saw a long line of daffodils, "Fluttering and dancing in the breeze." The last stanza runs thus:

"For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

That is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils."

Qualia memory events can have powerful pharmacological effects, like words and music.

Tonight the clocks go forward. For the next week I'll be getting through the day with a sense of guilt that an extra hour of daylight has passed and I've done nothing with it.

Lent 2025: Day 25
Dealing with Evil

Lent 2023, Day 25
Intuition and Dreaming

Lent 2022: Day 25
Writing It All Down

Lent 2021: Day 25
Faith and Knowledge

Lent 2020: Day 25
Chances, complacency and gratitude

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

Into the second half of Lent, downhill towards Easter. Going nicely. Today, I want to turn my attention to what we consider to be our 'reality'. Solid things, people, places, arranged in space and time – we feel we know exactly what reality is. We can sense it all around! But do we truly understand?

We can all agree that everything's made out of molecules, which in turn are made out of atoms. Yet none of us have ever seen an atom – even nuclear physicists will only have seen something that's a representation of an atom. Yet within those atoms exist smaller particles; electrons forming a probability cloud around a nucleus, which scientific consensus assures us is made of protons and neutrons, each made of up quarks and down quarks, though how that works (gauge bosons, gluons, leptons, whatever) is way beyond the understanding of all but the most dedicated specialist. So we end up take the Standard Model on trust, rather like in early times, mediaeval people would take the existence of Jesus Christ as the only begotten son of God on trust. 

Below: how Google Gemini's Imagen 3.0 pictures the sub-atomic (not very accurately, but try illustrating a cloud of probability) and the pangalactic.

We scarcely give any thought to the fact that the chairs we sit on consist of atoms that are essentially empty space. And yet they are. A hydrogen atom is about 99.9999999999996% empty space. If the nucleus were the size of a pea, the atom would be about the size of the dome of St Paul's Cathedral. Looking out over a landscape we're seeing fields and forests, fences, clouds and sky – what we're really gazing at is unimaginable numbers of atoms.

And the planet on which we live is whizzing around our local star, one of between 100 billion and 400 billion stars in our local galaxy. Which is just one of 200 billion to 2,000 billion (or two trillion) galaxies in the observable universe.

Just as we are unable to grasp the subatomic nature of reality, we cannot grasp the galactic scale either. Yes, we can recite the numbers, how very tiny and how very huge they are, but our imaginations struggle. 

You may try to deny the reality of reality, but to do so would be to question the physicalist model agreed upon by science. No rational thinker in the Middle Ages would question the existence of God either.

As human beings, we have evolved in the meso-scale; that is where we are; what lies above and below is of no evolutionary consequence to us. Finding food, finding a mate, avoiding predators. If you can do that, you are biologically fit. 

Cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman argues that in the same way as our laptop screens show us, via a graphic user interface, icons, words and images so that we can operate our devices, which are essentially voltages running through silicon, we relate to the world around us via a 3D graphic user interface in our mind. This interface, says Prof. Hoffman, evolved to perceive reality in a way that works best in evolution. Escaping tigers is more useful than seeing inside of an atom or scanning distant galaxies. Natural selection selected the optimal model for us to interface with reality.

Yet despite this, we cannot deny the existence of the subatomic or the innards of a black hole.

I would posit that much the same can be said about the reality of consciousness; all we know of it is what we experience at our own subjective level – qualia; units of the awareness of being. You know what it feels like to be you; you can imagine what it may be like to be me, but we'd both struggle to imagine consciousness at the subatomic or the cosmic level.

We can but intuit; reaching up to try to understand the nature of the Divine Consciousness is akin to gazing at the heavens without a telescope. 

Lent 2024: Day 24
The Ego Alone

Lent 2023, Day 24
We are all Sentinelese? 

Lent 2022: Day 24
Memory, identity and reincarnation

Lent 2021: Day 24
Reconciling science and spirituality

Lent 2020: Day 24
Refutation (II)

The Tao of Doing Less – Lent 2025: Day 23

"I should have pushed myself harder!"

And then what?

"With more discipline and drive, I could have achieved more!"

Again – and then what? I'd be in the same place as I am today, though with a fatter bank balance? Or surrounded by more material possessions? Would they make me happier?

What's the sense of pushing oneself harder, unless that push is driven by curiosity? [Wanting to learn, to discover, to understand – this I understand.] But pushing oneself harder so as to add an extra zero to your net worth? If it's at the expense of your health and mental wellbeing?

Do you seek to live a life acclaimed? And does it matter in the fullness of time? Why compare? Why benchmark oneself against others' achievements? If you think you're good, it's only because you're comparing yourself with the wrong people.

Is wealth the best measure of success? As inherited wealth becomes more common, how can you tell the self-made entrepreneur flaunting it from the grandchild of a rich person behaving likewise?

As soon as you can afford to do so, step back. Do less. Buy less. Consume less. Waste less. Eat less. Expect less (of the material stuff). Walk more. Think more. Do all the above, and you can expect more simplicity – and more joy – from life. 

Below: graffiti from a wall in Kraków, late November 2019. (Ulica Smocza 10 - indeed you can still see traces of it on Google Maps Street View. Someone, tasked to remove it, could only be arsed to paint over the lower half.) 

Today is three weeks after Dudesday (6 March), so a fittingly belated opportunity to mention Dudeism, also referred to as The Church of the Latter-Day Dude. This is a philosophy and lifestyle that promotes a relaxed, easygoing approach to life. Drawing from the character of 'The Dude' from the Coen brothers' film The Big Lebowski, Dudeism is the do-less way. Here's a distillation (with Google Gemini's assistance) of its central tenets:

Abiding: going with the flow, accepting what life throws your way, rather than constantly fighting against it.

Taking it easy: a laid-back attitude, prioritising simple pleasures and avoiding unnecessary stress.

Being Dudely: treating others with kindness and respect, promoting camaraderie and tolerance.

Emphasis on simplicity: Dudeism often critiques the modern emphasis on materialism and achievement, advocating for a simpler, more relaxed lifestyle.

Taoist influence: the concept of wu wei, or active inaction, acting in accordance with the natural flow of things.

Tolerance and acceptance: a tolerant and accepting attitude towards others; "that's just, like, your opinion, man."

Rejection of aggression and excess: Dudeism is a reaction to the agressive and excessive tendencies found in modern society.

It could be argued that Dudeism has its roots in the strand of Ancient Greek philosophy – ataraxia (a negation or absence of disturbance or trouble); 'imperturbability' or 'tranquility'. It is a lucid state of robust equanimity, characterised by ongoing freedom from distress and worry. 

One way or another, take it easy man; find peace in the simple things in life.

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

Lent 2023: Day 24
The Spirituality of Cosmic Life

Lent 2022: Day 23
Matter and materialism

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

Lent 2020: Day 23
Refutation I

Say farewell to materialism – Lent 2025: Day 22

I don't own a car (I do, however, have the use of my daughter's 19-year-old Nissan Micra, which I use once a week for a shopping trip to Warka). I've not been on holiday since 2014; I've not flown since 2020. The occasional short break within Poland or popping down to Prague to visit Moni – that's all the travel I do.

My lifestyle is ascetic – other than food, I buy little. I have stepped off the treadmill of materialism. The reward – a rich internal contemplative life. Long rural walks, exercise, a good diet, good neighbours, a large-ish library, the wonderful kitten that has adopted me, all bring happiness. Digital connectedness is important too. This allows for remote work, being in touch with family and friends online, and access to a wealth of fascinating podcasts and YouTube videos, to broaden and deepen my knowledge. Life is never boring.

So I find it hard to get into the mindset of those people who constantly need more – people who having reached a level of material comfort in their lives, strive to acquire more and more goods. Why? For what purpose? For the endorphine rush of walking out of a shopping mall laden with bags of new things? For the ego satisfaction of being swaddled with brands that raise one up the status hierarchy?

Tourism is also something that jars. I can understand the urge of someone with a spiritual connection to some distant place, for whom a visit there takes in the form of a pilgrimage. That is meaningful. But just to jet off to a far-off beach resort so as to show off the holiday snaps – absolutely not my cup of tea. And tourism is carbon intensive; 8.8% of human carbon dioxide emissions is generated by tourism.

Runaway consumer materialism is harming our planet in other ways; drawing minerals out of the earth to build a new car is not sustainable if multiplied by around a hundred million every year (the number is thankfully falling – only 88 million forecast in 2025). Clothes and other physical goods that have to be made, from raw materials, and then transported – none of this is good for our ecosystem. And plastics. And packaging waste. The toll on our planet affects us too.

Below: Google Gemini AI's Imagen 3.0 demonstrates the pernicious effect of runaway consumerism on the human psyche.

But buying new things keeps people in jobs; tourism keeps people in jobs. Materialism, powered by the status hierarchy, keeps the economy ticking along. The concept of conspicuous consumption and built-in obsolescence hark back to the 1950s and '60s, long before humanity started worrying about pollution and climate change; by then the New Age counter-culture was already signalling that it's time to slow down if for no other reason than for spiritual well-being.

Since then, things have got no better. What's the answer? De-growth? How to achieve that?

Well. policy-wise, I'm dead against forcing people not to do things they want to do (or forcing them to do things they don't want to do). Rather, I believe in convincing people that a less materialistic approach to life is better for their soul – or for those humanists with no belief in the spiritual – is better for their mental health. I'm de-growing, but not because I was made to. It's my choice, based on my observations.

De-growth? De-ego.

So – I end today with my big ask of humanity: aim to live in comfort, but not in luxury. There's nothing intrinsically valuable about living in discomfort – being hungry, cold, ill, stressed, unhappy. Work hard to achieve independent comfort; once you achieve that level, you can take your foot off the gas. There's more to life than doing a job you hate to earn money to buy things you don't need to impress people you don't like.

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

Lent 2023, Day 23
God, Aliens and the Unfolding Universe

Lent 2022: Day 22
The Good Lord and the Environment

Lent 2021: Day 22
Muscle Memory, Mindfulness and Metaphysics

Lent 2020: Day 22
Repeatable Metaphysical Experiences

Gender and spirituality – Lent 2025: Day 21

A profound insight I had late last year came when I chanced upon these words in The Economist, written by a male journalist. "I won life's lottery by being born male". A week later, I watched Lany poniedziałek, a film co-scripted by Moni. Set in rural Poland, it draws a sharp divide between male and female teenagers, their behaviour and worldview. 

Suddenly I had profound insight. What if sex differences are not only biological and social – but metaphysical?

I don't wish to stray into gender politics here (patriarchy, feminism, trans rights etc), but I do want to consider the soul. Is there such a thing as a male and female soul? Is consciousness flavoured by sex?

I dismiss the notion of God as male ('Father', 'King', 'Lord'). This is bunk; patriarchy writ large. The authors of the Bible probably did not even give a second's thought as to which sex to assign to their Supreme Being – to them, it was clearly male. This is the result of attributing personhood to God, a category error in my view. A narrative that politicises spirituality for the sake of social control. (Just take a look at Leviticus 15:19-30!)

Sex determination systems in living organisms that reproduce sexually differ, with mammals and other animals producing gametes that are either ova or sperm. Females are more conscientious, bearing more responsibility. A female cat is a better hunter than a male cat, because her offspring depend upon her to feed them between being weaned and becoming independent. Males are more prone to risk-taking, especially in adolescence and early manhood as they fight to establish themselves on the status hierarchy. Females have to endure menstruation, childbirth and menopause.

So – my metaphysical question is – are souls assigned a sex? If so, why? And when? Forever? I ask this in particular in the context of survival of consciousness and the possibility of reincarnation. All of my many exomnesia (or xenomnesia) dreams and flashbacks, anomalous qualia memories of another time and another place, have had a masculine flavour. None felt like the recall of the experience of being female. 

Is there something to this? Some profound, universal spiritual truth? Yin and yang? Two opposites that ultimately form One? How? By dilution over time? Or is does this happen at the End of Time?

Lent 2024: Day 21
The individual vs. the collective

Lent 2023, Day 21
Intuition, Inspiration and Creativity

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

Lent 2021: Day 21
Where is your soul from?

Lent 2020: Day 21
Finding a symbol for your religion

Why I keep blogging these Lenten posts – Lent 2025: Day 20

Blimey! Nearly three weeks into Lent and it's occurred to me that I haven't yet explained why I'm doing this series of Lenten posts on my blog! As usual, traffic is falling off (around 71,000 pageviews/month on Ash Wednesday, down to 41,000/month now). Why am I scuppering my regular readership to go off on a spiritual journey to the exclusion of my usual content?

AI generated image. Prompt: 'Preacher with Holy Book and Loaf of Bread'

Am I trying to convert people to my way of thinking? No, not really. You either hold that there's a Divine purpose to our lives, to the Universe, or you don't. If you don't – well, that doesn't make you a bad person per se. I'm not out to turn atheists into believers. Neither do I intend to proselytise Christians or followers of other faiths to abandon them for a different spiritual outlook, one that's couched in language closer to the scientific paradigm. 

{{ Anyone who seeks God shall find God in their own way. }} Since that intuition entered my consciousness one summer's night in 2021, I've made this a central tenet of my faith.

I'm writing these posts primarily for myself. So that once a year at this time I can confront my beliefs, so I can ask myself the questions that I consider fundamental to life, and that over the years I can return to these posts to see how my thinking has shifted, what new factors have influenced the way I see these spiritual matters, and most importantly – how it has become more nuanced over time. 

This is why each day there are links to the same day of Lent over the previous five years. I re-read past posts; they inspire, they suggest, they set off new thoughts and new ways of looking at old questions.

Though the posts are for a future me, they are also intended to spark thoughts and initiate discussion among readers who find this type of content interesting; if you are among them and you find some area of inquiry here worthy of comment, please do so, or drop me an email. Or mention it when we meet.

Counting pageviews is an ego thing. Reviewing my personal philosophy and approach to life on an annual basis is far more worthwhile.

Lent 2024: Day 20
Do we have Free Will? (Pt IV)

Lent 2023, Day 20
Practical uses of intuition

Lent 2022: Day 20
Free will, consciousness and determinism

Lent 2021: Day 20
No, but who are you really?

Lent 2020: Day 20
Applying Occam's Razor to your religion

Wisdom and the future – Lent 2025: Day 19

"With foresight, I should have done – " Well, what? What should you have done? Done something different, I presume. Or done nothing and left events to take their own course. But how would that have worked out? How often do we make decisions – choice of studies, choice of partner, choice of career – on the basis of incomplete data? Our inability to see into the future means that we live our lives like the driver of a car with no windscreen, steering only by what we see in the rear-view mirrors and out of the side windows. Moving forward without data as to what lies directly in our path. We can only posit the the future on the basis of the recent past.

As I grow older, I am increasingly struck by the singular lack of public intellectuals that Get Things Right about the future. Whether its in politics, economics or science, even the brightest minds tend to overshoot and exaggerate or underestimate what happens next. (Clickbaitism emphasises this effect. Videos entitled "Why [insert name of country]'s economy is about to collapse" attract more viewers than "Why [insert name of country]'s economy is about to experience a mild market correction".)

We are, said biologist Michael Levin, "self-justifying apes". We all get things wrong. And then, after the fact, the winner is not so much the person who got it least wrong, but the person with the best justification for their prediction.

Here I'd like to touch on the role of intuition in guiding us towards the future. All the intellects on earth, all the analytical powers, can sift through potential scenarios; they can work through the known knowns, the known unknowns and guess the unknown unknowns – and still get it wrong. Even aided with AI, which can scrape all the data there is and feed back from it, but it cannot feed forward. Here's Imagen 3.0 AI, when prompted to draw a cartoon about the pitfalls of trying to predict the future.

But if one is open to the power of intuition, a inspired glimpse into the future can prove as accurate as that a forecast based on pure analysis.

Given the bind that theoretical science is currently in, as the physicalist/reductionist/materialist paradigm runs out of road, it would make sense to look more deeply at the role of intuition in forecasting our future.

The key thing: don't overthink it – intuit it.

Lent 2024: Day 19
Do we have Free Will (Pt III)

Lent 2023, Day 19
Intuition and Superstition

Lent 2022: Day 19
Between Randomness and Cause

Lent 2021: Day 19
Pleasure and Self-Denial

Lent 2020: Day 19
Balancing the Spiritual with the Material

Science, spirituality and religion (Pt II) – Lent 2025: Day 18

All religions have their creation myths; their explainers about how the earth, the heavens, and we humans came about. All these myths posit the notion of some creator beings that set the whole process in motion. Religions, like genes, like memes, are subject to evolution, the survival of the fittest. Stronger religions have displaced ones less well adapted to evolving societies. Christianity has evolved and mutated into forms that the founders of the early Church wouldn't recognise. 

Out of many texts written in the first century AD about the life and times of Jesus Christ, many fell by the wayside, dismissed as apocrypha or even as heretical. A canon of 27 books (four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles of St Paul and the Book of Revelations) constitutes the New Testament of the Christian Bible.

The question is: how should a Christian approach the Bible (Old Testament and New) – as literally being the word of God? As a metaphor? Or viewing the texts through the prism of metaphysics?

Literal interpretation holds that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. It asserts that as such, the texts should only be interpreted according to their plain meaning. This approach stresses the Bible's historical accuracy and scientific precision (the world was indeed created over the space of six days). Metaphorical or symbolic interpretations are rejected as heresies, because the Bible – being the word of God – contains no errors or contradictions. Everything is simple; read, believe – don't question.

Metaphorical interpretation sees the Bible as containing spiritual truths often expressed through metaphors, allegories or symbols. This approach focuses on the deeper religious significance of the texts, rather than their literal meaning. Biblical stories are there for us to interpret them for their moral and theological lessons. This approach allows for greater flexibility in interpreting the Bible, but it can also lead to subjective interpretations (In Monty Python's Life of Brian, the misheard saying "blessed are the cheesemakers" is "not meant to be taken literally, it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products". )

Metaphysical interpretation (and this is my position) is to understand the Bible (and indeed any religion's holy texts) by seeking the deeper spiritual and philosophical implications in a search for universal spiritual truths and commonalities. This approach allows the seeker to explore the nature of God, humanity and the universe by drawing on philosophical and mystical traditions to interpret holy texts. This offers profound insights into their spiritual dimensions, but may also diverge significantly from traditional interpretations. 

Many Christians believe that the Holy Spirit guides their understanding of the Bible, and that the Holy Spirit was there inspiring the original authors, and the church fathers who set the canon and edited subsequent translations and versions of the Bible over time. This notion squares with my view that intuition is of great importance in guiding one's spiritual journey.

Confronting the God of the Gaps

[Cartoon by Google Gemini Imagen 3.0. Prompt: "Confronting the God of the Gaps"]

So. As science unfolded from its cradle, more and more of the phenomena that touch our day-to-day lives became understood. Lightning, volcanism, infectious disease, one by one, these became processes explainable through testable hypotheses, proved through repeatable experiments. The scientific method pushed back the need for God as an explanation for the unexplainable. If, in 1641 Descarte uncoupled the physical world from the spiritual world, by 1882 Nietzsche had declared the spiritual world non-existent. There is nothing but matter. Matter is all, all is matter. And Darwin proved we came from the apes, rather than from Adam. 

In such an intellectual environment, taking the Bible literally is no longer a tenable position. For instance Genesis 1:1 suggests that God created grass and fruit (on the third day) before filling the heavens with stars (on the fourth day). Examples like this are enough to prove to militant atheists that all human spirituality is wrong, rather than just taking the literal approach to religious texts is wrong. Literal interpretation has been discredited by advances in scientific knowledge – human spirituality has not. As one Jewish comedian observed, Leviticus should have written: "Ye shall not eat of the swine – at least, not until ye hath invented the refrigerator".

Sticking to metaphysical interpretation of holy texts, drawing on mystical traditions, cross-referring them in the search for commonalities, common factors that unite rather than divide religions, is far more fruitful than sticking rigidly to the literal interpretations. In stating this, I draw the ire of religious fundamentalists and militant atheists.

Lent 2024: Day 18
Do we have Free Will? (Pt II)

Lent 2023, Day 18
Intuition, Consciousness and the Physical Universe

Lent 2022: Day 18
Zen in the Art of Meditation

Lent 2021: Day 18
Possibilianism

Lent 2020: Day 18
Teetering on the Edge of Chaos

Science, spirituality and religion (Pt I) – Lent 2025: Day 17

How do we explain our world? Today, we do it with science. Rationally. Reality is based on matter – matter, made of atoms, atoms that obey the laws of physics. All can be explained this way. At the base – there's physics. On top of that – chemistry. And then on top of that – biology, with us humans, at the apex. Cause and effect. All neatly packaged, everything explainable.

Yet science as we know it today might not have all the answers; reconciling quantum mechanics with general relativity, or explaining dark matter and dark energy – these increasingly seem like intractable problems. The past 40 years of particle physics has yielded little more than confirming the existence of the Higgs boson. String theory has got nowhere, as have efforts to quantise gravity. And what's beyond the Standard Model? Don't know. What was before Big Bang? We don't know that either. And consciousness remains a deep mystery for science and philosophy. But will we ever know?

Here's AI's attempt to explain what was before the Big Bang. (Quite interesting, if you look closely. Multiverses? Fake universes?)

To paraphrase Stephen Hawking, there are only three scenarios for science: 1) There really is a complete unified theory of everything, which we're bound to discover in due course. 2) There is no one ultimate theory of the universe – just an infinite sequence of theories that will describe the universe ever more accurately. 3) We are destined never to know for certain.

What if it's scenario 3? 

Science has been on a roll since Newton and Leibniz began the process at the end of the 17th century, shaping a deterministic reality in which (in theory) everything can be predicted with mathematical formulae. Yet ever since the discovery of quantum mechanics, doubt has started to creep into the scientistic world view. How can the cat be dead and alive at the same time? How do we interpret wave/particle duality? How do we reconcile classic physics with the quantum world? Cosmology, too, has sown doubt in the minds of science. What is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate?  How will the universe end? In heat-death? Or a Big Crunch? Will we ever know?

Maybe we need something more than science to explain the ultimate mysteries at the heart of the existence of the universe. Could it be Consciousness? Could that consciousness be what Homo sapiens has for thousands of years called God? 

Tomorrow: the religious narratives. 

Lent 2024: Day 17
Do we have Free Will (Pt I)

Lent 2023, Day 17
Intuition, Precognition, Divination

Lent 2022: Day 17
Defining God

Lent 2021: Day 17
Karma - more than just social control?

Lent 2020: Day 17
Religion and Feeling Good

Intuition, the secret power of your consciousness – Lent 2025: Day 16

Our current scientific paradigm, based on the notion that everything in the Cosmos is based on matter,  rejects the idea of intuition as a sixth sense outside of the five connected to sensory organs – sight, hearing, taste, smell and hearing. Yet most people will to some degree accept intuition on the basis of what they have personally experienced.

Often mistaken for instinct, intuition is something different. Instinct is set of behaviours, innate and learned, that an organism carries out unconsciously in response to external conditions. Blinking, recoiling, shielding one's face, reaching out to grab – these are instincts. Watching a cat as it sit perched on the window ledge, watching the ground below. Its attention is fully focused on detecting movement in the undergrowth that could signal the presence of prey. The cat's ears swivel independently of one another; one rotates clockwise by ten degrees, the other anti-clockwise by 45 degrees, at the same time. This happened instinctively. The ears are not guided by the brain, but respond reflexively to external stimuli. 

Intuition is also different to thought or cognition. Thought is a process; intuitions come instantaneously. Intuition is a sense of knowing something without the act of reasoning. Intuition involves accessing information or insights that are not immediately apparent through logical thought. And now it's time to dive into the speculative: is intuition proof of non-local consciousness? It implies a interconnectedness of minds and potentially access to information that's not limited by space and time. And this implies magic; intending a physical effect without a physical cause. 

Now, is it something that we can tap into if we are open to it? Are some people gifted with greater intuitive powers than others? Or can we develop our intuition through practice and exercise?

Below: How Google Imagen 3.0 sees the difference... The AI must have learnt from somewhere that "hair are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos and transmit them directly into the brain."

Again, I return to my analogy about laptops. It's a very useful analogy. One laptop is fully-featured, has huge processing power and a vast hard drive, but stands alone. The other has a weaker processor and little read-only memory, but unlike the first is connected to the internet via wifi. Which laptop is more useful?

And further questions... As humanity makes the leap to being a technological species, are our intuitive powers losing out to our highly trained cognitive skills? Has our intuition atrophied during our evolution from hunter-gatherers?

Lent 2024: Day 16
Do we tend to get more spiritual as we get older?

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

Ego's journey through human life – Lent 2025: Day 15

As I age, the flame of my ego turns down from a 7 to a 3; then on towards a 1 before it is inexorably extinguished. Yet the flame of my consciousness grows in strength from year to year, along with my understanding of reality. And with age I grow in wisdom. Whilst the ego is visible to all (boastfulness, garrulousness, displays of status symbols), consciousness is silent and unseen.

In childhood I was both they highly conscious mądry Michaś and at the same time the rather silly, ego-driven głupi Michaś. Now, while 'głupi Michaś' would occasionally do or say stupid things – głupi Michaś rarely had the upper hand. When left to his own devices, it was 'mądry Michaś' that was in charge, spending time playing, observing, reading, pondering, playing, imagining, experiencing, thinking, playing, watching the clouds – feeling what it is to be alive – again. 

In adolescence, however, that conscious, wise, self was almost entirely pushed aside by testosterone-fuelled ego. Yet the wise self clung on somehow. In adulthood, it crept back gradually, pushing away the folly of youth. Mądry Michał finally emerged triumphant, around the time I reached the age of maturity, which I now recognise as being 65. But this very statement smacks of boastfulness, which suggests that the ego is still lurking there in the mix. It is hard to shed one's ego totally. Mindfulness helps.

The human condition

Whether you are a physicalist (everything is matter) or an idealist (consciousness is fundamental), the truth is that your biological body is subject to entropy, just like everything else composed of matter. It is the ultimate destiny of all matter is to break back down into random particles. To the physicalist/materialist (I use the terms interchangeably) who considers consciousness to be a mere product of neuronal activity, the process of ageing is tragic. One's youth fades, one's strength ebbs, and all that there's to look forward to is decay, suffering and oblivion.

Yet Consciousness abides. It does! I feel certain of it. Consciousness was there at the beginning, willing there to be Something rather than Nothing. Consciousness will be there after the end of all matter. And it is present everywhere. It survives matter. It survives entropy. Grasp this, and ageing, and what comes after – death – hold no fear. 

I asked Google Gemini's Imagen 3.0 to create an illustration in the Arts & Crafts style entitled The Human Condition. Rather nice, don't you think?

And the same title, this time in Mid-Century Modern style. Isolation and materialism have taken over. "I am no longer part of a community, but I have things."

Lent 2024: Day 15
Aligning Prayer with Cosmic Purpose

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

Ego, consciousness and Time: Lent 2024: Day 14

One analogy: your body is the car, the driver is your ego, your consciousness is the passenger, observing the journey as it unfolds. You consciousness knows where it wants to go; the driver, however, is erratic, speeding, showing off. After many wrong turns and traffic violations, the destination draws nearer, the driver has settled in and no longer feels the need to rush; the passenger is now contented and finds joy in the passing scenery.

How does Google Gemini Imagen 3.0 see ego and consciousness? An definite east-west split here!

Whilst we need to separate out the ego from consciousness, the ego is not ethically bad per se, it just has a tendency to boastfulness, cutting corners with the truth, and focused on acquisition of material goods. Some of which are needed for a comfortable life, but others, more luxurious than necessary, being used as status symbols.

The ego is an important aspect to our personalities. It's a suit-and-mask ensemble worn by the biological self. needed for establishing our place in the pecking order. It is needed for mating; it is needed for getting on financially. Ego is primarily motivated by our need for status. This is natural; we are, after all, mammals, and hierarchy is inherent in mammalian groups. 

Meanwhile, our consciousness is there in background, observing and feeling. Cringing at times at what the ego is up to. Representing nobler sentiments.

Your consciousness is the real you; your ego but an artifact you forge. It is the suit of armour your biological self dons to protect you against the buffeting you'll get from society, at school, at work, socially. Ego can lead you to acts of folly, but also to build a positive public persona. Whoever regularly speaks publicly will know that. (My ego was delighted that six people who left an opinion on our webinar today all gave five stars – and my ego is keen to share that fact with you.)

But in general, the older one gets, the need for the ego recedes. Materially comfortable, folk who are still chasing ever-greater fortunes to live in ever-greater luxury as they approach old age are the spiritually hollow. 

The maturing of the soul over this lifetime is an important aim. Yet I'd argue that one lifetime is nowhere near enough for this process to reach fruition. If you can accept the idea that our biological selves are only containers for our immortal consciousness, then it's possible to envisage the process of spiritual evolution as spanning many lifetimes (in this regard, I am more aligned in my thinking about reincarnation with Hinduism than with Buddhism). This places my view of time as traditionally linear; the arc of progress from imperfect past towards a perfect future, in incremental improvements.

And finally an intuition that came to me on a walk a few days ago:
{{  Never show off what you know. Share what you know.  }}

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

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

You, your consciousness and Time – Day 13

Time ticks away, marked by an increase in entropy (things breaking down, falling apart, rotting, rusting) but also by an increase in syntropy (new life coming into being, new stars and galaxies forming, awareness growing all the while).

If you accept that Consciousness is the fundamental property of the universe, from which space, time, matter and energy derive, then it becomes far easier to accept that your small-c consciousness is eternal.

The theological question, then, is to define the word 'your'. Pure consciousness, untainted by ego, the driving force behind our quest for status. The pure consciousness of subjective experience, of being in the moment, unmotivated by any material plans, just being aware of existence. Your consciousness is not boastful, it seeks not status; it observes, it feels. 

The discrete units of consciousness are qualia, defined as instances of subjective, conscious experience. We live them – but do we notice them? Do those moments imprint themselves upon our memory? 

Memory is our past living on in the present. Indeed, the past that exists in the present does so solely through memory. And our memory is far from perfect. Our memories of events are analogue, rather than digital. They get coloured and mutate in the retelling. The ones that evince positive responses from the listener are kept, the ones that fail to impress are forgotten. As the ego-storyteller retells the story to ever-greater effect with each retelling, the boring bits are skipped, and the focus is on the wow! moments, that tend to aggrandise the storyteller's ego. 

But qualia flashbacks are different; they remain constant. Your ego wasn't involved; you were just the conscious observer. Qualia memories – not of events but of instants of being – do not fade, do not transmute. They feel as real as they did when you originally experienced them. The memories snap you right back into the moment. They may be experienced weakly, like a déjà vu, but they're absolutely genuine. They do not change in the retelling, because they are never retold, they are refelt. 

PAFF! I felt one just now, preparing lunch – a flashback from childhood; reading Look and Learn magazine on the sitting-room floor; an advertisement for a Scalextric model car racing track. The feel of the dark-green carpet; sunlight streaming in from the window; cooking smells. Cosy, happy, engaged in my imagination. Qualia flashbacks such as this can be conjured up from memory, but more likely they're triggered by sensory inputs such as light, sound (music), smell, taste or feel.

If consciousness is syntropic, defying the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it would suggest that qualia memories could be eternal, borne into Cosmos – by who knows what mechanism – into the Akashic record, to be replayed within a different biological container's mind at a later date. As triggered or unbidden anomalous qualia memory flashbacks or else in dreams. 

And now onto the questions. The anomalous qualia memories that are clearly not those experienced by my current biological self. They come from another place, another time, and experienced by a different biological self – and yet feel as real as qualia memories that I can put a finger on.

The experience is real, it's genuine, I've had this since childhood, it is my quest to learn more about these anomalous qualia memories, exomnesia or xenomnesia (memories from outside, or foreign memories). Can these be scientifically explained? If so, what is the vector? Some as-yet-undiscovered field of consciousness? Or is searching for scientific explanations essentially futile – the answer being metaphysical in nature? 

Tomorrow: more about the Ego

Lent 2024: Day 13 
Aesthetics, metaphysics and ethics

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