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