Lent 2026: day 32 – what it is to be talented

The Parable of the Talents has puzzled me since I was a teenager. If the master or lord in the parable refers to God – where is God's mercy? Where is God's love? It was this parable that first caused me to question the authenticity of the Gospels. Were the Evangelists (who wrote the four canonical Gospels between 30 and 75 years after Christ's crucifixion) accurately recording the actual words of Christ, I wondered.

Let us begin with asking what is a 'talent'. In Biblical times, it was a monetary unit, expressed as the value of 30 kg of silver, equivalent to 6,000 denari, one denarius being a day's pay for a labourer, so therefore one talent represented the equivalent of about 20 years' worth of work. In modern terms, this would be somewhere around 1.1 million złotys or £200,000 at the national minimum wage. That's one talent. Now, the master gave his servants each five, three and one talent respectively. Those sums would have been understood by those who listened to the parables of Jesus as inconceivably vast amounts of wealth.

In the Middle Ages, the meaning of the word 'talent' came to be used figuratively in Latin as "a gift from God", "a marked natural skill or ability" and thus into our modern lexicons.

So let's read from the Gospel of St Matthew (chapter 25, verses 14-30)

14 For the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods. 15 And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey. 16 Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same, and made them other five talents. 17 And likewise he that had received two, he also gained other two. 18 But he that had received one went and digged in the earth, and hid his lord's money. 19 After a long time the lord of those servants cometh, and reckoneth with them. 20 And so he that had received five talents came and brought other five talents, saying, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me five talents: behold, I have gained beside them five talents more. 21 His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord. 22 He also that had received two talents came and said, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me two talents: behold, I have gained two other talents beside them. 23 His lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord. 24 Then he which had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed: 25 And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine. 26 His lord answered and said unto him, Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed: 27 Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury. 28 Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents. 29 For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. 30 And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

I find these words harsh, and in all honesty, unGodlike. I have reflected upon the parable of the talent over the decades, but if we look at it through a Gnostic perspective, we can imagine the lord not as the loving Jesus, but as the Demiurge, the Archon that created the material world, more interested in what his servants can do for him materially than in what makes each one different, and maybe take account of the innate risk-averse nature of the third servant. The lord is extractive, profit-driven and punitive. I see not a trace of Jesus about him. More the 'rank-and-yank' corporate CEO with an eye on Q4 earnings and a big year-end bonus for himself. So why the inclusion of this parable (in two versions) in the New Testament? Certainly, there's not a trace of the Sermon on the Mount here ("Blessed are the unprofitable servants, for they too shall have abundance").

But age and experience has told me that the evangelist Matthew (who wrote his Gospel some 50 years after Christ's crucifixion) was merely being perceptive of the human condition. Verily, those that have shall get more, while those who have little shall have even that snatched away from them. Matthew posits this notion earlier in his Gospel (Chapter 13, verse 12): "For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath." From this comes the rather harsh 'Matthew effect' in economics – advantage begets further advantage. Wealth inequality has a natural tendency to increase over time.

OK, that's life, it doesn't sound particularly Christian, but Matthew puts these words into Christ's mouth. Matthew is backed up by his fellow synoptic evangelist Luke, writing on the same theme. "For unto you I say, that to every one which hath shall be given; and from him that hath not, even that little he hath shall be taken away."

There is but one charitable interpretation that I can hold with – that the talents are neither money, nor indeed innate gifts or talents in the modern sense, but God's love. The servants that accept God's love and spread it in the world are rewarded, and the one who ignores it, burying it instead, is punished.

[If you are keen for a comparison with the Gospel of St Luke, here it is (chapter 19, verses 15-26):

15 And it came to pass, that when he was returned, having received the kingdom, then he commanded these servants to be called unto him, to whom he had given the money, that he might know how much every man had gained by trading. 16 Then came the first, saying, Lord, thy pound* hath gained ten pounds. 17 And he said unto him, Well, thou good servant: because thou hast been faithful in a very little, have thou authority over ten cities. 18 And the second came, saying, Lord, thy pound hath gained five pounds. 19 And he said likewise to him, Be thou also over five cities. 20 And another came, saying, Lord, behold, here is thy pound, which I have kept laid up in a napkin: 21 For I feared thee, because thou art an austere man: thou takest up that thou layedst not down, and reapest that thou didst not sow. 22 And he saith unto him, Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant. Thou knewest that I was an austere man, taking up that I laid not down, and reaping that I did not sow: 23 Wherefore then gavest not thou my money into the bank, that at my coming I might have required mine own with usury? 24 And he said unto them that stood by, Take from him the pound, and give it to him that hath ten pounds. 25 (And they said unto him, Lord, he hath ten pounds.) 26 For I say unto you, That unto every one which hath shall be given; and from him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken away from him.

* The 'pound' used in the King James Version of Luke's Gospel is also known as a mina, a Greek coin that is one-sixtieth of a talent, and rather than the servants being entrusted with five, three and one talent respectively, each gets just the one mina, a significantly smaller sum all round.

More on talents as gifts tomorrow.

Lent 2025: day 32 
[No post, the day of my heart attack]

Lent 2024: day 32
Time and spirituality Pt II

Lent 2023, day 32
The Practice of Gratitude

Lent 2022: day 32
The Search for Perfection

Lent 2021: day 32
Meditation

Lent 2020: day 32
Divine Intervention

Lent 2026: day 31 – what do you want from life?

A tough question to have to face up to. Doesn't it all depend where you are in life's cycle? "Get into a good university." "Get a good job." "Get married and buy a home." "Pay off the mortgage, get the children off to university."  "Inherit the family fortune." And then we'll see. Usually this means buying something you've always wanted, ticking off bucket-list destinations, boosting one's position in the status hierarchy, chasing honours and fame.

What do you want from life? Something material? Or something intangible? Is there an ulterior purpose?

It is useful to consider the Aristotelian notion of teleology (from the Greek telos, aim, purpose, end goal, design, final cause), the study of where we're heading to and why. This is about the fulfilment of your human potential. Making the most of your talents, temporal and spiritual. But reductionist materialists would argue that we are nothing more than stochastic products of emergence (evolution) existing in an indifferent and meaningless universe, and our only purpose is survival and reproduction, and there's nothing more. The race to own more stuff and to show off achievements is a vestigial remnant of sex drive; peacock feathers.

Personally, my own quest is for a higher level of consciousness; for greater understanding; transcendence; participating in something more than the ego; coherence. I am aware that I am destined never to get anywhere near grasping intuitively the wholeness of Cosmos, of which we are such a tiny part; nevertheless, each insight, each step nearer, is significant. Hence – one lifetime at a time.

Joy I seek, rather than pleasure. Comfort; not reaching out for luxury. Conscious experiences, rather than ego trips. So, I am (eventually, over time) to observe the Universe unfolding, as it experiences itself (Big 'C' Consciousness). And integrate my own small 'c' conscious experiences, my qualia, with those of the Universe. Over time. This is not (and this notion is central to my beliefs) something that can be achieved in a single lifetime! In feeling the sun and wind on my face on a sunny day, in reflecting upon triggered or unbidden memories, in experiencing simple joys, I am doing this. Physical reality is but a substrate for conscious experience; the biological layer (consciousness requires a container, a platform, from which to observe the unfolding Universe). Health is important, bodily aches distract consciousness from being aware of anything other than the source of the pain.

I asked Google Gemini for its distillation of  the purpose of life, and the answer astounded me: "Be at the interface where chaos becomes meaning". Wow! Very good. And ChatGPT? Slightly more prosaic, but instantly relatable. "To become more conscious, and to use that consciousness well." Yes, I'd agree with that too. It's a search, a journey – in the form of daily rural walks, a starry night, the changing seasons, cats, good food, good music, interesting conversations that share new ideas and refine old ones. The framework is complete.

Lent 2025: day 31
Hope and hopelessness

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

Lent 2026: day 30 – how do souls migrate?

If we accept consciousness being immaterial and persisting beyond bodily death, rather than a phenomenon tethered to neurons and synapses of the brain – how does that signal bind, unbind and rebind to new biologies?

Over the years in this blog, I have considered possible vectors (or metaphors for mechanisms), from brain waves, quantum effects and gut flora to music. Today, I'll dive in deeper.         

Let's start with the metaphor of consciousness as a broadcast field. Our brains act as receivers, picking up signals from the field. At death, the receiver fails – but the field, the signal, persists; a new brain with compatible structure locks onto the same frequency or pattern. The question here is that of compatibility; is this purely a biological factor? Is it random? What of karmic affinity? The 'broadcast field' metaphor also explains atheists who do not feel the numinous, who have no spiritual attunement; for they are like computers, able to think, logically, quickly – but are not connected via wi-fi to the Cosmic Consciousness, to the Eternal Whole. Then there is the idea of the brain not so much as a receiver but as a transmitter, generating electromagnetic fields that might imprint on the environment and later be reabsorbed, but no there are no hypotheses as to storage or retrieval mechanisms.

Acoustic / vibrational models begin with the notion that reality is fundamentally vibrational, and that consciousness is a frequency pattern. At death, the pattern dissipates but does not vanish; it can be congruently reconstructed under the right conditions via resonance. As I wrote, this echoes Pythagoras's 'music of the spheres', as well as the Vedic concept of Nāda Brahma ('universe as sound'). Whether your physics is field-based or wave-based, this is intuitively powerful; and while lacking a concrete encoding mechanism for memory/identity, it could be that music somehow acts as trigger.

Physics (bless it) has not yet detected neither such fields nor such vibrations. (Note the word 'yet' there– as I wrote yesterday, should it? Will it ever detect them? Or is science destined never to nail down the numinous and ineffable as a mathematical formula?)

The next mechanism is quantum information transfer. This posits that consciousness as a quantum state (or information pattern). Consciousness is encoded in quantum information, potentially in microtubules (the Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory of Sir Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff) or some deeper quantum substrate. At death, quantum coherence collapses the information of consciousness, which disperses into the quantum vacuum or entangled states; it then recoheres in another system. This theory provides a technical framework for non-local persistence. However, there is no evidence that personal identity can survive decoherence.After 30 years, Orch-OR has neither been proven nor falsified. Sir Roger has often stated that he does not believe consciousness to be computational.

However, if we think of our consciousness as operating system software, and our thoughts as the apps run on that operating system, the brain being the biological hardware, then we can think of a computational continuity model of reincarnation, with old software being copied over into a new computer. A wave pattern of information reforms in a different medium, recreating the consciousness of the deceased person. This model is favoured by those who believe in a simulation hypothesis. But the question remains: what's the transfer mechanism? Pen-drive or wi-fi?

Biological carriers are also worth considering. Genetic memory links consciousness to DNA patterns. This can explain 'atavistic resurgence', whereby a memory from an ancestor re-emerges via blood lineage; however this can't explain non-familial cases of reincarnation. This could explain the strong feeling of familiarity I got in May 2010 while cresting a low hill outside Mogielnica, unaware of the fact that my grandmother was brought up nearby. Then there is the microbiome (gut flora). The gut-brain axis has been proved to influenced cognition; it could be  hypothesised that microbial ecosystems carry 'memory markers' from one human to another. This, however, is thought to be highly implausible as a carrier of identity and complex personality; at best microbes can influence mood.

The panpsychist and idealist models, towards which I lean, are based on the core idea that consciousness is primary, rather than derived. There is no migration of consciousness, only localisation (life), delocalisation (death), and relocalisation (rebirth); a whirlpool forming in a river dissolving and reforming elsewhere Advocates include three of my favourite philosophers, David Chalmers, Bernardo Kastrup and Phillip Goff. Idealism, which gets away from the primacy of matter, sidesteps the transport problem entirely, but is hard to reconcile with personal identity continuity that we see in those cases where one dead person's identity seems to inform the consciousness of another (which I experience).

If we want to abandon any pretence of scientific rigour, we can seek non-mechanistic answers in karmic or causal continuity, as propounded by Buddhism. There is no migrating entity here, only a causal chain, with one life conditioning the next, as a flame passed from candle to candle or a wave propagating on a calm surface of water. In Buddhism (unlike Hinduism) there is no permanent self, but continuity of tendencies. While philosophically rigorous, it doesn’t satisfy intuition of a persisting 'self'

So... what persists? Memories? Certainly. Personality traits/behaviours? Possibly. Physical traits (birthmarks etc). Personally, I can't see why. Causal chain (karma – learning lessons, undoing past-life wrongs), yes, I get that and appreciate this argument.

Any viable mechanism must explain memory continuity (rare but claimed cases), identity persistence, selectivity (why one body, not another), and ways whereby energy and information are conserved. The answer lies in a blend of the above. Perhaps.

Old Souls and New Souls: some people report the feeling of having experienced many previous human lifetimes. Others few, or just one. But most folk – none at all. My thinking here: humanity is expected to peak at ten billion sometime in the mid-2070s before settling back to a more sustainable and stable number in the middle of the 22nd century. More and more human beings will become inhabited by old souls, who will have experienced many lives and therefore become wiser, gentler, understanding the notion of win-win rather than looking at life adversarially. A stable population will mean lesser pressure on natural resources. Less greed. So – is the number of souls finite? Still so many questions remain.

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

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

Lent 2026: day 29 – can reincarnation be proven?

The two great religions of the East, Hinduism and Buddhism, accept the concept of reincarnation. The great religions of the West, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, don't, while still accepting life after death in one form or another. [Certain esoteric traditions within or adjacent to the three Abrahamic faiths are more open to reincarnation, but they are far from the doctrinal mainstream.] Secular materialism, or physicalism, likewise rejects reincarnation. 

So to the Western mind the concept is entirely alien, on the one hand, it's not passed down in religious education, on the other it's poo-pooed by rigorous rationalism. Awareness of the transmigration of souls in the West only really kicked off with New Age in the 1960s, a movement focused on the unification of body, mind and spirit.

Today, reincarnation is considered increasingly seriously as a hypothesis in the context of life after death. The blending of Eastern traditions of reincarnation with science, and the philosophy of idealism, which posits that consciousness is the fundamental property of the universe, from which space, time, matter and energy are derived (and not the other way around, as science believes).

If any one Western researcher has done more serious work into this subject, it is Ian Stevenson (1918-2007), from the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Over his 40 years of work in this field, he authored 14 books and 300 academic papers, based on over 2,500 cases of children who claimed to remember past lives. What made his work notable was his systematic methodology. His research focused on children (typically aged 2–6) who spontaneously spoke about 'previous lives'. 

Prof Stevenson studied cases mainly in countries where reincarnation was a culturally accepted belief;  India, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Turkey, Burma and Thailand. He was looking for statements made by the child relating to a deceased individual that could be verified. In particular, he was looking out for behavioural and physical traits that corresponded with those of the deceased. Prof Stevenson's methodology focused heavily on early documentation, interviews with multiple witnesses, and taking care to minimise the possibility of information leakage between families.

I don't intend to highlight any of the cases that he brought to light (if you are interested, ask your favourite AI for a summary of Ian Stevenson's most persuasive cases). What I do want to share with you is what he claimed, and what he didn't claim. He never claimed to have proven reincarnation. His position was more restrained; the cases he published "may point to a currently unknown mechanism of memory transfer." ChatGPT sums up his work as "anomalous but not definitive, sitting at the boundary between psychiatry, anthropology, and parapsychology".

Stevenson emphasised that the information he collected was suggestive of reincarnation but "was not flawless and it certainly does not compel such a belief." Yet he believed that he had produced a body of evidence for reincarnation that should at least be taken seriously. Reincarnation, he posited, might represent a third factor, along with genetics and the environment ('nature and nurture'), contributing to the development of certain phobias, philias, unusual abilities and illnesses.

Now, while believing in reincarnation on the basis of first-hand experience, I feel that Prof Stevenson's approach is flawed. The problem I have with seeking empirical evidence to prove any metaphysical subject lies in the problem of using the scientific method as a tool to validate it in front of an innately sceptical scientific community. If they don't wish to accept it – fine. I just happen to do so, and if I need to validate my spiritual experiences to anyone, it is primarily to myself.

I don't reject Prof Stevenson's work, but consider it incomplete and pursuing the wrong goal. If he proves some unknown mechanism linking a living person with a dead one through memory, then why does it manifest itself so rarely? Are most people – even in cultures that accept reincarnation as reality – unable to reincarnate? Unworthy of reincarnation? Or do the hallmarks or a reincarnated soul manifest themselves in vaguer, more subtle ways than direct, literal, links to a real predeceased person?

I personally do not believe that the spiritual realm wishes itself to be proven empirically by science, with experiments, in a formula. We are not simply meant to know – yet. We should accept the mystery of these anomalies as part of our reality, but unless a case is too strong to overlook, we should not dig through archives in an attempt to prove its literal reality. 

Attempts by scientists (who have to endure taunts of 'pseudoscientist!' from their fellows) to prove the existence of a range of psi phenomena using the scientific method (repeatable experiments, peer-reviewed papers etc) are ultimately doomed to failure, not because the numbers lie, but because no one has the slightest idea of a mechanism, a framework, by which they can happen.

So let's say I find medical records of a 'Mr. Martin' who died in the early hours of the morning in a modern hospital building in America in the mid-late 1950s – then what? Does that prove anything? Does it explain my dream? Validate a lifetime of anomalous qualia memories? Would it silence the sceptics? Of course not. Do I need validation? Personally, no. I know what I experience – however, how it happens is a mystery. And I expect it to remain so. For many lifetimes to come.

More tomorrow.

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

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

Lent 2026: day 28 – a case study in reincarnation

How does reincarnation 'work'? I put the word 'work' in quote marks because it suggests a mechanism, a process. To me, It doesn't feel that way. It's more ethereal. Whilst I have experienced a lifetime of what I call 'past-life flashbacks' and 'past-life dreams', I've long stopped looking for names, dates or precise locations. Such a search is futile, and indeed spurious. "Please, accept the mystery." I'm happy with a vague feeling, a familiar sense of the returning qualia. Dreams, I find, offer greater historical and geographical precision. Even so, pinning down a former biological container for my consciousness somehow does not feel to be the right thing to do. So much room for wishful thinking and other cognitive biases. 

Are we destined never to know names, dates, precise locations? That's what I think. But there are well-documented cases suggesting that it is possible. One of the most compelling cases I've come across of a 'past-life memory' corroborated by historical facts is that of James Leininger, born in 1998.

Starting around the age of two, the boy began having recurring nightmares of a plane crash. From his accounts of the dreams, his parents, Bruce and Andrea, pieced together a story far too detailed for a child of his age to invent. James provided specific information that his parents later verified in military archives; he identified the plane as an F4U Corsair and a ship called the Natoma. Research confirmed an escort carrier named the USS Natoma Bay. James mentioned a friend named 'Jack Larsen'. Bruce Leininger eventually tracked down the real Jack Larsen, who had indeed flown with the Natoma Bay squadron during WWII. James described his plane being hit in the engine by the Japanese, catching fire, and crashing into the sea near Iwo Jima. 

Bruce Leininger identified a pilot as James Huston Jr. from squadron VCS-81 on the USS Natoma Bay. The details align; Huston was the only pilot from that squadron killed during the battle of Iwo Jima. His plane was hit in the engine, caught fire, and crashed into the sea, just as the child had described in his nightmares. As James grew older, he met with James Huston’s surviving sister, Anne. After speaking with the boy and hearing his specific memories of their childhood home and family, she became convinced that James was the reincarnation of her brother.

Sceptics suggest suggestibility (where a child absorbs information from a documentary or book and later forgets the source), but the Leiningers maintained that James had had no exposure to WWII history or flight simulators before the nightmares began. By the age of eight, James’s memories began to fade, (common in these types of cases), and by on reaching his teenage years, he reported that the vivid memories had almost entirely faded, leaving him with only an interest in aviation.

I used ChatGPT to examine the veracity of the details. 

Squadron name was not strictly correct (VCS-81 flew floatplane scouts like the Vought Kingfisher from cruisers). There was, however, a squadron VC-81, which did indeed fly from the carrier USS Natoma Bay. But the big disparity between what James Leininger reported as a two-year-old and historical fact is that VC-81 did not fly F4U Corsairs; instead, the squadron flew FM2 Wildcat fighters.

Below: F4U Corsair (left) compared to FM2 Wildcat (right). Google Gemini Nano Banana 2 images. Note the significant difference in the wings and overall size.

Any naval-aviation historian will immediately tell you that escort carriers like the Natoma Bay were too small for F4U Corsairs to fly from. The Natoma Bay was, however, present at Iwo Jima and its squadron heavily involved in ground-attack missions supporting the US Marines' invasion. 

Asking ChatGPT about losses incurred by VC-81 at Iwo Jima, I got this:

"Confirmed loss: Lt. (jg) James M. Huston, Jr. Aircraft: FM-2 Wildcat. Mission type: Strike on shipping at Chichi Jima. Outcome: Aircraft hit in engine (likely AA fire), crashed into the sea. No wreckage recovered. Huston was the only pilot from Natoma Bay (VC-81) killed during the Iwo Jima operation."

I present this case in detail because it is unusual and represents, in my view, an atypical scenario. Striving to identify a real individual is something I don't personally feel comfortable with; while I have put together a 'past-life narrative' of my own, it was not in childhood, but over decades. The 'past-life' feelings have stayed consistent in terms of flashbacks and what I call my canonical dreams; they have not faded.

Another major difference between what I feel and the Leininger case is the time between lives. I sense an immediate overlap; the flavour America of the mid-1950s being so clear to me, so compelling. Death and rebirth within months, or even an overlap. Yet more than half a century passed between the death of James Huston Jr. and the birth of James Leininger. 

Finally – if James Leininger could experience this – why can't more of us? Why don't we hear of more such cases? It suggest that reincarnation is an extremely rare phenomenon.

So many questions...

More tomorrow!

Lent 2025: day 28
Death, dreams and memories

Lent 2024: day 28
Ego, Consciousness and the Environment

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

Lent 2023, 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

Lent 2026: day 27 – life after death

The conventional view held by most people today is that as brain activity ceases on biological death – that's it. Game over, Player One. The afterlife is seen as a historical notion, a religious construct that had been created for the purpose of social control, and as sop to the bereaved. 

Yet the conviction that there's no such thing as a afterlife is a modern thing. No one in Europe in the Middle Ages held that view. On the contrary – mediaeval Europeans would have been haggling with their parish priest over how many years they can shave off their time in Purgatory before being allowed into Heaven. To them, the afterlife was a real as the next harvest.

The sophisticated modern mind scoffs. "How easy it was to brainwash illiterate simpletons!"

But has not the sophisticated modern mind been brainwashed too? Through the seductively rational arguments of logic, science and materialist reductionism?

Reality, I believe, is more nuanced; it is not binary.

How do I see the afterlife then? I see it as being as real as one's childhood. We no longer live in our childhood, but we we retain memories of it. Those memories colour and flavour who we are. Those memories come back to us in flashbacks, some vivid, some less so – qualia memories. Some you can summon. Some are triggered (by smells, by music, etc). Some come to us unbidden. Yet there's no atom in our brains that was there ten years ago, let alone decades ago. Molecules, proteins, cells, restructure, recycle, die, grow – and yet memories persist. The neuronal structures of our brains remain the same, but my analogy is of these being bookcases in a library, and memories being books.

Survival of awareness after biological death hinges on one concept – that of non-local consciousness. In our lives, we have nothing but fleeting glimpses of this phenomenon. Déjà vus, precognitions, dreams, synchronicities, telepathically shared thoughts; these are hard to pin down, and impossible to rationalise satisfactorily within the framework of our prevailing scientific paradigm.

But if you place consciousness at the centre of Cosmic reality, as its fundamental property, everything clicks into place. Consciousness is one thing you can be certain of. You are currently aware of the moment? That cocktail of sensory inputs that creates consciousness leads you to conclude that you are alive. Qualia moments, registered in your memory.

And now – a thought experiment. One by one, close off your sensory inputs. No vision, no sound, no smell or taste, no feeling (your bum on your chair). What happens in your mind? Dreams, apparitions, memories will replace the awareness that stems from inputs, from the five senses, and will do so until the sensory inputs are restored.

I have no clue as to explain in scientific terms where consciousness 'goes' after bodily death, nor where it is 'stored', nor how it is 'transferred' to another location (heaven? A subsequent body?). All I know is the frequent experience of a sense of familiarity; the memories of qualia once experienced elsewhere and elsewhen.

I feel this in the form of 'congruent qualia'. Yes, sensory inputs are required as triggers. The wind blowing into my face as I walk towards a warm sun. Lying on the lawn and gazing up at white clouds dotting a blue summer sky. The sound of waves lapping on a beach. Snowflakes falling as Christmas shoppers bustle between brightly-lit storefronts. [Four qualia, illustrated by ChatGPT] 

Earlier today, I was getting these congruent qualia feelings in my garden as I clear the ground under the apple-trees and prune back dead vegetation. Again, bright sunlight, and that experience of exomnesia. It feels so familiar. From some other time, from some other place.

It is not a strong phenomenon but it is ever-present; it feels real to me, as real as my memories of childhood, familiar and comforting. Childhood lives on in memories; past lives live on in weaker memories, intangible; a fleeting sensation, a melting snowflake. It passes quickly, but if you are sensitive to it, you are left with a pleasant feeling, and a sense that there's more to eternity than just one allotted lifespan.

I have no proof, but I feel that with each successive life, the certainty becomes greater, the detail clearer. 

We want to know, "OK – it's a mystery – but how does this work?" What are the vectors that convey consciousness from body to body? Will we ever fully know? Will we inch closer to an answer? Or are we destined never to know?

One way or another, I am convinced that consciousness is not snuffed out with bodily death.

More tomorrow as the fourth week of Lent comes to an end.

Lent 2025: day 27
End of Time II

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

Lent 2026: day 26 – dream of a future life

My scheduled Lenten blog posting is interrupted once more by a vivid dream from which I have just woken up. I am a five-year-old boy, with a twin (non-identical) sister. Our parents are extremely wealthy and live in what feels like Tasmania or New Zealand. Southern Hemisphere, Anglophone, temperate climate. We live on a vast estate, built in the style of a faux Edwardian country house with plenty of outbuildings. Architecturally, it reminds me of a cross between Banbury market place and Bicester outlet shopping village, but all of this is owned by one family. (I cannot tell whether this is inherited wealth or whether our father was a newly minted tech billionaire). 

My sister and I have tutors. We are being inculcated into the knowledge that our destiny is to become part of a group that rules over mankind with the goal of making the world a better place for mankind, and indeed, for the planetary ecosystem. A heavy burden for small children to be aware of.

It is the second half of the 21st century and global depopulation has become a challenge, though resource scarcity is now no longer a worry. My sister and I have everything of the best quality. We have just got new wellingtons to wear in the garden, having outgrown our old ones. They come from Sweden or Norway and the label, the guarantee and information card is in a Scandinavian language which gives my sister great amusement to read out aloud. 

It is meditation time. We sit cross legged on the ground, and a tutor begins the session. We are told to stop giggling, to calm ourselves, and to focus on the future.

We are constantly reminded by our tutors of our mission. We must stay in the background, working anonymously to influence global outcomes. We must stay humble; we must understand how societies function and strive to improve them. This seems daunting to small children. We are assured that our immense family wealth is needed to make the world better, to reduce human suffering, to prevent the degradation of the environment. We are constantly told this story. This is why our family wealth shouldn't be taxed and why it is our duty to hold on to as much as possible.

********

How did we get here? My sister and I knew each other from our past lives, in 20th century England. One day, as ageless entities, neither young nor old, we meet in the lobby of an impressive corporate HQ building, very modern and well appointed. It could be London, Paris or New York. We are immediately ushered up a short flight of steps into a claustrophobically small lift, barely large enough for two passengers. The golden doors slide shut and the lift starts to rise. I fear that this could be a trap. The lift reaches the top, and the scene described above begins to unfold...

The fact that we know each other in this life is somehow important to our mission in the next, the dream informs me.

As five-year-olds, we are saddled with the knowledge of the great weight of duty and responsibility that lies ahead of us. Could we not have more carefree lives like other children that we briefly see from our car as we are whisked from one compound to another? No. This is meant to be.

Of course, now I have opened this particular box and observed what's inside, thus collapsing the wave function, this particular outcome has been rendered void in this timeline. In an adjacent parallel universe, however, it remains a possibility...

Three weeks to Easter Sunday.

Lent 2025: day 26
The End of Time

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

Lent 2026: day 25 – death (and life thereafter)

Hope. When it comes to the survival of consciousness after biological death, that's what we have. But is it all we have? I would argue we also have insights gained from reports of near-death experiences (NDEs) as well as first-hand intuition, which suggest that there's a reality to this.

The consciousness that moves upon the face of the Earth is not to be extinguished. 

Last April, as I was lying on the operating table in the middle of my heart attack, I had the profound – and most calming – intuition that should I slip away, I am ready for death and fear it not. Though with no idea of what would follow my physical demise.

Unlike matter, subject to entropy, consciousness evolves; in alignment, I would argue, with the unfolding of the Cosmos. We observe, we are curious, we learn. Too much to take in during a single lifetime. The journey from Zero to One is eternal; our consciousnesses are not even midway on that journey. 

Consciousness is, I believe, the fundamental property of the Universe; from consciousness derives matter and energy, space and time. Our individual small 'c' consciousnesses, in the here-and-now, are participating in something far greater than that spanned by the life on the individual biological container that currently houses that small 'c' consciousness.

I feel certain that consciousness survives the demise of the physical container in which it's housed for this lifetime. The real question for me is how does this work in practice? Does consciousness migrate to a new body? Human or some other life form? On our world, in our timeline, or somewhere else? When? Straight away, or after a certain period (Christian purgatory)? Or does individual consciousness merge with the Big 'C' Collective Consciousness (the Christian notion of  'being seated at the right hand of God' in heaven, or the Hindu and Buddhist notion of nirvana)?

Both Buddhism and Hinduism hold reincarnation to be a fact. Whilst Buddhism sees individual consciousness merging into  an Eternal Whole, Hinduism sees spiritual evolution as a series of bodily reincarnations (saṃsāra), with lessons learned along the ascent to a final merger into the Big 'C' consciousness.

My personal experience with exomnesia, anomalous qualia-memory events and past-life dreams suggest the Hindu interpretation , with an endless series of reincarnations into new containers, new human lives, new lessons, new learnings. But then, my strong intuition that "all who seek God shall find God in their own way" suggests a myriad paths to that ultimate oneness...

Today, I attended the funeral of Peter Hauke, another West London boy whom I knew for over 50 years, who died last month, aged 64. I have so much to be grateful to Peter; above all, Peter was instrumental in my move to Poland. One day in 1995, he popped by my house to ask if I'd be interested in doing some consulting work for the mobile-telephony company he was working for in Warsaw at the time. I jumped at the chance, and within two years I had been offered a full-time job in Poland. Peter taught me many practical things, from how to order a tidy Excel spreadsheet to the right way to sharpen a scythe. He has helped me out on my działka – the very chair I'm sitting on was a housewarming gift from him. A natural educator and serial entrepreneur, Peter had the character of an Ancient Greek logician and an Enlightenment natural philosopher. His consciousness, I am certain, abides.

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

Lent 2024: 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

Lent 2026: day 24 – hope

Things change; that is a constant. But are they changing for the better but for the worse? Right now, the world is asking – will the eventual outcome of the war in Iran be positive or negative? The answer is granular; the answer will be found in the lives of the hundred million or so people that it affects directly, and the billions that it effects indirectly. Most of these human beings will one day look back at how events since 28 February 2026 have have influenced the way their lives have subsequently unfolded.

Does hope help? Psychopaths, sociopaths or a crazy end-times religious maniacs excepted, most people tend to hope for the best. But can that hope – can those prayers – actually translate into positive outcomes, or should we abandon hope and accept that what will be will be? 

This is about setting those sliders between Doing Something and fatalism. Well do I remember the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine four years ago. After the shock and the uncertainty, the world simply got used to it. "Do wszystkiego można się przyzwyczaić," as my late father used to say ("You can get used to everything"). We can; we are resilient. We live in hope.

Ukraine, supported financially and in materiel (to a greater or lesser extent) by Western democracies, is holding Russia to a draw; the war is costing Russia heavily. But who would have expected it to drag on for so long? We hoped for a coup in Moscow. We hoped Putin would be killed or just die. We hoped that successive Ukrainian offensives would push the occupiers out of its sovereign territory. None of that happened. We hope the Iranian people will throw off the shackles of the murderous regime that tramples on its personal freedoms and stifles their economic wellbeing in the name of religious fundamentalism.

Peace and freedom are good things to hope for, for others as well as for ourselves. 

Collectively, we are learning. Some societies learning faster than others.

Brexit, the Iranian revolution of 1979 – people hoping that an imperfect world will get better if they leave the EU or overthrow the Shah. Their hopes manipulated by those determined to get their chance to rule and impose their worldview on millions. [The fundamentalist regime ruling Iran for the past 47 years stands as proof that religion and government should never mix.]

This is a hopeful time of year. The past two weeks have seen winter chased away, mainly sunny days, brightness and a sense that nature of starting to wake up. Here amid the orchards, there is the ever-present anxiety that a late frost might yet come along and damage the crop. "The hope that springs eternal/Springs right up your behind" – Ian Dury, This Is What We Find (1979)

If we live in hope, we should be prepared to wait; things tend to get better with time. Align with the Cosmic Purpose. 

And this leads to the Biggest Question there is – survival of consciousness after biological death.

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

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)

Lent 2026: day 23 – change

Today marks the halfway point of Lent. Twenty-three days gone, another 23 to Easter Sunday. Time to reflect on the passage of time, and what time brings along with it – change. My 68 years on earth have seen change – technological and social – happening at a pace that sometimes is frightening. 

My earliest memories were of a drab suburban world, childhood spent in front of a black-and-white, 405-line TV set that seemed miraculous to my parents' generation. I was born on the day space travel began (with the launch of Sputnik I), a week before and a week after the two largest nuclear accidents up to that time. There were few cars in the streets (eight times fewer than on UK roads today). There were 12 pennies to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound; food (and sweets) were sold in pounds and ounces. Clothing was drab. Things were of poor quality, pieces of wood or gaspipe held together with Jubilee clips, splints in your hands. In the skies over West London, piston-engined propeller airlines flew into London Airport (as Heathrow as known then). 

Change, Hanwell London W7, 1960 and today, as visualised by Google Gemini's Nano Banana 2. The flavour is there, but the architecture too grand; the parade of shops was two, not three stories high.

Change came in leaps. I remember sometime in the mid-60s my father bringing home an analogue calculator (ANITA) and the glow of the red diodes. It filled a quarter of the dining-room table. This was the future! Fifteen years later, my father had an Amstrad computer (MS DOS) and was working on spreadsheets, I could not yet see the sense. In 1990, at work, I initiated a project to introduce desk-top publishing to the magazine I edited back then. Apple Macs, black-and-white screens the size of large TVs that cost as much as a family car. This was the future! Then came the Internet (with a capital I back then), linking computers into a global network through dial-up modems. This was around the time we moved to Poland. 

Oh, the changes taking place here! Cash machines, mobile telephones, hypermarkets, joining NATO and the EU – everything changing for the better, and at pace. Life is becoming more convenient for people – online banking, online government services, social-media connectivity 24/7. And now, we are rapidly entering the age of AI. And the Polish economy has been one of the fast-growing in the world, what's not to like?

Adapting to the change that's happening all around us is a an important skill. The maladapted become disorientated, frustrated, and prone to poor choices at the ballot box.

Maybe we should look at the downsides of change? In the UK, a general sense of stasis, marasm; urban decay, perceptions of 'uncontrolled migration'. But in Poland? The threat of Russia, mainly. And climate change. The economy, meanwhile, is growing nicely... A golden age in Polish history?

The change that I've been describing is all in the physical realm. But what of consciousness? Does this change? 

Many qualia experiences and qualia memories are coloured by the Spirit of the Age; the music, the art, the fashions; nostalgic longings for the once-familiar are predicated by change. Our digital age means we can reproduce or even synthesise many aspects of the past on demand. A piece of music or some TV show that conjures up my childhood? There it is on YouTube. Or groups discussing bygone Ealing on Facebook. I can scratch that long-felt itch for life in mid-century America online with ease.

But strip away the markers of the passage of time. Qualia that come from timeless experiences; walking along a shoreline, toes in the waves; is this the 21st century or three thousand years ago? A cloudless night sky with full moon from a hilltop far from any town or city. Is that what it would have felt like to the earliest hominids? 

The role of consciousness is to observe; to witness the unfolding at its own scale. The ant sees the Cosmos as its scale, we see that same Cosmos at our scale. The ant is subjectively at the epicentre of its own Universe, as is each one of us. The ant also observes change – day changing to night, that twig that wasn't there yesterday, the rivulets of water pouring into its nest during a summer thunderstorm. 

Imagine a Consciousness scaled up as ours is scaled up from that of an ant. Imagine perceiving change on a scale of galaxies over billions of years.

Matter breaks down (entropy), but consciousness abides (syntropy). Adaptation to change is a biological necessity. Awareness of change as a flow, as a characteristic of the unfolding Universe, is crucial to spiritual evolution. Live a spiritually conscious life, and the change that affects the physical world ceases to be a bother to you. 

Tomorrow: living in hope, or living in alignment with the flow?

Lent 2025: day 23
The Tao of Doing Less 

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

Lent 2026: day 22 – a life measured in spiritual challenges

Spiritual challenges? Surely, spirituality is something you either feel or you don't? Something more profound than mere religious ritual and doctrine... The spiritual search should not stand as a challenge; surely it comes naturally? And yet, in our materialist, physicalist-reductionist world, having a spiritual worldview can be a challenge...

As a child, I felt that spiritual realm in moments of transcendence, as the sun streamed in through the living-room windows, highlighting motes of dust in the air. Or experiencing that strange sense of familiarity from another time and another place upon looking at a picture in a book. As a child, however, I was unable to define it. Church-based religion offered an inadequate explanation of what I felt spiritually. 

As an adolescent I  came to reject religion as overly dogmatic, claiming to know all the answers. However, as a parent, I reconsidered religion, this time more instrumentally, as something socially useful in the process of raising young children. Today, I have become critical of all religions for the way they all tend to co-opt the innate human yearning for the numinous, the metaphysical, the infinite and eternal for the purposes of social control. 

And so we come to a fork in the road. Accept religion and outsource your spiritual curiosity to an institution that claims to have all the answers. Reject religion and there is the danger of falling into the abyss of materialist consumptionism, narcissism and status obsession. Wanting external affirmation for your ego.

There is an alternative that neither submits to dogma or materialism, and it is based on affirmation of the experience that no one can deny – the experience of consciousness.

I do have a core sense, a deep intuition, that there is more to reality than matter and ego, that consciousness is fundamental, that our subjective experience of being alive and sentient is at the heart of  everything, and that this experience is somehow connected to the whole of creation. This intuition is gaining definition as I get older, though the older I get the further away it seems. The journey to complete understanding will take a myriad of lifetimes. That very notion is a challenge.

As biological entities, we are insignificant on the Cosmic scale of time (13.8 billion years) and space (90+ billion light years). However, as observing consciousnesses (or souls), we are – each and every one of us – subjectively the epicentre of the Universe. 

Grasping this paradox is a fundamental spiritual challenge. Casting aside the Ego, as it becomes less necessary to project oneself upon the human status hierarchy, while maintaining the sense of self as a curious, observing awareness requires focus. [Why am I writing this? For the ego-satisfaction of page-view metrics? Or for the discipline of staying focused on reaching a tighter definition of what I really hold to be true?]

The more vociferously any religion insists that it – and only it – holds ultimate truth, and all unbelievers are damned, the more I shun it. I am deeply wedded to the insight I received a few summers ago that everyone who seeks God shall find God in their own way.

Many do not seek God; fine. I am not attempting to change their minds, though I'm more than happy to enter into a discussion on spiritual matters with them should they wish to converse. A spiritual challenge. Others are on their own pathway to God, different to mine; perhaps it is a pathway that lies within the framework of an established religion. Fine! Again, I will not attempt to change their mind. In spiritual conversations with them I focus on a search for common ground, seeking that which unites us spiritually, rather than digging up doctrinal divisions.

Assuming that you too are on a path to spiritual growth, to enlightenment, to a deeper understanding of reality, to greater wisdom – should you consider your journey to be a challenge? Or a series of challenges? Or does it all come naturally, with ease?

Moments of connectedness with the infinite and eternal. Moments when you feel consciously plugged into the Cosmos. Moments of awareness that you belong to far more than just your physical body. My challenge is to seek such moments, notice them when they happen, and learn from them, and grow from them; Lent helps me focus my mind.

Lent 2025: day 25
Say farewell to materialism

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

Lent 2023: day 22
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

Lent 2026: day 21 – a life measured in physical challenges

Reaching the end of Lent's third week and feeling that I've been too easy on myself. I'm finding the physical challenges of giving up meat, alcohol and salt snacks a doddle. I'm not feeling any sense of struggle. I'm not having to fight the temptation to open that bottle of cider in the fridge or to have a glass of port. There's no temptation to buy a hamburger or fry some steak. After all, this is my 35th Lent in a row, and so the practice has become habitual, instinctive almost, and something that I've come to associate with the season. 

Long ago, when I began taking Lent seriously, giving up confectionery, cakes, biscuits, desserts and sugary carbonated drinks used to be a thing, but over the decades, these have all disappeared from my day-to-day diet. I miss them not – and so avoiding them during Lent as I do at all other times of the year has long ceased to be any kind of challenge. Outside of Lent, I will occasionally eat cake or dessert for the sake of social politeness, but this category of foodstuffs does not enter my shopping cart at all. I whizz past the confectionery and cake/biscuit aisles in the supermarket without giving them a glance. 

So avoiding sugar is a challenge overcome. Like learning to read or learning to drive, I've learnt to avoid sugar. And with each passing year, giving up alcohol for Lent is getting easier and easier. The widespread appearance of zero-alcohol beers, wines and even spirits, in Poland's shops and restaurants is a boon during Lent (and indeed, a cold zero beer swigged back on a long walk is preferable to one that gives you a buzz when it's hot).

However, I do not intend to drop alcohol altogether. Conviviality garrulousness in social occasions enhances quality of life. Entering the altered state of consciousness, consciously, with purpose, is a positive thing.

My daily exercise-and-walking regime, now conducted every day since 1 January 2014, was something originally instituted during a Lent a long time ago, and was gradually spun out over the whole year. So again, in terms of physical activity, Lent isn't a challenge – it's no different to any other time of year. However, since my heart attack  (which occurred last Lent!), I have ceased to do pull-ups, press-ups, sit-ups and weights, as these put too much strain on my heart. 

Overall, the observance of Lent has introduced more and more healthy things into my routine; both the will not to do something unhealthy and the will to do something healthy have been trained and put into year-round practice.

So should I be setting myself tougher physical challenges? Probably not. I have lived without caffeine for Lent twice, but brain-cracking headaches put me off taking that any further. One strong cup of coffee first thing in the morning, the year round, is good for me (with the very occasional social cup now and then). I have also gone vegan for Lent twice, but that also proved too tough to continue in subsequent years. So my Lenten diet includes dairy products and fish/seafood. And this I find easy; though it will be nice to have a big juicy steak when it's all over. Exercises? If I come across something valuable (plank, back extensions and bird-dog stretches are relatively recent additions), I intend to add the exercise into my daily routine, though from the next New Year.

Absolutely crucial to all this my use of spreadsheet and gamification. The aim is for me to beat the younger me. More paces, holding the plank longer, more portions of fresh fruit & veg, and (slightly) less alcohol than last year. That's my long-term challenge. Lent is a boost, a spur. But why am I not challenging myself more during Lent? I am, but with a different focus.

The ultimate physical challenge we all face is ageing. Do we accept the challenge fully, grudgingly, or do we deny that ageing affects us? Or postpone even thinking about it until old age has caught up with us good and proper? I do see ageing as a challenge; it's rather like going on a very long bicycle ride. You need to know where you're going, train beforehand, have the right equipment, talk to those who've done it – but above all, have the right mindset.

I view life as a succession of challenges. The reason my Lents are becoming less focused on physical challenges is because I'm taking up the spiritual challenge of Lent with increasing seriousness.

Lent 2025: day 21
Gender and spirituality

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

Lent 2026: day 20 – music, physics and metaphysics

One note, plucked on an acoustic guitar. A single chord, strummed. Three chords in quick succession. Another three. A bass guitar joins in, and percussion provides a beat. Add a piano, woodwind, density, variety... We have music, it resonates with us emotionally. 

There's something magical about music, isn't there? The ability to conjure up a mood, a feeling, a memory – qualia – with a run of notes, a succession of vibrations at different frequencies, is hard to pin down rationally. The rollercoaster of emotions experienced while listening to, for example, Bohemian Rhapsody, is impossible to quantify in a mathematical equation.

We all recognise a minor key in music (sad). And a major key (happy). Why do we  respond this way, rather than the other way around?

Science tells us that the way our brains process music is all about dopamine activated by the mesolimbic reward pathway, the activation of structures such as the amygdala, hippocampus and anterior cingulate cortex, and our cultural expectations. 

I'd say this this physicalist explanation overlooks the metaphysical mystery at the heart of our emotional response to music.

Earlier this year, I posited the possibility that music operates on the same substrate as our consciousness. We experience music rather than think about it (unless we are trained musicians). The notion of music literally belonging to the ages is important. I would guess that the conscious response to a Mozart minuet in a human is the same today as it was when it was first played. (I might have to add 'to a European human', conditioned to Western tonalities.)

Familiarity is important; you may hear a piece for the first time and like it – this may be because it's derivative, sounding similar to another piece you know and love, or it may use familiar musical devices or tropes that work on you emotionally such as a crescendo, choir entry, shift from major into minor etc. (Somehow, this doesn't happen with AI-generated music.)  

But then there is that 'click' of instant familiarity when you 'know' a tune you've never heard before. Was it there in the background while you were in your earliest infancy? Do you associate it the tune with childhood? Or some vague time before you were born – how could that be? Two months ago, I had the insight that maybe music plays some role in assigning consciousness to its biological container.

Two and half thousand years ago, Pythagoras posited that the Cosmos is structured according to harmonic ratios analogous to musical intervals, and that the motion of heavenly bodies form a cosmic harmony, inaudible, yet fundamental to the structure of reality. Plato developed this idea further. He suggested that the World Soul is built from harmonic mathematics. according to musical ratios which structure the Cosmos. 

These ancient intuitions resonate with our current understanding of the physical substrate of reality.

Modern physics has uncovered parallels to the Pythagorean view of 'the music of the spheres': stable structures, from atoms all the way up to galaxies, emerge as resonant patterns in dynamic systems. In this profound sense, the universe does indeed behave like an enormous hierarchy of vibrating systems across countless frequencies. 

Vibration may be a fundamental organising principle of reality, maybe even bridging the divide between the realms of matter and consciousness. Maybe.  

Lent 2025: day 20
Why I keep blogging these Lenten posts

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 

Lent 2026: day 19 – dreams, and how the Universe functions.

Since childhood, I have been blessed with vivid dreams. Even nightmares – powerful enough to wake me up – when they come, which is rarely, are interesting (here's a good one!). 

Yet I dream those Big Dreams less frequently than I once did.  For me, those increasingly rare 'past life dreams' that inform me of my consciousness having experienced life from within a different biological container at a different time and a different place, are fundamental to my identity. I have catalogued these dreams here. They are qualitatively different to the run-of-the-mill dreams, having no cognitive disjunctions, that is, following the classical unities of time, place and action. This category of dream has served to convince me that consciousness is non-local and immortal, passing through myriad biological containers on its eternal journey from Zero to One. 

This rare class of dream co-exists with those humdrum, regular dreams. These are full of cognitive disjunctions (people and places interweave – for example my brother and my son frequently appear as a single character), the narrative switches – illogical plot twists – or the location jumps, from, say London or Warsaw. Then there are the regular tropes (losing my wallet or rucksack, squeezing through tight passages, nice things turning ugly and broken). 

But even these are becoming less frequent and less memorable. I'll wake once or twice in the night for a wee and focus on that dream I've just had; typically it will be so confusing and so vague, and I'd have nothing worthy of jotting down in my bedside notebook. Two years ago, I'd have three or four dreams a month that I'd enter into the book. Now it's down to an average of one a month. Is this an age-related phenomenon? Or maybe the cardiology drugs I've been on for the past 11 months are taking the edge off my dreams?

On the other hand, over the past couple of years, I have become much more aware of the experience known as hypnagogia (hallucinations experienced between wakefulness and sleep) and hypnopompia (hallucinations experienced between sleep and wakefulness). I can now tell that I am about to drop off when my brain, unbidden, starts generating imagery of unknown human faces, fleeting shapes, landscapes, symbols etc. And waking up with a few bars of new music (nothing I've heard before) or unusual names on my mind.

Images left from Google Gemini, right, from ChatGPT

Our human stories, our tales, the narratives that have been telling ourselves for millennia, speak of great prophecies coming to people in dreams; premonitions of fortunes, of catastrophes; yet this is not our daily experience with dreaming. Rather, what comes to us in the night are nudges, small warnings, signals, signs worth noticing. Which is why I rather like Michael Palin's portrayal of the boring prophet in Monty Python's Life of Brian. "There shall, in that time, be rumours of things going astray, and there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things with the sort of raffia-work base that has an attachment. At this time, a friend shall lose his friend's hammer and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before..." [Michael Palin, who coincidentally, appears in the BBC comedy series Small Prophets, out now.] That, dear reader, is now the Universe functions.

Lent 2025: day 19
Wisdom and the future

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

Lent 2026: day 18 – timeslip

A break with the planned Lenten posts, a new one has come to light. I have awoken from a profound dream, a time-travel dream; back to May 1979, the last weeks before my undergraduate final exams at Warwick University. I wake in the ground-floor room of the house I shared as a student. Beaconsfield Cottage, corner of Moor St and Clarendon St, Earlsdon, Coventry. I wake up as me, my consciousness ageless, though bearing the experience acquired over the intervening decades. 

'Morning stroll in Earlsdon, Coventry, 1979.' ChatGPT.

I realise that I have the Chance To Do It All Again. But this time, in wisdom.

My first thought, sitting on the end of my bed, was for my children. They do not exist. But will they? The second thought is how the world has changed; the digital revolution and the end of the Cold War, a free Poland in NATO and a part of a European union. I suddenly realise I have nothing to record any of this other than a ballpoint pen and notebook, or a voice-note dictated into a blank C90 cassette. 

What to say, where to start?

The mind of a 68-year-old trapped within a 21-year-old body. Do I want this to be happening to me? I feel knowledge , the physical knowledge of things, events, slipping away, though not my consciousness. Those companies that created the digital world I knew... what were they called? ... I'd invest heavily in their stocks... But this materialist thought quickly slips away. No, it's not about that, it's absolutely not about money-making. It's about a life better lived, a chance to be more thoughtful, kinder, more empathic, better behaved. I should call my parents. Give my mother a big hug. I understand her now like never before.

A fresh dawn, full of every possibility. Will the world unfold along the same path as the one I stepped out of in that long dream leading up to 2026? Other than the digitalisation, the geopolitics and the pervasiveness of stuff (so many more things than in 1979!) the world is still familiar. But whatever happened to 2026? Had it gone on to unfold into 2027 and beyond, but without me? 

What to do with the rest of 1979? Easy. Pass those final exams and lead a good life. Take nothing and no one for granted; don't slip into complacency; stay aware, rein in the ego; observe more; ask the right questions. Read more – more broadly, more deeply. Engage in sincere conversations, listen more, ask the Big Questions, draw the right conclusions. Stay true to your wise self, shun the foolish self. Procrastinate less. Get On With It. Settle down sooner? Don't waste time chasing ephemeral pleasures. Avoid the pinball machines in the Students' Union. But listen to more jazz. Discover Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Miles Davis at an earlier age. Read  Plato's Republic. Read Alan Watts, tap into Eastern mysticism. Engage with and protect nature.

I have woken up in 1979 with a massive expansion of my awareness of What Life Is About. What a fine gift! It is mind-blowing. How to react? My first reaction is to share all this with someone, to tell them everything about the long journey from 1979 to 2026, how things turned out, the big things, the personal things, the changing flavour of reality, the milestones, the turning points, the crossroads, the discoveries... Will they listen? Take me seriously? How much can I remember? Details are slipping from my grasp...

My thoughts turn again to my children. Do they still exist in the future? Or was the future/will the future be/ unfold along a different timeline? Their consciousnesses abide, but held in different biological containers, different parents but the same in spirit?

I open my eyes and slowly they focus on the digital clock. It is (and I'm not making this up!) 5:55. Back in 2026. Time to get out of bed, feed the cats and listen to the news headlines.

If we live in a block universe where past and future coexist simultaneously, and entropy is balanced by syntropy, could this be possible? Would I want it to be possible? [see Possibilianism post, coincidentally below] Are intuitions of the future a gift or a curse?

I wake at the interface between the material and the realm of consciousness. 

{{ 'Shindoku' }} pops unbidden into my mind just now. I look up what I presume to be a Japanese word. It is.. "Shindoku (しんどく): the adverbial form of the adjective shindoi (しんどい), meaning 'tiring', 'draining' or 'bothersome'. It describes a state of being exhausted or finding something burdensome."

Not my state of mind at present!

Lent 2025: day 18
Science, Spirituality and Religion (Pt II)

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