Imaging future qualia

It’s just gone ten, but outside it is already 25°C. The kittens are back from playing outside. Kwińcia is asleep on my kitchen table next to my laptop (below). 

Wiktor, Dorian and Memphis are asleep in the cat tower, and Mars is asleep on the windowsill. The sun shines; I feel its power. A fly buzzes around the kitchen.

Kittenhood passes all too quickly. Within a few months, the five kittens will have lost their intrinsic kittenish cuteness and will rapidly be turning into normal adult cats. And sadly, for reasons of feline management, I will have to get the two girls sterilised, as dealing with 12 cats plus another ten kittens this time next year would be beyond my abilities and would stretch the budget.

So this is the last summer during which I can rejoice in the presence of kittens – like, ever. The last summer in which I can stretch out my hand and stroke the innocent softness of kittens as they sleep.

Summer will pass. Right now, the front door is open, the windows are all ajar, the trees are beautifully green and the sky is blue. But πάντα ῥεῖ – panta rhei: everything flows. By December – or, who knows, January? – there will be snow, lots of it, covering bare trees and dead vegetation. But there will also be those blue-sky days, with hard frosts and the stark beauty of winter. There may be fewer sunny days in midwinter, but they will happen.

Can I imagine the forthcoming winter? By then, my five kittens will have become adolescent cats, the same size as last year’s litter, who by winter were already larger than their mother. Both Wenus and Céleste are petite for adult cats. How will the kittens’ faces have changed? Can I imagine that transition?

Autumn will come: shorter days, more grey skies, leaves changing colour and then falling, leaving skeletal trees through which the horizon becomes visible. I cannot yet feel its approach; the late-summer heatwaves are bound to come. But I can imagine the first intimations of autumn, especially those clear mornings: dew-flecked spiders’ webs in the garden, wet shoes, chilly air, golden leaves, apple trees and grapevines full of maturing fruit. All of this, less than six weeks away.

I have this blog, now in its twentieth year, so I can go back in time and see my emotional responses to the changing seasons: but always looking backwards rather than forwards. We can project ourselves into the future on the basis of past experience, but the qualia will never be exactly the same twice. I ask myself whether we can dream into the future. [For me, these are exceedingly rare.]

Not only does the Earth spin on its axis and orbit the Sun, but the entire Solar System proceeds around the Galaxy at about 7.32 billion kilometres a year. The Earth circles the moving Sun somewhat like a point on an obliquely mounted propeller (although the geometry is not quite as neat as this analogy suggests).

In six months, the Solar System will have travelled about 3.66 billion kilometres farther along its roughly 227-million-year orbit around the galactic centre. During the same period, the Earth will have travelled about 470 million kilometres around the Sun — half its annual orbital journey of 940 million kilometres. For every kilometre the Earth travels along its solar orbit, the Sun carries the Solar System nearly eight kilometres along its galactic orbit.

Relative to the Galaxy, the Earth will therefore be about 73.2 billion kilometres farther along its path in ten years. Time travellers returning to the coordinates they occupied ten years earlier would materialise somewhere out in interstellar space rather than back on Earth.

Nothing remains where it was. At the cosmic scale, worlds and stars are ceaselessly in motion; at the quantum scale, position itself is not definite. From the quantum to the cosmic, nothing is ever simply where it once was.

But qualia memories – consciousness taps into something intangible, something for which physics has no formula. Intangible yet instantly familiar. From another time – and a very, very distant place.

This time last year: 
Aesthetics of New Asphalt

This time five years ago:
Samsung Galaxy phone camera vs. Nikon D3500

This time eight years ago:
Karczunkowska viaduct takes shape

This time nine years ago:
My father's return to Warsaw, 2017

This time ten years ago:
My father's first visit to Warsaw in 40 years

This time 11 years ago:
What's worse – unemployment, or a badly-paid job?

This time 12 years ago:
A return to Liverpool

This time 14 years ago:
Too good to last (anyone remember OLT Express airline?)

This time 15 years ago:
Poland's Baltic coast as a holiday destination

This time 17 years ago:
The Warsaw they fought and died for?

This time 19 years ago:
Floods, rainbows and hope

Rolling Rock flashbacks

I remember when I first caught sight of a bottle of Rolling Rock beer, imported from the USA, in a Perivale off-licence. It was probably some time in the early 1990s. This was a powerful exomnesia moment, a sense of nostalgia for something I knew I couldn't have normally remembered from this life.

The label was printed in white paint onto the green bottle; the pony's head, the cross-hatched plinth, above all the green, the exact shade of green, contrasting with the white and the blue. The typeface. Everything. An absolute guaranteed purchase.

But the taste? Did the taste summon immediate 'PAFF!' moment qualia flashbacks? Well, nothing memorable. Nothing as memorable as my first swing of Jever Pilsener, Worthington's White Shield (sadly killed off by the corporate bastards that owned it in 2023 after 194 years) or AleBrowar's King of Hop, for example. And yet, look at it. So familiar. Somehow this summer, I have been getting flashbacks to Rolling Rock beer. Yesterday, three. Is it the green of the forest that I see from my kitchen window at this time of year? Is it the green of the landscape through which I stroll?

Rolling Rock (which features in three of my flashback-dream accounts and short stories) was brewed between 1939 and 2006 in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. After that, Anheuser-Busch shifted production to Newark. But before that, in 1987, Canadian brewery, Labatt, bought the Rolling Rock brand from the Sundor Group, which had bought it from the founding family two years earlier. Labatt in turn was swallowed up in several more corporate mergers, each diluting the meaning, the relevance and the uniqueness of what originally made the brand what it was. Labatt introduced Rolling Rock to the UK market, around the time that it rebranded the Hammersmith Odeon rock venue as Labatt's Apollo.

So by the time I first tasted Rolling Rock, the visual branding might have been familiar, but the taste had drifted. Taste is a powerful memory jogger. I remember my first taste of coriander (cilantro), chorizo, pesto, and feeling instant familiarity. But not here. Early postwar Americana was not on the tip of my tongue. Today's Rolling Rock is brewed elsewhere; corporate owners no longer insisting that the bottled beer is brewed in glass tanks.

But how did Rolling Rock once taste? I prompted Google Gemini to come up with a recipe that would conjure up the precise qualia sensation of sipping a Rolling Rock back in the 1940s. The answer was surprising. Mixing Asahi Super Dry and bottled Heineken. Rolling Rock was unusual in that it was brewed not only from malted barley and hops, but also with adjuncts of maize ('corn') and... rice. Bottled Heineken would offer the "light, fruity, tang of dimethyl sulphide".  Served not too cold, either. So... "Mixing Heineken (bottle) with Asahi Super Dry creates a blend that effectively engineers-out the parts of both beers you don't want, while combining the traits needed to mimic mid-century Rolling Rock". 

ChatGPT is more specific: "I would expect the optimal blend to contain considerably more Asahi than Heineken. Heineken supplies some characteristics that Asahi lacks: a fuller malt centre, light fruity fermentation character and a grassy, slightly herbal bitterness. Asahi supplies the leaner body, pale colour, adjunct character and very dry finish. Heineken is an all-malt lager, while the current European-market Asahi Super Dry uses barley malt and maize starch. Try two parts Asahi to one part Heineken. That should soften Asahi’s rather severe, carbonic dryness, introduce a little rounded malt and herbal hop character and remain lighter and less distinctly European-tasting than a 50:50 blend. There is one important limitation. Neither beer provides the maize-and-rice combination of classic Rolling Rock. Asahi contributes maize starch but not enough rice in the current UK/European formulation; Heineken contributes no adjunct grain at all. The mixture might therefore approximate the weight, attenuation and bitterness, but not precisely the old beer’s faint mixture of corn sweetness and rice-derived lightness."

So there we have it! I shall have to try it out; Heineken is universally available in Poland (the corporation owns Grupa Żywiec), and Asahi Super Dry can be sourced in Warsaw if I look hard enough.

I shall let you know if any metaphysical magic takes me back to Kentucky or Ohio of 1950.

This time four years ago:
Sunset mysticism

This time seven years ago:
You've either got or you haven't got style

This time eight years ago:
Total eclipse of the moon, Warsaw

This time ten years ago:
'Others' vs. 'Our others'

This time 11 year:
Reducing inequality in Polish society

This time 13 years ago:
Llanbedrog beach

This time 15 years ago:
The Accursed Soldiers - a short story

This time 16 years ago:
Driving impressions of the Toyota Yaris
[Son still driving it to this day!]

This time 18 years ago:
Poland's dry summer

This time 19 years ago:
The UK's wettest summer ever

Water Which Does Not Wet Hands revisited (Pt II)

Part I of the review here.

It is the nature of Homo sapiens to be curious – to ask the most fundamental questions regarding the nature of reality. Why is there something rather than nothing? What are we made of? Why do we think and feel? If a tree falls in a forest and there's no one there, does it make a sound?

As humanity evolved from hunter-gatherer to settled communities, more time became available for asking those questions and making observations from which hypotheses could be created, putative answers to those questions that have gnawed at us from our birth as a separate species.

Our first attempts at defining the nature of reality were coded as myths and legends; supernatural beings whose actions defined the paths of celestial objects across the sky, good or bad harvests, and phenomena such as volcanoes and thunderstorms. Telling these stories was the job of shamen, not scientists.

Systematic scientific thinking and practice began in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia during the third and second millennia BC. These first steps in what would become mathematics, astronomy and medicine went on to influence Ancient Greek natural philosophy, who attempted to explain physical phenomena by natural, rather than supernatural, causes. Knowledge of these Greek concepts deteriorated in Latin-speaking Western Europe during the early Middle Ages, but lived on in the Byzantine Empire. The Hellenistic worldview was preserved and absorbed into the Arabic-speaking Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age. The recovery and assimilation of Greek works and Islamic inquiries into Western Europe from the 10th to 13th century revived the learning of natural philosophy in the West.

The Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe marked a break with the natural philosophy that had preceded it. The scientific method that emerged departed from previous Greek conceptions and traditions. It was more mechanistic in its worldview, nudging out the supernatural explanations, it was more integrated with mathematics, and focused on acquiring and interpreting  evidence. Proof became the ultimate goal, proving conjectures, experimentally or mathematically. Science became separate from philosophy; matter… from spirit.

Alchemy served as the bridge between Mediaeval thought and the birth of the scientific method in the Enlightenment. Dr Szydło’s book examines the links between alchemical thinking and practice and the first true scientists. In particular, the author sets out a number of Sendivogius’s accounts of processes, comparing them to modern chemistry. The book follows on with the work of pioneers of today’s scientific method, as they worked on identifying oxygen as an element.

Dr Szydło separates practical alchemy from philosophical alchemy in Sendivogius’s writings. The philosophical includes musings on “the spirit of the Earth”, the practical includes observations made while heating lead oxide, for example. Sendivogius’s central-nitre theory was instrumental in stimulating experimental investigation into the vital constituent of air and influenced Robert Boyle and John Mayow, whose work in isolating oxygen as a constituent of air were crucial in the shift from alchemy to chemistry.

Post-Enlightenment science took the path of reductionism, stripping away all of alchemy’s arcane trappings of mysticism, replacing it with empiricism. Yet four centuries on, scientists acknowledge many more gaps in their knowledge than was the case a hundred years ago. Reductionism is giving way to complexity. The acknowledgement of what we don’t know leads to new ways of thinking about the ultimate nature of reality. Consciousness and the conscious observer take on a new primacy. Thirty years on from when Water Which Does Not Wet Hands was published, new parallels can be sought between how alchemy viewed ultimate reality and how it is seen today.

Rereading the book today through the lens of contemporary consciousness studies reveals new congruences. Sendivogius's universe is alive, filled with purpose and permeated by a principle that appears simultaneously as spirit, matter and life. His worldview contrasted profoundly with the dead, clockwork universe of the materialist reductionism that would follow. 

Whilst Sendivogius's 'central nitre' is not consciousness, it is a vital force with formative causation, a fundamental property of the Universe.

Were Sendivogius to walk out of a time machine into today's world and to have the chance to talk to our leading scientific theoreticians and philosophers, I think he would rather side with Donald Hoffman, Phillip Goff or Rupert Sheldrake than with Richard Dawkins or Sean Carroll. Or, were he still alive, Daniel Dennett.

Is the pendulum of philosophy swinging back, or was materialist reductionism an aberration from more intuitive thinking about the nature of reality? Time will tell, I need more lives to assuage my curiosity.

This time last year:
A better tomorrow – science and technology

This time ten years ago:
Memory, place and experience

This time 11 years ago:
UK Number One in world Soft Power rankings

This time 14 years ago:
First flight from Modlin

This time 15 years ago:
Another cycle route to work

This time 18 years ago:
PZL M-28 and Piaggio Avanti – Okęcie regulars

Excitement is over-rated

It dawned on me the other day that I no longer get excited, nor do I seek excitement any more. One can be excited by the prospect of travel; I'm not. I've not been on holiday for 12 years, nor do I hanker for a holiday. I'm not excited by watching sport or going fast.

This is a profound difference between me today and the younger, thrill-chasing me.

Am I happier! Of course I'm happier! But why? What is it about an ascetic rural lifestyle that brings happiness? Primarily, peace of mind, agency over my time. Repeatable moments of joy.

One question arises however. I am convinced of the reality of non-local consciousness, of the survival of identity after death – in the form of consciousness and its associated qualia memories – rather than ego. The ego being intrinsically linked with the body, with its appearance and its place in the status hierarchy, dies with it. But consciousness, pure observation, abides. 

Much of the lore surrounding reincarnation features people with memories of dying young, of lives tragically cut short, and of the desire to return again to experience more of human life. 

But what of reincarnation as experienced by people who die in old age? A long life may bring substantial wisdom, along with a sharper perception of how much remains unexplored. I know what I know, my belief system is becoming ever-clearer, but I am also increasingly aware of what I don't know.

I witnessed two great forces driving my father forward in old age, namely observation and curiosity. Not everyone has had the benefits of a great education, but with enough observation and curiosity, aided by access to knowledge unparalleled in human history and more time for self-improvement, the life-long learning potential of an autodidact is vast. 

What's needed is the drive to learn; focus (for those wanting to specialise in any one field), the energy required to keep on with the hard work. And the inspiration to tap into the Flow, frequent moments of deep intuition. Didn't have enough of these qualities this time round? Ask for more next time.

A spiritually mature consciousness is likely to choose a next life that is not high in status or excitement, rather desiring an existence that offers the right conditions for further development.

Here I bow towards Plato and his Myth of Er in Book X of The Republic. For Plato, the purpose of philosophy is partly to prepare one's consciousness for the moment of biological death and the choice that follows. The philosophically educated person learns to distinguish a superficially good life from the genuinely good – wealth from justice, fame from wisdom, power from self-mastery. Once each soul has selected a life, its chosen destiny is confirmed. The souls then forget their old lives, before being reborn.

Much as I admire classic sports cars, ownership of one is not for me. Entropy would soon turn it to rust, I have zero mechanical or engineering skills; in any case I would not seek to wring out every last ounce of power on my local backroads, nor do I feel any compunction to show off a beautiful car in front of people. 

Should I have any curiosity regarding places such as Göbekli Tepe or any number of anomalous prehistoric sites, I can visit them online these days, and watch talks about them from experts. The prospect of flying off anywhere is no long exciting; the prospect of sitting for several hours in an aluminium cylinder at 30,000 feet, between security and passport checks. No thanks.

Excitement – I have have passed onto a higher plane.

A house full of cats and long rural walks.

Happiness is a 1:1 ratio between your expectations and your reality. (J. Koba)

This time last year:
The Aesthetic Attention Span

This time three years ago:
Wałbrzych, Książ and Riese

This time 11 years ago:
Something new in the skies over Okęcie

This time 12 years ago:
How the other half lives – a Radomite's tale

This time 13 years ago:
On guard against complacency

This time 14 years ago:
Ready but not open – footbridge over Puławska

This time 15 years ago:
Dusk along the Vistula

This time 16 years ago:
Mediterranean Kraków

This time 16 years ago:
Around Wisełka, Most Łazienkowski, Wilanowska by night

This time 17 years ago:
Summer storms

This time 19 years ago:
Golden time of day

An Experiment with Time by J. W. Dunne

One of the most fascinating books I have is a present (as with many of the most thought-provoking books in my collection) from my brother. A 1934 third edition of J. W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time, a book which strikes me as being so amazing as to possess otherworldly properties...

Firstly, a word about the author. A British aeronautical pioneer, Dunne designed aircraft with a swept-wing, tailless configuration. Today aircraft with identical configuration fly as the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit and B-21 Raider stealth bombers. [This article from a US Air Force website name-checks Dunne as the designer of the first practical flying-wing.] So in the world of science, engineering and technology, Dunne is acknowledged as a Serious Man, not some proto-New Age purveyor of woo-woo flakiness. 

Below: digitally enhanced photograph of J. W. Dunne at the controls of his D.6 tailless monoplane in 1911, and a Northrop Grumman B-21 stealth bomber, due to enter service with the USAF next year. The similarity in configuration, despite being separated by a century of aerospace evolution, is remarkable.

Dunne catalogues his most noteworthy  precognitive dreams. One that we can easily check today referred to the Burntisland railway accident that happened on 14 April 1914, the fatal derailment of the Flying Scotsman train (contemporary newspaper photo of aftermath, below).

Dunne writes: "The dream occurred in the autumn of 1913... the place was just north of the Firth of Forth Bridge in Scotland. The terrain was open grassland, with people walking in groups thereon. A train going north had just fallen over the embankment. I saw several carriages lying towards the bottom of the slope..." Indeed, just 12 miles north of the bridge. 

The author mentions many other precognitive dreams sufficiently memorable and shocking as to merit inclusion, including one about the naval bombardment of Lowestoft, which went on to happen during World War I – a war which not yet broken out when he had the dream. Spookily, Dunne refers to the 1914-1918 conflict in the book as 'the first world war' 12 years before outbreak of the second one.

The rationally minded reductionist-materialist would dismiss all this as the random firings of random neurons in the random brain of a random human. Given billions of humans each with brains containing billions of possible neuronal connections, yeah, I can see the attractiveness of this argument. Yet reading the book, I sense a consciousness that was unusually open to information from the future, a man who determined to use the scientific method to attempt to explain how this could happen.

An Experiment with Time was written as the final mathematical touches were being applied to the theoretical underpinnings of quantum mechanics were being agreed. Dunne is clearly up to speed with the work of Schrodinger and Heisenberg and the significance of the observer effect. The language he uses is groping towards that used by today's philosophers of mind, but lacking much of their vocabulary.

Dunne was convinced he could see (if only briefly and imperfectly) into the future. I am convinced that indeed he could. But as to how this process works – I have not the slightest clue. Is it something that one day rational science will be able to explain? Or is this phenomenon entirely spiritual in nature?

Dunne considered himself to be a rational man, steeped in the scientific paradigm and its explanatory powers. As such, he sought a scientific explanation to something he clearly felt to be real. His book is an attempt to couch in scientific language results of an experiment framed in the scientific method.

He calls for large cohorts of volunteers to log their dreams as soon as they wake up, with the highest degree of fidelity and detail, and then to see whether any events in the dreams correlate with actual events that happen in future days, weeks, months and years. He presents the results; nothing here that any scientifically trained mind would remotely accept as proof.

Ultimately, I believe that some people, Dunne included, did have the gift of precognition. Other rare cases have other gifts that our materialist-physicalist paradigm is unable to explain. Attempts to use scientific method to quantify such phenomena (the PEAR Lab's Global Consciousness Study) end up proving that there is indeed a statistically significant 'something' going on – but this is roundly ignored by science because there is no scientific framework to suggest why this may be. And so such efforts are sneered at as 'pseudoscience' with efforts made to dismiss the methodology.

Quantum mechanics and consciousness studies may take us further down a road towards an explanation that conforms with the scientific paradigm; on the other hand, it may open the door to an entirely new paradigm. Or it may just turn out that some things are simply meant to remain a mystery.

Precognition – being able to glimpse into the future –

This time last year:
The psychological benefits of 'place nostalgia'

This time last year:
From automatic action to mindful control

This time two years ago:
Keep on keeping on

This time three years ago:
Time and Consciousness

This time four years ago:
Altered states – higher planes

This time eight years ago:
Warsaw-Radom line modernisation – Czachówek

This time 15 years ago:
Climbing Mogielica

This time 16 years ago:
Good graffiti, bad graffiti

Persistence of identity beyond biological life

The notion of 'persistence of identity' is key to exploring survival of consciousness after bodily death.

What is it when 'I' have an experience? 

Crucial to persistence of identity is memory, in particular the memory of qualia.

The physical matter that makes up your brain is in constant turnover. Cells renew, the biochemistry flows on – and yet a memory from childhood can snap back with astonishing clarity and immediacy. The neurons, the synapses, the brain structures that neuroscience says once recorded that original memory have long gone. And yet you remember conscious experiences from childhood – being at the seaside, the feeling of warmth on wet skin, the salt tang of the sea, seagulls' cries, the sparkle of the sun on the waves. Or shopping before Christmas, snowflakes brushing your face, the busy crowds, the brightly lit shop windows, neon reflecting off wet pavements at dusk. 

Complex, multisensory memories of being there, that snap you back decades in an instant.

These qualia memories define the essence, the youness of you, untampered with by the ego and its story-telling. 

In your life, there have been events, some which proved to be memorable, some of which you have long forgotten. Reminiscences with former classmates highlight gaps in event memory. They remember events involving you that you have forgotten, and vice versa. 

But qualia memories linger. Event memory is highly susceptible to ego-narration. It's rarely just 'this happened'; rather, it becomes 'this happened to me'. 'I did well', 'I was wronged', 'I was vindicated', 'I failed', 'I was admired', 'they misunderstood me'. The remembered event is often recruited into the ongoing project of self-construction; a palimpsest, written over again and again to suit the ego's needs. 

Qualia memory is closer to the raw material of consciousness. It doesn't depend on external validation and is less easily recruited into the ego’s story about itself. Qualia memory, I believe, preserves identity more deeply than autobiographical event memory, because it is less contaminated by egoic narration.

The neuroscientist may tell me that memory is reconstructive; that I am seeking to put together a timeline of what happened to me. But a qualia flashback is not a witness statement. It is the resurgence of a conscious texture. Congruence, not facsimile. When it comes, I feel it from within. I instantly recognise it. This was what it was like to be there, then, as me. Me, the observer, the experiencer, not me the ego. I am not making anything up or altering anything, this is just about what I felt at the time – and my ego has nothing to gain from the experience.

Qualia flashback vary in three metrics – persistence (usually short or very short), intensity (deep or shallow) and familiarity ( I can pin it down to a place and time; I have had it before, I know that feeling. Or not).

From the point of view of persistence of identity, qualia are a fundamental part of 'what is is like to be me'. And yet, we are told that "to attain spiritual awakening, we must lose the ego".

First-person – the ego as a construct – should be separated from consciousness as an observation platform. Let me explain in the form of a thought-experiment.

Chic stride through piazza - image generated by ChatGPT

You are walking through a crowded piazza on a sunny day. You have presence. You are tall, attractive. You are attired in cool, expensive clothes, wearing cool, expensive sunglasses; a classy gold watch on your wrist. Your credit card is limitless. People notice you; they look at you admiringly, jealously. They want to be like you. You have status. You feel proud, haughty as you carry yourself through the crowd with supreme confidence.

Now imagine that you are walking through that same piazza – but you are invisible.

No one can see you, but you see, feel, hear and smell the same scene. You are pure consciousness slipping through the crowd, pure awareness – but there's no ego. This is not not the extinction of the first-person perspective, but the stripping away of the socially reflected self. Consciousness moving across the face of the planet, aware of all around. It's still you; you have identity as observer, but now there's no ego-vehicle. In decades' time, the qualia memory of the scene around you will still flash back, not as an event that sees you playing the lead role, but as the cocktail of sensations of having been there; the smell of coffee and sun-cream, the feeling of a gentle breeze on your face, the sight of the crowded classical piazza and its architecture.

The ego relies on external validation; consciousness does not. 

When it comes to delving into the mystery of reincarnation, spiritual traditions often speak of 'losing the ego'. This should not be seen as the annihilation of consciousness, nor even the annihilation of individuality, but the loss of possessiveness, vanity, grievance, entitlement, status-hunger and compulsive self-reference.

When it comes to delving into the mystery of reincarnation, there are two schools of thought, two inherited frameworks that shape thinking about reincarnation. One tends towards the dissolution of individual identity after death into a larger field of consciousness (the Buddhist tradition); the other tends towards moral continuity across births, often expressed through karma (the Hindu tradition). Both contain profound insights, but neither quite satisfies me. The first can seem to dissolve the very thing – identity – whose persistence we are trying to understand, which we so acutely feel. The second can too easily be reduced to a cosmic ledger of reward and punishment – religion an instrument of social control.

If there is a middle way, it lies not in the persistence of the ego, but persistence of the observer: an ego-less witness moving through space and time, inhabiting many observation platforms, gathering experience, deepening perception and slowly learning what consciousness is for. Acquiring ever-deeper wisdom across myriad lifetimes, on an upwardly spiralling path of spiritual growth.

Your identity does not persist throughout your lifetime because memory preserves a perfect archive of events throughout your life. It does so because your consciousness recognises those congruences across time; what it feels like to be you and what it felt like to be you. Sometimes these can return as flashbacks, as déjà vus. Familiarity, instantly recognised; they contain the quintessence of the youness of you.

This time last year:
Awaiting the asphalt from Chynów to Piekut

This time three years ago:
The sounds of summer

This time four years ago:
My działka - powered by the sun

This time six years ago:
Poland's town/country divide explored

This time ten years ago:

A long walk to Czachówek

This time 12 years ago:
Half a mile under central Warsaw, on foot

This time 13 years ago:
Dzienniki Kołymskie reviewed

This time 14 years ago
Russia-Poland in Warsaw: the worst day of Euro 2012

This time 14 years ago:
Thirty-one and sixty-three - a short story

This time 17 years ago:
Warsaw rail circumnavigation

This time 18 years ago:
Classic Polish vehicles

This time 19 years ago:
South Warsaw sunset

The thinker and the thought; the feeler and the feeling; the experience and the experienced

As I sit here at my desk, looking through the kitchen window at the fresh vegetation in my garden, the trunks of the silver birches illuminated by the westering sun, listening to the birdsong outside the open kitchen door, enjoying the warmth of the spring evening, I am conscious of it all in the moment.

But what is this consciousness? Is it an experience, an awareness? Or is it the apparatus which experiences, the thing that is aware? Another way of putting it: is consciousness a radio receiver? Or is consciousness the radio signal?

Of course, it's both. I am both the experiencer and that which is being experienced. But the question sits at the heart of what it is to be you, what it is to be me; it leads to greater questions – to what extent is the you-ness of you, the me-ness of me connected to the greater whole, the totality of being. And the question of consciousness is also central to the question of life after death.

For I believe that life after death – the survival of consciousness beyond biological death – is to be experienced primarily through the memory of experience. 

Let's take a close look at memory of experience. Bringing back into being, for example, qualia from childhood; precise memories of experience (as opposed to memories of events). Here's one I came across in a local-history page on Facebook earlier today – memories of painting at primary school, in my case, around 63 years ago. Powder paints... for some reason, it is the blue that I remember most vividly, it's exact shade. The powder was spooned from large tins into dimpled white plastic trays, along with black, yellow, white and red powders. The wooden-handled brush, dipped into a jar of water, mixing it with the powder to make a blue paste; then stirring the brush back into the glass jar and watching a swirl of blue in the clear water. Applying the rich, liquid paint onto a large sheet of greyish sugar-paper with deliberate strokes, the concentration of focus, painting a house, trees, the sky... the smell of the blue paint, the smell... vivid recollections of qualia. Can you summon that memory too? The school room, high-roofed, wooden desks, gloss-painted brick walls, tall windows, polished wooden floor, posters on the wall?

[Below: the above text used to prompt ChatGPT, and below that, Google Gemini.]

The child that experienced those qualia is now old; not a single molecule, not a single atom that once formed that child's brain is present in your brain as you recollect that experience. And yet, it was your experience, experienced by you. 

Yes, millions of children growing up in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s would have memories that can be summoned by the words 'school powder-paints'. The pure qualia memories would return in the form of a sharp moment of recognition tinged bitter-sweet, a knowing that there's no return to that moment, yet comforting nevertheless. A memory to savour, experience it, roll it around your brain before it evaporates back into the thin air from which it seemingly came.

The memory is yours. The memory is you. It defines you. The memory is ego-free, pure. It is what you experienced, not necessarily what you did, nor what was going on around you.

Now the question of life after death – does your consciousness (the receiver) return to the Eternal Whole, or remain separate, destined to experience, to receive, in another biological individual? 

This is the essential difference between the Buddhist and Hindu understanding of reincarnation.

I for one tend to believe in the individual hypothesis, based upon my own experience. I frequently have these anomalous qualia-memory events, which are to me just as real as the primary-school powder-paint qualia memory, but are not of this life. 

In recent weeks, as spring took hold in Chynów, I would experience these while gardening, while clearing the ground under my apple trees. It feels like America, from a different childhood, in the 1930s. 

These memory flashbacks, anomalous, familiar, comforting and pleasant, yet with a bittersweet tinge, a vague pang, a wistful longing for what's gone forever – I've experienced these since childhood, alongside the occasional dream – an entirely different experience, yet congruent in terms of atmosphere, time, and place. This is personal; it's not a dipping in and out of an eternal, continuous unity; rather it feels like an upward journey, a spiritual evolution of one consciousness, advancing, enhancing, from one lifetime to the next, towards that oneness – but it's not destined to come after but a single 80-or-so year lifespan. From the beast, to the human, to the angel, to God. The Purpose, the flow.

This time last year:
Mayday reverie

This time two years ago:
Prague, Central Europe

This time three years ago:
Under azure, Jakubowizna

This time four years ago: 
Łady roadworks

This time five years:
S7 extension works

This time six years ago:

Back to the działka after eight weeks locked down

This time seven years ago:

Vol 2. of Bevis's Betjeman biography

This time eight years ago:
New roads and rails

This time nine years ago:
The Gold Train shoot – lessons learned

This time ten years ago:
The Network vs The Hierarchy in politics

This time 11 years ago:
45 years under one roof

This time 12 years ago:
Digbeth, Birmingham 5

This time 13 years ago:
Still months away from the opening of the S2/S79 

This time 15 years ago: 
Looking at progress along the S79  

This time 16 years ago:
Two Polands

This time 17 years ago:
A delightful weekend in the country

This time 18 years ago:
The dismantling of the Rampa

This time 19 years ago:
Flag day

Easter Sunday – triumph of Life over Death

Waking up to witness the sun rising through the trees in the forest next door, I fed the cats, made myself a coffee, and sat down to start writing these words.

As a child, I used to wonder why the two main religious festivals of Christianity were spaced across the year as they are. Christmas falls just after the Winter Solstice, while Easter falls at or shortly after the Spring Equinox. But there is no major festival around either the Summer Solstice or the Autumn Equinox. Easter is around three months after Christmas, and  then it's eight or nine months until Christmas comes round again, with summer holidays in between.

Why the asymmetry? 

If one looks symbolically – metaphysically – and at Church history – it becomes clear.

Christmas is the celebration of the triumph of light over darkness. It is celebrated ten days after the year's earliest sunset. By 25 December, people across the Northern Hemisphere, even without sophisticated measuring instruments, could tell that the sun had stopped retreating and had started its return.

This year's earliest sunset will occur here in Chynów on 13 December at 15:24. By Christmas Day, it will set at 15:28. a full four minutes later. [However, due to the Earth's 'wobble', the latest sunrise won't happen until 31 December, at 07:43. Equinox – the crossing of the Sun back into the Northern Hemisphere is on 21 December, which also happens to be the year's shortest day, balanced as it is between the earliest sunset and the latest sunrise].

The Feast of Christmas, then, can be seen as the triumph of Light over Darkness. In the beginning was the Word (John 1:1)? No, in the beginning was Consciousness. From Consciousness emerged Thought, the Thought was communicated via the Word. Consciousness and Light. The spiritual, metaphysical nature of Light...

The ins and outs and what-have-yous of the date of Easter is way too complicated to even begin to explain (other than its historical relation to the Jewish feast of Passover). Suffice to say, it can fall as early as 22 March or as late as 25 April. This year's Easter is somewhere around the middle of that spread. And typically here in Poland, this means that Lent began with snow on the ground (left, 18 February) and ended with trees starting to come into leaf (right, 5 April) in the forest next door.

Life has returned. The sap is rising; birdsong fills the sky. The Earth is waking up, a powerful force, a natural resurrection. The dead, dry vegetation that lies on the ground is jostled aside by fresh green shoots pushing up towards the sun. In the year's cycle, this is a turning point. We can look ahead to warmth and plenty. Christmas marked the first, fixed, turning point. Darkness retreats, light advances. At the same time every year – it is astronomical. Easter, however, marks a moving turning point. Because of weather, spring can be early, or late. It is imprecise, biological. Hence a moveable feast, to remind us that nature's bounty is not to be taken for granted. 

We live in a Cosmos fine-tuned for life. The 31 physical constants are all just so, each to within orders of magnitude with many zeroes – indicating non-random or finely adjusted values. A small change in several of the physical constants would make the universe radically different. Matter might not even exist. The laws of science contain fundamental numbers, such as the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron, which seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.

Life is material. Life hosts consciousness, the immaterial. You might be able to find the neural correlates of thought, but not of consciousness. You can't calculate or weigh qualia.

********

I am entitled to nothing, but am grateful for everything good that comes my way. I don't have a need for a caring God, but I do need a purposeful God. A direction with which to align, a direction away from chaos and barbarism, and towards order and love.

To me, Easter is a strong argument against a random, purposeless Universe that just somehow exists. It serves as a reminder that it is unfolding towards something, and that we should strive to get close to that flow.

********

On this day last year, I had my heart attack, and was rushed to hospital by ambulance, wheeled into the operating theatre and given three stents. One year on, I feel fine. I give thanks.

Today is my father's birthday; he would have been 103. I still dream of him often, and feel convinced that his consciousness abides, perhaps in the body of a boy living in Ursynów.

In the bright Easter sunshine, I set off for a walk shortly before 7am today, a walk in gratitude and joy.

Easter Sunday 2025:
Jesus and me

Easter Sunday 2024:
Triumph

Easter Sunday 2023:
Easter and photo catch-up 

Easter Sunday 2019:
Easter in Ealing (my last as it happens)

Easter Sunday 2013:
Easter Sunday in the snow

Easter Sunday 2008:
Snowy Easter in England

Lent 2026: day 45 – suffering and death

Good Friday; whether you're a practicing Christian or not, this is a moment to contemplate Christ's suffering on the cross. A historical fact, one that even the atheist sceptical debunkers among historians cannot easily deny.  Whatever you believe happened after the Crucifixion, and whether or not you believe that Jesus Christ was God, it remains an undeniable fact that the historical figure of Christ had a transformational effect on Western civilisation. 

His teachings resulted in an entirely new ethos – getting on with your fellow human beings, whoever they are, wherever they're from. This contrasted with the previous Graeco-Roman ethos that the strong take what they can, while the weak suffer what they must. And God the Father of whom Christ spoke was a merciful and loving God, not at all like the Old Testament God, ever quick to anger and to smite sinners.

Christ's death on the cross was profoundly symbolic for all those who witnessed it or heard of it from first-hand witnesses. The immediate local impact was sufficiently powerful to spread a new spiritual movement across the Mediterranean basin, kick-starting a new global religion, broad in its appeal and inclusive it its reach. Christianity offered new hope and a new perspective to assuage earthly suffering. 

The quality of human life was vastly worse two millennia ago than it is today; disease and injustice making life hard to bear. Short, nasty and brutish. And so a universal message of salvation, of a kingdom 'not of this earth' would have been appealing. 

Life today is certainly easier than it was, but it is not without suffering, and that suffering is not evenly distributed among us eight billion humans. Watching your child die from malnutrition brought on by natural disaster or war must be the most intense emotional pain imaginable. How can your consciousness strive for some elevated experience when you are suffering?

Is God indifferent to human suffering? Here I'd pick up on the point I have made before; I do not believe in God is a person, nor on God as omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent, and certainly not one that intervenes in individuals' lives. If you see God as a purpose, a direction, a journey – a work-in-progress – you can accept an imperfect Universe. One filled with suffering and death, but one that is constantly improving, one with a telos – an end-point, a goal.

Given the undeniable historicity of Christ, why do so many people turn their back on His message? Lack of curiosity, I think. You don't need to buy into the whole doctrine. For me the important thing is to look at what all religions have in common with one other, rather than on what divides them. Humans have an innate urge to seek the Divine light.

Death is only the end if you see consciousness as something locked in the skull, a purely biological epiphenomenon, the emergent result of evolution. 

Easter is the triumph of life over death. Whether you see that as literal (Christ's Resurrection), metaphoric or metaphysical – that is entirely up to you.

Lent 2024: day 45
Asceticism and happiness

Lent 2023, day 45
The Summary, Pt I

Lent 2022: day 45
What is the point of it all?

Lent 2021: day 45
Mindfulness vs Materialism

Lent 2020: day 45
Unconsummated memories

Lent 2026: day 42 – dreams, coincidences and destiny

In the annex part of the building, the big table awaits delegates for the sit-down dinner that formally ends the two-day linguistics conference. Outside, it's already dark. In the main ballroom, people are mixing in small groups, chatting, champagne flutes in hand, waiting for the signal to take their seats. Everyone's in business attire. I walk across from the ballroom, into the annex, which is still mostly empty. But I see one person already seated, his back to the table, head in hands. He's not wearing a suit, but a dark-grey woollen jumper. I recognise him. It's Rysiek. But Rysiek's dead. He died in December 2023. I walk over to him and put my hand on his shoulder. Telepathically, I express my sadness at his passing. He raises his head, looks at me and stands up. We hug. I wake up from my dream with a start. He has just imparted to me the name of the next boy from our West London Polish scout troop and Polish Saturday school who is soon to die...

Do I believe in prophetic dreams? Not really. I can be persuaded by empirical evidence – but I've not really had any that I can correlate to a future event about which I dreamt. But are prophetic dreams not more similar in nature and mechanism to contemplated synchronicities – those meaningful coincidences that lead you to think about some possible misfortune which is then prevented? 

Yes – this is more like it. Collapsing the wave function. With consciousness. The person whose name came to me in my dream this morning will not die anytime soon, because I have considered that possibility happening. By narrowing down a range of possibilities, I have precluded an event from occurring by the simple act of awareness that it may happen.

Preventing the inevitable by thought: is this at all possible? How about a more nuanced approach – not so much preventing but postponing the inevitable, mitigating its effects, reducing the impact of the inevitable? This, I believe, applies to completely unexpected, out-of-the-blue occurrences. We were all expecting the Iran war to kick off – the roots were too deep for it not to have happened. It was just a question of when. The same goes for Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But how about the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 that killed 227,000 people? Could it have been forestalled, postponed or its effects mitigated by consciousness? By merely considering its possibility?

But what about (divine) purpose? The continued presence of latent chaos on earth, inherent in nature, between nations, and the small-scale chaos that can randomly befall any of us in our day-to-day lives?

Ultimately, we are here to learn, to develop, to elevate our consciousness through facing challenges such as illness, bereavement or war. I prefer the word 'challenged' to the word 'suffering', 'trial' to 'ordeal'. That we may overcome, elevated. And, having learned, moved on, out of one biological container to another, our consciousness having evolved a notch or two.

Six weeks of Lent have elapsed. Tomorrow I shall begin summarising this year's Lenten journey.

Lent 2025: day 42
Accident of birth

Lent 2024: day 42
More questions than answers (Pt III)

Lent 2023, day 42
Where did religions come from?

Lent 2022: day 42
A Future Like This

Lent 2021: day 42
Actively seeking Understanding

Lent 2020: day 42
From Zero to One

Lent 2026: day 40 – is God is knowable or unknowable?

 For Marek

What can we say of God with certainty? That God is good, that God is love? Or, that because of God's ineffable nature, and because of the limitations of human reasoning and language, God is entirely unknowable? We humans seem destined never to understand God through our human reason, through logic, through scientific method. The metaphysical lies forever beyond our grasp.

What, though, of our physical world? Will we even get to understand that? This is has been the pursuit of science since the late 17th century. Since then, mankind has built up an ever-more complete grasp of the immutable laws that govern everything from the inner workings of an atom to an expanding Cosmos full of galaxies, and on the basis of that knowledge, had developed technologies that have vastly improved the quality of our lives.

While our scientific knowledge has grown exponentially, we are still a long way off from knowing it all.

In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking posits three possibilities for a grand unified theory of everything that will satisfy our ultimate curiosity about the Universe:

1. There is a theory of everything “which we will someday discover”.

2. There is no theory of everything, “just an infinite sequence of theories” that describe reality with ever-greater degrees of accuracy, but never ultimately ties up all the loose ends, much like Zeno's paradox of only ever getting halfway to your destination.

3. There is no theory of everything – “events cannot be predicted beyond a certain extent”. Hawking stops himself from going further and stating the possibility that the Universe might be fundamentally unknowable.

So I would add a fourth possibility: it is not for us, Homo sapiens, to ever come up with a workable theory of everything. Our brains are just too puny to get to grips with the complexity of an unfolding Universe. Not only is the metaphysical beyond our grasp, but the physical is too. Maybe Homo superior will get there, maybe not.

All that is certain to us is conscious experience and our intuitions relating from that experience. Gnosis. Knowledge through experience rather than knowledge through learning. The one thing I do know for sure is that I am conscious. Indeed, I am conscious of being conscious. This is the fundamental base substrate of my subjective reality. Aware of being aware, I am! 

"Are you a Trinitarian or a Unitarian?" "Do you believe in Transubstantiation or  Consubstantiation?" Thousands perished for replying with the 'wrong' answer. But ultimately, do nuances of dogma matter at all?  Does God even care what we understand God to be?

This is why I find religious fundamentalism of all sorts intolerable; fundamentalists proclaim certainty of that which by definition is unknowable. Divine inspiration can only take us so far. We can merely be aware that those who seek God are on a quest for knowledge that is ultimately doomed never to succeed. In this lifetime.

"Jesus said : "Let him who seeks cease not seeking until he finds"." – From the [Gnostic] Gospel of Thomas, 1:2.

Lent 2025: day 40
The nature of the past

Lent 2024: day 40
More questions than answers (Pt I)

Lent 2024, Day 40
How we lead our lives

Lent 2022: Day 40
Fasting and Temptation

Lent 2021: Day 40
Medicine, Mindfulness and Miracles

Lent 2020: Day 40
Coercion, Persuasion, Conversion and Faith

Lent 2026: day 39 – on Original Sin

What is Original Sin? To many, it's become some old dogma cooked up by early Christian theologians to justify the whole schtick about why mankind needs salvation. 

In my personal theology, I consider original sin not in terms of vague inherited guilt, nor as an primordial act of disobedience, but as something far more immediate and recognisable. 

I take original sin to be anger.

Classical theology, rooted in the Augustinian tradition, frames original sin as 'disordered will' – the conscious turning away from the good towards the self. My lived experience suggests something else, something more visceral. The disorder does not present itself as 'will'. It is a reaction to external stimulus, instantaneous override of good judgment and the ability to calculate long-term consequences.

By 'anger' I mean that hair-trigger orientation that reacts before it understands. Losing one's temper, when instinct overpowers intellect, and 'flight or fight' kicks in. The collapse of the wave function into 'I' vs 'Adversary'. [If you need a frame of reference here, think road-rage. Google Gemini image]

Anger inhabits a space that is biological, moral and existential. It is innate. It is triggered by perceived threat. It carries with it an implicit judgment – this should not be happening! I am right! The moron driver of the black SUV is clearly in the wrong! And anger compels immediate action, from incoherent shouting to drawing a .38 revolver. In an instant, anger simplifies the world into opponent and self, wrong and right, offence and response.

Anger is not just one sin among many. It is baked into the operating system. Once anger is engaged, perception narrows, ambiguity collapses, and the other becomes the foe. Time shortens – there's no 'cooling-off period', no 'counting to ten', no space for reflection, only reaction. Lashing out. The self consolidates, defined by nothing else than what it is resisting. Anger is already a form of violence, even before any violent action – or even in the absence of violent action.

The Old Testament is full of references to a wrathful Lord. [This supports my contention – and that of the Gnostics – that the Old Testament God was an imposter, the Demiurge, the creator of the material world, and nothing to do with the almighty God of Love as preached by Jesus.] However, the New Testament rarely mentions anger. A rare reference: the Epistle of James 1:19-20: "Let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath: For the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God". All four Gospels tell of Jesus's Cleansing of the Temple, but in none of the four accounts does Jesus display any outright anger at the moneychangers, other than possibly overturning their tables (mentioned in Matthew 21:12 and Mark 11:15).

Anger always requires a trigger; it does not arise out of nothing. Anger is where the system 'kicks off' into an altered state. From the neurocognitive perspective, anger is immediate, subcortical and energetically mobilising. While the idea of the 'reptile brain' (a reptilian complex at the heart of the brain, surrounded by paleomammalian and neomammalian layers) has long been disproved, there is a grain of truth here. Bypassing deliberation, anger is evolutionarily useful in a threat-filled environment, but maladaptive in a world of complex social relations. In theological language, one might say that our base nature is not evil, but misaligned – optimised for an environment that we are no longer living in.

The implications of this maladaptation is important. Original Sin here is not primarily rule-breaking or rejecting God. It is misperception under the influence of anger, a form of behaviour caused by loss of self-control. Ethics becomes less about compliance and more about the discipline of not allowing reptilian first reaction to define our reality. Also of huge importance is the speed with which we can right ourselves after being hit by a wave of anger, how quickly our consciousness, our intuition and our intellect can return once more to dominate our behaviour.

'Salvation' in the context of anger is that recovery of self (literally, "I was beside myself with anger"). Loss of control is temporary; the mind returns to the space between stimulus and response.

'Sin' in the context of anger is no longer a static condition, but a feedback loop. Anger generates anger. Reaction provokes reaction. Strike calls for counter-strike! Yet response to egregious behaviour directed against one should always be appropriate and proportionate to the infraction, and that calls for analysis, not mindless lashing out. Ultimately, anger can be mollified, its causes mitigated (like, drive less, avoid cities and motorways), but the trigger mechanism is always there, in your head.

AFTERTHOUGHT: After writing the above, I went for a walk. In the other part of Jakubowizna, a large aggressive dog suddenly started barking at me from behind a wooden fence, at a distance of about  a metre and half. My instant response was to shout a stream of obscene Polish words at the hound. Fortunately, there was no one in the front garden to witness this and to think me mad. A few paces further along the pavement, I had returned to my usual disposition, albeit shaken up a bit.

Lent 2024: day 39 
The Magic Power of Gratitude

Lent 2023, day 39
Peace of Mind

Lent 2022: day 39
Animal spirits, animal consciousness

Lent 2021: day 39
Praise the Sun God

Lent 2020: day 39
Don't let misfortune catch you unaware!

Lent 2026: day 38 – do animals have souls?

Czester and Scrapper went to the vets today for the snip – a far less invasive operation than what poor Wenusia had to endure. It's eight pm, they've just had their first (small) meal of the day, and they both seem in fine form. Still, I felt guilty that the two boys were being deprived of their sexual potential. Fatherhood is no longer a reason for them to live. Why do cats live? What do they live for? Who do they live for? We keep cats as pets, and it is for our convenience that we get them sterilised. We humans manage their reproduction. Companion animals are cared for, fed and sheltered, but wildlife – hunting and culling excepted – self-regulates, existing as it does at the fringes of human civilisations. Deer, hare, boar, we see them from time to time; their lives are perilous but fully agential. Living in instinct and intuition. And aware of their existence.

Whenever I look into the eyes of any of my cats for any length of time, we end up staring at each other, exchanging slow blinks. We may not know what each of us is thinking, but I am aware that I am looking into the eyes of a conscious creature, just as self-aware as I am. A being that is as central to the universe as I feel that I am.

I absolutely refuse to speculate on the possibility of cross-species reincarnation, for I have never had any experiences that could possibly inform me of such. But I do feel that my cats have that small 'c' consciousness which I possess, and that their feline bodies are indeed containers for consciousness. Or souls.

Our relationship with our pets, is more simple than the complexities of inter-human relationships. The feelings we have for our pets, fondness, love even, expect no reciprocity. The ego doesn't get in the way, no trying to show who's boss. Just acceptance of who we are.

Dogs, having lived in the presence of humans for much longer than cats, have evolved facial muscles that can form expressions to which humans can ascribe emotions. Cats can't do this (yet!), rendering their faces more enigmatic to their human owners. Yet cats' inner experience cannot be denied. That feline mind is forever occupied by something. It is paying attention; it is there in the present.

But does the cat have metacognition – is it aware of being aware? Probably not. I'd posit that metacognition requires a substrate of higher intelligence in parallel with the substrate required for consciousness. But this lack of consciousness of being conscious does not negate the presence of consciousness in animals.

In 2012, the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness (2012) concluded that many non-human animals, including cats and dogs, possess the neurological substrates necessary for consciousness. This landmark scientific statement challenged the long-held view that consciousness is unique to humans, and has since influenced global animal welfare policies.

Take a strictly Darwinian view of animals and their purpose is solely to survive and reproduce. But spend time getting to know cats and you will see that there's more to them than that. There's a soul in there, and that soul is also on the eternal journey from Zero to One.

Lent 2025: day 38
A Lenten interruption (heart attack)

Lent 2024: day 38
Neither a follower nor a leader be

Lent 2023, day 38
Go with the flow, or swim against the tide

Lent 2022: day 38
When I was a child, I understood as a child

Lent 2021: day 38
Will we ever understand what's inside the atom?

Lent 2020: Day 38
Religion, Society and the Individual

Lent 2026: day 37 – diverse minds, diverse souls?

I base my theological worldview on the ground truth that consciousness is primary. I can declare with absolute certainty that no one other than myself can experience what it is to be me. My life is my own. It is built upon memory, my memories of myriad qualia going back to early childhood. Not memories of events, which are prone to fail, degrade or twist, but memories of feelings, conscious experience, awareness. Memories that resurface, either bidden, triggered (typically by smell or sound), or that pop into my stream of consciousness spontaneously. Congruent familiarities. And that, dear reader, is the essence of me.

And yet no man is an island. Cooperation has made Homo sapiens an unparalleled evolutionary success. Yes, as members of the species, we are all different, neurologically different, each with our own blend of strengths and talents. In the material world, we all have to cooperate to get by, working as a plethora of professions and service providers woven together into societies.

Today I want to ask what role does neurodiversity play in the way we respond to the metaphysical? Does our neurodiversity lead to diverse ways to define and find God? How do neurological differences affect our spirituality? After all, they affect our social, cognitive and emotional functions. But our faith in a supreme being – or belief in the lack thereof? And those of faith – how does it manifest itself in our lives? How do we conduct our search for meaning and purpose in life? How does it affect the relationship between our consciousness and our ego?

Some minds have an innate tendency to systemise how they see reality, with a preference for internally consistent frameworks. They crave order and neatness. Other minds, however, are stronger on loose associative thinking, and are able to detect novel patterns or connections across domains.

Just looking at the above pair of mind-types in the context of metaphysics, the first suggests a preference for ritual and doctrinal clarity; the second for imaginative immersion and symbolic/transcendent interpretations. In other words, I am postulating that some mind-types might innately seek exoteric faiths that set out their truths based on the received word.  For other mind-types, however, esoteric traditions are more attractive – engagement in a search for truth based on subjective experience. Here, I'd place exoteric faith as an equal and opposite to reductionist-materialist atheism: you base the faith on the Word of God or your atheism on the certainty of Science. No place in either for fluffy, woolly notions of first-person subjective experience of the Numinous.

Metaphysics – aspects of reality above or beyond the physical, the material –  is by its very nature underdetermined. Neurodiversity affects how people tolerate that lack of definition. Some minds have a high need for certainty, and are uncomfortable with ill-defined concepts unless formalised. They will strive to collapse metaphysics into clear doctrine. The Nicene Creed which I mentioned two days ago is a good example – the certainty-seeking mind aligns with religion as social control. Other mind-types have a much higher ambiguity tolerance, and are comfortable with paradox (something can be both true and not true at the same time), and are able to sustain open-ended philosophical tension.

We all have but the mind we were born with. But we can ask for more – we can learn, observe, extend our curiosity. Frequency and intensity of experiences vary from mind to mind. This imprints upon the consciousness in different ways. Ultimately, we must strive to understand ourselves, our biologies, our minds – and then to engage in open dialogue if we genuinely seek metaphysical enlightenment, to progress on the journey from Zero to One.

Lent 2024: day 37
Observer or participant?

Lent 2023, day 37
The Inner Hug: Contact with the Eternal

Lent 2022: day 37
Take it easy - or get rigorous?

Lent 2021: day 37
Dream insights into past lives

Lent 2020: day 37
Further thoughts on Reincarnation