What is your relationship to time?

As I woke up yesterday morning, I found myself in that wondrous state between sleep and wakefulness – hypnopompia – when one's consciousness freewheels and random thoughts pop up out of nowhere.  In this state, I was mentally going through all the things I had to do before I got on the train to my physio appointment, when all of a sudden the following thought emerged in my mind: “What is my relationship with time?”

Wow. Profound. Well, what is it?

If there were a one word answer, it would be 'inconsistent'. In general, time gets me to act. When there's a deadline, I'll get my arse in gear. I prepare – mentally, or on paper – a list of what has to be done by a given time, and assign priorities. The nearer the deadline, the sharper my focus. But if there's no deadline? Problematic, I'd say. Putting off until tomorrow is something I do all too often. That dripping gutter? It's been eight years now. I really should get it sorted... But there's no pressure. It'll still be dripping tomorrow, next week, next month. Next year?

Phone the cardiologist at 08:30 because she's forgotten to send me my e-prescription? No problem. I'm on to it. Two hours later I get an SMS with the code, half an hour after that I'm in the chemist's picking up the prescription, all in good time to catch my train. Shopping done. Cats fed. Everything sorted. Friday has worked out perfectly. And over 16,000 paces racked up.

But where are those books I was going to write and publish? Some other day, maybe. Autumn clean-up in the garden? Nah, I'd rather go for a walk and watch the sun set. Well, at least I'm writing this blog.

I ponder about the power that deadlines always have had over me. Am I time's servant, or time's master? Depends. I've only ever failed one exam in my life (Latin O-level). Give me an exam to swot for, a train to catch, an article to finish, an appointment to keep, and everything snaps into place. Take away that fixed point in the future, and time becomes an amorphous, gloopy substance, something that stretches out indefinitely, with no particular reason to do anything now rather than later.

Is time something in the background, something we swim through, as fish swim through a flowing river? Or is it a human construct, a framework that allows us to arrange events into a meaningful sequence – past, present and future?

The amount of time available to me is not indefinite. Far from it. I am surrounded by digital clocks (the ones in my bedroom and car both set to summer time the year round). Yet our subjective experience of time is anything but precise. Four minutes spent holding the plank seems painfully interminable; an hour spent in fascinating conversation vanishes in an instant.

There's a theory that our perception of time accelerates as we grow older because each successive year represents an ever-smaller fraction of the life we've already lived. For a five-year-old, a year is a fifth of their entire experienced existence; for a 70-year-old, it's a mere seventieth. Yet this doesn't fully explains the phenomenon – after all, one seventieth isn't that much smaller a fraction than a sixtieth, and yet time seems to be galloping much faster than it did a decade ago.

Our biological future shrinks as we age, but not at a steady pace. At 20, one can reasonably imagine having another 60 years ahead. Approaching 70, the arithmetic looks different. This ought to focus the mind. If a deadline at work can make me so efficient, surely the ultimate deadline – the end of biological existence – should make me the most purposeful and productive version of myself imaginable? Somehow it doesn't.

There's the 'energy' excuse. It's no longer purely a matter of motivation, but of the fuel to keep running at the same pace I used to when I was in my thirties and forties. I understand life far better than I did back then. And this makes me think of people in their thirties and forties who do manage to get books written and gutters fixed, and have already acquired wisdom through reading more, listening more, thinking more deeply, having managed to do so at a young age. More focus? More self-discipline? More drive? More energy?

I still put off fixing the gutter. I still haven't written those books. I still find myself choosing to go for a walk rather than wash the dishes.

Perhaps the biological clock isn't all that important. My body is merely the container of my  consciousness. If one believes – as I do with a high degree of certainty – that consciousness is fundamental, and that my experience of existence will persist beyond bodily death, then time pressures and deadlines ease. The ego becomes less important. What will appear on the next epitaph is meaningless in the scale of eternity.

Is an hour spent walking through the autumn countryside, watching the leaves fall, listening to the cranes overhead, observing the slow transition from one season to the next, an hour wasted? Is sitting in the kitchen watching the cats interact with one another, doing nothing more productive than enjoying their company, a poor use of my remaining biological time?

There's a difference between spending time and experiencing it. One can approach the spending of time as one does the spending of money; a finite resource. There's a difference between cramming the hours with activity, and being fully conscious of those hours as they pass. A day filled with completed tasks may be satisfying, but a day being aware of the world around me can be every bit as valuable.

The real challenge as we age is not to jam more and more into the time we have left, but to become more discerning about what truly deserves that time. 

If the choice is between tidying the kitchen and going for a walk on a glorious autumn afternoon, with the sun low in the sky and the last leaves glowing golden against the darkening forest, I know which I'll choose.

This time last year:
Bright autumnal moods

This time two years ago:
Memories, memes and dreams

This time three years ago:
Fully automatic – intuitive intelligence

This time five years ago:
A deeply spiritual experience

This time six years ago:

Poland experiences its first wave of Covid

This time nine years ago:
Gliwice's new station

This time 11 years ago:
Reanimated – my father's car 

This time 12 years ago:
Defending Poland against hybrid warfare 

This time 13 years ago:
Another office move

This time 15 years ago:
PiS splits again – Solidarna Polska formed 

This time 16 years ago:
Tesco vs. Auchan

[Since then Tesco has left Poland and I'm still boycotting Auchan – let its billionaire owner choke on his fucking roubles.]

This time 19 years ago:
My father's house

Losing the plot – paying attention to attention

I'm about fifty pages into Microcosm by Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse, the book I'm currently reading. The book is a history of the city of Wrocław, whose turbulent past encapsulates that of Central Europe as a whole (full review in a post in about three weeks' time).

The book's prologue, Götterdämmerung – the fall of Festung Breslau in 1945 – was utterly absorbing. I read through it in one go, full of drama and violence, the clash of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Chapter One, however, jumps back to the palaeolithic times and the beginnings of human settlement. This is not my most favoured period of history... consequently I'm finding it harder to stay focused on this story. As my eyes scan over the words, my mind is wandering...

And I can recall this precise sensation – from school, from university, from reading boring press releases at work in the 1980s. How long is this chapter? How much more of it? It is as dull as sifting through soil looking for tiny pottery shards on an archeological dig. I want to get on to the Piasts and the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburgs, but I'm stuck on archeological finds such as fish-hooks and flints from the fifth century BC. I want to skip ahead.

BUT NO! STOP!

Here's the fundamental difference in the way my mind works, age 69, and how it did when I was a teenager. I am aware of my awareness. I am aware that the words passing beneath my eyes hold little interest to me, especially after such a vivid opening to the book, soaked in blood and destruction. And now I'm reading about islands in swampy rivers, the migrations of primitive tribes – the Slenzanians, the Marcomanni, the Przeworskers, the Venedi, none of whom I'd ever heard of. A little peek into the next chapter, maybe?

NO! I have learnt enough about learning to know that every detail, every knot along the thread, has its importance. In a good history book, seemingly inconsequential details can acquire significance hundreds of pages later. Skip over one of them, and you might miss a link in the chain of cause and effect.

And so, having caught myself in the act of skim-reading and not taking anything in, I stop. I consider where in the narrative I (literally) lost the plot, and return to that very paragraph. And I start reading again from there. After a page or two of more focused effort, once again I find my mind drifting. And again, I catch myself in this process. Again, I go back to identify the paragraph where my attention began to wander. And again, I proceed with a more consciously determined attempt to read with understanding. Slowly and thoroughly. Got it? Good.

What's going on? I'm recognising that I've stopped taking in the words I'm reading. And, aged 69, I now have the metacognitive control required to bring myself back to the point at which comprehension broke down. And I'm making the conscious effort to go back, despite the temptation to skip ahead. 

A teenaged me, reading an uninteresting passage would have experienced the same wandering of attention as I  have just now, but not noticed it, and jumped forward to something more interesting. The older me recognises the departure from the task. It's not an increase in the quality and quantity of my attention; it's an improvement in my ability to notice when it slips, and manage it back on task.

Metacognition is the process of thinking about thinking; recognising when one's thoughts have strayed, and consciously steering them back on course. I could not do this when I was young! (Or if I could, I was not even anything I was aware of.) Age doesn't automatically confer this ability; it develops through experience, practice and self-observation. This ability varies between individuals. It is a capacity I have learned to cultivate; this is not as such a universal benefit of ageing.

This time, I try to get into the subject matter more deeply. I look up the Wikipedia page about the Przeworsk culture, and learn something new. Why, I've even been to Przeworsk, unaware that the town gave its name to an Iron Age material culture that existed across southern Poland for around 700 (!) years from the 3rd century BC to the 5th century AD. Then I dip into the Marcomanni page, and again I learn something new (the etymology of Bohemia). Wikipedia really is the wonder of our age to anyone with curiosity. In my childhood, any unanswered question that bothered me long enough would have to wait until the fortnightly visit to Ealing Public Library. In the 1960s, curiosity had to survive the delay between wondering about something and obtaining the information that might satisfy it. 

Nowadays, curiosity can be rewarded immediately. But instant gratification also makes it easy to pursue another question, then another, then another, until one has forgotten the original enquiry – the dreaded rabbit hole. The internet has simultaneously made it easier than ever to chase up some arcane topic but easier than ever to abandon that chase halfway, distracted by a tunnel leading off the original rabbit hole.

Thinking about this at the meta-level: yes, it's easier today to get distracted (have I got any more new replies or likes to my recent Facebook posts?) but it's also much easier to find out answers to questions you may have. 

Back from five minutes on Facebook. Gosh, yes. Self discipline. [I have a craving for dried mango, and have lacked the self-discipline to stop myself from eating 1.2kg of the stuff in under three weeks. Yes, dried mango counts towards my daily fruit-and-veg, but Google informs me that a mere 30g of dried fruit constitutes a portion; eating more than 30g per day has no health benefits. A waste, then, because I didn't have the self-discipline to stop.]

Here's a distinction worth making: when I stop reading to look up the Marcomanni, am I being distracted, or am I deepening my understanding? The distraction takes me further into the subject rather than away from it. Contrast that with Facebook, where I emerge five minutes later knowing nothing more about early Central European history, but quite possibly having forgotten why I put the book down in the first place.

I am not arguing that all distraction is bad; I'm saying that we need to become conscious of where our attention is leading us.

Self-discipline – so important. The clouds have moved away, the sun is out, the cats are asleep – time for my walk.

And as I walk, I ponder more upon this subject further. Getting absorbed into any activity, be it reading, writing or painting – for example, getting into that flow state. Being 'in the flow' means having to expend little to no conscious effort in staying focused; you barely notice the passage of time. You are engrossed. This is the opposite of the effortful attention required to concentrate on something that is not naturally holding your interest. Dozens of distractions are lurking within your easy reach. Getting into the flow state requires the self-discipline to persist through the less immediately rewarding bits.

Our minds have two competing tendencies. One is to wander about, covering ground, seeking novelty, new sensations, fresh information. The other is to settle upon one thing and pursue it relentlessly, to the exclusion of everything else. We all experience both tendencies to varying degrees. The trick is not to eliminate either one, but to recognise which is taking charge at any particular moment. 

Metacognition. Pay attention to attention.

This time last year:
Cherish the Morning Light

This time two years ago:
Post-consumerist hygiene

This time three years ago:
October's benign end

This time four years ago:
Disclosure day tomorrow?

This time five years ago:
Coping with time change (go to bed an hour earlier!)

This time six years ago:
A sustainable food system for rural Poland

This time seven years ago:
Sifting through a life

This time nine years ago:
Throwing It All Away

This time ten years ago:
Hammer of Darkness falls on us again
[This is what going to be early in winter protects us from!]

This time 11 years ago:
The working week with the clocks gone back

This time 13 years:
Slowly on the mend after calf injury

This time 14 years ago:
Thorunium the Gothick

This time 15 years ago:
Łódź Widzew or Widź Łódzew 

This time 17 years ago:
A touch of frost in the garden

Do you need a monstrous ego to get things done?

In a further exploration of laziness, I find myself wanting to link the notion of ego to that of energy or drive. What drives a billionaire to strive for further billions? It's certainly not the need to keep the wolf from the door. There comes a point at which another million złotys, pounds or dollars cannot appreciably improve one's material existence – let alone another billion. Once comfort, freedom and security are assured, why bother pushing further?

The obvious answer is that the money has ceased to be money. It's now a score against which some people feel the need to measure themselves against others. Why this need for external validation? Isn't it just a symptom of insecurity?

The question of what makes some people push themselves relentlessly while others are content to coast along through life has fascinated me since youth. Some seem born with an inability to switch off. They build businesses one after another, acquire properties, push for promotion, write multiple books, enter politics, collect honours, climb mountains or run marathon after marathon. Achieving one objective provides no lasting satisfaction because its achievement merely reveals the next objective beyond it.

Others reach a point at which they can say to themselves quite reasonably: this will do nicely.

For much of our human history, we tended to explain such differences morally. One man was industrious, another lazy. One had ambition, another lacked it. Sloth and indolence are sinful – it says so in the Bible. Protestant societies in particular elevated industriousness to the level of a spiritual virtue: hard work was not just economically useful – it was evidence of good character.

Advances in our understanding of psychology complicates that simple distinction enormously. We are now far more aware that humans vary greatly in temperament, impulsivity, conscientiousness, appetite for excitement, and desire for social status. We are also much quicker than earlier generations to recognise patterns of behaviour that may have neurological or psychological components. In everyday conversation we hear, ‘that's a typical autism-spectrum trait’, ‘she's rather obsessive-compulsive’, ‘he's an absolute narcissist’. There is of course the danger of judgmental amateur diagnosis, but ultimately  there is no single standard human mind. Our brains differ, and those differences affect what we find rewarding, what bores us and what compels us to act.

What we perceive as ambition can be seen as a question of reward circuitry. One person experiences a tremendous psychological boost from achieving a goal and immediately hungers for another fix. Another achieves the goal but gets an even greater boost from just sitting beneath a tree with a good book. To the first, the second may appear lazy. To the second, the first may appear slightly unhinged.

Ego plays a major role here because human beings are social animals. Wealth does not merely purchase goods; beyond a certain point it purchases rank; it also purchases human souls – influencing how millions of other humans think and behave. “Can I buy a TV station? Newspaper? Political party?” Billionaires compare themselves with other billionaires. Once the essentials of life have been secured, human striving becomes positional. Enough food is enough food, enough warmth is enough warmth. But there's no quantity of status that can be considered ‘enough’. 

And yet obsession with status has driven much of human progress. 

We live in an age defined by technological advance. Our lives have become astonishingly easier. I no longer queue in a bank to pay a bill sent to me through the post. I buy my train ticket on my mobile telephone minutes before boarding. I can communicate instantly with someone on the other side of the world, search a library containing nearly all of human knowledge. 

But who brought this world into being?

The mythology of capitalism hails the heroic entrepreneur: the visionary individual who sees what others cannot see and wills a new reality into existence. Sometimes that story is justified. But behind almost every technological revolution there are engineers, mathematicians, programmers, researchers, technicians, administrators and obsessive problem-solvers, many of whom are not interested in achieving fame or having more money than they know what to do with.

Civilisation advances because human beings possess many different kinds of drive. We specialise. One individual has the ego necessary to raise money, persuade investors and command an organisation. Another possesses an obsessive fascination with solving a technical problem. Another simply has the patience to spend ten years perfecting something to work reliably without ever breaking down.

The successful institution somehow harnesses these different energies, but which one gets the praise?

And here lies another distinction worth making. Ego may fuel drive, but it doesn't usually provide wisdom. Excessive ego can become destructive. The leader who needs every success to bear his name eventually becomes an obstacle to the organisation they lead. Decisions begin to serve the preservation of their status rather than the purpose of the enterprise. They surrounds himself with people who tell him how brilliant they are. The organisation becomes an extension of the personality at its summit. We can think of many like this – in politics, and in our workplaces (we've all come across bosses like that).

At the opposite extreme stands the ideal associated with Lao Tzu: the leader whose presence is scarcely noticed and who, once the work is accomplished, leaves people believing that they achieved it themselves.

Wise leadership requires finding a balance: enough ego to fuel the drive required to bring something into being, relentlessly pushing forward across obstacles, combined with enough detachment to relinquish ownership of the achievement once it exists. 

And this distinction applies beyond leadership. There's creative ego – the force that says “I can make this happen” – and possessive ego – the force that says “everyone must know that I made this happen”. The first one build things; the second often ends up building monuments to itself.

Which brings me back to laziness. Instead of asking why some people lack drive, I should ask why others possess too much of it. Why should the natural human condition be assumed to consist of ceaseless striving? For most of our evolutionary history there was little advantage in expending energy unnecessarily. Energy was precious. If one's belly was full, the weather benign, and there's no predator approaching, sitting quietly beneath a tree was an entirely rational thing to do. Take it easy, man.

Modern civilisation has inverted the logic of biology. Rest requires justification; work does not. The person who says 'I have enough' can appear deficient in ambition. Yet the ability to recognise when enough is enough is a deep a form of wisdom. Slacking off when one really doesn't have enough is indolence.

The billionaire pursuing his tenth billion has more drive than the man contentedly reading under his tree. But it does not mean that the billionaire has a better understanding of what life is for.

This time last year:
Dzieci wojny – Children of War

This time two years ago:
Ten grand a year

This time three years ago:
The ephemeral pleasures of materialism

This time four years ago:
W-wa Zachodnia modernisation – a long way to go
(Three years on: still not finished)

This time five years ago:

The Wilderness and the Garden 

This time six years ago:
Back in Aviation Valley

This time seven years ago:
My flight to Rzeszów – delayed

This time ten years ago:
English as she is used in Europe

This time 11 years ago:
Where asphalt is needed – Nowy Podolszyn to Zgorzala

This time 16 years ago:
I cycle to work along the cyclepath along ul. Rosoła

This time 18 years ago:
First apple 

Goodness and Truth as Destinations

I woke up this morning pondering whether the Universe is intrinsically unfolding in the direction of Goodness and Truth, those Platonic ideals which every human being ought to, however imperfectly, pursue.

The orthodox reductionist-materialist answer would presumably be no. The Cosmos has no direction in the moral sense. Matter and energy behave according to impersonal laws; stars form, burn and fizzle out; planets coalesce around them; chemistry becomes sufficiently complex for life to emerge. Eventually, here on our rocky planet, the conditions turned out to be just right for one particular species of primate to start asking “what does it all mean?”.

But the rationalist will argue: there is no meaning, because there is nobody or nothing doing the meaning. That we are here, they say, is simply stochastic happenstance, the consequence of sufficient time, sufficient complexity and the right roll of the cosmic dice, one roll out of trillions.

And yet our current theories of physics contain a number of fundamental quantities which seem remarkably hospitable to human-level complexity. Change the relationship between gravity and electromagnetism just a touch and you change the sort of stars that can exist. A tiny change in the nuclear forces and stellar nucleosynthesis leaves the Cosmos too poor in the heavier elements from which planets, chemistry and living things are made. Alter the relative masses of elementary particles just a smidgin and you affect the stability of protons and neutrons. Tweak the cosmological constant too much one way and matter flies apart so fast that galaxies can't form; tweak it too much the other way and the cosmos implodes in on itself.

This is the fine-tuning problem. It's not evidence of Divine fingerprints on the control panel, but it does make you think. Within our current understanding of physics, a universe capable of producing stable stars, complex chemistry, planets and ultimately conscious organisms appears to be miraculous. A one in a trillion-trillion chance.

The anthropic principle provides the obvious response. We live in a universe compatible with observers. If it were not compatible with observers, nobody would be around to observe it! Proponents of the multiverse hypothesis would contend that an unimaginably large numbers of universes exist, each with different physical parameters, nearly all of which are sterile. We're just fortunate enough to live in a universe that isn't – and therefore one that contains observers that can observe its existence.

And then comes the question that interests me still more. Our Universe has produced matter that is alive, stuff that feeds and breeds. Life is matter that can experience consciousness. Consciousness that is aware of being able to contemplate the Cosmos (just stare up at a starry sky to see what I mean). And also, we have evolved into beings capable of recognising Goodness and Truth.

Now time for a crashing change of gear from cosmology to human history. Are we as a species progressing towards ultimate Goodness and Truth? I realise as I write this that my thinking on this subject has been inspired by a talk with the pessimistic British philosopher, John Gray, with whom I found myself disagreeing profoundly. Over sufficiently long timescales, I think humanity is on a course towards Goodness and Truth. The path, of course, is neither smooth nor linear and is marred by appalling reversals; we need to be able to take a longer-term perspective

Homo sapiens has existed for around 300,000 years. For almost all that time we lived in small groups as hunter-gatherers. Around 12,000 years ago, in several parts of the world independently, human beings started cultivating crops, domesticating animals and building settlements.

Hunter-gatherers did not live as prelapsarian innocents; archaeology gives us abundant evidence of interpersonal killing and sporadic outbursts of group violence long before agriculture. Humans didn't invent violence along with the farm. But agriculture changed the way that violence was organised and channelled. 

For the first time on any significant scale there were fields that could be seized, borders that could be disputed, livestock that could be stolen and stores of grain that represented many months of accumulated labour. A wandering band carries relatively little portable wealth. A farming settlement may contain enough stored food to sustain hundreds of people through the winter. There was now something worth raiding and therefore something worth defending.

Settlement also meant larger populations. Larger populations produced hierarchy, division of labour, inherited status and, over time, organised political power. Violence could cease being merely a quarrel between individuals or a raid between neighbouring groups and become something planned and collective on an ever-greater scale.

Archeology has unearthed enough fortified settlements, massacre sites and evidence of repeated organised conflict to prove that the Neolithic was the period in human history in which violence was dramatically scaled up. This is confirmed by several genetic studies that have identified a sudden reduction in Y-chromosome diversity after the adoption of agriculture. At one point, 8,300 years ago in the Near East, the inferred effective number of reproducing males relative to females became extraordinarily small – around one male lineage for every seventeen female lineages. When one clan defeated another, it didn't just mean the deaths of a few dozen random individuals: an entire cluster of related Y-chromosome lineages could be wiped out, while successful male lineages expanded dramatically. To the victors, literally, the reproductive spoils. Kill all the men, enslave all the women.

But killing, plunder and rape were not the only way. Another possibility gradually emerged in the Neolithic – trade.

Instead of taking what the other clan possessed by killing its menfolk in war, it turned out that exchange was a superior and risk-free way of obtaining what a given clan may need or want. Trading grain for pottery, wool for metalwork, wine for timber, and yes, livestock for slaves.

Trade requires something uniquely human; the recognition that the other clan has its own interests. “I may dislike you, distrust you, worship another god and speak an incomprehensible language, but if we can agree on the value of an amphora of olive oil, cooperation becomes more profitable than robbery, and without the risk of violent death.”

Unfortunately, as civilisations became more sophisticated, our reasons for killing one another also became more sophisticated. Territory and plunder remained and remain reasons to this day, but religion, dynasty, ethnicity, nationalism and political ideology could supply a grander casus belli.

Yet civilisation also invented mechanisms for restraining violence; law and legal contracts, upheld by courts; the notion of citizenship; governments; diplomacy, and the rules governing warfare. Multilateral institutions. Human rights. Property rights. “What's mine is mine, not yours, unless you pay me an agreed price for it.”

None of these mechanisms is anywhere near perfect, and each can collapse. And each one can be used as a smokescreen behind which the powerful continue doing what the powerful have always done. But the continued existence of these mechanisms is crucial; the fact that these mechanisms have survived and evolved over the centuries do suggest an upward arc of progress.

A critical inflection point bending the arc of history away from barbarism and towards goodness was Christ's injunction to love your neighbour as yourself – indeed, to respond to the stranger with empathy rather than aggression or indifference. And the spread of that idea into mainstream customs and laws.

The philosophical pessimist, however, sees a different pattern predicated by human nature. “We are status-seeking primates organised into hierarchies, inclined towards tribalism and perfectly capable of murder when circumstance licenses it. History therefore moves in cycles. Empires rise and fall. Peace is merely the interval during which exhausted combatants prepare for another war.”

“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times” – the memetic quote is from G. Michael Hopf's 2016 novel, Those Who Remain, and is widely quoted as evidence for a cyclical model of history.

But history doesn't move in circles that loop back to exactly the same place. I rather think that history moves in spirals. Sometimes it can spiral downward for a whole generation. Sometimes there's no up or down motion for a century. Some societies are on a steady upward path while their neighbours decline or stand still. 

Yet observe mankind long enough, and the spiral moves upwards and outwards, encompassing ever more goodness and truth, squeezing out the evil and the lies.

Knowledge and wisdom accumulate, as does a sense of ethical morality, and the understanding of the necessity for empathy within any society that functions smoothly. The understanding of the Prisoner's Dilemma – that in the long term it is better to get on with the Other rather than trying to cheat them – is crucial. Cheating only works in the short term.

In the past, until not so very long ago, slavery, torture, racial supremacy, religious persecution, aggressive conquest and the legal subordination of women have all been considered acceptable by sophisticated civilisations. They have not vanished, but increasingly they require justification, concealment or outright denial. Today, a tyrant won't announces: “I'm invading my neighbours because they are weaker than I am, and I want their resources.” He will make up some historical grievance, or claim self-defence or hold a referendum invoking national ideology.

Hypocrisy may be the tribute that vice pays to virtue, but the very need for hypocrisy (just listen to Sergei Lavrov lying through his teeth) tells us that over the centuries, standards have changed. Even out-and-out tyrants have to pretend to be the goodies.

The rules-based international order suffers setbacks. Civilisations regress. Evil persists, particularly when political systems fail to prevent psychopaths from acquiring enormous power.

But a mere twelve thousand years of civilisation is as nothing; our species is 300,000 years old! Earth is 4.8 billion years old! The Universe is 13.8 billion years old! Cosmically speaking, human intelligence (as opposed to consciousness) is in its infancy. We do not know how humans will evolve over the next ten thousand years, let alone another million. Nor do we know what consciousness may already exist elsewhere. Or even here. 

I cannot derive Goodness from the cosmological constant, nor Truth from the strong nuclear force. Fine-tuning doesn't prove God, but then neither does the anthropic principle disprove God, and human history certainly doesn't prove a inexorable law of moral progress. My claim is philosophical rather than scientific; to me, the trajectory is strongly suggestive.

A universe initially containing apparently nothing but energy and elementary particles produces stars. Stars manufacture heavier elements. Those elements produce planets. Chemistry starts to happen on those planets, chemistry which becomes biology. Biology becomes capable of consciousness. Intelligent beings evolve that start to ponder why they exist – indeed, why anything exists.

Why should a meaningless Cosmos give rise to life capable of perceiving meaning? Why should a morally indifferent universe produce sentient creatures capable of coming up with the idea of moral perfection and judging themselves against it? None of these questions proves teleology, but then I don't think it's irrational of me to intuite one.

Plato's ideals of the Good and the True are more than fancy inventions dreamt up by some Greek bloke two and half thousand years ago; I believe that they're an integral part of our fundamental reality.

History repeats – it rhymes – it's cyclical. But looked at from sufficiently far away, I think the circle is moving. It spirals, raggedly, often painfully, upwards. Give it a few more millennia. And my faith, for that is ultimately that's all it is, is that Goodness and Truth are somehow baked into cosmic teleology.

Whatever happens next in our own short-term perspective, the ultimate destination – in the scale of billions of years – is divine perfection. From Zero to One.

This time last year:
Strange, storm-crossed sky

This time six years ago:
God and gratitude
[what a meaningful synchronicity...]

This time seven years ago:
Defending one's country is a costly business

This time 14 years ago:
Back to work

This time 15 years ago:
Clinging onto summer – cycling to Powsin

This time 16 years ago:
Composition in blue and yellow

This time 17 years ago:
Z-9

This time 18 years ago:
My favourite aircraft

This time 19 years ago:
Утомлённые солнцем

Back to back troubles

My painful back twinges had almost subsided after three weeks without any exercises. So yesterday, I thought, 'new month, new resolve', a good time to return gently into exercising. A minute of holding the plank (rather than the usual ten); ten sit-ups and ten squats rather than the usual sixty of both. Two lots of back extension rather than eight or ten. Half the usual number of bird-dog extensions. So – taking it easy to get back into it.

But waking up in the middle of the night, those twinges returned. I can lie down, sit, stand or walk without pain, but moving from one position to another can result in a sharp spasm of pain. I wince; I curse.

This is worrying. Night is a bad time to worry – would it get worse and worse? Have I passed a threshold after which return to regular exercise is impossible? 

About 27 years ago, I took a statutory medical examination ahead of taking on a new job here in Poland. My spine was X-rayed and the doctor told me my backbones were fusing together. She said that my spine would become immobile in old age. “Exercise and sanatoria” – the only things that could save me, she said. For the next 15 years or so, no symptoms. Then, one morning in June 2015, after a day walking around London, I woke up to feel numbness in the big toe on my left foot. In Warsaw, I called the clinic and was subjected to a barrage of tests to see, for example, whether a tumour wasn't pressing on a nerve somewhere. It wasn't – an X-ray revealed that it was indeed those bones in the spinal cord growing where they shouldn't be growing. Again, exercise was prescribed. Which I have been doing ever since, with a focus on maintaining core muscle strength and flexibility in my spine.

Earlier this year, I twanged my back doing something (I know not what!); several days laying off the exercise and I was back to normal. And again in early August, the same – but this time, the break from exercise did not solve the problem.

I worry about ankylosing spondylitis – did my father have this in old age? He was severely bent over in his nineties... This photo (he was 92 at the time) shows his characteristic posture. He could straighten up with effort, though he'd slump back to this default position. In his last years, he would take his afternoon nap lying flat on his back on the hard wooden floor, no pillow.

My great fear for old age is immobility; my daily walks are a source of joy and inspiration, especially on sunny days, at dawn, at dusk, any time of year. Losing the ability to keep on walking would be a terrible blow.

But sitting still, there's no pain, I'm not thinking about my back. Until a sudden sound below and to my left – it's Memfis ('Fisia') playing with a ball on the kitchen floor. I turn – and a sharp spasm (nothing too painful) shoots across from my lower back.

Time, I feel, to arrange a visit at the doctor's surgery to have all this checked out. I don't fancy a whole lot more new medications to go alongside the ones for my heart, but would be keen to learn about specific exercise protocols that might do the trick. After all, I still have more than eleven thousand days before my 100th birthday!

This time last year:
Early-September sunset moods

This time eight years ago:
Early-September travel news

This time nine years ago:
Fields filling up with houses

This time 16 years ago:
Things can only get better

Twanged back (again)

One of the purposes of this blog is as an aide-memoire to myself as I physically grow older. Health setbacks are worth recording as they can serve as lessons on what to avoid and how to recover. I can learn from the experience – as long I have an accurate recall of the incident.

Since starting the blog, I have three times injured by calf muscle by suddenly initiating a sprint on unwarmed-up legs (Here's a recent example). Twang! Instant spasm of pain, like being hit in the back of the leg with a baseball bat. And then a week to ten days of immobility, hobbling, limping and returning to normal. In these cases, I knew immediately what went wrong... and have now learned to avoid doing it again. The urge to sprint for a bus or train is restrained by muscle memory.

But with my back, it's something else – a different process. The root cause is harder to pin down...

Was it that I overdid my exercises (holding plank for over nine minutes)? Or carrying too many heavy things (clearing out bags of rubbish for recycling on Monday)? Overdoing the paces (over 19,000 on Saturday)? A combination of all of the above? At least I know it wasn't gardening. That was the cause of a similar sprain injury of my back in the late March when I had a go at scything away dead vegetation. That twisting-upper-body motion requires warm-up exercises! The result was a back sprain that lasted a week and returned two weeks later.

This time – I honestly can't pinpoint one cause. I would like to know, so that I can avoid doing this again in future!

By Tuesday, I would feel spasms of pain when lifting (even taking the cat litter-tray out into the garden), when suddenly changing positions, when my foot dropped into an expected dip in the earth. OW! That hurt! When sitting or lying down – no pain. To the extent that I would forget about it. Until I try to move. OW! Wednesday was the worst; by today I can feel improvement.

Back twangs don't hit me suddenly, they come on gradually. On Monday, I thought I'd pause all exercises, but I still walked 10km. On Tuesday, things were getting worse so again – no exercises – but again, 10km walked. Wednesday and today – I stayed in; other than short excursions around the garden – no walking. And no exercises. The spasms have lost their intensity, but still manifest themselves if I execute some sudden manoeuvre. 

Today it's better than yesterday. There is healing. So – stop the exercises, don't walk... wait it out rather than push through it. The most important thing is going back to my normal routine. I won't be returning instantly to 30 sit-ups, nine minutes of plank, eight sets of back extensions, 60 squats and ten repetitions of bird-dog extensions held for ten seconds each. I need to build up gradually, taking intense care as I return to the exercises not to overdo it.

A steady decline? More sprains, twists, stiffness, falls even... Exercising is the antidote, But overdoing it can lead to problems too. As ever, finding the balance is crucially important. Have I become too obsessive in my quest to 'beat last year'? Time to take it down a notch or too? 

My father taught me a lot about having the right attitude to living with old age. He would often ask “Why was I so lucky?” I think he knew the answer – gratitude. Being grateful for being in good health.

I must say – the very act of writing about it makes my back feel better!

This time last year:
Weeding the tracks/Rail update

This time three years ago:
Dave: An Emissary

This time four years ago:
Fifty years with Virginia Plain

This time five years ago:
The Curve (and one's place on it)

[A crucial blog post!]

This time seven years ago:
Fifty years on, my last kolonia

This time 13 years ago:
Grodzisk Mazowiecki's pretty station

This time 14 years ago:
Exorcism outside the President's Palace

This time 15 years ago:
The raging footsoldier - a story about anger

This time 16 years ago:
Graffiti and street art 

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

The joys of an early start

Once upon a time, I'd have bluntly refused the proposition of an 7:50am appointment for a blood test. "Offer me a slot at some civilised time," I would have said. The clinic is 40km (25 miles) away in Wola, a district to the north-west of central Warsaw. 

But having shifted my sleep routine ahead the spring time-change, I thanked the clinic's receptionist for the chance of an early visit, knowing that getting up before sunrise no longer poses a challenge.

And so indeed it proved to turn out. 

I went to bed at nine pm, woke up at 05:07, had a shower, made a thermos of coffee and a packed lunch (or more accurately packed breakfast, as the blood and urine samples had to be on an empty stomach). I fed the cats, and was ready to leave home at six. I caught the train from Chynów to town at 06:18 (below), reaching W-wa Wola station just after seven. Then I took an eastbound tram four stops and walked a bit to the clinic, arriving there at 07:25. 

No one around except the receptionist and the nurse. I got everything done within a few minutes, beating the queues. Beating the queues? Thrashing the queues. Soon I was back on the tram to W-wa Wola and the train back to Chynów. Home before ten (below), with nine thousand paces on the clock.

The sun was shining brightly throughout. A brisk northerly wind put a light chill into the air as I set off to the station, but the sense of aliveness was all-powerful. Sleeping in is no longer an option for the summer months. Grab that dawn!

Think about the terms 'midday' and 'midnight'. The original meanings have slipped, distorted by modern life. 'Midday' is the time when the sun is at its zenith, its highest position in the sky on a given day. Midday is midway between sunrise and sunset. And 'midnight' is halfway between sunset and sunrise. Yet for nowadays, 'midnight' is a time shortly after most folk go to bed. 

Modern humans have been around for 300,000 years give or take, but it's only in the past 100 or so of those years that we've had universal access to electrical lighting. Radio and television have been entertaining our species for slightly shorter, clocks and wristwatches have been informing us of the time for slightly longer. This is the tiniest slither of time in terms of mammalian evolution. 

Our circadian rhythms – our body clocks – have suddenly been thrown out of kilter. The  result is all manner of psychiatric disorders which our rationalist, materialist paradigm says need pharmacological treatment.

But how about changing your sleep patterns instead? Make midnight the middle of your night?

Granted, it can be hard when you're in the nine-to-five. Assuming your midday (sun overhead) is at 12:00, an eight-to-four working day makes more sense... and then there's the whole issue of time change. Clocks going back in the autumn exacerbate the psychiatric effects of seasonal affective disorder (SAD), while the clocks going forward in spring lead to a huge spike in heart attacks and strokes (a 24% jump in cardiac-ward admissions in the week after the time change). 

However, our legislators have shown unwillingness to tackle the issue of daylight-saving time changes. We seem stuck where we were; an overwhelming majority of people across the EU  want to see an end to the spring and autumn time changes, yet the legislators seem unable to act. The European Commission proposed abolishing clock changes in 2018. The European Parliament voted in 2019 to end them (originally by 2021). But the crucial body, the Council of the European Union, has never agreed a common position. And so an indefinite delay is entirely plausible under current conditions. Countries disagree on permanent summer time vs winter time. If countries choose differently, Europe risks a patchwork of time zones, which is politically and economically awkward. Covid, the war in Ukraine and now in Iran have all pushed the issue down the agenda. And so, the EU is not waiting on science or public opinion – it’s waiting on member states to agree with each other. Until that happens, the system persists by default.

So it's up to us as individuals to deal with this each in their own way. In a working world of flexitime and hybrid work, we should be able to get around this.  Of course, much depends how far from the equator and how close to the poles you are. Daylength is the same (just over 12 hours) all year round at the equator, while the two cities nearest the North Pole (Tromsø and Murmansk) have almost no daylight in midwinter and almost no night in midsummer. Warsaw, London and Berlin have (to the nearest hour) seven hours of daylight in midwinter and 17 hours of daylight in midsummer.

The way we sleep depends not only on the time of year, but how far north/south we live. Human sleep timing is governed by the circadian system, centred on the suprachiasmatic nucleus, and the hormone melatonin. Darkness lengthens the melatonin secretion window; light shortens it. Longer nights mean a longer biological 'night signal'. People living close to the equator will tend to sleep the same number of hours all year round, whereas by the time you get as far north as Warsaw, people should be sleeping half an hour more in winter (roughly eight and half hours) and get by with half an hour less in summer (roughly seven and half hours).

The key thing is to aim to keep midday at the middle of your day, and keep symmetrical the times between waking up and sunrise and sunset and going to bed. Ideally, this would mean (for Warsaw, 52° North, 21° East) in summer time (solar noon at 12:30) waking up at 4:45 am and going to bed at 8:45 pm, awake for 16 and half hours of the day, with seven and half hours of sleep, and in winter time (solar noon at 11:30) waking up at 3:45 am and going to bed at 7:15 pm for eight and half hours of sleep. 

This might sound extreme when considering one's social calendar (and the TV schedule for those who still watch), but the above times reflect how things were for the whole of human history until the recent past. Not practical today, to be sure, but a target to keep in mind. An ambition.

Overcome the owl, be more like the lark, for that is our biology. Ah yes. Teenagers and young adults are exempt – their body clocks have been biologically tweaked for a more nocturnal bias, at least until they have found a mate.   

Having said all that – would I readily accept a 7:50 appointment in Wola in midwinter? Not readily, no. It would mean waking up nearly two hours before sunrise. Still, by spreading my eight-and-half hours of winter sleep between quarter to eight in the evening and quarter past four in the morning, straddling the midnight hour equally, it could theoretically be doable...

This time nine years ago:
Changes in Nowa Iwiczna

This time ten years ago:
Tracks to Tarczyn

This time 11 years ago:
Translation and cultural differences

This time 13 years ago:
The demand for Park + Ride keeps growing

This time 14 years ago:
Cycle-friendly London

This time 15 years ago:
The end of the Azure Week

Lent 2026: day 44 – the importance of nuance

Our brains are wired to seek certainty. Evolution takes no prisoners – that's either a sabre-tooth tiger waiting to pounce on you from that outcrop, or it isn't. Life has become vastly more complex ever since. As we struggle to understand reality, we need to ask: how do we do so? Assuming of course we have enough curiosity; some folk simply ask why bother?

An intellectual framework. Do we need one? Or just take asking those questions one at a time, as they come? Here's a start. Ontology – the 'what we know', and epistemology – the 'how we know it'.  Epistemology? Heuristics is many people's epistemology. Making macro-level deductions from observed patterns. "He's a bad 'un, and that one's also troublemaker. They're both immigrants, therefore by deduction, all immigrants are bad and immigration should therefore be stopped." Bayesian inference – your epistemic confidence rises with frequency of observation. "Trump has lied yet again – I can now confidently assert that he's a liar."

And then there's the question of lumpers or splitters. Are we trying to divide and subdivide aspects of reality into ever-smaller discreet units (splitters)? Or are we trying to manage complexity by grouping commonalities into larger categories for easier assimilation (lumpers)? Or both? Or neither?

But when it comes to spiritual questions, we find ourselves wrestling with inchoate intellectual structures, rather than material quantities. Our intellectual framework has no empirical evidence to go on. A divine presence ordering the Universe? Where's the scientific proof? Life after death? I know many people who have died, none have returned from the dead. 

Our certainty-seeking brains look for tidy answers. Solutions rather problems that further investigation. Close the door to that question, declare it solved and move on to the next one, rather than living in a world of ongoing uncertainty. Nuance is uncomfortable.  It often requires finding balance between the objective and subjective; holding two seemingly contradictory views at the same time. So it is important to be able to feel comfortable with uncertainty while engaged in the quest for answers. Leaving things to fate, submitting to the flow; like a gibbon flying through the air before grasping the next branch, trusting that the next insight, the next incontrovertible fact, will be solid enough to support you on your further quest. 

Your personal ontology is the result of the interface between intellect and intuition; a blend of what you have worked out vs. what has come to you; what you have read vs. what you have experienced.

On the face of it, there seems to be no room for nuance in binary questions such as "Is there a God?" or "is there life after death?" The first one suggests a yes-no answer, rather than a challenge to define 'God'. Similarly 'life after death'. Is this even the right question? 'Does consciousness survive the death of its erstwhile biological container?' is a more nuanced framing.

Ultimately, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and the like are futile questions; approaching theology and metaphysics through logic, using deduction and inference is a dead end. Answers that satisfy you, subjectively, that do not need external validation, they come from personal experience. From insights, but above all from intuition.

Feel comfortable in uncertainty.

Lent 2026: day 44
Kicks, thrills, fun, pleasure – and joy

Lent 2024: day 44
Spirituality and the Dream World

Lent 2023, day 44
The Purpose

Lent 2022: day 44
Habit, discipline or obsession

Lent 2021: Day 44
Life after life after life after life

Lent 2020: Day 44
A myriad paths to God

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.

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