As I walked out one midsummer's morning

I've used this title before – borrowed from Laurie Lee.

The sun rises at a quarter past four. Most people are still in bed until at least seven thirty. Today, I rose, as I do, early – at quarter past five, having gone to bed shortly after nine yesterday evening. And yet I still missed an hour of daylight!

My recent habit of early starts have one big benefit; they extend the length of summer as I subjectively experience it. The addition of two daylight hours a day every day between the equinoxes is the equivalent of stretching summer out by around one eighth. That sunlight can be converted into boosted levels of melatonin, serotonin and endorphin, which bring about blissful feelings. "Increase the joy in your life by 12% - FREE!"

The early, pre-breakfast walk in the sun need not be long (5,400 paces today, 4,900 yesterday for example) but it is optimal for bringing on that sought-after state of elation. On an empty stomach, the transcendental benefits of extended fasting bring on a gently altered state. Before eight am and it is already hot; my armpits are sweaty. The paths are sandy, the smell of pine-resin is in the air.

The cherry season has begun; I know where the unkept, unfenced, unsprayed orchards are. The cherries are ripening, a few are already ripe for picking. Given that there's no health benefit of eating more than one portion (80g) of a given fruit in any one day, a few handfuls is all I need before turning home for breakfast.

Ripening cherries. Never ask me whose.

Two midsummer garden anecdotes to recount… Yesterday morning, around 11 am, I went out to chuck out some kitchen waste onto the compost heap at the end of the garden. On my way back, I could hear stirrings in the bushes. "Too big for a cat," I thought. I took three paces forward, and saw an adult roe deer crashing through the undergrowth, across the path and into the trees, no more than about ten yards away from me. It was so sudden and over in an instant, there was no chance to whip out the phone to catch it. This is only the second time I've witnessed deer in my garden. 

A deer in a nearby meadow, last week. The same one?

And today, around 10 am, sitting in the kitchen, front door open, I was aware that the cats were uneasy… something was up. Scrapper, Czester, Arcturus, Hipek and Céleste were milling around outside… suddenly there was a loud feline shriek and action – cats running around every which way. Then I caught sight of him, again, it was just a flash – the grey tomcat that had fathered Céleste's kittens. She chased after him, evidently furious with him, up the path to the drive. I left the kitchen and ran out after them. I caught up with Céleste, sitting on the drive. She had seen him off; no sight of him. 

Cause and effect

Some seven or eight years ago, a visitor to my działka left an almost-full packet of cigarettes behind. Since then, these come in handy for recreating holiday qualia memory. This is a rare occurrence; twice a year, but only if the circumstances are right. 

Today, they are exactly right. The sun is shining; it is hot (30°C outside), there's no rush, it's a lazy day. The kitchen smells of fried food (breakfast: smoked salmon, fried bacon-style, with scrambled egg, served on bread fried in olive oil) and coffee. I light a cigarette from the gas stove; no puffing on it! I impale it upon a wire stand, angled upward at 45 degrees, it smoulders away, with a jar-lid underneath to catch the ashes. Eventually, it goes out; the smell, however, lingers. Time, now, to open a bottle of craft lager from the fridge. And PAFF! I am sitting at that brasserie overlooking the beach in Stella-Plage. All that's missing is the sea… Qualia memory, recreated. (I've done this in winter too; lots of snow outside, blue sky, sharp frost, and I'm brought back to an alpine bar, high up in the French Alps.)

A few hours later, I am in the back garden, picking wild strawberries (poziomki). As I get down among the weeds to fish out the tiny fruit, I notice the lingering smell of the cigarette smoke on my shirt. Marvellous! The Perfume of the Past. Instant nostalgia for the klimat of times when most people smoked. 

Incidentally, this year I notice no, like zero, wild strawberries with rodent nibble-marks upon them. Another bonus of cat ownership!

This time nine years ago:
Jeziorki's grey herons
Cygnets up close

This time 11 years ago:
Midsummer's Day in Jeziorki

This time 13 years ago:
Kittens at six weeks

This time 15 years ago:
And the Lord spake unto the tribe of Hipsters

This time 16 years ago:
Exit polls can get it wrong

This time 17 years ago:
In search of good Polish beer
[Situation's much better, thankfully!]

This time 18 years ago:
In the Solstice garden

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

Lent 2026: day two – the very essence of your being

I am aware of being aware, therefore I am. Awareness – consciousness – precedes thought. Thought is a cerebral process, thought is the passage of electrons firing through neurons and synapses. Thought is about reason, deduction. But consciousness is primal. It is the very essence of your being. Feeling, experiencing, being alive. 

Here, the notion of qualia needs to be explained. Qualia are the subjective, first-person instances of 'what it's like' to have an experience. The word 'qualia' (from the Latin, of what kind) stands in contrast with that which is countable – quanta.

Example: having just drunk my morning cup of black coffee, it would be possible for a scientist to measure the pH level in my mouth, and to compare the metabolic effect of the caffeine on my organism to the state of my blood pressure and heart rate before I drank the coffee. But all none of this data captures the 'coffeeness' of my experience itself. That complex sensation of coffee aftertaste that I'm experiencing right now is a quale (the singular of qualia). As is the feeling that I just got looking up from my keyboard at the horizon through the snow-covered forest, tand he brightness of the sun shining through the trees.

Qualia are the quintessence of your lived experience. They are sensory in origin; the smell of the now-empty coffee cup; the feeling of stroking the long, silky hair of my cat Céleste; the pungent taste of anchovy; the sound of my laptop's 'new mail' alert; sunlight acting on my retina. Sensory inputs all adding up to how it feels to be you at any given moment. 

Those lived moments are experienced and remembered; they return, familiar moments of recognition, tinge your consciousness with their afterglow, then dissipate in a second or two, like a snowflake melting on your hand. But they give you a sense of continuity; despite not a molecule in your brain having been there even ten years ago, those recollections persist.

The youness of you is formed over time from myriad qualia memories, memories of qualia rather than events, as the recollections of doing things, witnessing things, saying things, all tend to degrade over time, changing with each subsequent retelling, shifting in emphasis, importance and tone. But qualia memories remain constant to you across time. Sharp and resonant.

Qualia imprint themselves on your memory, and those memories of purest qualia experience can return to you, summoned, triggered or unbidden. I've just conjured one up – an old familiar one – the qualia memory of the smell of my first day at primary school – the smell of newly-varnished parquet flooring and Magic Marker pens. A qualia memory as sharp as the moment I originally experienced it. And this prompted a new memory, just as vivid, but one I've not had since leaving primary school; classroom door knobs. Knurled brass with concentric 'ribs' – set high, I was not yet five years old – reach up, twist and push (or pull) to open the heavy door... I can see it, feel it in my small hand... as if it were yesterday. Yet it was over 60 years ago.

Our bodies age, but our conscious experience does not fade over time. The experience of being aware, conscious, is as acute as its ever been. This fact to me offers proof that unlike our bodies, our consciousness is not subject to entropy – the second law of thermodynamics; things fade and decay, but qualia memories (as opposed to memories of events) maintain their precise quality, unsullied by time.

This to me is an intimation of the immortal nature of consciousness, or to use language of the past, the soul; the spirit. It is a consciousness that's fundamental, that pervades everything and everywhere in the Universe; consciousness that is present in you and in me, consciousness that abides – unlike matter that is subject to death and decay.

More tomorrow on how I understand that 'consciousness everywhere' idea.

Lent 2025: Day two
The language of science, the language of spirituality

Lent 2024: Day two
How much spirituality do we need?

Lent 2023: Day two
The Nature of Reality Pt. I

Lent 2022: Day two
Objective/Subjective, Ego and Consciousness.

Lent 2021: Day two  
Your life: a miracle? Or something that just happened?

Lent 2020: Day two
The Physical and the Metaphysical; the Natural and the Supernatural

Migratory consciousness; migratory souls?

What's your earliest memory – the first thing you can remember remembering? 

And why don't we remember the first months of our lives? 

Were we indeed conscious in our first months? Aware of being aware?

My earliest memory is a memory of a memory. It would be from some time early in 1959, I guess. 

My father would develop and print his own black-and-white photographs in a makeshift darkroom (our kitchen with blackout blinds over the window) right through until the end of the 1960s. One evening, he developed a set of prints from Christmas 1958. I am kneeling on a chair next to our Christmas tree, decorated with lights, baubles and tinsel. I am wearing a woollen jumper knitted by my mother. I have a small scab on my forehead/temple, about the size of a thumbnail. There are presents under the tree. 

On seeing the photograph, I remembered that moment clearly. I remembered that scab, and the bump that it resulted from. And I remember having quite a sophisticated thought; as I looked back at photos from the earliest weeks and months of my life on the previous pages of the photo album, I was aware that I had no memories of myself from those times. Yet when I looked at the photo of myself by the Christmas tree, I recalled experiencing that moment, living it, being aware.

And that was the first memory that I can remember*; the excitement of Christmas impending. I would have been around 14-and-half months old at the time. I had precise recollection of the moment captured in the photograph, and the sense of self that associated my consciousness with the little fellow portrayed in it.

When does consciousness slip into this house? It felt fully formed by that age; but was it fully formed earlier? If so, when? And if so, why no earlier memories? 

If we work on the assumption that consciousness is the underlying substrate of reality, the fundamental property of the universe, from which spacetime and matter/energy derive, and that our biological bodies are containers of our immortal souls, which evolve over the aeons – at what point did my consciousness and my body become one? At conception? At the 'quickening'? At birth? Or some time during that first year of my body's life, that time from which we have no memories?

What brings a soul to a body? I had an intuition yesterday while walking through snowy fields. Could it be... music? I started thinking about my earliest musical memories. We had a radio, which my parents had bought soon after getting married. It stood in the dining room, and my mother would have it on for much of the day as she went about the housework. Central to this was Housewives' Choice and Music While You Work, the signature tunes to both which are instantly familiar to anyone around in the UK at that time.

Below: my parents' radio, bought at Barker's of Kensington department store. Screenshot from the Bluebells' Young at Heart video (at 0:41).

This makes it nice and easy in our days of AI to track down typical BBC Light Programme playlists with the music I'd have listened to as a very small child. Now, whilst Housewives Choice played records, Music While You Work presented live music played by dance bands (union musicians). So whether discs originally cut by Count Basie, Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington or Tommy Dorsey – or live covers thereof – I would have been exposed to a great many numbers from these bands. Tunes from the 1940s were as close to my early years as tunes from the 2010s are to today.

Count Basie and his Orchestra entered the Capitol Records recording studios in New York City on 21 October 1957, just over a fortnight after I was born, to record an album now known as The Atomic Mr. Basie. The first track, The Kid from Red Bank, as well as several other tracks (Flight of the Foo Birds, Whirlybird and Splanky) have resonated strongly with me since I bought the album in the early 1980s, especially on snowy days under clear blue skies. How, why, I don't wish to speculate. I just feel a strong connection here.

[*But then there are what I'd term the 'birth-canal dreams', one of the most common tropes in my dreambook – squeezing through a narrow passage. Do these dreams prove a memory connection with birth?] 

This time last year:
Sunshine reminds me of spring
[not a whisper of spring right now! It's -8.7°C outside at the moment]

This time two years ago:
Winter's wildness

This time five years ago:
Snow turns to slush

This time six years ago:
London in its legal finery

This time seven years ago:
Winter walk through the Las Kabacki

This time nine years ago:

1967: The Year The World Started Turning To Colour

This time 12 years ago:
Rain on a freezing day (-7C)

This time 13 years ago:
Jeziorki in the snow

This time 15 years ago:
Winter's slight return

This time 16 years ago:
Unacceptable

This time 17 years ago:
Pieniny in winter

This time 18 years ago:
Wetlands in a wet winter

Qualia compilation 12: moderne living

As a child, we lived in a 1930s end-terraced house that my father (inspired by BBC's Barry Bucknall) modernised in the 1960s. My parents were sociable people and would often visit their friends, the majority of whom also lived in 1930s or Victorian houses. The latter made a different impression on the five-year-old me; they had higher ceilings, ornate carvings, ceramic floor tiles, stained glass and draughty corridors. By the mid-1960s, even the Victorian houses were starting to look different inside, with wall-to-wall carpets, brightly coloured curtains and patterned wallpaper. But the world I was born into was still somewhat drab and austere.

I remember two houses I visited with my parents that stood out and triggered anomalous familiarity. Memories of these two will flash back to me from time to time.

Both were newly built and served as harbingers of a new style of interior space. One was a maisonette in Hanwell, another was a terraced house in Hemel Hempstead New Town. This would have been sometime in the early 1960s; these new homes were quite unlike the fussy cosiness of pre-war or Victorian/Edwardian housing. We drove there in our Morris Minor along a short stretch of the newly opened M1 from Watford, my first ever motorway journey – very exciting, and futuristic.

I can't remember the people we were visiting. It could well have been a colleague of my father from work. I do remember, however, that he was keen to show off his new hi-fi, and that my father was very keen to see it. This was an entirely new concept to me, and when we saw it, at first I thought I was looking at a radiator or some form of domestic heating. Then the man took out a record and played some modern jazz. Whenever I hear Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, I get that vibe; maybe that's what he played. 

The maisonette was also a new thing. The very word 'maisonette' smacked of modernity. On Lower Boston Road, it looked like a two-story semi-detached house from the outside, with large windows, white siding and brick, but you had to climb stairs on the side to get in and it was only on the upstairs. A Polish woman lived there, a friend of my mother's; we visited her during a weekday, so maybe school holidays, most likely before my brother was born. 

I associate the this place with the new house in Hemel Hempstead; both were qualitatively different to the way most of my parents' friends (or indeed we) lived at the time; up-to-the-minute, spacious, clean lines, no clutter.

American style. That's what it was. Those two homes that felt instantly familiar; not from the sets of American black-and-white TV shows I watched (I Love Lucy etc), but a lifestyle that I felt I knew from before. The space age was entering the living room.

Below: I asked both ChatGPT and Google Gemini to illustrate the contrast between styles of homes. ChatGPT produced the result that resonated better with my childhood memories.

This time last year:
Springlike Autumn

This time two years ago:
Encouraging more cycle-rail journeys

This time three years ago:

Time's Telescope

This time four years ago:
Justify the buy: Nikon D5600

This time five years ago:
First frost, 2020

This time seven years ago:
Edinburgh, again and again

This time 11 years ago:
Ahead of the opening of Warsaw's second Metro line

This time 12 years ago:
Keep an eye on Ukraine...

This time 13 years ago:
Płock by day, Płock by night 

This time 15 years ago:
Warning ahead of railway timetable change

This time 18 years ago:
Some thoughts on recycling

High winds, high summer, night.

Last night; just gone ten pm. I've just finished my evening exercises. Bare-chested I go to take rubbish out. It's a strange night; though warm (still over 20°C) and dry (rain is expected within the hour), the wind is blowing hard. This is the tail-end of Storm Floris. Outside, the tall trees and bushes are rustling like they would be in the gales of early spring or late autumn. But it's summer, I'm shirtless and not feeling any cold...

I get that sudden flash of familiarity. I've experienced this feeling before. But never in this life... Scenes from old movies have triggered that same familiarity – two that I remember are Key Largo (1948) and I Walked With A Zombie (1943) – both films, shot in black and white, had scenes with high winds blowing through luxuriant vegetation at night. But watching a film on TV is not the same as living the experience, feeling the wind on my skin.

For those who tend to dismiss my reports of anomalous qualia memories, which I attribute to non-local consciousness from another time, as "memories of films you once saw", I can clearly tell the difference between the two! The films brought about similar instant sensations of familiarity, of an experience lived – yet not in this life.

This time last year:
Interrogating one's intuition

This time two years ago:
Notes to a future me

This time three years ago
The End of Times

This time four years ago:
Going round in circles

This time five years ago:
Between wakefulness and sleep 

This time eight years ago:

Hammersmith, on Thames

This time 11 years ago:
In search of quintessential English countryside

This time 12 years ago:
Behold and See – short story, Pt III

This time 15 years ago:
Another return to Penrhos

Qualia compilation 10: the Road to South Wales, 1960

Up in the hunter's pulpit in Adamów Rososki. Nice place on a summer Sunday afternoon; a wooden cabin on stilts overlooking fields and forest. Settle in, settle down, crack open the tinnie: Guinness Draught (with free kitten toy inside each tin). Out of the fridge and into a small cool-bag, the beer is suitably chilled. 

The field in front of me is green and yellow; goldenrod and tansy are coming into flower. As I sip the Guinness, I am cast back my first Guinnesses as a teenager. The Wye Valley, on the English side of the river. Yes, and the first Guinness I drank in Ireland in 1981. I remember the taste, the experience. Not Watney's Red Barrel or Skol lager but a far superior beverage. As the beer begins to have its effect, I allow myself to drift off into a reverie; I find myself savouring earlier memories – indeed, some of my earliest memories – from the journey from West London to South Wales when I was three...

A recurring memory (or set of memories) from childhood relates to when we lived, briefly, near Newport, South Wales. Much I recall of that happy time, but this specific set of memories relates to the journey there, by car, most probably in the spring of 1960. 

My father, a civil engineer, was posted to Newport, Monmouthshire, to supervise the construction of the foundations under what would become the Llanwern steelworks. This would have been late 1959, when I was two. From memory, my father went out first (photos of Christmas 1959 were from our West London home), my mother and me joined him later. I seem to recall making the journey several times. 

Many memories flooded back to me today as I sat there high up in the hunter's pulpit, sipping stout.

Our route took us west along the A40 (this was before the M4 and M40 were built). One memory was of leaving London, the A40 in Hillingdon as it crosses Long Lane. To the right there was a yard where construction equipment for hire was stored. Cranes, what have you. My father explained that his company hired pile-drivers and vertical drilling machines from here. The old road would wind through small towns and villages, the occasional wood, up and down hills – and traffic jams would be frequent. I remember that we were part of an enormous jam once – a bank holiday? As we stood there. stationary minute after minute in the heat, a car drove by the other way (traffic flowing freely). I remember it well; it was an estate car with wooden frame in the rear, not a Morris Minor but something older and bigger. Maybe a custom conversion, maybe even pre-war. Inside were several older children. They were laughing at us. My father, evidently cross at being stuck in the jam, said "huliganie" (hooligans). I had just learned the word 'cyganie' (gypsies, Romany), and associated the car-load of mocking children with gypsy-folk. 

As a child, I could distinguish cars, lorries and buses very well. The lorries I liked best were the ERFs and Fodens and the big Commers with their distinctive diesel growl, especially as the driver dropped a gear to labour up a steep hill. And the roadside food... Much as my mother distrusted the snack-bars, trailers parked up in lay-bys, there was often no alternative. I remember one such place; we stopped there more than once. The woman serving the hot dogs (with British bangers rather than frankfurters) would ask each customer in turn "With onions or without onions?" in a sing-song voice that my mother imitated as we drove on. Again, I remember the greasy smell of the onions and the fatty sausages with mustard served on a white bread roll.

 

And I remember the petrol stations along the way. National Benzole and Cleveland, brands long gone, sold from pumps standing outside tin shacks with corrugated roofs, My mother would tell me that well before I could read, I was able to identify all the petrol stations by their logos – Shell-Mex, BP, Esho (as I'd pronounce Esso), National (Benzole), Cleveland and BP.

In Herefordshire and Gloucestershire – orchards. It is the sight of the orchards around Chynów that snaps me back to those childhood memories. They also remind me that as a small child, even then, the sight of those orchards set off anomalous memories; a strong sense of familiarity, from where I knew not; I'd been here before but not here. Another time, another place.

This time last year:
Procrastination, time and mindfulness

This time time three years ago:
Summer as it should be

This time four years ago:
Measuring the unmeasurable

This time six years ago:
Heading Home [my father leaves Warsaw for the last time]

This time eight years ago:
From my father's historic return to Warsaw

This time nine years ago:
Country life in a capital city 

This time 11 years ago:
My ogród is my działka

This time 13 years ago:
Mazowieckie province tempts with mini- and micro-breaks

This time 15 years ago:
Pride and anger

The pareidolias of smell

We know about pareidolia – seeing the face of Jesus on a tortilla, a cloud as a mounted General Custer, or a pyramid on Mars. Last Friday week I noted down the term 'pareidolia of smell' to refer to when you sniff an aroma that reminds you of something else entirely... Two weeks later, I experience just that. I had washed out a one-kilo plastic bucket that had contained Lidl's sauerkraut with carrot (a dietary staple of mine). I reuse these buckets to store spent coffee grounds, which make for an excellent fertiliser. Anyway, the plastic bucket was on the dish-rack on the draining board; I lifted it up to check if it was dry, held it to my nose for a sniff.

And wow.

Suddenly, I was getting the smell of a Greyhound Bus terminus somewhere in America, and the date came to me clearly... it was 1947. A smell that compounded cleaning fluid, stale tobacco, sweaty bodies and diesel fumes wafting in. The moment evaporated in a flash, but I experienced it. Below: for a second, I was here.

More common ones are the smell of my morning coffee, brewed in a Bialetti moka pot, which reminds me of the Italian café on Gray's Inn Road, opposite the Eastman Dental Clinic. It was here, at the age of 13 or 14 that I had my first proper Italian coffee and pizza before crossing the street for orthodontic treatment. The smell in my kitchen each morning triggers that nostalgic memory. And again, AI captures the scene it perfectly. This was it!  Can you smell it?

And another new one; recently I noticed that the teabags I'd been throwing out with the food waste onto the compost heap at the end of the garden do not biodegrade. So I've started doing something my father used to do – let them dry out, then snip the bags and tip out the dry leaves. I drink a lot of Herbapol fruit teas, which are 100% dried fruit – sour cherry and raspberry/cranberry infusions. Once dry and in the bucket, the smell reminds me of the pantry in our kitchen in Ealing, a 1930s built-in cupboard made of oak, full of sweet things beloved by my mother – jams and the like. Again, the smell is a perfect match that triggers the exact memory every time.

One more that occurred about a week ago; half past three in the morning, I wake up for a pee, and let Wenusia out. I open the front door; it's about an hour before dawn, there's a soft drizzle outside, and quite chilly. The smell of air, the petrichor, takes me back to a magical time and place beyond my current experience. I try to replicate it by opening the front door on subsequent nights but never quite get those same precise qualia. Now, from the scientific point of view, are my olfactory organs detecting a molecule-for-molecule match? And comparing them – without my conscious bidding – to qualia memories from childhood and youth, stored in some part of my amygdala? 

And another. Walking between Adamów Rososki and Grabina, I pass an orchard being sprayed with chemicals. The smell reminds me of the precise smell of the cardboard used in the warehouses in which I did holiday jobs in the late 1970s – either Pilot-Taylor Gauges of Coventry or Siemens Electronics on the Great West Road, London.

At this time of year, my rural walks are bountiful when it comes to smells; floral scents in particular that waft through the air in corridors; I notice a scent, it intensifies, passes; I walk back a few paces to catch it at its most intense, consider it, memorise it, before walking on. So important. 

Marcel Proust's madeleines made famous in À la recherche du temps perdu; involuntary memory, triggered by the sensory experience of a smell conjure up qualia moments from the past. And, I hold that for me at least, those qualia memories can extend beyond my own lifetime.

This time last year:
Qualia compilation 7: Motorways at night, Yorkshire

[Here, an unbidden memory from 50 years ago unlocks memories from past life.]

This time three years ago:
Interstices (junction of S7 and S2 expressways just ahead of its opening to traffic)

This time four years ago:
Joys of Spring

This time five years ago:
Jeziorki in May

This time six years ago:

Spitalfields and Smithfields – more from London

This time eight years ago

That tune going round your head now...

This time nine years ago:
The eyes... the eyes... 

This time ten years ago:
New old terminal open at Okęcie airport

This time 12 years ago:
Arrogance vs. humility 

This time 13 years ago:
Warsaw looking good ahead of the football-fan influx

This time 14 years ago:
Heron over Jeziorki

This time 18 years ago:
Present rising, future loading

The nature of the past – Lent 2025: Day 40

“My past is nothing more than a box of tools that can serve me in the future.”

“I was never young; I have always been my age. The past is an illusion; it survives only in your memories, which, being analogue rather than digital, degrade over time. Only the strongest memories survive, distorted in the retelling."

The present is illusory; it passes you by in a fraction of a second (neuroscientists and philosophers reckon it’s somewhere between a fifth and a two-hundredth of a second. Bernard Carr calls this the 'specious present'). 

"There is only the future. Of which we know not. The past, though it shaped you, is no longer relevant.”

Events that have happened to you – and the way you dealt with them – are of practical use when confronting new challenges in life. You learn skills. You acquire experience. But dwelling on how things could have turned out differently is a train of thought to avoid completely. It happened; learn your lesson, acquire the new skill, and move on.

So far, I have been pondering on the past as it affects your ego, your body, your physical self.

But there is another type of past, another sort of memory; not memory of an event that happened – but a memory of being in the moment. Qualia – the basic units of consciousness – the observed, felt, experience of being there – return from the past, and unlike event memories, which distort, the sensations of qualia memory are identical to the qualia as they were originally experienced within your consciousness at the time. Like dreams, which don't lie, but about which you can lie, qualia memories are true.

As a result, the past as presented in my qualia memories is more important to me than events-based ‘practical past’.

And lying in hospital (much like my experience with Covid in December 2023), gives me an opportunity to examine these. Two come back to me; both concern being driven at night in our family car to the houses of my parents’ friends, typically on a Sunday, back in the 1960s. London’s traffic was lighter then. The street-lights differed from borough to borough; Acton’s were mushroom-shaped and of a bluer colour than those of Ealing. Balham – again, different. I could feel the precise sensation of looking at the quiet streets at night, passing familiar landmarks along the way, the railway bridge with the coal-merchant, and a model locomotive hauling a rake of coal trucks in the window. An evening train, all lit up, crossing Wandsworth Common. Road signs, pubs, hedges– and the cars; Standards, Humbers, Singers, Rileys, Wolseleys; passing parks, and shops – all closed. Below: Google's Imagen 3.0 has a pretty good go of bringing back those qualia memories.

Elthorne Park, Hanwell, not far from home; the bandstand; the swings, the backs of houses on Townholm Crescent. Most fascinating for me was the far end of the park, where the lawns and paths gave way to bushes and rough land before dipping down to the Grand Union Canal. Beyond that, Warren Farm, and then Osterley. But as a child with a pronounced squint, my eyes could not focus on infinity, and my recollection of the distant fields beyond the park's boundaries were of a magical land that touched the ocean. I could see aircraft on the flightpath coming in to land at London Airport (renamed London Heathrow in 1966), but my eyes' resolution could not distinguish very well at that range. In the early sixties, airlines, charters and air cargo flew a mix of jets, turboprops and piston planes; was that an Avro York or Airspeed Ambassador? Was that a Tupolev Tu-114 or a Boeing 707?

There can be no time without memory. And there can be no memory without consciousness. And so it is that the past only exists in the present through memory, which itself is entirely contingent on consciousness. And so without conscious observers around to subjectively experience time, everything is happening simultaneously, from Big Bang to the heat death of the Universe and all points in between. This is how Big-C Consciousness, which I would take as the Divine, perceives the Cosmic Entirety.

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

Death, dreams and memories – Lent 2025: Day 28

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lent 2024: Day 28
Ego, Consciousness and the Environment

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

Lent 2022: Day 28
Understanding the Infinite and the Eternal

Lent 2021: Day 28
Higher life forms, imagined

Lent 2020: Day 28
The Secret and the Hidden

You, your consciousness and Time – Day 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow: more about the Ego

Lent 2024: Day 13 
Aesthetics, metaphysics and ethics

Lent 2023, Day 13
High Church and Low: Religious Styles and Personality

Lent 2022: Day 13
Comfort and Luxury, Consciousness and Ego

Lent 2021: Day 13
Comfort and Luxury – knowing when to stop

Lent 2020: Day 13
Holy buildings and the sense of the mystical

A Dream Journey through the Central Europe of my Childhood Imagination

It was a different world, a dream world. As a child I had visited it often; sparked by trips to Poland through West Germany and Czechoslovakia, journeys which had a profound influence on my aesthetic sensibilities as I was growing up. The atmosphere, the klimat, was so unlike the London suburbs in which I was born and where I grew up.

Below: have I been here before? Kind of, sort of, think so... But when? Memory can be so fickle.

Below: have you been here, in your dreams of long ago?

Below: I dreamt of trams that delivered coal. All night, fleets of tramcars haul trains of coal wagons which drop their load through trap-doors between the tracks, down chutes into coal bunkers located below the cellars of the tenements that line the city streets. Noisy, but necessary activity. Shortly after daybreak, task completed, the trams return to their more usual duties – conveying passengers to their places of work.

And I loved the cars. They were so different to our Austins, Hillmans and Jaguars! My grandmother's family lived in a flat overlooking the petrol station, so I'd often see some amazing cars. Here, for example, is a Krenzstaier 2,8 Liter (in Luxus trim), a favourite among local plutocrats and captains of industry.

Did I dream that my mother bought me a model of one of those cars that fascinated me so? Is it still up there, in my late parents' attic?

Let's cross the tracks to another part of town... this is the line that skirts the western side of the city.

And I'd often take the opportunity to check out the Metro system, which back then still used rolling stock that dated back to the early 1920s!

Here's another one, the trains used on Line No. 2... These had an additional headlamp to provide extra lighting in the long tunnel sections in the distant suburbs

Line 3 stations were my favourite ones on the network – note the chandeliers. 

Below: "The streets were deserted/The police were alerted" – looks like one of those black saloon cars favoured by the state security apparatus heading our way. My father prudently hides his camera.

The car passes without incident. Let's continue our stroll. Almost back at my grandmother's...

Below: the bar on the corner of the street where they live. Looking at this image today, I've become quite thirsty, and fetch myself a bottle of Lützaner pils from the cellar.

Your very good health! The Beer Magnate'f  fineft offering. Beer, as I could only imagine. Cheers!

You will have guessed by now that these images are AI generated. I used Google Gemini Advanced 1.5 Pro with Imagen 3. Compared with my early attempts with AI-generated art, it's so much better in responding to my prompts. The pictures really click with my imagined world, dreams triggered by visits to Poland in the 1960s.

AI art is controversial. Is the content, the intellectual property of millions of creators, being scraped, royalty-free for the benefit of the tech giants? Or has a new creative tool been handed to humanity, just waiting for our imagination to be let loose on it? I'd be keen for your feedback.

Each of the above images is unique. I could type in exactly the same prompt a million times, and never get the same image again.

This time last year:
Poland's sleeper trains: 2024 timetable

This time two years ago:
City-centre notes
[One week living in Warsaw's Nowe Miasto]

This time four years ago:
First snow for ages!

This time five years ago:

Politics and personal responsibility

This time six years ago:
Consciousness, memory and spirit of place

This time seven years ago:
Polish Perivale

This time eight years ago:
Power in the vertical

This time 12 years ago:
And still they come [anomalous flashbacks that is]

This time 13 years ago:
Classic glass

This time 14 years ago:
What's the Polish for 'pattern'?

This time 16 years ago:
"Rorate caeli de super nubes pluant justum..."