How much spirituality do we need in our lives? Lent 2021, Day Seven

This is a perennial question for me, the need to balance one's life between the material and the spiritual. For many, there's no need for any deeper questioning of life's purpose, no desire to search for meaning or understanding, no desire to seek connection with the Eternal and Infinite, no longing for the Metaphysical, no spiritual quest. Life is focused on earning money and making our way in society.  Externally we may all look the same, but matters spiritual are deeply hidden. Intelligence isn't the clue here, nor is gregariousness; it is something intangible. It's about some people's strong urge to make sense of it all and to seek communion with the Eternal Sublime. How often though? How intense is that need?

Devout people may have daily rituals around prayer at set times. But how often do they genuinely feel that they have engaged in meaningful contact with the metaphysical? Some indeed will have, and do so frequently. But for others - the ritual brings comfort, rather than a genuine spiritual insight. Yet this is not about religion or being religious. Some go to church each week, but they do so because they feel that they should go, and be seen to go, rather than their church-going being an active form of seeking contact with God, regular a chance to enter a more exalted state.

Moments of true spiritual enlightenment are rare in our lives, even if we seek them through meditation or prayer. Some times, some places are more conducive to such activities than others.

The corralling of human spiritual needs into one day of the week, one day in seven - the Lord's Day, the Sabbath - is predicated by our lunar calendar. That's why it's one-seventh. The Judeo-Christian God made the Earth in six days and rested on the seventh. Literally? Metaphorically? Or mystically? On other planets inhabited by sentient life-forms, the calendar might look quite different, so the Biblical notion of one in seven is hardly a Universal constant. 

For me there is no set time of the week other than at the setting of the sun, and rarely (as I'm an owl rather than a lark), at its rising. The disappearance of the sun over the horizon is always a spiritual moment; it induces an awareness that I'm standing on a planet that spinning backward away from our neighbouring star. And when the moon rises into a cloudless night, and I can view it through a powerful telephoto lens, that consciousness of being an inhabitant of this particular planet awakes within me. Suddenly I am torn away from material thoughts of the everyday. And so, I seek out such moments, when the higher plane can be touched. A walk that involves setting out before sunset and returning in dusk's glow is part of my routine, especially on sunny days.

Sun melds into Earth

Today, out in Jakubowizna, augured well for such a spiritual communion, but by the late afternoon, low clouds on the horizon had robbed me of the experience. But I caught it two days earlier, on Sunday. Watching that sun go down, meditating upon that thermonuclear force.

The sun has a profound influence on my mood. In autumn, as evenings draw in, I mourn the shrinking day. Now, at this time of year, the slow but steady return of the light, conquering darkness, each day longer than the previous one, fills me with hope.

It is at this time of year that I feel a spiritual rebirth. Maybe the need to touch the metaphysical isn't consistent; maybe some seasons are more conducive than others to hearing that inner voice and to push open the door to a more spiritual state.

Spiritual evolution is crucial. It is happening, at least for those of us who actively seek growth, seeking a ever-closer connection with the Universe; it happens in tiny steps. Progress is slow and hardly tangible, and yet is there. Away from the beast, towards the angelic. It begins with getting to understand your biology and rising above it. The base instinct, the reptile brain given to unthinking furies, driven by the most primordial of motivations. A calm, clear awareness of the span of life, from birth, development to maturity - a life focused on continuous improvement. From that first moment in which one is conscious of being conscious one must wrestle against the mindless.

There is a long, long way to go. So many profound insights that need to be experienced, studied, understood instinctively and communicated. The Lenten time is one in which I focus more intently on matters spiritual, but not to the exclusion of the remaining seven-eights of the year.

Should we be spending every moment of our waking life in pursuit of spiritual goals? Probably not. Sometimes, these things come to us, an if we try too hard, they evaporate before us. Better let chance intervene and take its course. The middle way between trying too hard, and not trying at all.

In the meantime, I often feel guilt at spiritual indolence; letting things drift. Tomorrow I shall explain how I see guilt, and sin.

This time last year:
The Mechanical Engineers

This time two years ago.
Ealing in the earliest of spring

This time four years ago:
Fat Thursday: a blast against sugar

This time five years ago:
The Devil is in doubt

This time six years ago
Are you aware of your consciousness?

This time eight years ago:
"Why are all the good historians British?"

This time nine years ago:
Central Warsaw, evening rush-hour

This time ten years ago:
Cold and getting colder

This time 12 years ago:
Uwaga! Sople!

This time 13 years ago:
Ul. Poloneza at its worst

How should we see God? Lent 2021, Day Six

For those who do not believe in a divine, supernatural power, there is no God - it's as easy as that. Life's an accident, live it as best you can, for when you die - it's all over, Player One.

For those that do believe in a divine, supernatural power, there are as many Gods as there are believers. Even if you take a devout follower of any organised religion, you'll find under examination that there are differences between the religion's stated doctrines and what that individual follower really believes.

Believers in a divine supernatural power can be generally grouped into those prepared to accept a given truth, revealed through holy texts, and those who seek their own truth, one that squares with their deepest and most honest thoughts on the matter.

Brutal honesty, constant winnowing of one's thinking to weed out cognitive bias, is crucial in this process. If you seek power, wealth or fame, you will be used to bending the truth to obtain your goals. But if you are seeking truth, you must not be swayed by wishful thinking, intellectual shortcuts or pre-digested, one-size-fits-all answers.

Over the next 40 days, I will be expanding on my beliefs, and how they have gained shape and clarity over the years. It is a deeply personal journey - hence I believe that the way to understand God is not with a crowd but alone. Alone, though aided by people who are likely to challenge your thinking, rather than by people who merely go along with what you are going along with.

Familiarity and comfort are offered by organised religions; peace of mind at the cost of acceptance. 

My main gripe with organised religion is how easy it is to turn a deeply spiritual purpose into a form of social control, be it to do with controlling our behaviour or defining 'us' vs 'the others'. Strip away the history and the trappings, a religion has its own continued existence to worry about. Any ecumenical movement that strays too far in terms of building bridges with other religions tends to get sidetracked.

And yet in our Universe of a couple of hundred billion galaxies, each of a couple of hundred billion stars, if there is a God - there is but one God, undivided by dogmas or histories. The same God for every one of those stars, and for everything in between, for everything conscious that ever existed and is ever to exist. A Universal God, certainly not human in form (such conceit! Such geocentrism!), certainly not for our human minds to grasp. And the notion that God is male (or indeed female) is again a sure sign of limited imagination. Given that we have so many unanswered questions regarding the nature of the Universe, we can only hope to see God as a Mystery, something that we are unlikely to unravel during the course of a lifetime. All we can aspire to, in our 80 or 90 years, is to get closer to God, to rise a bit further from the primordial, towards the angelic.

The earliest known religious rituals uncovered by archeologists related to funerals. The death of a member of a tribe would indeed hasten questions regarding the purpose of life and an afterlife, genuine questions that - if answered plausibly with a strong story - could hasten one's ascent within the tribe's hierarchy. Respect and veneration to them that could explain the world in supernatural terms which would fit most closely with the tribe's observations and hopes.

In the times of the early hunter-gatherer tribes, building a religion would be a sensible activity. It would bind the tribe with a set of shared rituals and experiences, and bring comfort to those mourning the loss of loved ones. But those who built those proto-religions could also use them for personal gain. By linking their power within the group to a higher power, they could impose their will on the others, and so a proto-priesthood would form...

Rejecting God is today seen as analogous with rejecting those who seek to control the individual. I would argue against believing in any God that has been devised by humans for that purpose. Instead, I'd seek to refine what I mean by God, a concept far harder to grasp than one devised by committee to function as an ultimate authority.

God should not be seen as an instrument of social control. God should be seen primarily in terms of a purpose, a will, a force, a goal, a journey, a destination, a destiny - of which we are all a part.

This time last year:
Live fast or live slow? Preparing for Lent

This time two years ago
Warsaw growing in the sun

This time three years ago:
Of Consciousness and Will across the universe

This time five years ago:
The Devil is indeed Doubt

This time six years ago:
Are you aware of your consciousness?

This time seven years ago:
"Why are all the good historians British?"

This time nine years ago:
Central Warsaw, evening rush-hour

This time ten years ago:
Cold and getting colder

This time 12 years ago:
Uwaga! Sople!

This time 13 years ago:
Ul. Poloneza at its worst

Science, materialism and God: Lent 2021, Day Five

Once upon a time, some 400 years ago, there were no atheists. There were merely people who worshiped some other god than the one you worshipped. Every human being believed in some kind of a supreme being, and took comfort in everlasting life after death, a reward for a life well-led, in accordance to scriptural precepts. [To what extent that belief was instinctive, and to what extent it was taught, is something I shall return to in a later post in this Lenten series.]

Then something changed. In 1687, Isaac Newton published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, one of the key texts that was to lead to the Enlightenment. The Principia outlined in detail Newton's laws of motion, a foundation of classical mechanics. Also included were Newton's law of universal gravitation and his laws of planetary motion. Man could now account for tides, the trajectories of comets, the precession of the equinoxes and other phenomena. Newton proved that the motion of objects on Earth as well as celestial bodies could be accounted for by the same principles, following the same laws.

Newton's thinking did not emerge from a vacuum. It was based on the observations and measurements of Pythagoras, Euclid, Archimedes, Plato, then after a pause for the Dark Ages, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes and Kepler. Hence Newton's quote that he was merely standing on the shoulders of giants. 

What Newton did was to devise a conceptual framework, pulling all the strands together, thus creating classical physics, still for most of us the dominant model of how we understand the world.

It took the best part of a century for the implications of  the Principia to sink in - it wasn't God who moved the planets about their way - it happened in accordance to a mathematical formula, which can be demonstrated and proven.

Kings and queens who had ruled by Divine Right found their authority undermined by the rising tide of rational science; this came to a head with the French Revolution and the secular state that followed. 

And so the scientific method began to displace the hermetic gibberish of alchemy. Scientific proofs, peer review, repeatable experiments, began to push back against God as an answer. Thunder and lightning, volcanoes and earthquakes, eclipses and epidemics could all be explained by natural - as opposed to supernatural - causes. 

The pushback against superstition and irrational beliefs was in full force by the early 20th century, as Rutherford delved into the structure of the atom and Einstein defined spacetime. Before long, rational minds believed, the 'God of the Gaps' - the use of divine power to explain the ever-shrinking realms which science couldn't - would finally be squished into oblivion. Rational minds believed they would conquer the Universe with logic and irrefutable proofs. By the 1920s, theoretical physicists were convinced that mankind was years, months even, from an equation that would explain everything.

In a godless universe, matter matters. And so materialism came to supplant beliefs in a higher unknown. Those who remained with organised religion - and it was far harder after the horrors of WW1 and WW2 - more often than not did so for reasons of social cohesion, demonstrating loyalty to the group, rather than because of any deeply harboured spiritual feeling. 

We lived through a rat race in an age of conspicuous consumption. "Life's hard and then you die." "You only live once." "You die - that's the end - get over it." Reasons for living are boiled down to biological instinct - to establishing one's place in our mammalian hierarchy. Get money, power, the trappings of power - possessions, material possessions. In our post-Enlightenment rush to acquire the possessions intended to impress our fellow humans, we lost sight of higher aspirations. Even strictly humanist ones, a desire for fairness, a need to help others, and a sense of fulfilling one's human potential have been pushed aside in a life stripped down to its materialist minimum. 

But then Newtonian science ran into doubt. 

Quantum physics brought into question certainties that had been held for well over a century. Science has yet to resolve the inherent contradictions between the Standard Model of the atom and General Relativity which works on the galactic scale. Physics Beyond the Standard Model has yet to deal with Phenomena Not Explained, with Experimental Results Not Explained and with Theoretical Predictions Not Observed. In other words, physicists today are far less certain of what they really know than what physicists a century ago were almost certain they knew (or felt they soon would know).

It is likely that confusion will grow rather than decline, as competing theories such as supersymmetry, quantum gravity or string theory (none of which are readily understandable by the layperson) slug it out for supremacy. The age of scientific certainty - from the late-17th to the mid-20th century - is waning.

Is God coming back to to fill the gaps?

Certainly not as an Abrahamic God-as-an-old-man-with-beard-in-the-clouds, handing down commandments to Man, steering our daily lives from on high. Organised religions are having a tough time.

Yet mankind's innate spiritual sense has not died out. It is something much deeper than just a need for peace of mind or the wonder of gazing at a cloudless night sky; it is a search for understanding and a desire to be at one with the Universe. As our affluent society takes the edge off hunger and cold, our needs are becoming more sublimated. Experience becomes more important than possessions; quality of life starts to matter more than wealth.

To know where we are going, we need to look into ourselves and, without letting cognitive biases get in the way, ask ourselves what we really feel about God.

Next up: a changing definition of 'God'.

This time three years ago:
From the world of science to the social world

This time five years ago:
Music, mysticism and the human spirit

This time six years ago:
My first Pendolino journey 

This time seven years ago:
Poland's universal panacea

This time eight years ago:
Of taxis, deflation, crisis and strikes

This time nine years ago:
Lent starts again

This time ten years ago:
Art Quiz

This time 11 years ago:
A month before Spring Equinox

This time 12 years ago:
The beauty of winter
[still some of my finest winter photos]

Would the Universe exist without God? Lent 2021 Day Four

"Define God." OK, but at the end of this post (with a very basic definition), and in a few days' time, and then on Easter Sunday, in the summing up of my Lenten posts. 

But first, an overview of the fundamental physical constants that holds the Universe together. Two days ago, I wrote about the several-billion (if not trillion) to-one chance of your existence. Today I want to write about the similarly improbable odds against there being a Universe as we know it at all. 

Science currently believes that there are 19 of fundamental physical constants, universal and constant across time, which determine the rules of everything. [Some are now saying 22.] 

Let us look at one of them, the strength of the force binding nucleons into nuclei, denoted by the symbol Epsilon, (ε). According to Martin Rees, British astrophysicist and cosmologist, the value of ε is 0.007. If it were 0.006, no other atom other than hydrogen could possibly exist, and complex chemistry would be impossible. Yet if it were above 0.008, no hydrogen would exist, as all the hydrogen would have been fused shortly after the Big Bang. 

All the other fundamental physical constants are similarly fine-tuned for life. They ensure that galaxies are pushed apart at the right pace; that water freezes from the surface down rather than from the bottom up, unlike other liquids. That the energy state of the carbon atom allows for its abundance throughout the cosmos, a building-block of sentient life. That gravity is neither too strong nor too weak (as it is, gravity is 10^-38 times weaker than the strong atomic force binding nuclei together). 

Had any one of these fundamental physical constants differed only slightly from those observed, the evolution of the Universe would have proceeded very differently and life as it is understood may not have been possible.

 Amazing, eh? Welcome to the fine-tuned Universe. British astronomer, Fred Hoyle (who first coined the term 'Big Bang') argued for a fine-tuned universe: "The list of anthropic properties, apparent accidents of a non-biological nature without which carbon-based and hence human life could not exist, is large and impressive".

So - you can either consider these many factors creating conditions to be mere chance, without all of which we would simply not be here to marvel at the fact - or we can begin to ask why the Universe has been set up in such a way. A miracle here, a one-in-a-billion chance there, a statistical improbability over there. [Some scientists posit that myriad Universes have failed to form because their fundamental constants were wrong.] But our Universe is here, because we are here to observe it. And the statistical improbability of the universe existing multiplied by the statistical improbability of you existing (see this post if you've not read it already)

Yet both are in place, the Universe, and you. Allowing life to exist here on our planet, at this particular time, and be observed by you.

This really should be freaking you out by now, even if you're an avowed atheist.

I'll be writing much more about the nature of God, my proposed definition of God (about as accurate as a cat's definition of electricity) over the course of this series. And what I believe God not to be. But for the time being here are some ideas:

God = a force/entity that enables the extremely improbable to happen - for you to observe and experience.

There was nothing, there was chaos. Now there is something; we know that, because you are consciously observing and experiencing something. So:

God = the journey from nothing to something, from chaos to order.

This time last year:
Bus shake-up for Jeziorki and Dawidy

This time five years ago:
The Occult and mysticism

This time six years ago:
How do we see God?

This time seven years ago:
Who needs a Leica with a Noctilux lens when you can do this?

This time eight years ago:
Fides quaerens intellectum

This time nine years ago:
To the Devil with it all! - short story, Part II

This time 11 years ago:
Building the bypass as the snows melt

The time 13 years ago:
Two weeks into Lent

Would the Universe exist without us? Lent 2021, Day Three

Inspired by a conversation with Andrew Nathan

"If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it - does it make a sound?" The answer is no - it does not make a sound. Sound, being the reception of acoustic waves caused by vibrations in the air, and their subsequent perception by the brain, requires someone around to hear it. Without a person present, there's a falling tree, vibrating air, acoustic waves - but nothing that could be subjectively experienced as sound, because there's no observer.

Anybody hear that?

Let's take it a step further: if there were no conscious life anywhere in the Universe - would it still exist?

In the 1930s, Edwin Hubble proved conclusively that the Universe is more than just our local galaxy, the Milky Way, and that nebulae long observed by astronomers are other galaxies lying far beyond. Supernovae - violent deep-sky events, stars exploding as they die, ejecting matter from which new stars, new worlds are born - have been observed by humans for millennia.

Without a human observer to ponder the phenomena of transient celestial events - did they happen? Yes. Astronomical sensors can now echoes of ancient supernovae that occurred tens of thousands of years ago. But did they have a meaning? Were they relevant? No. Not to us, on this planet, at that time.

I remember the awe with which I first observed the moon through a telescope. The moment I realised for real that it's not a flat disc. It's a huge, globular, rock, silently proceeding around our planet-home. With a stationary telescope, the moon passes through your narrow, fixed field of view quite quickly; that movement is imperceptible if you're looking up with the naked eye. The sky on a cloudless night (ideally well away from the light pollution of towns and cities) inspires those numinous thoughts that lift us above the concerns of our daily existence.We snap into a new, more elevated context - why are we here, what's it all about, where is all this heading? 

Unless you are a philosophical zombie - equipped with a human brain that can process information, a body that reacts instinctively... I rather see Trump like that; devoid of any capacity for wonder, unable to see in categories other than money, power and personal adulation. I doubt that Trump has a soul; a meat-covered skeleton responding to base instinct. The same goes for his offspring and followers.

But for conscious, aware people (and the fact you've read this far suggests that you are), there are the great questions regarding life. Is there a supreme being, and is there life after death are the two most important ones. How often we ask ourselves these questions is important too. For some, the need for a spiritual (i.e. non-material) reason for life is all great, for others - the philosophical zombies - it doesn't exist.

In previous Lenten blog posts, I have mentioned quantum physics and how it has changed philosophers' outlook on the biggest issues. Notably, the concept of 'superposition' - of a subatomic particle being in two states at the same time until observed. When a conscious observer is there to check the outcome of the experiment, the particle's superposition collapses and it becomes one or the other. Without an observer in the forest, the tree is both upright and fallen at the same time (within the bounds of statistical probability. Aspens and birches are more brittle than firs, so the chance of a fir tree falling are slighter). 

The physical existence of superposition, verified in many thousands of laboratory experiments around the world for the past 90 years or so, suggests that something can be, and not be, until observed by a conscious person. 

Schrodinger's famous cat becomes Schrodinger's Universe - present/not present and until there's a conscious observer around to be aware of it, it is and it isn't at the same time.

Can it therefore be that God is - and is not - at the same time, until we have a personal awareness of God?

_________________________________________________

"And everything was made for you and me 

All of it was made for you and me" 

 

- Iggy Pop, The Passenger, 1977

_________________________________________________

More tomorrow!

This time five years ago:
Dreams and visions of past lives

This time six years ago:
Monist or dualist: which are you?

This time seven years ago:
Grim prospects for Ukraine

This time eight years ago:
Wrocław's new airport terminal

This time nine years ago:
A study in symmetry: Kabaty Metro station

This time ten years ago:
To the Devil with it all - a short story

This time 11 years ago:
Waiting for the meltdown

This time 13 years ago:
Flat tyre

Best day of winter so far

The strong sunlight on the snow boosts your organism; you feel alive and full of verve. Get up and go!

Chances are this will be the last day with a crisp frost, fresh snow, strong sunshine and blue skies. The forecast is for rain and snow, temperatures hovering above zero and heavily overcast.

Below: view from my bedroom window - eventually. The roller blinds had frozen shut; the answer was hot tapwater from a watering can poured into the bottoms of the window frames. And what a view!

 

Time for a short, half-hour walk before the working day begins in earnest. Below: sun rising through the birches, ulica Dumki.

Below: further along ul. Dumki...

Perfection - not even having to use a polarising filter; this is how my 16-85mm Nikkor lens captured the scene, taken from the frozen lake. From my afternoon walk.

Below: a 209 bus departs from Jeziorki Płn bus stop heading for Dawidy.

Below: an empty biofuel train heads back from Siekierki power station, passing between W-wa Jeziorki and W-wa Dawidy stations.

Sunset approaches, looking west from the other side of the tracks.

Below: setting sun illuminates the last of the row of new houses, ul. Trombity 59 A-L

Below: sunset taken from the other end of the same row of houses, ul. Trombity.

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

"You are as insignificant as a grain of sand"

"The Universe was made for you."

Which of these two statements are true? 

I'll argue that both are. 

I'll start this post by hitting you with some big numbers.

Science currently (2021) estimates the Universe to consist of 200 billion galaxies. Each of those galaxies consists of anywhere between a hundred million and a hundred trillion stars; there are therefore more stars in the observable Universe than there are grains of sand on Planet Earth.

Our entire galaxy, the Milky Way, is pretty ordinary, consisting (it is estimated) of somewhere between 100 and 400 billion stars, of which ours, the Sun, is pretty ordinary.

The Universe is estimated to have been around for around 13.8 billion years (and what happened before the Big Bang remains a matter of competing scientific theories). Our planet has been around for 4.5 billion years, and life on Earth has been around for at least 4.1 billion years. And from the moment the first life form took on the hallmarks of being alive, reproducing, evolving, an unbroken chain of ancestors has made it all the way to you - alive, conscious, right now. Had just a single amoeba or proto-fish or lobe fin or dinosaur or early mammal or hominid in that chain died before it had the chance to reproduce - you'd not be here, reading my blog at this moment in time. A chain consisting of billions of successful reproductions - and now, here you are. A lineage, an ancestry running all the way back to the very first successfully-reproducing form of life on earth

The odds of your existence, of your consciousness being here, now, to pore over these words, are infinitesimally small. And yet it happened. Rejoice!

Is that not a miracle? 

Or, would you turn it the other way round: there's so much life, even conscious life, with 7.8 billion humans alive on our planet right now, that your existence is totally unremarkable...

But had your parents never met - would you still be? Not the physical you, but the conscious you - the awareness that defines how you experience life?

The physical you - the Ego - is indeed as insignificant as a grain of sand. But your Consciousness is why the Universe exists - so that you can experience it.

The way you subjectively see life is crucial to understanding that the Universe was made for you, for you to observe, to sample, even to a very limited degree.

The conditions for you to be you have all been met, right the way back to the Big Bang. A Universe that's physically right, that has the right set of laws of physics to enable it to expand, to develop heavier atoms that can combine into molecules that can build proteins and cells - and conscious life.

It's pretty miraculous. If the Big Bang were to start all over, what would be the chances that 13.8 billion years later, on one planet orbiting an ordinary star in an ordinary galaxy, you'd pop up to start observing it unfolding?

Sit back and consider that miracle. That's what it means to be alive, a conscious observer of an unfolding Universe. To make it more amazing, consider this: the hydrogen atoms that you are made up of have been around since shortly after Big Bang, and will exist after your death for another nonillion years (10³²) before decaying (science currently estimates).

Your consciousness is a part of this Universal process. 

A tiny part/A huge part.

This time three years ago:
The evolution of the biosphere cannot be predicted

This time four years ago:
Jeziorki meltdown in the fog

This time five years ago:
Health, happiness and wholeness

This time six years ago:
Kicking off Lent again 

This time seven years ago:
Improving the procurement of Poland's infrastructure 

This time eight years ago:
Wait to spend or save lives now? An infrastructure quandry

This time 12 years ago:
It's not rich countries that build roads, its roads that build rich countries

This time 13 years ago:
Snow that was doomed to melt

Lent 2021; my thirtieth

By Easter Sunday, falling on 4 April this year, I will have completed 30 Lenten periods of abstinence, beginning in 1992. Each year, without exception, I have given up alcohol (a much harder task for me as a sociable young man than it is for me today, in lockdown, with no social gatherings, and with bars and restaurants shut). 

For the first 20 or so Lents, the period has been little more than giving things up, exercising the will not to do something. Far harder than not doing something is doing something, and doing it consistently, regularly. Building good habits, for the good of body and soul. Much of the sensible living habits I have adopted into my daily, year-round, life, has been an extension of a Lenten resolution. Good things have come from Lent, I find.

More recently my Lents have taken on a more spiritual focus, a period of intensified search for meaning, for understanding conscious life and its purpose. The uncovering of spiritual truth is, I posit, is a journey that takes far longer than one lifetime. A quest that spans millennia; thousands of millennia.

Have we a part in that quest? Do even you want a part in that quest? 

Many of us are not in the least bit interested. Dismissing notions of a Divine Being, of an afterlife - indeed of a spiritual side to human nature - to life itself, many humans of all levels of intelligence - are entirely materialist in their outlook. "When we die, that's it. All over," they say. "You only live once". YOLO. An excuse, then, for indulgence, self-indulgence - and often at the cost of the environment. "Tearing up the highway in a big old dinosaur." 

So - there's this life. It's getting shorter every day. The world spins and circles the sun; we are back where we were but have moved on, the upward spiral of learning and understanding. 

This year, I intend to contrast materialism with mindfulness. And I will be returning to old questions, such as how much spirituality do we need in our lives; is there an afterlife and if so what does it look like; what is the nature of God. I freely acknowledge that I am but two yards along a road that is infinity miles long, but I feel I am a few inches further along that road than I was last year or five years ago, and a foot or two further than I was 20 or 30 years ago. 

Last year's Lenten exploration - 'Build your own Religion' was particularly useful to me, confirming that I have no intention of building a religion, rather I seek to bridge the gap between religions and science, based on my philosophical observations. 

I want to consider who - or what - God is; the Universe and why it exists; if there's an afterlife and if so, what it's like; how much 'spirituality' we need in our lives, and how this all fits in with a more humanist approach to living a life to fulfil our potential.

The basic building block of my approach is our own conscious experience, the feeling of being; how it feels to be, when you are still, calm, without external stimuli, without your ego getting in the way. Mindfulness, if you will, meditation, decoupling of the awareness from the material.

Today, there's a thick layer of snow outside; by April we could easily be experiencing an early-spring heatwave while blossom fills the trees. A time of year of re-birth, the best time of year, brightness and optimism emerging from out of the depths of winter.

There are 46 days between now and Easter Sunday (Sundays included); each day I shall explore aspects of the spiritual quest, with the hope that this exercise will bring new enlightenment, new insights into the conscious condition. So join me, do - I'd be grateful for the company along the way, any comments, questions, do please jump in, all will be responded to, either in the comments box or by email.

This time last year:
Grey February dusk; buzzing Warsaw

This time last year:
Skierniewice-Łuków line modernisation announced

This three years ago:
Entropy and anti-entropy in a constant-ruled universe

This four three years ago:
Truth, spin, bullshit and lies

This time five year:
How much spirituality do we need?

This time eight years ago:
The Chosen Ones

This time nine years ago:
Fixies in the snow

This time 12 years ago:
Just the ticket