Plenitude at the year's fruition

Nature's bounty manifests itself across the local landscape; tipping from mid-September towards late-September, and the sun still prevails, keeping clouds and rain away. Meteorological autumn began on 1 September; astronomical autumn begins next Saturday, but the weather has remained that of high summer, with top temperatures reaching toward 30C.

Below: orchards, full of apples. And indeed, here and there, the occasional orchard of pear trees. The plums have already been picked.

Below: meadow, field, forest, orchard - all under perfect, cloudless skies. Looking north.

Around here, I can go for a 90-minute walk and not see any other human being. Spirit of Place.

I am experiencing sublime elation as I walk through this forest in this particular weather - the peak joy of being alive, (tempered by the knowledge that the forest has been heavily logged this year and last, thinning it out significantly).

At the forest's edge, homeward bound. Back to the aroma of mature apple in the air.

Weatherwise, 2023 has been a optimal spring and summer here in Jakubowizna - may the autumn stay clement as long as possible. 

This time last year:
Behold the wonder of the commonplace

This time two years ago
The force-field of fate

This time three years ago:
Hot in the city

This time four years ago:
Resting with the heroes

This time six years ago:
Polish employers' demographic challenge
[Since then, it's got worse. And it will be worse still.]

This time 11 years ago:
The rich, the poor, the entrepreneur

This time 11 years ago:
Food: where's the best place to shop in Poland? 

This time 12 years ago:
Bittersweet

This time 13 years ago:
Commuting made easy

This time 14 years ago:
Work starts on the S79/S2 'Elka'

This time 15 years ago:
Warsaw's accident-filled streets

Clinging on and letting go

For Marek

Yesterday I was travelling from Łódź Fabryczna to Łódź Widzew on my way home. Boarding a crowded local train, I found myself sitting next to an elderly woman in a headscarf  and woolly cardigan - the stereotypical baba w chuście that has all but disappeared from the Polish landscape, replaced by elderly women in leggings and sweatshirts. Anyway, the headscarfed woman was clutching rosary beads and was deep in spiritual contemplation. Staring down at her fingers, her lips moving silently, she was not present with the other commuters as they scrolled down their social-media feeds on their omnipresent smartphones. She seemed more focused and calmer than everyone else - sublimely transcendent, indeed.

I could see a greater commonality between her and an orthodox Jew, head bobbing up and down in prayer, or a whirling Dervish in a trance, or a Hindu chanting a mantra, than between her and her fellow Poles in the train. 

But was she clinging on to a learned behaviour, or was her faith an integral part of her identity? 

Since the James Webb Space Telescope began transmitting data, astronomers and cosmologists have taken to question the nostrum that our Universe is 13.8 billion years old. Some are starting to suggest that it might be twice as old - others are trying to get more a more precise number, whittling down the hundreds of millions plus-minus to a smaller number. Most scientists feel comfortable with that 13.8 billion age - but are they clinging to it? Will this accepted figure end up being completely overturned? In five years' time, will our textbooks teach pupils that the Universe is 27.6 billion or 13,787,150,000 years old? Don't know.

I am entirely agnostic, watching videos on YouTube I see the majority of mainstream cosmologists sticking with the accepted figure. I wonder what it will take to shift that consensus. If it does shift, will there still be die-hards clinging on to the figure of 13.8 billion? 

It is, I posit, much easier for a rationalist, scientific mind to accept a changed consensus on the age of the Universe based on analysis of observed data, new hypotheses put to peer review, and multiple experiments all pointing to the same outcome, than it is for such a mind to accept a genuine paradigm shift regarding consciousness. From an emergent phenomenon, the by product of biological evolution, to a fundamental property of the Cosmos. Indeed, the fundamental property of the Cosmos

I believe in the power of intuition, a power that is metaphysical in origin, a manifestation of non-local consciousness. My belief in intuition is an intuitive belief, not something taught or learnt. It is something I have observed subjectively over time, and in my own n=1 world, it holds true. Belief comes from experience, from gnosis – not from scripture.

If you intuitively hold that something is right, then its validity runs deep. It's as right to you as any extraneously derived theory. Deep intuitive conviction, emotional, visceral and abiding, honed over decades, elevated to higher levels of understanding. The honing process is a mixture of absorbed knowledge and intuition - science and spirituality together, blended, in balance. Fine-tuning of an idea, rather than rejection or clinging to dogma. Like a statue coming to life from a block of stone, rough hewn at first, but taking on shape and definition with the well-judged honing.

This time three years ago:
Out in the mid-September heat

This time four years ago:
Poland's ugliest building?

This time nine years ago:
Weekend cookery - prawns in couscous

This time 11 years ago:
Draining Jeziorki

This time 12 years ago:
Early autumn moods

This time 13 years ago:
The Battle of Britain, 70 years on

This time 14 years ago:
Thoughts about TV, Polish and British

This time 15 years ago:
Time to abandon driving to work!

This time 16 years ago:
Crappy roads take their toll

The Ephemeral Pleasures of Materialism

Nothing survives death. Let me rephrase that - no thing survives death. The human organism is a thing. It serves as a container for the soul – which is not a thing. By 'thing', I mean something that can be weighed and measured and empirically defined. The soul, or to use preferred terminology - consciousness – is immaterial.

If you don't believe in the soul, you are all container, all thing, all matter, and therefore death stands as a finality. If you don't believe in the soul, the process of ageing beyond your physical best-by date must be terrifying. "It's all downhill from here."

But if you feel the presence of consciousness as something above and beyond the corporeal construct of proteins and cells and double helixes, then the ageing process is something you don't need to rage at. Indeed, I embrace it for the additional spiritual wisdom that lifelong learning brings.

Entropy is balanced by growing complexity, driven by biological evolution. But there's also spiritual evolution, something we cannot measure, only intuit. And so, while entropy is trying to drag all matter down to a random mess of atoms randomly bumping around, I would posit that a cosmos filled with source consciousness is the purpose that powers this evolving complexity of the unfolding of the universe.

God, the Purpose, the Reason, the Destination, the Goal, God the Infinitely Long Road from Zero to One – I see God as a journey as well as an end-state, not as the God whom we humans have historically tended to anthropomorphise. That God has become a straw man, one that rationalism found all too easy to knock over and replace.

Since the Enlightenment, religions which once held a total monopoly over our human spirituality have been pushed back by the materialist-reductionist steamroller. 

We have been seduced by matter, the instant gratification offered by material pleasures. So we have come to abandon the spiritual, we have come to reject notions of the metaphysical as mere woo-woo. Meanwhile, religions' controlling behaviour has made them easy to reject in favour of convenience and fun. But out went the baby (our conscious experience, our spiritual existence our longing for the numinous), along with the bathwater (dogma, rituals, hierarchy, etc).

Attempts to empirically prove that the supernatural or paranormal co-exists with the material are dismissed as pseudoscience, and yet we kind of intuit that there's also a metaphysical aspect to our reality. We have come to expect evidence – hard, scientific, evidence – before we'll buy into any idea to weave into our worldview. I feel no need to seek scientific confirmation of my consciousness via machines trying to detect extra-sensory perception.

{ Flashback: Leamington Spa railway station, 1979/80. Just thought I'd drop that qualia memory event into this post as it happened. } 

But back to the topic. In the absence of that hard evidence, we have bought into the materialist paradigm and the materialist values with which it has replaced spirituality. 

"There's nothing spiritual in our lives – so just focus on making money, buying things and chasing pleasure." This nicely meshes with our innate status hierarchy – the more money you have, the more things you have, the more you can prove to all and sundry that you are better than them – higher up the ladder. "It's a competitive world/Everything counts in large amounts." 

Materialism makes us do more – but as I wrote the other day, not necessarily things that need doing. Stepping out of the hamster wheel allows us to see beyond the false pleasures that materialism brings. We can now catch sight of the true values that the spiritual approach brings. Better mental health and a less-despoiled environment to name but two tangible benefits.

"All things must pass, all things must pass away"

All things, yes – but consciousness, no. Your consciousness was, is, and will be. As long as you are aware of it.

This time last year:
W-wa Zachodnia modernisation - a long way to go
(Passing through today: still a long way to go)

This time two years ago:

The Wilderness and the Garden 

This time three years ago:
Back in Aviation Valley

This time four years ago:
My flight to Rzeszów - delayed

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

This time eight years ago:
Where asphalt is needed - Nowy Podolszyn to Zgorzala

This time 13 years ago:
I cycle to work along the cyclepath along ul. Rosoła

This time 15 years ago:
First apple 

Summer's welcome extension

The last seven days have seen perfect blue skies. The orchards are ripened; fruit is being gathered in. It's still summer-hot, with highs approaching 30C. Despite the dryness, the earth isn't scorched, the vegetation hasn't been burnt brown. Optimal late-summer/early-autumn weather as far as I'm concerned. But it's definitely hotter than the early Septembers from days gone by. 

Below: a farm track wends its way through a small copse; behind me and ahead of me, orchards.

Below: over the next few weeks, this will be a common sight - tractor-hauled trains of apple-crates on their way to the punkt skupu, where they'll be sold.

Below: stepping out of Chynów station on the east side - Jabłkowizna full of apple.

Below: mid-century Americana in Kodachrome - the bottom end of my street.

Below: from the same end of my street, sunset across the tracks

Below: as canonical as prospects of Jakubowizna come - with a Radom-bound Koleje Mazowieckie train approaching Chynów station.

Below: wooden house, Barcice Rososkie. Another one where the new residence and farm buildings are out back, while the old house has been left as a kind of family museum, a placeholder that says: "we are from here."

I walked along the side of the main road to get from Grobice to Chynów, where I've found plenty of lovely large ripe hop cones growing wild on a field of corn. Below: looking east along the DK50.

Below: further along the farm track in the top photo, nearing the orchards a few days earlier, the sun setting behind the apple trees. The sun set at 19:00 today; two weeks until equilux (25 September - sunrise 06:26 - sunset 18:26 - 12 hours of day, 12 hours of night).

This time six years ago:
All hopped up

[Picked local hops today!]

This time eight years ago:
September song

This time ten year ago:
A traveller's tale (reading this shows how fast Poland has progressed in transport infrastructure)

This time 11 years ago:
One for the record - hot September day (30C)

This time 12 years ago:
MOSTTOMOST

This time 13 years ago:
The half-closed airport

This time 14 years ago:
Last of the summer bike rides to work?

This time 15 years ago:
My own Polish Adlestrop

This time 16 years ago:
Laurie Anderson's chillingly prescient 'O Superman'

Mycelial roots of coincidence

And thus did it occur to me, as I was walking up the escalators from Metro Centrum and across the patelnia on my way to Warsaw Central station, en route to Wrocław. 

That like the mycelial network of fungus under a forest floor connecting colonies of mushrooms, there is a similar unseen network of coincidence that holds events together.

A beautiful intuition! It draws me back to this worthy post from Lent 2021. 

Literally, the roots of coincidence. As in the title of Arthur Koestler's seminal book of that title. It's a book I read back in the late 1970s, when it was all the rage among students. [With the perspective of the decades, I'd argue today that Koestler's attempts to explain metaphysical phenomena using the scientific method were doomed to fail.]

But if you accept it as it is, and understand it, you can use synchronicities or observed coincidences to ward off misfortunes, as you walk your daily life along the edge of chaos.

To do so, you need to do just two things:

1) Accept that coincidences do contain meaning. This means stepping above the materialist reductionist mindset that would dismiss synchronicities as meaningless. 

2) Act consciously upon observed coincidences. If you consciously observe two people on crutches within a short space of time, it doesn't mean you will have an accident that results in you walking on crutches - rather it is a suggestion offered to you to be aware of the possibility of an accident occurring to you. 

There is a balance, between obsessively over-reacting to every possible manifestation of coincidence - and just outright ignoring this phenomenon. Seeking coincidences where there are none is as dangerous as dismissing coincidences that you do become conscious of. As I wrote two and half years ago, "don't go out of your way to look for coincidences; but when you do notice them - don't ignore them!"

The effect is weak but noticeable over the long term. But it will grow in strength as we evolve spiritually. Consciously observed coincidences can be a powerful set of signals to point daily life in the right direction.

This time last year:
Personal reflections upon the death of Queen Elizabeth II

This time four years ago
Best sandwich ever

This time five years ago:
Pictures of Warsaw

This time  eight years ago:
Scotland's independence referendum looms

This time 11 years ago:
Summer comes crashing to a halt

This time 12 years ago:
The atmosphere of impending autumn - Mono no aware

This time 13 years ago:
Time to recycle.

This time 16 years ago:
Coal train running

Do less. Seriously.

Am I promoting laziness? I am and I'm not. I'm certainly in favour of cutting right back on mindless activities - activities that add no value, nor preserve value; and particularly cut back on activities that damage the environment (even by one eight-billionth of a percent).

I take as my starting point for today's post an article in this week's The Economist (here, but behind paywall), entitled The best bosses know how to subtract work. We may have an innate inclination towards laziness but: "doing less goes against the grain in many ways - one is how humans are wired." The piece quotes a study, published in Nature in 2021, in which people were asked to think of ways to improve something, revealed that without an explicit prompt to think about subtraction, participants would tend to add features rather than taking them away.

On the działka, it's easy for me to find things to do; indeed there's too much. And so I focus on the Important and Urgent (as I wrote the other day), paring down those activities which are neither. Exercise is important; were I to stop doing my daily sets, I would be inviting health issues further on up the road. Cleanliness and personal hygiene is important for the same reason; but spending too much time and effort on press-ups and polishing also needs to be avoided. And don't mow lawns!

The article ends with the following exhortation to corporate leaders:

Add value. Do less. ■

It's not just CEOs who need to follow this - it's all of us. 

Do less. Buy less. Consume less. Waste less. Eat less meat. Eat less sugar (well, no sugar, really). Expect less (of the material stuff). Walk more. Think more. Do all the above, and you can expect more simplicity - and more joy - from life. Below: graffiti from a wall in Kraków, late November 2019. (Ulica Smocza 10 - indeed you can see it on Google Maps Street View.)

That is all.

This time last year:
Nothing but trees and sunshine

This time two years ago:

The year has achieved fruition

This time three years ago:
Jabłkowizna!

This time eight years ago:
Low water level - Jeziorki lakes

This time nine years ago:
Around the Czachówek diamond, again

This time 12 years ago:
Second line of the Metro runs into delays

This time 13 years ago
Army helicopters in action at Kielce defence show

This time 14 years ago:
World's largest helicopter over Jeziorki

Retrocausality and the Goneself

If you are into Possibilianism, consider this scenario: rather than incarnating from a historic past life into this present life and then on into some future life - you reincarnate into the same time and same place, over and over again. Each time you grow in terms of spiritual evolution.

In such a scenario, there was no past before your birth, there will be no future after your death - just an endless loop of lives lived that span the 20th and 21st centuries. But each version in which you participate will become incrementally better and better, tending towards a perfect future, that's always just an eternity away. 

Imagine being born again as you, to your parents, only they are just happen to be ever so slightly wiser. Everything in this new iteration of the life you currently live will be an improvement; there's less anger, aggression and violence. You have better teachers, better food. And there's a better environment - with greater ecological awareness in more people's mindset and habits. A kinder, happier, healthier world. One notch up. And so on, and so on, into infinity. From the mid-20th to the mid-21st centuries, over and over and over again. Your consciousness never experiences the late-21st century; nor will you ever get to peek into the 22nd century. And why ever not?

I woke up for a wee at 04:30; just as I was dropping off, the words { messaging information... } appeared in my mind - not as an auditory hallucination, just a telepathic signal that I could not ignore. I dropped off to wake up at 06:30 to receive the words { ...to the goneself.} The gone self; the self that has gone. 

But which self? The ego or the consciousness? The material self or the spiritual self?

The spiritual self doesn't go. It is eternal. Ask yourself the question - who you'd have been had your parents never met? The biological you is a product of that pairing, shaped also by the environment in which you grew up and in which you live. Your consciousness would have been in a different biological form had your parents never met - but it would still be around.

So the goneself is a previous biological self. But messaging information to it?

My intuition, based on a lifetime's anomalous qualia memory events, leads me to believe that the goneself is now historical. That guy born around 1920, died in 1957, lived in the US; my canonical past-life dreams place him growing up around Kentucky or Ohio, taking part in the Pacific War as a mechanic in the US Marine Corp, re-enlisting in the USAF around the time of the Korean War, then working for a private corporation developing, making and selling military equipment. Died in a motorcycle accident (preventable had a helmet been worn, had that corner been taken more slowly, had beers not been consumed beforehand, had there not been an early frost that night).

What { information } could I { message } to my { goneself? } It can only be transmitted in the interstices between being awake and slipping into sleep... A message should be prepared - a warning, maybe? But wouldn't that change history, removing my consciousness from my current body, giving it several more decades in the past one?

Or does { messaging information to the goneself } prove the existence of parallel universes?

One for me to ponder on.

This time last year:
Many Machcins

This time four years ago:
The Long Dark Half-Hour of the Consumerist Soul

This time five years ago:

Early-September travel news

This time six years ago:
Fields filling up with houses

This time 13 years ago:
Battle of Britain: Poland's contribution

This time 14 years ago:
Sewer under ul. Karczunkowska

The Unbearable Pleasance of Flashedback Familiarity

On the train to town this morning, a family boards at Nowa Iwiczna and sits across the aisle from me. Mum and dad, son and daughter. Along with them, a smell - a blend of suntan oil, perfume and stale tobacco - wafted from their clothes. I'm looking the other way, out of the window at the blue sky over the passing fields between Dawidy and Okęcie, and I'm also conscious of the smell. It's familiar. It flashes me back to summer holidays in Stella-Plage, Northern France in the 1970s.

Instantly I'm hit by a deep yearning to return there, to experience that precise moment once again. 

This is a typical triggered qualia flashback in which a sensory stimulus sets off a memory of a past conscious experience. The other forms of qualia flashback are the bidden one (where I can conjure up a memory of a past conscious experience), and the spontaneous one – the rarest – which out of the blue serves me up a qualia memory, despite a lack of stimuli or willing it into existence.

These sharp pangs of nostalgia are always pleasant, bringing me through their very familiarity deep joy and comfort; yet they are tinged with the frustration of knowing that the qualia once experienced and remembered cannot be returned to. All that can be re-experienced is a congruent simulacrum of that exact original qualia moment. 

And when that qualia memory happens, it needs to be savoured; rolled around in the mind for a while before it evaporates (though this time, that lingering smell helped keep it it there longer). Unbidden and untriggered qualia memories are the most ephemeral – I love the moment when I can catch the original experience, and say to myself – "ah, that's _______" - and pin down precisely where and when the experience was felt.

[It is important to note that qualia memories are different to memories of specific events. Qualia memories refer back to the conscious feeling of experience, of being there, rather than a sequence of things that happened, or were said.]

Later today, in the evening, out for a walk in Jakubowizna, I had another flashback - but this was not from this life, one of those anomalous qualia memories - xenomnesia or exomnesia - just as pleasantly familiar, but seemingly related to 1950s America. Certainly nothing from my West London youth. These are most likely happen most when the sky is clear, the sun bright, and around the changes of the seasons. Landscapes also seem to be a factor. I have them more often around Jakubowizna than in Jeziorki; I have them far more often than I used to when living in London.

The anomalous qualia memories are less frequent but no less intense as the ones I can put my finger on. How they happen is beyond me; I have written before that the vectors which convey exomnesia could be quantum in nature, or electromagnetic radiation, or carry through DNA (atavistic resurgence), or passed through gut flora – I just don't know. I am, however, aware that I have experienced this phenomenon since childhood, and seeking an answer to this is something that keeps me going.

"But when you get right down to it, don't you want to relive this moment again? All over again, all over again, just live it again..."

"Let's get together and do it again..."

"Can I take you back there, can I take you back..."

This time last year:
The imperceptible end of summer

This time two years ago:

Another new bus stop for ul. Karczunkowska

This time three years ago:
Energy, focus and state of mind

This time four years ago:

50 years on - Gunnersbury Grammar school reunion

This time six years ago:
All things visible and invisible

This time eight years ago:
Work starts on Warsaw-Radom rail modernisation

This time nine years ago:
Won't be long 'til summertime is through

This time 11 years ago:
It was a good year for the apples

This time 13 years ago:
Early-September moan about the commuting