Phronema

I was struck this morning during meditation by how incredibly active the mind is. It seems almost impossible to stop the inner dialogue, the jumping from association to association, the articulation of feelings, thoughts and moods. Habituation with breathing, or mantra occurs within seconds, it seems like. Running through everything is an undercurrent of thought, ‘What am I doing? Where is this taking me? Is there a God? Is there anything other than me?’ This morning I was sharply aware of the need to stop all this, simply to be aware of the breathing, the external sounds, my body sitting on the chair. Thinking involves energy, it involves emotions which use up vast amounts of energy. I longed simply to be still, simply to be. In spite of this the 45 minutes went very quickly. Presumably I will get better at detecting the inception of thoughts, the first syllables of inner articulation and become a detached observer of moods. It’s a question of getting out of the head and into the body, of being aware – just that, no more.

It occurs to me that ‘being aware’ is to be in the ‘betweenness’ of mind and body, of the mind and outside the mind, of the mind and feelings, of the body and outside the body. I was going to say, ‘of me and God’ but God is not an object, or even a person, with whom it is possible to have a relationship. God is ‘betweenness’ itself, though ‘betweenness’ does not exhaust what it is to be God. God is Other, but this Other, as Augustine said is ‘intimior mei meo’.

Apart from Pure Land Buddhism, in which the Amtabha Buddha is seen as a kind of semi-divine saviour, Buddhism does not go in for petitionary prayer. Christians cry out de profundis. They cry to God to intervene in their particular cases. This childlike attitude – unless you become as little children – goes back to Old Testament attitudes of making a bargain with God, a covenant. Rather contradictory this, because a covenant requires at least a degree of equality between the parties – but then the Bible is full of contradictions and inconsistencies and the last thing to expect is a clear logical progression running through it. It is, after all, a record of the experiences of many different people with different worldviews at different times. But there is a felt need, and this explains why it emerged in Pure Land Buddhism, in the face of the powerlessness and contingency of existence to cry out for help. It may be comforting to do this but it is not very helpful in coming to know the real nature of things, in coming to know Ultimate Reality. In this context I cannot forget the story of the old Jewish rabbi in the line of prisoners shuffling along to the gas chambers during the holocaust. Suddenly he broke away from the line and looking upwards shouted out, ‘Oh God, how can you let this happen to your people?’ For a long drawn out moment everything seemed to stand still. There was silence. The shuffling line stopped. The guards looked on warily. And then the old man’s shoulders sank and all the life and energy seemed to go out of him. He went back into the line shaking his head saying, ‘There is no God.’

Poor man. All his life he had believed and lived his religion. As a rabbi it was his life’s work to teach others and to lead them in their prayers to God. It gave meaning to his life and to the lives of his congregation. But now, all that he had lived for and believed in crumbled away to nothing. The Covenant did not save him. His prayers were not answered. He was forced to come to the appalling conclusion – the God he believed in did not exist. The terrible crime of the Nazis was not killing his body. They destroyed his faith, his hope, his soul.

Buddhism goes to the root of the matter. It asks, ‘Who am I? Why am I suffering? How can I get out of this intolerable situation?’ These are existential questions that go to the heart of the nature of reality. Christianity asks these questions too but it also answers them, answers that have been handed down and which have to be accepted on faith. This is fine until we find ourselves, like the old rabbi, crying out in desperation and the only answer is an empty silence. This is the point where Christianity falters, at least for many people. It is also the point where Buddhism begins. It says, ‘Don’t shy away from the emptiness and the silence. Go into the emptiness and the silence and there you will find the answers.’

The temptation is to think that this phenomenal world is what is really there, to give it permanence, to look to it for security. But when you draw back from it, when you enter the emptiness and the silence and hold yourself there, just looking, you begin to see that it is as ephemeral as the ruffled surface of a pond touched by the wind. Everything really is empty (sunyata), all those things we attach such importance to, even ourselves. It can be scary, frightening even, standing on the edge of emptiness. It is not easy to get to it. It is less easy to hold oneself there. We will all have to do it at the moment of death. I want to do it now. It is being on the edge, looking at the horizon of existence itself. The horizon only becomes visible when we have begun to see beyond it. I want to know what lies beyond, if that is possible. Only then will I begin to know what it means to be human and what it is possible to become.

Why is Buddhism so insistent on anatta? Why are Christians, and indeed all religions, so insistent that selfishness is not a good thing? The answer must lie in the nature of the person and in the nature of reality itself. There is so much here that needs to be thought out.

First, as humans we are social beings. What is born is a living body with the potential to become a person. We are made persons as a result of the social interactions of our families with us and our interactions with the surrounding milieu. How good a job is made of making us persons depends on the quality of these contacts. The more loving, the more they give, and the more we are allowed to grow. We are easily damaged and stunted by rejection, indifference and exploitation. Therefore what exists is not an ‘I’ with a right to claim priority for itself over all others, or even some others. What exists is not an independent individual in total possession off itself.

What exists is an amalgam of relationships. A person is a dynamic nexus of interacting relationships not something whole and complete in itself. This applies to everything in fact. There is nothing which is independently self-existing. Everything is what it is a) because of the relationships of its component elements, and b) because of its relationship to everything else in the scheme of things. This is what Buddhists mean by everything being empty.

This applies to our physical bodies; it also applies to us as persons. We are persons only in that we relate to other persons. So when a person acts selfishly, putting himself before others without taking account of their rights, needs, or feelings, he is denying the fundamental reality that he is part of them and that they are part of him. By diminishing them he is diminishing himself. By hurting them he is hurting himself.

Secondly, it goes deeper than this. Empirical reality is only the tip of the iceberg and the beneath-the-surface dimension cannot be ignored. Our first awareness is of sensation and out of the sensations the empirical world emerges. It imposes itself on us through our senses. We become aware of rough and smooth, hunger and satiety, pain and pleasure, light and dark. We become aware of noises and shapes and then the noises and shapes become speech and faces and I become me, and I responds to you, and the world is no longer part of me and becomes an it. A gulf appears between me and not-me. The process of individuation has begun.

What I do not realise is that the gulf is a mental construct. My mind has created the gulf, that distinction between me and not-me. But in reality there is no gulf, there is no separation. In a way we are like trees. When we look at a tree we tend to see only that which is above the ground. We do not see the network of roots, as extensive as that of the branches. We do not see the transpiration of the leaves, the action of photosynthesis, or the absorption of water and minerals by the roots. We do not see the tree as a source of life, an environment, a habitat for a multitude of other creatures. We see a static object. We do not see a dynamic organism part of and interacting with its environment.

Similarly when we look at ourselves we see actors playing out roles on the stage of the world. We think that we are no more part of the stage and the scenery than are actors in a theatre, that we are no more linked to each other than are the players brought together by the selection process of the theatre company. We see ourselves as self-contained individuals. Such a view is even more wrong than the view of a tree as a static object. Like trees we emerge onto the surface of conscious and empirical reality from roots that are plunged deep into the fabric of Being. Only when we become aware of our roots will we begin to understand what it is to be.

D. W. Mann has this to say

With bodily birth the self is born. The universe of self-experience comes into being through the severance act of birth. But the resultant separateness, which I have said lies at the heart of the self-experience, is from a biophysical perspective more illusory than real. While the body lives, it remains a standing wave of active earth, gathered and propelled by the happenstance channeling of genes into an amnesic emissary from the mineral world. We are of earth but not within it, moving ever so slightly beyond it but always in its outstretched stream, borrowing and returning, dust to dust. Into this fabric each of us weaves, from earth, through man and woman, man into woman, out of woman aloft into life, and finally back into earth, our single stitch of life. The generations quit the earth, like ragged seams. In all but ecstatic moments we feel separate, but in physical fact our bodies join us to the earth, to one another, and to the seemingly separate universe that envelopes us.
Mann D.W., A Simple Theory of the Self, W.W. Norton, New York, 1994 p.42f

And he is only talking about ‘physical fact’. If only we could be aware of the beneath-the-surface dimension. If only we could be aware of the pattern woven by our single stitches.

There is an old story about a group of ancient Greeks, a group of mercenaries known as the Ten Thousand. They were part of Cyrus’ army when he was defeated at the battle of Cunaxa on the Euphrates by the Persian King Artaxerxes. They were led by the Athenian general and historian Xenophon. For months they struggled through hostile lands and over alien mountains, despairing sometimes of ever seeing home again. Until, at long last, on scaling the last mountain they saw, in the distance, the Black Sea. And a great cry went up, “Thalassa, thalassa.” (The sea, the sea.) They were as good as home.

I remember once in the American Mid-west looking around me and thinking – go for a thousand miles in any direction and you still will not reach the sea. For someone born and bred within yards of the Atlantic it was a very claustrophobic feeling. For me, as for the ancient Greeks, to be by the shores of the sea was to be in touch with home. The waters that lapped the eastern shores of America were the same waters that surged round the shores of Europe.

To be in the now is like being at sea, the same sea that touches simultaneously every coast in the world. To be present to this moment now is to be in the same now, the same present moment, of every single person. It may be the only thing we share, but share it we do. Many, perhaps most others, are not present there with us. They are, perhaps, wandering the alien mountains of the mind, or captured by fantasies, or enthralled by dreams, or preoccupied with their obsessions and compulsions, infatuated with money, or sex, or power, or just drifting. But for many this now is real, unforgettable, palpable reality. It may be raw and bleeding; it may be ecstatically happy; it may be of the utmost significance, but whatever it is, it is unmistakably real. This is the now that we share, whether we realise it or not. This is the now which is pregnant with possibilities. It is the fulcrum on which we move our lives.

But some, very many people, are imprisoned in this now by suffering, by pain, anguish, grief. If they could escape from it of course they would, but such is the centripetal effect of suffering that it draws all our attention, all our energy, away from wider perspectives into the affliction from which there is no escaping. For many more of us our awareness of these people in this now which we all share — that they are hurting, that they are in despair, that they are facing torment and death — this awareness is distressing. We feel for them. We would, if we could, help them, but we feel so powerless.

Tibetans have a practice they call Tonglen. It is a form of breathing meditation, a way of exercising compassion. Compassion means, literally, to suffer with. As one breaths in one breaths in all the pain, anguish and suffering of those with whom we share this present moment. As one breaths out one breaths out peace, gentleness and love. We may be separated by thousands of miles but we are all linked by this present moment now. We are linked by our common humanity. We are linked by the Spirit who lives and breaths in us and comes to the aid of our weakness. In this now we all touch Reality.

I am reading a book about Zen meditation by Elaine MacInnes which is very helpful, especially in its insistence on being in the body in the present moment. Only this is real. The past does not exist, nor the future; only the present moment. If one is to become aware of Reality it can only happen in the present moment. One of the reasons why falling in love is such an exhilarating experience is because when one is with ones lover one is wholly in the now, in the present moment. All the senses are absorbed by her, her beauty, the music of her laugh, the shape of her, the texture of her skin, her smell. Past and future no longer matter. All that matters is this magic now when all ones senses are captivated by this object of every desire and the prospect of possessing her, of being oned with her.

However, such an experience can so dominate the attention that all perspective is lost. Meditation allows us to place some distance from the attention and objects of desire. In meditation there is no object of desire. There is no object. Dualism runs right to the heart of the psyche; mind-body, body-soul, subject-object, I-Thou. Sartre describes the tyranny of The Other seen as a constant threat to the ego, which is tender and diminutive, hesitant to reveal itself lest it be dominated by, or worse, rejected by the other. And yet, paradoxically, the longing to annihilate this rift runs equally deep. Hence the desire to possess the other if possible. Failing that to overcome or annihilate the other. Failing that the only recourse is into a private stronghold, walled and barred against the outside. The experience of enlightenment, on the other hand, is that there are not two. There is neither ego, nor other. Tat tvam asi. That art thou.

The trouble when one gets to my age, especially if they have a health problem which makes them aware of impending mortality, is that they become aware of all the things they have not done and of the things they have done but now no longer can. The imagination becomes filled with regretful nostalgia, wishful ‘if only’, and a longing to be able to live dozens of lives so that one could do all the things one desires. But it is not to be. I can see how this could generate bitterness and mordant regrets. I can see why the idea of reincarnation might be very attractive, if only one could carry over memories from life to life. But all this is due to a failure to understand what the process of life is, where it leads and what it means.

Life is not about experiencing for the sake of experience, nor about savouring and enjoying the new, the exciting, the exotic. Nor is life about cultivating the ego, expanding and embellishing it so that it can stand on its own in an alien universe. Life is about love. Only love can annihilate the gap between the ego and the other and make the two one without diminishing either. On the contrary. This is why love is at the heart of all religions.

Descartes was right in a way in assuming a split between mind and body. Though I think the split is not so much between mind and body as between being in a world of fantasy and ratiocination and being a physical and mental unity of awareness. Zen meditation is concerned, I think, with getting back to that original awareness before self-awareness allowed us to construct a mental world of fantasy and concepts, of day-dreams and wishful projections. We live too much in the head and the mind is a cork bobbing on a sea of emotions, feelings and moods. Meditation helps us to get out of the head and to be fully in the now so that we are physically present in our actions and not, as so often, miles away.

But why should inhabiting the now be so important? Why should one go through years of discipline and long hours of meditation simply to be fully present to oneself? Part of the answer is that only the now exists and our actions and reactions can only take place in the now. Too often the remembered past and the imagined future colour, distort even, our perceptions and determine our actions. To live in the now is to be fully present to oneself, to the others we meet, to the world we inhabit. It is also, though I haven’t quite worked out why, to be aware of the limits of existence and therefore of the transcendent.

In a sense, the fantasy world of the mind is a timeless world. The past and the future can be made present at will and the present can be made to disappear. Being timeless there can be no progress. The process of becoming is held in abeyance. It is a sterile place. The world of the now is a world that is constantly becoming, a world of a multitude of possibilities. It is not closed in on itself but open. It is open to and aware of the stream of life, open to the kaleidoscope of nature, to the actions and interactions of others, to being. Being in the now is not the total absorption in a task, or an activity, or a sensation, so that one is hardly aware of anything else. Being in the now is to be present to the now and, at the same time, present to all that is going on within and without.

(MacInnes, E; Light Sitting in Light: A Christian’s Experience of Zen, Fount, London 1996)

I have been reading about Padre Pio. It struck me that he was a throwback to a fathers-of-the-desert type of spirituality. He had a fuga mundi attitude and a preoccupation with extreme forms of ascesis (vigils, the discipline etc.). He wrestled with demons who used to smash up his cell and throw things at him. He had many preternatural gifts, stigmata, perfume, bilocation. He was not at all what you could call a psychologically well-balanced person. Now it is interesting thing that in the middle of the twentieth century he could become an icon of holiness alongside Mother Teresa. She had a universal appeal. Padre Pio attracted the more conservative Catholic signs-and-wonders brigade.

The interesting thing in all this is the perception by many that the supernatural dimension is filled with good and bad spirits, that there is constant warfare between them and that we mortal humans are caught up in this war. It is easy to stereotype good and evil, both people and our own internal feelings, and paint them large on a cosmic canvas. People are hungry for signs and wonders. It is all too easy to exaggerate internal struggles and project them outwards. It is also only too easy to blame forces beyond one’s control for one’s own failings and it is comforting and reassuring to have the protection of spiritual amulets and talismans.

All this assumes a worldview which is two-dimensional, the natural and the supernatural. Between the two is an, almost, unbridgeable gulf. From time to time messengers, angels, are sent to communicate important information. These are received by a few select people. There are also special people who are granted visions and mystical knowledge. Again these are few and select. For the vast majority the natural world is the domain of our experience and the only knowledge we have of the supernatural is second hand. Hence the importance of the Church. It is the guardian and guarantor of what has been revealed. It is the administrator of the Sacraments. These are natural things, oil, water, bread and wine, which, when used with the proper rituals, communicate supernatural grace to individuals; essential if, after death, one is to achieve eternal bliss in Heaven. This supernatural grace is not usually experienced, only by mystics and other spiritual giants. But, if it is to be received, it has to be believed in. Faith is essential for salvation. Hence the importance of people like Padre Pio, and the children of Fatima, and all the other people whose experiences and visions bolster this worldview and reinforce faith.

This is not, however, the only worldview and the more one examines it the more this becomes clear. According to the Religious Experience Research Unit, formerly at Oxford, now at University of Wales, Lampeter, perhaps as many as 60% of people have religious experiences of one kind or another at some time in their lives. These are not limited to believers or church-goers. This should not be a surprising statistic if we accept what the Bible says, that we are made ‘in the image and likeness of God’. There must, therefore, be something of God in us, naturally. These experiences are varied but there is a common theme running through the majority and that is of unity, what David Hay calls relational awareness. For most ‘primitive’ people – American Indians, Australian aborigines – the natural world is shot through with the supernatural. These are not two separate dimensions but rather two aspects of the same. Both Hinduism and Buddhism hold that there is only one reality. For most people the view of this reality is distorted by ignorance, or by maya, the illusion that the ephemeral and transitory are real and permanent. For both these religions the purpose of religion is to help people become aware of and pierce the hidden assumptions which blind them to reality as it really is. Not easy.

Yesterday was a glorious day, warm and sunny. I went for a long walk down the field at the back and along the sea wall. The tide was almost in, very still, with barely a ripple on the water. Just a few noisy seagulls feeding and the silence, which was almost palpable. I keep coming back to this search for the ground of being, for God, for want of a better word. I have touched it once or twice in the past, twice – both very different and yet, not dissimilar. Krisnamurti says that if we can give an answer to the question – what is it we are searching for? – then it is clear we are not searching for something new, but only for something old, something we can recognise. At this point the language of logic and rational thought falls away. No, I do not know what it is that I am searching for and yet I know I will recognise it when I find it. It will be new, new to me, and yet, I will know that I have always known it.

How can I say these things? They do not make sense, not in a logical sense. Yet the nature of reality cannot fully be described in either logical or mathematical terms. Walking on down to the beach – the tide was almost full, the sea very calm, with the faintest of breezes. There were two white-sailed yachts far out. It was very beautiful and peaceful. Coming on to the beach, with the bright sun on the water and the sound of the wavelets was, in a sense, an arrival, a terminus. The symbolism of the sea is very powerful and it makes an impact at many levels. How is it one can sit and watch the sea for hours? Why does the sound of water have such a calming, soothing effect? The sea speaks to the depths.

It just struck me that the whole point of prayer is to become present to God. To be present to someone is to have one’s attention focussed on them. Once our attention is focussed elsewhere then they are no longer present to us.

I still wonder at our anthropomorphic way of understanding and speaking about God – though I shouldn’t really – it is what comes naturally. But it still surprises me when it comes from people who are professionally religious, like monks and nuns. “This is where God wants you to be… It’s God’s will… etc.” I feel more and more uncomfortable with this idea of God, someone who has specific plans and wishes for each person. Thinking in this way is a roundabout way of justifying whatever it is that we want to do, or whatever it is that happens to us. God no more has specific plans for us than a parent has for his grown up children – other than a general desire that they should be happy and fulfilled in whatever they choose to do. The idea that God wants to determine us in all the little details of living does not fit easily with our perception of ourselves as free and self-determining. If we are made in the image and likeness of God and if God loves us as we are, then God’s relationship to us is not that of a parent to a young child. Maybe this is a clue as to why people persist in thinking of God in this way – a nostalgia for the innocent and uncomplicated relationships of childhood.

I keep coming back to the idea that a new Gospel or ideal is needed. It was interesting reading recently that Graham Greene was riling against the lack of any spirituality or ideals in the average English person in the 1930’s. Walking through — on a Saturday afternoon is not an uplifting experience. I go in sometimes because I have to. Many seem to spend most of their Saturday wandering around the shops and market in a sort of purposeless way and without displaying any great joy or enthusiasm.

Whatever the new Gospel is it must be one of action. There is a very interesting chapter in Hayward and Varela’s book, Gentle Bridges by Livingstone on the development of the brain. The nervous system, he says, is built for action. The action consists of motility, which has three categories: visceration, expression and effectuation. The last ties in very well with Marx’s idea that it is through work that we make ourselves what we are. We are above all social beings, made so by our extended childhood which allows the impartation of culture. The new ideal, or perhaps old one rediscovered, must build on what we are and try to correct what is happening in modern society.

Extended childhood is for the communication of culture and a meaning system. The more I think about it the more it appears that the very early and almost constant exposure to the media and the sort of pop culture it imparts is damaging to say the least.

a) We live in a pluralist society. Most children do not identify with any particular culture except in a minimalist way. In fact many are adept at being one thing at home, another with their peers and another at school.

b) Identity is bound up with fashions, clothes, possessions and peer group rather than family, goals, or ideals.

c) The only alternatives on offer seem to be fundamentalist groupings of one kind or another.

d) The prevailing ethic is an individualistic one where the rights of the individual are considered to have priority over any social considerations.

The ideal must be about making society but not in one of the current fundamentalist ways. It must have a worldview which is modern, coherent, attractive and not so outré that it arouses disdain or derision; a worldview that is open to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans.

The new gospel must be experiential. The old religions are too much based on dogma and ideology and this is one of the reasons why they no longer appeal. The ideologies are seen to be hollow and the dogmas were formulated and are expressed in terms of an ancient worldview. Buddhism is experiential. It makes no dogmatic claims. It simply says, ‘Here is the problem. This is the solution. Try it and see for yourself.’ The witness of the Buddha and of those who have achieved peace and serenity are powerful testimonies. So it must be with the new gospel, as in the early days of the Christian era when they said, ‘See how these Christians love one another.’ At present the Church bears witness to faith, to dogma. There is no correlation between the lives of most Christians and the faith they profess. There are more Catholics in prison, for example, than any other denomination. The horrors in what was formerly Yugoslavia are, in part, due to two different groups of Christians.

I was thinking yesterday at Mass that we need a new Gospel. The Good News seems neither to be news nor particularly good any more. When you explain it to others there is no point in waiting for the jaw-dropping realisation to dawn. It won’t. Much more likely the reaction will be, ‘OK, so?’ Part of the problem, of course, is the fact that there are so few who have discovered the Pearl of Great Price and who live with the joy and unselfconscious generosity of spirit that characterise it. We need a new worldview and it needs to be proclaimed with conviction. Too many have been inoculated against Christianity by exposure to the attenuated strain found in this country. The old Christian cosmology lost the battle with the Newtonian version. Now that the Newtonian one is seen to be inadequate, at least by those with a little science, it does not follow that the Christian one is restored. We live in a vacuum, in that difficult in-between stage of the dialectic while we are waiting for a synthesis to emerge.

There are two areas where there is a desperate search going on. One is at the level of fundamental physics and it is the search for a Grand Unified Theory which would unite and, hopefully, explain the disparate laws and theories. The other is the search for the meaning of consciousness and self. What does it mean to be a human person? Is my existence, my life meaningful? Do I have a purpose in living, a goal to find and if so how do I go about it?

Newton and Freud shattered my simple belief that I was a soul living in a body which would one day depart for Heaven where all would be happiness and bliss for evermore. I must admit it was not just Newton and Freud. The older I get the more I realise that true happiness, moments of ecstasy and bliss, are more likely to occur in times of agony, doubt and turmoil than in times of leisure and tranquillity. I am not sure that I want eternal rest, or even that eternal rest is a true description of the next life, if there be such a thing.

No, I am sure that there is because I have experienced transcendence and glimpsed the Transcendent in some of those fleeting moments of true happiness. But this knowledge leaves me no wiser as to who I am, what my life is for, or where my true destiny lies. And if I who have spent a lifetime of reading, thinking, searching, praying and meditating have no answers what must it be like for others who are just at the beginning of their journey. I sometimes envy the certainty and conviction of others. I feel guilty at times that I do not stand up more and speak out with firmness and confidence. But I am not confident that my view is right, or any more right than that of others. That is not quite true. I seem to have gone beyond the ideological proclamations. I no longer accept the myths of Christianity as literal truth but as symbols and metaphors pointing at the Truth. I am reminded of the Kena Upanishad:

Who says the Spirit is not known knows; who claims that he knows, knows nothing. The ignorant think that the Spirit lies within knowledge, the wise man knows It beyond knowledge.

Not that I consider myself wise, far from it. However, it is seldom possible to talk about this with others. It would not be understood and so I drift among them trying to hang on to my integrity without upsetting theirs.

I think Christ was a most extraordinary man, A man who knew the Divine within himself and who wanted to show others that they too could come to know God. I think he was very like the Gautama in many ways, cultural differences apart. He wanted to communicate experience not dogma. Buddhism remained firmly rooted in experience but in Christianity dogma took over from, and became more important than, experience. We should be showing people by example how to find inner peace, how to live unselfishly, where true joy lies, but instead all energy goes into indoctrination, into outworn ideologies and the production of catechisms.

I sit on a beach in France writing and wondering what next to say. There is so much that is not sayable. The mind is full of a range of thoughts, images, sensations, feelings, moods and impressions. Many are so fleeting and ephemeral that to try to stop them and pin them down is to distort them. It is these which make up any particular experience, give it flavour, make it that particular reality and no other.
One can capture the gross details, the major parameters and these are true but only partly so. I am not sure that words can ever capture, certainly not the totality of an experience, but just those essential ingredients which give it its particularity. I can remember once by the sea when I was young and had aspirations to be a writer, trying to encapsulate a sunset in words. I never succeeded. And even if I had, to my own satisfaction, succeeded it is doubtful whether my particular words would have created in another’s mind what they meant for me. It is in this that the artistry of writing lies, poetry especially, in being able to communicate something of a particular experience to another.

After all, many percepts coming from ‘outside’ are not percepts of enduring things at all. They are shadows and reflections, they are smears of milk and dust that may be wiped away, vanishing effectively for ever . They are things that burn or dissolve before our eyes.
(Donaldson M., Human Minds, Allen Lane, London 1992 p. 37)

And so I sit here at a loss. I no longer have the burning desire to capture in words the ephemera of this moment. Then, when I was young, I think it was partly insecurity – not knowing what life was, or even myself. Hence the urge to capture the fleeting moment in order to give it solidity and, somehow, prolong a reality and a dynamic over which I had no control. I was powerless. The only power I had, if I could obtain and master it, was to capture the fleeting moment, enclose it in words, which could then at will be opened any time in the future to realise the experience again. Now I know that is not possible and that it is based on a distorted view of reality. Reality is not fixed, not concrete, not based on something solid and substantial. Reality is constant flux, a dynamic process and it is the process which is ultimately real and not the things which are forever emerging from it and being absorbed back into it.

Hence the emptiness. Things are empty and insubstantial. They are moments. They are the individual notes which emerge in the playing of the music of the dance. The knack is not to fixate on any particular note, or series of notes, but to listen to the music. Only if one can hear the music can one join the dance. Most people not only do not hear the music, they are not even aware that reality is the music, the dance. Hence they can make only noise, a dreadful cacophony, though there are some who play beautifully even though they may not be aware of it. Next to me is a French couple with two daughters – one very severely brain damaged. The love and care they give her, their patience and gentleness, is a very pure note in our discordant world. Sometimes very old people, or those who are severely handicapped, are ugly and painful to look at and many, children especially, turn away in horror and revulsion. But it is important not to look just at the individual but at the whole process which surrounds them. This is often a beautiful one filled with love, care, compassion and a shining commitment.

But how does one begin to hear the music? And how does one identify the melody among all the disharmonies and counter medleys? And if one can succeed in identifying the music how does one teach others to hear? And so I am not trying to capture this now. I am listening and all I hear, under the surge of the sea, is silence. It is in the silence that the music is heard, but so often we are afraid of silence. It is in the emptiness that one touches the Real, but we are so afraid of vertigo that we cling to things.