Study the Self to know the self to forget the self.

“To study the Self is to Forget the self”

- Dogen

“Gnothi seauton - know thyself”

- Ancient Greek motto

A while back I had a kind of epiphany: not an intellectual one - it was intuitive - like getting a joke. I had been re-reading some Bertrand Russell, and was thinking to myself that one of the main themes in his Conquest Of Happiness, is to lose the sense of self. Russell was a philosopher: a professional thinker; someone who suffered at times from prison that is the self or the Ego. Quite a few times in his book he stresses the importance of letting go of one’s anxieties, one’s ego, one’s obsession with thinking. As I was contemplating this I remembered a phrase I had read in Zen Mind beginner’s Mind: “to study the self is to forget the self”. I saw that, in many ways, both men’s projects for happiness: abit very different as to means; are, in their ends, rather similar.

It is something of a paradox: the paradox of individualism. Both Russell: representing Humanism; the Stoics such as Epictetus and Aurelius; Zen Buddhism such as Dogen, Suzuki; all, doctrinally stress the importance of individual development, restraining the ego, and promoting wellbeing. I recognise of course that this is a somewhat broad and idiosyncratic representation
of all these systems of thought; they, however, contrast markedly with Islam, Christianity or Communism and Fascism - all laying stress on the individual conforming to the group and submitting their interests to it - to the collective.

Individualism in this sense differs from what can be called Egoism. I had this distinction clarified for me by Karl Popper in his book: Open Society and its Enemies. Egoism - can best be grasped by example - the kind of “Aristocratic” selfish, cruel, and violent individualism of a Nietzsche or a Byron. Altruistic individualism on the other hand sees the individual as a free agent, who keeps his independent mind, yet helps others, and integrates himself as part of a larger whole. The example of the Buddha, Socrates and Jesus attest to this altruistic individualism.

“Find something greater than you are and surrender yourself to it”

- Dan Dennett

In meditation practice you sit and notice the Self; you notice all the vain, useless and selfish thoughts that whirl into focus then drift out. Meditation practice, as I have wrote, is a kind of mental discipline, its also like mental weeding: a process by which you break down all the barriers and barricades that separate you from other people, that keep you wrapped up in the prison of the self. Joko Beck has a illuminating analogy were she compares the gradual practice of meditation to melting ice cubes. The cube, at first, is cold, sharp and impenetrable. It keeps people from connecting; when two people (or cubes) collide - chaos and anger ensures. Meditation then, is a heat that melts the cube, that frees people - this is why perhaps, contemplative practice is often called a liberating experience. Indeed, the vow of the Bodhisattva: “I vow to liberate all beings, without number”, express this sentiment well. Bertrand Russell, who did have a admiration for certain aspects of Mysticism, did not meditate of course; but he sought similar states of attention through love; through work; through hill climbing and many other activities. He ends his gem of a book: Conquest of Happiness, with this, marvellous little peroration.

“In fact the whole antithesis between self and the rest of the world, which is implied in the doctrine of self-denial, disappears as soon as we have any genuine interest in persons or things outside ourselves. Through such interests a man comes to feel himself part of the stream, of life, not a hard separate entity like a billiard-ball, which can have no relation with other such entities except that of collocation. All unhappiness depends upon some kind of disintegration or lack or integration; there is disintegration within the self through lack of co-ordination between the conscious and the unconscious mind; there is lack of integration between the self and society where the two are not knit together by the force of objective interests and affections. The happy man is the man who does not suffer from either of these failures of unity, whose personality is neither divides against itself nor pitted against the world. Such a man feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely the spectacle that it offers and the joys that if affords, untroubled by the thought of death because he feels himself not really separate from those who will come after him. It is in such profound instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to be found.”

Best

Mike.

Neuroscience, meditation and mind.

Check out this interesting podcast from Upaya Zen centre, on the mind, neuroscience, meditation and relationships. It is described thus-

“Psychiatrist, researcher, therapist and author Dan Siegel says there is a deep truth to the question, “Who are we?” If the brain is a social organ, as Dan’s research and clinical experience show, then what does “I” mean? It takes the practice of mindfulness to dissolve the delusion of the “I” that separates and makes disharmony out of our experience. We can use the mind to change the brain.”


http://www.upaya.org/dharma/mindsight-and-personal-transformation/

Do Not Dwell or Be Introverted. Project Eudemonia, Principle Five.

The famous story of Buridan's Ass- a poor old donkey, who starved to death because he could not decide which bale of straw to eat as they were both identical. I have a friend, who can on a whim, spend hundreds of pounds on electronic equipment, yet frets over which bar of chocolate to buy in the local shop. I, myself, spend far too much time attempting to decide what to have for dinner, rather than attend to the more important matters, such as the eternally pressing questions of philosophy or what to do at the weekend.

The relevance here of this fable to the topic I am currently discussing, is how wasteful, and unproductive much of our thinking is, especially when it takes the form of brooding, worrying, introspection. While my above examples are somewhat comical, there is nothing funny about being wracked with chronic indecision and worry about the more existential topics, such as death, love, money, purpose, family, friends, etc etc. Yet, even more for an obsessive thinker like myself, I would have to seriously question the value of applying all the rigour and laser like critical attention to myself and my problems. In my view, I think it is not only wasteful, but harmful, in that one is left in a worse state of mind than before.

What is to be done then? I will be discussing practical thinking in a later blog. In the meantime, however, I would like to mention two things that I have learned from Zen practice. In many ways the spirit of Zen could be neatly described as “just do it”. Charlotte Joko Beck states that “practice” (mindful attention) “is simply maintaining awareness of our activities and also of the thoughts that separate us from them.” The result of such mindfulness, would be a mind liberated from the paralyzing effects of obsessive thinking. You live in the Zen way, you live your live like making the "Zen cup of tea.” You are present in your experience, you observe and notice all the sensations and perceptions, internal and external, that arise, but, you do not become mired, caught, and lost in thought. Your activities become effortless, there is no worry, it’s as simple, as making, a cup of tea.

Best

Mike

Don’t Believe Your Thoughts. Project Eudemonia Part Two: The Second Principle.

Don’t believe your thoughts, is a Zen quote, that comes up time and again in the discourse of meditation. I cannot find the origins of the quote, however it probably traces back to an ancient master, maybe even Bodidarma

This neatly dovetails with the last principle I blogged on, “All is as thinking makes it so.” While the kernel of that principle recognises the fact that we can “direct the mind” as Marcus Aurelius might say, (we can view events and experiences positively, negatively, or indifferently) “don’t believe you thoughts” seems a more radical, sceptical principle.

Some qualification is needed here. What the quote means, is that when sitting in Zazen (meditation) or simply observing your mental experience, you will see that, thoughts, feelings, and judgements arise spontaneously and disappear. Thoughts start out like little seeds, at the periphery of our consciousness, they then become recognised, the seeds have now grown into weeds, more thoughts and judgments pour forth, they then envelop and entangle the mind like ivy, then we have emotional reactions to those thoughts and judgments. For example we remember someone at sometime criticizing us, either we believe what they say and get all upset about it, or we think how wrong that person is, and what all their faults are - why they are at fault etc etc. In the end we are caught up in a perpetual cycle of thought, reaction, judgment, emotion, thought, reaction ad infinitum.

Not “believing” thoughts is simply to see them as impermanent, and insubstantial. When you calm the mind in meditation you are able to see, feel, understand, that thoughts or concepts just arise, and then just fade out. You are untroubled by them, you don’t “believe” or need to follow them up with more thinking, you simply observe the thought or judgement dispassionately, and let it go on its way.

The practice of meditation is not achieving a thought free state, but being able to break our emotional attachment to the thinking process. Freedom, like I said in my last post is being free from the opinions of ourselves and others; thought is not reality, there is the world as it is and the world as we want it to be. There is a disconnect here, a kind of ought and is fallacy, when we see this fact and henceforth integrate into our lives - we will experience the liberation of non-duality. That is to say - “you don’t believe your thoughts”.

All Is As Thinking Makes It So. Project Eudemonia: The First Principle.

““All is as thinking makes it so.” The retort made to Monimus the Cynic is clear enough: but clear too is the value of the saying, if one takes the kernel of it, as far as it is true.

“By This anticipation of Hamlet, Marcus (Aurelius) means that the nature and impact (for good or ill) of any external event or circumstance- all “indifferent” things - is determined solely by the rational judgement of it formed by the directing mind, not by the event itself. “Remove the judgement , and you have removed the thought “I am hurt, and the hurt itself is removed”: “If you remove your judgement of anything that seems painful, you yourself stand quite immune to pain.”

(Quoted from Mediations of Marcus Aurelius, translated by Martin Hammond, extract by Hammond.)

Stand back and objectively assess your experience, your consciousness, indeed, the entire terrain of mental life, you will find that your thoughts, judgments, opinions, are the cause of much unnecessary unhappiness and suffering. The ability to recognise this fact, and maintain a mindfulness of your thoughts - will allow you to remain free from the tumultuous vicissitudes of experience. This, is true freedom, a freedom from the opinion of others and from ourselves and our fantasies. This will allow ourselves to become less preoccupied with the ego, as Bertrand Russell and many others have pointed out, true happiness is largely built on a life less preoccupied with the self.

A Day in the City. Arguments, Thoughts and Opinions.

“Having a brain and not thinking is like having a hand without fingers.” Sam Harris.

“many people are walking around unwittingly with another’s ideas or memes in their head” Sue Blackmore.

“is this your idea man or is it someone else’s?” Krishnamurti.

“some people would sooner die than think” Bertrand Russell.

“the use of the intelligence and the critical faculties are inseparable from angst, conflict, doubt” Christopher Hitchens.

Thinking, argument and disputation is not useful but essential to progress. Not only as individuals but as a society and as a species. Is there though limits to thinking? To disputation? To the dialectical method? It is vital but is it always sufficient on all matters? Is there some questions, some problems or spiritual yearnings that lie beyond the scope of rational, critical analysis?

To ask such questions is of course to beg them. For we are attempting to answer them by the process of thinking about them. So on Tuesday the 4th of November the moment I became conscious, my mind began its thought cycle. Thinking about future events, repeating solutions I came up with to last nights private arguments. The idea or thought or memory emerges slowly almost imperceptibly like a flower or weed sprouting from a seedling. The thought arises, I recognise it and attach to it and fly off into a extended tour through my consciousness . Its not so much thinking but repetition. Almost as if the constant repeating of sayings, visualising reactions to situations is a balm or bad habit or a confabulation. An unceasing narrative that gives my life drama, importance a sense that there is a I.

This is of course one of the reasons I meditate or rather practice mindfulness. The exactness of being present in the moment and experiencing each sensation as it is. I practiced for about twenty minutes after getting up. I’m getting “better” at it. Your actions take on a serene flow, a suppleness. Your powers of attention and awareness towards your body, your thoughts and feelings and external phenomenon is heightened. Your concentration is improved and your ability to precisely notice things about your self is developed. Certain patterns of thought and perception, little quirks and oddities noticed. Like ways you wash your face or butter your toast or thoughts of past memories that the smell of coffee brings. Mindfulness is not at all like self-consciousness with its feelings of anxiety and doubt. No its that you simply observe the arising of thought and sensation, notice and label your thinking. Rather than “I am angry” “this body is feeling anger” Observing without an observer, thinking without a thinker.
*

Later when I was in Belfast to meet a friend I got this recurring impression. As I walked past the numerous coffee shops hosting lawyers, bankers and other assortments of young professionals. I saw a large sign stuck to the window that read. “Your best Neighbourhood corner store.” The choice of the word neighbourhood was strange, it has American connotations and not something that is not normally used in our vocabulary. So with this, the coffee shops, the men in suits, the minimalist asexual hair salons, the variety of life that passed me by. I got a feeling of being in America, in New York. The greatest of cities and no doubt getting ready for election night with the chance at cathartic relief with an Obama win. It stirred within me that profound yet trite knowledge that there is billions of people on the planet getting on with their lives at this very second on this moment without being aware of either me or me of them.

Imagine also all the people of history. What must it have felt being the last of the Mayans? The last of the Greenland Norse witnessing the collapse of your society and the only way of life that you know? Or a young man gazing out into the pacific ocean from the remote Easter Island hundreds of years ago? For thousands of years humans have fought, lived and died, have loved and lost and suffered shocking, inexplicable natural disasters. Experiencing the mysterious deaths of loved ones whose reasons only modern medicine would understand. The majority of life so far and for the majority of people still, live under the aegis of the most abysmal ignorance. I often consider our teeming loneliness on this planet, on this little pale blue dot. In the middle of nowhere with nothing out there. This is what it must have felt like to those lonely souls of antiquity.

I sat down at city hall, waiting for my friend to arrive. Every time I see the Victorian nature of it I think of the similarly looking building in Baltimore’s The Wire. The site of which houses the mayor and is the base from which many dubious and nefarious schemes are plotted and executed. As I waited I started to read from Jonathan Glover’s Humanity a Moral History of the 20th Century. It begins with something called Nietzsche’s challenge. Nietzsche of course dramatically and contradictorily proclaimed that God was dead. How can a non existent entity die? Nietzsche like a good fundamentalist Christian of which he was rebelling from believed that without God there was no morals. You were free to decide for yourself. You were “free” to self-create yourself. Nietzsche, Glover writes did not like Darwin but saw in his theory a confirmation of his world view which was struggle, hardness and cruelty. When we talk of Social Darwinism we should really talk of Social Spencerism as it was Herbert Spencer who advocated pulling the rug of compassion and charity for the suffering and improvised. Spencer would interpret this as natural and good for the species, Nietzsche would have agreed with this. Though I doubt that Nietzsche got his views from Natural Selection applying them callously like Spencer and hence committing the Naturalistic fallacy. (that is what occurs in nature is morally right or ethically justified).

Glover rebuts Nietzsche by rightly pointing out that although God may not exist and that the moral law may not be as self evident as it once was it does not follow that cruelty, strife and selfishness proceed from it. Others peoples ideas of self-creation may be compassion, charity and tolerance. I first seriously encountered Nietzsche’s writing in Will Durant Story of Philosophy. I found his views adolescent and callous, it was asking for trouble. The impression I got of him is that much of his writing was a guilt induced rancour when young and unable to participate in a war with his comrades and losing the chance at marriage. His views on women and hence “feminine” qualities turned particularly caustic. Some of his views stuck me as nothing more than the private and hectic writings of a forlorn, sexually vexed fourteen year old.

It reminded me of nothing more than Sayyid Qutub. The man who would “unsettle” Islam. Who is required reading for every aspiring Islamist. Another chaste and puritanical virgin who’s bitter views on America, women and western culture in particular have shaped the Islamist psyche. He is Bin Laden’s favourite philosopher and perhaps is to him what Nietzsche was to Hitler.

My friend was late. I paused and looked up at the thousands of people around me. I had just finished reading anecdotes under the section the Festival of Cruelty. Iraqi political prisoners under Saddam being thrown into tubs of acid called the “swimming pool”. South American junta’s torturing prisoners by attaching electrical nodes to their genitals. Women forced to serve the guards naked and being raped and violated with strips of wood and metal.

I stared at the passing people. Watching them “live” with no idea of me or what I was reading or the suffering and misery in the world. Ian McEwan’s remarks about photography and its evocation of mortality came floating back into my attention.

“Not only the young couple pausing by a park railing, but the child with a hoop and stick, the starchy nurse, the solemn baby upright in its carriage- their lives have run their course, and they are all gone. And yet frozen in sepia, they appear curiously, busily, obliviously of the fact that they must die-as Susan Sontag put it “photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading towards their own destruction” Photography she said is the inventory of mortality”

That thought returned to me as it does near every day, that this will all end. That my life is finite and ever depleting, that with each passing moment with every exhalation of breath I move closer to my death.

My friend arrived on bike puffed, yet without looking hurried or upset. Hugh is perhaps my oldest friend and I have known him since I was a very small boy. A model candidate for eudemonia, a Greek word roughly translates to flourishing or human well being. A fair, tolerant, engaging personality. Open minded and affable. Indeed despite being a Christian he display qualities of openness and curiosity that would shame many an atheist. He perhaps represents the pragmatic argument for religion in its strongest form. We have had many adventures, scrapes, arguments and discussions. Played football together, represented the school on debating matters. Though we have many different views and interests we both subscribe to the essential attitude of being earnest about life.

He told me a charming story being at an Oasis concert and getting involved in a fight with a “Yo” over some trivial jostling. My friend politely asked the man to calm down. Rather than a sheepish acknowledgment and apology from the drunk, a head butt was the reply. My friend speared him to the ground, an unconscious subliminal reaction before being set upon by his friends. No serious damage was sustained. Hugh had the guy in a armlock and was struck from all sides. While this almost surreal event was taking place his mind found time to press play on a discourse as what should he do as a Christian? Fight the attackers or turn the other cheek. Perhaps this best represents Blackmore’s line that we carry foreign ideas or memes around in our head that we would not think about otherwise. I replied jokingly- you have obviously not read Aquinas and his Summa Theologiae his justifications for war. I told him you had plenty of Casus belli to throw a few “digs”. Though he was lucky somebody did not stick a knife in him. The effects of alcohol have never been summed up better by Epictetus that there are three branches to it. First relaxation, second drunkenness and third violence.

*


My friend took me to a gallery- a joint project between art and science. A challenge and an attempt at consciousnesses raising over our attitudes to disposable materials. Essentially it boiled down to the amount of plastic we throw out rather than recycle or reuse. The novel solution was once the plastics (a fairy liquid bottle say) use was no longer required then it could be dissolved in warm water. It could then be further used by using the plastic gel or perhaps “plagel” or “pell” as a kind of compost. I assure you this is no joke. Plant seeds could be stored in the bottle cap and planted when required. They had a cute display of this with fairy liquid bottles slowly “metamorphosing” into sunflowers. A true fusion of the plastic and the organic perhaps. It was though novel and pleasing to see the fusion between an arts and science project. The two are of course notorious in their antipathy towards each other.

This was signalled as I was introduced to a female acquaintance of my friend. “ah he loves this its all science stuff.” directed jokingly at me. There is of course a division between what can broadly be called the humanities and the sciences. Higher Superstition: the Academic left and its Quarrels with Science. Stephen Pinker’s Blank Slate has a long section on it. Then there is of course Richard Dawkins Unweaving the Rainbow. Where it begins with the famous charge by Keats than Newton destroyed the mystery and wonder of the Rainbow by his “cold” and “sterile” experiments on light. There is something interesting though in the debate. Science Tand technology has made enormous contributions to civilisation and no one is left untouched by its effects. It has an almost promethean ability to discover knowledge and cultivate that knowledge to the betterment of mankind. (Caveats aside-weapon technology, Global warming) However something so practical and useful is generally looked down upon as “lower”. Indeed things like paintings, dance and poetry are elevated to “high Art” and seen as works of genius and the greatest fruits of human aspiration. There is undoubtedly a gaping chasm between the excess and abstraction and uselessness of much art and its cultural prestige and promethean science which is largely snubbed and trivialised. I’m no philistine nor am I far from sympathy with culture (I feel my life would be a great deal lesser without some of the pleasures of literature, film and music.) The best case comes from evidence against interest which is John Carey’s What Good are the Arts? A kind of God Delusion for the art world which asks some tough questions and gives some pointed answers. Carey is no barbarian at the gate, he is a professor of literature at Oxford no less so its his “turf” he is talking about.

Another thought arose when viewing the gallery. The depressing but realistic conclusion from Jared Diamond in his book Collapse how societies choose to fail or survive. (which I had just finished). Diamond argues that our environmental damage and ecological destruction is hurtling us toward the cliff (unsurprising) but that with much of the world in third world or developing status they will contribute to the damage by modernising. The cruel irony is that the world as a whole will not be able to support large swaths of the planet living as we do in Europe and America. Mass immigration will not solve the problems as it will overwhelm our own resources. In this day and age, with Global warming, weapons of mass destruction, rogue states and continuing human rights abuses the need for a world government is needed more than ever. Millions though will have to live in abject misery for a very long time. And unless the experts are very much wrong our current form of living will not last forever.

I flicked through a copy of Sight and Sound while in reception. It had as its main spread “What good are film critics?” I had little time to ingest the pro and cons but David Thomson as ever had something interesting to say though as usual unconnected with the issue discussed. He relayed Norman Mailer’s views on film as death “Film is a phenomenon whose resemblance to death has been ignored for too long.” The similarity of this reminded me of my earlier thoughts of McEwan. He goes onto to say that the capturing of emotion, atmosphere, action on film which survives as a kind of memory of what has passed. This is similar to our own memories which constructs the past and plays it out in our heads like little film reels. Films are “static” yet watch a favourite years apart and your aware of the changes and differences in your own life since your last viewing. You move on but the film is entombed in time.

We had lunch near the Albert Clock. I had an enormous “lunch” box of pasta. Hugh less so. We enjoyed a cigarette post lunch and a talk about happiness and society. We start out at roughly the same place: a disenchantment with poplar culture, a refusal to be satisfied with “barbecues and ball games”. Hugh liked the phrase though I must confess I stole it from Robert De Niro in Heat in the immortal address between him and Pacino. My friend’s solution is ultimately in Christianity, mine is far less certain and open ended. The importance of friendship and connection is something he lists as a valuable necessity for the good life. I broadly agree with this but as someone who has dwelled both on and in solitude I wouldn’t say that this was sufficient itself for happiness. For there are many people who are hermits and profess to be perfectly happy. This however is the exception not the norm.

The truth though is that for most of us it is neither possible nor desirable to live alone. My friend somewhat romantically pines to live in the past, in a small, tightly knit community of cooperation and friendship. There is much to had in this but I think part of our generations challenge is to think globally and internationally. It cannot be dismissed though that loving ones neighbour and existing in a community is surely better than living in one that’s selfish and alienated. The other challenge is of course to have community that is not tribal, belligerent and hostile.

I believe it is on this question that religion seems to stand on firm ground. Its surely contributes to tribalism but for creating strong, similarly minded communities and hence enabling trust and cooperation it is monolithic. In this country especially it is the only game in town when it comes to occasions such as marking births, marriages and deaths. Providing youth centres and community projects. This is certainly one of the reasons why religion still persists and gives the false impression on people that without it society would collapse. Let me put it bluntly. If your working class in Northern Ireland you have three spheres to belong to. Firstly you have drinking. That is going out to clubs, pubs and house parties near every week to get blind and fighting drunk. Secondly you can cocoon yourself in football and devote yourself to the God that is the Premiership. Third is religion. Drinking and football go well together, football and religion can work. Its hard though to do all three.

You don’t need to be a social psychologist to see and understand the appeal of all three. But if secularists are to win the war with religion they must provide some idea and structure of community, identity and values without committing the excess and divisiveness that religion causes. A article in slate magazine seems to be saying the same thing, showing that there is not just one way of creating, happy vibrant communities.

http://www.slate.com/id/2203614/?GT1=38001

*

Me and my friend visited another art gallery and an interesting exchange occurred. It had an exhibition on the Mexican festival of the day of the dead. Where celebrations and gifts to dead children would be “given” to alters. My friend disliked it, perhaps for its “gaudy tastelessness”. It is certainly a different “perspective” from our culture. The curator, a woman dressed in punkish clothes with her hair in dreadlocks engaged us in dialogue. I agreed with her that our culture has a high and unusual aversion to death and it appears unable to look at in and properly acknowledge it. I cannot help but recall Larkin’s line “the vast moth eaten musical brocade created to pretend we never die” the brocade is of course religion and it was on display at this gallery. A huge cross decorated with trinkets and ornaments, skulls, toy cars, sweets, stones.

I posed a question to the woman. Asking for her take on my little “performance art” suggestion. Gather together a few hundred male and female revellers and dress them in Burka’s for a rave. Halfway through the set and no doubt played to some rousing anthem, the lights would go down for a few seconds to come back on again to reveal a transformation. Witnessing a few hundred people discard a symbol-better than any, for the enforced oppression of women and a sign of their servile and secondary status. My little proposal, perhaps the most explosive and radical “performance art” that would ever be undertaken was met with consternation with this impolite suggestion. Apologies were offered over words like “sensitivity” “racism” “modesty” and this “some women choose to wear them.” There is something almost ironic in me with short hair and dressed in denim and desert boots- a short hand look for social conservatism outdoing the so called counter cultural curator before me and my bohemian friend beside me.

Protests such as women “choose” to wear such things is although disputed is still met with the rebuttal that even if freely elected it’s done in the connection with several other unreasonable beliefs. These beliefs come from the Koran and the Hadith which are ultimately given authority by the creator who presumably authored them. A book is not a sufficient reason for either men or women to believe that females are better off treated as chattel and the sexual property of men. What are the odds that Chinese, American or Irish women would freely choose to display their “modesty” in such a way if it was not for the inculcation of such ridiculous beliefs at birth?

The curator said to me that she engages in a lot of cross community work and that it would probably upset people. I wish I had of replied by telling her to look at the Christian cross behind her. Did people NOT get upset by that? Is that not a form of sacrilege? A short time ago you would have burned for such an offence and it is only through the many deaths and brave actions of men and women do you now have the freedom to erect that cross upon your wall. “who are we to criticise other peoples beliefs and practices?” Who are we NOT to criticise beliefs and practices when they are needlessly contributing to the suffering and misery of millions of the worlds population. Words like sensitivity, modesty and respect are obscene when set against the very real and disgusting events such as the thirteen year old Somali girl who was first raped, second accused of “adultery” and third buried to her neck before being bricked to death. Pause on the word adultery and consider this in the context that the girl is thirteen years of age. This further highlights the despicable practice of forced marriages and underage institutionalised rape that occurs across the Islamic world.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7708169.stm

There is so much white guilt on this issue and so much political correctness along with the ecumenicalism that religion fosters among itself that is almost impossible to challenge any of the pervading dogmas that surround the issue.

After the art gallery me and my friend had an interesting chat with a police inspector overseeing the arrival of a Royal prince (who’s name escapes me) to the war memorial building in the Cathedral quarter. I asked him what he thought about the war on drugs. The man was articulate and intelligent and it was hard to tell what he really thought. What came across was more or less a support for the blanket ban on drugs. Though we politely disagreed, I did learn something from the exchange. The debate is muddled on two key fronts. Firstly the mistake of equating all drugs as the same and omitting no key distinctions between them. Secondly the framing of the issue. The chief reason of banning and of criminalising them is that they pose a threat to human life. Essentially it is a question of pharmacology not morality nor legality. Looking at it this way you discover the obvious but often omitted point that all drugs are not the same. So we arrive back at my first point. Which as I said is almost always overlooked.

Drugs such as LSD, MDMA and Cannabis are far less dangerous and corrosive to society than is either Alcohol or Tobacco or even perhaps junk food. Our policing on what is essentially a human universal-an unstoppable and eradicable a desire like sex is doomed to failure. Violent offenders both in America and in Britain are released to make room for drug users and dealers. Watching something like The Wire you see that it is prohibition rather than the drugs themselves that cause the violence, the deaths and the societal collapse. The UK recently upgraded Cannabis to class B against the advice of not only the medical experts but the police as well. There was no rational basis for the upgrade. Like a lot of other culture war issues a serious debate and rectification of reasons is scarcely possible when such actions take place.

The proper way of conducting and deciding such debates is via a fourfold step. Firstly the application of reason. Acquiring facts and documenting evidence. Leaving dogmas and superstitions at the door is also required. Secondly using these facts to decided which action or choices increases the net happiness and reducing the suffering of human beings. In a sense what action reduces the most harm. Thirdly considering something like the golden rule. Doing onto others what you would have them do onto you. Or doing onto others what they would want seen done to them. The Golden rule, GB Shaw’s inverse of it and the platinum rule serve two principles. Empathy and opening yourself up to the charge of hypocrisy. Finally considering what is a civil society. What is best for the whole of society? What contributes to the liberty, well being and aspirations of individuals as well as the whole. Though good arguments can be made on both sides of an argument for a variety of issues it is clear that when we consider moral problems through this prism the intellectual and moral pretensions of many who oppose things like abortion, stem cell research, homosexuality, inter race marriage and drug prohibition are left stripped and bereft of any credibility whatsoever.

*

A quiet coffee and cigarette at writers circle on Cathedral quarter is how we played out the rest of the diminishing afternoon. We talked about the Northern Ireland “troubles” I mused as to why it had taken so long for a power sharing agreement to be reached. I asked the open question of what role did people like Gerry Adams, Martin McGuiness and Ian Paisley play in prolonging or instigating the violence. The agreement that we have now is little different from the proposals of the sixties and the 1973 Sunningdale Agreement. Who or what was responsible for the unnecessary violence of the last thirty years? Why did Irish Nationalists give support to bombing and bullets rather than civil rights protests and peaceful marches? Why did they not model themselves on the desegregation movement of America in the sixties? What role did Protestant intransigence and intolerance play in creating the divide? These are open questions to myself that will one day need to be explored. What will people say and think fifty or sixty years hence? That Irish mothers raised a generation of psychopaths? That the failure of reason, compassion and common sense determined the violence? Both sides have a richly sordid and shameful history but can the deep divisions ever be overcome? Our we going about it the right way? Is it good thing that protestant and catholic identities are drummed into us since the moment we are born?

My friend left me at the Linen hall library. A great and vast house of books, a wonderful place to spend a day, reading, chatting and mulling over the great issues. I doubt I fitted in well with my garb of denim and sandy coloured boots. Not with the place mostly populated by wealthy looking elderly people. It was a great little moment as me and my friend chatted overlooking Belfast city hall at twilight. The city centre beautifully illuminated, with the Eye slowly rotating in the background. It was a day well spent.

*

My time in Belfast had not finished yet. For the past few months I have attended a Meditation group or a Zen group. Sitting that night took on an uncommon simplicity and ease. Suzuki Roshi stated that Zen is “nothing special” “Zen is not some fancy, special art of living.--just to live always in reality, in its exact sense.” I simply sat. Simply did the walking meditation or Kihin. I’m the sort of person who steels himself up for things, mental preparation, planning out moves and thinking ahead. I noticed this aspect in myself that night quite clearly. There was a freedom in simply “getting on with what your doing.” Doing what the moment required without prior thought or planning. There was no thoughts such as “have to concentrate now” “or I must meditate well tonight” “oh look at me Mr meditation”

So why am I interested in such a weird or unusual endeavour? I have always been interested in the orient for as long as I can remember in particular Japan. Childhood fascination with Samurai and Ninjas (who practiced meditation) Japanese history, culture etc. A passing interest in Buddhism but more the particularly Zen school of Japan. So it is somewhat arbitrary my interest in Zen rather than Theravadin or Tibetan Buddhism. Secondly one of my favourite authors Yukio Mishima used the metaphysical underpinnings of rebirth and karma as a vehicle for his sea of fertility teratology. This somewhat rekindled my interest but it was Sam Harris who persuaded me that there might be something of interest worth pursuing. Greek Stoic philosophy also lead me to it, so there is many tributaries and streams which have brought me to it.

Am I wasting my time? In a sense we are all wasting our time in one way or another. How we do it and why is of course the fundamental question. Ironically it is this that Zen attempts to uncover. Similar in a sense to Socrates judgement that an unexamined life is not worth living. A claim I would tentatively advance for eastern religions or philosophies (I’m using a broad brush here) is that some of them in some forms have the very best and most desirable aspects of western traditions. They go on to distil and refine them and claim to cultivate them systemically and methodically via the practice of various meditation strategies. This is of course an empirical claim and I expect science to fully settle the question in the next few decades. Ie whether it is bullshit or not. For myself I can say that I have benefited and enjoyed both the practice and find some of the ethical considerations relevant and useful for today. Its philosophical views on life best expressed in the four noble truths, three marks of existence and eight fold path are particularly elegant. You don’t have to believe anything on faith and nothing need be taken without having good reasons supporting it.

*

The day though was capped with-well what else? The US election. I was glad to see the Obama win and for the shocking and disgraceful campaign of John McCain to implode. As I write Obama plans to overturn Bush’s obstinate and irrational refusal of funding stem cell research and for his brazen unconcern for unethical methods of oil drilling. I hope of course that the tarnished image of America as a stupid, racist and bellicose nation can be repaired. Obama is not just black but an intellectual-an elite. This is something to be celebrated of course as we have seen what a regular “guy you can have a beer with” does to a country.

I was barely able though to stay awake during the election night. Drifting in and out of sleep, waking up to see Obama edge ever closer to victory. It was a surprise and pleasure to see Christopher Hitchens come on the BBC and ruffle a few feathers with his acerbic wit and bombastic polemics against the McCain campaign. I’m well used to Hitchens on You Tube and in writing but seeing him live and with the rather non-descript company of two bit political pundits made me recognise just how rare and special he is.

So when the election was called early on Wednesday morning I allowed myself a smile. The economic crisis may have given Obama the victory more than any other factor. However there is still some room for “hope” and a example that the lowest common dominators do not always hold sway. After eight years of Bush I sincerely wish that Obama can restore America as the respected leader of the free world.

“everything must be doubted” I was glad to see many Republicans cross party lines and give up divisive single issues and vote for the candidate who is actually best for them. Dogmatically holding on to beliefs, ideas, ideals of how things should be is harmful. It is especially corrosive when those beliefs simply do not map onto reality. Such as Obama being a Muslim or a terrorist or a socialist. To finish lets hope that statements and beliefs such as this are never again operational in politics.

“A few days before the 2004 presidential election, Ron Suskind, a columnist who had been investigating the White House and its communications for years, wrote in The New York Times about a conversation he had with a presidential adviser in 2002. “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community’, which he defined as people ‘who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality’. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors.. and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’

Best

Michael Faulkner.

Review of AC Grayling's The Choice of Hercules

AC Grayling is a useful ally in the battle between secularism and religion. It was largely through this conflict that I encountered him. A citing in Richard Dawkins God Delusion prompted me to look out for him. A reader in philosophy at Birkbeck college, a writer of numerous books on philosophical subjects both technical, academic and lay. A member of Humanist and Secular organisations. A contributing editor of the intellectual journal Prospect. It is mostly through the lay books (in particular The Meaning of Things and the blistering Against all Gods) that I am familiar with him along with his Comment is Free articles on the Guardian. He is the house critic of religion and stupidity with a near weekly polemic launched on Christianity and its consequences.

Its not just his criticism of religion that is welcome and useful, he is a good guide through the world of western and ancient ethical thought. His mission in many of his books is to bring the subject of moral philosophy to the lay reader. Not only that Grayling does the rare thing and actually moralises (in a good way). His writing is clear and concise, liberally garnished with choice quotes from master philosophers and essayists. He is a rare thing, an intelligent writer who does not obfuscate, temporise or pander to sensibilities. Someone like me grounded in humanistic values may find his views normative even trite but it needs constant reminding just how many people hold diametrically opposed views. So Grayling makes the secular humanistic case in a splendid, virtuoso way. As such his writing and views crystallise the humanistic position, resting on such luminaries as Mill, Bacon, Hume, Kant, Aristotle, Socrates and Epictetus.

His latest book is The Choice of Hercules: Pleasure Duty and the good life in the 21st Century. He writes early on that this is the sequel to his previous one Towards the Light where he documents the struggle for the modern day human rights and freedoms that was won against the forces of unreason-namely Christianity. This book begins where that ends in asking the question Pleasure or Duty? And what is the best way to live?

As the title of the book suggests, it bases it premise on the myth of the choice of Hercules. Hercules working on a farm as punishment for murdering his family (he was struck mad by Hera as revenge for his father- Zeus’s dalliance with the earthly ladies.) He is approached by two women, one simple plain and slender the other tantalisingly curvaceous and beautiful. Given a choice between a life of slothful, sensuous, sex-laden pleasure or hardship, pain and simplicity of Duty. Hercules chose the latter of course and went on to do all the things he is renowned for (though I mostly know him through the TV series starring Kevin Sorbo)

Grayling sees this rightly as a false dichotomy and he explores the social, moral and artistic background and history of the myth. As a launch pad for the book its an interesting beginning but it fails to address the right questions. Firstly what are we to think of duty? Or more importantly to whom? The other phrasing of the question is sometimes posed as vice or virtue? Though he does not miss it entirely-it is there only somewhat implicit is that the real question is between small mindedness and big mindedness. Ignorance versus education, reflection versus delusion, generosity versus selfishness. In a sense a life that betters the individual and the society or that one resides in or a life unexamined and narrow minded. To be fair he does tackle these issues but the issue of work and its compromises (overriding individuality, moral concern etc) and clearly labelling what our duty is not dealt with. I would guess from being familiar with his work he would suggest the development of an internationalist, a person who holds ethical views and political opinions which transcend local politics and the glib nature of national identity. I would also hint that the main duty is to improve ourselves and to extend universal human rights to the rest of the world.

This concern dominates the latter half of the book and it can rightly be seen as a Herculean task. In the early portions of the book though Grayling outlines the ideas or rather strums the “notes” of the good life.

Let me clarify perhaps his thesis. Pleasure and Duty are a false dichotomy. Pleasure is as he sees it essential to the good life. Duty is seen as a dual way: to grow oneself to make “educated use of ones leisure” which is to have a life of meaning and value. Secondly to hold responsibilities towards others, the aforementioned spread of human rights and a compassionate social policy. Grayling deploys ethics in a way similar to the Greeks, that it is about questions, attitudes, views on well-doing and well-being and that ethics how one regards the good is inseparable from politics.

The meat of the book then rests on seven “notes” that when “struck” and played in harmony signal the good life. They are meaning, intimacy, truth, endeavour, freedom beauty and fulfilment. Meaning is seen as a life of values and goals. This surely is essential and fulfils Socrates maxim that an unexamined life is not worth living because it is at the mercy of powers that the individual has no control over and is hence easily swayed. The other being the question should one commit suicide? Intimacy can be seen as friendship both platonic and sexual and loving. Truth is honesty, the ability to change ones mind, to live without delusion and to want to have ones view of the world, map onto reality. Endeavour is as what is says, that achievement in life does not come without sacrifice and hardwork. Freedom naturally is an essential, both freedom of body in a social, institutional sphere but perhaps more importantly freedom of mind and the ability to express those views without fear and opprobrium. Beauty the experience of pleasant sights and sounds and the development of “taste”. lastly fulfilment the bringing together of all of the above in a rich harmonious whole. An embrace of Aristotle middle way: The golden mean, between rashness and cowardice is courage, generosity between meanness and profligacy etc.

It’s a fine list and he explores each in a considered interesting manner. I was a little disappointed though that they were not explored in more depth throughout the book in a more detailed way and ways of cultivating them. However the rest of the book is sufficed with them and they underpin the discussions of morality and “moral” problems later on. Meaning and freedom here stand out in particular. I believe them to be the two most essential in the list. Though confirming his view of harmony the commitment to truth grounds them and keeps them in focus. I am of course hinting at religion here and how one could claim the two but its irrelevant if its not true. The note of beauty is a odd one. To me a 22 year old and someone of very different background and “taste” to Grayling it strikes me as somewhat fanciful, precious and glinting of an ivory tower. Grayling is of course an aesthete and a gentleman, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Though he includes things like pottery, gardens and ornamentation he is clearly putting forward the western canon as the best and most beautiful. I furrow my brow at such things. Not because I’m a young philistine or expound some modish PC doctrine of cultural inclusiveness, no because it begs the question.

John Carey in his book What Good are the Arts? tackles head on the idea that art can make us better people or ideas that “high” art is “better” than low art. Indeed can there be a distinction between high and low art? Can art provide ethical answers? I would ask is it necessary for happiness? Indeed is it even required at all? Carey is no philistine an oxford intellectual well versed in the classics. He asks some very tough questions of the arts and gives some very honest answers without cant or bullshit. I love movies and literature. I believe I could happily live a good life without ever again seeing a movie or reading any of the English classics. I could quite contentedly go to my grave without ever experiencing the music of Bach or Beethoven. For me I think I could get on pretty well without ever playing GTA again. The music I love though- would be tough giving that up. That does not confirm his thesis though. Arts are pleasures, they should be thought of as amenities not necessities. They are incidental to the good life and to ethics. Admittedly whatever your pleasure is (and I believe it could be anything from football to chess, to reading to Coronation Street) life would be a little duller and a little greyer if you were denied it. Considering this issue though forces us to ask what really is happiness or well-being and what is the minimum needed for it?

What would I add? Tolerance I think is an essential one though it could be subsumed under freedom. Tolerance though can be seen as quite distinct and not just for letting others flourish and prosper. No tolerance is essential and it leads me into something which is missed entirely by Grayling that is Equanimity. Intolerance is based on emotions such as fear, anger, hatred in short self destructive emotions. I think all of our intuitions of the good life lead us to conclude that mental states of calm serenity are more conducive to happiness and wellbeing than their opposites. Generosity is another note I would wish to add, not just material but being generous in spirit, wishing well people who succeed and not clinging to jealousy and envy. Generosity would also signal letting go of greed and selfishness. Once again I believe these states are essential for happiness and the good life.

Grayling later turns ethics and morality. He thus conceives a useful distinction in particular the chapter Moral Attitudes and Ethics. “Morality is about what is allowed and forbidden in particular realms of behaviour;” and “ethics is about character of one’s personality and life, and what flows from both in way of choices, relationships and action.” and “(ethics) are questions about human intelligence, human flourishing-which is to say: human well-being and well-doing. They therefore seek answers not only to questions about what sort of people we should be, but about what sort of society we should have”

I will go on to say that we should conceive of ethics as an attitude, a way of thinking and a method. His application of reason, evidence and compassion to such “vexing” questions as drug legalisation, sex and relationships, marriage, divorce is refreshingly straightforward. He also turns to other more emotive issue such as abortion, and euthanasia. I found his views as I have said to be normal and unexceptional though argued with clarity and conviction. Grayling does show how religion and unthinking traditional attitudes has obscured our thinking on ethical issues. Indeed once one jettisons religious morality and applies the principles of reason, happiness and suffering, the golden rule and what constitutes a civil society, you come to counter-intuitive or untraditional conclusions. His view of drug criminalisation is a fine example of this (he is in favour of decriminalising it)

Grayling rightly argues that many of the issues that are battlegrounds in the culture wars are either non-problems, trivial or obscene when set against human rights abuses. Our attention should be to such global concerns and not fixated on parochial and pedantic worries. Though Grayling is earnest and his sentiments are to be applauded he offers no in depth practical way of alleviating such abuses both in macrocosm and microcosm. At the very least the world needs to aim at some kind of world government or at the very least a armed and properly funded UN that can deploy quickly and effectively in such cases as Darfur and Chechnya. Though he may well respond that perhaps that is our duty, to think how to tackle these issues and to work towards them.

A few quibbles. I found his views of science-well in particular evolutionary psychology bemusing and further proof of Mr Graylings aesthete nature (not that that is intended to be a insult). I’m in no position to judge between Sui Generis, blank slate human nature and man an animal just as much a part of the evolutionary escalator as everything else. All I know is that there is a vast, detailed and interesting literature on evolutionary “influences” on human behaviour. Not least from the popular and academic work from people like David Buss, Steven Pinker and Helen Fisher. Grayling’s distaste here resembles the protestations of Christians who accuse scientists of being barbarians for saying that humans are no more an animals than a ape-indeed we are apes. For an effective critical thinker he sets up a straw man for the EV argument. “ (Evolutionary psychology) which says that all aspects of human nature….is explicable by reference to mankind’s early evolutionary history”.

Grayling response to this is “this essentialist view wholly ignores facts about the intricate interplay between human subjectivity and culture which no mechanistic account can hope to capture”. This is a non sequitar. What are the facts of human subjectivity? what does intricate interplay between subjectivity and culture mean? The facts are that post-enlightenment culture has only been around for a few hundred years, Greek society was around a few thousand years ago. Humans have first existed between fifty and two hundred thousand years ago. Before that we had homo erectus, homo habilis and before that Australopithecus and so on. Evolutionary psychology, cognitive sciences and neurosciences are “rattling at the gates of Rome” of some of our most cherished and perhaps wrong ideas of human nature. Perhaps this was the philosopher who Richard Dawkins was talking about in his conversation with David Buss who refused to accept the evidence of evolutionary imprints on human nature.

This next criticism leaves me somewhat ambivalent. I despise religion as much as Grayling probably does but his many pot shots and haranguing of religion- mostly Christianity in a book not expressly about religion I believe undermines it. People maybe sympathetic to religion who might not appreciate the wisdom on offer here because they are put off. At the very least his chapter Reason and Religion should have came early on and should have absorbed much of his justified ire. Another complaint was that much of the writing in that chapter was recycled from another of his books The Meaning of Things which in turn was taken from newspaper articles. I think he could have freshened it up a bit. The final gripe here was that I believe he takes aim at the soft target of Christianity, Islam at the minute is more responsible for human suffering and outrage and is more unhinged that even the most extreme form of Christianity.

Before I finish I want to highlight something in dire need of correction. He writes that in the US state of Georgia homosexuals can be executed (page102 paragraph 3) this is just plain wrong.

My final remark is more an observation than a criticism indeed its more a general point about western philosophy in general. Really its two things: the lack of discussion on consciousness and engagement with eastern thought in general in particular Buddhism. The two are although related quite distinct. For someone like Grayling who is so clearly interested in the good life seems cheerfully ignorant and dismissive of perhaps a even vaster, richer, more systemic tradition. This seems a trend in general two examples will suffice. Zen Buddhism has a rich history and expansive literature on consciousness and the inner workings of the mind that has been largely born out by experimental science, indeed as we speak neuroscientists are studying the brains of people who practice meditation. Reading the work of the philosopher Daniel Dennett in particular his book Consciousness Explained there is not a single mention of anything of eastern import yet plenty of citing for western philosophers. Another case would be Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy does not deal at all with it (though it does acknowledge this oversight).

The point seems especially apt to me because I finally pursued a long held curiosity about Zen by reading Stoic literature. Indeed the only person or collection of writing I can compare with eastern contemplatives would be Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. A touching, deeply human book of a mans private feelings who seems to have overcome abet in a very unsystematic way the dualism and subject object problem that western philosophy is wedded too. There is much much more to recommend about the book though.

There is nothing sectarian or religious about contemplation. Admittedly there is much bullshit and new age nonsense associated with it. Sam Harris I believe is right when he writes that “although the Christians invented physics and the Muslims Algebra-we don’t talk of Christian Science or Muslim Mathematics in the same way we might not talk about Buddhist meditation and methods of observing the mind.

I don’t have enough room here to go into the issue in depth but the notes of the good life that Grayling writes about and indeed a conception of happiness and equanimity that he seems to overlook has been achieved again and again in eastern contemplatives. When mystics go off onto a cave or Zen masters peer into the mind, ideas like loving-kindness, generosity, equanimity, states of non-hatred, non-delusion is what comes back. Perhaps meditation and mindfulness are the methods for better achieving and understanding the good life. The point being that we live in the prison of our owns minds every day of our lives and anyone who has even glimpsed at their consciousness transformed with the mind at rest and not in constant reactive mode is a happier, better mind to have.

Western philosophy like its religions suffer because they never deal with the moment to moment experience of the mind. We should be tolerant or generous because of some intellectual understanding or commandment but out of a deep unprompted, emotional understanding that transcends language and conceptual thinking. Indeed you could be on the surface tolerant and generous and perfectly miserable. What Zen and eastern contemplation aim at is the inner workings of consciousness to achieve freedom and happiness or rather well-being.

I am not seeking to simply denigrate one or more tradition, I’m looking to synergise and use the best of every piece of human knowledge and experience available. There are many on all sides who simply do not and this is a disservice both to their own tradition but to the ongoing human conversation.

So despite to caveats I highly recommend Mr Graylings work, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this little book and will dip into it from time to time to refresh and refocus my own ethical outlook and to top up ones own arguments against the credulous, the ignorant and the superstitious.

Best and Be well

Michael Faulkner.

Conclusion to Garden of the Good life.

Storms and Sunshine. Chaos and Peace.

In order for gardens to flourish, to grow, for the flowers to bloom and our trees to bear fruit we need good fortune. We need good weather, no pests, and no bad luck. In life the absence of war, slavery, marauding tribes, the absence of widespread death and diseases are requisites for peace. We should ponder for a second just how peaceful and civil our society is compared with its hundreds of thousands of years of life that was in Hobbes words “nasty, brutish and short”. Only from peace and civility do we have the foundations to seek happiness or well being. Of course even in this lucky part of the world and at this time where many of the historical ills have largely disappeared or subsided we all will encounter death.

At some stage in our lives everyone we know and love will die. We as individuals are of course not exempt from this termination yet puzzlingly or miraculously we act as if it will pass us by. Ian McEwan puts it

“It (Death) emerges in childhood as a baffling fact, re-emerges possibly in adolescence as a tragic reality which all around us appear to be denying, then perhaps fades in busy middle life, to return say, in a sudden premonitory bout of insomnia.”

This is a rather interesting paradox, every human is surrounded by death. Yet It seems in our culture there is a supreme denial of it. I would argue that most of us do not consider death, or emotionally explore it until we are looking it in the face. The death of loved ones is devastating-an event that brings forth, anger, denial, suffering and depression. Men and women who are terminally ill are carted off to hospices to die. We are at a loss to comfort our friends and relatives when their loved ones pass away. It seems to me we are emotionally, psychologically and spiritually unequipped to deal with death. Many would accept this as normative, a cruel sour to be taken with life’s sweetness. We should seriously ask ourselves, must it be so?

The opposite of death or dieing, a Eros keeping at bay Thanatos is sex. The requisite activity for the creation of new life. Sex is another human universal (as well it must) now consider its contrast with death. We are awash in sexual imagery, our TV’s, films, literature, art, is all saturated in it. We obsess, worry and pursue it when and whenever we can. (this would of course apply more to men than to women) In civil societies most children are grounded in some form of sex education. A well oiled industry has sprung up around making sure our physical and emotional needs can be met through it. Some people do get more emotional information and support. But virtually no one goes through life without some kind of understanding or information as to the experience and consequences of sex.

It would be disastrous to society if no one had a clue as to what sex was or what its ramifications where. Ignorance of sex is largely and rightly scorned upon in society, so why is it then that death is treated with ignorance and denial? Granted I can understated why we might want to avert ourselves to dealing with what can seem a horrible, depressive, inescapable occurrence. I see no good though in simply sticking our heads in the sand. Is it not also selfish when we don’t prepare our loved ones and friends for our death?

So is there a way to reduce the suffering of death? To stoically face the end? To comfort the dieing and the grieving? I will not be so arrogant as to suppose I have any answers and would be sceptical of anyone who claims such things. I am left though somewhat bereft over Cicero’s consolation strategies in his Tusculan Disputations, an attempt to console himself at the death of his young daughter.

1. That death is not an evil or not a great evil. That it is an indifferent, out of your control and as such not an evil. 2. Focus not on death but on the good times with the person. 3. That it was to be expected and something you just have to get used to. 4. Get rid of the idea of grieving or mourning. 5. You are not the only one this has happened to.

While these may be helpful routes to take at certain times, these above methods rooted in Greek philosophy never deal with the actual experience of loss.

In researching this piece I came across a wonderful, compassionate, luminous woman. A Zen Roshi from America called Joan Halifax. She has spent a considerable portion of her life as a hospice caregiver, someone who has sat with and consoled many dieing people along with grieving relatives. She runs a project Being with Dieing that seeks to help give caregivers, the terminal and their relatives emotional and spiritual support. She has also attempted to raise consciousness over dying and what she feels is the western inability to cope with it.

From what I understand from her thesis and proposals is that a grounding in contemplative practice (Meditation, mindfulness etc) can reduce our suffering of the death of loved ones. At the heart of her message is the view of impermanence, the inevitability of change. That everything arises and passes away. This Buddhist view which sees life as one where suffering, decay and death is ever present. However this does not lead to a morbid self absorption in death but rather a calm acceptance of change. We have to welcome everything that comes into our lives without grasping or without trying to push away.

As one Buddhist teacher said “life is impermanent but that does not mean that it is not worth living. It is precisely because of its impermanence that we value life so dearly-- we can remain peaceful and content in the face of change, prosperity and decline, success and failure.” As Roshi Halifax concludes death can be the bedrock of an entire spiritual path. The state would be achieved through mediation practice and deeply understanding the Zen Buddhist view of impermanence. Taking time to understand the physiology of death as well as the cultural, psychological and spiritual dimensions is also important. She calls for schools to offer teaching students about dying and its ramifications in school. To offer contemplative practices to medical students who will encounter death and the dying. To form out-reach partnerships with current social groups and communities.

I cannot offer a full analysis of her ideas nor would I be equipped to. I can however say this. This proposition that contemplative practice can ease our suffering over death along with life’s vicissitudes is not something that can be gained through intellectual activity. It is not a set of magic words or ideas simply believed in but a skill that must be practiced. Even when learning this caveat it took some time for me to let it sink in and of course will go on sinking in. As I have already wrote contemplative practice is subject to rational inquiry. In order to fully experience this rather than understand it you must walk along the road of practice rather than simply survey the terrain through the prism of the intellect.

I fear this may sound as something of a cop out. Indeed I have frequently remarked to myself that it seems so. However do we really expect life to be easy? Do we expect that getting over death or disaster is something that requires no effort?

There is no Gardner

We are coming to the end. We have planted our seeds, weeded and watered attentively, protected our garden or reduced the damage done from random, unforeseen, terrible events. The flowers are in bloom, the fruit is ripe, a stability and equanimity has been established. Is there anything more left to do?

There is one more thing to do. The garden rests upon the gardener. Our actions and behaviours seem to rest upon the idea of a self. The removal of the self is perhaps the last barrier to the garden of the good life. The self that wants, that desires, that thinks in terms of I. The little selfish self. The I that separates from others. That there is a thinker of our thoughts a central planner in our brains, a ghost in the machine.

We become an entity that no longer judges “he is so nasty to me” that no longer evaluates “I cant cope with this break-up”. The self that craves “if only I had this my life would be so..” We remove our dualism and simply be. We simply watch emotions and thoughts come and go, simply watch the actions of others. Simply observe and participate in the world. The past is simply the past, our thoughts are simply so. No drama. Nothing special.

The garden looks after itself, it already has everything it needs. Weeds no longer grow for the garden is so rich with beauty so full with fruit. Our sense of self and what we do moment to moment is inseparable. We are precisely the activity that we are doing in the present moment. The garden and the gardener have become one.


Best and be well

Michael Faulkner.

Garden of the Good Life. Part Three

Weeding and Watering.

Weeding is essential to a well kept garden so that our tender and still growing plants and flowers do not become overwhelmed. Weeds are bad mental states or actions that are obstacles to well being. Without water nothing can grow or live. We can respectively think of weeding as both stopping undesired, negative and harmful behaviour. Watering can be thought of in terms of effort. Effort in contemplative practice- mindfulness and meditation and in our effort to lead better lives. Weeding and watering are simply two sides of the same coin.

At the heart of Zen philosophy is the idea that our suffering is conditioned by our thinking. That very often it is our thinking that is the problem. The first weed we should be on guard against is the hardest to eradicate and the well from which the others weeds drink from. Neurotic discursive thinking. Imagine what our consciousness is like when we are not thinking neurotically? Thinking about what others think of us. What actions we did or didn’t do. Or our anxieties about things that haven’t happened yet. At some time I am sure we have all experienced what it felt like to have our minds intrinsically at peace.

Our thinking gets us absorbed so much that we lose our perspective, our spontaneity, our freedom. We fail to fully experience the moment because neurotic thoughts keep careening through our brains. It is like we are reading a book in our homes only to have ornaments being flung and smashed around us. We are constantly kept in a state of upset or distraction. We cannot enjoy or fully experience what we our doing because we are constantly gripped in thought. A writer whom I admire summed well the difference between Western thought and its Eastern counterpart. Christopher Hitchens put it after scorching eastern style “religion” and its seeming need to dissolve the intellect or thinking “The pleasures and rewards of the intellect are inseparable from angst, uncertainty, conflict and even despair.”

I used to subscribe to this way of thinking. The intellect and critical, combative thinking is of course essential to many human endeavours. However we need not think like this all of the time. Or even positing a priori that we have to “think” all the time anyway. States of worry, or fear or neuroticism seldom lead to good actions or a healthy and calm mind. From this turbulence of mind we have much of the source of conflict we see not just within ourselves but in the wider community. From this we have separateness. The sense of me and him, us and them. From this we have fear and from fear we have hatred.

Hatred is perhaps the most divisive emotion that we can experience. By definition hatred implies intolerance, condemnation and disgust. It has been well remarked that hatred and fear are closely linked. The American south in the pre civil rights years are both showcases of hatred and intolerance but fear as well.

Zen goes further than simply labelling the emotion of hate and saying it’s a dangerous, divisive emotion. It makes an empirical claim that the person who is hating and who is intolerant has a mind that is suffering. We know enough about ourselves on an intuitive level to say mental states such as hatred whether it be over ethnicity or politics is a mind in turmoil and as such is not conducive to states of well being. Simply put we are in a much better mental state of mind when we are at ease with people rather than being at odds with them.


Attachment to pleasure.

Our attachment to sense pleasure and material enjoyment is another weed that needs eliminated. There is nothing wrong of course in taking pleasure in many of the things that constituent human experience. Whether it be having a bowl of ice cream or sex with ones lover, or listening to ones favourite music. Today in our consumerist paradise, with nearly every kind of pleasure and novelty on perpetual offer. There is still a wide spiritual gulf we feel within ourselves. Many of us still think the solution is the age old division between hedonism and asceticism.

Hedonism as a philosophy is simply that happiness is got from sensual pleasures even if they are say intellectual such as connoisseurship. Hedonism says that the repeating of favourite source of pleasure until we run out of steam is the best we can do. Asceticism is the renouncing of all worldly pleasure. The problem with this practice is that its life denying and joy sapping. I believe there is much to be had about luminous experiences whether it is found at the top of a mountain, gazing into the paintings of a Da Vinci, hallucinogenic drugs or in the arms of a lover. Asceticism does pose however a spiritual truth that lurks at the heart of every religion. That is our well being or ideas about a good life are not dependent on sense pleasure.

The Buddha himself both practiced hedonism and asceticism before his enlightenment. His philosophy and ethic was that of the middle way. We crave our pleasures however fleeting they are. We chase after it, become upset if we cant satisfy them. Search for new pleasures if our old ones fail us. Our attachments to such things is like a gerbil running perpetually on a wheel. We ultimately get nowhere. We are all on the same continuum with the crack addict who’s mind is totally absorbed in the procuring of the drug. He will steal, lie and cheat and stomp over anyone to get his fix. It momentarily sates him then the cycle begins again. We are of course not as selfish and violent as this: but pause for a second and consider what we have done to ourselves and to others in our pursuit for our pleasures?

Doubt

In Buddhism one of the hindrances that prevents enlightenment is doubt. Doubt is like all the above weeds, a mental state. It is thinking. How many times do we hear a voice in the back of our head telling us that what we are doing is a mistake? Or that we are not good enough or that we should not have done such and such? To the extreme we have mental conditions such as self harming or anorexia, a doubt or a pathology about how we think we are or how we think we should be.

So how do we weed and water? How do we rid the mind of these unwelcome mental factors. It is not enough to say on a intellectual level that these are unwelcome states that need to be removed. We need to have a method of noticing them and removing them.

The cultivation of mindfulness or awareness builds welcome states and reduces unwelcome ones. We train ourselves to be aware moment to moment of our experience, labelling our thoughts. Becoming aware of our thoughts and thought processes, our attitudes and attachments. Our strategies when dealing with people. The Buddha taught that mindfulness or awareness is a purifying force. The most powerful for cultivating desirable states and lessening undesirable ones. When we recognise thoughts as thoughts and stop our discursive thinking we cut the string upon which much of suffering is wrought. We can cultivate this by meditating, watching detachedly our thoughts as they arise. The mistake we make however is that once our sitting is done we return to our normal thinking styles. Throughout our lives we should practice mindfulness, simple observation without judging or reacting or evaluating. So when someone insults us they have simply insulted us. The problem comes when our thinking goes into haywire and says “oh this is bad” “I must hit back” or that there is something wrong with me that I MUST FIX.

Mindfulness is something we use to both pull out weeds and cultivate our seedlings. We observe tolerance to others. We observe and let our mind be open and free to new ideas or experiences. We observe ourselves letting go of greed and being generous.

Effort

Effort is another tool essential to both weeding and growing our desired states of mind. Effort is at the root of all achievement. Life will not settle to how we want it, we must go after it, no one will cure our ills or make us happy we must seek it out.

One of my favourite teachings in Buddhism is that the Buddha will not enlighten us. No one can enlighten another person, no reciting of words or mere study can make us enlightened. Buddha points the way to enlightenment but we must make the effort. A Buddha shows us the way like a person pointing to the moon. Many of us get caught obsessing over the figure or the different fingers pointing at the moon. Our concern should be with attaining our own enlightenment. Consider this passage from Marcus Aurelius-I have quoted it at length.

"Remember how long you have been putting this off, how many times you have been given a period of grace by the gods and not used it…… there is a limit circumscribed to your time- if you do not use it to clear away your clouds, it will be gone, and you will be gone and the opportunity will not return."

So now we have laid our soil, planted our seeds, weeded and watered our garden. We have been attentive to each plant that has grown. Our garden perhaps is stunning looking. Our day to day, moment to moment experience has been transformed. We experience not only a balance of mind but a joy. A joy that goes beyond transient states, pleasure or satisfaction, pain or disappointment. We have achieved a equilibrium and calm state of mind. Nevertheless we still wonder-- can such states last? Is it only temporary?

Say we have lessened our neurosis. Stopped our discursive thinking, severed our attachments and cravings to pleasure. Fear and hate no longer largely take root in us? We have a good job, a loving companion, the fridge is stocked with good food and good wine. It is the height of summer and our friends and family are close at hand. So what happens say when we get that phone call in the middle of night? What happens if one of our children die in a car accident or a partner leaves us. Or we lose our job? Even the most normal and well adjusted life at some point is going to experience hardship, the hardest perhaps being the death of ones we love.

Best and be Well.

Michael Faulkner

Garden of the Good Life Part 2

Planting The Seeds.

Once we have laid the foundations of our garden, laid the soil, laid the mind to a state of relative serenity. There are no fires to put out, no disasters to deal with. We can now take some time to build for a better life. We can start to plant the seeds necessary for the cultivation of well being. What could these seeds be? I’ll offer some examples that we may wish to grow to better ourselves and our communities in which we reside.

Its useful to consider what ideas we may have of community. Aurelius considers us to be made for each other, like limbs connected to the tree of life. We do not live alone, we need other people like a left foot needs a right one. Most religions place community and ideas of respecting and loving one another as yourself. Any conception of the good life must consider our treatment and view of other people.

Tolerance.

The first seed I would plant is the seed of tolerance. John Stuart Mill captured the essence of tolerance in this line “Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest”. The caveat is of course we should not tolerate the intolerant.

Any semblance of civilisation should be based on tolerance, from its institutions to the family to the individual person. Tolerance is living by your own lights and letting others live by theirs. It is of course not an easy state to obtain. Many hurdles may have to be overcome to see the world in such kindly light. Upbringing, education, past experience, suspicion and fear of others. Zen Buddhism talks of something that is similar to tolerance though distinctly different is lovingkindness. Even if we cannot obtain or even if its possible to obtain such a state of universal love, tolerance is something that we can and should obtain.

Generosity.

Generosity is listed as the first perfection of the Buddha. Generosity without thought as to who the person is or what we might get back (if anything) in return. We should give to ease the suffering of other people. Natural, unprompted giving is an expression of mind that is non-attached or one of non-greed, not clinging not clasping. Even sharing with other people, our friends and family. We should also be generous in our praise of other people. To be happy not jealous when they succeed. Being generous however is not a simple commandant to be followed. We should experience a lighter happier state of mind when performing such actions which lessen the mind to attachments and promote bonds with people.

Education

Though it is not a hard and fast rule that educated or knowledgeable people are more ethical or happier. I do think there is a substantial link to suggest that there is. There is a difference of course between intelligence, knowledge and wisdom which I wont discuss here. I’m not really talking about school education but a kind of curiosity, an awe of the world. I feel incredibly lucky to live in this time and place. To be privileged to know so much that thousands of smarter men and women before me did not know. I believe an interest in the arts and sciences is vital. Arts especially which make us identify with people such as literature or certain films especially foreign or radically different ones to our typically parochial perspective. We should travel, talk to as many different people as possible. Immerse ourselves in other cultures. These things can help sow the seeds of tolerance. As Socrates was claimed to say an “unexamined life is not worth living”. As such learning should be one of the driving forces in our life. We should learn that there is a deep well of universal human nature on this planet. That people are motivated by much the same needs and wants. This cuts both way of course, love and compassion and altruism are ever present but so to are ignorance, delusion and racism.

Reason and detachment from delusion.


Can we say that Nazi Germany was a exemplar of reason when it purported to believe that it was a master race descended from Norse Gods? Was burning books, invading other countries and murdering six million Jews really the end product of reason? We don’t need such striking examples to show that reason and delusion are like love and hate in our discussion of the good life. Consider the jealous and suspicious husband who when drinking hits his wife and utters sexual obscenities over her supposed transgressions. His wife is not cheating of course, its all in his head. He is guilty off not using his reason (as well as compassion and restraint) and acting under a drink induced delusion.

Reason is the exercise of intelligence to construe the world in a way that purports to reality. Delusion is living with ideas, opinions and beliefs that do not meet the necessary burden of proof. Following on from delusion is dreaming and wish thinking. Dreaming is of course useful but all to often it carries over into the real world. How we view ourselves, our lives, other people and the world itself.

In life we have to be brave and put our dreams or comforting delusions away. Our attachment to such states is a source of our suffering. The Buddha said of our thoughts can be likened to “water in a cup. If the cup is filled with dirty, stale water, it is useless. Only after the old water is thrown out can the cup become useful.”


Best and Be Well.

A Letter on Love

Love is a human universal. It cuts across all cultures, all times and all places. Many cultures isolated from one another have independently evolved understandings of the concepts and experiences of love. Both ancient Greeks, Romans and Chinese’s have unique expressions for differing ideas of what love is. The world today is vastly different from the one Aristotle and Plato inhabited millennia’s ago, their (Greek) conceptions of love however is as useful now as it was then.

They of course have a term for that notorious state of sexual lust eros which is sensual pleasure and desire allied with mania which is obsession. Consider though agape, self sacrificing, altruistic and thoughtful love. ludus- affection of children. Or philia covering a range of non-sexual love, between parent and child, brothers in arms, travelling companions and business partners.

It is of course sexual or romantic love that writes books, makes songs of lost love and longing, paintings and poetry. It is this love that we hunger for, search, sacrifice, die and ultimately even kill for. The paring and bond of loving men and women is something that fundamentally underwrites our very existence. The eros that frequently brings children into the world and the pragma needed to bring them up in a loving and caring environment.

We all consider ourselves experts and philosophers on this subject. We can ask our grannies on questions about love and romance in a way we don’t ask them questions about particle physics or molecular biology. The experts have stayed largely silent on love and human emotion up until know, even psychology for large swathes of the 20th century remained silent on the subject. The monsters from planet explanation I am talking about are of course the men and women in white coats we call scientists.

Oh dear! You may say. We are going to have to hear about boring explanations and lines about bodily process and chemical change. I’ll take my Shakespeare sonnets any day of the week and your mechanical explanations of serotonin and dopamine can go up your you know what. The purpose of this essay is to show why certain fears of science are misplaced and that much of the conflict between science and the humanities is a non-starter. I intend to show that much of our supposed conflict comes from a confusion of categories, between understanding and knowledge on the one hand and experience and experiencing on the other.

It seems in the West we have an almost culturally ingrained antipathy to science and its promethean ability to unravel the mysteries of the universe and everything in it. This is of course paradoxical to the point of hilarity. We in the West in 2008 enjoy a tremendous standard of living much of which is denied to the rest of the world. These tender fruits are from the tree of knowledge and progress of which science is the mainstay. We have eradicated much of the terrible diseases that have plagued us throughout history, measles, smallpox and rubella. We have cut infant death mortality, we have prolonged life to almost double or triple the age of which millions of our ancestors lived. We have developed life saving drugs, techniques such as blood transfusion which have saved countless souls. We even have the ability to control our means of reproduction thereby freeing women from their historic role of being nothing better than livestock for the bearing of male children. To say nothing of the sheer delight and utility in modern communication, the internet and air travel. The aesthetic and architectural elegance of something like the Golden Gate bridge or the Empire state building. Surely the laptop, In vitro fertilization and a Space Shuttle are masterpieces of human effort, imagination and creativity the same way renaissance painting is or the writing of Shakespeare or the music of Mozart.


At this point you may wish to interject with some damming counterexamples. Firstly we have Einstein’s monsters which allow us the capacity to destroy every single person on the planet, this is of course the atomic bomb. The development of the lethally poisonous Zyklon B allowed the Nazis to streamline their genocide of Jews during the second world war. Following the train of association we have the closely linked development of science, technology and weapons development. From this we have horrors such as napalm, white phosphors grenades and Sarin gas. I could go on……


These abominations though say less about the “evils” of science than they do about the dark chasms of human nature. Science is morally neutral. Stephen Jay Gould the American palaeontologist had this to say “Science shows us how the heavens go not how to get to heaven” Science is our greatest tool at apprehending reality, it explains how things work and how they came to be. We look to things like moral philosophy or ethics or religion for guidance on how to behave.

Is it not baffling when many men and women who can be very well educated are leery and fearful when science comes anywhere near human nature? This attitude cuts across the political and socio/economic spectrum. The culture wars in America have the near comical spectacle of the religious/conservative right joining forces with the extreme left (who share almost no common ground whatsoever) to batter back Science and its discoveries.

Its worth the trouble pondering where these hostilities arose from. For Religion the matter is easy. The creation myth of Genesis has God forbid man to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Right at the core of the Abrahamic faiths we have a taboo about learning and knowledge. Jesus himself said that we should be as little children. The Catholic church has continually opposed nearly every kind of scientific and ethical progress in human history, only absolving Galileo of heresy as early as 1992. Martin Luther the pillar of Protestantism had this to say- “Reason is the devils harlot, who can do nought but slander and harm whatever God says and does”

If this all sounds piddling and an abstraction then consider the real world consequence of unreason. Consider Bush and his bioethics council. Bush a member of the United Methodist Church-a Protestant staffed his committee mostly with hard-line Catholic intellectuals (it would seem there was a shortage of “intellectual” Protestant men and women) This council which advises Bush on topics such as genetic manipulation of animals and humans, cognitive enhancing drugs and stem cell research. The Bush presidency has of course blocked funding for stem cell research clearly on the back of the dogma that ensoulment begins at the moment of conception. His councils report which was their justification and argument for the refusal to fund federal dollars for stem cell research was littered with biblical passages and vague conceptions of human “dignity”. Much of the passages were added uncritically without thought to either their accuracy or relevance. Needless to say none of the contributors were people with relevant backgrounds to the subject such as a life scientist or a psychologist, neither was a sociologist or a historian present.

America the most technologically advanced nation and among the most brightest has allowed superstition to stifle one of the most potentially promising scientific and medical advances in history. The belief that somehow the “dignity” of a collection of human cells in a Petri dish should trump a little girl wasting away with leukaemia is simply obscene. It is tirelessly pointed out though that “Judaeo-Christian” values underwrite our “civilisation”


The academic left, the arts and humanities have their pet dogmas as well. Perhaps a large figure looms in the presence of Keats. Keats accused Newton of destroying the poetry of the rainbow. This was of course in response to Newton’s discovery of using a prism to decompose white light into a visible spectrum. In his poem he writes “conquer all mysteries by rule and line, empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine-unweave a rainbow…


Keats wrote in the romantic tradition but this antipathy to science-that it is cold and sterile and un-imaginative has carried through to two of the major art movements of the 20th century. Modernism and Post-Modernism. Although the romantics it seems never challenged the veracity of science, simply labelling it as empty and sterile. The Modernists and Post-Modernists though attacked not just enlightenment ideas such as progress and its marriage to science but its authority on truth. This of course is the schoolyard chant that there is no such things as facts or truth. The American anthropologist Matt Cartmill wrote on this dogma


Anybody who claims to have objective knowledge about anything is trying to control and dominate the rest of us…there are no objective facts. All supposed “facts” are contaminated with theories, and all theories are infested with moral and political doctrines.

This is a good approximation of the kind of sub Marxist paranoid conspiracy theorising that can take place. Its funny don’t you think that no one says that gravity is not a “objective fact” while flying at thirty thousand feet in the air? And for the life of me I cant see how the Copernican revolution with its removal of earth as the centre of the universe is “infested with moral and political doctrines” can you?


Coming back to Keats and to my main point. Understanding something and experiencing something is not the same thing. Newton unravelled the mystery of the rainbow but even with this knowledge can we really say that it is any less beautiful to look at? I don’t have enough room to refute the charge that science is incapable of producing states of awe and reverence and that it is sterile and cold. My purpose here is to illustrate how understanding and knowledge do not lessen our personal experiences any less.


My favourite food is homemade Spaghetti Bolognese, for years my mum made it out of a ready made jar. Around four years ago I purchased an Italian cookery book since then my mum makes the recipe from scratch. I have myself learned to make it, though more emphasis is placed on chilli powder when I make it for myself.(I am a fanatic when it comes to hot stuff!) Here is the recipe-




30ml ½ tbsp olive oil

1 onion, finely chopped

1 garlic clove, crushed

5ml 1/1 tsp dried mixed herbs

1.25ml ¼ tsp cayenne pepper

350-450g/ 12oz-1lb minced beef

400g/ 14oz can chopped Italian plum tomatoes

45ml1/3 tbsp tomato ketchup

15ml/1 tbsp sun dried tomato ketchup

15ml/1 tsp Worcestershire sauce

5ml/ tsp dried oregano

450ml/ ¾ pint/¾ cups beef stock

45ml1/3 tbsp red wine

400-450g/ 14oz 1lb dried spaghetti (Fresh is better- my emphasis)

Salt and ground pepper

Freshly grated parmesan cheese to serve

(for kicks I would use red pepper and fresh bird eye chillies and copious hot chilli powder, its also good to have some fresh baguettes to eat along with it-)

When I was sixteen all I knew that was in spaghetti bolognese was spaghetti, mince and tomatoes and It was my favourite meal. I’m now 22 and I know the ingredients and know how to make it and its still my favourite meal.

We could subject this to all manner of analysis. Study the chemical properties of parmesan cheese. Follow diligently the process of slaughtered cows to meat processing plants to supermarket displays to its cooking. We could investigate the ingredients and see if they have any welcome health benefits such as tomatoes which have been linked to reducing cardiovascular disease. We could even I’m sure study the effect of heat and the chemical interactions that are taking place in my stove. If we wanted we could hook up my brain to nodes and see how and where my brain lights up when I take a forkful of my favourite nosh.


I could go on ad nausea but ask yourself the question does knowing all this make my experience of when I eat any less pleasurable or important? You may see where I am going with this and if you find this analogy a little too facile- let me offer something more substantial.

Consider cancer, this disease is a killer that does not discriminate. You could be a neurosurgeon or a gardener and still fall prey. Now no one in their right mind would say we should not study or explore cancer least it leave the sufferer or potential sufferer a robot or empty or somehow robbed of humanity. Indeed we actively welcome research on this topic and any knowledge can be put to use combating it. As you read this there is a very high possibility that a person is wasting away from this disease who holds a degree in medicine, who fully understands the history, nature and composition of the disease yet still they live in abject pain and suffering. Their knowledge does not diminish their suffering and experience in any shape or form.

It is the same of love or any other human experience. Cancer and love are of course very different but they are rooted within our bodies they have a physical nature. There is no ghost in the machine that turns on love. Love is real, it has both physical and chemical properties. Consider some of the recipe for romantic sexual attraction.


Male signs of attraction

Enlarged pupils

Flushed face

Brushing back hair etc

Gazing into the eyes of beloved



Female signs of attraction

Blushing

Nervous laughing

Pupils dilating

Touching face and or hair playfully

Caressing a cylindrical object


Physiological responses regarding sexual attraction

Males experience swelling of the testes.

Males will experience penile tumescence and erection

Females will experience increase in breast size

Females will experience erection of the clitoris and labia

Females will experience vaginal lubrication and enlarging of the vagina


Brain Chemistry in association with love and sexual attraction


Elevated levels of testosterone and estrogen present when men and women respectively become romantically attracted to each other.


During the initial phases of love, when monogamous bonding has occurred raised levels of dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin are present.

Oxytocin- which has been linked to long term bonding and marriage. Oxytocin has been linked with empathy and trust.

Every single person in the world could learn this and then safely place it back on the shelf when experiencing the bliss of romantic love. A man may hold his wife in a loving embrace, smelling the summer fruit scent of her hair and feel absolutely euphoric. He may even attribute such states to elevated levels of serotonin and dopamine. But does that diminish his love for her and his wish to be with her for the rest of his life in any way? Of course not and I can prove it. There is a maxim, I forget who said it- “to question whether or not you are in love means your not” you are either experiencing it or not and when you are, when your under it you know for sure for its unlike anything else. Now of course what is the ultimate guarantor of this observation? Our own experience, our self report of what it feels like to be in such a state, and these reports can be checked against others who have experienced it.

Having knowledge, even scientific knowledge of human emotions does not stop or diminish or trivialise them or make people zombies. To say otherwise is like claiming that understanding of the human digestive system stops you from having a shit or trivialise what you “feel” on the pot or that knowing this makes you any more “robotic” or “deterministic” during your daily sit-down on the john.


Best

Michael Faulkner


Notes.

I recommend reading the work of American Anthropologist Helen E Fisher who has researched and published findings and theories of love and sexual romantic attraction.

Anatomy of Love – a Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray

Here also is a exciting talk she gave to TED

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/helen_fisher_tells_us_why_we_love_cheat.html



For a fuller discussion on Keats and his quarrel with science I recommend Richard Dawkins Unweaving the Rainbow, Science, Delusion and the appetite for wonder.

For the Academic Left--

Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science By Paul Gross and Norman Levitt.

For a critique of Bush’s bioethics committee and its pernicious ideas of dignity- Stephen Pinker’s article from the New Republic

http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=d8731cf4-e87b-4d88-b7e7-f5059cd0bfbd