Last night I had been listening to a news report on the politics of Rwanda which charted the way in which good intentions had started to be undermined by corruption and repression – a drift into the camp of countries like USA, Iran, Israel … who commit the worst possible crime: that of destroying the nature of law itself. Law is the means by which society breaks the cycles of vengeance which otherwise drag us into chaos. I am convinced that the transition from vengeance to justice was the greatest step in human history. It can be seen in the Jewish development of the concept (tsedeq) as it starts to appear in the Psalms (perhaps 7th century BCE), stressing the establishment of a right order of things in which the poor were protected. And for me it finds a definitive statement for the Western world in the Eumenides of Aescylus in the fifth century BCE. But some 2500 years later, after Jesus had moved even further with his teaching on love, the majority of newspapers in the UK are filled with vitriolic articles putting forward vengeance in the name of justice, as if we had learnt nothing since the dawn of humanity.

So I drifted to sleep with pessimistic thoughts and awoke under a weight of awareness of human viciousness. I thought of the way in which, as law recedes from the collective consciousness, so violence in the support of greed (and of addiction and despair) flows in. Well meaning systems, both religious and secular, have held back this threatened tide with rational legal structures, but rationality is a weak thing in the face of the deeper parts of our mind. And that is where spirituality lies. The prophets, both recognised and unrecognised, of each age and each community call their people to open their eyes, to see the vision of rightness both in the fabric of the universe and inside themselves. Rightness/justice is not “fairness”, nor the absence of suffering, but a living consciousness of the intrinsic value of every being, from the scores of baby frogs emerging from our pond this month, most of them destined to perish in the weeks ahead, to the mountains of Wales which we shall be visiting soon, with their roots sinking deep into the crust, surviving humanity’s tearing at them for slate and no doubt destined to outlive humanity when our species goes to extinction like all others. All are wonders at which we can rejoice. And, unlike the frogs and mountains, we can if we wish then bring in our amazingly powerful rationality to help maintain this justice, this right order, in our planet.

Earlier this week I was scanning a series of quoted letters giving opinions for and against holding Tai Ji classes in a church hall. For some, Tai Ji was a covert conspiracy to ensnare Christians into evil; for others it was a healthy exercise of mind and body, entirely appropriate for a church hall offered for community use.  It was fascinating to see how both sides were using the same methods of handling language. The Christian fundamentalist group looked at words associated with Tai Chi to demonstrate that Tai Ji was linked with them and therefore bad, while the liberal Christian group did the same thing to demonstrate that it was linked with us and therefore good.  One writer, for example, affirmed (on what grounds?) that Tai Ji contained a hidden teaching, that the word “occult” also meant “hidden”, and that “occult” was a label for some non-Christian practices. So, putting all this together, Tai Ji was to do with them and evil. Rational thought, evidence or experience hardly got a look-in.

It was apparent that here language was no longer a way of conveying or discovering information. It had broken free from the actual world and had become a collection of symbols for distinguishing an in-group from an out-group.

Sadly, a great deal of God-talk is just this; free-wheeling language serving only to give the hearers a cozy feeling of being in rather than out. Which is why it is so refreshing to go on a retreat and listen, either from dedicated teachers or from readings of the classics, to people who are talking about what they have experienced, and who for evidence are calling on the intimations of spirituality that we all have in our own experience.

Much of being human seems to be to do with keeping our language (whether spoken inwardly to ourselves or outwardly to others) in contact with our experience, with our genuine knowing. When language looses touch with experience and becomes a tool of our emotions, the result is chaos or even warfare – within ourselves or within society.

I confess I’ve had a problem with people wearing dark glasses or niqabs. In the past I’ve always given passers-by at least a quick glance in the eye, which is my way of acknowledging that they are fellow humans like me and welcome in my world. But a month or so ago someone pointed out to me how culturally-bound this was, and that in some cultures looking in the eye was as intimate as going up and embracing them in our culture. Ah! now I realise … So it makes a lot of sense to cover your face, if you don’t want to be visually hugged all the time but are proud to declare your faith.

I was reminded of this just now when jogging across the common. This is new for me. In the past I’ve occasionally tried it (recognising my woeful state of fitness) and – because this is the first deliberate “exercise” I’ve ever done in my life – I started gradually, alternately running and walking. Since the other occupants of the common at 7.30 am were all either dog-walking or jogging I always felt uncomfortable engaging in an Unrecognised Activity. A couple of weeks ago, however, it clicked what jogging was (as opposed to running) : modest steps so that you could turn the energy up or down at will. In addition I donned a T-shirt and sweat pants, and Yea!! I’m one of them. Yes, I know I’m a bit paranoid, and no one else could care less because they were all listening to their I-things anyway; but I put on my temporary identity and felt fine.

I’m lucky in having a very fulfilling and pretty weird main identity (mathematician-cum-philosopher with strong interests in mysticism and circle dancing) which I’m perfectly happy with. Now these thoughts are making me aware of the difficulty of those whose off-the-peg identity is starting to get a bit threadbare.

This raises thoughts about the “real self” – what’s left after you’ve taken off all these garments. But I’m inclined to agree with Ibsen’s metaphor in the play “Peer Gynt”. Taking off identities is like peeling the layers off an onion: when you’re finished, there’s nothing left.

Spare a thought for us self-tortured intellectuals. While many Christians are unencumbered by the need to pin everything down clearly, I am constantly perplexed in reconciling the resonant symbolism of Christianity with my vocation to engage the rational mind as well.

Take the “Jesus Prayer”, which I’ve already referred to in an earlier post, with the (abbreviated) Greek words “Kyrie Iesou Christe, eleison”: “Lord, Jesus Christ have mercy”, where the word “mercy/eleison” is tempered by its traditional (but unevidenced) association with “anointing”. What, for a scientist, is the relation between the universal Christ-consciousness (kyrie) and the in-dwelling image of the human Jesus? (The central paradox of Christianity.) It occurred to me this morning that there was a clue in the well known story by the 12th century Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar of the “Conference of Birds” (or, as Anne Baring renders it, “The Flight of the Birds to Union”). The punch-line of the story [scroll away here if you intend to read it and don't want the ending to be spoiled] occurs when a party of thirty birds finally finish their arduous pilgrimage to visit the King of the Birds, the Simurgh. Exhausted, starving and almost featherless they drag themselves into the audience chamber of the Simurgh, to find it empty. Empty, that is, apart from 30 birds, or in Persian “si murgh”. They have in fact found what they sought, and know it as themselves.

This helped me to touch the core of this Christian paradox, that the universal  Christ-consciousness is the same as the ultimate essence of humanity hidden way down in myself, and the same as the more-than-human which, in moments where reality breaks through, is present in a community. Indeed, you might even say, creator, infant and spirit, respectively.

William Blake’s poem Auguries of innocence begins:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

I was reminded of this today while chanting the “Magnificat” (the song of Mary). Each interval between the pitch of one note and the next is up for exploration by me: a fraction larger, a fraction smaller, and the emotional quality of the chant shifts between light and dark like the shadows of thin clouds passing the sun.  In addition there is the shape of the note’s sound: its variation in intensity, pitch and emotional quality from start to finish. Each successive note that arrives opens in offering a little universe of possibility, and is succeeded by another such universe.

It is the same when sitting still out of doors gazing at the wild vegetation before me: seeing the diversity of plants, then the diversity of the shapes of each leaf and stem, the varied communities of insects swarming over each one, and continuing in imagination into the endless layers of microscopic detail that we know are there: the inner cosmos of the world “out there” calling to the world “in here”, in me. And, as the religious traditions remind me, these worlds are ultimately the same world: “that art thou”.

Hope is starting to dawn for me. Hope in the sense of what emerges “beyond optimism” (the book title by the political Buddhist Ken Jones), when optimism has been unmasked.

Yes, I’ve been having a gloomy time. Hardly a day goes past without a reminder of the continuing, and at times growing, presence of “climate denial”, fuelled by an amazing ignorance of what has been established in the vast body of climate research over the last 15 years, the widespread feelings of fear and mistrust that lead people to believe charlatans rather thinking for themselves, and a culture of self-seeking greed. I found myself deciding, in the face of this, that the best the human race could for, after the first wave of mass population deaths, was the decline of Homo Sapiens into a minor species scratching a living in a few fertile patches. I had reconciled myself to such a fade-out, while not ruling out continual cycles of expansion through greed and ingenuity followed by collapse and self-destruction. The problem is fundamental: most popular religion is spiritually bankrupt; in its place we think we can force through the changes needed by controlling and dominating each other and the world, while failing to see that it is impossible for humans to live while ignoring the non-rational part of our nature.

Yet (as I argued in my last post) this part of us is not only the source of violence or insanity but also the source of love and wisdom. So we need to paint a picture, tell a story, of what the earth could be like if we turned back to the times and places in our history when the intuitive and the rational (right brain / left brain, implicational system / propositional system) worked together. In the past such windows of grace were limited to a particular class in a particular region — Classical Athens, Ashoka’s India, the Renaissance … Now it can be global; indeed with what we now know and can do there is no other way. We have a few pictures of what might be, but they are idiosyncratic and partial (e.g. Ben Okri’s Astonishing the Gods, Sally Gearhart’s The Wanderground). So we need to start dreaming, beginning with dreaming  a new relationship with Gaia, who can teach us much of what we need to know. We have immense capacities to love, to love each other and the Earth.  I think we can now start to dream our way forwards in the hope that this can give us.

This information has been rediscovered every generation or so for at least the last 2500 years. Each culture has expressed it in different ways, and so their commonality hasn’t been recognised, but now I think it’s time that it became fully recognised and taken into account. It concerns a basic polarity in ourselves, in how we come to know the world and hence in how the world appears to us.

I’m going to name some significant landmarks in this process:

St Paul (who was very hung up on morality) expressed it in terms of “flesh” and “spirit”: “For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh and these are contrary the one to the other, so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.” (Galatians 5:17 and many similar instances.)

Mediaeval Western thought expressed it in terms of “body” and “soul”, though this was confused by not knowing what came under which of these headings, and where to fit “spirit” into the picture. Descartes (1637 etc.) tried to tidy it up with res extensa (physically extended stuff) and res cogitans (thinking stuff) — trying to grasp the same thing, but still not really getting the point.

In 1945 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, developing a strand of philosophy called phenomenology, formulated this polarity in terms of the interaction between our rational thinking and our immediate sensory immersion in the world, mediated by our body. In 1997 David Abram wrote The Spell of the Sensuous emphasising  the importance of uniting with the world  holistically, through our senses; and he linked the progressive weakening of our ability to do this to human cultural change from spoken to written language. In 1998 Leonard Shlain in The Alphabet versus the Goddess argued that this cultural/linguistic shift corresponded to a shift in emphasis from the way the right hemispheres of the brain views the world to the way the left hemisphere views it, though this was based on a very narrow range of experimental data regarding the hemispheres.

Meanwhile, understanding of our ways of knowing the world increased with the advance of experimental psychology, and in 1993 John Teasdale and Philip Barnard (in Affect Cognition and Change) derived from this experimental work an effective (though necessarily highly simplified) model for how the human mind functioned. It was as if  the mind was run by two independent meaning-making systems, which they called the “Implicational” and “Propositional” systems.

Most recently, in 2009, Ian McGilchrist in his monumental The Master and his Emissary has brought the whole thing together, drawing on a vast body of research into the the two hemispheres of the brain and into cultural change. This isn’t the last word (in particular, the post-1960 work just alluded to needs linking more closely with McGilchrist’s work), but it is now clear that there is a fundamental polarity built into human knowing, and expressed in the nature of the world as it appears to us. This polarity can, and often does, reach the point of a disabling internal conflict within the individual and within society. The two poles involved are, very roughly:

1. Rational — language-based, precise, analytic, thinking sequentially, divorced from immediate experience (left hemisphere, propositional system).

2. Intuitive — sensation-based, holistic, integrating experience in parallel, rooted in relationship with the world and with other beings (right hemisphere, implicational system).

Humanity is in extreme peril because Western culture leads us to divorce these two ways of human knowing, leading to a collective insanitiy.

A few days ago I awoke from a confused dream accompanied by the words “God is within me and I am within God” — a proposition that could mean something, though it has the paradoxical consequence that God is within God. So I spent a few days mulling it over.

At a logical level it’s message is very familiar to me. I find “God within” in prayer/meditation: going inside myself, usually closing my eyes to exclude the “external” world, shutting off the constant internal dialogue that absorbs me for too much of my life, and finding a permanence, a ground, that seems greater than my usual superficial life. At the much deeper level reached by more dedicated meditators than I this is the Self with a big “S”, called in the Indian tradition the Atman. The God within is also, in a different way, perhaps a metaphor for the sudden promptings that sometimes come to guide me or turn me in a different direction.

Similarly the “God outside” is the unity of the cosmos that I know as a scientist: the vastness that gives rise to everything that has being, known as the Brahman. On this way of thinking, and continuing with the Indian tradition, the paradox of “God within God” is resolved at a yet deeper level at which it is realised (as it says in the Upanishads) that “Atman is Brahman” and “I am that”.

But since I have not reached an actual experience of this unity, this is all at an intellectual, logical, level; and so I have been inquiring as to whether it had another, more authentic meaning for me. As I have written before in this blog, I found this at the bodily level, rather than the intellectual. As I walked briskly home this morning I enjoyed the surging of energy in my body and the balance and active intention that was a part of being me at that moment. This awareness did not stay within my body, however: it resonated with the whole landscape I was walking through. Walking was an action involving the whole web of physical connections between myself and the landscape — the trees, the wind, the earth …  a landscape that responded and returned energy back to me. (All this, by the way, in a strictly metaphorical use of the word “energy”!) I was intensely aware of a single web of life, of which I was an integral part.

If I were to call “God” the totality of this web, in all its aspects  (though I would prefer the word “cosmos”), then this is indeed a level of organisation which be said to be both “God” within me and “God” around me. But more than this: it is a dynamic “God”. My awareness can sometimes start with my own intentions, my role as an actor in this greater whole, whose act flows outwards from me; or sometimes I can start with the wonder of the trees and the planet and allow this awareness to flow into me and energise me.  So “God”, in this rather animistic sense, can be thought of both as outside, flowing into me, or within me flowing out, mirroring the dynamic of my own inward and outward breath. And when I allow myself to do this, life becomes richer and sweeter.

Last week changed the way I thought about Easter.

Easter, the main Christian festival, has always been important for Isabel and myself. In the past we have celebrated it by taking part in the traditional Vigil in the evening before Easter. The service starts in complete darkness, psalms are sung which introduce the themes of descent into darkness and liberation into light, and bible readings recap the key messages of the Hebrew scriptures. Then some or all of us go outside, where a fire is kindled from “new fire” struck from a flint (in the form of cigarette lighter!), and a large candle is marked with Christian symbols and lit from the fire. The candle is carried into the church with three cries of “the light of Christ”, and candles held by each member of the congregation are lit from it. After this the meaning of the ritual is proclaimed by a soloist singing a very old chant called the “Exultet” (Latin for “rejoice”). By now it is past midnight, so, with the impatience characteristic of Christian liturgy, the first mass of Easter begins. A lot more goes on as well, but this is the gist of it.

More recently a few of us used to extend the celebration with a party continuing into the small hours, at which time we travelled to join a church that lit a bonfire on the beach at dawn and roasted fish on it for all to eat, in recollection of one of the biblical accounts of an appearance of Jesus after his death. And in the last few years Isabel and I have shared the silent vigil offered by St James’ Church, Piccadilly (London), passing the night from Saturday evening to a mass after sunrise on Easter in this inner city church surrounded by the noise of drunken party goers and speeding ambulances — a powerful experience putting us in touch with the mission of Christianity to the brokenness of society.

This year, however, we were attracted by an announcement in GreenSpirit Journal of a “Cosmic Easter Retreat”! I’ve been involved with the charity GreenSpirit for many years. It promotes a wider view of spirituality, embracing not just the human world but also our living relationship with the whole amazing cosmos on which we depend; so now was the opportunity to rethink Easter in the light of this.
It was a really valuable 3 days from Maundy Thursday (the evening when Christians traditionally recall Jesus’ “last supper” with his disciples) to Easter day. Nine of us were taking part with Mary-Jo Radcliffe facilitating but everyone engaging fully with the process, either by constant attentive presence and the non-verbal interaction that goes with that, or by contributing ideas, poems, songs and so on. (We contributed songs and circle dances.) We all met in the “dovecote” of Ammerdown conference centre — a spacious room (everything in this estate, including the dovecote, was on a grand scale) fully converted for human habitation. Mary-Jo created an environment that was regularly reshaped to inspire the changing needs of our process, by using a succession of different centrepieces: sombre colours, or complete emptiness, for reflecting on times of diminishment, where we are stripped of the comfortable trappings that hide us from our true essence; glorious glittering drapes for celebrating our unity with the whole creative cosmos on Easter day. And a subgroup of us sang the “Exultet” together.

The whole process supplied the essentials of what spirituality means for me. Moments of transformation of mind and body, when I felt that my old habits had fallen away and I was open to begin afresh; awareness of the the need for justice to heal a suffering world; inspiration from the wonder and splendour of the whole universe which made sense of existence. This is surely what religion is about.

Later on in my stay at Douai I went to vespers (in Latin), after which we all went briskly over to the chapel with a statue of the Virgin Mary, where we lined up and sang a hymn to her.  I found myself wondering about this and similar devotional practices. She is a very complex character. The statue was the usual image of the delicate simpering young woman in a head-scarf, but in many historical periods the concept of “virgin” was something much more robust and feisty. Elsewhere I have described the Greek goddess Artemis (named as ‘virgin’ in the second line of her Homeric hymn to her), who moves effortlessly between her roles of choreographing the dances of the gods in heaven and spreading the terror of the huntress on earth. In the history of the early church, taking a vow of virginity was almost the only means whereby a woman could live independently from subjugation into an inferior status to men; and Eckhart in his sermons often stressed that “virginity” meant inner freedom. And there is much evidence that Mary played a key rule in the organisation of the church in the years following the death of Jesus. But also, of course, there is the St Augustine of Hippo, with his hang-ups about sexuality, installing into Christianity the idea that Mary had to be a virgin because Original Sin is a sort of sexually transmitted disease.

So who was it that we were singing this hymn to?

To me, the most obvious answer is, a Mother: supplying the maternal love that we all may have had or may have longed for in childhood: a further dimension of the love that I wrote about in the previous post. Rather than the effete statue of Mary in the church, I warmed more to the icon of the Virgin and Child in oratory of the residential area of Douai. As well as the tranquillity of mutual love, each one is by a gesture drawing the viewer’s attention to the other: Mary presenting to us the one who both erupts into the world like a new-born child and also is the expression of the creative power of the universe; Jesus presenting to us unfathomable abundance of love itself.