Last weekend I spent three days at Douai (pronounced “dowey”) Abbey, enjoying a time of quiet and country walking, interspersed with monastic services. The most therapeutic part of it was probably just getting away from daily routines, but the religious dimension was also helpful.

My first thought, once I had settled down, was “what am I here, at Douai, for?” To which the immediate answer seemed to be, to learn to love. This was a theme I’d already been much concerned with — it occupies half a chapter of my next book. Following this proposal, there now came the further question, “how do I learn to love?”

A preliminary answer emerged through some of the readings at morning prayer: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us ” (first letter of John), accompanied by the suggestion that we learn love in response to being loved, and that this process of response holds at the level of the totality of all being, not just at the level of loving individuals.

But how does this work in practice? I can no longer resonate, as I did in my distant evangelical days, with the way this quotation from the Bible continues: “he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” The language of sacrifice (even carried to the tyrannical absurdity of the Father sacrificing his own son in order to appease himself) is no longer meaningful, in this form, for me and for most people today. Even if I were to accept the language, it could only be effective in leading me to a response of love if I could identify this act as making a real change in my own context — something that was no longer the case for me.

But at the cosmic, ecological level it does make sense. In my walks I was opening to the wonder of the world, the way each individual plant or animal is uniquely itself, drawing me into a vast and astonishing community of being. This was love, in the sense in which I have now grown to use the word: the passionate desire to expand into a greater organism (whether partnership, society, planet or cosmos) than my own individuality. I could identify this wonder as “God loving us” in the sense not necessarily of being delicately nice to us, but of enlarging us into a greater beauty.
There remained problems, however. For one thing, if love is enlargement then how can God, who is already everything, be enlarged? And how can one then be said to love oneself (something that we now see as psychologically vital) since in this case there is no ‘other’ to call me into a greater aggregate being?

Here Meister Eckhart, who I was reading at Douai, came to my assistance:

“So simple and unified is this fortress (within the soul), so beyond all manner and all powers is this solitary oneness, that no power or manner, not even God, can enter there even for a moment, nor has he ever done so, in so far as he exists in the manner and nature of his Persons. … as he is in himself One, beyond all manner and nature, he is neither Father nor Son nor Holy spirit in this sense, and yet he is still something which is neither this nor that.” [German sermons #2]

The being of God, and the being of ourselves, is ultimately paradoxical: it encompasses within itself that which is not itself (neither this not that), something that is both self and other, before which I echo, “behold I am fearfully and wonderfully made” — as is the cosmos.

Recently I’ve been stuck with a book chapter that I’m writing. My argument (about physics and spirituality) kept needing more explanation; I slotted in digressions, expanded previous sections – and as I wrote felt the readers’ eyes glazing over as as they flicked to the next chapter. My punch line was going to be great, but the text en route was a morass. As always, I needed to ask the land for advice.

Starting up the Test Way from Romsey, the morning was idyllic, with the sun filtering through a layer of thin mist spread over the fields. On the way from the Station to the start of the path I dropped into Romsey Abbey to dedicate the trip. The stones were peaceful, friendly, the space not too cluttered iwth artefacts. And they had provided an airy chapel furnished with the Sacrament where I could kneel for a while. All boded well.

The walk, with the sun burning off the mist as I progressed, was just what I needed. Autumn leaves, an ancient oak in a moss-green hollow, the light reflecting from the swollen river … all kept drawing my awareness fully back to the living Earth. It had been raining for several days, and keeping my footing through the waterlogged meadows also brought me back into my body: my whole being was responding, linking together my pilgrimage with the robust terrain.

Half way through I lost the map – what I had thought was an inner pocket was actually the gap between two garments! So then the landscape became my map, bringing me yet closer into communion with it. I realised that now all my actions were freely emerging from the interplay two converging currents: one narrowing from the greater to the small, from the rain, the woods, the fields into my immediate vicinity; the other ascending from the germ of my intention outwards, both meeting in my body.

Surely any conception of the self that omits the body is an illusory construction!

(A composite blog 11 Nov to 13 Nov)

Wednesday had ended in a collapse. During the day I had worked on half a dozen “projects” – tasks which involved others, but which I had elected to do. I would progress one, then skip to another; then an idea occurred taking me back to the first … and so on for hours seated in front of the computer in an unheated room (carbon saving is another project);  finishing up numb in body and mind. It was then time for my Taiji/chigung class, requiring a cycle ride in the dark and rain to catch the train to Romsey then a further walk …

So there I was standing in the middle of the hall surrounded by waterproofs, reflective vest, helmet, water bottle, taiji fan, book for the train, rucksack .. saying “there’s no point in going; my teacher isn’t up to scratch; I’m no good at it; I get nothing out of it …” etc for over 5 minutes. Until, from somewhere, it was suddenly “Just grab the bike and GO!” That voice was the start of recovery.

It’s not just a matter of organisation. I’ve been doing that, with lists that get longer and longer, spawning sub-lists and sub-sub-list, then switching to minimal lists, with time slots, then roving time slots, alternating physical and mental, with automated timers, with spontaneous decisions … But now there came a new thought. My projects had been charging round my brain like frightened rabbits, and after the taiji they kept me awake half the night. Then I realised  the nonsensical nature of my being controlled by my projects; for “me” and “my projects” are not separate combative entities: that they are things at all is an illusion thrown up by my own imballance.  

Thursday 12th Nov

I did what always helps for me: I walked, allowing the land, the plants and the animals to speak to me; from Nursling to Romsey; recalling as I went -

“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help. My help cometh even from the Lord, who hath made heaven and earth.”  (Psalm 121, vv 1,2) and

“In his hand are all the corners of the earth, and the strength of the hills is his also.” (Psalm 95, v. 4)

Half way through this walk, which is over a very flat flood-plain, I saw “the hills” to my right, beyond the river, reminding me of many other hills in the past through which help had come. This time, no great saying of revelation arrived. This time what I sought, I now realised, was not words; it needed to be a matter of being, not of thinking. Something had now lodged in my body that could make a difference.

In the afternoon I slept for over an hour. Outlandish!

Friday13th Nov.

This new spark is going to need tending, practice. The rabbits are scuttling back. I waste time chasing them, get late for a planned trip to London, and miss the train. So, I can enjoy a slow and really quite good cafe latte, doing nothing, in the station cafe. Ahh!

At the library that I was visiting in London, all the books I needed were in various special collections and so needed fetching, except that no books were fetched on Fridays.

This is a blessing: I have an opportunity to walk along the Thames (always exciting), obliged to stay well in my body so as not to be strained by the fairly heavy pack on my back, and then to spend this extra time provided by the library’s excentric regulations in sitting in The Tate Modern gallery, with its leather sofas and stunning view of St Paul’s cathedral, enjoying writing this blog. That “something” which had lodged in my body got stronger.

Reflecting on Karen Armstrong’s “Muhammad: prophet for our time” I realised the sense in which I and every living organism is here for a purpose. I don’t mean that there is a pre-ordained task, like an exam question, that is set before us, to achieve or fail; that would imply that the world was run by a divine Examiner and would belittle the nature of life. No, rather – we find ourselves in the midst of purposefulness; we are agents, creative sources of change, and our actions concern us: we are responsible for them whether or not we desire this. Moreover, as coherent beings, holding together as a whole organism at each moment, being informed and shaped by the past, being called by the future that is implicitly receiving our actions, we cannot think of our responsible agency as a multitude of choices, but as constituting a single coherent act. Not only is it the case that the angels, in the traditional theology,  only make one decision (namely, the decision to face God or to turn away from God – see Rupert Sheldrake and Matthew Fox’s “The Physics of Angels”) but the same is true for us: in its essence, it does not make sense to divide this holistic complex of action into separate actions, even though that is what our narrative rationality tries to do to it. Our life is one purposeful act. That is what “being here” means.

So spirituality consists of facing this fact within the context of the whole of our niche in the cosmos; of grasping my life-being in a firm grip of awareness – awareness of just what this context means. For meaning and purpose are simply the two sides of contextuality. But of course, most of the time we grasp this partially, in the provisional moment, by means of rationality and morality. These are the props that we earthy beings require.

I’ve always found the Christian notions of “prayer” confusing (and perhaps confused). The innumerable practical books on the subject don’t help with the basic conceptual problem: what is the point of asking for something of a being who is claimed to be fully benevolent and to know all your wishes and needs in advance? The usual answer is something along the lines that by “asking” you enable yourself to receive in an effective manner the good thing that God is wanting to give you; but praying only in order to create the byproducts of the prayer sounds fake.

I still think this is the case, but I recently got a better insight into the general area. I can see the point of meditation as a means of training the mind/spirit, and I sometimes use the Jesus Prayer as a mantra for this purpose. The version I use is “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy” which sits well with the breathing. The full version ends “… have mercy on me a sinner”, which, apart from being too long for a good mantra, assumes a forensic situation in which I am the plaintiff in a court faced with a strict judge of my sins – and this is not the concept of God that Jesus taught. I know perfectly well my need of the inner transformation that spiritual masters tell us is possible but the setting of a law court is, as the masters also tell us, not a good place in which to achieve it. Now, there is a plausible Byzantine tradition (for which there is unfortunately not a scrap of sound etymological evidence) that the Greek “eleison” (have mercy) in the original is derived from “elia” meaning “olive”, with the implication of anointing, So by missing out the “on me a sinner”, and leaning on this tradition I can interpret the mantra as a process of opening myself to a healing anointing that can bring me closer to the godlike.

This took on a deeper meaning recently, however, when I realised that I could do this mantra for someone else: by mentally uniting my breathing with theirs, the possibility of this healing – if this sort of connectivity means anything – was being enabled for both of us. This seemed to me to be a very genuine sense of prayer, and one in the spirit of Jesus as healer.

This morning I had a bash at singing the Te Deum. I always loose the tune at “O Lord, save thy people : and bless thine heritage” (“Salvum fac populum tuum, Domine, et benedic hereditati tuae”) so I worked on that a bit. The power of this poetry lies in the vividness of its mythological imagery: “The glorious company of the apostles praise thee; the goodly followship of the prophets praise thee; the noble army of martyrs praise thee …” You can imagine them all formed up in massed ranks carrying their books or the instruments of their death as in a mediaeval painting.

And then follows the solidly orthodox credal statements: “Thou [O Christ] art the everlasting Son of the Father … Thou sittest at the right hand of the Father” and so on. I was reminded of the period of the 4th century Christian Councils which laid all this down.  Christianity’s “unique selling point”, in the competition with the other products available at the time, was that it offered everlasting life, guaranteed by the proposition  that Jesus (a) was man and so could fully sympathis and identify with us; and (b) was also God and so really did carry the clout required to intercede with the Father in heaven. Never mind the logic: without this guarantee of everlasting life in heaven, you might just as well sign up for Gnosticism or Judaism which were logically tidier. And everlasting life (which Ravi Ravindra once described as “a threat, not a promise”) was, if it was in heaven, really worth it in comparison with the sort of life that most people struggled with in the days of the declining Roman Empire. (Richard Rubenstein’s “When Jesus became God” is a great book about this period).

At a rational level, I can bracket off this line of thought by reflecting that it is founded in St Paul rather than in the synoptic Gospels (whose preceding material was probably almost unknown to Paul). But it seems to be saying something important at the mythic level – at the depths of this level where logic becomes almost completely paradoxical – namely, that the pure Being which love sometimes enables us to see in a person is also present in the Absolute. Meister Eckhart and Dante had it right: “isness” is also “love”.

I’ve just been reading some writings of Rumi (I grabbed a volume from my son’s stored books in the garage when I needed something to read in a hurry!)

He often evokes mixed feelings in me: on one hand – “wow, this is amazing!” On the other hand – “but this is hopelessly far from where I am, spiritually.” It evokes a faint, unfulfillable yearning. But later today, I realised that, in a way that’s hard to put my finger on, it’s not so far from me. In Rumi’s language, the “heart”, those very inner feelings of desire, warmth and longing, is very close to me and it constantly prompts … “yes, this is the right way” or “no, you’re getting colder”.

The above was written a week or more ago, since when I’ve been grappling with maybe the biggest obstacle that the Koran poses for the liberal Christian -  the constant repetition of rewards and punishment at the day of judgement (which I’ve blogged about before). Two points came to me that helped with this. The first is based on the what Seyyed Hossein Nasr once wrote: that the whole of the Koran is contained in the first chapter (al fatihah). This means that the Koran is not a narrative, but rather there is only one chapter which is repeatedly enlarged upon in different ways. The day of judgment is a part of this one chapter, as is the mercy of God, and so both these are invariably repeated.

The second point that came was this: the crux of the idea of judgment is the fact that life is finite (which might seem different from the tenor of many Eastern religions with their stress on reincarnation). One the Christian and Islamic view, we only have one bite at the cherry, one chance to wake up, so don’t blow this chance. And if there is an eternal dimension to our life (meaning: a timeless dimension, not a dimension going on and on and on and boringly on) then this dimension must logically reflect the content of the temporal part. And that, mythically expressed, is judgement.

Actually, the difference between “only one life” and reincarnation may be superficial. After all, you could say that we have 30000 bites at the cherry, one for each day of this life. So having more lives doesn’t much alter the largeness of the opportunity. Thus, “now is the acceptable time”: how about waking up today? It’s easy to say that, though. As the Beatles said, leave me where I am, I’m only sleeping.

Which brings me back to Rumi and the heart. The path to waking up is following the heart, Rumi says. Through the heart I can read where I need to be heading. Rumi writes
“A human being is a great thing: everything is inscribed within him, but ‘veils’ and ‘obfuscations’ prevent him from reading the knowledge he has within himself. …
despite all these things that lie hidden in the ‘darkness’ beghind the ‘veils’ a human being does manage to read something and be aware of what he reads.” (Fihi ma fihi #11, translated Kabir Helminski, “The Rumi Collection” pp 78-9)

The circumstances surrounding the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi seem to have thrown into relief the way humanity is still struggling to reach a truly moral level. Let me explain what I mean. I think of our justice concepts as going through three levels (a bit related to Kohlberg’s “stages of moral development”).

First was vengeance; that is, the absence of justice. Someone does something to inconvenience or hurt me or my tribe, I/we get angry, so I/we go and thump them, with a degree of hardness depending on how angry we are. This still seems to be the dominant stage, both individually and collectively throughout most countries. It has the result that the person thumped then gets angry and thumps back and so on. It only works at all when the population density is so low that people can wander away for a while and forget about it, a situation that was becoming obsolete by about 1500 BCE.

Next was State punishment: the idea that cycles of retribution could, and must, be broken through the establishment by the State of a rational system of justice that overruled personal vengeance. One might place the definitive statement of this at 458 BCE with the performance of Aeschylus’ play Eumenides at the official Athenian tragedy festival.

Finally was the idea of non-violence, which received its most well known form in the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) of Christianity, and later in the teaching of Mohandas Gandhi. The theologian Walter Wink has elucidated – to my mind, convincingly – that Jesus reached the position of non-violence set out in theses Gospels as a response to life under under occupation by the Roman Empire, a force that was impossible to defeat by violent means. Non-violence embodies compassion as as an ultimate good.

The steps to the second and third stages each involved going beyond a small-scale good to a greater good. The apparent loss and defeat at the scale of the individual or tribe, and then at the scale of the State, is, in its most recent forms, finally redeemed by the possibility of planetary justice based on the rights of all beings.

It was sadly to be expected that the vast majority of newspapers (if we count the number of copies in circulation) stayed, as always, at the pre-Aeschylan stage. The concept that upholding the integrity of  itself is more important than almost any other consideration is still immensely fragile, and we see it flouted time and again by world leaders. And time and again, from Cambodia to Zimbabwe, we see the vastness of the cruelty that breaks out when the dikes of law itself start crumbling and disintegrate.

Did Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish justice minister, in fact uphold the law by granting release, or pervert the law by bowing to commercial and other pressures? It looks as thought the former was the case. But many strange arguments have muddied the waters. In Saturday’s Guardian Geoffrey Robertson argued that law was violated because what was at issue here was a crime against humanity, and, in the international laws regulating this, compassionate release was out of the question. But MacAskill only had power to administer Scottish law: international courts has not tried Megrahi nor was there an international warrant out for his arrest.  Robertson (first president of the UN war crimes court) seems to have been led, by his own involvement in international law, to confuse the greater global extent of international law with a greater level of justice. Only compassion itself (for the individual, for the community and for the planet) can have this higher status.

Such considerations do not, of course, make the decision any easier. Quite the contrary: we all blunder our way through as best we can, and we all mix baser motives with higher ones. What saddens me at times like this, however, is the extent to which the higher principles are not merely overridden, but in so many place are thrown out of the window at the outset.

I spent last week at Cae Mabon, a wonderful encampment in the woods of Snowdonia, with a group from GreenSpirit. It was immensely rewarding, though not quite in the way we had been anticipating. We’d been aiming for holding a “Council of All Beings” in which we would come together, each one representing a “being” of this planet – a species, a place, an element, or whatever – which we had previously chosen, or which had chosen us, and we would be asking these beings what message they had for us humans at this time (see http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/coab.htm). The night before we were due to hold the Council, one of our members had a seizure and had to be winched out to hospital in a helicopter; the energy changed, with more of a focus on the human, but we realised that in the course of our preparation we had already learnt what the earth was saying to us, and we only needed to come together in a circle to draw it together.

I’ll describe my own process in this. The first step was to go out and open myself to being chosen by some being, to represent them. In the past, when starting on a significant journey like this I had sometimes been guided by a buzzard, which I had seen high in the sky, its call seeming to encourage me in my enterprise at the time. On this occasion I had only gone a short distance up a path leading from the track into Padarn Country Park , when a buzzard came down low, a little above the trees, and flew in circles, spiraling forwards to the Northeast and crying at each turn. I followed it until it veered off to the left over an exit from the park, which I took, and it then left me, at the start of a track that led through the disused Dinorwig slate quarry.

Interactions like this are a beautiful example of so-called “both-and” logic, whcih I prefer to think of as context-dependent logic (in particular, topos logic). From an exclusively rational point of view, or indeed from the buzzard’s own point of view, it was probably carrying out some normal buzzardly activity, such as looking for prey. But from the different perspective that I was occupying at the time it could be seen as conveying a message. It is the nature of context dependent logic that there is no contradiction between different contexts: the rational causal account and my “magical” account are simply different contexts for the same event. Carrying out a ritual like this is a process of changing contexts, of moving perceptions and feelings into a different system, a different way of knowing.

It was in this spirit that I was able to walk through the quarry, and come out at the far end where, with a feeling of  joy and blessing I was greeted by the sight of a green valley stretching ahead. At which point a group of three birds, which I couldn’t identify, flew over from the far side of Llyn Peris and danced, squealing, in the air above me for a while, before returning to the other side. I then knew that the being whcih had chosen me was this mountain whose side I had just traversed, a mountain whose southern flank had been entirely stripped away by the quarrying.

As I was a late developer in social relations, I tend to stop and think about interactions that others carry out automatically, such as who does what when I pass someone in the street. In this instance my starting point is a combination of my (well suppressed) mammalian brain that wants to go up to them and sniff them, or groom them; and a feeling of respect, even awe, at this other being who comes towards me. I’ve already posted about the strategy of leaving the mammalian brain bit to your dog to sort out, but as I’m dogless that doesn’t help me. So let’s forget about that one, and look at the second, the reaction to the sacred in the other person.

I was once told that the greeting, traditional in most parts of India, of bowing my hands palm-to-palm to the other and saying “Namaste” means “the sacred in me greets the sacred in you”. That can be a good thing to do, but it’s not really practical as a way of interacting when getting onto trains in the London Underground, for instance. So what happens in practice is usually pretty random. I find other blokes and teenagers tricky, and more often than not don’t make eye contact at all, which is a sad denial of the little piece of holiness that I feel about the encounter. With older people on  the other hand, particularly women, there is often a shared glance, so that I feel we have acknowledged our presence. With people who wear dark glasses – and I admit this could be for reasons of health – I feel cheated out of the whole process.

In such a glance, almost unconscious, there may be a multitude of instinctive reactions going on. Once, when I was a very open and relaxed state, as I passed someone I noticed that, in the half second or so of the glance, our eyes flicked in rapid mutual response like two butterflies in courtship. I then understood a very strange passage by Rudolf Steiner (from whom stems the spiritual movement of Anthroposophy and Waldorf Schools). He recognised many different human senses in additions to smell, touch and so on, and he called one of these extra senses, very confusingly, “the sense of self”. By this he didn’t mean, as you would expect, the sense of your own self, but the sense of someone else’s self. And he described its operation as a succession of quick approaches and violent withdrawals, just as I had experienced in that glance.

All these thoughts were triggered in practice as I passed someone, meeting each other with a quick open gaze,  on return from my morning walk (into which I’m now struggling to incorporate some jogging – the first deliberate exercise I’ve done in my life). I then started wondering about the other species around me. When passing most non-human animals our reactions are straight forwardly species-ist. I’m either a predator or irrelevant. Fortunately in the UK I’m never potential prey. But I can still be aware of them and take pleasure in their presence, as I can in the case of the trees and plants. A friend once described to me how she succeeded in so focussing her thoughts that she calmed an agitated chittering squirel and established a loving relationship with it. I’ve tried that with squirrels but have never achieved it. But I can take pleasure in the existence of all other beings, and this is a worthwhile exercise to develop.

So maybe the starting point with other humans also could be found in this general sense of the holiness of all beings.