The World Within Me: A Personal Journey to Spiritual Understanding

The World Within Me

of related interest

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Faith, Stories and the Experience of Black Elders Singing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land

Anthony Reddie ISBN 1 85302 993 3

Spirituality, Healing and Medicine Return to the Silence

David Aldridge ISBN 1 85302 554 2

The Spiritual Dimension of Ageing Elizabeth Mackinlay ISBN 1 84310 008 8

The World Within Me A Personal Journey to Spiritual Understanding Peter Houghton

Jessica Kingsley Publishers London and Philadelphia

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, England W1T 4LP. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the publisher. Warning: The doing of an unauthorised act in relation to a copyright work may result in both a civil claim for damages and criminal prosecution. The right of Peter Houghton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in the United Kingdom in 2002 by Jessica Kingsley Publishers 116 Pentonville Road London N1 9JB, UK and 400 Market Street, Suite 400 Philadelphia, PA 19106, USA www.jkp.com Copyright © Peter Houghton 2002 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Houghton, Peter The world within me : a personal journey to spiritual understanding/Peter Houghton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1-84310-079-7 (pbk. : alk.paper) 1. Houghton, Peter. 2. Spiritual biography--England. 3. Catholics--England--Biography. I. Title BX4705 H7565 A3 2002 282’.092-=-dc21 [B] 2002070910

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-13: 978 1 84310 079 9 ISBN-10: 1 84310 079 7 ISBN pdf eBook: 1 84642 024 5 Printed and Bound in Great Britain by Athenaeum Press, Gateshead, Tyne and Wear

Contents Preface 7 Chapter One: Awareness 15 Chapter Two: Commitment 31 Chapter Three: Sweetness and Cold 56 Chapter Four: Pilgrimage 70 Chapter Five: First Creation 86 Chapter Six: Focus 99 Chapter Seven: Alignment 112 Chapter Eight: Wise Creating 138 Chapter Nine: Enlightenment 155 Coda: Future Thoughts 172 REFERENCES 176

Preface I began writing notes for this book in the late 1980s at a time when I met with three friends every Friday night to discuss spiritual concepts. The four of us – Sunni Muslim, a Shi’a, an agnostic and me, a Catholic – indulged in long, often disputatious debates which ended in a joint prayer. After a time we evolved a special prayer out of the two traditions, and with regard to agnostic considerations. We met together for over four years and it was sometimes a moving experience, but times changed and we were able to meet no longer. My notes of our discussions were all that remained. Soon after these meetings, while reflecting on my own life, I wrote Chapters 1 and 2 and part of Chapter 3. I came to feel that my ‘spiritual’ or intuitive experiences were best understood under a number of aspects and these eventually became the titles of subsequent chapters. It involved, I felt, a ‘descent’ into my own intuitive self. There seemed to be no other direction in which to go, for ‘if I am not, neither is the world’. Thus the idea of nine aspects or descents in this kind of experience gradually evolved. The chapters of this book reflect the names of the 7

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descents and are essentially different ways of seeing into oneself or interpreting experience. Then came the doubts. Who would be interested in reading these very personal musings? How relevant were my ideas to other people’s lives? I was discouraged, stopped writing on these topics, and did not expect to resume. However, the possibility of some kind of a book kept churning in my mind. When I had a heart attack that resulted in cardiomyopathy, I retired. Terminally ill, I lived a gradually worsening existence. In the process of casting about for an occupation that was not demanding physically, I came across the notes based on the Friday night meetings, as well as my subsequent partly autobiographical writings. It occurred to me that if I put these together and added some further text, I could at least leave a testament of my experience and encounter with my inner life for my friends and family. I saw it as a kind of last testament. I retained the hope that after my death someone might be persuaded to publish my testament in book form, as I felt I had a particular message that I wanted to pass on to posterity. I therefore also wrote with such an eventuality in mind, even if I might never see such a time. I wondered what I was doing writing about inner experience. I am neither a theologian nor a philosopher. I do have a knowledge of psychology and social interaction and long experience in managing and initiating charitable work and counselling people in difficulty, particularly the 8

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dying. Would it be enough, I wondered, to ask people to hear what I had to say about inner topics, inner life or being in touch with God? Like most experience of this kind, it is personal and mostly subjective, so maybe what I have to say is as relevant as what others perceive. I am not claiming any special rightness or vision, just describing my experience and how it seems to me to have echoed in other people. I don’t think people have to be special or inclined that way to have experiences that seem beyond themselves; I think everyone has such experiences. The difference is how we interpret or explain them. I began to see that the purpose of what I was writing was to raise concepts that other people might also understand from their experience. It seems to me that if one person can have insights of particular kinds or, as some say, a sense of the Spirit, or simply an experience that is very deep, then everyone can and probably does. Is there a way in which we might be able to recognize that experience outside controversies about religion, spirituality or mysticism? I am simply trying to find a language for these different kinds of experiences with the aim of illuminating them and encouraging people to see themselves as having spiritual, mystic or insightful abilities and to use them. There is a divide between those who see these kinds of experience as evidence of divine intervention in human life or divine presence in it and those who do not. I do not wish to get into that argument because for me it is irrele-

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vant. It is the experience that matters and making sense of it in our human context. As Alexander Pope once wrote: Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man. (An Essay on Man, Epistle 2, 1733)

I do have difficulty trying to reconcile my own deep and real experience of God (or the Holy Spirit) with the problems of finding empirical evidence supporting that experience, thereby demonstrating the existence of God. It is not easy for me to abandon the search for God in thinking about this kind of human experience. I have a feeling or maybe a hope that should mankind apply science to the task, God would in the end be revealed, but the defeat of poverty, injustice and ill health should come first. What is the point of knowing God exists if you do not have enough to eat or are in danger of death or violence? My experiences may be helpful because I have had to face the same range of dilemmas, problems and choices as many others in my little cultural world of middle England; experiences that I hope are not too different from elsewhere – but I am a white man in my sixties and I am aware that other experience is different. Nevertheless I presume to present this work in the hope that some will find in it the comfort and insights which will enable them to see their own experience in a new and helpful light. I made sense of my own experience as I wrote it.

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My inward experience has illuminated my life, though it has not always been kind; nor has the God I perceive been helpful in giving me good health or fortune. On the contrary, I have had to live with the evil consequences of my mistaken actions when I have made wrong choices. I have never expected God to be on my side, or on the side of humankind, as so many do. We make our own destiny I think by the choices we make. We are subject to the same random dangers of luck and disaster as any other creature in the universe. For me there lies within a deep and profound sense of connection with the universe, perhaps with God or the act of creation from which my origins in the end derive. This gives me a sense of peace and of the Glory of God. That is my way of dealing with it. Others will explain these kinds of feelings differently. It is not for me to say how someone should view their own experience. I do think, however, that it might be possible to see what different visions have in common and how they arise in the first place. Deeply felt experiences define us more than we allow. Our ethics and moral behaviour are influenced by deeply felt insight. I hope I can find a language with which to talk about it, rather than argue as to its meaning. I think this task is necessary because in a world that is becoming increasingly secular in nature there is a need to find ways to decide how to behave in a changing and less certain society. If I had the money, I would set up a centre for the study of God, to ask once and for all if God exists and, if so, 11

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whether he is concerned with how our lives are spent. I think that if we tried we might even see physical evidence of God, or at least of the act of creation. We might find some universal values in ordinary human experience that transcend the purely human. In my view all knowledge is about God and concerns the history and function of the universe, seen in the ways in which the human psyche perceives, stores and uses its discoveries. To me the mathematical formulae describing the Big Bang or relativity are as valid as prophetic insights as any in the Bible or the Koran. In future I hope religious organizations will see themselves in a more transcendent way…less as places of worship or for the defence of particular views, and more as centres that explore the idea of God. To celebrate the ongoing revelation of that Glory, mosques and churches should be centres of learning, using the new information technologies to explore the concept of God.

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Acknowledgements My thanks go first to Ahmad Turan, M. Reza Mozdianfard and Tony Grove who joined me in our Friday night explorations. I wish to thank my wife, Diane, who encouraged me to finish this book, despite my doubts and despairs. I am indebted to Elizabeth Larrabee for her inspired editing of my lackadaisical English and for her sharp questions as to my meaning and the point of it all. I am grateful to Almine Barton, Countess of Shannon, for sharing her unique ways of looking at things, and to my friend and secretary of 30 years, Val Gotheridge, for her word processing, comments and enduring faith in me. Peter Houghton March, 2002

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Chapter 1

Awareness The journey begins To start a journey you must have conceived at some point the objective or at least a tentative objective. I think there are many ways in which people become what I call ‘aware’: that is, finding there is something greater than them. Such a feeling is experienced within. It may be simply intuition, but the feeling convinces many that they are not alone. Others reject it as just a product of the human imagination and a need for purpose or belonging. To me the persistence of this inner experience has been convincing, even though I do need to belong and to have a purpose greater than my own survival. It is not simple to know what you mean, even to yourself, when you try to describe why you are more or less sure that there is something genuine in the God business. It is even more confusing to know what one ought to be doing with that awareness. Does it matter? I think it does, if only because feeling something like that is bound to motivate you to some exploration of what you are experiencing. You may, of course, conclude that it is self-deception and reject the concept as irrational and mis15

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leading, but even this reaction is evidence that something is occurring in the face of some kind of experience of awareness. In this chapter I am going to share how I became ‘aware’ and how it influenced my life. I hope readers will reflect on how they became aware and see that awareness for what it is – a response to a life experience, something real in the sense in which we have experienced it and thus as valid as anyone else’s experience. It began for me when my father and my uncle engaged in long debates about the existence of God. My father had fallen in love with my mother, a Catholic, and converted to her faith in his early forties. My uncle, on the other hand, having experienced the horror of trench warfare in World War I, had lost what faith he had as a young man. He could not believe that if there was a God, that God would have allowed his creation so utterly and wilfully to destroy itself. If God can permit such evil, went my uncle’s theory, he cannot be good, and if he is not good, he cannot be perfect, and if he is not perfect, he cannot be God. To me this viewpoint seemed to raise more questions than it answered. My father would retort that all these concepts were from the point of view of a man who had suffered – a view that did not endear him to my uncle. My father argued that we could not judge God for the horror that man had caused. God was experienced within oneself. God was not something we could be convinced about through science. Nor could we blame God for misfortune because if God 16

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existed then misfortune was part of the way things worked. (As I had to experience the consequences of my father’s beliefs both as an altar boy and in the choir, not to mention having to go to catechism lessons, I was pretty sure of what he meant about misfortune.) They argued these issues until my father died. The debates reflected the opinions of ordinary people in the early 1950s. What bounty, if any, God gave to us was purely theoretical, and if you were Catholic, as we were, conditional on many ideas that seemed contrary to common sense. I remember Adrian, a friend in the choir, asking me if I knew the point of all this ‘God stuff ’. I asked him what he meant. He said that as far as he could see, God did not have much to do with how things really were for him. His dad earned the money that fed and clothed the family, with a bit of help from his mum who worked part time. The food they ate was in the shops; men had built the house they lived in. Whether God liked it or not, Adrian also wanted to stop being a virgin at the earliest opportunity and couldn’t see why God should object, having made him as he was. As I had the same desire to lose my virginity, this seemed a fairly convincing argument, despite what the Church had to say about it. Adrian’s summation about ‘God stuff ’ has remained with me. ‘Anyway,’ Adrian wanted to know, ‘what about the Protestants?’ They seemed to get on as well as we Catholics did – better for the most part. This must mean, he 17

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reasoned, that they were just as likely to be in favour with God. The same with Muslims or Buddhists or Jews, although he thought the Jews worshipped the same God we did, but differently, which, in his view, was why some people had been paranoid about them in Germany. He asked me whether there was something he had missed. I hadn’t thought much about it. I took what the priests said with a pinch of salt but, nevertheless, tried to remain loyal to the Church as my father said I should. Being a Catholic, my father argued, was a way of life. This was true, as, by and large, our social life was connected with the Church. You couldn’t go anywhere with Protestants. They wouldn’t have you – not that I had asked. Therefore I told Adrian that we went to church to meet people. He was unimpressed. He thought we met better friends at school, and this was true. I said that some people believed in God and that the Church taught us what God wanted from us. He asked me how I knew this. As far as Adrian could tell, he had never met anyone who was sure of how God informed us of what he wanted. Now I had met someone who was sure about this. This was a friend of my father who believed the Bible should be used to guide us throughout our lives. He had told my Dad that when he was worried about something or anxious to know what course to take, he would say a short prayer and then open the Bible. It was uncanny, he said, how it always fell open at a scripture that would direct him to the appropriate action. My father had been sceptical 18

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and considered this notion not much different from astrology. However, it was worth a try so I asked God to help me in forming an association with Olga White, then the object of my desire. My Bible fell open at a puzzling reference to much begetting by various persons whose significance I was unsure about. My brother took the view that this might mean I would do a lot of begetting with Olga – so it was a positive answer. However, it did not end up that way and Olga rejected my charms. In any event I was able to tell Adrian that some people thought there were ways to know what God wanted of you. He questioned whether this example was sound, pointing out that priests were certain that God spoke to them and yet most of them seemed unhappy. By this time we had walked as far as my house, on the way home from church. Adrian lived in the next road along, the son of a professor at the University of Birmingham who was known for brilliant work in chemistry, but who had absolutely antediluvian views on religion. His father even believed, as the Church then taught, that bread and wine really turned to flesh and blood when you partook of them during communion. Adrian and I often speculated that if this happened we would have gagged on them, so this couldn’t be so. I suggested Adrian come in for a drink so we could continue our discussion, but he had homework to do. I was disappointed that I hadn’t been able to argue a contrary view more convincingly. I never had the chance 19

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to rally some decent argument because a week after our exchange of ideas he was killed by a bus while riding his bike. I was standing at the bus stop on the Pershore Road waiting for the same bus and saw it happen. He was convulsing in the road and I put my coat under his head. He died in hospital without regaining consciousness. This tragic ending etched into my mind the last conversation we had. Was God angry with him, I wondered, and if so what kind of God would have taken this revenge? It was a rainy day when Adrian was buried in Lodge Hill cemetery. My family stood crying with others around the grave, while the priest spoke words that were both empty and comforting. Adrian’s father thanked me for being his friend. This was very upsetting as I realized that he believed his son had gone to a better place, one that was out of bounds to us at present. I did not then understand the depth of his father’s suffering. Later I appreciated what an effort it must have been for him to comfort me when he was grieving so deeply himself. I wasn’t very insightful when I was 14 years of age.

Wales A year later my uncle bought a house in the Twch valley in Merionydd, about four miles up from Lake Bala. This was a delightful place to go on school holidays. My aunt was an unhappy woman and something of a harridan because my uncle was a dominating chauvinist. They were well matched and spent a great deal of time in recriminatory 20

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argument, which did not make their home an easy and pleasant place to be for long periods. For me though it was a joyful experience because of the great natural beauty. The house had magnificent views over Bala Vale to the Migneint Mountains and up the valley to the Aran Benllyn. This was wild and magnificent country and I loved to roam alone. I could think up on those hills, I wrote my first poetry, and it was there that I began my long internal experience of awareness. High on the hill above Afonfechan farm was a barn with wonderful views in all directions. It was always full of hay so I could use it for shelter when it rained. I went there each summer, but never met anyone. It was as if the hay had been put in the loft by magic, although the farmer must have put it there. One beautiful day I felt a sense of wonderment at the sheer beauty of the scene. It was sensuous as well as grandly beautiful. I realized what a puny part of that scene I was, even irrelevant, and yet here it was, like a gift to me. I felt for the first time a sense of awe and wonder. That was the moment I began to think seriously that there might be something to this ‘God stuff ’ after all. I still remember those steep sparse hills of Merionydd. I walked them all, up the Twch to the pass of the Bwllch y Groes, up to the peaks of Aran Benllyn and Fawddwy, over the hard moors along the course of the small but wild Afonfechan towards Lake Vyrnwy. I remember the boulder-strewn bottom field below Coed Laddur farm 21

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where my uncle told me the boulders had been washed down in a long forgotten flood, probably at the end of the ice age. I remember the sun setting behind the Migneint Mountains and the Moel Lyfnant in those summers. We would sit on the terrace on warm days and drink cocktails as we watched the sun go down. Even my talkative aunt was silenced. ‘It’s just physics,’ my uncle would say, ‘but magnificent physics.’ Ever since then, watching the sunset has been one of the special pleasures of my life. Nowadays, when I hear a Welsh choir singing in that special way, I can feel the wind blowing up the valley from Llanuwchllyn and how those long, inspiring sunsets lifted up my heart when I was young. Those summers were the beginning of my own personal encounter with God. I use the word God with reluctance as it seems to require a definition, but I need none. I instinctively know what I mean. It was an awareness that came over me in my thoughts and my feelings; an awakening in those Welsh hills that has been nurtured by other experiences, good and bad, throughout my life. I know it, but cannot explain it. It is some other kind of knowledge at what seems a deeper level than ordinary experiences, but nothing that I can prove. I am choosing therefore to describe this knowledge as an encounter with ‘awareness’; coming to know something inside my being that is beyond myself. These are somewhat like the feelings I first had in the Aran mountains when I felt part of the beauty and realized, with a 22

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sense of awe, that it would be right to find out about whatever caused the ‘magnificent physics’ I was witnessing.

Keeping in touch with God I could not always be in the Welsh hills. How was I going to access that feeling of wonder and awe when I needed to? Since it comes from somewhere deep inside me, it became necessary to create an open path to the experience. This is hard to do, so I think some try while others just wait for another moment of awareness. Essentially I tried to cultivate a method that kept in contact with the idea of God. This is the role religion plays for some, since to practise a religion is to accept a view of the world and a set of beliefs by which to guide one’s life. The surviving religions have different belief systems and values. They are able to live with discordant belief systems, but the cognitive dissonance over values seems dangerous. So the first decision to be made about awareness is whether to practise a religion or belief system consistently and with enthusiasm. Since some people are converted to a new belief system, when awareness comes at that time of conversion it may seem like actual evidence. Thus the convert embarks on a belief system that seems directly connected with his own sudden encounter with awareness. This did not happen to me, as no belief system was part of my own first insight. Nevertheless, the search for a belief system 23

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becomes a powerful force in life once awareness has been experienced, even if it is not possible to describe exactly what it is being searched for. One great danger is that you may discover a belief system and, for various reasons, adopt it in the absence of something more akin to your own feeling. This is what happened to me. In the end, however, such belonging cannot succeed because you will find yourself in conflict with some aspect of the system you are following, which relates either to its values or discovery of the difference between what is said and what really occurs. Sometimes you may discover that the theology is deficient; sometimes changes in social life may force you apart from the belief system; sometimes it is just boredom with the repetitive nature of the system. Whatever the reason, parting is painful and can lead to a loss of confidence in the actual process of awareness. This also happened to me and it took a long time to regain the confidence I lost from the discovery that the belief system I had espoused now seemed inadequate. The result of this experience led to me hiding from others and from myself my belief in anything but the most acceptable ideas. I returned to my Catholic origins. Awareness becomes a personal reality as you adopt the behaviour or disciplines that help you to experience it more frequently than would otherwise be the case. However, the trouble with disciplines is the difficulty in adhering to them. The enthusiasm waxes and wanes – 24

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sometimes you are keen on them and at others you can take it or leave it, mostly the latter. Perhaps the disciplines to which you keep returning to are those that matter. Here I want to put in a personal plug for the Catholic sacrament of confession. While it might leave a lot to be desired as to how it is administered or observed by the faithful, it does seem to reflect what, in my experience, is a more realistic view of human nature. You keep failing in your best intentions and need something to assuage the guilt. I remember the observation of an old priest I met quite casually in the street. He looked very depressed so I asked him what was the matter. He said he was on the way to take confessions. I remarked that this wasn’t all that bad, was it? He said that I might change my mind if I’d been doing it for as long as he had. He said the depressing thing about it was that people kept confessing the same damn sin over and over again as if they didn’t have the imagination to try a new one. ‘I tell you,’ he said, ‘by the time I’m through, if the last one confessed a murder I’d let them off with a couple of Our Fathers just for honesty and change of pace!’ Well there are problems with disciplines – like all those New Year resolutions we make, knowing full well we shall have forgotten them by the end of January. What matters is what endures in us, despite the cyclical nature of our moods and desires. My father used to tell me that we were much more influenced in mood and behaviour by our chemistry than anyone liked to admit. He took the view that, if we did admit to it, we would soon develop the mood control drugs and other ‘medicines’ which might 25

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place us in a form of control that we would hardly recognize. While he gave credence to theories of inheritance and how learned behaviour affected us, and in no way meant his theory to diminish the importance of these factors on our behaviour and attitudes, he was convinced of the power that our chemistry had over us. Well, he was a metallurgical chemist. I mention this because there is great complexity in the factors that influence our day-to-day actions. The adoption of a discipline, or way of behaving, as an accretion to these is difficult. Most religions rely on the training they give to the young of their adherents for the continuing power of their message. The converts are few compared with those who sustain a faith because it is part of their background experience.

My existential task While in South Africa I once went out by myself into the bushveld just south of the Orange River border with what is now Namibia. I had a gun, a dog, a riding horse and a packhorse. I was struggling with grief so, despite the dangers, I desired to be alone whatever the cost. For two days I wandered. Then one evening, before I had found a place to stop for the night, I rode towards a baobab tree – an uncommon sight that far south. As I grew closer I observed two Bushmen, one young and one old, already settled in and preparing their evening meal. They did not seem surprised to see me, though I was very surprised to see them. I must confess to being afraid because in those days race relations were rather testy in South Africa. I was 26

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relieved when the old Bushman gestured to me to approach the small fire he was building and I was pleased when, in halting English, his young kinsman invited me to spend the night with them. We shared our food and after a good supper we talked well into the night. For me it was a glimpse into an unfamiliar world; in some ways a wiser and more natural world than our complicated, civilized society. The old man sensed my sorrow and as we spoke he asked me how I was going to deal with it. I gave an incoherent answer to which he listened patiently, as his kinsman translated. Suddenly he put his finger gently onto my arm, as if to silence me with a gesture of kindness and caring. His kinsman had some difficulty with the translation. The old man spoke with great reverence and the young man tried to emphasize that reverence in his translation. The story had to do with a mantis, an insect that stalks and kills other insects. It was a strong and successful predator apparently full of pride in its achievements. It suddenly saw its prey and seized it in its jaws. ‘Let me go,’ begged the insect. ‘Never,’ replied the mantis, ‘for you hunted your prey and ate them not only to live, but for the pleasure of it. Now I offer you the same fate. You have sought your purpose in hunting, but you yourself must be eaten to fulfil your destiny.’ The story hovered on the air in the dark and the firelight. The seeming senselessness of the accident that had caused my own grief came to mind, but I saw the parallel 27

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with the insect that fell victim to the mantis. I was touched by something deep in what the old man was saying, something I had not heard. There was a period of silence as we watched the patterns made by the flickering flames. The old man spoke again. ‘Too often we look in the wrong direction and do not see the mantis as it lies in wait for us. We become angry at the fate that seems unfairly to have afflicted us. Mantis is not concerned with what is fair. When we look in the wrong direction, he is there ready to devour whatever of ours he can take. Mantis is absolute. He lies still amongst us waiting for an unwary moment. Then there is no escape from those jaws. They never give up what once they clutch. But other things will live that would not have lived if mantis had not taken what it could. Look for what you can now do that you might not have been able to do, had mantis not eaten what you thought he would not.’ With these thoughts, we went to sleep. The old man wakened me at the break of dawn. ‘Watch the sunrise with me,’ he said. As the sun rose above the bushveld, the sky lightened. ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘that the sun rises each day. No matter how dark the night before, this can be relied on.’ This encounter marked a new beginning for me. I began to think about what I should do, how I might give special thanks for the life of the one I had loved and lost. This experience in the bush also marked the end, for me, of the argument between my father and my uncle. Things were as they were. If we had the capacity for destruction then that was how things were too, just as much as the fact that we had the capacity not to destroy. 28

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The argument of my father and my uncle was irrelevant to the question of whether God existed or not; whether God was good or not. The spirit of God, the force and flow that is creation, lives in the devouring mantis as much as in the grazing gazelle. My task was to identify the purpose and potential of my own existence and to use them in furthering the great work of creation already begun, we hope, by God. This was the beginning of my own awareness, my underlying faith in the existence and love of God. I found it deep within myself in that place where I seem to fade away into a unity with my biological inheritance and my own direct experience of the world. Whatever the challenges, however much I have strayed away from right actions and done foolish and destructive things, this underlying belief has stayed with me. I remember going into a room for an operation. I was scared, even though I knew this particular operation, an appendectomy, was pretty routine. I felt within myself the peace of God up to the moment that I came to have the anaesthetic. Then it was time to face the fear. Later, as I came round I felt the Presence again and I thought, ‘God is back.’ Why did he leave at the moment of my greatest need? I saw that it was only by leaving me to feel that moment of fear and to conquer it that I came to know how great the universe was. This underlying certainty has endured. In the darkest moments, when I have been caught up in webs of my own 29

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wrongs, which have made me ashamed to continue in my attempts at exploring the glory that is God, this has endured. I have always returned to the task, slowly learning the Way. This book is therefore the story of my awareness, as conceived through what I have come to call the nine descents of the spirit. I table them in the hope that they will resonate with others who have had similar experiences and in the hope that my journey may help those struggling with the demands of awareness. I hope it will help people to recognize their own awareness.

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Chapter 2

Commitment By itself, awareness, as described in the previous chapter, is just one experience among many. We may decide that this is all there is to it – something that happened among the many different events of our lives. After all we cannot be sure that seeking more of it would mean anything fresh. If the awareness was of God, it is easy to remain conscious of something beyond ourselves, valuing that awareness, but not pursuing what it might mean for us. We have more pressing and immediate commitments to work, family, friends and leisure. Awareness is an event which we may have experienced and filed away. But I was unable to leave it like that because for me this had been an experience that took me both within myself and outside myself. The discovery within of something beyond now influenced how I subsequently behaved and saw the world. However, it is not easy to identify those acts of ‘commitment’ that flow from awareness. They take place in ordinary day-to-day life, a kind of consideration – almost intuitive – when decisions must be made.

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Religion My response was to set out deliberately to explore the ‘God business’. I did the conventional things. I had a look at religion. I thought that this must be where you learnt about God. As I had been brought up Catholic, I began with Catholicism. I wondered if I ought to become a priest and spend my life in the service of God, but celibacy did not seem to be for me. I imagined that priests would have to teach or study only Catholicism. There must be lots of other ideas, other ways and paths. I used to go to the Bull Ring in Birmingham and listen to the various people preaching repentance; repent, that theirs was the right way; that they knew what God wanted of us. I fell for it and I joined the Mormons for a year or so. They offered a complete way of life, friendship, status, a sort of process within which to live. The problem was that when I began to question fundamental things, especially about their own origins or the existence of God, I was unable to get answers. What I got were testimonies, ritual mantras of belief. Making something of my awareness I began to wonder if religions really knew about God. I had to return to my own sense of awareness and start my exploration again. I asked myself what happenings in my own life related in some way to my ‘awareness’. When I looked at things in this way, I began to see how committed I was to making something of my awareness. 32

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The first thing I remembered was a small incident that happened to me one evening in Kensington Gardens, London. I sat on a bench by the Round Pond for a few moments of quiet. A young man with Down’s syndrome was strolling around with an older woman whom I assumed was his mother. He was cheery and bright and obviously glad to be there. Beside me I had a briefcase full of the books I was studying and the draft of a long essay. I thought how lucky I was not to have been afflicted as he had, and how useless his life must be compared to mine. I felt smugly superior and a little bit nervous, wondering what I would say to him should he approach. I am ashamed to admit that I did not want him near, so when he started heading my way I stood up to leave. As I did, so I slipped and fell hard, knocking my head against the edge of the bench. My briefcase, which was not shut properly, fell open and books and papers scattered about. I was not seriously hurt but a bit stunned, disoriented. I accepted a helping hand to the bench, gradually realizing it was the young man with Down’s syndrome. He was rather upset and asked if I was OK. His expression was open and guileless, clearly worried about me but also amused that I had tripped up. His mother asked if I was all right, then helped her son gather up my belongings and put them into the briefcase. She waited until my pain and confusion subsided. Her son, delighted to be of help, periodically and cheerfully assured me that his mother would take care of me. Thanking them for their help and assuring them I was fine, I went on my way. The boy’s kind, Down’s 33

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syndrome face was imprinted sharply in my mind, in contrast with my own arrogance and conceit. How could I have regarded his existence as useless and mine so very important? What made me believe I had such special privileges? This incident was followed almost immediately by another challenge. During a long, summer Sunday afternoon, we were lounging around in the garden. I was bored and wandered into the old shed at the end of the garden. It was full of abandoned household items and toys. I rummaged around and came across a stuffed teddybear that I had been utterly devoted to when I was a little boy. Not only did it look the worse for wear after years in the shed, but it had diminished in size from my memory of it. I noticed a large spider’s web in the corner by the window. An incautious bee had flown into it and was struggling in the silk. The spider, a particularly large one, felt the bee’s presence. I shuddered and without thinking broke the web in my attempt to rescue the bee. It fell to the floor still tangled in the web, buzzing angrily as it struggled to release its wings from the sticky threads. The spider must have been alarmed and remained at the core of its web, assessing the situation. What should I do about the trapped bee? Several problems presented themselves. First, it was hard to get at. It had fallen into a corner and access would require moving a considerable amount of junk. Second, I was aware that bees sting when alarmed and, quite apart from the fact that I didn’t relish a sting, I knew that if they stung they died. Third, I was not sure that even 34

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if I moved everything and risked the sting, I could free the bee from the thread. In addition, the angry spider might drop on my head. All these thoughts encouraged a hasty exit from the shed, leaving the bee to its fate, while I resumed a supine sunbathing position. However, I was spared the guilt of abandoning the bee by the sudden arrival of a beetle that scuttled from another dark corner and attended to the bee’s buzzing. I felt guilty that I had caused the bee’s death by opening the shed door and letting it in. A perfectly innocent bee had been lured into a spider trap by a bored, curious young man on a sultry afternoon. Upon hearing the story, my brother remarked that it only served to illustrate why the Buddha tried to live on one pea a day and had a philosophy that everything was sorrow. This statement made me reflect on that internal awareness I had about God, that sense of Presence. What use was it? How did it affect anything? What was one to do with it? Somehow the fate of the bee and the existential value of the child with Down’s syndrome made me wonder about the connection between these two incidents and the effect on my awareness. Then another incident occurred. When I was 19, I had a friend who was very distressed by the suffering of her father who was dying of cancer. He asked to see me in one of his better hours. When I arrived, he was wrapped in a blanket, sitting by a fire in the breakfast room. He was not as I remembered him. He had lost weight and looked 35

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ashen. He had observed my surprise at his appearance, so I let him know how glad I was to see him and embraced him warmly. He gestured his daughter and his wife out of the room so that we might talk alone. ‘I won’t deceive you,’ he said, ‘I shan’t see Christmas.’ It was the beginning of October. ‘I’ll miss you a lot,’ I said. He squeezed my hand. ‘Only for a short time. You’re young, you’ll get on with your life as you should.’ ‘If there is a God, how could he let this happen to you?’ He took both my hands in his and told me to look him in the eye. ‘In all this,’ he said, ‘though sometimes I’ve come to understand how Jesus felt on the cross when he asked why God had forsaken him, I have never lost my faith. I’ve come to the conclusion that God is present in all things, even in the virus that is eating away my life [at the time cancer was thought to be viral], so do not let your sadness about me get in the way of your belief in God.’ He was very concerned that I listen closely and so repeated it. Then he seemed satisfied and sat back in his chair. I wrapped the blanket around him as he had begun to shiver. ‘Peter,’ he said faintly, ‘man is not so special. It is a mistake to think this. You are special because you think about these things. Keep on thinking about them.’ I sat with him a few minutes longer but he was weakening. He smiled his goodbye and there was a finality about it. He died at the end of October. His idea has lingered with me ever since and become more relevant as time goes by. Man is not so special. As we see earth for the little planet it is, 36

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floating in an immense space in an immense universe, it seems to me that theologies which make the experience of humankind the central work of God’s creation are at least open to doubt. Yet I do have a real experience of the Presence. This is not an experience that gives way to the usual critiques. It results only from my own internalization of beauty, of a need in me to worship, or a residual superstition. Awareness to me just is. It has a validity and life of its own. Yet it is passive. It is there to be used, but you must realize that it is there before you can use it.

Adult life As the years passed, I gathered more experiences, developed my own career and professional education and married. Often I was too busy and self-absorbed to bother with the question posed inside me by awareness. Looking back, I see this period as a preparation for real learning, since I had no idea I was learning until later. For example, from the Mormons I learned that you had to make an active commitment to the faith for it to mean anything. I stayed with them for a time because of the commitment I had made, or as they put it was called, to work in their youth organization. I had a lot of fun with that and the fun obscured the problems for a time. But then another event took me along a little further. My job presented me with a moral dilemma. Assisted by my wife on a voluntary basis, I was in charge of a settlement house for a number of disturbed teenagers living 37

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amongst resident university students. I will call the young man in question Andrew. He is now the father of two, a music teacher and author. He was just 16 years old when he was placed with us because of a breakdown at home. The referring psychiatrist told us that he was highly intelligent but, absorbed by his problems, he underperformed educationally. He was not violent or disruptive, but acted in strange ways. He painted his room black within a few days of arriving, which gave a clue to his feelings. On the face of it, Andrew’s condition was a simple case of rejection by his stepmother, but beneath there were layer upon layer of problems. He was still mourning his mother who had died of cancer when he was seven, an event which his father never explained to him or allowed him to explore. His father had then married the housekeeper, who had one child about the same age as Andrew. Two more children were born. This was a household in which problems were not acknowledged or discussed, where the father always adopted the side of the new wife and never stood up for Andrew. Here was a stepmother who could not bear Andrew to achieve above her own son, or her two children by Andrew’s father. She gave him neither praise nor comfort. Yet Andrew loved his father, who was an older man in frail health, and dared not press matters for fear of upsetting him. Andrew could not help but protest in all kinds of ways. He took to wandering out at night to find a doorstep on which to defecate. If he couldn’t be part of a loving family he was not going to let someone forget he was excluded. 38

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He came to live with us and stayed nearly three years. We encouraged him to develop his music, which was itself a protest as his parents had been enthusiastic participants in amateur musicals. Andrew was an experimenter, a daredevil, always pushing to see how far he could go. He took drugs but never became dependent upon them. My stand with Andrew was never to raise the matter with him as long as he kept his activity out of the settlement house. He challenged a few times but I took no action other than to warn him. I had learned that Andrew’s challenges were designed to see how we would react, if we would confirm his expectation of rejection. We had reached a compromise: he didn’t push me too far and I didn’t question him too much. He respected my goodwill and I respected his intelligence. Then one day all was shattered. A student from Aston University who occasionally looked after things when I was away told me he had seen Andrew hiding something under a bush in the garden late one night. When he looked he’d found a large quantity of LSD tablets, at least 50, and a number of other items. He had long thought that Andrew was bringing in drugs for other students and now here was the proof. The tablets were on my desk. What was I going to do? This could not go on. The gentleman’s agreement I had with Andrew seemed to be a sham. I was angry. This put the institution in danger together with all the vulnerable people within it. What was more, the student who made the discovery had talked widely about it. I sat and thought for some time and eventually rang for 39

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legal advice and an off-the-record talk with social workers and a psychiatrist. I spoke with my chairwoman at length and consulted other residents. Then I sent for Andrew, who by this time knew the game was over. I spoke to Andrew’s parents but they did not want to get involved. They asked me not to send him home to them and also not to let him go to gaol. I became calm as I formulated a plan of action. First, I confronted Andrew with the evidence. He admitted everything and apologized for breaking our understanding. He went on to say that he had not really broken faith with me. He was taking no more than before and all the people he supplied, including the student who informed me of the problem, were regular enjoyers of the odd chemical adventure. He realized it was foolish, but he was just keeping friends. I told him that, whatever the situation, I was sure he understood that I could not just ignore it. His time with us had to be over at the very least. It did not matter what I felt or thought or what he really intended. He had gone over the boundary of what was acceptable and had put other people at risk for an unworthy and futile purpose of his own. I understood Andrew, and had no wish to see him on his way to gaol, which reporting the event would undoubtedly have meant for him. So I offered him a choice. He could take his medicine. I would call the police and see where this took him. I would stand by him as far as I could and if he was in prison I would not lose contact or 40

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friendship with him. Alternatively, he could take the one-way ticket on my desk to the German port of Lübeck, where a former German social work student with whom he had struck up a friendship would meet him and help him to start some kind of new life. I gave him some cash and half an hour to start the journey. I asked him to call me on arrival, and thereafter each Friday until time eroded the use of such a call. He was not to return to the UK for at least three months, or to ask for more cash from us or his father. If he wanted to be an outcast he could try it. He had five minutes to choose. I remember wondering whether this gamble on his intelligence and basic integrity was justified. It was. Andrew ended up in Copenhagen earning his living as a street musician and after many adventures over the next year he met his future wife and grew up enough to cope in the real world; not enough to be healed, that process is still underway in his life, but enough to be a good citizen making a contribution to the community. I went back to the settlement and told the assembled residents that they had better support this action as they would be on the line if it came out into the open. Andrew had not lied to me when he said they were the main users of his bounty. They backed me up and so did the staff and committee, because the last thing they needed was a scandal. The chairwoman told me she was supporting my belief in Andrew. However, the real dilemma for me in this situation was to whom I was committed. As I took advice and agonized 41

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over what to do, I tried to ask what was the right course of action. In the end I felt the solution had to settle around not only what was safest for everyone and good for the institution, but also what would give Andrew a chance to prove what I knew to be true about him; that underneath he was a person of some integrity and real intelligence and goodwill. I realized the evil that had begun the trail to this crisis was not in Andrew but in the denial of his needs by his parents. Their actions had damaged this young man beyond his ability to endure. Thus, sending him abroad also had the merit of separating him more completely, for a time, from that perverse family environment. I committed myself to my belief in Andrew.

The nine descents Suddenly the question of awareness came into focus. I realized that awareness by itself was nothing. It was perhaps an invitation to do something, but then you needed to commit to doing something. The memory of the old Bushman and his kinsman came back to my mind. During our conversations we had talked of life as a journey. What we made of that journey was up to us, but all journeys ended in the jaws of the mantis and as we went through life we descended to the mantis within ourselves. He mentioned nine stages in this process – the last descent being the welcome sense of the jaws themselves as we surrendered to the fate that awaits us all. First, we had to know the mantis was there. Then we had to commit our 42

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lives so that we learned the stillness that gave us time away from the jaws. Now I had an idea upon which to build. This was to be my commitment to descend to God and find the seven modes that now remained between me and what I then felt was that great act of reunion called death. I had experienced the first descent of awareness and reached the second: the need to commit. What would come next? But first, how was I going to commit, and commit to what precisely? Awareness for me had been about recognizing a sense of God inside oneself. Perhaps commitment had to be about discovering how God works in one’s own situation. Where would the road lead me if I were to follow it? What would it mean to be committed to discovering how my sense of awareness influenced my actions? I had no idea. One friend told me I could not possibly attempt the journey on my own. Another said I should start by finding out how God influenced me and how that influence prevailed over my other tendencies to foolhardy behaviour and ill judgement. This was a good point. Years later, he asked how I was getting on with identifying God’s role. I told him that I was often discouraged in the way the Greek sophist and teacher Protagoras had been. He had said, ‘As to the gods, I have never been able to discover whether they exist, owing to the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of life.’ My answer contained a good measure of the frustration I was feeling about the task. 43

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The first problem in this part of my journey was time. When you are young and making your way, still with a busy social round, it is hard to find time to explore other things. A good part of your time is spent earning a living, with your family, with friends, often with continuing education, sport or leisure activities. There could be time for God, but you must make it. Nowadays there is something in our culture, however, that regards the pursuit of religion as odd or suspect. It is not easy to talk about or even admit, as people tend to think you have either been the unfortunate object of a cultist conversion or are unwilling to face reality. Religion is for the old or the inadequate. I tried to think about awareness each day. I found within a duality of mood about God which needed to be overcome. When we are in trouble we turn to God, but at the same time we have so many personal problems that we do not really advance our understanding. When we are joyful, we are so full of ourselves that we tend to do without God. Even so I tried to keep God in my daily routines and consciousness. I said a prayer. I tried to fast each Friday from breakfast to dinner. I put 5 per cent of my monthly income aside for what I described as spiritual events or places. I learned about meditation and tried to practise each day. Finally, I decided that I would set aside one evening a week for reading, or activities that would expand my consciousness of the Presence. None of these revaluations was kept. I called them my disciplines. They were meant to aid my pursuit of awareness and, more particularly, how to persist in that pursuit. They did not 44

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achieve their purpose. It is easy to think you are doing something when you are not accomplishing much at all. I found that my real commitments were to individuals and not to ideas and institutions. I am not sure why this idea came to me or why it was sustained through all kinds of problems, but it was. I want to give another example of the curious consequences of this type of commitment.

Debtors One day a deeply troubled and desperate woman came to see me in my office. She had heard that the settlement had a legal advice service, but it was unable to help her. So she had returned and sat crying in the entrance hall until the staff asked me to see her. Her problem was that her debt was unsustainable by her income. With four young children, she could not call her home her own because of the importunate visits from moneylenders. Although I did not get to know her very well, I learned a great deal from her situation. Her husband had virtually abandoned her, opening the debt trap. Without resources, she stood to lose everything and there were days when she had no money and no food. I saw that sometimes she had done unwise things and that she was not altogether without fault in the process that had reduced her and her children to utter penury. I grew angry that this woman could be left without advice, persecuted by debt collectors for funds she could only obtain by increasing her indebtedness, reduced virtually to begging. In a civilized society this was not right. 45

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This impression was reinforced as more debtors found their way to my office. They were the pariahs of modern society, taking resources from the credit givers and thus upping the cost of everyone else’s credit. Some were irresponsible. The reactions I encountered as I tried to negotiate their debts into a more reasonable and sustainable repayment configuration reminded me of the blind prejudice against those who broke the moral code in the early years of the twentieth century and in late Victorian times. It was assumed that the debtor had chosen to get into debt. I was coming to see that this applied only in a minority of cases. The debtor had broken a dominant code in modern society; that is, live up to your obligation to repay. This attitude persisted even in the face of continuous advertising to buy on credit with easy terms and the prodigious lending by the banks to Third World countries on highly profitable but risky terms. Was it not, I thought, all part of the pattern to exploit a new market, with little thought for the ease with which this market could damage people taking credit? I came to be the advocate and friend of the debtor. I sought the funding for and eventually established the first Money Advice centre in Britain dedicated to helping the individual debtor. The point I am making was that this foundation was part of the process of commitment I discovered after the Andrew affair. It was a commitment to the easing of suffering that I had personally encountered. (For more information about this foun46

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dation, contact Money Advice Centre, Birmingham Settlement, 318 Summer House, Birmingham B19 3RL.) Now I had my mode of commitment, but wondered if it had anything to do with God. These acts of mine in dealing with Andrew and founding a new public service for the credit age were not the result of any working out of awareness. They were the result of issues I had to tackle in my work. They did not leave me with the sense of awe and fullness of my experiences of awareness. If anything, they left me a bit empty, drained, the more so as the working out had to be left to others. Thus I found I had the inspiration, but not the reward. At first it didn’t matter. I was proud of how others built upon my original ideas, but after a time it rankled and I began to wonder if this was the commitment I thought it was.

Dark night of the soul At about this time I experienced something that seemed to be a dark night of the soul. It turned out not to be, but was a time of difficulty. I could not understand why my efforts had led me to a kind of hiatus, where there were no answers, no means to pursue commitment. God remained unapproachable. For years I felt this sense of unease and low level depression. I went through the motions, but felt the road was barren. I travelled on but I still felt empty. I could see no way out. I had tried participation in both cultist and orthodox faiths, only to find neither offered a

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release from the unremitting sameness of life. Life was one long struggle against boredom, a losing one at that. Then, quite by accident, I had an encounter that taught me something new. It happened in a Swiss medical institute on the mountain above Vevey. I had attended a conference and then accepted a friend’s invitation to spend a couple of days with him and his wife in their beautiful home in the village of Blonay, with views over Lac Léman. On a mountain walk I came across a fine building hidden among pine trees at the end of a long path. I was curious as it did not look like an ordinary home and there was no designation on the gate. My hosts thought it was a clinic, but were not sure. As I had seen no people, cars or ambulances on the road or in the car park I was intrigued. I walked up again at dusk and as I approached the house I saw the porch light was on. The front of the house looked out over cliffs into the valley. An old man was walking along a path from the entrance gate towards me. I waited for him. He spoke in French and said he had noticed me earlier. I replied that, unfortunately, I was English and my French was not up to a conversation. He replied in accented but near perfect English. I told him I had felt drawn to the house. He invited me in for a drink, explaining that the building was largely empty now. Its great days were gone. We entered a beautiful room with a magnificent view over the lower lake and up the Rhone valley. It was lit by a few subdued lamps and had an air of 48

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comfort and peace. A woman, Gabrielle, was sitting in an armchair admiring the view. She was quite a bit younger than my host. She greeted me and went off to make coffee. My new friend and I sat quietly talking, enjoying the scenery over the lake and valley. It was turning into a beautiful clear evening with mists slowly swirling over the lower valley. The mountains stood out like island kingdoms above a white sea. The sense of peace and beauty was pervasive and I felt a touch of that awareness I had first experienced so long ago in Wales. The man told me he was near 80 years old, a retired psychiatrist. He had studied under Carl Jung when he was younger and had for a long time operated a service for the severely disturbed in this house. He had tried to make it a refuge for people who could not cope where they lived. This was a place to come to be understood and healed. Many who came had been the victims of torture or physical abuse in the communist countries to the east and from elsewhere in the world. Gabrielle had been the nurse and they had married shortly before his retirement and after the death of his wife of 40 years. They had stayed on, maintaining a correspondence with many of the people they had helped, who occasionally came to see them. But now they had decided to live in the valley, perhaps in Montreux, in a flat overlooking the lake. The big house was too large for them and they were negotiating with a Christian evangelical group who wanted to acquire it as a weekend ski centre in winter and as a summer school. He 49

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wondered how the old house would take to these new, ‘very certain’ people. However, he was more interested in finding out why I had been drawn to the house and what was troubling me. I told him about my problem of awareness and the struggles I was having in working through the next stage. He and Gabrielle listened closely, making few comments. I must have spoken for a long time since it was dark outside when I finished. I had talked at such length and so openly that I apologized for taking their time. ‘All we have is time,’ he said, ‘and we are glad to use it for someone again.’ He asked me if I would like to hear his observations on what I had said, although he did not know me well, or the context in which I lived and worked. I might find what he had to say disconcerting; maybe it was best to leave it unsaid. I paused for a moment and we gazed out of the window at the mist in the valley and up the mountains beyond. Gabrielle poured a fresh cup of coffee. ‘I think I would like to know what you think,’ I said. ‘I was drawn here. There must be a reason.’ He said he would like to comment in three parts. The first was on what he observed of the state of my soul; the second on what I might do about that. Then he would suggest some things about my pursuit of commitment. He asked me to listen to him and then afterwards we might talk about it. I felt curiously calm but expectant. It was the first time in a long while that I had talked to anyone with such frankness and truth. He was a complete stranger, but I 50

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felt I had known him for years. He waited for me to respond to his suggestion as to how we might proceed. I agreed to what he said. He gave me a little notepad and pencil in case I wanted to make notes. He would speak slowly because of both age and language and asked me to be patient. He would watch my face to see if he was overstepping the mark and if he did he hoped that I would understand and forgive him. He then began to speak. Noting that I had not mentioned the fact that I was married and had no children by this marriage, it suggested to him that my married state was not wholly happy and fulfilling. That alone might be a blinding factor in my experience. He could sense in me an unfulfilled grief which might be the reason I was not finding happiness at home. He did not know what that grief was, maybe it was more than one, but he was sure it was something that must be faced. Many times he had met people who had buried their grief in activity and then failed to see that the activity was obscuring the need to deal with the grief. He advised me to get in touch with that grief and let it go; not hoard it as if it were something to be treasured. I found myself near to tears as he spoke with such assurance. It hit home. It was all the more meaningful to me as I had not spoken of grief, but only of my awareness experiences. He went on to suggest that sometimes you had done all you could in one place and it was time to move on to new pastures so that fresh ideas could come into play. Much of my boredom and discontent might be caused by doing a 51

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job longer than was right for me. Because it was a responsible post, maybe I was trying to reorder myself to meet those tensions rather than look for the next step forward. He advised me to move on and take a new, less stressful job, one that gave me time for reflection. I felt some resistance to this idea, even anger. I resented the implication that I might not be doing my job well or that I was no longer right for it. Finally he came out and said directly that I was losing a sense of the needs of others. How must my wife feel always being second to whatever I was mourning, let alone to my career? Was I damaging her? Was I still able to serve my clients? If I was under stress and overactive, could I give them what they needed? If I was on a spiritual quest with my life, could it not be argued that I was living outside the spiritual concepts I was trying to espouse? Maybe this was why all I did in the name of commitment turned back only barren results for me. He paused. I was tempted to speak but I did not. We sipped coffee silently for a few minutes and gazed at the view. He then began to tell me what I might do about these things if I were ready and he hoped I would remember this advice. He was not sure I had reached that time. He told me that one way I might cease to grieve those things I was grieving was to visualize them in my mind, realize all that was lost and let it go. I might find this painful, but it was what I needed to do. At the same time he suggested I either decide to let my wife go, so she could be 52

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free to be herself and find new relationships, or spend more time with her and show an interest. I resisted this in my mind as I was still in love with her. He said that I should find a new job as soon as possible. I ought to have a rest for a month or two. I was to go away and find myself. ‘You are not a person who can live without the calm moment and you are doing just that,’ he admonished. There was another pause as I thought about whether I could take any of this advice. I didn’t see how I could. Resistance to his advice was rising in me. Then he went on to the third theme. I felt his manner and style change. He moved from his chair and went to the window, turning back to look at me. He said very quietly that it was a great undertaking to try to identify God in your life and live according to how that identification worked out. If he had understood me, that was what I had said was the secret aim of my life. Yet it was so secret that it had not become part of my presentation of myself or of my observable daily activity. My friends might say I was interested in religious issues but not much more. This was his criticism of me as regards what I said was my true intent. He felt that my innermost intent was true. He went on to say that the usual way for people to seek the path of commitment was by participation in a religion or church. To choose to do it as I was through the medium of my own life was difficult and he was not sure it was possible. He said that concentrating on finding the commitment, as the next step from awareness in my own life, 53

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was a path that could not succeed. However, if I were to take a lesson from religion and look for the metaphor, then I might have a chance. As to what this metaphor might be, he did not know, but he suggested I read the account in the Bible of the three temptations of Christ. These might have something to say to me. He also said that in my decision to set up in the modern world a framework for the nine descents of the spirit, an idea I got from a vanishing nomadic world, I had my own metaphor. I should work on that while I got my own house in order. He felt that what I was attempting was far more important than I realized and I should carry on, but it was the dream, the goal expressed in the metaphor, that mattered. ‘Find your metaphor and you might find a way to work out your dream.’ He sat down. We looked at each other. After a pause I asked him to explain a bit more about the matter of a metaphor. He could think of nothing usefully to add to what he had said, but he would make this further observation about faith. Any service offered to God had a way of being accepted if it were offered with true intent. In which case, the offerer of the service was in real danger. For if God were to accept a service he must first purify the person offering it. In that case all the metaphors I had for the nine descents would come into play and there would be suffering. ‘There will be a catalyst that brings it all about,’ he said, ‘and you will not expect it.’

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We did not talk much after this. The effect on me was strange. I was a little angry because I felt exposed and didn’t like it. Yet this old man and Gabrielle were so manifestly welcoming and kind that I did not want to leave. We said our goodbyes. My host said, ‘We shall not meet again, but I believe you will have a very singular and unusual life.’ I walked back down the path in a mood of reflection. It was a conversation that I would remember for many years and it did change the direction in which I pursued commitment. As I neared my friend’s house I realized the old man hadn’t told me his name. I saw that I was experiencing the descent of commitment. Despite everything, the intent to find God had not disappeared from my life. I had spent too much time trying to find this commitment in my own daily experiences, but it was there all the time in my intent. The task now was to work on the dream I wanted to live out in this descending metaphor that I had to make my own.

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Sweetness and Cold Change I resolved to try and change my life; to feel it was more in tune with myself and with my sense of awareness. How to do it was the problem, even what to do. Managing change – personal change is no exception – is very difficult and involves loss and a gain yet unseen. You revisit the sweetness of the things you have and face the cold of giving them up for some future but yet untested better way. The temptations of Christ The old psychiatrist had referred to the three temptations of Christ. I decided to read them carefully to see if I could fathom why he had referred to them in my context. I found there were two versions: one in the fourth chapter of Matthew, the other in the fourth chapter of Luke. The only real difference I could see between the two was the order in which they were presented. The first temptation in both versions had the Devil inviting Jesus to turn a stone into bread and thus satisfy his hunger. The second, in Matthew, had the Devil taking him to the pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem, suggesting he cast himself off 56

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and let the angels catch him. This is the third temptation in Luke. In Matthew’s third temptation, the Devil takes Jesus to the top of a very high mountain and shows him all the kingdoms of the world. He offers Jesus dominion over them if he will only worship him. This is the second temptation in Luke. If the different order has any significance, it isn’t apparent to me. I gave a lot of thought to what these temptations (to me they are symbolic stories not actual events) were trying to say. What was the meaning of Jesus’s answers? To the first he said that man cannot live by bread alone. This seemed almost self-evident. In the current age it seemed to be about what money could buy. Does this refer to the pursuit of wealth and pleasure at the expense of other things, and if so what things? I am reasonably sure there are other things in life besides money, wealth and pleasure. My own experience of awareness had been one of them. On the other hand, people who had to subsist in our society without enough money to enjoy life were on the whole not much interested in matters other than bread and the acquisition of the means to subsist. Jesus had, however, added the words: ‘but needs every word that God speaks’. This connected in my mind with the Buddhist teaching that right actions produce right results and wrong actions the wrong results. The Word was a way of describing how God had created the universe and continued to do so. Thus, by inviting us to live by every word of 57

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God, as Luke had it, we were asked not to seek worldly success but to listen to what God had to say. The trouble was how to hear what it was. This seemed similar to the observation of the Buddha. The task was to determine what was right to do in each situation, not merely what was open to us or what was easy. We found, as Jesus called it, every word that proceeded out of the mouth of God by learning right action and experiencing the benefits of right results. Was there anything else in this temptation? Was the invitation to turn the rock into bread really a show of what position and wealth could buy? Was the Devil offering a crazy competition relating to status? I thought of a woman I knew who had invited her friends and neighbours to admire her newly decorated and carpeted, double-glazed lounge. Rather than sharing, she was telling those among us who were less fortunate that she had climbed a rung above us on the social ladder and those as affluent as she that she was now their equal. Her efforts and success were applauded. Her party came to mind as I contemplated this temptation. Another example of status occurred to me. A well-to-do woman, involved in charity, gave generously to many causes and scrubbed floors when she didn’t have to; yet she had made this work her life. It was admirable, but it was also a type of showing off. I felt guilty that the deeds of this worthy and much loved of women came to mind. I

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wondered what it was that demanded of her that she lived not by bread alone. In Luke’s order, the second temptation, Jesus was shown the kingdoms of the world and offered dominion over them. To this Jesus replied, ‘Get thee behind me Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and him only shalt thou serve.’ This exchange is about power, status and authority. We are not to seek these things, but to serve God. It is easy to call to mind people we know who are concerned with authority and power, and not much else. Most of them don’t seem to care that this is not a likeable trait. As with the pursuit of wealth, this temptation has informed every age of man. Again the answer that Jesus gives to the Devil is not so clear. We know what it means and probably salute the sentiment, but many are not much given to worshipping God and still less to serving him. Indeed, many are undecided whether God exists except as a human creation. It raises too many questions as to how we might serve God and, if we did, how we would be better off. It may, of course, only be a simple warning against conceit, arrogance and hubris. As to the third temptation, this seems to be the one which has a particular resonance for the modern age. The Devil takes Jesus to the pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem and suggests he throw himself off so that God can save him. Jesus replies, ‘Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.’ Here is a problem endemic to our civilization. We must have proof before we can accept anything. This is the 59

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legacy of empiricism which has stood as a beacon of light against the darkness of ignorance and superstition. I have long been a strong supporter of the rational and the scientific and scientific advance has hugely increased the quality and quantity of life. My experience suggests that the answers to these temptations have another level of truth. Suppose we see these answers not as replies to the Devil given in the language of the time, but as statements of a special truth along the following lines. The truth is that the only thing which has any spiritual importance in life is the discovery of what is the right thing to do in any situation: that is, what God, at the best option, might do in a given situation. It is not a matter of dispute but of fact and wisdom that man cannot live by bread alone. It is also a matter of fact that we can only live by the Word of God. It is the truth, since the working out of creation is the process by which we came into being and remain in being. We cannot tempt God because nothing can distract the flow of creation, except that which is right and melds with creation. We can be too bound up in our sense of the importance of humankind to see this. It has been said that it was sheer folly for humans to establish the rules. We can do what we like within the limits of our own ability, circumstances and imagination, but when it comes to dealing with the flow of creation or the Glory that is God it is not for us to bargain or manoeuvre.

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Taking stock What had these temptations, recommended reading by the old psychiatrist, actually told me? I was not to know the answer for years. I was unable to see their significance to me except as intellectual observation. The next thing I did was to take stock of my affairs, as it had been suggested that I had been making some bad decisions. This self-auditing was the central part of my experience of the sweetness and the cold in these early stages. What I did not realize was that I was not yet ready to both undertake the audit and then act on it. I concentrated this reappraisal of my life in five areas, based on the ideas of Eugene Heimler (1968). His theory was that your life had to be harmonious in four of a number of areas of activity or you could be expected to show signs of mental disturbance. I followed his indicators for my audit. 1. Finance. I was reasonably secure financially. My wife and I had a joint income that enabled us to meet our commitments, particularly our mortgage, and to have a small surplus each month for holidays and a few luxuries. We had no savings. This meant that any change involving loss of income might be difficult. We felt prosperous but we weren’t after all financially secure. To accumulate some savings, I invested in an insurance endowment. This added to my current costs and limited my action. I was trapped in the mid-mortgage glue.

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2. Family. My wife and I loved one another, but at that time we did not make one another happy, despite the loyalty to our marriage. We had no children together even though we very much wanted them. Try as I might I could not see a way out of the dilemma. I concluded that what we had was better than the alternative. This was a serious mistake and, as we became less and less happy, the relationship damaged us both. We somehow maintained our basic loyalty and love but, older and wiser, we had to organize our lives so that we could tolerate the situation. 3. Occupation. I took the old man’s advice seriously. I sought and was offered another job. However, for various reasons, I did not take it. My present post had status attached to it as I had done well in the development of the institution, but the main reason was that I met and assisted people with real problems. The other post would have taken me into the realms of education and policy alone. I wanted hands-on experience, but it was a delusion. The expansion of the settlement took me away from the clients and did not give me the range of policy and educational issues I desired. I had come to the conclusion that I needed a change of occupation, but I rejected my own conclusion. I should have listened to myself. 4. Friends. I had a number of friends, but apart from the young people I had helped in the settlement 62

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house over the years who had remained in touch, I was not strongly committed. I realized that most of my friends were work connected. This did not seem healthy and indicated an attention to work that was too pervasive. Still I stayed where I was, with huge demands on my time and energy. The problem remained unsolved. 5. Leisure. I had none except for an occasional holiday. My hunger for space had been revealed to me while on a Churchill Fellowship to study urban villages in North America. I had the urge to remain on holiday and not return. Yet I did return and was soon absorbed in the old demands, although I subsequently took longer breaks. My personal audit had revealed my problems, but gave me no courage to take the decisions for change that might have made me happy. In a sense the audit was a distraction as I was out of touch with the pursuit of my commitment. There arose enormous barriers to my going any further in the search for God. I tried for a time to find a way forward by chairing the National Centre for Christian Communities and Networks. I met a number of interesting people with whom I discussed serious and profound religious matters, but it did not lead me where I wanted to go. One day, I thought about John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and the spiritual journey. I imagined a pilgrimage on similar lines for myself. I wondered what it would be like to go to the gates of heaven and then through them to the other side, as Bunyan had gone with 63

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Christian. What would my journey be like? This idea developed over the next few years, and what follows in this book is the use of that metaphor to describe what I term the nine descents of the spirit which I began to define from that time on: a definition that had to be won against increasing adversity at home and work that nearly broke my heart and my reputation.

Pilgrimage Over the next few years I changed my job, failed at the new one, lost all my money and many of my friends. I learned the true meaning of the sweetness and the cold. I had begun in sweetness, and ended up in the cold. My own audit would have shown me, if I hadn’t stubbornly rejected it, how the sweetness of things was trapping me into walking in the opposite direction to my spiritual quest. I was faced with the cold when I lost all that made my life sweet. I learned the meaning of what T. S. Eliot had written in Ash Wednesday (1930) about the loss of hope. It became necessary to create something upon which to hope. In this dark time of the destruction of my sweetness and the experience of cold, I imagined not only the journey through the gates of heaven to the Holy City itself, but also the descents of the spirit that mark the way. These are descents, rather than ascents, because they illuminate something within the self, deep in that place inside us where our individuality meets the universal. I suppose it is a place beyond our present incarnation and our inheri64

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tance from all our ancestors linked to the act of creation itself with which we are absolutely connected. Thus, it seems to me, we have to pay attention to how that creation might work through us, and not how we might survive in the comfort and the modest excitements of daily life. These then are my descents of the spirit that I identified from the original idea of the old Bushman. I have described awareness of the Presence that comes to us, commitment to the search for the Presence, and the sweetness and the cold which is the point at which our search becomes serious. Whether by choice or by circumstance, we move to a persistent search for, as I call it, God within and without. God must be within us, immanent in our history and genes, and must also be in all other creation that awaits our exploration. As a professor of physics commented on television, we are looking at the act of creation itself as we gaze at ever-more distant events in time through our new astrophysical technology. If we gaze on the act of creation itself, shall we see God? I am not sure, for if God caused creation, he is somehow beyond it. This is hard to conceive and remains the great mystery. It is not my idea of how it will be. For me, God inhabits the whisper inside myself that speaks only to me. What he says does not seem constrained by the universe, but free because of it. I realized that another descent was that of the pilgrim. We try to discover how to live right and do right, according to our talents. After this comes the attempt to create form out of the chaos of our 65

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own reality and circumstance. We are on our way. We begin to live within the metaphor we create, taking ourselves before the gates of heaven to dine with the angels. This enables us to take up our spiritual journey towards reunion with God. By becoming sensitive to the right modes of action, the gates of heaven will open and lead us through to insight and understanding of what the life of the spirit means. It is not so much a life of sacrifice as a life aware of the limits of human ability. We can access this immense potential of the act of creation only as we learn to distinguish between actions that flow with the creative intent of God and those that are simply anathema to the laws of the universe and thus doomed to fail.

The pursuit of happiness We learn throughout our lives that there is more to life than the pursuit of happiness. Indeed, the attainment of happiness may not be beneficial since it will provide its own incentive for inaction, and inaction is not the way of the universe as we observe it. Everything is in perpetual change, be it at different paces. Nothing except perhaps God is permanent. As the Buddha taught, all things pass and are never the same. We live with the knowledge that we can never recapture a delight or a time of joy. It is gone forever, peculiar to its time and place. This is also true of ugliness, pain and misery. These too shall pass. We can be sure that other joys and moments of wisdom will recur in new circumstances and times, as will 66

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new miseries and troubles. So all is renewed, but also not the same. This too can be relied upon. These two ideas, that everything is sorrow and that all is renewable but not the same, underlie life. It might be wise to keep them in mind as we travel. First, so that we do not get too attached to an experience or relationship so that it governs us and our actions after we have passed that time. Second, so that in times of difficulty we can remember that good times will come again but in new forms and ways. There are other things to be borne in mind. The Buddhist invitation to seek right action to achieve right results needs to be retained in our minds. This is simply the truth, but not the obvious truth it seems. Right action is not simple to define and all too easily we can go for the immediate or that which requires least effort. Right action requires thought and a review of consequences. Above all right action requires a review of intent, for we act out of intent. If the intention is wrong and the objective flawed, then however right the action towards that intent, the results will be disappointing. Right action is about right intent or it is meaningless. Right action based on right intent changes the flow of creation working out the Glory that it is. Wrong action may create eddies that are needed to right its effects. It may even destroy potentialities; in which case it is an evil. But wrong action has the ultimate fate of oblivion as it cannot be contained in the flow of the real creative force of the universe.

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There is another factor to keep in mind since we are gregarious creatures. This is that all relationships need to be mutual. They have to give and receive. If they are one way they are destined to destruction since both parties will feel pain and frustration. This true friendship and partnership is rare. Creation together is a goal that involves everyone. Finally, we must always be conscious of what we learned in awareness. That Glory is at the heart of everything. Creation and the working out of its potentialities is sheer glory. This is what is at the heart of experience and of our very existence. It is not easy to see. Humankind suffers as it cohabits with other life on a limited world. Humankind by its own experiment creates ugliness and destroys. We are thus separated from the Glory that does not cohabit with imperfect creation. Our own relationships are confused and often bitter and recriminatory. These are not full of the mutuality needed for glimpsing the Glory. We act with what we call free will. We do what we want within a human system of law if it has not broken down. Yet there is no free will. When we glimpse the Glory we have no choice for there is only one right action. What we have is the freedom to make wrong choices, which is in itself a working out of the creative glory of the universe since it illuminates what is the basis of the Glory. I have often felt that the concept of Islam, surrender to the will of God, has within it a real truth which is neglected in the Christian objection that this inhibits free 68

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will and thus the free choice of godly works. Muslims know that we need to be slaves to the will of God. This is the slavery that truly sets us free for it teaches us that submission to actions that are right and reflect God’s word are the only ones that are desirable and bring lasting benefit. Within this submission we can then rely on the mercy and compassion of God who is the most compassionate and merciful of all. This is simply the truth. Yet it is not quite enough for I think it ignores the necessary qualification that even this can make human existence seem more important than it is, except of course to us. The descent of sweetness and cold challenges awareness and commitment at a fundamental level. It makes us lose much that is or has been sweet to us and leaves us out in the cold, very much thrown back on our own resources. This can lead to depression, despair and loss of confidence – all of which I experienced together with anger at the unkindness of fate. To many suffering leads away from God but this was not my experience, even though from time to time I felt abandoned. However, the experience tested the very roots of my belief but there for me God remained present.

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Pilgrimage Events Life can be seen as a kind of journey in which events take place. Some of these events are in the external world around us, others are within ourselves as we respond to the world around. The responses we make to such events we can call experience, our special perspective on the world as an individual. Many events we experience just happen either in our society or among our circle. We do not determine them, simply respond to them. Other events are a result of choices we make that result in something happening. Large parts of our lives simply deal with events as they happen and with decisions as and when required. They are not part of a plan we have for ourselves, just the natural progression of our lives. However, there are times when we explore purposefully, maybe inchoately, but with some goal in mind. We are looking for something. I think these are the times when we are pilgrims and that pilgrimage is a common experience in life related to learning, the search for meaning or change of perspective. It is perhaps the name we give to a particular kind of exploration. In this 70

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chapter I want to look at both what in our minds might constitute pilgrimage and what actually we experience in ordinary life. Everybody is not a pilgrim all the time, but sometimes they are, within my understanding of our journey. Pilgrimage is another exploration within, another descent giving a greater understanding of the world and our place in it.

Journeys The modern idea about pilgrimage is that it involves a special journey in search of a particular spiritual objective. The most famous pilgrimage is that to Mecca, the most sacred city of Islam. All Muslims should make the journey (hajj) to the heart city of Islam and the Ka’ba to touch the Black Stone at least once in their lives if they can afford it and are healthy enough. A nun, monk or mystic might see their pilgrimage in their ongoing day-to-day effort to live by a discipline involving abstinence, prayer and hard work. Their lifestyle reveals to them new spiritual perceptions that they may see as milestones along the way; times of doubt or adversity as tests or trials of their faith and intent. Life might be seen as a pilgrimage if we could be sure about where we came from and where we are going, but the certainty of faith is not the same as the certainty of knowledge. The Islamic emphasis on pilgrimage (hajj) teaches us something about the need to find both the time and concentrated effort to attain a spiritual object. The men and 71

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women who attain the honorary title (Hajji, Hajja) for making the journey are respected because they have undertaken a personal pilgrimage. The experience of nuns and monks tells us there is difficulty in persisting with a spiritual life in the face of day-to-day demands on our time. Monastic people create a unique lifestyle centred around the search for spiritual grace. A Hindu friend suggests that the idea that spiritual life is somehow better than ordinary life and viable for everyone goes against what we know about human nature. While Hindus celebrate festivals such as Divali, they perceive the spiritual as part of ordinary life. They worship at shrines in the home and honour the gods as part of their daily experience. A special spiritual journey is also part of their tradition, but is undertaken in search of work, to visit far-away relatives, or find peace in old age. I once went with my brother on a trip to Lourdes with people from our parish. Many were sick and chairbound so my memory of the pilgrimage is sombre rather than exciting. My father thought it was time to take a journey of faith so he joined us at Lourdes and took us on to Santiago de Compostela to see a piece of the true cross. As a late teenager, not too keen on my father and less than keen on being with a bunch of sick people when I might have been on the beach with pretty girls, this did not seem a thrilling experience. I was wrong. I learned that the sick and disabled were full of fun and courage. The radio programme ‘Does He Take Sugar?’, run by the disabled, 72

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later reminded us to treat them as ordinary people. That journey had opened my eyes. The trip also taught me what was not good. The approach to the famous spring at Lourdes, for example, reminded me of the moneychangers in the Temple at Jerusalem. I wished someone would do to the cheap trinket sellers what Jesus had done. What’s more, no one seemed to be cured by being sprinkled at the spring. One elderly lady from our parish seemed sick with exhaustion, although she declared herself uplifted. On the way to Santiago we saw a man travelling the last few miles on his knees. This act gained him great respect from other pilgrims, but I thought of Jesus saying that you should do things in secret, not to be seen by man. I took an instant dislike to the man. My brother said I felt that way because he made me feel guilty that I was not doing something so difficult. The chance of kneel walking was so remote and the idea that I would ever want to do such a thing made me scornful. I was but a callow youth and carried no burdens needing expiation. In later life I came to understand why the kneeler might have done such a thing. Thus the idea of pilgrimage lodged in my mind. There were many negatives, but I had observed at Lourdes and Santiago the living out of faith by thousands of ordinary people. There was emotion in that final journey to Santiago and a sense of the same presence I had first glimpsed on the hills above Lake Bala. Unwilling though I 73

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was to admit it at the time, my father had laid a seed and demonstrated that the idea of pilgrimage had some value. On the way back we had a meal in the Basque town of San Sebastian. I had always complained about Spanish food, probably because I only knew how to order paella. In vain I resisted my father’s suggestion that we order paella – his idea of something authentically Spanish. I wanted to have something authentically Basque, but none of us had enough Spanish to request it so paella it was. As we ate, my brother told my father that he thought the Church used the idea of a pilgrimage as a rip-off. My father argued that even if this were so, it did not deter the faithful who had true intent. There was a long discussion about priests and other churchmen who were not likely to be any better than the rest of us, since the Church is a mirror of ordinary human life. My observation that it left out one aspect, namely women and family, was not held to alter the basic verity of the argument being developed. Neither was my argument that if the Church had got into such a state that the moneychangers need clearing from the Temple, then there must be something wrong. My father said there was always something wrong with human institutions, even when they claimed to represent the divine. The main reason I remember this discussion is because I realized that however angry we became at failings and however much pure things became corrupted, the faith went on. This was a truth and a puzzle. I had seen it for myself. There must be, I thought, some essential component in the essence of each religion that touched 74

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God: the Holy Grail inside the darkness of the human world. Thus to me the true pilgrimage has been the search for the Holy Grail, by which I mean the true evidence and experience of God in life. I do not believe the Grail can be found, but I think it might be glimpsed on rare occasions. Those few minutes illuminate our lives. Thus the search for the Grail continues through all generations until we realize we have journeyed far enough in that direction. Pilgrimage runs as a thread through my life: not one journey but many and with no conclusion. I have not yet ended my search for the Holy Grail. It has not been a consistent journey, but instead at times frequently undertaken and, at others, half-forgotten. Pilgrimages have illuminated my life, maintained and developed my faith in both good times and bad. Pilgrimage requires persistent effort. It is a journey with interesting and inspiring stopovers, but it has no final destination except perhaps a worthy death. There is however an objective, like Christian’s journey to the Holy City in Pilgrim’s Progress. We are trying to reach God, to find the best place and the deepest joy, not distracted by lesser goals that pull us away. Thus, each stopover is both opportunity and temptation. It has been my experience that progress is not inevitable. The ground gained one day can be lost the next, so each encounter with the best place and the deepest joy is fresh and comes against a background of struggle. We might be lost in the latest temptation or 75

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endeavour, only to return to what Bunyan called the straight and narrow path when, unexpectedly, we are again reminded of awareness. Just before my father died, he told me that life was a series of ups and downs. When we are up, he said, the danger is in enjoying ourselves so much that we forget to look out for the things that would make us go down. When we are down, we live in permanent expectation that our next up would take place very soon, and be much the same as the last. He felt this was dangerous. This subject arose because he was feeling low. I was worried about him and tried to cheer him up, a daring thing to do because he never allowed displays of concern. Most of the time we had to relate intellectually and he never made allowances for the fact that we might be young and inexperienced. Now that he was lonely and broke, he did not push me away. Nevertheless, we were soon talking philosophically rather than emotionally. He went on to say that after each bad time he had needed to make a journey, partly of thanksgiving, partly of exploration, to sense and feel what he needed in the next stage of life. His theory was you couldn’t do it when you were going down as you concentrated on trying to retain something of the happier past, and you couldn’t do it at the bottom because of the distress and sense of danger. You had to make a pilgrimage when things began to change for the better and you felt secure. At the time I thought this was an expression of his distress. This was the last long conversation I had with 76

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him. He never made his next pilgrimage. He died suddenly a few days later. Later I realized there was wisdom in his last words to me, that pilgrimage can be made at times of celebration, that it can be a journey of thanksgiving and a search for how we might build on our successes. ‘It is wise not to rest on your laurels’ was his message. Pilgrimage is an option when there seems a need to prepare for the future. You either incorporate the past or let it go.

Freedom Once I met a woman who, very late in life, felt she had come into her freedom for the first time. She decided to spend her few remaining years as she had always wanted and been unable, because of the demands of her dead husband’s career and her children’s needs. She sold her large house in a prestigious area and bought a small flat to stay in if she needed it. Most of the time she visited various religious communities in search of a place where she might make a contribution. Eventually she came to live in a small flat on a run-down inner city estate. Her jobs were mainly making tea and running a food co-operative, but she had, through her quiet and unassuming confidence, assumed a pivotal role in that project. She was trusted and sought after for her advice, even by the community workers. I’m not quite sure why we became friends, nor why people came to value her company. She made no demands but respected what you had to say and would 77

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occasionally steer you into a new thought or indicate in some unfathomable way that you might want to change something. She rarely spoke about herself. Everyone wondered how old she was, but any attempt to find out was rebuffed. I realized she must have been in her seventies when she told me of her Edwardian childhood in a house in Hampshire where her father had been the vicar. She said she had spent her whole life serving men and their ambitions; her father, then her husband and after that her son. Her husband had risen to an ambassadorship and they had spent years in the Far East, then in a prestigious embassy in Europe. While back in England he died suddenly. She had hoped to make a new life, but a year later a son, her youngest child, became ill with oesophageal cancer and she nursed him until he died two years later. For a time she had been too distressed to do much more than stay with her two married daughters and help with her grandchildren. On the third anniversary of her son’s death, she told me, it was as if she had just awakened. As she took a day out to visit her son’s and her husband’s graves she asked herself if she were really needed by her children. She decided she was not. So she sat in a small country church and pondered what to do with the remainder of her life. It should, she felt, be fundamentally different from what she had known. In that church she realized it was necessary to rid herself of the trappings such as her houses in Haywards Heath and Spain. She made the Spanish house 78

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over to her daughters as part of their inheritance and she sold the other. She bought a flat in Kensington so she could have what she called a pied-à-terre. At first her daughters had been alarmed and tried to dissuade her from what they thought a ‘whimsical course for an old woman’. When they found she had settled the Spanish house on them, however, they desisted. Thus armed with an enthusiasm she had not known since she was a girl and enough pension and capital to last for quite a while, she began her journey. It took her six years to find a place where she might be useful and feel at ease at the same time. During that interval, she had stayed in communities all over Europe and North America, as well as four months in an orphanage in Honduras. She met a lot of prejudice against an older woman offering herself for service, disbelief that she could be of help and suspicion about her agenda. Scoundrels had tried to persuade her to part with her capital to build new Jerusalems, as she put it, around their own inspirations. Then there were the devout who, it seemed to her, put too much on prayer and exclusivity and too little into service. She ran into people who were so concerned with their work that they forgot the larger concepts, as well as those who tried to foster their political agendas onto whatever they did. During her journeys she had seen much and came to feel that she might never find a resting place. She considered setting up a mission, but could never quite see in her 79

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mind ‘the shape of it’. Through her work on the inner city estate, she had gained the appreciation of her colleagues and knew that she was valuable to them, which came as a surprise. Gradually she realized that she had made a difference to those who had come to her for help, those she worked with or was known to, such as myself. I asked her what was the most important result of her search over those six years. She answered without hesitation: ‘I learned that I was a first-rate listener and that by listening I might influence.’ When her husband had told her she was an invaluable companion because she could put even the most difficult people at ease, she hadn’t considered it a particular talent. Now, after all her travels, she showed more interest in what people were saying and that’s what made the difference. She believed that most people had a particular talent, if only they would tune into it. We tend these days to acquire competencies or professional abilities and these hide our real gifts unless, she qualified, ‘your work was your vocation’. I did not see her much in her later years although we kept up a correspondence. When she died she endowed her remaining capital to a small fund for an annual scholarship for workers in communities. In her last letter she wrote: I am now more or less confined to my flat and am rather dependent upon the woman who comes to do for me every day. I am glad I bought a flat with a view of greenery, it makes me feel in touch with the natural world. This seems very important to me as I sense the slow dissolution of my own being. I

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feel a new kinship with all living things all of which reabsorb into the world when they die. I look back with so much pleasure on those years when I could be of service and when I made so many friends. They are a fitting finale to my active life. Now my great adventure is nearly over. Like so many people I wish I could live it over again knowing then what I know now. I might have found my true vocation earlier. But who can say? It was easy for me. I met so many people who had no money and no idea how they could even start to change their circumstances. I came to understand I had been lucky and I am angry that so much privilege causes so much exclusion for others. My last years were a pilgrimage and a making of amends as I tried to remedy some of the wrong I felt class and power caused to the less fortunate. Blindness, Peter, that is what is so much around us. Blindness to the truth of other people. Blindness caused by our own justification of ourselves and our privilege and behaviour. I hope I helped some who suffered to overcome their handicap and I hoped I touched one or two of the blind enough to shake them to see the true nature of their position and that of those less privileged than themselves.

There is both acceptance and rage in this testament. Some people seem to find both a reconciliation and a cause to fight for when they undertake something like a pilgrimage. The image that remains with me about pilgrimage is much fiercer than those ideas I have presented so far. 81

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God the Most Merciful I met an elderly Catholic priest from the south of Ireland quite by accident. He was taking time out to attend a conference of the National Centre for Christian Communities and Networks. Each of us had expressed similar dissent from certain Catholic viewpoints. Our conversations continued for some time as he had based himself in the city where I lived. He told me of his internal journey in preparation for death. He believed that his life had not had the quality of thought and adventure he had hoped for when he became a priest. He had found that the Church stifled bold thinking and did not provide the space for the continuous illumination of the ‘Presence’. He believed that years of obscure parish work withered the spirit of the imagination. When he was a young priest he had read a book which explained the spiritual journey in ways that he found illuminating. He had lost the book during his moves about Ireland, but its message stayed with him. He could not remember the publisher, author or title, only that it had been published in the 1930s. He had tried unsuccessfully to find this work, reflected on it and wrote down what he could remember. He passed his notes on to his order, asking that it be kept for all enquirers. I told him I thought the papers would be filed in some obscure library to lie forgotten for many generations, if not forever. He replied that in such things one must rely on the will of God.

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His ideas have formed a basis upon which my thinking has developed. Since his writings aren’t available to me, my memory may be entirely at odds with what he intended. However, in terms of how I was thinking about the subject of God and the meaning of the universe, his ideas have been a shrine to which my pilgrimage led, and from which a rich source of thought and enquiry has stemmed. The place at which my pilgrimage ended was scarcely a place at all. It ended in the lounges where we talked, both in my own home and at the Selly Oak colleges where he stayed for a time at Woodbrooke, the Quaker college (which was a daring thing for a Catholic priest to do). Having travelled so long in search of something I could not define, this discovery of a leitmotif for the future in the familiar surroundings of my home city reminded me of T. S. Eliot, who wrote that the end of all our journeying was to return home and know the place for the first time. The priest taught me that God is not merciful, but the Most Merciful, as Islam teaches. God is not to be understood as if we have an automatic right to comfort or success. The Most Merciful sees what is best for us even if it involves suffering and loss. He taught me also about immanence. God is present not because of some magic system rather like a spy camera and recorder, but because God is within, a possibly external presence in ourselves. God created – and thus all creation contains the Spirit. It is up to us to find it within ourselves as well as in all creation. 83

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Thus begins the search for the Presence itself, within which I have found myself descending. By this I mean my route to God has been mostly within. After all, is it not true that if I am not, neither is the world? Is not everything I do and experience the result of my own use of my senses and the interpretation of all I receive through them? Thus the truth about God must lie inside me. If I were, by some miracle, to discover it in the external universe, I would still know it through my own senses. This was the discovery of my pilgrimage: that what I know of God must lie inside me in that unremembered, hidden place where the I that is me meets and mingles with the I that is God. This has been the most profound thing I have ever learned. With this has come an understanding that occasionally a message can be passed between these worlds. This is the poem I wrote after this discovery – it is my beginning place for Praise: When the darkness is such That even the memory of light is lost Then God is the light bringer. When darkness is forgotten God is the welcome cooling dark. When love is unremembered God is the pulse that brings it into being. When growth proliferates to abandon He is the vine pruner, The true gardener, The maker of puzzles.

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what they could say when examined in a more luminous way. It is, after all, how we experience things that determines how we think about them. In essence this is an emotional experience not easily influenced by intellectual analysis. I felt that what I knew now was that if there was anything to be known about God and the Presence, we could only know it within ourselves. We might share these experiences, seeing some evidence for their reality in the fact that many have them, but we know that this cannot be conclusive. The evidence within has to match what we know about the universe. Nevertheless, the intensity of internal experience is moving and may be what we call faith: something short of proof, but convincing in the soul. As to whether faith helps us understand or obscures true knowledge of the universe remains to be seen.

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Chapter 5

First Creation In our lives we eventually come to do some act, deed or task that flows from our own uniqueness. I call this the descent of first creation: ‘first’ because it is what we have come uniquely to do; ‘creation’ because it is new or makes something new. It need not be positive. We make mistakes in doing things. We hope we learn from them, though sometimes we repeat them, but error changes things as well as success. I think doing something unique is a common experience. I believe it also teaches us or demonstrates who and what we really are. Our individual struggles to enjoy the world or change things in our favour and our failures can teach us to be better people. This chapter is about that. First creation is engagement in the world with the result of altering it.

Children Children are people’s most important achievement. We pass on our genes to a new generation and we nurture our young. It is a visible way of showing what we are capable of doing, of demonstrating our manhood or womanhood. What we gain from it can best be understood from con86

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templating the problems of the one in eight of us who do not have children. One study of childless people describes their anxiety and despair in three ways (Houghton and Houghton 1984/1987). The first is a feeling of thwarted love. There appears to be an imperative in most people to nurture, to share experiences, to pass on. When there is no opportunity for fulfilment, this essential quality must be diverted, or it becomes disturbing. A second problem is described as that of peripherality. The childless person is gradually pushed to the edges of family life, unable to share the experience of their peers as parents and later grandparents. They become a kind of second-class citizen, excluded from the majority world, and suffer feelings of inadequacy as a result. Attempts to include them in family life only serve to emphasize their isolation. Many classical novels point to the sad fate of the unmarried aunt. A final problem reported by most is that they experience something called genetic death. They pass on no genes to future generations. They are a wasted biological resource. This can evoke a sense of purposelessness and of despair. If you have no stake biologically, what is the point of activity which may contribute to the future? These are serious problems, not always understood by those enjoying family life and feeling deeply satisfied with it. When you have grandchildren, you feel a continuity with the past. Nothing can take away that sense of achievement. You created another human being and so the 87

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future and past are linked through you. Our children demonstrate our commitment to the future, our full participation in humankind, our sense of belonging and authenticity. Becoming a parent is thus a deeply satisfying experience for most. It is the most common act of creation. In some ways it is the easiest thing most of us can do; that is, to obey our biology and reproduce. People unable to reproduce, or sexually attracted to their own sex, may face the feelings described briefly above. However, some choose to remain childless or accept their lot with every sign of satisfaction. Parents delight in children and grandchildren, which demonstrates the generally creative nature of the experience of raising a child, of watching them go on to raise their own and being of use as they do.

Relationships Relationships are an achievement. Their successful pursuit, whether in a marriage, in friendship or in partnerships for specific purposes, are also acts of creativity as we make of the encounter whatever is possible from it. My relationships have developed around different activities and were part of these processes. Only those that mattered have endured beyond the scope of our business together. Tom Lee was a solicitor from the old school. He was senior partner in one of those prestigious local firms, the model of probity, a dry and uncharismatic man. His family had been in the law for generations. His sons were in pupillage as barristers. He was a pillar of his community, a 88

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churchwarden, the treasurer of several charities, an altogether worthy man. His wife appeared more fragile, retiring, but dutifully followed his lead, having a special interest herself in the children’s hospital. I ran a youth club. Tom was churchwarden of the ancient church in whose hall we met on Tuesday evenings. Officially it was an ecumenical venture by the local churches, but the youngsters were not as much interested in denominations as in each other. We did three big events a year at the church: a pageant for St Peter’s Day as the church was named after him; a play that the youngsters more or less wrote themselves; and a camping trip in the Welsh hills. I ran the youth club successfully for three years and it was a lot of fun. We had a few disputes because the verger thought we were messy with his hall, which we were. The curate thought we were not Christian enough. He went on to be a big noise in the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, an organization in the Anglican Church which seems to have not done too well in England. However, we had enthusiastic young people, so we survived. One day Tom Lee asked if I would run a residential settlement. I was uncertain, but let myself be persuaded. As treasurer, he promised me full support if I wanted to make changes. So I went to the Birmingham settlement as warden. I was permanently on duty and the job was exhausting. Yet Tom Lee was as good as his word. He stood by me when I made radical changes, he raised some 89

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extra cash and he asked only to be kept fully informed. I had lunch with him every Thursday and could always ask his advice, which was consistently wise, if cautious. Then one day Tom arrived at his office, had his morning coffee and fell down dead. It was rather tragic and I missed him, but our little partnership, based on a mutual understanding of what we could both do, re-established the residential project and enabled it to adapt to new ways of handling problems. I have had many other such partnerships, framed around a particular task, event or policy, some successful, others not. Barbara Mostyn was an American woman who, having been married to a British man, lived in London. She was childless and wanted to have children. She went to India and adopted, as a single parent, first one child, and then a second. In the turmoil of official disapproval and constant worry she became active in the National Association for the Childless, which I had founded. She led the work on exploring inter-country adoption and was later Chairwoman of the Association itself. She was an attractive, warm-hearted woman with steel underneath. I much enjoyed working with her, though we disagreed sometimes on policy and aims. She was able to set up an Inter Country Adoption Working Party and helped establish fair and sensible systems for handling it. Many social workers remained resolutely hostile. Perhaps the greatest partner I had was Maisie Smith, who became my chairwoman. We gelled – with Maisie as 90

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a brilliant fund raiser, me as the ideas man. We worked together for 12 years, creating many new projects and developing the settlement from a tiny agency into something of a national centre of social innovation. We became good friends. Most important, however, our complementary skills made each the greater and able to achieve what would otherwise have been out of reach. This is perhaps the great lesson of first creation: we do best in co-operation. We make our name with others. Alone we rarely succeed. So finding those partnerships that make something possible is one task of the descent of first creation. First creation is also an attitude of mind. We are learning what we can do to have an effect on others and on our own lives. We are going through a process of maturation because we must take responsibility for these actions.

Responsibility The trouble with responsibility is that we have to take it, for the most part, in the face of failure or wrong judgement. Our natural tendency is to avoid taking responsibility and here is where the famous four defences lock in: denial, admittance, transference and obfuscation. Each is designed to lessen or avoid responsibility. The first defence is straightforward denial, refusal to countenance that a problem arose because of your own doing, and persistence in that denial in the face of even the most damning evidence. This can work because a persis91

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tent denial of the facts leads also to doubt about the facts. Once this point is reached, responsibility is avoided. It takes great effort on the part of an accuser to pursue a matter in the face of such a denial. The second defence is admittance. This defence says simply, yes I did it, forgive me. Some call it the puppy defence because puppies, when they annoy, roll over to show submission. This defence also leads to doubts. Can the person be responsible to that extent, are there mitigating factors? The third defence is transference. Blame is transferred to another. It was not me, it was really them or him or her or circumstances… In other words, I did not start this. At best I went along with it unwisely, or at worst it was not me but someone else. This is also an effective defence since most problems involve a number of people, so a counter-attack creates doubts as to who is really to blame. The fourth defence is obfuscation. The whole issue is wrapped in minute detail, irrelevant or off the point, so that the matter becomes too irritating to pursue. You can end up uncertain what the original issue was. Politicians are masters of this kind of defence, explaining consequential issues so that you feel they have been forced into actions by hidden forces only barely understood and not, therefore, really their fault. I have observed all these defences. Denial often goes with transference and admittance with obfuscation: anything to avoid taking responsibility for one’s actions 92

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and face the pain of criticism and rejection that may result. However, learning to take responsibility is important. If we do not, the lesson indicated by our behaviour is lost. To avoid the problems that develop as a result of our faults requires taking a hard look at the consequences. I have reached the conclusion that, as we grow older, we develop ways of handling things characteristic to ourselves, inevitably mitigating our full responsibility. Learning to keep that process in check is one of the great tasks of the time of first creation. We begin to be aware of things we do as responsible adults, and those that impinge on others, their feelings and rights.

Lessons of interaction First creation is a time of learning, both from our mistakes and our successes. A few words by Longfellow seemed very important to me as I undertook my first actions: If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it. Every arrow that flies feels the attraction of earth. (‘Elegiac Verse’, 1880)

We often aim higher than we can achieve, and what emerges may not be the ideal we sought. Our children may not turn out the way we had hoped or expected. Our activities go in directions we did not choose. We can learn to accept these disappointments as the price of working harmoniously with others, but we lament the lost ideals.

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So the first lesson of interaction is compromise. We must accommodate ourselves to the ideas, needs and feelings of others. This often involves changing our own. We learn, often painfully, how far we can let this go so as not to damage our own integrity. We make mistakes. We challenge ourselves. The second lesson of interaction is to learn our limits: what we are able to achieve and how much we can compromise. Time and again these choices are presented to us, in childcare, in work situations, in relationships. If we lack flexibility we become rigid and end up alone, if we have too much flexibility, no one knows where they stand with us. The third lesson of interaction is to be aware of our motives.

Motivation First creation confronts us with the need for a morality to guide our actions. A fundamental element in developing morals lies in discovering our motives, not only for doing things, but for doing things the way we do. It is easy to forget to question the manner in which you act and react, and so apply it willy-nilly to most situations. There are two elements in motivation. First is the grand element, the reason why we wish to do what we are doing or intend to do. Second is how we have arrived at the methods to achieve our goals. Within the grand element may be motivations such as ambition, desire for 94

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power, sexual attraction, desire to serve or please, the wish to impress, the need to survive, the need for money, the altruistic urge or perhaps a combination of them all. What we have to learn is what motivates us. For example, our own ambitions for our children can blind us to their ambitions and needs. We can force on them patterns of behaviour or ambitions that are more ours than theirs. It is surprising how we can hide our real motivations from ourselves or others. The important thing is to have a general idea of what motivates us, what forces us into action so that we can exercise control. We need constantly to question why and how we do what we do. From past experience, we learn to work or act in ways that are beneficial. We expect those lessons to be enduring, but they may not be. What was once a valid method because of circumstances may now be counterproductive. The opposite action may be required. We must carry out a constant reassessment, even in relation to values we hold dear, because if we do not we may become out of touch, unable to affect our surroundings, bypassed because we have no relevance. This process is painful because it challenges our security and as we advance in age it becomes increasingly difficult. Older people may be more rigid in their ways but – once the need is demonstrated – they can be more radical in their changes. However, understanding why we do things in the way we do them is important if we are to grow. Lessons are never forever. To continue to develop as a person we have to make change. 95

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Changing We come to the end of first creation when we wish to apply new, more profound analysis to our actions. Sometimes this process is described as learning to be what we want to be, rather than to do what gives us status or influences our peers. Others think it is the point when you no longer feel you have to please your parents. We undertake a measure of introspection to re-examine goals and purposes. These changes may be a product of our own ageing, and changing roles in life. We change because we are caught up in them. We cannot avoid parenthood, for example, which is very different from being a son or daughter. Our experience accumulates precisely because we have been through our own process of first creation, but what lies at the end of it? Some take the view that in previous generations life was so short that very few lived beyond the period of first creation. Thus, later life presents a dilemma concerning its purpose and opportunity. ‘It is,’ said one psychologist, ‘like a long coda to an accomplished task.’ The brilliance of youth is succeeded by decline. This negative view downplays the achievements possible in later life. It fails to acknowledge that the move towards self-fulfilment marked by the end of first creation and the changes wrought by that experience are also universal experiences applicable to any age.

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Setting out the future agenda So another crossroads has been reached. Our experiences of first creation slip into our past. The need arises to move towards something different. So we set a new agenda for ourselves: a last act of first creation. Everyone has a unique agenda based on their own experiences and circumstances, but here are things to consider: 1. Supporting the family in the new role as a grandparent. 2. Where there are no children, looking to assist young people to develop. 3. Working out simple goals for the future that are achievable and pleasurable. 4. Seeking new friends and spending more time in leisure. 5. Trying to make work more satisfying and interesting. 6. Achieving final career ambitions or changing career or occupation. 7. Reflecting on the nature of life, its meaning and purpose. 8. Seeking to remain useful and remembered. 9. Having adventures, doing things not otherwise done. 10. Resolving conflicts. No longer accepting unhappy relationships. 97

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There are, no doubt, many more things to take into consideration. So we exit from first creation in a state of uncertainty, while anticipating new tasks and fresh ideas. We become mature, perhaps old.

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Chapter 6

Focus There comes a point when you feel that your exploration of awareness is inchoate. You dip in and out of it, sometimes more interested than at others It is one small thing you do among much else to get the best results. It seems necessary to find a way to focus more effectively on your task in the time you have. Some will wonder whether it is worth maintaining a link to interior experience. Others will feel it ought to be possible to make more of it. One approach to try is prayer and/or meditation. There are other possibilities – contemplation, study, taking up an act of service which requires some personal sacrifice. However, I want to concentrate on prayer because I think it is most commonly used, even by people who reject the notion of awareness and do not think they pray. I believe that at various times people more or less automatically call upon something beyond themselves. So what do we do when we do this? In most people’s minds, prayer is connected with traditional religious practices. We learn prayers such as the Lord’s Prayer or the great Muslim prayer which begins ‘God is Great’. The use of prayer as a part of the religious 99

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life has diminished it in the eyes of those who reject or are suspicious of these religious forms, who see the human imperfections in religion. Such imperfections raise questions as to the usefulness of prayer in the face of suffering and death. In my view, prayer is not necessarily a religious experience. To some extent all of us pray, even if we don’t call it prayer.

Prayer as communication One religious theory is that prayer is a form of communication between ourselves and God. The object of prayer is to illuminate this encounter and enable us to introduce the superior wisdom and favour of God into our lives. There are obvious dangers to such views. We can too easily mistake our own desires, insights or beliefs as having been divinely informed, when all that has happened is that we have increased by the process our own prior convictions or desire. It is one thing to identify what we are doing when we pray, but it is almost impossible to describe how God responds. We can testify that we believe God does reply, but we cannot prove it. Prayer as a way of life Another theory as to the nature of prayer suggests that we should learn to live prayerfully, creating a bridge between ordinary life and the mysterious hidden inner self. In some religions, shrines and altars are built to remind us of the existence of the sacred alongside the profane. The danger with this is that we may lose sight of the sacred in the sym100

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bolism created to remind us of it. Further we can see the symbol itself as sacred, rather than as a representation of something that has to be encountered within.

Another view of prayer There is another way of looking at prayer: it is something we do, or perhaps choose not to do, day to day, which is particularly apt in times of reappraisal, difficulty and renewal. In this view prayer is a tool of intention, a way in which we seek to balance our present circumstances with more desirable ones. The act of prayer invites us to ‘feel’ or perhaps ‘seek’ the conditions beyond ourselves that are affecting us and try to determine a response more able to be of use or support. This view puts prayer where it belongs as a human act or method, concerned with seeing what best to do, what forces to harness in our support, and to engender the calm and confidence to act on our convictions once clarified. I think we all do this to some degree, since even those who reject the existence of God have to balance themselves within a frame of existence which is not always self-determined. Nevertheless some feel they encounter ‘that’ beyond themselves in much more pragmatic ways. For example, an old friend tells me that he realizes there is something outside his scope, but he can only acknowledge it because he is limited by human faculties or science to determine what it is. Thus he feels the inward encounter as a limitation and so it becomes less numinous. 101

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Years ago I wanted to find the way to my own encounter. I knew that instinctively one prayed when faced with hard choices, sometimes following one’s instinct (usually to advantage), at others not (usually to woe). In those moments of especially fraught decisions I tried to listen, if only for a moment, to something other than my own noise. I searched for a more direct way to that point inside myself where I seem to end and the universe begins. This is how I have come to understand it, but then I felt a kind of need to see if the idea of the ‘Presence’ first encountered in awareness could be called upon at will.

A fortunate encounter At that time I met a much respected South African woman who was into spiritual meditation. Her experience as an Afrikaner woman had to be abandoned for a commitment to the struggle for liberty and justice. She rejected apartheid and was forced into exile where she was sustained by her Christian commitment. She did not live to see the new South Africa, dying of cancer when only in her forties. We were not great friends, but had talked about our experiences. She told me of a meditation that put her in touch with her inner self, how she had felt enormously excited as she had undertaken it and met what she called the ‘ineffable presence within’. Although she had been at pains to point out that people might need to design their own journeys into themselves, I decided to follow her path as it seemed to 102

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offer a way ‘down’ which I lacked. I was encouraged by the fact that, after a time, she no longer needed meditation. She could go directly to that ‘presence’ within if she were in a meditative mood.

A journey of the imagination within On a Monday bank holiday in August, I was staying at a cottage in Cornwall on the cliffs above Falmouth. I tried meditation. It was a rainy day and I was sitting in the lounge looking out of the window, which had a view of the sea below. It was misty and the clouds were low, but the rain easy and warm. I imagined an empty cinema with a film on the screen. Scenes from my life, current worries and concerns flashed on and off. In order to go within I had to control these images. I sat in the cinema for a while and let all these thoughts pass through my mind. They repeated themselves as if a series of films was playing. Suddenly, I turned around. The cinema was darkened but I could see a small door in the far corner. I had an overwhelming feeling that I should go through the door, although the constant thoughts flashing on the screen were a distraction. I remember opening the door. A flight of stone steps led downwards. I could not see where they ended because the light was dim and strange. The screen behind me still flashed with all my thoughts, demanding my attention. This was a moment of decision. It was hard to suppress my day-to-day thoughts. Fearing what might be at the 103

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bottom of those steps, I wanted to venture down although I knew from my South African friend’s description that I would find myself in a vast and ancient cavern. I paused, then advanced. Shutting the door behind me, I proceeded to go down into the cavern. It was calming though a chill pervaded the place. Beautiful stalagmites and stalactites testified to its antiquity. The hidden lighting had a mysterious glow. There was a pool of crystal clear water at the heart of it, where the steps ended. I thought this must be the water of the river of life, so I walked into it. The water closed over my head but I felt no discomfort, only a sense of movement through dark spaces and hidden caverns. Then suddenly there was a burst of sunlight: the spring at the beginning of a great river. The first journey down the river was vivid. Now all I need do is assume the journey. It is enough to know I am following the river of my life. At first, the river poured through mountains, waterfalls, great forests, gathering waters from other streams. It meandered long through a vast plain until I found myself in a marshy delta. I looked for a reed castle in the marsh and it appeared suddenly, the water lapping around it. I could only enter by the roof. I realized the river was the way home, the thread that connected me to my worldly life. This reed castle was deep within, an unvisited place, but I was assured there was a way out if I entered. When I entered the reed castle, it turned to stone. 104

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Another stairway led further down. At each turn of the stair, rooms lay off to the right. On the first level was a vast room filled with crystals of all colours and sizes, pulsing with distinct intensities. This was the room containing my memories, all I have known in this life. Was there a vast untapped resource of these memories in my brain? I was curious to find out, but something urged me downwards. At the next level was an even more peculiar chamber. It seemed to be alive, its walls pulsing in many colours, faces forming in them, then vanishing. This was not a frightening experience, but felt welcoming. ‘This is the ancestors’ room,’ a voice told me. ‘Here are all the things, biologically and in memory and instinct, you have inherited from the ancestors for whom you are a continuity, a continuance.’ I watched a while, tempted to enter and talk to remote ancestors who barely flashed into memory, yet I was more inclined to continue downwards. The third level was like a living museum. Creatures of all shapes and sizes seemed to live in vast containers that were themselves projections into the past. ‘This is the room of origins,’ the voice explained, ‘our connections with the first life that emerged in this world. We are the children of that moment.’ I was entranced, but I went downward. The next stairway ended in a courtyard. It was like the cloisters of an ancient monastery, facing on to a beautiful garden. In the centre was a fountain, a stone bench and blooming bougainvillea. I felt I had arrived at the core, the 105

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essence of myself, of which the fountain was the heart, the water of life. The atmosphere was quiet, joyful, yet filled with anticipation. As I rested at the fountain, a figure came towards me, wearing a cowl like monks of old. I could not see clearly, yet I felt a friend was greeting me. The figure pointed to a passageway that led out of the cloisters. This was the path that connected me to all that is – my link to the first moment of the universe of which I was but one end product. In a flash my companion was illuminated, as he or she walked into the light that glowed in that tunnel. ‘Here you cannot go until death.’ I understood. Here was the love and marvel of creation itself with its roots reaching right to me. I was reluctant to leave and paused to sit by the fountain. This was my first experience of what Jesus described as the ‘peace that passes all understanding’. It was not easy to return to the castle, then the river, into the cavern and through the cinema to the outside world. But from then on I have known that, if I were to will it so, I can reach down into the deeps of myself and greet the Presence at the point where I and the universe become one. It does not seem like an illusion.

The sense of correctness This inward journey was real to me, a product of my imagination following a route someone laid out for me. I know others have similarly travelled, or reached that sense of the Presence within by other means. This was simply my way 106

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of travelling. I understand too that what happened at the end of the inward journey was in my own psyche. I do not claim for it an existence elsewhere. I imagined myself along that path. I arrived and experienced the Presence. To me it remains and is a real connection with God, not the God of the super-omnipotent human, but the force or power that caused the universe to be. It seems natural that somewhere within myself I should find a place connecting me to creation. After all, everything in this universe stems from that supreme moment of creation we call the Big Bang. Is it so strange that an echo of it might be within? I know that if the echo does lie within, then this says little as to whether the universe has a purpose. But to me the echo suggests that it does. I cannot demonstrate this with certainty, but I express my view with conviction. I do not think my experience is solely the result of a psychological need to experience God. To be sure, I have a need – just as others may not – but I feel this goes beyond simple satisfaction of needs. All our experiences are understood and interpreted in our own psyches. Any experience is inevitably transcendent, but one interpretation is as good as another. It is my opinion that to feel the Presence within is a common human experience, more common, I venture to suggest, than its opposite. Therefore, it has to be taken seriously, for if the evidence of God is within our connection with creation, then this is of immense significance. Humankind may not be as separate from God as is sometimes thought. 107

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Although I feel connected, I do not expect too much. It takes energy and time to connect and some repose. These are scarce commodities in busy lives. Yet those lives, and what we create in them within ourselves and with others, are the universe becoming. What we do increases the possibilities within the universe and adds to its wonder and glory. To me this is the purpose of human life. What we do day to day, what we achieve, especially by our interactions with the planet and the universe, increase the glory of creation and thus the glory of God. To perform those tasks as perfectly as we can should be a lifelong quest. We do not always heed the inner voice and so can become destructive of ourselves and others. This too is an aspect of creation.

Afterwards To me, living with an understanding or feeling of connection with all creation, and with a sense of purpose, is wonderful. Whatever difficulties I may face, there is a central experience and belief to fall back on. Some may think that beliefs such as mine are mere props for support in times of woe. I do not think so. This is a robust, self-determined view of the universe. It is up to me what I do with it. Jesus said: ‘I am the light, the truth and the way, no man comes to the Father except by me.’ To many, this is simply a statement of Jesus’s Godhead and a pointer that requires us to follow the particular teachings he laid down at that time or those propounded now. To me, his words express a wider truth. Jesus is also the Son of Man, calling us to find 108

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the godly inside ourselves and follow the way it points. He is right to say that no one can come to the Father except by following the right path, for God cannot be imperfection. He can only tolerate it. Thus the call to follow the light within, the light Jesus found, is powerful and draws our attention to the need to be better human beings.

Studying Most of us study at some point: that is, we focus on some subject, skill or concern and learn all we can about it. These days the acquisition of skills or special knowledge is simply a part of the work culture necessary to our future. Study by scientific and empirical methods has also been the way we have learned so much more about the nature of the earth and the universe. It has enabled us to create a better quality of life, although we have not yet learned to be able to share that advantage universally. One approach to focusing on awareness is to study God or the phenomena we have discovered in ourselves. Some people turn to sacred books such as the Bible or the Koran to try to ascertain God’s will and live it along the lines they believe are indicated there. This does not, however, satisfy everyone. The books themselves have to be examined for what they are and only a few conclude them to be the sole repository of the received wisdom of God. To believe in them as the only information we reliably have about God and his intentions is in itself to suspend our judgement about the doubts that do exist about the sources themselves. 109

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One woman in her early sixties found she was dying but would have some months to prepare for her death. She was robustly agnostic, although illogically she went to her local Anglican church. ‘I’ve always been,’ she would say when challenged. ‘Why not?’ She decided to study the ‘religion affair’, as she called it, in her last months and this she did, delving into comparative religion, debates on the existence of God, Christian studies and so forth. She focused because, as she said, ‘It would be useful to have an idea where I might be going.’ I know she did not have the time to complete her study, after all it is a complex study, but I was impressed with one observation she made near the end. ‘One thing,’ she said, ‘is that there is a great sea of faith as the broadcaster said. It cannot all be baloney.’ Well I suppose it could be, but there is enough of it for us to ask whether it does reflect something real, some connection with the universal, perhaps through methods or physical laws that are as yet undiscovered. Study is a way of searching for awareness. It may not be conclusive, but it can lead to insight, even if the insight concludes that we are just dealing with our own imaginations and nothing more.

Service One way of discovering God is said to be undertaking some kind of service to your fellow human or to some other cause like the ecology, animal welfare or religious proselytization. Some believe that by acting with dedication and not always in our own interest we learn something about ourselves and thus about our awareness or 110

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relationship with God. It is pretty clear that we have to learn some personal discipline if we are involved in activities that demand from us not only our best effort but some personal loss. Of course to the individual the sense of satisfaction and gain may far outweigh the cost of any sacrifice. I have never been able to find the actual quote but I once heard a cynical observation said to have been made by de Roquefort to Frederick the Great in there correspondence: ‘Your Majesty, there is no such thing as unselfishness, only enlightened selfishness.’ This seems worth remembering. In the end though service alone cannot be a guide to awareness. This is because compassion burns out and sacrifice that becomes routine ceases to matter. Nevertheless insights are to be gained on this path for a time and who is to say that they are not as valid as anything else.

Conclusion To focus, to try and find out about something in depth, are natural reactions to something we don’t understand. I believe that if you are serious about pursuing a knowledge of awareness, then you will come to a point when you want to study it. Even if you do not desire this, mere curiosity may cause you to think about such matters from time to time. Thus, part of our descending to understand the experience within is to focus and find a method by which to focus. In the end the method we choose becomes habitual and as long as it does not thereby become ossified and irrelevant, it helps our journey towards our own truth. 111

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Alignment Engaging with time We take time for granted. We live in a time frame during which events happen in succession, whether random or planned. A lot of our time is used up by the need to sleep, eat, prepare food, earn a living, etc. Because of the entropy that takes place in our bodies, time is finite. Time may exist for us, but strangely some theories of the nature of the universe wonder if it actually exists. Perhaps because we are experiencing life as a series of events happening in one sequence and direction, we mistake that situation as being universal, whereas it could be merely a way of experiencing the eternal now. Something in the human psyche appears to recognize this because we describe God as eternal, unchanging, free of the constraints of time. Maybe we are seeing a universal truth, but it does not alter the fact of our time-ridden existence. Our time is limited. Most of the time we have is used up in survival and leisure so it is not truly our own to use. If you are trying to align your life in order to live in harmony with your awareness, then using time well is necessary. We

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have to be more conscious on a day-to-day basis of how we use our time. Focusing is an attempt to align one’s thoughts, actions and behaviour to express our own uniqueness in a harmonious way. A balance has to be sought between what we know of ourselves and our abilities, our situation in the world and our inner awareness. We need to bring into alignment the various strands of our life. Mine are only suggestions as to how you might focus. Other methods work as well. The aim is to seek new perspectives, to include the possibility of a continuing encounter within.

The lessons of experience One way of viewing our experience of time is to try to understand ordinary experience in a new perspective. Doing this we might accumulate knowledge and understanding of the world in a novel way. This process is most clearly illustrated by a parent’s observation of a child’s learning process. Parents and teachers set out to encourage the learning of things that will help the child to develop in healthful ways. At the end of the teens or higher education, our understanding that this learning process continues all through life sometimes becomes obfuscated. Sayings such as ‘experience is the name we give to our mistakes’ remind us that a learning process is continuing, but there is no generally accepted mechanism through which the adult can come to grips with experience, nor the opportunity it provides for the future. Many ask them113

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selves what they have learned from experience. The very nature of this question helps us overcome the temptation to load preconceived moralities onto experience. Each experience takes us towards the next, with a greater understanding, we hope, of how to deal with it. If at the end of a day or week we try to recall memorable events that have affected us, and ask what we learned from them, we can begin to see our lives in a different way. The path becomes one of enlightenment. Experience brings with it emotion; sometimes joy, sometimes guilt and fear. Any of these states can prevent us from judging what has happened and where it might lead. One result can be a refusal to analyse what has occurred, to let it pass into forgetfulness, as did the childhood experiences which formed much of our behaviour. It may be emotionally too difficult to ask ourselves what the lesson might be. We tend to want to deal with experience only when it feels beneficial.

The mirror How we behave at any one time is a mirror of our present state of self. It describes who or what we are at the moment and how we cope and act. In all actions we give away something of ourselves and we judge others, often not realizing that we do so. Thus in a daily or weekly reflection on the particular experiences of that week, we might also ask what it tells us about ourselves. This is not easy. To ask the question with any hope of a proper answer 114

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means having to challenge the way we look at the past. It can be uncomfortable to face up to the fact that we may not have been as good as we had thought. The Hindus teach us that a key objective of the human experience is to be ‘That Thou Art’. This is also a Gnostic theme with its idea inscribed over the ancient Temple at Delphi: ‘Know Thyself ’. Yet the means by which these goals are to be achieved are not clear. They are left to the individual to fathom. This suggests that in examining experience for its lesson, you must first ask what it tells you of yourself in order to understand the lesson. You must look in the mirror at yourself.

The gift Nothing happens that does not present potentialities for the future. Some people may be unhappy if things go the wrong way; others have the potential to resolve problems and demonstrate the good. So in questioning our experience, one thing we can ask with confidence is what the gift is. What do I now have the potential to resolve? What can I gain from the experience? Even the most bleak experiences free us for some renewal. In asking ourselves what is the gift of an experience, we continue the process of changing our perception. All experience has the potential for favourable change if we see the possibilities. The problem is that we may have to clear away from our conscious and subconscious minds some of our well-entrenched patterns of behaviour and 115

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perception. We may have to cope with grief and despair. We may fear something and see the first task to protect ourselves, or we may be seeking confirmation because of a secret sense of inadequacy. The gift of experience is that it demonstrates the best way of living life. The discovery and accurate identification of the gift is also to perceive how we are part of the universe. The time-constrained biology we inhabit has little meaning in itself, other than the delights of reproduction or the achievement of temporary gain. One of the objections to religious faith or belief in God in the modern world has been to challenge the concept that God is good. Another is that religion is irrelevant on the grounds of the self-evident problems of evil: ‘If there is a God, how can God allow slaughter or pollution, etc.?’ These are heartfelt questions but human life and the biological world cannot be understood in these ways. The act of creation made the universe and the purposes of it (the Word) flow from that act and not from the interaction of our biology with its environment. The discovery of the gift in our experience is the beginning of our journey to find that Word in the context of our own existence. It is our biology that is temporary and transient, not the spirit that inhabits it. The question is whether we can accept this new perception of reality.

Can I accept that bad situations may contain good things? Our experiences cannot be measured in worldly terms. They can only be understood in the context of a learning 116

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experience taking place within this biological context – an encounter with another less accessed part of ourselves, sometimes called ‘the higher self ’. Sometimes we refer to this higher self as conscience since it creates conflicts when it involves opposing objectives (for status in the world, for example) in the struggle for personal growth. The discovery of the ‘higher self ’ through these new ways of looking at experience may change our view of things, bringing us to the question: Can I accept that what I see might be good? It implies a test of our belief in the enlightenment. It is a challenge to accepted ways, goals and beliefs that have governed our perceptions of our experience. Let us suppose that the function of the higher self is to pull us towards growth, the real growth needed to make the best of this experience. If this is true, then in some cases there may be an inevitable conflict concerning choices that tend to maximize our worldly situation. It may be, for instance, that the experience of loss or defeat is needed to move us on to better purposes. We become vulnerable because we need to become vulnerable. This conceptualization of our experience needs us to look at overall themes in a new light. We might see that we tend to strengthen what we oppose too fiercely, attract what we fear, and only succeed in what we really focus on. Thus we may understand that, in many ways, we are actually in charge of what we experience. Our emotions, attitudes and intellectual assessments draw us into situations. Of course we may not have been in charge of what 117

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has caused us a measure of suffering, but suffering is an experience with the power to destroy. These emotions arise as we interact with family, relationships, work, survival and leisure. We develop responses. I think we do this automatically, that we are on autopilot. When we consciously think about either handling pain or seeking an advantage in the possibilities we face, the process makes us vulnerable to negative experience.

Can I allow what is happening to me or what I see is happening? What is the meaning of the discovery that we can determine our own fate more than we might have thought? One meaning is that we should cease to strive and let things flow: in other words, let our higher self guide what we do. But how do we know it works that way? We can move towards a less proactive or reactive set of responses to experience, and try to interpret them in the light of how our higher self or conscience guides us. This might be seen as allowing the ‘Godhead’ to flow through our actions; what is needed to make the best of our lives. Reorientation is not easy when hampered by the burden of past experience and how this reverberates into the future. We cannot easily change the responsibilities we have taken on. So the first task of this period is to find a graceful way, in tune with what our conscience tells us, to bring our present situations into harmony with our new insights. This may involve facing up to what is bad in our 118

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experience and taking responsibility for it. It may involve diminishing our excitement over some of our achievements as the pursuit of them no longer accords with the way we see our lives. Yet changing one’s life, even in small ways, is a positive act. It creates new hope, new energy and zest.

Can I release the energy? If we refuse to accept what is unacceptable to us, or to see it as mundane, we may be able to release energy within us. To do this, one must trust the voice of the higher self and understand that it works for the good. Our confidence, in its genuineness, will grow as we use it or ‘allow’ it to guide us. Are there any concepts that we can apply to help us release the energy to revitalize our lives, which may change how we perceive ourselves? If we permanently change our focus so that we make choices based on the higher self, that new focus will slowly replace earlier ways of reacting to events. We might begin by realizing that if one person is capable of discovering a higher self that connects to the Word, then we all are. Therefore, when we think of others, deal with them, suffer at their hands, and share joy, we should also bless them. As Jesus taught: ‘Bless those that curse you and despitefully use you.’ This is the simple truth. By blessing we reach out to the higher self in others, who may or may not respond, but in our sincerity we ourselves are healed. 119

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We should try to perceive that we are the door to all things. Our higher self connects us to the love that is the essence of the Word – the Word which made the universe through its living presence in ourselves. We are the result and echo of the Word. Thus we are involved in making the Word greater, but only if we act and flow in the perfect way that it behaves. The introduction of our higher self into our experience can tune us into the love that made us. As we become more adept at listening to that love, we become happier, energized, confident and capable of handling our problems. This new confidence will release enormous energy into our day-to-day activities. It will enable us to set goals that not only fulfil our personal needs and bring joy, but also illuminate the Word and guide others to renewal and fulfilment. It may also attract opposition, because many do not believe in the good but would rather seek only self-serving personal gain. Others will think it all a myth and be angry about our use of it. Thus the path will never be smooth and will always be full of conflict, as the lives of the prophets have demonstrated to us. Jesus was crucified. Mohammed was decried and exiled. Many saints were martyred. Yet the grace, the love, the confidence within sustains us when darkness remains. Even painful death becomes a kind of fulfilment, up until those last days of dissolution.

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Can I be grateful? Life can be seen as a miracle, given all that had to happen over aeons to bring us into being. Thus to be alive, to have consciousness, is our central gift from the universe. We should be grateful for the miracle of being. Gratitude involves forgiveness: forgiveness of those who have wronged us; forgiveness of ourselves for our own wrongs; forgiveness of God or the fates when it seems that mere chance adversely affects us. We may see the possibilities of forgiveness in understanding the value of negative experience. We may contemplate what it mirrors and what it gives. But gratefulness requires that forgiveness is real. We must actually forgive. In doing so, the burden of anger and fear is lifted, freeing us from what previously entrapped us. Years ago an elderly Catholic priest gave a homily to his congregation on the Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12): ‘Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.’ The priest was wise but after listening to confessions for years he had become a little cynical. He said, ‘Jesus wants you always to do the best for someone no matter what they do to you.’ He paused. ‘I expect most of you are not up to that. It is not easy to be like Jesus, so I recommend that you think of how hard it is to be done good by when you don’t deserve it. I bet you don’t like it when that happens.’ You may not agree with the priest’s appeal to baser motives in his effort to persuade people to follow the teaching of Jesus, but he had a point. When we forgive, we 121

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overcome not only our own anger and guilt, but we also challenge others to deal with theirs. We offer a healing process. It may be ignored, but we are the better for offering it. Yet gratefulness is not only about forgiveness. Gratefulness is a state of mind that we can achieve if we forgive, and make forgiveness part of our effort to be a better person in the future. It helps us to understand the persistent human error of expecting God to favour us with only pleasant experiences. Gratefulness challenges the understandable human tendency to blame God for bad times. We must welcome and endure disappointments that befall us, as we do the joyful events. My thoughts turn to the author Primo Levi, in Auschwitz concentration camp. He refused to pray as he said he thought it was wrong to change the rules because he was losing. This is not to say that experience which is cruel, violent or wrong is to be tolerated and accepted. Gratefulness understands enough to see what is evil. It should be resisted. This too is a matter of gratitude. We can recognize evil and know that it harms us when we are helpless in the face of forces beyond ourselves. If we are victims, then we must endure, even if we lose our sense of gratitude. One day all will turn to good.

Not what you are, but what you are becoming In a sense, we are never what we are because the present, the moment, is indefinable. We cannot ascertain what it is. Those who take the view that the concept of time is a 122

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human mistake visualize an infinite succession of nows. Thus, all we have is now, yet it is ephemeral. If there were a point where we could slow down time, we would become infinitely extended. We tend to think of the now, or the present moment, in the framework of a day, a week, a year. We see ourselves in that context. We ignore the momentary changes that are taking place in order to set up a theory of who we are at a given time. We assume that, for the most part, we are progressively changing, slowly and gently. Allowing for sudden trauma, that is true. We need to change gradually because trauma is hard to cope with psychologically. Yet this comfortable process of change, which seems almost like stability, is a misconception. We are always in a state of becoming, although we suspend our understanding of the changes we’re undergoing, or even try to ignore them. We must understand what is happening to us, how we are changing and where we are going to end. In this way, we might influence the process and become what we need to become. The difficult challenge is to welcome change in our lives. We must be pleased with it and resolutely prepared to incorporate new experiences, the good as well as the bad, into what we are becoming. What we are becoming, after all, is what life really is.

The collective aspect of human life The primary aim of alignment is the liberation of the spirit and the discovery of what is uniquely oneself. Since we are 123

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individual members of a single animal species, we have a personal destiny, as well as an intimate involvement, with the survival and enhancement of our species. We have an individual and collective destiny as human beings. Our task in the light of so much danger in the physical world (e.g. illness, disablement, death) and in the world of experience (e.g. pleasing others, taught responses) is to find enough balance to express our unique selves. When we become ourselves, in balance with our environment, we have the potential for wise creating as will be described in the next chapter. Earlier in this chapter we looked at a way of re-examining our individual experience. Now we should try to understand how we fit among fellow human beings in the collective sense. Our discussion uses the analogy of human beings as nodal points in a vast, complex mesh of relationships and shifting allegiances.

The node A node is a point of interchange, the nexus between one system and another. I exist in the life of the connectives that it receives, transmits and transmutes. It stores or retransmits the knowledge it has in changed form. This is its basic nature. How does this nexus come to exist where it does, and how does it do the crucial work of synthesis? The individual is here to be understood as having as its dasien ‘being as such’ the function of a node. A person’s range of power when receiving information seems to be 124

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wide. The number of syntheses it can make of this information and the number of retransmissions possible are correspondingly greater. At the level of interpretation and presentation, each human node has, because of its genetic history and time and place, its own unique nuance. This uniqueness of individual nuance is both confusing and troublesome. It complicates any attempt at classification by nature of node. Since the nodes are of different ages, they change. In their place and in their existence they provide a continuing transcendence. The nature of the matrix or environment is continually altering. Classification of nodes has to take place by resemblance discovered by comparative studies of human action in given situations. For example, the idea of extroversion and introversion results from observation of characteristic responses to connective reception, rate and intent of transmission of connectives. It is useful in defining an approach to that node, not as an explanation of the variety of response within that range. Jung (1971) defined his idea further into typologies, but they are, as he said, a signpost only. The fundamental question is whether the node exists or can exist separately from the connectives of the place it occupies. Is the synthesizing function of the node merely a function of the matrix or does it function in isolation? The answer appears to be no, since all human experience takes place within its range of sensory perception and interpretation. If this is so it raises intriguing questions about the nature of human experience. It suggests that it is not the individual but the gestalt of humankind as a whole 125

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that is the true life force in which the node is but a unit; be it the basic one in which change is enabled, information stored and conscious perception fragmentally developed. Do we exist solely in relation to information received from the environment? In medicine and psychiatry, in sociology and psychology, in physics and chemistry, in all human knowledge, we are confronted with studies of the world and of one another. The withdrawn person, whose bizarre behaviour contrasts with the rest of us, is regarded as disturbed or needing return to the fold. Treatment and therapy are organized with that intent, even when the right to difference and idiosyncratic activity is accepted or encouraged. It has been rare for society to see such persons or groups as divinely endowed. The implication of such a perception of difference is that it enables the rest of us to measure how we are able to function satisfactorily. We are clearly structured to need sensory stimuli. Therefore disturbance and distress result if we are deprived. Only in sleep is conscious perception reduced and a measure of isolation from external stimuli possible. Thus the node seems to function only in relation to its connectives and/or its interpretations thereof. This leads to a second question. Does the node exist for itself, for the development of its own potential, or does it need to integrate its own development with that of its neighbours because it is only part of a huge gestalt? These two functions are not necessarily exclusive. It is quite possible that the node’s assertion of itself is intrinsically 126

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the way in which the gestalt grows, using other nodes to prevent damage from too great an assertion of itself.

Nodal function As to the processes which take place inside the node, the results can be examined in part by observing the transmissions made by the node. Information flow seems to fall into four classifications of survival stimuli and four classifications of other stimuli, which can then be examined as to frequency of reception. First, however, it would be best to look at the functional situation of the node. We know that it receives information through its sensory perception. It interprets that data according to its experience of other data, its ability to understand and learn from it, and its knowledge and intuition of possible courses of response. Response can be purely reflexive and unthinking (irrational), or reasoned and considered (rational), or a mixture of both, but the response cannot be avoided. Things can even be responded to as worthy of no response, and not retained. The fact that some things are remembered and some are not, however, means that some things are edited. Somewhere in the node are criteria that select important receptions and minimize others. Indeed, this is clearly an essential function of a node if it is not to overload.

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Nodal survival The node must survive. To do this it needs to be aware of its physical existence in time and place, and know the essentials of that existence. Food and shelter are required and a great deal of nodal energy is spent on securing them. The purely physical survival with its surrounding connectives requires much time and organization. Eating is a communal activity on the whole, a co-operative act in which the node prepares and consumes with other nodes. Its survival thus seems to depend upon successful co-operation with others. Stories such as Robinson Crusoe serve to emphasize two things. First, a node can survive by itself (i.e. without human company), but exists without a relationship to the environment. Second, the nodal interdependence upon other nodes, and received information from the surroundings, is clear. In its editing function, therefore, a node must give much weight to information concerning survival needs. Its retained information and connectives are organized around this. The life cycle seems to begin with these basic transmissions and receptions, and differentiates between them. There is a theory which believes that most acquisitiveness and desire for security and power stems from problems in the primitive experience of survival in the earliest months of childhood. The vulnerability of the node is also notable. Deprived of food, warmth, or love, it can decline and die. Faced by numbers of other nodes, it quickly has to conform to certain activity or suffer conse128

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quences unacceptable to it. Death may be imposed upon it or, more commonly, the ridicule or low esteem of others. The vulnerability of the lone node thus also makes imperative integration with others for self-protection. This it carries out in a number of ways. One is to secure the company of friendly nodes, with bands of fealty against hostile or potentially hostile exterior nodes. This is done to secure work or economic advantage, and thereby income to purchase necessities, comforts and luxuries. This is also a protective act. In the end, most significantly, it combines to contribute its own particular nuance or creative spark to the community to seek fulfilment. This last view has not been accepted by those who expound the idea of the ultimate value of the individual. They see the individual as struggling for identity in the face of society, and the assertion of that individuality as the ultimate triumph. The truth is that the individual can only come to a sense of fulfilment in relationship with his world, and according to its nuance and capability. Thus, neither the concept of individuality in the face of society, nor community requiring surrender of individuality, are valid views of the reality around us. Nodes simply exist and in so doing are moved by the existence of environment and other nodes. This means that the environment determines the nodal response to its received connectives, which themselves feed the node. It does not mean that the node is then incapable of original or self-determined activity. The extent of nodal actions is determined by the input of connectives, and thus the node is unavoidably 129

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reactive to its background. The individualism of the node is built on the inputs it most frequently absorbs.

Nodal mobility The node has limited mobility. I say limited because human mobility is often exaggerated. The limitations include the need for oxygen, language barriers, money requirements, acceptability by dominant node amalgams or complexes, and other survival factors. No node, for example, can go under the sea of itself. It can do so only after a great deal of technical exchange with others, and then but for a short time, as is true in all other hostile environments. The cultural background of the node can also be a hindrance as it inhibits freedom of reception and transmission. Few nodes acquire the culture or language of another amalgam. They remain strangers and are thus cut off from that part of experience. The fear of detachment is a severely limiting factor in nodal mobility. The few nodes that do make permanent moves in place and culture are very rare, and they find themselves in a dangerous position. Most immigrant groups, for example, cling to familiar culture and traditions, and are thus disliked and feared by the established group. This factor of acceptability is also limiting. We can go to Australia if we satisfy the entry requirements, and enjoy the basic act of acceptance. When several other acts of acceptance are required, as in seeking a job, we need to be admitted to that node complex. We need 130

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sufficient friends, as well as shelter and so forth, to avoid a sense of isolation. Even if we make it to Australia, we can face the same constraints as at home. I imagine how much more difficult it would be in China or India. Indeed, the example of the British in India is an interesting case. Survival factors existed as they were able to impose physical dominance. They translated their basic fear of the surrounding Indian majority into the creation of a lifestyle modelled on the home country. This situation changed after the end of the rule of the Raj, and now exists only in a few preserved traditions, or imitations by the sufferance or enjoyment of the majority. The life of the node in the Raj complex or amalgam was thus exceedingly restricted. Likewise, the lives of immigrants in the Britain of today are restricted, as they strive to preserve their culture. Faced with all these factors, therefore, nodal mobility takes place against a background of amalgam and complex acceptability, and survival possibility. Most changes are the result of the move of a node by order of a nodal complex, as in a promotion or transfer. Fewer changes come about as the result of a nodal decision to seek fortune in a place where the prospects seem better. The British, Irish, Spanish and European Völkerwanderung of the preceding three centuries falls into that category, and is similar to the returning input of Indians and West Indians. These occasional explosive nodal mobilities seem to be connected with survival; either the need for food or the need to express ideas contrary to an enforced norm. They can only come about, however, when the move is 131

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acceptable elsewhere, or can be imposed by acting as a complex in the new place. The purpose of nodal mobility, however, is more difficult to fathom. There is some evidence that the clash of cultures is a profoundly important factor in the human experience. In his Study of History, Arnold Toynbee (1960) expounded this theory in great detail, showing, with varying examples of successful and unsuccessful response, how the clash of cultures was a factor in the growth of civilization. This may be translated to the level of the node. Clearly, since the connectives determine the action of the node, the node itself is forced to change its habitual responses if new receptives come upon it. The effect of relationships on people is well known. This is achieved by mobility. The greater the mobility, the greater is the need for constant node adjustment. Too many stimuli can saturate the node, force it into rejection, defensive exclusion or inactivity. Too few stimuli can lead to an absence of challenge and a limitation of capability growth.

Nodal uniqueness All this still leaves the node with a basic problem. Despite dependence upon other stimuli, why does it still produce the unrepeatable nuance of its own existence? It functions with a unique quality that is synthesized from its biological make-up and its connective input. The deceptively simple answer may be that the biological laws affecting the genetic make-up of the node produce continuous vari132

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ations on the original genetic theme. Likewise, the connection always changes and thus no node has the same biological make-up as another, or the same input of connectives. Given this, it is hardly surprising that nodes have a unique quality. Jung (1971) believed that the deeper someone penetrated into the psyche, the more universal the nodal experience became. To Jung the universal world of the archetype and the coniunctonis (the circular nature of experience – everything connects) seemed dark and mysterious, but it may in fact represent an underlying sameness or unity. The process of day-to-day survival in this world has prevented us from exploring it. Jung saw in myths, rites and legends the keys to this mysterious ‘oneness’. Indeed, if one sees the node as a point at which connectives in a matrix are joined, one has sympathy for the view that when the communications have been received and the messages sent, the equipment remains the same. We hear the task performed, but unless it breaks down we do not inspect the equipment. We know the function of a communicative station. We designed and built it for a purpose. We pay attention not to its components, but to the data it receives and the process of transmission. We do not know the purpose of mankind, nor do we have perfect knowledge of the components, but we do hear the noise a few others make and a few hear our noise. The range of perception available to the node has vastly increased where we have the equipment available. It is difficult to see how we managed without the mechanical aids we use today. These extend nodal experience, 133

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store it for others to use, investigate the world so that it becomes known and, we hope, familiar. The storage is scattered and no one node could possibly contain even a minute part of the information discovered. The information exists, however, either in the minds of men or in vast libraries or museums. One cannot help asking why – why this instinct to preserve and to continue? It is perhaps a simple insurance policy for survival; a nodal assertion against anonymity. It is also an unconscious recognition of the node’s inseparable connection with his own race, of racial consciousness and ‘being’. Yet it is impossible not to see the node as more than a communication centre. Its quality of imagination and the creative development of the connective material it receives pose questions as to how the faculty extends experience both for itself and for others. Much has been written on the subjects of intelligence and intuition and much is known about these two faculties. They appear to be of vital importance. Intelligence is a much maligned concept, largely because of the problem of measurement and the social implications. The inequality of the distribution of intelligence does not fit comfortably with current theories of social equality and the basic equality of all men. Yet the idea persists because of the observable differences in capability. It may be true that social conditions operate to reduce some nodal capacity to impotence, which may be a widespread effect of the matrix structure of node complexes and node amalgams. It is also true that each node differs in its innate abilities. This should not, however, be a 134

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judgement of quality; rather it is a function of node in matrix where, in the end, all of our needs are equal in the common mould.

Summary To summarize, people are a single unit, irreducible into parts that collectively function identically. The individual demonstrates certain nuances and ways of acting that are peculiarly and solely their own, even though similarities may exist in type, action, nuance, feeling or belief with other nodes. Each person has their own nuance and character that has not existed before, and cannot be repeated by the natural biological process. People exist in a time and a place. They have a period of growth where they learn to survive and to know the world. They have a period of experiment where they form new relationships, find sexual identity, complete the process of learning by coming to use the acquired knowledge. They have a period of quiescence when they watch the maturation of their work and can advise upon it. Next comes a period of withdrawal when, in physical and mental decline, a person retreats from full involvement with the matrix and finally winks out altogether. These processes can of course be interrupted by death or accident. A person has a time limit and exists in relation to other nodes at varying stages of their time span. We are communication centres. We receive information from the world, analyse and interpret it and then 135

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retransmit it. People also edit the information they receive by use of various devices. These range considerably from forgetfulness to instant transmission. People seem to have certain definable approaches to life and some attempts have been made to codify general types by which to characterize certain modal approaches. People use an editing or defence system against the world, especially when danger to survival is anticipated. These defences take numerous forms. A defence system of some kind is characteristic to every individual. People are mobile to a limited extent. The boundaries are determined by their own situation and the opportunities available to and through the major cultural grouping. The mobility of the person is a crucial factor in their development because changing connectives fertilize the imagination and extend experience. A person exists in relation to the environment and always as part of one major node amalgam and of numerous node complexes. People do not live without such stimuli or protection. The more reduced the connectives from its place in matrix, the less able it is to function; although some people require less contact with matrixal connectives than others and exist in smaller units of relationships. In a functional description of individual human existence, the node is both the source of originality and the source of connectives. It is the individual unit in the gestalt that the nodal complexes and amalgams continually change, either by manipulation, discontinuance, or other reasons. The node has the appearance of self-sufficient existence, but this is belied by its actual 136

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dependence upon its fellows, its connectives or upon the world. It is as a node that I write and what I write will be perceived by other nodes, but the effect of what I write may be to stir communication between nodes (connectives). We go from the part to the whole, knowing the whole may not be differentiated from the part. In the knowledge that I know of my own being, I can approach awareness of other being in the ‘Cogito’ of René Descartes (1596–1650) and the ‘Connato’ of Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677). As people we must align ourselves to the facts of our existence and the uniqueness of ourselves.

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Wise Creating What purpose do we serve as individual human beings? My thoughts are quite simple. The innate goal of our existence is to employ wise creation for humanity, for the earth and for the universe. Wise creating, no matter how small the change, affects the nature of the universe. It opens new possibilities and closes others. In the first moment of creation, the physical laws that govern the universe were set. What happened subsequently is an exploration of all the possibilities those laws allow, but none outside them. They are beyond us. What we can contribute to this universe then is wise creation.

God’s Glory The act, or accident, that started the universe occurred according to laws outside its scope. This means that God exists outside the laws that govern our existence. God is greater than the universe, since God made or allowed it to come into being. Thus, I assume, God had something in mind. I could, of course, be wrong. Our concept of God is inadequate. We often imagine a supremely powerful human because we sense in ourselves those acts of will 138

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used by God to create. But by any measure, God, who was before the universe, and will still be when it is over, is beyond comprehension. We tend to attribute to God those characteristics we consider high values in the human experience; for instance, God is good. After all, the universe came into being, so it must be good, and as a result of this good, we came into being. We grope for an understanding of God through our human understanding of what is best for us as humans. One generally accepted scientific view is that, in the moment of the Big Bang or the first leak, the fundamental nature of the laws that govern the universe was established and is unchangeable. The operation of those physical laws is demonstrable in mathematics and physics as the underlying basis of the universe. Indeed, we get back to the concept of the leaky Big Bang simply by logically tracing those laws to origins. The universe is still expanding, cooling and expanding according to those laws. God’s Glory is in the moment of creation; its potential is what we can ever hope to know. Does God tweak his creation into paths that his omniscience perceives as best? Is this what many humans are experiencing when they resolutely declare a divine intervention in their interest? The answer to this is impossible to ascertain. It may be that individuals hear a little of what we might call the song that flows through all creation from the beginning. The song calls into being new possibilities within the creation, and this acts as a guide to all seekers of 139

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the divine will. Our own wisdom and ability to add to the song are enhanced. So all we may be doing is tuning in to the expanding creative force. It may not matter to God how we perceive his Glory. It matters to us because we summon up the Glory within to be part of the creative and endless exploration of our possibilities. If we do not fulfil the call to be what we can be, we are like the dead sperm around the fertilized egg.

God’s values There is only one value: to be what we are capable of being in balance, in alignment with our surroundings; to enhance other creation as far as we can, but not to destroy. Years ago I attended the inaugural lecture of a person appointed to a high position in a major organization. In this speech he set out a series of values through which he hoped his stewardship of the organization would be informed. He pledged himself to act within those values. His reforms of that international organization earned it new respect and trust worldwide. Yet his declaration of values was not easily appreciated as a policy statement by those accustomed to targets and intentions on specific matters. His view was that if you proved the spirit to be right, the possibilities for your successful action were immensely enhanced. He talked of his organization as a bridge, rather than a goal. It was there to serve, to offer a helping hand over turbulence. It did not exist for its staff or supporters. The social reformer and Oxford Scholar Canon Barnett, who founded the settlement movement in 140

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the last quarter of the nineteenth century, had the same idea; in this case to bring relief to the appalling squalor of the industrial slum. Canon Barnett made clear that settlements should be a bridge and not a goal. The organization is subservient to those whom it serves, without being unkind to those who serve it or found it. This value is important since it affects the dignity of the people. It necessitates the development of respect and the ability to listen to needs and aspirations. A second value is democracy: a system that allows all participants in an endeavour, whether founders, service providers, funders, volunteers, clients or beneficiaries, to share and work out their hopes and insights, needs and dismays so as to achieve the best results. To act together is always better than to act alone. As the Xhosa proverb so beloved of Nelson Mandela says, ‘People are people through other people.’ Our individuality is enhanced and empowered by the experience of democracy. It opens us up to new ideas, to better insights and the realities of a situation. From democracy flows tolerance and respect. All people are different, as are societies and cultures, full of achievement as well as failure and darkness. We celebrate achievement while standing against darkness. We must do this within ourselves, within our own culture, in our encounter with other cultures and in our exploration of God’s Glory. Much in human history is remembered that was destructive and deadly, as well as what was good,

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acting as a warning against repetition of the same mistakes, as well as a celebration of the marvels. In his study of the Iranian city of Yazd, Buick Ghorbani (2000) traces 2000 years of this community, now a provincial capital, and shows us how the city adapted to social, political and cultural change and conquest. The story is a snapshot of Persian history at a crossroads of Asia: first, its origins as nomadic tribes settled; then the great Achaemenid empire of Darius I and Cyrus the Great, an empire founded on tolerance and belief in Ahura Mazda, the great God; then Alexander the Great’s destruction of this empire as he demolished many of its cities, plundered and colonized, bringing the Greek pantheon of Gods. Alexander is still known as the Great Satan who brought death and destruction from the west, an echo of which emerged in recent Iranian history. His successors were Persianized, and then the Sassanians established their great empire based on the teachings of the prophet Ahura Mazdak, as inspired by Zoroaster. To this day, Yazd has Zoroastrian communities which never assimilated into Islam. After this came the Arab conquest, the rule of the Khalifs and the forcible conversion of many to Islam. Mosques were built in the old neighbourhoods (Mahaleh) and the great central mosques became the focus of the city. The Mongol conquests swept away the Arab empire, and the rule of the Ilkhans was a prolonged period of alien rule in which local regions became virtually autonomous. Then the Safavids restored the Persian 142

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identity and adopted the Shi’a form of Islam as the state religion. Drawn across the architecture and planning of the ancient city of Yazd is a picture of human society, often striving for greatness, sometimes destructive, always creative, innovative, artistic, celebratory of family and seeking for God. Tolerance is writ large in Yazd, as is the pain of prejudice and ignorance against which it stands. The fact is that tolerance leads to creativity since it releases energy and diminishes fear. In his great book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), Max Weber suggests how the ending of the papal stranglehold on invention and scientific exploration released the energies that created the modern world. Arnold Toynbee’s (1960) monumental and passionate Study of History showed how the stimulus of challenge and the element of tolerance enabled great civilizations to develop. He gives the striking example of the Mughal empire in India which collapsed because the successors of Akbar the Great abandoned tolerance. Similarly, the inability of the Hapsburg monarchy in Spain to adapt to the challenge of industrialization led, with its related need for tolerance, to the collapse of Spain as a world power from which it is only now re-emerging. Thus the values of respect for others, democracy and tolerance can help release the creativity that enables us to find in ourselves our purpose and sense of achievement.

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God’s wrath and challenge God’s creation must, by definition, be perfect. God is a statement of perfection. Were God not perfect, God would cease to be God since that would imply a greater perfection. Thus everything that flows from the act of creation is perfect. The universe is just the best there is, all there is. Yet, here at a far end of the universe man develops the faculty of mind and, unlike other creatures of earth, seeks to create himself to enhance human survival. The creation is necessarily imperfect, a groping towards glory. Thus mankind walks at the edge of oblivion, for to create imperfections is to create destruction, and in the end the destroyer is always destroyed. Yet waste and some destruction are part of the way in which the universe grows, so the line is thin between what is a tool to learn and what will be destroyed because it diminishes the flow of creation. Mankind learned to split the atom. In so doing he created the means to destroy civilization. The choice is still whether to use the power with wisdom or to destroy and be destroyed. The god of wrath (deus irae) rises in that mushroom cloud over Hiroshima and Nagasaki; vengeance for war on the innocent of Japan and the careless use of power to save armies, the end of one world. The persistence of individuals who make wrong choices destroys just as surely. If we do not learn from our mistakes, but repeat them endlessly, if we do not hear what others hope for us, then we become incapable of achieve144

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ment. Our life becomes a wasted potential. Such is the wrath of God. The challenge to human beings of God’s presence in creation is that the very nature of the universe involves continual and unceasing change. We long for repose, peace and safety in the swirl of life, but there is only change, sometimes subtle, occasionally dramatic. One need only look back over ten years to see the challenge. The world around us changes when our car breaks down or a water main bursts. We face these challenges as we travel the road of life. We must aim to be calm within ourselves about change, to see it for what it is: a perpetual challenge to be the best we can in both good and adverse circumstances. In any case, whether we protest or not, it just is. Therefore it is part of creation until we can find a better way.

God’s love Many say that a loving God would not allow such suffering as humans often experience. He would intervene. If God does not intervene, goes the argument, he is not loving and, since love is the supreme idea, there can be no God. This is, of course, a statement about the human nature of love. What is good for man, what enhances, is love. However, if God were to act in this way, he would limit our ability to feel. I remember an Estonian woman who had spent 27 years in the gulags of the Siberian wilderness. She was one 145

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of the many thousands of people from the Baltic states who were enslaved and shipped off to die in the cold of Siberian mines. She had watched her husband die, and nearly all her friends. Somehow she survived. She did not ask about God’s love. She believed it sustained her, as it had those who had died. She saw the suffering as a result of man’s inhumanity to man, through which the love shone as it had with Jesus on the cross. Many who have also suffered have this testimony, while others feel abandoned by an indifferent God. Even Jesus endured such a moment of abandonment on the cross. ‘My God, my God,’ he said, ‘Why hast Thou forsaken me?’ God did not relieve Jesus, or those who have suffered as a result of man’s inhumanity, whether in his name or not. It is man who must protect man. God does not, since to do so would be imperfect. This is a bleak truth for many who expect a benevolent God who intervenes to relieve suffering in individual cases or from hideous oppressions like those of Stalin or Hitler. What this tells us is that God’s benevolence and compassion to creation are different from our own, centred as we are on species’ survival and natural support for others who suffer; others whom we may cruelly kill. Was the creation an act of love? Many think so and celebrate love, God’s love, as the prevailing intent as the universe develops. Mankind with its power to create, however imperfectly, is a manifestation of that love, that search for every possibility the creation offers. Yet it is a matter of faith as to whether you view the ongoing surge of creation as a manifestation of God’s love or not. 146

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This returns me to the moment of awareness at the very beginning of this journey, and to the personal experience of meditation considered in Chapter 6, which we later called the ‘connections’ of Chapter 7. The Presence, the act of creation, the link between ourselves and the universe, whatever we call it, seems benevolent, peaceful and exciting. Perhaps God’s love is that which inspires us to be of service, to find balance and uniquely contribute to creation. The spirit of the universe, insofar as we can perceive it within, seems to challenge us to be who we are. The teachings contained in the Upanishads revealed this truth thousands of years ago when they invited people to be ‘that thou art’. The Buddha later elaborated upon it in his challenge to seek the ‘jewel in the heart of the Lotus’. Thus God’s love becomes personal within: a source of strength and inspiration. It is not and cannot be a source of power over others or over events. It rests quietly at the point of ‘oneness’ (coniunctonis), waiting to receive the best of the gifts our lives have added to creation. In doing so it emphasizes that the eternal is present within us, which is all that we can hope for. The promise of eternal life becomes a possibility of our existence; not a static place of rest, but an engagement in the ongoing working out of creation.

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God’s grandeur What comes to mind when I contemplate God? My humanity and the limits of my imagination suggest a glorified human being unrestricted by the human condition; one who wants us to share his purpose and inspires us to be joyful in the task; one who protects us. Islam teaches us the need to surrender ourselves to God and God’s service. But what is that service? The origins of the Koran are, after all, as open to question as those of the Bible, or the divine sonship of Christ. So this is the human part of me, gazing out of myself towards a benevolent superior, and thousands of years of history in Islam and Christianity and other religions: Islam teaching the existence but unknowable nature of God; Christianity creating the idea of Jesus as God made manifest in the human world. These historic contemplations, and my own nature, create the image of the omniscient and omnipotent superman. But God is greater than my image, and existed before the universe. It cannot be otherwise, for God cannot be a product of the universe. God must be the originator of it or there would be one greater. Thus God is great beyond all words. God was present and made the universe. He flows through what is to us its unimaginable vastness. God’s grandeur is the universe itself and his comprehension of each element. God is so great that we feel the Presence in this minute part of being. God does not need our devotion, but when we contemplate his grandeur we express our awe in worship. God is quite simply awesome. 148

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God’s invitation The third great noble truth of the Buddha is: ‘Right action leads to right results and wrong action leads to wrong results.’ There are consequences of wrongs which cannot exist in the perfect universe. There is said to be a great terrace built on the edge of the cliffs of doom (Bunyan 1665). Leaning on its balustrade you look down into the Great Pit from which the deadly darkness of oblivion rises. You see grief, misery and sheer ignorance, and realize you have reached a crossroad. In the pit is all that has no part in the continuing universe; the false, the destructive, the idea of Satan who seeks to devour the works of creation unfinished. A bridge lies between the terrace and the city over the Great Pit. It is a fragile, single line of gold, a narrowing path unprotected by a railing. This golden bridge across the chasm is the place of judgement so often spoken of in Christian teaching. Either you must go on to the Holy City or wait your time to fall. The Holy City shines beyond: glorious, indescribable, ever changing, ever the same. Sooner or later we must cross that bridge and risk the judgement. This is God’s invitation to enter the Holy City and become part of the creation, yesterday and forever. What does this story mean? We exist in the universe, in a remote biosphere, dreaming of the Holy City where our imagination steps outside the frame of our existence. We may see this imperfectly, have no more than an image in our mind’s eye, but we are boldly able to visualize it. We 149

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struggle to achieve the wisdom to enter it as God invites us to join in the making of the universe. We learn, within our limitations, to create for it, to transform, to change it. Then we cross the golden bridge into the Holy City and go beyond ourselves.

God’s death We are born under cultural and social circumstances that embody some sort of attitude or concept of God. For example, in the Christian West there is an underlying assumption that God must be good or ‘loving’. The Christian story reveals God’s concern extended to the sacrifice of his own son to redeem the world. This is a highly controversial view of God. We are bound, if we accept it, to pursue love and neighbourliness as prime moral objectives in the face of malice and persecution. The immense capacity of human societies to create suffering and the sheer random nature of, for example, natural disaster also create doubt about the very existence of God in the face of so much that is painful, unjust, evil. God’s loving nature is bound to be questioned. A feature of Christian society is a sustained attack on God because it often seems that the love of God is less manifest than the pain of existence. The growth of human understanding about how the universe works creates another problem. What it reveals is that some of the explanations, or stories that describe a particular religious truth (the Virgin birth, for example, or 150

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the recitation to Mohammed of the Koran by an angel), are suspect. Such things do not happen in day-to-day life. As knowledge expands, religious scholars have had to abandon much that has been believed and taught. What were once known as truths are now revealed quite simply as errors in thinking. Slowly we realize that God, or the religions through which God is understood, are at least in part the work of human imagination. At this point the theoretical concept of God becomes remote. What we have is disillusionment: God is dead. What is the use of a god who does not intervene in our interest? The strength of religions such as Islam and Christianity is that they make God personal to their followers. The medium of Jesus, for example, who is both God and man, bridges the unknowability of God and shows us how to behave in a godlike way. Likewise, the revealed Koran provides the blueprint of how God wants us to behave. God lives, as often asserted by Christians and Muslims, because the basic teachings demonstrate how God can be used and understood by humans. Religions arm their adherents with a moral and emotional certainty or, at best, confidence that they are at one with God if they obey the rules. Needless to say, the presentation of those rules to others and the encouragement to adopt them become very important. The news that God is accessible spares us a pointless existence.

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God reborn The suggestion that religion is the means by which a bridge is built between the unknowable creator who made the universe from nothing and this minuscule result is the reason God is real in the psyche of many. Making the distinction between the fallible symbolic language of that bridge which arises in the collective human mind and the existence of God as such is important. In an age where the beneficial pursuit of empirical scientific method has done so much to raise living standards and to show how the universe works, God should be recognized. After all, mathematics is a symbolic language and it is through the rigorous use of it that we reach concepts such as the Big Bang. Thus, earlier connections with God die. God will be reborn out of the capacity of the human psyche to use symbolic language to consider what is not known. Millions of human beings have real experiences linking them with what we might call God. The Sufi poet, Mohalem Rumi (1207–1273) wrote, ‘You cannot escape the feeling God is abiding in your being and among your brothers.’ It would be easy if God would disappear. Some feel it would save millions of lives; others that it would remove one level of ignorance from human activity. Regardless of whether or not God disappears, these things probably will not change. God was imperfectly described in the symbolic language of the past. People persecuted others in their God’s causes and a few will continue to do so, 152

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ignoring the tolerance at the heart of the main religions. The question about the origin and purposes of the universe will not go away because it cannot; to have a purpose, to know what we are doing, is necessary, and so we must ponder about the universe.

God’s action All we can know is that we are God’s action in what we do, what we say, how well we enhance ourselves and our species, what we may leave for future generations, what changes or alters creation. St Thomas Aquinas (1920) explained this understanding of God. The universe at the most basic is ‘pure matter’ and lacks structure and form. It is pure potential. As it evolves it gains structure, form and potentiality, and finally it encounters God who is actuality and has no potentiality. Our actions, therefore, create the forms that move towards God’s true actuality. The universe is a gift of that potential to learn about perfection. But we are in a state of transcendence. We have not arrived at a place where we can see God; only glimpses of God are for us. Wise creating When we act, we do so within certain values. We hope these are closely reflective of our own best ambitions as they are utilized within our society. Maybe we will be dimly aware that we are acting as agents: making the universe what it is; gaining satisfaction from what we do 153

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well and what we do that helps others. That satisfaction will be qualitatively different if it is truly ‘wise’, reflecting the best that is possible in our circumstances. In that, we participate in the purpose of the universe and become one with the spirit of God within us. The invitation of God to share the work of creation, to reveal to us that we are quite simply God’s agents, is a wonder. Yes, our biosphere may be small, lost in the vastness. Yes, the creation we can undertake is not perfect or omnipotent, as was the Word that Made, but we have a gift of Making. This is our destiny. I wonder if the primitive, evolving, simian creatures we once were looked up into the blue horizon and felt the yearning to go beyond: I am like a wild bird Flying the blue horizons Out where the biosphere meets the universe Unwillingly caged in a beautiful prison Saying in my heart I hear the Song I know the music Give me your hand God As I would add my song to yours.

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Enlightenment How beautiful it is to die. Dying is, of course, not at all beautiful, being often painful, a lengthy process and depressing. Death when it comes is merciful, a relief; to some a gateway to a better kind of being; to others a completion, a door to oblivion. Our encounter with death, our last great life experience, is the end point of all our journeys within and without. They will come to an end, but what follows is uncertain, except the dissolution of the physical body into its microscopic parts. If we do not die suddenly and unexpectedly, we have the time to think about our lives and what they have meant to us, to others, and maybe to the ever-continuing work of creation. We may have to undertake these reflections unwillingly, feeling ill or in pain. We may be grieving the lost years we would wish to have and the people we will be leaving. These may not be the best conditions in which to reflect on our lives, but reflect we do. In On Death, Dying and Not Dying (2001), I reflected on the questions I had asked myself as I began to die and compared them with the questions people who were dying had asked me. I worked as a counsellor with dying 155

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people for some years. These reflections fell into a pattern over the period just before physical decline and often pain relief made thought difficult. The questions often began with the knee-jerk response: ‘Why me?’ Then people moved on to question what life has meant; what happens when they die – was there anything more; and finally whether their life was worth something to someone. For many there is a turning to ritual or belief systems as they die. I myself became concerned to receive the Catholic communion, to say confession and to plan my funeral. Many people in my experience received the comforts of their faith and planned their farewell. Others resolutely rejected what some call mumbo jumbo and faced death as they believed they had faced life, personally, with their own courage and no false hopes. They often specifically excluded any religious funeral ritual. There is no doubt that this last descent into death profoundly affects everyone. It is the one descent we cannot avoid. It takes us past that point of no return between this being and whatever then happens. The majority of people have a dying period, from the onset of a life-threatening condition, through attempts to cure or control it. If these fail then there is a period when treatment ceases and palliation, relief of symptoms, is used. Relief of symptoms can provide some time as the exhaustion of pain and other troubles such as diarrhoea, constipation or malnutrition are relieved. During this period, when death is a certain prospect, most people ask their questions about life and 156

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death; how they will die; what suffering there will be; what relief is available; what their life has been about; and if it will continue somehow. Eventually relief of symptoms cannot halt the progress of disease. The body responds and other symptoms of decline occur and palliation results in putting the patient to a virtually soporific condition. They lose interest in their surroundings and become anxious only to be left alone physically, although relatives and friends may gather to comfort them. It is good to leave with farewells. I had the fortune to be given extra life by the use of a new experimental treatment, just as my symptoms multiplied, my kidneys began to fail and I was within a month of death; weeks not months they said, and it could be any day. I did have time, before that point, to ask questions, to prepare myself for my death and to think on what might be afterwards. I had one advantage. I knew the kinds of things people had asked in similar circumstances and some of the results of their questions.

Why me? This was a question that used to make me impatient when a dying person asked it. After all sooner or later all of us would die so it is never just you. What is more we are all subject to random fate; we could win the lottery and then we would not complain. I realized when I asked this same question that it was really a way of expressing distress and fear. It is not a sunny prospect to face inevitable suffering, 157

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decline and death. I found it impossible to imagine death itself or myself experiencing it. I suppose my question was really one for God and was about suffering and death. Why did it have to happen and if it did why so unpleasantly? This raises the age-old problem of evil, of what it is, and how we can define it. My inclination in the face of dying was to define it as something dangerous and unpleasant to me. It is, of course, an egocentric and inappropriate definition, although I hope it is understandable. I came to the conclusion that the question could lead nowhere. We are all subject to dying sooner or later, thus to wonder ‘why me?’ was to defy the nature of life.

What has my life meant? For me, this question asked if it had mattered at all that I had lived. If I answered it that way it depended upon what I thought of the things I had done in my life and what ramifications they might have for the future. This would be a subjective exercise, although I wanted as far as possible to make that assessment and try to reconcile the unresolved issues and personal mistakes I had made. I did do this, saying farewells to family and friends, apologizing to those I thought I had offended or disappointed. It was helpful and not only revealed misjudgements I had made about how people had felt, but also enabled me to look at my life and feel good about much of it.

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The process did not serve, however, to answer the question. Did my life only mean what I had made of it? I realized not. The mere fact that I had existed, consumed, loved, and acted in some things had changed the world and thus the universe. The change might be infinitesimal, but it existed. By what miracle I had come to be one of the possibilities inherent in creation had come to mean that I had a stake in how the universe developed, even if I could not know what it was. Thus, what my life had meant was simply a function of being. It meant something because it came to be. I would have liked something more passionate, more personal, but in the end that is all it is – we were, so it mattered. I had to leave the passion and personal satisfaction in my own assessment of my life, but it was satisfying simply to have mattered. So in a way it was irrelevant whether I had been successful, or well regarded, or not.

Does life continue after death? Most religions affirm it does, including my own. The trouble is that modern science has rolled back the authenticity of religion as a source of provable information. Most ideas of the worlds to come sound mythical, symbolic, wishful, or even vengeful. Possibly they are extensions of the human experience. Religion requires us to believe or have faith in alleged facts such as the resurrection of Jesus, the fact that Mohammed received the Koran direct from the angel Gabriel, the Jewish God speaking through his 159

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often bloodthirsty prophets. Without detracting from the messages of the prophets, Jesus or the Prophet, in this age we have to admit that belief in such unlikely events requires faith. Some people think that cloning or gene therapy suggest the way the resurrection could have happened. Others are appalled at the interference with life which it involves. I cannot conceive why we should wish to recreate ourselves in a glorified form of our present selves. I know Paul said we would be raised incorruptible, but still the body is very limiting to one habitat in a vast universe. So perhaps we have not understood what we mean by life after death. I suggest this because I feel, maybe earnestly hope, that my spirit, my essential self, is just inhabiting this body and will be released to some new and more permanent existence when I finally leave through death. If God has arranged something like that, it will be fine with me, I hope. When I knew inside myself that death was coming, it was a knowledge that seemed to emanate from my body to my mind. The mind did not want to accept it and could not contemplate death, although within I knew it full well. I wonder if the body and spirit are separate or separable. I would like to find out if this is so. I cannot be sure. Nevertheless, the point about whether there is life after death is that we have to die to find out. To me, just as the I am that made the universe or multiverse is real, maybe the I am that is me also exists because, after all, it is just part of the original I am or what flowed from it. It seems to me that the ability knowingly to create or change things 160

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mirrors, in a tiny and imperfect context, what the great I am undertook in causing existence.

The triumph of death I think we need to look at death in a different way. Of course, I am making a distinction between the process of dying, the subsequent dissolution of the corpse and the meaning of death. There are concepts associated with death that are positive: the idea of rest, the ending of suffering, the possibility of something new. All our lives lead to our death. We will end in this form of being at the very least. Is that so bad? Lives are not things that can proceed indefinitely. I find it very hard to think of eternal life. When you ask people about eternal life, they often say that God will ensure it will be bearable. To me it sounds unbearable. If life or some form of me does continue after death, then I hope it will be a bit different, will offer new challenges and serve to enhance creation – just as this life has done, however minutely. Frightening though dying is, and the idea of the end of self, death may actually be necessary to the health of the universe. I say this because as far as I can see everything has a beginning, a middle and an end. The end leads to new beginnings. Unless that end was reached, resources would be wasted in maintaining something when it had ceased to be useful or creatively functional. In wise creating, we saw that the aim of our life was to leave something behind for others to grow; not to remain with it and 161

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let it wither because we had done all we could but just didn’t wish to let go. So to reach an end is a good thing, both for ourselves as individuals and generally. Something in me protests at such a conclusion. I want to live. My life force seems to insist on it, if I have a life force that is. Nevertheless, my mind tells me that it will be neither possible nor desirable to live forever. At some time I have to let go of life, but I shall try and delay the moment as one is dead a long time. I want to squeeze all I can from life. Still I know, and I believe we all know innately, that at some point the best thing to happen would be for us to die. For some reason this seems to be a secret knowledge that we never acknowledge and even fight against. I think when we know that there is little left for us to do in this physical state, we should not worry about death. We will of course worry about dying. It is unpleasant. We may be afraid of death itself, but we have death built into us somewhere. We will end. That is the way of things. There are societies these days that advocate work to prolong life indefinitely. I am sure the new possibilities of cloning, the use of the myoblast in stem cells or intelligent computers will fundamentally change the lifespan and probably the whole nature of society. I hope I see some of this change in the life left to me. It is such a wonderful opportunity for mankind at last to be free of the faults in a genetic inheritance and the terrible consequences of illness. Such developments will, however, only postpone 162

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death. Accident or other changes beyond our control will lead to an eventual end. One danger may be that we become so unfamiliar with death that our fear of it will grow and become an obsession. That is for the future to worry about, but right now we might think about the rights of people to die when they feel their time has come. If we prolong life, as individuals we may need to have the right to end life. I remember a man I once counselled who had been on haemodialysis for about 20 years. He felt his life was no longer of value to him or his family. He was a burden on the medical resources and on his wife and children who had to care for him. Just after his youngest daughter married and was settled, as he put it, he decided to refuse further dialysis, which would mean death in 10 to 15 days. My job was to see whether he really meant it; that he had the chance to change his mind in the first few days when it was possible; and to talk to his family about his decision. A persistent question asked of me by the doctors and nursing staff on the renal unit was whether he was just depressed and would not feel like this if he were not. They also wondered whether his wife or children were unduly influencing him in this decision for their own ends. As a result, I spent time trying to persuade him from his decision. He was not to be persuaded, however. He took himself off dialysis and died ten days later, only being frightened for about an hour when he became very breathless before a final injection was given to him. This 163

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man exercised his right to die because he could. No one was able to force him to have dialysis. For those less in control of their last times, the choice may not be possible. I have a feeling that in a future where death can be indefinitely postponed, there will be more people like the dialysis patient. They will, however, probably seek to die out of boredom, loss of the will to do new things, feelings that they may no longer be useful. This raises all sorts of issues about the difference between suicide and normal death. My point, however, is that death is within us, it comes to us, and we need to embrace it in order that other things may come to be. The nineteenth-century American essayist James Russell Lowell expressed this well in his poem ‘The Present Crisis’: New occasions teach new duties: Time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth. (‘The Present Crisis’, 1845)

Farewell to life When I was dying I wanted to remember those moments in my life when I had felt the Presence within. Beauty and landscape often triggered the experience. Here are some of those moments which I would like to share in celebration of life. I am on Bear Island in the Norwegian Sea. It is early winter and a cold wind blows over barren land. Bleak 164

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rocks rise above the storm waves. The sun barely rises each day. But I found you there, Great One. In the freezing wind. In the deep drifts of icy snow. In the crash of the storm waves on pebble beaches and at the foot of granite cliffs. And in the cry of a dying seabird under the shadows of cliffs where the night would soon fall for the season. And in the steamy heat of the tropic jungle where after each movement the sweat flows freely, and we long for cold lemonade and the juice of mangoes. The crocodiles turn in the swampy river and rain is relief. You are here, Great One. In the dripping leaves. On the long, sandy beaches of the warm ocean where the jellyfish float inshore and blissfully are. And you are on the Dakota prairie at the end of a hot, dusty August. The harvest is gathered and the land is bare, waiting for the winter rains. And you are with the harvesters as they prepare their festival to bring thanks to your altar for the fruit of the land, as they do in dry years and in blessed ones. And you are in the sparsely populated Great Forests of the Taiga where the ferns have a distinct smell in the spring. And you are in the wild daffodils springing from the winter earth, and in those same glades in summer where it is good to lie face upwards to the blue horizons and the sun. And you are in the great waves that roll around the world on the Southern Ocean. And you wait with the fishermen on their rafts on the Salween River where the 165

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waters flow down from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal. And you are in the deep trenches of the ocean. It is your song that we hear when storms blow over the seas and across the remote isles where none go but the seabirds and the mammals of the ocean. You are in the voices of pre-adolescents in the choir of St Peter’s and in the frozen thoughts that are made into the classical glories played by Western orchestras. You are with the samba rhythm and the limbo dance and in the Great Opera of Peking, and in the folk songs of Gaelic peoples. You are there when a child cries, or an old man remembers the love songs of his youth, or a soldier sings of his cause or country. You inhabit the beauty in the sound, the emotion and the true intent. You are in the long dawn of summer in an English meadow, where the dew glistens on cowslips, and long grasses and the lark and curlew sing welcome to the rising sun, and the swallows emerge from old barns to gather the rich insect harvest on the wing. And you are in the ghettos of the great cities where people have come from the countryside to find their fortune and bread and shelter in overpopulated lands. When the urine runs down the channels that are cut into the streets, and when an old woman cries for her children’s sorrows, and when she longs for the farmlands of her youth, you are there Great One. As you are in the prisons and in villages laid waste by soldiers returning hope to

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helplessness, and you are beside those who strive to rise above the squalor. And you are in the blooming of the magnolias on the hills of the Vaud above Lac Léman where, some evenings and mornings when the mist is on the lake, the mountains rise like islands in a white sea. And you are on the low bushveld of the African savannah where the mantis waits for its first meal of the day, and the jaws of lion pride are bloody with the gazelle that was its prey at dawn. The lions now come to drink at the waterhole which is all that remains of the river that ran in flood in the season of rains. And you are with us in the great mass of Easter morning when we remember you can never die, and thus we cannot die, for that which has your Presence lives on forever in the possibilities created. And we break bread and drink the wine in your memory, and acknowledge your Presence when the host is lifted up before us. We know in our hearts you are ours and we are yours and that we are one. You are the Most Merciful and the Most Compassionate. You made the possibilities that created us and you take us into your Glory when we know your Presence. These images from my experience symbolized how the Presence had impacted on me in one aspect of my life. They would not happen again, but they were joyful incidents in my life. I hope that in sharing them readers will remember similar events in their own lives and find cause for happiness.

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The last praise This book has been about my life journey towards enlightenment. I offer it to you, Great One. I offer the wrong I have done and the good. I know you will see both, and all the reasons for compassion and for mercy. Most of all, I offer you the mind that within me glimpsed your mind, and sought it in the remoteness of this tiny place and time. You were there waiting for the call of mind and you answered. I could not quite say how or prove you did. There are no words of mine that can begin to describe the Glory that flowed from your Word that made the universe. For your Word is the universe. So from one-minute, temporary end of creation, I am part of your creation. You are the first and you will be the last. This is my hope and certainty. For in the face of death, the arguments of scientists, philosophers, priests, wise people, prophets, seers and loved ones fade away. What matters are the things we know within, where our lives have brought us. Only from this place can we move toward you, Great One, for this is where you are, where you live within us. In the new millennium I hope the great task of humankind will be to seek you, Great One. To perfect the resonance between mind and mind. Thus is our need, for what we make, create, cause by our being, validated. It will add to the Word that made and be surpassed by what comes after. Humankind seems not destined to rule the universe or to establish dominion, which is a creation of the Word 168

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of God. Therefore, its task is the augmentation of the Word, and its goal must be to ensure that the Word accepts the gifts offered in the human variation that has achieved mind. We can seek the Great One in the observable universe. We can look for the empirical evidence of the Word as we gain a greater awareness of the way the universe works. We can explore the different ways in which humankind has discovered and explained God from the experience and metaphor of its own psyche. We can learn the meditative and action skills that reveal our own talents, and teach us what the Presence means for us. This is the search inside ourselves, in the nature of our own existential being, for the Word that made. The Word is present within us just as our genes are, for we are descendants of the Word as much as we are of our human ancestors. For generations humankind has struggled just to survive. Many billions still struggle like this while in parts of the world others have all the leisure they need. Yet over the centuries there have always been those whom others have supported, for good reasons or bad, to placate the gods or to teach the meaning of the Word as understood in some revelation that has acquired the power and culture of a religion. Now, as human knowledge increases exponentially, it must surely be the task of humankind first to see that all people have security and the necessities of life. This should be the real task of the first years of the millennium: that the gifts of the human mind, its ingenuity in 169

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problem solving, its persistence in the search for justice and security, should be made available to all. The human invention of money should no longer only serve the rich. We must devise new means of exchange. For human beings must not be taken over by their own invention to the extent that it exists to entrench the power and advantage of the few over the needs of the many. I have the experience of having nearly died and been given some extra life. I hope this new life will linger with the beauty of those sunsets in summer that so inspired me when I was young. I hope that I can still imagine those things I do to augment the Word and will do some new things that will have value for the future. I hope I can be strong in the face of any suffering I must face and that I can make new friends and give love to my family and present friends. The deeps of myself are sure and true; to me they are full of the Word and the Presence. I ask that in the going down of my sun I may show the Glory of the Word to the world: When I see the mountains on the other side of the moon I shall know I have left this beautiful pebble, That confined me long and held me close And look outwards Ready to sail the stellar winds.

Do not grieve for me those who remain On the lustful and effulgent earth

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I am free and you must endure again The long years of entropy In that uncertain place. I go on the great adventure The earth prepared me for Free from the sheer profusion of devourment The earth so beautifully allows And in some exultation of the spirit I shall begin my real existence.

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Coda Future Thoughts What comes after we die? No one has ever returned from death and so we do not surely know. Neither can we travel to whatever future world there may be. Life cannot embrace death. Some may have faith in what they believe are God-revealed futures, places we shall go to or not as we may deserve. Life longs for itself and imagines no death, only a transition to something that is another, and maybe better, life. Death is often seen by religiously inclined people as a gateway, a portal leading to a new kind of being. If they are agnostic or atheists they contemplate oblivion, a reabsorption into basic elements. And yet death may not be that at all. We cease to be, our song is over, but the Great Song goes on and includes our song, even if not remembered, as it will not be among those who survive us. The smallest song changes the reality of the universe. Many people may regard a death that puts an end to our individual song as too grim a prospect to be true. Our biology affirms life. As Christians affirm in the idea of the resurrection: 172

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Now is Christ risen from the dead and become the first fruits of them that slept. I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, shall never die. (Book of Common Prayer, 1960)

There is something valiant, even inspiring, about the assertion of life in the face of death, but whether our life, our thoughts and our being survive is an open question at best. It is a matter for faith. It now seems certain that the ‘Big Bang’ brought this universe into being although that event might have occurred in a dimension that contains thousands of universes. Everything we know and are has, however, stemmed from that event. Our exploration of causes and origins looks essentially at the history and structure of the universe, which slowly over the centuries is becoming clearer to us. As to what conditions made the universe or sustain a multiverse, and whether that was an act of will by some extra universal force, we do not know. We seem to be confined to this universe perhaps because as yet we do not comprehend anything beyond. It has become a given that the time before the creation event, or the subject of a god that may have made it happen, are beyond our reach as human beings. We are of this universe. Is this so? Is it beyond possibility to look past the beginning to what preceded it, for beginnings are only from other paths? Indeed we may have already done so as 173

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a new theory develops that this present universe was created by collisions in the eleventh dimension. This makes the universe just part of a multitude of universes. Despite the sheer scale such thoughts imply, it remains true, at least for me, that something inside us is linked to the origin of this universe. If that is so, it must also be linked to the conditions that brought it into being. It is time, I believe, to study God.

Studying God Studying God is not, to me, simply a survey of the various religious and philosophical forms and practices used by mankind. It is not the concentration of the mind on the meaning of one particular revelatory text. It can include these things, of course, but it must not exclude the new science of the universe, the new knowledge of origin and causes. These too are revelations. I hope in time that some churches, mosques and temples will also become new centres for the study of God. Centres that retain their particular religious expression, but are open to discovery of what God actually is, what caused the universe to be or the multiverse beyond that. The modern age is creating a new global culture and forging cross-cultural links between previously relatively isolated societies. God can be, is and will be worshipped in many ways, but in future God might also be explored in a scientific way that aligns scientific method and religious

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experience. The new knowledge of the universe belongs to all people and we must see where it takes us. I hope that I can help to establish a pioneering centre for the study of God where these ideas can be more fully explored. It is time to bring God from the mythic realm symbolic of human desires. God must be in the real universe that God might have caused to be. If God did cause the universe there must somewhere be evidence for it. Will anyone help me on this quest?

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References Aquinas, T. (1225–1274) Summa Theologica. Revised English Edition. The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1917. Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England (1960). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bunyan, J. (1665) The Holy City. Bunyan, J. (1678) The Pilgrim’s Progress. Descartes, R. (1641) Meditation on First Philosophy – Meditations II. Translated by John Veitch (1901) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Ghorbani, B. (2000) Urban Design Principles of Iranian Historial Cities in the Arid Zone. Ph.D. thesis, The University of Central England. Heimler, E. (1968) Human Social Functioning. London: George Allen & Unwin. (A catalogue of Heimler’s papers are held in the Parkes Library, University of Southampton.) Houghton, P. (2001) On Death, Dying and Not Dying. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Houghton, P. and Houghton, D. (1984/1987) Coping with Childlessness. London: George Allen & Unwin. Jung, C.G. (1971) Psychological Types. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Rumi, M. (1207–1273) ‘O you who’ve gone on a pilgrimage.’ Translated by Annemarie Schimmel (1993) Hafiz – Collected Works. London: Threshold Books. Spinoza, B. (1677) The Ethics. Translated by R.H.M. Elwes (1883). Dove Editions, 1937. Toynbee, A (1960) The Study of History. Abridged Version. London: Oxford University Press. Weber, M. (1904) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.. Translated by Talcott Parsons. New York: Charles Schribener, 1937.

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