Singing from the same hymn sheet, jargon, and the poet’s view

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Philosophy, Reflection, Soapbox, Writing

I’m currently reading a book written by a Western Buddhist, and struggling with it a lot. It is not, however, the teaching which is the source of my struggle and irritation. It is the writing.

More and more I find it is less and less what something is ABOUT that matters to me; it is the voice itself. This may mean that in the end I am doomed to be forever style over substance, and on one level this is true. However another way of experiencing this is that what interests me is the story, and can the storyteller make me experience the story.

This is as true for me in ‘texts about facts’ as it is in fiction. It is always an illusion to say a fact is devoid of an interpretation of it. Our subjectivity is always within the objective.

What has this got to do with the book about Buddhism?

It is this – any ism way of viewing the world, faith based, political, philosophical carries its own jargon within it, which means something to the cognoscenti, and is of course a very useful shorthand. But one of the major problems of jargon is that over time, its well-worn grooves move further and further away from the immediacy which caused their initial creation. And so the writing connects less and less with the experience.

There is a particular strand I come across in a lot of Western Buddhist instructional – I suppose vaguely ‘self-help’ writing which is intensely (I really mean over intensely) pragmatic salt-of-the-earth writing (or speaking) It’s the ‘monkey mind’ ‘loving instruction of a puppy’ the ‘be-here’ which is all about the (apologies to the easily offended) ’you have to smell the shit, taste the shit’ approach. Once, maybe with the first person who spoke those words or wrote those words, their effect was immediate, direct and wake-up. Now (for me) they are without power and jaded. Singing from the same hymn-sheet can mean singing by rote on auto-pilot, a mindless musical mumble of a well-worn groove.

The best writers, it seems to me (on anything) are those with poetic sensibilities. And by that I am not talking about intensely lyrical writing. What the poet does, because of the strictures imposed by form, is to carefully make words work. The best writers (in any medium) do not take their words lightly. Writing can be extremely plain and pared down to the bone, and yet be poetical in immediacy. What poetry and poets (if they are skillful!) does, and do, is to freshly mint the experience for the reader or listener. Poets (whether they write poetry or not) shake us awake into sharing the experience. They take the cliché of Moons/Junes/Hearts/Flowers used as symbols of love (or whatever) and break them apart.

Back to the self-help Buddhist book. What I suppose irritates even more is the unremitting focus on being pragmatic, on escaping the trap of illusion, facing things as they ARE. Well, life may be full of shit – but it is also full of stardust, mystery, the unfathomable. Personally, as reader, neither the shit nor the stardust in writing will work when their description relies on cliché.

Which is not to say the writer needs to try and forever shock or be ‘new’. But the writer does need to find a way to make sure they have not placed cliché between the thing itself and their truthful experience of it

I do like reading books which come from various – vexed word – ‘spiritual traditions.’ Which I suppose means books which grapple with what is not ultimately tangible. And some of these are written by atheists.

Perhaps in the end it comes down to personality – who finds the words that ignite you into really being here, waking up, and being able to hold (metaphorically, I think!) the shit and the stardust together.

Nothing is new, everything has been said before – but maybe a way of saying what has been said before makes it new enough to be heard, or seen, as if for the first time.

Paradoxically, some of the writers who have connected most with the ‘is-ness’ have not been writing from any ‘spiritual’ or instructional place. And the one I come back to, as sure pointer, is the Scottish poet Andrew Grieg, whose At The Loch of The Green Corrie is a deep delight. Michael Mayne, a Christian cleric, and Richard Holloway, one time Bishop of Edinburgh, and now atheist, are others. The nature poet and writer Kathleen Jamie is yet another. None say anything which has not been said before (philosophically) except, through the immediacy of language which is from their own tongues, this reader experiences the matter of their writing in immediacy.

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Sounds disgusting, sounds repellent – but……….

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Big Pharma, health, Holism, Medicine, Philosophy, Reflection, Soapbox, Tangible Intangibility

Where the darkest shadow falls, the brightest light is shining

There is a blog I follow, Medical Revolt written by an American clinician, trained in conventional medicine, but married to a complementary health practitioner. I follow his blog with great interest as I too have a deep interest in complementary and holistic approaches to health.

Indeed, the word Hael, an old English word, has a word root from which other words, other concepts are derived – Hael, Whole, Health, Holy, Holistic, Holism (literally, what is holy, is also wholly, the whole is more Hale/Hael healthy than the sum of its parts. Hail! (as in a word used to greet) – is to wish good health – and therefore good all-the-sum-of-your-parts – body, mind, spirit – to the other.

Perhaps we could even say it is even more than to wish that to other – it is also to GREET (or recognise) that which is hale/whole/healthy/holy in each other. And where do we see or recognise the health/holy/completeness of the other – except from that part of ourselves which is similarly healthy/holy/complete, no matter how broken parts of us may be, or may appear to be, to ourselves or each other.

So………….what does this have to do with Medical Revolt’s blog, or the title or subtitle of this post……and why am I particularly interested in, and excited by, Mr Revolt’s blog, rather than any other blog about matters to do with health and wellbeing, whether physiological, psychological, spiritual or the whole-hael-of-what-is.

Well, it’s the SCIENCE. It’s incredibly common, for what I suppose I might loosely think of as the broad world of matter – physics – and the broad world of the intangible – metaphysics, to be distrustful or dismissive of each other. In fact there is a place where everything becomes (and indeed contains), its opposite

So I am rather more interested in finding out about cutting edge biological science from the edge where oppositions meet. It’s the Buddhist concept of ‘The Middle Way’. The ‘extremes of thinking’ for me – whether of number crunching pure statistics, or the edge of irrational (in my view) extremes of New Age-ism both frustrate me equally, because they fail to contain opposition, and the duality of homoeostasis AND entropy, – whatever movements there are towards the edge – expansion, dissolution, flying apart, this OR that, the opposite exists, the condensation, the contraction, the holding together. This AND That, rather than This OR That

Mr Revolt, for me, provides a beautiful illustration, approaching the far-out through a scientific rationale, or approaching the scientific precision of taking a thing apart to see its inner workings through the paradigm of encompassing the whole.

Not micro OR macro but micro AND macro (and of course the oppositional middle which contains the whole

Oh but hang on, what is it with the post title – there has been little of disgust and repellent so far, (you might be thinking, if you have had the patience to stay thus far) and what’s this about dark shadow and bright light, even:

commons on flicr –  silentius’ photostream,

There is an obvious physical manifestation that it is when the sun is brightest (more illuminative) that the shadows, the areas without light, where objects interrupt the light, are seen. Sunlight and shade are neither good nor bad, they are.  The above yin and yang version does the illustration through sunlight and shadow, night day, dark light

There is a concept, from Jungian psychotherapy, of the ‘shadow self’  – the self we do not wish others to see. It is the self we may not even wish to see ourselves. We don’t want to own that shameful self, that hidden self. This is the self (because WE place constructs on it of illumination good, hidden/shadow= shady, dodgy,bad) The shadow (whether individual, cultural, or of an epoch) – is however made visible through illumination, and the shadow contains within it the light and the illumination.

yes, yes, but what is it which is so disgusting????

Well Mr Medical Revolt (you will be REALLY pleased I’m not posting the obvious illustration at this point) made an absolutely FASCINATING (well it was, as far as I’m concerned) post about a rather counter-intuitive way of dealing with a potentially lethal gut bacterium, which is on the verge of being untreatable by any antibiotics – indeed has developed strength, virulence and population growth THROUGH the over-prescription of antibiotics. Here’s a pic of C.difficile – it is found in the intestine.

Medical Revolt’s post on ‘Poo Cure for Clostridium difficile’

Now, seeing the title of Mr Revolt’s post, aren’t you pleased I am going no further with graphics at this point?

What fascinated and interested me about his post, once I got beyond the Yeurrh gut (!) reaction stage, the disgust, the horrified embarrassed black humour, and even the science of it and the predictable anger at Big Pharma trying to suppress it, was this:

It was such an illustration of the shadow side, that which is unwanted, hidden, which we wish to eliminate (hah!) from ourselves, vent from ourselves, void from ourselves, being the part from where new health may come.

Strange to find excrement itself (well, it was strange to me) providing some sort of visceral (ha again) illumination about the metaphysics of dark and light, and the absorbed, acknowledged and integrated shadow rather than the disowned shadow

This post of mine, has, finally a practical purpose. As someone who doesn’t facebook, doesn’t tweet: I believe Medical Revolt’s post is hugely and scientifically important. Changes in medical thinking may often come ground up, rather than top down. Many extremely compassionate, caring dedicated clinicians ARE UNAWARE of unconventional effective, safer treatment protocols other than the protocols of Big Pharma itself or the last resort surgical scalpel – for all the obvious reason. PHARMA isn’t going to publicise the positive evidence of anything unpatentable.

Patients and clients are often the means by which other approaches come to the awareness of clinicians. Information just needs to be out there more widely in collective consciousness. If I did twit, face, or anything else, I would be twitfacing Mr Revolt’s post.

A journey of a thousand (virtual) miles  starts with a single facetwit!

Ancient Chinese Digital proverb, often unattributed to Lao Tzu

Flicr, Commons, elliotmoore photostream

Michael Mayne – Learning to Dance

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Book Review, Christianity, Learning to Dance, Meditation, Michael Mayne, Reflection, The Natural World

A book of wonders and delight

Michael Mayne was at one time Head of Religious Programmes for BBC Radio, and Dean of Westminster. By this book, he was clearly wise, erudite, deeply compassionate, thoughtful, creative, and intensely and fully human.

It’s extremely hard to categorise this book.

The Dance is many faceted – The Dance of The Cosmos, The Atomic Dance, The Dance of Living and of Dying.

Mayne structures the book around the seasonal and pictorial idea of the Medieval Book of Hours, dividing chapters into months of the year, their activities, and an inner poetic, mystical meaning of those activities.

Each chapter starts with a beautiful paean to the natural world, both Mayne’s own observations of what is happening in nature in that month, and the interspersed writings of poets, philosophers and naturalists, all chosen for their transcendent view.

He then explores a theme, and always, whether it is the ubiquity of Fibonacci numbers in the petals of plants, the creative urge which gives rise to Cezanne’s paintings, Mozart’s music or Shakespeare’s final plays, he draws close to a relationship between the perception of what God means, particularly within the Christian faith, and who indeed we, humans, are.

His thinking is subtle, profound, and holds paradox and the discomfort of no easy answers. Never platitudinous, deep and beautiful writing, with a graceful and light touch, this is a book to reflect on and return to.

What is the book about? – in Mayne’s words, somewhere in November, in a chapter called The Dance Of Faith, and a little flavour of his writing:

And perhaps we are most human, most what we are called to be, when we have one foot on the shore of that we know, and one foot in the mysterious, unknown ocean. This is where the poet and the painter stand, together with the best scientists and the wisest theologians: exploring, probing, digging deeper; and sometimes breaking through to a fresh realisation of truth. Art, science and theology meet and flower at the boundary of the known and the hidden

He provides movements towards answers, not prescriptions, dogmas or implacable certainties. The book is a beautiful exploration for the reader, into true mystery, true wonder, and embraces pain as well as joy.

Boucicaut Book of Hours. Wikimedia Commons

In one of Amazon’s annoying listing blips, in the UK the author of the foreword is given as the author of the book. I don’t expect Mayne, who comes across as a man of some humility, cursed and stamped too much.
Learning to Dance Amazon UK
Learning to Dance Amazon USA

 

Sara Maitland – A Book of Silence

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A Book of Silence, Book Review, Meditation, Philosophy, Reflection, Religion and Spirituality, Sara Maitland, The Natural World

Many words about silence – almost an oxymoron

This is a wonderful and thought provoking book. Maitland explores silence both from her personal experience, and from the garnered writings, sayings and teachings of others who have either sought silence, or had silence thrust upon them.

Inevitably, many of the chosen experiences of silence come from those who sought silence and or solitude (as she points out, the two are not necessarily the same) as the route towards an experience of the Divine. Maitland recognises that certain groups of people, while not seeking a closer union with divinity, may encounter experience of profound silence and contemplation – for example, explorers in inhospitable climes. She finds a common felt sense of silence across written accounts of these various experiences, although inevitably it seems that those who consciously search for the experience in spiritual surrender may travel further into the silence.

I was also fascinated by her drawing out the difference between the ‘eremitical tradition’ – hermits seeking surrender to Divinity and the tradition of solitude as ‘the way of the artist’, which was part of the Romantic tradition, and has influenced much modern thinking about individual artistic creation. She contrasts the surrender of the ego, the losing of boundary, the merging with all, that is the spiritual way, and the solitary act of artistic creativity which is the fuller realisation of ‘Self’ – if you like, the clearest realisation of the individual.

I would have liked a little more exploration of the journey towards inner silence – that quietening of the mind’s chatter – even if one is in a noiseless environment, and solitary, the full mind can often feel like a crowd of irritating noisy chattering fools! (well, mine can!) She touches more briefly on this, in the final chapter. it is perhaps a more difficult subject to write about anyway, since how can the wordless space be described? To describe it with words is to lose it.
Image: Deviant Art.com
A Book of Silence Amazon UK
A Book of Silence Amazon USA

Jonathan Balcombe – Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals

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Book Review, Ethics, Jonathan Balcombe, Philosophy, Reflection, Science and nature, Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals

Embracing our animal nature may be the only hope for us

Jonathan Balcombe is an animal behaviourist of the right sort. By which I mean that he views animals with respect and empathy, in the same way, I surmise, as he views other members of his own animal species.

Essentially, this is the nub of the book. Balcombe eschews the idea of ‘anthropomorphising’ because in effect he shows (backed up by good references and citing) how time and again many of the ‘higher’ behaviours which we arrogantly assume are evidence of our unique ‘humanity’ – such as altruism, empathy, the ability to reason, language are in fact ‘animalistic’. There is not such a clear divide between ourselves and the rest of the, particularly, mammalian and avian world, though Balcombe also shows reptiles, fish and even insects to be more advanced than we might suppose.

In fact, rather disturbingly, the idea cannot help but surface that our unique
humanness may rather be a retrograde capacity to delight in the wanton infliction of suffering upon others, whether of our own species or of other, supposedly dumb (sic) animals. Balcombe posits that we may well have introduced the philiosophy of regarding ourselves as separate from other species in order to justify this brutality, to find an excuse for our cruelty towards other animals – and indeed, our cruelty, expressed across cultures, geographies and the centuries, towards individuals and groups of our own species, which the dominant cultural group regards as ‘subhuman’. This ability to separate the human from the subhuman has been responsible for some of our most intense acts of racial cruelty.

Balcombe’s well written, carefully thought through book ends with an impassioned argument in favour of veganism, on environmental grounds, as much as any other argument against the exploitation of our fellow, though non-human, animals.

Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals Amazon UK
Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals Amazon USA

Jonathan Balcombe – Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good

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Book Review, Ethics, Jonathan Balcombe, Philosophy, Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good, Reflection, Science and nature

A challenge to blinkered speciesism

This is a terrific book, giving the lie to those who dismissively accuse those of us who ascribe emotions to animals as ‘anthropomorphising’ Its always seemed to me to be rather crucially the other way round. As human beings are after all also animals, and as we can see clearly the development of anatomical structures across aeons of time, and across species, its absolutely obvious that all the aspects of physiology have also been a-developing. Animals – not just other mammals, but other vertebrates, have neurological and endocrine systems like ours. It has always seemed to me to be supreme arrogance to interpret human behaviour and human emotion one way, and deny that complex behaviour and emotion also exist in animals. Why should we interpret the playful human one way, and see other animals, both wild and domesticated, behaving in a manner which looks playful, and looks as if the animal is enjoying itself, and not draw the conclusion that he/she is also having fun. I have used the term he/she deliberately, as Balcombe does, pointing out that our language, calling animals ‘it’ removes them from individuality. His tenet in this book is that we have failed to investigate the clear evidence that animals feel ‘pleasure’ in all its many guises – pleasure from companionship and social bonds with other animals, pleasure in play, a sense of beauty, enjoyment in the feel-good of sex – not just a mechanical urge, but pleasurable, like it is for humans. Even, in one startling image, he presents the idea that certainly other primates may experience a sense of awe.

As he points out, carefully tracing what appears to be complex emotion back and back – even to invertebrates, to insects, once we begin to see the adaptive, in evolutionary terms, nature of ‘feel-good’ and to see that ‘dumb animals’ not only feel pain, but also the complexities of the pleasurable (a much more individualised, personal identity response than the pain response) we should be forced to change our thinking about the separation between ourselves and other species.

The further I read into this book, the more Jainism, with its deep respect for all that lives, makes scientific, not just ethical sense.

My only cavil about this excellently put together, well-written, carefully argued and researched book is that I wish the extensive bibliography and citing of published research material had been footnote referenced, rather than all the books and studies cited in a chapter collected together at the end of the book, as I wanted to look for the evidence of some of the more surprising information given.

Its possible that this may have been done in the physical text, but certainly is not a feature of the Kindle edition.
Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good Amazon UK
Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good Amazon USA

Richard Holloway – Leaving Alexandria

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Autobiography, Book Review, Ethics, Leaving Alexandria, Philosophy, Reflection, Richard Holloway

The uncomfortable comfort of doubt

Richard Holloway, formerly Bishop of Edinburgh has written a biography which is much more than that, examining as it does the clash between the blacks and whites of certainties and the dappled, doubt filled view which may be where `faith’ resides.

As Holloway puts it, religion is man made, is God? His conclusion that the fundamentalist certainties – whether theist or atheist miss the ability, on the one hand, to temper rules and decrees with the nuanced approach needed in dealing with the individual, and on the other, to answer the mystery and the need for mystery, is one that struck a chord for me.

The title of the book more than nods towards Cavafy’s `The God Abandons Antony’ (Leaving Alexandria) – the loss of dreams, home, the painful gap between the dream of oneself, and the self which our lives reveal to us.

Holloway’s Alexandria is both a real and a metaphorical place – his boyhood home in the Vale of Leven, Dunbartonshire, and the more mysterious inner journey.

He writes beautifully, using quotations from favourite poets to illustrate what can not be usefully explained except by metaphor – Hopkins, R.S. Thomas, Philip Larkin, Cavafy.

Holloway asks more questions, of himself and his reader, than he answers, and in the end, settles with the fact that much cannot be answered.

I particularly liked this:

“The best I had been able to do was to persuade myself and others to choose to live as if the absence hid a presence that was unconditional love……..It was a relief now to name my belief as an emptiness that I was no longer prepared to fill with words. But though I had lost the words for it, sometimes that absence came without word to me in a showing that did not tell. It was the absence of God I wanted to wait on and be faithful to”

A compassionate, tender and painful book
Leaving Alexandria Amazon UK
Leaving Alexandria Amazon USA

Anatomy of a Rose – the secret life of flowers

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Anatomy of a Rose, Book Review, Reflection, Science and nature, Sharman Apt Russell, The Natural World

Botany written by a poet, a mystic, a lover

This is the most lush and gorgeous book. Russell wears her research and erudition lightly, and writes a book about the pharmacology and morphology of plants as if she is writing a song of praise, a novel with a delicious cast of characters and a page-turning plot, a passionate political/ideological credo and a torrid piece of erotica! All in one book.

I can’t recall a piece of scientific writing this exciting, which had me laughing out loud at some points and moved to tears at the wonder of it all at others.

What a glorious and rich world we live in! The flowers in my local park have never seemed more potent and thrilling!

Anatomy of a Rose UK
Anatomy of a Rose USA

Sharman Apt Russell – Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist

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Autobiography, Book Review, Ethics, Pantheism, Philosophy, Reflection, Sharman Apt Russell, Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist, The Natural World

Everything Connects

I’ve long loved Apt Russell’s writings, a combination of science and the transcendent experience of mysticism, inspired by the natural world, since I discovered her Anatomy of a Rose: The Secret Life of Flowers some years ago.

I’ve known that the term to apply to myself was ‘Pantheist’ since my teens, and that luminous, numinous experience from the natural world was present for me since childhood. However this book reflects a more mature analysis of Pantheism, tracing skeins of Pantheistic thought through from the ancient Greeks (Heraclitus), Roman (Marcus Aurelius) through other figures such as Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, and strong traditions which can encompass facets of Pantheism in Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and, closer to a Western Tradition, the Quaker movement.

Apt Russell describes herself as a ‘scientific pantheist’, but her connection to the Quaker movement is also strong, taken there because the ‘everything connects’ of course includes all humanity, and therefore has to have a strong basis in reconciling conflict, taking practical action in community, and living with clarity, as far as able. The book is a lovely combination of tracing the theory and history of the wide variety of Pantheistic thought, and her own personal relationship with ‘the healing power of nature’ – whether that is mountains, cranes, grass – or fellow humanity.
Standing in the light Amazon UK
Standing in the light Amazon USA