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consciousness

“The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”

Meister Eckhart

Meditation:

“Saying the mantra is like dismantling a wall that separates your true Self from union with God … each syllable a brick … each word a course.”

Via Positiva

eyeEinstein was a realist. As he said, “I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it”. Does the full moon shine in the forest if there is no-one to witness it?

Not if your name’s Deepak Chopra. He is not a realist he is an an idealist in scientific terms when talking about consciousness i.e. it takes an observer for anything to be ‘real’. This stems as much from his deep understanding of quantum physics as much as his deeply Indian influenced advaita – non-duality – philosophy.

In the recent Science & Non-duality Conference he delivers a very clear presentation on what science can tell us about the nature of the universe and the nature of consciousness … almost nothing. He makes the observation that our scientific observations reveal that 70% of the universe is dark energy leading to the expansion of the universe, the edge of which is apparently unknowable at 47 billion light years away, 26% is dark matter which glues it together both of which cannot be observed. Of the remaining observable 4% almost 99% is made up of hydrogen and helium (invisible to human observation) and the 1% of 4%, or less than 0.01% of the (un)known universe, is made of ‘stuff’ – atoms in galaxies, stars, planets and bones.

The most powerful MRI scanner exploring the “nooks and crannies of our neural networks” has not yet located consciousness. Deepak’s conclusion is that we know very little about what makes up the universe and what makes up consciousness. Either consciousness is, as Daniel Dennett argues, an illusion of a biological robot or a priori the ground of our Being … ”die Grunde’ as Meister Eckhart refers to it.

“There is existence and there is awareness of existence.”

Enquire into this your self and see what you find – who is the observer?

 

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gravity

“If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.”

Meister Eckhart

Meditation:

“Saying the mantra is like a free floating space walk daisy-chaining with atoms, saints and galaxies.”

Via Positiva

gravityIn ‘Gravity’ at her lowest ebb high above the earth Dr Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) gives up on life and turns off the oxygen supply in her space capsule.

As her thoughts turn to her imminent death she murmurs to herself “No-one taught me how to pray.” Without spoiling the ending, when she crawls out of the lake (like a creature re-born) she murmurs to herself “Thank you.” She taught herself how to pray.

At the end of ‘American Beauty’, Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) – who has just lost his life after finding it – says “I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me … but it’s hard to stay mad, when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst … And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life … You have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m sure. But don’t worry … you will someday.”

The strap line to ‘Gravity’ is ‘Don’t let go’. It should be ‘Let go’. As George Clooney as Matt Kowalski says as he floats off, “You’re gonna have to learn to let go.”

An attitude of gratitude is the daily mantra of the secular monk in all of us. We are priests to ourselves in our own lives.

 

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much ado about nothing

“Outside of God there is nothing but nothing.”

Meister Eckhart

Meditation:

“Meditation is like fly fishing without a fly expecting to catch nothing … expecting nothing … standing in the Source.”

Via Negativa

nothingIt was only in the 5th century that ‘zero’ was introduced to mathematics and philosophy and it set a cat amongst the pigeons. Before then there was no nothing. The church even banned any talk of ‘zero’. It seemed to negate everything that God had created and everything that was ‘good’.

The oldest known text to use a decimal place-value system, including a zero, is the Jain text from India entitled the Lokavibhâga, dated 458 AD, where shunya (“void” or “empty”) was employed for this purpose.

The rules governing the use of zero appeared for the first time in Brahmagupta’s book Brahmasputha Siddhanta (The Opening of the Universe), written in 628 AD. Here Brahmagupta considers not only zero, but negative numbers, and the algebraic rules for the elementary operations of arithmetic with such numbers. Here are the rules of Brahmagupta:

  • The sum of zero and a negative number is negative.
  • The sum of zero and a positive number is positive.
  • The sum of zero and zero is zero.
  • The sum of a positive and a negative is their difference; or, if their absolute values are equal, zero.
  • A positive or negative number when divided by zero is a fraction with the zero as denominator.
  • Zero divided by a negative or positive number is either zero or is expressed as a fraction with zero as numerator and the finite quantity as denominator.
  • Zero divided by zero is zero.

In saying zero divided by zero is zero, Brahmagupta differs from the modern position. Mathematicians normally do not assign a value to this, whereas computers and calculators sometimes assign NaN, which means “not a number.” Try it now on a calculator or your phone – on my iPhone I get “ERROR”. On my Mac I get ‘Not a Number’. I like NaN … its also a palindrome – nothing is the same backwards as forwards.

But without nothing, or rather what we’ve long taken to be nothing – we’d be nowhere. For centuries, scientists have known that it may be the key to understanding everything from why particles have mass to the expansion of the universe. The start – and end – of the universe, dark energy, superconductivity, consciousness – all these scientific issues are players in the drama surrounding nothing. These ideas about nothing are explored in the New Scientist book aptly titled … ‘Nothing‘.

So, don’t avoid doing nothing or thinking about nothing … it is the seed of everything.

Watch this animation from New Scientist explaining why there is no such thing as nothing.

 

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Gardeners Question Time

“What we are looking for is what is looking.”

St Francis of Assisi

Meditation:

“Saying the mantra is like reaching hand over hand for the rungs of a monkey ladder over a gorge.”

Via Integrativa

viaduct

One of the great railway journeys in England is the Settle to Carlisle line renowned for the viaduct across the Ribblesdale Valley. I travelled it for the first time as a guest in the Green Room of a specially chartered Gardeners Question Time train being recorded for BBC Radio 4.

As we approached the viaduct no matter how we strained to look out of the carriage windows we could not see the beautiful arches of the viaduct … because, of course, we were on it. It took question master Eric Robson to announce “we are now crossing over Ribblesdale viaduct.” You could also see the whitewashed cottage where Michael Faraday was born.

It reminded me of my favourite John Davies photo of Stockport viaduct (unfortunately stolen … from me not by me) which looks like an Escher illusion as the factory disappears into the arches. It also reminded me of St Francis’ saying “What we are looking for is what is looking.” John-Davies-StockportViaduct

Just as you cannot see your own eye, you cannot see that which you are seeking in awakening – it looks upon itself as That.

 

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153

“Cast the net on the right side of the boat.”
Jesus, John 21v6

Meditation:

“Meditation is like fly fishing without a fly expecting to catch nothing … expecting nothing … standing in The Source.”

Via Creativa

20061130_antikytheraIn 1901, a group of divers excavating an ancient Roman shipwreck near the island of Antikythera, off the southern coast of Greece, found a mysterious object – a lump of calcified stone that contained within it several gearwheels welded together after years under the sea. The 2,000-year-old object, no bigger than a modern laptop, is now regarded as the world’s oldest computer, devised to predict solar eclipses and, according to recent findings, calculate the timing of the ancient Olympics.

One of the gears has 153 teeth – a prime number – and was used to predict eclipses. Several working models of the Antikythera Mechanism have been made and accurately predict lunar and solar eclipses – although we do not need it to predict the date of the next Olympics any more.

Jesus predicted an unusual event – a large catch of 153 fish on the right side of the boat – when the disciples caught none on the left side. A prime catch. When it seems as though your nets are empty try letting go of proven methods and allow yourself to be caught up in the abundance of  The Prime Mover.

There is a Radio4 snippet here – http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02hzdgz

 

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how long is now

“This is the fullness of time – when the Son of God is begotten in you.”
Meister Eckhart

Meditation:

“Saying the mantra is like a Mexican wave of prayer from Christian monks in desert monasteries to Tibetan lamas in mountain monasteries from age to age.”

Via Creativa

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

ClockAllWht1_00BFI-230pxOne of the metaphysical conundrums which we don’t need to feign interest in here. Although, modern quantum physics does suggest that it is only when ‘reality’ is perceived by an observer and the wave function collapses that anything ‘real’ can be said to exist at all.

If a clock chimes in the heart of a mountain and plays a different tune every day for 10,000 years but no-one is around to hear it does time pass? And this is not purely metaphysical conjecture to exercise the minds of budding monks. It is a real project in Texas created by The Long Now Foundation which includes amongst its founders the polymath composer, artist, and app developer Brian Eno – he of Roxy Music fame and author of ‘A Year With Swollen Appendices” which is wonderfully eclectic.

“It is a huge Clock, hundreds of feet tall, designed to tick for 10,000 years. Every once in a while the bells of this buried Clock play a melody. Each time the chimes ring, it’s a melody the Clock has never played before. The Clock’s chimes have been programmed to not repeat themselves for 10,000 years. Most times the Clock rings when a visitor has wound it, but occasionally it will ring itself when no one is around to hear it. It’s anyone’s guess how many beautiful songs will never be heard over the Clock’s 10 millennial lifespan.” The Long Now Foundation

The creative spark behind the project was Brian Eno’s observation when he lived in New York that everyone seems to be living in ‘the short now’ – busying themselves with today’s or this week’s projects. “What about the project of your year or your life?” he mused … and wondered what living in the long now might be like.

I like my home-spun philosophy on time – if there is such a thing as eternity … then we’re in it now. And if we’re in eternity now then time, as such, is an illusion. That’s the long and the short of it … choose how long is now.

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”

William Blake

 

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Life of Pi

“Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world, by running away from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there.”
Meister Eckhart

Meditation:

“Saying the mantra is like reciting the genetic code of God.”

Via Integrativa

Life of Pi

If you don’t know which God to believe in (if any) then do what Piscine does in The Life of Pi – believe in them all. Bob Hope was asked why he does benefit gigs for all religions. “Why risk the afterlife on a technicality”, he quipped.

Joseph Campbell who developed the idea of the universal ‘monomyth’ in his seminal book ‘The Power of Myth’ held that numerous myths from disparate times and regions share fundamental structures and stages, which he summarized in The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won:

The formula works for every hero’s story from Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ to Simon Beaufoy’s ‘Full Monty’. In essence, there are three stages of the journey – the call/departure, initiation/crisis and the return/victory. Works for all religions and all vocations … try it for your own life and journey.

In the case of Pi he is confronted by Richard Parker – a tiger in the boat. For me, this represents a mirror of our deepest fears – in this case of being eaten. We all have our fears which co-habit the same boat we’re in. Like Pi the only way through is to embrace them and make them our friend. Grrrr ….

Pi says to the Canadian novel writer who comes to hear his story, “my story will make you believe in God.” Our own story is to make us believers. That’s why we can be grateful for the perils as well as the thrills of the journey we experience as Life.

“(the monomyth is) the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find, together with the challengingly persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told.”
Joseph Campbell

 

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lighten our darkness

“I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God”
T.S. Eliot

Meditation:

“Each repetition of the word is like a hachure stroke towards perfect darkness.”

Via Negativa

lighten our darknessThe purpose of meditation is not to control your thoughts – they cannot be tamed – but to lose control. To shift out of the constant stream of thoughts that animate our every waking moment. To rest in the still small voice of silence. To give yourself – your frantic posturing self – a break and allow the natural self to rise up from the ground of your Being.

The word ‘meditation’ comes from the Latin ‘medio stare’ – to stand in the middle. In the middle of what? In the middle of stillness … in the middle of darkness.

There is a wonderful visitor attraction on Lanzarote created by Cesar Manrique called Jameos del Agua which some say is the eighth wonder of the world (probably the Lanzarote Tourist Board). It is a natural volcanic grotto with a lake home to a unique species of blind white crab – ‘munidopsis polimorpha’. I guess they’re blind because there was no natural light in the cave until it was turned into a night club. It’s a great place to visit – I created the ‘Via Transformativa’ audio meditation there. But its not dark.

If you want real darkness, in your face darkness, just across the road on the way to the Cuevas Verde caves there is a hidden cave with a kink after the entrance so in a short walk you are in total darkness and total silence. Take a torch. Take two. And a candle and incense and meditate in utter darkness for half an hour. You can even keep your eyes open – not a single photon disturbs your gaze.

At first its a bit scary … but do you know what? After a while it is the most natural relaxing way to just ‘be’. A bit like a womb without a view.

“The final goal of being is the darkness and unknowability of the hidden divinity, which is that light which shines but the darkness cannot comprehend it.”
Meister Eckhart

 

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I see you

“We are the mirror as well as the face in it. We are tasting the taste of eternity. We are pain and what cures pain. We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.”
Rumi

Meditation:

“Saying the mantra is like fingerprints on a steamed up bathroom mirror until you can see clearly.”

Via Transformativa

AvatarPair43In James Cameron’s movie Avatar towards the end of the film when Neytiri is holding the real Jake in her arms, not the avatar Jake, they say to each other, “I see you.” Of course, they could have said “I love you” which is what we might expect – but our Hollywood notions of ‘love’ are too romanticised for real communication these days. Jake is the one she loves, the real him, regardless of his avatar. She sees through to his soul and loves him.

In modern love you may as well say “I need you” … we are accomplices in projecting onto the other what we need to make us feel good about ourself, to feel accepted, to feel loved. This is proxy love. No other person can give you the love you seek. Only wiping away the illusion of separateness … from others, sure, but crucially from your True Self will allow you to see into the truth of who you are … the beloved. Meditation dissolves all known illusions.

“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.”
1 Corinthians 13 v.12

 

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alchemy

“We must learn to penetrate things and find God there.”
Meister Eckhart

Meditation:

“Meditation is like a chocolate soldier slowly submerged in a river of hot chocolate; or a mercury cop in Terminator crossing a river of molten mercury.”

Via Transformativa

The goal of the alchemist is to turn base metal, typically lead, into pure metal – gold. An early form of quantitative easing … if it ever came off. Many have tried – including Sir Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle – without success as far as we know – unless you count the Bank of England’s £375bn money printing festival.

The Philosopher’s Stone – the legendary alchemical substance capable of transforming base metal into gold was also seen as the ‘elixir of life’ with healing and rejuvenation properties – like Nigella’s chocolate. It is the central symbol of the mystical terminology of alchemy, symbolizing perfection at its finest, purity, enlightenment, and heavenly bliss.

Central to the Hermetic tradition – the body of alchemical knowledge – is the idea also prevalent in Indian mystical cosmology – that the ‘microcosm is a reflection of the macrocosm’. Newton states it like this in his translation of the Emeral Tablet:

“That which is Below is like that which is Above and that which is Above is like that which is Below to do the miracles of the Only Thing. And as all things have been and arose from One by the mediation of One, so all things have their birth from this One Thing by adaptation. The Sun is its father; the Moon its mother; the Wind hath carried it in its belly; the Earth is its nurse.”

This may sound very strange coming from England’s leading scientist and committed Biblical Christian. He saw his experiments with light as an experiment in difracting the very Word of God.

We can see our own journey as one of alchemical transformation – from the base idea that we are nothing more than an accidental concatenation of atoms – a body – to the refined idea that we are nothing less than the recepticle of the One essence.

Re-scripting our lives in this sense we are all on the journey of The Alchemist.

“If there hadn’t been a sixth day, man would not exist; copper would always be copper; and lead just lead. It’s true that everything has its Personal Legend, but one day that Personal Legend will be realized. So each thing has to transform itself into something better, and to acquire a new Personal Legend, until, someday, the Soul of the World becomes one thing only.”  Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist