A Meditation on the Material World

Who knows about the humble heat riser tube? I didn’t until my car almost stalled on a hill coming into central Victoria the other day. My mechanic pointed out the ragged mess that was my heat riser after the car limped into his garage. Apparently it heats the intake manifold of the engine so that the fuel is properly vaporized and ensures that, on freezing days like it gets in winter in central Victoria, a venerably old Mazda like mine can putter around as normal.

As I drove away after it was fixed, I thought how meagre my knowledge was about cars, even though they’ve been an important part of my life for decades. I depend on them yet I live with a general ignorance about how they work and the intricacies of their operation. In fact, I understand precious little about the workings of the mechanical and digital technology that is part of my everyday world – televisions, refrigerators, phones, computers, the internet, trains, airplanes ... I interact with all of them, yet they are largely a baffling mystery.

I admit I’m not a practical person and am more comfortable in the world of ideas than the world of things, but it struck me that it was impossible for any of us, given the level of development and complexity of modern technology, to have a strong understanding of all the material components of life. We sail along dependent on the specialized knowledge of others and in blithe ignorance until a malfunction or breakdown of some kind happens. I believe this state of affairs contributes to the psychological disconnection and alienation that is so prevalent in contemporary times. Our culture is materially focused, yet because of the complexity of the human-created world, few of us are actually “grounded”. The material conditions of life, which ought to be affirming identity and meaning, present seemingly insurmountable barriers to a healthy psyche.

Culture mediates our relationship with technology, creating a means by which we make sense of it and integrate it into our lives. Our culture emphasises material expansion and consumption, where a person’s relationship with things is about identity through possession. The more things we have, the better we are supposed to feel about ourselves and the more integrated we are supposed to be in a world of meaning. The relationship with the object doesn’t matter, nor does our knowledge of it or skill in using it; the primary value is simply that we have it. I have therefore I am.

No psychologically dynamic or creative relationship with technology is encouraged. We are left to be, in the main, passive consumers of objects created by other people in systems of mass production. The introduction in recent years of more “interactivity” in technology – such as through the internet and smart phones – is simply a means of expanding choice in consumption and doesn’t improve the pervasive sense of alienation created in the first place.

The antidote to this situation lies in the values we can summon towards a healthy life: simplicity, self-sufficiency, sustainability, connection and meaning. We don’t have to take an extreme low-tech turn and go back to living in caves, but we do need a reappraisal of our individual and collective materiality so that objects are part of the way we serve our deepest needs and not a means to enslave us. There is a small but growing movement in this direction: community gardens, Transition Town groups, local sharing networks, home craft and cooking, the popularity of cycling, environmentally responsible technology, are all evidence of a more connected materiality. They still require levels of specialised knowledge, but this is in service to a more grounded and whole picture of humanity.

Ultimately the material world has to be seen in greater context, as part of a bigger reality. We are much more than flesh and bone. As we age and watch ourselves, our loved ones and the world around us change, we become more aware that matter is in an endless process of flux and that to be attached to objects creates illusion and suffering. We can live fully in the material world on the condition we are prepared to let all of it go, that life asks us to recognise and fully accept that what is here today will not be tomorrow, and that is OK. Wisdom traditions teach us to build a relationship with the Spirit at the core of all life, the essence, that which animates and infuses everything. “Make every act an offering to me; regard me as your only protector,” Krishna, representing Spirit, says in the great Hindu text, The Bhagavad Gita. So we begin to experience all things differently, perhaps as they ought always to have been experienced.

Alice Springs

I was privileged to travel in central Australia recently, and was struck by the beauty and power of the land. It seems that where there is still a strong, living Indigenous connection to country, that place is somehow more alive and spiritually potent. The following is a poem I wrote after returning from the Centre.

Alice Springs

What is aridity?

Is it lack of water,
or its presence
flowing deeply under the surface?

Is it stark rocks
piled on parched spinifex hills,
or how their presence shapes
the stark spirit of place?

Is it light so bright
that it sears everything,
or its slow evening decline
revealing form in shades of darkness?

Is it sky, so unchanging perfect blue
that a single cloudy wisp is relief,
or uniformity shaping awareness
of eternity in All?

Is it mulga and ghost gum,
ironwood and cypress pine –
the strong who overcome –
or they who are one with the land
who crown its true glory?

The Orange Band

Heavy with cloud, damp with passing showers, the day was ponderously coming to an end. Only the most diffuse light, a kind of soupy grey, had been present and now it too was beginning to fade. Then, like a miracle, a bright orange band appeared on the horizon, a stunning break at the edge of the blanket of cloud. From the balcony of my flat I watched this blaze; it shone for some time, gradually waning and deepening in colour, growing thinner until finally a faint glimmer surrendered to the purple night.

Such was the beauty of this sunset light, and its stark contrast to the rest of the day, my mind leapt to understand it more. Could it hold some meaning? Was it a sign of some kind, perhaps a portent? It was fascinating to think that, if everything in the universe is truly interconnected and inter-related, an appearance of this kind had to have meaning on many levels.

I believe that a leading edge of development for Western culture in its recovery of a respectful relationship with nature is the ability to read it intuitively. We have to learn the languages of the natural world, understand the way that everything is speaking to us, and honour people with the ability to do so.

The orange band on the horizon might be interpreted by an Indigenous person as the presence of a dreamtime creator being, by a Hindu as the dance of devas or the revelation of Shiva, by a Christian as the radiance of God’s grace in the world. A priest or medicine man/woman may divine in it a message for the future or a sign of how things are in the present. Whatever the levels of science or rationality in these beliefs, they express a fundamentally intuitive relationship to nature. And it is the valuing of the intuitive mind that is sorely needed in our highly rationalist, grossly material modern society.

We start with awe. The American mythologist Joseph Campbell believed that awe in response to the great mystery of life was the source of all religion. Awe places you in a position of humility in which there may not be simple answers but only an attitude of questing openness. With this receptivity, we start to cultivate what in Hinduism is called “buddhi”, the intellect or intuitive mind. The Catholic monk and Hindu scholar Bede Griffiths describes buddhi as “the still point” at which we open to the transcendent, unitive order of things. We find ourselves in the psychic domain, aware of a deeper reality beyond the world of the senses.

In the liminal, unitary consciousness of psyche, we start to recapture the soul of the world, the essence or nature of things. From this view point everything is radiant with meaning, everything has a purpose of some kind. To translate this meaning into the concrete world requires storytelling, the ability to weave the strands of the psyche into forms that speak to everyday experience. The creation stories of Indigenous people achieve this by linking the work, crafts, rituals, ceremonies and family life of the people with the magical activities of creator beings and animals.

What is achieved through storytelling is a poetic consciousness that values and incorporates both the literal and the metaphoric in a more inclusive, holistic vision of reality. Good poetry is always doing this – speaking of the concrete while pointing to the unseen. And unlike empirical science, which is focused on literal explanation of the world, poetry embraces mystery, the unknown and unknowable. One of my favourite examples of this is Robert Frost’s classic short poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”: we don’t know why the author of the poem stops by the forest with his horse or where he is going, but there is a strong sense of the attraction to mystery. The last lines of the poem are: The woods are lovely, dark and deep/ But I have promises to keep/ And miles to go before I sleep / And miles to go before I sleep.

Perhaps sometime soon we will recover storytelling as an integral way of meaning-making in our culture, and create new stories that connect us holistically and deeply to our world. We can re-engage with nature by appreciating it both literally and psychically, and in doing so create the kind of consciousness that will value all life. The orange band that captivated me on that wintry evening may, then, be an invitation to look deeply into the heart of the cosmos and to spin dazzling and wonderful tales anew.

Tour Du Monde

The following poem appeared in Ricochet Magazine in May. It's about the contradictions in our world portrayed through the prism of the somewhat obsessive foodie culture that has appeared in recent times. Stir liberally and enjoy!

Tour Du Monde – Degustation Menu

 

Fillet of wallaby lightly fracked

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Fukushima salad

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Mountain pygmy possum, capers and juniper berries

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Meatballs syriane in a bloody jus

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Marron, shale oil vinaigrette and kauri sprouts

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Pademelon charcuterie, bleached reef coral and quandong

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Coode Island lamb, croutons and fenugreek mustard

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Mangosteen sorbet with crème Kabul

On Power

The aliens have arrived: they’ve invaded our cities, enslaved our people, committed unspeakable acts, and now we must fight back!

According to seasoned film watchers, Hollywood has been churning out a stream of spiky alien invasion flicks in recent years, including the latest, Edge of Tomorrow, with Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, which is currently showing in Australia.

Films are products of the imagination and the imagination a product of the psyche, individual and collective. Perhaps the theme of alien invasion is particularly relevant to Americans, who it could be said are facing challenges to their self-identity. The rise of China and the constant menace of extreme Islamism are threats to US global military and economic dominance that also challenge US ideas of exceptionalism and self-belief in primacy among nations. The fear of America (and indeed the West more broadly) losing its power implies at the same time an attack on its values and self-worth. Anxiety usually triggers soul-searching (Why do they hate us? What’s wrong with our values?) and denial (They are evil, we must intensify our resistance) which can occur simultaneously. This is essentially no different to what any other empire has faced throughout history when under threat. Indeed, it’s interesting to note that the Islamic world is perhaps still trying to come to terms with its losses and decline from the 13th century.

Power is self-possession: the taking hold of an internal form and expressing it through will in the world. This applies equally to individuals, groups and whole nations. In attempting to understand a particular manifestation of power, we need to know what the “self” is that is being possessed – what kind of self? What is the operating conception of self? This is important because power can be expressed very differently. If we take the example of a referee or umpire in a sport: one umpire may conduct a game in such a way that they are barely noticed, while another might blow their whistle and intervene frequently and awkwardly. In politics, democracies and dictatorships express power markedly differently.

In the modern world, the self is typically equated with the ego; power is understood to serve a self that is narrowly defined as one’s own material interests. The individual acts for his/her own benefit, the family likewise, the extended group, the small business, the organisation, the corporation, the nation. The conception is of separate actors competing with one another in a kind of grand Darwinian drama where the sole purpose is to get more for you and your own. What is missing is the reality of interdependence, mutuality and unity of all life.

The ego, it must be said, has its place in ensuring material and psychological health for individuals and groups – we couldn’t live without satisfying our basic needs in the world – but its exclusive identification with the self means we reduce the range of our humanity. In squabbling over our individual rights to do what we like, we miss the bigger reality that is the oneness of all. We can see this in the failure of countries to unite over the current global ecological crisis, instead pursuing their own agendas of material wealth at the expense of an increasingly polluted and depleted planet.

Power needs to come from a much broader understanding of the self. When we move outwards from the ego our concern becomes centred on Life in general and on serving the greatest good. We identify with an intangible force that manifests everywhere as life-affirmation and which entails action aimed at fulfilling the best in ourselves, in others and the world. Nobody but truly enlightened souls can act from the greatest good all the time, but the more we aim in that direction, the greater is our sense of meaning and fulfilment and the happier is the full body of Life.

We know that good acts don’t need to be big – helping a sick person cross the street is action in that moment for the greatest good; so too is being kind to yourself by resting for a few days instead of taking on more work; or cooking a pleasing meal. Millions of small acts of kindness every day keep the whole world going, forming the nurturing soil upon which everything flourishes.

The challenging aspect in seeking to centre the self in the greatest good is that it defies definition and boundaries. The ego, the family, the tribe and the nation are all objectively well-defined and so it is easy to identify with them. But when power rests upon the greatest good no single entity forms the basis for identity because all life is embraced equally – all egos are your ego, all families your family, all tribes your tribe, all countries your country ...

In our time there is a desperate need to reorient power towards a self larger than the ego. This self has to be anchored in the greatest good and be expressed in forms that are meaningful in today’s world. Perhaps the ecological self, the embracing of our beautiful blue planet Gaia and all its life, will emerge as the libratory vision. The work of the great prophets like Jesus, Zoroaster, Buddha and Mohammed was to provide, through divine inspiration, the means by which latent spiritual energy could find expression. They unleashed enormous, world-changing power. Maybe in our time there will be no single individual but millions of prophets working for the good all over the world who will harvest an equally powerful transformative movement. We can only look forward to that day.

Giving Thanks

We take a lot of things for granted, maybe more so in Australia than anywhere else – take the sun as an example. I once happened to be in Germany at the start of spring. Coming from Australia, where sunshine is a staple of life, it was amusing to see people in parks basking in the feeble rays streaming down on days that were still quite cold. Then it occurred to me that these poor folk had seen very little of the sun through the dark northern European winter.

The other morning while walking to work I suddenly noticed the beauty of the sun. Over the top of the city’s buildings, past the spires of St Patrick’s Cathedral and the date palms crowded around a small patch of green, the sun was a wonderful, gracefully strong presence. Its warmth kindled something in me and I said, quietly and looking upwards, “Thank you, sun, for shining on me and the world. Thank you for the life you bring. May you shine and shine.”

What is the value of such simple gratefulness? In our highly rationalist culture my giving thanks to the sun has no meaning aside from a temporary good feeling I might get, and any further significance would be considered illogical and woolly-headed. But we think this way only because we take for granted the conditions of our existence – nothing on Earth would live without the sun; there would be no life here. In being thankful we recognise and, crucially, renew the life-giving relationships of which we are part and the grace that those relationships bestow.

We start with the assumption that everything has a life beyond its material existence. The sun, the moon, stars, rocks, water, animals, people etc resonate at subtle and spiritual levels and all are interwoven in the one Spirit. By giving thanks we identify ourselves beyond our own finite existence and into this collective channel of oneness, acknowledging that we are part of a much bigger Life. Recognition entails naming, which is synonymous with truth and carries power. The Gospel of John begins famously with “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Naming brings us into the field of direct and primary relationships.

Renewal is brought about at subtle levels because of the energy that flows between all things. An act of gratefulness directs energy back to the object of thanks, so there is a mutually enhancing flow both ways. We experience this concretely every day as positive feelings when either we thank someone or are thanked for something we have done. A measure of physical, energetic and psychic replenishment takes place. I believe it’s essentially the same when we give thanks to the sun: when we return its constant, loving presence in our world a mutual reinforcement occurs. Being more aware of nature, growing our awareness of the interdependent conditions and relationships of our existence, also creates a platform to act in life-affirming ways. Protecting a forest is then not just about the trees or the animals, but about us and all life.

Thankfulness to nature is important in another way – it stimulates and nurtures our inner child. Being connected to the inner child, and to play more broadly, brings joy and vitality; we experience life a little more lightly and manageably. Much of the time our culture denies and buries the child in us – we are supposed to be occupied with work, serious and productive, busy for the sake of money and consumption. But the child in us wants none of that; it wants to play and experience the world in its own pure way. The inner child is psychologically closer to nature and can guide us back to the sense of wonder and simplicity that is essential for reverence. Jesus said: “Let the children come to me and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.” (Matthew 19:14).

I think that our culture is in the process of casting off the extremes of rationality and is moving again, slowly but steadily, towards recognition and respect for Spirit. In the growing popular feeling for (usually non-religious or non-church based) spirituality we see the sacred starting to return to our world. In truth, it never left but our perception of it simply hibernated for a while. In the 21st century our understanding of the divine and the ways in which we give thanks – by word, ritual and deed – are evolving. Though we can draw from the wisdom traditions of the past, our time in the sun is unique and very much our own. We are in a creative moment in history.

The Wasp and the Cockroach

I watch maybe a bit too much television. It helps relieve an active brain at the end of the day, but I’m also captivated by the stories, anecdotes, myths and humour that I pick up sailing from one program to another.

Occasionally something I see leaves an indelible mark, stimulates further contemplation. This happened to me watching an episode of the British comedy infotainment show, QI. Host Stephen Fry was describing the habits of a certain species of wasp that preyed on a type of cockroach. Rather than killing the cockroach, the wasp’s bite released venom that drugged it. The wasp would then lead the befuddled victim to its nest, lay eggs on it and the hatchlings would progressively eat the insides of the still-living cockroach. After telling this story and showing some vision of the wasp in action, Fry declared in disgust: "I challenge anyone to tell me there is a loving God!"

For those of us who’d like humanity to move to an ecological or earth-centred consciousness, Fry’s challenge is a very appropriate one. We cannot simply see nature as positive and nurturing without also appreciating its destructive side. Killing is a fundamental reality of the created world – life lives upon life. The wasp kills the cockroach for its survival and that of its progeny just as we humans do the same to a multitude of beings, from bacteria right through to sentient animals. Life lives upon life: the Earth Mother and the dark goddess Kali, ever hungry for sacrifice, are one.

Of course in this we are required to see the big picture, to realise that the various interactions of living beings are contained within larger biological systems. The wasp and the cockroach have purposes within their ecosystem, contributing to particular cycles of life. The processes of nature move outwards from the smallest sub-atomic particles to the interactions of stars and the universe as a whole, each process relating to and nested within other, larger processes.

For me, Fry’s response to the story of the two insects points to what humanity’s purpose in nature may be. His outrage is the sign of a being aware of the quality of things. The development of human consciousness allows us to stand back and look upon nature, making independent choices and decisions and distinguishing between right and wrong. In a sense this process is an illusion because we’re not outside nature but are nature like everything else; what is actually occurring is life looking upon itself, creation understanding its own self deeper.

Codes of behaviour that set down what is right and wrong, and by extension what is good and evil, have been part of cultures across the world for thousands of years. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they were forced out of the Garden of Eden, banished from a simple undifferentiated existence in nature into one marked by knowledge (or awareness) but also suffering. Human consciousness, as an aspect of the consciousness of nature, had discovered the existence of good and evil, or that which furthers life and that which negates it.

Good is essentially about aligning with the processes of life in their ongoing evolution, embracing and furthering them in the understanding that all is ultimately one and that everything is interdependent. Evil entails denial of unity, separation and self-interest in opposition to other beings, and often leads to domination and abuse. Humans have been struggling with this most fundamental polarity, good and evil, and its implications for millennia.

In expressing disgust with the wasp and sympathy with the cockroach, Fry is not necessarily saying that evil is occurring in that situation, but his reaction does come out of that singular human appreciation of quality. This discernment has always brought out the best in us: from loving human relationships to love of nature, great art, architecture, civilisations, systems of thought and knowledge, magnificent leaps of creativity and inspiration. Without quality all life, not just our own, suffers. That’s the human gift to nature – an awareness of and aspiration towards quality, or soul.

What do we make, then, of the present situation in which we humans have overrun the planet and are progressively destroying so much life? Perhaps it all comes down to fundamental polarities and choices: how many of us are prepared to aim our lives in the direction of quality instead of following the path of ignorance and greed? What is at stake cannot be underestimated – it’s about the radical transformation of humanity and the planet as a whole. With good acts some forests may be saved, some people’s lives improved, some disasters averted, but the big picture is nothing short of a full-scale birth of planet Earth into a new era of life. It’s the new creation that Jesus was said to have initiated 2000 years ago ... if we pay attention, we can see it stirring all around us.