I have never been one for value statements and mission statements and the like. I have a cautionary approach to broad statements of intent. Get on with it, I say. Do what you can, inch by inch, take a breather, get round the next corner …
But, in the space between Christmas and a new year, I have been thinking about intention,
I do not call myself a Buddhist. I do not call myself a Christian. Or a Freudian or a Kleinian. I live in a context, I am English, born in 1943 and brought up in post-War Britain. I am influenced by the thinking and example of Christ, of Western philosophers and psychologists, and by the philosophy and psychology of the Buddha among Eastern thinkers I am thinking what does it mean to follow the path that the Buddha taught, in the context of our society now? It seems clear to me that Western capitalism and its accomodation with the monotheistic religious traditions is fatally inadaequate to the task of achieving a good society and we need to look for other ways of experiencing the world. The Buddhist reality of impermanence, of the interdependence of our own being with others, of our pervasive dissatisfaction with experience, offers a different way, certainly. The practice of mindfulness and compassion, living with an ethical principle of non-harm to ourselves and others, and an understanding of the world that does not put ourselves at the centre of all things that matter, offer a different kind of freedom of action. I have come to think that it is both necessary and possible to change our ways of seeing the world. In the end we do have to understand the world better in order to live in it.

living in the present?

How we make sense is open to wildly discrepant possibilities – at any moment. A distant murmur may sound like the sea – or motorway traffic. How we name it and build a story will influence our response, pleasant or unpleasant. The experience may be just a murmer in our ears, but the perception, our understanding is what we think we experience.
So perception is always retrospective. We are always reviewing the past, moment by moment.
The neuro scientists have found that there is activity in the brain before we think to act. We are not in control then, always reacting and justifying our actions after the event. Even when we scratch our nose. How we react is influenced by our lives up to that point. A musician will hear a sound and know it is a B minor chord. Another person may find the sound pleasurable, but will not remark on it or be able to recall it in the same way. Recall is always a reworking of the story. I do not have a photographic memory; I have to recreate each memory that I have, and each time I will recreate it a little differently. I remember you differently today than I did yesterday. The recollection I have of an event is a remake of a movie, where the original is lost.
We translate this experience into language. We not only feel and think, analysing our experience in a rational way, as a pigeon does in a Skinner box when it wants food, but we interpret that experience: having the use of language we do not have to tell the truth about our experience – we can make it up. And that is all that we can do. You can be in my dream if I can be in yours.

a good age

T.S. Eliot said: The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.
The weather forecast is vile but at the moment I am writing this, there is a Mediterranean blue sky and all the usual portents of spring. I want to catch this moment of expectation, just before Easter. As a society we face a general election and, we think, ten years of austerity to pay off the profligacy of the last ten years. There is a certain appeal to non-materialistic values – for example, recognising the impermanence of things, according to Buddhist understanding of the world. We could do with less greed, hatred and delusion in our lives, that’s for sure.
How may older people think to be helpful at this time, apart from a traditional role of being active grandparents for working-age parents – I can see one such couple across the street.
In certain cultures, there is a tradition that older people may become renunciates, going off to the forest to look after their spiritual health. I am not suggesting that, but there is a case for taking a different stance. We have become coy about ageing – the correct phrase now seems to be ‘people who are older’ – older than what? Older than people who are not older. I heard a 50 year old commentator talk eloquently about the deaths of his aged parents and how this might be done better than in a hospital surrounded by tubes that get in the way of the simple act of holding hands. But he went on to describe a good death as coming after a fine meal and fantastic sex with his wife – that, I suggest, is the dream, of a person who is younger. This was not the priority of his parents at their age, I think. He was intelligent and compassionate but his imagination failed him when he described that good death. Final salary pension schemes and bonuses and pay-offs encourage the idea that older people have the same expensive needs as they did when they were raising their children and fulfilling their ambitions and buying status.
There are other needs and they do not cost the same – but as a society we cannot afford, it seems, these costs associated with peace of mind and the comforts of lying in one’s own bed. After thirteen years, a ton of legislation of all kinds, two wars, a free market and a banking crisis, the government is proposing a national care service – in four years time. Don’t hold your breath.
The next generation of older people will have known the good years, the overpriced handbags and underpriced shoes, second homes and three holidays a year, air travel free at the point of delivery, Perhaps they can set an example of living in relative poverty with dignity.

Hooke's Law

The end of February is the best of seasons. We have had the cold and now the ground is waterlogged. But this is the time of year when it is easiest to get up at dawn.
Yesterday the family dedicated a bench to someone who died twenty-five years ago. The bench is at Willen Church in Milton Keynes, designed in the 17th century by Robert Hooke, whose Law in physics is about capacity to bounce back from stress – not a bad Law.

Don’t water the vegetables.

Hullo again.
My website has been lost for a while – for reasons I don’t pretend to understand – but now I am back in the world, sort of, virtually speaking. Not a lot has happened – but it doesn’t, most of the time: tune into the Archers every few months or so, and you can immediately pick up the story. Last week it snowed and people in the street smiled some more. I lost a day’s work. So what’s new? In Afghanistan. In the wine bars of the City. In the FA Cup. In Haiti, suddenly much much much worse.
The Goldstein quote was meant to be inspirational. I have been reading the Desert Fathers: Control your tongue and your belly. Why weren’t we given this stuff to read at school – more imaginative and relevant than most religious instruction.
Here’s a story I like:
A hermit had some visitors, and he treated then generously, giving them all the food he had. His guests said to themselves – well, he does all right, he eats better than we do at home. They were going on to visit another hermit, so their host asked them to give his friend a message: be careful not to water the vegetables.
The second hermit welcomed them and asked them to join him during the day in the work he was doing. And when it got to night, he invited them to join him in prayers. And he said, he didn’t eat every day, but as they were there, have some bread. And more prayers.
In the morning, he said, you are very welcome here, stay some more. But they buggered off.