Virtual reality is not the same as a computer game. We are expected to get up in the morning and go to work to make money for shareholders, anonymous hungry ghosts,and ourselves in later life worrying about our pensions.
The future lives of the present, like a man begging in the street. We give to the beggar, not knowing why we are doing it. Not knowing is sufficient reason.
None of this is for real: we live to make money, we make money to make more money. The richer we are the more we are in debt, our fortune measured in pixels on the screen.
Those richer than us do not know how to spend their money. We do, of course. Those worse off are by definition dumb, not clever at all, victims and spongers.
The rich provide enough evidence that they do not know how to spend their money. Race horses, yachts and ugly houses; for the mega rich, Premier League football clubs and media empires …They caricature the villain in a James Bond movie, confident that there is no James Bond.
The poor are villains, you can see it in their faces.
I suggest that these are underlying assumptions in our personal and collective thinking about austerity, government policies and financial systems.
Rich or poor, we have a tendency to be profligate in our desires. The single most important rule about money is to use it well.

What is an appropriate state of mind at this time? I try to be a reflective citizen. I would like to have the negative capability that Keats wrote of, but he was writing about Shakespeare. Harold Bloom sees Shakespeare as god-like in his humanity. Nothing wrong with aiming high. As they say, don’t be a Buddhist, be a Buddha. Do Christians have the aspiration to sainthood? I think Thomas Merton suggested that they should.
We could use more prosaic language and talk of a paradigm shift. I was in the bank yesterday, paying in cheques. It was a Friday and I was expecting delays as local small businesses sorted out their cash returns. In fact it was not so bad, a wait of five minutes or so, but a woman ahead of me was saying that it was disgusting, the delay, and she would be writing to head office. I thought: if waiting at the counter is the only difficulty we’ll be facing at this time of potential financial meltdown, then I’ll settle for that.
What other states of mind might be useful? An apocalyptic vision is helpful when everything is collapsing around you. There is a great exhibition at Tate Britain at the moment.
And you need to be paranoid when the others are out to get you. The human skeleton is designing for running, not walking.
We find it hard to think of prosperity without growth. We are not used to facing years of austerity – that is, when we are not going to be reassured all the time that we are getting to be better off than before.
We are hearing all that time that this is the biggest, smallest, hottest, coldest, wettest, driest, fastest, slowest, whatever since ten years ago or twenty, or a hundred years, and increasingly, since records began.
We need mindfulness, to keep in touch with the interconnectivity of all things, but not as a quick fix for depression. There is something about the human condition that we have great ideas, great religions, and we reduce them to a concern about inessentials, what we wear on holy days and rubbish collections and 2p on the price of petrol.

mindfulness at work

Buddhist psychology – which has brought the concept of mindfulness to our attention in thinking how people may have more control over their lives, in the context of stress, addiction, depression – starts from the premise that we do not understand ourselves or the world we are a part of. We start from a position of ignorance. We just don’t know. We don’t get it. What we have are a whole lot of habitual ways of seeing things and doing things. These inform our consciousness of what we experience – whether this is a door or love affair. At any moment we are in contact with the world of which we are a part, through our senses, sight, hearing, smell, touch, the work of our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, and our thoughts, the work of our mind. Buddhist theory says that this contact is at first pleasurable or not, or it is neither pleasurable nor not pleasurable. And then we give it a name, a description, we build a story around it. We create a meaning for the contact, which becomes our way of understanding the world. So a pain becomes something that has been done to us, and it makes us angry. We look with hostility for the perpetrator. The pain is not the problem, according to this analysis: it is our reaction that is the problem. This is how we react and overreact to each and every stimulus that arises.
This is a psychology that is asking the question how. This is how we feel, think, and behave. It is not interested so much in the question why, which is a more familiar question in psycho-analysis. The Buddha ridiculed those who want to know why all the time. When you are shot with an arrow you just want it taken out, not wait to get a detailed description. But if you are always getting shot at when you are out and about, it seems sensible to ask who is shooting the arrows and a description is then very helpful in identifying the enemy. This is after all the way of diagnosis in medicine, and the Buddha is said to have been diagnostic in his description of the four truths of the existence of suffering, of craving as the cause of suffering, that suffering can cease, and there is a way of making that happen – the eight-fold path, involving a profound understanding of how things really are, an ethical framework for living, and a training in how to be fully aware of how things really are. It is called an eight-fold path but they are none of them independent of the others. Buddhists make lists but this is deceptive, as their approach is always integrative and holistic.
The theory of dependent origination is itself a theory of causality; that everything that we might call a fact has in fact been constructed; it could not be as it is but for other stuff that came before, necessary but not sufficient for its present existence. This door could not be as it is without a thousand acts that contributed to its existence, and each of these acts were themselves consequent on previous acts, and so back into the mists of time. But the final act – say, of cutting the wood – in that moment the craftsman was paying greater or lesser attention, the line is more or less true … With each act there is renewal of intention. So much for a door – so much more complex for a love affair … how you met, that first contact, pleasurable, not pleasurable, neither pleasurable nor unpleasurable.
It is not the thing in itself but the idea of the thing that is important. The thing in itself does not exist as such. An organisation, for example: in what sense does it exist in itself? We talk instead of an organisation-in-the-mind. The organisation is made of all kinds of stuff – there is plant, there are people, there is trade, there are raw materials, products and services, there is intellectual property, there is legal identity. But what is Accenture or Marks & Spencer , or, to take a particular example, the NHS? How we think about them makes them what they are.

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.