“No matter which tradition, go back to the foundational teachings, that are the three marks or the three statements that the whole Buddhist system is built upon.

(The first is) impermanence. How wonderful! Get impermanence: nothing lasts. If I truly experience impermanence then I’m in gratitude for whatever is, because everything’s on loan. And its a temporary relationship. That’s a shift in understanding. He said that needs to be tasted and understood. If you really grok it, then you don’t grab any more. Clinging and attachment is the problem.

The second is that with life comes pain. Stop running and hiding from pain. Bring it on! How interesting? Wouldn’t that be different if I stopped ducking and hiding from pain.

And then finally, Knock, knock. (Who’s there?) Nobody… The centre, right now, of your personality and your being is absolute pure emptiness or shunyata. The idea of a soul or the concept of a continuing thing is a neuro-linguistic, philosophical construct that allows you comfort, but it’s existent there only and it arises in the absolutely purity of your being.”

- Jun Po Denis Kelly

Such is the danger of the podcast in the modern age (given that podcasts in all previous ages were no problem whatsoever). One may wake up an honest man- ideas of his own making- and return to the very same bed, a non-reductive physico- Kuhnian -psychoexistentialist, with troublingly liberal, anti-historicist tendencies. I might dare to think that this is all just names, but then suddenly this makes me either a staunch logical positivist or belong to any number of post-modern genera, and I’m stuck in a universe factory.

Today’s realisation came about because of a podcast on the nature of time, from the ABC’s Philosophers Zone. The discussion took place with Dr David Braddon-Mitchell, who was a philosophy professor of mine at the University of Sydney.

Dr D. B-M: “…the block universe (view) says that all of space and time is one ginormous, eternal thing, and it has parts which are temporal parts, if you like. So the moment that we’re in now, is one of the parts, there are lots of future parts, all of which exist, and lots of past parts, all of which exist. So this is the Yes, it’s all there view, that’s the eternalist view.”

I like this view of everything existing as a timeless whole. When combined with ideas emerging from quantum physics suggesting that there is only one kind of stuff, we get a picture that is not unlike the views of some ancient monist philosophers. When one tries to add/reduce consciousness into the picture the ontological (simply, what is) picture gets really interesting.

At the close of the programme, the host, Alan Saunders, read beautifully from T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.

Burnt Norton, T.S. Eliot

The full programme can be downloaded from the Philosophers Zone website for a short time.

Stepping from my day dream, fleeting passed the rest.
My station has approached, so I reason that it’s best
To alight unto the platform, where shortly it’s laid bare
“My bag and laptop left me”, to the Monos I confessed.

I rush to Platform Staff, and to these best of Men I share,
“My most necessary possessions to Victoria will fare”.
Alarmed they race to radio a colleague down the line
No hopes they give, nor promises, yet act in utmost care.

The minutes pass and hope falls flat, but curse no luck of mine
Knowing full determinism, to fate I must resign.
At last a call, a railway man- my laptop he did find.
From”Deus sive Natura“through these such Men doth shine.

______________________________________________________________

Commentary on “An Interlocking Rubaiyat in Celebration of Platform Staff in General and London Victoria in Particular in the Spirit of a Monist Metaphysic“.

1- In case it wasn’t clear, thank you thank you thank you for returning my laptop, thus saving me from having to fall into a fetal position and give up all efforts concerning written language.
2- I guarantee this is the only Spinoza-themed customer feedback form that South West Trains has ever received.
3- One of my favourite pieces in The Onion, “I Could Write A Better Rubaiyat Than That Khayyam Dips:^t“. Ahh, rubai humour.
4- Watch out for me in bars; “Anyone here written a freaking rubaiyat? I wrote one once… Mighty fine set of quatrains that was…”

In 1922, shortly before publication of “The Prophet”, the great humanist poet Kahlil Gibran started to complain of the illness that would deteriorate until his early death nine years later. In his letters from the time we read,

“But my greatest pain is not physical. There’s something big in me. I’ve always known it and I can’t get it out. It’s a silent greater self, sitting watching a smaller somebody in me do all sorts of things.”

What strikes me about Gibran is his ability to express the deeply spiritual element of the Human, without religion or philosophy. Many other traditions, notably the Hindu sages, have delved deeply into these concepts. They name this greater Self the Atman, and this smaller somebody the Maya, or source of illusion. Perhaps looking at Gibran they would say that he knew only moments of this greater self, and that his end found him before be found his end. But I feel this is only a half-truth. Gibran was a sage of the seasons and knew their rise and fall within him. He played a game, that these bearded ones seem to shy from, and was duly elated and crushed by it. And how else could it be?

Depending on the moment, I am certain that there are many roads or one. For some time I have considered the benefits of this path or that, critiqued this choice or that. But I realised once again that I am well upon my way and a good many more footfalls is what is needed if I wish to see these mountains that loom so large upon the horizon of my mind.

Like Socrates I see sophistry everywhere; purveyors of packaged truths aimed at our recurring desire for the absolute- that impossible ecstasy of the answer. Yet I too see wisdom flowing abundant in the Great and the Human. In leading physicists and philosophers alike I see a depth of truer understanding, a knowledge which cannot be easily known, lest communicated, lest taught. Would it be folly to tease it out and make it one’s work? And perhaps, as for Gibran, how else could it be?

Travel well my friends and may we meet at many crossroads in the coming year.
Peace.

I’ve been listening to an audiobook of Will Durrant’s “The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time“, seemingly a most ambitious work- until I discovered Durrant’s previous epic, the 10 volume “integral history” of “The Story of Civilization“. The final volume of this 6 million word overview of the human story won Will, and his wife Ariel, both the Pulitzer Prize for literature and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Will was a historian who resonates very deeply with me, not only for his erudite and objective scholarship, but his passion for drawing the lessons from history for the progression of our human story. For his 96 full years he offered calm reflection for our journey of chaos and creation, yet for far longer still his historical narrative will provide us bridge to the past so that we may yet learn for the future.

Will and Ariel’s 68 year union was a joint journey of discovery; they wrote together, learnt together, travelled together, and ultimately, passed away within two weeks of one another in 1981. A man of 25 years of age can say naught about such a union- he yet lacks the words and the years to touch it’s tender bonds.

Read about the development of his celebrated 1945
“Declaration of INTERdependence“

And a final quote from Will,