A Special Temple Homily

God may forgive you, but your nervous system will not. 

Alfred Korzybski, Science & Sanity

It occurred to me the other day whilst watching Star Trek and reading some stuff about Quantum Mechanics, that the universe may be some kind of spatio-temporal anomaly issued forth from the 'big bang'. 

The anomaly is space-time itself.

Without the anomaly, there is no space, and there is no time.

Thus one could conclude from this hypothesis that man himself is an anomalous creature, and that what people call God is simply an immense disruption in nothingness.

I cannot say what the alternative to this anomaly would be. Perhaps non-consciousness. Perhaps nothingness, no space, no time, no anything. 

I recall when I had to undergo surgery for a broken wrist being 'put under' and the resulting effect of waking up having not felt the time in between. It wasn't the same as going to sleep. There was something sinister about having your nervous system depressed to the point of virtual death. There was no time to speak of. The being put under and the waking up were instantaneous. It was seriously weird as if I had somehow been put into a cryo-chamber for several years and then awoken.

Perhaps the universe is as our nervous system... 

Perhaps the universe is our nervous system...

And the anomaly some kind of homily....

The homily being as its etymology suggests (from homou "together" - from Proto-Indo-European somo-, from root sem- "one, as one, together with") , a togetherness, a sameness, a oneness, that shines through  one's manufactured consciousness.

Just a thought...

Earth Trek: The Next Generation

So. Five card stud, nothing wild, and the sky's the limit. Jean-Luc Picard

I'm not a big TV person.... partly because I don't have one. I have managed to live without one for the most part of the last two decades with no problem at all. Televisions are like guns insofar as there's very little positive to say of them, but plenty negative (read no further than Jerry Mander's 4 Arguments for the Elimination of Television or Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death). In other words, they cause more trouble than they cure. Yet, every so often, there comes around a program whose writing and thinking is worth every minute of your life's brief span. Even, perhaps, as in my case here, twice...! [It is here I thank the sharing capabilities of the electronic sphere, that is downloading programs as opposed to having to buy a TV].

There are two programs here I wish to discuss: the first a soap opera set in space, the second a dramatic documentary set on earth. Both of which I watched very recently and which tie in neatly together.

The first is Star Trek: The Next Generation, a wonderful piece of writing  and acting spanning seven years during the nineties. As I watched it a second time these past couple of months I realised that it was just as good, if not better, than when I first watched it when it originally came out. It wasn't just the mature and interesting writing, and the often strange metaphysical storylines, but the way the whole cast gelled together as a single unit. Indeed, having just watched the final episode (again), I kinda think the whole 180 episodes gelled together as a single unit, the portmanteau wraparound with Q notwithstanding. In fact, in the final episode as Picard is tackling a spatial-temporal anomaly (is this not what we are all effectively doing here?), and Q emerges to offer him some advice, we see Picard coming to the realization that he has caused this anomaly to happen. We see Picard understanding, finally!, the paradox.

We also hear Q, in his final words to the starfleet Captain, warn him in no uncertain terms that the exploration lies not out there, in the various quadrants of the galaxy, but inside.

       PICARD: I sincerely hope that this is the last time that I find myself here.

        Q: You just don't get it, do you, Jean-Luc? The trial never ends. We wanted to see if you had the ability to expand your mind and your horizons. And for one brief moment, you did.

        PICARD: When I realised the paradox.

        Q: Exactly. For that one fraction of a second, you were open to options you had never considered. That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknowable possibilities of existence.

        PICARD: Q, what is it that you're trying to tell me?

        (Q nearly whispers in Picard's ear)

        Q: You'll find out. In any case, I'll be watching. And if you're very lucky, I'll drop by to say hello from time to time. See you out there.

Getting beyond the strict subroutines and superimpositions laid down for you by society is a tough business. Finding your own way, organically, and not pollutingly, in a world where convention incessantly beats itself over your head, is even tougher. Expanding your mind and your horizons to encompass, even embrace, the paradox, in a society where reason and logic hold sway, is nigh on impossible. But it is possible. It may take seven years to get there, but you will get there. If you have enough faith, and space.

Where Picard realizes the paradox at the end of his 7 year star trek, so too does it seem that David Attenborough realizes his at the end of his 70 year earth trek, and an illustrious career as a television presenter of nature documentaries.

In the final episode of Planet Earth II, 'Cities', David Attenborough signs off atop The Shard (a monument to excess if ever there was one) looking down onto a sea of concrete and coagulation that is the city of London:

    Only a small number of animals have managed to find ways of living alongside us.
    And every 10 years, an area the size of Britain disappears under a jungle of concrete.
    But it doesn't have to be like this.
    Could it not be possible to build cities more in harmony with nature?

Does Attenborough actually realise that all his efforts have actually contributed to this 'jungle of concrete'? Think of all the hotels and the like that have sprung up in order to cope with all this nature tourism. Not to mention the globalisation (at the cost of the local) that he encourages through his globetrotting. I'm all for what Deleuze calls 'the sacred right of migration', but being ferried around in a tour bus is not migrating. I should have thought that seven decades watching animals would have revealed some essential truths to David about our own animality.

Attenborough then comes out with a typically small-minded response, locked in as he is to this developmental paradigm :

Create the space, and the animals will come.

How about, David, that we just leave the space alone.  Let the habitat, and its inhabitants, be? If only Attenborough and his grease-monkeys had embraced Starfleet's prime directive of non-interference.

Attenborough calls this interference 'ingenuity', but true ingenuity (as its etymology might suggest) is all about using your own engines.The natural ones inside you.

Looking down on this great metropolis, the ingenuity with which we continue to  reshape the surface of our planet is very striking, but it's also sobering. It reminds me of just how easy it is for us to lose our connection with the natural world. Yet it's on this connection that the future of both humanity and the natural world will depend. It's surely our responsibility to do everything within our power to create a planet that provides a home not just for us, but for all life on Earth.

Therein lies the rub:  Responsibility... as the ability to respond.

And yet, within an increasingly manic and distracted society focused on making money (at whatever cost), our ability to respond to Nature is lamentable. Our responsiveness has been redacted and redirected into the sphere of finance and the non-essential. Indeed, the essential has been buried almost entirely beneath a mountain of artifice, and this reshaping of the surface of our planet. And when you lose touch with the essential you lose touch with essence and with spirit. And the ability to respond, originally.

Here's the theological ethicist James Gustafson:

Before we can address the problems of the environment, we must first be addressed ourselves. We must first hear the live voices of diverse neighbours, wondrous creatures great and small. We must hear something more than the echo of our own thoughts...
... to know ourselves as addressed can awaken us from dogmatic slumber and present us with "counter-love, original response". [...] Responding to the uninvited voices of what is foreign to us, we finally venture to participate in the ambiguous world of nature.

It is not our duty to create a planet when there is already one here. As animals, it is our natural 'duty' to blend in and to respond, to be our environment, not to destroy it and disassemble it. If we do alter our environment then it is our obligation to do it in a manner that befits nature's ways, and not man's greed, or his quest for excitement.

Our cities are not emblems of freedom, or 'great'. They are, certainly in a case like London's, symptoms of all that has gone wrong in the human being, and in his removal from his own nature. These vast urban centres, full of noise and smoke, nature poor and concrete rich, impose an artificial and dehumanized existence.

As James Gustafson signs off in his book A Sense of the Divine, he writes:

As we live in an increasingly urban and artificial environment, we are losing touch with most of the biotic components of nature. As we lose familiarity, we lose our sense of the majesty and wonder of nature. Instead, feelings of fear and revulsion maybe be evoked upon encountering an insect... The real saviours of nature and the human species may be those individuals who take the time to introduce children to the wonder of nature and nurture an emotional attachment between children and insects.

When you have been weaned on a diet of noise and business, something like a babbling brook in a cool unpopulated wood can be disquieting, even threatening. Wild animals even more so. Spiders and wasps are immediately swatted because of this perceived threat. Woods and forests turned into fields.

Mis-meetings with nature abound. In order to understand nature, one must meet with her aboriginally and intimately. This invariably means alone, and unencumbered.

It took me many years to finally understand (in spite of my Jesuit education) that trapped insects like wasps, spiders and flies mean you no harm, that they are in fact like you.... dislocated by an un-seeable pane of glass from their natural habitat. They require our empathy and our help, not our ignorance and the back of a rolled up newspaper. We erected the glass and the walls, so it is our responsibility to create an exit that doesn't involve killing it.

This 'dislocating pane of glass' crops up all over the place in nature documentaries. Attenborough's team of cameramen, editors, soundmen et al. have all conspired to manipulate certain natural scenarios to their own end. Through the power of editing, and high-power lenses, they have created 'noisy' stories with fascinating creatures and even more fascinating expressions. They have pimped up nature to use the modern term, and turned something relatively mundane into something modern and stimulating. Yet, to go into nature is, invariably, not like that at all. There are few melodramatic scenes to see (unless you're very lucky), no killings, or births, no quirky little faces staring at you from a few inches away. And certainly no cuteness. Unless of course you're in the koala enclosure at the local (outdated) zoo. In many ways then, with all their contrivances and conceits, Attenborough's documentaries are a type of zoological pantomime, watched by an armchair generation that knows little of real unadulterated (and un-theatrical) nature.

In the worst case, Attenborough has encouraged a sort of televisual voyeurism, and created a generation of children expecting nature to be like his programs. Understanding nature however requires the opposite of what Attenborough and his cronies give us. It requires what Goethe called a 'delicate empiricism' and a quietness of 'being with' the phenomenon or entity. In order to attune to Nature, one must learn to quieten and un-busy the self. To this end, God knows how much quietness you can get when you're rushing all over the world like a troop of hungry hamdryas baboons.

The next generation of  cities, if humans wish to survive outwith the realm of compacted unthinking automata, will need to concentre itself on nature and not concrete, will need to focus on quietness and not noise. It will need to stop thinking in terms of 'development' and business (the state of being busy), and more in terms of live and let live and contemplation. It's the only way: To upturn the paradigm. To stop interfering. To realise Nature as the foundation upon which all else rests.

Action is not the answer. Doing nothing is.

Welcome to the paradox!

Your Lot

Land, plot, allotment.... your lot.

Much of today's troubles stem from a dislocation from the land, a displacement from one's greater self. A landless people are a troubled people, and even though we may live in supposed democracies, the land is not allotted equally.

Reading through the natural farmer Masanobu Fukuoka's One-Straw Revolution I am pleased to see that I am not the only one who believes the land should be divvied up equally amongst the people and animals, and not, as in Scotland's case amongst 81 or so human individuals.

On the subject of working the land, not intensively or industrially but sensitively and intelligently, Fukuoka has this to say:

In general, commercial agriculture is an unstable proposition. The farmer would do much better by growing the food he needs without thinking about making money. If you plant one grain of rice, it becomes more than one thousand grains. One row of turnips makes enough pickles for the entire winter. If you follow this line of thought, you will have enough to eat, more than enough, without struggling. But if you try to make money instead, you get on board the profit wagon, and it runs away with you.

 The message is clear: grow your own food, on your lot.

When I lived in Warsaw, I was amazed to see how much of the city had been given over to allotments, and not just any allotments, but plots of land that accommodated little huts and sheds that would have made the likes of Thoreau and other shed-dwellers jealous. I was amazed at not just the blaze of vegetables, flowers and fruit, flowing forth from each of these little plots, but from the very aesthetic of these plots themselves with their little wooden daschas, their colourfully painted fences, water features and a general countenance that demonstrated a deep love for these small urban gardens. Within a few kilometres of my humble flat in Mokotow, there were several large spaces that had been given over to this practice of growing your own.

The allotments (Ogrodki dzialkowe) of Warsaw have a long and colourful history, and are one of the city’s more redeeming features. Almost 5% (1,700 hectares) of Warsaw's city surface is given over to allotments. The first ‘dzialki’ were set up before the war when the Polish Socialist Party put forward an initiative to form ‘special workers’ oases of peace’. Where the likes of London gradually lost hers to property developers (inner city London was covered with allotments following WWII) Warsaw has retained hers, governed by an allotment cooperative to protect and conserve them. During the Communist era, and as part of a remit to have people ‘grow their own’, most of the dzialki were allocated to professional groups such as teachers, railway workers or miners. An allotment ‘parcel’ was a symbol of a certain status. More importantly, it was a gurantee of a regular food supply since buying certain foods at stores was not always possible. In effect, it was a form of collective and responsible living which is still vigorously continued to this day.

In Glasgow, the situation regarding allotments, however, is rather lamentable, and in spite of their existence here and there, they inhabit nowhere near the same space as they do in Warsaw. Then of course you have the trouble of getting to your allotment if they are so sporadically placed. In Warsaw, you walked to it, because they were everywhere. 

Here's Fukuoka again:

In olden times there were warriors, farmers, craftsmen, and merchants. Agriculture was said to be closer to the source of things than trade or manufacturing, and the farmer was said to be the 'cupbearer of the gods'. He was always able to get by somehow or other and have enough to eat.

And The Upanishads:

First, know food.
Towards food all things move.
By food all things live.
Into food all things return.

In other words, treat food frivolously at your peril.

Which is difficult, because we live in a frivolous society that does not take these things seriously until we have invariably passed the point of no return. We live in a world of luxury restaurants and nouvelle cuisine, where the Heston Blumenthals and Gordon Ramsays of the world dictate what is good for you.

Then there are the elitist outlets like Roots & Fruits and Waitrose where organic produce (in spite of it costing less to produce, think of all those pesticides and chemicals you don't have to buy as an organic farmer), costs more than the treated stuff.

If a high price is charged for natural food, it means that the merchant is taking excessive profits. Furthermore, if natural foods are expensive, they become luxury foods and only rich people are able to afford them.

Being removed from food, whether physically from the land and from the growing process or from the fancy nonsense foods that distract us from real food, is at the root of our troubles today. If people ate (and drank) correctly - a plant-based diet with wholegrains  and little alcohol - then the world would soon come to its senses. As Fukuoka states:

If the Ministry's (of Agriculture) staff were to go to the mountains and meadows, gather the seven herbs of spring, and the seven herbs of autumn, and taste them, they would learn what the source of human nourishment is...

He then continues:

... if 100% of the people were farming it would be ideal. There is just a quarter acre of arable land for each person in Japan. If each single person were given one quarter acre, that is one and a quarter acres for a family of five, that would be more than enough land to support the family for the whole year. If natural farming were practiced, a farmer would also have plenty of time for leisure and social activities within the village community. I think this is the most direct path toward making this country a happy, pleasant land.

Pleasant, and peasant!

Yet, the word peasant, from the Old French paisent meaning inhabitant of the land (one who works the land), has garnered a distinctly pejorative tone within our luxury-minded modern age. It is interesting to note that the word luxury itself derives from the Latin luxuria meaning excess, extravagance, and ultimately from luxus meaning dislocated.

Remove a people from its land and you can convince them of anything !

Like normalizing and industrializing the eating of meat.

Which is possibly, when you look at this holistically and not blindly as we are apt to do in the profit-led West, the silliest thing you could ever do on a plant-based planet and to a plant-based lifeform, on an energy-finite planet.

But don't take my word for it:

If 22 bushels (1,300 pounds) of rice and 22 bushels of winter grain are harvested from a quarter acre field such as one of these, then the field will support five to ten people each investing an average of less than one hour of labor per day. But if the field were turned over to pasturage, or if the grain were fed to cattle, only one person could be supported per quarter acre. Meat becomes a luxury food when its production requires land which could provide food directly for human consumption. This has been shown clearly and definitely. Each person should ponder how much hardship he is causing by indulging in food so expensively produced.

Meat and other imported foods are luxuries because they require more energy and resources than the traditional vegetables and grains produced locally. It follows that people who limit themselves to a simple local diet need do less work and use less land than those with an appetite for luxury.

...Brown rice and vegetables may seem to some like coarse fare, but this is the very finest diet nutritionally, and enables human beings to live simply and directly.

If we do have a food crisis it will not be caused by the insufficiency of nature's productive power, but by the extravagance of human desire.

What can you say, other than perhaps:

Get an allotment!

Grow your own food!

Think and move critically!

Modernity is a state of War... Dig for Victory!