Spirituality and Politics

This is a difficult one for me.

My kabbalah teacher urges me and the others in our group to keep out of politics and political discussion, and concentrate on developing our own behaviours and attitudes in such a way that we become more generous, compassionate, disciplined, empathic, less greedy and fearful, and just generally more useful and pleasant to our fellow Earth dwellers.

For those of you who have not read my posts before, or need reminding, Toledano kabbalah (the form of Kabbalah that was developed in 13^th century Spain) has divided humans into three ‘classes’ – with names that I think are rather tasteless, but nobody’s thought up anything more appropriate yet. The first group of humans, by far the largest, are the ‘vegetable people’. These souls are content with enough to eat and drink, with adequate clothing and shelter, with being entertained, and having the opportunity to have children if they so desire, and they are keen to fit in with their 'tribe', e.g. their culture or religion. They are happy to be led, providing the leader does not cause them too much physical discomfort or alternatively, can offer a convincing promise of better times. When they don’t think they’re getting this, they may well form a populist movement to warn or overthrow their leaders.

The next group are the ‘animal’ people. These are the people who desire wealth, fame and/or power. Among them you find, for example, (not all, but a lot of) pop stars, business men and women, TV personalities, rabble rousers, people high up in religious hierarchies, teachers, and politicians. I’ve heard it said that if vegetable people are the pebbles on the beach, animal people are the waves that roll them about. However, people in the animal class are guided by the deep desires and aversions of their egos (their personalities). In a sense they, too, are the pebbles, and their egos (and ids, that is, their sub-conscious minds, fuelled by strong and ancient animal instincts) are the waves pushing them about.

The third class, the ‘human’ people, are those who are trying to free themselves of the control of their ids and egos in order to be able to see more clearly, to achieve glimpses of the bigger picture unskewed by ego fears and id impulses, and to act accordingly. It is probably still the road less travelled. Toledano kabbalists make regular visits to meetings where they recount their recent experiences to each other.  Others in the group are usually able to see if the ego is interfering in a way that a person themself cannot see. In my experience to date, this has never been a daunting procedure. I’ve not been in any group where somebody has taken a delight, or felt superior in pointing out to others something that has been overlooked. The prevailing culture is about mutual support for each other on our journeys. Nevertheless, I think that a person has had to have got through the ‘defensive against any suggestion that I’m not perfect’ stage before they can open to this in the most constructive way. I think you have to be a genuine seeker.

However, not all those aspiring to be human people are spiritual or believe in higher, nonphysical dimensions; many are humanists, for example.

There is another group with which I am closely involved and that is the Integral movement. Most Integralists are also concerned to act in the world from a ‘higher place’ than their egos, and that includes acting in politics, reasoning that this is what the world needs right now. Many people within the movement believe that the world will become a fairer, more pleasant and sustainable place for all to live in when we move beyond ‘left-right’ politics to something more, well, integral. Recently I’ve been part of some extremely interesting political discussions with others within the London Integral Circle (which I have to say have not degenerated into the ‘I’m right and you’re not’ slanging matches that I’ve been part of elsewhere.) And one thing that’s emerging is the need for a meta-political stance. John Bunzl, whom I know through Integral circles, and who also blogs for The Huffington Post, has set up an organisation called Simpol. To quote from their website:

“Simpol invites citizens around the world to use their votes in a powerful new way to encourage politicians to solve global problems like global warming, financial market regulation, environmental destruction, war, and social injustice.

Simpol offers us a way to take action on global problems; problems individual governments cannot resolve by acting alone.

That’s because these problems cross national boundaries, and because competition between governments to attract investment and jobs means the markets - not the people - end up calling the shots.

Governments cannot act alone to solve these problems because any government doing so would make its economy uncompetitive, leading to inflation, unemployment, or even economic collapse. Any government that moved first would lose out! While governments remain stuck, it's the markets that continue to run politics - not we, the people.

Simpol aims to break this vicious circle by encouraging people around the world to oblige their politicians and governments to cooperate globally in implementing appropriate policies simultaneously for the good of all.”

If you join Simpol, you are signing up to vote for any politician, wherever they are on the left-right spectrum, who will make a declaration of support for a process leading to the simultaneous implementation of a range of policies to solve global problems. The website contains the names of politicians who have already signed up to this pledge.

Naturally these policies (that Simpol advocate should be simultaneously enacted by all), have certain values embedded in them. It could not be otherwise. These values are based on the fact that, as humans have evolved and life has become more materially bearable for a lot of us (less nasty, brutish and short), certain values have developed as well, values that have perhaps made such evolution possible. These values are to do with 1) being able to cope with increasing complexity: evolution can be seen to be producing increasingly complex systems all the time, in both the natural and human made worlds; and 2) developing greater compassion and empathy for others, people who are not us, or not like us, not part of our ‘tribe’, or even part of our species. Those who have made efforts to become more spiritually developed repeatedly report back that the feeling of separateness we all have in our ‘skin encapsulated egos’ is an illusion. So are feelings of independence and dependence. We are all inter-dependent, and so it makes sense to develop and live by values that reflect that.

I hurriedly add that becoming more compassionate and empathic does not preclude preventing others from taking advantage of you. It is perfectly possible to ensure one’s own needs, and non- greedy wants, are met, and still be generous and tolerant of others. As Gandhi said, “there’s enough for everyone’s need, not everyone’s greed”.

In kabbalah the universe is said to be held in existence between two poles: ‘force’ and ‘form’. (‘Yin’ and ‘Yang’ comprise a similar model). ’Force’ is outgoing, creative, expansive, merciful and generous. ‘Form’ is structuring, curtailing, setting boundaries, disciplining, gathering in, and defining. Without this latter ‘form’, the universe would expand into chaos; and without ‘force’ the universe would just shrink into itself and eventually disappear up its own fundament. The work of a kabbalist is to balance these two poles. This cannot be done successfully without having first developed a perspective which has risen above the level of ego and id. Some politicians have done this, even if temporarily, and changed the course of history for the better in the process but, again, one’s own level of consciousness has to be developed beyond the level of ego and id to spot them at the time.

After writing the above, as I had reproduced material from the Simpol website, I sent it to John Bunzl for comment. He offered the further thought provoking observations:

 The need for a meta-stance, beyond simply going beyond the right-left dichotomy, is that, in practice, the left has all but disappeared from the political scene. Today, party politics is really just different shades of right. This, I argue, arises because of the free-movement of capital which, because it forces all nations to enact only those policies which keep the nation competitive and attractive to investors, means politics is squeezed into a broadly centre-right straightjacket. An effect I call pseudo-democracy: whoever you vote to govern, the policies delivered remain substantially the same. (Like Henry Ford’s ‘you can have any colour you like so long as it’s black’)

-          So the need for a meta-stance is actually two-fold: 1. To be able to see the above in the first place and to see why/how its occurring. 2. To devise a strategy for doing something about it.

-          Force and Form. These two energies are like dance partners. Each is vital but each leads the dance at different times as evolution unfolds. Force, it seems to me, is what economic globalisation represents: market competition, as a force has outgrown the Form of the nation-state and has now gone global. Absent Form at the global level, Force is pathological, as we see today. (Another way to look at it would be to say that the market economy embodies the masculine principle whereas cooperative governance embodies the feminine.) Either way, the masculine principle – Force – has, since 1648, led the dance to the point where, if Form doesn’t make her move to go global too and so catch up to balance Force, we’re in big trouble! Simpol, if you will, is a channel, an emergent possibility, for feminine Form (i.e. global governance) to emerge and take practical shape.

-          Spiritual Politics: To me, the underlying spiritual import of Simpol is forgiveness. When we accept that no one is really to blame for the global vicious circle we’re all embedded in, we truly see that we’re all in the same boat. We forgive ourselves and each other. We give up the ‘blame game’. Only by doing that can we reach a spiritual turning point in which truly inclusive global solutions might be envisaged: we take responsibility!”

To finish this post, I would say just this: Those of us trying to develop beyond our egos (“egos are wonderful servants, but dreadful masters”) refer to it as ‘the work’ and, as my kabbalah teacher said recently, it’s not called the ‘work’ for nothing. It is extremely hard work.

But the wages are good.

Reprise - 'Soul Midwifery'

At the urging of my better half, who found some of yesterday's post confusing, I've re-written it. He now finds it comprehensible so, if you read it before 23.30 yesterday GMT and didn't understand it, you should do now! (And hopefully I am, albeit very slowly, improving my writing style!)
See 'Soul Midwifery' or 'You Only Live...How many times?!'

Soul Midwifery, or "You only live...how many times?!"

It’s been a while since I blogged, and much has gone on. Last May I was wondering, now that I’ve retired, what I was for. (See the blog post 'But What Am I For'). Since then I have met a ‘soul midwife’. She works as a management consultant for a living, but in her spare time volunteers at a local hospice, working with the dying and their relatives. While the nurses take care of the dying patients’ physical needs, a soul midwife helps them deal with their emotions, thoughts, and/or spiritual issues, (not their religious ones – there are priests and ministers, imans and rabbis etc for that.) 

Those who’ve read my previous blogs will know that I’ve had personal experiences which have led me to believe that there is more than the physical dimension to life. In fact my experiences lead me to believe that the physical dimension is just the tip of the iceberg. Intellectually, i.e. thinking this through rationally, the existence of dimensions prior and causal to the material world seems to me to make perfect sense. Not that you can prove the existence of non-material realms to others from within the material realm itself. But you can’t disprove them either, so we‘re a bit stuck on the empirical front. Nevertheless, the empirical approach has served physical science so well for the last few centuries, it’s no wonder that physicalist-inclined people would like to apply it to the non-physical as well.

I have done some serious thinking about applying to become a soul midwife, and as a result I have also done some in-depth reading and re-reading on death, which has also led me back to the literature on ‘out of the body’ experiences. I started with the spiritual classics, those written by people with direct experience (mystics), which have been revived again and again down the centuries (the books, not the people writing them), and then onto books written by people who have recently actively experimented with out of the body travelling. Their descriptions of what they have discovered are as different as descriptions of the physical world by people inhabiting differing regions of it, but there are some aspects which seem common to all, regardless of where and when the experiences were written about, or the culture or religion of the person(s) writing.

The first seems to be that we have not just one body, and not just two – the material and the immaterial – but four. They're called different things in different traditions but I'm going to call them 1) the physical, 2) the psychological, 3)  the spiritual and 4) the causal. The psychological body is composed of your thoughts and emotions, and is sometimes called the astral body, and this is the one that I'm mainly going to talk about in this post. Note that the psychological body has a separate existence from the physical body. All four bodies exist in the same place, in the same person, but in different dimensions, which overlap. Furthermore, there are several planes or dimensions for the second and third bodies (the psychological and the spiritual) to move between. Of course, the ’bodies’ don’t actually move at all, it is the level of our consciousness that changes, like re-tuning to a different wavelength. The wavelength we are on most of the time is where the psychological and physical body overlap

Those who go ‘astral travelling’ have learnt to re-tune to the level of their psychological body without their physical body and, when their physical body is asleep, can stay conscious and move around without the aid of that physical body. (What people tend to see in this state however is the physical world overlaid by the psychological world, with the psychological world prominent so it looks a bit different to what your physical eyes see- this bit gets fairly convoluted to explain, and I refer you to one of the books recommended at the end of this blog.) It seems to be a fairly common experience that in this state you will meet up with other sleeping people wandering around in their psychological bodies. You can chat and arrange to meet up again but, unless those people are also consciously in their psychological bodies, they won’t remember a thing in the morning. You can also meet up with dead people still in their psychological bodies as well. In fact, if the classics and those who claim to write out of direct experience are right, you do this every night while you’re asleep (or in a coma) anyway. That’s not what your dreams are about though, or very rarely. Dreams are usually your physical brain rummaging around trying to process waking experiences. However sometimes you may bring back to your waking state rather distorted memories of a dream which touches on what’s happened to you in the psychological realm. There is usually a slightly ‘magical’ feeling to these dream fragments, even distorted as they are.

Those who have done it say that you can learn to stay conscious when you’re asleep with about a month of daily practice. I can’t say I’m attracted to this myself. When I was a child I used to experience the sensations which I now know are also the beginnings of a trip into the psychological realm, and as a child my instinct was to fight it and stop it happening. I think such fear is natural. I also now believe I’m in this physical body for a reason, and will only be in it for a limited time. Personally I don’t want to be too distracted while I’m physically embodied by haring off into the other dimensions (I really, really want to get the hang of this dimension.) I also wonder about the practicality of such adventures while regularly sharing a bed with somebody, or if you’re likely to be needed by a child whilst away, mainly because, at the slightest disturbance, you will snap straight back into your physical body. Of course, that’s a good thing on a practical level, but must be annoying if you were in the middle of something interesting in the psychological world.

I am however very grateful to those who have been courageous enough to go through with these experiences, and then talk and write about them.

There is widespread agreement among mystic sources that when we die the cord connecting our psychological and physical bodies breaks, leaving our physical body to dissolve back into its component parts for re-use. There is also something often referred to as an etheric substance, which has acted as the connecting medium for the psychological and physical bodies. This too begins to disintegrate when the physical body dies, but on some occasions this etheric substance can stubbornly cling to the psychological body. Sometimes the dead person does not want to give up this etheric substance, their connection to physical life. Sometimes it takes an act of will to shrug it off (not always), and sometimes some people just don’t realise they’re dead, which means the person's consciousness hangs about, not quite in either the physical or psychological world, and a little in both. (One wonders if this might explain some ‘ghost’ sightings).

The first truly psychological dimension from beyond the physical very much resembles the physical world, but your psychological body, as mentioned, is composed of your emotions and thoughts. So, though you are no longer encumbered by physical handicaps, illness, hunger, thirst, physical pain etc. you are just as encumbered with your emotions. If you were a prejudiced, bigoted person when alive this won’t change just because you’re dead, as David Staume so beautifully puts it. And another across–the-board point of agreement is that the heavier the emotions you’re carrying, the closer to the physical plane (i.e. the ‘lower’ in the psychological plane) you’ll stay. Furthermore, like seeks to like here; you’ll be surrounded by others carrying the unpleasant heavier emotions. By ‘heavier’ I mean emotions like hate, jealousy, greed, arrogance, envy, anger, guilt, remorse and so on. One analogy I’ve read is that it’s like your heaviest emotions drift to the exterior of your newly exposed psychological body, blocking the light and weighing you down. It is said to be extremely unpleasant – hellish even. But in fact it’s only purgatory. Unless a person is extremely determined to hang on to their negative emotions, rebuilding and reinforcing them, that heavy outer cladding will eventually wear away, leaving the person free to float up to a lighter place within that first psychological plane, and be with equally light people, where they can prepare to move onto an even more refined psychological plane. There seems to be agreement that there are seven psychological planes in all (it's difficult to tell if that 'seven' is a factual number or symbolic of something), most of which, once you’ve divested yourself of your negative emotions, could be described as ‘paradise’. When you’re bored with them, and have suitably refined yourself, you’ll shed your psychological body and pass on to the first of the spiritual ‘heavens’ in your newly revealed spiritual body. Some extremely evolved people have managed, with inside help, to get into one or more of these paradises and heavens while still alive, and stayed conscious enough to be able to talk about it on their return, but all agree that it is a very difficult experience to put into words, and one mostly has to use analogies, metaphors, symbols etc. Others, after a lifetime of dedicated spiritual practices, remember their own time between lives, which brings us to the topic of reincarnation, on which even Christian mystics are agreed.

Some people don’t get very far through these planes at all before being swept back down into the physical plane and another physical body by karma, or by their own longing to be embodied again, for sheer physical pleasure or for the sort of further development that only being embodied physically can provide. (Two of my sources, but only two, state that some people never incarnate in a physical body if they don’t have to – they consider it just too unpleasant and demanding an experience! The rest of us, it seems, are like, well yeah, go for it!) But even though it takes several hundred, if not thousands of physical lives to get the experience to develop fully, all the sources seem to agree it’s worth it, because beyond the psychological and spiritual dimensions is the causal dimension, blissful beyond description. (Also described as ‘arriving back home’)

But back to where I started this blog. In our materialist world many people don’t start to think about what’s coming after death, if anything, until they’re quite near it.  Some people naturally get very frightened by the thought of dying (and some are just relieved). There are ‘helpers’ just on ‘the other side’ waiting to come to the aid of anyone who will let them, but apparently these helpers often have a hard time getting through to people who, coming from such a materialist world where physicalists reign supreme, have no idea where they are, or why, or who simply refuse to believe what they are experiencing.

However, I have come to the conclusion that if people do not know about all this until they're just about to die, it could be very daunting. Ideally, people could know about this and think about it for themselves long before they reach that stage. Soul-midwifery goes with whatever beliefs the dying person has.

So I think I'll continue trying to communicate all this only to the still-very-much-living. Undertaking soul-midwifery demands a different set of knowledge and skills, and I have already undertaken development in some of those earlier in my life,  so considering applying for the relevant training is still on the table.

Your thoughts and comments are more than welcome, both about soul-midwifery, and about the metaphysical worldview set out above. (It’s actually very difficult to add a comment in the boxes below for the purpose, but if you email me your comment at  helenjdavis1955@gmail.com  . I’ll cut and paste them in.)

If this topic is of interest to you, I'd recommend you read 'The Beginners' Guide for the Recently Deceased' by David Staume, and 'Adventures beyond the Body' by William Buhlman.

PS: Apparently, it's still possible to have sex without having a physical body....

I Despair....

It was in the news this week that  Stephen Fry the actor, comedian, raconteur, author etc. tried to commit suicide last year, because of his depression. He is the President of the charity ‘MIND’ and, in that capacity, felt it was important to talk about what happened. There is still a lot of shame, mystery and misunderstanding generally about the condition, and he hopes that the more the whole subject is brought out into the open, the better the situation will become.

For sufferers, and no doubt many others, depression is a miserable subject to talk or hear about.  When I was urged to attend a self- help group with other depressives, I simply couldn’t bring myself to do it. The thought of spending a whole evening with other people suffering like myself was too much. But it does help to read about other people’s experiences, and to know that one’s own experience is not unique.

However, I think it’s even more important to have non-depressives understand the condition. I am an ‘endogenous’ depressive which means that, even though life can be going swimmingly with everything I ever hoped for, I will experience bouts of depression, because of the way that chemicals in my brain seem to have been programmed, or perhaps wrongly  programmed.  (Exogenous depression, as opposed to endogenous, is caused by external events, such as a death in the family. One in four people will experience endogenous or exogenous depression  in their lives.) 

Recently a friend who I had known for some time accidentally made my condition temporarily worse when she heard I was having what I call a ‘flat’ day (with life feeling as if it has no meaning, but is just one long struggle). I think she thought that my depression that day was down to the situation my husband and I are in at the moment, with him having been made redundant and searching for another job (it wasn’t, it was just those chemicals not behaving as they ought again.) In an attempt to cheer me up she told me about a friend in a much worse position, somebody who had just discovered that her husband had stage four cancer. I know her intentions were good, but endogenous depressives like myself have very porous boundaries, in so much as we’re not always sure where we ‘end’ and other people start. So this other woman’s agony became my agony, and life seemed even more of a meaningless, painful struggle.

One night, 25 years ago now, before I knew that what I was suffering from was depression, I had an experience of this ‘boundary porosity’ that nearly did for me. My baby son had very bad nappy rash and had woken screaming in the middle of the night. I took him into the bathroom to wash and change him when I suddenly had a vision of all the women, both then and down the ages, who had heard their children screaming and couldn’t do anything about it. I saw mothers in famines with starving babies, mothers having their children wrenched from them by soldiers….it was all over in a second, but literally knocked me backwards against the bathroom wall, so overwhelming was the despair.

I thought I was probably going mad, and it’s only now that I know that depression isn’t just severe sadness, it’s more to do with extreme fear and hopelessness, the sort of fear that leads to despair; and it’s to do with a porosity of boundaries (see above) that means that one is trying to cope with the ordeals of the entire world.

My search for ‘God’, for meaning, is probably born of an even more instinctive need for self- preservation, coupled with an intuition arising from my own experience and intellectual reasoning that the materialists who dominate our modern culture seem to be overlooking and dismissing whole chunks of reality in a way that doesn’t make sense. (For more on this see my post ‘Betwixt and Between’.)

Like many people with endogenous depression, I suffer from other ailments, which doesn’t help. I have a heart problem which means that I have to take tablets which worsen the chronic fatigue I suffer because of my Fibromyalgia. For a long time my GP thought that I didn’t have ME or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or Fibromyalgia; she thought that my lack of physical stamina was purely a result of my depression. It has been suggested to me that the depression is actually a side effect of the Fibromyalgia/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but I am fairly sure now that I was born with depression. I know of lots of people with this sort of confusing diagnosis and, believe me, it doesn’t help!

My brother once remarked that it’s depressed people who see the world as it really is- that is, unpredictably and potentially horrifying, and that it’s ‘normal’ people who have been born with rose- tinted spectacles that screen out this awful truth. Scientifically we know now that it’s not rose- tinted spectacles that keeps the majority of humans struggling on, it’s serotonin and, although I’m against testing on animals in general (especially for cosmetics) I bless day and night every  animal who died to help produce paroxetine without which, I’m very sorry to say, I probably wouldn’t have made it this far.

As always, I would love to hear the views of others. Lots of people find it difficult to make the ‘comments’ box below work, so please feel free to email me at helenjdavis@hotmail.co.uk with your observations, which I will reproduce below.

A Soldier Murdered in Woolwich, and Gandhi's 'Way Out of Hell'

After the awful events of the previous day, yesterday I had the pleasure of listening on-line to the Harvard professor, Bob Kegan, giving a talk at the RSA. It will be available in a few days in both audio and video versions (http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2013/the-further-reaches-of-adult-development-thoughts-on-the-self-transforming-mind)

Professor Kegan is interested in how the human mind goes on developing even once adulthood has been reached, and has spent a lot of time researching this subject.

We are said to have reached adulthood once we have developed a ‘socialised’ mind. Many of us do not develop further than that, though some of us do go on to develop what Kegan calls a ‘self-authoring’ mind. Some adults, though a small percentage at the moment, go on further to develop a ‘self- transforming’ mind. Over the years Kegan has never come across anyone who has gone back a stage, though he has found many increments within each stage.

The socialised mind,  the stage at which the majority of adults in the world remain, seems to me to correlate with Maslow’s ‘need to belong’ (in his ‘hierarchy of needs’ model, which is taught widely in business schools as a tool for understanding the various motivations of workers.) I would also correlate it with Spiral Dynamic’s ‘blue’ or traditional stage.

The socialised mind  is a wonderfully civilising level, where the individual’s focus shifts from ‘me, me, me’ to ‘us’. The good of one’s ‘tribe’ becomes paramount here, and it’s where loyalty to one’s family, religion and country springs from. The rule of law is accepted, even when it inconveniences the individual, for the greater good. There is a reliance on tradition for deciding how life is to be carried on.

I think the correlation in Kabbalah would be the so called ‘vegetable’ person (although I really hate that term) because those of us who have developed to the socialised mind state, though not beyond, are happy providing we can lead comfortable lives – eat, grow, reproduce, and feel the sun on our skins (the simple things for which so many of yearn!) See my earlier post on this: Vegetable,Animal and Human People.

Those of us who go on to develop a self- authoring mind also need those things, especially a set of laws which apply to all; one doesn’t suddenly start driving on whichever side of the road one feels like, when it’s much more sensible to stick to the left like everybody else in the UK. However, people moving into this stage find a new capacity for independence, especially independence of thought. “Emotional life seems to be more internally controlled” as well. (Kegan, 1982, page 102). At this stage the individual’s ‘sphere’ of loyalty tends to get wider, going gradually from ‘ethnocentric’ towards world-centric’. Kegan himself, in the book quoted above, “The Evolving Self”, equates this level with the ‘need for self- esteem’ stage in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs model, and talks of people at this stage exercising “personal enhancement, ambition or achievement” (page 120).

In Kabbalah, I would correlate people at this stage with those referred to as ‘animal people’.

The next development is that which most excites Kegan.  He says that he has not yet encountered a stage of development beyond this, though he admits that this may be because he isn’t able to recognise it. (It is widely accepted that up until and including the self-authoring level, the level before is seen as ‘backward’ and the next level as incomprehensible and threatening. People generally have a nasty habit of killing other people who stand out at or represent a level or two above.)

A person with a self- transforming mind is able to hold multiple interpretations of one situation at the same time, more and more comfortably as they develop further into this stage. Strange, confusing and even irrelevant as this would seem to many of us, this is ‘a way out of hell’. In last night’s talk, Kegan referred to an incident in Gandhi’s life – particularly relevant as I write this, a couple of days after the brutal murder of a soldier in Woolwich. 

A Hindu comes to Gandhi to tell him he has killed a Muslim child by hitting its head against a wall, because Muslims killed his own child. Now he was ‘in hell’. Gandhi (a Hindu himself) suggests a way out of that hell – to adopt an orphaned Muslim child, and bring it up in its own faith, while continuing to practise Hinduism himself. This is a suggestion from a self-transforming mind. In Kabbalah I’m presuming that a person at this level of development would be called a human person.

Kegan reported last night that he had never come across this stage fully developed in anybody who had not yet reached mid-life. (Can I throw in here that I think I may have met younger people who were well on the way? But I’m not an expert.) He pointed out that two thirds of the people who have ever lived / are living into their sixties are alive now, life expectancy having grown that much in the last few decades. He assumes therefore that many more people will develop self-transforming minds and this is most propitious, because socialised and self authoring minds cannot solve the problems on this planet caused by socialised and self authoring minds! Only from the next level, which includes and goes beyond the two previous levels, will that be possible.

But what am I for??

Those of you who’ve read the first few postings on this blog will know that I took voluntary redundancy last July from my job as a lecturer at a University in London, at the age of 56, (calculating that the redundancy sum would see me through to when I could start receiving my pension without too harsh a financial penalty.)

The opportunity to retire early came at an opportune time. I was so exhausted because of fibromyalgia, depression and heart problems, that I was seriously doubting I would manage to work through to 60. When I first gave up work I slept.  And slept.  Sometimes for 20 hours a day. It wasn’t what I had thought would happen; I’d envisaged that once I gave up work my energy would immediately start to come back, and those first couple of months were very frustrating. But then  I did start to regain energy. I started to learn to pace myself and, by early December I had joined a local choir and had started attending a fortnightly kabbalah meeting- both wonderful sources of mental and spiritual nourishment.

In January of this year, however, a financial problem, which had been unforeseen when I took voluntary redundancy (that of my husband also being made redundant), led me to consider going back to work part time. There was plenty of work  for what are known as ‘visiting’ or ‘hourly paid’ lecturers in my subject. And so, buoyed up by my increasing energy levels, I agreed to go into a University in the City of London and teach all day one day a week. Looking back now, I don’t think that decision was purely financial; I think I was also seduced by the notion of being wanted again, by contributing something to society that others thought was worth paying for.

It is easing our financial situation but, from the point of view of my physical, emotional and mental health, it is proving disastrous. I'd forgotten that even perfectly healthy lecturers my age would try to avoid doing 3 hours teaching with only one hour’s break before the next 3 hours, followed immediately by one hour of seeing students with individual queries. Within a fortnight I had to give up choir and kabbalah, and was not getting up out of bed at all the day after going into London.

To many of my friends and relatives, the solution was obvious: my health was more important than money. We’d learn to manage on whatever money we had. My GP, who for years had told me that there was nothing I could do about fibromyalgia other than pace myself, finally referred me to a specialist consultant in fibromyalgia/ chronic fatigue syndrome/ ME and he told me that he thought he could alleviate the symptoms of my condition, but not while I was commuting in and out of London during rush hour one day a week.

And yet,  and yet. I have a contract until the end of July which I do not intend to break, but saying no to offers of work for succeeding terms and semesters, from various sources, has proved to be profoundly difficult. You see, if I’m not working….. what am I for??

It’s not that I have identified so completely with my work persona that I don’t feel as if I exist unless I’m working (though I have had that problem in the past.) The problem is around what I really want to do instead, which I’m now very clear about. I want to know, I want to understand everything I can about the human condition, about human potential. I want to read every book I can lay my hands on about psychology, philosophy, spirituality, watch every programme on TV, attend every talk at the RSA, listen to every radio programme and join every internet group concerned with these topics. I know my understanding will necessarily be bounded by my own level of development intellectually, emotionally and spiritually, but it is hard to describe the pleasure I get from coming across a writer or speaker who makes sense of something that has hitherto been a puzzle, who resolves a paradox, who enables me to expand the area of my understanding, to see the bigger picture.

But isn’t this all just dreadfully self-indulgent? I didn’t think it was, when I could pass on some of the more relevant things I had come to understand to my students, but when I finally give up teaching for good, for the sake of my health, I no longer have that ‘justification’. Although I suppose it’s not so much justification I’m seeking, as doing something  with what I’ve learnt.

Do many people my age feel this?

In terms of justifying these pursuits,  I know I can use what I’ve learnt to decide how best to vote, and which shops to avoid if I don’t want to be exploiting other people or participating in cruelty to animals. I am slowly learning to balance discipline, boundaries and structure with tolerance and mercy. I hope I am learning how to live a better life for myself and the good of others generally.

I passionately want to avoid leaving this planet having taken more than I’ve contributed. This is not just because I have a son, who will probably have children of his own, and I don’t like to think of leaving them a degraded planet (I know of people who have chosen not to have children because of their concern about over- population). There is an even more basic force at work, which those of you who have read my earlier postings will know I put down to the imperatives within my soul (for those who haven’t, please see 'Honouring the Gods')

But here’s another thought. We all know that a wave of anger, or of love, or of any other emotion, is as real in terms of their force as a wave of the sea. Many of us know how the material world can hold on to emotions that seem to have soaked into the physical fabric – for example, the peacefulness within many places of worship, or the feeling we get when we walk into an unknown place that something dreadful has happened there. Some people claim that if you can get a certain critical number of people meditating within a certain geographical area, that area will enjoy a reduction in crime and various other positive outcomes, because the altered brainwaves of the meditators are not confined within their own brains. (For those who don’t know from earlier postings, this is not a blog for materialists, see my post "A Sense of Being Stared At"  .)

So, then, maybe what I’m learning and understanding  is not confined to my own brain? Maybe it doesn’t all disappear when I die? Perhaps by just making the effort to learn and understand, I’m boosting the general learning and understanding level within the local population? No man (or woman) is an island......

The Righteous Men

I’ve been reading a book by Sam Bourne (a pseudonym for Jonathan Freedland, the journalist) called ‘The Righteous Men’. I didn’t know it when I purchased the book, but it has kabbalah at the core of its story (and a very good story it is too – Da Vinci Code-ish without quite so many terrible factual errors)

I don’t want to spoil the story for anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure of reading it yet, so won’t go into too much detail, except to say that ‘a righteous man’ is one who does good things for other people anonymously. The recipients never know who their benefactor or helper is. The righteous men do good for others because it is the right thing to do. They are not trying to win a place in heaven, or the admiration of others, or simply following rules. They are often in very ordinary everyday occupations, or even in occupations scorned by others.  They are not necessarily religious, or even spiritual. But they are regarded by some Kabbalists as the holiest of men.

(I’ve kept using the term ‘men’ here though I have no doubt that there are righteous women. I expect the concept was first solidified in a time when women weren’t considered evolved enough – or given enough freedom – to exercise free will.)

In the past religion has been mainly either consoling, (i.e. it gives people hope for the future, and a meaning, plus guidance); and/or a form of social control. Most forms of spirituality seem to come about as a result of glimpses of, or a yearning for, the transcendent. Spiritual revelations however are often shattering; they tend to turn one’s world upside down and inside out. As St. John didn’t quite say ‘And ye shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free. But first it will make you bloody miserable.’

One of the first things one has to let go of in the wake of many spiritual revelations is the idea of the 'ground of all being' as a personal God (though one often discovers intermediaries between humans and the no-thing- which-is-the-cause-and-essence-of-everything which/who are very personable indeed.)

But it doesn’t even take a spiritual revelation for something to start to happen which society, especially those in charge of it, consider very dangerous. People look at the rules contained within their local religion and state laws and start to make choices about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ rules based on their own rationality and feelings of fairness and goodness. And so there were the women who kept vigil at Greenham Common, and CND supporters breaking the law (and accepting they had to pay the penalty for that.) In South Africa and in the south of the USA you had people breaking the segregation rules. Many modern Christians turn a blind eye to the bible’s injunctions for women to obey their husbands and slaves to obey their masters.

Often these law breakers are ‘righteous men’.

Karen Armstrong (see my post 'Who is this God person anyway?') talks of the need for the rituals which produce a sense of ‘other’, of awe, and which religion has often provided in the past. But in the Guardian today was news of a new sort of ‘church’ that has set up in Islington, where the ‘services’ include inspiring music and sing-alongs, talks on the wonders of nature, and discussions on the best ways of helping other people. The service includes an opportunity for people to meet and mix, in order to engender a feeling of community. But God is not mentioned. It is a service for atheists.

 I would call this a humanist meeting, but humanists are materialists, and I don’t know if the people who attend these meetings in Islington are all also materialists (though at least one of the organisers is.) If it is an essentially materialist approach, that would discourage me from attending, but I applaud the idea of such meetings. Indeed I consider that they are probably a fertile breeding ground for ‘righteous men’, the ‘most holy’,  and when it comes down to it, as Helen Titchen-Beeth said (see my post Goodbye-meditation-hello-spontaneity.) loving, kind behaviour towards others is more important than any dogma, or any cosmology.