Conviction without Hatred (3/3)

My mind . . . . .
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there’s no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

(W. B. Yeats: ‘Prayer for My Daughter‘)

My recent focus on the role of religion, and my rejection of the idea that all the main religions do not have any really common ground, suggest it is worth republishing this attempt to define some of the main causes of ideological conflict. 

A World-Embracing Vision

A central concept in Bahá’í discourse, as could be inferred from previous posts, is the heart. This is used to refer to the core of our being. It is not purely emotional, though emotion is an important factor.

In the garden of thy heart plant naught but the rose of love.

(Persian Hidden Words: No. 3)

It also involves insight. Bahá’u’lláh uses the phrase ‘understanding heart’ on a number of occasions.

There is more to it even than that. In previous posts about the self and the soul I have explored the implications of the way that Bahá’u’lláh describes the heart either as a ‘mirror’ or a ‘garden.’ I won’t be revisiting those considerations here but they are relevant to this theme.

I want to look at another angle on the heart which Bahá’u’lláh repeatedly refers to.

In the Hidden Words (Persian: No.27) He writes:

All that is in heaven and earth I have ordained for thee except the human heart, which I have made the habitation of My beauty and glory; yet thou didst give My home and dwelling to another than Me and whenever the manifestation of My holiness sought His own abode, a stranger found He there, and, homeless, hastened to the sanctuary of the Beloved.

The meaning is clear. Like an addict we fill our hearts with junk as an addict blocks his receptors with heroin so that the appropriate ‘occupant’ is denied access and we do not function properly. We are in a real sense poisoned.

Bahá’u’lláh is equally clear about the advice He gives:

Return, then, and cleave wholly unto God, and cleanse thine heart from the world and all its vanities, and suffer not the love of any stranger to enter and dwell therein. Not until thou dost purify thine heart from every trace of such love can the brightness of the light of God shed its radiance upon it, for to none hath God given more than one heart. . . . . . And as the human heart, as fashioned by God, is one and undivided, it behoveth thee to take heed that its affections be, also, one and undivided. Cleave thou, therefore, with the whole affection of thine heart, unto His love, and withdraw it from the love of any one besides Him, that He may aid thee to immerse thyself in the ocean of His unity, and enable thee to become a true upholder of His oneness. God is My witness.

(Gleanings: CXIV)

Though it is easier said than done, of course, this has several important implications.

We are often divided within ourselves, worshipping more than one false god. We are divided from other people when we perceive them to be worshipping other gods than ours. This warps the proper functioning of the heart. It prevents us from becoming ‘a true upholder of His oneness,’ people who see all of humanity as our business and behave accordingly.

Bahá’u’lláh observed:

No two men can be found who may be said to be outwardly and inwardly united. The evidences of discord and malice are apparent everywhere, though all were made for harmony and union.

(Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh: pages 164-165)

‘Abdu’l-Bahá developed the same theme:

Let all be set free from the multiple identities that were born of passion and desire, and in the oneness of their love for God find a new way of life.

(Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: page 76)

Note that transcending such divisions within and between people is linked with a unifying devotion to an inclusive and loving God: if we worship an exclusive and narrow god our divisions and conflicts will be exacerbated.

There is a key passage in the Arabic Hidden Words (No. 68) which assists in helping us understand the spiritual dynamics here:

Since We have created you all from one same substance it is incumbent on you to be even as one soul, to walk with the same feet, eat with the same mouth and dwell in the same land, that from your inmost being, by your deeds and actions, the signs of oneness and the essence of detachment may be made manifest.

Oneness and detachment are inextricably linked. Only when we detach ourselves from false gods can we integrate all aspects of ourselves, bring our divided loyalties together under one banner, and see ourselves at one with all humankind. When we dismantle the barriers within us we can also dismantle those between us. Only then can the expression of unity come from the depths of our being and manifest itself in actions and words that are a seamless fabric of complete integrity harmonised with all humanity. The process of striving to achieve this state in this physical world is a slow and painful one but cannot be evaded if we are to live a full and fulfilling life, as against an empty, sterile and potentially destructive one. Above all it involves expressing a sense of common humanity in action regardless of how we feel sometimes: positive values are a better guide to consistently positive action than feelings that can shift swiftly from light to dark and back again.

Without such a radical integration we will not be able to achieve the world embracing vision required of us if the problems confronting our civilisation are to have any hope of resolution. Anything less runs a very strong risk of perpetuating prejudice, conflict, discrimination and all the evils such as pogroms that have their roots in such heart-felt and deep-seated divisions.

We must be careful not to substitute some limited idea of God of our own devising for the limitless experience of love that is the one true God beyond all description. That way hatred lies. It is the ‘rose’ of love that we must plant in the garden of our hearts, not its daisy or its dandelion, though either of those would certainly be better than the stinging nettle of animosity, but probably not up to meeting the challenges that this shrinking and diverse world is currently throwing at us.

Planting the most inclusive and embracing flower of love in our hearts that we are capable of is the indispensable precursor to the positive personal transformation of a radical kind that is demanded of us now.

The Method

Without some plan of action, what I have described may well of course turn out to be empty rhetoric. Every great world religion has described in detail the steps we need to take to perfect ourselves once we have placed its message in our heart of hearts.

Buddhism is perhaps the clearest in its ways of doing this, with its four noble truths and eightfold path. Also its system of psychological understanding is second to none, which is perhaps why current psychological approaches to distress are borrowing so heavily from it, for example in the concept of mindfulness.

The Baha’i Faith is a much younger tradition but is unique in combining recommendations for individual spiritual development, such as prayer and reflection (in the sense I have discussed in detail in previous posts) with prescriptions for expressing spiritual understanding collectively in the special conditions of the modern world. There are two key components of this.

First, consultation, which is a spiritual and disciplined form of non-adversarial decision-making. Second is a way of organising a global network of like-minded people, which combines democratic elections with authority held collectively by an assembly. There is neither priesthood nor presidency. The system allows for a flexible process of responding to what we learn from experience: there is nothing fossilised about it.

I believe there is much to learn from the Baha’i model that can be successfully applied in our lives whether we decide to join the Baha’i community or not. The learning is readily transferable to almost any benign context.

Seat of the Universal House of Justice © Bahá’í World Centre

An Appeal to our Better Selves

After such a long post as this, now is not the time to go into this in detail but the many links from this blog will introduce these ideas in accessible form. I intend to return to this aspect of the issue in due course.

I would like instead to close with the words of a powerful message sent by the Universal House of Justice, our governing body at the Baha’i World Centre, to the world’s religious leaders in 2002. It stated in its introduction:

Tragically, organized religion, whose very reason for being entails service to the cause of brotherhood and peace, behaves all too frequently as one of the most formidable obstacles in the path; to cite a particular painful fact, it has long lent its credibility to fanaticism.

They continued:

The consequences, in terms of human well-being, have been ruinous. It is surely unnecessary to cite in detail the horrors being visited upon hapless populations today by outbursts of fanaticism that shame the name of religion.

All is not lost, they argue:

Each of the great faiths can adduce impressive and credible testimony to its efficacy in nurturing moral character. Similarly, no one could convincingly argue that doctrines attached to one particular belief system have been either more or less prolific in generating bigotry and superstition than those attached to any other.

They assert their conviction:

. . . that interfaith discourse, if it is to contribute meaningfully to healing the ills that afflict a desperate humanity, must now address honestly and without further evasion the implications of the over-arching truth that called the movement into being: that God is one and that, beyond all diversity of cultural expression and human interpretation, religion is likewise one.

And they close with the following appeal:

The crisis calls on religious leadership for a break with the past as decisive as those that opened the way for society to address equally corrosive prejudices of race, gender and nation. Whatever justification exists for exercising influence in matters of conscience lies in serving the well-being of humankind.

This is work that we can all support, wherever we are and in whatever God we do or do not believe. We should not just leave it to our leaders.

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Conviction: the Double-Edged Sword (2/3)

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

(W. B. Yeats: ‘The Second Coming‘)

My recent focus on the role of religion, and my rejection of the idea that all the main religions do not have any really common ground, suggest it is worth republishing this attempt to define some of the main causes of ideological conflict. 

Ruling passion

We obviously need to take care what we believe in. It tends to determine the person we will become. Sadly, most of us devote more conscious effort to choosing a car than creating a character. We simply accept what we have been given, rarely assessing its value, rarely considering whether or not it could be changed for the better, and if we do feel dissatisfaction with what we have become we tend to test it against inappropriate measures such as the wealth it has brought us, the worldly success we have achieved, the number rather than the quality of our friendships, the power we derive from it and so on. We seldom carefully reflect upon our beliefs and how they have shaped and are still shaping who we are.

Culture has struggled to get a handle on this problem for generations. In the 18th Century they talked of people having a ‘ruling passion.’ This was the organising principle around which all activities and aspirations were supposed to revolve. Alexander Pope wrote:

The ruling passion, be it what it will,
The ruling passion conquers reason still.

(Moral Essay iii: lines 153-154)

(Samuel Johnson, though, questioned the usefulness and validity of this concept in his usual robust fashion.) That they called it a ‘passion’ gives us a clue about what is going on here.

Samuel Johnson (for source of image see link)

Erich Fromm’s book, ‘The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness‘ (1973: page 260) develops this idea very clearly.  He argues that, in human beings, character has replaced instinct as a driver of what we do. And character creates a special need in us.

Man needs an object of total devotion to be the focal point of all his strivings. In being devoted to a goal beyond his isolated ego, he transcends himself and leaves the prison of absolute egocentricity. He can be devoted to the most diverse goals and idols but the need for devotion is itself a primary, essential need demanding fulfilment.

This has created a god-shaped hole in the middle of our being. We cannot help but fill it with something. Our sense of identity is at stake. In 2001 the Bahá’í World Centre published a review of the Twentieth Century which contained these words (page 59-60):

The yearning for belief is inextinguishable, an inherent part of what makes one human. When it is blocked or betrayed, the rational soul is driven to seek some new compass point, however inadequate or unworthy, around which it can organize experience and dare again to assume the risks that are an inescapable aspect of life.

Is conviction, like atomic power, a double-edged sword? Can we truly say that no great enterprise was ever accomplished and no huge and large scale evil ever completed without it? If this is so, and I think it is because both great good and massive evil require great energy and great persistence, what determines whether it will be destructive or constructive?

Idealising something (or someone) seriously flawed corrupts us: I  think the opposite is also true and that worshiping something both better and greater than ourselves improves us. I would like to entertain the possibility that it is the object of our devotion as we understand it rather than simply the intensity of the conviction that makes the greatest difference, though if the object of devotion is less than good then the intensity of our devotion will strongly influence how destructive espousing that belief will make us.

Is there any object of devotion that does not induce in its followers intolerance and hatred towards others especially those who have a different god?

Tolerant Devotion

The issue of what determines the strength and nature of our convictions is not a straightforward one. When I was studying psychology for the first time in the 1970s I came across the work of Thomas Pettigrew, which is still referred to even now. It illustrates nicely the exact nature of the difficulty.

To put one set of his findings very simply, whether you were a miner  in segregated West Virginia or apartheid South Africa, the culture around you differed depending on whether you were above ground or below it. Below ground discrimination was potentially dangerous so the culture there frowned on it: above ground the culture was discriminatory. What was particularly interesting to me was that 20% of people discriminated all the time regardless of the culture and 20% refused to do so at all: 60% of people shifted from desegregation below ground to segregation above it (the percentages are approximate: the pattern is accurate).

The implications are fascinating.

First, as Richard Holloway stresses, most of us are ‘infirm of purpose’ and lack the courage of our convictions or even any convictions at all. We follow the herd, a potentially dangerous tendency.

Secondly, the proneness to develop strong convictions does not lead us to develop only the best ones. In the example of the mining communities, segregation and desegegration are antitheses and cannot both be right and desirable, but clearly both attract approximately equal numbers of adherents with equivalent degrees of courage in their convictions, in stark contrast to the moral cowardice or lack of conviction of the rest of us. It is questionable whether it is the ‘best’ that  ‘lack all conviction.’

Thirdly, while most of us are drifting with the tide rather than choosing a firm rock to cling to, the strong-minded do choose but on grounds that have little if anything reliably to do with their strong-mindedness. Authoritarianism  has been wheeled out as a favourite explanation for why people end up fascist or fanatical. It would though be hard to make it work as an explanation of the moral courage and firm conviction of a Martin Luther King or a Ghandi. The vision of these two men was not one of replacing their oppressors in power and becoming oppressors in their turn but of transcending oppression altogether.

So where on earth or in heaven does that leave us? Are these two men so exceptional that their example does not count? Or is a humane and constructive kind of strong conviction possible for most if not all of us?

A Possible Way Forward

When it comes to determining what might provide a positive vision of sufficient power to heal the divisions of the world of humanity, a consideration of religion is inevitable. Although I was brought up a Christian, became an atheist for nearly two decades and was strongly attracted to Buddhism for a period of years, the religion I know best is the Bahá’í Faith.

Much of what I will be describing in the next post about the vision I have derived from its teachings, is also to be found in other faiths. For instance, anyone who wants to know about the healing heart of the Christian message and the positively empowering concept of God it enshrines, there is no better place to go than Eric Reitan’s book, and I would also see God in much the same way as he does. His view also opens the way towards discerning the same spirit in other faiths.

One of his premises is that our concept of God, who is in essence entirely unknowable, needs to show Him as deserving of worship: any concept of God that does not fulfil that criterion should be regarded with suspicion.  Our idealism, our ideology, will then, in my view, build an identity on the crumbling and treacherous sand of some kind of idolatry.

I will though confine my discussion now to what the faith I know best, with its inclusive vision of the divine, has taught me about a way out of this divided and intolerant state by which we are bedevilled. Even those who do not believe in the divine can relate to much of what I will be saying by reframing the ‘divine’ as their highest most inclusive sense of the ultimate good around which to organise our lives.

I am not claiming that others have not grappled with these issues: nor am I saying that what they have discovered as possible antidotes to fanatical intolerance is to be ignored or discounted. McCullough, for example, has much of great value to say from which we can all learn a great deal.

I do believe though that religion and spirituality have recently been so demonised in certain quarters that we are in danger of neglecting the powerful antidotes to evil that they also can provide. It is to these that I wish to draw our attention in the next post.

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The Star of Truth (2/2): Why It Matters So Much

Given that I justified republishing the sequence on Mapping Consciousness by stating that art, as well as science and religion, has a role to play in understanding consciousness, it seemed only right to republish this short sequence which goes some way to explaining why I feel that to be the case.

Last time I explored a new realisation. On the back of a fleeting comment I made, in a recent conversation, that Iain McGilchrist, in his recent book The Matter with Things, was stating that art can serve as bridge between our consciousness and the ineffable aspects of reality, I came to see all too clearly a truth that I have been blind to all these years: art is not just a meaningful but subordinate domain to science and religion – it is of equal importance. We need all three if we are to mobilise all parts of our brain to enable our minds to grasp almost any important and complex truth more completely in all its aspects. One of these domains is in itself not enough for most of us, at least.

Now I need to try and pin why that insight is so important.

Why It Matters So Much to Me

Not everyone will jeopardise the balance I am about to describe by piling all the eggs of understanding into one basket, though there is an unhealthy drive in our culture towards specialization, as McGilchrist points out in The Matter with Things, and a contempt for what seems like a more superficial dilettante approach. While I have probably never gone to that extreme, I have had a tendency to let my enthusiasm for newly discovered lands carry me away for long periods of time.

For example, when I came to realise that my too exclusive focus on literature was motivated by what books taught me about people, and then shifted my attention to focusing on psychology, the same monochrome method induced me to neglect poetry as no longer relevant to my life. Novels, plays and films were acceptable as stories about people though I no longer trusted them to be reliable vehicles of truth. When, later still, psychology and psychotherapy triggered an interest in Buddhism because of its obvious deep understanding of the mind, rooted in centuries of meditation, the resulting blend of spirituality and psychology tended to even ease narrative forms of art out of focus.

Each time I got a dream reminder to recalibrate – first the Dancing Flames dream pointed me back towards poetry and diluted my obsession with psychology, then, after my decision to tread the Bahá’í path had to some degree reversed the correction, my Hearth dream not only reminded me about the value of art but also that of nature too. Both of these dreams are explored in some detail elsewhere on this blog.

Even so, in my conscious mind I still had this prejudicial sense that psychology and spirituality were somehow more trustworthy guides along the path towards truth than the arts, no matter how much (guilty) pleasure I derived especially from poems, songs and paintings.

Now, at last, I seem to have consciously realised that I must keep all three in balance.  Different people will privilege different domains at different times and in different places, as I have tried to illustrate in the three different diagrams fronted by different aspects of the STAR: what is critical is that discounting any of them reduces our ability to draw as close to the truth as we are able and desperately need to. Various forms of destructive dogmatism and fanaticism lurk in the shadows created by these discounts. When science disparages spirituality, for example, as I have explained many times on this blog, the mind gets reduced to the brain. When religion dismisses science we topple into fundamentalism. When either of them closes the door on the rich symbolism and metaphor of the arts, not only do they risk depriving themselves of the language by which their understanding can be more effectively conveyed, but they also impoverish their own ability to tune into aspects of the truths they are discovering. For this reason, not only are there three versions, each with a different domain at the front, but the colours of each domain are not primary colours, as that would suggest they do not overlap as much as they do.

Reductionisms

Such reductionisms must be avoided at all costs and ideally everyone should be open to and seek information and experiences from all three domains, or risk descending into illusion at best, or dangerous delusion at worst. If I hear anyone disparaging any of these domains as pointless, I’ll know not to trust a word they say. It is interesting to note here, as just one example, that metaphor, myth, symbolism, story and allegory, the tools of literature as an art form, are crucially important in Bahá’í and other religious scripture. Without parables where would the gospels be. Physics, confronted by its awareness of the role of consciousness, seems to be leading the sciences towards a more spiritual perspective and a felt need to use more metaphorical language.

Any form of reductionism or potentially toxic over-simplification is to be avoided at all costs in all three domains. The richness of artistic vehicles of understanding and communication can be a strong antidote. A reductionist ‘science’, a materialistic ‘art’ or fundamentalist ‘religion’ is neither art, science nor religion. I think with this model, if I am immersing myself in any kind of genuine manifestation of any one of those three domains, there is no need to feel guilty, or slag myself off for betraying the other two and wasting my time.

Imbalances

Because the Bahá’í Writings talk so much about the harmony of religion and science as paths towards the truth that, even though they praise the role of the arts in expressing spirituality, I failed to see that there is more to the arts than that. This is where my obtuse misunderstanding of the Bahá’í path in this respect did not quite get me to this new level of understanding, and has caused me to limp along more slowly in certain respects than I would have been able to do otherwise.

I think these insights might help me shed the burden of guilt that prevented me from spending more time enjoying and learning from literature, painting and song in the way I used to. Fortunately I haven’t got as close, as in my early days of my immersion in psychology, to the position McGilchrist reminds us that Darwin found himself in:

He draws from Charles Darwin’s Autobiography which speaks of the great pleasure he derived as a young man from poetry, music and art, something now almost completely lost to him (page 619):

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts . . . And if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through the use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

But still slightly too close for comfort.

Basically, I think I have come to a firm realisation that my path entails using an exploration of the arts, social sciences and spirituality, in an effectively balanced way, to help me enhance my understanding of reality and ease my own existential pain as well as lift the understanding and ease the pain of others. I think that has always been my unconscious priority, but my discounting of the arts tended to make my exploration of them feel like a stolen pleasure and reduce the efficacy of my search for deeper meanings both within experience and within the Bahá’í Writings.

Maybe the fact that ‘arts’ and ‘star’ are anagrams might make it easier for me to hold onto this insight now I’ve gained it. The cube below places sciences at the top because that is where our culture sees it as belonging, while religion has been sidelined. My hope is that this post will help redress that imbalance, and also bring the arts closer to the front in this dynamic.

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Understanding the Heart (3/6): Following the Breath to the Heart

One product of my digging around the internet to find other sources of information about the complexity of the heart’s contribution to consciousness was Science of the Heart: Exploring the Role of the Heart in Human Performance – An Overview of Research Conducted by the HeartMath Institute by Rollin McCraty (see Link).

The Brain in the Heart

Chapter 1 looks at the physiology and concludes that ‘the heart communicates to the brain in four major ways: neurologically (through the transmission of nerve impulses), biochemically (via hormones and neurotransmitters), biophysically (through pressure waves) and energetically (through electromagnetic field interactions). . . .  Moreover, our research shows that messages the heart sends to the brain also can affect performance.’

He quotes the work of John and Beatrice Lacey who observed that ‘the heart communicates with the brain in ways that significantly affect how we perceive and react to the world.’

Their research suggested that ‘[t]he heart was behaving as though it had a mind of its own’ and ‘appeared to be sending meaningful messages to the brain that the brain not only understood, but also obeyed.’

Further research strongly supported the idea that ‘The heart-brain, as it is commonly called . . . is an intricate network of complex ganglia, neurotransmitters, proteins and support cells, the same as those of the brain in the head.’ While ‘it is generally well-known that . . . [descending] pathways in the autonomic nervous system are involved in the regulation of the heart . . . it is less appreciated that the majority of fibers in the vagus nerves are [ascending] in nature. . . . This means the heart sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart.’

A possibly key point for where this is all heading is that:

More recently, it was discovered the heart also manufactures and secretes oxytocin, which can act as a neurotransmitter and commonly is referred to as the love or social bonding hormone. Beyond its well-known functions in childbirth and lactation, oxytocin also has been shown to be involved in cognition, tolerance, trust and friendship and the establishment of enduring pair-bonds. Remarkably, concentrations of oxytocin produced in the heart are in the same range as those produced in the brain.[1]

The Importance of Breathing

In chapter 5 I stumbled across an idea that resonated strongly with me. In a discussion of how to achieve an optimal brain-heart balance, the author writes:

The first step in most of the techniques developed by the HeartMath Institute is called Heart-Focused Breathing, which includes placing one’s attention in the center of the chest (the area of the heart) and imagining the breath is flowing in and out of the chest area while breathing a little slower and deeper than usual. Conscious regulation of one’s respiration at a 10-second rhythm (five seconds in and five seconds out) (0.1 hertz) increases cardiac coherence and starts the process of shifting into a more coherent state.[2] With conscious control over breathing, an individual can slow the rate and increase the depth of the breathing rhythm.

This was encouraging. As I brevetted through the literature I had been looking for a technique with some hope of providing me with direct experiential validation of these findings My diary entry of 1/10/23 reads:

I’ve been very focused on using every spare second to garner all the quotes I can find on the heart. What I am finding frustrating is that, while the quotes are piling up, what would be genuinely significant sustained experiences of a deep connection with my heart are seriously elusive.

I am using a technique of breathing meditation once more (learned in my Buddhist days) and, yes, I am keeping surprisingly calmer more easily, which is good, but it does not feel enough. Perhaps I should be satisfied with that for now as it’s early days for me to pursue this goal with such a level of intensity.

I got another prod in the same direction soon after.

I’d been to town to meet a friend for coffee. After an immersive conversation exploring Picasso on the one hand and all this new information about the heart on the other, he had to leave to pick up his grandchildren from school. I had half-an-hour to kill before the time arrived when I could buy quiche from the same café at half-price. I don’t do cooked lunch much anymore so it’s handy sometimes to get a bargain like that for dinner later in the day.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do but wandered out of the café and, perhaps unsurprisingly, headed in the direction of Waterstones. There was nothing of interest downstairs so I climbed the steps to the first floor. No biographies of interest – I had thought they might have the one on Pessoa I saw in Birmingham but decided not to buy but no luck.

I moved across to the Smart Thinking section which often houses books I have already decided to buy. As my gaze travelled along the shelves the title Breath caught my eye. Not one to discount a possible synchronicity, I pulled it down and scanned its pages. Though materialistically focussed it looked as though it would test the value of breathing to some degree at least. I left the shop with Nestor’s book in my shoulder bag.

I prioritised getting to grips with his relatively short book before stepping back into the flood of other texts I had on the spiritual side of the heart. I clearly had to get my left hemisphere sceptic on board with the value of all this before it would let me proceed with my main research uninterrupted.

I was not disappointed. I’m not going to plod through all the mechanical details of his research in this thought-provoking book – I might come back to that another time. But those details clearly confirmed a conclusion that was of direct relevance to me at this point.

James Nestor quotes research carried out at the University of Pavia in 2001:[3]

Whenever [the subjects] followed [the prescribed] slow breathing pattern, blood flow to the brain increased and the systems in the body entered a state of coherence, when the functions of heart, circulation, and nervous system are coordinated to peak efficiency.

. . . It turned out that the most efficient breathing rhythm occurred when both the length of respirations and total breaths per minute, were locked into a spooky symmetry: 5.5-second inhales followed by 5.5-second exhales, which works out at almost exactly 5.5 breaths a minute. This was the same pattern as the [Catholic] rosary.

The results were profound, even when practised for just five to ten minutes a day.

Nor is he afraid to flag up the possible spiritual link:[4]

In many ways, this resonant breathing offered the same benefits as meditation for people who didn’t want to meditate. Yoga for people who didn’t like to get off the couch. It offered the healing touch of prayer for people who weren’t religious.

As readers of this blog will know, breathing has been connected with two major breakthroughs as well as with powerful meditative moments. A long period of at least two years Buddhist meditation nested in between the wakeup moments. One such was my falling into the previously unknown well of tears deep down in my mind and the other was my finally becoming able to let go of the anger and terror of my two hospitalisations along with the script decision they triggered (see the links for more information). Nestor also describes this Holotropic Breathwork approach, pioneered by Stansilav Grof, in Chapter Eight of his book.

Perhaps McCraty’s approach is not as flaky as it might sound to some of us.

Intuition

In Chapter 7 McCraty moves onto examining the heart and intuition, something I had thought was simply located in the right hemisphere.

He explains what he means by this:

. . . we can learn to intentionally align with and access our intuitive intelligence, which can provide moment-to-moment guidance and empower what HeartMath calls heart-based living, reliance in all things on the wisdom, intelligence and qualities of the heart.

There are several types of intuition in his view:

The first type of intuition, often called implicit knowledge or implicit learning, essentially refers to knowledge we’ve acquired in the past and either forgot or did not realize we had learned.

. . . The second type of intuition is what we call energetic sensitivity, which refers to the ability of the nervous system to detect and respond to environmental signals such as electromagnetic fields (also see Energetic Communication section). It is well established that in both humans and animals, nervous-system activity is affected by geomagnetic activity.[5] Some people, for example, appear to have the capacity to feel or sense that an earthquake is about to occur before it happens

The third type of intuition is nonlocal intuition, which refers to the knowledge or sense of something that cannot be explained by past or forgotten knowledge or by sensing environmental signals. It has been suggested that the capacity to receive and process information about nonlocal events appears to be a property of all physical and biological organization and this likely is because of an inherent interconnectedness of everything in the universe.[6]

Here we have clearly moved from the material to the transpersonal and are beginning to cross the threshold into the deepest exploration will be attempting.

Daniel Kahneman

The first system is very much the same as Kahneman explores in his book Thinking Fast/Thinking Slow:

It processes information very rapidly and associates current inputs to the brain with past experiences. Therefore, it is relatively undemanding in its use of cognitive resources. For example, when individuals have gained experience in a particular field, implicit intuitions are derived from their capacity to recognize important environmental cues and rapidly and unconsciously match those cues to existing familiar patterns.

Kahneman uses the example of an experienced fireman who instinctively knows when to evacuate a building which is about to collapse.

The second system is also one which most of us will have experienced at one time or another:

 . . . The term intuition also is used commonly to describe experiences scientific literature refers to as insight. When we have a problem we cannot immediately solve, the brain can be working on it subconsciously. It is common when we are in the shower, driving or doing something else and not thinking about the problem that a solution pops into the conscious mind, a process we experience as an intuitive insight.

It’s one of the main reasons I carry a notebook with me wherever I go. I can never know when such insights will pop up, but one thing I am certain about – if I don’t write them down I probably won’t remember them.

Finally we come to a capacity of the heart that appears to include precognition and clairvoyance. We’ll be digging more deeply into that next time.

References:

[1]. 24. Gutkowska, J., et al., Oxytocin is a cardiovascular hormone. Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research, 2000. 33 – pages 625-633.
[2]. Alabdulgader, A., Coherence: A Novel Nonpharmacological Modality for Lowering Blood Pressure in Hypertensive Patients. Global Advances in Health and Medicine, 2012. 1(2) – pages 54-62 5 and McCraty, R., Atkinson, M., Tomasino, D., & Bradley, R. T, The coherent heart: Heart-brain interactions, psychophysiological coherence, and the emergence of system-wide order. Integral Review, 2009. 5(2) – page 10-115.
[3]. Breath – page 83.
[4]. Op. cit. -page 84.
[5]. Halberg,F., et al.,Time Structures (Chronomes) of the Blood Circulation, Populations’ Health, Human Affairs and Space Weather. World Heart Journal, 2011. 3(1): p. 1-40.
[6] Bohm, D.and B. J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe 1993, London: Routledge, Laszlo, E., The Interconnected Universe: Conceptual Founda tions of Transdiciplinary Unified Theroy 1995, Singapore: World Scientific, and Nadeau, R. and M. Kafatos, The Non-Local Universe: The New Physics and Matters of the Mind 1999, New York: Oxford University Press.

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Book Review – ‘Living in a Mindful Universe’ (1/7): synchronicities & NDEs

Given that the post on 13 November makes reference to Eben Alexander’s near-death-experience I thought it might be helpful to republish this sequence albeit slightly soon. 

This is likely to be the most complex and ambitious attempt to integrate and express my understanding of some of these issues that I have ever undertaken. I mustn’t overload it though or the sequence might sink

As if all this was not already enough, in the interests of synchronicity I’m afraid much more needs to be said before I even start to describe the main trigger to this attempt.

Post-Covid I had been attempting to reconnect with friends and former colleagues after a long lapse in communication, but been pretty sluggish in taking any kind of consistent action.

Interesting Synchronicities

The first event of interest here was a conversation with an acquaintance of my wife’s in town. She inadvertently dropped into the conversation that I was – or, perhaps more accurately, had been – a psychologist. The next day he texted to say that a psychology friend of his from abroad was wondering whether he could help her find out how to get work in that field in this country. It was proving difficult. When she first asked him he hadn’t a clue how he could help. After my wife dropped the hint he got in touch.

This triggered me to get off my procrastinating backside and contact a former colleague who not only was a psychologist but, as I knew, had a number of European friends in the same boat as the lady asking for help.

He kindly agreed to consult with her and see if he could help in any way. I thanked him and suggested we meet for coffee, which we did soon after. For two hours upstairs in the All Saints café we were immersed in in a deeply enriching exploration of spirituality, the afterlife and consciousness. I wish we had recorded what we discussed as I can’t remember half of it. But that’s not the main point here, but I will be sharing some of the material we covered later on this blog, I expect.

The day after we’d had the conversation and exchanged emails about how enlightening we had found it, a friend in Australia phoned and during the conversation asked me if I had any videos on NDEs. I explained that I preferred reading to watching, and apologised for not being able to help.

Within hours of that call, I got an email from the former colleague with an attachment. It was an essay by Jeffrey Mishlove titled Beyond the Brain:
 the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death. I’ll be touching on some of the content later but what is most relevant now is that is contained 71 links to videos on NDEs and closely related issues.

This is by no means the first experience I have had of synchronicity. There are many times in my life when I had read a book on a particular topic, usually consciousness related but not always, and within days someone asks me to help them understand exactly that topic and its implications for their current situation.

Even more importantly my discovery of the Bahá’í Faith depended upon finding a particular book in the Hendon Library, which I would not have dreamed of bothering to borrow if I had been able to find anything else to take away to compensate me for my trudge through the snow and bitter wind on a winter’s day.

Not surprisingly, the essay reactivated my exploration of NDEs once more, as well as enabling me to share 71 video links with my Australian friend.

As though to make sure my research was definitely reactivated at this point, I was also asked to make some comments on a draft text that was replete with quotations from the NDE literature.

Following the various threads, both in terms of reading the essay and watching two hour-long videos (yes, I really did break my pattern and do that!), not only left me with some new insights, which I will explore soon, but also flagged up a book by Eben Alexander and Karen Newell, Living in a Mindful Universe. That book will be my main focus in this sequence alongside an exploration of the way some of my previous insights map onto or complement their perspective.

Hearticulture

Early in life I had thought my interest in books meant I should be focusing on literature. Later I came to realise books were definitely not my calling for their own sake. My interest had always really been in what made people tick, in addition to our heart beats that is. My joke with my wife, who is a keen gardener and therefore a horticulturist, is that my specialism is hearticulture. 

This, though, involves not patronisingly treating other people as plants, but rather, as I also joke, practising heart-to-heart resuscitation. We’re all in danger of spiritual suffocation in this material world. The links between breath and spirit are close. Heart to heart resuscitation, it must be emphasised, is a reciprocal process, not a one-way street. We all need to work at helping everyone we meet to breath in the spirit. 

That’s why I’m grateful for Alexander and Newell’s book — Living in a Mindful Universe — which has been rather like visiting a spiritual optician. The book has tested my mind’s sight, given me a prescription for a new and much improved soul-lens, which is greatly enhancing my ability to see spiritual truths more clearly, and hopefully helping me be a better hearticulturist, if that makes sense.

I want to get to the bottom of the mind. That will not happen, of course, before I die, but I’d like to pothole down as deeply as I possibly can.

Near-Death Experiences

When I was about 11 years old I fell seriously ill. In the poem Solitude I recently tried to capture the experience I’d had:

At the time I bought into delirium as an explanation, but the experience has stuck in my memory in a way that other periods of delirium never have, even more recent ones. I don’t think this alone has been the trigger for my almost 40 years of unrelenting exploration of consciousness.

My well of pain revelation at the Encounter Group weekend in London in the mid-seventies certainly played its part. Clearly my mind was not what it had always seemed to me till then. From that point on various forms of therapy, Buddhist meditation, the study of psychology and existential philosophy, all focused on the nature of the mind, catapulted me towards the Bahá’í Faith where I met the words of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá that set the core of the puzzle that bewildered the psychologist in me at the time:[1]

. . . the mind is the power of the human spirit. Spirit is the lamp; mind is the light which shines from the lamp. Spirit is the tree, and the mind is the fruit. Mind is the perfection of the spirit and is its essential quality, as the sun’s rays are the essential necessity of the sun.’

He went on to add: ‘This explanation, though short, is complete; therefore, reflect upon it, and if God wills, you may become acquainted with the details.’ Reflect upon it I certainly have: how well acquainted with the details I have become remains to be seen, I think.

My experience of the Bahá’í Faith has been very much a quest. I am travelling the Bahá’í path, my understanding influenced by all the twists and turns I’ve just mentioned that shaped my perception. I know I will never be truly a Bahá’í in this material life but I can at least try to inch closer to a truer understanding of spiritual truths.

The book I am about to explore has reinvigorated my desire to explore and understand all this far more deeply. In the process of sharing its impact, I will be going back to the Bahá’í Writings, poems I have been affected by, and other texts, to re-examine them with what I hope is now my keener gaze.

Eben Alexander

Eben Alexander’s NDE

Before we plunge more deeply into the book, we need to briefly go back to the experiences I have blogged about in my posts on Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven. Certain aspects are clearer now.

For example Mishlove explains how improbable during his coma was any kind of conscious experience, and afterwards how unlikely was he not only to survive, but if he did survive to have anything remotely like a full recovery of cognitive functioning:[2]

Bruce Greyson examined the medical records, over 600 pages, with two other physicians. Puss from a rare infection filled Alexander’s cranium. His Glasgow Coma Scale result indicated minimal brain function. The three physicians all agreed there was less than a one percent chance of survival and no possibility of a normal recovery. As Greyson describes… ‘This guy was as dead as you can be without having his heart stop.’

Not only that, but his recovery, in the light of Greyson’s data on his extremely dire brain state, would seem to be unique:[1]

. . . Any physician realises the basic impossibility of a complete medical recovery, and yet that is what happened. I have discovered no cases of any other patients with my particular diagnosis who then went on to benefit from a complete recovery.

One of the most moving aspects of his story for me, not suprisingly given my sense of connection with the sister who had died four years before I was born, was his discover of the identity of his companion during his NDE:[2]

Another interesting slant on his recovery he deals with in this book is how his memories returned:[5]

Most personal life memories returned by three weeks after awakening from coma. All prior knowledge of physics, chemistry, and neuroscience . . . returned progressively over about two months or so. The completeness of my memory return was quite astonishing, especially as I thoroughly reviewed my medical records and held discussions with colleagues who had cared for me, and I realised just how ill I had actually been.

Memory

What was even more astonishing than the return of his basic memories, was that[6] he  ‘[e]ventually, . .  came to realise through subtle evidence over the next few years that, in fact, [his] memories had come back even more complete than they had been before [his] coma.’

He goes into the specifics of some, such as:[7]

In expanded states of awareness, I have recovered memories going back very early in life, and these have included the realisation that the perceived abandonment by my birth mother, initially on day eleven of my life when I was hospitalised for ‘failing to thrive,’ was an event that was so dramatic and shocking that it left scars that are still apparent in my psyche.

His has led him to see memory in a different light[8]:

Just as filter theory allows that the brain is not the producer of consciousness, likewise, we use the brain to access memory from an informational field . . that exists outside of it.

According to Alexander, all systematic scientific attempts to identify the exact location of memory in the brain have failed:[9]‘. . .  The mechanism and location of long-term memory storage remains a complete mystery.’

There will be more on filter theory later. This is enough for now before we take a long look at the idea of a Universal Mind next time.

References:

[1]. Some Answered Questions – LV.

[2]. Beyond the Brain:
the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death – page 25.

[3]. Living in a Mindful Universe – page 37.

[4]. Op. cit. – page 49.

[5]. Living in a Mindful Universe – page 63.

[6]. Op. cit. – page 146.

[7]. Op. cit. – page 379.

[8]. Op. cit. – page 487.

[8]. Op. cit. – page 653.

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Haikus and Loneliness

My solitude shall be my company, and my poverty my wealth.

(Bashō 1693 – quoted in the Penguin Classics Edition – page 45)

I would normally publish a new post on a Monday but given how this 2020 post links to my recent sequence on reflection and fits into the Facing Uncertain Death poems I’m re-posting at the moment, I couldn’t resist re-blogging it now.

This is becoming rather weird.

Until the 9^th April I hadn’t watched the BBC4 programme about Dufu, an early Chinese poet (712 – 770). It’s rather bizarre that I had already had the vivid experience of blossom, which I recorded in the poem I’ve just published, with its Chinese and Japanese associations, on the 7th, and then rediscovered Wang Wei (699–759) more recently on the 10^th, which led me onto another rediscovery, Japanese this time, which I’ll come to later.

Wang Wei is another solitario, someone who had lost his wife far too early, after the pattern of Machado.

Looking back over his poems in a book bought in the early 70s triggered me to remember the poem Poet in the Country,which I wrote with my tongue in my cheek many years ago, when I was living in Hendon, overlooking a park and its brook. I tracked it in my notebook of draft poems: it was 1983 — just before my 40^th birthday and soon after I became a Bahá’í.

Poet in the Country

River mist – no tinge of dawn –
Brackish tang – bird silence –
A specialist in Chinese loneliness –
Exiled – no Emperor to blame.

Even though I had found my Faith, in my diary I was still writing such entries as ‘my life is drained of all meaning by my yearnings for something lost (if it ever existed) in childhood. That’s how my life has been – making me the Chinese specialist in loneliness of my poem.’ Just over a year later I married, which certainly helped change things for the better, but it was only when I went on Pilgrimage to the Bahá’í Shrines in 1987 that I understood more deeply what at least some of those feelings of exile were about. Pilgrimage felt like coming home after a lifetime in exile.

I’ve a number of pared-back poems in that notebook, clearly influenced by Chinese and Japanese poetry – this one from April 1981.

Parting

The cold Plough shines and shines.
The stream’s flow glints.
I walk out, my eyes cloudy.

This refers to that same Hendon brook at a difficult time of my life, when divided affections were causing a great deal of pain.

There is a haiku I’ve always remembered, from the same year, written in my time at the Manor Hospital in Epsom when I was in training to qualify as a clinical psychologist. I can even remember the gravel path I was standing on as I stared towards a faraway copse of trees after a shower of rain.

Walking in Spring

Green mist gleams in distant trees.
I splash through puddles
reflecting cherry blossom.

Cherry blossom again – no surprise there then. Even more importantly, I didn’t know at that point how important the concept of reflection was going to become for me.

I was influenced not just by Wang Wei at this point in my life.

The Japanese Buddhist poet Bashō (1644–1694) was a favourite of mine as well. I don’t think I was consciously trying to pattern the poem on the model described by Noboyuki Yuasa in his introduction to Bashō’s writing when he says of a poem about a frog jumping into a pond that ‘the action thus described is not merely an external one, that it also exists internally, that the pond is, indeed, a mirror held up to reflect the author’s mind.’[1] I think there was a subliminal influence at work though nonetheless.

At the front of my notebook of draft poems I wrote these words of his:[2]

In this mortal frame of mine . . . there is something . . . called a wind-swept spirit for lack of a better name, for it is much like a thin drapery that is torn and swept away at the slightest stir of the wind. This something in me took to writing poetry years ago, merely to amuse itself at first, but finally making it its lifelong business.

Elsewhere he refers to the ‘everlasting self which is poetry.’[3]

This led to a more complex poem in February 1982:

Candle in the Night

Flickering Spirit!

Poised like a frightened snake
to wound the dark —

or is it the dog dark
worrying the spirit?

more like a cat

trapping the soul
but taunting it
with illusions of release

before extinction bites.

Interestingly, in my diary  I was quoting from Yeats’ Byzantium as well, shortly before the writing of this poem:

At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

I saw poetry at that time as something that ‘endorses life, accepts death and always affirms.’ The best poetry, possibly, but not all of it.

It was not just their poetry that drew me to them. The power of solitarios, dwellers in solitude, such as Bashō and Wang Wei haunts me even to this day, as my sequence on Los Solitarios testifies.

Poems like Huatzu Hill by Wang Wei, whose Buddhism was a strong attraction for me at the time, were like looking in a mirror:[4]

Flying birds away into endless spaces
Ranged hills all autumn colours again.
I go up Huatzu Hill and come down –
Will my sadness never come to its end?

I must revisit him again, and I must also read more of Dufu as well. I have only a handful of his poems in my Late Tang collection (referred to as Tufu in my Penguin Edition): I don’t remember reading him at the time.

He resonates also:[4]

My ambition, to be pictured in Unicorn Hall:
But my years decline where ducks and herons troop.

The Unicorn Hall refers to his brief experience of thwarted ambition at the Emperor’s Court.

At this time of enforced isolation, for anyone who missed it, Dufu: China’s Greatest Poet, with Michael Wood’s enthralling commentary and Ian McKellen’s quietly powerful renderings of the poems, is well worth catching up with on BBC iPlayer.

Footnotes

[1] Bashō (Penguin Classics Edition – page 33).
[2]. Bashō (Penguin Classics Edition – page 71).
[3]. Ibid: – page 30.
[4]. Wang Wei (Penguin Classics Edition – page 27).
[5]. Poems of the Late Tang (Penguin Classics Edition – page 42).

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