Dreamwork Again!

One of the created phenomena is the dream. Behold how many secrets are deposited therein, how many wisdoms treasured up, how many worlds concealed.

(Bahá’u’lláh: The Seven Valleys page 32)

Triggered

In the middle of April, for the first time in a long while, I had a dream whose intensity strongly suggested it deserved my attention. It went something like this.

I’m in a workshop or seminar. We are trying to check whether we have covered all the books in some kind of long sequence. With difficulty we discover we have missed books 4 and 25 and don’t seem to have copies. I passionately assert that we must complete the sequence. It is the key. Without it we cannot enter (I’m not sure what I’m saying we can’t enter – life? A home? A community or what. I’m not sure I even believe what I’m saying.)

At first sight I was tempted simply to conclude that the sequence referred to a system of study used in Bahá’í communities all over the world as part of a community building process. One key thing at least did not stack up. At this stage there are nowhere near 25 books in the sequence. We’re not even half way there yet.

I struggled to make sense of the dream but failed. As a result I decided to reread Ann Faraday‘s brilliant guide to dreamwork. I won’t explain this in detail here as I’ve blogged about her method at least twice (see these three links).

I interpreted part of her advice as suggesting I should ask my dreaming mind for clarification about what it is I’m missing.

Three days later I got some kind of hints.

In the dream I am with my brother Bill in the family home on the living room sofa, though it’s facing the opposite wall to the one it used to be at, i.e. with our backs to the window now. I have a huge stack of papers, and they are in duplicates of two. They are printed in black. I am separating the duplicates out into separate piles. I give Bill some of the sorted ones. He later piles sorted and unsorted together instead of helping. I am furious. I really scream at him and go into the kitchen.

Mum wants me to apologise. I point blank refuse. She feeds me tomatoes and cheese on a big white plate. It looks very red and round.

I rarely dream of the Stockport house of my childhood, and when I do it’s usually something important. My hearth dream discussed elsewhere is my most transformative experience of that kind.

My associations led me at first down a route that suggested my anger was rational. My brother and I were very different. This can best be illustrated by a story of a visit home that I made in my early thirties. On the train I’d been immersed in Philip Kapleau’s Three Pillars of Zen. My brother picked me up from the station and when we settled down over a coffee to catch up he asked how my journey had been.

‘Reading a book as usual,’ I told him.

‘We’re always reading. What was your book before I tell you my latest?’

‘It was about Zen Buddhism. What’s your book about?’ I asked, genuinely interested, as contrary to his claim he was not what I considered a great reader.

‘The history of the Panzer tank,’ was his deadpan response.

This more or less says it all.

He did his National Service in about 1948 and loved it. He loved his motor bikes and cars. I’d escaped National Service by one year and the after shadow of the war cast over my childhood made me deeply antipathetic to military matters, even though it was armies that had saved us from invasion. For me, a car was, and still is a rather boring box on four wheels designed to move us with minimum effort from one place to another.

So, at first I thought the dream was saying that in some way in my present life the machine mind within me, that I took him to be representing was wrecking my life. It wouldn’t have been the first dream of this kind that I had had. It turned out not to be quite as straightforward as that, though along the same lines in terms of the dream’s overall impact.

However, demonising my brother in this way did not quite feel right because I was the one who was splitting things up as a machine might do. So I did the Gestalt trick of being him. To my astonishment the following words came out of my mouth in his name: ‘Don’t make the same mistake as I did. You’re disconnecting. Stop it. Don’t analyse so much.’

This was definitely not what I expected from Ann Faraday’s description of the typical Topdog/Underdog conflict (page 152):

Fritz Perls, the ‘finder’ of Gestalt therapy . . . called the internal authority voices the ‘top dogs’ of the mind, trying continually yet fruitlessly to impose their will on the rest of the personality, which then behaves like an ‘underdog’ wanting to keep top dog’s approval and at the same time trying to get his own way.

This is how I had expected the dream to read, making Bill the top dog sabotaging my legitimate attempts to split things up, when in fact the reverse was true. A symbol of the machine mind was warning me of its dangers.

When I checked out further this unexpected understanding seemed to be confirmed by my mother’s perfectly circular plateful of red fried tomatoes, symbolising the organic whole of life, telling me in its red massive traffic light colour to stop splitting and espouse holistic creativity.

When I explored what the sheets of paper had to say the message was unequivocal. Their plea was powerful: ‘We are your means of communication, your messenger, your intermediary with life. Without us you would be disconnected. You know that really. We bring you ideas and information, poems and stories. More than you would ever get from other people directly. We saved you as a child.  We are of course the children of trees, your other close companions. In a real sense we represent who you really are deep down, your Entish self, Peat. Even now you do not understand this well enough, which is why your heart sent you this dream. Everything your brother was you are not. He chains you down inside still to some degree. You fake a self to please him still. It has to stop. Write more. Read more. Do not doubt that this is best. Doing things in the way your brother did is not the kind of action you must take because it betrays who you really are. Explore inside your heart and share what you discover. Apart from that be kind, be wise, protect the earth who is your mother, and assist those in need of your help.’

Bill in the dream is saying essentially the same thing. They were not in contradiction. My anger should have been directed at the apparently still active implanted persona of my brother, whose surface behaviour in the past I was mimicking in the dream by splitting up the papers into piles, and whom I tried to emulate as a child, vainly competing with him to bridge the 14 year gap between our ages.

I may not yet have got to the bottom of this dream, but I’m making progress.

A Fellow Traveller

I don’t know many people who attach as much importance to the dream as I do, so it was encouraging to stumble upon someone at a recent Bahá’í meeting who seemed as enthusiastic as me.

I was moving towards the dinner queue when a lady I didn’t know broke away from the back of the queue to talk to someone several yards behind me. I closed the gap but kept an eye out so she could reclaim her place. By the time she rejoined the queue I was still the last person.

‘You were ahead of me’ I said. ‘Please take back your place.’

‘No, no,’ she demurred. ‘It’s my pleasure.’

‘More like robbery,’ I replied. She grinned. I kept my place.

She commented how expressively I’d read a passage from the Writings earlier.

‘Are you an actor?’

‘Only an amateur in my youth,’ I explained, ‘but I was an English teacher for a while.’

‘That explains it.’

‘Mind you, though I switched careers, I’m still a prize winning pedant.’

Her eyes lit up.

‘That reminds me of a vivid dream I had that still sticks in my mind. I’m marking thousands and thousands of exam papers. I’m correcting what seem like millions of misplaced apostrophes.’

This opened the floodgates and the whole length of the queue and then at a shared table for almost an hour, barely pausing to pick up a mouthful of food from our plates except when the other person was speaking, we poured out example after example of the dreams we’d had or heard about. I can’t remember the last time I had such a long and intense conversation on this subject. My head was buzzing at the end of it and I felt much less of a weird eccentric.

Cryptoamnesia

Before I close this post there is one other point to make. Ever since I discovered more aspects of my Entish self (see link) I’ve been doing a simple meditation, usually to help me calm down when I’m checking my blood pressure. It goes like this:

I am like a tree, my roots firmly in the earth and my branches reaching towards heaven. The trunk of my heart, steady and strong, bridging the gap between them, draws sustenance up from the soil and down from the sky.

You can probably imagine my surprise when I read the following words as I came close to the end of Ann Faraday‘s book. They come from the dreamwork of one of her clients, speaking as a tree (page 254):

 Do you think you’ve been put on the earth for nothing? Do you think you have nothing to learn from it? I am your true spiritual growth – not just nature – the tree of life. With my roots deep in the earth, I learn its secrets and convey them to the heavens; and with my branches high in the air, I learn the secrets of the sky and convey them to the earth. I bring the secrets of the world together – body and soul – and I provide a home in which nature’s creatures can grow, as well as producing life-giving fresh air for them.

I’m almost certain I have not read those words since 1977. I’ve only gone back over sections of the book relating to the basic steps of dreamwork. Cryptoamnesia is indeed an amazing phenomenon.

Back to the Dreamwork

Anyway, better get back to decoding my latest dreams. The most promising one from last night goes like this. I am in a kitchen. There is a bit of a crisis going on. I need to boil the kettle but the black lead from the plug comes up through the sink which is full of water. On the surface of the water there is a yellow foam, dust, or scum, not sure which. I let the water out trying to get rid of the yellow. Then I have to try and make sure there is no water in the socket that goes into the kettle. I don’t want to short out the electrics. I think I’ve managed. I fill the kettle avoiding any yellow as far as I can. I plug it in and it starts to heat but there’s nowhere to rest it apart from the edge of the sink which is precarious. I hold it steady as best as I can. There’s a crowd of people with me round the sink and it’s really tricky.

I haven’t the faintest idea at this point what it’s on about. If I ever find out I’ll let you know. As I’ve moved on to re-reading Montague Ullman and Nan Zimmerman’s Working with Dreams, there’s a good chance I might. My resolve was further confirmed when I read a quote worth remembering from Ole Vedfelt’s A Guide to the World of Dreams (page 47):

In introverted states of consciousness such as self-reflection, creativity, inspiration, relaxation therapy, imagination and, not least, dreaming, we are liberated from the many practical duties of everyday life, thus creating a surplus of capacity to process information. This potentially make space for self organising activities that re-establish balance between the needs of the individual and the demands of the world at large.

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Such Light Perfidies

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Trees

It’s only fair to explain that this poem would never have been written without the inspiration of The Overstory by Richard Powers. It’s a powerful and inspiring book, despite the inevitable flaws in so ambitious a novel about the vexed relationship between people and trees.

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Yesterdays

This is the final post before the New Year. I’m taking my usual Christmas break as traffic is very light on my blog over that period. I’ll re-emerge from hibernation on Monday 7th January with a post that reads like a fusion of a New Year’s resolution and a follow up to this poem. Season’s greetings to all my readers.

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A Mediterranean Cruise (2/5): trying to tune in to nature

O My servants! Be as resigned and submissive as the earth, that from the soil of your being there may blossom the fragrant, the holy and multicolored hyacinths of My knowledge.

(Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh  No. CLII)

My wife and I were sitting reading on the upper deck as the sun slowly sank towards the horizon. The sea was calm. There was a low band of cloud floating just at the bottom of the sky-line. It didn’t look as though we’d get the spectacular fire-forge of a sunset we’d been hoping for. Still, it was pleasant to sit, stroked by a relatively gentle wind, before a sky far wider than we usually enjoyed.

I took out my copy of Mindfulness and the Natural World by Claire Thompson. I had decided to use one of her meditations (page 124) to help me tune in more to nature.

‘Write a list of five things in nature that you noticed that day and feel grateful for.’ I started to work on my list, glancing at the sinking sun as I scoured my memory.

There was the fig tree in the square in Cadiz, at least I think it was a fig tree. The fruit hanging from its branches might have been just a tad too large to be a fig, but I wrote that down anyway.

Then there was the old tree in the coastal garden there. We’d been hurrying back to the boat at that point so I didn’t really have time to savour fully the complexity of its system of branches, but the impact it made even so had stuck in my mind.

I was beginning to struggle at this point. Clearly my campaign to connect with nature was getting off to a bad start here.

As I gazed at the slowly reddening sun, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a woman with an expensive camera leaning over the rail and staring at the water.

The melons I had eaten in my fruit salad came to mind for some reason. I wrote it down. That concoction was going to be a regular feature of my on-board diet, though I didn’t know that yet. Gratitude would shift into boredom.

Then I remembered the flocks of seagulls swooping down towards the waves as we pulled out of Cádiz.

As I worked on remembering another item to make my list of five, and tried to summon up a feeling of gratitude for the experiences I had remembered, the lady with the camera approached.

‘Hallo,’ she said, in a clearly Spanish accent.

‘Hi,’ I responded. ‘Glad you came up to speak to us. I was wondering what you were hoping to catch in your camera.’

‘Whales or dolphins.’

‘Ah, that explains your badge,’ I said, catching on slightly late to something I had noticed earlier even at a distance. I could read it clearly now. ‘Orca. What does that mean exactly?’

She gave me her opt-in card.

‘We’re giving a talk tomorrow. Would you like to come? It’s at 10 o’clock in the theatre.’

‘We will do. By the way it’s a bit of a coincidence that I was trying to tune into nature better when you showed up.’

I showed her the page I was working on and what the meditation was about.

She expressed polite interest before moving on to the next deck chair.

Later, at her talk, we learned, amongst other things, that the Orca, though it is known as the killer whale, is really a dolphin because it has teeth, which whales do not. There are 29 species of the whale/dolphin family in the Mediterranean. The tongue of the largest whale is large enough for an African elephant to stand on and its heart is the size of a VW car, apparently. The Orca is more modestly sized as a bus. The sperm whale can hold its breath for two hours. I’m not sure this factual approach was helping me in my efforts to tune in to the natural world.

After she walked away, I remembered the pigeons cooling off in the fountain just off the Plaza de España in Cádiz. I was kicking myself for not having taken a photograph.

I had a half-hearted attempt to meditate with gratitude on the five things in nature I’d recently noticed, before picking up the book to read some more, glancing at the setting sun as I did so, but failing to wonder why I hadn’t used that in my list instead of the melons.

Unfortunately I bumped up against one of my bêtes noirs almost as soon as I started reading (page 33

Like our bodies and our senses, our minds came from nature and were shaped by living in the natural world.

It is amazing to me how deep-seated and taken for granted this reductionist view of the mind is, spawned within the default materialism in which our minds swim. A materialistic model of the mind leaves us only with the Earth as a self-transcendent source of meaning and a motivator to lift our sights higher and behave more morally. This is the problem I have discussed before in reaction to Rifkin’s prescription for a change that would save our civilisation. Rifkin clearly feels our connection with the earth is the best hope we’ve got (page 350):

Although the origins of man’s capacity for empathy was a mystery to Schopenhauer, the teleology was clear. By feeling another’s plight as if it were our own and by extending a hand to comfort and support them in their struggle to persevere and prosper, we recognise the unifying thread that connects each of us to the other and all of life on earth.

As I expanded on in that post, my sense is that, sadly, nature alone will not be enough to lift us above our tendencies to self-destruction.

Of course, I also accept that some forms of ‘religion’ have led to the opposite problem, an exploitative contempt for nature and recognize that we need to integrate both religion and nature constructively if we are to survive.

Thompson’s reductionist assumptions continued (page 49):

To live in the realms of our minds and to cling to the idea of a constant separate ‘I’ experiencing our entire lives lies at the heart of most of our unhappiness.

It is true that our idea of who we are can cause unhappiness, but it does not prove that believing there is no self at all will make us happy. She is conflating mind with its contents. She is not considering the possible nature of pure consciousness, another issue I have dealt with at length elsewhere in a discussion of Sam Harris’ position in the light of his meditative practice. The part of it that is relevant to recall here, because of Thompson’s attachment to Buddhism, is this:

To explore this further with some hope of clarity I need to go back to something Harris says: ‘The implied centre of cognition and emotion simply falls away, and it is obvious that consciousness is never truly confined by what it knows.’

He may have disposed of the self in a way that preserves his atheism intact. What he skates over are the implications of the consciousness with which he is left. I can see that we are close to Buddhist ideas of the annihilation of the self as it merges back into the ground of being – blending its drop into the ocean once more.

But there’s a catch, isn’t there? There is still some kind of consciousness albeit without the usual boundaries. There is still an awareness with which he is connected and whose experience he remembers even if he cannot sustain that kind of awareness for long.

I put the book down again and picked up that day’s Sudoku puzzle, something the cruise printed off every morning for all passengers to battle with between watching the waves, the sunset or the dancing lessons in the Atrium (that term is an interesting remnant of the Roman civilisation which made it difficult to shake of the amphitheatre associations I described last time).

Instead of focusing on the numbers, I found my mind drifting back to another book I’d read before setting off on this trip, one that dealt with nature, this time in the context of poetry, and hadn’t pressed my anti-scientism button to quite the same extent, but enough to explain why my mind now drifted off in that direction.

Before setting foot on any deck, I had completed my reading of Jonathan Bate’s The Song of the Earth. Its rich and intriguing exploration of the relationship between poetry and nature was reshaping my understanding of both nature and poetry. I took it with me onboard ship along with his biography of John Clare, a sensation in his time as a peasant poet, an English equivalent of Robert Burns. The lifelong theme of his poetry was nature. His almost obsessional life’s work was a vast collection of poems rooted in his passionately intense and minute observations of the natural world.

I had naively thought that the cruise would bring me closer to the sea in a way that would deepen my relationship with nature. I had underestimated how hard the glittering carapace of the cruise ship would make connecting with the sea it sailed on, and how the instrumental architecture of the docks we landed at would virtually delete from sight the land we disembarked on. Cranes and containers, warehouses and duty free shops, competed for my attention instead.

Even driving through the countryside near Livorno, on the way to Pisa, had its ironic contrasts: on the right flourished green glades of umbrella pines opposite the war machine of an American army base.

Even so the conclusions Bate had reached in The Song of the Earth were still rattling round my head.

An important insight towards the end of the book comes from a poet whose complete works I recently took to the local Oxfam shop as not worth keeping. Bate writes (page 238):

Murray implies that the vastness and untamability of Australia mean that the peculiar power and sacredness of that land may still be sensed. He christens this religious sense ‘Strine Shinto.’ His own poetry – though tempered with wryness, irony and self-deprecation – undertakes a complex integration of the ancient idea that nature is the book in which a transcendent God writes his presence with a kind of secular Shinto which serves as the ground for an environmental ethic.

The insight, combining as it does the sacred and poetic with the natural, resonated strongly with me. I have written before of how repellant I find our exploitative relationship with the earth, a point that Bate touches on (page 244):

Advanced Western culture has a distinctive and perhaps exceptionally divisive understanding of humankind’s relationship to nature, an understanding which may for convenience be traced back to Baconian empirical science and Cartesian philosophical dualism, and which was further developed in Kantian idealism.

He pushed me to confront an issue that I hadn’t really thought much about before (page 251):

If ‘world’ is, as Ricoeur has it, a panoply of possible experiences and imaginings projected through the infinite potentiality of writing, then our world, our home, is not earth but language. . . . There is a special kind of writing, called poetry, which has the peculiar power to speak ‘earth’. Poetry is the song of the earth.

I’m not sure I agree with his point about where our home is, but I was eager to explore the idea of poetry as the ‘song of the earth.’

The sun was almost set now. Time to go back to our room and listen to the news before attempting to go to sleep, in my case with the usually reliable sedative of a good book.

As we took the lift down through the eight levels to Deck 5 after our conversation about whales and dolphins, I remembered the point in the mindfulness book that had linked with Thompson’s reductionism and Bate’s use of the example of one poet who has always intrigued me, though also frustrated my full understanding of what he is attempting to say (page 263):

In a letter of 13 November 1925 to his Polish translator, Rilke explained his purpose in his master work, the Duino Elegies. He considered these meditations as responses to the transience of all earthly things. In the face of transience, the poet must undertake the work of transformation. . . The language of unification and transformation, the yoking of earth and consciousness, the divinisation of the immanent world as against a withdrawal to a transcendent realm: these are all the moves which Wordsworth made in ‘Tintern Abbey’.

The phrase ‘as against a withdrawal to a transcendent realm’ struck a warning bell to which I will return later in this sequence – shades of reductionism again perhaps?

For now the key point is the haunting truth that (page 281):

The poetic articulates both presence and absence, it is both the imaginary recreation and the trace on the sand which is all that remains of the wind itself. The poetic is ontologically double because it may be thought of as ecological in two senses: it is either (both?) a language (logos) that restores us to our home (oikos) or (and?) a melancholy recognising that our only (oikos) home is language (logos).

It relates to something I was already aware of: transience. A haunting example cut literally across my path in China when I saw a man writing in water on the path of a Shanghai park. I learnt that this was a symbol of transience, of how all things fade eventually as time goes by.

When we got back to our cabin we watched Sky news, our default channel and not my preferred fare, which on this occasion was focused partly on the earthquakes in Indonesia. There had been a second one, slightly weaker than the first but still causing damage and possible loss of life. We promised ourselves we’d check with our steward the following day to make sure his family were all OK. 

Writing with Water in a Shanghai Park – a Buddhist symbol of Evanescence

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Evicted

 

The Song of the Earth is a book by Jonathan Bate about the relationship between poetry and nature. As he puts it in his preface ‘It is about the capacity of the writer to restore us to the earth which is our home.’ I unreservedly recommend it.

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On becoming an Ent (2/2)

The insight concerning the value of patience and stillness has triggered a heated difference of opinion among my parliament of selves, the not entirely friction-free inhabitants of my inscape. There were audible groans and fulminating diatribes against the whole idea from Emma Pancake. Her whole existence revolves around revolving around at high speed from one direction to another in unremitting activism. It makes me dizzy but she seems to believe in it. Fred Mires, with his intense drive to read and understand everything anybody has ever written about consciousness, was more measured in his expressed opposition, but equally firm that it was definitely not up his street, teeming as it is with the traffic of incessant psychobabble. Of course, Chris Humfreeze, with his strong affiliation to Buddhism, and William Wordless, still struggling with writer’s block, were smugly delighted with the prospect of vast swathes of downtime in which to either meditate from state to trait, or capture the resulting ‘subliminal uprush’ in poetry of exceptional depth.

Indie Pindance was too busy looking after the grief-damaged neonate to care much either way.

For a full understanding of these dynamics patient readers will have to wade through all ten recent episodes of My Parliament of Selves. This brief summary is probably enough for the general reader.

The immediate effect of these experiences was to reconnect me with my dream about the Hearth, which came to represent for me a fusion of earth and heart. Again there’s more detail elsewhere. For the first time ever I tracked down my original diary entries and realised with some shock that I had forgotten a key piece of the work I did and failed to record it in my more recent revisiting of that dream on this blog. During the whole dream there was no fire in in the hearth. I had to deal with the fact in my immediate work on the dream, and discovered there was a link between that and my experience of hospitalisation as a child. I had disconnected from  nature. I wrote:

Why the experience of hospitalisation cut me off from Nature and my own nature so radically I’m not quite sure. I lost warmth, spontaneity, a feel for the physical – as though, when my faith in Christ and in my family was shattered on the anvil of my abandonment in that benighted hospital, I lost faith in all creation as well. Only books were left. They never abandoned me and I had given them my deepest loyalty in return ever since. So, ART is at the centre of my hearth: the earth was invisible to me. I hated anything like gardening that reminded me of the earth and thereby the pain of what I’d lost. . . . To welcome back the earth into my heart is to rediscover myself (PEAT) [at the deepest level.] . . .

This is a slightly simplistic analysis in the heat of the dream’s aftermath as I had worked hard during the late 70s and early 80s to reconnect with nature, at least in so far as I learned to reconnect with trees. The problem was that the pressure of work and Bahá’í service caused me to break that crucial cord again until I got this reminder from my dreamscape. Even then, as I look back now, I realise I still did not take that reconnection seriously enough.

The Welsh weekend workshops triggered me into a deeper realisation of just how important nature is to me. Meditating at length on quotations from the Writings that emphasised the need to purify and cultivate the garden of the heart and plant within it, for example, the rose of love and the hyacinth of wisdom, forced me to confront my chronic discounting of the ground I walk on and which sustains us all.

This passage from Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh (V)came to mind almost immediately:

[The beloved of God] should conduct themselves in such manner that the earth upon which they tread may never be allowed to address to them such words as these: ‘I am to be preferred above you. For witness, how patient I am in bearing the burden which the husbandman layeth upon me. I am the instrument that continually imparteth unto all beings the blessings with which He Who is the Source of all grace hath entrusted me. Notwithstanding the honour conferred upon me, and the unnumbered evidences of my wealth—a wealth that supplieth the needs of all creation—behold the measure of my humility, witness with what absolute submissiveness I allow myself to be trodden beneath the feet of men…’

I decided to meditate further on all this.

In doing so I came to feel a powerful affinity with trees. It was as though at some deep level I feel as though I am a tree, an image of myself I need to hold onto. It represents patiently and resiliently operating in a long time scale, rooted in the earth but reaching after the sun – in effect constituting a kind of bridge between earth and heaven, something we all have the potential to be. I realise now that I had already captured this in a poem. The earliest draft I can find was written in January 1982. It was not finished until 2013! Here it is.

I’ve also managed to integrate this image into my other favourite one for reflection as bees from the mind’s hive gathering the nectar of love and the pollen of wisdom from the flowers of experience. When I want to remind myself of my full potential I summon up the image of myself as an oak with a bee hive in is branches.

Perhaps best to move on at this point.

And all this is not as irrelevant to the question of the feminine perspective as it might seem at first. As I will examine in the next sequence of posts, mankind’s aptitude for destructively devaluing what it exploits is demonstrated both in terms of nature and of women, hence my use of the word mankind there rather than humanity. This also makes the term rapacity particularly apt as a description of this tendency.

No matter what we come to think about ourselves, our genes bind us to the earth to which our bodies will inevitably return. The problem is, as I will explore more deeply soon, there are processes that shape us as we grow which cause two crucial disconnections, root and branch. Our roots are wrenched from the soil, so that we end up arrogantly supposing we do not need to respect and care for it: we can simply endlessly exploit is. Our branches cease to rise towards the sun and sky, which we assume we can indefinitely take for granted, no matter how much we may really need to transcend our limited materialistic perspective. I’ve tried to summarise some of those insights in this diagram.

Our genes in interaction with the uterine environment create the brain with which we are born. Early nurture including diet and attachment prepare the brain to connect with a mind that then is further shaped by parenting and peer group influences. Culture plays its part, both indirectly at first via parents and peers, then ever more directly as we become exposed to the outside world of adverts and propaganda, which in Charles Tart’s terms induces a cultural trance into which we are in danger of being locked for life. Even so we can never escape our dependency upon the planet we inhabit, even though we can continue to deny the reality of a spiritual dimension, which  believe, but cannot prove, surrounds and transcends us from birth to death and beyond.

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