Thinking About Thinking

19/05/2019 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

This may sound like digging a spade with a spade or mixing clouds – confusing.

But thinking is a tool and like all tools it needs to be made of high quality materials and regularly maintained.

Thinking was not taught in schools and places of further education. Perhaps it is on the National Curriculum now? If it is not and I was a parent I would want to know why. Because thinking is perhaps the most important of all acquired and learnt skills. Not only because it governs our whole perception of events and things we call – reality – but because it has the tendency to pretend it is not there.

Like a fish swimming in the sea, if you asked it where the sea was, it would not know.

The nearest we get to any sort of scientific reality is through ‘rational’ thought. To be rational is to use logic as a device in which information is chosen to be from a credible source, tested in every manner possible and judged to be useful or not.

Here are some of the ways of thinking that are problematic;

Filtering: when information is presented the thinker chooses either consciously or unconsciously the facts which fit the thinkers prior beliefs.

For example: a person develops a hatred towards a religion and it’s followers. Events around the world which reflect badly on those who may or may not represent that religion, are used as examples justifying extreme behaviour.

Polarisation: Dualistic thought considers only the two extremes of something that in reality has a million levels of degree. An action can be judged as bad when in fact it has some good effects. To judge how far along the see-saw between good and bad is complex and sometimes impossible.

For example: Criminals are sent to jail for an act that is perceived as ‘bad’. If Adolph Hitler had been murdered to stop the war early, was that a ‘bad’ act?

Over-generalisation: The thinker arrives at a conclusion based on sparse or selected facts. The saying ‘one swallow does not make a summer’ describes this. Sometimes political correctness will leap on one very minor aspect of a statement or action and generalise this into something much greater than it is.

For example a group of young girls wearing unsuitable clothing and footwear attempt to climb a mountain; get lost and have to be rescued suffering from hypothermia. Afterwards the politically correct Authorities revue whether to close access to the mountain for reasons of safety.

Mind Reading: Without their saying so, the thinker assumes to know what people are feeling and why they do what they do. This may be particularly directed towards how others feel about you.

For example someone you think of as a friend ignores you when you pass them in the street. You feel offended and decide to cut them out of your friendship circle. In reality they are short sighted (which you did not know about) and on this particular day they were not wearing their contact lenses and therefore did not recognise you.

Catastrophising: The thinker suffers from emotional fears which tell them to ‘expect the worse’. These type of emotional demons can be learnt in an unbalanced way from watching or reading tragic news reported from anywhere in the world. These events are not representative of the thinkers personal risks but never the less influence their decisions.

For example: A plane crashes in on the other side of the world the day before someone frightened of flying is due to fly. They cancel their ticket and take the train. The fact that air travel is the safest method of travel per mile, is ignored.

Personalisation: Another individual, often in authority, makes a decision that affects the thinker in a way that displeases them. The thinker does not refute the actions / decisions of the authority figure with reasoned debate. Instead the thinker personalises matters. In this way they move the debate from a subject they are less likely to win to won that may allow the thinker to ‘triumph’.

For example: A politician decides to allow the building of a nuclear power station contrary to the wishes of the local people. At a public meeting they pillory the politician over his or her personal conduct and private life.

Control Fallacies: You are Under Control

The thinker may feel that they are in a situation over which they have no control. This can lead them to feeling stressed and unable to escape.

For example; A person believes that the authorities are monitoring their behaviour using technology for sinister reasons. This is fictionalised as ‘Big Brother’.

Control Fallacies: You are In Control

The thinker feels that they are responsible for the pain, happiness or other feelings of those around.

For example the hostess of a dinner party is distraught when two of the guests have an argument in the garden.

To be continued…

Caterpillar Sheds his Skin

17/05/201917/05/2019 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

The marble table in the centre of the kitchen is gleaming. You make a note to compliment Mrs. Caterpillar – the housekeeper – how well she keeps the servants busy cleaning and polishing.

For you have been the butler in this fine and noble house for as long as you can remember. You sit now, at the kitchen table with a copy of yesterday’s Time’s (that your master discarded) a warm coffee and rather tasteless cigarette. It is seven o’clock in the morning and the kitchen staff will be down soon to prepare breakfast. But for the moment all is quiet.

Above you are seven brass bells are linked to thin wires that travel across the ceiling and up. Each bell is labelled in gold script with the name of a room.

Before we going any further, bemused yet interested reader, know that the house in which you sit is yourself; your physical body and all the aspects of self that you experience as ‘being alive’.

The first three bells relate to the three rooms commanding your instinctual behaviour. Your body mind unity has many instinctual needs and of all the bells, this one summons you the most – or at least it seems that way. They are characterised as demanding immediate gratification whether it be the alleviation of pain, sleep or hunger. Sometimes they are craving pleasure associated with sex or relaxation. The bells are labelled in accordance with the three base chakras (which the master learnt about during his service in the Army for the West India Company). They are named Root chakra, Sacral chakra and Solar Plexus chakra

And as if these were not demanding enough, there are four more.

The next in line is the one labelled Heart chakra. In a way, this one is the most important and yet most difficult to satisfy. When you enter this room and enquire politely after the reason for your attendance, the master or mistress is likely to be experiencing either pleasing or difficult emotions. The pleasing are generally rewarding and include happiness and contentment. The less positive will present as states of anxiety or extreme disquiet as a result of some injustice, frustration, jealousy, annoyance and many others.

Each one has to be dealt with head on and care taken for the matter in hand to be explored thoroughly and in the presence of other parties involved, if possible. Failure to work through these emotions to an acceptable conclusion to all, can lead to problems. The master has been known to order you to lock a troublesome feeling in one of the large cupboards – to be ignored. When in there, experience tells you that it will grow and emerge even more strongly and therefore more troublesome. Emotions tempt your master and mistress into behaviour which is clearly ‘risky’ whether it involves amorousness and romance, gambling, cocained addiction and much, much worse.

The next bell is labelled Throat chakra. This is the room where all communication goes on. There are comfortable chairs for sitting and smoking after dinner for the gentlemen. The ladies occupy another room in which to withdraw, where considerable conversation takes place on topics which the men are generally totally unaware.

The conversations in these rooms are contained within the room as silent speech or as we say, ‘thoughts’. They can take over your time with alarming ease and rapidity often in the middle of the night. Little or no benefit is likely to occur from this obsession with thinking and chattering, but still it goes on.

The last two bells are the rooms which interest you most; although being called there is regrettably all too uncommon.

They are labelled the Third Eye chakra and Crown chakra. You might expect these rooms to be occupied mostly on religious festivals and Sundays, but this is not the case at all. When the master and mistress enter these rooms they do so generally in complete silence. In this condition and in a slightly melancholy atmosphere tinged by the musty smell coming from the peeling wallpaper where it meets the ceiling and the roof above, here great self discoveries are made. It is as if not only the combined knowledge and experience of those in the room come into conscious understanding and therefore ‘guidance’; but the whole knowledge and experience of the community at large – indeed the whole world – is here.

All of the above illustrates in metaphor the position that we occupy in our early lives in relation to our body mind complex. It is hard to get to grips with and involves a lot of running around. Fortunately the energy of youth makes these huge tasks just about manageable – although you are aware that there are some of your peers for whom the tasks become too difficult. They withdraw into a sort of mechanical relationship with the world and their fellow occupants of the world – whom they blame for most of their own shortcomings.

Now as in all tales told by the masterful story tellers of the past, there is a twist – an unexpected turn – as in life, the road very occasionally takes a sideways impromptu step or about turn.

Here in your house, where you thought you were the butler, something extraordinary happens. As you peer over the top of your Times newspaper one morning, you observe yourself unexpectedly sitting in the master’s high backed leather chair. The pipe resting on the ivory holder next to you, curls a wisp of luxurious perfume and tempts you to take another draught of it’s smoky elixir.

With both shock and satisfaction in equal measure, you realise that you have either become the master of the house or have in fact, been the master all along and failed to realise it.

And there is Mdme. Butterfly, your wife now, sat opposite, threading a needle into a circle of cream canvass stretched on a mahogany frame. Several of her colourful depictions of your favourite flowers, adorn the wall behind her.

Sun enters the room, as if to sweep the colour from the exquisite Persian rugs into the air. You feel exalted, ecstatic even – and only the ardour of your parallel experience ‘downstairs’ prevents you from rising at will to the ceiling.

You have experienced what psychologist’s term ‘individuation’ – become a collection of part’s united – a whole being.

Slowly, tentatively, tortuously you reach across the rich velvet arm of your chair for the tasselled bell chord. You wonder;

‘Is there anybody there?’

Love Your Brother and Sister Humans

16/05/201916/05/2019 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

Once again the lawyers and politicians are going around in circles.

For in the United Kingdom a cross party group of MPs have had a go at defining Islamaphobia ( a word not contained in my Word spell check!)

Before looking at this definition it is worth thinking back a year or so when we were treated to the spectacle of Teresa May and advisers thinking up a definition of Anti-Semitism. This at a time when hatred of Muslims was a far more important problem.

Perhaps the group of MP’s missed a trick. A school child might think that to define Islamaphobia you substitute the word ‘Islam’ for ‘Hebrew’ in the Anti-Semitism definition.

Not a moment too late has the spot light now moved onto our Muslim brothers and sisters who are suffering hatred in the UK and other countries, in a way that the Jews were targeted in Nazi Germany.

It is good someone has the intelligence to write a definition of what is the problem. This is the first step to the review of existing laws and any supplementary or new UK legislation.

Here is what the cross-party group came up with;

‘Islamaphobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.’

Here is the first test of the statement. Let’s change the religion in question.

‘Christianaphobia is rooted in racism and is the type of racism that targets expressions of Christianness or perceived Christianness.’

So the attack on the congregation in Christ Church New Zealand was racist? I think not.

Consider for a moment what racism is, since it is being included in the definition in question.

It appears that there are numerous definitions; made more confusing the ‘ethnicity’ being considered the same as ‘race’.

My contribution to this word play would be to suggest that there is only one race, the human race. This is split by ethnic difference based on environmental, genetic, cultural, linguistic and other fundamental factors.

So here is what the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination said;

The term “racial discrimination” shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction, or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin that has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.

If this definition were adopted into UK law then the signs at airports instructing EU Members to queue here and all the rest to queue there – would be illegal.

Fortunately gender and race are universal constants and in my view, nothing to do with prejudice based on ethnicity or religion.

Taking a step back from what we are discussing here is the unpleasant aspect of being ‘human’ – hatred of ‘the other’.

As members of the human race to our shame we have a long history of dividing ourselves up into tribes or villages or clans or nationalities or supporters of a football team and seen this as reason enough to wage war on ‘the others’.

All the prejudice in the world is an expression of intolerance towards other humans.

It’s expression ranges on a scale from minor to major. Football hooligans are at the pathetic end of the scale and fascist government leaders at the other. In between is all the prejudice – hidden and open – that we carry within ourselves.

Hatred based on religion is therefore simply another expression of intolerance ranging between sour looks to beheading.

My definition of Islamaphobia would be;

Hatred of Muslims

Now can we get down to the real problem? Because until a child steps forward to take over the role of Prime Minister, no single person appears to see the problem with any clarity.

The head of the National Police Chiefs Council, Martin Hewitt, is dismayed at the vagueness of the definition. He believes it will cause confusion and hamper the effectiveness of the police against minor and serious crimes motivated by religious hatred.

In law, precise definitions produce laws which are executable.

If I had any advice for the devout of any religion, it would be to remove all cultural affectations in dress and any other public signification of your personal beliefs. Put these items on in the place of worship if it makes you feel more comfortable.

Hitler had to identify Jews by ordering the placing of a yellow star of David on their dress. To preserve your dignity and safety – I would advise not to make it easy for the biggots.

When the time and place is right – in a tolerant society – freedom of religious expression will be protected.

To base new laws on eliminating hatred is in my view to start at the wrong end of the stick. I believe the best way to introduce tolerance is to introduce love, as well as eliminate hatred. One cannot exist without the other but we can at least set the balance straight. So this debate is not just for the law makers, it is for all the humans.

Raise a hand if you are a human!

Boring into Boring

14/05/201914/05/2019 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

My inspiring English teacher, ‘Windy’ Gale, fixed the aphorism

There are no dull subjects, only dull mind

to the classroom wall.

This supported my own attitude to life of keeping myself perpetually busy. I was an inventor or games amongst my childhood peers and a ‘meddle Sir Mattey’ on protracted visits to grandparents. My grand mother didn’t like her clothes mangle taken to pieces and reassembled in a novel way. But I was busy.

Teenage is the classic period in one’s life for being ‘bored’ – that is entering a state of inaction due to lack of stimulation. This state of inactivity is induced by mental and socio-environmental factors. It is mostly found in predominantly ‘inactive’ people who rely on external forms of stimulation. Their minds have become dull – uninterested in the apparently, uninteresting.

If and when we realise a need to change, then it is down to the individual to break out. Proactivity rarely produces boredom.

Psychologists nominate the state of boredom as a ‘feeling’.

If people, places and / or events induce a state of inactivity in us, then we ‘feel’ bored. This may explain why boredom is hard to identify at first. We will then need to understand it’s causes and take control in order to move out of it’s influence.

A classic way of doing this can be seen in the interaction between a parent and young child. Children often require a boost from outside themselves. They just run out of steam (attention span) and need support. Any or all of the people-place-event factors, need to be manipulated by the parent to provide stimulus to the child to prevent it drifting into a state of boredom.

Does this pattern disappear through adolescence and into adulthood? I fear that as adults, many of us today become even more stuck in the reliance for external stimulation. If you question adults about a simple activity like ‘going to the beach’ – many will reply that they don’t do it because they find it ‘boring’. The beach is a place which indeed provides limited stimulation. In it’s simplest natural state there is just a large volume of empty sky, empty sea and (on a quiet day) – an empty beach.

But if you took a child to this place they would be filled with excitement. Think for a moment of your own endless hours of pleasure spent as a child on a beach…often with hardly any play things, just what nature provided.

Something has happened in our modern Western societies that leaves adults unable to be proactive when the external stimulation of people, place and events is limited to say, ‘a beach’. Late nineteenth century sea-side resorts in the United Kingdom, evolved and thrived on their ability to provide stimulation such as Punch and Judy shows and donkey rides. Today the ‘amusements’ are multiple and complex. You might think that there really is no excuse for being bored on a beach, but apparently there is.

Leo Tolstoy defined boredom as ‘a desire for desires’. I do not agree with this definition as I have already described boredom as a ‘reactive’ rather than a ‘proactive’ state – which surely desire is. The powerful emotion that ‘desire’ is hardly produces any relief from boredom because it is ill equipt to do so. Desires are either realistic or unrealistic and both can be frustrated and denied for reasons out of an individual’s control. This realisation prompted the detached mental state associated with Buddhist philosophy. Sorry Leo old boy, but you are behind the times.

Life has a habit of placing you in a situation that you cannot control or choose. In the nineteenth century you might have to work long hours in a factory for very little reward. There might be a day’s outing to the sea side once a year to relieve the boredom – but that was it.

Factory work is, by definition, repetitive, which is an obvious and common cause of boredom.

I recently took a flight with a well known air line where the cabin crew had a sort of comedy routine to read out.

It was unfunny and in places, in bad taste; ‘the company’s priority is making money over safety‘. Yes, passengers were meant to laugh at that, at a time when Boeing 737 Max 8 airliners are grounded following two fatal crashes.

It appeared to me that the routine was for the benefit of the cabin crew rather than the passengers, because the cabin crew were, well – bored. Can you imagine doing that safety routine with the life jacket and exits, over and over again? Yet these are people who self selected the work as it was ‘exciting’ to travel. Well clearly it isn’t; it gets boring. The people, the places and the events don’t provide sufficient novelty. It’s like a play in which there is only one act, one actor and one set. Life can feel like ‘Waiting for Godot’.

Like all emotions we repress them. Apparently psychologists have discovered that after ‘anger’, boredom is the most repressed emotion.

Even the most proactive, inventive, creative, unpredictable mind finds itself at times running down the endless sets that appear in cartoons like ”Tom and Jerry‘. Or like the scene in The Matrix movie where the character Leo finds himself on an all-white platform, waiting for a train. When he runs down the tunnel he returns to the same platform. Life has this quality in spades and we have to learn to deal with it. We all get bored, even the most active of us.

Psychologists define five levels of boredom ranging from ‘indifferent boredom’ to ’empathic boredom’. They are scalar between one and five. If you wish to know more look here;

I would add that boredom should not be confusded with being frustrated. Being frustrated is like waiting in a queue that hardly moves, in a supermarket or airport. Being bored goes deeper than that as it drills into our emotional state and brings us uncontrollably down, down, down.

This might be why children and adolescents, scream so loudly when boredom hits them between the ribs. For them it’s not always easy to get active – the only known cure. They usually do not have the power to change the cast, the set and the story line in the play of life in which they find themselves.

But sometimes you have to wonder, how much of ‘I’m bored’ or ‘are we there yet’ is down them to find a way out of the boredom pit.

I listened to an account on the radio of a female journalist Zehra Dogan, who is an Kurd and an artist working in southern Turkey. She painted the war zone as she saw it and was imprisoned by the Turkish authorities. In jail, her friends and family sent her art materials but these never reached her.

So the journalist / artist made art on bits of bed clothes that she bleached so that the guards did not recognise them. She used coffee, tea, blood and no doubt tears as her medium for expression. In all she was able to take out 300 pieces of work when she was released, which now form a major exhibition.

With the right state of mind, I believe that most humans can overcome the most extreme deprivation by being active. This natural state of mind is what children, teenagers and many adults benefit from being able to conjure; for the world can and will stop spinning for you– if you let it or can’t stop it.

It takes the super hero or heroine to start the world up again but I believe that power is contained within us all because there are no dull subjects.

Looking Through the Glass

07/05/201907/05/2019 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

OK, look out of the window and tell me what you see.

I see some fields and trees and a couple of cows.

Think carefully. Tell me what is the first thing you see.

The fields.

Wrong. The first thing you see when you look out of any window is glass.

This little exchange may sound pedantic but it crudely illustrates how we ignore the way we perceive the world. Sweeping short cuts are made during the process of perception in order to to establish some sort of certainty of what is out there, for our deaf and blind brains.

The next logical step in this line of thought, is to consider how many other things we do not see, whether they be ideas or physical things.

I would argue that there are many more than we believe.

Take technological ‘evolution’. I avoid the word progress because there are examples of new technologies that were a step backwards rather than forward. The release of energy from matter in nuclear fission for instance, creates as many horrors as quick fixes for warfare or the provision of electrical power.

Nobody votes for new technology. One day you are sitting on the sofa eating your dinner when, on the news, they are demonstrating a car that drives itself. Or you are a farmer in nineteenth century England and suddenly you hear you neighbour starting up his new tractor.

These changes to our lives come about as if by stealth. Generally they are considered benign – that is the benefits out weigh the problems. The fact that all new technology is by definition ‘untried’ is something that neither proves nor denies a problem exists, in the present or future. So it is allowed to be produced.

The mobile phone, for instance, has revolutionised many people’s lives. Even children as young as three are given them. And yet there remains a question mark over the emission of microwave energy and the effect it has on young and adult brains. At present the young are thought to be particularly at risk because their brains are developing. Making a phone call in a car for instance, is the same as putting food in a microwave cooker, only it’s not food being cooked – it’s you and your family. Because this background energy has been with us for over a generation, it is not possible to establish a ‘control group’ to measure the development of brains. There are no humans alive now, who have lived without a constant background of microwave energy.

Of course there are checks and balances at work in various committees in Universities where research is done. Also government organisations monitor and grant licences to new technologies. The ethical concerns, the effect on other systems such as the environment, sustainability, disposability, carbon footprint etc. are just a few of the concerns applied to new technological developments.

The problem is not all countries judge new technology in the same way. If there is a political, monetary or social ‘quick gain’ to be made through say, shale gas fracking, then some country somewhere is going to do it.

And if in the eighteenth century what happened on the other side of the world didn’t matter because it was too far away; this century has no choice but to think global.

The trails of diesel exhaust from ships crossing oceans can be seen from space. Imported goods do not arrive without an environmental price tag.

It is as if technology has a mind of it’s own – and in the next few decades it will quite literally– using 5G and the ‘internet of things’.

But without innovative technologies, the planet would not be supporting the present human population. The number of people pre-industrial revolution, was small. England had about four million citizens when horses ploughed fields. Now there are over seventy million.

But new technology is not the only object seen in the window. Remember the glass.

And it might not be a new technology that is about to alter the course of your life fundamentally. There are numerous ‘low balls’ that could change everything tomorrow. For instance there might be a series of powerful solar mass ejections, bombarding earth with cosmic rays so strong that the earth’s protective magnetosphere gives way. Computer systems go down, power grids and machinery of all kinds are cooked.

Trusted technologies, reveal that they have been trusted too much. The impossible or ‘once in a thousand year event’, happens. Then mankind realises it had not seen the glass in the window.

The earth is a space craft and like all complex systems they are fine until they break down. Then back up systems have to be activated and emergency plans initiated…if they exist.

In the case of planet earth they do not. A ‘survivalist’ shelter designed for two weeks, two months or even two years, will eventually either be discovered or run out of supplies before the re-population even begins. Mad Max doesn’t even come close to the post apocalypse chaos.

The question for the present generation and for those yet to be born is;

‘what are the blind spots in our modern lifestyle that could leave human population exposed to near elimination and what is the back up plan to each eventuality?’

Governments, committees, industrialists, academics scientific researchers and technological inventors and innovators are our modern day ‘dictators’. You won’t be voting whether to survive disaster or not. Your trusted leaders just won’t have seen it coming because they too were looking through the glass, like Alice.

Let Them Eat Happiness

04/05/201904/05/2019 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

Western culture has come a long way since it was ruled by royals and aristocrats – or has it?

Few French peasants would have even glimpsed the lifestyle of the immensely rich and powerful in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They would have been unaware of what really went on behind the iron gates of Louis 14th’s palace at Versailles. The mirror lined rooms and the golden corridors of power might have well have been in another dimension.

Eventually the Aristo’s and the royals have lost much of their wealth and most of their power. The wealthy industrialists took on their mantle in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the West. Instead of taking taxes from the poor, they stripped nature and nations, and occupied the masses (and their children) in factories.

With their acquired wealth, they built mansions set in Inigo Jones style gardens, just as the elite before them had. They bought military commissions, titles and honours and entered parliament. Power too, was for sale. It was a different game but with the same lust for money and dominion over others, as played by the royals.

In the twenty first century there is an awakening to these processes as having been outrageously ‘unfair’. There appear to be glimmers of similarity between the Gillet jaune and the revolutionists of the French Revolution. No guillotine’s yet but this revolution has only just begun. Perhaps it is a Gilletine.

This time round, the capitalists and the so called ‘elite’ are in the firing sights of the missiles from the streets. The possession of most of the wealth by the few, reverberates around the internet like a pin ball in a crazy machine; lit up with flicking levers, lights and cartoon graphics. How can it be fair, we are asked, that the ‘elite’ have so much money? Are they killing off the humans to save the planet using fluoride, chem trails and advice to avoid vaccination? Lies and suspicion are great hunting dogs.

Confucius; he says, ‘when the duck puts his head above the reeds in the hunting season, he had better be ready to be shot at.’

For just as the Sun King and the royal families of Europe were human enough to be pulled kicking and screaming from their palaces, so are the modern elite.

The injustice and the irony of the lessons of history are obvious, but a working alternative is not. Even an establishment introduced by the anarchist rioters, is an establishment; ergo the Soviet Union. If a hundred anarchists met in a town square to tell the masses to get rid of their leaders, there would appear amongst the anarchists, a leader.

Philosophically and scientifically it is true, that to every force there is an equal and opposite reaction. So when you put on your black anarchist costume and mask and join the ‘anonymous’ mob to riot, what is the problem you are trying to solve?

The problems of the French or Russian peasant made a long list; no clothes, no health, no food, no water, no home, no land, no animals, no day off etc.

The problems of modern westerners is none of the above as they have it all; health, food, transport, leisure, labour saving technology etc.

The problem appears to me therefore to be no longer external, but in the mind. It is built on the number one illusion in the hall of mirrors, that ‘money equals happiness’. We know this isn’t true but we still pursue it and want to be rich. The lines of people buying lottery tickets from the street vendors where I live in Spain, are an indication of the pursuit of wealth as being perceived as the same as the pursuit of happiness. Or just peep over the pond at the great USA and it’s everywhere in their way of life.

The pantheon of the Ancient Greek gods, has been replaced with so called ‘political elite’ and ‘celebrities’. Vane and pointless people who have had the luck of being in the right place at the right time, self promote on social media. They spread the myth that everything on their side of the palace (or Big Brother) wall is great. Instead of hiding, in the manner of the royals, aristocrats and industrialists, they tease the rest of us with videos and photos of their material success and happiness.

Even when the mascara is smudged with tears, even when cancer eats away the golden vocal chords, the golden divorce unfolds, the assasins bullet richochets amongst the pillars of the halls of power; the masses worship their sacrificed gods. And should an over dose of some not-so-whizzy drug, close down the not-so-happy participant in the great party of celebrity life, selective memories promote the deceased as a greater god for being dead. Goodbye Norma Jeane.

And yet, as long as two thousand years ago, a man said;

I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

For if you change the problem from ‘not being rich’ or ‘others should not have riches’ or ‘I want power’ or ‘I want what he’s got’ or ‘give me what I am owed’ or ‘they spoilt everything for me’ or ‘I just want what I deserve’ or ‘you can make me happy, why don’t you’ or ‘if only I was rich’ –

to; ‘how can I be eternally happy?’ then that is an easier problem to solve. Most of the historical examples of people who became eternally happy did so by giving away their possessions and gave love to others. Well documented examples would be Prince Sidhartha, Jesus the Christ, Vishnu and Kali, Mother Teresa, St Francis of Assisi.

Lesser known examples are the monks, nuns, non- government agency relief workers, public servants, healers, charity workers, environmental activists, street sleepers, the wanderers and people who you may know personally.

We may not all be saints, and perhaps those posthumously awarded sainthood were not either, but we can aspire to share what we have, however much or little that may be.

The non-self centred may not hit the news headlines, they may not be seen in a queue for a lottery ticket, they may not self promote like politicians, they may not stand up against the politicians, they may not have flashy cars and houses or go for golden globes – but they exist.

Their happiness is not necessarily in this life time or even the next, but they will have seen over the wall into the garden of Paradise. It is not on this earth for this globe is not, and never will be, ‘golden’. It is but a shadow of the real Paradise where there is no chaos, no illusion, no entropy and certainly, no lottery.

Matters Blog

Original thoughts on a variety of subjects that matter to me

Month: May 2019