Blog Posts, Cultural Issues, History, Meaning, New Ideas, Reality, Science, Sudha's Art, Uncategorized

Polymath

Having multiple talents and pursuing them in the marketplace, is it a blessing or a curse? I have a number of interests and have invested time in each of them and have achieved a level of proficiency in several of these pursuits. Does this entitle me to express these in the marketplace as vocations or does one have to limit oneself to a single professional calling?

My experience in the marketplace, with this quandary, is that most people wish to associate you with one thing (whether this is a reflection of their own simplicity in this matter is another question). I find that there can be an initial dropping off of respect, from potential clients, when they are informed of my multiplicity in this regard. So in many circumstances I remain mum, when discussing their needs and requirements, so as not to disrupt their professional equanimity when doing business with them. This can be frustrating when watching them make mistakes that could be avoided, but I suppose this is often the case anyway, as we all want to do things our own way and learn most from our own mistakes.

We are all familiar with the term, ‘Jack of all trades,’ I would posit, and that this is often used in the pejorative sense, as it is followed by the rejoinder, ‘Master of none.’ Is this saying a result of the sour grapes felt by the the majority of people, who have no second string to their bow, or is it based on some verifiable truth in the matter? Of course the world has greatly changed since the first coining of this, ‘so called,’ kernel of wisdom, and singular professional vocations have gone, to a substantial extent, the way of the dodo. A vast percentage of people are now forced by economic circumstances to pursue a second or third means of employment; but these are most often jobs not vocations.

When I was reading about the renaissance in sixteenth century Europe, I suddenly thought, ‘I am a renaissance man!” As at this time a multitude of Arts and Sciences were explored through the rediscovery of classical texts from ancient Greece and Rome, which had been suppressed by the Church for the previous ten centuries( ie the dark ages). Leonardo da Vinci, the greatest polymath of this fervently fertile time, homosexual? bisexual? vegetarian and blessed with an insatiable curiosity and creativity; along with great talent and technical expertise in drawing and painting. Still, I imagine during his own lifetime, that he was confronted with clients and friends who questioned his proficiency in some of his expressions of interest. Being dead and famous always makes things appear easier, I find.

The fact is, that we are not all suited to the narrowly focused exploration of a single pursuit, we are not all made that way, and indeed, some are born with a degree of interest in a variety of directions. However, our education institutions are not designed to encourage this polymath approach to learning and life, our education institutions are still firmly rooted in the nineteenth century, in the way they educate. We are encouraged to sample a selection of pursuits at the beginning of our educations, which are then quickly removed to narrow the focus to a single vocational study as we progress through to tertiary levels of education. That this approach probably fails the majority of students has never been of particular concern to the proponents of this system, as they merely squeeze the round peg to fit through the square hole. Education, over the last hundred years, has been stripped of its classically well rounded approach to learning and our universities denuded to provide functional, technical college, style educations aimed at producing specialists with limited broad spectrum appeal. Giving us technicians,’ masters of the molecule’ who are unable to know the whole, unfamiliar with their own history and language, and easily manipulated by their political masters.

Tradition sits on our backs like a fat arsed Cardinal from the middle ages, holding back humanity and condemning it to repeat its mistakes, again and again. As a new grandmother generally wants her daughter to ‘mother’ just as she did, and is usually offended by any initiatives in this regard, our schools and colleges are just as miserly with their openness to real change. Schools, as we know them today, began in the eighteenth century, as places to mind the children of the newly wealthy middle classes and to provide them with a basic education; and it was not until the nineteenth century that a national system to include the children of the lower classes was instigated in England. Which is why schools are run along the lines of prisons or army barracks, their concern has been as much with the security of the children as possessions as it has been about education. By which I mean there has been very little innovative thought going into how and what is the best means of enlightening and ‘drawing out’ (which is the meaning of edukate from the Greek) – ‘know thyself’ was a motto of the Hellenistic times – the best for and from children and young adults in these institutions. Cramming as many as can be fitted into a room, seated at uncomfortable desks, and ordered to listen to the droning of an often less than inspired teacher, is the model followed still today by most schools. Perhaps having laptop computers and the Internet may change things for the better, but I doubt the core principles underpinning how the children are instructed to learn will alter that much.

We live in an age, where we are all conversant with a mega multitude of data, superficially acquainted with a surfeit of knowledge, and this is only increasing through our exposure to technology. Perhaps it is time to open up to the possibility that we can be good at more than one thing and that when we go to a party, and someone says, as they usually do, “what do you do for a living?” The answer may be more than the listener quite expected.

©Sudha Hamilton

Tagged da Vinci, history, jack of all trades, Leonardo, Leonardo do Vinci, polymath, polymathic person, renaissance man, vegetarian

Aug 12 2011

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Blog Posts, Cooking, Cultural Issues, History, Meaning, Published Articles, Religion

Kitchen gods and the sacrifice

Excerpt from – House Therapy – Discovering who you really are at home!

By Sudha Hamilton

House Therapy is Sudha’s soon to be published new book.

The Kitchen

The Ancient Greeks, who gave us many of the founding principles upon which we base our modern societies – democracy; logic; philosophy; literature and poetry to name but a few salient examples, had a rich collection of gods and goddesses. Hestia was the goddess of hearth and home, older sister to Zeus and first born of the titans Kronos and Rhea – perhaps not as well known today as her siblings Demeter, Hera, Haides and Poseidon. This may have been due to the fact that she was swallowed first by her titan father Kronos, who in a bid to avoid being overthrown by one of his children, as prophesied, ate all his children, she was thus the last to be regurgitated, once Zeus had forced his father to do so.

The Romans also worshipped her in their homes and knew her as Vesta. The areas of responsibility for which Hestia was worshipped and sacrificed to, were most aspects of domestic life and in particular what we now call the kitchen. For it is around the cooking hearth or kitchen that a home or house builds up or out. Hestia was always toasted at the beginning of a meal in thanks for the hospitality proffered. She was probably where the early Christians appropriated their ‘saying of grace’ before dinner from.

Homeric Hymn 24 to Hestia (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C7th – 4th B.C.) :
“Hestia, in the high dwellings of all, both deathless gods and men who walk on earth, you have gained an everlasting abode and highest honour: glorious is your portion and your right. For without you mortals hold no banquet,–where one does not duly pour sweet wine in offering to Hestia both first and last. And you, Argeiphontes [Hermes], son of Zeus and Maia, . . . be favourable and help us, you and Hestia, the worshipful and dear. Come and dwell in this glorious house in friendship together; for you two, well knowing the noble actions of men, aid on their wisdom and their strength. Hail, Daughter of Kronos, and you also, Hermes.”

Interestingly Hestia was a virginal goddess and refused the suits of both Apollo and Poseidon. Perhaps this is where we get the separation of the sexual roles of the wife and mother in the home and the focus on providing nurture and hospitality instead. Hestia was seen as the giver of all domestic happiness and good fortune in the home and she was believed to dwell in the inner parts of every home. She was also the first god mentioned at every sacrifice, as she represented the hearth where sacrifices took place – this is the direct link to our kitchens today and the genesis of the sacred chef. There are very few temples of Hestia extant and this is thought to be because every home was her temple in the Hellenistic world. I think we can draw some intuition from this in our view of our homes being places of divine inspiration.

The kitchen has of late become a popular focus of interest, with TV chefs and groovy restaurants grabbing the public’s imagination. For House Therapy the kitchen represents our centre, our practical and instinctual selves. This is where we prepare food for family and ourselves. It is also often where food is stored in the refrigerator and pantry cupboards. Food is about survival and security. There is no bullshit about these things and the kitchen is a place where the elements of nature still regularly intervene. Fire on the stove and in your oven; water at the sink, earth in the bench tops and structure; and air in the extractor, fan forced oven and all around. You can be hurt in the kitchen if you do not pay attention to what you are about. Unlike the faux furies vented in the kitchens on TV, you can experience some real passions in these hot and pressurised places at home. You might be burning fingers and dishes, dropping scoldingly hot plates and crying bitter tears over chopped onions. The kitchen is where we show our real reactions to strong emotions, pressure in our lives and our appetites and jealousies.

Have a look around now at your kitchen, the colour of the walls and general lay-out of things. What is your first impression? What does it say to you about your instinctive self? Are you clinical or passionate? Are the walls white/neutral or vivid/strong colours? Is it large or small? Is the instinctual, raw and pragmatic you an important part of your life? Or is it hidden away or missing? The trend in studio apartment architecture now, to build them without kitchens and have neutered mini servery’s instead, is a reflection of a missing essential in sections of our culture. Stripping away the practical ability to fend for yourself by cooking your own food and becoming dependent on pre-prepared meals is symptomatic of us having lost our way along the journey. Is your kitchen well equipped? Can you cook? Do you enjoy cooking for friends, family and yourself?

Returning to the rich historical connection our modern day kitchen has with Hestia’s hearth, as mentioned earlier it was the place where the highly necessary ritualised sacrifices took place. These sacrifices usually involved a calf or some other domesticated animal and those involved with the sacrifice would share in eating the meat of the roasted animal. So the power of the sacrifice would be in the ritualised slaughtering of the animal in dedication to the goddess for a particular purpose – to bring good fortune upon whatever was so desired for example. Today the cook or cooks go into the kitchen, risking cuts, perspiration and burns, to prepare a celebratory meal for our friends and or family – Christmas, birthdays and other days of ritualised festivities. We may not consciously invoke Hestia or any other gods but the overall intention is the same, we wish to share good cheer with those we love and bring good fortune upon us all.

It is interesting to ask oneself what is true sacrifice and what does it mean in our lives today? When we think of sacrificing something, we tend to see it as foregoing or missing out on something so as to have something else. “You cannot have your cake and eat it too.” Which I have always thought was an incredibly stupid saying, because what is the point of possessing uneaten cake? A sacrifice I hear you say, perhaps a slice for the gods. Interestingly the Greeks and Romans would eat the cooked flesh of their sacrifice, offering the bones and fat to the gods and goddesses, but it was the life itself, that was the real sacrifice in my view. The word sacrifice means to make sacred, so whatever we offer up in dedication to the gods becomes sacred. Actually the word anathema, was the Greek word for laying-up or suspending something in wait for the gods, and it is has now taken on the meaning of something that is accursed, through its contact, down through the ages, with the jealous Hebrew god, Yahweh; the Christian god. Our language, and lexicon of words, have taken an interesting journey over the last four millennia, and it is no wonder we are all a little confused at times. So we could make a correlation between sacrificing something in our life and that thing, which has been sacrificed becomes anathema to us or accursed. How do you feel about the things you have sacrificed in your life? A person’s love; a relationship; a career; types of food; alcohol; drugs; sex; lifestyle; freedom? We do not live in a particularly sacrificial age, more of a ‘you can have it all’ age, but can you really enjoy it all and be present for entirely disparate things in your life? Do we appreciate things more when we make room for them in our lives? Perhaps sacrifice still has a part to play in our lives today, better sharpen those knives.

The kitchen is also a place of transformation, where base elements are turned into the gold of love and nourishment. Is your kitchen a space where magic like this happens, regularly or just on special occasions? Domestic kitchens have a great tradition throughout the West of being incredibly impractical, lacking preparation space and adequate and functional cupboards. This is now being addressed in more modern homes, as the passion is returning to the kitchen. I think that we suffered for a few decades from the ‘American wonder of white goods’ syndrome, where no home was complete without these wonderful space and time saving machines and that a mentality of faster was better grew up around them. Fast foods, sliced white bread, whipped cream in a can, all these travesties were accorded the haloed status of modernity and progress. When in actual fact they were soulless short cuts that ripped the heart out of good cooking. Yes we still do have a lot of gadgets in the kitchen but we also now understand that good food still needs dedication and application. Bread makers are great, but bread cooked in a wood fired oven tastes better and if it is naturally fermented sour dough even better. Espresso coffee from your home machine tastes a lot better than instant coffee.

Your kitchen is a place where you can practically respond to the basic needs of living. Is your kitchen letting you do this? Is your kitchen supporting you in feeling centred and secure in dealing with the vicissitudes that life often throws up? Are your knives sharp and well balanced? Do you have enough bench space when preparing meals? Does your stove cook the way you want it to cook? If not then you are letting yourself down and going around with a bloody great hole where your centre should be. As a member of the human tribe you need to be able to fend for yourself, and the kitchen can empower you to be grounded in the here and now. Not wafting around on the ceiling hoping for the crumbs of human kindness to drop your way.

Things we can do to transform our kitchen

As a chef, who has owned and managed a number of restaurants and cafes, I know all about kitchens and their design downfalls. First and foremost it is about space and in particular bench top space where most kitchens, especially older kitchens, are lacking. Storage space comes a close second and it is in these areas that a solid beginning can be made in transforming your kitchen from a frustration trap into a pragmatic pleasure dome. Cooking is never completely easy, if it is, it isn’t real cooking, in my opinion, there must be some blood, sweat and tears in every great dish but not too much. Unnecessary suffering is not on anyone’s menu by choice.

Buy an island bench if you lack bench top space and cannot easily create more, they are great and I have several of them, and you can take them with you when you move.

Sharp knives, that are also well weighted in the overall heft of the knife, can bring a smile to any good cook and I always say, “happiness is a sharp knife.”

Obviously kitchens need to be clean and cleaned regularly for all sorts of reasons, hygiene, health and happiness. Clutter in the kitchen causes chaos and calamity, food takes longer to prepare and the energy around it is bad.

Trapped dead energy, in the form of rotting and old produce in fridges and cupboards, does not augur well for happy kitchen gods and thus producing yummy healthy and nutritious food; so clean out and clean up.

©Sudha Hamilton

Cooking school on the sunshine coast, the Sacred Chef cooking classes, where you will prepare delicious food, discover new recipes, eat, drink and meet new friends.

For more articles www.sudhahamilton.com or www.sacredchef.com

Tagged ancient Greeks, Ancient Rome, cooking, Demeter, good cooking, Haides, Hera, hestia, history of cooking, house therapy, kitchen design, kitchens, Kronos, Poseidon, Rhea, Roman culture, sacred chef, sacrifice, sacrificial rituals, titans, Vesta, Zeus

Jul 09 2011

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History, Meaning, Reality, Religion, Science, Therapy

Stages of Our Mental Journey

Heading: Stages and Phases of the Mental Journey.

Subheading: Exploring consciousness, linguistics and language.

“O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theatre of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all- what is it?

And where did it come from?

And why?”

Excerpt from Julian Jayne’s book, The Origins of Consciousness In the Break Down of the Bicameral Mind.

This journey of mind we set out upon hopefully fearlessly, but invariably not, is unique to each of us. It has been indelibly influenced by our childhood and the love we did, or did not quite receive in the particular manner that we would have preferred. From the very beginning we start with a sense of our self, a nascent spark that will emerge in time like a sculpture quite unlike any that has ever been before. So defined by our life experiences and in turn our reactions and responses to them, that the twisting formless space that seems to be located behind your eyes might be beautiful art or something else again.

Does the aging process effect our thinking and feeling sense of self, and if so, how does it?

I once read, that according to a study conducted amongst a cross section of age groups, most people feel in their mind’s eye that they are twenty five years old, irrespective of their actual body age. That whether they be fifty, sixty or seventy years old, inside they see themselves as that bright, shiny twenty five year old. Perception and self image are powerful things, and perhaps we function best when we feel young at heart. It begs all sorts of questions, like what is wisdom, and how does one get it? Is it the stoic acceptance of the vicissitudes of life and the bearing of tragedy with uncommon grace? Is a flexible quality of mind something that we should foster in the hope of a life well lived?

The mental journey through life could be said to be the only real journey we take, as we modern folk don’t live much below the chin. We think ourselves through life, from a moment somewhere between conception and birth up until physical death takes us we are marching to the constant thinking, taking place in our brains. Rene Descartes’ old dictum, “I think therefore I am,” sums it up pretty well. A few qualifications are needed before we can continue. Is our mental journey the journey of consciousness, and what is the definition of consciousness? Is our beginning located in developmental psychology or in the actual origin of consciousness itself? Who am I? What is consciousness? Pretty heady stuff as you can see.

The word consciousness is used in a multitude of circumstances to mean:

a. awake in the literal sense (as in not asleep or in a coma).

b. general awareness of things happening around you.

c. the totality of a person’s thoughts & feelings.

d. a spiritual merging of your awareness with God/s.

I think we will take c. here – the totality of a person’s thoughts and feelings – to be our definition in this instance. Looking briefly at the development of consciousness in the individual we need to understand its beginnings in our infancy.

Developmental psychology begins its inquiry with the conceptual sense of self. When the child is born, and first breathes its breath separate from the mother, and perhaps even earlier as a foetus inside the womb, it is that sense of self that we know that defines us as truly us. When a baby first begins to smile in response to its parents’ gaze at the age of two to three months it is due to an altered subjective experience within the baby. It is the beginning of a pre-designed sense of social awareness that all babies are born with and which Daniel N Stern, infant psychologist and author of The Interpersonal World of the Infant, views as the beginning of the development of the core, separate self. He states, “the subjective experience of union with another can occur only after a sense of core self and a core other exists. Union experiences are thus viewed as the successful result of actively organising the experience of self-being with another, rather than as the product of a passive failure of the ability to differentiate self from other.” So we begin with a sense of the self. As that sense of the self, within our own mind, grows with age we continue to differentiate what is us, and what is not. The child later begins to understand that its inner thoughts are not automatically known by those around him or her but that he or she can still convey that information by facial expressions and the like.

Our minds and in particular their use of language is what really sets us apart from other animals on this planet. It has indeed been posited that our experience of consciousness is in fact a result of metaphorical language and the constructs this has caused. Put simply we do not just see, hear, touch, smell or taste something, we immediately place that experience in the context of our own unique reality or story. We name it according to our rules and define its reality in line with our wishes. There is no true objective reality but only our mental interpretation of it. Everything is interconnected in a web of language that explains something by referring to it in comparison to something else. For example words like ‘heart of the matter’ or ‘bring to a head’ are all words that have been taken from our bodies to describe situations. Metaphors have created our languages and perhaps language has created our consciousness.

In this quoted passage from Julian Jayne’s book, The Origins of Consciousness In the Break Down of the Bicameral Mind, we can grasp the essence of the mystifying question that has plagued us down through the ages – what is consciousness?

“We are trying to understand consciousness, but what are we really trying to do when we try to understand anything? Like children trying to describe nonsense objects, so in trying to understand a thing, we are trying to find a metaphor for that thing. Not just any metaphor, but one with something more familiar and easy to our attention. Understanding a thing is to arrive at a metaphor for that thing by substituting something more familiar to us. And the feeling of familiarity is the feeling of understanding.

Generations ago we would understand thunderstorms perhaps as the roaring and rumbling about in battle of superhuman gods. We would have reduced the racket that follows the streak of lightning to familiar battle sounds, for example. Similarly today, we reduce the storm to various supposed experiences with friction, sparks, vacuums, and the imagination of bulgeous banks of burly air smashing together to make the noise. None of these really exist as we picture them. Our images of these events of physics are as far from the actuality as fighting gods. Yet they act as the metaphor and they feel familiar and so we say we understand the thunderstorm.”

What I am conveying here, is that much of what we trust in our shared realities is in fact complete delusion – we do not really know what happens inside a thunderstorm but we have a story that we all agree upon. Our mental worlds are all uniquely different, and we share tenuous imaginary links that hold our communities together – that perhaps stop the sky from falling in. Our minds are magical things that have been directed to think in certain ways by the adherence to traditions. We have an innate ability to believe in things and thus make them appear real. Religions are a great example of this, when you do a little investigating into many of the religions of the world, you find an incredible willingness to believe things based simply on tradition & the handing down of beliefs from generation to generation. In the Christian tradition, Mormonism, a relative late comer to the field, has an extraordinary tale to tell of solid gold giant tablets inscribed with the words of the angel Moroni – that nobody except the profit Joseph Smith Junior ever saw. Far fetched fantastical stories that apparently only occurred a couple of hundred years ago in the United States of America, and yet now several generations down the line, these things are solemnly accepted as true by bicycle riding missionaries around the world. Now I don’t wish to merely pick on Mormonism, as the stories in Catholicism and the other bands of Christian faith are equally unrealistic with virgin births and the raising of the dead. We have an inordinate faith in anything that has been written down or passed down to us as true by our forefathers. Even when faced with incontrovertible evidence of the impossibility of these things, we hold them near and dear to us – in fact we place them as the very bedrock of all our civilising institutions – myths that we swear by in justice, in love and in government.

Our minds are malleable and impressionable, and our consciousness is very likely a construct of excerpts of our sensory reality, which are glued together by the lie of language. No wonder there is a lot of pain and suffering in the world. Socrates was apparently a very ugly looking chap, and every day he would go into the city square and challenge the truth of various statements made by his fellow citizens. He would not back down and would not accept the little white lies that we all share in, and as if peeling back layers of the onion he sort out the truth. Of course it all ended badly for Socrates. We are all so conditioned to accept lies, untruths and tall stories that it is a very hard road if one chooses to seek the truth.

Develop a healthy aptitude for doubt in your life and mentally this will take a great deal of the bullshit out of everything. As we age be vigilant for the desire to take ‘short cuts’ and to limit the size of your world – remain open to the mysteriousness of life in all its strange and varied nature.

Following ideals in your life can be a two edged sword – it can inspire and motivate you to reach for things and states that are seemingly beyond you, but it can also make you immune to the spontanaeity and passions that mark our existence as well. As we get older the attachment to certain ideals can cause us to become rigid and inflexible. Compassion and the ability to truly say you are sorry are the hallmarks of a great soul.

In returning to the question of what is wisdom. Is it knowing that you are right? Or is it knowing that you don’t know the answer to any of the really important questions in life? Or perhaps it is having experienced the very real pain of losing someone that you loved forever? When I meet much younger people than myself, I notice that they have an almost bullet proof idea of optimism in the future and I sense an absence of depth that only tragedy can truly provide.

Releasing control over your life or rather letting go of the illusion that you have any control anyway will free up a great deal of your mental faculties. You are going to die and people close to you and loved ones are also going to die – accept these facts with good grace. The compulsion today to always have a fantastic time and to avoid any pain or discomfort, has created in many of us a vacuum where the other side of life’s experience once resided. Without the fullness of sadness in our lives we cannot scale the heights of ecstasy and we will be forever in the shallows of ‘searching for happiness.’

Age can give us perspective on things, allowing one not to get all ‘het up’ over the details. Having experienced the ups and downs of a life well lived; we can refrain from being so quick to judge things at any particular juncture in time. I am reminded of a hundred clichés and truisms that point this very fact out.

Of course our minds are not able to live in isolation; they are a part of our monkey bodies and they will not function at their highest level without being exercised. A healthy body – a healthy mind, the interconnectedness of our brains with the other major organs and our autonomic nervous system really places our mind throughout our body. For peak mental performance, lots of stimulation – physical, emotional and intellectual – is desirable.

New research into depression and Alzheimer’s disease is now seeing inflammation within the body as a cause for these very serious conditions and imbalance in our diet and lifestyle is a strong contributing factor. Feeding our brains a diet rich in Omega3 essential fatty acids will improve their functioning ability and re-dressing the imbalance in our diets by reducing the intake of foods rich in Omega6 fatty acids will further this.

In my own experience I have found the strategy of making decisions about things highly effective – don’t dither or procrastinate over choices in your life, trust in your instincts and make a decision. If it turns out in hindsight to be the wrong choice then review and be flexible enough to change tack. There is no value in over identifying with your life choices. We are in my view travelers through life and there are no prizes for getting everything right first time. I used to be very fearful of making mistakes as a young man and found parallels for this in my father’s attitudes to life. That whole thing of only attempting things that you know that you are good at and avoiding everything that may embarrass you. At a certain point, as a young adult, I needed to confront and make conscious this aspect of myself and let go of this life strategy, as it was not aiding my journey. I remember someone sharing with me the story of how an aeroplane reaches its destination by continually correcting its course.

Life is a mental journey and it is far more interesting than many of us acknowledge. Thinking techniques based on fear avoidance and pain avoidance severely limit your life experiences. Drop the mental barriers and go fearlessly where you have not gone before. Start conversations with people – from whom you cannot predict replies – and relax into a sense of unknowingness because you will never know everything anyway. Smile at the sky sometimes and encourage gratitude for the showering flowers in your life. And if you cannot see those flowers look a little deeper.

©Sudha Hamilton

Appeared in WellBeing Magazine.

www.wellbeing.com.au

Midas Word

Tagged ageing, Alzheimer's disease, beliefs, brain, Christianity, consciousness, happiness, how we think, illusions, inner universe, language, life, linguistics, living well, mental journeys, mind, Mormonism, omega 3 essential fatty acids, psychology, religion, Socrates, sudha hamilton, therapies, thinking, wellbeing

May 29 2011

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Blog Posts, Cultural Issues, History, Meaning, Reality, Religion, Science, Uncategorized

Imagine If You Will…

Imagine if you will, that you lived in a world where every day you were told that you had no influence on the really important things in your life. Imagine that you were born to parents, who likewise, believed that they, and you, had no power to affect the way life was; and that they also had been born to parents, who were very sure, that they too, were powerless in this manner. Generations of firm belief and concomitant proof, through life experience, that this was true. That reality was operating outside of you and that you had no noticeable effect upon it, it would go on doing what it would do, whether you were there or not. The sun would come up in the morning and set in the evening; the rain would fall from the sky when there were precipitating circumstances; people around you would live and die – and all of these things would happen, pretty much without your direct input making a world of difference. Imagine what effect this would have upon your sense of self worth and attitude towards your existence.

Well, welcome to the real world, and to the psychological basis of your life and the lives of the majority of the six billion people living on this planet we call Earth. Newtonian science has for the last four hundred years firmly placed us outside of reality, as spectators in our own life, able to measure things but not much else. We have been taught and told, as were our parents, that life and matter happens independently of us. We can of course engage in transmutation of substances, if we follow strict rules for doing so, in a laboratory under controlled conditions and with the appropriate levels of technological education. Our subjective consciousness, our sense of who we are and how we process the sensory experience of our lives, however, cannot directly interface with existence. It can bear witness and it can measure, and oh what pleasure can it be to measure, everything. Science has measured and identified and named much of the fabric of our known universe, we know a hundred different names each for a billion different things we have never experienced; and most likely never will. I suppose it is a bit like that old Islamic idea of there being 999 names for God. Our Western scientific heritage has set us up as the ultimate arbiters of measurement and not so much good taste.

For the taste of powerlessness is one reason why, I think, that we have massive levels of depression in our modern cities and why we are medicating, or sedating, vast numbers of their inhabitants. Now smarties can put up their hand and say well Newtonian physics is dead, it died in 1904 with the discovery of Quantum Mechanics, but I would reply, that this fact is a well kept secret, culturally speaking, and that the greater majority of human beings are untouched by its revelations. Even Einstein struggled with accepting Quantum physics basic premise and resisted its outcomes for decades. The uncertain nature of The Uncertainty Principle does not lend itself to the delusional controlling proclivities of generations of white coated lab assistants and the population at large. We are all in love with the idea that we can benignly go about life, if we stick to the rules as Science has laid out for us, derived from all that measuring, and, like a good anti-depressant, avoid the lows by sacrificing the highs.

So the good news is, that on the most basic level we can perceive matter, the sub-atomic level, we actually do effect whatever we attempt to observe or measure, our consciousness of it changes it; and so the deadening spectator sport, that was Newtonian physics, is now obsolete. The bad news is, that the reality of this over the last hundred years has failed to bite, or be taken up by us, the masses, and that our lives continue to be mired in the complacency of our previous understanding of the workings of reality. Which means, that while we live in a truly wondrous world of modern scientific genius, the greater majority of us only get to experience it, as consumers, as if we are watching it on TV- and I reckon, that discovering ground breaking shifts in human evolution, via the Discovery Channel, years after they happen, is not an individually deeply rewarding experience. As populations in our cities, have grown and grown, we have replaced concern with the direct experience of the individual with statistical concern for the majority percentage of the many. Which is why so many people can still be unhappy or depressed, despite the fact that their lives contain less death, hunger, poverty, disease, and numerous other positively indicated quality of life evaluation measurements. Western medicine is a statistical science in practise and theory and concerns itself ultimately with the individual only as a unit of population. The pharmaceutical industry, which funds the medical behemoth in part and provides it with its tools for healing, is predicated on the double blind testing of its drugs and their ability to work on the greatest statistical percentage of people with as few side effects as can be managed.

“Over the last 30 years, rates of depression have been steadily increasing in Western societies. In the last ten years, consumption of antidepressants has doubled in the most advanced Western countries. Today, more than 11 million Americans are taking antidepressants. The estimated number of people in Britain taking antidepressants is two million. In Australia, 66 percent of those seeing a GP for the first time about depression have a chance of being medicated – in most cases with antidepressants. These data are so stark that most of us and our institutions prefer not to think about them.”

Dr David Servan-Schreiber, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Pittsburgh University School of Medicine

Author of Healing Without Freud or Prozac, 2004, Rodale.

So we live in a world, where care and concern, is officially monitored in terms of our per unit participation in demographic data for various population studies. We read in the newspaper, or online, about rates of unemployment, rates of breast cancer, rates of life expectancy, and rates of mortgage defaulting etc. We learn that if something affects the many then it must be powerful and have substance – it must be real. An example of this is the many chronic health conditions, which began under clouds of suspicion, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome began as this shady condition affecting bludgers and other weak and lazy people; Bulimia and Anorexia were likewise considered examples of neurotic women’s problems; ADHD is still doubtful in many people’s minds – but once weight of numbers builds up, then democracy grants acceptance for these diseased manifestations into the canon of medical reality. Pharmaceutical companies then go into overdrive to come up with a drug to cure them – often recycling ones that did not work out for other diseases, like Ritalin, now the drug of choice for ADHD and ADD.

Common sense is most people’s strongest definer of reality, meaning if the largest number of fellow citizens consider something to be so, then it must be so. The term common sense also has many subtle strands of meaning: its common sense! Can be exclaimed to mean that something is so manifestly obvious, that its truth cannot really be questioned. For something to be of common sense, it must appeal to a primary indicator of what is true, which is shared by the greater majority. We school our children in institutions made up of hundreds and sometimes thousands of pupils, we encourage socialisation and the herd mentality that goes with it. Common sense must survive the sometimes brutal testing of the mob and therefore have the appeal of being the lowest common denominator. Common sense is very often paraded as a decidedly uncommon virtue by those wielding it in argument.

I question whether common sense is the most apt indicator for the understanding of truth and also whether capitalism – the so called ‘free market’ and selling things – is the best distributor of truth. How will we, the masses, discover the changing nature of humanities perception of physical reality? Through our consumption of product, which has been created in light of the technological changes made possible by subatomic particle physics, and through the consumption of media informed by it. It has been over a hundred years since the first experiments baffled and perplexed physicists like Nils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, before ultimately turning them 360 degrees around in a new direction. Yet most people have no idea about this reality shaking, new awareness and the consequences to our culturally accepted perception of what existence is made up of and our consciousness of it.

“I think it would be misleading to call particles, the entities involved in the most primitive events of the theory (quantum topology) because they don’t move in space, they don’t carry mass, they don’t have charge, they don’t have energy in the usual sense of the word.

Q – So what is it that makes events at that level?

A- Who are the dancers and who the dance? They have no attributes other than the dance.

Q- What is they?

A- The things that dance, the dancers. My God! We’re back to the title of the book.”

Physicist David Finkelstein & author Gary Zukav

The Dancing Wu Li Masters, 1979, Hutchinson & Co.

So the nature of matter, at the most fundamental level known to humanity, is a dance of energy and barely understood as matter. We have gone on, since the publication of this book, to comprehend that much of our known universe is in fact empty space and that we could fit all the actual particles or dancing energy, which make up the six billion people who inhabit the Earth, into a small suitcase. So perhaps Mother Earth is travelling light after all and cataclysmic disasters, like that which wiped out the Dinosaurs are not such a big deal, sub-atomically speaking anyway.

The most important aspect of this to understand, is that how the universe is perceived by those who make it their business to care, has had a filtering down effect upon humanity since the beginning of time. It may seem so much irrelevant bumph to those firmly rooted in the here and now of survival and making money, but once those, who wish to lead and control the rest of us, get hold of this information; they then utilise it for their own ends. In the West we are still greatly influenced by the thinkers and early scientists of the classical world, from ancient Greece and then Rome.

“Every domain of post-classical life and thought has been profoundly influenced by ancient models. True, these models have not always been interpreted in ways that a sober modern scholarship would consider correct. On the contrary: it has often been creative misunderstandings that have preserved the ancient heritage and made it useful.”

Edited by Anthony Grafton, Glen W Most & Salvatore Settis

The Classical Tradition, 2011, Belknap Press

Our very language, the meaning of our words, comes from those who thought in Ancient Greek and Latin. Homer the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, who was alive anywhere from 1200BC to 850BC, is a great example of where we can see the changes in consciousness, in the development of the words used to describe these states. Terms like thumos, phrenes, noos and psyche, which are the first recorded words referring to places within an individual where inner life is happening. There were no words for ‘mind’ or such as we would understand, and in the Iliad everything happens outside of the hero, through the directions of the gods. Achilles is directed by the goddess Athene in his actions against Hector, during the Trojan War, and the Iliad relates similar control over the other players into the hands of the gods. Thumos originally is used as a term in the poem to indicate spirit of life, as in it ceases to exist when a warrior is slain, it then evolves to incorporate the aroused pre-battle state experienced by a warrior; and then if it is not a god urging a man into battle it is his thumos. Julian Jaynes goes on to say:

“All these metaphors are extremely important. Saying that the internal sensations of large circulatory and muscular changes are a thing into which strength can be put is to generate an imagined ‘space’, here located always in the chest, which is the forerunner of the mind-space of contemporary consciousness. And to compare the function of that sensation to that of another person or even to the less-frequent gods is to begin those metaphor processes that will later become the analog ‘I’.”

Julian Jaynes

The Origin of Consciousness In the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976, First Mariner Books, pp 263.

Noos of course becomes nous, and this term is still used as a slang colloquialism in English to mean intelligence or smarts. It began in the Iliad as a term referring to perception or seeing, or a sight or show, as in for a warrior there is no better noos than hand to hand combat. Noos was then located in the chest and began to mean heart or spirit. Words in all languages evolve and often come to mean different things over time, but in these early recorded examples it can show us the development of how these people were thinking. These are the first recorded examples of the internalisation of consciousness in human beings.

This process obviously continued over time and grew and grew until we had such a strong sense of an inner subjective consciousness, and this was reflected and emphasised in our languages, that we separated mind from body; mind from matter. Dualism was born and came to flourish into Aristotelian physics, which really lasted from Aristotle’s time 384BC-322BC right up until Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century. It continues today as commonly held belief – that our minds are separate from our bodies. And most of us live inside our heads, within those 20cm from chin to the top of our skull. Well that is where we perceive ourselves to reside – to be floating somewhere inside our craniums; as we sit slumped on our couches at night staring at flickering screens and wondering why we are depressed. So our imagined space, where we consider our consciousness to reside, has moved from chest to head over the last couple of millennia.

Where do we reside inside ourselves? Do you know where your consciousness, spatially, has its abode? When you speak of your self, and your awareness of your self, where is that self inside you located? Where does the watcher live? What do you imagine when you refer to these things? How do you calibrate your own levels of self? Do you have a soul and is your mind separate from it?

Religion has made great use of this split between body and soul, and flourished in the crack like a healthy weed. For once you remove the necessity of having a corporeal presence, then you are unfettered by any physical limitations like material reality, you can bend truth any which way you like. God, in my opinion, is an invention based on our own inner reflections of mind space, and, seemingly, can float like a butterfly and sting like a bee (apologies to Muhammad Ali). Has there ever been a bigger fib than the one about there being a god? An all seeing, omnipresent , omnipotent and omnificent being, who, just like Santa, knows when you are good and definitely knows when you are bad. The thought police were invented by the Church and still exist in many people’s minds today, because if you are brought up with these fairy tales about good and evil, God and Satan, Jesus dying for your sins etc – then you have been brainwashed at an early and very vulnerable age to believe in fantasy. If your mummy and daddy believed in these things and their mummies and daddies also believed in all of this, then it becomes solidly fixed as a reality; a traditional lore established over generations. People stop questioning things like this and act out of deference to the past. It takes much greater strength to question and overcome tradition, to break away from the beliefs of your tribe. Because once you believe in things that have no verifiable relationship to reality, and are simply asked to have faith, then you are lost in Maya – an illusion of ancient parentage designed to control you within the flock.

“One facet of the many faces of religion is intense love focused on one supernatural person, i.e. God, plus reverence for icons of that person. Human life is driven largely by our selfish genes and by the processes of reinforcement. Much positive reinforcement derives from religion: warm and comforting feelings of being loved and protected in a dangerous world, loss of fear of death, help from the hills in response to prayer in difficult times, etc. Likewise, romantic love for another real person (usually of the other sex) exhibits the same intense concentration on the other and related positive reinforcements. These feelings can be triggered by icons of the other, such as letters, photographs, and even, as in Victorian times, locks of hair. The state of being in love has many physiological accompaniments, such as sighing like a furnace.”

John Smythies, Neuropsychiatrist, 2006 - http://wn.com/John_Raymond_Smythies

Ask yourself how many assumptions, about reality and existence, you hold among your most valued truths? How many untested beliefs live inside your consciousness? Is there a god? Is there good and evil? Do you believe in sin? What about love, what is love? What is the purpose of your existence?

Do you have any proof, any discernable evidence that would stand up in a court of law for your answers to the above questions? Why do you believe the things you do? Where did these beliefs come from? Who was involved in their transference to you?

The reality is, that just because something has been passed down to you by family, does not make it true. And just because something has been written in a book, and published, similarly does not make it true, even if it is a really old book, which has been accepted as the gospel truth over hundreds of years. Truth is something we all need to seek out ourselves, in our own lifetime, and see it put to the test by experience. At some point in time, we all need to put aside, the desire to be liked and to belong, and use our time on earth to find out what is really what. Don’t take my word for it – find out yourself!

Who are you? What are you? Beyond the roles you may play of wife, husband, partner, mother, father, daughter, son, and far beyond the work you may perform. Who are you really? Deep inside your consciousness, what are you? Go beyond the pat answers you may have read in some book and answer the question from your own true knowledge and experience. Nobody knows you as well as you know yourself! So who are you?

Are you an accident of nature? A dribble of sperm and some egg, that has grown into a human being and been given your name? If you don’t know who you are, then why are you here? What is your real purpose? Why are you alive this day? Why do you have consciousness?

©Sudha Hamilton

Tagged consciousness, psychology, beliefs, religion, parents, humanity, energy, capitalism, drugs, healing, depression, science, love, pharmaceuticals, reality, God, meaning of life, Julian Jaynes, Ancient Greece, quantum physics, Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Latin, antidepressants, truth, Newtonian science, family, existence, uncertainty, subatomic, mass, statistical medicine, Western medicine, Servan-Schreiber, chronic illnesses, common sense, mob rule, free markets, Nils Bohr, David Finkelstein, physics, universe, classical life, Ancient Rome, thumos, noos, metaphors, inner life

May 04 2011

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Blog Posts, Cultural Issues, History, Meaning, Reality, Religion, Science, Uncategorized

One God

Today in the harsh daylight of our overcrowded cities, in developed nations around the globe, we are encouraged to worship only one god, the holy dollar. People are rushing about in their cars, and on public transport, to reach their destinations, their places of work and of investment, where labour and lead may be turned into gold. Sitting at terminals, tapping keys, in the hope that interest rates will rise or fall, that the market will strengthen their position; and that bears will turn into bulls. If you can imagine an animated city scene, with hundreds of besuited pedestrians crossing the pavements, all with a cartoon circle above their heads, showing their thoughts as a dollar sign. This is the charge of the light brigade, where horses have become mobile phones and helmets and swords, iPods and sunglasses.

Newspapers, and online sources, today are filled with economic imperatives, and this obsession, which began in the late nineteen seventies, has become the overriding concern for dad and mum; and their kids. Money is on everyone’s lips and in everyone’s mind, how to get it, how to make it, how to keep it; and how to hide it. Everyone’s become a banker and governments are complicit in this – the tax department has driven these changes , as your tax return became more and more complex, you had to think like an accountant to make sense of it. Paul Keating, as rock star Treasurer, had a hand in it, as he, and PM Hawke, deregulated the banks and made public announcements about “banana state economies.” Suddenly everyone had to get up to speed on the balance of payments and interest rate figures daily made the front page. It was like a crash course in economics, skewed with the dramatics and sensationalism that sells papers.

There are and were positives, about this new found economic literacy amongst the hoi polloi, as people are always empowered by knowledge. In this new era of freedom, individuals and groups, were able to break down decades and centuries of banking obfuscation, to achieve their wants; even women, who had been particularly disadvantaged by the prejudices of this male dominated industry. Economic growth came spurting out, after years of lazy conservative rule, people got money and invested it in new businesses and real estate – the housing market exploded. Of course we got some excessive behaviour, Alan Bond, Christopher Skase etc but generally it was much more for the good, as a greater number and spread of people were enabled to become productive.

However, and I will use a controversial analogy here to illustrate my point, the economic awareness grew and has now become such an overweening thing that it has strangled all other gods. I liken it to the historical journey of Western women, from their hair covered and protected imprisonment in wifely roles, through the suffragettes and then the women’s liberation movement, up until now in their emancipated state from legislated prejudice; but still with the biological necessities to be women. This potentially challenging, dichotomous position is most dramatically seen in the form of the traditionally attired Islamic woman, as she represents the other extreme pole, as if she has just stepped out of the pages of history into the twenty first century. I respect the fiercely won freedoms of today’s Western woman, but also see the conflicting impact that the demands of the world have made upon the inner life of some women. In a similar vein, today’s awareness of the economic imperative has damaged the inner life of us all, removing perceived value from other pursuits not so closely held to the material bosom.

As Science, in the service of money, has slain the Christian religion, condemning it to the irrelevancy of a surfeit of poorly attended suburban churches clamouring for ageing attendees, the great god avarice has filled the breach. Materialism, what you can buy with money, has taken hold of head and heart inside the majority of us all. What is the holiest, most sacred, thing that you can purchase? It is of course the home, a house or flat, villa or apartment, but a home by any other name just the same. This haloed quest, the often life time journey devoted to owning your own home, is, in Australia anyway, a culturally approved goal that lies beneath the day to day activity of millions. It gives meaning to life to many of these people, and I imagine the banks must really love it. It reminds me of the association between diamond rings and marriage; doctors, pharmaceutical drugs and illness; and other firmly entrenched cultural beliefs. How do you get people to work all the time and do it more or less willingly? By making what they want so expensive that they have to. If the average home is priced around nine times the average annual income, and you have to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars from the banks at substantial and fluctuating interest rates, then you are going to be tied into working for a very long time. Mentally, by the time you have paid off your house and loan, you are often so brain washed into that behaviour that you go on working anyway. Homes bought as investment properties, charge rentals at a market value so determined, that they can pay off housing loans and or profit accordingly – thus making shelter/housing expensive for everyone. The goal for many in owning their own home is financial freedom, which often really means, once achieved, becoming a landlord and profiting from others, for money as they say does not stand still and you will be advised by those who work with money to invest your new found freedom in more real estate; and the cycle continues.

Going to work every week day, and often doing something that you dislike in some way, treating another human being in a less than human way by focusing on the money at the expense of everything else, damages the soul some say. You might go to your doctor and complain that you are not feeling, dare I say it, happy, and he most probably will tell you that you are depressed and prescribe an antidepressant.

Dr David Servan-Schreiber, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Pittsburgh University School of Medicine

Author of Healing Without Freud or Prozac, 2004, Rodale.

Then, in a tra la la drugged state, not caring so much about a lot of things, unable to achieve an orgasm, you will keep on doing what you were doing, working in much the same way and edging hopefully closer to that nirvana, called financial freedom. When you set out on the journey as a youngish adult, I imagine that the many things you associate with financial freedom will change over the years and that when you get there, often decades later, you will be a completely different person. It is like any long journey, in that it is better to make the experience of your journey your succour than the goal itself. Otherwise you are training yourself, every day, to switch off subtly and desensitise yourself to life, killing yourself a little bit each day in the hope that when you get to the end you will be able to turn yourself back on; and enjoy that wonderful financial freedom you see in the scenes depicted in those TV ads for the banks.

If you read a little history and have a good look at the Christian religion, you will see that belief in god, for much of their sixteen hundred years in power, was not optional. From the time of Constantine, the Roman emperor in the fourth century AD when Christianity became the state religion – the Holy Roman Catholic Church, if you did not believe in a Christian god, and their version of that Christian god, you were very likely to be put to death. This heavy handed approach began to soften after the Renaissance in the sixteenth century, but life remained very hard for those who did not acquiesce and worship in the prescribed manner. Jews of course were murdered, exiled, banned and generally hated since the time of Christ. The crusades slaughtered millions of Muslims over centuries and religious pogroms have continued the genocide of both Jews and Muslims by Christians. I always smile when I remember Sunday School, and the things I was told about the poor Christians being thrown to the lions by the Romans, of course this was true for the three centuries it happened, but nobody was teaching the children about the next twelve centuries of Christian atrocities committed against the rest of the world; and also within their own communities in the prosecution of heresies. History always favours the victors.

Within, and despite all this bloodshed, many people had an experience of god being present within their lives. It seems in a lot of instances to have provided these individuals with a sense of belonging to something divine, which was beyond the reach of those with the swords. I would posit that the very threat to some people’s belief in god, through perceived heretical accusations, as in the time of the Cathars in France in the thirteenth century, and in the very bloody later schism between Catholics and the Reformation Church in the sixteenth century, to name but a few, intensified their experience of their religion and god. Nobody loves quite so much as when that love is threatened and or about to go away. Religion, and or belief in god, is always like that enormous elephant in the room, which will not go away.

“Superstition requires credulity, just as true religion requires faith. Deep-rooted credulity is so powerful that it may even, in false beliefs, be thought to perform miracles. For if anyone believes most firmly that his religion is true, even if it is in fact false, he raises his spirit by reason of that very credulity until it becomes like the spirits who are the leaders and princes of that religion and seems to perform things which are not perceived by those in a normal and rational state.”

Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535)

De Occulta Philosophia

I ask myself, a lot, what belief in god really is. Rationally there is no evidence for the existence of a god, and in my historical search so far, there never has been any evidence. In Christianity’s case, we now clearly know that the gospels in the Bible, which were written between seventy and up to two hundred years after the time of Jesus, are not reliable historical accounts and indeed are more like PR releases or overly favourable biographical sketches, designed to sell Christianity to the Roman power elite and others. The account of Pilate for instance, is completely fictitious and reworked by the writers of the gospels to exonerate the Romans from the execution of Jesus and to put that blame squarely upon the Jews; which has had onerous historical consequences to put it mildly. Christianity is not alone in creating fictions to make it divine and more than merely human, in PR and sales there is a great and long lasting tradition, which is about making your product uniquely special and divinity ticks all those boxes. The tablet which held the ten commandments, where is it and who else but Moses really saw it and if it was placed in the Ark of the Covenant, where is it also? The Mormons then, through their prophet, Joseph Smith Junior, and I imagine from his impression of the historical precedent set by Moses as reported in Exodus, had a solid gold tablet from the Angel Moroni containing their scriptures, which conveniently only Joseph actually saw. Now Christians, who believe in Jesus rising bodily from the dead, often chuckle softly at the unrealistic beliefs of other religions, whilst having no problem with the outlandish collection of miracle stories and the like contained in their Bible. When we inherit beliefs from our parents, these loving and respected beings, and they likewise inherited their beliefs from their parents and so on, it is easy to understand why these often ridiculous beliefs have lasted so long. It is hard to shoot down the firmly held beliefs of your elders and those whom you love; many people choose to turn away from confronting the elephant in the room.

Buddhism, both the Theravada and Mahayana schools of Buddhism, are also a collection of stories tinged with the magical properties of the divine. Siddhartha Gautama, the Nepalese prince did exist historically and most probably did venture out on a spiritual quest, but then the story tellers take over and we are regaled with unearthly feats designed to impress the uneducated masses. Hinduism is a fantastic collection of wildly colourful stories, creation myths involving gods and demons, many of them extraordinarily beautiful.

“An ancient Hindu warrior-king named Muchukunda was born from his father’s left side, the father having swallowed by mistake a fertility potion that the Brahmins had prepared for his wife; and in keeping with the promising symbolism of this miracle, the motherless marvel, fruit of the male womb, grew to be such a king among kings that when the gods, at one period, were suffering defeat in their perpetual contest with the demons, they called upon him for help. He assisted them to a mighty victory, and they, in their divine pleasure, granted him the realisation of his highest wish. But what should such a king, himself almost omnipotent, desire? What greatest boon of boons could be conceived of by such a master among men? King Muchukunda, so runs the story, was very tired after his battle: all he asked was that he might be granted a sleep without end, and that any person chancing to arouse him should be burned to a crisp by the first glance of his eye.

The boon was bestowed. In a cavern chamber, deep within the womb of a mountain, King Muchukunda retired to sleep, and there slumbered through the revolving eons. Individuals, peoples, civilisations, world ages, came into being out of the void and dropped back into it again, while the old king, in his state of subconscious bliss, endured. Timeless as the Freudian unconscious beneath the dramatic time world of our fluctuating ego-experience, that old mountain man, the drinker of deep sleep, lived on and on.

His awakening came- but with a surprising turn that throws into new perspective the whole problem of the hero-circuit, as well as the mystery of a mighty king’s request for sleep as the highest conceivable boon.

Vishnu, the Lord of the World, had become incarnate in the person of a beautiful youth named Krishna, who, having saved the land of India from a tyrannical race of demons, had assumed the throne. And he had been ruling in Utopian peace, when a horde of barbarians suddenly invaded from the northwest. Krishna the king went against them, but, in keeping with his divine nature, won the victory playfully, by a simple ruse. Unarmed and garlanded with lotuses, he came out of his stronghold and tempted the enemy king to pursue and catch him, then dodged into a cave. When the barbarian followed, he discovered someone lying there in the chamber, asleep.

“Oh!” thought he. “So he has lured me here and now feigns to be a harmless sleeper.”

He kicked the figure lying on the ground before him, and it stirred. It was King Muchukunda. The figure rose, and the eyes that had been closed for unnumbered cycles of creation, world history, and dissolution, opened slowly to the light. The first glance that went forth struck the enemy king, who burst into a torch of flame and was reduced immediately to a smoking heap of ash. Muchukunda turned, and the second glance struck the garlanded, beautiful youth, whom the awakened old king straightaway recognised by his radiance as an incarnation of God. And Muchukunda bowed before his Saviour with the following prayer:

“ My Lord God! When I lived and wrought as a man, I lived and wrought – straying restlessly; through many lives, birth after birth, I sought and suffered, nowhere knowing cease or rest. Distress I mistook for joy. Mirages appearing over the desert I mistook for refreshing waters. Delights I grasped, and what I obtained was misery. Kingly power and earthly possession, riches and might, friends and sons, wife and followers, everything that lures the senses: I wanted them all, because I believed that these would bring me beatitude. But the moment anything was mine it changed its nature, and became as a burning fire.

Then I found my way into the company of the gods, and they welcomed me as a companion. But where, still, surcease? Where rest? The creatures of this world, gods included, all are tricked, my Lord God, by your playful ruses; that is why they continue in their futile round of birth, life agony, old age, and death. Between lives, they confront the lord of the dead and are forced to endure hells of every degree of pitiless pain. And it all comes from you!

“My Lord God, deluded by your playful ruses, I too was a prey of the world, wandering in a labyrinth of error, netted in the meshes of ego-consciousness. Now, therefore, I take refuge in your Presence – the boundless, the adorable – desiring only freedom from it all.”

When Muchukunda stepped from his cave, he saw that men, since his departure, had become reduced in stature. He was as a giant among them. And so he departed from them again, retreated to the highest mountains, and there dedicated himself to the ascetic practices that should finally release him from his last attachment to the forms of being.

Muchukunda, in other words, instead of returning, decided to retreat one degree still further from the world. And who shall say that his decision was altogether without reason?”

Joseph Campbell

The Hero With A Thousand Faces, 1993, Fontana Press, pp 194-196.

I would say that the original author of this story was probably a new parent, indicated by the hero wishing for eternal sleep over all other riches LOL. What it also tells us, is that the successful religions, which have been taken up by kings and therefore the state, all have messages at their heart which assure the listener that the rewards and sufferings of life are nothing in comparison with the promises of divinity. These are not their only messages, but clearly that message would resonate with the suffering masses – to hear that all life, good and bad, is an illusion, would be a panacea to the many who were decidedly short changed by the distribution of commonwealth. It is kings who have driven religions and enforced participation in their rituals, and kings who have controlled and censored the scriptural content of these religion’s holy books. Kings have had much more need of religion and its ability to control the behaviour of adherents, than have subjects had need of religious beliefs.

The belief in a god, who will upon the death of the believer, even things up in terms of getting a fair share of the goodies, in heaven or some paradisiacal garden in the afterlife, has had broad appeal among the disadvantaged. I think we see that now in the fervent take up of extremist Islamic beliefs, many of these adherents are poor and have been racially slighted in the countries they reside in, and they believe that their actions and belief in a vengeful Allah will deliver them to paradise. The African American slaves took the Christian message of the meek inheriting the Earth to heart; women, who have been down trodden and abused by men, have found succour in religion, and it is often a belief which burns brightest in the hearts of mothers within a family; perhaps as salve to the tragedies that historically affected women through the deaths of their children. To believe in something better than avarice, competition and bloodshed is an understandable wish, if Darwinian evolution can only provide that the strong/intelligent will prevail, then it is perfectly understandable that humanity would invent a god that possibly offers the mercy of something else with a kinder face. Although the original incarnations of the old testament Judo-Christian religions were decidedly brutal.

“The great unmentionable evil at the centre of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal – god is the Omnipotent Father – hence the loathing of women for 2000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.”

Gore Vidal

The belief in god has been used by the strong to justify their rule and control over others, the divine right of kings to rule, and the same belief has been employed by the weak to salve their hurts and pains in the hope for a better deal in the afterlife; it is a flexible beast this elephant. All religions seem to make a heap of promises, which require your extinction before they pay out on them, and as nobody has as yet returned from the dead (Jesus excepting but then he works for them) we are none the wiser when it comes to knowing their truth and efficacy. The poor and down trodden masses, who were forced to subscribe to the state religion – the Holy Roman Catholic Church – would have taken what message of hope they could from their time in church. The church collected taxes from these same people and controlled their lives as much as the king, for hundreds of years people were expected to go on a religious pilgrimage during their lives and if they did not they were expected to pay the church the equivalent amount of money they would have spent on their holy journey. Representatives of the church would sell common folk religious relics, purporting to be splinters of the cross that crucified Jesus and the like, and absolutions; so you could buy a piece of heaven, a bit like you can buy financial freedom through home ownership today.

I would say that in our relationship with the new religion, materialism, we have done away with a good deal of hypocrisy about money and its importance in our lives. When I was growing up it was considered rude to ask direct questions about money, which set me back somewhat for many years when it came to negotiating transactions. It was bad form to ask how much something was worth – shopping could be a struggle – bad manners to ask how much someone earnt for a living – life was a bit less exacting I suppose – I imagine as it was before the advent of the electric light, when the edges of existence were not so pronounced in gaslight and candle light. Not a bad thing sometimes to have a bit more mystery. There was however a great deal of downplaying falsely of the importance of money and this was simple dishonesty in many instances. A bit like not being able to talk about ‘fucking’ and always having to say ‘making love’ when referring to sex, which was also the case when I was growing up, at least in polite society or with a lady. But sometimes ‘fucking’ is a more correct description for the activity and incorporates more of our animal natures, whereas ‘making love’ is a far more ethereal term, non-corporeal in fact; and “fucking” is after all only a small part of making love. There always needs to be black and white in the equation, otherwise if we are forced to pretend to only live in the light, we will get corruption, as we do with celibate priests and all those who deny the darkness and their shadow side.

Similarly we need the balance of spirit, inchoate things inside of us, anti-matter if you like, especially now in the time of money. When the zeitgeist is the passion for money and the things that money can buy and people are marching to the consumerist beat, for technological toys like IPhone’s and other gadgets, then the opposite pole becomes so very important. Familiarity breeds contempt and that is what is happening, and will happen even more, with materialism, its strident voice drowns out the sensitive and the mysterious. Science like a Krispy Kreme doughnut has deliciously explained the how but has nothing at its centre to explain the why – consciousness continues to elude neuroscience and all other branches of material knowledge. We need to realise that just because we have named a street on a map and given a moment in time a precise number, that it does not truly define the reality of that particular space and moment. We have killed the mystery, the unexpected nature of existence, by naming and measuring everything and then agreeing amongst ourselves that this is its only reality – we have turned symbols into things and references into realities. No wonder so many people are depressed, having lost contact with the earth beneath their feet, because they are walking on a line on a map inside their head.

I wonder if you or I were to go and lie in a dark cave for a year, a space with no light whatsoever, but with enough warmth, food and comfort to sustain us, and we had no contact with the outside world for that entire year – how we would be on our emergence from the cave after the year? Would our consciousnesses be changed, affected, transformed in any meaningful way? What would we encounter within our own psyches and would the zeitgeist of the times slip away? I imagine that our thoughts would continue to go around and around, as they do, chasing their own tails and tales. But after awhile, with no points of external reference, with which to reinforce their existence, these thoughts would, I suspect, evolve or devolve. Perhaps as in a spiral motion returning to their points of origin, regressing to where they came from – things someone said that we appropriated; wisdom from mum and dad; teachers and mentors; books that we have read; Sunday School scriptures; and finally back even further as we lie there in the pure blackness. We would, I suspect, begin to break down all thoughts and all the things we live by, our moral compass so to speak, our very own philosophy of life, and things would be reduced to essentialities and much of the guff would simply fall away. Close your eyes now and drift away into that eternal night of King Muchukunda.

Tagged antidepressants, Australia, banking, belief, Bob Hawke, Buddhism, Cathars, Christianity, Church, Constantine, doctors, economics, financial freedom, genocide, GP's, Hinduism, history, home ownership, investment, Islam, Jesus Christ, jobs, Judaism, Krishna, materialism, money, Mormons, Moses, Muchukunda, one god, Paul Keating, persecution, pogroms, prejudice, Reformation, religion, Roamn catholic Church, science, spirituality, Vishnu, women, womens liberation, work

Apr 14 2011

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Blog Posts, History, Reviews

Who Murdered Chaucer?

Who Murdered Chaucer?

Book Review

Who Murdered Chaucer? – A Medieval Mystery

By Terry Jones, Robert Yeager, Terry Dolan, Alan Fletcher, Juliette Dor

Methuen, 2004.

Geoffrey Chaucer, poet and most importantly one of the earliest literary stars of the English language, was the author of The Canterbury Tales – a celebrated collection of verse pieces which have provided an incredibly rich source of historical information about the types of people inhabiting the Middle Ages. Many of us studied Chaucer at school, and I am afraid, that by dint of either my own shallowness or via unenthusiastic teaching, I was not a big fan at the time– the early English language was quite challenging I seem to remember – he remains however a major influence upon our Western canon. Like much of the history taught at school, a great deal of important information and context was omitted, thus denuding what could have been a powerful lesson about real life. You see, Chaucer seems to have been disappeared, in the same way, that more recently, people in South American countries have been disappeared by forces within their governments.

I don’t know if it is merely that the majority of people who study history and literature are averse to making waves, or that it is something else entirely, but we seem to get a dry, unquestioning version of history being passed down in our educational institutions. I know here in Australia, teaching was always the profession of choice for the less academically gifted and the ones who didn’t really know what they wanted to do at university. Perhaps the title of this essay should really be, Who Murdered History? As one of the primary integral qualities for teaching must be passion, if a teacher’s communication is not imbued with enthusiasm and real care for the topic, then who is going to listen to him or her?

Geoffrey Chaucer was a poet and scholar in the court of the English king, Richard the second, at the close of the fourteenth century. Now if you are at all familiar with medieval history, or Shakespeare, you will know that Richard II has a seriously sullied reputation as the fey, spoilt, generally unloved king, who was usurped by a far more deserving Henry IV. Here however, is a great example of the fact that history is written by the victor, and the disappointing thing in this circumstance is that in this case, it has been unquestionably accepted by historians down the centuries. I personally came across Richard II as an acting student, when I was doing my NIDA audition – I studied Shakespeare’s play of the same name and chose an audition piece, of Richard expressing his outrage and righteous indignation at being deposed. The whole experience made a lasting impression upon me and I found it very interesting to revisit this piece of history. Terry Jones and his co-authors make it abundantly clear, that Richard was not the despot history and Shakespeare made him out to be, citing chronicled evidence to the contrary. More importantly they show that these chronicles, kept by the religious orders within their abbeys (Westminster, Kirkstall), had been doctored and amended once Henry IV had taken the throne.

Richard II had ascended the throne at the age of ten, and so you can imagine the difficulties he had in establishing his authority as he grew into the role, with overweening advisors and power hungry barons all around him. Terry Jones posits, that far from being a weak and corrupt king, Richard was in fact a king who was at the forefront of new royal practises. He suggests that Richard was creating a uniquely English court, and that Chaucer, with his wonderful wielding of the newly flourishing English language(in contrast to Latin and French), was a big part of that. Richard resisted supporting the maintenance of the military campaigns in France, that his father, the Black Prince, and grandfather Edward III and his forebears had campaigned so vigorously at. Indeed he wished for a peaceful reign and copped a great deal of flak from the more warlord like dukes around him. Similarly today in the United States, great chunks of their industrial wealth is based on armaments and technologies of war, and Presidents are lobbied to support these activities to maintain the economy (Donald Rumsfeld and George W Bush in Iraq). Likewise, several of the barons around Richard, depended upon constant military actions for their upkeep and any threat to this was viewed with great resistance, especially by Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, Richard’s uncle and the youngest son of Edward III. Often this military action was portrayed, especially to the poor, as courageous and brave behaviour to be admired in a man and a leader; manipulations utilising cultural assumptions that still exist today. So Richard reigned during a precarious time and his behaviour actually challenged the status quo, in ways, which we would now admire in our modern more peaceful world.

Terry Jones and co-authors make clear that Richard II, once he had taken personal control over the realm in 1389, made the pursuit of peace with France a priority. They cite the influence of Giles of Rome, the Italian theologian and philosopher, in Richard’s education, as a setter of kingly aspirations in the direction of peace. They also suggest that Richard may have been a more intellectual king than his predecessors, and one who fostered and encouraged men of letters; like Chaucer and his contemporaries. Jones makes a good argument for Richard’s court being one of new ideas and creativity; and in a cultural ferment with the recently flourishing English language at its centre.

‘Namoore of this, for Goddes dignitee,’

Quod oure Hooste, ‘for thou makest me

So wery of they verray lewednesse

That, also wisly God my soule blesse,

Myne eres aken of thy drasty speche.

Now swich a rym the devel I biteche!

This may wel be rym doggerel,’ quod he.

The Canterbury Tales, VII, II. 919-25

‘No more of this, for God’s dignity,’

Swore our Host, ‘for you make me

So weary of your total unlearnedness

That, just as God will bless my soul,

My ears are aching with your dreadful speech.

Now such a rhyme I’ll teach the devil!

This may well be doggerel rhyme, ‘ said he.

It is interesting to read the early English employed by Chaucer and in particular the spellings of the words – I found it threw new light and understanding about certain words and their origins. The piece above by Chaucer, is in the persona of the character Harry Bailey, and highlights the author’s opinions of the travelling minstrels, who were the traditional courtly entertainers before the advent of the poet/authors. A modern parallel for this evolution in courtly tastes would be the difference between the singer/songwriters of the sixties (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell) and the vocalists or cover bands of the previous decade , who did popular renditions of standards. So Richard II was a new type of ruler and under him there flowered a new language, new expressions and new ideas.

In the book Who Murdered Chaucer? the authors describe the effect this change had on those with vested interests in how things were, and the Roman Catholic Church was one organisation who had deeply rooted and very valuable vested interests in medieval England. The powerful leaders of the Church were busy protecting their own authority against forces for change, like John Wyclif, an Oxford theologian who translated the Bible into English and was against many of the commercial aspects of the Church. Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, eventually aligned the Church establishment in its reactionary crushing of all dissent and introduced the practise of burning heretics at the stake into England. Terry Jones and co-authors produce evidence, that it was the recently exiled Archbishop Arundel who joined forced with Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby, another recently exiled by Richard II, to topple the young king and place Henry on the throne. Together they travelled from Europe back to England illegally, and became irresistible forces of conservatism, appealing to the barons and bishops who had been dismayed and offended by Richard’s new methods and associations. Richard II had been surrounding himself with men of ideas and letters, who were not necessarily from the aristocratic classes, and promoting these men of middle class into positions of power. This is suggested as one reason for the relatively quick and successful usurpation by Henry, as he and Arundel were able to unite the anti-Richard forces together and bring down the king.

Chaucer, and his literary cohorts, had under Richard II been able to express a number of quite radical ideas in their work, ideas about the role of the Church and State. There are many Wyclifian concepts within Chaucer’s work, and in particular in the mouths of certain characters, who inhabit The Canterbury Tales. The Poor Parson truly embodies Christ like behaviours in his holy thoughts and good works, and these sit in direct contrast to the avaristic exemplars of what Jones calls the ‘Church Commercial.’ Chaucer parodies other Church representatives, like Friar Huberd in The General Prologue and the character of the Summoner in The Summoner’s Tale, conveying the well known corruption within the Church, being practised by these ecclesiastical officers. The selling of relics to the general public, pieces of the holy cross which crucified Jesus and a myriad of other bogus bits of rubbish, was rife throughout Christendom. In addition to this, people were encouraged to purchase prayers, and if they did not go on a pilgrimage they were expected to donate the dollar value of the journey to the Church in compensation. The Church collected taxes from everyone in the form of tithes, which could be 10% of their income or more. Basically the Church was a vehicle for the systematic abuse and exploitation of the population. It was run by the disinherited children of the aristocracy, the sons who were not first born, and became their private fiefdoms – many bishops were ordained at the ages of twelve and fifteen. You had the irony of the Church being run by completely irreligious people, who were more akin to our corporate CEO’s today.

Archbishop Thomas Arundel, was like a Rupert Murdoch of the Church Commercial, conspiring to prevent the radical forces of change from interrupting the control exerted by the Church and the flow of revenue coming to it. Chaucer could be seen as a literary lion, who expounded with humour and style the lie of the land, and told those who would listen, what was really going on. During Richard’s reign this was permissible and Terry Jones would say perhaps even encouraged, but upon Henry IV taking over, it was now an entirely different universe. The rules had changed and it was unfortunate for Chaucer that he had a written body of work out there, which could act as evidence of his heretical beliefs. Like many usurpers Henry IV was insecure, especially just after murdering an anointed king in Richard II, and he looked to secure his newly stolen throne by a policy of containment and suppression. Apart from the evidence of his sending out a directive to all chroniclers, that he wished to witness what they had written, an unspoken message that said you better write nice things about me and my new rulership of the realm or else, there was also a spate of mob executions of most of Richard’s friends and allies. Henry IV, with the help of the master strategist Arundel, was able to eradicate much of his opposition without directly bloodying his hands. The last known record of Chaucer, was that he had in the year 1400, just taken out a 53 year lease on a house in the garden of Lady Chapel, in Westminster Abbey. Westminster was a sanctuary of the Church, which meant that theoretically it was a place you could go and not be touched by forces of the State, but in practise it did not stop determined agents riding in and dispatching whoever they were really after. Westminster became known as a place where people who were still loyal to Richard II gathered, and indeed the Abbey itself, was implicated in a plot to overthrow the new king and this was discovered by Henry IV not long after the usurpation; and there were deadly ramifications for some of those involved. So it was a time of secrets and suspicions, a bit like East Berlin during the cold war, and those writers and liberals who had flourished in Richard’s court were under the microscope of Archbishop Arundel and Henry IV.

John Gower, a Chaucer contemporary, managed to rewrite sections of his Confessio Amantis, swapping praise of Richard II to Henry of Lancaster, and this rewriting of history to support Henry IV’s new regime was so successful that it was used by later historians to justify the Lancastrian view of English history. This was one example among many of the exorcising of Richard II from histories warm embrace and his consignment into no-speak and ignominy. Thus we have had six centuries of misinformation and unfounded slander upon Richard II and his reign. This book and its detailed referencing of available records and evidence, really showed me how easily history can be re-edited by those who control the information and records. If we do not ask the question and are not prepared to dig a bit deeper then we will never know the truth.

There is no clear and incontrovertible evidence that Chaucer was murdered by agents on behalf of Arundel or Henry IV, but there is a long list of unexplainable facts.

Why did Chaucer the literary star of his day just disappear?
Why did he leave no Will, when he was a meticulous public servant?
Why was no monument built to him?
Why do none of his own copies of his work survive today?
Why is his death eulogised as a tragedy by other poets?

It seems as if Geoffrey Chaucer, England’s most esteemed poet and public servant, just dropped off the face of the Earth. It is the very lack of recorded information about his death, which points to something decidedly suspicious having occurred and the likelihood that he may have died in Archbishop Arundel’s prison; like many other perceived heretics of the time. Arundel used the uncertainty of the times to eradicate enemies of the Church at home and managed through the threat of burning heretics at the stake to get many dissenting voices within the Church to recant and retract their statements. William Sawtre was the first man burnt at the stake in this new England, this religious police state. Sir Lewis Clifford, one of Chaucer’s oldest friends and one of the Church’s most outspoken critics , was persuaded to recant under the new regime and to bow before the unholy spectre of an agonising death amid the flames. Chaucer’s fellow poet John Montagu, the Earl of Salisbury, was ripped to pieces by the mob at Cirencester in the wake of an abortive revolt in 1400. This was a very scary time to be alive, if you held to an alternative view about Henry IV’s right to be on the throne and the nature of Church and State.

Nobody knows exactly when Chaucer died, whether it was the year 1400 or 1402, various biographers down the ages have drawn on misinformation and then compounded that by using that as mistaken sources for factual information. Like a few journalists today, I suppose these biographers thought why spoil a good story just because there are no concrete facts about the ending. Most commonly Chaucer is depicted as gently dying of old age, in a state of contentment at his own home, of course there is no evidence for this and a whole lot of holes in the story – what happened to his substantial library (books were very rare and valuable in 1400) and his own copies of his body of work? Why didn’t an old man, well versed in the law as a respected public servant in the employ of a king, leave a Will? Very strange indeed and highly unlikely. Who murdered Chaucer? The most likely candidates, Archbishop Arundel and Henry IV, have swept clean histories trail and left little trace, but the book concludes, that the glaring omissions of any recorded evidence regarding Chaucer’s final days and demise are highly suspicious, and considering that they quietly despatched Richard II with similarly no official announcement- it is, in detective speak, their MO modus operandi.

Tagged Archbishop Arundel, Black Prince, Chaucer, Edward III, English history, English kings, English language, English literature, fourteenth century, French, Henry IV, John Gower, John Wyclif, Lancaster, Latin, Medieval history, Middle Ages, Parsons Tale, poetry, Richard II, Roman Catholic Church, Shakespeare, The Canterbury Tales, verse, York

Sudha Hamilton

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