Finding the mind’s pause button

THE POWER OF NOW by Eckhart Tolle

For this book, ‘thought-provoking’ is a huge understatement. The book makes you question so much in your thoughts, feelings and even consciousness that it is a slow, slow read, you stop every few pages and wish you had someone to talk to, to share your latest discovery. The only parallel in anything I had read before is Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation  – where getting away from thinking is part of the struggle to move closer to God.

But here it’s much stronger – the mind, the ego, is an absolute tyranny with its self-dramatization, its mental movies about a better tomorrow, and so many more little tricks that distract you from consciousness of yourself, your deep body, your current existence, your immediate problems now.

Achieving all this is a big ask, of course. One of the many annotations I have written, early on in the book, says, ‘If you are saint!’, next to one of Tolle’s calm injunctions to ‘watch the mechanics of your mind.’ For a person with health problems and pain it might be too late to try and adopt the principles of this book, much as Tolle tries to get us to understand pain and tolerate it.

Following this book is scary but liberating at the same time. It chimes very closely with some of my own thoughts as I’ve faced up, this autumn, to a world without my father in it. This grief needed a strategy to make it tolerable. Also he presented a sad example of over-reliance on the mind, even to burning it out while the body limped on.

Since reading this book I have found myself less bored, less frustrated, less impatient. As Tolle says, ‘Waiting is a state of mind. It means you want the future; you don’t want the present.’ (That sounds rather like a late Leonard Cohen lyric – one of those phrases that, like the best coaching questions, are simple but very perceptive.) I have noticed the beauty of my surroundings; even sitting in a traffic jam this morning the sunlight on the frosty field was glorious. I have concentrated more on what I am actually doing now.

The mind is so powerful, it can churn away day and night with thousands of images and sounds and feelings. But it can hold you back from action, too. I remember going to ‘Go Ape’, a tree climbing experience where you make your way through high treetops across wobbly rope bridges and zip wires. Every movement was preceded by a fiddly process of fastening and refastening the three rope slings that were connected to my safety harness. Of course I was glad of the harness, but still all those loops, carabiners and buckles slowed down my progress. In the same way, the mind can surround you with a fog of thoughts, rationalisations and interesting patterns that have to be spotted before the next step can happen.

Also it sets you up with too much self-image, a compilation of image and sound that you have to see coming true. That builds up the pressure to succeed to an almost unbearable tension.

The other problem with these mental movies is that when they are optimistic they are often less vivid than the pessimistic ones. The prospect of change is less easy to imagine than the prospect of staying the same; rejections are intensely familiar because they come so often. If they are allowed to become mental movies then we can gravitate towards them. That’s the trouble.

This book helps you find the off switch. The mind has its essential uses, but like every television, it needs to be turned off at the end of the programme you wanted to watch. 

WHY I AM STILL A CHRISTIAN

8^th July 

Many years ago my father contributed a chapter, intellectually rigorous but lucid, to a book entitled ‘Why I am Still a Catholic’.  Nowadays I would broaden this to all denominations. For me the answer to the question lies in the bleakness of death. Death makes a nonsense of all our love-based edifices of family and blood. Eventually all those bonds will be dissolved, and that is inescapable. For many of us death softens itself in the padding of ‘a good innings’ and ‘a full life’. But sometimes it flaunts its cruelty, reducing small children to tears as they walk behind a coffin. Today I was a mourner at such a funeral; a family where a mother and father had lost a child, their little grandchildren had lost a loving parent.

Everything we try and achieve through the people we befriend and mate with, and the children we engender - their vulnerability freighted with the intensity of our love - can seem a completely empty ritual in the face of death’s power. Today, the question loomed in my mind - what is family love, ultimately, but passengers trying to provide comfort to one another on a ship that has already struck the iceberg, and is heading for the bottom?

This bleakness is unsustainable without hope. This may be just a case of wishful thinking, of wilfully holding onto something that exists beyond proof. But we all know that we all feel, we don’t only think: our intellects are often little help to us. As I sit in my garden this evening with vivid colours from the flowers receding away to the lawn and orange sun in my face and a soundtrack of birds and distant sheep bleating, I can feel, just fleetingly, a certainty (not a conclusion, nothing that cerebral) that the loveliness of the scene is not all there is, that our minds and emotions are, in a way we can’t yet articulate, copies and hints of something greater outside and beyond, something of infinite duration beyond the transience of these earthly bonds and loves. Coupled with this conviction that we are made in the image of God, we also have the solid scriptural record of a poor carpenter’s son who defeated death several times and finally rose from his own tomb. In the bleakness of this life’s struggle, these are the reasons why I cling to the word ‘this’. And why I am certain that another life extends beyond.

Too much democracy?

Is that possible? Two recent exercises seem to suggest that at least it might be. Obviously one took place last Thursday. But the other (which I also took part in) was the Labour party's leadership ballot where anyone could buy a vote for the price of a pint of beer. Interesting to speculate how a different result in the first election might have helped us swerve away from the cliff edge in the referendum...
However, I do somehow feel that the country will cope with Brexit better than the labour and trade union movement will cope with Corbyn - a man with a donnish level of charisma and a political level of intellect.

The Arguments are balanced – but the Power isn’t

           Considering where to place my cross on Thursday, I am still unconvinced by the arguments on either side.  The Economic and business arguments favour ‘Remain’ without question, but the only way to meaningfully control England’s population growth is to curb free movement from the European Union. I have three children who may need unskilled work and certainly need places to live. No amount of economic strength is going to create any more land in our country. The mighty housing developers’ pressure on the Green Belt will soon start to win out against the flimsy under-resourced planning system.

          However, this referendum was never meant to happen. David Cameron included it in the Conservative manifesto at the last election with little expectation of achieving an overall majority. He did get a majority, but it is slim. By a significant percentage, MPs of all parties favour Remain. If there is a ‘Leave’ vote on Thursday it could only be implemented if Cameron (or his successor as leader) whipped all the Tory MPs into line. I can’t conceive of that being accepted without a long process of delay and amendment to the 'Leaving' legislation.

         Given the House of Commons’ current makeup, a leave vote, I have decided, would be a vote for political chaos, and certainly would be compounded by an economic recession. We would stay in full membership for a period of some years and during that time any Romanians and Bulgars still weighing up whether or not to try their luck in London would have a major incentive to get on a budget airline. So immigration would go well up before – maybe - it went down. In Britain we have a Parliamentary democracy not a direct-vote democracy. Only Parliament can raise taxes, only Parliament can pass laws.

        If the country votes to leave, I can’t help thinking it would be like a household of three people where two, who are unemployed, want to move house, but the third who has a job and pays the rent, wants to stay put. And it would be much less clear-cut than that because the result is certain to be very close.

        I feel that in fact it won’t arise, that on Thursday we will end up with a pragmatic, unenthusiastic ‘Remain’ vote. But UKIP won’t go away and can only go on to build their numbers in Parliament, both by election - and defections. If they and their allies had a larger coalition in Parliament then I might have voted differently.

Possession by A.S. Byatt - one of my biggest influences

A tremendous roller coaster of styles and times, the original of the research-based plot, with pages of fine poetry. It's remarkably like the process of archive research. Every word is beautifully chosen but somehow you rattle over some of them, just as you would if really handling old letters in a freezing room in a Lincolnshire mansion, or in a boiling dusty basement in the British Museum. I remember well the 'ironworks' where Prof Blackadder has his lightless office - all swept away now for the Disneyland-like space of the Great Court. That was a sad loss and I'm sure that The British Library's St Pancras offices will never have the same atmosphere. I also remember the Great Storm of 1987 - I was in Sussex at the time too - and the specificity of that night of destruction gives even the modern scenes some historical distance now. As also do the feminist emphasis of Maud, and her womens's studies library. That would never have seemed, in the 80's, to be something we'd lose, but now of course that kind of feminism is a dead letter on any university campus. Why not 5 stars? - [Spoiler alert-] The final scene in the graveyard was a little too rushed, I would have liked more Gothic descriptions of coffins etc. And I was unconvinced by Mortimer Cropper meekly climbing down from the role, so well portrayed throughout the book, of acquisitive villainy. Still, a great read and a great book. It stays with you.

She didn't just live as a man, she fought as one Hannah Snell: The Secret Life of a Female Marine, 1723-1792 by Matthew Stephens

Hannah Snell served as a marine in the Royal navy in the 1740s, under the name of James Gray. According to the legend her true sex was never detected during several years on the lower deck. She was even wounded in action - possibly at the siege of Pondicherry, possibly elsewhere - and kept the secret by insisting on removing a musket ball from her own groin! Later, back in England, she exploited her reputation by touring in uniform and giving drill demonstrations. I first heard of her when visiting the Warwickshire Regiment's museum, though her connection to the regiment or its predecessors is not apparent from this book. She was born in Worcester and supposedly first put on uniform by joining Guise's Regiment in Coventry in 1745, but this seems much less convincing than her later marine service. The main source for her biography is a sensationalist account written in 1750 by Robert Walker. Stephens has traced the documented facts such as Hannah's marriages and children and the service of 'James Gray'. He points out that in many instances Walker's account is contradicted by the facts - she could not have been receiving 500 lashes at Carlisle Castle because she was in fact having the baby in London! The truth remains elusive, even after finishing this little book (which includes all of Walker's account) though the image of a young woman, no doubt strong and muscular enough to be taken for a boy, yet able to act as a wardroom servant and even sing for his masters, remains alluring. I was left wanting to know more. I wonder what further research has been done, or can be done - the life of an illiterate member of the working class, in the days before universal registration and censuses, will perhaps always remain frustratingly shadowy, and, in the case of Hannah, hidden by legend. One annoyance is that on a Kindle the illustrations can't be enlarged, and text notes don't link to the text, but have to be read in a block at the end. However, this is well worth reading and buying, and very good value.