Anarchy in the NT

I dropped in on Alex recently. I bore small gifts ... a few stubbies of dark ale and printouts from the internet on the pricing of some classic books of dialogues with the Buddha and subscriptions to philosophical journals. Alex mustered enough concentration to cursorily read the printouts and made a quick decision to settle for The Journal of Philosophy and let the others go.  After our customary discussion of his poor health, he fell back into his pain, which seemed greater than usual. 

I made a few lame attempts at conversation in an attempt to distract him. Knowing nothing small would work, I tried the future of  world capitalism. Alex's interest flickered briefly but quickly waned after he made some vague comments about the necessity for Government control.

That was interesting, in light of the way things went. Alex drank his single beer quicker than usual, then apologised that he would have to lie down.  But he didn't want me to leave, so I followed him and brought my chair with me. Scattered across the bedroom floor was a pile of leaflets and magazines. Alex suggested I have a look at them, and began to doze fitfully.

There in black and white, colour, gloss, recycled newspaper and three or four languages was a dazzling selection of current anarchist literature from around the  world, from Melbourne to Warsaw. Alex must have been looking for something or knocked down the pile  by accident, because it was out of place with the rest of the his library, which his daughter cleaned up a few years ago. The printed word still covered every wall and corner of  the flat (except for the bathroom), but it was contained. Here and there a few piles could be observed slowly creeping higher ... particularly the Buddhist stuff, which comes in crateloads from Hong Kong ... but no longer did the visitor fear that Alex might eventually meet his end by having a wall of encyclopedias or religous tomes fall on top of him.

I soon found myself  renewing my long-standing acquaintance with anarchist propoganda. As a young man I had been an uncommitted admirer of the philosophy. There was a group in Brisbane called the self-management group, started by the mildly charismatic Brian Laver, who always wore white shirts and a beard.  My only encounter with Brian had been shortly after Joh Bjelke Peterson declared a state of emergency in response to a few peaceful anti-Springbk demonstrations in 1971, when I was  a fresher a Queensland Uni. I rashly declared to Brian  that somebody should shoot the man .. to which he calmly responded that Joh was in fact a human, and no humans deserved to be shot. I was immediately both humbled and impressed.

I had a good friend who was also in the group. I enjoyed his lazy sense of humour and consistent stance on issues, and relished reading self management group pamphlets, which always seemed to make good sense and resonate with my feelings about how the world should be: relaxed, friendly, co-operative and most importantly not run by bossy bullies of the kind who had dominated my five years at high school.

As I drifted further and further away from either conventional or so-called radical politics, the vision of anarchy remained in my mind, although it became increasingly apparent that, as a handbook for life, anarchism allowed folk such as I to pretty well absolve themselves of any need to take action of a political kind. I have to admit this suited me, and in many ways still does, and that it has also evolved into an equally convenient cynicism about proper anarchists, who write pamphlets, live in squats and do the other things that anarchists really should do.

This cynicism was immediately summoned up by the first article I read  from the pile, from a London periodical which lambasted Ken Livingstone and Gordon Brown for allowing Yuppies to "gentrify" urban areas at the expense of the "working class."  Although I don't like yuppies either, I quickly became annoyed by the fawning tone of the writer as he glorified the "working class" and lampooned the "middle class." The usual us and them stuff, I complained to Prus, who roused briefly.

But despite myself, I began enjoying the diatribes. There were lots of articles about the suffering of prisoners, who according to anarchists seemed to be all in jail either for being unable to pay fines or expressing their frustration with mindless globalised oppression. One newspaper appeared to have been created by prisoners. In another, there was a pictorial spread purporting to show a minister of the British crown having sex from behind with an overweight prostitute, and (unrelated) a full page article celebrating the virtues of unfettered body odour. You've got to admit - the author has a point. Have you ever tried to find a deodarant that actually lets you sweat?

Gradually the cheerful defiance I remember of so many anarchists I have known began to percolate up through my long-standing disillusionment with politics and humanist philosophies. There was something admirable and inspiring here, something you could never get in New Internationalist or The Guardian Weekly or Time. An incisive critique of multiculturalism sank the boot into the idea that cultures are sacred cows which must be protected at any cost to free speech and international human rights. I found myself cheering. Particularly seductive was a new periodical entitled Green Anarchy , which included a long and thoughtful article about the value of silence, stuffed full of lovely quotes from people like Thoreau and Emerson, and shafting that famous French post-modernist (obviously not famous enough for me to remember his name) who apparently regarded silence as the enemy of civilisation. Whatever that is, I found myself thinking.

Prus roused again, and asked me to make sure I put the magazines in a pile. Was he reminding me of the subtle difference between anarchism and what Yeats referred to as mere anarchy? Probably not, but I am now reminding myself that the untidy pile in random order that lay on the floor attracted my attention in a way that a stack of neatly catalogued magazines would not done had they remained on whatever shelf where they once were.  Like pieces of the I Ching they seemed to have landed in a way that revealed the meaning of a particular moment in time ... if only to me.

A textbook anarchist might scorn such a thought as an example of magical thinking -  but I would say to him, or her, what is an anarchist doing in a textbook anyway? The beauty of anarchism is not in any recipe it might have for a better world, but in its continual examination and questioning of authority. This is a process that is not exclusive to anarchism, but can be found, for example, in some strands of Buddhism. Ultimately all the layers of authority are peeled back until only the real authority remains.  Whatever that is.

The Peake experience

Look out for a new author marking out his stamping ground in discussions about the metaphysical, paranormal and just plain weird stuff.

Anthony Peake is the perfect companion for people who love to speculate about all those things we haven't satisfactorily explained, and may never do so. He is a very twenty-first century heir to a tradition of ruminations on the nature of reality that goes back thousands of years. What makes Peake interesting is his ability to mix modern scientific knowledge and theory with ancient beliefs and philosophical positions.

If you haven't already encountered his misleadingly titled Is There life After Death  or The Daemon, and you're interested in exploring the evidence for Peake's claim that we never actually die, but actually go on repeating our lives over and over,  you could skip the rest of this blog and go straight to his: http://cheatingtheferryman.blogspot.com/ or his website , www.anthonypeake.com/ (and from the latter to his forum, in which various aspects of the Peake world view are discussed.

If you are familiar with the books or the ideas, I offer my own response to Is There Life After Death by way of contribution to the discussion.

As I read the book I was excited to discover that Peake had read several books which have been among my favourites. One was The Beginning of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of the Bicameral Mind. The others were An Experiment With Time by J. W Dunne and  The Death Of Forever by the late Darryl Reannie, who was born in New Zealand and later moved to Australia. Rather surprisingly, Peake mentions the Reannie book in passing but omits it from his bibliography. This is odd because Reannie is treading on similar Territory and making similar conclusions about their central subject of Time, and how it is perceived subjectively and scientifically. Reannie is also interested in the concept of parallel universes. We will speak more of Darryl Reannie in a  coming post - except to say that he makes fewer conclusions than Peake who appears to have decided that he has "proved" his hypothesis that none of us do die, despite appearances to the contrary (indeed the essence of Peake's theory is that death is something that happens to other people.

There are many threads in Peake's argument, which he tries to bring together at the end of his book. En route it's an interesting journey through the twilight zones of quantum physics, the science of the brain, and human experience, mostly documented by individuals and therefore "unproven."

Peake seems keen to prove that all of human experience takes place within the brain, which is in his view the seat of consciousness. But, in contrast with other materialists, Peake uses scientific evidence to argue that there is no death, as far as the individual is concerned. At the point of death, he argues, the chemicals in our brains which affect our perception of time slow that perception down to a virtual standstill. At this point our brains run through what he calls a Bohmian Imax (named for the physicist David Bohm) , creating a "virtual reality" replay of our entire lives. Everyone else watching us sees us die, but from our point of view we never do. 

I am of course oversimplifying a  theory that takes Peake several hundred pages to elucidate. But that is the nub of it. There are a number of  obvious queries that arise from it. The most obvious is the sheer solipcism of the whole thing. If  we are hallucinating our lives as we lie on the ground somewhere bleeding to death, what are we to make of the people with whom we imagine we are spending our lives ? How can they be anything more than 'sims'? If Peake or any of his followers sincerely believe that they are experiencing the Bohmian IMAX, how can they treat anyone else with the respect that a real human being might expect?

Peake claims to have dealt with this question in his book, but this reader at least didn't get it. At one point he brings in the concept of parallel universes, to suggest that when we die,  a new world branches off  in which we "escape" from the danger that kills us in one world. But this would appear to be a different road completely than starting our lives all over again "eternal return" style. Does he mean that we actually keep going on one road and start all over again on another? Peake claims somewhat annoyingly that parallel universes are a proven fact, but it's also a fact that a lot of physicists don't believe in them.

There are other problems. Do we always know when we are going to die, so that we can slow time down quickly enough (!) to live our lives over and over again? It is hard not to believe that there are many times in which sudden death would win the race with the brain chemicals. 

Peake argues that the "life review" which people who have near-death-experiences describe is proof of his theory. In my opinion, it's not. Descriptions of life reviews usually involve some sense of observation, whereas Peake's proposal involves a three-dimensional re-experience of one's whole life, repeated ad-infinitum.

On the other hand it must be said that Peake raises enough questions and highlights enough bizzare phenomena for us to at least be forced to admit that something is happening Mr Jones. Is There life After Death? is like a more erudite version of Ripley's Believe It Or Not. And his attempts at holism are admirable. He has since published another book, which I have not read, called The Daemon,  and he does say that he and a colleague are working on the original theory with a new line that seems to involve some sort of collective unconscious.

 How this would be sustained in his materialistic model of life I'm not sure. Peake rejects telepathy, ghosts, reincarnation and indeed anything outside the brain in  Is There Life After Death?, when I believe his model would be well-served by adopting the ideas of Rupert Sheldrake, and conceding that there are waves and fields which don't have a material existence and don't required the continued existence of brains to sustain them.

 

A Man And His Books Part Two

If knowledge hangs around your neck

like pearls instead of chains

you are a lucky man

 

from "Oh Lucky Man" by Alan Price

Alex has never stopped reading or collecting books, despite obstacles.  He moved to Alice Springs in the late sixties after numerous adventures in South America. Alex had left the church in Brazil, shortly after being ordained. His passion for books had achieved exactly what the church believed it would: an open mind. 

He began a series of  jobs, including working as an accountant on the Argentinian side of Tierra Del Fuego. Still single, Alex could think of nothing better in the world to do with his money than buy books. As he recounts in the videoed interviews accompanying this text, he made money by buying and selling gold dust collected by prospectors from the ocean shores ... and spent it all on books. As his book collection grew he carted it all over South America and eventually in crates to Australia. And still it grew. 

There are elements of compulsion and obsession in Alex's search. He is driven to search for answers, but is forever unsatisfied. Not only that, but any loss of memory and dimunition in his stores of knowledges causes him distress.

Despite abandoning organised religion, many of Alex's books are about theology and other religions. He subscribes to journals and annuals from the Jesuits and the Humanist Society. At one stage he embarked on a study of Prali - on top of the eight or nine languages he already had - so he could read original Buddhist texts.  He deplores Islam more than any other religions, but has read the Koran and numerous texts about it.  And although he ridicules religion,  at the end of his life he is frustrated that he is unable to say what he actually believes. Is he an atheist or an agnostic? More on that matter in a future blog.

I remember reading as a youth about the various paths open to the searcher. The path of knowledge, the path of experience, the path of devotion .. what were the others? The path of knowledge seems a lonely path,  although one meets many great minds.  But who is there to share it with?

Alex has a strange and wonderful mind.  His thirst for knowledge is so strong that it has a life of its own.  For a period of several months he was beset by bizarre hallucinations, which he described to me.  They consisted of hour-long or longer documentaries on subjects which he knew nothing about. One was about prostitution in China!  Alex's sensation was that these  "films" were mysteriously projected onto a screen "inside" his forehead.

For those who have lost their faith or never had it, it may be that we are compelled to acquire more and more knowledge in order to sustain interest in life and some sort of "happiness". I wonder if the reason that so many scientists seem to be agressively athestic is that they are sustained by this ongoing search for knowledge and the sense of excitement that it generates and snobbishly deplore other paths, such as devotion or experience. 

Of course not every scientist ends up like John Dawkins. Whether their excitement stimulates primarily a sense of wonder or one of power would seem to be a crucial difference among them. In some sense these two feelings can be considered opposites ... in the sense that wonder can be a positive experience of one 's own powerlessness.

I haven't asked Alex if he feels powerless. I guess he does, either often or mostly. He is beset by chronic pains: a benign growth in his stomach that should have been removed years ago, sciatica and arthritis, not to mention headaches, nightmares and random plagues. It is obvious that knowledge has not freed him from suffering. But his most painful moments are when he is unable to read, because of headaches, or recently because of his dry eyes, the cause of which is yet to be diagnosed by his doctor.

Ultimately I have to ask myself what I get from reading. My aversion to fiction is nowhere near as strong as Alex's, but I am also inclined to the same subjects as he is, which is why I am so happy to sit among his books. (In fact, just knowing that the books he has even exist makes me happy ... and more so that they exist in one place.)  In my own reading I experience both the power and the awe. Power of understanding, awe of amazement - as well as  befuddlement as I realise my tiny brain is unlikely to put all this together and hold it. Certainly not to remember it.

Just today I revisited another library .. that of my dad who died in the year 2000. My mother in law had kindly offered to keep them while we sorted out what to do with them, but now herself is concerned about what she should do with them.  When faced with this collection, much smaller than Prus's, but with its own potency, I find myself falling into a dither. Unless I were to retire now and take them with me to a cave, there is no chance that I could read all of them, but I find myself plotting how I could build a shed somewhere to store them. Could I let them go ... to Lifeline? To strangers, even the bin?

Most likely Prus will die close to his books, as my father did. You can't take it with you, not even knowledge. But, if in the process of accumulating knowledge, you have also gotten a little wisdom, is it possible the soul of your library will travel with you _ or at least sweeten your departure?

A Man And His Books Part One

A lot of sentimental nonsense has been said about books. But you have to admit they have something other media can't beat.

It's the package itself that is so enticing, with its promise of a hidden world more consistent and comprehensible than our own, fashioned by an intelligent creator and  contained between two small pieces of cardboard. For this we love the book as a form in itself, even before we begin to explore its contents.

Collections of books can enlarge that sense of mystery and promise, or betray it. What book lover has not felt cold and lost in a bookshop or library that fails to honour the authors, artists, editors and publishers who have created its contents? 

This honour is not simply a matter of efficiency - putting books in their right categories and keeping authors together. It's about choice, and character. The bookshop or library that tries to please everyone either becomes too meagre or too vast, and in either eventuality becomes nothing more than a collection of books. A great library reflects the soul of its owner or owners and has a collective story of its own.

Truly greater than the sum of its parts, the most wonderful library I have ever been in exists in a single bedroom public housing flat  in outback Australia. Its location is unimportant because wherever it was it would still create its own location, beyond time and space. Its story is of a man who has compulsively sought knowledge and meaning in his life. Raised to be a priest and forced to become a teenage resistance fighter, Alex's life story is one of both suffering and exploration, as he breaks free from the intense conditioning of the Catholic Church and discovers new worlds of philosophy, history, politics, science and religions.

Under his mother's tuition, Alex read his first books before he went to school, at the age of five. They were historical novels about Poland ... and among the very little fiction he has had time for.

As Alex's education progressed, much of it under Russian and German occupation, Alex's reading became increasingly limited to the confines of the Catholic Church. His mentor during the resistance was a Catholic priest, an intelligent and kindly man who nevertheless kept Alex on the straight and narrow road of the church, which proscribed the vast majority of books because they conflicted with its teachings. After the war, in a Polish seminary in Rome, Prus began tentatively exploring the world beyond, and by the time he was transferred to London he took on a job searching for unexploded mines in order to pay for his books.

Jesus for non-christians

An alien visiting from another planet or watching from their own with quantum binoculars might have assumed that Christmas was a good opportunity for earthlings to talk about Jesus, given that so many are ostensibly celebrating his birth.

In fact,  it's harder to talk about Jesus at Christmas than it is the rest of the time. Baby Jesus, safely away in a manger and not yet able to form a sentence, is OK of course. But grown-up Jesus is persona non grata for most people in most western societies, possibly excluding those of the Americas. In Australia we even have a special name for the person who talks too much  about Jesus, except in oaths or jokes: the god-botherer. It has often seemed very apt to me.

Enter at this point a new kind of god botherer, the militant atheist, and Jesus experiences a revival as the meat in the sandwich between the two camps, particularly on ABC websites.

In the past year I have encountered two people talking about Jesus outside the usual parameters. Interestingly, neither claimed to be a Christian. The first was a Muslim, Rageh Omaar, the BBC's correspondent in Iraq in 2003. He presented a three-part series for the BBC called The Miracles of Jesus.  The second was John Carroll, the sociologist, who has written several books including The Wreck Of Humanism, and in this case a book called The Existentialist Jesus.

Neither Omaar nor Carroll make any commitment to a view of what Jesus "actually'' did or "actually" said.  While we have the interesting phenomenon of Christians like Dr Selby Spong delivering their considered judgements on the veracity or otherwise of various biblical stories ("No miracles please, we're protestants"), these two outsiders have the courage and intelligence to keep their minds open and ignore both the current debate between theists and atheists and the efforts of modern Christians to water down the gospels.

Carroll is not primarily concerned with discussing the finer details of the historical Jesus,  although he is speculating on what Jesus actually meant, reinforcing his interpretations with impressive comparisons of various translations in English with his own of the original Greek. Some of these come as revelations to unscholarly people such as I. The fact that there were different Greek words for "time", depending what kind of time was meant was one. Kairos was a special kind of time, outside of the chronological day by day, sequential sort. Mark and John use it in distinction to ordinary time, but the distinction is lost in translation.  I did realise there were several words for "love" , but hadn't realised how often translators had skipped the nuances involved. 

Most interesringly, Carroll compares several versions of the Lazarus story in John. In this story Jesus arrives later than Mary Magedelene had hoped -  "too late " to have healed her sick brother. The original Greek quite clearly portrays anger and annoyance in Jesus at the behaviour and expectations of Mary Magdalene. Successive translations have watered the story down further to the point where instead Jesus is described as being "deeply moved" as he recalls Lazarus from the dead.

Carroll believes the translators missed the point of John's representation of Jesus and what he was on about, here and elsewhere. Carroll's Jesus, or Carroll's Jesus of Mark and John, is not a moralist, nor a revolutionary, nor a lawmaker, nor someone who sought to gather new God botherers to the fold. He speaks only secondarily of doing good deeds, but primarily about the nature of Being, being that transcends the petty accounting of religosity or ordinary human relationships organised around memory, social obligations and cultural imperatives. Goodness flows from this sense of being, and not the other way round.

Although Mark and John present different versions of Jesus - the former tormented and uncertain, the other serene and magisterial in his power - Carroll suggests these two represent two aspects of the Human Being.

Carroll vindicated my intuitions that Jesus' primary work was not to establish a religion as such, but to inspire us to live more powerfully in the everyday, the "eternal now"  rather than codify a new set of rules for living.  With this Jesus, the purpose of the forgiveness of sins is to allow us to live without the shackles of anger, guilt and remorse, and to "have life more abundantly" , fully responsive to the moment both with its transitory demands and underlying timelessness. This is a Jesus from whom atheists can learn f if they are prepared to abandon their literalism.

Omagh's documentary is a very different kettle of loaves and fishes (a story to which he devotes considerable attention). Omagh is concerned to examine the veracity of accounts of Jesus' life, but at least partly in the context of Jewish religious traditions. He also examines the evidence of non-biblical sources including Roman histories, what archeologists have discovered, and does some good investigative journalism.

His Jesus is refreshingly human, but never merely ordinary. Omagh highlights the story in which Jesus responds rudely to a gentile woman's request for help, virtually calling her a "dog". Her reply seems to utterly disarm him, and he gets down off his high horse and cures her son. Omagh suggests this was a pivotal moment in the life of a man with remarkable abilities and insights. 

Omagh resists the temptation to take sides in a debate over Christ's divinity. This is a rare achievement in its own right: to recognise that there was something curious going on here, whatever it was, and whatever the explanation for it might be , rather than simply putting aside these stories, with their elaborate and sometimes unnecessary details, as complete fabrications.

Both of these works invite the reader to take their own looks at Jesus, unfettered by their Jesus baggage if possible. 

Why bother? At least as intellectuals or "thinking people" who claim to respect "culture", we ought to be interested in the single person who has arguably shaped Western thought more than anybody else (as Carroll reminds us), so much so that whole nations at one time have described themselves as "Christian."

Maybe we have missed something.  Despite the message we get from God-botherers of both sorts, here was a man with a far more sophisticated notion of God than either Christopher Hitchens or John Dawkins. What is God, according to this man? God is love. Where is God's kingdom? "Within us," comes the reply. Claims to divinity? When about to be attacked for allegedly claiming to be the son of God, he points out that according to scripture, we are all gods.

This doesn't sound to me like the "Supreme Being" humanists postulate as the only possible definition of God.  Perhaps it's more like the actual state of  supreme being to which, mystics suggest, we all have access if we are prepared to give up our habitual and conditioned thought processes for the odd moment of kairos. In our abstracted, intellectualised world it is message with some relevance.

 

The Trappings of Christmas : a meditation

Every year it happens, like one of those dreadful bites that supposedly reinfect you on the anniversary of the original attack. I begin the season with a mixture of apprehension and muddle-headedness, looking forward to the whole strange business as if this might be the Christmas that really does it for me after so many disappointments. 

As the days rush by, my annoyance grows and my goodwill wavers. Why is everyone in a bad mood - or is it just me? After nearly  50 years of practice, why do I still get stressed out worrying about what Christmas presents to buy? Just as often it is the lack of Christmasness that affects me as much as its pervasive commercial presence. This year I have to say, a little to my disappointment,  I have noticed no badly dressed, underweight Santas smoking in secret corners out the back of the shopping centres, and not many decorations in the stores, nor even the smell of freshly cut pine trees in Woolies. ("I think there are some plastic ones up near the cheeses," the check-out chick informed me when I inquired.)

I suspect, if my sons' attititudes are any indication, that Christmas is losing its magic - however tenuous and forced that magic may have become. And this year, when our local Carols by Candlelight was cancelled on account of a few desultory morning showers, I began to wonder if the whole thing was becoming too much trouble for everyone.

Perhaps as a consequence of all this, I found myself thinking of the old Yeats poem, "The Second Coming" and that oft-quoted line:  "What rough beast is this that slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

What kind of birth might we be celebrating in these unholy days of ours, I wondered. Yeats spoke of a beast with the head of a man moving through the desert. When we believe in nothing but what we can see with our eyes, when there is no divine spark nor even the possibility of one, are we allowing ourselves to become simply another animal with no special knowledge or claim on God's attention ... what or whoever that may be? If we are just another animal, how we can "celebrate" the birth of a child who claimed a direct connection with that God? 

Even the pagan elements of Christmas, carried over from the festival of the summer equinox, held a sense of the numinous, but now they too are threatened as the widespread obsession with climate change replaces our sense of the rhythm of the seasons with an anxiety that we are embarking on one hell of an endless summer. The scientists have told us it is so; so it must be so. The scientists tell us there was no Christmas star; so it must be so. No resurrection, no eternal life, no miracles, no God. The 'priests' of our time have declared it; so it must be so. 

In my own way, like most of us, I have joined in this frenzy of negation in various periods of my life. But now I find myself in the final stage of a Christmas ritual, a compulsive affair that changes slightly each year. I realise the simple exchange of gifts, the early morning phonecalls far away, and the big Christmas dinner will not be enough.  What will I do this year? I don't think I could seriously cop another session with Pastor Basil and the Lutherans. The summer festival at the Steiner School was something, but the children were left to sing the carols while we adults wimped out.

Now, like the hapless quarry of vampires gathering all the garlic, crucifixes and sharp stakes he can lay his hands on to keep the evil at bay, I find myself rummaging in the storeroom with my wife,  for ancient plastic bags of decorations, and rushing to pin them up around the living room. We must protect ourselves from a world without soul.

Photo: Christmas night market in Alice Springs.