Living "well"...

AREN'T we the offspring of tool-making hunter-gatherers wholly at ease with the idea of slaughtering other creatures for their own survival? Have we done more than simply industrialise and commercialise those activities? Isn’t the blood-letter one of us? We know that bad stuff happens. So, while it’s one thing to become aware of realities far greater than oneself, it’s a different thing to live comfortably with that realisation.

Unless we’re prepared to live always on tenterhooks, or skim by life in mists of existential denial, we have to find some way of trusting the mystery of which we’re such an intrinsic part.

On foundations of their awareness of things beyond mortal comprehension, our ancestors built superstructures of thought and insight that complemented and facilitated their day-to-day lives. They learned to make survival a shared concern. Their constructions may have helped to make warfare one of humanity’s earliest collective activities, but they were not careless or capricious. To their slow drawing-together and passing-on there was a painstaking care.

As the tales of one generation were passed on to the next, and the next, the good sense of experience must have become an organising theme, each generation’s insight enhancing the experience and insights of the past. In an oral tradition, stories get edited and gathered into each other as myths, and form themselves into a body of cultural wisdom.

Hero-figures emerge, values coalesce, ideals become explicit… myths intertwine to become a body of thought we can identify as an enduring, composite truth and the culture itself becomes, more than a collective narrative, an identity: a resource to empower descendants in their struggles with the world. The stupid stuff, for the most part, gets left behind. Symbols, metaphors, imagery and poetry give some elasticity to ideas that otherwise would be too rigidly or narrowly understood.

From early days, those hunter-gatherers seem to have been less than wholly at ease with the idea of slaughtering other creatures to consume as food. And many hunting and gathering societies have been known to surround their harvesting of animals, including birds and fish, with ritual and a sense of obligation to somehow counter the abstract imbalances they sense in the taking of life and set some bounds around the necessary act of killing.

This, it seems to me, has to lie at the heart of the ways of thinking that have come to be called “religion”: a primal need of the human consciousness to maintain a balance. Losing it can destabilise the intersecting dynamic and static realities that keep us alive. In the same way as a single broken thread can lead to the disintegration of a piece of fabric, so the heedless breaking of a single thread within the integrated natural processes that sustain us may lead to catastrophe.

The idea of a “god” or “gods” having the power to over-ride the damage we do, or punish us if we do it again, cannot have been the silliest way to face the abyss of mystery that envelops every experience we try to fully understand. Ultimately, a religion gives us a way, not only to make survival a collective concern, but also to make it a transcendent universal aspiration and a path to redemption. And there are dangers to that.

In even in the most literal of ways, it’s reasonable to think of the “religion” having been informed by interactions with, and instruction by, the “mystery”… thousands upon thousands of years of mystery. But, while a religion is formed and propagated collectively, it can only be deeply experienced individually. It’s not like joining a club; nor does it appropriately involve the regimentation of inquiry and supposition. It has to be more personal than that.

But there’s a strong impulse to back away from the abyss itself and, instead, turn a religion’s olden founders and exemplars into talismans to cling to, seeing them as more than what they were, and so lose a sense of the corporate shaping of the “belief” system.

So “Christians” sometimes adopt Jesus as a fetishist’s totem —a lucky charm — to be worshipped superstitiously… despite the Gospels as having consistently portrayed Jesus as pointing beyond himself, to “God”: to the mystery. Siddartha Gautama, the Buddha, 500 years previously, did the same. “Islam” means “surrender: not to Muhammad, but to Allah the Merciful… to the compassionate mystery. Judaism talks to Yahweh, the “I Am”, the mystery of existence, but interposes the ancient books and falls into the anachronistic superstitions of Zionism, locating a “Holy Land” as a particular place crucial to its divinely ordained destiny… when the whole Earth is necessarily “holy”. All of these reductions of mystery to the level of garden furniture need to be recognised for what they are, or religions face meltdowns of their own making. And that would see their slowly, painstakingly acquired reservoirs of wisdom run to waste.

The mystery is absolute. The purpose of a religion is to give us healthy ways to live well within the mystery; a healthy religion does not focus on death and what might happen afterwards — no-one can possibly know the other side of death, but no-one should be incited to fear it. A healthy religion helps us to focus on life and gather our capacities to live it well. A religious “truth” can only mean that people have found it be “true” — in the way that a chart or compass bearing is “true”: a religious “truth” can never be more than a touchstone or a pointer; if it becomes an anchor, it is no longer true.

A religion that makes greater claims either imagines a very little “god” that’s itself subject to the greater mystery, or it is obliterating its own only reason for existence: there can be no one, single, “true” religion until there’s no longer a mystery. When there’s no mystery, there’ll be no need for religion. The first sign that a religion is running amok is when it forgets this.

At the age of about 14, I was taken to a Billy Graham rally: it made me think of black and white newsreels of Hitler rallies and street mobs. I recoiled from his manner, his message and his rhetoric, and from religion. What I’d seen was controlling and manipulative, sinister, ugly and bombastic. So, by my 15th birthday, I was a confirmed atheist. That I got bullied for it at the “Christian” boarding school I was sent to pretty much confirmed me in my view that Christians and Nazis were cut from the same unpleasant cloth.

Like most atheists of my acquaintance, I simply saw no need to suppose a god exists… certainly not that loathsome, uniquely male, arbitrary and violent “God” that got off on the blood sacrifice of “his” own “son” and turned a blind eye to atrocity while, at the same time, stooping to answer the prayers of “good” people for parking places. “His” kind of “heaven” would be my kind of hell.

No-one showed me any good reason to ensnare my intellect or my experience in the dictates of texts that had been misconstrued, diluted, misrepresented, exploited and perverted by 2,000 years of centralisation, imperialism, anti-intellectualism, crusading, sectarianism, misogyny, warring, witch burnings, persecution, slave trading, genocide, ethnocide… the “charge sheet” is far too long to repeat here. Atheism held exciting challenges to think critically for myself, to enter into experience, to open to feelings, to be open-minded and curious… to make the most of my capacities and my freedom.

But at last it sunk in: I one day recognised the impossibility of unravelling all the mysteries of existence* using a merely human mind, certainly not with mine, and the impossibility of proving a negative. I saw that my proselytising atheism was not just conceited and contradictory… it was also stupid. So I stopped declaring it. Instead, I went looking.

The Christian narrative, if it’s taken as an example, has been muddied by omission, addition and mutation, translation and interpretation issues and trivial confusions, but it also is distanced from us by all of the “stuff” that teems in our consciousness today that was not teeming in the consciousness of its founders.

Many Christians seem to have approached the complexities by making the bits they like tiny enough to fit into some cramped “Sunday” corner of their consciousness, like an preserved anatomical specimen in a medical museum’s vault… to be taken down and peered at briefly from time to time — but never is the jar opened. As a society, we’ve learned to compartmentalise consciousness and avoid difficult paths of thought. So we’re encouraged to see religious teaching as more “stuff” to stuff into over-stuffed minds and lives… where the wisdom of it is soon extinguished.

Cultural change is bound to throw a religion into a spin, and the responses of Christian churches to modernism and postmodernism have been surprising for their incompetence: untenable attempts to assert the factual historicity of all of its sacred literature; attempts to de-mystify teachings about the mystery; efforts to trivialise the issue of faith by turning it all into matters of “morality”. But, while so much has been done to obscure the core values of Christianity and its wisdom, it has yet to extinguish them.

Religion is far from being the cause of all of the world’s problems, as some like to allege. Rather, it’s sometimes their best chance of a resolution. Greed, one comes to see, is vastly more ruinous than religion — and religions have too often been subverted to political and economic adventures driven by greed.

Political hegemony is far more destructive than religion; militarism and ethnic conceit are incomparably uglier… governments have always perpetrated far more serious harm to humanity than religions, not least by promoting their interests in the name of a religion.

But religions are not alone. Ill-motivated and damaging projects have been launched under all varieties of lying banners of convenience: from “freedom” to “manifest destiny”, “peace” to “democracy”, “empire”, “civilisation as we know it” to “the people”… anything to incite a mob. Hitler’s concentration camp guards didn’t have “Gott Mit Uns” on their belt buckles because were answering calls to a religious vocation.

The point to which we’re inevitably returned is our own unique, personal consciousness.

And that is what gives us each a personal mountain to climb and a personal mountain from which to gaze on beauty, on life, on wonderment… on expanses of extraordinary, teeming diversity.

From our own mountaintop, we need only to muster the courage to leap, to fly, to venture, to live. Personally, I’ve found that Jesus’ purported core teachings to be helpfully “true” for this quest: the loving and forgiving, trusting the mystery, being unafraid, seeking wisdom and “truth”, and refraining from greed, judgement and vengeance… even to the extent of trying to put this “way”, “truth” and “life” in mind whenever I eat and drink.

These tips all disencumber us. There’s nothing like grudges, revenge-seeking, chasing after money, risk aversion or picking apart the actions of other people to seize us with immobility.

And I do hear an echo of the far, far older, primal call for balance. Balance is perhaps what we most deeply need if we’re to live well.

This is where wisdom traditions and religions can help us, not by prescribing a journey but by giving us the confidence and courage to undertake one… even a companion or two for encouragement along the way.

Our lives may be short, but there’s plenty of living to be done.

* see ‘Making Connections’ click here... Making Connections

A single table

I WAS in the pretty, orange-tiled hilltop village of Scapoli — in central Italy — for an international bagpiping festival.

Scapoli, with its potted geraniums and steep, narrow streets and terraces, overlooks valleys of olive groves, vineyards and cornfields, across to forests where native bears and wolves still roam in the safety of the 44,000-hectare Parco Nazionale di Abruzzo and its 60,000-hectare extended protection zone.

Although it is itself perched on a 600-metre hilltop, Scapoli is overlooked by the spectacular peaks of the Mainarde range to the north-west and the Matese range to the east. The mountains — held sacred by the early Pentri people whose culture held sway here until the Romans seized the region in 263 BC — give a tranquillity to Scapoli, even at the height of the festival.

This is a relatively poor part of Italy, unpretentiously rooted in the traditions of its rugged environment. Life here has made for a hardy but hospitable rural culture that persists, despite its having been weakened by emigration and economic vulnerability. It’s produced close functional relationships between hard physical work, community pride, food, celebration and hospitality.

There’s something compelling about a commitment and sense of beauty that binds a community so proudly around the presentation of things its people produce with their hands. Yes, this is an “Italian thing” to be sure, but little Scapoli does it well.

The village’s own bagpipers — and there are a few of them — were out in their dark, knee-length cloaks, red ribbons and black felt hats, processing through the crowds. With them went singers, accordion players and percussionists… thudding drums, ringing cymbals, jangling tambourines, rattling castanets, moaning friction drums – as many as 20 different languages were being spoken, and all around were bagpipes: all sorts of bagpipes, with their own strange-sounding names: baghets, musas and pivas from northern Italy, zampognas from Sicily and the south, bots from the Pyrenees, Scottish Highland and Irish uilleann pipes, gaitas and gaidas, dudas, sacs de gemecs from northern Spain and other instruments from around Europe. There were tarantella dancers from southern Italy, singers, guitarists and other performers.

Many of these people had arrived, some by hitchhiking across Europe, with little money, lightly packed backpacks and their instruments. They had come to play, to learn, to celebrate, to journey. A few stalls displayed piping supplies, crafts and souvenirs; others filled the air with the smells of spit-roasting pork, fresh-baked bread, and locally made smoked meats, wines and cheeses. Trestle tables and chairs attracted visitors and performers.

It was at such a table, with wine and food passed around, that I saw an elderly local instrument maker, a young woman piper from Scandinavia, a burly Serb, a costumed Spaniard, another Balkan piper who was introduced to me as a Croat, and several north Italian piva players locked in animated discussions in several languages about their music and their various bagpipes. Instruments were being taken apart, reeds were being passed around, snatches of tune were being sung, techniques were being compared and the table was rocking with laughter.

This was the summer of 2002. Less than a year had passed since the terrorist attacks that felled New York’s “twin towers”; United Nations weapons inspectors were looking for evidence of “weapons of mass destruction” in an Iraq that was still ruled by Saddam Hussein. The former president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, was being tried in The Hague for war crimes: Serbs and Croats, like that pair at the table, had very recently been deadly enemies. And, from time to time, NATO military jets made loud, roaring passes overhead.

On the ground, in striking contrast, little Scapoli had in its own beautiful way brought the whole of Europe to a single table.

Looks like fun!

IT looks such fun at the outset: a low-risk fast-track to social identity… fancifying the semiotics of self into an avatar then living through it, one safe step back from reality.

Grooming ourselves to an image is a step popular culture powerfully incites us to take… constructing, inhabiting, then becoming bound to identities we hope others will reward with attention, companionship, opportunities and hard cash. The Photoshopped ideal may be impossible to achieve in the flesh but a fair approximation is alluringly within reach. And it brings us many of the things we crave… not least, a romantic sense of “me”.

But one day, sadly, it’s bound to bite.

In the world — part real, part imagined — that attaches itself to our image, it’s possible, even desirable, to unhook body, mind and spirit from each other, and it’s a rare person who can sustain that sort of existential dismemberment, day in and day out, without a gathering awareness of conflicting needs. Our necessary devotion to sustaining the vital, youthful, attractive image that represents “me” is likely to fully preoccupy us. So, as the groomed self eclipses the real self… happiness gets less reassuring, relationships falter for want of depth… we trust less fully, more conditionally and less impulsively. We feel we’re doing what we “have to” rather than what stimulates or satisfies us. Worse, we sense both the fragility of that “self” that others relate to, and its hold over us. Just when we most need our whole selves, they seem furthest from us… denial and anti-depressants are easier.

Real “real life” is an unstoppable process that rolls implacably along: from birth, through childhood, into adulthood, on to old age and, finally, to death. Our bodies are magnets for scars, lines that deepen to wrinkles, imperfect teeth, cellulite, liver spots, split ends and grey hairs. Our skin dehydrates and roughens, our muscles lose tone. Our demeanour drifts; our hair thins, our libido wanes and our memory unwinds; our stamina weakens. Pains and aches disturb our sleep and change our gait. Short of dying young there’s no way to stop it.

The physical trajectory of life is vividly clear. What popular culture would deny us is the opportunity for that trajectory to be experienced as liberating, continually surprising and filled with meaning and delight — as an ongoing release into the full flow of life.

The great secret of life is not about making it last forever; it’s about living it well. It’s about following vectors of beauty, truth, passion, curiosity and love every step of the way — and it takes some time to learn the art. Popular culture is not about living life well; it’s become a heavily promoted, cash-flow driven escape from life, as abusive as it is addictive.

So, more and more, for example, we see “normal” physiological processes being re-branded — and medicated — as pathologies. There are pills to govern sleeping and wakefulness, activity levels, moods and emotions, appetites and libidos. And such is the anxiety about pain levels that we’ll take painkillers when we feel a headache “coming on”. And there’s advertising to focus us on our disappointments and encourage our sense of entitlement to a never-ending twenties-something “lifestyle”. It renders us less free to be, to become or to explore the truths of our relationship with experience… and it’s all about market extension.

So, in the churning wake of global “Big Pharma”, there bobs along the less intimidating nuisance of the “health products” industry, its extracts, potions and placebos all of which would be obviated by a sensibly varied diet, the acceptance of minor discomfort and a little more exercise.

Similarly specious, but with more marketing whack, are the overtures of processed food purveyors who have taken to add “health” claims to their products, usually based on alleged properties of additives they have added to all of the other additives. So, along with the preservatives, colourants and colour retention agents, acids and acid regulators, thickeners, bulking agents, texture and moisture regulators, emulsifiers, artificial flavourings, salt, sugar, corn syrup and canola oil… we also get vitamins, iron, antioxidants, anti-inflammatories, fibre… breakfast is about making my bowels move after all of the substances I’ve unwittingly just consumed? This is “reality”?

In 2010, Joanna Jastrzebska, a psychiatrist in North Shields, England, wrote in frustration to New Scientist magazine about seeing “an increasing number of people consulting psychiatrists for all sorts of life-related problems and using diagnostic terms to tell us that they are ‘depressed’, ‘bipolar’ or ‘suicidal’.

“I am astounded,” she wrote,  “by the number of people who come to me for a diagnosis, and who then are unhappy when I try to explain that this is called ‘life’.

“At first “I thought it was all the fault of us doctors, that we medicalise these poor, unhappy, non-coping people. But the longer I work, the more clearly I see that people want a ‘diagnosis’ because a diagnosis means there must be a treatment, and a treatment amounts to an easy way of getting their life or themselves fixed. …They want tablets to stop them crying, although their mother died only a few weeks ago, or something to calm them down when they become aggressive after they have a drink. They ask us to sort out their unruly children who have ever known any boundaries. They want it sorted and they want it now. This problem is partly a result of the modern pressure to be happy and advert-perfect all the time; if you aren’t, there must be something wrong with you.”

By the beginning of the millennium, anti-ageing treatments and technologies were a serious business. It’s led to some eloquent moments of naivety. In 2009, for example, the American Advertising Standards Authority compelled Estee Lauder to withdraw an advertisement after a touchingly credulous customer complained that Estee Lauder’s premium-priced Tri-Aktiline Instant Deep Wrinkle Filler failed to make her wrinkles “disappear instantly” as the advertisement claimed it would.

Cosmetic surgery, in the United States alone, was a $10 billion a year industry by 2007. That was the year that, at the terrifyingly advanced age of 44, the erstwhile Hollywood actress Demi Moore, by then married to her 29 year-old third husband and having spent half a million dollars on cosmetic surgery, announced she’d drawn a line in the sand and launched a campaign against “ageism” in Hollywood… she wasn’t getting $12 million movie roles any more.

That kind of ego-gouging discrimination is disproportionately but not exclusively inflicted on women. For men, the nightmare issue is “erectile dysfunction”: the inability to indefinitely sustain a hammer-hard erection. In fact, a song to celebrate this decrepitude, called The Fumbler’s Rant, was doing the rounds in Glasgow, Scotland, back in the early 19th century. It went, in part, like this:

     Come Carls a’ of Fumbler’s Ha’,             (old men all of Fumbler’s Hall)

      and I will tell you o’ our fate,

      Since we ha’e married wives that’s braw,         

      and canna please them when ’tis late.

      A pint we’ll tak, our hearts to chear;

      what fauts we ha’e, our wives can tell;              (faults)

      Gar bring us in baith ale and beer,                    (then… both)

      the auldest bairn we hae’s oursell.                    (oldest child)

      Our bairn’s tocher is a’ paid,                             (child’s dowry)

      we’re masters o’ the gear our sel';           (masters of our own goods)

      Let either weel or wae betide,                           (good or bad)

      here’s a health to a’ the wives that’s yell.        (barren)

Nowadays, let this sort of libido failure last three months, and many doctors — instead of pulling a fumbler’s pint to celebrate — will deem it a “clinical condition. Erectile dysfunction crushes the self-esteem of 40 per cent of 40 year-old men and 70 per cent of 70 year-old men. It’s caused by a complicated set of interacting psychosocial, neurological, and vascular factors commonly known as “ageing”. Come on, guys. It’s permission to relax, to lighten up and laugh.

While, on the one hand, there’s this aversion to life-as-it-is, there’s an almost hysterical reluctance to let go of it.

The Eighth International Congress on Anti-Ageing and Biomedical Technology in 2000, held not inappropriately in Las Vegas, gambling capital of the world, attracted more than 3,300 physicians and scientists — “experts” — half of whom said they fully expected to live to be at least 120 years old. For the men, that would add about 45 years of erectile dysfunction anxiety to their lives and, for the women, more than 32 additional years of expensively disappointing encounters with miracle moisturizing creams.

It’s ironic that, while youthfulness is such a favoured state, so many people seem eager to vest greater proportions of their whole-life experience in the socially despised and marginalised condition of old age… all of those added years of incontinence and hospital gowns, your butt moulded to a bedpan, gumming food that tastes like denatured tapioca and sitting in your wheelchair in “care facility” lounges watching daytime television or comparing medical histories. I lack words to express how much I’d sooner slash my wrists with the shards of a freshly-emptied bottle of malt whisky.

In contexts like these, it’s perplexing to realise that there’ve been simpler societies that have not only accepted ageing but have embraced it with genuine respect for the elderly. Their respect had to do with the wisdom their elders gained through real-life encounters with real stuff in the real world… and perhaps they were not so lacking in grace as to spend their time trying to ape the hyperactive sex lives of 20 year-olds.

Around the whole of what can be thought of as “popular culture” there runs a fence — the morbid fear of death — but popular culture is so vast and vigorous that there is no need to constantly fret about it. More noticeable is the strong attractive force at its centre: a comfort zone.

Comfort zones, sustained as they are by pharmaceuticals, mass media, 24/7 entertainment and the efficiency of supermarkets, and accessorised with high tech toys and other totems of consumption, provide at least the mirage of a life without pain or uncertainty, or threats of unfamiliar moods and foods, sensations and vexations.

So the further one imagines venturing from the hearth of one’s comfort zone, the larger looms the razor-wire of fear: fears of criminals, of spiders, of asteroid strikes and of terrorists, of foreigners, of dogs and cats, bedbugs and crowds, of “third hand smoke” (the lethal residues that are said to linger where people used to smoke), of carcinogens and snakes, of the “devil”, of alien abductors, of darkness, of young people, of germs and allergens and “bad things” in general, imagined and unimaginable.

To be persuasive, a genuine risk needn’t even exist. Almost anything a little unusual — a petite woman with her head demurely covered by a headscarf, for example — can get a hotter hazard rating than real and immediate dangers that lurk in the inner sanctum of the comfort zone. In most societies, for example, murder victims are far more likely to have been done-in by a friend, acquaintance or family member than by any of the countless strangers they’re bound to have met during their shortened lives. Accidents carry off many more souls than assaults. Your car and your home are high-risk areas. And obesity is deadlier yet… statistically, fast food queues are killing zones.

Popular culture creates the illusion that there’s always an “off” switch to deal with discomfort. It gives breath to the lie that our actions needn’t carry consequences and that virtual worlds do no harm. But, at the end, it can feel like impalement… and that shouldn’t be a surprise: it’s not as though we evolved to inhabit comfort zones.

The Astroturf is no greener out there. It’s not even Astroturf… it’s grass, and YOUR LIFE, your real life that’s out there. It’s freedom and it’s wonderful.

One day, you’re almost sure to hear it howling, like a wolf in the night.

I suggest you run to it.

Freedom’s where spirits expand and “lives” become life.