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Archive for the ‘philosophy’ Category

The colour blue

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, from the viewing room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, Uncategorized, writing on October 13, 2016| 3 Comments »

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I recently came across Rebecca Solnit’s contemplation of the colour blue through the Brainpickings site.

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue. For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.

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If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away.

I got to thinking about a couple of photos I took recently in Spain, one in Grenada and one in Segovia.

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She talks about how artists used the colour blue, and cites the following classical paintings amongst her examples –

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Isn’t the blue of distance in these paintings really beautiful?

Here are another few examples from an old French book which we have at home –

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The beauty of water

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography on October 5, 2016| Leave a Comment »

webdrops

Autumn can be such a beautiful season. In the early morning everywhere I look I see spiders webs turned into chandeliers and sparkling jewels.

The water reveals what is already there. I don’t think spiders spin their webs only in the autumn. The webs are there, but they are invisible to us as we hurry by. The water does more than decorate the webs. It turns them into the most eye-catching feature of the landscape.

I love the variety of drops you can see on a web like this one. There is a huge range of droplet size, from the tiniest beads to impossibly large spheres. A close look reveals that each drop contains a view of the world around it. Every one of them is like a lens, gathering all the surrounding light and colour, turning it upside down, and showing us a completely different perspective on the world.

This one reminded me of a fountain I recently photographed where the water droplets seem to be strung along invisible threads as the curve up into the air, and back down towards the pool.

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What strikes me about both of these images is how the water droplets are individually beautiful, but the greater beauty is revealed in their relationship to each other. Those invisible lines and threads create something quite magical.

People are like that too, aren’t they? Each one unique, and each one connected to the others by invisible threads of relationship.

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When day becomes night and the sea reveals the land

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography on September 18, 2016| Leave a Comment »

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We are drawn towards the edges….

Sunsets attract us. How many of us gather at the viewpoints to watch the setting sun? There’s something deeply appealing about both the disappearance of that fiery sphere as it mutates from a full circle, to a semi-circle, to a rapidly diminishing crescent. Then when it drops below the horizon there’s a period of time when the sky can glow with shades of red, orange and pink, or some tobacco tints until gradually night has fallen. When did you last stand and watch this happen?

It’s a great meditation practice. Just to focus your attention on the changing light and try to become aware of the point where day turns into night. That’s a trick, of course, because there is no such point. The transition of day into night is far more nuanced, way more gradual than that. But keeping your attention on it is calming, delightful and connects you to one of the deepest rhythms of life.

In the second photo here (both taken one evening in San Sebastian, Spain), as day turns into night, the street lights glow in the calm sea as the tide recedes revealing the wet sand below the water. You can see a few people wandering at the edge of this transition. There’s another edge that attracts us. The edge between the land and the sea.

And that’s another edge which is not exact and is certainly not fixed.

Strolling along the ebb or the flow of the sea is deeply pleasing. As is gazing down at it from a promenade, or a viewpoint.

We are drawn towards the edges….you could say that’s how life proceeds, moving towards difference, exploring the boundaries and connections, discovering the new, playing in that “far from equilibrium” zone where growth occurs.

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Science for Heretics

Posted in books, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on September 7, 2016| 2 Comments »

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Barrie Condon, a retired Professor of Physics, generously shared his new book, “Science for Heretics” with me. He thought I’d like it. He was right. The subtitle of the book is “Why so much of science is wrong” and his aim is to provoke the reader into questioning both the claims of science and its methods. He uses the device of three characters, The Believer, The Sceptic and The Heretic, throughout the book as he considers several fields of science including mathematics, physics, and medicine.

The Believer is one who science reveals the Truth and will one day enable us to understand everything in the universe. The Sceptic accepts the basic tenets of science but retains some doubts about whether of not we will ever be able to understand everything. The Heretic doesn’t buy the whole project. He thinks the universe is not completely knowable and that our scientific theories which shape our views what we see are simply the projections of our human brains.

He particularly attacks the use of theory in science which tends to be translated into “laws”. He clarifies that no such “laws” exist and sets out the case for a return to observation and experimentation instead. I really enjoy his writing style and some passages particularly stood out for me.

For centuries we have been measuring all sorts of things but generally only recording the results we expected and ignoring the rest.

This captures two of my main objections to so much of medical practice – the reduction of human beings to measurements and the belief that the particular measurements which are made allow us to completely understand a patient and their illness. Although I have heard of a medical teacher say “Don’t listen to patients. They lie all the time. You can only trust the results.”, my own experience of doctoring couldn’t more diametrically opposed from that view. ONLY the patient’s experience can be trusted. Measurements, sadly, frequently mislead, and ALWAYS need to be set in the context of this individual patient.

Life saving claims for medicines need careful examination. Drugs do certain things which are beneficial to the human body in disease, but they inevitably have other effects which can be deleterious or even fatal.

I wish more doctors made that more clear every time they write out a prescription.

He’s even better on physics and cosmology.

For me, the two most important things he has to say are, firstly –

Science gives us theories that purport to explain how the universe works. This breeds confidence in scientists who then go on to do things that carry certain risks. These risks are rationalised away on the basis of existing theory. Even if our Heretic is wrong in saying that all theory is actually erroneous, history shows us that most or perhaps all theories ultimately prove incorrect. Our perceptions and calculations of risk are therefore also likely to be erroneous. Science generally also assumes a high degree of control over experimental conditions and again this faith seems misplaced. While we may routinely underestimate risk, we also routinely overestimate our ability to control it.

This is SUCH an important point. He’s arguing for a greater use of the “precautionary principle”. Instead of assuming that everything we produce, all our chemicals, all our technologies are safe until proven otherwise, we should be more wary. What we need is a whole lot more humility and the ability to confess that we really don’t know very much at all. And we certainly way overestimate our ability to control things. It’s the arrogance of believers which frightens me most – people who are so sure that they, and only they are right – I’m on the side of the Heretics in Barrie’s terms. It’s likely that what we think we know at any point will be proven not to be quite right in a few years time (or, indeed, to be completely wrong).

The second important conclusion he reaches is that there are no fundamental laws of the universe…..apart from, maybe, two –

As well as a possible law for uniqueness, the Heretic is open to the possibility of a second law governing complexity, namely that it increases with time.

Well, there he puts his finger on what I’ve written about many times on this blog – that the most important characteristics of the universe are its tendency to create uniqueness and its trend of ever increasing complexity.

Take those two undeniable features on board and try and practice science or medicine by measuring, generalising and trying to control the future! Good luck with that.

Thank you, Barrie Condon, for your delightful, humorous, thought-provoking, paradigm-challenging book. If it was an integral part of science education we might be able to look forward to a better world.

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Time, place and space to turn within

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on September 5, 2016| Leave a Comment »

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I can’t remember when I first encountered a cloister or an inner courtyard. Part of me thinks it was in Marrakech where I stayed in a restored ryad. I loved how you could walk around the sheltered edges of the square, how there were places to sit, and how there were two other, what I think are essential, features – trees and water (either a fountain, or a well).

So, here are a number of photos from my trip to Spain last week. There are three kinds of courtyard/cloister here – very Christian, very secular, and very Islamic. Isn’t it interesting how these three different traditions have the same core features whilst they are distinctly different?

I think one of the reasons I adore these spaces so much is that induce a desire to slow down, pause for a while, and turn within.

Of course we don’t need these types of spaces to do that. I often recommended Julia Cameron’s “artist’s date” practice to patients – scheduling some time to spend by yourself doing something you don’t have to do.

When I came back home I listened to the latest episode of Onbeing, an interview with Mirabai Bush, about the importance of contemplative practice. During that interview there was a mention of the “tree of contemplative practices” which brilliantly illustrates the diversity of contemplative practices through the varied traditions in the world. I hadn’t realised there were so many.

We all need to find some way to be still and become aware. Maybe you have your own favourite ways, favourite places, or practices. Or maybe you’d like to explore some by clicking through on the links in this post……or maybe you’d just like to sit and gaze at one of these photos for a while and see where that takes you?

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Who makes the world you live in?

Posted in art, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography on September 4, 2016| 1 Comment »

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I stepped out through the back door of the cathedral in Segovia and onto a large paved terrace surrounded by stone lions. When I turned to look back to the tall arched doorway I noticed that the plain glass doors which hung in the doorway perfectly reflected the buildings across the street. I took a photo.

When I loaded up the photo later I noticed that there were some strange lights above and on the roofs and when I zoomed in I saw more clearly that behind the reflection of the tiles and the satellite dishes some of the cathedral’s stained glass windows shone through the glass door.

That got me thinking……

Here in this one photo is an interesting idea. For centuries the church has created the images and the stories to tell people what the world is like, what life is like, and how they should live. With captivating art and gripping stories it presented a particular view of the world. More than that, really, because in presenting that view and spreading it so widely, it created a reality for the people who lived in it.

But look at those satellite dishes.

Who is creating the images and the stories now? Who is telling people what the world is like? What life is like? And how they should live?

Who is presenting a view, and spreading it so widely, that it’s creating the reality for those who live in it?

With the rapid development in communications technology, with powerful mobile phones, connected computers, the internet, social media, memes, images and videos which “go viral”, some writers say we have created a whole new layer of the environment in which we live – the “noosphere” (the sphere of human thought). The truth is we’ve always had a noosphere. We’ve always lived, we humans, within this environment of human thought.

There are the image creators and the story tellers who fashion the patterns in this environment, and in so doing, they influence many others.

We have a choice. We can be the image creators and the story tellers, or we can be passive consumers. If we choose to be passive consumers, whose world, whose idea of the world, are we choosing to live in?

If we choose to be the image creators and the story tellers, what images shall we share? What stories shall we tell?

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Waves and seeds

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography on August 21, 2016| 1 Comment »

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Lots of us love a trip to the beach, don’t we? I love the sound of the surf, the surge of the water, the breaking of the waves on the sand, and the rush of noise as the water flows back into the sea. It’s like breathing. It’s like the ocean is breathing. Have you ever taken a little time to watch the waves and see if you can spot any patterns? I’m not a surfer but I guess the surfers learn to read the waves in a language I don’t know.

I was lying on my back on the sand and I looked up and saw a number of seeds passing by high in the sky, blown along in invisible currents of air. I wondered where they had come from, and where they would end up.

When I got back home I noticed these in the garage –

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Now I don’t for a moment think these are the same seeds! Sure, they are also windblown seeds but I really don’t think these are the ones which passed overhead at the coast making their way inland…..but probably not to my garage. But where did these ones come from? And is this the end of their journey? In my garage?

All this got me wondering about the things we do, the thoughts we think, the words we utter and write. I’ve often thought that all we do, think and say in life sets off and has effects we couldn’t predict, couldn’t have expected, and didn’t intend. I’ve tended to use the metaphor for waves for that. Like when you throw a stone into the water and you can’t tell what ripples will emerge or what effects those ripples will have elsewhere in the pond.

Others have used the story of the butterfly, haven’t they? You’ll be familiar with that I expect. How chaos theory shows that small changes in the initial conditions can result in massive differences in the outcomes, and how the story of a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world can result in a hurricane elsewhere.

But these seeds, blown in the wind, strike me as another powerful metaphor for these truths about our world. The connectedness of everything…..how nothing occurs in isolation, how because of the nature of connections and openness of systems we can never contain causes and effects in simplistic terms, and, so of course, how that means that unpredictability is the essence of life. How no-one, not even an “expert” can know exactly how the future will pan out.

So, these seeds might set off from a plant somewhere on the planet, cross seas, cross lands and end up either growing into a flower, a bush or a tree somewhere distant, of landing somewhere where there is no soil (like in my garage)…….or maybe that’s not the end of their journey if I, a human being, pick them up and release them.

If our actions, words and thoughts are like that, then maybe the best we can do is choose the good ones, the loving ones, the kind ones, the nurturing ones……so that wherever they end up they might contribute something positive to our world.

 

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Ways of looking

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography on August 17, 2016| 2 Comments »

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Here’s a small corner of our potager. I took the photo because the beauty of the abundant diversity caught my eye.

When I look at it now I realise that different people will see different things when they look at this.

Some might see competition – survival of the fittest – as each plant fights all the others for the most sun, the most water, the best nutrients from the soil. When the world looks like that its full of fighting, of winners and losers, of the pursuit of self-interest. In such a world is there ultimately one winner? One species of plant which beats all the rest and eliminates them from the competition?

Some might see chaos – unruly, disorder, no control. Does such a world need to be tamed? Does it need to be ruled, ordered and managed to produce….to produce “outcomes” – and what will those outcomes be? Who determines them? Who measures? Who manages? Who controls?

Some might see beauty and diversity – as I do – each plant expressing its uniqueness to the full, flourishing amongst the others. When the world looks like this, it looks like a community. It looks like a living, growing, healthy being. Gaia. Nature.

I see uniqueness here.

I see flourishing here.

I see community here.

I see beauty here.

What do you see?

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A differentiated communion of subjects

Posted in books, from the dark room, from the living room, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography on August 9, 2016| 1 Comment »

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Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme who developed the new story of the universe talk about three core values which seem to be embedded in evolution. It’s a really interesting and different take on evolution. The story we have heard most over the last hundred years or so is one of a random, harsh, competitive universe full of “stuff” or materials which somehow have stuck together to make ever more complex objects which can each be studied and understood in isolation from each other.

That story never resonated with me and it can be argued it has more to do with the dominant politico-economic model of capitalism and “the market” than it has with science.

The three values Berry and Swimme articulate are differentiation, subjectivity and communion. Their claim is that take away any one of these three and the whole universe as we know it collapses. Brian Swimme also claims that we can use these three values to check if our actions are in harmony with the evolutionary direction and activity of the universe. In other words they can be considered as fundamental values which help us to assess and judge our behaviour and that of others (including politicians and economists).

Differentiation.  The universe started differentiating from its earliest moments. We don’t look around and see a homogenous mush – we see clusters, or “objects”. But the universe doesn’t just produce what Swimme calls “articulated constellations of energy”. It produces UNIQUE articulated constellations of energy. No two galaxies, no two stars, no two creatures are identical. Producing uniqueness turns out to be a key universal value.

Subjectivity. Everything has an inside. Even the simplest atoms are self-organising, self-maintaining phenomena. The particles within the atom are held together and organised by the atom itself. This self-organisation reaches its most complex in human beings. We are all “autopoietic” – we are “self-making” creatures. We self-defend, self-organise and self-maintain. Yet this interior “self” remains unknowable. We can’t see it, can’t define it, can’t pin it down. This interiority is what enables us to see every object as a subject.

Communion. Thomas Berry used the word “communion” to describe the relationships which exist everywhere. Nothing exists in isolation. Everything is connected to other things. We all live in a vast web of relationships.

This all leads to Berry and Swimme describing the universe as an “communion of subjects”, or as a “communion of differentiated subjects”.

Try this idea out for yourself. What does the world look like through this lens? What sense do you make of life which part of a “communion of subjects”?

When considering any political policy, any scientific description, any choices you might make, what happens when you set them in the context of  the three values of “differentiation, subjectivity and communion”?

For me, I experience a shift from fear to curiosity, from senselessness to meaningfulness, from isolation to belonging…..how about you?

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Far horizons

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography on August 7, 2016| Leave a Comment »

far horizons

The country where you live now…..have you lived there all your life?

What about your parents? Or their parents?

According to the UN one in every thirty people lives in a country other than their birth country in the course of their lifetime.

That’s true for me. After retiring from clinical practice in Scotland two years ago this month, I sold up and moved to the Charente in France, which is where I live now. I had an ambition to live in another country for a long time and retirement gave me the opportunity. I didn’t want to just live in another country, I wanted to learn another language and to live in the culture of that language. I find it not only enlarges and deepens my experience of the world, but it changes my perspective on my birth country and culture too. It’s not a matter of one being better than another. It’s about the difference.

I guess I’m now a migrant.

I hadn’t really thought I was until the “Brexit” vote (don’t get me started!), but I now know I’m like millions, yes, millions, of Europeans who are born in one country and live in another. The EU project emphasises what they call the “four freedoms” and they are all freedom of movement – freedom of movement of capital, goods, services and people. What the people who promoted Brexit seem to want is to take away only one of those freedoms – the freedom of movement of people. They seem to prefer only the freedom to make money.

I read an article in a French newspaper recently where the writer questioned the policies which divide people who migrate into two categories – “economic migrants” and “refugees” – and asked who decided it was more noble to flee from war and violence than it was to try to escape death from hunger. Not all migration, of course, is about escaping from anything. Migration can be stimulated not just by fear, but by curiosity.

Migration has, of course, become a huge issue because of the surge in mass migration produced by the US and Europe destroying other states and bombing their cities. Is it any surprise people want to escape Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Libya and so on? But migration is what human beings do. As a species we’ve done that since we were hunter-gatherers and there have been huge waves of mass migration throughout history. Without those waves we wouldn’t have the diverse countries we have now.

I feel it’s time for us to tell a new story of migration – both of migration to escape something and migration for a better, deeper or larger life.

None of us need to go back many generations to find ancestors who were born in one country then moved to another. Maybe that’s the place to start…..tell the stories of our migrant ancestors, and tell the stories of our own migrations.

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