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Archive for the ‘philosophy’ Category

Living in the real world

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on July 30, 2016| 1 Comment »

ladybird yellow

I was sitting under the mulberry tree last saturday afternoon reading the newspaper when this little creature landed right in front of me. In an instant I was back in the real world. Let me explain….

I think that when we are reading, particularly if we are reading something which engages us fully, then we become absorbed into a different world. It’s a world partly described by the author, and partly created by my (the reader)’s memories and imagination. It’s not that that world isn’t real, but it’s highly subjective and intensely personal. Nobody else has my memories. Nobody shares my imagination. Nobody is having an identical experience to me. I might be transported by the words and my thoughts to far away places or far away times….real or imaginary.

But when this startling, attention-grabbing, little creature lands right in the centre of my vision, I leave that place and time and return to here and now.

I read an article by a French philosopher recently who argued that human beings can never experience the real because we always bring our memories, our imaginations and our processing of the sensory signals from the world to all of our experience. What we live is our subjective creation of the real. I’m not sure what I really think about that. I understand the point he is making but I something nags at me….maybe it’s that there is no real for we humans to experience other than the real that we humans experience. Oops, that sounds rather peculiar doesn’t it? What I mean is, is there any “real” “out there” which doesn’t include us? Isn’t the universe whole? And doesn’t the universe include us? So an imagined universe without us is less real, not more real, isn’t it?

Oh, I didn’t set out to go down that path. Where I meant to go was a different story altogether. Pokemon Go was released in France last week and in the papers I read a report of over a 1000 people rushing around the public garden in Bordeaux trying to find a rare Pokemon creature. Over a 1000 people! Rushing around a park looking for something that doesn’t exist! Well, only as a digitally manufactured creation. The makers call this “AR”, for “Augmented Reality” and the reporter who wrote the piece about the crowd in Bordeaux said that it was a delight to see so many happy people, their faces beaming with anticipation as they rediscovered the childhood delights of play. Wow! Very positive Monsieur Journaliste! But does something like Pokemon Go genuinely augment reality?

But then, I’m wondering again….isn’t this just a contemporary example of how the human imagination interacts with the rest of the universe to produce the “real”, irrespective of whether you are going to use the word “augmented” or not?

Maybe these technologies are bringing people together, stimulating delight and pleasure, creating a brand new world. Maybe.

I think my reality is augmented every day by the world around me. This little yellow ladybird made my day  different and made it feel special to me.

Don’t we augment our reality through curiosity and paying attention, by delight, wonder and being prepared to be amazed?

I think it does…….

 

 

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Flourishing, because that’s what we’re all here for….

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, from the viewing room, life, movies, personal growth, philosophy, photography, video on July 27, 2016| Leave a Comment »

fields of gold

Fields of gold….this is what they look like where I live. Aren’t they spectacular? And don’t they go so well with a wide blue sky?

wide field

The first year I came to live here I kept driving past them thinking, must stop and take a photo sometime, but, somehow, I always had something more important to do. “I’ll catch them next time I pass by” I thought. But I didn’t. And when finally I decided to make a special trip out to photograph them, they were gone. Or almost. Heads down and turning brown. Just didn’t have the same appeal. So I missed them. Didn’t take long to miss them. It turns out they don’t look like this for very long.

I learned that lesson.

So when this caught my eye recently……

individual

….I pulled over and took a few photos.

As I stood looking out across the field up to the top of the hill I recalled the scene on the beach at dawn in the movie, “City of Angels”, and I thought, “How amazing that this field of little seeds transforms into a carpet of tall green stalks and leaves, which, one day (or at least it seems to happen in one day), the sun comes up and these glorious golden flowers unfold to greet it, bathing their petals in its rays which warm their rich, abundant crops of seeds.”

Flourishing.

How flower like.

I believe we are here to live like that. To flourish. To reach up, unfold, respond to the sun, the rain, and the wind. To emerge and to engage with a full becoming….becoming the unique and singular creatures which we are, and to express our uniqueness in full awareness of our communion with the rest of nature.

There are terrible stories around just now. Stories of acts of cowardice and killing. How are we to respond to them?

With fear? Closing down? Making our lives smaller?

Or with LIFE? Opening up, living our lives to the full?

Maybe I can learn from the sunflowers. Maybe I can stand up, radiate with the beauty of the life force which surges through me. And flourish.

Let me use that astonishing capacity which I share with all human beings – the ability to make conscious choices.

I choose to relish this moment, this day, this present, because if I put it off, I might miss living altogether.

I choose love instead of hate.

I choose to create instead of destroying.

I choose to be grateful for this “one wild and precious life“.

I choose to share my delight.

 

 

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Becoming – nature and nurture

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on July 13, 2016| 1 Comment »

cygnet

peachicks

On a recent trip to the nearby town of Saintes, I chanced across two little families.

Do you know what these particular chicks are going to look like when they grow up?

We are all dealt a certain hand when we are born, a particular and unique pattern of DNA. Our personal pattern shares a lot with others of course. All we humans have distinct DNA patterns that distinguish us from other animals. The surprise really is how shared the common patterns are. Some patterns are the same in humans, chimps, fruit flies and earthworms. Fruit flies and earthworms? I’m not too astonished about the similarities between humans and chimps (over 95% similar genome apparently), but fruit flies and earthworms? Who’d have thought it?

But there’s more to how we begin than our DNA code. From the very first moments of life we begin to develop differently. We humans have fingerprints for example, and there are no two identical sets of fingerprints in the world – ever. We have unique patterns all over our bodies, not just in our fingertips. Our eyes, for example, are also very distinctly different. We’re all becoming a lot more familiar with that uniqueness as we use our fingers to gain access to our mobile phones, or our irises and fingers to gain access to particular rooms, buildings, or even countries.

Babies develop distinctly different patterns of behaviour from their very first hours in this world. If you are a parent of more than one child you’ve probably wondered many times how can your children be SO different when they both came from the exact same parents, and grew up int he exact same family?

It’s so, so difficult to know what a little one is going to become. We can’t know what events will occur in their lives. We can’t know how their personalities will develop, what coping strategies they will acquire, what choices they will make.

But all of that is ok. It’s the nature of life. It unfolds. Little ones grow, change and develop every single day. And when I say little ones, I don’t just mean little human children. We see the same, albeit over shorter timescales, when we watch chicks grow into adult birds, or seeds grow into flowers, vegetables or trees. We see it everywhere.

I’m sure at some point you’ve chanced across an old photograph of yourself, your parents, or your children and you recognise them. Instantly. But oh how they’ve changed! Oh, how I have changed! And isn’t that second insight often quickly followed by “but I still feel the same me” (or some variation of that).

What’s the best thing we can do for the little ones?

Nurture them.

Love them in their developing uniqueness, knowing that from those very first days they are already different from us, and it’s our job to help them on the way to becoming all they can be.

If you’re still not sure what those chicks at the start of this post are going to turn out to be like when they grow up – here’s a couple of hints –

swan family

peacock family

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Kahlil Gibran (On Children. From “The Prophet”)

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Curious or fearful?

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, neuroscience, personal growth, philosophy, photography on July 4, 2016| 2 Comments »

tulip new

A new day, early morning, the sun rising, the dew glistening on the unfolding petals of the flowers which were just buds yesterday…..

Ellen Langer, the mindfulness researcher, says there are two ways to live your life – mindfully, or mindlessly. Her research shows that the simple way to live mindfully is to search for, and to be aware of, the new.

Neuroscience has revealed that we use our two cerebral hemispheres for different purposes. One of the key differences is that the left seeks out the familiar, whilst the right prefers what’s new.

Our preference for what’s familiar, or what’s new, is inextricably linked to our attitude towards difference. If you are averse to difference, you’ll prefer the familiar. What’s different, or unfamiliar, is then experienced as something to be afraid of, or anxious about.

“You ain’t from round here, are you, stranger?”

It seems the driver underpinning the preference for the familiar is often fear.

Whereas, the driver underpinning the preference for the new is more likely to be curiosity.

The good news is we all have both hemispheres, and we can all choose to focus on fear, or on curiosity. (Remember the story of the hungry wolves?)

If you want to develop certain muscles, you have to exercise them. If you want to develop certain attitudes to the world, you have to exercise those as well.

How much do you exercise your fears? How much time and headspace do you dedicate to them? And, on the other hand, how much do you exercise your curiosity?

Remember, as Ellen Langer says, if you want to live mindfully, seek out the new….

Or, as I’d put it “If you want to be a hero instead of a zombie, be curious”

 

 

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Hearing and caring

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography on July 1, 2016| 5 Comments »

alone

When I worked at what’s now called the NHS Centre for Integrative Care in Glasgow, every patient attending for the first time had a sixty minute appointment. 60 minutes doesn’t seem a lot in the context of a life time but to receive a whole hour of undivided, focused, non-judgemental attention feels like a gift.

My colleagues and I would frequently have patients tell us “You’re the first doctor to have actually listened to me.” I don’t think that feedback ever lost its power to shock. How did so many people get so far into the health care service and not have the experience of being listened to?

We all need to be heard. We all have the right to be heard. All of us.

The recent EU Referendum in the UK, and its political fall-out has made it even clearer to me that, politically, we are not being heard. There is a disenchantment with politics and politicians across the so called democratic world. Maybe one of the reasons for that is that our democracies are not enabling people to be heard.

In the UK there is a whole chamber of government, the House of Lords, which is 100% unelected. There is nothing democratic about it. Nobody voted for them and they aren’t accountable to the electorate.

The electoral processes based on simple majorities lead to government after government which does not represent the majority of the electorate. In the recent referendum 52% of those who voted, voted Leave and 48% voted to Remain. About 30% of the electorate didn’t vote. The 52% of the 70% are heard (on this question). The rest of the population are ignored. Parliamentary elections are like that too.

Is handing power to the largest minority the way to ensure that most people in the country are heard?

How can it be?

Most people don’t have the experience of being heard and, in consequence, don’t feel the elected governments represent them.

There’s an additional problem and that is that politics, as currently practised, is about power, not consensus. Those minorities who are elected believe they have the power to act according to their own beliefs and values. They act to exert power over others. If politics was about creating consensus, rather than wielding power over others, it would be an entirely different kind of politics. It would be more democratic. More people would have the experience of being heard.

Being heard isn’t enough.

We need to be cared about too.

Whilst it’s a good thing to listen to someone, to give them the time and attention to enable them to tell their unique story, it’s not enough. The response to that story, the doctors’ responses, the politicians’ responses, need to show that they give a damn. They need to show that the individual human being matters.

If we don’t have a system based on the principle that every one of us is unique and valuable then we get what we’ve got – politics, economics, education, health care, as if people don’t matter.

Isn’t it within the capacity of we human beings to create something better? What would the world look like if we did?

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Better before? Really?

Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, personal growth, philosophy on June 28, 2016| Leave a Comment »

better before

I came across this article in the French “Philosophie” magazine this month. Translated into English, the headline says “It was better before”, and the article goes on to explore this particular, common, state of mind.

It begins with a dissatisfaction with the present, but instead of that stimulating creative thinking motivating people to turn that dissatisfaction into positive action, the mind turns backwards to think back to a past which quickly becomes a utopian illusion.

When Donald Trump says “Let’s Make America Great Again” – what previous time is he referring to? When the UK Leave campaigners said “I want my country back”, which country were they referring to? A country of the past, but an illusory one. When they said “Let’s take back control”, when did we ever have it? Which controls are they referring to?

The fabulous Woody Allen movie, “Midnight in Paris”, beautifully plays with this way of approaching the world –

When was that time? The time of Hemingway’s “Moveable Feast“, or the time of the “Belle Epoque“…..or just when exactly?

The article argues that older people are more likely to think this way because they have less life left to look forward to. A young person might look at the future and see it full of potential, where an older person might look at it and see illness, decline and death.

refage

Maybe that partly explains one of the voting patterns seen in the EU referendum, where older people voted Leave, and younger ones, Remain.

I saw one elderly Englishman struggling to hold back tears as he said “I’ve got my country back”…..and I wondered, what country is that then? And how, exactly, have you got it back? But the emotional power of his view was clear.

I think there are many other factors at play in what’s happening in the UK just now, but I’ll leave them for other posts in the days ahead…..meantime, I think it’s worth asking people who have been seduced by the illusion of the utopian past to say more clearly what they intend to do now. Now that they have voted to go back to wherever they think it was, what do they want to do today?

In fact, I think that’s a question for all of us, because illusory past utopia or not, the present has changed for us all.

Let me modify my question so we can all join in…..what are YOU going to do today? Now that we are where we are? (And, yes, I’m asking myself for an answer too!)

 

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Called back to the present

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on June 24, 2016| 5 Comments »

redstart close.jpg

This morning I woke up to the news that the referendum vote on the UK’s membership of the EU had been won by the Leave campaign.

I immediately felt sad, not least because I see this as a victory for the forces of xenophobia and misinformation. I’m a great proponent for diversity, for the celebration of uniqueness and for integration (the definition of which is “the creation of mutually beneficial relationships between well differentiated parts”).

But I found something else happened too. I tumbled into anxious feelings of uncertainty. Question after question flooded my brain.

Will I have to give up living in France? Will I need a residency permit and visas to visit other European countries instead of having the right to live here and to drive across the borders into Italy, Spain, Belgium or wherever I else I want to visit freely? What will happen to the currency exchange? To the value of my pension? What about my children and my grandchildren? Will they now lose the right to travel, study and live in this richly diverse continent?

Oh, the questions kept coming, and the answers are unknowable.

Then I looked outside and there he was again. The redstart. I’ve written before about my experience of a particular redstart in this garden but since yesterday he’s been perching on a chair right outside my front door and whistling loudly. He’s never done that before and it got me wondering.

What’s he trying to tell me?

Is he in trouble? I even went and looked where his nest is but couldn’t see anything wrong. He can’t be hungry. There’s an abundance of food around just now. He looks healthy and vigorous. Nope, I couldn’t figure it out.

Then I thought, well maybe he just likes it there. On the back of that chair.

Or maybe he’s just enjoying being close and asking for some attention.

Well, you know what he did? He called me right back into the here and now. The worries, the unsolved problems which might not even ever exist, all faded away. I just enjoyed looking at him, listening to his song, and taking his photograph.

Attention to the present and the particular does that for us. It makes today, this moment, more real, more vivid, and more enjoyable.

Thank you, Mr Redstart.

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Love and hate

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography on June 19, 2016| Leave a Comment »

ceramic plate.jpg

I came across this medieval ceramic plate in a museum recently. Here’s what I thought.

How beautiful!

How unique!

Look at the two birds and how together they almost seem to create third bird in the middle, looking out at me!

What a delightful scene! Two birds kissing. Or one bird feeding another.

What a great example of integration – the creation of harmonious bonds between individuals.

I still think all of that.

But something else struck me as I uploaded this photo to share with you……maybe some people will look at this and see it as two birds fighting? Maybe they’ll see it as conflict and competition, not bonding and dancing?

Then I realised that everything we encounter has an element of the Rorscharch Ink Blot test to it – what we see in it is what we bring to it.

If that’s true, then we can experience more love by bringing more love to the table.

Here’s one of the reasons I immediately saw an image of bonding –

hoopoes feeding.jpg

This is a picture of one Hoopoe feeding another in my garden last year.

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Making time

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the viewing room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography on June 17, 2016| Leave a Comment »

sundial

A number of things struck me as I looked at this sundial.

The first thing I did was look at my phone to see “what time it is” and my phone said midday. Yet, the sundial said ten o’clock. How come? Is the sun slow today? Or did someone make a mistake when they carved out this sundial? Or has time changed since this sundial was created?

The next thing I noticed was that the sundial starts at 4 am. That’s quite early for France. I know up in Scotland in the summer time it will be light by then but in Paris? Maybe….I don’t know. Perhaps more strangely though, it seems to finish about 3 pm. Surely that wasn’t anywhere near sunset, even centuries ago! So there must be a reason they didn’t think it useful to measure time after three in the afternoon. Or was it just that the sun didn’t cast any shadows on this particular sundial after that time in the afternoon..?

Henri Bergson, the philosopher, wrote a lot about time and he mentions two kinds of time – measured and experienced. I hadn’t thought about time that way until I read him. But it’s true, we humans haven’t always measured time. With our sundials, our clocks and watches, we divide everyday life into pieces, naming the pieces as hours, minutes or seconds, and counting them. But this is completely man-made. It’s totally artificial.

In reality time passes, not in discrete pieces, but as a continuous flow. This chopping it up into bits is a human invention. I’m not saying it hasn’t been useful to do that, but it’s just a bit of a surprise when you suddenly realise that. We could have agreed to chop it up differently. Couldn’t we? Have you ever thought about that?

I saw a watch for sale the other day. It was called a “slow watch”, not because it ran slowly but because the face had 24 hours on it and it only had one hand which moved slowly from hour to hour. Maybe that’s not so different from this medieval sundial!

Bergson talked about experienced time as “duration” – we experience time passing, but we don’t experience it passing in a steady, consistent of constant way do we? Sometimes “time flies past” and sometimes “it drags”.

Csikszentmihalyi, describes “flow” as being a particular experience of time. I love his description of that. Here’s his TED talk about it –

 

So how do you experience time?

Might be fun to stop and think about that a few times over the next few days and see just how differently we experience, or make, time in our own lives.

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Relationships

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography on June 10, 2016| Leave a Comment »

pink

As I walked between the trees at the side of the Charente in Jarnac this caught my eye.

I don’t think it was only the pink and yellow colours together which grabbed me. It was the surprise at seeing this delicate flower growing right out of the trunk of the tree. Now, I’m not a botanist, just someone who is insatiably curious, so I don’t know what this flowering plant is. But I’m pretty sure it isn’t a usual part of the tree it’s growing from. There weren’t any other flowers like this further up the tree.

As usual, an image like this sparks a few trains of thought.

How do we notice what we notice?

Difference.

Isn’t it usually difference which catches our attention?

One of the commonest kinds of difference which we notice is movement. By definition, motion is difference. It’s a change of place in time. It’s the flight of the barn owl from my house to my neighbour’s barn. It’s bats flying round and round the garden at dusk. It’s the sudden appearance of light and shadows as the sun appears from behind a cloud.

Another common difference to catch our attention is sound. Any sudden new sound. The wailing of a siren in a city street, the alarm call of a blackbird which has just spotted a cat, the distant church bells striking noon. The sounds we don’t hear are those which are constant. We only notice them when they stop.

What’s new is different too. We’ve got two cerebral hemispheres, and the right one, in particular, is wired to seek out whatever is new. The left might seek the familiar, but the right is attracted to novelty.

So maybe that’s another reason I noticed this strange and beautiful pink flower growing out of the tree trunk. I’d never seen anything exactly like it before.

Not least because I don’t know what this flower is, I don’t know what the nature of the relationship is between the flower and the tree. Is it parasitical? Is the flower gaining something from the tree, but not contributing anything? Or is it commensal, with both the flower and the tree benefitting from the relationship?

One of the keys to creative development and growth is integration. Integration can be defined as “the creation of mutually beneficial relationships between well differentiated parts”. In other words, it’s when there is a bond, a good, healthy, mutually supportive bond, between two very different organisms or objects.

I’d like to think this image represents that. It certainly increases my awareness of such an idea.

Integration isn’t just about the relationship of course. It’s about the well differentiated parts as well. And that brings me back to the idea of difference.

When we are surrounded by attempts to force us into pre-determined moulds, by monocultures of chain stores and pressures to conform, it can be hard to express our differences in a positive way. There’s so much fear these days of “the other”, of strangers, immigrants, of other races, other genders…….

How different might the world be if we pursued integration instead…..by not only tolerating, but celebrating difference, and finding ways to create mutually beneficial relationships between them?

Might be beautiful. Might be surprising. Might be attention grabbing.

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