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Archive for the ‘philosophy’ Category

The living universe of bonds

Posted in books, creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on April 9, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Every connection we make is a bond. Every relationship we have involves an interaction between ourselves and the other which changes both parties in the process.
In Saint Exupery’s “The Little Prince” he describes two key relationships, one which the Prince has with a rose, and one with a fox. In both cases he makes the point that creating the relationship changes how they see each other. In that process they become unique to each other, they start to care about each other, and, in fact, they become responsible for each other.


Lynne McTaggart writes in her book, “The Bond”

An entirely new scientific story is emerging that challenges many of our Newtonian and Darwinian assumptions, including our most basic premise: the sense of things as separate entities in competition for survival. The latest evidence from quantum physics offers the extraordinary possibility that all of life exists in a dynamic relationship of co-operation.
All matter exists in a vast quantum web of connection, and a living thing at its most elemental is an energy system involved in a constant transfer of information with its environment.
The world essentially operates, not through the activity of individual things, but in the connection between them – in a sense, in the space between things.

We often have the tendency to think of a bond as a limitation, even something which imprisons us, as if each bond is a chain. But, I prefer to think of bonds as relationships, as connections which, at their best, are “integrative” – that is – mutually beneficial bonds between well differentiated parts. That, after all, is how the body works. Every single cell, every organ, every tissue and every system within the body exists in constant interaction with all the others. It functions because the basis of all these relationships is the creation of mutually beneficial bonds. And as I often think, what happens inside the body, happens outside the body. In other words, what we come to understand about the nature of reality by coming to understand ourselves helps us to understand the entirety of reality.

Carlo Rovelli, the nuclear physicist, advocates a relational understanding of the universe. He says

The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events. The difference between things and events is that things persist in time, events have a limited duration. A stone is a prototypical ‘thing’: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not stones.

Once we shift our awareness away from parts and separate entities towards relationships, connections, experiences and events, we find a whole other set of values develop.

Try it for yourself and see how it seems to you.

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We are not machines

Posted in art, creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on April 8, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I took this photo in a steampunk themed cafe in Capetown a few years ago. There’s no doubting this is a work of art. There is a beauty in technology which we can admire in both some of the latest devices and machines we have available to us, and there’s also a certain beauty in old technologies, which are the source material for these steampunk creations.

But we humans have become almost hypnotised by the machine model of reality. Everywhere we go we see machines. We use the concepts of components, parts, processes with inputs and predictable outputs everywhere. The human body is often thought of as an elaborate, perhaps complicated, machine. But it isn’t.
If there is one big modern myth I’d like to counter it’s the myth of the machine. Life is NOT machine-like. Human beings are not like machines….no not even computers! Animals and plants are not like machines. Reality, in fact, is not machine-like.

Why not?
Because reality, Nature and Life are not assemblages of components. We are not made up of discrete parts which can just be replaced.

Reality, Nature and Life are non-linear and massively interconnected. Nothing exists in isolation and every movement, every behaviour, every birth, life and death makes changes which ripple through the entire world. Life is dynamic, never fixed. Life is emergent….it changes in ways which cannot be predicted at the individual level. Life is adaptive, constantly detecting and responding to changes in the environment and in the vast networks of relationships.

Reality, Nature and Life are inter-dependent. All that exists is implicated in the co-creation of all that exists.
Some scientists have defined life as possessing a quality of “auto-poiesis” – self-making capacity – all living creatures grow, mature, reproduce, replace cells, repair damage throughout their entire lives.
Others define life as having “self-moving capacity” – a stone can’t move itself, but a bacterium can, a bird can, a human can.

In fact, it’s still pretty amazing to look at Biology textbooks, check the index and see if you can find a definition of Life. Let me know if you find any! Similarly, textbooks of Medicine don’t seem to have even index entries, let alone whole chapters, about “health” – it isn’t even defined!

There are many other arguments to consider which make the case for just how UNLIKE machines reality, Nature and Life are. So, why do we persist? Thinking we can deal with reality as if it is a giant machine. Why do we persist in giving such attention to short term thinking and reductionist science? Because the longer the time scale, the less and less machine-like, reality appears.

In the last fifty years or so there have been great advances in our understanding of networks, of systems, and of “complex adaptive systems” in particular. We are waking up to the inter-dependent nature of this little planet we all share. My hope is that these insights will shift the balance and the machine-like model will be put back in the box where it deserves to be – the box marked “machine”. Let’s not put anything else in there!

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Observers and observed

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on April 4, 2021| Leave a Comment »

As I walked along this beach I came across a piece of seaweed and shell. But that’s not where my observation ended. So, I stopped and took this photo.

What do you see?

Maybe you see a piece of seaweed and a shell on the sand.

But maybe you see the suggestion of a face? Maybe this piece of seaweed looks like the eyelashes on a closed eyelid, and the shell, a piece of jewellery on the side of someone’s nose?

Well, that’s what I saw. And once I’d seen that I felt more connected to the beach. It was as if the beach was at peace, and lying beautifully in the sunshine. I know that at the beach we often feel pretty relaxed anyway, but as I saw this, and as I look at it again just now, I feel a wave of calm. This image pleases me. It delights me. It brings me joy and makes me feel content. It stirs that deep feeling I have inside that the universe is essentially a friendly place, created with such precise balances between fundamental forces that everything Life needed to come into being fell into place, that the abundance of the universe facilitates both our survival and our thriving…..individually, as a species, and as one of Life’s myriad of forms.

Maybe you look at this image and the seaweed is a sort of smile? Maybe it seems to be a happy emoji? Well, I didn’t see it that way, but if you do, I bet you are aware of feelings of happiness growing inside you.

It’s strange that for many years now we humans have lived with the idea that there is “me” and there is “everything else” “out there”. That somehow we live separate from, and disconnected from a meaningless universe of objects. But that seems to be changing now. The Physics of the 20th and 21st centuries have revealed to us a whole other perspective on reality and our place in it. Gone are the notions of separate, disconnected objects. Everything, it now appears, is connected to everything else. Everything which exists is manifested within a universal energy field. Everything which appears, briefly, or for a number of years, is a manifestation of relationships and connections. The universe, as Carlo Rovelli, the Physicist, says, is made of events and experiences, not things.

And maybe one of the biggest insights we’ve gained is how there is no disconnection between the observer and the observed. We now know that whatever we observe is changed in the act of being observed. And we also know that the observer is changed by what they observer. It’s a two way process.

We humans bring our imagination to bear on what we observe. We bring our memories and our consciousness. We uncover meaning, create narratives, and enrich our worlds with art, with poetry, with stories, music and dance. We interact with the rest of the universe every moment we are alive. Now, we are beginning to realise that.

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Waves not building blocks

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on April 2, 2021| Leave a Comment »

One thing which always fascinates me at the coast, is the appearance and behaviour of waves. I love to stand, or sit, and gaze at them, watching the areas of swell in the water turn into obvious waves as their tops break into white surf. It’s amazing to see the ocean unfurling as the waves appear, rush to the shore, turn white, crash, and dissipate into foam and bubbles, before the water rushes back out to the sea again.

This one photo captures something of the complexity of waves at the beach. You can see at least half a dozen different “fronts” here, each one interacting with the others. It reminds me of the experiments we did in Science class at school which taught us about “interference” patterns as one wave interacts with another. I always found that both beautiful and mesmerising.

Another thing we were taught in Science class was about the molecular basis of all substances. I remember the brightly coloured balls stuck to each other with rods which were used to show us the molecular structure of different crystals and other materials. It was only much later that I came to understand that reality isn’t really made up of discrete units like that.

The world isn’t like a lego kit, a jigsaw, or any kind of machine assembled from discrete parts. I know it can kind of look like that, but it’s not how things are. A better way to think is demonstrated for us at the beach. Reality consists of flows – flows of energies, of atoms, molecules, and of information – flows which are in constant interaction with other flows. What we see as separate objects are just some flows which hold together for a time. The world, as the Physicist, Carlo Rovelli, says, is better understood as “relational”.

I sometimes think of that as I watch the waves, imagining how we too are each like a single wave, emerging on the surface of the ocean, but never separating from it, forming complex relationships with others and with the rest of the world, for a time……for moments, for days, months, years, even for what we call a “lifetime”. Then we return to the rest of the universe from which we emerged.

We are not as separate as we sometimes think we are. Even you and I, dear reader, are interacting just now, as you read this. My thoughts are stimulated by the images I’ve captured, then I express some of them as words in this post, and you read it, and look at the photo, and you, too might begin to have some thoughts very similar to mine. Perhaps even some feelings similar to mine.

We do this all the time throughout our lifetime, don’t we? Everything we do, think, create, express, ripples out far beyond the here and now, and flows into the flows of other lives. We affect each other all the time. We influence each other all the time.

That’s why I want to share these images, these words, these feeling of wonder, awe and joy, in the hope that they influence your life a little, and bring some of those positive energies to you.

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Living as ONE

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on April 1, 2021| 2 Comments »

I’m standing at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, taking a photo of the wet sand, the dunes and just part of a very long beach. It looks peaceful, doesn’t it? Well, play the video below and turn your volume level up!

This is the sound of the Ocean. Just one minute of video as I stood holding my phone towards the waves.

As I walked through the pine forest from the car park, I could hear that roar of the sea. I could hear it long before I could see it.

Isn’t it wonderful?

I love the sight and the sound of the ocean…..so much more than the estuaries and rivers where you can see the other embankment from where you stand and the whole expanse is bounded in by the edges of the earth. With the ocean you look out and you don’t see an edge.

And that captures an important truth for me – there is only ONE ocean, ONE expanse of water on this Earth. We divide it up artificially and give the parts different names – Atlantic, Pacific, and so on – but you can’t find the dividing lines in Nature. You can’t find any borders or frontiers between “one ocean and another one”. We share not just ONE ocean on this planet, we share a single water cycle, a single atmosphere, ONE Earth.

We are embedded, embodied, emergent, within Gaia, this one, living, beautiful, awe inspiring planet. I wish we lived more with a conscious knowledge of that. I wish we lived more knowing how interconnected and interdependent we all are. I wish we lived more as ONE.

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Pining

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on March 31, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I took a walk in a pine forest yesterday.

We are still living under significant restrictions, and there are rumours that they might even be tightened later today, so I took the opportunity to drive about an hour west of here to the coast, have a walk in a pine forest, have a picnic, then stroll along the beach at the “côte sauvage” which means the “wild coast”, a stretch of coastline here in South West France where you can stand at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

I took several photos in the forest and down on the sand. Here’s one of them.

This is a single pine cone forming at the end of one stem of a pine tree. The forest floor was covered with pine cones of all shapes and sizes, but this one, still in the process of emerging, caught my eye. It’s a beautiful collection of developing pine seeds, and the long narrow pine leaves radiating out in all directions gave it the appearance of a sort of “starburst” – the very shape of the plant capturing the essence of the behaviour to come, where the seeds will be dispersed in all directions.

When I look at this image I see potential. I see that abundance I mentioned the other day in an earlier post, where each plant produces millions of seeds and scatters them near and far to produce the greatest chance of proliferation yet more plants, yet more pine trees. Because I zoomed in towards the seed head you can’t see the edges of the pine leaves….so every one of them looks like a direction indicator….it heads out in all directions and you can’t see just how far any individual leaf can reach.

So we see potential here – the potential to be more than we can see in this moment, the potential to be more than we can see in this small space. When we look too closely, when we separate out whatever we are looking at from all of its contexts, connections and environments, then we fail to grasp its reality.

To see the whole we need imagination. To see the whole we need to “see” in our “mind’s eye” what the part is attached to, where its come from, where its going, and how it interacts with everything else. I capture an aspect of that in the little phrase at the top of this blog – “becoming not being”. I am always more excited by vibrant, dynamic living forms than I am by artificially disconnected, dead parts.

I pine for Life, for growth, for the realisation of potential, for the expansion of possibilities, for the deepening of understanding.

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Beauty in the soul

Posted in art, books, creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on March 29, 2021| Leave a Comment »

There’s a bird reserve near Nimes, in the South of France, where you can see flamingos. I’ve visited it several times, and each time I take a host of photos. They are SUCH beautiful creatures!

I’m reading Gary Lachman’s “Lost Knowledge of the Imagination” just now, and this morning read these lines about beauty –

We perceive beauty, the Neo-Platonic philosopher Plotinus said, when we perceive something that is in accord with our soul.

Knowledge of beauty is knowledge of soul. It is self-knowledge, and when we discover beauty we are discovering part of ourselves.

The knowledge we receive in this way is not of fact but of quality, of value and meaning.

We perceive beauty, are open to its presence, through a change in the quality of our consciousness. Only like can know like. We must have beauty within ourselves to see it in the world.

I hadn’t thought of beauty this way before. When I read it I thought about the old adage of “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” which always seemed to me to be a statement that beauty was in fact a matter of taste. But this perspective from Gary Lachman describes that sort of third way interpretation which I like so much. It’s not that beauty is “outside” us, as some kind of measurable object. I think we all know that. Beauty can’t be reduced to data, can’t be captured by mere facts. But neither is it just a matter of taste, as if it is entirely an experience of the individual rendering the rest of the real world unimportant.

The third way is that beauty is a resonance. It’s a harmony. And therefore it emerges in the lived quality of an experience, of an engagement, of a relationship. We need both parts of the relationship to be present…..something “within” us, let’s call that “the soul”, and something “outwith” us, let’s call that “the other”.

We know instantly when we find something, or someone beautiful. We don’t need to way it up, analyse the inputs, stimuli and signals. We just know. We know because our inner being resonates with whatever it is we are looking at….or it doesn’t. When it does, we have the sensation of joy, delight, and gratitude which accompanies all engagements with beauty.

Beauty, I reckon, is good for us. It’s good for our souls. It’s good for our consciousness. It’s good for our health.

So, here you are, a few photos in this post, all taken during one visit to the flamingos. I find them beautiful. I hope you do too. And I hope that appreciation of their beauty nourishes your soul, warms your heart, adds some positive quality to this present moment.

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Living together

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on March 28, 2021| Leave a Comment »

You’ll be familiar with the phenomenon of starlings creating a “murmuration” where thousands of them flock together and create the most astonishing shapes in the sky. I see that around here from time to time, but much more commonly I hear a few hundred, or perhaps a few thousand, starlings flying through the vineyards together. Then they’ll “assemble” on a couple of the biggest trees at the top of the hill. They make such a noise while they do that, that they absolutely catch your attention. Then as they sit on the branches together they sing and call and chatter for a while, making a unique flock of starlings racket.

Suddenly, they all go quiet. It happens over perhaps two or three seconds. The clamour of the flock is replace by silence. Having witnessed this many times I now know what’s going to happen next. They all take off! Just like you can see in this photo. In fact, it’s quite an easy photo to take if you just listen. You just focus the camera on the tree and wait a second, then, whoosh, what you hear next is the sound of a thousand wings beating as one. It’s a rush, a sudden noise of air being pushed aside by the birds. I don’t think I’ve heard exactly that sound anywhere else.

From time to time, I look up from my garden because I hear that rush of wind and I know it’s a flock of birds speeding over the tops of the vines, and settling onto their branches. Then I hear them call to each other, then a bit later, silence occurs, and a moment later….whoosh! They take off into the sky, becoming visible again as they soar over the vineyards.

It’s a delightful sight and sound.

It always makes me think about that balance in the world between competition and co-operation, and the delicate balance between individualism and collectivism. It makes me reflect on the human need for autonomy and a sense of Self, and the powerful human need to belong, to be in relationship, to love and be loved.

I do think we’ve got the balance all wrong over the last few hundred years, and there have been whole books written about that. We can look at the narrowing of consciousness from when humans lived in greater harmony with the landscape and with other creatures, to the present time where whole societies have become atomised and the sense of alienation has shot off the top of the scale. Or we can look at the rise of industrialisation, technocratic modes of organisation and control, and the mass competitive consumption of capitalism. Or we can consider the divided brain thesis of Iain McGilchrist and see that the Emissary (the left hemisphere) has cut itself off from the Master (the right hemisphere) and produced our current patterns of thought and social organisation. There are many ways to approach this same issue…..but the conclusion is……

we have got the balance wrong. We have gone way too far down the road of atomisation, reductionism, generalisation, command and control, consumption and competition. Well, that’s how I see it anyway. I think the world, our hearts, our souls, the World Soul, are all crying out for a shift in emphasis – towards a recognition of the “commons”, of how we all share one planet, one water cycle, one atmosphere, one common genetic heritage. How all of Life is part of the same, single, complex web.

Maybe this pandemic has quietened down the rush and pressure of competitive, busy life, and if we listen carefully we can hear the emerging silence which comes before we take off together with one great “whoosh” and fly higher than we’ve ever done before.

I think we need to move towards more kindness, care and love. Towards the creation of mutually beneficial bonds and relationships. I think we need to do that personally, and we need to do that together. What do you think? Maybe that would be pretty wonderful.

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From sunbeams to the Plant Kingdom

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on March 26, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Before there was Life on Earth, the Sun shone down on the surface, baking the entire planet. A big step forward in evolution was the emergence of plant life. Plants developed the ability to use the Sun’s energy to capture carbon dioxide and water from the atmosphere, and turn those two molecules into sugars. In a way, plants learned how to tap into the vast, seemingly infinite, reserves of energy which were produced by the furnace of the Sun. As they transformed those two abundant molecules into sugars which they could use to survive and thrive, they produced oxygen almost as a by-product.

As plants proliferated and spread across the Earth’s surface, they changed the atmosphere, enabling a new kind of life to appear….cells which needed oxygen. Actually, before there were plants, there were single celled bacteria which developed this capability to capture carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. One theory of evolution is that all multi-celled organisms evolved from the collaborative and integrative behaviours of single-celled organisms. I find that a pretty convincing story.

Animals evolved later. And we humans belong in the Animal Kingdom. So, without our ancestors of the Plant Kingdom, none of us would exist. It’s not just that none of us would exist because humans wouldn’t have evolved, but none of us could exist now, because without the Plant Kingdom, no animals would have access to the Sun’s energy. It’s only the plants which have learned how to capture the Sun’s energy directly. The rest of us live further along a food chain, getting our energy from the other creatures (plants and animals) which we eat.

This beautiful photo has a lovely symmetry…..the sunbeams are echoed in the rows of the vineyard….and that phenomenon of symmetry, of echo, of resonance, reveals some of the intricate inter-connectedness of all that exists.

In this one image, I can lose my boundaries, and find myself as a unique, embedded, transient part of a vast web of Life.

I find transcendent experiences in the natural, everyday world. It’s in the vineyards, the forest, at the shore beside the crashing waves of the ocean, in my garden as the different birds call and pass through……..It’s no surprise to me that spending time outside, in natural habitats, lowers stress, lowers the human stress hormones, stirs our spirits, nurtures our souls, and is good for our bodies. It’s one of the best things we can do to stay healthy…..connect to the natural world.

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Caught by the light

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on March 24, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Once upon a time I was walking in a London park. I was attending a weekend workshop and we finished up late one afternoon. As I walked past the gates of the park I was drawn in by the colours of the autumn leaves and I spent a while strolling around, just noticing, pausing, photographing.

I didn’t set out with any intention to take photos. I wasn’t even looking for a park. I didn’t think I should get some fresh air or exercise. I was just walking back to the hotel and the park called me in.

We are a pretty driven, goal-focused, outcome-focused, busy society, so unexpectedly finding “free time” was a real bonus. Many thinkers have written about the value of being a “flaneur” (someone who strolls around without any explicit intent), of passing some time just being present, not working towards some, as yet, imaginary future point.

This was one of those times. I took a lot of photos. I sat on a park bench, listened to birds singing, watching families and individuals enjoying the park. I noticed that at the end of one path there was a fountain, and I’m pretty keen on fountains. They draw me to them, too. As I approached the fountain I noticed the water was catching the light of the low sun. It utterly illuminated the fountain so that it shone as if it was radiating energy all around it. I stopped to take a photo.

As I framed a shot I noticed there was someone standing under a tree, gazing towards the exact same fountain, that fountain of light and water. I took my photo, and then took some more. Then I lowered my camera and just stood taking in the scene. The person under the tree stood completely still, solely focused on the fountain and the play of light and water. Was she lost in her thoughts? I’ve no idea. Was she utterly absorbed in the moment, completely present in the experience of these magical moments? I don’t know. But my instinct says it was the latter.

Did I catch the sunlight? Or did the sunlight catch me? Did the water catch the sunlight? Or did the sunlight catch the water? This was one of those moments where the connection, the interaction, the relationship came to the fore. It wasn’t important to know the direction, it was more than enough to enjoy the flow.

As I look at this photo again, now, I am, once more, caught by the light. It draws me to it, pulls me towards it, and I slip into a few moments of quiet, of peace and calm. I bathe in the feelings of contentment and delight. It nourishes me.

Maybe it will nourish you, too.

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