THE NUMINOUS AND THE DEAD
There is a rather shallow formula that declares that the older you get the more prone you become to adopting religious faith, this is a variation of there are no atheists in foxholes argument, presumably the greater proximity of death concentrating the mind. In my own case this does not appear to be true.
In his rather wonderful memoir ‘Experience,’ Martin Amis reflects that your parents are what stand between you and death. Certainly, having as they say ‘lost’ both my parents within the last eighteen months,- and isn’t the terminology here interesting, rather as if one had suddenly regressed, a child wandering around the station concourse having been separated from mum and dad, -I can certainly testify to this sense of having nobody now between me and the abyss, the feeling that “next comes me.” Not that I find myself in the departure Lounge just yet, more that the time when my flight will be called just got closer; though I have to say that this feeling has not induced in me any particular desire to ‘find’ God.
I have never liked being defined as an atheist and indeed find this obsession with such labels reductionist in the extreme, -in this particular case defining yourself in terms of what you do not believe,- fundamentally antagonistic to the complexity of human experience. Though respecting belief it is indeed often far easier to define oneself in terms of what you don’t believe than what you do.
When I was about thirteen years old I was hauled out of school assembly for acting the fool, it being pointed out to me that this particular gathering represented an act of religious devotion, to act the fool was being disrespectful to God. I believed in God didn't I? My reply, that I was not sure, I think added to the length of my detention.
In the end it was not difficult to let go of Christianity completely, ‘fairy stories’ my brother said, and I was inclined to agree,
The belief in a personal God, in what the American comedian Bill Maher describes as ‘an invisible friend,’ was slightly harder to shake; it haunted my childhood and crept into my somewhat extended adolescence. Such beliefs are incredibly tenacious and seem able to survive any amount of assaults from reason and rationality; given the alienation and spiritual poverty of modern life within ‘more developed’ societies this perhaps is not surprising. The idea is a pervasive one, chiming with the solipsistic idea of ourselves as the centre of the universe.
I remember around about 1992 working with a young man who had discovered God through his engagement with Alcoholics Anonymous, he was in the process of leaving his bicycle unlocked out on the street. When I suggested that this might be unwise he declared that his ‘higher power’ would look after the bike. This at a time when Bosnian Muslims were being slaughtered by Serb Orthodox fanatics; God indifferent to mass murder able to take time out to look after this young mans bicycle. Similarly all those declarations in the power of prayer having saved this or that person, on days when throughout Africa many thousands were dying through war, starvation and disease. Such a God relinquishes the right to be considered good; no truly moral person would want such a being as a friend, let alone as the all powerful deity.
I think many points occur in any ones life, or indeed ought to occur, when they question their basic beliefs, when, like Hamlet they reflect that “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”; True knowledge being an acute awareness of your own ignorance, knowledge not only what you do not know but in many instances of what you cannot know. Having rejected religion as a child in my late twenties I began to wonder if perhaps I had got it wrong. The doctrines of the three monotheisms struck me then and even more strike me now as not only absurd but in so many areas positively poisonous, but of course the dominant and domineering, indeed the bullying, monotheisms do not represent anything like the last word respecting the spiritual, the transcendent, the numinous.
The nineteen eighties saw the birth of the so called ‘new age’ movement, a pick n’ mix spirituality, a touch of Celtic mysticism here, mixed with kaballah and white magic ritual. The age of credulity was born.
However amidst all the absurdity there emerged amongst other things, renewed interest in Buddhism and the historiography of an older pre-Roman Christian tradition. It was a time when I was introduced to Rumi, to the potency and power of mythology and mythological constructs. Timing being everything I discovered Zen and meditation just at a time when I was questioning some of my former certainties.
For a period of about ten years I meditated regularly every morning. The experience of meditation does not lend itself to language, it is not something that you can talk about, it something that you do. Perhaps being over cerebral it is this quality that most attracted me. There was also the prospect of something called ‘enlightenment.’ However meditation is for the long haul, it is not a short term fix, it can also mislead, lead you up the garden path, at times revealing incredible insights at others barren, a restless uneasy experience. The trap in meditation is expectation, the demands in our cerebral and over stimulated lives for constant activity, entertainment, insight; demands that are inimical to the practice of meditation.
I once spent two weeks in a restored Bulgarian monastery up in the mountains not far from Asenovgrad. Two weeks of meditation and seclusion, a retreat. As the evening fell you could feel the centuries surround you, the presence of those early monks chopping wood, drawing water, keeping the fires going, surrounded on all sides by hostile forces, sustained by a faith that is now beyond our comprehension.
Christopher Hitchens says that this level of faith belongs to the infancy of the species and of course he is probably correct. However is it possible that in that infancy we posessed insights that we have since lost? For when I look back at my own adolescence there were periods when I posessed sudden intense insights, a time when,
"I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now. ..."
I stopped meditating sometime shortly after this trip to the mountains. My reasons for doing so are complex and still not fully clear to me now. Perhaps too enmeshed in materialist and rationalist conceptions I was unable to let go, to, as they say in Buddhism, cease grasping, that I am just another spiritual window shopper. Then again perhaps I just hit a dead end. Certainly whatever else I experienced and I experienced much, the presence of God, whatever that means, did not materialise. Though the door is not completely closed and I may yet return to this landscape. What I do believe is that those who have not struggled with these questions are not to be taken seriously.
Up until a few years ago I considered death peripheral to my life, but on closer examination I began to see that not only had it been much closer than I had imagined but in fact stood at the very core of my life experience. The death of my twin sister only a few days after we were born was a shadow cast over my childhood. My maternal Grandfather, with whom I had been close, died when I was four, a few years later I had an illness that brushed up against death. Much later my other sister, also a twin, died after a long and disgusting illness. Ten years later both my parents followed her.
My mother died on my birthday, if she had died a day later she would have died on my sisters, a day after that on her own birthday, or even a day later she would have died on my brothers. My mother had a talent for this sort of synchronicity. Life a circular process, my mother dying on the day she gave birth to me. My mother also hung on for my arrival at her death bed, I was present at her death, thirty minutes after I had got off the train from London. Whatever else my own mortality was now longer an issue that could be ducked.
Three days before my father’s death I arrived at Gatwick, slightly exhausted, I started to unpack but unwilling to face up to the hideous reality of life back in London I fell asleep. My father presented to me in my dreams twice, firstly as the enfeebled man I was later to see him, breath running out, I asked him to hang on, then as a young man, in his navel uniform, ready for a night on the town, on the razzle.
I don’t draw any particular conclusions from these experiences other than an admiration for the rich complexity of life; it is this very richness that keeps me engaged.
It is not of course, possible to consider the issue of death without considering suicide, suicide of course now the preserve of the mental health industry, not a crowd wholly to be trusted. The tradition of seeing suicide purely in mental health terms dates back to the nineteenth century, a polite formula for bereaved relatives, ‘whilst the balance of the mind was disturbed.’
There is however an older tradition, all those Roman Stoics like Seneca putting ‘an end to evils,’ indeed some of the most distinguished minds in the ancient world chose suicide as a logical and rational response to the absurdities of existence. A full stop to a life lived to a particular conclusion.
In the film The Hours Nicole Kidman playing Virginia Woolf drowns herself, I think, not out of the desperation and pain wrought by manic depression but as much out of a sense that a journey has come to an end; enough already. It is suicide placed within oriental as opposed to an Occidental tradition.
I suspect that far more people have suicide as part of their baggage than ever admit to it; it is a modern perception that your own life belongs to you and consequently is yours to dispose of as you wish. Though of course life as ‘yours’ not belonging to God or the state always representing a threat both to religious and secular tyranny, hence the moral opprobrium, the implications of mental instability and state prohibition that have characterised attitudes to suicide.
Certainly suicide was part of my own baggage for a very long time, it may be still lurking in the attic somewhere, but it is now no longer feels quite the attractive option it once seemed. For all its enormous difficulties, frustrations and absurdities, life, it turns out, is all we have.
So what is my attitude now toward death? Well unlike Larkin I do not wake in a cold sweat in the early hours, though that may change, nor am I especially sanguine at the prospect of my own extinction. After all the narcissistic pleasures of life are very real and can be very intense. You stand for a moment, the wind lifts the leaves, the sky turns slowly blood red, you make love and then walk out onto the balcony to feel the warmth of the sun on your face as the sea crashes heavily against the rocks. In such moments life surmounts its obstacles and re-asserts the extraordinary power of simply being. However for the most part, bewildered and confused we struggle on with, in Cesare Pavese’s phrase, ‘this business of living.’ It is at best a delicate process; at any given moment the balance can tilt savagely against you, a diagnosis of cancer, a change in brain chemistry, the sudden loss of a loved one and the game is no longer worth the candle.
A number of years ago I was flying back to London from New York, slightly exhausted, irritated by lack of leg room and the sticky discomfort of long haul flights. I was dipping in and out of the in-flight movie; Woody Alan suddenly starts talking to a dead relative, a ghost. “All I ever wanted was to be happy!”
“Happy, happy,” he responds, “Alive is happy!”
The Buddhists understand that life is breath and breath is life and when I watched my father die I watched him stop breathing. When you most truly feel alive you take a deep intake of breath, drunk on being alive something opens up, albeit for the briefest of moments, we transcend being human for a moment in the greatest of all paradox, we are at our most human when we transcend our daily human experience. What this means I do not know, what I do know is that this is very probably all we have, so we had better make the most of it.
In his rather wonderful memoir ‘Experience,’ Martin Amis reflects that your parents are what stand between you and death. Certainly, having as they say ‘lost’ both my parents within the last eighteen months,- and isn’t the terminology here interesting, rather as if one had suddenly regressed, a child wandering around the station concourse having been separated from mum and dad, -I can certainly testify to this sense of having nobody now between me and the abyss, the feeling that “next comes me.” Not that I find myself in the departure Lounge just yet, more that the time when my flight will be called just got closer; though I have to say that this feeling has not induced in me any particular desire to ‘find’ God.
I have never liked being defined as an atheist and indeed find this obsession with such labels reductionist in the extreme, -in this particular case defining yourself in terms of what you do not believe,- fundamentally antagonistic to the complexity of human experience. Though respecting belief it is indeed often far easier to define oneself in terms of what you don’t believe than what you do.
When I was about thirteen years old I was hauled out of school assembly for acting the fool, it being pointed out to me that this particular gathering represented an act of religious devotion, to act the fool was being disrespectful to God. I believed in God didn't I? My reply, that I was not sure, I think added to the length of my detention.
In the end it was not difficult to let go of Christianity completely, ‘fairy stories’ my brother said, and I was inclined to agree,
The belief in a personal God, in what the American comedian Bill Maher describes as ‘an invisible friend,’ was slightly harder to shake; it haunted my childhood and crept into my somewhat extended adolescence. Such beliefs are incredibly tenacious and seem able to survive any amount of assaults from reason and rationality; given the alienation and spiritual poverty of modern life within ‘more developed’ societies this perhaps is not surprising. The idea is a pervasive one, chiming with the solipsistic idea of ourselves as the centre of the universe.
I remember around about 1992 working with a young man who had discovered God through his engagement with Alcoholics Anonymous, he was in the process of leaving his bicycle unlocked out on the street. When I suggested that this might be unwise he declared that his ‘higher power’ would look after the bike. This at a time when Bosnian Muslims were being slaughtered by Serb Orthodox fanatics; God indifferent to mass murder able to take time out to look after this young mans bicycle. Similarly all those declarations in the power of prayer having saved this or that person, on days when throughout Africa many thousands were dying through war, starvation and disease. Such a God relinquishes the right to be considered good; no truly moral person would want such a being as a friend, let alone as the all powerful deity.
I think many points occur in any ones life, or indeed ought to occur, when they question their basic beliefs, when, like Hamlet they reflect that “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”; True knowledge being an acute awareness of your own ignorance, knowledge not only what you do not know but in many instances of what you cannot know. Having rejected religion as a child in my late twenties I began to wonder if perhaps I had got it wrong. The doctrines of the three monotheisms struck me then and even more strike me now as not only absurd but in so many areas positively poisonous, but of course the dominant and domineering, indeed the bullying, monotheisms do not represent anything like the last word respecting the spiritual, the transcendent, the numinous.
The nineteen eighties saw the birth of the so called ‘new age’ movement, a pick n’ mix spirituality, a touch of Celtic mysticism here, mixed with kaballah and white magic ritual. The age of credulity was born.
However amidst all the absurdity there emerged amongst other things, renewed interest in Buddhism and the historiography of an older pre-Roman Christian tradition. It was a time when I was introduced to Rumi, to the potency and power of mythology and mythological constructs. Timing being everything I discovered Zen and meditation just at a time when I was questioning some of my former certainties.
For a period of about ten years I meditated regularly every morning. The experience of meditation does not lend itself to language, it is not something that you can talk about, it something that you do. Perhaps being over cerebral it is this quality that most attracted me. There was also the prospect of something called ‘enlightenment.’ However meditation is for the long haul, it is not a short term fix, it can also mislead, lead you up the garden path, at times revealing incredible insights at others barren, a restless uneasy experience. The trap in meditation is expectation, the demands in our cerebral and over stimulated lives for constant activity, entertainment, insight; demands that are inimical to the practice of meditation.
I once spent two weeks in a restored Bulgarian monastery up in the mountains not far from Asenovgrad. Two weeks of meditation and seclusion, a retreat. As the evening fell you could feel the centuries surround you, the presence of those early monks chopping wood, drawing water, keeping the fires going, surrounded on all sides by hostile forces, sustained by a faith that is now beyond our comprehension.
Christopher Hitchens says that this level of faith belongs to the infancy of the species and of course he is probably correct. However is it possible that in that infancy we posessed insights that we have since lost? For when I look back at my own adolescence there were periods when I posessed sudden intense insights, a time when,
"I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now. ..."
I stopped meditating sometime shortly after this trip to the mountains. My reasons for doing so are complex and still not fully clear to me now. Perhaps too enmeshed in materialist and rationalist conceptions I was unable to let go, to, as they say in Buddhism, cease grasping, that I am just another spiritual window shopper. Then again perhaps I just hit a dead end. Certainly whatever else I experienced and I experienced much, the presence of God, whatever that means, did not materialise. Though the door is not completely closed and I may yet return to this landscape. What I do believe is that those who have not struggled with these questions are not to be taken seriously.
Up until a few years ago I considered death peripheral to my life, but on closer examination I began to see that not only had it been much closer than I had imagined but in fact stood at the very core of my life experience. The death of my twin sister only a few days after we were born was a shadow cast over my childhood. My maternal Grandfather, with whom I had been close, died when I was four, a few years later I had an illness that brushed up against death. Much later my other sister, also a twin, died after a long and disgusting illness. Ten years later both my parents followed her.
My mother died on my birthday, if she had died a day later she would have died on my sisters, a day after that on her own birthday, or even a day later she would have died on my brothers. My mother had a talent for this sort of synchronicity. Life a circular process, my mother dying on the day she gave birth to me. My mother also hung on for my arrival at her death bed, I was present at her death, thirty minutes after I had got off the train from London. Whatever else my own mortality was now longer an issue that could be ducked.
Three days before my father’s death I arrived at Gatwick, slightly exhausted, I started to unpack but unwilling to face up to the hideous reality of life back in London I fell asleep. My father presented to me in my dreams twice, firstly as the enfeebled man I was later to see him, breath running out, I asked him to hang on, then as a young man, in his navel uniform, ready for a night on the town, on the razzle.
I don’t draw any particular conclusions from these experiences other than an admiration for the rich complexity of life; it is this very richness that keeps me engaged.
It is not of course, possible to consider the issue of death without considering suicide, suicide of course now the preserve of the mental health industry, not a crowd wholly to be trusted. The tradition of seeing suicide purely in mental health terms dates back to the nineteenth century, a polite formula for bereaved relatives, ‘whilst the balance of the mind was disturbed.’
There is however an older tradition, all those Roman Stoics like Seneca putting ‘an end to evils,’ indeed some of the most distinguished minds in the ancient world chose suicide as a logical and rational response to the absurdities of existence. A full stop to a life lived to a particular conclusion.
In the film The Hours Nicole Kidman playing Virginia Woolf drowns herself, I think, not out of the desperation and pain wrought by manic depression but as much out of a sense that a journey has come to an end; enough already. It is suicide placed within oriental as opposed to an Occidental tradition.
I suspect that far more people have suicide as part of their baggage than ever admit to it; it is a modern perception that your own life belongs to you and consequently is yours to dispose of as you wish. Though of course life as ‘yours’ not belonging to God or the state always representing a threat both to religious and secular tyranny, hence the moral opprobrium, the implications of mental instability and state prohibition that have characterised attitudes to suicide.
Certainly suicide was part of my own baggage for a very long time, it may be still lurking in the attic somewhere, but it is now no longer feels quite the attractive option it once seemed. For all its enormous difficulties, frustrations and absurdities, life, it turns out, is all we have.
So what is my attitude now toward death? Well unlike Larkin I do not wake in a cold sweat in the early hours, though that may change, nor am I especially sanguine at the prospect of my own extinction. After all the narcissistic pleasures of life are very real and can be very intense. You stand for a moment, the wind lifts the leaves, the sky turns slowly blood red, you make love and then walk out onto the balcony to feel the warmth of the sun on your face as the sea crashes heavily against the rocks. In such moments life surmounts its obstacles and re-asserts the extraordinary power of simply being. However for the most part, bewildered and confused we struggle on with, in Cesare Pavese’s phrase, ‘this business of living.’ It is at best a delicate process; at any given moment the balance can tilt savagely against you, a diagnosis of cancer, a change in brain chemistry, the sudden loss of a loved one and the game is no longer worth the candle.
A number of years ago I was flying back to London from New York, slightly exhausted, irritated by lack of leg room and the sticky discomfort of long haul flights. I was dipping in and out of the in-flight movie; Woody Alan suddenly starts talking to a dead relative, a ghost. “All I ever wanted was to be happy!”
“Happy, happy,” he responds, “Alive is happy!”
The Buddhists understand that life is breath and breath is life and when I watched my father die I watched him stop breathing. When you most truly feel alive you take a deep intake of breath, drunk on being alive something opens up, albeit for the briefest of moments, we transcend being human for a moment in the greatest of all paradox, we are at our most human when we transcend our daily human experience. What this means I do not know, what I do know is that this is very probably all we have, so we had better make the most of it.
