Why is the sky dark at night? - Olber's Paradox

Here is an entry from my personal diary for Friday. Though it rambles on for a couple of paragraphs, the essence of it passed through my mind as a flash of insight lasting perhaps 10 seconds that struck me as I was on my way home from a reluctant evening walk. This is what I wrote about it when I got home (with very little editing). It is an example of the limited power of words to express what is in our mind.

The other day I saw a video – ‘Why is the sky dark at night? – about Olber’s paradox. It is a question that puzzled medieval astronomers: if the universe is infinite and has existed forever, the light from an infinite number of stars should fill every available spot in the night sky making it bright as day. The video explains that today we know that the universe is not infinitely old and therefore not all the light from all the stars has had time to get here. The narrator says ‘the darkness of the night sky is a characteristic that argues against infinity’.

Tonight as I was walking home from a walk (yes I wrote that), I had an insight as I remembered this video and phrase. The universe has not existed infinitely: it has a finite beginning. But the space existed. Something existed for there to be a big bang in. Where did those gases come from? Where did the space before the big bang come from? Wherever it came from is a place of higher being, higher intelligence, higher good. The paradox may argue against infinity, but it argues for God, for another essence beyond our comprehension. If we align ourselves with this essence, we align ourselves with creative powers and principles – with God – and we cannot go wrong. We will prosper. If not, we will not prosper (or not for long). In this we can rely, in this we can have faith. Not that we should expect everything to go our way without effort all the time. There can be no guaranteed results or there would be no life, no point, no merit. ‘Do not expect God to change the laws of nature for you’. But having faith is the correct attitude. Following the virtues as much as we can is the correct conduct. Courage, patience, love etc. Discipline also : discipline and courage are needed to harness virtue as the sailor harnesses the wind.

To know what one should do – for one’s health for one thing – and not do it is weak and stupid. To have gifts and not develop them – even moderate gifts that can become greater – is a terrible waste. To have the ability to understand virtue and not to follow it is against the intention of the higher essence, against the laws of nature, against the will of God.

To have faith in God is to have faith in oneself, since God is inside us. When we have faith in ourselves, we reward ourselves, as God. We allow ourselves to succeed, because in our hearts, our subconscious, we know that we have merited it by following the laws of nature and of God. And so it happens to us, according to our faith.

I Ching - nourishing the superior

I have never, and I mean never, consulted the I Ching without it being spot on in its commentary on my problem and supplying me with extraordinarily simple but meaningful insight. So I consulted the I Ching again this week concerning certain persistent demons I wished to expunge.

Yes, I have demons. Do you think I apply effortlessly all the principles of philosophy I talk about here? Certainly not. Some of them I apply to some degree, for some length of time, with some success. Some things I have improved enormously; other things are stubbornly hard to overcome. But at least I am thinking about them. Sometimes.

So it came about this week that I asked the I Ching to shed some light on a difficult problem and as an answer it gave me hexagram 27. I / The Corners of the Mouth (Providing nourishment) changing with time into hexagram 5. Hsu / Waiting (Nourishment). That’s quite a lot of nourishment going on, you say. Or not. Or should be, as the case may be. Yes, it is.

Again, the I Ching absolutely hit the nail on the head without trying. From the Wilhelm/Baynes edition:

.

THE JUDGEMENT

THE CORNERS OF THE MOUTH.
Perseverence brings good fortune.
Pay heed to the providing of nourishment
And to what a man seeks
To fill his own mouth with.

In bestowing care and nourishment, it is important that the right people should be taken care of and that we should attend to our own nourishment in the right way…. Mencius says about this:

If we wish to know whether anyone is superior or not, we need only observe what part of his being he regards as especially important. The body has superior and inferior, important and unimportant parts. We must not injure important parts for the sake of the unimportant, nor must we injure the superior parts for the sake of the inferior. He who cultivates the inferior parts of his nature is an inferior man. He who cultivates the superior parts of his nature is a superior man.

Here of course it is not merely about nourishing the body, though it means that as well, but about nourishing the mind and the soul. As we care about what we put into our mouths and into our bodies, so we must care about what we allow to enter our minds and our souls, because what enters there will decide whether we function well and grow and thrive or not. If we are not careful what we let in, perhaps we may even get sick.
I went on to look at hexagram 5. Waiting:

All beings have need of nourishment from above. But the gift of food comes in its own time, and for this one must wait…. Waiting is not mere empty hoping. It has the inner certainty of reaching the goal. Such certainty alone gives that light which leads to success….

THE IMAGE

Clouds rise up to heaven:
The image of WAITING.
Thus the superior man eats and drinks,
Is joyous and of good cheer.

When clouds rise in the sky, it is a sign that it will rain. There is nothing to do but wait until the rain falls. It is the same in life when destiny is at work. We should not worry and seek to shape the future by interfering in things before the time is ripe. We should quietly fortify the body with food and drink and the mind with gladness and good cheer. Fate comes when it will, and thus we are ready.

Here the message of the previous hexagram is reinforced: carefully nourish the body and the mind, the important and the superior parts. This is the way to cooperate fully and efficiently with the forces at work and takes away the worry and the stress and the striving. Let the Tao take the strain.
I personally also read into these lines the message ‘stop trying to get something you haven’t paid for yet’ or ‘stop trying to jump the line for the things you desire’. In other words, wait for them, prepare for them coming, be ready, and when they come they will be yours.

So, based on the timeless wisdom of the I Ching, I made a resolution about my problem. The thing with resolutions is if you make too many that you don’t keep, they lose their power. So this one I wrote down in the form of a covenant. This resolution is too important not to keep. Now I will view everything I do through the lens of ‘is this cultivating the important and superior parts of my nature, or the opposite?’

I hope you found this helpful. I encourage you to discover the power of the I Ching for yourself. It will be one of the most important steps you will ever take.

Photo by lapie

Footprints in the snow

Feeling ‘in a high state of grease’ (as Stephen Maturin would put it) from too much eating and too little moving, I decided I better go for a walk tonight. Nothing like a walk ‘to set you up’ (as Jack Aubry would put it).
It was 10 degrees below zero, but Canadians consider that quite mild to go for a walk. Where was it I read that only at minus 60 is it considered ‘too cold to go to the mall’…? So wrapped up like an astronaut I set off on my usual circuit that takes me along by the baseball park. There was a beautiful thin blanket of snow on the ground, just enough to make everything pure and white but not thick enough to hinder walking. The ‘crunch, crunch’ of my steps lulled me into a state of meditation.
I thought of the recent holiday dinner where my new girlfriend met my son for the first time and my daughter for the second. After my daughter’s first meeting my girlfriend would say ‘she is so beautiful and charming, so different than you…ha, ha’ and comments along those lines. After my son’s meeting it was ‘he is so handsome’ to which I replied ‘yes, he’s my son’ to which she replied ‘no, no, he doesn’t resemble you… ha, ha’. After the third or fourth comment of this kind I went to dig out my first (and only) British passport, issued in 1979 when I was 22 years old, 1 year older than my son today. ‘I hope you are ready for this’ I said, as I passed her my passport containing, basically, a photo of my son. Perhaps a more intense look in the eyes, but for the rest, copy and paste. ‘There!’ I exclaimed triumphantly. ‘Let us hear no more of this ‘Oh, your son is so handsome…’’
I came to the end of my path and turned around to walk back the way I had come. There on the path, unmistakably mine yet curiously alien, my footprints in the snow.

Photo by MsJimmy

We who merely happen to be walking around

Here is another interesting video for you. It’s an amazingly high quality film of the view from a streetcar travelling down Market Street in San Francisco in 1905. What I found so unusual in this film is that there is nothing… unusual. It must be that we are so used to seeing bad quality films of this period that we begin to think that all people walked like Charlie Chaplin or something, or that they were in some way quaint or inferior to us. In this film we see clearly that the people are like us. The policeman gives us his universal policeman stare, people gingerly cross the street avoiding the tracks as we would do, the fellow on the bicycle rides like anyone you would see today, the boy running could be the neighbour’s son.

From there it is easy to see that two hundred years ago or even a thousand years ago, apart from the props, people were basically the same. Just because we live in an era that is technologically, politically and socially more ‘advanced’ (so to speak), it does not necessarily mean we are better or even different than people who came before us. To me, the film illustrates clearly our alikeness, our solidarity with our ancestors. We, like they, are merely living in the ‘now’ of the present moment. We go about our business, thinking - as they probably did - that we are in some way more privileged, more intelligent, more everything than those who came before. But this is not true. I am reminded of a quote from G.K. Chesterton about the importance of tradition:

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

Courage - the wiser brother of Fear

Humility may the root of virtue but courage is its spirit. Courage is the spirit of virtue because as C.S. Lewis said, courage is the form of every virtue at the testing point. Virtues are by definition qualities we choose (if we are wise) and develop and by definition they are often not easy to practice, otherwise everyone one would be virtuous all the time. Therefore we sometimes need courage to stick to the path of virtue when it would be easier and safer not to.
But what is courage?

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. Ambrose Redmoon

Courage is doing what you're afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you're scared. Edward Vernon Rickenbacker

Valour is a gift. Those having it never know for sure whether they have it till the test comes. And those having it in one test never know for sure if they will have it when the next test comes. Carl Sandburg

There is no such thing as bravery; only degrees of fear. John Wainwright

Courage is fear holding on a minute longer. George S. Patton

Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away. Thomas Fuller

Fear and courage are brothers. Proverb

Courage is subordinating fear to the background as we give priority to a higher purpose, more important to us than our safety or comfort. Courage hears the voice of Fear, as an older wiser brother hears the complaints of his sibling, but he doesn’t allow it to stop him.

Do not take counsel of your fears. George Patton

The goal is too important to be left in the hands of fear. There is a kind of necessity to courage, a kind of obligation. That is why often heroes will say they did nothing courageous, they only did what had to be done, what anyone would have done. They did not hesitate.

If you have a strong enough why you can bear almost any how. Nietzshe

Real valour consists not in being insensible to danger; but in being prompt to confront and disarm it. Sir Walter Scott

Courage is not recklessness. Courage has confidence, wisdom, awareness. It is a conscious choice, not a moment of panic. There is no honour in recklessness, there is much honour in courage.

Courage is a virtue only so far as it is directed by prudence. François de Fenelon

Courage is... the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared and how not to fear what ought not to be feared. David Ben-Gurion

Life is a series of choices. Every moment we decide what we will do in the next moment, either through good habits or by considered thought. This is the beauty of life, our ability to consciously choose. And with courage, we assure that our choices will always be consistently good when what is happening to us is not.

Facing it - always facing it - that's the way to get through. Face it! Joseph Conrad

As we shall see, fortune smiles on the brave. But that is not the reason to be brave, though it is a nice side benefit. Virtue is its own reward, courage also. What does it matter that we succeeded or not, as long as we acted virtuously with courage? By definition, courage will have no regrets.

Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt. Shakespeare/De Vere

There would be nothing to frighten you if you refused to be afraid. Gandhi

Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to be fearless in facing them. Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it. Rabindranath Tagore

Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on. Rabindranath Tagore

Health, happiness and success depend upon the fighting spirit of each person. The big thing is not what happens to us in life - but what we do about what happens to us. George Allen

The best way out is always through. Robert Frost

.

Image from Documents and Designs

Acceptance - the opposite of childish resistance

I came across this quote the other day, which reminds me of my grandmother’s saying ‘What cannot be cured, must be endured’ but rephrased in a more positive way:

What cannot be avoided, t'were childish weakness to lament or fear. Shakespeare/De Vere

Here we have acceptance in a nutshell: to be a man is to face the inevitable bravely without complaining that it should be otherwise. Shake-speare always has the knack of putting his finger on the crux of the matter, doesn’t he?
When we don’t face up to what can’t be avoided, we are in resistance mode. We are wasting energy bewailing our fate. We are hanging on to an idea of reality that doesn’t exist any more, if it ever did. We are not adapting to the situation at hand and we are not considering what the situation at hand demands of us. We are being childish instead of being men, or women. The feeling of a weight falling off your shoulders when you accept something is nothing more than the relaxing, the abandoning, of this effort of false resistance.
We saw the value of seeing clearly in Decrease and other posts about sincerity:

Decrease does not under all circumstances mean something bad. Increase and decrease come in their own time. What matters here is to understand the time and not to try to cover up poverty with empty pretence. If a time of scanty resources brings out an inner truth, one must not feel ashamed of simplicity. For simplicity is then the very thing needed to provide inner strength for further undertakings. I Ching

We tried complicated. We thought we had complicated covered. We were wrong. We got hurt. Now we have to face simple, even though we don’t want to. But the funny thing is that simple is what we need. Simple was staring us in the face all along but we didn’t want to see it. Now we have no choice but to face it - but its OK. Simple is how we move on from here. So let’s get over it. Let’s embrace it. Let’s accept it.

The survival of the fittest is the ageless law of nature, but the fittest are rarely the strong. The fittest are those endowed with the qualifications for adaptation, the ability to accept the inevitable and conform to the unavoidable, to harmonize with existing or changing conditions. Dave E. Smalley

A man shares his days with hunger, thirst, and cold, with the good times and the bad, and the first part of being a man is to understand that. Louis L’Amour

Attitude is your acceptance of the natural laws, or your rejection of the natural laws. Stuart Chase

A flower falls even though we love it. A weed grows even though we don't love it. Dogen

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. Francis Bacon

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative. H. G. Wells

All that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable, and bear the intolerable. Kathleen Norris

The quickest way to change your attitude toward pain is to accept the fact that everything that happens to us has been designed for our spiritual growth. M. Scott Peck

Almost any event will put on a new face when received with cheerful acceptance. Henry S. Haskins

Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become love. That is the mystery. Katherine Mansfield

Anything in life that we don't accept will simply make trouble for us until we make peace with it. Shakti Gawain

The resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering. Ram Dass

The chief pang of most trials is not so much the actual suffering itself as our own spirit of resistance to it. Jean Nicolas Grou

To oppose something is to maintain it. Ursula K. LeGuin

If you can't fight, and you can't flee, flow. Robert Eliot

Often the prudent, far from making their destinies, succumb to them. Voltaire

The mind which renounces, once and forever, a futile hope, has its compensations in ever-growing calm. George R. Gissing

Peace of mind is that mental condition in which you have accepted the worst. Lin Yutang

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content. Helen Keller

Don't be sad, don't be angry, if life deceives you! Submit to your grief; your time for joy will come, believe me. Aleksandr Pushkin

The greatest evil which fortune can inflict on men is to endow them with small talents and great ambitions. Vauvenargues

The English know how to make the best of things. Their so-called muddling through is simply skill at dealing with the inevitable. Winston Churchill

Things past redress are now with me past care. Shakespeare/De Vere

I not only bow to the inevitable, I am fortified by it. Thornton Wilder

Acceptance - the truest kinship with humanity

Reading the following quotes about acceptance, one can only wonder that it is not common knowledge, that we seem to have no current expressions about acceptance (apart from the put-down ‘get over it’.) My grandparents had the expression ‘what cannot be cured must be endured’. It seemed to my youthful self at the time to be a poor, tired, defeatist expression. Perhaps their grandparents had a few more expressions which they did not pass down, as I have not passed down their expression to my children.
Acceptance is not part of our vocabulary. But it is so important to a healthy attitude. Humility, gratitude, patience, sincerity, love, acceptance – how little we think of them on a daily basis, yet how impoverished our thoughts and actions are throughout the day that are not based in them. All of them are ‘companions of wisdom,’ their invisible power is always there, waiting to be tapped by us on demand, yet we rarely do.

The power of spiritual forces in the Universe – how active it is everywhere! Invisible to the eyes, and impalpable to the senses, it is inherent in all things, and nothing can escape its operation.

Nothing can escape its operation, especially not us, the only reasoning animals on the planet, with one foot on earth and one foot on heaven.

Reading these quotes I feel a kind of shame for my irritation with small things, my unreasonable, unaccepting anger with what life brings me, my ignorance of the necessity of acceptance, and my lack of grace in adapting to what is required of me by life. I am resolved to change my attitude. Thank God I decided to write this blog, I might never have discovered acceptance.

Acceptance is the truest kinship with humanity. G. K. Chesterton

Happiness can exist only in acceptance. Denis De Rougement

Happiness is a function of accepting what is. Werner Erhard

Listening is a form of accepting. Stella Terrill Mann

He is happy whose circumstances suit his temper; but he is more excellent who can suit his temper to any circumstances. David Hume

Contentment, and indeed usefulness, comes as the infallible result of great acceptances, great humilities-of not trying to conform to some dramatized version of ourselves. David Grayson

Happy the man who early learns the wide chasm that lies between his wishes and his powers. Johann von Goethe

Happiness comes from within a man, from some curious adjustment to life. Hugh Walpole

The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings. Okakura Kakuzo

Greatness of soul consists not so much in soaring high and in pressing forward, as in knowing how to adapt and limit oneself. Michel de Montaigne

We cannot conquer fate and necessity, yet we can yield to them in such a manner as to be greater than if we could. Walter Savage Landor

If one has to submit, it is wasteful not to do so with the best grace possible. Winston Churchill

There is no quality of human nature so nearly royal as the ability to yield gracefully. Charles Conrad

What you can't get out of, get into wholeheartedly. Mignon McLaughlin

If I could define enlightenment briefly I would say it is the quiet acceptance of what is. Wayne Dyer

Give love and unconditional acceptance to those you encounter, and notice what happens. Wayne Dyer

You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes. Moses Maimonides

Our entire life consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are. Jean Anouilh

A man must live in the world and make the best of it, such as it is. Michel de Montaigne

Trouble will come soon enough, and when he does come receive him as pleasantly as possible ... the more amiably you greet him, the sooner he will go away. Artemus Ward

I make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes. Sara Teasdale

To succeed, it is necessary to accept the world as it is – and rise above it. Michael Korda

We win half the battle when we make up our minds to take the world as we find it, including the thorns. Orison Swett Marden

The most popular persons are those who take the world as it is, who find the least fault. Charles Dudley Warner

We must accept life for what it actually is -- a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature. Ida R. Wylie

Maturity is achieved when a person accepts life as full of tension. Joshua L. Liebman

You have to accept whatever comes and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give. Eleanor Roosevelt

It is almost more important how a person takes his fate than what it is. Wilhelm von Humboldt

God asks no man whether he will accept life. This is not the choice. You must take it. The only question is how. Henry Ward Beecher

You have to take it as it happens, but you should try to make it happen the way you want to take it. German proverb

Acceptance

My colleague Paul’s recent little speech to me about accepting my anger took me by surprise. I had told him how I had gone into the meeting determined to remain calm, determined to hold in those horses by the scruff of their manes. And the rolling chariot of anger had not only rolled but had become a rolling god-darn freight train of anger. I sat in his office with what must have been the guilty shaggy dog look. Paul is one of the few people who know me and who know I write this blog. So my inevitable lack of philosophical discipline is the subject of running jokes between us. Then I got the speech and I must say I felt a weight drop off my shoulders.
This is the power of philosophy. A different way of looking at something changes it.
What was the weight that dropped off my shoulders? That is what I have been trying to figure out. I think it had something to do with stopping beating myself up for being… myself.

‘The world is made up of all kinds of people. Some get angry, some keep their calm. Both have their uses. Both are always evolving. Your dissatisfaction with your angry reaction is noted and will be integrated into the next experience. Now move along, nothing to see here.’ Such was the feeling of the weight dropping off my shoulders.

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune. William James

The first step toward change is acceptance. Once you accept yourself, you open the door to change. That's all you have to do. Change is not something you do, it's something you allow. Will Garcia

Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery. Joanne Kathleen Rowling

We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses. C. G. Jung

The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance. Nathaniel Branden

Acceptance does not necessarily mean ‘liking,’ ‘enjoying,’ or ‘condoning.’ I can accept what is – and be determined to evolve from there. It is not acceptance but denial that leaves me stuck. Nathaniel Branden

Acceptance is not submission; it is acknowledgement of the facts of a situation. Then deciding what you're going to do about it. Kathleen Casey Theisen

Acceptance of one's life has nothing to do with resignation; it does not mean running away from the struggle. On the contrary, it means accepting it as it comes, with all the handicaps of heredity, of suffering, of psychological complexes and injustices. Paul Tournier

Accept everything about yourself – I mean everything, you are you and that is the beginning and the end – no apologies, no regrets. Clark Moustakas

The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely. C. G. Jung

Acceptance makes any event put on a new face. Henry S. Haskins

One completely overcomes only what one assimilates. André Gide

Some people confuse acceptance with apathy, but there's all the difference in the world. Apathy fails to distinguish between what can and what cannot be helped; acceptance makes that distinction. Apathy paralyzes the will-to-action; acceptance frees it by relieving it of impossible burdens. Arthur Gordon

'The White Company'

I have been reading an absolutely wonderful little story today - ‘The White Company’ by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. (You can find an online text here at Gutenberg.org). It is the tale of the adventures of a young man raised in a monastery in fourteenth century England who must go out into the world for one year before deciding whether to become a monk or stay in the world. The White Company refers to a company of English longbowmen who wage war on the French.
I have for some time been mulling the idea of writing a novel and this tale is very much of the essence and of the period that I would like to write about. It also has the kind of humour and zest for life that I admire in a writer. Barely a page goes by that I don’t burst out laughing in delight. I thought you would like this example because it centres on a philosophical discussion.

Alleyne, the young adventurer (trained as a clerk by the monks), stumbles upon a couple of arguing students sheltering from the rain under a holly tree at the side of the road. They invite him to partake of their food...

"But I pray you, good youth, to tell us whether you are a learned clerk, and, if so, whether you have studied at Oxenford or at Paris."
"I have some small stock of learning," Alleyne answered, picking at his herring, "but I have been at neither of these places. I was bred amongst the Cistercian monks at Beaulieu Abbey."
"Pooh, pooh!" they cried both together. "What sort of an upbringing is that?"
"_Non cuivis contingit adire Corinthum_," quoth Alleyne. (_It is not every man’s lot to go to Corinth_.)
"Come, brother Stephen, he hath some tincture of letters," said the melancholy man more hopefully. "He may be the better judge, since he hath no call to side with either of us. Now, attention, friend, and let your ears work as well as your nether jaw. _Judex damnatur_--you know the old saw. Here am I upholding the good fame of the learned Duns Scotus against the foolish quibblings and poor silly reasonings of Willie Ockham."
"While I," quoth the other loudly, "do maintain the good sense and extraordinary wisdom of that most learned William against the crack-brained fantasies of the muddy Scotchman, who hath hid such little wit as he has under so vast a pile of words, that it is like one drop of Gascony in a firkin of ditch-water. Solomon his wisdom would not suffice to say what the rogue means."
"Certes, Stephen Hapgood, his wisdom doth not suffice," cried the other. "It is as though a mole cried out against the morning star, because he could not see it. But our dispute, friend, is concerning the nature of that subtle essence which we call thought. For I hold with the learned Scotus that thought is in very truth a thing, even as vapor or fumes, or many other substances which our gross bodily eyes are blind to. For, look you, that which produces a thing must be itself a thing, and if a man's thought may produce a written book, then must thought itself be a material thing, even as the book is. Have I expressed it? Do I make it plain?"
"Whereas I hold," shouted the other, "with my revered preceptor, _doctor, praeclarus et excellentissimus_, that all things are but thought; for when thought is gone I prythee where are the things then? Here are trees about us, and I see them because I think I see them, but if I have swooned, or sleep, or am in wine, then, my thought having gone forth from me, lo the trees go forth also. How now, coz, have I touched thee on the raw?"
Alleyne sat between them munching his bread, while the twain disputed across his knees, leaning forward with flushed faces and darting hands, in all the heat of argument. Never had he heard such jargon of scholastic philosophy, such fine-drawn distinctions, such cross-fire of major and minor, proposition, syllogism, attack and refutation. Question clattered upon answer like a sword on a buckler. The ancients, the fathers of the Church, the moderns, the Scriptures, the Arabians, were each sent hurtling against the other, while the rain still dripped and the dark holly-leaves glistened with the moisture. At last the fat man seemed to weary of it, for he set to work quietly upon his meal, while his opponent, as proud as the rooster who is left unchallenged upon the midden, crowed away in a last long burst of quotation and deduction. Suddenly, however, his eyes dropped upon his food, and he gave a howl of dismay.
"You double thief!" he cried, "you have eaten my herrings, and I without bite or sup since morning."
"That," quoth the other complacently, "was my final argument, my crowning effort, or _peroratio_, as the orators have it. For, coz, since all thoughts are things, you have but to think a pair of herrings, and then conjure up a pottle of milk wherewith to wash them down."

HMS Victory - Britain's 'Ship of Theseus'

I remember as a youth reading about the legend of Theseus. As a young boy, the future King of Athens volunteered to be one of the seven youths sent as a sacrifice every seven years to King Minos of Crete to be devoured by the Minotaur that lived there in the labyrinth. Theseus hides a sword in his tunic and slays the beast. On the return journey to Athens he forgets to change the black sail of his ship to a white one as agreed with his father to signify his success. His father Aegeus believes his son dead and commits suicide by throwing himself into the sea, giving his name to the Aegean.

According to Plutarch’s Life of Theseus, the ship Theseus used on his return to Athens was kept in the Athenian harbor as a memorial for several centuries.

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place...

The ship had to be maintained in a seaworthy state, for it annually carried the Athenian envoys to the festival of Apollo at Delos.
As the wood of the ship wore out or rotted and was replaced, it was unclear to philosophers how much of the original ship actually remained, giving rise to the philosophical question whether it should be considered "the same" ship or not. Such philosophical questions about the nature of identity are sometimes referred to as the Ship of Theseus Paradox.

For Athenians, the preserved ship kept fresh their understanding that Theseus had been an actual, historic figure, which none then doubted.


From Wikipedia

Reading about the ship of Theseus brought to mind my trip to England in 2005 and my visit to HMS Victory. The Victory was the flagship of Admiral Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 where the British Fleet virtually destroyed an equivalent French fleet thus eliminating the threat of invasion of Britain by Napoleon.
My visit to this ship merits a post or ten of itself. Over 6,000 trees went to build it, all by hand. The photo does not do justice to the size of the ship. This was at the time the largest man-made moveable object ever made. Going aboard you feel small, insignificant, humbled. Some of the ropes are so thick you probably couldn’t get your arms around them. The masts are about 4 feet in diameter at deck level. The ship, like the ship of Theseus, has been restored and inevitably some parts have been replaced by ‘new and stronger timber’, mainly on the upper decks. The lower decks are largely original and you can walk the same planks that Nelson and his crew walked 200 years ago.
The Victory is all that remains of the Royal Navy of the Age of Fighting Sail and we would not have even that but for the pleadings of a wife of a First Lord (of the Admiralty) that it should be preserved. (The Admiralty of the period had no sentimental qualms about sending famous ships to the breaker’s yard).

Like the ship of Theseus for the Athenians, Britain’s Victory ‘keeps fresh their understanding’ of Nelson and his navy and what they did at Trafalgar and in other battles in that critical and historic period. Personally, it makes no difference to me that only 30% of the ship is ‘original’. Like the Gold Pavilion, the spirit and intention of the original builders is what survives and that is what we want to see.

.

See also HMS Victory – Nelson’s flagship and the most famous British warship in history

Seeing the essence of things

I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn't weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century.

"So it isn't the original building?" I had asked my Japanese guide.

"But yes, of course it is," he insisted, rather surprised at my question.

"But it's burnt down?"

"Yes."

"Twice."

"Many times."

"And rebuilt."

"Of course. It is an important and historic building."

"With completely new materials."

"But of course. It was burnt down."

"So how can it be the same building?"

"It is always the same building."

I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.

From the book ‘Last Chance to See’, by Douglas Adams

See The Ship of Theseus Paradox at Wikipedia, where I found this passage, for more about the essence of things whose parts have been replaced.

Photo from that breathtaking site, The Tale of Genji

To understand all is to forgive all

When you lose in love, things are very confusing. The joke about being the last to know is based on truth. We see what we want to see, we ignore the rest. We project our feelings of love onto our beloved and we believe that they are experiencing the same thing. Of course they are not. We don’t see the end coming. And when it hits us we are not ready. When it hit me I had to understand.
I pulled out my agenda and reconstructed the play: Act 1, Act 2 and the devastating Act 3. I had to understand what happened and how it happened. In hindsight I revisited the conversations, the scenes and the places and I had to admit to myself that the signs were there, I just refused to see them. Eventually, I understood pretty much what happened and this allowed me to gain a modicum of peace of mind.
Anger remained and remains still a little, if I give it any thought, in my heart if not in my head. Strange how love can turn to anger. Over time, with the help of the philosophy of Anthony de Mello and others, I understood more. Until one day I read this quote from Spinoza.

To understand all is to forgive all.

This was a powerful insight for me. I saw that the only reason I still harboured anger and hatred was because of my incomplete understanding. I saw that even if I did not have the power to understand all yet, still forgiveness would be correct. I should not deprive myself of peace of mind and the liberation of forgiveness because of my incomplete understanding.

Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.

Because when you understand you can accept, and you can forgive. Marcus Aurelius helped me further along this path of understanding:

Whatever man thou meetest with, immediately say to thyself:
What opinions has this man about good and bad? For if with respect to pleasure and pain and the causes of each, and with respect to fame and ignominy, death and life he has such and such opinions, it will seem nothing wonderful or strange to me, if he does such and such things; and I shall bear in mind that he is compelled to do so.

That I would lose my love was plain for others to see. I blinded myself to the possibilities. If I had been able to keep my wits about me as Marcus Aurelius suggests, I would have understood the situation as it was happening. As it was, I had to understand in hindsight, whilst sorting through my negative emotions.

Now keep looking at this unpleasant situation or person until you realize that it isn’t they that are causing the negative emotions. They are just going their way, being themselves, doing their thing whether right or wrong, good or bad. It is your computer that, thanks to your programming, insists on your reacting with negative emotions. Anthony de Mello

My love was compelled to act in the way she did. I was compelled to act in the way I did. That’s life.

To understand is to transform what is. Krishnamurti

Love - the Prologue of 'The Alchemist'

In my first post about love, Love (lost), I shared with you the insight that the love we feel for someone, the beauty we see in them, is our own creation: it is all in our head. It is a bit like the famous zen koan: if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? If a woman enters the room and nobody gives her a second glance, is she beautiful? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Besides finding our love beautiful, we are linked to our love by the way our love makes us feel about ourselves. We see in our love qualities that we admire, qualities that thrill us, qualities that we possess also perhaps, but to a lesser degree; or that we would like to possess. Our love has a way of making us feel that we too possess these qualities. Being with our love is, in a way, the next best thing we can do to actually being our love. (See this post for a technique about imagining being our love). So being in love has a component of ‘reflected glory’ in it, which makes us feel good about ourselves.
‘Beauty is truth’s smile when she beholds her own face in a perfect mirror’ said Rabindranath Tagore. Perhaps this quote was the inspiration for Paulo Coelho’s prologue to ‘The Alchemist’.

The Alchemist picked up a book that someone in the caravan had brought. Leafing through the pages, he found a story about Narcissus. The Alchemist knew the legend of Narcissus, a youth who daily knelt beside a lake to contemplate his own beauty. He was so fascinated by himself that, one morning, he fell into the lake and drowned. At the spot where he fell, a flower was born, which was called the narcissus.
But this was not how the author of the book ended the story. He said that when Narcissus died, the Goddesses of the Forest appeared and found the lake, which had been fresh water, transformed into a lake of salty tears.
"Why do you weep?" the Goddesses asked.
"I weep for Narcissus," the lake replied.
"Ah, it is no surprise that you weep for Narcissus," they said, "for though we always pursued him in the forest, you alone could contemplate his beauty close at hand."
"But..... was Narcissus beautiful?" the lake asked.
"Who better than you to know that?" the Goddesses said in wonder, "After all, it was by your banks that he knelt each day to contemplate himself!"
The lake was silent for some time. Finally it said:
"I weep for Narcissus, but I never noticed that Narcissus was beautiful. I weep because, each time he knelt beside my banks, I could see, in the depths of his eyes, my own beauty reflected."
"What a lovely story," the Alchemist thought.

Love, no risk free trial

If you have been following my posts on love, you will know that love and non-desire are not contradictions in terms. Love, as opposed to attachment, is a free, independent choice or it is nothing. Don’t take my word for it. You will find this theme in all philosophies and all religions.

In Taoism for example:

There is no greater mistake than wishing to satisfy one’s desires;
there is no greater unhappiness than not being self-sufficient.
There is no greater calamity than the desire to possess.
Tao Te Ching 46 (my translation from Tao Te King)

In Zen:

One major obstacle in living a life of love is the tendency to hold on. We grasp and cling to each other, preventing the freedom of love from rising on its own. Zen asks us to let go.
When someone comes into your life, let him come. Welcome the person, whoever he is. Enjoy what it is he brings, even if it's only for a short time.
When it is time for a person to go away, let him go. Do not turn the person's leaving into an experience of rejection, loss or abandonment. Realize that his leaving has nothing to do with you. It is simply time for him to go.
Do this with yourself as well. Let yourself come and go freely in life, and don't get caught in unnecessary chains. The more you free yourself and others, the more easily you fall in love.
From an article by Brenda Shoshana, author of Zen and the Art of Falling in Love

In the Bhagavad Gita:

The liberated man receives what the Divine Will brings him, he does not long for anything, is jealous of no one: what comes to him, he accepts without repulsion nor attachment; what goes away, he lets go, to rejoin the whirlpool of existence, without regret, nor affliction, nor feeling of loss.
Sri Aurobindo, The Bhagavad Gita and its message (my translation from Tao Te King)

In the Christian tradition:

Nothing renders man more like God than this implacable detachment. For what makes God God is his implacable detachment: from this springs forth his purity, his simplicity and his immutability… This resemblance must be achieved by the grace that elevates man above the temporal and purifies him of everything that is impermanent.
Master Eckhart (my translation from Tao Te King)

Love from a position of detachment allows us to enjoy and appreciate what comes into our life and saves us from the pain and feeling of loss for what goes out of our life. Not only that, but good things and people are more likely to come into our life if they are free to come and go as they please. And, once here, they will likely stick around longer.

The Samurai of Love

By the Way of the warrior is meant death. The Way of the warrior is death. This means choosing death whenever there is a choice between life and death. It means nothing more than this. It means to see things through, being resolved. Yamamoto Tsunetomo

There comes a time in a budding love relationship when our partner will test us. A careless remark. A certain lack of response. Or something more blatant. I’m not even sure if they do it consciously or not. But what it boils down to is seeing what you will put up with. If you go along then it will eventually get worse as they realise you are hopelessly in love and they can pretty much get away with anything and you will still be around. From there it is not far to their losing interest in you and finally they leave you.
Of course I am talking about my own experience but perhaps you can relate to it.
So there comes a time when you have to be able to stand the test by standing your ground, walking away, saying no or whatever it is that your love does not think you will have the guts to do. You have to be able to ‘kill your love’ or ‘die the death of love’ like a samurai.
We have seen in my posts on love that ‘you can’t love someone you can’t live without’. That is merely attachment, infatuation. Real love can only come from a position of strength and independence. You have to be able to choose to love. This means you have to be able to walk away.
Ironically, it is your ability to walk away which gives you the better chance to win your love.

Those who cling to life, die; those who defy death, live. Uyesugi Kenshin

You have surely been in the situation where someone is in love with you and trying too hard. Or at least you have known people who try too hard to be loved, to be liked, to impress. And it always backfires on them. Trying too hard is unattractive. Clinging is unattractive. We just want to run away.
So when our love turns cooler on us, the answer is not to cling more but to cling less, and, like a samurai of love, prepare our soul to face ‘death’. And defying the death of love, perhaps we may see it live.

Photo from Wikimedia: Yamana Tokoyuni

Sit on top of the world

Touch my skin and tell me what you’re thinking,
take my hand and show me where we’re going.
Lie down next to me, look into my eyes
and tell me, oh tell me what you’re seeing.
So sit on top of the world and tell me how you’re feeling,
what you feel is what I feel for you.
Take my hand and if I’m lying to you,
I’ll always be alone if I’m lying to you.

These words are the lyrics of a song that for me most completely embodies the feeling of a person in love (who is uncertain of the feelings of the beloved). They come from the song ‘Take my hand’ from Dido’s album ‘No Angel’. I will not try to comment on the beautiful musical score or the flawless voice and execution of Dido. But the words… listen to the words.
Here you have the attention, the complete attention of the person in love. The need for information, the need to know the heart of the beloved. Here you have sincerity and the grace and poetry born of sincerity. Sit on top of the world, she says – that’s how I feel about you. If only she could make you understand how she feels. She is not exaggerating - here you have the solemn invocation and vow of truth – she’ll always be alone if she’s lying to you. Later she adds ‘Take your time’. Love is patient. Take your time. Have you ever said that to someone?

From what we have seen about love thus far, we know this person is ‘in deep’. She has a beautiful love, in her head. Perhaps it will be alright. Sometimes love is reciprocated and the magic happens. We hope it works. We believe in the singer’s hope and earnestness. Sometimes we need to believe.
(If it doesn’t work, we hope a friend tells her about Anthony de Mello, and Healing Philosophy).

The Way to Love (3) – The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello (part three)

You see persons and things not as they are but as you are. If you wish to see them as they are you must attend to your attachments and the fears that your attachments generate. Because when you look at life it is these attachments and fears that will decide what you will notice and what you block out.

When we are in love we are seeing the beloved not as they are but as we are. We are projecting our own qualities into this person. Rabindranath Tagore said it so well:

Beauty is truth’s smile when she beholds her own face in a perfect mirror.

We are seeing an idealized projection of our own self, magnified to a perceived perfection in this person. They are a beautiful creation, a work of art, in our head. This reminds me of a technique for helping one get over a lost love (I forget the source) that consists in meditating and imagining oneself to be the person one loves. The power of the technique resides in showing us through the meditation that we have the same qualities as the person we love, because we see them, we feel them, we know them. Thus we need not miss the person, for we ‘contain’ all the qualities that we loved.
Getting back to de Mello, we see through attachment-coloured glasses. Love is not blind, it is attachment that is blind. Love sees clearly because love encompasses everyone and everything, whereas attachment encompasses very little: it excludes everyone and everything except the object of its attachment.

You were in love and you felt rejected or jealous; suddenly all your mind and heart became focused on this one thing, and the banquet of life turned to ashes in your mouth.

I remember when I was going through my ‘attachment’ how it killed my enjoyment of everything else. I could hardly concentrate on the karate instructor, I could hardly read three paragraphs of a book, I could hardly enjoy the presence of my children. This is not love: it is slavery.

How can you love someone whom you are a slave to? How can you love someone whom you cannot live without? …Love is to be found only in fearlessness and freedom.

De Mello shows us the path out of slavery: awareness of the folly of our dependence, our addiction to this person or to anyone. The path to freedom comes from cultivating activities that we love, activities that we engage in without regard to society or the opinions of other people, activities that are our true passion.

The royal road to mysticism and to Reality does not pass through the world of people. It passes through the world of actions that are engaged in for themselves without an eye to success or to gain – or profit actions. Contrary to popular beliefs, the cure for lovelessness and loneliness is not company but contact with Reality. The moment you touch this Reality you will know what freedom and love are. Freedom from people – and so the ability to love them.

The Way to Love (2) - The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello (part two)

In my post Love (lost) I told you that the love I knew was all in my head. It must be so otherwise everyone my love meets would fall in love with her. In fact, my friends would have varying reactions to her from ‘She’s bad news’ to ‘I don’t know what you see in her’ to ‘She’s kinda cute’. When things were going ‘well’ and I was sitting on top of the world, it was all in my head. And when things broke down and I was filled with negative emotions, they were all in my head too. Feelings of anger, betrayal, jealousy, revenge rose and fell in me like a stormy sea. But reading de Mello I found, if not immediate peace and calm, then at least the direction to and the sight of peace and calm. And that is a lot when you are emotionally cast adrift on that cruel sea.

Now keep looking at this unpleasant situation or person until you realize that it isn’t they who are causing the negative emotions. They are just going their way, being themselves, doing their thing whether right or wrong, good or bad. It is your computer that, thanks to your programming, insists on your reacting with negative emotions.

And the clinching argument:

You will see this better if you realize that someone with a different programming when faced with this same situation or person or event would react quite calmly, even happily… The way to be in charge of this situation is to be in charge of yourself, which you are not. How does one achieve this mastery? All you have to do is to understand there are people in the world who, if they were in your place, would not be negatively affected by this person. They would be in charge of the situation, above it, not subject to it as you are. Therefore your negative feelings are caused, not by this person, as you mistakenly think, but by your programming.

Yes, someone with better relationship skills, someone with more clarity, someone with better self-control, someone with better understanding, someone who loves from a position of independence and non-attachment, someone who loves truly – such a person would react very differently than I did.
Thus there are no excuses – the answer lies within. We must change the programming. Our pain is the light showing us the way we need to change. We must become that person who is master of himself and the situation. Then, one day, we will know the way to love.

More to come in part three

Awareness

Regular reader Jaliya has left some interesting comments about Anthony de Mello which can be found on my post The Way of Love. She provides some quotes from his book ‘Awareness’ which I thought it would be good to share with you. Thanks Jaliya.

The chances that you will wake up are in direct proportion to the amount of truth you can take without running away.You want freedom? Here it is: Drop your false ideas. See through people. If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone. Then you will love them.

I'm going to write a book someday and the title will be ‘I'm an Ass, You're an Ass’. That's the most liberating, wonderful thing in the world, when you openly admit you're an ass. It's wonderful. When people tell me, 'You're wrong,' I say, 'What can you expect of an ass?'

When your illusions drop, you're in touch with reality at last, and believe me, you will never again be lonely ... Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality.