Skip to main content

Consciousness Cafe

I had lunch today with a dear friend whose diverse career has embraced psychiatry, interior design and gardening. She spent a period in situ training people from the Caucasus to work with people traumatized by the ongoing conflict and with the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, founded by the inspirational and redoubtable, Helen Bamber.

One purpose of the lunch was to invite me to be the guest speaker at the 'Consciousness Cafe': a monthly meeting in Totnes that gathers to explore a broad range of issues around consciousness - what is it? how does it work? what meaning does it carry or possess? How might it be transformed within both personal spiritual quest and social transformation? It sounded a fascinating format and gathering of disparate minds so I agreed for September: to talk about both the work of the Prison Phoenix Trust and the broader metaphor that 'We are all doing time': that we all inhabit different forms of imprisonment that condition our lives, our behaviours - and what our work with people in prison (on meditation and yoga) have to teach us all on becoming free, realizing from within a different potential.

I am delighted to be invited: to return to a space and an activity that I have inhabited too little of late - the interface between intelligent exploration and adult education. It is a space I have loved: maybe it is an inkling of things to come!

We, also, talked about a parallel meeting with 'Transition Totnes' on exploring social innovation. I think we (from a work perspective) have a lot to learn from the Transition movement - not only about the content (how to build sustainable living spaces in an age of gathering resource constraint) but also on methodology (how do you galvanize/organize communities to take effective action on this content when the system conspires against you).

A related theme occupied one of our sessions today on complexity - what is the dissonance between our expressed values, say towards a simpler life, and the actual lives we lead? Are we simply feigning our real values, geared towards consumption, and lying about the virtues of simplicity?

I think not but we assume that values are 'ours' (they inhabit our skin) rather than being a dynamic interaction between 'ourselves' and the multiple contexts/systems in which we live. Values to be lived need sacrifice or support - the former is for the few, the latter is necessary for the majority.

So, for example, in Macedonia, when I first arrived there was virtually no crime. This was not because Macedonians were inherently more virtuous than other people but partly because they inhabited social networks that we known and transparent. The social networks could not be bear the presence of a criminal and worked to avoid it through means both positive and negative. As those networks broke down - people became more autonomous, geographically distant etc - so crime edged upwards. Opportunities to perpetrate crime grew (as did inequalities that fostered it), sadly.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Red Shambala

Nicholas Roerich is oft depicted as a spiritual seeker, peace visionary, author of numberless paintings, and a brave explorer of Central Asia. However, Andrei Znamenski in his 'Red Shambala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia' has him perform another role - that of geopolitical schemer. The scheming did have at its heart a religious vision - of a coalition of Buddhist races in Central Asia that would establish a budding utopia - the Shambala of the title - from which the truths of Buddhism (and co-operative labour) would flow around the globe. This would require the usurpation of the 13th Dalai Lama to be replaced by the Panchen Lama guided by the heroic saviour (Roerich) who appears above dressed for the part. In the achievement of these aims, the Roerichs (including his wife, Helena, who had a visionary connection with 'Mahatmas' whose cryptic messaging guided their steps) were willing to entertain strange bedfellows that at one time include...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

The Jewel in the Crown

I spent six months in Nizhny Novgorod ostensibly as both the chair and the director of a micro-finance fund. I must confess much of that work -apart from the spectacular resignation of my predecessor as director - has faded from view but what I vividly recall is at weekends progressing through Paul Scott's 'The Raj Quartet' and subsequently re-watching its painstaking and triumphant dramatization (by Granada) that I had watched, long before, on the television. It was without doubt my most deeply cherished reading experience to date. This extraordinary narrative of the British in the last, declining days of colonial rule that begins with the doomed relationship of Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners, her rape, and the injustice of Kumar as accused by Ronald Merrick, the Police Superintendent, and one of the most malevolent characters ever created in fiction. He is a magnified alter ego of Scott himself especially the sharply, destructively repressed homosexuality. The narrati...
Post a Comment
Read more