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

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

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...
1 comment
Read more

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...
17 comments
Read more