Communing with the Universe

Catching up with some long overdue email correspondence yesterday morning (pausing a moment to offer apologies to friends who follow me here who are long waiting on replies to emails sent this summer ... sorry!), I returned a message to someone who tracked me down here on blipfoto after reading my book. We'd started to enjoy a bit of a dialogue but then work intervened. In his previous email he had written ...

"Like you I often feel like an outsider looking in, whilst looking out for like-minded souls - people who have a deep intuition that there is meaning and purpose within the mystery but who reject the materialism of science, the narrow-mindedness of religion, the dodgy ideology linked to intelligent design, the hippy-dippy antics of the new age - and the soullessness of consumerism. And often it seems they are pretty thin on the ground ... which is of course why I connected so readily with you and Earthdream".

That touched a deep chord. My book suffered from not being easy to pigeon-hole. It wanders around all sorts of subjects without being rigorous enough to be considered academic, but at the same time too challenging to be considered popular. It was subtitled The Marriage of Reason and Intuition. I argued that Reason alone isn't sufficient to fashion a model of our world. I tried to show - on a number of different levels - that the rational approach ultimately fails. We need a suprarational way of looking at the world, one which encompasses both the logic of what I referred to as the Many (the parts) and the alogic of what I referred to as the One (the wholes or systems which exhibit totally surprising emergent phenomena). My book had lots of questions and very few answers - possibly explaining why it never sold many copies! Most of all, I like to think that it stands as a celebration of the essential mystery of our existence.

I use Reason and Intuition fairly loosely to refer to two modalities. They correspond to the head and the heart, to thinking and feeling, to the left and right side of our brain. Our consciousness tends to inhabit one side or the other. It's not easy to get in a state of mind where we are employing both modes - but when we do there is a feeling of well-being that beats almost any other experience.

I've been talking recently about seeing symbols, getting nudges from the Universe, but for the most part I've only been paying lip service to that notion. When I'm inhabiting the thinking part of my brain (most of the time at the moment) these ideas seem quite ridiculous and I almost feel embarrassed to have admitted to entertaining them. However, if I go for a run and loose myself from the grip of thought, getting in the 'zone' so to speak, then the concept of being in tune with the Universe and receiving messages seems perfectly reasonable - albeit in an entirely unreasonable way!

It's impossible to know with any certainty. The language with which we feel this communication cannot be translated into the language with which we reason and make arguments and decide on truth. I was musing on this very question as I was running over the moor to the match at Thackley yesterday, trying to 'feel' the Universe, when I ran past a guy lost in conversation on his mobile phone. From a distance my first thought was that he was a standing stone I'd not seen before. It was impossible to resist stopping to take a shot of him so absorbed amidst the vast flat expanse of this part of the moor. For some strange reason - as I was feeling the pressure of time to get to see the start of the game - I dallied a while, long enough for this chap to finish his conversation and wander over to say hello.

He was such a wonderfully engaging fellow that we ended up chatting for quite a while. He was just so full of enthusiasm for life. Within minutes we were talking philosophy and I was caught between wanting to linger and talk more, and wanting to leave so as not to miss Roam bowling or Forrest batting. It was only after running the half mile to Horncliffe Well that part of our conversation was replayed in my head. I hadn't been paying full attention at the time. He mentioned that his mother was a philosopher. And her name was Mary Midgley. The Mary Midgley?

Well, as it turns out, yes. We swapped email addresses and we're corresponding. I'm amazed to find out that mum is 93 and has just completed a first draft of a new book. She's spent far longer studying far more deeply the kinds of difficult questions with which I've been wrestling. She's never been a fashionable philosopher but, then, who would want to be. I suspect her work is going to be seen to be more and more important over the coming years. I think the Universe has given me a very clear message. Who am I to argue? I need to catch-up with some reading. Her output is prodigious.

It's been a very busy day but I did manage to squeeze in a cycle ride to Burnsall and a run this evening with Spartan. I had a shot in mind and we timed our run to arrive at the Buck Stones here quite perfectly. I don't normally try to contrive shots but I could argue that he would have struck this kind of pose even if I hadn't asked him! Cheers mate. And if that was a slow run I'm not sure I want to come on a fast one with you!

PS Even if you're not someone who normally comments, I'd love to know if you can relate to any of this. Are we really thin on the ground, or is it, as I suspect, that we just don't have much of a voice, drowned out in our uncertainty and acceptance of the essential mystery by those who proclaim knowledge of some supposed truth?

PPS Thanks for all the love for yesterday's portrait. You're all so kind to me.