I am not an accommodating person. I draw a line quickly and if you cross it, well that’s it for our relationship. When I was younger, I was just too nice and accommodating and that allowed people around me really take advantage of me. I took a lot of abuse from my friends and peers. My feelings were always sacrificed for another’s happiness or needs.  There were many times I felt badly hurt and neglected and ignored. I had to draw a line eventually.

I still do this, protect myself from “abuse”. But a part of me is conflicted. As an adult, I have grown to believe that things are not random, that people are in my life for a reason. How am I going to find out what the reason is if I don’t allow the relationship to develop?

Should I accommodate people or not? Where do you draw the line between accommodating others and being abused.

Continue reading →

Steve Paul Jobs (1955 – 2011) claims the title of the iconic leader of the personal computer (and digital device) revolution of the late 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century. Co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Apple Inc, Pixar and NeXT Inc, Jobs’ genius was behind the Apple brand, the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. As well as the revolutionary wave of animation from Pixar, including the much loved Toy Story series.

In this post I look at Jobs the man and his legacy through the lens of Jungian psychology. What can we learn about the psyche of Jobs, what motivated him, what haunted him and to what can we attribute his legacy as imagineer extraordinaire. What does it take to ‘think different’, ‘make a dent in the universe’ and ‘stop making sugar water and change the world’.

Who was this man who so embodied the tech revolution, personal computing, Silicon Valley and its curious blend of counter culture, technology and massive commercialisation.

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Nature makes of man merely a natural being; society makes of him a law-abiding being; only he himself can make of himself a free man -Rudolf Steiner.

I have very recently come across a concept of freedom which is so radical and so groundbreaking that it changes everything. Seriously. I have been able to think of little else since I encountered this idea a few days ago. In this post I am going to do my level best to communicate the essence of this idea to you and exactly why it is as powerful as it is.

Let me begin though by giving you some context.

Are we truly free?

Do we have free choice?

What does it mean to be free?

These are questions that philosophy has been grappling with for the last two and a half thousand years. And yet still today these questions plague contemporary philosophers. I have spent the best part of the last six months engaged with this question on a daily basis.

During this time I was busy with three concurrent projects:

I wrote my MA dissertation, at Essex University, on the subject of Jung on Consciousness, Articulating the Archimedean Point. In this dissertation I argued that the defining feature of consciousness, for Jung, is that it is capable of making free (unconditioned) choices.

I participated in the Philosophy of Mind module at Wits University where one of the central themes under consideration was the idea of free choice (is it possible and if so what would it look like). The thesis we considered is known as compatibilism, which means simply that we are free inasmuch as we act in accordance with our given nature.

I was part of a study group reading Rudolf Steiner’s definitive work The Philosophy of Freedom. In this book Steiner argues that freedom is our fundamental and true nature.

That is to say I spent quite a bit of time thinking about the nature of freedom and some of the problems in believing in the possibility of freedom.

Continue reading →

An ex- lover of mine contacted me on Facebook. We had a love affair when I was 20.

He was so beautiful!

It turned out that he stays in the same suburb as me and asked me to meet for coffee. So I mentioned to Stephen that my former lover wants to have coffee…

‘What are you going to do?’ He asked, suspiciously.

I thought I would tease him and raised one eyebrow .

‘No, I am not comfortable with that!’ he proclaimed. ‘Don’t you know what having coffee means? Don’t you ever watch those movies where they go up to the apartment after the date for ‘coffee’?’

I said OK. I gave in easily. Usually I wouldn’t tolerate such simplemindedness, but really…

I honestly did not want to see him!

He was the most beautiful young man and I didn’t want to see my precious memory spoilt by a balding middle aged man. Horrible? Maybe, but true!

THE FIRST PROBLEM WITH OLD SCHOOL FRIENDS.

In fact, I don’t want to see any of my old school friends. I definitely don’t want such an obvious reminder that I am old (ish) . When you get to 35 or older, suddenly when you have to tick your age on a questionnaire as 35-40, 40-45 or older, it is quite a shock!

What! Am I really that old?

But you quickly forget it. It is when you meet up with your old school buddy and they are sooooo old, that the reality starts banging on the door: ‘There was a time. ……..but now it is over!’ Horrible, truly horrible!

Stephen recently met up an old high school friend on Facebook and when he looked at the pictures he thought it odd that his friend had posted photo’s of his dad. Then he realised that he was looking at his friend!

THE OTHER PROBLEM WITH OLD SCHOOL FRIENDS

The other problem with meeting up with old school buddies is that you are reduced to who you were when they knew you. Never mind if you are successful or fatter or thinner or whatever; in their eyes you will always be the kid they knew way back when.

Years of transformation reduced in a single glance.

Think about it. When you meet up with someone who you went to school with, do you not relate to them as if they are still that same person?

I have a problem with that!

THE REAL PROBLEM WITH FACEBOOK FRIENDS

This incident with the ex- lover happened about 6 months after I initially joined Facebook. After the coffee (which meant something else(?) and didn’t happen) event, I immediately deleted myself off Facebook. I had to re-start it when I started blogging, but if you go to my profile, you will see that I still keep a low profile .

Before there was Facebook (or any internet social structure), school friends naturally drifted apart. They spread all over the world: different universities, some went travelling, some started working straight away. It was an initiation into adulthood, to part from your friends. You moved on and up, spread your wings, etc.

Now, you sort of drag along your whole life.

You are friends with people by default. It is awfully rude not to accept a friend request or to block someone on Facebook, so you end up having ‘friends’ with whom you don’t really want to be ‘friends’ with.

The Jungian approach is one of discretion. You need to make choices for yourself. Choices of who you want to be. What path you want to walk. We all know how profoundly we are affected by others, and this is really nicely explained in Stephen’s blogs Transference: The saviour, the Madonna and the slut and Counter-transference: the obscene other.

One needs to think carefully about whom you surround yourself with. And don’t kid yourself by saying that it doesn’t apply to Facebook. Just because they are not physically in your life, does not mean they aren’t affecting you or who you think you are. When you post things on Facebook, who are you communicating with? This unconsciously affects what you put out there, how you feel about yourself and who you are in the face of others.

I’ll leave you to ponder this with 2 questions:

Do you wish you could delete some of your Facebook friends?

Can you re-invent yourself without deleting the past?

And finally:

‘No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.‘ ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Until next time

Anja

Well, I was listening to Redi’s show a few months ago and heard her speechless for the first time ever. I am not sure what the topic was when I tuned in, but I caught a young man (let’s call him John) phoning in to say that if he spends his hard earned cash taking a woman out to dinner, he will be expecting her to ‘put out’ later. Afterwards, men were sms’ing and phoning to say that guys like that embarrass them and they certainly did not believe that or buy into that.

What do you say to that?

So I was thinking to myself, what do you say to a young man like that? How do you get through to him that setting expectations like that, and having woman have to behave like that to get attention, is not really the foundation you want your country to be built on. You can see how prostitution started, I spend money on you and you put out. Going to a prostitute is probably more honest then, because at least John would not be hiding behind the facade that he is actually interested in her and not in what she can do for him. But he probably still thinks he is a nice guy with something to offer and once she is out on a date with him, she will not be able to resist his charms and give it up gladly.

Maybe that is where the idea of going Dutch (both parties paying their own way) comes from. From a woman’s’ perspective, I certainly would not want that Damocles sword hanging over my head whilst on a date. If I wanted a one night stand, I would go to a pub or club. But dinner is something more serious, more romantic. Time spent talking and getting to know each other to see if you are compatible and whether you like each other enough to maybe get involved. Obviously John has no interest in getting to know his dates, or to consider whether they would be compatible or genuinely like each other. He is only interested in one thing. Yip, you guessed it .

Reason will prevail?

But I did think of something you could say to him that maybe would make him think about his behaviour. What if you could get him to think about what type of girl he would like to marry and be the mother to his children? Marriage (a healthy one) involves both parties coming together and creating something better than they are individually. A good marriage means that you have someone at your back, someone to support and push you, someone who is there when you need them. How is John going to find that woman who is going to be loyal and supportive and his anchor if he only dates girls who will ‘put it out’ every time.

But maybe this argument will be too sophisticated for John. After all, he wants a good time and he wants to be with girls who want to have a good time too. He is not thinking ahead, he is only thinking about the here and now. He has not grown up yet. If he has any goals, they do not include marriage and children. Unfortunately for John, some girl will fall pregnant and put pressure on him and he will most likely find himself in a situation which is less than desirable when he is older. I certainly don’t see a healthy happy marriage for him in the future.

He is where he should be?

But I empathise with John, because like him, in my early twenties, I too was trapped in the moment. Not thinking about the consequences of my actions and just going with the flow. Hopeless and helpless with a good dose of fatalism. It was only when I met Stephen that I started to want something more and imagining something better for myself. I suspected that there was more to life and wanted to find it. I turned all my attention to this goal of understanding what was going on, and in the process empowered myself and let go of this fatalistic approach. I grew up and started taking responsibility for myself.

At the same time, I am grateful that I had the opportunity to be young and dumb, and I think it is an essential part of growing up. Someone told me once that women need to date absolute shits to get it out of their systems and then settle down with a nice guy. I think there is some real value in that. If you don’t get it out of your system in your early twenties, it will hang around and tempt you. And at 40, you may just find yourself attracted to all the things you should have done whilst you were young (and your body was young and strong and beautiful ).

So perhaps there is still some hope for John. He may be right where he needs to be now, with his stupid ideas and instinctive drives. He could still end up with a good girl going through a bad patch and she could help him get his act together. We can hope

‘You can’t be old and wise if you were never young and crazy.’
Until next time
Anja

The more time I spend thinking about the significance of stories in our lives the more amazed I am at how significant these stories are.

The first peak behind the curtain I got into this, was on a warm summers evening whilst I was walking through downtown Tucson. Under an azure sky splashed with broad strokes of pink and fine highlights of red from the setting sun. A comforting warm breeze blew as I walked along side a philosopher I had met on the conference I was attending at the University of Arizona, Towards a Science of Consciousness, in April 2008.
It would not be a lie to say that this man, who later disappeared as suddenly and as mysteriously as he arrived, was one of the most remarkable human beings I have ever encountered. His name was Cary Winograd. Cary born into the Jewish faith, but non-practicing, was a Catholic Apologist and would often go on retreats to the Catholic Mission in California, his home State.

As we walked through an all but deserted downtown Tucson my thoughts were filled with an overload of information, from the conference, about such diverse topics as gamma synchrony, lucid dreaming, machine consciousness, quantum consciousness, Duality vs. Monism, the morphic field, the neuronal patterns of consciousness states. It was my first time in America and the experience, particularly on the evening in question, had about it an air of the unreal or the surreal if you will.

Cary spoke to me about many things that evening including the technologist Ray Kurzweil’s vision of the future being virtual and the forthcoming singularity. The philosopher Zizek’s arguments that reality is already virtual.

He spoke about the overbearing feminism of the American Jungian movement under James Hillman and about Derride, whom he had studied under in France. He spoke about Lacan and his conclusion that it was our neurosis which defined our humanity.

But above all else what he said that has really stayed with me and has taken me a year to assimilate is that God is not true or false, that He neither exists nor doesn’t exist. God, Cary explained, is a concept which is beyond truth or falsity, existence or non existence; even Nietzsche was too shrewd to deny God’s existence, he said God was dead not that God never existed.

I have always found it strange the way I can hear something, believe it to be true, and yet not assimilate it. And so it was with this concept, the concept of a concept beyond the concept of truth or falsity

A Funeral

Almost a year after Tucson, I attended the funeral of my friend, Rodney Anthony’s, father at the Cedar Park Catholic Church. And my mind turned, during the funeral service as it is want to do at funeral, to the Existential Conundrum.

I have never been a believer in Christian Dogma. However the truth of Cary’s words really struck me this day in a way that I had never previously understood them.

That is to say I realised that the ideology that I had unwittingly and unconsciously bought into, was the Religion or Story of Truth and it was from this standpoint that I judged the Christian Story to be untrue. Meaning to say I realised on Wednesday for the first time that the Christian Myth is a story which is as valid and valuable as any other story and better than most.

It struck me that we have all bought into one or other story or stories which for whatever reason have resonated for us.

The Story of Truth

In my case one of my principal stories is the Story of Truth, meaning by that that I honestly was arrogant enough to believe that I, the great and powerful not to mention wise, Stephen Farah, had access to this mythical creature called Objective Truth. And I judged the world by its alignment or not to the virtues of Objective Truth.

Now that I think about it, it is laughable, but for the past forty years I have lived my life in service of this story. But folks that’s all it is – a story nothing more and nothing less.

And I have to tell you letting go of it has been incredibly liberating.

I have come to realise Truth is not necessarily Meaningful and Meaning is not necessarily Truthful.

What is Your Story

This brings me to my point. Ask yourself this: what story are you running, telling yourself, or have bought into?

You see if your realise that it is ultimately just a story, then you have the privilege of being able to reformulate, rewrite, retell and live a New Story. One which you consciously choose. Or of course you also have the right and privilege not too, either way it’s your choice.

Spoiler Warning.

Saturday night saw the end of an era.

A television series so compelling that it almost makes the invention of TV justifiable.

The final episode of the series Lost has aired. This marks the end of a journey that began in 2004 and has taken an average of 16 million viewers (per episode) on a mysterious, nail biting, brilliantly written, acted and sublimely produced journey.

A journey which for six years, six seasons and 117 episodes kept us all guessing and desperate to know what was really going on. In a storyline that kept evolving, created its own mythology, and was never predictable. The mystery of Lost reached a stage where the question had to be asked whether the writers themselves knew the answers.

Did they answer the mystery in the last season? The answer is a resounding yes! The central questions as to what the Island was and what the survivors of Oceanic 813 were doing there was conclusively answered. The answers to the central mystery of the series were plausible and satisfying.

Were all the loose ends tied up? No. It must be conceded that we were left with many unanswered questions concerning the myriad of subplots that sprung up over the series.

No doubt opinion will vary on the merits of these unanswered questions. For my money they (the writers) couldnt have done a better job. If we as the viewers were not left with some unanswered questions it would have been a pedestrian and wholly unsatisfying conclusion.

Great art like life does not explain itself.

The Final Episode

The revelation that the parallel universe that had come into existence at the beginning of the sixth season was a kind of purgatory- wow brilliant! The various couples who had been so cruelly torn apart during the series being reunited and remembering who they were and what they had been through together was very moving.

The showdown on the mountain between Jack and Ben was great. The tension held, as to whether a fortunate few would finally make it off the Island, right to the last scene.

Jacks realisation that he is dead and Christian Sheppards ( his father) explanation of why Jack was reunited in the church, with the people t he had shared the most meaningful time in his life with, with was deeply meaningful.

The final scene:

The survivors of Oceanic 813 finally being reunited, beyond danger and outside of time, at the end of the incredible adventure, to take the next step on the greatest adventure of all into the afterlife; offset against the image of Jack dying, lying on his back amongst the emerald green foliage, looking up at a small patch of blue sky and seeing the plane soaring above it, carrying his greatest friends whom his actions had saved. Knowing unquestionably that he had fulfilled the purpose of his life.

What can I say, call me sentimental, but I dont mind admitting it had me in tears.

The Spirit Temple

The Spirit Temple is an archetypal concept we come across in Jung (specifically Max Zellers vision of the Night). Jung describes it as the temple are all working on which will be completed in about six hundred years.

My interpretation of this is that it is a place which is constructed from the imagination of man. A place which exists, in a non material form, beyond space and time.

I think the depiction of the church in Lost as the destination where all of those who journeyed together on the Island came together and then prepared to take the next step into the afterlife was an excellent portrayal of this concept. A place they had created together where they would find each other beyond the Veil.

It was the best artistic interpretation of the afterlife I have ever come across. Its meaning being infused and amplified with the life of the characters and their adventure together over the last six years, which we the viewers has shared so intimately with them

So I suppose that leaves one final question. Once the church doors were flung open and the light flooded in where would our friends from Lost travel to?

Well naturally each of us is left to answer that question for him or herself, but for me the at least the answer is clear- The Island.

The issue of science versus spirituality is a dilemma which many people around the world have been grappling with for the last few hundred years. And the absence of soul life has become increasingly acute in the 20th and now 21st centuries.

This post is a look at what these challenges are to the life of the spirit, presented by science, where they come from and what, if any, answers may be offered in defence of the human soul.

This paradox came into the world with the advent of modern science. A new truth ushered in by the likes of Rene’ Descartes, Sir Isaac Newton, Nicolaus Copernicus, Sir Francis Bacon and Galileo Galilei, amongst others.

With these men a new spirit of intellectualism was born. Epistemology and crucially the concept of empirical verification became the standard as the absolute test of truth. Empiricism and the scientific method became transcendent and remained so amongst the intellectual elite, the thought leaders, for the last four hundred years of human history.

With the transcendence of science the previous transcendental truths of religion and the belief in God were challenged. Truths which prior to the scientific revolution were considered unimpeachable.

This movement towards a secular society and away from theism was further promoted by Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud who each in his own way challenged the very tenants of traditional religion. Marx challenging the social relevance and morality of organised religion and ushered in a social revolution and Freud suggested that it was darker more clothonic aspects of the human soul which moved us rather than the conscious and superficial beliefs we gave testament to.

I think though, it would be fair to say that of all of these men the one man, a scientific giant, who truly changed our previously held perceptions, was Charles Darwin and his Opus Magnus, The Origin of the Species.

The Theory of Evolution provided an alternative to Creationism, (at least on the face of it). It offered a believable, viable, rational alternative to Creationism, which is now looking increasingly like an antiquarian, antiquated myth. Most importantly of all what Darwin gave us was scientific, supported by empirical research and subject to the scientific method.

I personally had occasion recently to visit the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site at Maropeng, in the Gauteng Province of South Africa. I highly recommend it. The fossil display and simple yet powerful presentation of the evolution of modern man, Homo sapiens, from earlier hominid creatures is very impressive. It brings evolution home in a way not entirely evident in a text book.

With the Theory of Evolution and the scientific movement as a whole we, as humanity, were no longer being asked to believe blindly. We were offered the option of personal, active and observable inquiry. The option of applying our critical facilities as opposed to the yolk of passive faith.

This, in and of itself, is cause for celebration. A real and meaningful step forward in the evolution of human consciousness; one that has become ubiquitous throughout the First World, East and West. We are all scientists today in the broader sense of the word, it is our modern zeitgeist.

Victory! Yes certainly, but at what price?
However with this new found Promethean freedom, a shadow has been born into the world. What has happened to our religious and spiritual life?

Nietzsche said God is dead, and I think history has proved him right. God not as a metaphysical being but as a human reality has died.

Not for everyone certainly, otherwise we wouldn’t be living under the threat of the current Islamic ‘ Judeo-Christian conflict, as well as the other myriad of atrocities, violence, perversions, cruelty and lack of humanity practiced in the name of God.

However I contend that institutionalised religion is on the way out. I think that the writing is on the wall, so to speak . Whatever the traditional religions have given us in the past, their relevance in the modern world is fast diminishing.

Those that cling to these religions in much of the world are either financially or educationally disenfranchised, or both. And as people in the poorer parts of the world are brought into the 21st century the hold of religious and cultural fundamentalism will lose much of its grip.

I must concede at this point that these statements, about religion, (above), are sweeping, sound arrogant and have the potential to offend. For all of this I apologise. It is not my intention to offend, nor to make arrogant sweeping statements as though they were the roilhoil truth.

However let’s say it is my ardent prayer along with much of the secular world that we are moving away from fundamentalism, religious, cultural and political. (Who do we pray to you ask? Well I’m not sure…but it’s a good question ).

Anyway getting back to the issue of our spiritual life post the birth of modern science…

Cartesian Duality
Cartesian Duality properly speaking is Descartes suggestion that we find two fundamentally different types of substances or entities in existence: spirit and matter, or in more modern terms consciousness and matter.

However it is worth noting that another split emerged with Descartes and the birth of Science. This is the split I mentioned above between spirituality and science. We can express these opposites in a few of the ways that they have become evident in our psyche:

Religion (traditional) vs. Science

Spirituality vs. Materialism

Faith vs. Knowledge

Rational Intuition vs. Empiricism

Theism vs. Secularism

Soul vs. Mind

Imagination vs. Intellect

Constructivism vs. Reductionism

Then Another Small Step for Science, a Big Step for Material Reductionism
In the 2oth and early part of the 21st century science has gone quite a bit further in its destruction of what has traditionally been considered sacred. Much of this has not filtered down to everyman who is still struggling to assimilate the rapid shift from a theistic theology to a secular theology. I write about this in another post In Search of the Transcendent.

Briefly the very tenants of our humanity and what might be called our sense of the dignity of man are being challenged by recent scientific research and developments.
I am referring here to (amongst others):

‘ Free Will: although the concept of free will has long been contentious in philosophy, I think it is fair to say we all operate from the assumption of free will. However research started by Benjamin Libet and continued by others seriously questions this assumption through clinical tests. And although these findings are still controversial their implication, if true, is devastating to any illusion we may have of making conscious choices.

‘ Artificial Intelligence: the Turing Test for AI (can a machine create the illusion of human consciousness) aside, what is beyond doubt is that machines are intelligent, their intelligence is increasing exponentially and within the next 100 years their intellectual capacity will (a) become capable of self replicating (b) will exceed the boundaries of the wildest imagination of today’s science fiction writers. Man’s role as the supremely intelligent being in the known universe is under serious threat.

‘ The Science of Consciousness: current research and finding in the newly emerged science of consciousness questions much of what we have long taken for granted and with which we essentially identify ourselves. This topic is too complex to do justice to here however I will mention a few of the issues worth considering:

1)The absence of a homunculus (executive chairman of the board of consciousness is absent and not expected to return in the near future ).

2)The possibility of a complete mapping of the human brain and its replication in a virtual environment. (This is still far from definite the brain is immensely complex even by today scientific standards, however I am willing to place a bet let’s say $10 000 US that this will in fact be achieved before the century is out- any takers?)

3)The fallibility of consciousness, its poor replication of its own environment. We have an impression that are brains are camera like in their ability to reproduce what is being fed in about our environment by the senses- this is an illusion. There are huge gaps in conscious cohesion in relation to the surrounding environment, if consciousness is a camera of sorts it’s not a very good one.

‘ DNA mapping, gene therapy, artificial insemination and cloning.

‘ Transhumanism, the increasingly blurred lines between man and machine. Impossible to say how far this will go but if we listen to the likes of futurist Ray Kurzweil a time may come in the future where the lines between man and machine will be completely undifferentiated, essentially creating a new life form.

So the old gods have died my friends, but what are we left with?

Modern Man in Search of a Soul
This is the spiritual dilemma we face today. For one, science has largely usurped God as the transcendent entity in which we place our faith and furthermore opposes any overtly spiritual position.
Secondly, science presents us with a soulless reality, and life devoid of the soul, pure utilitarian materialism is a very dead experience. It is an experience which leaves us wanting, succinctly articulated up by the title of one of C.G. Jung’s essays ‘Modern man in search of a soul.’

Is there an answer, a spiritual answer, to the age of science besides one of pure materialism?
First of all a definition: what do I mean by Spirit?

Once I had occasion to be in Mauritius during Diwali and as were sitting in the restaurant we were offered tattoos by the woman celebrating the festival. I requested the word Spirit to be tattooed on my arm. (Not because I am any great original thinker or anything like that, I saw someone else with the word tattooed on them and liked it.)

Anyway my sister-in-law asked me, once I had it done, why I chose the word, what it meant to me. I was unable to answer impromptu ‘as frequently happens, which is most frustrating. The perfect response only occurred to me sometime later. (Ah who says writing is not without its own compensations.)

This is I mean when I use the word here:
Spirit the ineffable, irreducible, essence without which we would be mechanistic, meat, machines.

Then an answer:

Well yes I think there is an answer. A spiritual and/or philosophical answer which is not a purely materialistic one. No doubt there are a number of answers but I am going to suggest two answers which I believe are not mutually exclusive.

The Wonder of Life (1). Where Technology meets Spirit.
We are growing up and as we all know growing up is a painful condition. Having a parent to turn to in times of crisis, having a ubiquitous, benevolent presence to watch over and care for us is naturally appealing. God of course is the ultimate parent- our Father in Heaven.

The downside is that as long as we subscribe to this belief we remain eternal spiritual children.

We are becoming gods ourselves. Not omnipotent (although who is to say omnipotence is not ultimately within our grasp) and certainly not omniscient, but gods none the less. I wouldn’t say a comparison to Yahweh would be appropriate but we are fast approaching and overtaking the pantheistic gods.

The myths about Pandora’s Box and Prometheus are being lived today. And yes of course there is grave danger, our wax wings may well melt and the terrible power unleashed by opening Pandora’s Box may overcome us.

But it hasn’t yet.

We are still alive, doing the most incredible things, things which only a hundred years ago were unimaginable, things which transcend the wildest imaginings of the occultists and alchemists of yesteryear.
In the next few centuries, assuming we survive them, we will redefine man, life, death, the universe, basically reality itself. This is not science fiction this is what is happening today and following an exponentially increasing curve of change. We stand now at a point where we can no longer tell where technology and science will take us.

Yes it may be hell, but then again it may be Paradise.

I’ll tell you this much the train aint stopping now so you either need to get on or become irrelevant. Not much of a choice I know but there you have it.

The challenge we face is finding love. All of these material advancements will be empty if we are unable to evolve our spiritual life as well. We need to find in ourselves the capacity for love, love of self and love of each other.

In as much as God can be said to exist, even if we understand God as a conceptual rather metaphysical entity, we are Him, and He is us.

We are the thoughts of God ergo we are God.

So the challenge of finding our way spiritually is not unimportant.

The spiritual challenge we face in light of the reality we perceive is to personalise God. We need to understand this spirituality as something out there, but rather as something in here. We need to grow up and assume personal responsibility for being alive, for being human, for living and loving. We can no longer afford to place this burden on a God out there; we need to shift it to the god in here.

If each of us learns to imbue every action he or she takes, every thought, every interaction with another person or the world at large with a sense of reverence for the enormity of this gift we have been blessed with we may start approaching something akin, but superior, to morality, and to a legacy that we might be proud of that bears testament to the divine in man.

If we accept for a moment the Darwinian Universe and I don’t propose that this world view is not subject to correction. Science, or rather certain spokesmen of the scientific community, has a tendency to dogmatism which frequently contradicts the very tenant they serve- the scientific method. (Science by definition is subject to change and correction over time.)

Nevertheless dealing with the scientific truths as they currently present themselves.

In the Darwinian Universe man, you and me, consciousness itself, has emerged from the primordial slime. There was nothing and now we have this life, this world, each other, our civilisation and our culture. We have architecture, science, literature, music.

If all of this evolved through a series of random mutations, unguided by intelligent design, then truly we have a miracle of untold and unspeakable magnificence. A miracle so spectacular, so profound, as to not only seem unlikely but one that eclipses anything spoken about in any religious text dating back to the dawn of time.

We are the Spirit, we are the Miracle. There is no need to look outside ourselves for something greater- what in truth could ever be greater than this?

The Wonder of Life (2). The Mystery of Being.
I think a part of the problem in becoming spiritually disenfranchised is the idea that we have absolute knowledge and/or knowledge of the Absolute.

I would like to suggest that the mystery of our being and of being in itself is far, far greater than anything suggested to explain it.

I think in our naivet’ we are inclined, or led, to view the metaphors the great spiritual teachers, who have visited us, as objects. We treat the metaphorical as literal. This is a vestige of an earlier atavistic or mythological type of consciousness.

We live in a world of stories. Science too is a story. This is not to say that the teachings of both science and spirit do not refer to an ontological reality. The error is to believe we have direct access to that knowledge, we don’t.

The absolute is infinite; it is not containable in a finite mind. It is at best symbolically represented.
So what I’m saying to you here is do not get too caught up in the manifest world.

Live it, enjoy it, contribute to it, live the best life you possibly can- but don’t for a second believe that you have understood all its mysteries.

Until next time.
Go in peace,
Stephen

The very first movie image I remember seeing, as a child, is the scene of Zorba (acted by Anthony Quinn) dancing naked down the beach into the sea, to the well known theme song. The movie was Zorba the Greek.

It was actually the last scene in the movie and it’s the only scene I remember. Somehow it encapsulated the whole movie for me. And if you were to ask, I would definitely list Zorba the Greek as one of my all time best movies.

What made such a big impression on me? In a word Pathos (passion). I was too young of course to have heard the word or understand the concept when I saw the movie, I was maybe five or six when I saw it, but somehow it touched me.

As a boy and later a young man my godfather George Farah made a big impression on me. He was a man who like Zorba understood what it means to be alive, to be a human being. In the sense that he understood that there is more to life than pursuing it as a functional challenge.

He lived a life that was filled with pathos, with love, with laughter and of course with sadness. He consumed life and his appetite was avaricious.

He became for me a living symbol of Zorba. And over the years that I knew him I strived to understand what it was he knew, what he embodied with his orientation to the world.

Now to say that I really understood him would be fake and arrogant. For how can we ever truly know the soul of another? But I do think I understood something of what he offered the world and it is this small thing that I would like to share with you.

So what is this thing, this appreciation of pathos?
It is an appreciation of beauty. The beauty of being alive, of being human. An appreciation of life in all its sensual, hedonistic, emotive, culinary, sexual, musical, pleasurable and profound being.

We live in a time when function has become our supreme ideal.

Everything we do comes with the question, why am I doing this? And by this question what is meant is ‘ where is this going, what is going to be realised (achieved) through this act?

Now I am not suggesting that such an approach is without merit. It is important, I think, to know where we are travelling to in life. It is good to have direction, purpose and goals. However if that is all our life becomes about then it can become a bit flavourless, a bit flat.

The question to ask is what gives me pleasure? What is it in my day to day life that makes me happy?

To identify these things that make our lives colourful, that add tone and feeling to our experience of life is accessing the Zorba Consciousness.

Not everything we do needs to necessarily have a value beyond itself. Some things have a value in themselves, in the doing, and that’s enough. Finding these things, these pleasures and learning to appreciate them makes the experience of life a better one.

Oh, come with old Khayyam, and leave the Wise
To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies;
One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown for ever dies

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went.

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse’and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness’
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

Embrace life my friends. Taste each mouthful of food as though it were your last. Whenever you can, only eat with those whom you love and those who in turn love you. Leave your troubles behind you when you sit to eat and experience the moment with an open heart and a pure soul.

Sing praise to God as you raise a glass of wine to your mouth. Let your heart reach out to touch and be touched by the winemaker and his family, by the sun that ripened the grapes and the stony soil from which they sprung.

When you sit down, after a great meal, to drink an espresso, delight in its dark, rich and frothy taste. Place your arm around Dionysus’ shoulders and celebrate the fine art of good conversation.

And when you kiss your lover let the passion, the love, the longing, of a thousand young lovers fill you up.

To do anything less than this is to sin against the Creator. But to live your life with such a sense of the sacred, to celebrate life like this, is to be one with our Creator.

This is the wisdom of Zorba the Greek.

As a child my father told me a story which was the start of my spiritual journey. It was the story of two dreams.

My grandfather, Anthony Farah had a strange relationship with the number 5. Everything significant happened in my grandfather’s life on the 5^th year. He was born in South Africa in 1905, shortly thereafter returning to his family’s village in Lebanon called Sib’il, he was a Sib’ilenie (man from Sib’il).

In 1925 my grandfather married my grandmother Nora. My grandfather, a stone mason by trade, buried members of my grandmother’s family who died in the plague that swept Lebanon at the time. He did this when others, scared of contracting the plague from the dead bodies, had failed to bury them.

As a gesture of gratitude he was given Nora’s hand in marriage. Shortly after getting married my grandfather had a dream. He dreamt that he was carving his own gravestone. He had his date of birth in 1905 and his date of death in 1945. An angel who was standing behind him, as he did this, told him that the patron saint of the headstone was to be Saint Joseph and he was to carve this into the gravestone.

When he woke from the dream he told his wife and mother-in-law. They were peasants and as such took dreams seriously. In 1935 my grandfather and his young family immigrated to South Africa. In 1945 my grandfather’s youngest son was killed in an accident whilst riding his bicycle, his name was Joseph and he was ten years old at the time of the accident.

So this meant that my grandfather had this dream, which was clearly a premonition of Joseph’s premature death, prior to Joseph even being born!

A Second Dream

The story didn’t end there. Years later my father’s brother Francis travelled to America for an arranged marriage. The marriage did not work out and my Uncle Francis ended up stranded in America and unable to raise the fare for the return journey to South Africa. He contacted my father in desperation asking him to try and raise the money for his air fare back.

My father had a dream in which Joseph appeared and spoke to him. Joseph told my father he should place a bet on a horse, running at the race meeting that Saturday, called Prince Bertrand. My father checked the race card the following day and found that sure enough there was a horse by that name, owned by the Oppenheimers, running at the meeting. The only fly in the ointment though was that the horse was fifty to one outsider, in other words a no-hoper.

Still trusting his dream my father stole 3 pounds out of the family shop till and placed it on Prince Bertrand to win. The horse won and my father used the winnings to pay for his brother Francis’ return air fare to South Africa.

When Francis landed at Jan Smuts International airport and disembarked from the plane, he kissed the ground and vowed never to return to America as long as he lived. He kept that promise.

I would frequently question my father about his take on these dreams and my father who was a great rationalist had no explanation, only quoting Hamlet, ‘there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’

Half a Dream

Many, many years later when my father was an old man I visited him one day. As was my habit I asked him on this occasion if he had recently had any dreams he could recall. He said not, only that every time he closed his eyes he could see Joseph’s face. He told me that he felt this was a premonition of sorts and he decided to buy a lottery ticket. He said that if he won the lottery he would finally concede that miracles do exist. He didn’t win the lottery but died quite unexpectedly, and suddenly, three days later.

Joseph had in effect come to accompany my father across the threshhold.

In Conclusion

So thanks for taking the time to read this story. It is one which has become a personal legend for me, a kind of family dream mythology. I believe it suggests quite clearly that we access a realm of knowledge in the dream state which cannot be explained in current, rational, scientific terms. I think that paying careful attention to this dream life imbues our lives with a meaning and a sense of the divine which enriches and expands our lives.

For more on dreams and dreaming see Dreams: a user’s guide

Please share your comments or even better a dream experience which was particularly meaningful for you.