Section 5 April 1992

3rd April

Comments on progress: Last month was devoted to ‘religion’. There was some good stuff, but I realised rather belatedly that there was too much preliminary, and too little about the theory. I avoided this in the chapter on science by pretending to talk to a professor of physics, and so dodging the need to explain the subject in a general way. I do not know a professor of theology!

I am going to change documents, since it is the beginning of the month, but I shall continue with ‘religion’, in my expanded sense of the word, and concentrate on pattern! explanations.

How pattern! explains ‘religious’ belief and associated conforming behaviour.

‘Religious belief’ covers any package of belief which is accepted by groups of people, often on trust, as natural or obvious, sometimes aggressively and defensively. Thus it is a package which is handed on culturally, rather than worked out anew on the basis of experience and need.

The way pattern! explains adherance to belief is on the basis of the appeal of ‘belonging’: the drive to be part of something greater than oneself, to transcend the solscius and reach the comscius. The influence of patterns! which have been repeated many times is also involved. The power of resonance is felt by any being which bears some similarity to those past patterns! – which are, of course, always present, though invisible from a solscius state. There is also a powerful neurotic drive to ‘be right’, and to have one’s rightness acknowledged by others. This need is provided for if one joins a group of others who share one’s beliefs.

The need to be part of a greater whole is so compelling that many people are prepared to risk death for it. And it is not only in religious wars that this applies. Belonging to an army is in itself an achievement of comscius, especially when recruits are trained into unquestioning obedience to orders. Safe situations like drilling on the parade ground provide experiences of losing one’s individual identity and merging into the ranks of collective movement. Add the drama and emotion of a threat from the Enemy, and the need to respond courageously for the good of one’s country – yet another greater being to be part of – and there is the potential for an altered state of consciousness, a religious experience.

On the battle field, various comscius experiences are possible. The soldier may allow his training to carry him, and he becomes part of the pattern! of his own training period and the resonance between all the training resembling his own from the recent past, and back through military history. Or his personal fear may bring into his mind early religious instruction, and he may call on a deity to protect him, thereby connecting himself with all the patterns! of that religion and its believers. The shock of seeing his comrades killed, mutilated and injured may intensify his identification with their shared mission at the expense of his individual self. The chaotic nightmare scene may bring an altered state of consciousness in which the soldier is not present in his normal state of being. If he survives the battle unscathed physically, he may have passed through a personal crisis whereby everything has to be re-evaluated before his life can resume. Like the mystics, he has endured a sojourn in the wilderness.

The effect of the solscius may be to isolate the individual from the immediate influences of the environment, but no being can be completely isolated. The unit which is created becomes a cell of humanity. Its role is as a flexible, but cooperative and obedient, unit of the human team to which it is assigned. So, instead of merging smoothly into the intimate patterns! of the environment, humans form mosaics with each other. Each solscius fragment is clearly defined, but it has little meaning on its own.

7th April 1992

Most of us become possessive and insistent about the validity of our own truth. It is usually assumed that there is one set of consistent facts about anything: that, given two contradictory statements about something, both may be untrue, one or the other may be true, but both cannot be true. This very often translates into ‘I am right, you are wrong’, either openly stated or inwardly thought. An alternative is to be perpetually ‘agnostic’: not knowing, undecided, easily swayed; an easy-going, pink-blanc-mange-like perpetual listener; or an unquestioning, incurious, bored skeptic.

The advantage of pattern! thinking is that we can have the best of all worlds as believers: being as certain as we please, and as open as we please, but completely tolerant of others’ beliefs, and so getting plenty of new ideas and information whilst not feeling under pressure to agree or disagree.

The area of belief where pattern! tolerance is most needed is in religion or spirituality. Apart from disagreements between Christian denominations and between the major religions, there is a sad lack of understanding and respect between those who adhere to one or another of the sets of religious belief and the considerable group of those who do not. I recently attended a talk by a well-known actor in which she shared her experience of practising a faith – her own personalised version of Christianity – and of being regarded as strange by her colleagues who generally did not have a faith – at least, by her judgement, they did not. She professed to feeling somewhat embarrassed at being regarded as strange: as this peculiar woman who meditates twice a day. But I felt she was really rather smug about it. She was certainly very dismissive of those who offered their experiences of nature and contemplating the stars as constituting a spiritual life that was comparable to hers. She said (twice) that she had dismissed that sort of experience by saying to them, ‘I am not talking about the Green Party manifesto!’ She was equally dismissive of people who were deeply involved in social concerns, particularly those who were ‘Marxists’, delighting in telling of one such who had a religious experience and became a Christian, presumably then giving up the profound identification with oppressed people which had previously been his faith.

This example of the intolerance of the conventionally (looked at from my perspective) religious person towards those who are not conventionally religious is useful for teaching two lessons in pattern! tolerance. One is the lesson I would teach the actor; the other is the lesson I would teach and learn for myself. They are very different lessons and in a way contradict each other, but by pattern! that is fine. First of all, what I would say to the actor.

Spirituality is connectedness, it is seeking and experiencing the comscius. Someone who professes a faith which is shared by others living and dead, or which bears some similarity with their faith, is drawn into their pattern!, their comscius. An ancient faith such as Christianity has an enormously powerful comscius which someone can tune into through prayer or meditation, by being in a church or cathedral, by looking at religious paintings or listening to church music, and by reading the Bible or accounts of other Christians’ thoughts and experiences. Someone who is prepared to surrender their solscius to the huge and powerful patterns! of Christianity may well sometimes succeed in escaping the inward-looking self-reflective brain, and connecting with something so much bigger than him- or herself that, from a Christian perspective, it would be called ‘God’.

One could say, somewhat dismissively, that this is ‘all’ that is happening: the experience was not of God, but ‘only’ a connection with the patterns! of Christianity: the shared experiences of millions of other Christians, living and dead. But for me that is in itself amazing and wonderful, far better than an experience of God, whatever that might mean. If I were comfortable with the word ‘God’, I might say that a comscius experience of the Christian community is an experience of God.

Where what I am saying becomes particularly delicate is if I go on to observe that the spiritual or comscius experience does not depend on any part of the Christian story being literally and historically true, but only on its being believed by many people. And all those people do not need to have believed the same story, but only something similar enough for resonance to be felt by the person who opens up to the contact.

The other half of this lesson is that if a huge number of people have been stuck forcibly by the awesome beauty and power of nature, their experiences form a resonating pattern! which can be tuned into by others who open themselves to that contact, which is then just as much a spiritual experience as the Christian’s contact with God. What is more, the contact is as much with nature itself as it is with the other humans who have looked upon nature with awe and wonder. Indeed, we can make a further connection by observing that many people who may or may not profess one of the established faiths, would describe such a contact with nature as an experience of God.

The benefit of learning the lesson that spiritual or mystical experiences may come through religious practice or through contemplating nature is that those who value nature only because it is ‘God’s Creation’ may come to value nature for itself. The separation between the material and the spiritual, the secular and the sacred, the body and the soul, may dissolve. Furthermore, those who only know a feeling of involvement and concern towards humanity may come to feel a sense of connectedness with the whole of nature.

That was the lesson for the actor. I now come to the difficult part: the lesson for myself.

Since consciousness is all its forms is reality, and is what creates reality, belief in something makes it so. All those people believing in the God of Judaeo-Christianity bring Him into being. Nothing I, or anyone else, says can make what they believe untrue. The same principle holds for the Trinity, the Bible stories, heaven and hell, the immortal soul at death going to one or the other of those places, choirs of angels, Judgement Day and so on. The truths that I, and others, hold about the sacredness of nature, and of the inherent value of life on earth in all its forms, cannot invalidate the belief held by many Christians today, and by most Christians from the past, that this planet was created as a testing ground for the human soul, and will be destroyed at Armageddon.

Given that I can accept the necessary outcome of my own theory, what difference should this make to how I relate to others? Firstly it shifts the emphasis from persuading to living. I have an obligation to live my life according to the moral dictates of my own truth. I am excused and denied the duty of persuading others to think or do the same. This may be difficult for the politically inclined person, as I have certainly been, but it is really rather liberating.

I have a sense that what we do is the test of whether we really believe what we say we believe. By the extent, and historically this has been questionable, that Christians have lived by the dictates of their faith, their belief may be judged. It may be that there has been so much ‘double think’ amongst Christians that they have not in fact created a reality corresponding to their professed beliefs. I am conscious that I may be trying to wriggle out of my difficult lesson here but, if Christian belief imposes a moral obligation towards, at least, human society – loving one’s neighbour as oneself, for example – to the extent that Christians fail in that moral obligation, they invalidate the truths they profess. Therefore God may not exist.

23rd April

A great deal has happened in my personal life since the last day I wrote. Much of it is very relevant to the subject of religion, in my extended sense of the word.

Something of relevance also occurred in the life of this country of Great Britain: a confirmation of what I have said about the power of conformity to the current belief system – free market, capitalistic economics – and the roles and values associated with that belief system. I am referring to the re-election to government of the Conservative Party in spite of a severe recession, the poll tax fiasco, high levels of unemployment, business failures, house repossessions, and various other concerns and threats to the wellbeing of many people in our society. The election result is a reflection of the fact that the current belief system is at the height of its power and influence. People are cells in the comscius of various commercial bodies and other organisations which are themselves organs of the global system. Through that wider identification people escape the loneliness of the solscius. They could not be expected to question or reject the body of which they are a part, so the alternatives they were offered by opposition parties were little different from the total conformity which the Conservative Party represents. Any individual or collective uneasiness about the current situation was held back from full expression by the draw of the patterns! of the system. The tendency is towards business as usual and more of the same, and so, in spite of all the reservations, that is what we chose.

What has happened in my personal life is the advent of my fiftieth birthday combined with getting married to my partner of nine years and our honeymoon in Sicily.

Most people find the first birthday of a new decade somewhat disturbing because it marks the passing of a significant chunk of one’s allocation of years. Few of us can expect to see as many decades as the digits of our hands. At fifty, one moves on to the second hand and, from a physical point of view, the down side of life. So I decided to contrive a lift and a new beginning through the formal commitment of marriage, and to use this as an opportunity to re-evaluate our relationship and set new goals.

A human being can be considered as having three aspects: mind, body and spirit. Each of us has all three, although some people might question the ‘spirit’ component, but one of them may be more dominant than the others. In my own case my mind or intellect is, and always has been, very much the main focus of my sense of who and what I am. This is perhaps somewhat less true of my partner, who has been a keen sportsman, and has a surprisingly strong, though very private, spiritual being. However we currently share enough of a bias in the mind direction to have decided to aim to give more attention to the physical and spiritual aspects of our relationship and life together.

In my discussion of pattern! theory I have identified two states of consciousness: the solscius and the comscius. The ‘mind’ component of ‘mind, body and spirit’ is more or less equivalent to the solscius. Physical and spiritual experiences tend to be more comscius oriented in that they often involve putting mental activity to one side. For example, although I have never been keen on sport, I have enjoyed skiing, and I know that I could only ski well when I was able to let my body, and my unconscious memory of the movements needed, take over from trying to tell myself deliberately what to do. The experience of skiing when I was able to let go my mental efforts and my fears, and tune in to rythym of my movements, the beauty of the scenery and the purity of the air, was so different from the ordinary experiences of life that it could be called spiritual.

The same putting aside of the mind is necessary in meditation. Distracting thoughts float in, and the trick is to notice them, but to give them little attention, and let them float out again. For someone with an habitually busy mind, as I have, the discipline of minimising the attention given to distracting thoughts is also helpful in making love, which in turn becomes a form of meditation. Just as meditation is directed at spiritual experience, which is often described as an experience of connectedness, so good love-making brings an experience of communion with the lover and a transcendence of the lonely inner self or solscius.

A similar shift away from the mental realm and towards the physical and spiritual is the basis of the changes my partner and I intend to make in the way we live. We have been planning for some time to move away from the South-east of England, and to buy a house with one or two acres of land, where we will live simply and grow as much as possible of our food. The idea is to live our truth, rather than to be engaged in persuading others of the need for changes or, worse still, grumbling privately that the world is headed for disaster.

I have already mentioned ‘living one’s own truth’ in the context of the ‘two lessons’ for the actor and for myself. I shall be describing in some detail the style of life my partner and I hope to adopt in the final section of this book. But the spiritual implications of the way people live is an important aspect of the pattern! domain of religion, which I shall say more about now.

There is a tendency in pattern! theory for apparent dualities to become different aspects of the same pattern! or kind of pattern!. So, for example, the time and space duality becomes the influences on pattern! formation and the forms which patterns! take; which cannot exist without each other. Pattern! theory also dissolves the duality of mind and matter by stating that there is only consciousness – as creator and created. But the implications of removing the mind/matter duality are intriguing.

For most of my life I have been a politically active person, and many of the people I have known well have been the same. Political people generally have strongly-held opinions and talk and argue a great deal. Such a person, when confronted with the idea that thoughts create reality, so that each of us creates our own world, might well dismiss it as New Age nonsense and an excuse to shrug off one’s responsibilities to society. If persuaded to consider the idea sympathetically, he or she might say that, if it were true, their own political thoughts should have created the improved conditions society needs. However, political thoughts are more often critical than constructive. It is what we believe is true that creates reality, not what we believe is wrong. So, paradoxically, by pattern! theory, the talkers and arguers would be expected to bring about the reality which they believe in and condemn, not the reality they say they want.

It may seem very unfair or ridiculous to say, for example, that the protester against rainforest destruction creates a reality where rainforest is being destroyed by believing that the destruction is happening; or that the Amnesty International supporter creates a world where people are tortured. But we do not create our worlds independently; we respond to certain patterns! and become part of them as they are part of us. Those who create a world in common are all cells of that world, and have different functions. The protesters may have the function of feeling the pain of their world; and certainly this is a role that I have identified for myself. But in the end the world can only be changed by changing oneself, that is by believing that it can be different so surely that you come to live the new truth and so make it real.

By pattern! thinking, one can leave others behind in the old world and bring a new world into being. Since time is the dimension of influence, one can think of each version of reality existing in a different time zone, or parallel universe, but with the various zones interweaving with each other as bits and pieces of one world bear some resemblance to the bits of pieces of others. The consciousness of various entities can drift between the worlds, drawn by patterns! of empathy. But the human mind, the lonely solscius, sees itself as bound to one thread of time. If it glimpses other realities it strives to explain them away as dreams or imaginings. But the mind of the artist, the poet, the musician or the dancer knows that it is all pattern! from who knows where.

28th April

Universalism and moral values

Some years ago I joined a group called the ‘Quaker Universalist Group’ (QUG). The group had been established to draw to the attention of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) that, notwithstanding the Society’s Christian origins, its rejection of creed and clergy in favour of the personal spiritual search made it fundamentally universalist. QUG includes a statement in its literature saying that ‘spiritual awareness is accessible to men and women of any religion or none, and that no one Faith can claim to have a monopoly of truth. The group is open to both Quakers and non-Quakers.’ The sentiments behind this statement have led to QUG becoming a refuge for a number of people who, for various reasons, feel uncomfortable with, or even hostile to, some or all the established religious bodies, and who need other people to talk to who feel the same way or who understand how they feel. The Society of Friends has also, both independently and via QUG, attracted people who feel at home in the welcoming and non-judgemental silence of a Quaker Meeting.

My theory of pattern! is universalist, in that it recognises the validity of different beliefs. I like to think that pattern! could be recognised as underlying all beliefs, but without taking precedence over individual beliefs. I am not saying that pattern! is some ‘perennial philosophy’ or ‘core of truth’ which everyone is supposed to be aiming for by different paths. This is because the basics of pattern! theory are so basic that, once accepted, they would become obvious and uninteresting; hardly the ultimate in spiritual knowledge. Pattern! may enable us to understand what spiritual experience is, but it is not the experience.

Spiritual experience is a coming together, an escape from the lonely solscius into the comscius, which people discover through losing their separate selves in their shared faith, and by being and acting as part of a greater whole. The contribution of pattern! understanding may amount to little more than preventing belief in a shared truth from leading to aggressive evangelism or hostility to people with other beliefs.

One of the problems of present-day society is the separation between religion and the rest of life. This is not a necessary or inevitable separation, but the fact that it can occur is peculiar to our culture. Other human cultures, now almost annihilated by the imposition of European civilisation, have often not really had religions as such. They have had what a Native American lecturer referred to as ‘spiritual ways of life’. By pattern! theory this indicates that human groups have been able to combine, and shift freely between, solscius and comscius modes of operation, to provide initiative or conformity as necessary, and to include other beings – plants, animals, rivers and mountains etc. – in their comscius experience.

In our society we are ‘consciously’ solscius and ‘unconsciously’ comscius; we think that we are independent individuals but we are actually strongly driven by collective habits of thought and behaviour. We suffer from a form of collective neurosis which, hardly surprisingly, has led to obsessively selfish and stupid exploitation of the weaker members of our society, and of what our alienated psyche calls ‘natural resources’.

What we call ‘religion’ is partly the remnants of an historic form of social coercion, partly a genuine seeking after comscius experience. But those who profess to be religious seem too easily satisfied with feelings of self-righteousness and the occasional glimpse of something beyond themselves. They often fail to embrace humanity and nature in any comscius experience they achieve, calling it rather ‘God’ or ‘Christ’, so mysterious and powerful is it felt to be. As may well be apparent, I have considerable difficulty in being tolerant of established religions, particularly Christianity. I confess to not being a very good universalist. Being tolerant of other beliefs and cultures than one’s own is not easy; one’s tolerance is often very selective.

I remember reading some of the books written by a well-known anthropologist. This was many years ago, and I have been left with impressions rather than the detail. There seemed to be some ‘tribe in Africa’ for every extreme of social practice the imagination could dream up. There were those who lived a gentle, loving life in a tropical Garden of Eden. And there were those who had various practices which we would regard as immoral, if not cruel and evil, including infanticide, euthanasia, rites of passage for the adolescents involving genital and other mutilation, polygamy, polyandry, concubinism, constant inter-tribal warfare leading to slavery, rape, and cannibalism, and so on. And yet many of these cultures had survived within the dynamic equilibrium of their ecosystems for a hundred thousand years or more. They were, to use the pious term of the environmentalist, ‘sustainable’, which our culture appears not to be.

Pattern! theory can, I think, help to reconcile the moral values of our culture with the apparently immoral primal culture. It is a matter of the predominant focus of consciousness of the culture.

Our culture is extremely individualistic. Each human life is regarded as, in theory at least, absolutely precious. Often the emphasis is on the protection and prolongation of each life, rather than on quality of life and well-being. So, for example, many people feel very stongly that abortion is destroying a life, and disregard the quality of life of either the mother or the child. Similarly, very sick or elderly people are kept alive regardless of whether their life is worth living. Personal rights and freedoms are given emphasis over social responsibilities. This leads to such absurdities as the expectation of excellent health care and education, with prompt service and freedom of choice, coupled with a strange blindness to the consequent need to contribute the taxes to pay for these services.

Every human culture has individual elements and a complex social structure, with life and consciousness at every level. The belief system of our culture only recognises life and consciousness at the level of the individual. It does recognise certain social elements, in particular the family, the nation state and the economy, but does not allow them any group consciousness, instead encouraging individual loyalty to and respect for these as institutions, or as established organisational units made up of individuals, but having no life of their own. But the economy in particular behaves as if it does have a life of its own, such that individuals are allowed to thrive within it only while they are useful.

Other human cultures have given prominance to the group, or tribe, rather than the individual. The consciousness of the individual is subsumed into that of the group, and its interests take priority. Weak individuals are sloughed off like dead skin cells. It is difficult for someone from our culture to imagine what that would feel like, although we have occasional glimpses of group consciousness when caught up in the atmosphere of a crowd of people with some common purpose. In the group or tribal situation the loss of individual identity and security would be compensated for by ‘being’ something bigger and more interesting than a single human individual.

The moral values of the tribe would be those which sustained the tribe and kept it healthy. Measures which served to keep the population within ecosystem bounds would be morally correct, even if they involved the death and suffering of individuals. Tribal warfare may have served both to ward off threats to one tribe by another, and also as a form of culling, and an opportunity to bring in fresh genetic variety.

We do actually have a kind of group morality in our culture. If it is the interests of the economy for some people to be poorly paid or shed from the workforce, this is allowed even if those individuals suffer. However, because we deny that an entity composed of many individuals can experience life and consciousness, we are able to shut out and ignore that suffering. But I believe that we feel it at an unconscious, or comscius, level. It is felt as an uneasy guilt, and a compulsion to try to justify the values and needs of ‘the economy’.

The European Empire, with its mixed up values and handicapped consciousness, has spread over the entire globe. Its practices are exploitative and threaten the viability of its own life support systems. It needs to wake up. As members of that sick being, we should try to learn from the remnants of tribal societies how to cultivate open and conscious collective morality. We need to recognise the link between collective health and morality: that right and wrong are not absolutes but expediencies. We could then cultivate a form of universalism which tolerated differences in moral values as well as differences in religious beliefs. We might then even shed the idea of religious beliefs altogether, recognising that many of them are relics of ways of life we no longer live. Then we would be free of the old rules and able to build communities which would draw up new codes appropriate to sustaining the health of each community being, which would become our being.

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