THREE GURUS: PART ONE: RAMANA MAHARSHI

"A realised one sends out waves of spiritual influence in his aura, which draw many people towards him. Yet he may sit in a cave and maintain complete silence." - Ramana Maharshi

Well, I made it. Four months or incredible adventures across the vast landscape of India which took me from such epic sights as the Taj Mahal and the Great Temple of Thanjavur to the natural beauty of Karnataka and the backwaters of Kerala. I saw every religion known to man in operation - Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism, Judaism, even Bahai (ok so I didn't see Taoism or Shinto, but nobody's perfect) - and drank deep on the mystic wonder of the country. It wasn't all roses. I saw and smelt more shit and faeces than I care to remember, although even that experience came to be an integral part of the whole journey. I remember getting out of a bus to take a photo of the most breathtaking sunset I had ever seen only to be assailed by a wall-like stench of stinking piss... But this was towards the end of my time there and so, almost completely assimilated, I realised then that it wasn't going to faze me anymore. Majestic beauty and utter squalor were all One... India had done its magic...

While I was out there, of course, I couldn't avoid the ubiquitous presence of the Guru. Everywhere you go in India Holy Men and Women abound. While such people barely exist over here, in India they are still very much part of the landscape. Indeed one of them, Sai Baba, claims that India is the last country on Earth where a Guru can completely incarnate. The argument is that the inherent spirituality of the people is still so communally great that, consciously or unconsciously, they can still provide an environment in which the soul of the Guru can fully realise itself. Inherent in this idea is that we are ALL involved in creating a spiritual condition in which things can grow. Thus a genuine Guru is an expression of a collective aspiration towards inner growth... Its a beautiful, anti-elitist idea and says something about how we are all able to make a contribution to the wellbeing of everyone else. But it takes a society which hasn't turned its back on the idea of spirituality to happen en masse. Makes you think about where we are in our part of the world with our rampant materialism and skepticism and what kind of environment that creates for the Spirit to soar....

Cultural comparisons aside (and they are always simplistic), the presence of the Guru is a key element of India. There are many bogus ones, many genuine ones and many scandalous ones with some Gurus, as we shall see, accused of being all three. Not all Gurus have enormous communities attached. Some remain obscure individuals in remote parts of the country with only a few dedicated followers. Others have international organisations attached. I encountered three on my travels, visiting two of their Ashrams and actually staying on one for the greater part of the week. To my delight, it turned out that the three I encountered, two of whom were dead, one living, were three of the most important in India, so I had the chance to encounter the singular power of these three men in person. I thought I would dedicate this post which marks my return to these three men - Ramana Maharshi, Sru Aurobindo Ghose and Sai Baba...

Ramana Maharshi was one of the most famous of all the twentieth century Saints and Gurus of India. So great was his reknown that Carl Jung, when he went to India, made a point of not visiting him. Not only did he not visit him, but he wrote a lengthy article about why he didn't visit him. What is interesting about this article is the fact that he doesn't really explain why he decided not to, except that he felt that India produced Holy Men like Ramana all the time, so there was no real reason to do so. Reading between the lines, one senses that the great man was a little nose out of joint at the fame surrounding Ramana Maharshi. Perhaps everywhere he went everyone said to him 'Oh you must visit his Ashram!' so often that he got a bit fed up with it. A shame, because although the article remains a rather wonderful description of India, it would have been wonderful to know what would have happened had the two men met...

Jung, genius though he was, was always a little suspicious of Indian thought. Although he admired the wisdom of the Buddha enormously, he was not so enamoured of Vedanta and Hindu Mysticism which, to his mind, was the antithesis of his own explorations. For Jung, the purpose of existence was to realise the Self through the Individuation Process. Roughly speaking, this was the evolution of the Self, its development and growth into its fullest nature. It was not the annihilation of the Ego but the transformation of the Ego into something greater than itself, hence his interest in Alchemy with its vision of the transmutation of Lead, the Base Metal, into Gold. For Jung, the goal was to become truly oneself, images of which he included Christ, Buddha and other high expressions of mythic culture such as Mithras, Osiris, Dionysus, Odin and so on. His suspicion, or perhaps wariness about Hindu thought was that to him it was just the opposite, preaching the disappearance of the Ego/Self into the All. Thus instead of realising the Self, in his eyes Vedanta was about annihilating the Self, vanishing it into nothingness. To Jung, this was the antithesis of everything he stood for.

Which is a shame, because the teachings of Ramana Maharshi are not too far from this. His Ashram was the one I spent time on. It was a wonderful experience, even though I was there for only a few days. Had I booked months in advance I could have stayed longer but I wasn't able to even find out where the Ashram was until I got to India, and even then only through the fortuitous event that one of my friends was visiting it while I was in Coorg at the School I was teaching. It is located at the foot of Arunachala, or the Red Mountain, near the town of Tiruvannamalai, a centre of pilgrimage in Tamil Nadu. Arunachala is revered as a physical embodiment of Siva in his guise as the element of Fire (Agni). Legend has it that he manifested as an infinite lingam, or column of flame to prove to Vishnu and Brahma how superior he was to them. Every year in November Sadhus light an enormous pyre there to commemorate this event and, down below in the town, there is an enormous, white-towered Temple honouring Siva as Divine Fire, one of a network of four other Temples in Tamil Nadu which represent his other guises as Divine Water, Air, Earth and Spirit.


Ramana Maharshi didn't found the Ashram, it grew up around him. He arrived at Arunachala as a boy of 16 having had a life-transforming near-death experience which made him understand his existence as Pure Consciousness. I will post his own famous description of the event in the Comments box as a note (1) but, in a nutshell, he underwent a living experience of death in which he felt his body go numb and inert like a corpse. Immediately as this happened, he realised the truth that his body was only a temporary vehicle for something more eternal within - the Higher Consciousness which the Vedantists call the Atman, or World Soul, of which our own individual Atma, or Soul, is part. Suddenly Ramana Maharshi lost all fear of death and from then onwards dwelt in an awareness of this state of Pure Consciousness. He tried to continue life as a schoolboy of 16 and then, thanks to a vision or sense of yearning, found himself leaving his home town of Madurai and undergoing a pilgrimage to Arunachala where he spent the rest of his life, having been guided to the place he needed to be.

Its worth taking a pause here and explaining a little bit about Vedanta and Hindu Mysticism which is the uniting factor of the three Gurus I am discussing here. The word Vedanta stems from the Vedas, the name given to the holy hymns and prayers which form the foundation of Hindu culture. These prayers were 'channelled' by ancient Brahmin Priests of the Aryan conquerors who first poured down into the Indus valley from the Himalayas millenia ago, Veda simply meaning 'Knowledge' (interestingly, the same term for the Western concept of Gnosis and, in a sense, Kabbalah, which means 'received tradition'). Vedanta is the movement or 'Way' which grew out of these divinely inspired hymns and the later Upanishads which supplemented their wisdom. Vedanta, to the surprise of most people who view Hinduism as essentially Polytheistic, is fundamentally Monotheistic. The Vedas and the Upanishads posit the existence of a single Spirit without Form or Limit known as Brahman. This Spirit is universal, omnipresent, immanent and transcendent, containing and sustaining everything, even the Gods. Brahma, Siva, Vishnu, Krishna, Ganesh. Lakshmi, Kali, Durga et al are seen as avatars of Brahman, expressions of this single Spirit which is everywhere. The idea is very much like the Ain Soph of Kabbalah, the One of the Hermetica, the Concealed God of Apophatic Theology, the Tao of Lao Tzu, the Great Spirit of the Lakotah Indians etc etc. Brahman is found in everything, simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. Most powerfully, Brahman i found in the human soul, as the Upanishads say. This is the source of their inherent beauty, a beauty which is also sublimely simple, for the Upanishads reveal the essential truth that Brahman is in us just as we are in Brahman. When we know this, and the knowledge is not dependent upon rituals or obedience or penance, 'we go to God' as the sages say.

Vedanta was of special interest to the Quantum Physicists, most particularly Nobel Prize Winners Erwin Schroedinger and Eugene Wigner for a very simple reason: Brahman was defined as Consciousness, or rather Universal Consciousness. The three key terms with which the Vedantists describe Brahman are SAT, CHIT and ANANDA which translate variously as Being, Consciousness and Bliss or Existence, Awareness, Joy (keen syncretists might want to think of the parallels between this trinity and the Trinity of Christianity). The central term, CHIT, is the key one here, as Consciousness is the prime element of Brahman. Given that the Quantum Physicists were keenly interested in the role Consciousness played in the operation and cohesion of the Universe, the Vedantic concept of CHIT was especially important to them. So it was to Ramana Maharshi and, as we shall see, the two other Gurus I encountered.


Ramana's fundamental teaching was that everything was Pure Consciousness. Indeed, Pure Consciousness was the only Reality. Understanding of this was found in the Atma, or Self, also translated as the Soul. If the Seeker could truly understand this, then the antinomies and conflicts of life would come to an end and he or she would dwell in a constant state of ANANDA, or Bliss, as Maharshi himself did. Thus the actual teachings he gave were very simple, often stubbornly so, for Maharshi was very hostile to all esoteric discussion or enquiry which distracted from the pursuit of this knowledge of the Self. Although he knew his way around all the different concepts of Vedanta, he discouraged speculation on Creation, the Nature of Reality, Reincarnation etc, not because he thought they were false, but because he believed what he called 'Self-Enquiry' was the true route to what he was teaching.

'Self-Enquiry' was the exploration of one's own Consciousness. As one's Atma was the seat of this Consciousness and the bridge to the Atman (World Soul) which was One with Brahman, Maharshi urged his followers to ask 'Who is asking the question?' - in other words to go inwards beyond the waking self into the Brahmanic Self which was behind it. Vedanta recognises four levels of Consciousness, each of which is contained within the four syllables of the Sacred Word OM, pronounced AUM. These levels are Waking Consciousness (A), Sleeping Consciousness (U), Dreaming Consciouness (M) and Brahmanic or Cosmic Consciousness (the Silence after uttering the Word). By asking 'How may the Knower be Known', by passing through the different levels of Consciousness, back through all the different illusions which we call the 'I' to the Universal Consciousness, the Seeker would discover the Brahmanic state of Pure Consciousness that each of us truly is. At this moment, Liberation would occur and ANANDA would fill the Soul... As Ramana said, with characteristic simplicity: "Just be the Self, that is all."

Maharshi lived and taught in the Ashram and in two caves higher up on the Mountain where he sometimes retired with only his Mother for company for extended periods of meditation. He never wrote anything and most of the books that contain his teachings were compiled by Disciples who transcribed his different conversations. If one is looking for elaborate cosmological systems or detailed moral teachings, one is likely to be disappointed, as Maharshi tended to turn every conversation back to his central point. Some listeners found themselves baffled as he tried to head them off from fruitless questions about, for instance, how Reincarnation worked. On one occasion, when a listener was expressing frustration that he had not yet had a vision of Siva, he said to him: 'What is more real? The vision of Siva or the person having the vision of Siva? Ask first who is having the vision.' As an example of how he would try to bring back any inquirer to his central truth it is probably unsurpassed.

Even such conversations were rare as more often than not, Maharshi preferred to 'teach' by sitting in silence among his followers, merely emanating his condition of dwelling in a state of Pure Consciousness. To we skeptical Westerners, this sounds ridiculous, mere poppycock designed to dupe the gullible at worst, a way of avoiding doing anything at best. But I can say from experience that a visit to the Ashram reveals the reality of what these silent teachings must have been. Rudolf Steiner, in his writings about Christ and the Buddha, speaks of how when the soul of these individual incarnate in physical bodies, they do important work but the work is, by necessity, impeded by the obviously obscuring nature of human communication. When they die, their physical bodies give way to an etheric presence - ie the earthly Christ becomes the Cosmic Christ or Holy Spirit, for instance - and the work of the former individual takes on a new, more universal, intuitive but at the same time more easily accessible and effective mode. The physical presence gives way to the all-pervading presence. If this is so, it explains the extraordinary atmosphere of the Ashram and its Meditation Room in particular...


The Ashram is approached by a ten or twenty minute auto-rickshaw ride from the bus station of Tiruvannamalai, which, like so many small Indian towns, is a mixture of wreckage, chaos, suffering and squalor but also warmth, vibrancy and life. The road outside the gates are lined by shops, beggars, crumbling temples and the whacked-out looking Sivaite Sadhus who tend them. Inside the Ashram the atmosphere is infinitely calm, as if noise and sound tread respectfully around the trees and buildings within. The only real noise one hears are the sudden, cacophanous outbursts of the many peacocks and peahens that roam freely there along with the monkeys that bounce around regularly. These peacock choruses are such a prominent feature of the place that they even found their way onto the intro of Kula Shaker's first single, GOVINDA, a song to Krishna put to a rock beat (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SyVaLpa_vc&feature=related). They roam around the small collection of huts and buildings that make up the Ashram, which include the administrative centre, complete with bookshop, the Temple to Siva, which includes a shrine to Ganesh and a monument to Ramana Maharshi himself, a dining hall, the Samadhis, or mausoleums of deceased Saints and Teachers, some other hust which serve as accomodation for the Priests and elders of the community and the Meditation Room.

In keeping with the spirit of the man, there is no strict regimen to the Ashram. What programme of events there is fits on a single piece of paper, most of which describes meal times and a few Pujas (ceremonies) and daily readings. No compulsory Yoga classes, no doctrines or teachings being pushed. Instead, one is allowed to roam free, respectful of others, to experience the place as one wants. The effect is to plunge you into a wonderfully calm, contemplative mood, in which nothing is expected of you and so everything becomes possible. One can sit in the main Siva Temple, made in exquisite marble, meditate, or simply watch the people coming and going, praying and circumambulating the shrine. It is the same for the monument to Maharshi and the other Temple building. One can listen to the readings, walk the shrine oneself, drink in the Vedic hymns sung by the Priests at key moments (even without knowing the Sanskrit the effect of the sound is incredible) or even, if one is so inclined, stay in one's room, thinking, resting and reading. At the opposite end of the scale, its possible to pass through a gate at the back of the Ashram and walk up the mountain to the two small caves where Maharshi used to live and meditate for years on end. Be warned, its something of a trek, and given the baking sun, make sure you take water. Oh, and watch out for the 'helpful' guides!

Meals in the Ashram are communal. One sits on the floor with everyone else and eats off a banana leaf food which is so delicious it baffles the mind. In fact these communal meals were a highlight of my stay there. The group feeling of equality, friendship, lack of pretention and togetherness was wonderful and gave me an insight into what life in a monastery or special community might have once been like.

But the real sense of presence is felt in the Meditation Room. It is here that the true magic of Ramana Maharshi is most tangible and where one understands what his 'silent sermons' must have been to experience. I went in on my first day, aware of the Room's reputation thanks to a leaflet my friend had given me which described the overwhelming feeling of the 'sense of Presence' there. I still wasn't prepared for the enormous emotional experience of going in.


It is a tiny room. When he was alive, this was where Ramana Maharshi 'held court' as it were, reclining upon the bed in one corner, while his followers and disciples sat and asked him questions. Now he is gone a life-size painting of him in the Room has taken his place. The powerful atmosphere in the room is indeed as tangible as I was told. As with the Aurobindo Ashram which I will get to in my next post, the silence and concentration there was something I had never experienced before. I can only describe it as a kind of 'negative silence', a silence beyond silence or below silence. The people within were so steeped in their own meditations that the air felt full of a kind of hidden energy, as if the air had been made especially heavy by the collective concentration of the people within. One didn't even have to meditate to have a profound experience and some of us just sat there, looking about us, staggered by the power of the emotions we were having. I have never been very good at mediatating, but here I could do so and the effect was extraordinary.

The sense of Ramana Maharshi being there in some way was absolutely real and didn't diminish each time I returned to the Room. On each occasion I was struck be the power of the presence in the room, which increasingly felt like a Room in another world. The people there were often so deep in meditation it felt like they were floating outside their bodies, or at least in a very altered state. The sense of communication with something deep, profound and benign was very moving. I myself felt that some kind of dialogue was going on just below the frequency of waking consciousness. So powerful and real was it that if you asked me today, I would tell you that I had met Ramana Maharshi. I understood easily what the books meant when they said that often he would just sit there giving off his energy to all who were present....

I was only able to stay at the Ashram for a few days but I will always be grateful for the experience. I will never forget it, or the different people and Gurus I met there and around it. Tiruvannamalai is one of the holiest towns in Tamil Nadu and Maharshi's Ashram still one of the most revered and respected in India. Its a place where one feels genuinely welcome, not coralled or patronised or told what to think or do. The people I met there were all very genuine. There was none of the false spirituality I encountered in other places of the dreadlocked, beautiful-body, yoga-on-the-beach type, nothing New Agey or bogus, just something very pure and simple and, dare I say it, humourous, as if Ramana Maharshi's welcoming, slightly wry, crooked smile was glowing in every corner of the walls...

"That pure consciousness which is the reality, and which shines without a break, as "I AM" when the mind becomes calm, is the supreme bliss." - Ramana Maharshi

THE FLIGHT OF PEGASUS: AROUND THE WORLD IN A BIT OF TIME

As of next week, I start my voyages around the world. I fly from London Heathrow to Mumbai via Kuwait (!!!) and will travel from there down to Mysore where I will be teaching homeless kids in a remote village somewhere for about a month. After that I will be journeying around India and possibly beyond...

I will be keeping up this Blog from time to time should some mighty ideas occur to me but will also be starting up a new Blog which will just be about my Palin-like adventures in the Far East (that's Michael Palin, not Sarah Palin). Its called THE FLIGHT OF PEGASUS and will be at:

http://flightofpegasus.blogspot.com/

If I have time and find myself at an internet cafe anywhere I will keep the stories coming!

Hope to see you there! Wish me luck!

Pegasus x

A STILL, SMALL VOICE: ISRAEL AND PALESTINE, A PERSONAL VIEW

I wouldn't normally do this, but I have been asked by various friends to put this on my Blog. I wrote it a few days ago on Facebook. Well, here goes:

Amidst the chaos and pain of what is going on in Gaza at the moment, surrounded by the shrill horror and outrage being expressed all over the world, its very hard to keep one's feet on the ground, to hold onto one's perspective and to recognise that in this crucial moment, if we do not keep hold of our sanity, all hell might break loose (if it hasn't already). In a decade steeped in violence, in which hate-mongers on every side have pursued their illegitimate goals seemingly with any kind of international pressure or law removed, this event in the Middle East still doesn't feel like one of many. We have had the Second Intifada, Sept 11, Afganistan, Iraq, July 7, Darfur, the Bali bombings, Zimbabwe, 2006's assault on Lebanon, the violence in Tibet, the violence in Burma, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Georgia and Mumbai, but still the conflict in Gaza seems or being made to seem different. The fury is greater than any of the others, the desire to punish Israel greater than ever before, the condemnation greater than before and, dangerously, the determination on both sides to throw out all humanity and drive this violent confrontation to its bitter end worse than ever. I myself have been caught in stupid and futile arguments with pro-Israelis and pro-Palestinians blind to the suffering of their opponents. Cheerleaders for Hamas, cheerleaders for the IDF seem united only in their blindness to the reality of the deaths of innocents on either side. With the world poised so precariously, as we close a decade marked by immense tension between nations who want to identify Islam as the enemy and nations who want to identify non-Muslims as the enemy, this conflict threatens to drive us all mad and push us all into further bloodlust and killing in the deranged belief that somehow this will make the world a better place. So I felt that I, at least, wanted to say something about this present conflict, if for no other reason than to have some kind of personal catharsis of my own. A million words have been spent on Israel and Palestine. A few more won't make any difference. So bear with me, even though it might be long.

Before I start, to pre-empt hysterical attacks by frothing at the mouth nuts who will mistake my argument as anti-Israeli or anti-Palestinian, let me make my position clear. I hate this violence. I want it to end. I want the children to stop dying and I don't want to hear any more justification on either side for killing. I want an Israel and a Palestine living side by side in security and peace. I want the wider 'players' who have spent this decade stoking this conflict and making sure it doesn't get resolved fairly - America, Syria, Iran - to back off and allow a settlement to be forced through. We are all hoping that Obama will make moves in this direction. Alas, the problem seems intractable. But for all the screamers and shouters out there, let me make clear that my position is both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian. So shut up before you even begin to open your mouths. Or at least read the whole of what I have written and think about it before you begin to fire off.

So what do I want to say? I want to say something reasonable about this conflict, to remind us of the bigger picture before we all go mad and do something terrible we will regret for ever. Unless we keep our heads, we cannot expect anyone on the ground to. And we are looking at the consequences of not doing that right now.


First of all, what are the origins of Zionism? And what is Zionism? Well, first of all, the term 'Zionist' simply means someone who thinks there should be a state of Israel, or a state with a 'Jewish character' in the same way that France is a nation with a 'French character' or Japan is a nation with a 'Japanese character'. That's it. Within that definition are a host of shades of meaning. The original Zionists, for instance, were secularists and socialists, who wanted a secular nation with a Jewish character built along egalitarian lines in which Arabs, Jews, Christians, Muslims etc could live together much as the Indian National Congress of Ghandi and Nehru wanted for India. Let us call this Left Wing Zionism. This tradition was the dominant one in Israel until the 70s, when the balance of power tilted towards the Right, with Likud, lead by Begin, took power, ushering in the growth of what we might call Right Wing Zionism, which is inherently nationalistic, often bellicose, and sees the whole of what it calls 'Greater Israel' as the destined property of the Israelis. Proponents of this have included Begin, Shamir, Netenyahu, Sharon et al, men who believe that the West Bank and Gaza is theirs, that the Palestinians are a lesser or at least an 'alien' people and who have always been more prepared to use violence to further their ends. It was Netenyahu who began the process of ruination of the Oslo Accords after winning the election against Peres, following the death of Rabin (an election won with the help of Hamas who shattered Israeli belief in the Accords with a lethal series of suicide attacks during the campaign) and it was Sharon who, in alliance with Bush, sent in the tanks against the Palestinians during the Second Intifada (having triggered it by visiting the Temple Mount), destroyed the infrastructure of the PA, built the Security Wall which snaked into Palestinian territory and did everything he could to bypass the Palestinians in negotiating the future boundaries of the State of Israel.

Oops. Bit of a rant there. My point is that when people babble about 'Zionism', they nearly always mean the Right Wing kind, or their fantasy of the Right Wing kind. All Left Wing Zionist opposition to it - from Labour and Meretz, from the artistic and intellectual community, from the many Human Rights movements within Israel such as Peace Now - is ignored. All Israelis are tarred as would-be Sharonites. But this is simply not true. The word 'Zionism' is an almost meaningless term in telling you what someone believes. Daniel Barenboim, for instance, calls himself a Zionist but was a personal friend of Edward Said and insisted on giving concerts for the Palestinians even during the Intifada. Artists such as Joshua Sobol, the Israeli playwright who wrote the great play GHETTO, has spent his life working with Palestinians and Israelis, protesting against the Zionist Right and even speaking in the Knesset in protest against the violence going on in the Territories. And then there are the Refuseniks, the young Israeli soldiers who will defend Israel but refuse to serve in the Territories. The truth of Israel is intensely complex. It serves no-one to lump every Israeli into the group-all term 'Zionist' as if this word effectivly means 'Jewish Nazi Who Wants To Kill Palestinians'. And yet so often this is what happens.

Where did Zionism come from? Well its founding father, as it were, was Theodore Herzl, an Austrian Jew who kicked off the dream of a Jewish homeland as a political reality in the 19th Century. Zionism is so often viewed in isolation that it is almost always forgotten that it emerged in a climate where movements for national self-determination were gathering ground all over the world. In Europe, movements of national unity and independence were gaining ground in Germany, Italy and what was then the Austrian Empire. 1871 saw the founding of the unified states of Germany and Italy, four years after the political campaigns of Ferenc Deak had negotiated the double-monarchy of Austro-Hungary. After the failed rebellion of 1848, the Hungarian leadership had been agitating for equal rights within the Empire and, rather than lose everything, the Austrian Imperial family agreed to the compromise of a dual administration. Thus all over Europe formally oppressed or divided people were demanding representation. And not only in Europe. In India the Indian Mutiny/First War of Independence rocked the British establishment to its core and forced it to reorder its rule of the country. People wanted freedom and nationhood. It was in this climate that Herzl found himself inspired to agitate for a Jewish nation. Zionism didn't just sprout out of nowhere. It followed a logic. If a lot of other stateless or disenfranchised people could have a nation, why not the Jews? It kind of makes sense. And indeed its still a question I would like to hear a satisfactory answer to from those who call themselves anti-Israeli!

Nor was Zionism initially violent or aggressive. At the time of the beginning of Zionist immigration to the Middle East, there was no Israel or even Palestine. The region we now refer to was a backwater in the sprawling Ottoman Empire. The early Zionists hoped that as they appeared in the region, developed it and helped it to prosper, the indigenous Arabs would see the benefits and let a Jewish state take form. Deeply naive, perhaps, but it was what they told themselves. Violent Zionism didn't begin until the interwar years, when a Zionist settler called Jabotinsky developed the Iron Wall doctrine in reaction to the attacks Jews were experiencing at the hands of Arabs throughout the 20s and 30s. The official Zionist leadership - Weizmann etc - didn't like Jabotinsky because of his miltancy and still sought to find a way of co-existing with the Arabs and winning a state through careful development and negotiation. Jabotinsky' s view as one of those who took up arms to protect his fellow settlers, was that the Arab world would, quite understandably, never agree to a Jewish state and would oppose it militarily. The only way to force them to come to an accomodation with the Jews was to present an 'Iron Wall' - in other words to make the Jews so invincible that the Arabs would eventually realise that they could not be defeated by violence and would have to come to the table. What is significant about Jabotinsky, however, is that, unlike his successors such as Netenyahu or Sharon, he didn't believe in perpetual war. At some point negotiation would happen, even after a lot of fighting. At some point the time would come for a settlement.

At first Jabotinsky was expelled from the official Zionist movement who saw him as a violence- monger and an enemy to their efforts to develop peaceful relations with the Arabs. But inevitably as the violence escalated, even the official movement began to take on board some of his ideas. They never allowed the extremist parties such as Irgun and the Stern Gang to be part of the fold (something anti-Zionists ignore or forget when they attack Israel's history) but the Iron Wall doctrine still became a central part of Israeli policy. From 1948 to 1973 and, theoretically throughout the 90s, Israel's Labour Party operated in the belief that the day would come when no more wars would have to be fought and a peace could be made with the Arab world. Indeed, the peace treaties with Egypt in 1977 (sealed by Likud but prepared by Labour) and with Jordan in 1994 suggest that their belief might have been within reach - as were the optimistic days of the early Oslo Accords. But since the Second Intifada, the possibility of any kind of peace must seem so remote now. But its worth knowing about this Iron Wall policy when evaluating the Israeli 'disproportionate response' to Palestinian and Arab attacks. Israel operates with the belief that it is a tiny nation surrounded by enemies. It can only keep its position in these circumstances by maintaining total miltary superiority. If it shows any weakness, it opens itself up to attacks. Thus retaliation has always been a key element in Israeli foreign policy. Negotiations will only happen when they feel secure and in a position of strength, which is why the failure of the 2006 Lebanese War was so disastrous for them and why they are going all out against Hamas. Once the Myth of Israeli invincibility is lost, they believe they will be wiped away. This is not a justification for Israel's actions, its an explanation of the psychology behind it. Expecting the Israelis to operate along the standards of European nations who have lived in peace for 60 years is a hiding to nothing and a hypocrisy. They live under immense real and imagined pressure. Unless they are handled with this awareness, nothing will move forward. The Israelis will not negotiate unless they feel safe. And they don't.

The source of this 60 year problem is, of course, the famous (or infamous, depending upon your view) Balfour Declaration of 1917. In this Declaration, the Zionists secured from Balfour an expression of support from the British Empire for the establishment of a Jewish homeland so long as the religious or political rights of the Palestinians were protected. The British made this Declaration for two reasons. Firstly, they needed the Zionists' support in the region in their campaign against the Ottoman Turks, who were then allies of Germany and Austro-Hungary in the First World War. Secondly, because they never thought they would have to keep it as a promise. At the same time as the British were promising the Zionists a nation, they were promising the Arab tribes self-determination and nationhood if they agreed to help them against the Ottomans as well. Who cam forget the famous scene in Lawrence of Arabia in which Lawrence demands of Allenbrooke assurances for the promise he has made to the Arabs that they can have independence after the war? Allenbrooke hesitates for a moment, his face drops and then suddenly he remembers himself, smiles and then says enthusiastically 'Of course'. In the end, Britain never kept any of its promises either to the Arabs or the Jews. Instead, after WW1, France and Britain carved up the Ottoman Empire into protectorates and client states. Britain got Egypt, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Jordan while France got Syria and Lebanon. The aims of Arab Nationalism got nowhere and the Zionists got nothing. At the root of this conflict, then, lies the duplicity of the British Empire.

And it doesn't stop there. Britain held onto Palestine as a Protectorate until 1947 when the Arab-Jewish violence became too much. At the same time, the Zionists ,driven to desperation, had embarked upon a campaign (yes, a terrorist campaign) against the British authorities to force them to keep their promise in some way. All this came to a head in 1947 when Britain threw up its hands and passed the problem onto the UN. Its a common lie that Israel was created out of the world's desire to make amends for the horror of the Holocaust. This simply isn't true. If this was true, why didn't it happen in 1945 or 46? In actuality, the Jewish refugees from the Holocaust were being kept in camps all over Europe, with no-one willing to take them in - not America, not Britain, not anywhere. Most of them were told by the Allied authorities to go home to the countries they had come from - Poland, Russia, the Baltic States etc - the very populations which had enthusiastically collaborated with the Nazis to have them exterminated. Attempts by Jewish refugees to get to Palestine were blocked by the British. Driven mad by desperation, the Jews in the region embarked on the campaign of violence against the British authorities, a campaign not, alas, that different to that waged by Palestinians in the Territories over the last two decades. It was when all this became unmanageable that Britain gave up and, as with the issue of India and Pakistan, pulled out unceremoniously without ensuring a clean or just handover behind them.

The UN came up with an utterly unworkable plan which created a binational Israeli-Palestinian state in the region divided up like four quarters of a single state with Israel taking the top left and bottom right parts and the Palestinians taking the top right and bottom left. There were hopes that this would force the two communities to work together economically and politically. Some say that the plan was deliberately set up to fail. It was expected that the Arab states would reject the plan (which they did) and invade, driving the Zionists out. Indeed, the Arab armies were largely armed by the countries which had drafted the UN Declaration, while an arms embargo was put on Israel. The Jordanian Army was led by British officers (the famous Gen Glubb Pasha was head of the Jordanian Legion). The only nation to supply Israel with arms was, you will be surprised to learn, the Soviet Union under Stalin, who hoped it could be used as an ally against America in the region. Alas, this plan failed, although contrary to popular belief, America only became a staunch ally of Israel in 1967 after it defeated the Soviet-backed Arab states. Before then, it had remained either neutral or hostile, as in 1956 when it opposed the British-French-Israeli campaign against Egypt over the Suez Canal. From then until 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the region was another Cold War battlefield, just like South Africa, with Israel backing Saudi Arabia and Israel and the Soviet Union backing Egypt, Syria and Jordan at different times. Its no coincidence that the Oslo Accords happened at the same time as Apartheid had come down. The PLO and the Arab states no longer had the USSR behind them and America no longer saw itself as needing to support an ally in its struggles as it had done now that the old enemy had disappeared. George Bush Snr pushed forward the peace in South Africa, Clinton went for a peace between Israel and Palestine. In a time when there was no Big Bad Guy waiting in the wings, peace seemed in reach. Again, its no coincidence that, under Bush and the so-called 'War On Terror' support for the Right Wing in Israel from Washington has been unquestioning. Maybe without a wider peace, a specific peace in the region will not happen.

There is, then, a history to this conflict. One which we forget (or don't know about) but which the people on the ground do not. Indeed, it informs everything they do. The chaos of the 1948 War, in which there was an exchange of populations similar to that between India and Pakistan over Partition, is surrounded by claims and counter claims of ethnic cleansing and duplicity. About 300000 Jews were driven out of their homes by the Arab armies at the same time as 300000 Palestinians were driven out of theirs by the Israelis, a fact almost wholly forgotten, largely because the difference was that the Jewish refugees had a home to go to while the Palestinians didn't. Since then, after 60 years, the Palestinians remain far away from their dream of a homeland. Even their fellow Arab nations have not allowed them self-determination. Between 1948 and 1967 the West Bank and Gaza were annexed by Egypt and Jordan. Palestinian refugees in all the neighbouring states are not taken in or given citizenship, with the exception, now, of Jordan. Instead they languish in camps every bit as squalid as those in the Occupied Territories. Wars have been conducted against them by Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, often because of Arafat's attempts to overthrow the governments of those countries. In the Territories, the Palestinian people have been bombed, shot at, starved, imprisoned, blockaded, bulldozed and had settlement after settlement built on their land (this is an inescapable and unjustifiable fact even for those who are pro-Israel). They have been allowed precisely two elections - one in the 90s which Arafat won, cancelling any others which he thought he would lose, and one in 2005 which Hamas won. Even if one is a supporter of the state of Israel, it is hard to look at videos of the living conditions of the two peoples and not be disgusted by the disparity in comfort. What the Palestinians have had to put up with is hopelessly unfair to say the least. It is no wonder that the population has been driven almost mad with fear, suffering, pain and rage.

At the same time not a day or week has gone by in the whole history of Israel without some kind of attack across their borders. They have had to fight four wars against their neighbours - in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 - all against overwhelming odds (there were more tanks on the Syrian Border in 1973 than on the entire Russian front when Nazi Germany invaded in 1941) and have become embroiled in Lebanon again and again since the 80s. Meanwhile they have had to defend themselves against constant border attacks over the years from the PLO, Hizbollah and Hamas and relentless suicide attacks throughout the 90s, especially during the period of supposed negotiations during the Oslo Accords. Meanwhile on the airwaves, threatening proganda pours their way from Iran, Syria, Lebanon and God knows where from. Land-grab or not, the Security Wall is a symbol of how terrified and despairing the Israeli population is, however tough and defiant they may appear to the world. Nobody stops to think about the fact that unique among the nations of our planet, Israel is the only country which has some form of security wall around all its borders. It is totally encased in defences of concrete or barbed-wire and wood, protecting it from attacks from Hizbollah in the north, Hamas in the south and suicide bombs all along the border of the West Bank. If Israel do end up holding on to the Palestinian land west of the Wall, it will come at a cost. People often liken Gaza to a prison. Israel is destined to become one big bunker or fortress, or, dare I say it, one big concentration camp. It was Begin, I think, who described the borders of Israel as the borders of Auschwitz. Seen from an Israeli point of view, it is tragic that, having escaped the original borders of Auschwitz to found their own state, they find themselves hunkered down behind another military boundary, a terrible physical symbol of how the Jewish people still see themselves in the world - friendless and needing to defend themselves at all costs as no-one else will do it for them.

None of this is a defence of Israel or justification for 300 dead Palestinian children. What it is is an attempt to get into the heads of the two communities, to try to understand where they are coming from and why they do as they do. Because if we don't, if we go on thinking that the Palestinians or the Israelis just wake up every morning deciding, without any cause, to be violent, we will get nowhere. If we continue to believe that all Palestinians are rabid, unnegotiatable-with lunatics bent on killing or all Israelis are jackbooted racists barely restraining themselves from massacring all the Palestinians, we will go on lying to ourselves and justifying any act of terror and violence. One of the ugliest elements of arguments over this issue is the tendency of otherwise rational people to pick over every death and give it a relative value. Israelis should put up with rockets and suicide bombs because they are an evil country. Palestinians should put up with their schools being blown up with their children in them because they voted for Hamas. Its no good. In all the hysteria and condemnation over this issue, the calls for economic blockades, for punishment of the Rogue State of Israel, for support for the wiping out of Hamas, the marches for Israel and against Palestine or for Palestine and against Israel, where are the voices which are calling for peace, for negotiation, for a condemnation of violence on both sides? In short, where is the march in favour of BOTH Israel and Palestine?


Why is it impossible to recognise the legitimacy of both peoples' calls for justice, security, honour? Why should the Palestinians have to live in squalor, their rights taken away, with no home? Why should the Israelis have to live in a constant state of readiness to protect themselves against threats from Hamas, Hizbollah, Iran and Syria? When the Saudis pushed forward their Peace Plan again last year, Iran wasted no time coming forward to say it wanted no part of it. We all want a solution, but it will not just depend upon Israel and Palestine. The wider players will also have to agree to stop using the conflict as a way of increasing their control of the region.

What no-one seems to understand is that whatever the outcome, security and justice for Israelis and Palestinians is going to involve them having to find way to get on with each other. A military solution is impossible, as everyone knows but will not accept. The short-term catharsis of violence gives both sides the illusion they are doing something when in fact they are not. Hamas and Hizbollah's dream of destroying Israel and creating an Islamic Republic is never going to happen. Likud's dream of a Greater Israel without any Palestinians is never going to happen. Besides all that, there is absolutely no way that an Israeli and a Palestinian state existing side by side will not find themselves intimately interwoven politically, culturally and economically. The two sides are never going to get away from each other. The only way is to find some means of living together. But while we wait for Hell to freeze over before either side realises it, we will just go on seeing this futile carnage and have to endure the hysterical and hypocritical bleating from supporters of both that they are the real victims, that their acts of violence are justified while the other's is not and that, somehow, a dead Israeli child is more or less important than a dead Palestinian one, depending upon which set of killers you are waving a flag for.


The problem is that for anyone other than an Israeli or a Palestinian, this conflict is a kind of abstraction or political game. For the protagonists, it is real. Everyone enjoys getting on their high horse about this issue, demonstrating their indignation, thrilling themselves by their moral righteousness about their anti-Imperialist stance against the Zionist Entity or refusing to back down in front of 'terrorists' and the Axis of Evil. None of it does a shred of good. The only way is going to be negotiation. We know its hard. After almost a decade of knife-edge wheeler-dealing during the nineties, with the uselessness and corruption of the Palestinian Authority's leadership on one side, and the capriciousness and impossibility of the Israeli electoral system on the other, the Oslo Accords dissolved into disaster and the Second Intifada. People wanted violence more than they wanted accord. The tragedy is they were very close. I have read the documents on the Taba negotiations and they were a breath away from sorting it out. But violence won. The Israelis blame Arafat, the Palestinians blame Barak. We know negotiations are hard. But they are the only way.

Here is what I want to happen:

1) A ceasefire now in Gaza, before either side can claim a victory. That way neither side can lose face. If Israel get bogged down and cannot defeat Hamas, it will be a disaster for them as everyone will know they can be beaten. If they wipe out Hamas and flatten Gaza, it will never be forgotten or forgiven by the Palestinians. Stop the fighting now. Israel lets humanitarian aid in and lifts the blockade while Hamas agrees to cease firing rockets. All hostilities will cease. If need be an international force polices the borders, as Israel has asked for.

2) Once a ceasefire has been established the main international powers involved, or the Quartet as we call it, pushes forward with a non-partisan plan to bring both sides to the table for negotiations. This will involve Israel recognising Hamas as a democractically elected government and Hamas recognising Israel's right to exist. People tend to forget that Israel has been asking Hamas to do that. If Hamas are a democractically elected leadership and so should be recognised, so should Israel be recognised by Hamas, as it too has a democratically elected government.

The Palestinians should be represented by a power-sharing Government consisting of Fatah and Hamas, as was possible a while ago. Unless the Palestinians are united, they will never hope to get anywhere with Israel.

3) Taking either the Taba Negotiations of the Saudi Peace Plan, negotiations need to begin involving all the regional players - Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Egypt etc - to create a comprehensive and just peace for all parties. Incentives MUST be given by the international community to both sides to compromise and find a way towards common ground. If need be, threats of economic sanctions will have to be used to gain leverage, although it would be great to avoid this. George Bush Snr managed to force Shamir to the table with the Palestinians in the 90s by threatening to freeze the US subsidy to the country. If any party - and I mean ANY party, not just the Israelis if anyone thinks that is what I am saying here - refuses to cooperate, such leverage will have to be used.

4) All violence will have to cease on all sides - Hamas, Hizbollah, Israel etc. Both Israelis and Palestinians must be enabled to live without the threat of death coming through their door at any moment.

The only way in which there will be a solution is if this concerted, unified effort takes place. Everyone is hoping that Obama will embark on such a process once he is in power. But no-one knows if this will happen or if a settlement will be possible. All we do know is that there is no other way. The signs are not terrific. The arch-revenant of the Right, Netenyahu, the architect of the destruction of Oslo (and, some say, one of the voices which helped lead to the atmosphere of extremism that lead to Rabin's death), looks like returning like some creature from the Living Dead. Clinton couldn't make him play ball. Obama will have a real struggle to bring him to the table. On the Palestinian side, there are only signs of disarray, despair and disunity, with no clear, strong, pragmatic leader to unite their people. But if we don't do it, the pain will go on, the violence will go on and the conflict will continue to serve as a means to polarise the world community, to inflame passions and encourage extremists to further war and bloodshed. Other than a new push for peace, what alternative is there?

One thing we can all do is refuse to give in to hysteria and refuse to shout loudly for the punishment of one side or the other. We are not there. We are safe in our homes. Taking sides, while emotionally satisfying in the short run, will not help any more. We have to aim for something else - the reconciliation of the two peoples. If we can't do it from this distance, how can we expect them to?

And if we don't, we could find ourselves bearing witness to an even greater catastrophe, one which will devastate both communities. Its unthinkable. Ask yourself: do you really want that?

DISSING DICKY D: THE DELUDED DUDE: PART THREE

So let's look again at what the Penis-Headed One has to offer about Quantum Physics. Firstly, he says that its conclusions are based on "assumptions" which are "so mysterious that even the great Feynman was moved to remark : 'If you think you understand quantum theory... you don't understand quantum theory'."

Well, perhaps by this reasoning Dawkins DOES understand Quantum Theory, because he clearly DOESNT understand it, as none of the basic principles of Quantum Theory are assumptions at all. Rather, like most science, they are observable facts (insofar as anything is a fact). Action at a distance or non-locality, in which separated electrons act as if they are unified even at infinite distances, the tendency for things at a subatomic level to exist as potentials until they are observed and interact in some way with something else, the ability of electrons to exist in two places at once, the fact that everything is part of a unified, seething mass of quantum processes, these have all been OBSERVED by Scientists. They have not been 'made up' or 'assumed'. Unfortunately for Dawkins, the controllable, understandable, discrete world of cause and effect on which his entire world view is based dissolves into holistic uncertainty when it reaches the Quantum Level. Poor him. No wonder he regards the whole field as 'that rarified pinnacle of twentieth century scientific achievement'! It leaves him clinging to a bit of drift wood after the Good Ship Darwin has dissolved into a sea of weirdness.

Nor is Quantum Science 'true in some sense' because it makes predictions well. It is as true as any other scientific observation. Nor is it rarified, as the findings of Quantum Science have delivered us concrete 'things' which include lasers, DVD players and so on, simply by the way in which we have begun to understand how things operate on such a tiny level. So Quantum Science is NOT rarified at all. It has delivered the much-needed material pay-off scientists like Dawkins need to feel safe about things... A Materialist does need something material to hold onto after all.


Le Dawks goes on to speak of the 'shatteringly paradoxical' and 'shatteringly wasteful' Copenhagen and Multiple Worlds Interpretations of Quantum Physics, both of which he says violate 'common sense', that superbly scientific tool which loosely translates as 'what we can see' and 'how we think things are' (for a giggle, find out how Einstein defines it). Does this suggest Dawkins perhaps doesn't understand what he is talking about, hence his repeated quoting of Feynman on this point? Or is he wary of Quantum Science because it challenges his mechanistic/deterministic world view? Well if its the latter, he isn't alone, as this remark from Einstein reveals:

"All my attempts to adapt the theoretical foundation of physics to this new type of knowledge completely was as if the ground had been pulled from out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built." - quoted in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist

Poor Einstein! But at least he was brave enough to acknowledge what Bohr referred to as the sudden "insufficiency of our simple mechanical conceptions", as did Heisenberg when he said:

"The violent reaction on the recent development of modern physics can only be understood when one realises that here the foundations of physics have started moving; and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science" - Physics and Philosophy

So Dawkins finds himself in the position the Church started to find itself in in the Renaissance when Galileo and other Scientists began to unearth truths about the Universe which contradicted their long-established view. Poor Dawks! Of course, one hopes he doesn't start erecting stakes in outside the Royal Society with the intention of burning Quantum Scientists.

Even worse for Richard, the great giants of early Quantum Science found themselves turning to ancient texts by deluded Hoodoo merchants from India and China to grasp a better understanding of what they were discovering (so maybe we DO need those stakes after all!). Here are a few Scientists you may have heard of referring to Lao Tzu, the Buddha and others:


"The general notions about human understanding... which are illustrated by discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature of things wholly unfamiliar, wholly unheard of, or new. Even in our own culture they have a history, and in Buddhist and Hindu thought a more considerable and central place. What we shall find is an exemplification, an encouragement, and a refinement of old wisdom." - Robert Oppenheimer

"For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory... [we must turn] to those kinds of epistemological problems with which thinkers like the Buddha and Lao Tzu have been confronted, when trying to harmonise our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence." - Niels Bohr

"The great scientific contribution in theoretical physics that has come from Japan since the last war may be an indication of a certain relationship between philosophical ideas in the tradition of the Far East and the philosophical substance of quantum theory." - Werner Heisenberg

So where does that leave Mr D? We have had Einstein acknowledging the 'religious geniuses of all ages' and now Oppenheimer, Bohr and Heisenberg all giving the nod to Buddha, Lao Tzu and the Upanishads! One might even surmise that these other Scientists had READ these texts, unlike Dawkins, who has not. But as we have seen, Dawkins doesn't need to, as he can spot a book covered in pasta from a mile off. Of course, once again, none of this proves God exists, but the argument that anyone who does believe this is an idiot and cannot possibly have anything to offer the Pure Endeavour of Science is starting to look decidedly thin...

The more we dig into Quantum Theory, the more outlandishly mystical its claims are about our Universe. We have established, for instance, that Quantum Theory points to a holistic vision of the Universe at a subatomic level. Even if one takes out the role of the Observer in establishing 'wave collapse', the concept of 'Entanglement' - in which when two electrons interact they become as one, thus fixing their states and, in larger 'Entanglements', forming material objects - leaves us in a mysterious situation in which everything is bound up with everything else. Worse than that for Dawkins, this 'Entanglement' is completely universal in nature. If the Big Bang theory is correct and all the Matter in the Universe was contained in a single point, then a) the Universe is no bigger in terms of Matter than it was then and b) every electron/proton/neutron in that Boson that has been thrown out into the Universe as we know it as is operating non-locally with all the others ie it is 'Entangled' and capable of operating along the lines of 'Action At A Distance', as mentioned above. This means that the Universe is, quite literally, an enormous web of interacting electrons, protons and so on. It genuinely is One, with all the independent things within it only appearing to be so, just as the Mystics have said. As Marcus Cheown puts it:

"There is a ghostly web of quantum connections crisscrossing the Universe and coupling you and me to every last bit of matter in the most distant galaxy. We live in a telepathic universe. What this actually means physicists have not yet figured out." - Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You

Of course, when Cheown uses the word 'telepathic', he doesn't mean it literally. What he means is that, given the observable phenomenon of 'Action At A Distance' and 'Entanglement' they act 'as if' they were telepathic. In other words they seem to exchange information between each other in a way we don't understand, or at least not yet. One suggestion is that the Speed of Light is being violated, but that would go against a central tenet of Relativity Theory. Another is that they interact through through the superimposition of an infinite number of Multiple Universes which come into being at the instant any Quantum Process has taken place. Another is that the 'Action At A Distance' indicates that the Universe operates in a state of unbroken wholeness. None of these please Dawkins much as an explanation. A shame. But there's no pleasing some people. And only an irrational fool dares criticise Science, don't you think? Thank God Dawkins has Feynman's quote to let him off the hook of trying to understand these ideas!


No, Cheown doesn't mean 'telepathic' literally. To mean it literally would mean the Universe had a mind, wouldn't it? If that were so, wouldn't it be a bit like 'God'? Ridiculous! Except some Quantum Scientists are saying just that. David Bohm, for instance, who I have mentioned before, reasoned that, just as our physical universe emerges out of a wider, potentially infinite sea of Quantum Processes (demonstrably true), so does Consciousness. Just as Matter is concentrated Energy, so is Thought, an elegant idea which might explain how the brain and human nervous system is able to convert electricity into Conscious Processes. Thus Matter and Consciousness are seen to be synonymous, just as Time and Space are thanks to Relativity Theory:

"We have shown in some detail that matter as a whole can be understood in terms of the notion that the implicate order is the immediate and primary actuality, while the explicate order can be derived as a particular, distinguished case of the implicate order. The question that arises here, then, is that of whether or not the actual 'substance' of consciousness can be understood in terms of the notion that the implicate order is also its primary and immediate actuality. If matter and consciousness could in this way be understood together, in terms of the same general notion of order, the way wold be opened to comprehending their relationship on the basis of some common ground. Thus we could come to the germ of a new notion of unbroken wholeness, in which consciousness is no longer to be fundamentally separated from matter." - Wholeness And The Implicate Order

If Bohm is right, it would overturn all the biological determinism of modern science with its view that Consciousness is an 'epiphenomenon' of the brain. It would overturn all Dawkins' smug notions of evolution as a purely random process, as Consciousness would have to be taken into account as part of the evolutionary process - something Quantum pioneer Wolfgang Pauli himself suggested. With this interpretation, instead of being dependent on Matter, Matter becomes a means by which Consciousness transmits or expresses itself, the two being one. Not only that, but by implication Consciousness would have to be a latent property of the entire Universe with us as concentrated, localised expressions of that Consciousness, just as our physical bodies are concentrated, localised expressions of the material/energetic quantum processes of the Cosmos. In fact Bohm's theory stands to reason, even if it is hard to 'prove'. If all Matter is non-local and entangled, independent material objects being just expressions of a universal Quantum Field, then how can Consciousness not be the same? If the boundaries of Matter are illusory thanks to the Field, how can Consciousness not operate in the same way? Just as we would have to draw a distinction between a general field of Quantum Matter and localised material objects (eg our bodies), we would have to draw another between a generalised field of Consciousness and localised, differentiated Thought (eg us). Alas, all this just lets in the back door every Mystical notion known to Man ie that the Universe is Mind, that God or Siva is 'dreaming' us, that the we are all microcosms of a macrocosmic First Thought or that as Buddhism says, 'mind and matter are eternally the same'. The nutty delusion-merchants were all correct. Einstein's Cosmic Religion comes full circle. And Dawkins' 'common sense' idea of Science looks like a dusty old dinosaur being picked over by a dessicated Cardinal, both clinging to their rather limited concepts of what the Cosmos might be.


It gets more interesting when one follows the implications of the Consciousness/Matter theory to its logical conclusion in terms of Relativity Theory. If Consciousness is interwoven with Matter which we perceive in three dimensions and if Time is the fourth dimension, interwoven with three-dimensional Space, then it follows that Consciousness must in some sense be the fifth dimension, as it is part of Matter which is the same thing as Space. It is also an Energy, as all Matter is Energy. And Energy at its basic level is Light. Thus the whole Cosmos is Sentient or Conscious Light forming itself into different shapes, some of which are more Conscious than others. And to take things one step further, we know that our physical Universe only exists thanks to its relationship with the Speed of Light. Its existence, therefore, is relative. Thus in one sense, it is an illusion, possibly one of many other levels of existence moving at different speeds, some faster, some slower, and all filled with Dark Energy and Matter, none of which we can see or detect... And if Everett is right, all of these Universes and levels of existence are splitting off into infinite number of other Universes all around us every moment of the day...


Sound silly? Sound almost Mystical to you? And yet these are all things which are being debated by scientists. The problem is that at the moment we cannot test or 'prove' any of it yet beyond thought experiments, theory and mathematics, so we have to rely on, er, faith, or at least abstract thought until we find a way to do so. As popular a theory as String Theory, for instance, would require devices the size of the Solar System to even begin to verify them. So what are we to do? Well we can go back to our safe little Dawkinsian world with its fixed, deterministic rules and close the door of the cage on ourselves. Indeed this is exactly what Ricky does do, putting forward his 'Middle World' theory of a human mind evolved so as not to see things as they are because it didn't need to. If it did, it would not have been able to maintain itself in our apparently three-dimensional world:

"Our mental burka window is narrow because it didn't need to be any wider in order to assist our ancestors to survive" - The God Delusion

A point put perhaps more vigourously by the arch-enemy of Science and the probably the greatest exponent of loony mystical bonkerdom, William Blake, when he said:

"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." - The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell

How could two such opposing minds come together and reach the same conclusion? Dawkins thinks only Science has tried to "emancipate ourselves from the Middle World, tear off our black burka, and achieve some sort of intuitive - [again that word Intuitive! What happened to Reason?] - not just mathematical - understanding of the very small, the very large, and the very fast?". He is wrong, very wrong. Science is one of the many ways in which we have done this, Mysticism has been another. The correspondences between the findings of both seem to point to some kind of unity of insight. Indeed the whole endeavour of the human race has been to penetrate to the truth of things long before Dawkins's heroes came along, which is why people who have explored Mysticism probably have no problem grasping the non-linear reality of Quantum Science (although New Age woolliness doesn't help). Not only that, but the ideas of some of the people he has most contempt for, or would have if he had heard of them, might just hold some answers. Then we might be able to combine the inner study of the Mystics and the outer study of the Scientists into something very special, something which might be able to bring us together instead of tearing us apart.

But as we hold our breath waiting for this to happen, we can be sure of one thing: God loves Richard Dawkins too!

DISSING DICKY D: THE DELUDED DUDE: PART TWO

Before we get on to Quantum Physics, let's just rewind a moment to Einstein's notion of a 'Cosmic Religion' which Dawkins says 'we can all superficially sign up to'. If one looks at what Einstein actually said (which as we have seen Dawkins probably didn't), unfortunately for him, this vision of the Universe as one enormous harmony before which one stands with awe is exactly how the Mystics of all ages saw it. Einstein acknowledges as much by citing St Francis of Assisi, Democritus and Spinoza as sharing his vision. What Dawkins doesn't seem to realise is that these people ascribed a numinous intelligence to the natural world, believing that what we call 'God' revealed him/her/itself through Creation. In other words, the physical world was 'alive' in some way, suffused with some life-giving energy which lay behind the harmony we can see throughout it. It was contained something transcendent as well as immanent. Thus Einstein is not saying what Dawkins says he is saying ie that Cosmic Religion is just worship of the processes of Nature. St Francis, for instance, could not by any stretch of the imagination be regarded as someone who did not believe in God, and yet Einstein includes him in his roll call of geniuses. Now, this should invalidate Dawkin's argument, but it doesn't, or if it has, he hasn't noticed. So how can a bunch of hoodoo merchants possibly come up with something akin to what Einstein believed? Or rather what Dawkins THINKS Einstein believed? Well, at the risk of getting totally bogged down in 'definitions' and 'proofs' of God's and his/her/its existence, here goes at having a look...

The notion of a God which reveals itself through Creation is common to every single Mystical Tradition. In almost every instance this 'God' is not non-personal and both immanent and transcendent, therefore corresponding exactly to Einstein's definition of Cosmic Religion. Here are a few examples:

"God is whole and constant. In himself he is motionless, yet he is self-moving... He is hidden yet obvious everywhere. His being is known through thought alone, yet we see his form before our eyes. He is bodiless yet embodied in everything. There is nothing which he is not... He is the unity of all things... He is the Whole which contains everything. He is One, not two. He is all, not many. The All is not many separate things, but the Oneness that subsumes the parts. The All and the One are identical. You think that things are many when you view them as separate, but when you see they all hang on the One and flow from the One you will realise they are united - linked together and connected by a chain of Being from the highest to the lowest, all subject to the will of God" - the Hermetica


"The journey to God begins with the awakening to the concept that the phenomenal world is a veil which conceals the Divine. We begin the Quest by removing the veil, only to become aware that the veil and the Divine are one and the same thing. The veil is the theophany itself: the manifestation of the Divine through Its Names and Qualities. When we see the veil, we are seeing nothing but the Divine." - Laleh Bakhtiar (Sufi Mystic)

"The Ancient of Ancients, the Unknown of the Unknown, has a form, yet also has not any form. It has a form through which is the universe is maintained. It also has not any form, as It cannot be comprehended." - the Zohar

"There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all." - St Paul

"Exalted in songs has been Brahman. In him are God and the world and the soul, and he is the imperishable supporter of all. When the seers of Brahman see him in all creation, they find peace in Brahman and are free from all sorrow." - the Upanishads


Oh dear! Does this mean that Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jews and a whole lot of other nutty deluded fools were closer to Einstein than we think? To be fair on Squawkins, his view is a LITTLE subtler than this. Here he is on Einstein's Cosmic Relgion:

"As I continue to clarify the distinction between supernatural religion on the one hand and Einsteinian religion on the other, bear in mind that I am calling only supernatural gods delusional." - the God Delusion.

Okay! I get it! In fact Dawkins is a closet Mystic who is united with the 'greatest religious geniuses of all ages' and would be happy to rub shoulders with the likes of Ibn Arabi, Meister Eckhardt and Rabbi Isaac Luria. Or maybe he believes in Tree Spirits and Water Nymphs? They at least are natural. Or the Great God Pan? Or Ogun? Or maybe Dionysus, the God of Indestructible Life? Somehow I think not, although he gets close to saying something like it when he says, quoting Einstein again:

"'To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious [says Einstein]'. In this sense I too am religious, with the reservation that 'cannot grasp' does not have to mean 'forever ungraspable'. But I prefer not to call myself religious because it is misleading. It is destructively misleading because, for the vast majority of people, 'religion' implies 'supernatural'. Carl Sagan put it well: '...if by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity'." - the God Delusion

The muddle of this passage needs a little unravelling. Firstly, no-one did more to make 'graspable' the workings of the Universe than Einstein (considerably more than Ricardo himself), so it is fair to assume he didn't mean what Dawkins thinks he meant. This throws up another point which is what we mean by a Mystic. Dawkins says that a Mystic believes there are things which are beyond understanding 'and we should leave it at that' when in fact if anyone looks into Mysticism they will know that the opposite is the truth. The origin of the word Mystic is from the notion of the Initiate into Mysteries - in other words someone who is NOT leaving anything 'at that' but is trying to penetrate the inner Mysteries of the Universe. Dawkins assumes Mystics operate on Ignorance, when in fact a key element of all Mystical systems is the defeat of Ignorance, hence terms such as Gnosis or Enlightenment and the unusual fact that a lot of Mysticism deals with issues of Consciousness, the nature of Reality and the processes of the Cosmos regardless of the existence or non-existence of God. This is why so much esoteric study is as much about processes of Creation, study of natural phenomena an states of Consciousness as it is about spirituality, morality and 'God'. The writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, for instance, are a case in point. Whole chunks read like Science lessons and indeed it comes as no surprise that this most esoteric of books was a profound influence on people like Kepler, Newton and even, it would seem, the first splitter of the atom Ernest Rutherford, who included Hermes Trismegistus on his coat of arms, presumably not because he wanted to identify himself as a deluded idiot.

The Sagan quote shows, once again, the low level of understanding in evidence here. As Dawkins says 'for the vast majority of people, 'religion' implies 'supernatural' ". Alas, this applies to Dawkins too. In spite of his polymathic-telepathic knowledge of all the different things the world's religions 'imply', for Dawkins, 'God' is to be defined on the most primitive and basic of levels - a supernatural being outside Time and Space who punishes bad guys and rewards good guys, responds to prayers and favours his followers. Thus he is fighting on the same low level most of his opponents are on. The absence of a personal God is central to Mysticism, as Einstein pointed out. The Kabbalists, for instance, characterised God as an Infinite Field of Conscious Light (an interesting idea given Relativity Theory and E=MC2 as a paradigm for existence), with our world of physical things as an expression of that Light (again, see Relativity Theory). Granted, one doesn't find this spoken of much in Synagogues, but it is nevertheless a major part of Judaic thought. If one looks further than the Cornflakes Packet Guide To World Spirituality, one finds that the same definition holds true in Greek Orthodox Christianity, Platonism and neo-Platonism and - hey - pretty much all the other spiritualities of the world from Zoroastrianism, in which God's name is 'Right Thought' (Ahura Mazda) and all of Creation is made out of Light, to the Supreme Intelligence of Buddhism of which we are all part which is also pictured as an iridescent light. Out of all these visions of Light the material Universe unfolds, suffused by that Light even in its most dense forms of Matter. Once again, we are close to the ideas a certain Einstein came up with...


A God of limitless energy which reveals itself in created things is exactly what Sagan is clumsily lurching towards, defeating his own argument by suggesting that any God which is not anthropomorphic is 'emotionally unsatisfying'. Thus believers in any kind of 'God' are in a Catch 22 situation. An Anthropomorphic God is emotionally satisyfing but silly while a Universal God revealed in Nature is not silly but emotionally unsatisfying. So where does that leave us? Well, given the ubiquitous nature of of the latter vision of the Divine throughout the Mystical Traditions of the world, one would have to conclude that Carl is wrong, at least about the 'emotionally unsatisying' part. But I like the idea of Richard Dawkins the believer in a natural God. That would be fun, don't you think? He does, after all, say that Pantheism is 'sexed up Atheism'. Sounds plausible to me. If we look at the history of Pantheism as evinced, for instance, by pre-Christian cultures, they all thought along the lines of Dawkins, did they not? I would have thought so. Pop in a time machine back to the era of Paganism and ask them if their worship of the Great Mother was 'sexed up Atheism' and they would be bound to tell you 'Oh yes, Mr Dawkins! It certainly is! We are just pretending to worship the creative power of Nature as personified in Eoster/ Astarte /Danu /Ishtar /Isis etc. And while we are at it, what do you think of our theory of the structure of the atom?'


What Dawkins is doing is confusing his hatred of Religion with the possible existence of something more than the material. Dawkins' anger is towards the hypocrisy, double standards, superstition and repressiveness of so much Religion, be it Caste oppression in India, female circumcision in Muslim Africa, Creationism in the Christian Right in the US or hatred of homosexuals in the Catholic Church etc etc. Well, we can most of us sign up to that. Einstein certainly did! Dammit I can sign up to that! But because these practises take the existence of God as their justification has nothing to do with whether God, however we chose to define him/her or it, exists or does not exist. Many spiritually-minded people refuse to follow any religion because they dislike its excesses in much the same way as Dawkins does (me for instance). Equally, many people within religions retain a clear-sighted awareness of where their religions have gone wrong without losing their own personal faith. Likewise being interested in the existence of things like 'God' or the Soul does not mean you suddenly have to subscribe to what a bunch of Rabbis, Priests or Imams tell you. In other words, the reality of all these things is infinitely more subtle than Dawkins is willing to admit. Better minds than his have grappled with these issues from a religious/spiritual and non-religious point of view and come up with more fascinating and compelling answers.

Besides which, as a Scientist, Dawkins should be aware that the most current theories about the origin and workings of the Universe are so extraordinary that even ideas such as his take on Evolution become rather paltry in the light of what is really going on. In a recent book on Quantum Theory I found Cosmology described as 'the ultimate science', operating on a scale which dwarfs almost every other discipline we have, and yet this seems to be something he knows little about... which brings me rather neatly round to where I was going to come in: Quantum and Relativity Theory... Shall we take a look and see where these take us?

DISSING DICKY D: THE DELUDED DUDE: PART ONE

As readers of this Blog will have noticed from my many references to the man, I am a great admirer of 'Popular Scientist' Richard Dawkins (pictured here without the penis which is normally seen growing out of his head). Polymath, genius, witty raconteur, possessed of enormous breadth of vision and empathy as well as raffish good looks, few can compare in terms of insight and understanding of the true nature of existence. His comprehension of the nuances which differentiate Theism, Atheism, Deism and Pantheism (he seems not to have heard of Panentheism. Too many syllables perhaps?) is breathtaking. And all this without actually having to find out about any of them! As he says in his book The God Delusion in rebuttal of those who accuse him of not knowing what he is talking about, he doesn't actually NEED to know what he is talking about in order to be able to talk about it:

"To expand the point, most of us happily disavow fairies, astrology and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, without first immersing ourselves in books of Pastafarian theology etc." - The God Delusion

I'd just like to say what a pleasure it was typing that out. Touching genius is always exciting and for sheer poetry and use of language, that passage matches the best of any sacred book. Also, hats off to a man who believes in 'Reason' and 'Evidence' arguing in praise of his own ignorance. That is impressive. To reinforce his point, he moves on to rebut the accusation that he uses the 'Straw Man' method of attacking religion. This refers to the practise of creating one's opponent in one's own image - eg saying all religious people are stupid, behave like 'Robertson, Falwell or Haggard, Osama bin Laden or the Ayatollah Khomenei' (a direct quote, I kid you not) or believe in an utterly simplistic view of God, ignoring all other expressions of religious feeling - and so setting up an easy target to attack. Well argued as this is, it seems strange to claim one isn't doing this when only half a page before one has been proudly proclaiming that there is no reason to find out what any of these people actually believe. Such is Dawkins's genius that he can understand where his opponents are coming from through a kind of miraculous mental osmosis. He doesn't have to read books. Only those he is arguing against need to do that. He just knows. Amazing. To adapt the words of Bill Hicks, that's Reason in action for you!

I am being unfair, of course. Elsewhere in the book Dawkins shows that he is enormously well read on all sorts of subjects. On Carl Jung, for instance, one of the most interesting of explorers into the psychology of religion and spirituality, he has this to say:

"It is in the nature of faith that one is capable, like Jung, of holding a belief without adequate reason to do so (Jung also believed that particular books on his shelf spontaneously exploded with a loud bang)." - The God Delusion

Presumably Dawkins didn't feel he needed to actually READ anything of Jung's to come to this conclusion. It doesn't appear that he has even read the book in which he describes this 'exploding book' incident (Memories, Dreams, Reflections if anyone is interested). But then why would he need to? After all, Jung only helped revolutionise our understanding of how the mind works and went deeply into the nature of spiritual belief in all its forms. I mean, its not as if he knew anything about it. To say that Jung had 'no adequate reason' to believe in God would seem astonishing considering his lifelong work in the study of the mind, his voluminous reading and his friendships with some of the century's greatest thinkers. At the very least he could not be accused of 'not looking at the evidence'. But no matter. Dawkins doesn't have to read any of his stuff to know what he thought. All he has to do is look in the Oxford Book of Quotations or the back of a Cornflakes packet.

He's not all wrong, though. Here he is on Newton, a fellow scientist and one, he admits, who doesn't necessarily fit into his idea that no scientist ever, ever, ever, even if he said he did, believed in God:

"Newton did indeed claim he was religious. So did almost everybody until - significantly I think - the nineteenth century when there was less social and judicial pressure than in earlier centuries to profess religion, and more scientific support for abandoning it." - The God Delusion

I love this argument, one which he extends to all artists and thinkers before the nineteenth century (including people like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci) that as only stupid people have any spirituality all the most talented people in the world could only have been pretending to be religious. In other words, they were closet atheists, just like Richard, only bullied into pretending to believe in God. So there we go. Sophocles, Homer, Dante, Milton, Wordsworth, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, T S Eliot - all these people were just pretending. Sounds plausible to me. After all, if they were not all pretending, then they must have been psychotic and mentally ill, which is what Dawkins suggests when he defines what he means by delusion.

But lets look again at that sentence about Newton, that he "did indeed claim he was religious". Of course, Dawkins is right here. He did 'claim' it. Here is Newton 'claiming' he was religious and his views on the relationship between his discoveries and God:

"Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done." - quoted in Isaac Newton: Inventor, Scientist and Teacher

On God and Nature:

"This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent Being. … This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called “Lord God” παντοκρατωρ [pantokratōr], or “Universal Ruler”. … The Supreme God is a Being eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect." - Principia, Book III

And here he is on Atheism:

"Opposition to godliness is atheism in profession and idolatry in practice. Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind that it never had many professors." - A Short Scheme of the True Religion

Of course, Newton was only pretending when he said this. He was also only 'pretending' to be interested in arch-Hoodoo practices Kabbalah, Astrology and Alchemy (his translation of the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus is one of the most famous in the world) and most especially when he wasted a lot of time and energy writing the first ever study of a Bible Code! Indeed, Dawkins would probably be deeply upset if, in an altruistic act of descent from his lofty Tower of Ignorance, he were to discover that Newton's studies of Alchemy were probably the most important single influence on the development of his Scientific ideas. Newton was in fact a militant anti-Atheist, unpleasantly so, as intolerant as Dawkins is in his non-belief. I sometimes wonder if Dawkins isn't actually Newton reincarnated, arguing from the opposite point of view to work off some weird karma.

The point I am trying to make is not that Newton's spirituality or Jung's erudition mean that God exists, only that Dawkins' argument that Belief is incompatible with Science (or even intelligence!) is totally fallacious, as is the idea that Science began in the last two hundred years. The roots of rational thought lie in ancient Greece, for instance, one of the most religious and myth-orientated cultures in the world, while cultures like the Egyptians and the Mayans achieved astounding feats of architecture and astronomy in spite of believing in a host of bizarre-looking Gods.This is not even to get on to the subject of the incredible variety of artistic achievement involved with a religious or spiritual world view. From ancient Greek theatre to the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, spirituality has gone hand in hand with the most extraordinary artistic creative power. But of course, I forgot: they were all only pretending.

Its not fair to slam Dawkins so easily. He does know a lot about religion. Really. Here he is on some of the more Eastern beliefs:

"I shall not be concerned at all with other religions such as Buddhism or Confucianism. Indeed, there is something to be said for treating these not as religions at all but as ethical systems or philosophies of life." - The God Delusion

There might indeed be, unless one had actually looked into them. If he had, he would know that Confucianism genuinely ISN'T a religion and never pretended to be. It was always a philosophy, so even bracketing it with Buddhism is wrong. As for Buddhism, well clearly Dawkins is happy with ideas of Reincarnation, the Threefold Body, the Greater Consciousness of which all is part, the Six Worlds in which one can be incarnated and the legend of Shambala? Is he familiar with the Boddhisatva Vow? Or the many Saints of Mahayana Buddhism? Or is it possible that, in fact, he doesn't know anything about it at all? After all, how could one fit all that information on the back of that already crowded cornflakes packet?


I'm not even going to get into Dawkins and Einstein, whose ideas on these subjects were much subtler and informed than his successor. Einstein was certainly not a Believer in any traditional sense but nor was he a Materialist Atheist like Dawkins. Indeed he was far more humanist than Dawkins, who, if you look deeply into what he says, is actually deeply reductionist in his Darwinism and his view of human nature. Nor did Einstein believe, as Dawkins did, that Religion had made no positive contribution to our culture or civilisation, or that no religious person was possessed of any insight or understanding:

"The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling [Cosmic Religion], which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no Church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with the highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as Atheists, sometimes also saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi and Spinoza are closely akin to each other." - The World As I See It

Doesn't quite sound like Dawkins does it? Curiously enough, Dawkins doesn't quote this passage in his book (must be that damned Cornflakes packet again!). Einstein genuinely WAS a polymath and someone who was well-informed. If he rejected something, he knew what it was first. He rejected organised religion having been brought up with it. I have some respect for that. Dawkins was brought up an Anglican (a little like judging Chinese food by a bowl of plain noodles) but stopped there. Einstein actually studied ethics, philosophy, religion, mysticism, art. Not for him Dawkins' muddling of religion up with spirituality & mysticism (or even God!). The four are all interrelated, but they are not the same. In drawing a distinction between figures such as St Francis of Assisi and the average Believer, Einstein shows an awareness of the nuances of what he is talking about. Indeed, he touches upon the universal spirituality which is shared by the Mystics of all cultures - largely because he actually knows about them. Dawkins does not. Its all just one big bowl of noodles for him (we are back to the Pastafarian gag). He's going to empty them on your head no matter what and claim he's come up with a dispassionate, rational argument while he does it. Oh. And I have just realised that I DID get into Einstein and Dawkins, having said I wouldn't. How irrational is that?

But its futile criticising Dawkins for his ignorance about the things he attacks. And nor do I disagree with everything he says, as my own comments on the problems of organised Religion on these boards might suggest. I'm not a Creationist and don't belong to any Faith. Nor do I take literally every idea I have put on these posts. For me, all of these Mystical Systems are metaphors for something else - higher states of Consciousness if you like, an enhanced understanding of who we are and what we might be. They are ways of talking about experiences we have, images we can use to release insights and free ourselves from stultifying ways of thinking. All well and good. But what I don't believe is that we are only lumps of evolved meat, nor are we vehicles for genes to propagate. And if he had even a bean of intellectual honesty (something he likes to bang on about a lot) he would admit that Darwinism does not explain the source or creation of life, only how it evolved once it started. Even if it did, it explains nothing about the origin of the Universe. One doesn't need to believe in God to know that that mystery still remains unsolved (although he does say 'We're working on it' which is good to know). Sorry, Richard. I don't buy it. What we do know is that Dawkins' view is reductive and exclusive. There's plenty of proof for that. He thinks he has the monopoly on the truth. He does not.

But you are not going to win this argument with Mysticism. As I say, its futile to attack Dawkins with spiritual ideas. If one wants to run rings round him, one must take him on on his own turf - Science. This is paying him something of a courtesy, as he won't do this for someone arguing against him, but never mind. So where does Science open the box he is so determined to close up and seal? Well, lets see what he has to say on a subject which we have already discussed on these boards:

"Quantum Mechanics, that rarified pinnacle of twentieth century scientific achievement, makes brilliantly successful predictions about the real world... This predictive success seems to mean that quantum theory has got to be true in some sense; as true as anything we know, even including the most down-to-earth common-sense facts. And yet the assumptions that quantum theory needs to make, in order to deliver those predictions, are so mysterious the great Feynman himself was moved to remark... 'If you think you understand quantum theory, you don't understand quantum theory'." - The God Delusion

Again, all well and good. But then he goes on to say that 'Quantum Theory is so queer that physicists have to resort to one or another paradoxical 'interpretations' of it. Resort is the right word." He then trots through the main 'interpretations'. Fellow militant Atheist Everett's 'Multiple Universes' Theory is 'staggeringly wasteful' while Bohr's 'Copenhagen Interpretation' is 'not wasteful, just staggeringly paradoxical' (although he doesn't say what it is or why). In the end, he says, all of this fails to satisfy either 'human common sense or intuition' (Intuition? What? The opposite to Reason?!), but 'the more macho scientists don't care' as long as 'the mathematics work'.

And this is pretty much as far as it goes in terms of discussing it... Dawkins suddenly slips off into a conversation about how 'queer' the Universe is, the ridiculousness of psychic goats and then how terrific it is that Science is asking these questions (as if nobody else ever has). Faced with the complete rebooting of our concept of 'Reality' suggested by Quantum Science, Dawkins runs back to his cave with his idea of the 'Middle World', or the 'common sense' reality we can touch or feel. Why? Well clearly for two reasons.

1) he doesn't understand Quantum Theory (that cornflakes packet again), nor does he want to, hence his nervous ridiculing of it and

2) because it completely violates every assumption - physical, scientific and metaphysical - upon which he bases his views...

VISIONS OF JOHANNA: THE LAST SUPPER: PART FIVE

"As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you; if ye keep my command- ments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in these things, and abide in his love. These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full." - John 15:9-11

It is Paul who makes the connection between Love and the Holy Spirit overt:

"And now abideth Faith, Hope and Love, these three; but the greatest of these is Love." - 1st Corinthians 13: 13

It is a favourite device of the New Testament writers to refer to the Trinity in veiled terms through the use of three parallel words. Here Paul equates the Father with Faith (we have Faith in the Father because we cannot see or feel him), Hope with the Son (who gives us the message of the future) but we Love through the Holy Spirit. Thus Love in the guise of the Holy Spirit, or the Holy Spirit in the guise of Love which completes the drama of the Incarnation, pervading everything, uniting us with each other and with the Divine:

"No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us. Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit." - 1st John 4:12-13

Thus just as the great Kabbalists understood the role humanity had to play with God in healing the Universe, the great Christian Scribes of the New Testament understood how the energy of Love provided the perfecting connection to be made between God and all Creation. The great Beguine Mystic Marguerite Porete, drawing upon the ideas of Augustine, took this to its most sublime conclusion when she wrote that the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost were to be understood as 'the Lover, the Loved and Love':

"Beloved, what do you wish from Me?
I contain all things which were,
And are, and shall be,
I am filled with all things.
Take from me all which pleases you:
If you desire from me all things, I will not deny.
Say, beloved, what do you wish from me?
I am Love, filled with the goodness of all things:
What you will, we will.
Beloved, tell us plainly your will."
- Marguerite Porete: The Mirror Of Simple Souls.

So Love and the Holy Spirit prepare us for the final chapter of John's account of the Last Supper, the great threnody to God from Christ, unsurpassed anywhere else in the Gospels. Everything is coming to a head. The Divine connection has been made between Christ and the Godhead. The most sustained communication with the Divine in the whole of the New Testament is about to unfold. If John's Last Supper is not already Mystical, it goes way beyond the boundaries here, as ideas of Man and God, Time and Reality, Gnosis and Faith merge into one.


The Chapter starts with a continuation of the process of Glorification mentioned before. As the 'circuit' is established in the first Chapter with Judas' exit, it is continued and intensified here. As Christ speaks directly to God, the language of the lines becomes pregnant with meaning, as if something is being channelled from on high, the Divine Energy being passed on to the Disciples. In so doing, something of Christ's Cosmic Nature slips through:

"These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee: as thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him. And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent. I have glorfied thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with thine own self with the glory that I had with thee before the world was." - John 17:1-5

That last line in particular is fascinating. It bends time, revealing Christ's nature as an expression of the Logos as being continuous across Time. In the wording is an echo of the words of the Sophia in the Book of Proverbs:

"The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was... Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him." - Proverbs 8:22-23 & 30

Some theologians equate the Logos of the opening passage of the Gospel of John with the Sophia as well as Christ, seeing the process of Creation as being an interplay between the male and female energies of God, the Sophia becoming a hypostasis with the Trinity. For the Gnostics, this was doubly so, with the Sophia and Christ being Syzygies of each other, or two parts of t the same entity. Whatever the case, there seems to be a Sophianic echo in these words, and a stronger revelation of the pre-existence of Christ. This is, of course, not the only place that this occurs in John's Gospel. There is also the cryptic discussion in Chapter 8:

"Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: he saw it, and was glad. Then said the Jews unto him, Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham? Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am." - John 8:56-58

The inference here is that Christ as Logos appeared in some way to Abraham, perhaps as Melchizedek, as some commentators argue or as the 'three men' of Chapter 18 of Genesis. Whatever the case, there is a little timebending going on, just as there is in the description of the Trinity which begins Revelations:

"Grace be unto you, and peace, from him which is (the Son), which was (the Father) and which is to come (Holy Spirit)". - Revelations 1:4

We are being encouraged to think 'eternally', or non-linearly in terms of Time. Past, present and future are being seen as one. And as Christ's nature is potentially our own, as we shall see, it is being revealed that this non-temporal state is also ours.

A significant line in the passage quoted above ("And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.") reveals the essential Mystical/Gnostic element of the Christ message. Indeed, it is in this Chapter that we can understand why the Gnostic Christians valued John's writings so highly. For when Christ refers to 'knowing' God, he is referring to the Gnosis, the 'Knowledge' of God which was so prized by the Gnostics and so denied by the traditional Christians, who placed Faith as the primary source of Christian experience. If Christ is not talking about the Gnosis here, then what does he mean by:

"O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee: but I have known thee, and these have known that thou hast sent me." - John 17:25

And indeed this is where the Gnostic and non-Gnostic interpretations of Christianity should come together, contained in these central statements of Christ's doctrines. Christ speaks at length about "he that believeth in me" being rewarded, but without the 'Knowledge' of the Gnosis, which presumably lies behind the whole Incarnation, the Christ Message is pointless. Church teaching has always been about waiting until after death for the Beatific Vision of God. Here in John's Gospel, this is directly contradicted. Faith and Knowledge must come together to create the Union with God which is the centre of the Gospel message.


As Christ exhorts the Father, he brings in another element of the process of Theosis, the Name and the Word. As the Glorification continues, everything becomes about transmission of energy from the Father through the Son, onwards to the Apostles and, by extension, to all who come after. The ultimate end of this process is a relationship with each other which is identical to that of Christ with the Father:

"I have manifested my name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world: thine they were, and thou gavest them mel and they have kept thy word. Now they have also known that all things whatsoever thou hast given me are of thee. For I have given them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received them, and they have known surely that I came out from thee, and they believed that thou didst send me. I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me; for they are thine. And all mine are thine, and thine are mine: and I am glorified in them. And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are one." - John 17:6-11

"That they may be one, as we are one" - what more Mystical a statement could there be? While Catholic and Protestant teaching has put a gulf between human experience and God, John compares the possible experience of the Disciples, and by extension us, as being exactly like that between Christ and the Father. So we see how the Christ Nature is potentially our own. John is not alone in this vision, of course. In Matthew Christ says "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect" (Matthew 5:48), suggesting a state of perfection available to humans the same as that enjoyed by God. Once again, the radical nature of the Christ Message emerges. This is what Meister Eckhardt meant when he said that "The first fruit of the Incarnation of Christ, God's Son, is that man may become what the Son is by nature". Further, through the connection between Christ and his followers Christ is himself 'Glorified', just as he 'Glorifies' God and vice versa. Spiritual channels are being opened up between the Father, the Son and all humanity in which all become 'ensouled'. The image of Unification is absolutely clear. And in a passage quoted in an earlier post it is overtly described in terms of an inheritance, passed down through generations of followers from the moment of the Last Supper onwards:

"Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe in me through their word; that they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one even as we are one. I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one." - John 17:20-23

Again we have that word 'perfect', the term given to the Cathar leadership (Parfait/Perfecti). Surely it refers to a state of Wholeness, of completion in the Spirit, the Healing the Soter/Saviour has come to do. Wholeness and Unity - these are the key elements of these words, a Wholeness and Unity which combine Love, Truth, Gnosis, Faith and the Holy Spirit, all merged into a Union with the Father and the Son which is both within and outside Time. Of these qualities, it is Love which is the most important, and it is with this that John's description of the Last Supper, with all its Mysteries ends:

"And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and in them." - John 17:26

Once more we learn of the indwelling of Love and Christ in us. There is no separation, no conditions, not even much talk of sin and very little of any kind of intermediary between humanity and the Divine.

These, then, are the Mysteries of the Last Supper, recorded at length by John. Their complexities are subtle and neverending, but lie at the heart of the energetic life of Christianity. It is no wonder, perhaps, that this Gospel out of the four has most appealed to the Mystics, whether heretical or orthodox. It expresses a grass-roots spirituality which, far from being anti-human, is profoundly humanist. The issue of what the Churches have made of this message, how it has been obscured, misunderstood, confused, ignored, denied and, let's face it, often violently suppressed, are the subject for another time. For now we may be grateful that with all the revisions and changes made to the New Testament over the centuries, somehow the Gospel of John has made it through with its greatest words more or less intact. Perhaps their obscurity has not helped, but that is the way with Mysticism, although one could also argue that their obscurity is how they have been able to survive the scrutiny of those who would happily keep us all in a spiritual prison and throw away the key. There is no concept of Original Sin here, just a description of a spiritual inheritance available to all, whether the historic expression of Christianity in our world understands it or not.

And in the hope that one can keep hold of the Spiritual Baby while throwing out two thousand years of stinking bathwater, this analysis of John's account of the Last Supper comes to an end...