Eyre Lines

(Part 1 of this post looked at how we try and fail to deal with continua conceptually)

I spent around 30 years of my life as a practising lawyer, and the law is perhaps the area of human endeavour where black and white thinking is most evident. It’s obviously so in criminal law, but almost equally so in civil law. We need certainty; is this person guilty or not guilty (only in Scotland, as far as I know, is the middle not excluded, with their third verdict of “not proven”). Is this money owed or not owed? Has this person broken the terms of a contract or not? Should this person be ordered to do (or not to do) something or not?

It is not always easy to choose, particularly where the facts are somewhat unclear, as evidenced by the number of cases in which juries are unable to agree. This difficulty led to the UK government abandoning the old need to have 12 jurors all agree on a guilty verdict, and introducing the majority verdict. These days, you can have two dissenters in a jury of 12, one in a jury of 10. It also led to the abandonment of jury trials altogether in almost all civil cases in the UK (which is a move not followed in the States).

Even when unanimity was required, juries not infrequently got things wrong.

There was also the issue of needing to make a decision when, frankly, you didn’t know if there was a heap or not, in cases decided by judges only, or where the judge issued a strong direction to the jury. Inventive lawyers (including judges) would twist the wording of existing cases a little in order to avoid a result which was patently wrong, and that twist became a part of the law, to be followed, under the system of precedent, by future courts. Those courts, in turn, would feel they needed to twist a little more in some case, and the result was often a very unnatural interpretation of language. The legal maxim there is “hard cases make bad law”.

There are a couple of well-known quotations of Jesus which play on this X / not-X dichotomy; Matthew 12:30 and Luke 9:50; in the first, whoever is not with us is against us, in the second whoever is not against us is with us. The middle is excluded – but, of course, if you take the two quotations together, it is paradoxically allocated in both directions. Rather than ask whether scripture contradicts itself here, I suggest this should be read as paradoxical and pointing at the fundamental inadequacy of human language, which depends on such oppositions. It also depends on us creating the arbitrary dividing lines in continua, (in this case the disposition of others towards us, which may be anywhere between near-identity of objectives, and total enmity), which characterise the discussions about “heaps” and about turquoise. The truth of things is that there are often not such arbitrary dividing lines, despite what our language forces us to say.

Nowhere is this more seen, these days, than in politics. Oh, and in religion – in the Islamic world, the fundamentalists consider any slight deviation from their hardline interpretations of the Hadith to put people “beyond the pale”, including a large percentage of other Muslims, in Christianity, we are regularly seeing people condemned as outside the faith by the Evangelical “gatekeepers” (for instance Rob Bell for suggesting that “love wins” and espousing universal salvation, and a list of academics fired or persuaded to resign from religiously conservative seminaries and universities because their views had developed in a direction which was thought not to adhere exactly to the Westminster Confession or even stricter standards). But then, religion IS political since the Constantinian revolution.

In politics proper, however, we have in the last two years seen two events in opposite sides of the Atlantic which have produced horribly polarised, black and white divisions. In the UK, the issue was Brexit.

In the lead-up to the referendum, I talked with a lot of people about their likely vote. While my long term friends group and my facebook friends were nearly unanimous in rejecting a vote for Brexit, the area I live in voted over 60% for Brexit, and a lot of less close acquaintances were going to vote to leave the EU. There were members of both camps who thought there was only one correct answer, but quite a number on both sides were, on the one hand, dissatisfied with many aspects of the EU, and on the other, willing to accept that the EU has brought many advantages to us. Those in these groups were making a decision because they had to, but where the issue was not so clear cut for them.

I myself voted to remain in the EU; although I don’t like the current lack of direct democratic control in the institution (in which more power is with the appointed Commission and with the Council of Ministers appointed by the various national governments), I don’t like the slavish following of neoliberal economic policies by the European Central Bank (and, to be honest, by most of the hierarchy) and I am unhappy about the subsidy structures, which operate in favour of continental small farmers (including, in Germany, a lot of hobby farmers), the sheer likely economic pain of losing our single unified market of over 500 million people (the UK market is about 11% of that size, and well over half our trade is with other EU countries) weighed very heavily on my thinking (and although Brexiteers claimed that we would be far more prosperous if we left, all studies which have come out since the vote indicate that we will be 5-10% poorer overall), I really favour one of the original founding principles of the EU, which was to ensure by binding countries together that we did not repeat the two world wars of the 20^th century, both of which were primarily European wars, and I tend to think that the only way of standing up to global multinationals (some of whom could buy and sell the UK, and we may not be alone there) is to have a more global rather than a less global government.

Many of those I talked to who were voting for Brexit were doing so on the basis that we would be more prosperous (or, at least, not massively less prosperous) if we left, or because we “needed to take back our democracy”, although the EU is democratic, albeit a flawed democracy, and almost all of the European legislation that people cited as intruding on our sovereignty would need to remain unchanged if we were to have anything remotely approaching free trade with Europe. These were just two of the arguments for leaving which I found wholly unconvincing – indeed, only two people I spoke to had what seemed like thoroughly rational reasons. The first thinks that Europe is going to fall apart in the near future due to its internal political differences – and he may be right, but I’d rather wait until it’s clear that is going to be the case.

The other said “I want to see the world burn”. Yes, if that’s what you want, voting for something incredibly damaging might well do the job – although, really, it was a protest vote (as were many other people’s); it was a way of showing that they were dissatisfied with the way the government was functioning. And they never expected to win…

Since the vote, however, I have heard a constant chorus from not only the longstanding Brexiteers that “the people have spoken, we are leaving the EU” irrespective of what terms this can be achieved on. “If we have to crash out with no trade agreements at all with Europe or the rest of the world, that is the will of the people, and it must be followed”, they say – and that includes a raft of MPs, mainly Conservative but some Labour, who originally campaigned to Remain. It is, of course, the case that there was a very small majority among those who voted, and there was no majority if all voters were to be counted – and, in the case of something which demands a major constitutional change, I really feel that there should have been a supermajority. However, that was not the basis on which the referendum was couched (though neither was the fact that it would be considered binding on parliament…)

Institutions and companies are now relocating to continental Europe and the negotiations to secure some form of new trade deal cannot possibly be concluded by the “leave date”, as many pointed out would happen (and we haven’t even left yet). However, if those of us who are now seeing our fears realised, dare to suggest that the facts of the matter are now much clearer than they were when we voted, and it would be only reasonable to ask the electorate to review their decision based on these new facts, we are berated as “Remoaners”, asked to “get behind the programme” and “make Brexit a success”. To that last one I tend to reply that it was their damn idea, and they should be able to do that without my help – indeed, they should have thought about the “how” first  – as for me, I do not believe that Brexit is capable of being made a success.

See how the creep of ideas has gone – from an on-balance decision, hoping for a decent trade deal (and preferably the kind of trade arrangement Norway has with the EU, which several prominent Brexiteers suggested would be likely), which on my responses most Brexit supporters expected, it is now “If we have to crash out of well over 50% of our national markets, what of it? The people have spoken.”

In the USA, of course, the similar issue is the election of Donald Trump to be president. This was another election which, I think, few expected to go the way it did, at least until the very last minute. I am much less knowledgeable about US politics than about those of the UK, and have to admit that I know only two or three people who voted for Trump, so my sampling is not nearly as good.

In that case, however, it didn’t take until after the election for the sides to become fairly polarised; at an early stage some I spoke to were saying they would hold their nose as they voted, but would vote for Trump (because Hilary Clinton “is corrupt”, something I personally find difficult to accept given the level of scrutiny she has been subjected to for decades now), or would hold their nose as they voted, but vote for Clinton, because – well – Trump!

In the early days of his candidacy, few I knew took him seriously; even those I knew who went on to vote for him thought him lacking in any experience with a deeply unpleasant personality and habits, and no real clarity about what he stood for, given his conflicting positions on so many things, but once he was the candidate, things changed.

There was of course during the primaries, a third possibility in the form of Bernie Sanders (a candidate with policies much more along the lines I favour), and a fair amount of my US friends group were Sanders supporters. In much the same way as lines were drawn and positions hardened after the Brexit vote, quite a few of those utterly refused to contemplate voting Clinton after the primary result, some even to the extent of voting Trump – ABC, anything but Clinton! Their position, with which I have much sympathy, was that Clinton was thoroughly in the pocket of big money, and was therefore going to give us “more of the same”, and change was absolutely needed – but to vote for big money directly in the form of Trump? (Actually, to vote for any Republican, given their track record of complicity with big money, astonishes me from anyone with even slightly liberal views). There was some comment that the Republican machine would operate reasonably irrespective of the personal characteristics of the president, or his competence, or his financial ties to foreign states. I perhaps had some hope that that might be the case for, oh, a couple of days after the election result…

But again, there are a couple of “ABC” voters I know who take the “I want to see the world burn” position. Just as with Brexit, I can respect their position, while wishing fervently that we could somehow prevent the conflagration.

As with Brexit, however, since the result became known, I hear choruses of “well, he’s the president, and we should now support him and give him respect” – very much along the lines of “the voters have spoken”. Again, finding out that he is not going to “clean the swamp”, fight Wall Street or, indeed, do anything for middle and lower class voters, and seems to have little clue as to what a president is actually supposed to do, is not producing the “new facts, need to re-evaluate” response. People are just yelling “anything but Clinton” more loudly…

“He who is not with us is against us” rules, to the exclusion of “He who is not against us is of our part”.

Except when you’re claiming a majority, of course…

I suppose, going back to my initial musings, it’s a form of “excluded middle” fallacy – except we’re almost all somewhere in the middle (at least until we are forced to take sides), and so the system eventually manages to exclude all of us.

Perhaps the Taoists have the right idea – everything is black or white in their famous “yin and yang” symbol, making a concession to our need to find boundaries, but the two parts are always inextricably linked, and there is a little point of white in the black, a little point of black in the white.

(Part 3 of this post will look at a specific and very controversial example of black and white thinking in religion, politics and law).

I have friends who are ardently against digital recordings, feeling that analogue recordings (tapes or vinyl) reproduce sound far better than does digital recording – and I fancy they may well be right, though my own hearing is no longer sufficiently acute (or practiced) to convert me to their camp, particularly given the vast convenience of digital recordings. Some of them blame computers, which (at least so far) are resolutely digital devices, having grown up from what were initially a modest number of logical “gates” which were always either “on” or “off”. In the prehistory of computing, those were mechanical, then they became valves, then transistors, and these days are the equivalent of vast arrays of transistors all on a tiny sliver of silicon. Those friends yearn for something more analogue, which they imagine to be more like we are ourselves. Biologicals against computers…

And yet I find that it is not just the convenience of having pieces of kit which deliver yes/no answers to everything  which is “at fault” (of course those include answers which are very long strings of Y/N, binary numbers, such as 001011011001011101001000, which when long enough give an illusion of being analogue); we have developed, in our language and in particular our logic, our own binary predisposition.

It’s not the computers – it’s us.

In order to define anything, we define what it is not – a binary opposition. If you think back to your schooldays, the archetypal essay question started “compare and contrast…” It seems we rarely know what a thing IS until we can work out what it is NOT.

Western logic, at least, has the principle of the “excluded middle” – a thing is either A or not-A, there is no middle ground. OK, some Western philosophy has attempted to move beyond that – postmodern philosophy, in particular, is keen on the ideas of “excess” or “remainder” . In my eyes, it does not deal with these in a particularly comprehensible manner,  though in conscience that may merely be a reflection of my own tendencies to black and white thinking; Eastern philosophy has, perhaps, done it better (and earlier) as witness Peter Adamson’s podcast on Nagarjuna’s tetralemma. (Nagarjuna was a Buddhist philosopher of approximately the second century CE).

In brief, the tetralemma initially acknowledges that there are actually four answers to “is this X?”; “Yes”; “No”; “Neither yes nor no”; and “Both yes and no”. Nagarjuna, however, then goes on to argue strongly that, actually, none of these is the case in a plethora of instances. He would no doubt have loved the app which (to make a philosophical point) leads you to the conclusion that you don’t know what “soup” is.

In the West, however, philosophers have been arguing about when a trickle of sand onto a surface makes a “heap” or a “pile” for millennia. I’ve been present when people have argued quite loudly as to whether turquoise is blue or green – they may have been helped by Nagarjuna to come up with the answer “both and neither”. In fact, it’s a range on the spectrum of visible light between about 490 and about 520 nanometres, and you can expect arguments as to exactly where those dividing lines are… and they are arbitrary. They would be arbitrary even if the range were between (say) 505 nm and 506 nm. Nanometres are themselves arbitrary divisions.

This tendency has lead to some significant theological problems, among other things. “What is God?”, for instance, given the general impulse to apply superlatives to describing God. “God is all in all”, for instance. If there is no “not God” to contrast God against, how do we even start to conceptualise what-it-is-that-is-God? This is a particular problem for the panentheist or pantheist, for whom God is radically omnipresent, but also for anyone taking omnipresence really seriously.

In a linked example, Sam Harris here explores with a Buddhist contemplative, inter alia, the issue of how to talk of mystical and contemplative experience of God, given the dissolution of the sense of boundary between the self and other, highlighting the difference between Advaita Vedanta (which talks of union of the self with the all) and Buddhism (which talks of the self becoming nothing, and the all as being void).

(Part 2 will look at law and politics, with some further nods to religion).

Mystics have traditionally been considered very suspect by the Western branches of Christianity. Meister Eckhart was accused of heresy (though he died before judgment could be pronounced), Miguel de Molinos was imprisoned for the latter years of his life, and others were sidelined (frequently to monasteries) and treated with considerable suspicion; most of those who wrote did so in elliptical ways, possibly as much to avoid the attentions of the church hierarchy as to express what is possibly a fundamentally inexpressible experience. Some wrote anonymously, such as the authors of “The Cloud of Unknowing” and the “Theologia Germanica”. Even in the early 20th century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was regarded as extremely suspect for his “Milieu Divin” theology.

In the late 20th and early 21st century, however, mysticism has at least sometimes been seen in a more positive light. Father Richard Rohr, for instance, is very widely known, and is respected across many divides within Christianity. There is still suspicion, however – Marcus Borg’s mysticism-based identification of Jesus as “spirit man” is one of several factors which led to him being anathema to conservative Christians. It is, I suppose, hardly surprising; mystics have access to what at the very least feels like unmediated contact with God, and this forms a potential source of authority separate from that of scripture and tradition, and from the church hierarchies which exist to interpret these for us. I’ve written before that when Jesus is credited in the Fourth Gospel with saying “I and my Father are one”, this is something which any mystic would feel able to say to themselves, and so is eminently something Jesus could have said, but is almost certainly something he never actually said – because his life-expectancy would have been minimal after saying that in public, given the attitude of the Temple authorities of the time (and probably that of everyday Jews) to percieved blasphemy.

Mysticism also seems to be deeply suspect from the point of view of Peter Rollins “Pyrotheology” project. I’ve written about this before, here and here. (Pete has apologised for the suggestion that the mystical state might be equivalent to psychosis, but has still mentioned the potential connection a few times…)

Now, Pete spends a lot of time talking about mystics, and Meister Eckhart in particular. The snag is, he seems to treat the mystics as having a particular philosophical approach to the question of what-it-is-that-is-God, namely the apophatic, rather than as having a particular experience, albeit one which strongly tends to lead to expressions of negation of conventional categories when attempting to describe what mystics understand as an experience of God (William James, in “Varieties of Religious Experience” identifies this ineffable quality as being one of the characteristics of the mystical experience).

The thing is, the viewpoint is a result of the experience, not its cause. Indeed, talking about mysticism with people who do not themselves identify as mystics, many of whom say “that seems a good way of looking at it”, and so communicating the viewpoint, has never, to my knowledge, contributed to someone actually having a mystical experience themselves. That was for some time a major concern for me – it was, for me, a superlatively good experience, and I wanted to share that with others – but on the whole, couldn’t. Again, James identifies another characteristic as being that it is something which happens to you, not something you do yourself, as essentially passive.

(For what it’s worth, the way to get there is by recognising the signs that there may be a mystical experience developing, and not stop it, for instance by trying to analyse it as it’s happening or by becoming scared; both the dissolution of the sense of self and the realisation of the immensity of the divine can be extremely scary. Contemplation and meditation are both very helpful in training yourself towards this; in addition, most people find an affinity with certain places or situations in which an opening of consciousness is closer for them – the “thin places” of Celtic spirituality, and you can seek those out or create the right circumstances – but that is no guarantee, it merely increases the probability.)

Pete, bless him, goes further in a recent video (which I’m afraid is not accessible without at least some financial contribution to his Patreon page), in which he suggests that as wholeness and completeness (“oceanic oneness”) are not attainable, the suggestion that people can achieve this is effectively Satanic.

Now, were it true that wholeness and completeness were unattainable, I would be with him (at the very least, offering something which is nonexistent is cruel) – but another of the characteristics of the mystical experience is an immense sense of wholeness and completeness (this is not one of the characteristics identified by James, but is one identified by F.C. Happold in “Mysticism; a Study and an Anthology”). Granted, it is transitory (one of James’ characteristics), and it may be a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence (several major religious figures have written about a singular event which has shaped the entire remainder of their lives, notably Pascal). However, bringing in the fourth and last of James’ characteristics, the experience is nooetic; it carries some knowledge about the universe (as James puts it), and typically this knowledge is of ultimate oneness.

Again, it is true that you cannot stay in a peak mystical state for very long; you are not going to be able to combine a peak of mystical contemplation with (for example) walking down the street safely, without bumping into lamp posts or getting run down by cars; you are sometime going to need to eat, and attend to other mundane instances of being embodied. However, this long term continuation is not necessary due to exactly that nooetic character; once experienced, it can never be un-experienced, and at least some measure of the consciousness of oneness, wholeness and completeness is going to persist, possibly for life. I will grant that it is a mistake (one which I made for some time, though I did take away from that a much improved facility for not stopping an experience in it’s tracks) to pursue a repetition of such a peak experience to the exclusion of living your life – this results in people who, as has regularly been said, are so heavenly-minded that they are no earthly good.

Having said all that, do I think that proffering the possibility of a peak mystical experience to people is offering them something unattainable, and therefore cruel? No. In the course of something over 40 years of talking to people, I have found both that most people have at some point had experiences which are verging on the mystical, and that if I can stifle my own natural impulses to analyse everything happening to me and to be terrified in the fact of the immeasurably vast, I can at least sometimes progree from “verging on the mystical” to a fuller experience.

And those experiences are so good that I would still like to share them with as many people as possible…

 

There’s an account of an interview with James Kugel here; James has written a book called “The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times”, which has among its theses that not only did people in Biblical times think of themselves less as individuals and more as members of a body (a tribe or people), but that also their consciousness was (and this is my words not his) more permeable to having experiences of God, or angels, or other supernatural entities.

These two might well be aspects of the same difference in psychology; as I’ve written before, in the mystical experience, one hallmark is the breakdown of the barrier between “me” and “other” – the sense of self becomes amorphous, and in peak experiences virtually disappears (the consciousness of unity with all things). If he’s correct (and I have a sneaking suspicion he is), this argues that, on average, the consciousness of human beings has contracted over the last couple of thousand years, from something which could identify with at least a sizeable group of people as being in some sense “me”, and possibly something much wider than that (God, for instance) to something locked up in individual skulls.

I’ve written about the “fall” as the advent of self-consciousness (and thus self-centredness, which I regard as the “original sin”); I’ve written about God encouraging dependency rather than individualism and my writing is massively informed by the mystical dissolution of the boundary between self and other. I am also writing a sporadic series about tribes, which are not necessarily a good thing, given that they promote “us-v-them” thinking.

What I fear, here, is that whereas Kugel describes a society in which the larger group, in particular the Israelites, is the primary identifier for someone, before they are an individual, and one in which a consciousness of something beyond even that is common, we are now looking at a society in which the individual is the basic identifier (promoted by neoliberal economics, I may say, which is one reason why I criticise that so much), and if horizons expand beyond that, it is to the tribe (or political group, or religion, or nation, or – well, whatever other identity group or intersection of groups you choose) rather than to anything wider.

I fear, in other words, that we are progressing inexorably in the wrong direction, despite people talking about new dawns of spirituality and the expansion of consciousness. This may be the case in a relatively small group, but the vast bulk of people? In my nation, at least, we are far less communitarian than we were when I was growing up, and the mechanism to encourage any broader consciousness is not clear to me. I can write, I suppose, but I have only a small audience…

On the Wednesday before Christmas, I spent an hour or so visiting an old friend – well, maybe not that old, as he isn’t a pensioner yet, but we did go to the same schools from age 5 until I changed schools at 13, and after that we were members of the same organisation dealing in what might be called esoteric philosophy for some time, and also of several groups interested in the more arcane aspects of religion and spirituality. I’ve been making a point of calling round on him, or inviting him over, recently, as he was diagnosed with brain cancer last December, and had part of his brain removed on Christmas Eve 2016; he immediately had his driving licence recalled, and so has been feeling a bit trapped and isolated at home. After the surgery he started chemotherapy and radiation therapy, which finished fairly recently. He’s one of those friends who lives quite close to me, but before the cancer, we didn’t actually meet all that often. However, when we did it was as if we’d never had fairly long periods during which there was no contact. I was determined not to let him go without conversation, assuming he wanted it – and, apart from during the chemo weeks, it turned out he did. I’ve had too many friends and family members taken away by the big C in the last few years, and in at least a couple of cases we were going to get together for ages – and then it was too late.

I did mention to him, the first time I went round this year, Jason Michaeli’s book “Cancer is Funny” – I am firmly of the opinion that some things are so serious that it’s necessary to make jokes about them (much in the style of the M*A*S*H film and TV series, set in a field hospital in the Korean War), and commented that I thought I was aiming at collecting a “full set” – I’ve had friends die of lung, kidney, pancreas, bowel and lymphatic cancers, so adding brain cancer maybe made “Happy Families”… However, he regards my Christianity with some amusement – he moved from where we pretty much both were back in the 1970s to become a Practical Kabbalist with a sizeable dash of Buddhist practice, and his wife is a Buddhist/Wiccan, while I gently slid into Christianity. Jason’s subtitle is “Keeping Faith in Stage Serious Chemo”, and in conscience he wouldn’t resonate with the faith in question (I still think there might be commonalities, but he’d have to read through the strong Christian framework to find it. Actually, I was one of a group of three both at home in Selby and up in Durham who were involved with “the esoteric” during my late school and early university days; this friend ended up a Kabbalist, the other from home ended up Wiccan and the two others from Durham endede up Zen Buddhist and agnostic respectively, so I can understand his amusement!

In a spirit of radical honesty, I should say that my visit on Wednesday had an ulterior motive (or, at least, the timing of it did); we were just in the last week of having some work done to the house (so there were workmen with attendant random hammering and sawing in the house), and my wife had had the bright idea of getting in some cleaners to “bottom” the main part of the house, so that was full of cleaners (and random vaccuuming and talking). Or, at least, it seemed full to me. I have an anxiety disorder, and having people I don’t know really well in the house is one of the triggers for that; my wife had also just got out of hospital on Sunday after an operation the Friday before, and I was anxious about that (and, in particular, about what being knocked out after the operation would do to her mental stability – she suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder, otherwise known as Unstable Mood Disorder). That, of course, makes the timing of the cleaners visit typical – the idea was excellent (the results are splendid, and the house looks great for Christmas), but the timing was a bit “off” – particularly as, having cleaners coming, we had both felt the need to scurry around tidying the day before; she in particular was supposed to be taking it completely easy after the operation, and tying her to a chair seemed out of the question!

The result was that, on Wednesday, I craved getting away from home for a bit of time to get away from anxiety triggers.

Anyhow, our conversation was wide-ranging, but some of it revolved round commonalities between us – my depression, for instance, seems to have deleted some of my memories, or at least made them inaccessible (at its peak, I couldn’t understand any more what “happy” was; I’d forgotten – and when people suggested I recall times when I’d been happy, I couldn’t, possibly because the memory included the happiness and that wasn’t something my brain was doing any more). He has some memory holes arising out of the brain surgery – and in both our cases, in recovery, bits and pieces of memory are returning.

We also talked again about what for many people he meets is the “elephant in the room”. He is, deo gratias, beating the odds he was originally given both for recovery from the operation and for his survival, though the cancer is not completely gone, and the expectation is still that he has months rather than years. Brain cancer is different from all the others which friends have suffered from; there are no pain receptors in the brain, so he is in absolutely no pain (though, of course, chemo and radiation tended to make him feel sick, and he compains of much reduced energy levels, something which also afflicts me.

We’ve talked about the process of dying before, but this time I was thinking about the subject anyhow; I’ve recently seen my GP, having contracted a bad cold and that having interacted with my Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease to make me really quite ill (colds or flu, for me, tend to become pneumonia and be life-threatening). He strongly suggested (as all my doctors have) that I give up smoking – I’m an asthmatic to start with, so smoking was a bad idea from day one, but now the almost inevitable consequence of COPD has arrived, it’s an even worse idea. He said that these days most men (in the UK, at least) live until 84, which would be another 20 years; unless I give up smoking, I’m unlikely to. Then again, it’s the time of the year when we tend to think of endings and beginnings in any event, as well as being the prime time for funerals at the church (my parents died in November and December, going for the popular option for perhaps the first times in their lives).

As it turns out, though as far as I’m aware he isn’t technically a mystic (though he’s well versed in meditation, and I will probably quiz him about his experiences in that direction the next time we get together), he shares my more or less complete lack of worry about the fact that I am going to die sometime. My initial peak experience (confirmed by several since) makes me entirely confident that, upon death, I will again be “one with God”, and that is something to be anticipated rather than feared. I’ve written about this before – I fail to understand those who (like Freud) think that fear of death is one of the huge motivators of human psychology – and if it’s a matter of the “control freak” fear of not being in control, I sleep every night – well, most nights, at least, and while asleep am most definitely not in control – and, indeed, being asleep is, as far as I can see, pretty much equivalent to being dead (aside Shakespeare’s worry in Hamlet “but in that sleep of death, what dreams may come – aye, there’s the rub” – I remember relatively few of my dreams anyhow, and as I still have lingering PTSD, that is an altogether good thing from my point of view).

There’s also the fact that I shouldn’t have been alive at any time after 3rd December 2006 to consider, that being the date when I mustered enough anger at my chronic depression to make my most serious attempt to put a permanent end to it. Although I researched the dose of pills which would be needed beforehand, it didn’t actually kill me. As a friend in the recovery community says, I’ve been “playing with house money” ever since then (I might suspect he has a gambling issue as well as one with several substances); I prefer to think of it as “extra time” or, maybe, “borrowed time”. There’s a particular quality to the experience of deciding entirely seriously to end your life, and then finding out that it is continuing anyhow which is unlike any other (much as the mystical experience is unlike any other, though that’s about the only thing the two share); if I hadn’t lost any fear of death I once had due to peak mystical experience, I think it would have vanished at that point. It gives a peculiar sensation of freedom, if only in that, having gone there once, you know the way and are not likely to be worried by the scenery.

My friend shares the rest of those points of view; as we agreed, we don’t fear death at all – though, on the whole (with Woody Allen) we don’t want to be there when it happens. Our mutual fear, it turns out, is living on with severely reduced mental capacities. His cancer is itself eating bits of his brain, albeit slowly, and if he has another surgery (which is definitely being suggested), that will take more instantly. I have already seen what a complex set of psychological disorders can do to my thinking, and I wouldn’t wish severe clinical depression on my worst enemy; also, as I very much “live in my head”, the idea of failing cognition really scares me. Perhaps it shouldn’t, as one might conclude that if the cognition has faded, you won’t realise the state you have degenerated into – but I have memories of my late father-in-law in the latter stages of multiple infarct dementia. Most of the time the Geoffrey we used to know just wasn’t there, but just occasionally he would have a lucid interval – and then, being a retired senior Naval surgeon, he knew completely what was happening, and watching that happen was soul destroying. It made him very angry, as well (not surprisingly), and that anger often carried forward to when the cognition had gone. In addition, the fact that his body was still present even though (for the most part) the personality aand memories had gone was agonising to those who knew and loved him; having now lost all four of our respective parents, Geoffrey’s passing was by far the most painful – the other three managed to avoid long periods of illness before they died, and in my mother’s case, she died halfway through eating her bowl of fruit at the end of a meal – one suspects that she didn’t know what hit her!

I don’t want to end up like Geoffrey. Neither does my friend. Far better to emulate my mother.

But not just yet…