Going to Church

I have recently begun an activity which, to anybody who knows me, may seem rather bizarre. I have started visiting the local cathedral. Not, mark you, for Eucharist or Holy Communion. And certainly not for the speeches given by a man in funny clothes, on the subjects of sin, repentance, the wrath of God for the unrighteous, and his quirky sense of the meaning of love. No. I have generally popped in during the middle of a morning walk - about 11.30 is a good time. Sometimes there are two or three tourists around - normally female -, sometimes I have the place to myself. Despite the words of error often spoken within the cathedral walls, and despite the international missionary zeal that sometimes echoes through the place, the cathedral remains by and large a still, quiet, tranquil space.

Built during the nineteenth century, the cathedral has little historical significance. It was constructed, though, in the neo-Gothic style that was the rage at the time, and I find it effective. It is simple without being plain and without suggesting the sinfulness of richness and colour. Unpretentious stained glass covers most of the windows. On one wall there are a few miniature icons of Jesus presented as a gift by Alexander the Second, one-time Tsar of Russia. There is a copy of Melozzo da Forli's well-known Angel Gabriel in Annunciation. What I like most, however, is a little Madonna and Child, so sweet and delicate. It is apparently a copy of a fifteenth century Sienese, but looks older to me, like a contemporary of Duccio. I enjoy gazing at it, immersed in the silence of the cathedral.

It's a funny story, the Italian art thing. Thirty years ago, I was in the throes of life as a dedicated Buddhist. I lived in Buddhist community, and worked as chairman of the modestly-named West London Buddhist Centre ( a position I was in some respects remarkably ill-suited for; but that's another story). You might have thought that everything my soul yearned for would have been provided on a plate in this heady life deep in the Buddhist spiritual world. Wrong. Despite all my Buddhist, supposedly spiritual, life, I would long for my annual trip to Italy, to look at art. Italian art. Italian renaissance art. This spoke to me, fed me, in ways that no manner of study of Buddhist texts, sitting-on-a-cushion meditation even, appeared to do. One year I made a thorough cultural pilgrimage through the centres of northern Italy. From Ventimiglia and Genoa in the west, then to Vicenza, Verona, Padua, Venice, Siena, Florence, Lucca, Pisa. Rarely in my life have I felt so vital. It finally came to an end when I walked into an exhibition in Pisa that was composed entirely of crucifixions, and I felt a wave of revusion ripple through me. But I had had almost two months of immersion in painting, sculpture, and architecture by then.....

That I have lived for a decade within an hour's walk of the cathedral and until a few weeks ago had never entered its portals speaks volumes of my feelings about Christianity and Christianism, particularly the fundamentalistic, literalistic brand that remains in vogue hereabouts. But something has loosened up: not regarding the religion as such, but about the nature of its many expressions. I think that returning to Acharya S.'s work following her untimely death has had an effect. Her contention, which I find pretty watertight, is that Christianity, in common with other 'major world religions', has its own roots in the ancient astrotheology (sun, moon, planets, stars, zodiac etc). Furthermore, its assault on the former 'pagan' traditions is due in part to the need to cover up its own astrotheological beginnings.

Seeing the veneer of Christian dogma and doctrine overlaying the natural 'spirituality' of humankind for what it is - a synthetic gloss on the real thing - permits one to look beneath. I can enter the cathedral without playing the game. Opening my eyes to the Madonna and Child in my local cathedral, I was astonished that I felt myself to be looking at Gaia-Sophia, Mother Earth. And she was presenting us with her creation: possibly the entire world, possibly the divine child as representation of the human species, her special offspring, the one who is capable of becoming aware of its source. Maybe the creative act as an eternal, ever-present reality, the 'world' coming into being on a moment-to-moment basis: the never-ending game of creation and its emanations in their infinite variety.

Ah, poor old Mother Earth. She's having a hard time of it, we are told again and again, at the hands of her most destructive creation, humanity. She is angry,we are told, especially about our rapacious use of fossil fuels; she's had enough, fed up with it all. This is a common sentiment; some people who I generally respect take this line of thought. May I respectfully suggest that it may be utter bullshit.

James Lovelock has a lot to answer for in this respect. Having done a lot of valuable work in developing Gaia theory, ten years ago he produced a book entitled 'The Revenge of Gaia'. I have a copy on my bookshelf, which stares out at me from time to time; I think it's time for the book to be sent to the garage,out of sight, but just hanging around in case I need to refer to it at some point in the future. Over the course of nine contentious chapters, Lovelock outlines how the Earth is hotting up quicker than a modern-day fan oven, and it's all our fault. Gaia is straining to absorb the change, and is going to get real nasty with us as a result. Lynn Margulis, co-creator with Lovelock of Gaia theory, apparently opined that Gaia is a 'tough bitch', and can come through all this. The overall tone of Lovelock's book, however, is that Gaia is old, worn out, and that she is unable to absorb the manifold damage done to her by humanity's exploitations. 'Gaia, the living Earth, is old and not as strong as she was two billion years ago' (chapter nine). 'Unfortunately, we are a species of schizoid tendencies, and like an old lady who has to share her house with a growing and destructive group of teenagers, Gaia grows angry, and if they do not mend their ways she will evict them.' (end of chapter three).

I suspect Lovelock has come to regret writing the book: a while ago he admitted that the Earth wasn't bubbling and boiling the way he thought she was going to, and maybe he got something wrong. This in turn provoked the wrath and typically cruel and vicious ad hominem attacks from the green totalitarian zealots, who accused him of being senile and past it. What thoroughly nasty people.

So let's have a look at Mother Earth. No, let's look first at ordinary, decent mums. Or at least the image of an ordinary, decent mum. Ordinary, decent mum is a picture of unconditional love. Her function, if you like, is to give birth, protect, and provide for her baby offspring. She gives freely, without thought of receiving anything in return. She is prepared to sacrifice something of her own welfare for the sake of her child. This sounds like a ridiculously lofty spiritual idea, the stuff of high-level Buddhas and similar entities. My own experience of observing mothers, however, suggests that this is not too far off the mark. Mothers can make considerable sacrifices physically, emotionally, and energetically in child-bearing and pregnancy, in the act of giving birth, and in the rearing of their offspring. As their progeny have grown up, I have seen mothers in great sadness, anguish, despair even, as the child they have lovingly nurtured refuses to grow up into anything other than a monster. But punishment? Revenge? No way. Unless she's not the real deal, and is an archon in disguise.

If everyday mums do not have punishment and revenge on the menu, how less our archetypal female parent, Mother Earth? The notion that she's out to give us a hard time because we've been naughty boys and girls, using up her resources, shows a severe twisting of the archetype. She is, I would suggest, more than happy to give of her resources (even her coal, gas, and oil, for crissake!) for her special children, as the Gnostics would have it, those endowed with a spark of divinity (however hidden it may sometimes be). On our side, it behoves us to act respectfully, responsibly, lovingly, with her great gifts. Use them well, wisely, and she will be happy. Use them for nefarious ends, as has so often been the case, and Mother Earth may well lament to see her divine children failing to follow their innate divinity. But calling for revenge, for punishment, just ain't gonna happen.

Footnote: as an illustration of the nature of the Divine Mother, check out the Duccio at the beginning of this piece. The divine child is messing around with the Madonna's headgear. There are several Duccios depicting a similar act from the infant. He is apparently pulling aside her headdress, though to me it looks like he's tweaking her ear. Whatever, it's a tad irritating for the long-suffering mum. But is she angry? Does she look disturbed? Is she about to whack the baby with a rolling pin? Nothing could be further from the truth. Pseudo-greenies, if you're going to invoke archetypes to shore up your viewpoints, at least get the archetype right.....
      

  
              

Vortex

A vortex is not always everything it's cracked up to be. My father was once rather obsessed with a vortex. He would talk about it frequently. The vortex in question was Corryvreckan. Located in the narrow stretch of water between the islands of Jura and Scarba, it is a whirlpool of considerable repute. Being off the remote west coast of Scotland, the Corryvreckan whirlpool is difficult of access, particularly if, as was the case with my father, you were normally domiciled in faraway Oxfordshire. However, one year he made it. Up the highways to beyond Glasgow, then on the twists and turns of the byways that snake across the rarely-frequented vastnesses of southern Argyll.  He took the requisite tiny boat in the direction of the famed whirlpool. It was a calm day, the tides were wrong, and all he saw was a quickening of the waters as they passed between the two islands. He returned home in disappointment.

Meanwhile, back at this particular vortex of the pale green variety, anybody considering that it needs a serious overhaul would be absolutely correct! Pale Green Vortex has been going for almost six years now: we are still awaiting a letter of congratulations from the Queen, along with that invite for tea and biscuits with David Cameron. During the whole of this time, the design - if it can indeed be called as such - has remained steadfastly unaltered. It is not, in all honesty, something that is a top priority, but we may get round to it some day or another.

During these past six years, I have become aware of a major activity of many bloggers, podcasters, and the like. That activity is questioning whether or not they are going to continue with their blog or podcast; or whether at the least they will give it a considerable break.  I know of a number of instances where an announcement of cessation of activity has been made - only for them to start up again soon afterwards. This process is one that I understand very well. There has been a number of occasions on which I have come close to bringing Pale Green Vortex to a halt, whether temporarily or forever. A couple of times I resumed with renewed enthusiasm as a result of some timely encouragement from some readers.

Once you've got something going, it's easy to feel that you need to continue a regular and fairly frequent output. Last year was exceptional, in that I had more time available for writing, plenty to write about, and output flowed easily - happy days! This period is now over, though, I feel in my bones. My attention is being drawn to matters that require a longer period of gestation. What's more, they are rather more personal and clearly autobiographical (everything that goes on Pale G.V. is part autobiography), and to me fairly biggies! So I am letting myself off the leash of such regular postings, and will see what happens. I may continue to write as frequently as I have done, but I can't say. Vamos a ver. I certainly hope the fruits of some of my current 'inner work' will make its way into the Vortex.

I was in the process of preparing a piece on our good friend Richard Dawkins, but then I heard that the fellow recently had a stroke. Actually, I was writing a few nice things about him, but I still feel it inappropriate to put my piece out there just now.

So let's end this post with a quote from another good friend of ours, David Icke: "The key to 'power' is persuading those you depend upon that they're dependent on you. Just like how the whale depends on the plankton, not the plankton on the whale."

We can go as superficial or as deep as we wish with this one. There is far more to it than immediately meets the eye. If this is the key to power, than it is also the key to unravelling the grip of that power.

Who depends upon who? Maybe it's not quite like that at all. Maybe it's more like an unconscious collusion. We like to find someone to blame: the Jews, the archons, the banksters, Bilderbergers, a bunch of extraterrestrials, some deep secret black magick shamanic mystery dudes. Whoever. It makes things easy if we can point the finger, and there are plenty of folk who invest a good deal of time and energy in trying to uncover the requisite object for their finger waving. We kind-of feel secure, as if we understand, we've got things sorted, tied up. We're back in control. But I feel we need to own up to our own role in the mess. Playing the victim is not good enough. It takes two to tango. If we are not actually dependent on those supposedly with 'power', we have to organise our lives - emotionally, psychologically, physically: energetically if you will - to reflect that. This is the real work, the real waking up. And it's far more difficult than going around blaming everybody else. Not to say that we ignore the world 'out there'. It's no good being like me thirty years ago, in the middle of Buddhism and feeling that the world 'out there' is irrelevant. No, the world out there with its shadow and general energetic configuration is anything but irrelevant. We need to absorb all that it is, seeing deeply into its nature. Then we are finally in a position to skilfully weave our own independent way, shape our life in the mould of authenticity. Enough people do this, and the whole rotten system falls apart. It continues, in part at least, because we continue to validate its phoney ways. We each have to find our own means to leave it behind, create anew; in the words of Timothy Leary, drop out......

      

Publish and be Damned! - Part the Second....

OK. Here we go with the other extracts......

"For years I have searched far and wide for real justification for despoliation of Scottish uplands and mountains. I have found very little. In the absence of true rationality and logic, I have had to conclude - reluctantly - that factors less objective are at work. 'Ideology', in my book at least, is a dirty word. We can associate it with its horrendous consequences, as with Fascism, Stalinism, Islamic fundamentalism. Ideology essentially comprises a system of beliefs supposedly cohering into an entire, consistent worldview. Adopting such an ideology makes life easy, since we no longer need to approach each new situation with fresh eyes. We don't need to think. A ready-made answer is at hand, provided by interpretation of events based upon our adopted system of beliefs. One size fits all. There is also the comfort of self-identity: I know who I am: I'm a ........ist. Now I can sleep soundly at night.

The ideology I am referring to here can best be termed, I suggest, extreme environmentalism. A dogmatic approach to environmentalism suffers from the same blindness that other ideologies are prone to. Blanket answers to complex situations. In this case, fossil fuels are bad, renewable energy is good, so it follows that a bunch of wind turbines in a mountain landscape is no different from, just as vital as, a windfarm project anywhere else.

What I have written here is not fashionable, especially since the environmentalists are the good guys and gals, aren't they? Sometimes well-intentioned, I suggest, but unconscious of the blinding and toxic nature of ideology, whatever its shape or form. In my less charitable moments, I conceive of ideology as a kind of mind virus, warping ordinary decent people into inhuman fanatics blind to the wider realities surrounding them. Most politicians, in fear of appearing politically incorrect, will readily go along with whatever the environmental bandwagon tells them to promote.

So why bother? Why not just give up? What is it that causes people to sweat, curse, and toil into the hills each year? A few to die? Why do MCofS office bearers continue to work tirelessly against yet another lunatic proposal? This is, I submit, a most thankless task, and the MCofS folk engaged in this are among my greatest heroes. Literally. My eternal gratitude goes out to them. Why, indeed, do I bother to write yet another tedious letter of objection to some faceless bureaucracy miles away?

Having already ventured into the unorthodox and the unfashionable, I now propose a brief excursion into the life and work of J.R.R.Tolkien. There is a chapter near the end of 'Lord of the Rings' which is omitted from the celebrated film version, presumably because it spoils the notion of a simple happy ending. This chapter is called 'Scouring of the Shire', and is most relevant to our current plight. In this final section of the tale, our hobbit heroes return from their adventures to their native land, the Shire, only to find it has been despoiled beyond recognition during their absence. The green agrarian landscape has been transformed into an industrial wasteland dominated by outsiders (sound familiar?!).

Tolkien himself was reared in the English Midlands, and lived to see the progressive industrialisation of the region with its attendant destruction of the land. His dismay at this change, not just in the Midlands but as a recurrent theme in human affairs, forms a kind of subtext to much of his work. His concern has been referred to as that with the loss of the power of the land. 'The power of the land': a phrase that resonated with me deeply when I first heard it. It seemed to encapsulate what we most wish to protect and maintain better than any other words I have come across. Like love, power of the land does not lend itself to precise definition,  but we know it when we are in its presence. We don't need to attend a leyline workshop at Glastonbury, or venture into the woods at twilight in search of elven folk, to know it. Nan Shepherd's book 'The Living Mountain' drips power of the land from every page - as does Robert Macfarlane's magnificent introduction to the 2011 edition. The book is a wonderful testament to the living presence that is the mountains, in this instance the Cairngorms, and our personal interaction with it. All good mountain writing that succeeds in touching the visceral level of experience will exude this quality. Maybe we should talk here of 'power of the mountain' rather than 'power of the land'.

And here we arrive at an irony. In these tedious yet impassioned objections to 'inappropriate developments' in the mountains, it is this 'power' that is at the bottom of my pleas. It is not energy efficiency, damage to tourism and other business, subsidies to fat cats, carbon capture of peat bogs, not even aesthetic considerations strictly speaking. They all play their part, but the main mover and shaker is less tangible, and inadmissable as valid evidence. Writing to Fergus Ewing about the power held by the mountains, and its necessity for the well-being of the nation, will not yield results!

The hill and mountain community, if we can speak of such, is a marvellous thing. We are a disparate bunch, sometimes with apparently little in common aside from the mountains. Yet there can be an openness between otherwise strangers that a psychotherapist will spend months trying to evoke. Coming off Ben Macdui, you meet a couple going up, and within five minutes major life events are being shared. Back at the hostel in the evening you get into conversation with someone about recent adventures in the mountains. There is a look in the eye, as if a secret is being shared. We know something, though that something is rarely brought into full awareness, rarely given voice or coherence. It provides a mutual understanding and respect, and is what I am referring to here as the power of the mountain.

Meanwhile, the attack on these places of mental and spiritual refreshment continues unabated. As Tolkien suggests, it is an ever-recurrent theme in the tide of modern humanity. Last June I was on the South Glen Shiel ridge when suddenly I heard a loud mechanical din issuing from far below. Non-natural sounds are not unusual hereabouts, since the A87 is a favourite route for bikers, especially at weekends. But this noise was coming from the other side of the ridge! Peering down, I could make out a scene straight out of 'Scouring of the Shire'. Diggers and other mechanical plant, bare earth and peat, vehicles, scruffy little cabins and the rest, spread out over a considerable area. If it was Romany gypsies or young people enjoying themselves making such a mess, there would be a media frenzy. As it is, this was clearly another officially-sanctioned project going its ugly way. Looking harder, I could make out pipes. Long, black, and lots of them. A micro-hydro electric scheme, in existence courtesy of generous government subsidies, the kind which, according to an ecologist I once bumped into, create puny quantities of electricity. I shuddered, then made a firm decision not to allow this to spoil the day. On to the summit of Maol Chinn-Dearg, and silence. Powerful silence."

The good news is that several high-profile windfarm proposals in wild and mountain areas have been refused permission in recent months by government authorities national and local. A good deal of upland Scotland has already been trashed, but this is something. It is in good part a result of the agreement of 'core wild areas' in Scotland, a project spearheaded by the John Muir Trust. Many thanks to them for their hard work and persistence. Like the MCofS, the John Muir trust is, in my view, far from perfect. But these are the two organisations tirelessly working to give some protection to the mountains of Scotland. Nobody else is doing it. So they deserve our support and gratitude.