ANOTHER LITTLE MIRACLE

My son Ken is living in Maui, and he and his Lilly are expecting the birth of their first child very soon. When Ken was born, in Marina Del Ray I wrote a song about what being a parent had done for my spirit. Here it is, with chords... (the original poem by Dylan Thomas is worth a look.)


THE SOURCE OF THE SPRING


C F C
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
G C
So said Dylan the Welshman long ago
C F C
Now I see it before me hour by hour
G F G C
It’s replanted a seed that once failed to grow

C F^ C
For the first time in years here’s the flow
G C
And I’m able to speak of what all your hearts know
F^ C
It’s taken some years in the cold
G F G C
To re-build the bridge between body and soul



Chorus:
Am G
It’s been away so long
Am D G
When I feel it I’m strong



C F C
Remember the days we were young
G C
We’d change the world so we sung
F C
We had the power and the time
G F G C
It was so black and white our ideas were so fine
F^ C
But as we grew older it seemed
G C
That experience dimmed the light of our dreams



F^ C
And soon it was no longer clear
G F G C
The truth was concealed in the maze of our fears




Chorus:
Am G
It’s been away so long
Am D G
When we feel it we’re strong




C F C
The path that we tread isn’t known
G C
We discover it stone by stone
F C
And now and again on the way
G F G C
Out shines a light and we know our day
F^ C
There’s a light deep inside and it grows
G C
It shines in our hearts and it knows
F^ C
That the green fuse of life that makes babies grow
G F G C
Is the source of the spring from which all these words flow.
G F G C
Is the source of the spring from which all these words flow.

BAH HUMBUG

I hate going to the supermarket. I don’t find it a pleasant place to be, but it’s a place I have to go in order to discharge my wifely duty and keep the household fed and cleaned.

To minimize the emotional damage, my method is to get in, round, and out, as quickly as possible. That’s why I learn the whereabouts of all the things I may want to buy, and which parts of the place I can avoid completely.

Around this time of year my Supermarket-Tactical-Survival-Plan is thrown into total disarray. The shelves have been re-arranged and many of my regular purchases have disappeared to make way for the plethora of brightly coloured and cheaply made TAT that is the Christmas marketing bonanza.

I don’t do Christmas. To put it more accurately, I don’t get involved in that commercial and cultural abomination known as ‘Xmas’. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got absolutely no quarrel with those who wish to celebrate the religious festival which observes the birth of Jesus Christ. From what I can tell, he was a pretty cool dude who had some very good things to say. But ‘Xmas’! Really, what is this all about?

‘Xmas’ is an exercise in mass cultural and commercial arm-twisting to get us to buy stuff we would never normally buy, or at the very least, only buy occasionally, when we absolutely need it. Just watch the telly. At this time of year the advertising turns to perfumes, electric shavers and toothbrushes and all sorts of other silly kit that make up the bulk of the stuff that we buy to give to others.

‘Xmas’ is a time when everything must be ‘perfect’. Every year the news is filled with tragic stories of how some peoples’ ‘Xmas’ dream has be ruined by some company going out of business or some tragedy happening at this ‘time of year’. It is built up into an impossible web of commercial greed and sentimental expectation that, in the end, can only leave us let down and emotionally and financially exhausted.

Consider this:
At ‘Xmas’ the divorce rate and the suicide rate both soar. Many people go into debt to fund this extravaganza, and haven’t yet paid off the left-over debt from the year before. ‘Xmas’ is the busiest time of year for loan-sharks, and we know the misery and intimidation that comes from dealing with those characters.

In the Knight household, we observe the feast and enjoy Christmas Day. We do not exchange gifts, send cards or cover the place with tinsel. We really enjoy our Christmases. Rather than splash out on tat we can’t really afford, in order to let our loved ones know we care. We take great pains to observe their Birthdays instead.

It’s a little ironic that ‘Xmas’ is supposed to celebrate the birth of the guy who threw the money-lenders out of Solomon’s Temple. One suspects that Jesus would be pretty appalled to see the commercial mess we have made of his birthday celebrations.

The retail trade has come to rely very heavily on ‘Xmas’. For many in that trade, it represents over 80% of their annual turnover. One wonders how they would fare, if this annual distortion of the market didn’t happen. I suspect that we consumers would spread the same amount of spending throughout the year, buying stuff we actually want or need. The result would be a much smoother trading cycle for the retailers, and lower overheads, as they wouldn’t need the expanded and distorted warehousing and distribution facilities that are needed to deal with the annual ‘Xmas’ bulge.

I’m reminded of the joke told to me by a Jewish friend whose father was in the trade supplying wholesale Tat to retailers. Every boxing day his dad would go to the warehouse, look at the empty shelves and say:
“Thank you Jesus”.

Christmas? Right-on! Happy birthday Jesus!

‘Xmas’?

BAH HUMBUG!!

CHANGING TIMES

Today came a report from the top of the world. The Arctic Ice-Cap is disappearing much faster than was expected. Instead of disappearing (in summer) in fifty years’ time, we are now looking at ten to fifteen years. Boy, are the polar bears in trouble!

This is yet more evidence of a climate-change event we call ‘Global Warming’. There is a large body of evidence to say that this is a man-made event. There are those, in scientific circles who maintain that it’s mostly a natural, cyclical, event. Either way, the planet is getting warmer.

When we look at the long-term history of climate-change events, both cooling and warming, we can tell (from studying ancient ice-cores and geology) that major climate change has never been gradual. It seems that the climate has a habit of ‘tipping’ from one state to another in a few decades. This is because the climate is a very delicate interwoven structure where relatively small changes cause ‘cascades’ of events.

This is where we seem to be now. The loss of thousands of square miles of floating ice won’t have a huge effect on sea levels. It’s when the ice that sits on land melts and adds to the volume of the oceans that levels will be radically affected. However that huge expanse of floating ice (which is also disappearing in the Antarctic) reflects a huge amount of sunlight back into space. The result is a lot more solar energy staying in the atmosphere. The earth warms a little more, the oceans heat up a little more (liquids, by the way, expand when heated) and the sea levels rise a little more.

As the Northern climate heats up, just a little, and as the winters get milder, the Northern Tundra is retreating. On the positive side, releasing vast expanses of relatively unproductive land for agricultural use, on the negative side, causing the permafrost to melt.

The permafrost is a deep layer of surface soil that, just a metre or so from the surface, stays frozen all year round. If you live far enough north, you can freeze your food by digging a hole and putting it in. Free refrigeration! This layer of earth is full of vegetable matter that has never fully broken down, because its frozen state prevents the bacteria in the soil from going to work. As the soil melts, the vegetable matter starts to rot and break down. This process releases methane gas. Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas. Methane makes carbon dioxide look like pretty tame stuff, when it comes to greenhouse gasses. Kilo for kilo, methane has between twenty and twenty five times the climate effect of CO2. The more methane is released, the faster the permafrost melts, and the methane release accelerates. This is already happening. If you take a look at the globe, the Northern Tundra (and therefore the permafrost) is huge. The amount of methane about to be released is enormous.

And so it goes, one small event triggers a slightly larger one. Then that event triggers others. This is what’s known as a ‘cascade’. Cascades have a habit of starting slow and small then accelerating, at an ever increasing rate, until they become huge. The cascade has begun. The climate is going to tip, and tip very quickly. I’m nearly 60 and I will see it unfold before I pop my clogs. My children’s generation will experience the consequences, and the flora and fauna of the planet are headed for a mass-extinction event.

Of course, the planet will survive. Mass extinctions are nothing new. The long –term result will be the same old planet, populated by a plethora of new species. So why worry?

I worry because when countries drown, huge shifts occur in agricultural production and coastlines change, massive geo-political pressures will doubtless be generated. There will be a whole new balance of ‘Haves’ and ‘Have-Nots’. There will be big winners and big losers. This is the kind of event that starts wars. World wars.

We’ve lived for many decades in a world where global cataclysms haven’t occurred. My parents’ and grandparents’ generations lived through two of them. We seem to think it can’t happen to us. I think it most certainly can, and probably will. My offspring are going to go through some extreme times. They will need to learn to be survivors, fighters and many things they have not been brought up to be, if their off-spring are to survive and floursish.

There are many things we could do to slow-down, and eventually reverse, climate change (man-made or not). All of these things we could have started thirty or forty years ago, but we didn’t. There will now be no way of avoiding the cascade, it has already begun.

The planet will survive. The human race will survive. Many creatures won’t survive. In the meantime, things are going to get very dodgy indeed.

BILLIE THE DOG: “GOODBYE MY FRIEND”

Today we said goodbye to our dog, Billie.

On the ‘laffin-gas’ team roster, her title was ‘moral support’. Was she ever!

When David was battling for his life in hospital it was the long 4am walks in the country park, with the dog haring around after squirrels and rabbits that kept me going.

When David miraculously made it through, and got out of the wheelchair, it was taking the dog for a walk that got him back in shape.

We never heard her snarl or growl in anger. She didn’t have a mean bone in her body. She was probably the purest little soul I’ve ever had the honour to have known.

Her time had come, the years had caught up with her and we had to do the proper thing by her, and it was painful to do.

Now Billie is out in her beloved spinney, forever giving the squirrels a good run.

Farewell, our friend, Billie.

Om Shanti Shanti.

MONKEY SEE, MONKEY DO

Children are impressionable, young children, very much so. Basic patterns of behaviour are picked up almost subliminally and often parents do not realise exactly what their youngsters are picking up on.

Nowadays children spend a lot of time in cars, driven by their parents. What do they witness? Mum double-parking at the school gates or perhaps Dad cursing at some other driver, a grown-up talking on the phone while driving, or Dad complaining about being caught by a speed camera. They witness many, many small examples of their parents, their role models, breaking the law. They know from eavesdropping on adult conversation that their parents regularly break the law and think little of it. In some families, they witness other crimes, such as shoplifting and violent acts. Even in families where the big laws are properly respected, little violations are common.

What do they learn from this? They learn that it’s correct to pick and choose which laws they obey. They learn that legal behaviour is optional and that it’s alright to disregard the law if it is convenient to do so. Little wonder that many children grow up having no respect for, or fear of the law. We are teaching them, in little everyday ways, that it’s how people should behave.

The heavier traffic becomes and the more stressed drivers become, children see behaviours that, for, most people happen only inside vehicles. Shouting and cursing at total strangers is not something most of us would do in the street, but it is something most of us do in cars. Deadly aggressive driving is also terribly common. Tailgating another car at speed (to get the other driver to move over) is, to my mind, a threat with a deadly weapon. Many people do this every day, and many more witness others doing it. One cannot make a motorway journey without seeing what, in any other mode of life, would be considered heinous criminal behaviour. The vast majority of people would instantly report a threat with a deadly weapon in any other circumstance to the police, and would expect and get a swift response, and yet if the weapon is a car, one would not bother to report it, and the police would certainly not take any action.

So in a major part of our daily lives, which children are part of, criminal and anti-social behaviour has become an accepted norm. Do we seriously expect a four-year-old to discriminate between behaviour in, or outside the car? Perhaps some do make this distinction, and perhaps many more do not. What they all certainly do learn is that one can pick and choose the circumstances in which it acceptable to behave in seriously anti-social and criminal ways.

I have chosen the car as an obvious and pervasive arena in which we are teaching bad things to our offspring. Unfortunately illegal behaviour by ‘law abiding citizens’ is all about us. From dropping litter in the street, to stealing by finding, knowingly buying counterfeit and stolen goods or perhaps a bit of cheating on the benefit claim, the example being set is consistent: It is up to you whether or not you respect the law.

This, then, is the case for zero tolerance. All laws must be enforced, big or small, in or out of the car, and the consequences for breaking the law must be visible and obvious. Children need to understand that the law is not a bin of pick-and mix sweeties, but an immoveable object that bites when you try to shift it. If one does not like a law, get it changed. In the meantime the law is the law, it is all that holds society together and it must be respected and obeyed, simply because it is the law.

Every day, in so many ways, we are undermining future society by our own adult pick-and-mix attitude to the law, which we are teaching our children to emulate.

If we want to mend the ‘broken society’, we must mend our attitude to the law. Otherwise generation after generation will grow up with an ever-lessening regard for the law and an ever-growing perception that obeying the law is a matter of personal preference.

REALITY CHECK

For most people it’s not at all difficult to tell what’s real and what’s not. Dreams, for instance, aren’t real while what happens while we’re awake is. But is it all that simple? How do we know, for instance, that we’re not dreaming everything we’re aware of? ‘Well it’s obvious’ you may say, "what a silly question!" People under the influence of various drugs, or who are suffering from some mental illnesses can be wide awake and experience hallucinations that have no ‘reality’. So the question, ‘How do I know what’s real?’ is not so silly after all.

This is a question that has occupied Western philosophers for hundreds of years. If I can show what’s real and what’s not real, then perhaps I can find out whether God is real or not and perhaps understand the limits of what can be known as fact. This is all known as the problem of duality, how to connect my conscious being with everything I experience as ‘real’.

One of the tests for reality is to get a second opinion. “Did you see that too?” is the classic reality check. If the other person says “Yes”, then it’s probably real. Except that the other person could also be a figment of your imagination. So, while the second opinion is a good everyday tool for checking up on reality, it isn’t absolutely beyond question. If you really want to get picky you can take this all a step further and ask “How do I know I’m real?” Well, if you want to define reality, perhaps it’s not such a bad place to start. If we can prove the reality of our own person, then we can see how that proof might be extended.

It was a very clever guy called Rene Descartes that came up with the answer. He said “I think, therefore I am.” The very fact that I’m asking the question proves I must be real. It’s a very neat answer and hard to argue with. The next step is to take that proof of our own reality and make the next step which is to prove things outside us actually do exist. That’s a lot more difficult. Descartes came up with an ingenious answer and he needed God’s help to do it.

This is how his argument went. I think of a thing called God. God is, by definition, all seeing, all knowing, the creator of everything and (also by definition) perfect. As God is perfect he must exist, as something that doesn’t exist is less than perfect. Therefore God exists. God created everything, so everything must exist, therefore the universe must be real. Oh dear! That’s a string off assumptions based on an idea we’ve simply created in our mind. It’s not exactly a satisfactory proof of reality. Western philosophers have been tossing this one around for centuries and I’ve yet to see a proof of reality.

It’s interesting to note that this is a question only asked in Western thinking. Eastern philosophers have never bothered with ‘Dualism’ as we call the problem. They don’t even worry about ‘reality’ as any kind of a problem. That’s probably because they’ve never recognised anything as real or unreal.

The word we use for defining reality is the word ‘is’. When we say something ‘is’ we mean it’s real. But what does saying something ‘is’ add to our understanding? ‘The car ‘is’ black’ tells us nothing more than to say ‘black car’. All the word ‘is’ does is connect other words or ideas together. You can take any sentence that uses ‘is’, take the word 'is' out, and no meaning is lost.

So is there any such thing as ‘reality’? The purely objective answer has to be ‘probably not’. Does this amount to a hill of beans in the way we live our lives? Certainly not. If something is real to you, then it’s real enough for all practical purposes.

So whether or not things are real doesn’t really matter? If you find a large lump of yellow metal that looks like gold, asking if it’s ‘real’ isn’t so silly.

SEARCHING FOR THE (Y)SETI

S.E.T.I: The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. All around the world, the biggest radio telescopes we have are spending much of their time in an internationally funded drive to discover intelligent life beyond our planet. Ask any of the astronomers involved and they’ll tell you why it’s so important. They want to answer the question ‘are we unique?’ Is mankind special to the point that we are the only technological capable beings around? This search, of course, is another of those science-versus-spirit things and it could be the biggest boondoggle since the London Dome. (Boondoggle: American slang for a useless and expensive project designed to divert public funds into personal pockets). What they are doing is listening for very faint radio signals that are unmistakeably generated by an alien technology, and, at the same time they are beaming signals into deep space to let others know we are here.

While all this is going on, we are searching for signs of primitive life on other planets and moons in the solar system. Several Mars probes have gone the tens of millions of miles to soft-land on Mars and test rocks for traces of bacteria.

So why is S.E.T.I. a ‘boondoggle’? It’s a boondoggle for two reasons: First; the question about other life and other civilisations can be answered by sitting in your armchair and doing some simple sums with some very, very big numbers in them. Second; Even if such a civilisation does exist, there is no way they’ll ever spot us. Not, at least, until we’re long gone from the planet.

The universe is big, mind-bogglingly big. So big, in fact that we’ve had to come up with a way of describing and measuring the distances involved. What we use is a unit of distance called a ‘light year’. It’s not a measurement of time, although it has big implications relating to time, it’s a very big version of a metre or a yard. We know that, in this universe, at least, light travels at a constant speed; 186,000 miles PER SECOND. We also know that that’s as fast as anything can go. So you can relate that to Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari, that’s six thousand six hundred and ninety six point six million miles per hour. It’s very, very fast. A particle of light is called a photon. Photons always zoom about at that speed. When a photon leaves the sun, it takes about ten minutes to get to earth. That’s covering about 93million miles in ten minutes. We can call that distance (93million miles) ‘ten light-minutes’. A light-year is how far that photon can go in one year, and that’s actually 5,865,696,000,000 miles, and that’s a very silly number (it’s a lot easier, and it takes up less space on the page, to call that distance One Light-Year).

So a light-year is a shorthand way of calibrating very big distances. Our speed crazy little photon is not only the fastest thing around, it’s also a bit of a time-machine as well. Actually it’s not so much a ‘time machine’ as a ‘time-o-scope’. It let’s you look back in time. Unfortunately it only works for looking back, so you can’t use it for winning the lottery next week. Let’s go back to the fact that it takes this photon (small bit of light) ten minutes to get from the surface of the sun to the back of your eyeball. That means that you are seeing the sun now as it was ten minutes ago. If you were an alien on a planet sixty five light years away and you had a super long distance radio, you could hear Winston Churchill deliver his ‘finest hour’ speech LIVE as it happened. So when we see a star which is ten light-years away, we are seeing it as it was ten years ago. We can’t know if it’s actually there right now, in fact it could have just this minute blown up, but we’ll have to wait ten years to see the bang!

So what does this have to do with boondoggles? We send out a signal, a radio signal that is made of photons. Off they go at 186,000 miles per second. In a hundred years they will have travelled a hundred light-years, and that’s not far by cosmic standards. In fact they’ve probably not quite made it as far as the corner shop in our cosmic neighbourhood. There aren’t many stars (with planets) that close. The odds of one of that handful of planets having a population that can pick up our greeting are nil, zero, none what-so-ever. Let’s assume, by some miracle, that there is a planet (planet ‘Zog’) one hundred light-years away which has its radio tuned in to planet Earth. The Zogians could pick up one of our earliest radio broadcasts, maybe. If their radio is not quite so sensitive they’ll have to wait a hundred years until one of the signals we’re sending NOW will get there. They are also into boondoggles, so they’re listening for it. Aha! “There is life out there”, they say, “Let’s reply so we can say hello.” Of course they want to use the fastest means possible, because they can’t wait to see if their ‘X Factor’ is better than ours. So they send off the fastest thing they’ve got; our speedy little friend, the photon. One hundred years later the photon arrives and we get the reply. That’s two hundred years to say ‘Hello’. It could take an awfully long time to check out ‘X Factor’ on planet Zog.

We’ll come back to this very pedestrian inter-stellar conversation later.

Let’s go back to whether or not there is intelligent life out there. (Even it’s so far away that we can’t communicate with it very well.) It’s time to look at some more mega-numbers:

The Earth orbits the sun, which is a bog-standard average type star. Out of about ten planets orbiting our star, only one has a technological society. We can tell from looking around our bit of our galaxy (that’s a bunch of stars hanging out together), that most stars don’t have planets, but quite a few do. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that only one in ten stars has any planets. Let’s also say that watery earth-type planets that are just the right distance from their star to neither freeze nor boil are pretty rare, say one star in a million that do have planets, has got a planet that could support life as we know it. That means the odds of such a planet orbiting a star are one in ten million. That certainly looks like very long odds. Especially if we also reckon that, even with the right kind of planet, only one in another million actually has managed to produce technology. So now the odds are one in TEN MILLION MILLION, that’s ten thousand billion.

There are, at present best estimates, one hundred billion stars in our galaxy. So from those odds, we probably are the only planet in our galaxy with technology based on life as we know it. By our odds, we’d have to search one hundred galaxies to find our target. How many Galaxies are there out there? At best estimates there are two hundred billion that we could possibly see and many more that are so far away we’ll never see them. So if we searched two hundred billion galaxies we should find (by our crude odds) two billion earth-type planets with technological societies. Two billion!

Is there intelligent life out there? Of course there is. Save your money and use your telescopes for something more useful. We’ve figured it out without so much as a PhD in astrophysics!

Now let’s say there is a civilisation in a galaxy not too far away. The nearest galaxy is 250 thousand light years away. It’s a tiny little thing called Canis Major (big dog) and it’s what’s known as a dwarf galaxy. It’s not so much a big dog as a small rodent in galactic terms. So we’ll probably have to look a bit further than that. If we get lucky we might strike it rich in a galaxy quite close to use, say, ten million light years away. If we remember our conversation with the Zogians that was taking two hundred years (just to shake hands and say ‘hello’), we are now looking at twenty million years to do just that. In other words, it’s not worth the effort. We know they’re out there and we know we can’t ever talk to them or ever meet up.

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence? Boondoggle!

THE WITNESS

In the Western world we have a somewhat conceited approach to knowledge. We only value knowledge that comes from our own tradition and way of thinking. There are other ways of looking at the universe that come from the east – especially the Indian sub-continent, which we tend to dismiss because they don’t conform to our mental comfort zone. There is a written philosophical tradition that goes back well over five thousand years that takes an approach to the acquisition of knowledge that is very different to our own. There’s a lot in it that is of real value to anyone who might want to explore matters of the spirit without buying into belief systems that fly in the face of scientific understanding. Some of these ideas are difficult and uncomfortable for the western mind because they cross boundaries between science and spirit in an amazingly casual way. They are, however, important ideas that are well worth the effort.

Here’s one they made earlier:

When you’re dreaming you experience the dream in a very interesting way. Part of your brain is doing the dreaming and another part is ‘watching’ the dream as it unfolds. There are two levels of consciousness operating to make the dream work. There’s the movie on the screen and the person sitting in the audience watching it. This bit doing the watching is called the Witness or Witness Consciousness. Awake or asleep, part of our brain is always processing data and another part is watching it. We also call this awareness. This concept of the Witness, is basic to many of the ways eastern thought approaches an understanding of our place in the universe and how the universe actually works. It’s also that which we can define as the inner ‘me’; the part of us that experiences our life and all that happens in it. In the western tradition we would probably consider this to be our ‘Soul’; our central spark of life that many believe exists beyond the physical world: The immortal bit.

Western religions that arise from the Old Testament of the bible, such as Christianity, Judaism and the Muslim faith, and the philosophical thinking that comes from this tradition, have concentrated on making the connection between the individual soul and the rest if creation.

Very often, in order to make this connection, these ways of thinking require us to believe something that defies reason to make it all work. The eastern approach doesn’t do this. In this way of looking at things, consciousness is a universal phenomenon that is the basic building block of the universe. It can be found in everything from a brick to a human to a star. The witness is a bit of that very same stuff. Consciousness has some remarkable properties. It exists outside space-time and is a part of its fabric at the same time. It is also all joined-up in a way that makes ideas like the latest thinking in cosmology look rather familiar.


These are very difficult ideas and can be a bit uncomfortable to contemplate but let’s try and take it all a bit further. Our inner being, the witness, is made of consciousness and so is everything else. Therefore the problem of connecting our existence to everything else does not exist. Because consciousness does not exist in space-time, it does not conform to its laws and is actually all the same continuous phenomenon all joined up and identical.

If both we, and the universe, are made of the same identical continuous stuff then there would be a meaningful connection to be made. Rather than viewing God as the creator and grand designer, we could define God as consciousness, which would make a lot of religious people fairly happy. If all of this consciousness is all joined up and it is the separation between us, God and the universe that is the illusion, then God is the universe, we are the universe and, we are God. That sounds extremely blasphemous and such a statement would have got you burned at the stake not so long ago.

You don’t have to accept this hypothesis but if you, at least, go along with it far enough to explore its potential, it becomes an interesting and useful way to understand both the physical nature of the universe and the way our spirit fits into it. And there’s no need to chuck your intellect in the bin while you’re doing it.

There may come along some bright spark who succeeds in devising a scientific explanation of consciousness. At present it sits outside the realms of science as it doesn’t conform to the laws of physics. If you are of a scientific mind it is almost automatic to reject the idea of consciousness altogether and put it firmly into the realm of spiritual mumbo-jumbo. It’s not that simple. Science wants to see observable effects of the things it theorises about and consciousness does have observable physical effect. Nature, left to its own devices would never assemble a brick wall (it certainly wouldn’t produce a space rocket) and yet these physical things are there to be observed. The universe favours disorder. In the natural process ordered piles of bricks (walls) tend to fall down and become disordered. When we search space for radio signals that are the hallmark of intelligent life we are looking for the signs of consciousness acting on the universe.

MAKING PARENTS RESPONSIBLE

The most dangerous animal on the planet is a juvenile human being and yet parents carry no responsibility for the control and behaviour of their juveniles. If my dog bites someone, I am liable for the damage. If my child trashes my neighbour’s car, I am not. This is a state of affairs that makes no sense. There is a simple solution to re-establishing parental responsibility and to inculcating respect for authority in children. It is to make parents civilly liable for the damage done by their children. When I mooted this idea to a group comprising police and social workers, their response was to point out how difficult enforcement would be. They entirely missed the point. Civilly liable does not mean criminally liable. If your child trashes my car, I sue you for the damage. I don’t present the criminal justice system with an extra burden of prosecuting a difficult matter. I go after the parent, in civil court, for the child’s behaviour.

There is much public angst about out-of-control children, anti-social behaviour and lack of respect for authority. One suspects that every generation of adults has thought the next generation to be that way. In the last three decades however, something has changed, and that is the child’s lack of fear of consequences. Many children under ten years old are fully aware that the law can’t touch them and many older children have no fear of the feeble public response to criminal behaviour. An ASBO has rapidly become a badge of honour.

Any experienced teacher will tell you that many children arrive at school already beyond control and the same teacher can spot the future problem children as early as five or six years old. This indicates that the damage has been done, and is being done in the home. Once upon a time, a policeman bringing a child to the parents’ door would be welcomed, thanked, and the child would be punished for bringing the police home. Now the response is, depressingly often, a vigorous defence of the child to the police, the parental attitude varies from ‘why are you picking on my kid?’ to ‘haven’t you got anything better to do?’

It would not take too long before parents, who realise that they will be hit heavily in their pockets, to start teaching their children to behave properly when out of the house. The children will know, soon enough, that home is no longer a haven from the consequences of their public behaviour. Parents will not long tolerate their children costing them time and money involved in being on the wrong end of an action for damages.

This means that respect for the law and behaving properly in public would be enforced, where it should be enforced, in the home, not in the criminal courts.

For this to work, one other thing must change in the law. Evidence gathered by the authorities, identification of children in a civil action, and the provision of past public records regarding a child’s behaviour, must be made available to the party bringing an action for damages caused by a child. Restrictions on publication of this information, outside the civil court, could be imposed if that is thought desirable. This information is essential to allow the Judge to assess the degree of parental negligence and to bring a properly constructed action.

This is a step that would, in a very few years, restore the education in, and enforcement of, acceptable standards of behaviour, in the home environment. This is the only place where such education and enforcement is effective.

There will be many who feel that this is draconian and that we might be treating children badly. They would be misguided in thinking that. The many failed attempts to deal with anti-social behaviour in the public arena, show the limitations of legislation in tackling the problem. The civil courts cost the tax payer very little, as they are funded by court fees, and are relatively swift in their action. It would take only a few years for sufficient precedent to be set, for most cases to be settled out of court. Enforcement would be as in any other civil judgement: failure to pay up will bring the Bailiff.

Simple isn’t it? With out a doubt it would be workable and it deals with the core problem of returning such basic child education and control back to where it truly belongs: In the home.

IMMORTALITY

Fear of dying is something we all share. We spend our lives doing our very best to avoid the one true inevitability. There are those who say ‘I’m not afraid of dying’. There is a very simple experiment to test this: Point a loaded gun at someone who makes this declaration and see if they duck. Instinct will take over and that person will duck first and think later. It is very difficult to imagine a universe that our consciousness is not a part of and it is very uncomfortable to contemplate not being.

The instinct to stay alive is a Darwinian imperative. Any species that did not fear death would not last long in the survival stakes. All religions’ first job is to offer some way of dealing with that fear. Immortality, in whatever form, is their stock in trade.

The trouble is that fear makes people dangerous. The suicide bomber and the kamikaze both give their lives for a promise of immortality. People who ‘give their lives to Jesus’ do it because the other side of that contract is ‘the sure and certain knowledge of eternal life’. The reason such people have a problem with science is they can’t reconcile a scientific view of the universe with their need for immortality. Science says the bible is a myth, and therefore, when you die – that’s the end. Finish. Kaput. So they mount an attack on science. Never mind that they use the products of science every day in every way, and that it is science and not religion that has made the lot of the common man so bearable. It never ceases to amaze me that a person can watch an evangelical preacher furthering ‘intelligent design’ on that ultimate product of science, the television, and not have a problem with what the preacher is saying.

Science itself is not completely blameless in all of this. Science has great difficulty in dealing with ideas that it cannot quantify. There is a strong tendency in science to act from a perverse kind of scientific ‘belief’. When it comes to matters of the spirit and “the ‘super-natural’, instead of saying “I don’t know’, science says “if it can’t be described by science it can’t be true’. That is an assumption based on a belief. The belief is that the scientific method is infallible. One only has to look at the history of science to see instance after instance of radical thinkers (who later turned out to be absolutely right) being ridiculed and rejected as absurd by the main body of scientific thought. Religion does not have the monopoly on dogma. In fact every major leap forward in science has been resisted by scientific dogma. It is painful to watch so-called objective thinkers behaving in such a way but it goes on every day in the scientific community.

The word ‘immortal’ means exactly what? Not mortal – incapable of dying. Not even the most rabid fundamentalist would suggest that our physical body doesn’t die. The religious position is that there is a part of us that exists beyond the physical body (generally referred to as the ‘soul’) that is incapable of dying. Even that idea is problematical. I have witnessed, close up, the results of brain damage, and there are too many of us who have watched Alzheimer’s disease rob a loved one of everything that made them who they are. If the ‘soul’ is the essence of our being, how can this happen? Do Alzheimer’s patients recover their conscious awareness when they die? When all brain activity has eased and the body remains alive, where is the soul? There can be little doubt that our consciousness is a product of the physical structure of our brain, so when the brain ceases to be, must not consciousness also cease?

Science teaches us that time is not an inflexible constant, it changes with velocity and it is as much a physical dimension as up down or sideways. In our daily lives, this variability of time is not apparent at all. Clocks go at the same rate anywhere on the planet. For everyday purposes, measurement of time is constant. There is another component to time, however, and that is our perception of it. Time can seem to fly by or it can seem to drag on interminably. Our conscious experience of time is very variable indeed. There are states of awareness where time can seem to stop altogether. Eastern mysticism describes a mental state known as ‘Samadhi’, a state of bliss, achieved through meditation, in which one experiences time ceasing to be. In my earlier hippy years I experienced this by combining meditation with an unwisely large does of lysergic acid. This is not a practice I would recommend. While in that state of consciousness, time did, indeed, cease. From the point of view of one’s perception of time, it is possible for time to stop completely. If, time is not progressing, is that not a case of being aware and immortal? If time cannot pass and one is conscious, death (from one’s own perception) can’t happen. To dismiss this as mere hallucination misses the point. It is a demonstration of the fact that consciousness has a way of stepping outside physical time. In the physical universe, time does keep marching on. The point is that our perception of time is just as important as any other view of it.

There have been many surprisingly similar descriptions of ‘near death’ experiences. States of consciousness where one enters a tunnel of light, where one can look back at our physical bodies. These descriptions are so numerous and consistent that many scientists accept that such a phenomenon does in fact exist. Their explanation is that it is a natural experience of the brain finally shutting down prior to death. I find that a perfectly reasonable explanation. If, however, the experience of brain death is one that generates a state of timeless in the consciousness, then does this not constitute a conscious existence beyond the physical? If, by the very process of dying, one perceives time to cease, then one can have one’s scientific cake, and eat one’s spiritual cake at the same time. From the physical point of view, we do indeed die and cease to be. The brain can no longer support our consciousness. From the internal viewpoint, we have left the physical restriction of time altogether.

So there does not have to be an argument between science and spirit when it comes to death. Of course we die. Of course our consciousness is gone from the dead brain. But, in the infinitesimal moment of death, it is quite possible to achieve a state of awareness that does indeed constitute immortality.