If there’s one phrase from our recent politics that makes me grind my teeth to destruction, it’s “evidence-based” whatever.

This is pure wishful-thinking given that evidence is mostly faulty and is frequently manipulated to suit a political whim or half-baked conviction. It’s rife among the Left-wing former establishment.

Take the famous psychological experiment where a lecture theatre full of students is suddenly interrupted by a woman running in and screaming, “Help me!” She is followed by a villainous character with a large knife who apparently overwhelms her and stabs her to death before picking her up and running out again.

The theatre is then put into fashionable “lockdown” and a few actorly police officers enter, who interview the students about what they have witnessed.

The interesting aspect to this is that few students actually report what happened in plain sight. Most produce wild fantasies ranging from rape to alien abduction.

The “evidence” is so far out of kilter that none of it could ever be used in a court of law. Such is human nature.

So when the public sector constantly demands evidence-based decision-making on future public spending it’s pure tommy-rot.

Just look at the variety of opinions on what happened in the Mid-Staffs hospital where at least 1200 patients were alleged to have died needlessly because of lack of care. Human nature often refuses to accept reality because it is just too painful to contemplate, and even more to admit one’s own complicity.

Evidence is often fiction. Everyone has a different account of what happened and especially of what should happen to improve matters.

So let’s dispense with “evidence-based” decision-making and use simple common sense instead — preferably the cheapest option.

John Evans

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Socrates is probably better known today than he has ever been, despite his origins in the Axial Age — or Age of Transformation — around 400BC.

He is recognised in our time as an early philosopher in the great days of Athens, and as a mentor of Plato.

Not generally known is that he was also an ingrained mystic, a student of one of the many Mystery Schools that proliferated around the Mediterranean in pre-Christian times. Here is his mystical story:

The love of wisdom (Sophia), or philosophia in Greek, began in Ionian Greece in Homeric times. It was a deliberate increase of consciousness on the part of a small number of people who lived close to the land but who recognised that the mind of man had a structuring and ordering faculty which seemed to be above the processes of nature.

Their often puzzled cogitations gave birth to philosophy which, in turn, spawned science, mathematics and all the other systems of pure thought that bedevil students to this day.

Philosophers were known to be otherworldly and lost in thought, although I think a meditative state would be more accurate. They dressed in simple robes and lived frugally – rich living degraded the mind, they thought. Such a life would inevitably produce more than its share of enlightened beings.

The Greek philosopher Socrates is possibly the perfect exemplar of the philosophic life. He completely embodied the higher qualities of simplicity and ethics, and went to his death without a trace of fear.

He spent his entire lifetime, we are told, engaging others in conversations about the need to be good. Moreover, he was completely unworldly, careless of his appearance, and had no visible means of financial support. In Plato’s Georgias, one listener complains that, if Socrates is right, life would need to be turned upside down.

Socrates also claimed to have a guardian spirit who frequently advised him not to follow certain courses of action. He cared little for material goods and was frequently fed at other people’s tables, where he demonstrated the philosophic rules of argument and inquiry as the evening’s star turn.

Ethically, Socrates believed that to do good confers happiness, while wickedness – which arose in every case from ignorance, not evil – led to misery. He spent his 70 years of life perfecting the craft of living well, making the telling claim that “nothing can harm a good man either in life or after death”.

He also subscribed to a kind of karmic reckoning, as well as the continuation of life after death. When he faced his executioners without flinching, he demonstrated these virtues in the toughest of arenas.

Socrates’s proclaimed virtues were courage, moderation, justice and wisdom. Wisdom indeed was the queen of virtues since it conferred the others by default. The soul, he thought, was “mutilated by wrong actions and benefited by right ones.”

How much then does eternal life depend on simplicity and an ethical lifestyle? Knowledge of the base state of being is suprapersonal, beyond the body’s compass.

Although the body is “swimming” in eternity at all times, it fails to register the fact because of its self-partiality. It follows that extrapersonal values – an ethical life – will more easily align one’s being with the suprapersonal viewpoint than will a self-interested way of life.

Similarly, a frugal life will free up psychic energies for a more concerted intention towards the ultimate goal of seeing into one’s own self-nature, which requires a total commitment.

Socrates exemplified the qualities of simplicity and ethical living to a remarkable degree. His life in the so-called Axial Age seemed to anticipate, or draw on, some of the ideas of his near contemporary, the Buddha, and of Christianity more than 400 years later.

Although we don’t know much about him except for Plato’s dialogues and works by Xenophon, who denied the scurrilous rumours put about by his enemies, his worldview still influences the best of us in the 21st century.

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates.

John Evans

… who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

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So, scientists at CERN think they may have spotted something strange: neutrinos (very odd “particles”), travelling faster than the speed of light.

These nimble little dots pass through matter, in this case hundreds of miles of solid Italian rock, as if it didn’t exist. (BIG CLUE)

Shock, horror! This destroys the whole basis of Science as we know it. Albert Einstein must be spinning in his tomb.

If true, his 1905 theory of relativity is consigned to the rubbish heap. The entire Standard Model of the Universe collapses in on itself. Time disappears along with space.

Calm down, dears.

Here’s something I prepared earlier:

Around 2500 years ago, a wandering mendicant, known to history as Gotama (or Gautama) Buddha, sitting under a tree, underwent an “enlightenment” experience in which the world dissolved into gossamer insubstantiality revealing everything to be of one substance. That substance was much closer to mind than to matter, for crucially it exhibited intelligence. It is sometimes known as Spirit or, in modern times, Consciousness. [...]

When scientists “split” matter and claim to have found new particles, they begin with a mathematical model of what they are looking for. At the LHC it’s Higgs boson — the “God Particle” — which “gives mass to matter”. Doesn’t it strike you as peculiar that after a century of work, they still don’t know what gives mass to matter and have to invent a blob to explain it? I suspect the Buddha would say: matter is an illusion of the egoic mind. All matter is Spirit, or, if you’d prefer, Consciousness.

We await the cosy reassessment of peer-group reviews. Since they are all materialists, I’m not holding my breath.

The principal concern at the moment seems to be for “causality”: that one event affects another in time. After all, if a carrier of information arrives before the light that illuminates it, causality goes out the window because we will in theory be ahead of it in time.

When I was at school I wrote a physics essay in which someone travels from the moon to Earth faster that the speed of light. They would then see themselves travelling backwards from Earth to moon. I can’t remember the exact calculation now — I was probably cleverer in those days — but it worked at the time and I seem to remember winning a prize for the piece.

Today’s scientists should read Jung, or even Dogen.

Jung coined the word “synchronicity” to describe what he called “temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events.” He variously defined synchronicity as an “acausal connecting principle”, “meaningful coincidence” and “acausal parallelism”.

Could it be that he was aware that temporal sequentiality is not essential in this world, except to materially fixated individuals? In other words, could “mind” time travel? What is the point of “mind” if it can’t move easily around its natural environment of consciousness?

The mystic mind takes this for granted. Clod-hopping materialists find it inconceivable, except when nature demonstrates how out of touch they are, as it is doing now. Well done, CERN, you have successfully taken us forward to the past.

However, should the new view stand, it will at least cast much needed doubt over the prevailing pessimism of science. If the universe is totally different from what materialists thought it was, it opens doors for the mystic point of view.

What’s the betting that some small discrepancy will be found in the mathematics to cover the boffins’ blushes. It will also spare us watching a BBC physicist eating his underpants.

Whatever is the world coming to?

John Evans

… who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

Muscular Mysticism is coming soon.

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I’ve read my fair share of articles in the philosophical press, as well as their scientific, psychological and political equivalents.

As a result, I’ve long come to the conclusion that modern philosophy exists solely to demonstrate how clever philosophers are — or think they are. French “sages” are notorious for this tendency, but the Brits and Americans are not far behind.

One of the commonest ploys is to represent a point of view by quoting the name of a long deceased philosopher: Kant, Spinoza, Wittgenstein et al. If you had previously read the entire corpus of their work, you will know what the writer is getting at. If not, hard cheese. You’re not as clever as the writer, obviously.

This is what might be called “shorthand jargon”, a method of eliminating anyone who’s not in the club, the “throw the rascal out” tendency. It’s rife throughout the academic journal scene — the way experts communicate with each other. This is true of science and many other narrower disciplines.

I think philosophy is the worst though, because it has developed an acute sense of inferiority. The grand old art of thinking in abstractions has been steadily whittled away by the advance of science, the massively funded language of our times. Moreover, mathematics is taking over from elegant set-piece argumentation over sylph-like points of disputation.

It’s not an idle thought that if you can’t express your most complex ideas, or convictions, so that any intelligent person can understand them, they are probably not true, and if you need mathematics to express anything, it is not of this world. Happily, mysticism is the simplest of all the grand philosophies.

Most big-picture science is tenuous. It hangs on a gallery of dubious theories and yet is presented by big-science communicators as the finished article. If you object, you’ll get a load of brain-busting jargon in return, couched in a withering scorn, the most supercilious of which is: You haven’t done the mathematics!

By the way, this is also true of Left-wing ideologies. If you take issue with them, you’re a fascist Tory toad — never mind that Fascism arose on the political Left (see Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism). It is a potent form of fascism in itself.

So, modern politics, modern philosophy, modern science and modern society have one element in common. They employ complexity and monocultural certainty to eliminate opposition and alternative viewpoints. The truth is being deliberately obscured by runaway egotism.

Where then does mysticism come into this? It existed before formal science as Idealism, the conviction that everything is made by consciousness, or Spirit. Most philosophers down the ages have been Idealists in one form or another. It can be simply expressed by the latest political buzz phrase: “We’re all in this together!”

Dualism, on the other hand, creates a sense of Us and Them, a central crutch of most academic disciplines. Theology and practical religion are not immune either. It is also the cause of war.

If scientists dismiss “woolly mysticism” out of hand, they are rejecting most of the predecessors in their own subject area.

True mysticism, being essentially an experiential mode, uses the classic tools of science in a private quest: personal experimentation, data collection and interpretation. It is individualism unbound, with the proviso that anyone can participate — if they dare.

It begins with the mystic and the mind and ends with a transformation. Once you have had one of the great experiences, you change irreversibly. Doubt disappears, except for the scepticism of an audience that did not share your moment of truth.

My conviction is that the 21st century will slowly introduce a new era of philosophical and practical mysticism. The younger generation has been brought up on the mental wizardry of Harry Potter. The seed has been sown.

We do need to overturn the 20th-century’s totalitarian approach to understanding.

John Evans

John Evans is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

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Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? wrote poet Alexander Pope about the use of overwhelming force against a defenceless person.

Everyday life often seems like that, especially for the elderly and infirm facing an implacable death in the not too distant future.

In this piece I want to discuss reincarnation, the re-emergence of the butterfly from the wheel of life; in particular as applied to possibly the most charming and attractive figures in all world literature: the bodhisattvas.

The word can be rendered in English as enlightening being. They are found liberally sprinkled through the pages of Mahayana Buddhist texts. Here’s a description from the radiant Flower Garland Sutra:

Some appear in the form of mendicants, some in the
form of priests … some in the form of scholars, scientists,
doctors; some in the form of ascetics, some in the form of
entertainers, some in the form of pietists, some in the form
of bearers of all kinds of arts and crafts — they are seen to
have come, in their various guises, to all villages, cities,
towns, communities, districts and nations … They are
lamps shedding light on the knowledge of all beings … for
the purpose of leading people to perfection.

They can be of either sex, and are definitely ranked among the good guys.

Bodhisattvas are said to be trained in their previous lives for higher states of being but, out of universal compassion, they choose to return to this world to help all beings to the enlightened state.

In the text, there does seem to be rather a lot of them. But bear in mind that this is a celestial overview. In practice, they are thin on the ground. If you have one in your street, you are very fortunate, although it’s doubtful you would know unless you have the “all-seeing eye” of knowledge. Not many people have.

All spiritual literature is full of examples of, and speculations about reincarnation. Early Christians believed in it until it was razed from the record by politically-motivated priests and bishops. Christian politicians have a bad record of burning books they didn’t like or threatened their powerbase.

India still accepts its reality, which is burnt into the culture, as do many eastern countries. Tibet even picks its leader, the Dalai Lama, on the basis of the reincarnation of the last one.

The essential idea is that in any one life we have the opportunity to develop our portion of consciousness into a vehicle capable of lifting us to a higher plane of being after death. If we fail to make the effort, or are not ready for it, we simply return to this life in a different identity until we reach escape velocity, so to speak.

Some advanced beings come back to help us make the transition. They are the bodhisattvas, the enlightening beings. Consider this further excerpt on the work they do:

He saw countless enlightening beings on the
promenades or sitting on their seats, engaged in
various activities. Some were walking around, some
were doing spiritual exercises, some were practising
observation, some were projecting universal compassion,
some were working on various sciences having to do with
the welfare of the world, some were instructing, some
were reciting, some were writing, some were asking
questions, some were engaged in ripening conduct,
concentration, and knowledge …

In the Flower Garland Sutra, the whole universe, with its teams of enlightening beings busy within it, is a vast workshop where everyone is brought to enlightenment in one way or another.

The diversity is immense as befits the adornments of the Universal Consciousness, whose concentration maintains it. But the small details and individual acts of kindness and compassion are no less important, for, in the magnificent Flower Garland vision, each minute grain of sand contains the universe without end.

The world, the supernal manifestation of the Great One, constantly brings into itself countless clouds of forms and sentient beings, each with its own distinctness; but not even the most insignificant speck is refused participation in the vibrant life of the cosmic consciousness.

Within this framework, the enlightening being, who may appear as anything from a doctor to a wandering mendicant, is shown as the progenitor of change and the catalyst of enlightenment:

Then the Buddha extended his right hand, rubbed my head,
and revealed to me a teaching called universal eye, which
is the sphere of all Buddhas, revealing the practice
of enlightening beings, showing the differentiation of the
planes of all universes … communicating to all beings in
accord with their mentalities …

Unfortunately, our western science and materialistic metropolitan existence knows little of this, despite a mass of subtle hints and steers contained in our own spiritual literature. As a culture we have lost touch with the most powerful form of storytelling ever developed: the allegory.

Many of our most famous books exist on two levels: as a simple story, plainly told with a literal meaning, and as an allegorical tale disguising a mystical thread with immortality as its inner core. Much of Renaissance religious art conceals a preoccupation with an afterlife and a strong sense of upward movement.

The butterfly on the wheel has two choices: be broken and fall back to earth, or lift up the head and stretch the wings and soar into eternity.

The bodhisattvas exist to serve that purpose.

John Evans

… who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

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