When I started writing the Midweek Mysticism column here, I assumed it would attract a relatively small audience compared with the political commentary and critiques of current science, both of which have quite chunky readerships.

What I was unprepared for is the great spike of visitors for these pieces which has just kept on growing. The popularity is palpable and has confounded all my expectations.

But is it just “mysticism” or my particular take on it? I don’t know. My guess is that it is probably 80/20 in favour of the former. Naturally, I hope it’s the reverse, but how can one tell.

I know one thing, judging by other sites with similar content, if comments were left open, there would be a vast tsunami of choleric, spluttering bile that would have me questioning the sanity of the human race.

So no, I will not have the contemplative calm of Syntagma disturbed by … er … the disturbed.

If you want to say something though, you can write to me using the Contact link at top right. I might then devote one piece a week to publish the best of them — and not just the favourable ones.

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.

Coming eventually: Mystology: A different way of looking at the world. Also a website, mystology.com.

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In recent years, this site has been a sharp critic of the science industry. Not against the endeavour in itself, but of its tendency to hyperinflation: in the choice and cost of its projects, and of the declared results.

Until recently, we were a fairly small band in this country, which includes James Delingpole and Christopher Booker at the Telegraph. To call them sceptics would be mild enough to have them demanding a recount.

By contrast, the BBC has always been science-mad, taking science’s press releases as gospel and reporting claimed “discoveries” as wonders of the modern world.

Imagine my shock on Monday morning when Radio 4′s Start the Week, ably chaired by Allan Little, put four scientists through the mangle. The programme is available on the Radio 4 website.

One of the reasons for writing my forthcoming book Mystology: A different way of looking at the world is to make a decisive break with the scientism of the Western world by viewing it through the eye of mysticism instead. By mysticism, I don’t mean religion, a slab of ideology that has to be swallowed whole by its adherents. Regular readers won’t need an explanation, but here’s a summary of mystology.

Imagine an alien descending to Earth with the task of reporting back to his planet on our human way of life. Assume also that his only sense is that of hearing — this mimics the narrowness of our own sensory field.

He would naturally be attracted by sound alone, so we would expect him to make off in the direction of the loudest noise. Our extraterrestrial visitor would be more than likely to end up in the most deafening nightclub in town. The report back would make interesting reading.

The mystical among us believe that modern science shares the plight of our hapless ET in respect of its description of humans, both physical and psychological.

The prevailing model of human beings is similarly distorted by the same narrowness of focus: science concentrates largely on material processes as cause, rather than effect.

Mysticism has traditionally had a very different perspective. It sees people as made up of two distinct but temporarily conjoined parts: the animal (body, brain and nervous system) and the spiritual, a soul beyond that of the animal and beyond the remit of conventional science.

The errors of science, as the mystically-inclined see it, arise from the limited vision of the lower, physical body, whose intellect has a tendency to don the mantle of enlightenment, while ignoring its own tunnel vision. The story of the two frogs sums it up perfectly:

One frog lives in a small, mildewed well, while his cousin inhabits sand dunes by the sea. When the ocean frog goes to visit his kinsfrog in the well he’s dismayed by his narrow viewpoint.

“This well contains all the secrets of the universe,” he is told.
“And what are they?”
The well frog puffs himself up in a display of self-importance. “The universe is ten feet in diameter and bounded by a brick wall.”

When the ocean frog describes the vast blue vistas of his own home by the sea, his cousin laughs knowingly. “These are just neurological disturbances of the brain caused by over-excitement; hallucinations, dear frog, pure illusion. You should see a shrink.”

Many scientists are just like the frog in the well, disbelieving anything beyond their purview — geneticist Professor Steve Jones recently described spiritual experiences as a form of mental illness.

This is a self-limiting situation, which will always bedevil anyone putting a spiritual point of view. Zen is an attempt to get round this impasse by placing the whole of its emphasis on experience alone, without added description.

Buddhism is often accused of being atheistic. Its viewpoint is more simply understood as a paradox: God is everything and there is no God.

In order to see divinity, we need to stand back apart from it and realise what we are looking at. When merged with the divine, we don’t see it, just as we can’t see our own eyes. As the Christian mystics put it, God is dark to us.

But if God is everything, it is not possible to stand apart. Therefore God is always invisible to us. If, however, we shed our physical body in mystical experience, we see the world, and the divine, for what they are and on their own terms. This state is by invitation only, so we must work for it.

In ignorance, some look elsewhere for God, into the far reaches of the universe as scientists do, instead of within ourselves. And when they fail to make contact, they claim there is no God.

In this terrible isolation all the suffering of the world begins.

A while back a fascinating video went viral on YouTube.

It shows a series of segments in which several people in a shop or hotel take a lift (an elevator in American). Mid-trip the lights flash and go off. When they flicker on again a young girl has appeared in the compartment.

She has long, flame-red hair and is dressed in a white Victorian nightdress. She is holding a baby, or doll. When she turns to the occupant of the lift, she issues a penetrating scream.

Meanwhile, the people riding the lift are climbing the walls with fright. Not fear exactly, but elemental disabling terror. They are petrified, in its literal sense of turning to stone.

It is, of course, a stunt, set up to record various people’s reactions to a very realistic ghost. We, the viewers, actually see the girl coming in and out of a concealed hatch in the wall of the elevator, so we know that it is a setup.

Even so, I defy any watcher of the video not to experience a sense of existential fright, with cold shudders down the spine and the hairs on the back of the neck rising up.

It’s a very illuminating experiment showing how flimsy the hold of the intellect is when confronted with the power of the unknown, even when it’s faked.

So why are humans so terrified of ghosts? And it’s not only people; their dogs exhibit the same symptoms when meeting the inexplicable. It seems to be a mammalian thing.

All accounts of ghosts have one thing in common: they break the rules of life as well as the “laws” of physics. Ghosts walk through walls, suggesting they are the remnants of people past stuck in a particular location.

Spirits of the dead are seen as ghoulish “lost souls”, bearing heavy burdens of past misdeeds, of murder and other pitiless crimes. We fear them precisely because we don’t want to share their fate.

But what are they? A consensus view is that they are indeed the souls of the dead “who have not moved on”.

In life, they neglected to explore the spiritual realm, preferring all manner of enjoyments and a heightened physicality. They were unprepared for death when it came, which explains why ghosts are often associated with the victims of car crashes and other sudden death incidents.

Even the word “death” has a baleful air about it. “Passing on” is a much more benign expression and conveys a hint of progress and growth.

Deep mystical experiences show us the space we will arrive at immediately after death and how welcoming it is. Also, we retain no memory of our life and our people, so there is no sense of loss. That occurs back in the physical world among our friends and family. Mercifully, the “victim” is blissfully spared all the anguish of the occasion.

So, a pursuit of spirituality here on Earth confers a wider perspective that extends beyond birth and death. One no longer fears the end, although, being human, one would prefer it not to happen just yet.

Our bodies decay with age, a fact often held against an “uncaring God”. Actually, ageing is a gradual withdrawal from life, a progressive decoupling from the interests and passing passions of existence. To retain them into death would make us reluctant to let go, thus turning us into ghosts.

Fear of death is not justified. The released spirit has no regrets about leaving this mortal coil and moves on naturally and with ease, guided by more advanced spirits.

However, the girl in the lift illustrates how this whole field of passing on, as natural as it is, remains the source of existential petrification when the “other side” comes to meet us.

In reality, it’s the most benign and positive event that can happen to us in this life. We Westerners, who normally quail in the face of “extinction”, have got it all wrong.

Don’t listen to Richard Dawkins and his “selfish gene”. He is facing a very uncertain, and unknowing end.

Richard, there’s still time to turn it all around!

Watch the video: Girl in a lift.
Proof of consciousness after death

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.

Coming eventually: Mystology: A different way of looking at the world. Also a website, mystology.com.

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Taken at face value, there is no more peaceful religion than Zen Buddhism, based as it is on bringing a meditative calm to every aspect of life. Even to call it a religion is not quite right. Much of Zen’s activity is unorganised non-activity — seeing into the truth by adopting a quiescent attention simply to “what is”.

And yet every human grouping has its weaknesses. In Zen’s case it was the growth of Bushido, a militaristic training movement for the soldiers of emperors.

Bushido was a code of honour for samurai warriors. It has similarities with western chivalry but is culturally very different. Followers of “the way of the warrior” dedicated to Bushido were taught fine skills with both sword and bow. They could withstand great pain and discomfort.

As in many martial arts, Bushido emphasises courage, bravery, and unquestioning loyalty to its superiors. Its soldiers were widely feared for their proficiency in combat and their lightning-fast swordsmanship.

Although Zen was well understood in Japan, and as Ch’an in China and Son in Korea, its offshoots moved far from the original intent. Paradoxically, Bushido incorporated the very meditative techniques of Zen into the creation of an unchallengable warrior class.

Young men in particular will rarely be content to sit still and do nothing. Religions have never been far from almost all the major wars in history. Even Nazism grew from a Bushido-like German warrior cult and operated as a perversion of religion throughout its ten-year period of dominance over Europe.

In our time, Zen Buddhism is what it always has been, a poet’s religion. Although its objectives are beyond words and concepts, yet words are among the expedient means it uses to take the voyager to the “other shore”.

For a “scripture without words” it has generated billions of them over the centuries, including pithy koan, said to precipitate enlightenment, and haiku, a 17-syllable poetic form which is intended to awaken in the reader a direct perception of a timeless moment. For example:

An ancient pond,
A frog jumps in,
Plop!

The onomatopoeic “plop” gives us a pleasurable shock of recognition, bringing the scene to life. In the original Japanese the last line is Mizu-no oto!, or “the sound of water”, which is not a patch on the English version.

Beyond haiku and koan, the famous impenetrability of Zen verse mostly revolves around a single principle: students practise assiduously to enlighten their minds, BUT — and this is the great secret — their minds are already enlightened.

It’s only when they realise this — a long struggle sometimes — that they can declare themselves enlightened. The following conversation illustrates a common teaching method:

Pupil: What are you doing, Master?
Master: I am polishing this brick, as you see.
Pupil: But why, Master?
Master: To make a perfect mirror.
Pupil: But you’ll never succeed. It’s impossible!
Master: The same is true of the mind. No matter how much you polish it, it will never be other than it is.

A little explanation is needed here because in the original language, the words mind and heart are rendered by the same word.

My own usage is that “mind” is the contents of consciousness: thoughts, impressions and feelings, whereas what the master is referring to is “consciousness” itself, principally, personal consciousness (soul), but also impersonal consciousness (God, the Absolute, the Buddha-mind).

The Sixth Patriarch of Zen, Hui Neng — supposedly illiterate, although far from it — would later assert that to practise meditation by sitting quietly without ideas arising in the mind (consciousness), ranks the meditator with inanimate objects.

The only right way, he said, is to free the mind of attachment to objects and forms. All other methods put oneself “under restraint”. He castigated those teachers of meditation who instruct their pupils to attempt to slow down the activity of the mind.

This way can lead, in rare cases, to insanity — a point also made forcefully by Carl Jung in our own times, following the fate of his collaborator, Richard Wilhelm after half a lifetime spent translating texts from the Chinese.

Another of Jung’s contemporaries, Dr D. T. Suzuki, agreed, seeing in it the turning point from which Zen developed in its modern form. If the Buddha-mind is originally pure and undefiled, he asked, why is it necessary to clean it by wiping off non-existent dust?

Moreover, if from the Mind arises this world, why not let the latter arise as it pleases? The most natural thing to do in relation to the Mind would be to let it go on with its creating and illuminating.

The so-called Northern School, he implied, was just creating a Buddha-mind which stands against everyday mind, thus ordaining a dualism which does not exist.

Hui Neng, who instituted the sense of non-dualism in Zen, said: “As long as there is a dualistic way of looking at things there is no emancipation. Light stands against darkness, the passions against enlightenment. … The main point is not to think of things as good or bad, thereby restricting oneself, but to let the mind move on as it pleases to perform its inexhaustible functions. This is to be in accord with Mind-essence.”

It is more than likely that this refusal to make moral judgements about anything, while essential for spiritual progress towards enlightenment, also led more worldly types along the path of the martial arts and the philosophy of Bushido.

After Japan’s near total destruction in World War II, in which Bushido played a large part, the obsessive pursuit of peace has returned to the land.

The question for us now is will China’s sabre-rattling over territorial control of some remote islands, and the threatening behaviour of its client state North Korea, tempt the Japanese back to the Way of the Warrior.

As the horrifying events in Woolwich this week illustrate, any religion is capable of harbouring a kind of Bushido of the soul which releases the dark side of human nature.

Discussion: #zenbushido

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.

Coming eventually: Mystology: A different way of looking at the world. Also a website, mystology.com.

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Bartender, I’ll have a large omnishambles, if you please!

Sorry, sir, we’ve only got the megashambles left. There’s been quite a run on them lately. You might also try the doomsdayshambles. That’s the really strong stuff. The posh boys go mad for them. And they’re definitely not the common type, if you know what I mean.

The Commons type, perhaps?

Yeah, even that Little Richardjohn couldn’t make it up.

On the live topic of the seemingly wilful destruction of the age-old marriage laws purely to burnish the image of one David Cameron, there’s a potent card in the pack that he hasn’t played yet. I’m surprised that, as far as I can tell, no-one has thought of it.

Gender-bending chemicals.

These have been around since World War II and began making their mark in the Fifties through Rachel Carson’s epic game-changing book Silent Spring in America.

The world’s bread basket, the immense wheat-growing plains of the Mid-west fell silent as no birds sang and whole species of animals disappeared after the annual chemical spraying season began.

Decades later, the natural environment is soaked in supposedly safe pesticides which have ripped through nature in surge after surge of destruction.

Fish inhabiting inland waterways have been particularly affected by chemicals that interfere with gender, some even growing two sets of sexual organs, one male, one female.

Hermaphrodite fish might not seem to be a problem, but these substances now have a firm foothold in the human food chain. “Endocrine disruptors” pose a silent threat to life on this planet, even to human fertility and civilisation.

This appeared in New Scientist on 27 May, 2005: “Gender-bending chemicals mimicking the female hormone oestrogen can disrupt the development of baby boys, suggests the first evidence linking certain chemicals in everyday plastics to effects in humans.”

The Daily Mail goes with: “The diverse systems affected by endocrine-disrupting chemicals likely include all hormonal systems and range from those controlling development and function of reproductive organs to the tissues and organs regulating metabolism and satiety. Effects on these systems can lead to obesity, infertility or reduced fertility, learning and memory difficulties, adult-onset diabetes or cardiovascular disease, as well as a variety of other diseases.”

The New Scientist headline was: “Gender-bending chemicals found to feminise boys”.

Could this be the cause of the fairly recent upsurge in “gay” issues, politics and demand for same-sex marriage? It certainly seems likely, and totally changes the terms of the current debate.

One wonders what scientific advice the Prime Minister is receiving from the Food Standards Agency and Cobra. In politics nothing happens without context.

It’s beginning to look like a case of “bend it like Cameron”.

John Evans

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