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Introduction

Less than 5 minutes drive from where I live is a park I have gone to in the early mornings for a few years. It has a parking area that faces north, and the eastern end has been my go-to place. There’s something about that area that entrances me.

There’s nothing spectacular or obvious. In fact, one morning the rising sun filtered through mist to create an affect that let me create one of my favourite photos. To take it on my iPhone I had to wait for a guy with a flash camera – a digital SLR – to move out of the way. What he saw, I do not know, but it clearly wasn’t what I saw. He moved on without raising his camera.

Developing soft eyes

I have had a passion for photography since my teens, but I never took the straight path that delighted in crisp and technically perfected images. I loved the effect of light, and I developed a kind of painterly passion – expressionistic – rather than a love of the technical potential of the device. For a long time, I relied upon a basic point and shoot Kodak, and commercial processing. I couldn’t crop images until digital came a long, so I had to learn to see the finished image in my crappy little camera.

I bought a Canon SLR in the mid 1990s. It was my second. The first, a Minolta SRT 101, I bought in 1968, and it was stolen a few years later. So, the Canon was an act of indulgence, as modest as it was.

In 1999 I enrolled in a Social Ecology course through the University of Western Sydney. One of the units was A Sense of Place. This involved selecting a place and returning to it for at least an hour for each day for a week or two. I have forgotten the details now. I had to keep a diary and deliver 5,000-word report. With the permission of course convenor I produced a 30,000-word report and a portfolio of poems and photos.

My place was Broadwater Beach, north of Evans Head on the far north coast of New South Wales. The beach stretched south to Evans Head. It was not an area that was safe for swimming, so mostly fishers went there. It had a quality of wildness that domesticated beaches lacked. I went there often to fish. On the rare occasions I could see another person I felt crowded.

I picked an area of around 100 metres to limit any temptation to roam too far. My intent was to make a photographic diary, but 2 things happened. The first was that I got bored quickly, and the second was that a beach and sand dunes do not make for good photographs. I began to rue my choice of place. But, I chose to stick it out – even if my report would be about being bored and not able to take interesting photos. I had to be loyal to my original intent and see it through.

Broadwater Beach is home to what is called ‘coffee rock’. It’s a mixture of mineral sands and organic matter which produces a hard but friable feature that looks like compacted coffee grounds. Portions of the area I had selected featured areas of this ‘coffee rock’ eroded by wave action. I decided to photograph detail in the desperate hope of producing some images that were interesting. Apart from a few possibles, it was a forlorn expectation. 

But what it did do was transformative. It shifted my gaze from the beachscape to particular features and, quite suddenly, I was seeing extraordinary things under my feet. What was a visual desert became a bounty of the extraordinary. I changed the pattern of my visits – arriving just before sun up, and at the last few hours of daylight. 

Ground water seeped through the dunes and created wet areas that intersected wave cut sand structures. In the mornings the reflected light was golden, and in the late afternoons it was silver. 

What was supposed to be a few weeks of visits stretched to several months. I was captivated by the changes in the sands, and the variety of what could be seen. I ended up with over 70 images that I kept. What was beneath my feet and so carelessly walked over was a gallery of stunning beauty.

That experience transformed the way I see things. I had developed soft eyes.

The vision of complexity

What I see and esteem is not something that excites everybody. I couldn’t make an art form of how I see things and expect it would be popular. Back in the late 1960s I took a photo of a fallen log with a background of tea trees. It held a fascination for me that was incomprehensible to others. Where they saw ‘just bush’ I saw elegant complexity. I have recent similar images that fill me with delight, while my arty siblings offer compensatory comments about colours. They do not see what I see.

If bushland is just a chaos of plants, leaves, and branches it has no inherent meaning. A biologist or a botanist will see the same scene differently, but in a particularistic way.

As a coherent complexity, it ‘speaks’. This is something I grew up knowing; but had no frame of reference to articulate it – until Broadwater Beach. That experience took me consciously, step by step, into seeing beneath the habituated surface. Broadwater Beach triggered a flood of animistic poems, though at the time I had no language for that. Animism was an idea I would encounter for the first time a few years down the track.

The above image is from Broadwater Beach

Places have spirits

In the 1960s I walked in the Tasmanian wilderness as if it were already known to me. I was guided by something in ways that gave me an unwelcome reputation among my walking companions, even in my mid to late teens. My stepfather much later told me I had become known as somebody who could not get lost. 

The not getting lost bit was far more complex than I could let on, but I was also ‘guided’ by soft voices that whispered to me, or triggered visions of what was up ahead. Sometimes a direction simply felt right. I felt at home in the Tasmanian bush. It seemed to embrace and welcome me.

There were some places I was not welcome, perhaps the others were not welcome either, but they did not sense it. I could ‘see’ these places as I approached. They seemed discordant. Staying was not an option. If I tried, the best I could do was drop my pack and walk restlessly around. I’d find an excuse to wander off with my mug of tea in hand and come back only when the others were ready to move on.

On one memorable trip the group decided to camp by a group of granite boulders, but I could not pitch my tent until I had moved away quite some distance. I was chastised until I lied and said I snored badly, and I didn’t want to disturb others. In the morning virtually all those who had camped near the boulders reported nightmares, broken sleep and aches and pains on waking. I had slept soundly and was refreshed.

Sensing and vision

I think now there is a link between seeing complexity, rather than chaos when looking at the bush, and sensing the spirit of a place. Seeing something that seems to have meaning rather than being just a meaningless tangle of stuff creates an opportunity for meaning to emerge – as a sensation or feeling or thought.

The needed ‘soft eyes’ can be developed through intentional practice. When I moved to Katoomba, I saw the sandstone cliffs in geological terms for years. It was actually hard to stop taking photographs that were depicting the normal specific images. In fact, it was almost decade. During that time, I was in head mode – hyper rational and busy. Outside of work I was focused on study and working on the house. I had lost my ‘soft eyes’.

It was contracting Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) in April 2008 that changed me totally. The GBS conferred sudden paralysis, and after 3 months in an ICU, I was transferred to a rehab ward. I spent the first 9 months of 2009 doing physiotherapy to get my body working as well as it could, the last 6 months at home. My outside world was confined to the back verandah, which became a daily sense of place venue through autumn, winter and into spring.

Once I my ability to move was coherent enough to use Canadian crutches, I was able to get outside and get away from the house with a camera. But I discovered I needed to sit or lean to take photos. And not every opportunity accommodated itself to that need. Leaning was perilous in many places, and places to sit were scarce. Once again, I had to learn how to see differently.

Going bush was out of the question, so I learned to value the open gardens of Mt Wilson, which is about 45 minutes drive away. Sefton Cottage was my favourite. It was not the most spectacular, nor the largest, but it had the gentlest and calmest spirit. It was a bit wilder than other gardens – maybe that’s why it felt more at ease. It’s no longer open.

Above is the first photo I took away from home after my recovery. It’s taken at Sefton Cottage garden at Mt Wilson, NSW.

Conclusion

We are mostly moving and thinking, and even when we stop and look around it is easy to be distracted by our chattering ‘monkey mind’. And when we do get quiet and look, we rarely see, because we are still telling ourselves what we are looking at. Part of the trick to developing soft eyes is to change what we tell ourselves about what we see. We can presume a complex order of lives constituting a community, and an entity, and shift our vision to ‘see’ that – and leave ourselves open to an engagement with what we see – daring to imagine it may be two-way. 

Written on my birthday – 22 Jan – and got buried in my ‘to edit’ list. 

The chooks are making a racket and the breakfasting ducks pause and align their gaze. A passing shower obliges me to close my window. Another wet day. 

I have been listening to Don Watson’s Watsonia – a survey of his writing life. His sense of Australian landscape and culture reminded me of my jobs that were dominated by landscape – in northern and western NSW and on the Tasman Peninsula. 

That all stopped in mid 2006 when I began commuting eastward to Parramatta and Penrith.  Even so, I had the mountains at the beginning, and the end. In 2018 I commuted to Lithgow. It was mountains all the way. 

Watson’s evocative images, and extraordinary mastery of the language, reminded me how strongly we can split our awareness between the natural and human domains. On my commute east, once train passed Lapstone, and before it got to Emu Plains, the view from my window shifted from bush to the intensely and relentlessly human. 

I pause as the bird symphony is intruded by the sound of a jet overhead. My plane finder app tells me it’s a Qantas flight out of Sydney bound for Adelaide and it’s at 5,338 metres.  The human invades everywhere. 

The human is complex. Our senses are attuned to that complexity. Our eyes and ears are conditioned to interpret input that keeps us safe and helps us achieve our objectives. 

The natural world is complex. We know this rationally. Few of us have our senses finely tuned to it. At best we might engage with it as a respite from the relentlessly human. But rarely are such experiences immersive, or for long enough for us to need retuning to the human on our return. 

These days I avoid the inner city as much as I can, which is a lot. The sensory overload is exhausting and unpleasant. In contrast, when city dwelling family folk come to stay, they find the quietness almost unbearable. It can cause sleeplessness, apparently. 

The bush and the city are mutually incomprehensible, and maybe intolerable, to those senses and sensibilities are deeply attuned to the other.  This is as it should be. Fish do not walk on land, and I do not wander submerged. 

But we must not mistake a simple vision of a strange thing for a representation of what is. The absence of intimate familiarity is no sin, but neither is it a foundation upon which to presume an estimation of value or nature. 

We need to develop a dual nature that endows us with an ability to anticipate the presence of complexity of nature and behaviour of whatever we encounter – in the city or the bush. This is not a difficult task, but it a demanding one. It requires patience, stillness, to tune our senses. It requires the acquisition of knowledge that obliges us to reframe what and how we think. We don’t have to remember that knowledge, so long as it helps us unthink what we do think. As we unthink and tune our senses, we expose ourselves to things that may have been previously preposterous. 

A lot of opportunities to experience the paranormal are denied because we assume something ridiculous cannot be so.  Sometimes that lost opportunity is known only in hindsight. Some now long time ago, I was leaving home in a hurry. I had thrown my keys into a briefcase.  As I rushed to get out, I had a nagging thought to check that my keys were there. Ridiculous. I had tossed them in the briefcase mere moments ago and I had no time for a worry wort check.  I got to the car and ….no keys. Great. I was locked out of car and home. I was very late. When I managed to get back inside, I found the keys on the floor, right where my brief case had been. Had I heeded that hint, none of this would have happened. There was a lesson to be learned. I am less stupid these days, and nowhere near perfect – but now I listen to, and heed, the soft thoughts way more often than I ignore or dismiss them.

I hate flying. In the early 70s I was flying out of Adelaide to Melbourne and I was about to learn a valuable lesson. As I was about to board, I was overcome with an anticipation of drama and risk. I was unsettled scared by its force, and I needed to calm down. Was the plane going to crash? I sat down, composed myself and ‘felt into’ the journey. It would be okay. On approach at Melbourne, we were advised the was a problem with the undercarriage and the plane was going fly around a bit to get rid of fuel – just in case. We landed just fine. 

Not every ‘bad’ feeling has an adverse outcome. But I had to dare believe, and that, at that moment at the Adelaide airport, was a difficult choice until I calmed down and tuned in. I was on my way back to Tasmania – and I was driven to get there. As it turned out the plane’s passengers were right out of a Hollywood movie. There was a guy in handcuffs with 2 plain clothes cops as escorts, 2 nuns, a priest, a young couple with a newborn child. There was no way it would have been okay if we had crashed and burned.

I had adopted the habit of ‘feeling into’ a trip. Sometimes I did not go as intended, because it didn’t feel right. Mostly, there no evidence that was a good move. But one time, outside The Place cafe in Kings Cross, Sydney, I sat on the back of a motorbike and instantly felt bad. As good as the rider was, he was also inclined to push things to the edge. I got off, giving a weak excuse about feeling crook, so as to not offend him. I knew, if I had been truthful, he would have laughed at me. I was replaced by a shorter guy. He had his knee grazed in a close shave with a car that had moved out of a lane without seeing the bike. 

I don’t know if I was seeing what did happen or whether I dodged a more serious injury. It’s not possible to know. Not every thought that comes into our minds is uncontested. We habitually evaluate and edit notions that seem irrational or preposterous. We have a conceit that we are smart enough to know enough to make a judgement on a sudden, unbidden, thought – usually reflexively and with no careful consideration. We aren’t. The trouble is that averting a problem means you have no evidence that your intuition was good. Hindsight is, unfortunately, a good teacher – but sometimes it’s too late. 

Around 1992 I was driving for work between Grafton and Armidale on the NSW mid north coast. As I approached the crest of a hill sitting on around 100 kph I suddenly snapped into a strange hyper alert state. As I hit the crest, I saw a car insanely attempting to overtake a slow log truck on my side of the 2 lane road. I recall flicking left onto the verge, which was fortunately free of series debris, and back onto the road. As I drove on, I was in a state of shock. My heart was pounding and I was in a very strange headspace. I recall debating whether to pull over and chill or not. I decided that if I pulled over, I would probably fall apart and not be able to drive. I didn’t want that, so I kept going. I was fully conscious that the sudden hyper alert state saved me from a full-on head-on.

A few months later I was driving from Lismore to Moree. I was over the speed limit to the point where I might have been booked, had I been caught. It was a nice straight road, conducive to going over the speed limit. Suddenly I caught a glimpse of a blue light in my rear vision mirror. I cursed and slowed down, expecting a police car to loom up. Only it didn’t happen. There was no police car behind me. But there was in front. I slowed down just before a bend and went through it at about 80kph – and there, previously out of sight, was a police car and a cop with a speed gun. 

Even when my envisioning of my journey left me feeling confident it was to be a safe journey that did not mean everything was uneventful – just that I would get to my destinate safely – though maybe scared half to death. In a way, feeling into the journey developed a habit of ‘seeing ahead’ that certainly saved me from speeding fines. My colleagues and managers were all regional roles, and I think I was the only one, over 18 months, not to pinged for speeding. Several colleagues were down to the last points on their licenses – and their jobs were at risk.

You can fall prey to what are fears, and anxieties, that intrude. Not all ‘intuitions’ are that. But rather than dismiss awareness of them as folly, it is far better to learn to distinguish between fears and intuitions. That requires practice. Pause, on becoming conscious of an odd notion, and interrogate it – intuition or anxiety?

There’s a two-way conversation between the rational conscious domain of our mind and the unconscious intuitive realms. But mostly we edit and filter it out so, that, at best, it is a fleeting notion that offends against our immediate dominant habit of rational thinking (or so we fondly think it is), and is dismissed. There is so much ‘monkey mind’ chatter the subtle thoughts are missed or dismissed. Our normal states of mind are unfriendly places for intuitions. We can make them better.

Writing can be a useful tool to learn to discern those subtle thoughts and intuitions from the storm of emotions – once we have mastered the art of getting beyond our ego and conceit – and into an authentic voice. Here I don’t mean writing something for publication or sharing – just a private practice – a journal perhaps. This won’t help with idiot errors that get you locked out of car and home, but it can develop a softer ear to one’s inner voice.

If we write badly it’s because we were never taught to write well. If we can learn to write ‘from the heart’, we can tap into a deeper level of awareness and insight. We usually start off in a pretentious way – ineptly aping how we imagine good writing should be. It can take time to drill down beneath the BS to find our hearts. Mind, some souls are blessed with the ability to get there quickly.

In late 1996 I was coming back on a ferry from Calais to Dover. I had been on a non-lander return trip to buy duty free wine and cigarettes. I was sitting with a pint of bitter, reading, I have forgotten what. Suddenly I was struck with the idea that I would be a writer. It was a forceful and sharp notion that startled and rattled me. When I got home, I went to bed and bawled for close on 24 hours. I had no idea why, but I could not stop.

I had been writing in various ways for years, but I was not ‘a writer’. I did not take the idea to mean I would become a published author. Rather, writing would be something I did intentionally, as a practice – as a hobby perhaps. 

I still do not understand what happened on the ferry, nor afterwards. Now it seems like the purging of long pent-up emotion, some buried grief that had to be released, maybe.

In 1998, back in Australia, I joined the Far North Coast Regional chapter of the Fellowship of Australian Writers (FAW). I took to the meetings and workshops with a passion. In 1999 I entered the local chapter’s annual literary competition with 7 pieces. Like all such competitions, it was open for entries around the country and overseas. I was stunned to receive 5 awards – a First Place, 2 Highly Commended, 1 Commended, and Worthy of Mention in short story, article essay and poetry categories.

That was a brief blaze of glory. No other contestant had won as many awards in a single competition in the 12 years it had been running. I didn’t continue to enter literary competitions – though I did later enter a couple of pieces and one award a couple of years later. I stopped writing short stories and poetry after a few years because of my focus on my tertiary studies. It seems as if the experience was about getting me writing – and nothing else. I have put that newly developed skill to good use in my subsequent academic studies and professional work. But privately I have continued to write notes and explore ideas associated with my primary passion – some of which is expressed in this blog.

The point of this story is that a sudden and powerful experience was allowed full expression and realization. After bawling for 24 hours – and I mean this literally, not figuratively – I used a chunk of my meagre resources to buy a word-processing typewriter and started writing like crazy. Writing became my main medium of contact with a deeper sense of awareness – a kind of in between state of consciousness that was neither fully rational nor a reverie or trance.

But writing to tap deeper layers of awareness was a perilous business at first. Getting beyond ego and conceit was not easy. It took a lot of practice. I was told by a spiritual teacher some years back that what I had written was largely useless as a source of insight and ideas. It had too much ‘me’ (ego) in it. I couldn’t get out of my own way to let my deeper nature speak onto the page. 

It’s still a work in progress. 

Foreword

This was originally posted in April 2018. I decided to re post it because the blight of conspiracy theories is worse now. Over the past few years, I have looked into conspiracy claims sent to me by friends. They were willing to believe; and sent me the claim because they thought I would be “interested” and share their concern, or alarm. But it took me rarely more than an hour to google enough information to render the original story at least suspect. And often bogus. 

This kicked off a fascination for the nature of belief – a theme I arrogantly thought I could knock over in a few months. I am now 18 months into my quest, and the ‘answer’ still dances like an enticing mirage, in sight, but out of reach.

When we say “I know” something, we are stating a belief. It may be that the question we must ask is not whether the ‘belief’ is true, but whether it is gently held in service of what is good. And even so, the reader will instantly see that here, also, is a problem. This is the paradox we face.

What follows is a reflection on an investigation of a claim that offended my sense of being “in service of what is good.”

Introduction

I have just spent a couple of months reluctantly becoming entranced by the claim that the 2012 shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School was an elaborate hoax construed by the US government. Actually, I became entranced by one Wolfgang Halbig, the man who kicked off the claim.

The public story is that on 14 December 2012 Adam Lanza went to the Sandy Hook Elementary School Newtown, Connecticut and shot 20 students and teachers dead and wounded another 2. Halbig says this ‘shooting’ was in fact a hoax, an exercise concocted by the USA government as part of a campaign to control guns. Halbig collaborated with Professor emeritus Jim Fetzer in a book, published under Fetzer’s name entitled Nobody Died at Sandy Hook. That book was apparently withdrawn from sale on Amazon, but can be had online in PDF form.

For this idea to be real the government would have had to have induced the families of around 500 kids at the school (based on post 2012 figures) and their extended families, friends, neighbors, workmates and others to play along with the cruel lie that children did not die. In fact a whole community would have had to be induced to play along. And the difficulty in making that happen is so vast it hurts my head just trying to imagine it.

My immediate response was that the claim was complete nonsense. Halbig’s assertions didn’t make any sense to me. But he was plainly believed by a lot of rational, intelligent and thoughtful people. So why didn’t they see what I thought I saw? Why were they disposed to believe? What was it about Halbig and his claims that triggered me to be deeply suspicious of his claims? I was told that nobody had disputed Halbig’s credentials. That wasn’t literally true, but I think the statement intended to mean that among those who believed Halbig there was no reason to doubt his credentials. In other words he seemed to be eminently plausible on face value.

Now I am not a stone hard conspiracy skeptic – or denier. I accept that 9/11 stinks like a dead sheep in the summer sun. We have been lied to or been subject to serial misrepresentation on many many things since Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy. Just not everything. Some of my friends are default conspiracy theorists – that is their starting point. To be fair that’s probably a prudent safety strategy, so I respect folk who take that position.

But here is an upside-down conspiracy. Supposedly the government conspires to convince a nation that a shooting that did not actually take place did. Usually it is the other way round. Something did take place and the government denies it. Getting a community that knows an event did not take place to pretend that it did just lifts the order of complexity into the stratosphere.

To me the very idea that this was a government conspiracy is just so ludicrous I struggle to understand why anyone who paid it any attention could sustain belief in the proposition.

We are supposed to accept that some bloke watching telly on the other side of the country sees evidence in news reports that it is all a hoax. We are asked to believe that he has the insight and acuteness of perception to discern this so readily via a television report. This one was so acutely aware that he alone knew what was really going on.

The Problem With Conspiracies

If you pay attention to the conspiracy theorists this was the one time the government went all squeamish and decided not to use its tried and true method of actually setting up a mass shooting and framing some poor sucker as the lone wolf crazy. This time it decided to engage a whole community in an elaborate fraud to only pretend that the shooting took place. Parents and grandparents would have to pretend that their child had died. The child would have to pretend to be dead, agree to a new identity and be separated from their family. Even if we could imagine a government conceiving such a lunatic scheme what would motivate the families? Halbig suggests money would. Really?

My background – personal and professional – compels me to reject this proposition as ludicrous and preposterous. For most of my working life I have been in federal, state or local government roles, and operating on a conspiracy first basis would be suicidal in terms of professional conduct and career.

My model is assume incompetence (normal) first, then unorganized low-level corruption before considering conspiracy as an option. I have to say that by taking this approach I have still ended up at conspiracy, but relatively rarely. In my roles presuming conspiracy first is a denial of natural justice. You may think that assuming incompetence is just as unjust but reality is a fusion of natural mess (complexity which conceals evident order) and natural mild human incompetence (we are mostly wrong and we don’t do things particularly well naturally– which is why we need so many rules and management experts). Once that natural incompetence was just considered normal. Now management theories demand ongoing improvement, which is usually lost on public servants who sincerely do not get what the problem is. But that’s a whole essay or two in itself as a topic.

My point is that in any kind of role, if you want to survive, the incompetence/corruption/ conspiracy model works very well. If you are a complete outsider, a mere spectator or recipient of information on a matter about which you know squat, maybe having conspiracy as a default response is a useful and prudent reflex.

If you are in the forest and you see something that looks like it could be a bear it is better to act as if it is a bear – if you are not a forest dweller. That will improve your chances of not getting eaten by a bear – provided you know how to behave. If you are a forest dweller, and you know how bears behave, you can start off thinking that that bush looks like a bear – but it’s only a bush.

For a whole bunch of reasons mostly associated with my now many public service roles, it seemed to me that Halbig was operating in a forest I knew pretty well, but he did not – and neither did those who believe and support him. He saw something that looked like a bear to him and went hollering to the whole world that it was bear. But it wasn’t.

At various times I have inspected aged and disability accommodation for compliance with licensing conditions, conducted field audits against contract compliance requirements, investigated allegations of serious misconduct, conducted program evaluations, prepared evidence of prosecution of tax offences, prepared evidence for medical tribunal assessments of claims for military disability pensions, reviewed and remediated service systems, assessed tender submissions, conducted contract performance reviews. In essence I have a very strong background in assessing people, situations, systems, performance. I also spent over 3 years in recruitment – interviewing people, assessing their backgrounds, skills and character. I have also conducted a number of community strategic plan consultations, so I have a sense of the complexities of a community at a social and economic level.

I have also been involved in bush search and rescue in a very direct way. I have been in floods and fire crises as a volunteer. So, I have some small appreciation of how things can go in critical incidents. I have never been involved in anything to do with shootings.

In 1997 I worked with the Tasman Council in Tasmania in a position associated with the shootings at Port Arthur the previous year. So I have some sense of personal and community responses to a shooting tragedy.

Apart from going to 4 primary (elementary schools) a high school and a matriculation college, my experience of schools has been limited to dating a primary school teacher and later marrying a high school teacher – and selling books and teaching aids to around 30 rural and regional schools during a brief and unhappy foray into private enterprise.

And I have Masters and Masters Honors degrees in Social Ecology, which I hope conferred on my some capacity for research and analysis.

I have gone through this background because Halbig claims to have a background in law enforcement and in school safety and security. I can’t assess him on those things because I don’t know enough about either. But I can say that on the basis of the information I was able to review I doubt either claim would stand up to scrutiny by people who know these fields well.

What Happens When You Ask Informed Questions?

I have been involved in a bunch of community-based organizations incorporated under state legislation and funded by state and federal departments. At various times I have been an ordinary board member, a secretary, a deputy chair, and a chair. I was a co-founder of one organization, and I set up the board, wrote the funding proposal, gained community and business sponsorship. In short I know how to set up and run an NGO. In a professional capacity I have assessed NGOs to ensure compliance with legislation, which is a condition funding.

So, when I read that Halbig had founded two institutes, and had conferred upon himself impressive titles (Education Director, Chief Investigator, Executive Director and National School Safety Consultant). I knew to ask key questions – how substantial were these institutes? What was their revenue? What did they do? So, were they just paper exercises that gave legal legitimacy to claims of impressive positions?

Halbig and another person set up a security company (some sources say he set up several companies). Did it trade? To what degree? Was it more than a basis for Halbig to claim to be a security consultant, or a school safety consultant?

I found nothing on Google to convince me that the institutes had any standing in their claimed field. Likewise, I could find no confirmation that his security company had ever operated in any substantial manner, or at all.

This is evidence of nothing in particular, other than that neither institute nor the security company had any enduring presence on the web. They could have flowered brightly and briefly.

Halbig claims he is or is claimed as (it is unclear exactly which) a nationally recognised expert in school security and safety. He claims he has investigated school mass shootings, including Columbine. But this claim came late, and, if true, should have been a key element of his claimed credentials. However.

, nobody has been able, apparently, to verify this claim. When interviewed by mainstream media his qualifications were far more modest. This is interesting because the media was supposed to be a part of this establishment plot. Indeed, far from sustaining the conspiracy claim, mainstream media dealt harshly with Halbig’s claims.

I am an Australian in a nation of 24 million, and not in the USA with a population of just under 327 million. The population size matters because here in Australia getting recognised as a national expert generally means you have a substantial, visible and credible profile with evident expertise and standing in your business area. But in a much vaster population maybe the bar is set much lower because, comparatively, visibility is much lower and the relative need to demonstrate merit is lower. One could become a ‘nationally recognised’ expert via a narrow community of people. The term could actually be meaningless, but can imply a great deal. The claim could be true, but the implication misleading.

How many people does take for one to become a ‘nationally recognised’ authority? If I had one person in each state and territory in Australia willing to say I was an expert in X does that mean I could say I was nationally recognised?

I haven’t seen Halbig’s CV. I have seen a document put out by the SandyHookFacts.com website (a site created by members of the Sandy Hook community) which tracks significant recorded evidence, and which provides a timeline of aspects of his career. Halbig, or his supporters, claim he has presented before many school boards across the country on the subject of school security. This may be true, but was that on the basis of his self-styled positions in his own self-created institutes?

Halbig claims a credible background in law enforcement. Others, who claim to know, dispute his claims. When he makes public claims related to law enforcement actual law enforcement agencies seem to disagree with him. While he may have been a Florida State Trooper, the extent and length of his service is not evident. I am used to hearing law enforcement officers being quite precise about the nature and length of their service. I have seen no evidence that Halbig is as precise.

Halbig claims to be an expert in school safety and security. I’d expect this to be confirmed in explicit ways. When interviewed by the BBC Halbig is described as an administrator and safety advisor only – a very modest rendition of his claims. There is clear evidence he served in an administrative capacity with Lake County Schools as Director of Risk Management. This role, however, seems to have been concerned with employee WHS and insurance, not student safety and security. His apparent co-ownership of a security business (while being employed full time it seems) does give him the right to say he is a security consultant.

I have no doubt at all that his role as Director of Risk Management gave him the opportunity to visit many schools in his district (with 65,000 students apparently) and form opinions about school safety and security which may have been perfectly valid, insightful and valuable. But I saw no convincing evidence that any of his opinions or insights could be sustained on the grounds of professional expertise.

This brings me to another interesting aspect of Halbig’s character as recorded. He seems to be not well liked in many of the recorded perceptions of him. There are a number of recorded comments about him, and to him, saying he is a know it all who knows nothing, and claiming that he is aggressive and offensive in public forums. There are records of his attempts to win elected office and he seems to consistently perform very poorly compared to those who are successful – he loses by very significant margins.

Again, perhaps this is an Australian perspective, because of the small population; people who win national standing tend to be likable folk. Credible national experts tend to be able to manage their public images – are able to ‘sell’ themselves to people in authority consistently.

Now it could be that my assessment of Halbig is flawed in a major way – the information about him, and upon which I rely, is incomplete and insufficient. I would acknowledge this as a risk, but then would object that there is a pattern of probability here exposing three key weaknesses, in terms of what I can confirm readily:

1. Halbig’s claim of expertise cannot be readily verified, and is, in some instances specifically refuted.
2. Halbig’s apparent standing and credentials are almost wholly dependent on legal entities in which he has a personal stake as founder. It is easy to form the impression that he created them and the titles he later relies upon – and these entities did no other work.
3. Halbig doesn’t appear to be a likable person in general. This matters because being liked is a big factor. Being likable is a major factor in personal success, and especially professional success. Now and then there are people who deliver great professional value, but are not liked by clients and that does not matter. This could account for Halbig, but I doubt it.

I do not know how a person with these adverse indicators could make it to the degree that he is genuinely considered a national expert; and be employed in projects run by the US Department of Justice. I am assuming that the Department conducts proper background checks. If they do and they can confirm that Halbig met their requirements I am happy to rescind my adverse provisional opinions.

This isn’t a take down of Halbig as a person. I have heard him speak and I have no personal issues with him at all. What I am trying to do here is trace my efforts to satisfy myself that I should accept this guy’s claims.

This is an account of how I have responded to a hugely serious allegation in tune with my natural personal and professional reflexes – relative to somebody who has no experience or knowledge that can help them break down a situation.

There are real and important conspiracies to manipulate what we know and think about the world and reality we live in. People in positions of power conspire routinely to retain that power or to gain more. Their motives are grubby and shameful enough. If we are induced to give them credit for deeply elaborate and complex plots, we are handing to them a power they should not have, and we are surrendering a power we must retain.

We must obtain and retain the capacity to distinguish between a genuine conspiracy and a fake one. Halbig’s claim that the Sandy Hook shootings were a fraud invokes a level of complexity that, for me, cannot seriously be executed and a motive that cannot be comprehended against the sacrifice the complicit community must make, let alone at an individual level. And the fact that members of the community are resisting Halbig’s claims just demonstrates how hard it is to induce a whole community to play along with an insanely elaborate fraud.

I believe that aspects of 9/11 point to a conspiracy by some elements of the American government and power elite. Perhaps because I have had an enduring interest in community development, and personal and professional involvement in community engagement, as well as an active interest in sociology I think any 9/11 fraud would be a walk in the park compared to setting up a Sandy Hook massacre hoax. Imagining the motive defeats me. Imagining the methodology just sends me into shock.

I get that these days we are constantly induced to offer our opinions, and many take up those invitations with relish even though they are devoid of any actual knowledge, experience, or insight.

I get that the level of trust is now so low that presumption of conspiracy is prudent. But that does not mean that you employ the conspiracy reflex as an actual response – just keep it as a provisional response. If you don’t have the time or means to check out a claimed situation, do try to be a genuine skeptic – one who suspends formation of opinion because they have insufficient evidence to arrive at an informed conclusion.

Finding a Balance

I have been, and will remain, an enduring fan of Phillip Adams, the immortal host of the ABC Radio National program Late Night Live. Phillip has long and loudly declared himself an atheist. His listeners do not care. But one evening not so long ago he was indulging himself with a bit of a homey chat with a fellow atheist. They carelessly opined that being an agnostic was kinda gutless. Not knowing was, they were saying, a lack of courage. You had, in their mind, to elect Yes or No. Saying I don’t know was not acceptable.

This was and is a bullshit materialist trick. In fact, any deeply critical examination of what we think we know will appal us by demonstrating that most of what we think we know is rubbish and most of what we think we can know is illusion. We ultimately guess. Mostly we engage in acts of social affirmation and not philosophy. We are more concerned to be accepted and liked than demonstrate a capacity for deep critical thought. It’s not a nice thing to know about oneself, but it is necessary.

I like to think that I say “I don’t know.” a lot. I do say “I don’t care.” a lot. I like to think I care whether I can genuinely evaluate claims within my capacity to assess and confirm claims. I do work hard to watch, listen to, and read what quality stuff I can. But in the end I live in a community in which being loved is more important than being a smart arse.

Maybe the Nazis really did contact Reptilians who gave them access to anti-gravity technology so they could get to the Moon and Mars and have a ‘secret base’ in the Antarctic. But, you know, I really don’t give a shit. If this has been going on since the 1940s it hasn’t impinged on our reality to an extent that it is completely unworkable (this is another huge topic). The Halbig thing is more important to me.

It is the phenomenon of acceptance of, and belief in, conspiracies that seriously has me intrigued. The reflex to believe conspiracy is something I get and respect. But like any defensive reflex it must be only provisional, pending further evidence. You cannot build a successful defence strategy on inflexibility – the Maginot Line is the famous case in point. My personal motto seems to have become ‘the price of liberty is eternal vigilance’.

Assuming conspiracy and then locking it in sans evidence is, well, self-indulgent. It means arriving at a fixed position in advance of evidence and then being unable to adapt to actual evidence.

I have been asked why I got so wound up about Sandy Hook and Wolfgang Halbig. Outside natural compassion, I do not much care about Halbig the man. I care more that families in Sandy Hook have been subjected to the awful allegation that they participated in a lie that their children died. It is the willingness to believe that Halbig had a case that concerns me. From the very outset the idea that a mass shooting had been staged should have been treated with the deepest suspicion, and the most compelling evidence demanded. Instead, the claims that supported the hoax hypothesis were just risible. But I am being unkind. They were risible to me because I have a deep sense of how governments work, and what they can and cannot do – and what they will and will not do.

They will do terrible things in our name. But some things they cannot do – and running a hoax as alleged at Sandy Hook is one such thing.

My default was not conspiracy, but doubt and curiosity. I have less investment in whether Halbig is right or wrong – but how his claims were assessed, and why some people elected to follow his conspiracy theory and others did not.

The Halbig situation embraces a number of issues. He appears credible to those who do not know enough to think otherwise. It seems to me that this was his intent. I suspect that he set out to deceive and misrepresent who and what he is. I think he was intimidated by the BBC journalists who visited him in his home, and he contracted his misrepresentations to a safe degree.

Halbig is supported by allies, who respond to the fact that his details were allegedly removed from Wikipedia. The inference is that Wikipedia or some other agency was responsible. But the reality is that personal bio data on Wikipedia is frequently changed by people who have personal or ideological motives. I could well imagine that Halbig took down his own information. You can write your own bio on Wikipedia, and others can amend it.

Halbig’s Wikipedia data was supposedly transferred to another site but it is, in my view, doubtful that Halbig is the author or that he authorized the content, because of the inconsistencies. For example, this new posting claims Halbig assessed or provided training in over 8,000 school districts nationwide. On the basis of published information it does seem that Halbig could not have done this until 2009. So, if this information were to be considered credible he would have had to visit 3-4 schools per day every week from 2009 to 2017. That is, in my view, not plausible.

I do not believe that Halbig authored or approved this information. I also do not believe that if you are a nationally respected and recognised expert in the field of school security and safety you would be abandoned to the support of idiots or be careless of what is published about you.

Conclusion

I have tried to apply a genuinely critical assessment of Halbig’s attributes with no interest at all in his claims about Sandy Hook Elementary. Is he a credible agent?

I have been working from Australia using only my computer and acting in comparative haste. I have not done an in-depth analysis, only a quick and dirty indicative one. The impression I have formed is that I do not think that Halbig is either a credible person in the fields of expertise he claims or in relation to his claims about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

Pending closer and better research, I am not persuaded Halbig is a credible actor on the basis of the evidence I have had access to. I do not have evidence to prove my case, but I am satisfied that it is reasonable for me to assert that there is no compelling evidence that Halbig’s opinion on the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting should carry any weight.

I have done my homework on this matter. I think I am entitled to express an informed opinion. What about you?

There are real conspiracies we should attend to. If we cannot tell truth from fiction because we have not bothered to go beyond our comfortable prejudices and biases, we risk losing the right and power to know what is true and what is not.

Defaulting to conspiracy mode is justifiable as a remote defensive reflex. It is not a foundation on which to build policy or commit to action, and you cannot hope to have a culture of justice and truth if your first reflex is conspiracy.

I was watching one of those Marvel movies in which a deranged officer of the US military recites his duty to defend his country against “enemies foreign and domestic” as he kills a superior officer. Yes, that was a fiction, but the alt right guest on the podcast Unslaveddescribing left progressives as “enemies” was not.

The internal fault lines between groups of people in our cultures are becoming magnified as our means to communicate ideas and emotions become more sophisticated and accessible. It is easier to make allegations without evidence and gain a support base. It is easier for disinformation and misinformation to be not only spread, but targeted. Fake news is not new. Calling it that is.

There are many possible conspiracies afoot these days, and it can be tempting to become a passive consumer led by one’s prejudices and suspicions – and accept accusations as true. But, in reality, that is to risk causing damage and harm to institutions and people who do not deserve it.

I don’t have time to investigate every conspiracy to which my attention is drawn, and I am not prepared to take other people’s words on them. Long experience has taught me that doing so is perilous. I have made poor professional decisions because I trusted information given to me by colleagues who sincerely believed the information was true. It was not. Somebody assumed and nobody checked. These days I apply the carpenter’s rule of ‘measure twice and cut once’.

If defaulting to conspiracy mode is moving to an attitude that is vigilant and sceptical, I have no concern with that. But we live in an age when we are encouraged to have opinions expressed confidently and assertively. It is easy to be seduced into belief, and whether we like it or not, belief is not a neutral state – it is an action that has consequences.

Yes, we are lied to routinely by governments, commercial interests, and religions. Misrepresenting truth is the norm and has always been the case. Maybe it would be nice to return to days when we did not know this was the case – and we could innocently believe. No chance, sadly. Here we are, and here we will stay.

This imposes upon us a critical duty to manage our perceptions and conceptions of truth by taking personal responsibility to evaluate what we elect to believe. If we abdicate that personal responsibility for critical assessment, we are abdicating a vital element of our liberty.

Technology has not eradicated the need for hard work. It has simply shifted the demand for effort from the physical to the metaphysical (intellectual, emotional and spiritual). Our access to the sophisticated information technology means that we now have unfamiliar chores to perform – developing the intellectual and moral fitness to engage with what we encounter online.

Our biases are where we are weakest, and most vulnerable. Conspiracy theorists believe they are strengthening their liberty by identifying plots. But if they fail in their due diligence, they are also revealing how they can be exploited, manipulated and preyed upon.

In a substantial population of 327 million you need only a tiny proportion of that population to generate a sustainable marketplace – in terms of credibility and income. A conspiracy theory can be a source of income. Believers will give you money. Even if you do not give money you need to know that what seems to you like a plausible proposition could be no more than a scam that has been finely marketed to trigger your biases.

Richard D Hall’s investigation into the claimed abduction of Madeleine McCann (on YouTube) is not just an example of how an investigation of a suspected conspiracy should be undertaken, It also reveals what happens to money donated by people sympathetic to what turns out to more probably be an elaborate lie. Not a lot of it actually, or usefully, supported the core proposition – that Madeleine could be found.

Halbig raised money that enabled him to go places and do things he could not have otherwise done. While not accusing him of misappropriation I simply observe that there seems to have been no form of independent governance over the funds received. If funds are applied to travel, for example, there is no way of knowing the class of a plane ticket, the standard of a hotel, the cost of a meal. It seems to be easy to be funded to live well, and not tax one’s own funds. There is, in short, no code of conduct for recipients of unregulated public funds given freely to informal requests for aid.

Halbig didn’t survive because his claim had merit, but because his claim had fans who were not interested in any factuality. They bought the conspiracy/hoax story. That is what they want, and it is what they pay for.

Of course, Halbig could have a personality disorder. Intelligent and sophisticated people experience personality disorders and that could drive their behaviors in certain circumstances. I found reading up on the Narcissistic Personality Disorder particularly instructive in the context of those who instigate and propagate conspiracy theories.

In an article in the New York Magazine article Halbig is quoted as saying. “I feel good, because I really feel deep inside my heart that no children died that day,” … But then on the other side, what if I’m wrong?” https://www.newstimes.com/news/article/Sandy-Hook-parent-hoaxer-continue-their-9213399.php)

Elsewhere Halbig is quoted as saying “I’ll be honest with you,” he says, “if I’m wrong, I need to be institutionalised.” (http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-39194035)

So these are the words of a bona fide nationally recognised and respected expert on school safety? I don’t think so.

I am sitting at Black Mother Gully (BMG). It’s very quiet, but I hear magpies – and more as I listen more intently. Voices of children in the distance. Another overcast morning. 

Why gods? They are universal in the consciousness of humanity – under many names. The term itself is a problem for a Western European because we think it has a meaning that is useful. In fact, it’s a vague gesture in a complex direction – and no more. 

Hence whether one “believes in” God – or not – is just as meaningless. In this case belief inis vague but disbelief is specific. It is, after all, hard to disbelieve in a vague way. This is, of course, unless one is a materialist who utterly denies the metaphysical. But again, no materialist really does that. They just say they do. 

Imagine

So, what are the gods of our ancestors? Imagine all the forces of nature described by science in terms of them being mechanical forces – and now imagine them as forces of consciousness. That’s pretty much it. 

That wasn’t a matter of belief in – only a matter of not conceiving of nature as an objective reality.  Imagine a parent or a child. You know that, on some level, their presence is ultimately an assemblage of atoms, but to be conscious of that you’d have to put your head into a peculiar space. Ordinarily you imagine an entity with presence and behaviours, and with whom you have a relationship. Scale that imagination to embrace all that you know. The modern mechanist vision was neither available to, nor useful to, our ancestors.  

If we want to understand gods we must, therefore, be aware of how we constrain the concept and make it dance to our tune. 

Changing How We Think and Believe

The widespread materialism and loss of belief is a cultural phenomenon that is part of our evolution in how we comprehend our reality. That loss of faith is down to two important developments. The first is the evolution of Christianity into a multifaceted discourse about the divine and human relations with it. The second is the development of the lens. 

In certain respects, all human culture is a discourse between the human and the other-than-human. In terms of our culture, Christianity marked a transition between what we call paganism and what became known as The Enlightenment – and what happened afterwards. 

The lens made available to us the very small and the very large. Both were previously realms available only to imagination and speculation. There was a naive expectation that the lens would reveal the handiwork of God. When such evidence was not forthcoming, the impatient lost faith and decided no such agency existed. We live, in a sense, in the Glass Age – or the Silicon Age.

There’s a popular misconception that science has grown because of freedom from religion. But a review of the history of science will confirm that this is no more than a ploy by materialists to mislead. The great Newton was no atheist or materialist, and the developers of quantum science were likewise not members of the cliche that now claims sole rights over the shared history of scientific advance. Indeed, it is fair to argue that the religious and the metaphysically inclined have contributed the lion’s share to scientific inquiry. Galileo, the materialists’ poster boy was still a believer. He merely ran afoul of Church dogma and his own intemperate mouth. 

We must distinguish between belief as it once was, and as it has now become. Attitudes toward religion have shifted markedly in the past century. Active participation in religious activity has been declining since the end of World War 1, and in recent years a new category has arisen – Spiritual but not Religious (SBNR). Atheism is growing as well, but this is less about a positive move in that direction than a lack of exposure to religious ideas. No point in believing in something you know nothing about – though, to be fair, that’s hardly an impediment in the current climate. 

The Pew Research Centre’s surveys demonstrate that in the USA, at least, non-materialistic belief is alive and well. In the USA, 72% of ‘Nones’ (no religion) believe in god or a higher power. According to Pew:

The vast majority of Americans (90%) believe in some kind of higher power, with 56% professing faith in God as described in the Bible and another 33% saying they believe in another type of higher power or spiritual force. Only one-in-ten Americans say they don’t believe in God or a higher power of any kind.

Key findings about Americans’ belief in God

In Western Europe, the majority of people identify as Christian. In the general population 74% believe in God as described in the Bible (27%) or in another higher power (38%). Belief in no God or higher power is significantly higher than in the USA, at 24%.

10 key findings about religion in Western Europe

It is interesting to note that belief in a ‘higher power’ is significantly higher than belief in a Biblical God, or nothing – which are almost on a par.

Nietzsche’s observation that the old conception of God is dead (not that God per se is) sums up the situation. Even the relatively high numbers who assert an affiliation with a faith belie the level of disengagement from the dogmas, rituals and events that once made up an active community of faith. There’s a lot of reserve now. It’s as if there’s a waiting for something to change.

Our conception of God has simply transformed into many things – and no one conception holds sway – despite efforts to say otherwise by a tenacious few. Here it is worthwhile noting that it is ever an extreme minority who assert exclusive claims to knowledge about what is true and right – theistic or atheistic. The rest of us dwell somewhere on a spectrum of engagement with belief – from the scarcely motivated to the highly motivated – without bothering to contest differing views – beyond being sensitive to their ability to ruin social occasions. 

If the trend in quantum physics persists… (I suddenly stop writing and leave. As I do 3 vehicles arrive. The peace is gone. BMG fades away and Maple Grove Park is open for business)

As I was saying… we will be discussing exactly what the underpinning constituent consciousness of knowable reality is – and how it is organized. What will be different is that we will bring vastly different tools and ways of knowing. One hurdle will be the habit of distinguishing between objective and subjective knowledge – a holdover from The Enlightenment. We have invested a lot in this distrust of self in the process of perception. In the past it has helped distinguish between superstition and the new knowledge of science. But as we explore the nature of perception and experience that distinction no longer appears valid. In terms of knowledge, we are moving from a sense of the absolute to contingency being the norm. In terms of values, the reverse seems as if it may be true.

The Value of the Past

We see persistent memories of the ancient way of engaging with profound ideas as if they are expressions of a deep consciousness, rather than abstract ideas. The image of justice being a blindfolded woman holding scales and carrying a sword speaks more coherently as a symbolic image than a rational definition of the idea of justice. 

The Oxford dictionary struggles to offer a definition of justice as “just behaviour or treatment” and “the quality of being fair and reasonable”. Justice can’t be usefully reduced to a rational description of an abstract idea. But it can be conveyed as a ‘spirit’ and encapsulated in an image.

This idea goes back to Ancient Egypt and the Goddess Maat. This is from Britannica.com:

Maat, also spelled Mayet, in ancient Egyptian religion, the personification of truth, justice, and the cosmic order. The daughter of the sun god Re, she was associated with Thoth, god of wisdom.

The ceremony of judgment of the dead (called the “Judgment of Osiris,” named for Osiris, the god of the dead) was believed to focus upon the weighing of the heart of the deceased in a scale balanced by Maat (or her hieroglyph, the ostrich feather), as a test of conformity to proper values.

In its abstract sense, maat was the divine order established at creation and reaffirmed at the accession of each new king of Egypt. In setting maat ‘order’ in place of isfet ‘disorder,’ the king played the role of the sun god, the god with the closest links to Maat. Maat stood at the head of the sun god’s bark as it traveled through the sky and the underworld. Although aspects of kingship and of maat were at times subjected to criticism and reformulation, the principles underlying these two institutions were fundamental to ancient Egyptian life and thought and endured to the end of ancient Egyptian history.

What we see here in this brief example is an instance of a sophisticated moral theory being woven into a foundational narrative context. Humans have used stories as the primary means of conveying crucial values for the most part of our history. So, we can see the fusion of two essential truths – the sense of reality being ‘spirit’ and not dead mechanism, and the use of story as the primary means of conveying critical moral precepts.

In terms of our cultural history, we go back to Sumer for the origins of writing and mathematics as cities evolved as the major form of human community and the heavens a primary consideration for disciplined inquiry. Here we start to see the emergence of ‘rational’ intelligence as a powerful instrument. But still, the gods remained as a critical part of the cultural narrative for millennia. That narrative gave humans access to an integrated and holistic discourse that we began to lose as ‘Reason’ sought to dominate from The Enlightenment to now.

Our story-telling has a limited number of themes. There are claims and arguments about how many movie plots there are. These themes are moral or archetypal and play out no matter what the setting is. It does not matter whether a story is set 5,000 years in the past or the future. These fundamental themes are perennial and endure. The stories change in specifics, not in character, to keep the ‘spirit’ of the tale alive and relatable. Here stories of gods and spirits and heroes do some rational discourse alone cannot achieve.

Conclusion

The past offers us guidance to understand what is missing from our now. In the sense of L. P. Hartley’s immortal words “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” Our ancestors did things differently, not worse, not more primitively. Modern efforts to recover the past through occult organisaitons are useful to help us understand what of value in that different way of doing things can be discovered. But they are not practices that herald the future.

Our cultural discourse is so thoroughly a mush of materialism, residues of faith, superstitions, and hubris that it is a form of confusion, if not a madness of some sort. It is not fit for purpose – between the old ways and what is emerging in the sharp end of scientific inquiry – as an articulation of our shared sense of relationship with reality.

There’s plenty of inquiry and reflection we can do.

I am parked at Black Mother Gully around 7.30am. A wash of cloud softens the sky, leaving colours muted. Bird call is dominated by magpies. 

I am still thinking gods and how our ancestors sensed great Thous in which they were able to discriminate distinct characters. Maybe story-telling made this necessary as the morality of conduct essential to survival made discerning and talking/singing about distinct characters necessary. 

But equally, a landscape is full of character. Full of lives. We stop at assigning livingness to rocks and wind and water. Our ancestors did not. We discern some movement because of life and other because of mechanism. Our ancestors did not. 

Such a distinction is important to us. But, if we pause with sufficiently open minds, it is hard to understand why. 

Iain McGilchrist, in his The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the making of the Western World, thinks in terms of right and left brain. He sees our culture as addicted to abstract categories – left brain dominant. McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, not a new ager. If you are unfamiliar with sensible left/right brain ideas, here’s a quick update.

Our ancestors created categories too – sacred, good to eat, useful – a different consciousness of utility and care. They did not need to think living or not. They had no need of that category. 

I am not sure why we have that need. However, our moral make up is relational and categories of being or thing define relationships for us. We create a subject/object duality and thereby define how we may act.  Being and thing have distinct moral codes assigned to them. 

We needed to be less moral toward things, and we are thus relieved of a burden of relational interaction. 

As usual, we assume this duality is true and good, and an absolute reflection of how things are. But, this is a dogma that we believe serves us well, rather than a truth discerned. It is a dogma that is self-creating. We believe that concrete knowledge is a good of itself – and the fact that this is potentially never-ending is a marvel to be explored. 

Awareness of the nature of things, in a way that is not constrained by any relational or moral sense, yields knowing that is not associated with any value beyond the knowing itself. 

It does not serve our needs, as we define them, to speak of gods, because to do so casts a far greater relational net over what we can see and know. Or so we think. 

The values of utility are defined by our moral or relational sense. These define our needs. At core, survival has a particular set of values – the existential necessities of being in the world.  But the sacred and the moral have always constrained and shaped the boundaries of utility. They have been part of the necessities of being in the world for our ancestors – and now we imagine them as less and less essential.

The American anthropologist, Robert Redfield, writing in 1953, observed what he called the moral order and the technical order, noting that “The coming of civilizations disturbed, probably forever, the primordial relation between the tendencies.”(the moral and technical). Anthropology of the 1950s is unfashionable these days because of the language used – also because it was more sympathetic to the spiritual than later the theistic and materialistic interpretation of the field. Redfield’s book, The Primitive World and its Transformations, can be found online as a PDF. I prefer a lot of pre-1960s works. I am content to trade off language for insight and sensitivity to spirit.

The one God of our culture’s dominant religion emerged from the ecology of tribal spirits – inflated into being a cosmic progenitor. This was a harmless conceit at first. We like to think ours is the best. And in times of adversity that conceit can be a vital energiser and focus of will. To be chosen of the greatest is a comfort. It is a form of collective self-justification. 

We know in ourselves when egocentric self-justification becomes a toxic conceit – because we see it in others. Australians have had a tradition of celebrating mateship as if it were a unique trait not found in the males of other nations. It’s a conceit that seems harmless enough. But we look like fools if we broadcast it to others as if it were objectively unique and true.

As a culture we are still reacting to this conception of the divine. There is an absurdity to it that we seem to sense intuitively, and cling to – if we lack the confidence and imagination to move on. But in moving on we are now in a wilderness with no tracks and few reliable guides.

Later – back home

I have been listening to Don Watson’s remarkable book The Bush. Watson is a wonderful writer, and an historian. This book should be read/listened to by anyone who considers themselves an Australian. It tells the catastrophic tale of the white man coming to Australia with his European sentiments, beliefs, and ignorance. What we gently call ‘settlement’ was more an assault fueled by arrogance, ignorance and brutal desire. This not an account of evil, but of evil consequences wrought by innocent brutality.

The sobering truth of the European mentality is that it was awful in the consequences of its adventures beyond its domain – in Africa, in the Americas, as well as Australia.

Watson is on no moral rampage. He documents the history of what we call ‘the bush’ from settlement to now. He passes no judgements. The people he describes are ‘good people’ – but they handle their new home roughly.  What he has written is perhaps the most concise examination of the impact of the European Christian/Materialist mentality upon a landscape and the lives that dwell therein. 

I can think of no more telling account of the perils of that mindset – the left brain dominance that McGilchrist writes so compellingly about. 

Introduction

I recently had a strangely disjointed experience of listening to Elaine Pagels Why Religion?I had expected a scholarly discussion interlaced with elements of a personal story. I didn’t get that. 

Instead, I got a raw account of a life of peaks and achingly deep valleys interlaced with almost incidental accounts of presence of spirit. 

Pagels’ day job is as an academic whose field is religion. I love her work. As I listened to the book, I came to understand more of why she wrote the way she did. 

The book was accessible to me in ways I did not expect. In part this was a function of generational proximity. She grew up in a time I understood. And even though our lives are utterly different, hers was familiar to me in so many ways. 

The title question, Why Religion?, wasn’t answered as I expected. That brought a sense of relief I didn’t know I would experience. I am so used to grappling with that idea at a head level, I was relieved that Pagels dragged it down to a gut level for me – and let me put my own inadequate words to an answer. 

In effect, she magnified the question mark of the title by forming, but not asking, the question: “If you had been through these kinds of experiences, how would you feel about religion?”

In her day job she is a leading scholar of religion. In her private life is a cauldron of existential extremes. The 2 must intersect. But how she experienced that intersection isn’t how I experienced her story – and that would be true for every reader and listener. We would all have our individual reactions to her story. We tell stories for a reason – to share some essential truth we think is of value. Now and then, after a particularly memorable performance, there is a long pause before the applause. I feel almost trapped in that pause, captured by it – with only these thoughts.

On an intellectual level the Why Religion? question has filled volumes beyond any count I can imagine. On the personal level the count may be larger. Quite by accident I had purchased an audiobook by Mark Smeby called Losing Control Finding Freedom By Letting Go. I can’t recall exactly why I bought the audiobook. I did go through a period of looking for sources of inspiration to disrupt habituated thought to help a work project. 

This was before I got careful about checking out the authors of audiobooks on Google after getting burned a few times. For instance, I bought an audiobook that looked like it was a learned discussion of one of the gnostic gospels and it turned out to be a not at all interesting theological interpretation. The title was misleading, but I should have been more careful. 

So, it turned out that Smeby was a Christian. My first thought was “Burned again!” These days I wouldn’t have progressed the purchase. But, on an inner prompting, I listened. I squirmed at times, but Smeby actually had a rock solid message about being genuinely ‘Christian’. Even though he used the Bible often (mostly in ways that had me gritting my teeth), his theme came down to saying- just be a decent loving human being and relax – okay so a bit more sophisticated than that, but that was the underpinning message. I listened to Smeby straight after Pagels

Just before Pagels, I had listened to Mastering Your Hidden Self: A Guide to the Huna Way by Serge Kahili King. It was another audiobook bought on a whim, and a good hint of curiosity. I didn’t know anything about this Hawaiian system, and this was the first time I had come across a book on it. 

The 3 experiences interwove. They were all about individual responses to life experiences – about choices and interpretations – and understanding of how the world works. King spoke of an intentional and rational methodology based on an ancient tradition. Smeby’s approach was a hope-based rendition of the Christian tradition. Pagels was in the middle as the intellectual getting a powerful experiential lesson that head-based inquiry is not enough.

I had long been in Pagels’ position, which is probably why the book resonated so strongly with me. It was only this morning, as I listened to the last half hour of Smeby, that I realised that ‘Love’ was a common theme is all 3 books. King observed that the Huna Way was grounded in love – as an attitude through which the world is engaged. For Smeby it was the central theme – moving from the transactional and conditional ‘love’ of much common Christianity to the unconditional love that is a contested core of original Christianity. 

For Pagels, the drama of personal love wrenched asunder by deaths of intimate companions (child and husband) was contrasted with the enduring love of friends and the subtle presence of spirit. This was no simple experience of being an admired academic. A churning mill of emotional chaos was in the background. Pagels privileged the reader/listener by letting us be aware of this fundamental formative and transformative energy. I had always liked Pagels’ style, and now I understood why. It had heart – one that owned the extremes of personal struggle for understanding.

My Own Question Reframed

Back on the 10th of June this year (2021) I quit my job after 19.5 years. I am precise about that because it was a Thursday, and a payday, and exactly 6 months before my 20^thanniversary with this employer. As you will see below, dates matter.

I had had an extraordinary run in the last 4 years of doing what I was passionate about and being afforded an unprecedented level of liberty and support to do it. As 2020 ended and 2021 got under way, my enthusiasm evaporated suddenly. There were still things to be done with my cherished projects, but something had changed. 

For the past few years, I had been getting annual year ahead astrology readings from Kelly Surtees, an Australian astrology now in Canada. Her sessions were astonishingly insightful. In December 2020, the day I had scheduled annual leave was the end of a distinct 4-year period. Kelly asked me if I had planned to start my leave on that day. I misunderstood her. I had, but not for the reason she meant. It was just the earliest I could take it.

She talked about there being a huge change potential in the offing. I said my division was going through a major restructure and I had indicated an interest in looking at a voluntary redundancy offer. Kelly asked if I might accept it, if offered, and I said I didn’t know. She asked when I thought I would like to leave – if I did. I said at the end of the financial year – 30 June. She said early June seemed better indicated. As it was, the 10 June date was offered, and was not negotiable. 

The change Kelly spoke of was a greater sense of freedom and creativity. Virtually the day I left I felt as weight lifted from my shoulders. I mean this literally. The burden of having to respond to a bureaucratic culture was gone. My extraordinary run began in November 2016, when I became Chair of my Department’s Disability Employee Network – a role I held until March 2020. I won’t detail things here, suffice to say that this was a period of unprecedented influence and creative freedom. In late 2019 and over 2020 I had been given lead responsibility to design and initiate my department’s Disability Inclusion Action Plan. By early December 2020 the main work had been done. I felt exhausted, but I was unprepared for the sudden feeling of being completely disconnected. I began 2021 struggling to recover my passion; and could not. I went into mop up mode. I knew from past experiences that a change was coming for certain – a new job or redundancy. It was redundancy. It was an offer I could not refuse.

My astrology aligned with my mood and intuition, and with circumstance and opportunity. As an aside of note – my sessions with Kelly were during this period, and my efforts to book her for a 2022 preview, despite assurances, have turned to nothing. The lesson of matching life experiences and the ‘stars’ is apparently over.

I write this on 5 December just 5 days shy of a full 6 months since my departure. Oddly a significant personal event will take place on 10 December. That date was determined by no evident influence from me, though it came about because I delayed a series of critical actions until performing them seemed to be ‘at the right time’. This delay seemed overtly against my interests and seemed idiotic to others. It cost me quite a bit of money. 

This will be the true end of a stage in my life that began on 10 December 2001, when my employment with my now former department started. 

It may seem preposterous to assert that spirit would induce me to delay a critical course of action until a defining event could occur on a specific date. If that was just a one-off, I could be persuaded that was the case. But interventions have been a persistent feature of my life. That is to say that some compelling influence to act, or not, has been exerted in ways that have been radical and dramatic, or more subtle. And the 10^th of December has featured before as a radical event – in 1977. I remember that date not just for the event, but because it was also a federal election day. This was the first time I became powerfully conscious of tying a transformative event to a date. 

Over the past near 6 months I have shed bureaucratically influenced writing style. Today (6 December) a friend remarked that my writing had developed a new character, which he much preferred. I had idly thought I would take a least 6 months to slough off the bureaucratic imprint on my psyche.

A new project I am developing with an associate can’t take is first steps until after 10 February 2022. That’s the date she will be returning from overseas. This could be a defining moment of what happens next. The date is significant in that it’s a limiter – nothing can happen before it.

I am constantly exposed to the elegance of numbers in dates and times. There are times when I am haunted by 11:11 on clocks. This will go on every day for up to 2 weeks at times. As I write this, I glance at the clock on my screen. Its 11:09. That look was intentional. Usually, it’s a sudden urge to look at the time, despite it being unnecessary. Its 11:11 now. 

I am not into numerology, just patterns. Adding the numbers of my birthdate yields 22. A cycle started on 10.12.2001 and will end on 10.12.2021. Another may start on 10.02.2022 – but probably not, to be honest. Still, it’s fun this is the date my associate gave me (and she’s leaving to go OS on 10.01.2022).   My next birthday will be 22.01.2022. Oh! I wish I was born in February – 22.02.2022 would be so neat! I wonder what will happen that day. I have made a diary note as a reminder.

I don’t take these numbers seriously. They are like a constant playful reminder that spirit is always present. I have just paused, during an edit at this point, and picked up my phone. Its 22:11. I had no reason to pick my phone up on a rational level. Just spirit messing with me. Being delayed in action so that a critical event can happen on 10.12.2021 isn’t remarkable anymore. 

The past 20 years has been a time of intriguing synchronicities, intuitions, and interventions – from how I got my job in the first place – and my last two roles, where I began working, where I live – so many things in between – including contracting Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), which put me in hospital for 10 months. I was off work 18 months all up and returned to work with a disability that changed my life. 

But that was only a chapter in a spirit drenched life. I will write on this one day. I have tried, but it’s not yet time. I have the stories in scraps and fragments in files on my computer. One day it will become a project driven by a passion to complete. That’s just not now (or soon, I feel compelled to add).

Why religion? has been a question I have been asking since I was around 14. I have progressively, to my satisfaction, decided what it is not. Developing an understanding what it is has been a long hard journey. Around that age I was adamantly not Christian. I had been having paranormal experiences most of my life, and they were intensifying (and soon to go nuts). One place I could not go was to the religion my family was raised in, even though it claimed to be the authority on things of this nature. Science was no help either. What was the point of a religion that couldn’t help? Why bother with it? Where else was there to turn?

When I was 16, I discovered yogic metaphysics and I fell in love with the idea that there was another way of knowing. I had no interest in yoga itself. I quit the academic grooming I was being given because studying metaphysics was not an option open to my limited Tasmanian vision.

My grandmother was some help. She told me of experiences in Northern Ireland, where I was born. Our family, while religiously Christian, had many stories of the paranormal. They just weren’t spoken of any where near the Church. There was no open antithesis – each knew the other existed. At least I wasn’t crazy – influenced by the Devil, maybe, but not nuts.

The Pervasiveness of the Subtle

Pagels’ subtle references to manifestations of spirit, serendipity, quiet manifestations of ‘magic’ and religious acts, and synchronicities do not play a loud role in her book. I am not sure why. Does she recognise their significance, beyond acknowledging them? She has the sophistication of mind to be intentionally subtle. I chose to believe she was, but its not with full confidence.

King and Smeby take different approaches. King describes how to create effects intentionally, the way some of the people in Pagels’ story do. They use different methods. Smeby writes of ‘supernatural’ experiences generated by hope or faith. But they are not commonplace – more alluringly infrequent – a sign of what might be possible with hope and faith better expressed.

My life has been (and remains) full of subtle expressions of power and intelligence – and now and then not so subtle. None of it has been within a religious context – in the sense that nothing has happened that was directly associated with any formal religion. Some of it expressed during my time of involvement with Western Magic and Wicca. Mostly, it has just been between me and whatever is generating the expressions. 

Religion, as we understand it, clearly does not contain or control spirit. At its best, it may be a system for understanding and engaging with it – but no more than that. In this way, it is layered – providing what is needed according to need – and nothing else. Status based on position alone is meaningless. In Christianity, ordaining a priest can be mostly an administrative procedure. No actual initiatory and transformative event happens because of the act itself. Some individual priests/ministers may experience otherwise; because they are ripe for the experience. 

In some cultures, shamans are ‘chosen by spirit’ – whether they want the role or not. Individuals have no say in what spirit does through them. It can express through a formal religious organization; or ignore it entirely. 

Pagels’ best-known work is The Gnostic Gospels (1979). I haven’t read it because I have been focusing on audiobooks. The kindle version is ready to go, and now I feel an urge to get into it (maybe good holiday reading for me?). I have done a lot of peripheral reading on the Gnostics, and I am feeling as though I am ready. That may seem like an odd thing to say. It is said that ‘gnosis’ means ‘knowledge’, but Pagels said (in Why Religion?) that ‘insight’ is a closer translation. That makes a huge difference – between an intellectual and a personal encounter. Miss it, and you can waste time and miss the point. Maybe I needed to know that before embarking on reading the book.

Why has it taken me until now to encounter that distinction? Why is now the right time?

Gnosticism is seen as a kind of parallel interpretation of Christian source material. It was rejected and suppressed by the form of Christianity that prevailed to dominate our culture. That would be expected if it contained that which only those ‘who have eyes to see, and ears to hear’ might value. Insight is not common sense, and has to be won, not conveyed.

Gnosticism has become a contemporary hero of suppressed knowledge. It isn’t that at all. Insight can’t be suppressed. Christianity has become a villain in a pointless drama. Yes, the Gnostic Gospels were hidden to preserve them from certain destruction. Non-conformist thought is always suppressed in a culture bent on conformity. Disruptive insight is rarely welcome. Whether you think church, bureaucracy, company, or university there will always be an instance of insight being unwelcome. But maybe it was unwisely offered, or just futilely so – the timing was poor, or the minds too rigid.

Spirit is not about to be dictated to, or controlled by, any organization. In fact, the champions of Gnostics as heroes run a good chance of being what they profess to despise. By creating a story of suppressed knowledge, they create an illusion of certainty in what is claimed to be suppressed knowledge.

The ancients signified Wisdom as a female aspect of the divine; and called her Sophia. This is perpetuated in the Wisdom Tradition; and has been debased through philosophy. A philosopher was once a lover of wisdom. Now it seems that philosophy has become a form of intellectual neurosis.

The link between insight and wisdom is important. One might say they are the yin and yang of the same thing. I like that saying: Data is not information. Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom.

Once we understand that spirit is not contained or framed by religions, and cannot be suppressed by them we can more usefully ask – Why Religion?

So, Why?

First, what do we mean by the term? The dictionary definition is useless; but knowing this is so can be useful. My Oxford Dictionary says religion is “the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.” Dictionaries put a lot of hard work into arriving at a definition. It is a professional definition arrived at by experts at giving words meanings. The fact that it is such an awful definition is telling.

The words are coherent, and you will assume you know what the statement means. And you do, to the superficial degree that the definition permits. But the authors of the definition don’t actually know what religion is, and they are safely betting you don’t either. Many years ago, a product called Claytons was advertised as “The drink you are having when you are not having a drink.” It was a non-alcoholic beverage promoted as a replacement for the ‘real thing.’

This is a ‘Claytons” definition. It is responsible and sober; and will not inflame anything disruptive – like insight.

Unlike Pagels, I am going to attempt answer the question. I should say this is my answer, which serves my purposes. It may not serve your needs. We all need answers that work for us.

My definition: Religion is a shared or individual response to awareness that we dwell in something we call ‘Reality’ or ‘Nature’ and in relation to which we must conduct ourselves in a manner conducive to our best interests. 

The root of the word, religion is believed (according to the Oxford Dictionary) to derive from “obligation, bond, reverence” and “perhaps based on Latin religare ‘to bind’.”

We are bound to our conduct, and to a relationship with whatever we see to be the agents or agencies that make stuff happen – be that God, gods, chance, fate, Nature, or the mechanical forces of physics. Regardless of the cause we define, our responses follow a limited pattern.

Our ancestors, absent the option of materialism, saw reality in terms of spirit. This probably because acute awareness of one’s surroundings includes the subtle, the less obvious. This is something I learned from my youthful bushwalking days in Tasmania. Atmospheres and presences are pervasive.  We can argue about what that means from a distance, because we cannot know for certain what our ancestors thought. But there are huge hints in anthropology – in the lifeworlds of humans living traditional premodern lives. Humanity has been, for most of its history, more sympathetic to animism than materialism. The notion of the ancient Greek philosopher, Thales, that ‘everything is full of gods’ would be unremarkable to most humans for most of the time we have been around.

The most unhelpful aspect of the dictionary definition is the use of the word “worship”. The dictionary says it is: “the feeling or expression of reverence or adoration for a deity”.  That definition presumes to definitively describe a sense of relationship in a narrow way – with no allowance for fear or frustration, bribery or beseeching. 

The root of the word is more helpful – “Old English weorthscipe ‘worthiness, acknowledgement of worth’ (see worth-ship).” I don’t think it is possible to see this as other than seeking an assurance of personal worth in the face of an utterly overwhelming sense of the reality in which the human being is conscious of its presence. Seeking affirmation of self-worth in relation others is fundamental to human wellbeing. Others includes humans and other than humans – physical and metaphysical.

That ‘in which we live and move and have our being’ is something with whom we must have a relationship. We are bound to it. Religion is, in essence, an existential awareness of the necessity of a relationship with our reality at an individual and a shared level. Our ancestors did not have our sense of individuated being – so it was at a family, tribal or larger community level.

In our culture, the degradation of institutional religions, combined with materialism and atheism, and environments that favour less and less intimate awareness of what is around us has led to predictable outcomes. Our understanding of spirit is distorted by dogmas and errors. Our model of the real has become a wilderness rendered sterile by the intellectual napalm of ‘reason’. Our senses have been numbed – as if we are suffering from industrial deafness and blindness as a cultural norm. Of course, our definition of religion will be unsympathetic. Of course, we will have become deaf and blind to spirit in our reality.

Conclusion

The title of Viktor Frankl’s 1946 book, Man’s Search for Meaning, sums up what I think religion is. Until recently it hasn’t been an individual matter, so much as an imperative for whole communities – tribes to civilizations. 

But that meaning is not the intellectual quest. Rather, it is relational and personal. What relationship can we have with the ever-present spirit that peers at us from everything? How do we behave toward it? Unless we acknowledge its presence, and allow a relationship is possible, we can’t answer those questions. The moral psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, describes humans as the rational rider on the great elephant of instinctual and unconscious impulses. He sees that reason is often the ‘PR’ agent of the elephant – it makes rational and conscious what we have formulated at a less conscious level. I think there’s more to this than Haidt asserts. He is an atheist, but his science is sound and instructive.

Our science is only an expression of the same questions asked by priests and popes, albeit in a mode that repudiates their theological presumptions (and many other things besides – too many). We are seeing now, as science grapples with quantum physics, a vindication of that old saying attributed to Lao Tzu “Going on means going far, going far means returning.” We are coming back to an old perspective – albeit with a different way of knowing.

The cultural anthropologist, Mircea Eliade, is credited with calling humanity “homo religiosus” – saying we are innately religious. In a reality which is spirit infused (and everything is full of gods), the need to discover meaning, and to learn how to behave is always with us. Our cultures, our civilizations, set the larger lens and filters – and we define our ‘religions’ accordingly.

Our culture has profited from de-spiriting and dissecting what is around us; and focussing on utility for transient personal benefit. Organized and institutional religion has become debased as a litany of theological conceits and moral hypocrisies. It is little wonder we have been steadily losing our religion.

The word is in dire need of a makeover, and to be restored to its dignity as an essential attribute of humanity. We need, perhaps, to imagine that calling ourselves Homo Sapiens (Latin: “wise man”) is not a gross conceit, but a vision of what is possible. The term itself is credited to Carolus Linnaeus in 1758. It was an Enlightenment conceit that confused knowledge for wisdom. It had recast soul as mind.

We could rescue the term from its arrogant and immature mud; and convert it back into a humble goal – a radient prize in Sophia’s hands.

Why religion? It is what makes us who we are.

Originally posted on Jan 3, 2018 

Introduction – Missing the Point

The Gotthard Base Tunnel was opened on 1 June 2016. The Swiss tunnel is celebrated as the longest rail tunnel built at 57 kilometers under the Alps.

The Australian ABC (abc.net.au) reported that “The world’s longest tunnel has officially been opened in Switzerland with an elaborate ceremony featuring an eclectic range of performance art.”, observing that “Trapeze artists dressed as construction workers, a horse and carriage and other theatrics traced the history of the 57-kilometre tunnel’s construction as part of the opening ceremony.”

In contrast the newspaper the Daily Mail (dailymail.co.uk) described the opening ceremony as the “most bizarre opening ceremonies in history”.

The huffingtonpost.com was a little more measured, reporting that “the ceremony featuring alphorn players, topless “angels” and goats, could not have been more bizarre. Masked acrobats and interpretive dancers dressed like miners ushered in the Gotthard Base Tunnel’s opening near the town of Erstfeld Wednesday.”

Then things got very silly on Google – very very silly.

The vigilantcitizen.com insisted that: “the opening ceremony of the Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland was a dark, disturbing, weirdly satanic ritual.”

A YouTube video posted by Jeremy Hetrick carried the mouthful title: “Full Bizarre, Demonic Gotthard Tunnel Opening Ceremony, Satanic, New World Order, Illuminati Ritual.”

I have seen the video posted by Hetrick 4 times in full. There were bits I loved and other bits that left me kinda cold, but that’s not an unusual with contemporary theatre or dance. I understood that for some what they witnessed would have seemed bizarre, if they had no familiarity with indigenous European culture and folk traditions. But there is a gulf of difference between what is bizarre of itself and what is bizarre to a person who has no familiarity with, or understanding of, another culture’s culture. To be fair, misunderstanding can even be domestic.

The Swiss Cabinet was obliged to assert that “The artistic production, with its concept ‘Gotthard myths’, used figures and legends exclusively from Alpine culture” (swissinfo.ch) This clarification arose when a member of the Swiss government misinterpreted part of the ceremony to be depicting “whirling dervishes”. The Cabinet was obliged to clarify, saying “ The aforementioned figures are not dervishes but dancing haystacks.” I suppose that in the hands of a contemporary director that mistake might be made even if one was familiar with the culture and its traditions.

The Ceremony was directed by Volker Hesse. He is a well-established and respected German director, who has been living and working in Switzerland for the better part of this century. The official Gotthard handout on Hesse observes that he “has for many years regularly dramatised in Switzerland and is already connected with the Gotthard region.”

The same handout notes that: “In view of the context of an international event with several sites in the open air as well as indoors, Volker Hesse does not use spoken language but powerful images, bodily processes, music and dance theatre, and generally physical forms of expression.”

The Swiss, apparently, didn’t share the ignorant Anglo culture’s absurd take on their festival. The ceremony won a gold Xaver award (Swiss award for excellence in live communication). I have a variety of information I sourced from direct communication with the Gotthard Tunnel administration I am happy to send to anybody who asks for via the feedback email address.

Why does any of this matter?

Down the Wrong Rabbit Hole

My interest in the Gotthard Ceremony arose long after the fact. It was because of an interview (1 November 2017) on the Skeptiko podcast (skeptiko.com) with blogger Chris Knowles (secretsun.blogspot.com). Knowles made a few comments about the opening ceremony that got me curious. He said the ceremony was a ritual, and that got me interested. I had spent over a decade performing in, writing, and directing magical rituals, so I was very keen to see a claimed public ritual conceived by a dark elite. I was skeptical, but curious.

Knowles made a number confident claims I found hard to believe at first blush, so I wanted to check and be sure. I listened to the podcast several times to be absolutely sure I head what he was saying, and I watched the Hetrick video over and over. I emailed Knowles with questions and a few comments about what he had claimed on Skeptiko. He replied quickly, dismissing my issues and added a few more confident claims. I replied with some rebuttals and assertions and questions.

On his Secret Sun blog Knowles reported on his Skeptiko interview in the following manner:

Most importantly, I spell out my philosophy on understanding the Never-Ending Ritualism and its historical context. It’s important to have a grasp on the historical context of these symbols and these messages because I believe we are on the cusp of the next phase of the program- in which these increasingly audacious presentations will become more explicit and self-explanatory. 

 I believe there will be a very seductive and appealing pitch on the backend of this, something that a great many people will find very hard to resist, especially this historically-illiterate new class of witches and magicians.

 In order to offer a counterargument you need to understand the messages being conveyed, their historical contexts and the implications for the future that history teaches us. If you throw words like “Lucifer” or “Illuminati” around, the game will be lost before you even take the field. 

I have to confess to having never heard of Never-Ending Ritualism, so while I was skeptical about such a thing, I was also curious to understand what Knowles meant by it. It was certainly not an idea discussed in any of the many books on magical traditions I had read over the years. I had heard nothing of the idea in any contemporary commentary on magic and ritual. So, was it a new idea based upon a novel insight? Was it worth paying attention to? My first impression was that it was not. In essence, I found nothing Knowles said to be compelling or well-founded.

Normally I would not go any further, but Knowles has a reputation as an expert on occult symbolism in popular culture and appears with apparent regularity on podcasts, so he is credited as somebody who has an opinion worth listening to and reading. Also, he claims to be a deep researcher who goes to source material, and I have to say this got me in when I first heard it. I like listening to people who are deep inquirers. At first, I had no issues with what he was saying. But then I developed the opinion that he was talking complete bollocks. Was I being unkind?

I was puzzled by why nobody hosting any of the podcasts was challenging what he was saying. In fact, he and other guests on a couple of shows seemed to be getting free passes by hosts who were giving the impression that they agreed with Knowles in all that he said. That meant that the listeners to these shows, with less knowledge, might be induced to take Knowles’ notions to be as well-researched and well-informed as he claimed they were. If the hosts of the podcasts were not challenging him, he had to be okay – right?

In fairness I allowed myself to be wrong and went hunting to see whether I could confirm the merit of his sources and the quality of his ideas. The Gotthard Tunnel was a good place to start because I could see the same thing as he did, and I felt I could evaluate his claims about the event.

To him the Gotthard Opening Ceremony was a “state ritual” linked to an “internationalizing Mystery cult tradition.” To me it was just an opening ceremony like any Olympic Games – full of references and symbols that were incomprehensible to outsiders; yet filled with significance to the indigenous population. How do you turn that into a sinister ritual by dark controlling forces?

There’s a technical thing about rituals. They need structure and form. They need coherence and a purpose and a method. Without them you have no ritual, just a performance. For me all these essential elements were missing. It was just a performance devoid of any occult ritual element. Of course, ceremonies are intended to evoke responses to symbols and performances. But here’s the difference in simple terms– ceremonies evoke, and rituals invoke. I agree that the convergence between evocation and invocation can be blurred, or at least not sufficiently evident to people who do not know the difference. A good ritual should invoke and evoke, but even a great ceremony can only evoke. If the elements of ritual were present in this ceremony, they should be discernible to people familiar with ritual.

A ritual must have a purpose beyond celebrating something. A ceremony celebrates and in so doing it may use elements of performance that are common to both ceremony and ritual – including symbols and signs as well as music, dance, and atmospheric effects (lighting and scents for example). For instance, the Christian cross can be used in ceremonial and ritual contexts. The familiar sign of the five pointed star, the pentagram, is an essential symbol in some magical rituals. But it is also something that can be rendered in jewelery, printed on t-shirts, and generally displayed to signify belonging to a group or as a display that celebrates a belief.

Symbols are used widely in ceremonies because they are meaningful to participants and observers – and hence they evoke thoughts and emotions. But not all symbols are occult, or esoteric. Nevertheless, the very nature of a symbol is that it conveys meaning only to those who know what it means. A brand logo, such as the Nike tick, is meaningful to those who know what it means, and is just a check mark to those who do not.

These days a ceremony could be a product promotion event full of symbols that are meaningful to brand devotees, but nonsense to others. Countries hosting events like the Olympics will use an opening ceremony to ‘brand’ their national culture using motifs and symbols that are deeply evocative to citizen, but which might seem bizarre or absurd to those not in the know – and maybe even embarrassing to those who do know.

Symbolism is a legitimate and fascinating area of inquiry, and there is a genuine continuity between secular and ‘occult’ symbols. These days many of what used to be ‘secret’ or ‘occult’ symbols are known at a secular level as signifiers of secret things, and there is a popular belief that the secret significance is known – and that may be the case in many instances.

Signifiers that were once confined to sacred ceremonies are now exhibited in acts of secular homage to a cultural tradition. This is especially true of ‘folk traditions’ that echo pagan ceremonies. Even if the folk tradition retains a seasonal connection with the original ceremony the deep spiritual connection is long severed in the minds of the observers. So, the Gotthard ceremony can pay homage to what is a pagan ritual tradition by using symbols and signifiers without constituting a ritual.

The Devil is in the Detail

Knowles appears to me to not know the difference, and was not, apparently, interested in becoming aware of it. Knowles also seemed to me to be factually wrong on a number of matters. I will list several here that can be checked by viewing the ceremony video. You may or may not agree with either of us.

• He said the winged figure with the large head is Cupid. I say it is not. Rather it is a character related to the death of workers on the tunnel. Nine workers died during the construction of the tunnel. What was being performed seemed to me to be a death theme, not an erotic one. True, we are both interpreting a performance that has no word or signs to confirm what is going on.
• He said I shouldn’t be concerned that the figure is female as these days it is okay for Cupid to be female. I disagree. Cupid is male in the Greek tradition for a reason. Despite our affection for gender fluidity these days, traditional ritualists take gender very seriously. In this case the fact that the figure is female probably means that the character was intended to be female – we have no evidence either way, so I am inclined to guess in favour of the norm being applied.
• He said the ‘Cupid’ enters the performance on a train wagon on which an orgy is taking place, confirming the erotic association. I say the performance is a bit stiff and grim to be an orgy, even in Switzerland (sorry Swiss people – it’s stereotype humour to make a point – nothing personal – you are just not known for your orgies).
• He inferred the antler/horned characters are representation of the Devil, whom Knowles described as “Lord of the World”. Knowles seeks to associate these with Jupiter Amun – a fusion of the Roman Jupiter and the Egyptian Amun. I think that both are sky gods and have no direct connection with Pagan deities connected with fertility. This matters because you can’t get your gods confused in a ritual.
• He said the 3 beetles on the open stage performance are Scarab Beetles. I say they are the wrong shape for scarabs. They are beetles. They may signify something but that is not evident from the performance. Maybe they are intended to signify scarabs, but the fact is they are the wrong shape, so we cannot infer this from observation.
• He said the 3 women in the outdoor stage segment are the Morai (Greek). I say there is no evidence that they are anything, and they could be closer Celtic or even Norse references – like the Norns. We don’t actually know who they are without being told.
• He said the context is Greco-Roman. I say why? Why interpret traditions that are closer to the ancient pagan/Celtic roots as being other than what they are? Throughout Europe and the UK there are festivals and traditions that are rooted in the older Celtic and Norse traditions, and which owe nothing to the Greco-Roman – or indeed the Christian.

On every single count that Knowles raised with me in support of his assertion that the ceremony was a state ritual I found to be presumption without compelling evidence. Why insist that the bare breasted winged woman with the large head is Cupid? Knowles asserted that “there’s no similar figure in any indigenous tradition that I’m aware of.” I agree. I don’t know of any specific figure that could assigned to this performance. But that does not make the figure Cupid. We must allow the designers of the performance their own knowledge, inspiration, and interpretation in pursuit of their art. Besides why have Cupid at a death performance? Even Paul Seaburn’s lightweight piece posted on mysteriousuniverse.org on 7 June 2016 observed that “The flying baby with the giant head was played by a topless woman and was said to honour workers who died during the construction.”

While Seaburn’s article had some merit, it left a lot without substance. He noted that “While each of the individual performances had a real-world connection to the building of the tunnel, it would have taken a program the thickness of a phone book to explain them.” But was this based on knowledge or just a guess? The hyperbole suggests a lazy guess. His final paragraph tells me that maybe it’s just a lazy compliance with a contract obligation. Nevertheless, his humour makes it clear he has little sympathy for Knowles’ position.

What were Volker Hesse and the organizers of the tunnel opening thinking? Perhaps they were trying to preemptively top the opening ceremony for the Summer Olympics to be held in Rio. Perhaps this is the future of entertainment and we’ll all be wearing bird nest hats next year. Perhaps rumours of a New World Order run by Satanists are true. Perhaps the tunnel is the opening to hell.

What do you think the Gotthard Base Tunnel opening ceremony actually meant?

I confess I get pretty cranky when lazy writers ask readers what they think. Who is getting paid to do some research? Why give the reader next to nothing to go on and then invite them to come to a conclusion as to the meaning of the tunnel opening ceremony? It meant the tunnel was open for business. To suggest anything else is irresponsible.

In any case, to be frank, who cares what a random reader of the MU site thinks. I wanted to know the Swiss thought, and so I asked. Below is an extract of an email from the Gotthard Tunnel authority. My correspondent kindly translated the German into English for me. The full text of the email is available on request.

The most renowned Swiss Newspaper. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, described the show as follows: “The show was perfect, multimedial and a phenomenon. It reflected on a symbolic and allegorical way the raw mountain world, the mythology around the Gotthard mountain massive, the idealism and the courage of the tunnel builders, the dangers for the miners – and the colorful Swiss Zeitgeist (spirit of the age). Speaking of colorful: The show had two or more senses. It should bring the public to reflect the role of Switzerland in the current European context.

Knowles has told me not to trust bureaucrats, unaware that I am in fact a bureaucrat of substantial standing. My bureaudar tells me this guy is not a stooge or a dupe.

Knowles is not lazy and mischievous. I think he’s just plain wrong. While I have no doubt he is sincere in his beliefs I equally have no doubt he does not actually know what he is talking about. He exhibits no evidence he knows anything about ritual. His claimed understanding of occult symbolism seems to be based on him making claims and nobody challenging them.

From what I can make of Knowles he is a modern Gnostic with a model not openly articulated, yet hinted at in his email to me when he raised “the Christian Devil, ie., the lord of this world.” Knowles clearly has a theory born of his interest in Gnosticism. That theory includes what he sees to be an “internationalizing Mystery cult tradition”.

Aside from my direct personal experience in ritual I have been reading widely in esoterica and the occult for decades. I see no evidence for this tradition, at least in the way Knowles interprets it.

Of course, it comes down to whether one prefers to believe Knowles or me on this matter. I am not going to say it is up to you as a reader to decide. Have either of us have given you sufficient information to make a decision? You have to dig deeper if you think we have not. Check out Knowles’ blog too. Don’t just take my word. You may even like the material better than my argument.

To be fair to those who are concerned about the Christian Devil, he does appear in the opening ceremony. I wasn’t entirely sure at first, from watching the video, so I relied on my Gotthard correspondent to inform me. He said:

The most discussed element of the show is probably the dance of the Devil. It goes back to an old legend about the first bridge leading to the Gotthard pass (and) According to the legend the local people recruited the Devil for the difficult task of building the bridge. The Devil requested to receive the first thing to pass the bridge in exchange for his help. To trick the Devil, who expected to receive the soul of the first man to pass the bridge, the people of Uri sent across a dog by throwing a piece of bread, and the dog was promptly torn to pieces by the Devil. Enraged at having been tricked the Devil went to fetch a large rock to smash the bridge, but, carrying the rock back to the bridge, he came across a holy man who “scolded him” and forced him to drop the rock, which could still be seen on the path below the village of Göschenen.

You can’t enact the defeat of an agency in a ritual and insist that this wasn’t an evocative act. I suppose it is possible to imagine that the director, the performers, and some dark and powerful people could contrive to conceal within a public ceremony a secret performance of a ritual. But what would be the point? I can see none. What would be the benefit? I can see none. Other ritualists may disagree with me, and I would be interested in an informed contrary opinion. Even if I thought a conspiracy was plausible, I simply cannot imagine why anybody would bother.

Conclusion – Why do this?

And why bother imaging the enactment of an implausible conspiracy as a real act? I get that Knowles seriously believes this is what happened, but the evidence is not there in my book. There are enough real conspiracies that should engage our attention and concern. 

Distracting people with dramatic confections – an occult conspiracy of the elite – serves no good purpose in my mind. If the conspiracy is not real, then the response pointless and impotent. The witness, the knower, becomes even more powerless. Misinformation, like disinformation, weakens. Though I dislike the term, the ‘Elite’ is doing enough real harm by hording wealth way beyond their needs (and other things besides). Why make up mad conspiracy theories about them?

Introduction

I read a lot. Since 2009 my acquired disability has obliged me to rely more on Kindle and audiobooks. At the time of writing, my list of audiobooks, kept from early December 2020, stands at 219 (the latest being Tom Fort’s wonderful The Book of Eels). That’s better than 5 a month. I am not boasting, just providing evidence to back up my claim. Academics will wonder what I am talking about – but I had a fulltime job until June last year. As a hobby reader, its okay. Add Kindle books and podcasts to the list, and I have to confess I am a bit of an ideas junkie.

So, I thought it might be fun to share my top books that blew my mind. There aren’t a lot. In fact, at the time of drafting this essay I could think on only 6. In the end I got to 11 – and decided to quit there.

That does not mean there are only 11 books I would recommend. No, these are books that flipped my thinking on its head and obliged me to reimagine what was possible to think.

Back, around 1990, my life was in a period of crisis on many levels. I was talking to a colleague who had decided she had a need to explore the spiritual dimension. She was aware of my interest. I was dismayed to discover that nothing I said made any sense to her. I had spent the past 12 years immersed in esoterica; and had developed no capacity to communicate anything of meaning to anybody outside the jargon bubble.

Worse, I had been concerned for a few years that even among my fellow devotees of the Western Mystery Tradition and Wicca, few had any ideas that went beyond devotion and into speculation and inquiry. We recited jargon and dogma to each other. But we could not move into critical inquiry. 

What alarmed me most was the realisation that I was in a community which had no incisive critique of the contemporary world. I loved Wicca. I retain a deep affection for it. But if it talked twaddle about contemporary reality, it wasn’t useful to me. As a personal practice it is fine, but as a mode of interpreting contemporary human reality it lacked what I needed.

It is quite clear that the Western Mystery Tradition and Wicca satisfy the needs of adherents. I offer no criticism of either. I am explaining why they didn’t meet my needs. This may help others.

I was attracted to both, because I needed an explanatory model that helped me make sense of my experiences in the contemporary world. I wasn’t looking for absolute answers, just a tool to help me make sense. I suspect this motive drives others to ‘belief systems’. What I needed was an ‘inquiry system’.

This became clear when I had the opportunity to engage with discarnate teacher. Now before I go on, I want to make it clear that I am aware of all the objections to such an idea. It was a subject I researched intensely. I am satisfied that what I am about to say is grounded in reality.

After being ejected from 2 esoteric groups for asking too many questions and not consenting to agree to believe what was demanded, I was concerned that I was the one with ‘the problem’. 

The advice I received was that I was on a different path, more like doing a PhD as opposed to coursework. Back then, I had no idea what that meant, but at the time I was happy for the affirmation of apparent intellectual superiority. What an idiot I was. Just over 2 decades later I was to discover my own weaknesses in performing a formal research project. I started my research degree in 2002; and finished it in 2009. That was a very difficult and painful time. I nearly quit several times.

Now that advice makes perfect sense. That guidance also was very clear about something else. He was not there to tell us stuff, but to teach us how to learn. Around 40 years on, that’s starting to make sense.

At the time there was a growing passion for people having contact with their own guides. That led to a bunch of sentimental claptrap being passed off as messages from Pleiadians, and archangels. Most of it was delusional nonsense perpetrated by gentle souls who did not understand their limits of their ability to transmit messages – nearly all of which germinated in their innocent conceits and gentle follies.

I am not dismissing the idea of contact from the metaphysical dimensions, just asserting a need for a strong critical assessment of claimed contact. Most of it is BS.

There’s a reason there are no ‘new age’ texts on my list. But works by discarnate teachers are. They are challenging and demanding – confronting my conceits. Whether they really are from discarnate teachers isn’t the point. Being challenged by coherent, surprising and disturbingly plausible ideas is.

My Top 11 Books

1. Hidden Teachings Beyond Yoga, Paul Brunton, published in 1900

I started to read this book when I was 16. It took me nearly 18 months to finish it. I’d read a paragraph or 2 and fall asleep. It wasn’t that I was tired, or bored – just overwhelmed by the ideas. This book changed my life. Because of it, I quit school and gave up plans to go to university and study geology. Depending on your perspective it either ruined or made my lifepath.

I bought a copy a few years ago with the intent to revisit it, but I haven’t opened it. Not sure I will.

2. The Betty Book, Stewart Edward White, published 1937

I can’t recall how I came across this book – probably found it in a bookshop. Because of my direct experience with ‘channelling’ in the late 1970s I needed to do some research – to get my head around the phenomenon.

This was a foundational read for me. White’s The Unobstructed Universe is a companion piece. Both opened me up to a new source of ideas. The Betty of the title dies and speaks through Joan. The ideas are challenging, sophisticated, and coherent. This is what ‘channelled’ material should be. Otherwise, it’s of no use.

3. Journeys Out of the Body, Robert Monroe, published in 1971

I read this in the late 70s. My girlfriend had bought it after she had a series of spontaneous out of body experiences. I had one several months after. Monroe has unwelcome spontaneous out of body experiences, fears he is ill or going mad, and then discovers he is neither. Being consciously one of one’s body is quite something. It suddenly hammers home the proposition that we are more than our bodies in a veery empirical way.

4. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Robert Persig, published in 1974

I read this in the early 80s and bought the audiobook in 2019. I had a memory of being deeply moved by the book, but when I listened to the audiobook it was as if I had never read it. 

The book triggered strong self-reflection, both times. Even now I struggle to recall details. I have no doubt it would seem unfamiliar again; when I choose to listen to it again (it’s on my modest bucket list). It remains one of the most extraordinary books I have encountered.

5. Chaos: Making a New Science, James Gleick, published in 1987

I read this in the mid 1990s. Chaos theory just blew my mind. I saw the world differently thereafter.

6. Out of Control, Kevin Kelly, published in 1994

The mid 90s was a great time for ideas, for me. Kelly’s book added a dimension of complexity and subtlety to thinking about Chaos. It was a heady and wild ride into a blizzard of ideas.

7. Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman, published in 1995

Another mid to late 90s read. The title drew me in. This was when I began to properly appreciate the value of emotions. I had been head focused until then, and this corrective was essential.

8. The Book of Absolutes: A Critique of Relativism and a Defence of Universals, William D. Gairdner, published in 2009.

I read this in 2010. It’s a book I must revisit. The idea of universal values is powerful, and Gairdner’s arguments were compelling. He wrote it as an antidote to relativism.

9. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, Larry Siedentop, published in 2014

This is the most extraordinary book. Siedentop explores the evolution of the idea of the individual in European culture – arguing that it arises out of Christianity – perhaps in an unintended way. It is a masterpiece of scholarship and critical thought.

10. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, Peter Frankopan, published in 2015

History, as we see it, it centred on Europe. Frankopan moves that ‘centre’ to the ‘Middle East’ and obliges us to rethink what we thought we understood. It’s a powerful transformation, and I loved every minute of it. He has a follow up as well.

11. Rita’s World, Frank DeMarco, published 2017

DeMarco is, in a way, a new version of White. The Rita of the title and DeMarco are both associated with the Monroe Institute. Rita dies and she and DeMarco talk, and that becomes a book (well, one of several). I have read 6 of DeMarco’s books. As with White, the ideas are coherent, sophisticated and challenging.

While all 11 books profoundly impacted my thinking, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Inventing the Individual and The Silk Roads also stand out as masterpieces as reading experiences. Engaging with them was an intellectually and spiritually sensuous experience. I can’t ask for more than that from any book.

Conclusion

I love books. I have had to give up the 3D versions for ebooks and audiobooks because my manual disabilities have turned the pleasure turning pages from a loving caress into a chore. I still have books on the shelves in front of me. But they are more fond reminders and silent companions than sources. To be honest, ebooks and audiobooks are way cheaper by a huge margin.

It took me 18 months to get through Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga when I was 16-17. My second reading of Inventing the Individual took me just under 12 months. Brunton taxed my 16 year old consciousness. A paragraph could knock me out. Siedentop was such sheer pleasure I sipped him slowly, like a 20-year old single malt.

Reading is transformative in ways other forms of engaging with ideas cannot be. This is because each paragraph is an intimate encounter an idea that can challenge and transform in a way the reader can manage.

For me the best books are about challenging what I think. They confront me and oblige me to wrestle with ideas, which may be difficult, novel, or ideas that make me uncomfortable. In the privacy of my mind and imagination I can have that struggle on my own terms – fast or slow – so long as I honour the challenge.

22 January is my birthday – one of the ones ending in a zero that signify a temporal milestone. This morning I headed off to Mountain High Pies for an indulgent breakfast of a Big Breakfast Pie and coffee, which I brought to the Black Mother Gully. As I arrived, a red Subaru, which is often here, pulled out in perfect time for me to drive right to my (and their) favourite spot. Perfect timing. 

There were 2 men standing not too far away talking, unmoving, backs to car. This was the first time that loose humans had lingered. They depart as I eat. I am left with magpies and frogs in the background. 

The grass is dressed in the residue of overnight rain and fog embraces the gully. It is a cool 12 degrees C.  All is peaceful. 

I have been listening to The Righteous Mind by the moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He has been talking the biological and evolutionary foundations to our sense of right and wrong – and why we embrace some as ‘like us’ and others not so much. 

In the background there is the soft sound of chooks – as if offering sad condolences and farewells to their eggs. It’s always such a warm sound.

Haidt is focusing on human morality, and he sends a clear message – who we care for depends on who we embrace as ‘one of us’. The root of our instincts is tribal – in human terms. But it is also apparent that our ancestors shared fellow feeling with other lives – kinship beyond the physical with the many lives of the world they lived with in. 

Haidt’s insights are of immense value, but they are not absolute. He relies of science to make the very good case that there are instinctual behaviours that form part of our moral intelligence – it’s just not all there is. 

Who we choose to believe we are adds a dimension to our moral values, and our conduct. If we see ourselves as special creations of God, given dominion over the creatures of the Earth, we will frame a morality to interpret that. If we see ourselves as part of a community of lives united in the spirit of ‘we are all in this together’ we will frame a different ethos.

How we define who we are will determine how we define our relations with, and conduct towards, others.  Haidt observes that, in biological terms, we cannot progress beyond tribalistic senses of identity and care. We are group based, not species based in our care and concern. 

So, to be humanitarian is to access a sense of identity beyond the biological – to connect with our deep nature that transcends our biological being – a spiritual dimension perhaps. Haidt cannot go there. 

For me, it is the fusion of these two natures – the biological and the spiritual that generates a challenge of conduct and communication – bringing both together. There is a tension between them, when the aspirations of one push against the limits of the other. 

Toward the end of the book Haidt discusses the errors of reasoning in the New Atheist position. The presumption that religion is an irrational thing because it has been used badly is sloppy. It is not a primitive state of pre-rational error. 

Haidt, an atheist himself, raises the human capacity to see faces in clouds – pareidolia. This popularly asserted to be a kind of survival instinct – better overreacting to a mistaken perception that something is a bear than failing to react to an actual bear. This has been crafted into an argument that belief in gods is a mistaken interpretation of that reflex. 

This is so monstrously silly I can hardly take it seriously. There is a lot of sense talked about pareidolia. Awareness of agents in the world is fundamental to all creatures to the best of their ability, and false positives are common – either as initial reflexes or as actual errors. Cats will chase a light from a laser pointer as if it is a living thing.

But assuming that humans who, at one stage, had to be hyperalert to things to eat, and things that may eat them, will parlay the false positives into an enduring delusion is offensive nonsense. Nevertheless, there is a book called Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion by Stewart Guthrie, 1995, which seems to have gained and retained a wholly unmerited fame.

As a child I was terrified by a face in the clouds. I thought it was God. I was 4 at the time, and my father had been drilling into me the assertion that God was watching me. I was playing in outside, chanced to look at the sky, saw the awful face, and fled in doors to find my mother. I love watching clouds. These days I take photos of cloud formations in the Blue Mountains. Faces are rare, and not enough to build an erroneous beliefs system on. The idea that our ancestors saw a face in a cloud and mistook it for an actual being is idiotic. Even the best faces don’t look literally convincing – though I must allow the odd one might.

I saw a photo of a potato crisp that was supposed to look like Jesus. It didn’t of course. It just looked vaguely human shaped. You need to indulgently apply your imagination to agree it looked like Jesus, or Elvis.

Seeing lifeforms in nature is what you’d expect from people with acutely developed capacities to scan their environment. You look for almost, because not every form will be clearly defined. So false positives are always going to be high – at least on first encounter. For example, when looking for edible shellfish on a beach, you mostly see just hints – a mere suggestive line from a small section of the shell that is exposed – and more things look like that suggestive line that are not shells because lots of things look like lines. The ability to see that even vaguely looks like something you are looking for is critical if you want to get a feed. 

It is not rational to turn a schooled reflex that generates a high volume of false positives into a theory of religion – unless you need to explain away something you don’t want to have to validate.

Perception of spirit presence rarely involves seeing an organic representation. But when one seeks to represent it, the organic is the go-to metaphor. In fact, spirit often expresses through animal form, using actual animals – birds are common. So, awareness of the environment includes awareness of spirit as well as of organic beings – and anything else that might be useful.

I get it – if you don’t believe spirit is real, as Guthrie does not, then you will try to explain human behaviour in terms that exclude spirit. But that’s a conceit, and little more. It is a thinking error – form a conclusion and then develop a theory based on the conclusion. If a lot of people share that conclusion, few people will argue the point – and those who do can be discarded as ‘not like us’.

This is where we have problems with developing a moral philosophy – basing it on a conclusion that suits our conceits, rather than critical thought and evidence. Haidt relies on scientific evidence, which is perfectly fine. There isn’t ‘scientific evidence’ for spirit at this stage. This leads to clunky interpretations of data, reliant upon a belief set – the atheistic materialist model which assumes spirit is not real – as opposed to not proven. That’s a bad habit.

The so-called New Atheists, who condemn religion because it is perceived to be the cause of much ill, are in line for the same criticism. None are students of religion, and neither are they students of psychology. The most famous New Atheist, Richard Dawkins, is a biologist. They have, in my view, misused science in service of a dogmatic goal. In fact, science has been harnessed in the performance of awful things, harming humans and other lives of the planet. Yet nobody, so far as I know, has set up a movement to argue that science is the fruit of a delusion – a thinking error.

Science is, in essence, a methodology. So is religion. Both can be employed to injure, or aid, according to the lights of the practitioners. Haidt demonstrates that positive moral conduct is mostly directed only toward our group – we look after our own – and we may persecute others. Instinctual behavior can carry an overlay of a cultural narrative, including religion. Blaming religion for instinctual behavior is sloppy, self-indulgent, and unscientific.

Haidt, true to his scientific grounding, asserts, in relation to pareidolia, that “People perceive agency where there is none.” Because ‘science’ has not detected agency, the presumption is that it does not exist. The evidence of people asserting the presence of agency is discounted, because such evidence is not considered ‘scientific’. In an atheistic materialistic culture this makes perfect sense. In an animistic culture this is just a fusion of bias, conceit, and intellectual carelessness.

Conclusion

Good science is good science regardless of whether it is dressed in the pomp of conceit and dogma. The materialistic presumption is no different to the theological presumptions that impeded intellectual progress in earlier centuries. No age is free of conceits and bias in the formulations of theories about how reality works.

The fusion of good science and awareness of spirit is essential work. Reliance upon old discourses such as paganism without blending the old insights with new knowledge seems no more than a form of self-indulgence – a sentimental approach to spirit.

There’s a movement called New Animism. I have no affection for it because it seemed to me to be sentimental – animism was useful for what it conveyed about sensitivity, but essence of spirit seemed to be side-stepped – in an effort to make it intellectually respectable. We can get the desired sentiment better from insights into biology – ideas like forests being organisms – a community such as the wood wide web.

Flagrant exposure to spirit is not common for Europeans living in a predominantly urban setting. That’s how it is. The failure of Christianity to develop into an acceptable vehicle for discourse on spirit is a failing of Christianity, not of spirit. Rejection of the Christian God makes sense on rational grounds; but progressing to deny spirit does not follow. The absence a strong motive to ‘discover’ spirit will likely lead to not discovering anything.

The view of the New Atheists seems to be that ‘I am an important and intelligent person, so if the Christian God was real, he’d make himself known to me. I think this conceit overlays the more sensible – ‘As an intelligent person I don’t find anything persuasive about claims this God exists.’ That’s agreeable to me. It’s a position I can share. It’s what happens next that sets me at odds with atheists who claim their position is the universal and only valid one – all else are in error. Where have we heard that before? 

Religion and science are both fingers pointing to the moon. And despite Gould’s assertion, they are the yin and yang of our consciousness and not a mutually exclusive polarity.

Early religion was empirical – a struggle to make sense of an overwhelming sense of dynamic being; and to find a place for the human in it all. Science continues that task as a partner, not a competitor – or it would, absent the scientific and the religious fools. Religion has lost its way, because it has become tangled in the mess of instincts, culture, scientific (and other) ignorance, dogma, and conceits.

The ‘spiritual’ must see beyond the dogmatic follies of sound science and work with it to develop a new discourse. This must be an intentional commitment – to reshape how we understand and talk about spirit.

Introduction

The Case Against Reality removes the last bricks from the edifice of materialism. The 2019 book is by Donald Hoffman, a Professor of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California Irvine.

What has been missing to date has been a cogent and sophisticated argument free from dogma, and based on sound science. This is what Hoffman delivers. The book is good read for those who wish to imbibe the scientific thinking, but if you find detailed scientific explanations daunting, the book and the author can be readily searched on YouTube to deliver shorter idea-rich summations. I listened to the audiobook. 

We can take The Case Against Reality and use it to end the pointless squabbling – or pretend it does not exist. 

I don’t want to regurgitate the scientific arguments. I could only do a disservice to the YouTube summations. Rather I want to reflect on the consequence of attempting to incorporate the central message – that everything we encounter is but a representation, a signifier, an icon. 

Can We Have a Shared Story?

Reality, in its essence, is unapproachable because our means of apprehending it can generate no more than signifiers of it. The best we can surmise is that this reality is consciousness. Even so, that is hopelessly inadequate as a description.

We are left, thus, with our best efforts to say what is – guided by mystical, metaphysical, and philosophical thought in an alliance with contemporary science. The addition of vicarious empiricism in the book is a nice touch – science does have something important to say. It was refreshing to encounter a serious scientist acknowledging our tradition of deep inquiry through religious and philosophical practice.

I had a bit of a quibble about Hoffman’s allusion to the ‘mystical’ traditions of the Abrahamic faiths – because, apart from Kabbalah, they are tied to the precepts their parent faiths. In effect, they remain in a prison of signifiers, even if the sentiment expressed is transcendental.

From the moment Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics was published in 1975 materialists have been complaining that any analogy between what is and what is imagined by mystics is romantic folly.  Science, they fancied, would take us to a different destination. The idea that we would end up in the same place as a skinny bearded guy in a loin cloth got to three or more thousand years ago was intolerable. Wither the marvels of our intelligence and craft? Surely the destination cannot be the same?

But any survey of history will show that human life is a drama with limited themes. The climax is always one of a very small array of options. The telling of the story, is, however, infinitely varied. The story of contemporary science, informed by a materialistic passion or not, cannot end differently to other ways of knowing – yoga or shamanism. 

Signs of Consciousness?

Hoffman observes that, from an animistic perspective, saying that consciousness resides in a rock is not right, because the thing we call a rock is more like an app icon on our computer desktop. The icon for email is not the email app, not the program. 

It is more accurate to say “that which this rock signifies is consciousness”. But even so we are imprecise because the word ‘consciousness’ has so many layers of meaning. Even if we arrive at the idea that that which the rock signifies is grounded in consciousness as the primary nature of the real, we are little advanced. 

We struggle with the idea of consciousness. Like so many grand ideas, it is maddeningly imprecise – and yet we have no substitute. We have the same difficulty with Love and Space. Such imprecision reflects thinking at the boundary of present utility, and what beckons as future understanding.

But at least we have cast off from the shore of material certainty. The voyage has begun. It is necessary, from here, to distinguish between perception and relating. Once we are unmoored from the assumption that what we perceive is reality we need to frame a different sense of relating. That is the challenge that is yet to be cogently articulated.

At present we relate to signifiers as if they have inherent value. They have the value of their utility, which is no mean thing, but no more. After all, our primary apprehension of our existence is predicated upon the critical fact that we experience being in the context of life in an organic form – for whom the complex nuances of utility determine how our lives play out – for good or ill. 

Is it a Game?

In Far Journeys Robert Monroe describes a fascinating scene in which he and a guide watch beings in spirit form clamour to enter human physical bodies for a life experience in the material world. The intensity of experience generated by the critical utility of sensory experience is something we might usefully describe as analogous to playing an immersive game. The concentration of sensation caused by the constraints of the game is powerful. It is also to be craved, apparently. This is precisely what Buddhism counsels against. What Munroe witnessed as intentional desire for sensation becomes the ground of identity once the state is attained.  One in the body, we imagine we are the body.

The useful analogy can work for us again if we imagine becoming addicted to the immersive game to such a degree that identity outside it is forgotten. The game becomes our signifier of our reality – and hence the foundation of identity. What is beyond is forgotten, or, in the case of materialism, denied.

White, in The Unobstructed Universe, describes how time, space and motion are the obstructed (physical) analogues of more fundamental attributes in the unobstructed aspect of being. The unobstructed attributes are receptivity (time), conductivity (space) and frequency (motion). Thinking in unobstructed terms is immensely difficult – if only because the habit of the obstructed experience is overwhelming – if our only point of reference is physical existence.

But we need to remember that we can employ VR to create experiences of space and motion from a hard drive no bigger than a mobile phone – thus indicating that there must be a ‘code’ or signifier for both. Time is more problematic in that experience of it can be ‘condensed’ or manipulated in a different way – but not as comprehensively substituted. 

The hard drive still exists in the obstructed realm, of course, but it shares attributes of the unobstructed – allowing an experience we can take to be ‘real’ to be crafted from code – from signifiers.

As Hoffman observes, how do we know we are not in a ‘game’ inside a highly sophisticated hard drive developed by an alien? On one level the idea is absurd. On another, maybe not so much. The point is, however, that our sense of what is ‘real’ beyond our sense of utility is wonderfully uncertain.

A Question of Gods

According to Aristotle, Thales of Miletus (c. 624/623 – c. 548/545 BC) declared that “All things are full of gods.” Even allowing for problems of translation (an ever-present risk when encountering the thought of our more ancient forefathers), there is a tempting idea that could be retranslated as ‘Behind the appearances of all things there are expressions of conscious being.’

Hoffman quotes the Italian physicist Federico Faggin in saying “A central goal of conscious agents is mutual comprehension.” It is interesting that a cognitive scientist quotes a physicist re the goal of conscious agents. Things are changing!

Mutual comprehension may not extend beyond pure organic utility – Can I eat it? How do I catch it? Will it eat me? How do I avoid it? Can I mate with it? How do I do that? But we can imagine a deeper level of utility – between gods and humans – and a need for mutual comprehension as well.

The principle of free will confers upon us an essential uncertainty. In the muddled thought of Christianity that uncertainty is everywhere. The will of God can be defeated by human intransigence. Ignore the problems with that idea literally; and attend to the code. Things are way more uncertain and complex than theologians can imagine – so they create a signifying fiction that magnifies human choice as always a morally loaded act.

DeMarco (I have forgotten which book) provokes us with the idea that no matter what happens, it is always good. This can seem callous and cruel. The alternative is to see events upon a cosmic sliding scale of absolute good or evil. But events must surely be only signifiers. How we respond is more important than what we respond to.

The act of seeking mutual comprehension between human and god must be more complex, and uncertain, than can be imagined. For me, the word ‘god’ can only denote a discrete organised pattern of consciousness that can act on its own accord. And that can be on any scale, though mostly beyond the human.

Gods have always been a part of the human experience. The word ‘god’ has been applied through our cultural bias, and with wild abandon, to all cultures. This has led us to imagine we know what is signified when we employ the word. We don’t. When we speak of the ‘gods’ of the Egyptians, the Greeks, or anyone else, we need to remember we are interpreting their ideas on our terms. We may not presume we understand what they meant. For this reason, polytheism may be no more than a fiction of our invention. 

By that I do not mean that these traditions do not have multiple agents, just that we cannot assume there is an equivalence between the ‘God’ of the Abrahamic tradition and the ‘gods’ of the ‘pagan’ traditions. The word ‘god’, applied to both, does not mean there is actual shared meaning – or equivalence. This is a common feature of English. We do not confuse Scone, the place, with scone, the baked good – because we have no motive to do so. But when it comes to ‘God’ and ‘god’ some have a motive to mine confusion and conflict.

Materialism has attempted to confine our real inquiry about the nature of reality to a narrow peninsula upon which humans are the only intelligent agents of note. It has succeeded to an alarming measure. However, that extraordinary hubris is now melting under the glare of evidence presented by careful and modest thinkers.

The past has been a protective beacon of what is possible once hubris is persuaded to surrender to real reason; and give up dogma-infected intellectualism.

Hoffman reminds us all that “science is not a theory of reality, but a method of inquiry”, and argues for the testing of religious and philosophical ideas using the rigor of science.

Let us be frank and admit this is not likely to happen with any haste, absent any profit to be made. But it is refreshing that the conversation can be had among thinkers of goodwill once the death grip of materialism is replaced by the firm hand of intellectual honesty and discipline.

Proponents of religious and philosophical ideas are not innocents here. The opiate of belief is as much a tyrant as the dogmatic denial of the metaphysical. Honesty, modesty, and the eschewing of dogma on both sides is essential for mutual progress.

It could be that Faggins is onto something. Our passion to understand our reality beyond the scope of mere pragmatic utility may be because of a deep sense that what we encounter, and signify as ‘reality’, is a conscious agent.

A common attribute of human cultures is the establishment of a ‘higher utility’ of moral relationship with that ‘embracing other’ in which right action leads to reciprocal response. Whereas the Greeks thought their gods capricious, Christianity has sought to inject a sense of lovingness into its conception of the divine. Perhaps ‘lovingly capricious’ might be closer to ‘reality’?

Conclusion

For me Hoffman has taken a certain pressure off the tension between contemporary science, as conceived by materialists, and those of us who insist on the validity of human experience over the span of our conscious inquiring being. It has always been objective of humanity to make sense of the ‘reality’ it functions in. 

Inquiry mediated by machines is heading in the same direction as inquiry mediated by meditation, psychotropics, engagement with spirits, experimentation on states of consciousness, unbidden encounters with the strange, and everything else in religion, magic, mysticism and philosophy.

We must open up the conversation to participants of goodwill, intellectual modesty, and shared curiosity. Maybe we can make some serious progress on shared understanding.