Perpetual Lab

This blog has existed for seven years. It’s had three different titles: “An Ongoing Experiment” for the first few months, then “As in Life”, before fixing on “A Wayfarer’s notes” around mid-2007. It’s still an ongoing experiment, still a reflection of life, and reflections on life. Blogger allows you to change the title but not the web address. So it stays, a faithful reminder of its founding idea: a laboratory in which to make explorations into the nature of reality. On this site I try to take nothing on trust; to arrive at insights through unfiltered subjective experience. Here in this virtual lab, the prime source of insights is a single ongoing experiment: the locomotion of a perceiving subject through a transparent medium (the open air). This may be described in other ways: a sentient being interacting with the ambient All, where the one is softly caressed by the other; or the stream-of-consciousness of a piece of Nature interpenetrating the rest of Nature, each yielding to let the other pass. A self-regenerating membrane, the skin, separates the perceiving subject from the perceived All. To an equal degree, the same membrane connects the perceiver and the perceived, allowing mutual contact; as do the other senses. And while I perceive myself to be the perceiver, my wayfaring in the open air allows me equally to be the perceived. Such is life, such is wayfaring.

If the weather’s forbidding, or my bones protest, there is literature, through which a virtual wayfaring may take place indoors, through its pages affording glimpses through other eyes to other realms and epochs. Thus I might read and sometimes quote the Bible, the recorded sayings of Zen Patriarchs, or lines from William Blake. I’m not in thrall to them. Their tales and notions do not bind me. I dwell in the momentary swirl of subjective experience, eschewing fixed belief.

“Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth,” said Blake, in his Proverbs of Hell.

What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Certainly there be, that delight in giddiness, and count it a bondage to fix a belief; affecting free-will in thinking, as well as in acting. (Francis Bacon)

Indeed, I do count it a bondage to fix a belief. I do affect free-thinking, but it comes not from delight in giddiness. This laboratory is full of delight, but not the giddy kind. So I take one of Blake’s infernal Proverbs and bend it to my own understanding: everything possible to be believed could be someone’s idea of The Truth, sufficient to form a basis of faith, by which to live and die. And while such truth may be hard currency amongst believers, it’s a coin of no value to others. If this makes me a relativist, see if I give a damn.

Relativism: any theory or doctrine asserting that knowledge, truth, morality, etc., are relative to situations, rather than being absolute.

For there is no copyright on the meaning of the word ‘truth’, nor on any other word. How we make sense to one another at all is a mystery beyond the reach of linguistics.

What I perceive directly, and the insights that arise within me, are riches of knowledge, and don’t depend on belief. These riches are in a currency which cannot be traded, though sometimes the delight can be shared. And if it is a delight in giddiness, let it be so, and let it be contagious.

This blog has always been about sharing joy. Its author used to write with a naïve spontaneity, often more readably as a result. What I’ve had to say has not changed. Things arise from nothing and flourish; ultimately they must decline and die. I started here on the 19th April, 2006. On the 26th, I wrote a short piece on Spring, beginning: “Spring is the most important thing happening here. This [referring to picture alongside] is how far a chestnut blossom at the back of the house has progressed. I’ll give you an update soon. I love Spring, this year particularly, because it mirrors my own joy.”

In this year 2013, in this part of England, Spring has been grievously late. But now it’s here and I find myself mirroring its joy.

I see that Nature’s wisdom is built-in. When the weather’s too cold, it holds back the buds. Now it’s starting to catch up; the birds are singing their springtime tunes. “The evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design”, says Richard Dawkins in his subtitle to The Blind Watchmaker. I shall not challenge that point. But still, the trees have their own untutored wisdom, which tells them how to respond to events, as do I, without design! As the newborn arises from a unique combination of its parents’ DNA, each global moment arises from its predecessor. The connection cannot be described as freewill or predestination. If each moment is a question, its successor is one of a quasi-infinite range of possible answers, and therefore spontaneous.

---

I’ll be posting an anthology of excerpts from earlier years, to illustrate in better words the tendency I’ve tried to summarize above.

---

Epilogue
So what is the point of this Perpetual Lab? What practical outputs does it yield? Well, seven years is a short time to evaluate these things. But it may yield insights and possibilities of the highest significance.

What is the human imperative? At one level of existence it’s me (and my allies if any) against the world. There’s an extreme separation: I must save my own skin, so my ego is tyrant. I see that as the “Ayn Rand” vision, a softer version of which has been rightly or wrongly attributed to the late Margaret Thatcher, whose controversial funeral will be staged on Wednesday.

I propose that the principal disease of civilization is the inability to depose that tyrant ego and its philosophy of rational self-interest. It can be tamed, not killed, if we  improve our vision. For a realm exists beyond, of which sometimes we catch glimpses, as of blue sky on a cloudy day. A realm we can aspire to call home.

What to advise? “Look, learn and know.”