A Moot Point

moot, adj.:
Originally in Law, of a case, issue, etc.: proposed for discussion at a moot. Later also gen.: open to argument, debatable; uncertain, doubtful; unable to be firmly resolved. (OED)

It’s a long time since I went wayfaring, so long that I became a malade imaginaire and my soul went into hibernation. The vicious circle had to be broken, and this is the log of what happened. To get out of town the sooner, I drove to Loudwater, then walked to Wooburn Green & back. Yet again, my musings circled round the phoney separation of sacred and profane, or to put it crudely, the mutual incomprehension of “believers” & “sceptics”.

I took the voice-recorder along, to try & capture the moment. Some of what follows is nearly verbatim, some has been expanded later.

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Perhaps they [believers in the sacred] have been right all along, in one way, and all these people [believers in “a Universe without Design”—per Dawkins] have had a valid point of view in another way.

I read a review on Arash’s blog the other day of the film Slum Dog Millionaire. He says it has a hidden message:

that everything that happens to us, no matter how good or bad, serves a distinct and distinctive purpose. We may not see and understand it in the heat or burning suffering of the moment, but it seems part of a larger plan of the cosmos, the eventual fulfillment of the Logos.

That is what I mean by belief in the sacred. I’ve been in no hurry to decide one way or the other about it. It remains a moot point, in the original sense of something to be discussed at a moot.*

I look across the road at the ploughed field, where a tractor seems to be sowing for next year, and it takes me back to my time boarding at prep school, with farmland on all sides. We were supposed to behave like a pack of cubs, but even then I was the lone wolf. Sixty-five years later I’m reminded once more that this immersion in nature is for me as a vitamin, an open window letting fresh air into the sickroom, an air carrying intimations of immortality. I continue to Watery Lane, which snakes into a tunnel under the motorway.

There’s no-one but me on this narrow sidewalk. The road was built just for cars, to let them pass under the roaring motorway. I was near the black and white chevrons in my picture, warning night drivers that the bend is sharp, when I said that “this walk very definitely tells me about a Self, that I don’t really know, though I seem to remember having glimpses of it at moments in my life going back more than 60 years. This is why I walk!” For such encounters only happen in special circumstances.

I referred to this Self as it, but I actually see it as me, a strong me: a me, not an everyday I who sees and acts; but me as a Presence seldom perceived directly. I say me because in this short moment I see myself as aware of the Presence from the inside. The gaze of this Me is directed to a world I cannot explain, only glimpse in unguarded moments. Ordinary moments are always guarded: my ordinary attention locks on to this world as a guided missile locks on to its target, as if it’s vital that I do so; or because it’s a habit I’m unable to break. But of course there is no constant need for us to be in this kind of consciousness, not unless things are in a bad way. There are times when we can be unguarded; such as when I go wandering over the surface of this globe, and enter an invisible zone of safety. In this zone, I travel not just on foot through space, but somewhere else too, in another dimension co-existent with physical reality. And it feels worthwhile to have journeyed for a lifetime, just to get a momentary glimpse of it. There are tourists who go to Macchu Picchu, the Alhambra, the Taj Mahal, for a glimpse of the sublime. There are those who will flock to see a magician’s illusions, just for the momentary feeling of a veil pulled aside, offering escape to a world where earthly rules don’t apply. By contrast, you can enter the Zone anywhere, but there is nothing you can do directly to make it happen. You can only go into the unguarded safe place that you have found, & know how to be prepared, and wait.

I come back to my start point, the division between sacred and profane, believers and sceptics. We are all familiar with the idea of the sacred, even if we find no reason to subscribe to it personally. The secular has become the orthodox; religion has become corrupted, or rather, it has never not been corrupted. Despite that, my momentary insights help me empathize with those who take it for granted that there is a purposive force. My experience of a Him, or Me, at a bend on Watery Lane, just before it goes through the tunnel under the motorway, even helps me understand those who claim that Jesus walks with them.

I don’t know anything; but when things are shown to me I trust them. It’s been shown to me that neglecting “the sacred” is bad for my health. I must make space for it in the only ways I know how, and align myself with it.

The other day I was wondering about similar things, and came across this passage in Harari’s book Sapiens:

For more than 2 million years, human neural networks kept growing and growing, but apart from some flint knives and pointed sticks, humans had precious little to show for it. What then drove forward the evolution of the massive human brain during those 2 million years? Frankly, we don’t know.

It made me start wondering: yes, what is it that drives evolution? Why don’t we know? And I started to write a piece in which I called this driving force “impetus”. And then I thought of Henri Bergson, downloaded his book Creative Evolution (1907). Here is a quote:

Must we then give up fathoming the depths of life ? Must we keep to that mechanistic idea of it which the understanding will always give us—an idea necessarily artificial and symbolical, since it makes the total activity of life shrink to the form of a certain human activity which is only a partial and local manifestation of life, a result or by-product of the vital process ? We should have to do so, indeed, if life had employed all the psychical potentialities it possesses in producing pure understandings—that is to say, in making geometricians. But the line of evolution that ends in man is not the only one. On other paths, divergent from it, other forms of consciousness have been developed, which have not been able to free themselves from external constraints or to regain control over themselves, as the human intellect has done, but which, none the less, also express something that is immanent and essential in the evolutionary movement. Suppose these other forms of consciousness brought together and amalgamated with intellect : would not the result be a consciousness as wide as life ? And such a consciousness, turning around suddenly against the push of life which it feels behind, would have a vision of life complete—would it not?—even though the vision were fleeting.

*Later in my walk, I arrived at the village green at Wooburn. Outside “Ash Tree House Dental” was a big ash tree, with an engraved plate at its base:

ANCIENT SITE
An Ash Tree has been located on this site
for more than 1000 years since Saxon Times
to mark the MOOT (meeting place) of the
Saxon Inhabitants