Professionals vs laity. Hope

‘The longer Levin went on mowing, the oftener he experienced those moments of oblivion when his arms no longer seemed to swing the scythe, but the scythe itself his whole body, so conscious and full of life; and as if by magic, regularly and definitely without a thought being given to it, the work accomplished itself of its own accord. These were blessed moments.’ (Tolstoy: Anna Karenina)

For the waking, there is one world, and it is common; but the sleepers turn aside each one into a world of their own. (Heraclitus)

Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. (Beckett: (Krapp’s Last Tape)

What, Trump again? You probably think that I may have things to say about what it’s like dying of cancer and finding out on the way I’m not much of a Buddhist. But how are these idle political observations – and other here today, gone tomorrow, froth - relevant to the rarified business of extinction, eternity, or what have you? OK, I guess that what I want to do is to connect what can seem like a closed world of the full time dying patient with the open and on-going doings of life. I’m trying to offer a lived sense of dying, of dying as something lived through day by day. Basically, the world out there does not stop being relevant to my life just because I’m not going to be here for it personally for very much longer.

Likewise with my discussions of mindfulness and Buddhism – I want to talk about how my own training – including my own evident insufficiencies in applying myself to that training - actually work for this particular person in this elemental situation I find myself in. Not what is the relevance of Buddhism and mindfulness in supporting the work of dying, but what is the lived experience of this particular and perhaps rather limited Buddhist practitioner in that context?

Dying is a normal part of the normal world. There are a lot odder things going on in the world than one’s own death. Dying is part of my life, a very important part of it, and it is part of yours. I don’t like it much, it’s not fun, but it is where I continue to live my life, and where I continue to be engaged with the world and other lives. It’s coming for all of us, but we all need to enjoy life, even beneath its shadow. It’s very different from the life that precedes it, but it has its own peculiar rewards. Even pleasures – you never lose the human need for pleasure. So I try to get on with my situation as best I can. I’m aware that it is an alien world for most people. You can’t quite imagine your way into it, even if you may have seen a lot of people dying. They are doing this mysterious and horrible thing; you aren’t, thank god. A deep instinct insists ‘This is not about me.’ You walk away, thinking, ‘How good to be alive.’ I mean, even I find it alien. Can this really be happening to me? To special old me? So bear with me… ah yes, Trump.

Professionals are in retreat. Nobody seems to want a professional politician like Hilary Clinton any more. Donald Trump was the Republican candidate, and yet he has quite casually started cosying up to the Democrats, like a footballer suddenly deciding to play for the other side in the middle of a game. The laity imagine that politics is not a game, but the point of the game is that when you recognize an opposing side, you recognize that your position must be open to challenge. Trump’s advisors are either military or bizarre characters that have crawled out from various dark recesses of the internet. He lets off unconsidered tweets like trapped wind. He isn’t a professional. And many people like this.

Even the Pope has got professional Catholic theologians jumping up and down on their mitres and birettas, and pulling out what’s left on their scalps, with his latest idea – to reach out to divorcees: maybe they can remarry he suggests. What next, the theologians cry, condom machines in St Peters Square? The laity may not like Catholic teaching, they protest, but they should at least know what it is. The question “Is the Pope a Catholic?’ should surely remain that ultimate rhetorical question, they whimper.

The academic world is also at the mercy of the laity. The most recent storm in a teacup is over a proposed study of trans-gender people later wanting to de-transition, which was turned down on the grounds that the research might upset people. Unlike some highly contentious research you might think this one might be quite useful. But where the laity has decided there can be only one answer, there is no place for the academic question.

On the other hand… Have you ever tried reading research papers? A cement of deliberately obfuscating jargon carefully laid over an unwillingness to make the effort to think clearly. And are any of our current crop of professional politicians who are going out to bat for us abroad what you’d really call professional? I mean, David Davis (‘I was out of my depth all my life, and not grinning but drowning’)? Or Boris Johnson (Flashman meets Bertie Wooster)?

And then lawyers – my brother Roddy knew with uncanny perspicacity that I hadn’t sorted out a will, and he dragged me with my piffling financial affairs to the very grand old firm in Lincoln’s Inn where he used to work, to get it sorted out. He said that when he started out there were 20 thousand solicitors in the country. There are now 200 thousand, and most of these, he said, are complete duds or shysters. Roddy hates legal muddle.

But doctors too are on the ropes. The laity are looking up their symptoms on the internet and coming to their own conclusions. In my own case, I now know that we had a much clearer idea of my symptoms and what they might mean than both my GP and a neurologist he sent me to see. The consequent delay in treatment may well have been what has made the disease fatal. The laity can no longer be treated as passive consumers of professional medical wisdom, though the system has yet to accommodate the new reality (unless you go private). I see that a study of depression in older patients advises GPs that a patient ‘who consistently annoys you could well be depressed or have a personality disorder.’ One doesn’t know quite where to start with this – except to say, ‘WTF?’

Having said that, in oncology the professionals are desperately holding the fort against the dark powers of ‘alternative’ medicine offering ‘cures’ for cancer, with plausible ‘scientific’ guff and inspiring personal testimonies, and tales of conspiracies by the ‘pharmaceutical companies’ – ‘what nobody wants to tell you about cancer’. The headline ‘the truth about cancer’ signals that what we are talking about here is a kind of religious faith. A prayer. It’s about hope as well as fear. By its nature slow, uncertain, unseen, cancer naturally produces a gently narcotic secretion of hope. As the sequence of treatments fail, one by one, to halt the progress of the disease, the hope simply metastasizes. Because in a few cases the disease can quite miraculously go into reverse, at least for a while, there is any number of people out there with their miraculous cure, consisting in anything they happened to be on, or doing, or having done to them at the time.

The ancient Greek physician Galen said ‘confidence and hope do more good than physic.’ The modern medical profession is not at all easy with this, but it is aware of the power of placebos. What is truly extraordinary is research showing that placebos are effective even when the patient knows they are being given placebos. It is as if at some level the mind appreciates that our objective experience is in a sense, secondary; the mental state we bring to our experience is primary. Whatever the object, we always experience our own mental state. With the placebo, we know it is only the mind that will make the difference. But it can be trusted to do this.

It can, though, work just as effectively in the opposite direction, so to speak. A few years ago I was called out to a hospice to talk to a bloke with advanced cancer who had thought of himself as a Buddhist for many years. We sat in the garden in the sunshine, and he wanted to know what would happen to him at death. Of course I said I couldn’t tell him, but I reassured him that, whatever happened, what he experienced would be his own mind. In that sense it wouldn’t be anything he was not equipped to meet with confidence. Within a few days the chap was dead. It was as if he just needed that reassurance from a ‘professional’, someone who appeared to have the authority to offer it.

My own hopes are pretty limited now. On 13 September we saw the oncologist. The hormone therapy hasn’t worked, the tumours have grown; I’m now on chemo. I was concerned about the tumour at the base of my brain, and losing my marbles, but it seems that actually this is underneath the base of the skull, which offers a bit of protection to the brain. The main concern is the liver. You can manage ok with quite of bit of unpleasantness in the lungs and the bones. Not so much with the liver, so it will be liver failure that inflicts the coup de grace. Because my cancer is rather rare, the doctors are flying blind and hoping for the best. My chances of surviving very long into the new year seem to be narrowing.

Anyway, for all my skepticism, I’m getting quite a lot of non-professional support. I’m having cranio-sacral therapy from a very kind friend, Vilasamani, and I’m going to a nice lady in St Johns Wood called Gretchen for acupuncture and herbal bits and bobs. And there’s the pills and vitamins and special dietary stuff that Claudia and my son’s mother, Dom, give me to swallow - chia seeds, apricot kernels…. and a rather pricey marijuana or hemp oil. And one thing I’m doing which I do think may well be effective in reducing side effects, but which is not officially recommended yet, is fasting for three days around the chemo.

My hope is for little more than to be able to decline at a rate we can manage and contain. However, the tumour in the bone is now giving me some pain in the hips: how fast will it get worse? My hope is not to be bedridden too soon (wheelchair?). And I also have some back pain (I presume from the lung tumour.) The chemo has opened up my tongue ulcer, which had almost healed over. This is a frustrating setback – once more, a side order of pain with every meal. And one of my main pleasures used to be sleep; now I wake regularly through the night because of the buzzy, electrical flickering from the nerve damage around my eye, with very occasional sharp pain in the eye. Again, will this pain become more persistent (hardly bears thinking about really)?

At present I can meditate my way through this, but it is hard work getting quiet. I used to have a student with quite severe cerebral palsy, who couldn’t sit still; I get a slight sense of what he has to work through with meditation. The practice though, is to sit with your experience, to keep meeting it as it is, to be soft and curious with an experience that you don’t want to know about. So that is what I try to do. It is to be receptive, both to what is being communicated and to my own unwillingness to hear. I tend to sit there with that assumption we have that one is just dealing in meditation with some internal communication. But I think it’s helpful to challenge that assumption, and to meditate in a way that takes you beyond yourself.

What is being communicated comes with the experience of the breath. But in order to be able to listen, I have to calm that compulsive flinching away from what is unwanted (as if my experience could by some miracle be other than it is). Ducking around difficult stuff may have worked in the past – but not now. And there is one thing this experience of mine has going for it once it gets past my guard. This is that it is our secret and most intimate link with one another. One never wanted to get that close. This helpless, hopeless brute reality has to force itself on you. But maybe at some point the breath is found to carry some quality of belonging, of our belonging to one another, and of a sense of care that is maybe less self-protective, that can relax and break open to the world. I say 'maybe' because my self-concern tends to tighten its grip under the pressure of constant discomfort. What the meditation does is open a space in which that self-concern sits with a deeper awareness and understanding that I'm afraid in my case doesn't really get a look in otherwise.

We associate dying with loss, of the future, of what being alive means. In reality, loss does not leave you with less life. It’s a different life, with its own interests. Loss, the dropping away of things, reveals some larger perspectives that you don’t usually get without a lot of strong practice. Some of those perspectives – regrets and so on – may be uncomfortable, but others quite liberating. A friend of mine, Paul, said his mother when she was dying simply dropped her long held habit of watching Coronation Street, and reading novels, but she enjoyed painting. I’m not sure I have that sort of clarity as yet, I’m afraid I've been watching Game of Thrones avidly (top-notch tosh – though I could do without the dragons and their bloody doe-eyed mother). I don’t enjoy eating quite as most people do, but after months not being able to take in or taste anything at all, I love my morning coffee, strong, milky, sweet, and bread and peanut butter, with banana (to make mastication without saliva easier) – though eating anything stings the mouth at present. But sweet things are not at all bad. I enjoy some music. I enjoy meditation, even when it’s work. I feel I’m still curious, in touch, alive to the life of things. Also, I don’t have the usual mental detritus swirling round my head repeatedly. There is a nice simplicity to a life that is firmly tethered to the question of how to manage this trip to the hospital, this meeting, this immediate bit of food, this walk to the shop, this footstep. The breath naturally becomes the common reference point. 

Dying fairly early does mean that you get quite a lot of attention that is much less likely to be there for someone in their eighties who may have lost contact with a lot of people from their working life. Something that one can easily overlook amidst the downsides of dying early, is the love and appreciation one gets. It’s almost as if people just need that excuse to reach out to another person who they know is in pain, with kindness. We are all in pain; we all need kindness – or rather, we all need to be kind – I mean, when it feels difficult to be feel kind. Again, I think kindness is to be soft and curious with something you don’t really want to know about. My situation is a new one for me, and from my present point of view I have come to regret having lost sight of things or not having had time for things that now seem to be the only things that matter.

However, one has to try to limit the visits one gets offered even from people that ordinarily you would be delighted to spend time with. I think what can be a bit tiring is two quite different, even incompatible world views coming together. A world that is ending, closing, and a world that isn’t, that appears to be endlessly open. One view is saying hello, what’s next, the other’s saying good-bye, nothing’s next. Both my sisters have lost their husbands, one of them, Helen, to cancer not long ago. The other, Janet, to a road accident (which was much worse, at least for her - it’s as if your life goes over a cliff.) Both of them are able to bring these two perspectives together. So they are quite relaxing to be with.

With my brothers – both older than me - I get a refreshing taste of the old-school English approach. Hector’s response to my bad news is to tuck into his takeaway lunch with relish. I ask how he is and he tells me briefly about his two hours with the dentist, and his neuralgia. Then we get on to more interesting matters. We talk over the opening Champions League football results. We talk about Simon Rattle, the newly arrived chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. Hector feels there is something ‘earthbound’ about his conducting (basically the kiss of death for a conductor). So it’s not that you pretend that the elephant in the room isn’t there; but you chat cheerfully about other things in order to put dying in its place, to make dying secondary to life, as simply another event – and by no means the most important event – in one’s life, and certainly not a matter of huge significance for the life around you that will continue when yours is done.

The response of professional Buddhists is slightly different. Axiomatic to Buddhism is that you don’t take exception to death and dying, as an intolerable interference with life. Rather the opposite. The fact that life ends is built into its meaning. More than this, they take the view that dying propels you into a certain privileged perspective on things. This period of uncertainty about my continuing existence is regarded as opening up reaches of the mind that tend by their nature not to be available to inspection except under the pressure of a lot of sustained practice. My situation at present is therefore looked upon as extremely fertile ground for practice. (Not that it really feels like this.) Anyway, the main concern of Buddhists tends to be: how are you bearing up? Are you able to maintain reasonably positive mental states through it all so as to best take advantage of it? The basic attitude is that the person dying is not going through something that sets them apart from others. We are all dying. It’s just that I know I am and you (probably) don’t. In your case those men coming for you with that long black bag and zipping you up in it is an event in the future that gets lost amongst all the other things that you are planning to do first. In my case, the long black zip-up bag is my future.

Hector also talked about accompanying his wife to church every week. She has shifted her allegiance recently to a different denomination. Traditionally, your religion was laid down at birth, and you remained loyal to it, like one sticks to supporting a football team, however useless or unattractive it became. Consequently, the priests used to be in charge. Today it’s the laity that calls the shots. If the church doesn’t deliver, they’ll go elsewhere.

In Buddhism it’s no different. Traditionally in Buddhism, the laity did not really practice Buddhism as such at all. They just supported those who did, the monks. In the far east, the laity were given some very basic forms of largely devotional concentrative practice to do, that they could manage around their daily life – e.g. what is now known as ‘chanting’ Buddhism, Nichiren Sho Shu, where the practice is to recite ‘Nam myoho renge kyo’ ‘Homage to the White Lotus Sutra’.

It was only in the twentieth century that meditation became widely available to the laity. My own teacher back in the seventies, Mr Goenka, was taught by the chief accountant of the Burmese railways in the 1940s, U Ba Khin. And his teacher, Saya Thetgyi (1873-1945), who was taught the Vipassana method along with other lay people by a monk, Ledi Sayadaw, was at least nominally lay. However, these lay teachers remained good lay Buddhists. When one of Saya Thetgyi’s students put together a book of his teaching, Saya Thetgyi had the whole print run brought to him and set fire to the lot. U Ba Khin would not countenance the communication of this teaching for ‘therapeutic’ purposes. And as for Mr Goenka, he was appalled when IMS was founded in Massachusetts with the intention of teaching Thai as well as Burmese forms of practice. He told them that in teaching from more than one lineage they would be ‘doing the work of Mara’ – i.e. the devil’s work. And maybe he was on to something, because it was on a retreat at IMS that the modern mindfulness industry was conceived by Jon Kabat Zinn.

Kabat Zinn recognized that the only priests and shamans and magicians of our age that count are scientists and doctors, neuroscientists and psychiatrists. To appease them, he not only offered mindfulness as a secular practice for everyone, he dropped any mention of Buddhism at all. You don’t even need to be a Buddhist at all to teach it. In a way, very Zen (Jon Kabat Zinn’s original tradition). Most mindfulness professionals – i.e. officially trained and certified mindfulness teachers - are now non-Buddhists. So now you get lots of books on mindfulness (e.g, Mindful Sex, god help us) written by non-Buddhists; mindfulness is now not only therapeutic, it is widely regarded as therapy. It might seem that Mara’s work is done and he has his feet under the table. I’m not so sure. If Buddhists can give freely to people what they feel they need, without asking for any recognition in return, this is surely in the spirit of the Dharma, the Buddha’s teaching. No other tradition has that self-effacing generosity.

In being a professional, there is an inevitable element of performance, depending on your seniority. (An extreme example of this is the elaborate dance of Church of England bishops around the issue of same sex marriage.) I was never very senior (or professional to be honest). But still, it is good to be able at last to drop the whole performance of being a Buddhist. To take off the hat. And to see how it has accommodated me for this, the sharp end of things.

Feelings, meetings with predators, parents and children, a lucky death

‘Nothing happens to anybody which he is not fitted by nature to bear’. (Marcus Aurelius: Meditations)

I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening. (Montaigne)

‘The glorious thing about mountains is that they will endure no lies.’ (Heinrich Harrer)

The food retailer Lidl has been accused of pandering to its more illiberal customers by airbrushing out a cross on the top of a Greek monastery that features on the packaging of a range of Greek products that it sells. The outcry has been interesting. Here is a representative response: ‘As a Christian I feel really hurt, discriminated against, upset and disappointed’. What is interesting are the grounds for complaint: how it makes someone feel. And what I am not allowed to do here is question that person’s feelings of hurt and being discriminated against. If you can lay claim to these feelings this gives you automatically a position of authority that no mere argument can match.

There are any number of examples of this kind of thing. In Australia we have one of those hoo-hahs we get from time to time over statues of imperial bastards. The unfortunate inscription on the statue of the founder of Melbourne makes the fascinatingly insouciant claim that the land was ‘previously unoccupied’. So a second inscription was affixed in the nineties saying, ‘It is now clear that Melbourne’s site was inhabited long before by Aboriginal people.’ Fair enough – though it would be more honest to say ‘It is now clear that the aborigines displaced by British settlers were in fact fully human beings’. Anyway, more recently a third plaque has been added, apologizing to Aborigines for ‘the wrong beliefs of the past, and the personal upset caused.’ In place of telling the painful truth about what those ‘wrong beliefs’ were, we have the contemporary requirement of an apology for hurt feelings. I hope there’s room for another plaque in another twenty years.

Then there is ‘hate speech’. In this country expressing hatred is a criminal offence. Not only this, but the police determine whether or not what you say or write is motivated by hatred through the testimony not of the speaker, but of their audience. So there is huge pressure on all of us to avoid causing offence; to say nothing that might be interpreted by someone as offensive. There is however no pressure on anyone to tolerate views or the emotional outbursts of others that they don’t like. That is, there is no pressure on anyone to grow up. Quite the opposite: being offended or ‘outraged’ or hurt, shows that you are on the side of right against wrong.

I’m sure I don’t need to go into the contemporary student world of ‘safe spaces’ and ‘no-platforming’ and ‘micro-aggressions’ and ‘triggers’. It represents the same primacy of feeling, the same apotheosis of the victim - of weakness in the sense of an inability to tolerate emotional discomfort - as the source of moral authority in any given situation (rather than this source being a clear sense of shared values). What confuses the issue is that this all appears to be part of an overall cultural trajectory towards honesty and tolerance that is very positive, when in fact it is the dark shadow of that movement.

Without going into the whys and implications of this extraordinary situation, all I would say is that the Buddhists of Myanmar appear to be engaged in violently ethnic-cleansing a small Muslim minority, the Rohingyas: I would propose that how the Buddhist majority feel about what they are doing is irrelevant; how the Rohingyas feel about being persecuted is also neither here nor there; and how I feel about the situation is likewise beside the point. The question is what is actually going on, and what are our values, whether as Buddhists or Britons (by the way, unlike the Buddhists, the Rohingyas fought for us against the Japanese in the war) and what are we prepared to do to uphold them?

The Buddhist mindful perspective is quite different from the alarming modern cultural cul de sac of taking direction from feelings. The work is to shift our attention or perspective from concern for my feelings - that is, my experience of this moment, this situation, whether difficult and painful, or comfortable and pleasant – to concern for how I respond to the presence of this feeling, this experience, this situation. We shift from being concerned with getting what we want, to being concerned with the mental state we bring to getting or not getting what we want. We pay attention to sensation and feeling in order to separate it out from the mind’s active aspect, that is, the attention itself and the quality of that attention. Full awareness of our experience includes an interrogation of the mental state we are bringing to it. What we don’t tend to realize is the degree to which this mental state is the most decisive factor in determining the quality of our experience. So we imagine our experience is a given; but in fact we are creating it in the way we take it in.

This central practice is no faddish hair-splitting exercise. It can save your life. A well-known example of life or death mindfulness is the way Thai forest monks would test their practice by walking along tiger trails; if they did meet a tiger the pressure of the situation would hopefully push them into a meditative state, particularly one generated by the practice of metta or kindness. If not, well, too bad - an extremely steep but rather short learning curve would follow.

A wildlife film-maker told me a story that illustrates vividly what is involved in this kind of encounter. She was in Namibia, and just returning to her vehicle when she felt something behind her. She turned and saw a large male leopard a few metres away, looking at her. This film-maker specialised in filming predators, so she knew enough not to react instinctively to feelings of terror, not to behave like prey. She did the opposite. She slowed down her heartbeat. That is, she consciously relaxed. And she looked straight at the leopard, not staring, but making a ‘soft connection’. By this time she had her back to her vehicle. The leopard came right up to her, leaned his weight against her for a moment, and went away. So this is mindfulness. It can be a matter of life or death.

My own existential threat does not have the same compelling immediacy. My coming death won’t be the result of a failure of mindfulness. But the threat to my well-being in terms of pain and discomfort and despair is visceral and testing enough. So can I drop my guard, my defensiveness in the face of the killing machine stalking me, and fully take it in with a ‘soft connection’? Well, not really, no. (Except for a while in meditation.) There are times I must confess when I weep with the seemingly endless, day after day pain and frustration. The physical ease that I enjoyed all my life along with almost everyone else, with the people I see every day eating and drinking in the restaurants and strolling the parks, is gone, probably for good. To be honest I’m not always very good at welcoming this small visceral connection I now have with the other side of ordinary human life, with the darkness all around us, with those who have been pulled into the darkness themselves, in all the myriad horrible ways it happens. I really don’t want this connection to the reality of things. But this experience I’ve been dished out is the ground of my work now. It’s my practice whether I like it or not.

You see, much as I may rail against people offering up their feelings as if they were some higher truth, the fact is that I can become so locked into my own feelings that I cannot attend to the truth of what my actual experience is. As long as we are so emotionally identified with our wanting, our craving – in my case for simple well-being – we miss what is really going on. Mindfulness is the practice of learning to attend to feeling with interest in the truth of our experience, including the craving for what we might want out of that experience.

I have emphasized how difficult this is in the rough turns and distractions of ordinary life, because I’m afraid a lot of cheap mindfulness instruction makes the practice - all that walking with open attentiveness through autumn leaves and breathing in the present moment - seem so lovely and easy. It is in meditation that the mind is honed in mindfulness.  

Paying attention to bodily sensations and feeling in this way actually changes how we experience ourselves and the world. One is not necessarily consciously aware of this, but we start to see things differently, more truly. We are more aligned with how things really are. This is inevitably relaxing, because it takes a great unconscious effort to resist what is really going on. This change of our view of things tends to be unconscious, basically because it goes deeper than the conceptualising mind.

When you pay attention to sensations and feeling as sensation and feeling – i.e. separately from your interpretative, judgmental functions - you cease to be able to pin them down. I mean, what is a sensation like? Thomas Nagel wrote a famous essay entitled ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ Well, obviously, it isn’t like anything. This is the point. You are getting an experience of yourself that is ungraspable, essentially unknowable. It cannot be an object of attention at all. The more this becomes your experience of yourself, the more you should become aware of others as similarly inhabiting an essentially incommunicable and therefore private experience.

The really appalling truth of my experience is that my situation is not that bad. I’ve just been looking at a video of an eight year old girl who’s had terminal cancer since she was four (Claudia has been doing some psychotherapeutic work with her sisters). It shows the girl in her school with her sisters dancing to ‘Thank you for the music…’ She seems happy, and it ends with her kissing the camera. She died the following day. That lightness, that cheerfulness, that self-forgetfulness… is not easy for me at my age, but it gives me something to aim for.

My son Antoine has been visiting regularly, every day when he’s in London, and at present he’s flying over from Amsterdam every week. Very filial. One thing he said is that he feels lucky to have had two parents who both loved him. I think though it is more that he had parents who always had affection and respect for one another. Or to be absolutely honest I think he has been lucky to have a mother – Dominique - of such generosity, in every sense of the word. It reminds me of when my mother was dying, and she wanted to apologise to me for something in my own upbringing. Parenting was not the big deal that it is nowadays, more, shall we say, relaxed (and there were five of us) and they missed something – the fact I was deaf in one ear and so did not catch a lot of what was going on. I was taken to see a neurologist, and I remember my mother saying to him, ‘You see doctor, he’s so vague… I rather wonder in fact if my religious bent comes from that sense I had as a child of the world around me as being an unfathomable mystery. Anyway, I said to my mother, ‘I always felt loved’, which was true. And by far the most important thing.

I have been trying to reassure Antoine that as you get older, the very gradual decay of your powers makes death a much less alien prospect. Much less of a complete denial of your experience of life. When you’re young it’s as if it doesn’t compute. As you get older it is not so much of an enemy. I have to say that it seems sometimes now almost like a friend or lover who’s going to whisk me away from the abject daily grind of dying. Well, I say this now, but who knows how it’ll be when the time actually comes?

Another thing Antoine said is that we can have no idea how lucky we are (Sophocles says the same thing – ‘Call no man happy till he has crossed the bourn of death’). It may be that by dying a tad early I am dodging some much more painful event. Maybe. I think the point is that our life is always utterly uncertain. For all our savings and insurance policies and health check-ups we can never know what comes next, for good or ill. I think this is quite a good corrective to the usual lament of someone dying ‘early’, that they are going to ‘miss’ the future – grandchildren, Brexit, the later series of their favourite box set, Wimbledon… Nobody anticipates a nasty accident, a vicious divorce, a terminal illness of someone close to us, a suicide, some major nuclear disaster close to home… My mother, for example, was fortunate in dying a year or so before one of her daughters, Janet, lost her husband in a road accident. 

Antoine and I have been watching the new season’s football, even though I may well not be there for the end of the season. In some ways I’m surprised I remain interested in all this – and indeed in the absurd Brexit negotiations and all the other nonsense one allows to drift in and out of the mind. Ridiculous really to continue to be entranced by the whole gaudy show. In all sorts of ways I shall be leaving the field of play well before the final whistle. I would like to be able to say that I have lost interest in meaningless rubbish. Sadly, habits are not dropped so easily. Well, maybe they get a bit loosened.

Purpose and meaning, a journey, Mr Goenka and impermanence, a lucky escape

‘The earth is literally a mirror of thoughts. Objects themselves are embodied thoughts. Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.’ (Saul Bellow: Humboldt’s Gift)

‘All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware’ (Martin Buber (I and Thou)

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something becasue it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations for his enquiry do not strike a man at all'. (Wittgenstein)

When politicians get to the top, some seem to actually get on top of things; but others don’t; Donald Trump and Theresa May clearly don’t quite know what they are doing. They hold the position without quite being in charge. So why did they take on the job? What drove them to it? Where are they going with it? What is their purpose? What is the meaning of their own role for them? It’s a bit worrying when leaders of the free world seem to be making it up as they go along.

But then what about the rest of us? What are we doing really with our time in the world? Jinamitra (Nicolas Soames) and I have been talking about why we practice. What do we practice for? I mean, there comes a time when you may realize that you are not going to attain Enlightenment. So what’s the point of it all? J is someone who never had Enlightenment or Awakening in mind. The worldly life works well for him, but he took up Buddhism, and also initially judo, because he needed a practice, the discipline of it, to provide his mundane life with ballast, with purpose, a grounding.

To provide it with ‘a grounding in reality’, I add. But this isn’t really his perspective. He does have an intuitive sense of what is true or real or authentic – he knows when something ‘rings true’ – but his perspective on the Dharma is not really ‘cognitive’ so much as practical and emotional. And I think his is probably in the end my own position. You may not always be in touch with the depths of things, but you maybe know people who are, and you have a practice that embodies those depths directly.

I have no idea why I practice. The official Buddhist position is that you practice for the sake of Enlightenment, or for the benefit of all beings. Fair enough. And it is certainly fashionable now to set out clear ‘key performance indicators’ before you take something up. People want things to be measurable. It’s all part of the neoliberal commodification of everything. But even the Buddha’s sense of what he was trying to do was open-ended. He saw a spiritual wanderer, and he knew that this was for him too. But beyond that, he did not know, when he started, quite where he was going. The whole point of liberation is that it is inconceivable in advance.

Desire, wanting…  Sometimes you know exactly what you want – a cheeseburger, say. In Trump’s case, the presidency. But when you get what you want the wanting of course remains; it just moves on to a different object. Intention, and purpose are more integrated aspects of this propelling function of the mind, but they are similarly provisional. They give direction, without any true sense of an ultimate arrival. Often I think one is just feeling one’s way and seeing what comes to hand.

I just read a letter in a magazine for oldies (a magazine called ‘The Oldie’) from an 86 year old who writes, ‘As I get older and older, I find it increasingly difficult not to think that life is absurd. For example, I never asked to be born. I have no personal knowledge of my existence before I was born… I know that in a few years time I will return to the ‘existence’ of which I have no certain knowledge.’ And the letters editor interestingly agrees with him that life is ‘meaningless’, as if this old existentialist position was more or less incontrovertible for the kind of straightforward people who read this magazine. But it seems to me self-contradictory. It seems to me to buy into a vaguely Christian view of the meaning of life whilst at the same time rejecting it. And I think it is interesting to find this airy dismissal of the idea of meaning in life by intelligent members of that particular generation. Their inability to offer successive generations anything at all in that line means that people in our society don’t know where to look for values and meaning. What are we doing here? Islamism at least has an answer.

I am sometimes asked ‘What is the meaning of life?’ as if I were some kind of sage. I reply in different ways depending on who is asking. But I might invite the questioner to look at what is the present meaning in their own life. Everyone has meaning and purpose. It is what gets you out of bed in the morning. What confuses people is that most of us are driven by a lot of quite trivial purposes, and quite a superficial sense of meaning. It may be your football club. Your family. Your work. A love for food… They imagine, mistakenly in my view, that purpose and meaning have to be connected with something profound. I don’t think you can say that life is meaningless, only that you are not impressed by your own personal purpose and sense of meaning.

When you are young that sense of deeper meaning tends to be more exposed. For myself, when I was young I was open to Christianity even while I read Alan Watts on Zen Buddhism (everyone read Watts then). I enjoyed singing in the chapel choir at school. I visited a big Christian centre called Taize in France. And I read a lot of Jung. But I needed a practice, something to do, and Christianity did not seem to offer this. I took up ‘Transcendental Meditation’ when I was 19 or so. It was the thing to do in those days.

In 1975 I travelled overland to India on the ‘magic bus’. Again, it was standard practice for hippies of the time. Nothing very original. I had no conscious idea what my purpose was. I met a young Northern Irishman, Billy Calvert, in the ‘Pudding Shop’ in Istanbul and we travelled together through Turkey, Iran (this was before the revolution) and Afghanistan (both Iran and Afghanistan were quite liberal countries at that time – so blimey, you simply don’t know what’s around the corner). We spent a few weeks in the Flower Hotel in Kabul (run by a gay couple, one American, one Afghani) before going on through Pakistan and arriving in Delhi. We visited Dharamsala and Mcleod Ganj, which is where the Tibetans in India had made their home with the Dalai Lama.

Then we went on to Rishikesh and settled down in an ashram there. Billy and I shared a hut overlooking the Ganges. On the other side of the river was the ashram of the Maharishi, the inventor of Transcendental Meditation, and the teacher of the Beatles back in the day. It was all quite idyllic; the Ganges then was clean enough to swim in. And the ashram cost a few rupees a month. Billy left after a few months. I stayed on for about 10 months. We were taught hatha yoga, pranayama, and kundalini meditation, and the philosophy of Samkhya yoga. I think the hatha yoga was probably the most important thing for me at that time. Up till quite recently I have practiced quite regularly the hatha yoga I was taught there. Once a week I would go next door to the Sivananda ashram to listen to a swami called I think Chidananda lecture on the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad (an ancient Brahminical wisdom text). I would also go over there after meditation to listen to a swami playing the sitar. We were given lunch and dinner every day, dal and chapattis, plus a little bit of vegetable (unfortunately one of the ‘retreatants’, a doctor, eventually spotted that the cook had leprosy – though clearly not a contagious form of the disease - and the cook was replaced, which was sad, as he was a decent sort). Anyway, the point I want to make is that I was open to a lot of profound meaning during this time, yet somehow there was no deeper engagement with it from me.

After this long retreat I went on to do a ten-day Vipassana retreat with a Burmese gentleman called Mr Goenka in central India. This would have been in 1976/7. So this was my first introduction to mindfulness. And of course I could not know in advance that those ten days would hold more meaning for me than the ten months I had spent in Rishikesh.

The practice introduced to me was one of becoming aware of the nature of your fundamental experience: in particular, sensation, that it is impermanent - or as Mr Goenka used to say, ‘anicca’ (pronounced ‘anicha’). This was not the only aim of the practice from his point of view though. It was also about developing equanimity, or ‘upekkha’. That is, coming across feeling in the body, and not reacting to the pleasant with craving, or the painful with aversion.

So there were basically two prongs to the attack on delusion. One cognitive, ‘anicca’, the other emotional, ‘upekkha’. However, one can also look at these two prongs as poles. The object of attention you could say is anicca. Anicca is all about the nature of your experience, the objective pole of your experience. Upekkha or equanimity represents the subjective pole of your attention, i.e. the kind of attention you bring to the object. It is about the quality of your attention to, or awareness of, your experience. And gradually these two poles come together in what is called ‘direct experience’. That vague sense we have of alienation, of looking out from ourselves at things and people ‘out there’, that sense of being fundamentally separated from the world around us, is thereby gradually softened. The sense of oneself as a separate entity is softly challenged.

The main practice I was given involved paying attention to one’s internal experience of sensation and feeling, moving sequentially through the body from one bit of the body to another. The practice is known within the modern mindfulness industry as the ‘bodyscan’. When I began the practice I found it a struggle. And then eventually something shifted, and it was as if some internal faculty just switched on. So what is going on here?

I think when we give our attention to sensation we are cultivating an experiencing of things over our predominant way of taking things in, which is to perceive or register things – and even people - as objects. This is not always easy. It is much easier to register things as objects. Your upper lip for example. You touch it, you look at it in the mirror; there it is. A thing, an object. But then there is the sense experience of the upper lip. This is something completely different. It does not have a shape. It has no clear definition. And it is not a thing at all. It is me – or a bit of me, and like every bit of me an extremely important bit of me. I would miss it dreadfully if it wasn’t there. But you can’t really grasp it, pin it down.

So when you apply attention to something you can’t pin down, the mind that grasps and separates starts to struggle. To begin with, instead of finding the sensation of the upper lip, say, we may get only perhaps an image of it; but eventually, as we persist with the practice, those objects, lips and ears and toes etc, become experience, or experiencing. It is like a different quality of attention is brought into play. It changes your experience of yourself.

As for upekkha or equanimity, it does not look emotional. But upekkha is a key aspect of metta, kindness; in fact it is the heart of kindness. Kindness is, in a sense, about not being too identified with what you want, whether for yourself or others. It’s about being cool with what happens. It means you can give people space. The development of equanimity was really for me the most difficult aspect of the practice. You had to sit still more or less all day. It was quite painful, even for someone like me who had already done quite a lot of sitting meditation. But if you persist, there comes a point where you stop struggling with the discomfort, and again there is a sort of deep shift in your whole experience of yourself. You discover that most of your suffering is mind-made.

At some point after this retreat, I made my way slowly back to England. I did not realize though that the political landscape had changed. I was taken off the train at Quetta in Pakistan and searched for drugs. I happened to have a large lump of hashish that Billy had left with me when he flew home (though I hadn’t actually smoked the stuff after Afghanistan), and by some miracle, though it was sitting there in the top pocket of my rucksack, the policeman did not look there (needless to say, I chucked it down the toilet as soon as I got back on the train). From that moment I considered myself a lucky man. And it is a perspective that persists to this day, even with my terminal cancer. I think it is just a helpful attitude to bring to things.

Back in London I got an undemanding job (in an antiquarian book shop) and at some point I had the good fortune to be mugged as I walked home late one Friday night with my wages in my pocket (I told you I was a lucky man). This would have been 1977/78. Well, I was punched in the face but I broke away from the gang and ran off as fast as I could, so I got away with just a broken nose. I say good fortune, because after that I started going to a local judo club. I had always been interested in judo, even at school: a French teacher took some classes for a couple of terms. But it took that moment of violence in the street to push me into starting again. And at this club I met Nicolas Soames. (He said later that he had never seen anyone on the judo mat as unco-ordinated as I was.) And then eventually he dragged me along to the London Buddhist Centre in Bethnal Green, ‘the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order’ in east London.

I was quite happy with the practices I had learnt from Mr Goenka, but what I found in the Triratna tradition (the FWBO as it was known then) were three things. First, community; and an emphasis on communication; second, an outward-going concern for the welfare of others; specifically, a charity they ran to support the ex-Untouchable community in India (I had seen a lot of poverty in India). This charity was an early example of what later became known as ‘engaged Buddhism’ (and it is still operating under the name Karuna). Third, it was all rather English and sort of normal - though this ‘normal English’ Buddhism was the result of a radical interpretation of the Dharma for the modern world by Triratna’s founder, Sangharakshita. But all in all I felt I could be myself. So I had found purpose and meaning to a degree, but I had done so without being driven by any real sense of purpose or even any very conscious search for meaning.

Coming back to the present, Claudia pestered the oncologist to get a head and neck scan done, and yes, I now have a tumour at the base of the brain, where there are a lot of nerves to the head, including those round my right eye, which have been damaged by the metastasis there, giving me my double vision (I get around this by blocking off the right eye), plus some intermittent sort of nerve pain. In a week I will get a petscan and a week or so after that they’ll decide whether the hormone therapy is really working, or whether to go straight onto chemo.

So now I have quite a lot of discomfort, and sometimes pain around my right eye, as well as the pain and rawness and dryness in my mouth. Food is still a grim business. I look at something nice, and automatically think, ‘That looks delicious.’ I cook it (well, you know, stick it under the grill or whatever) and think again, ‘That smells good.’ But even as that thought arises I’m thinking, ‘You deluded fool. When that food hits your mouth you’ll get enough of a taste to know what it is, but not enough to stimulate appetite. You’re not going to want it after a couple of mouthfuls.’ So I quite understand people looking at me tucking into something and saying, ‘You seem to be enjoying that.’ But I never am. And now, never mind the cancer starting up in my bones, liver and lungs, it’s going to do more horrible things to my head.

But then, I have meditation to make this all ok, isn’t that right? Mindfulness - I’ve been practicing it long enough. So how am I doing - what’s the score? Well, it is difficult for me to say. The fact is that my practice has changed my whole way of experiencing myself. This is not to make some great claim for my practice - as a meditator I’m not a naturally gifted practitioner – but if you meditate for years, if you work on the mind long enough, then the way your mind takes in your experience will inevitably be more skilled, more responsive, than it would have been otherwise. It’s like anything – if you play football regularly, your feet know instinctively how to control a ball better than if you had never played at all. You may still be relatively speaking a clumsy footballer, compared with others, but the years of practice will have an effect, a profound effect. My experience of myself is certainly painful, but generally speaking I guess my mind does not get into a state about it. At least (I want to be honest here) it may get into a state occasionally, but such a reaction is experienced as an event, or series of events within the mind. I don’t identify with them – at least not for long. So the practice changes the way the mind works, and in doing so, changes one’s relationship with one’s experience.

The mind ceases to grasp after its objects, at least for a bit. And you are giving up a fixed viewpoint. To return to the meditation practice, you may start it with a sense of yourself as having a fixed position, in the head, say, but eventually you find that you are just as much in your right toe. Now this is just sensation. It’s when this process extends to the other senses, hearing and even sight, that it becomes quite interesting. Maybe we are not actually confined to our bodies. Maybe our experience of ourselves can extend wherever our senses bring us our experience. The point is that paying attention to sensation has this quite radical effect on the quality of our attention – it forces the mind to open up, to become receptive. It does this partly because it frustrates the controlling, objectifying aspect of the mind, which simply can’t get a foothold on things in this world of sensation. There is, in a sense, nothing there.

As for equanimity - how’s that going? Well, in my own present case, not always that great. What happens is that I start to close down around my new affliction. I turn in on myself. It is not part of who I am. I am no longer able to relate to the world from an experience of myself that I can accept. I’ve come to accept, more or less, that who I am now includes incurable cancer and the horrible side effects of my treatment. But it takes me time to accept any new development of my condition as part of the furniture of my experience of myself, and to live with it, and turn out to the world again from it. So it is an education in impermanence, especially of the self. Each new lurch into some fresh horror reintroduces me to who I am.