Mind and mystery
Ian Flintoff reflects on meditation, meeting and the enduring nature of mystery
Stephen Petter is concerned for the flight from Quakers’ origins in Christianity (14 January) and the shunning, by some, of the terms and concepts that this implies: ‘god’, the Bible, and Jesus Christ.
He is right to be anxious: transform the basis for meeting of any group and this must surely change, in essence and purpose, the value of the bonding for all who gather.
I think few would regard our Meetings as sessions for purely personal meditation.
The word ‘meeting’ is the key: we meet, we are together, and for me the Other (and the others) are more important than the Me or the Self. This links, inevitably, I think, to some of the distinctive characteristics of Christianity. No other belief says with quite the same firmness: This is my commandment, that you love one another; and also, love your enemies. In my thirty years of attendance before membership, these were among the challenging obstacles, and the foundation stones, which finally led me to join.
The conduct of so many Friends, past and present, is testimony to the practical reality and determination of these injunctions. Take them away and, with time, we could become a pleasant club for contemplative mystics, finding peace of mind for themselves but no longer walking cheerfully over the world or living more purposefully in it: so the meaning of ‘god’, which Noël Staples (14 January) so sincerely probes, is bound to arise.
Noël asks about ‘mind’. It is an arresting thought that our forebears, long even before the Stone Age, were invested with minds that had the potential for astrophysics, molecular biology, the sonnets of Shakespeare, landing on the moon, calculus, the elimination of smallpox, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the symphonies of Beethoven, and the huge commitments of self-sacrifice to the interests of others that our subsequent story, at best, has proved to be within our minded character.
Also, should it not astonish us that however wide and deep we may probe matter, the world, and the universe, our minds always seem to be up to the task of absorbing new knowledge and unprecedented understanding? It is as if, within us, there is a mirror that can reflect all that our brains and others’ can take the time and effort to unravel.
Isaac Newton believed he was understanding the mind of God, and Einstein argued that the same God did not play at dice. We also fathom the firm and immutable laws and constants which hold everything together or make sense of it: Planck’s constant, pi and the natural number e.
Hamlet speaks of ‘that capability and god-like reason’ that we have inside us. Quakers have a phrase for that of God. Rousseau proclaimed ‘la voix intérieure’, surely the still small voice.
Noël asks what a mind is. This has no easy answer, but human beings have some sort of internalised capacity and self-awareness that transcends all likelihoods of mere accident or randomness in its begetting. You can throw the dice an infinite number of times but you will never get fourteen.
Even those who argue against intelligent design would have to concede that only our own intelligence, and human motivation (often religious), can comprehend the nuances of the universe or, if they’ll forgive the phrase, of creation. We are surely entitled to call this mystery whatever makes the best of sense.
