On the search for the mystical and Retirement

On the search for the mystical and Retirement
Whilst retirement from work, giving up my woodcraft practice, in pursuit of the mystical may sound romantic, heroic and Christlike even, it was a retirement thrust upon me by my deteriorating mental health. I could no longer work due to the fractured condition of my mind. Having experienced the mystical, however, my life was changed completely. Everything I thought I knew may be wrong. Through research it became clear that mystical experiences were rare. Some spend their lives in religious piety and abstinence and never experience one. Others who never look can suddenly find themselves experiencing transcendence. Describing it is like describing falling in love. Beyond words. There is no way to prove it exists but once you have experienced it you know it is true. Being in love was the highest human emotion I had experienced in my life. The mystical changed that. It is the highest state a human can experience as far as I have found and it is as real and unquestionable as love. To have such an experience and dismiss it, to carry on would have been the greatest insult to life and all I hold sacred. I believe there is a biology of the mystical just as there is a biology of love, but I don't think the scientific search for a neural correlate could add anything other than confirm it to be an emotion of organic nature. To say it relates to activity in H2a receptor sites or that cortisone is present in the brain when we feel love adds nothing to our understanding of the experience. Music, art, poetry may offer a better language to try describe our feelings. But having seen the light, and only religious sounding phrases suffice, I could not continue a life pretending it had not happened. The virtue of poverty Jesus Christ espoused I see more as recognition of the insignificance of material wealth. All materialist values from design to houses, cars and technology became rubbish to me. They provide consolation for spiritually empty lives. Litter of life. Distractions. People who know me and readers who have followed my writings dismissing the supernatural may think I have lost my marbles, abandoned all I held true. But this is far from the case. The mystical experience is as real as any other and I still have little respect for organised religion that follows old books written about someone else's mystical experiences, invariably misunderstood as supernatural. What is lacking from the atheist philosophers and thinkers is an accommodation for the spiritual aspect of all our lives. Denying their is a spiritual dimension to ones life is like never having fallen in love, or certainly denying you have. I suppose perhaps some never do fall in love. Just as some never experience the full mystical. But we all experience the lower levels of the mystical experience be it whilst fishing, playing music or walking through the countryside. The state is beyond words but I can try convey some of my findings. Invariably one slips into words of immense baggage; religious, spiritual, seeing the light, mystical, soulful, all sound like observations from without but they are hard to avoid, the words describing someone else lost in dance. Being lost in dance, the abandonment of all self consciousness to music has to be experienced from within. My commitment is whole and not a little scary.
But such self pity is fleeting. No pain, no gain. Poverty has to hurt to provide spiritual cleansing. You can not really experience hunger in theory. The often heard mantra that class differences are like the support of football teams. Aren't we all the same and shouldn't we try understand and love each other? This may be true if you are talking of class as accent and manners. I agree whole heartedly. What I am against is the disparity of wealth. Until you have been homeless and without money you have no clue how it feels. Suggestions that the son of a Lord inheriting some dilapidated country estate, struggling to find funds for it's maintenance is in any way comparable to sleeping rough and looking through bins for food is laughable. The difference is choice. You can choose to sell the estate. It is the fear of loss of social standing, family shame, it is nothing to do with poverty. In the current climate of class war the conservatives have instigated, poverty and minimal use of resources are seen as bad. The mentally ill are held accountable for their suffering. Labour, for all their wrongs seem to apparently be at least offering a fairer alternative once more. Cameron's conservatism being indistinguishable from Brown and Blairs new labour. Whether Corbin politics is electable is yet to be seen but the fear expressed by the conservatives and centre left new labourists appears to reveal a genuine fear it is. At the very least it is healthy to see a conviction politician with ideas for radical change, just as Margaret Thatcher did, despite her unappealing sneering manner, instead of the recent years battle for the centre ground and homogenises of the two main parties. Both Thatcher and Blair advanced an end to the class system alongside sociologists of the day but the huge disparity of wealth seen between the richest and poorest that resulted from both their governments has left as deep a class divide as there has ever been. Opportunities to escape humble roots are now fewer than at any time since the wars. Suggesting we are all in it together as the Etonian cabinet millionaires do is insulting to those on the breadline. One wonders what brand of Christianity can accommodate personal greed and the blaming of the weak for their suffering. These fat politicians can no more enter heaven than a rolls Royce can drive through the eye of a needle. Each fiver spent on unnecessary luxuries is the murder of a child. Never has Christs political teaching been more needed.
Love is the closest thing to mysticism and it is through love that we can gain a foothold on its understanding. To feel part of the group consciousness that the mystical usually entails, we must love each other as equals. To strive for personal betterment, to search out wealth is clearly oppositional to the love of mankind and what is more life in all its many forms. Greed, whether excused by providing for ones children or amassing money to carry out charitable acts is wrong. Your children are no more important than any others. The fight for school places is transferred greed, a belief in the greater importance of your genes. Those who seek power least deserve it, those who seek betterment for their children least deserve it. It is this separation off away from the tribe into nuclear families fighting for their selfish genes that has caused the planets near destruction. Bill Gates may spend his time allotting his charitable donations where he sees fit but this is playing God. To believe he has the right to choose who lives and dies.
The mystical frees one from the status anxiety and professional competitiveness that blighted some of my days before retirement. I was never as bad as many but I now find it quite comical the yearning for professional respect. The hunger for attention of being in exhibitions, magazines, treasured collections, is pure vanity. I grew to despise the moral vacuity of fine furniture making. I enjoyed the zen state, being in flow, in the zone as a kind of meditative state and it was this mystical aspect of making that attracted me to furniture making. I found this most in college. Once projected in to the competitive market place it began to disgust me. The furniture now in vogue has homogenised to such a degree one can not tell a maker from another. The London design scene sees an arts and crafts simplicity of style. So in search of approval and inward looking to the design community are the makers it is as if they have all been given a mathematical question to solve and all come up with the same answer. The arrogant zaniness of the 70s 80s and early 90s has given way to a self consciousness and hunger for acceptance into the elite zeitgeist that the designers involved have abandoned themselves in pursuit of approval. Embarrassing. I see I could have chosen to make furniture as a hobby and in many ways I admire the hobbyist amateur over the careerist maker. The problem there is you can never be very good unless you do it all the time. Having said that many of the designers currently at the forefront are clearly teachers. Their websites show a handful of pieces they have made for competitions and awards between their main teaching jobs and hope that if enough faith and photography is invested, if these few works are shown to the right people, that it will make the work great. It rarely does. I struggle to understand show off makers these days.
Besides, along with finding that head state of being in flow, my main interest was art. At college I was able to make art though I never found sufficiently big a market. Probably due to my work being confused as furniture. Once I left college I made furniture for a living and seldom had time to make art. I was prolific in this and looking at the handful of pieces the part time teachers make it is understandable much of the work was over considered on their part, overly spontaneous on mine. Eventually, finding I had drifted from my aim to make art into making furniture through financial need, the whole idea became pointless. My final pieces were very expensive. The status symbols for a class system I despised. I could no longer continue with any integrity.
We are not here for long. To work until death in a job only done to finance ones holidays and weekends is to waste ones life. As I hit fifty I realised I couldn't risk waiting. I may be dead in twenty years, or too broken to explore this wonderful planet we find ourselves on. Jesus realised this at 33 I believe. Not to suggest I have any magical abilities or believe in life after death as he did. Just that we both gave up our woodwork businesses to follow a more spiritual path. I have great respect for the teachings of Jesus but believe he was just a man. I'm pretty sure he knew this too. And I agree with him on not wasting your life working. The mystical or spiritual renders the material unimportant. Poverty and the minimal consumption of resources is the right path as over consumption destroys this beautiful planet. I'm sure once we've destroyed ourselves and a whole bunch of other species in the process a new era will emerge. I don't think we will rule the earth half as long as the dinosaurs managed. And I share Christs shame in humanity. It is sad that like Socrates he never wrote his own story. I doubt it would have resembled the gospels of those who were trying to use his political and spiritual uprising and poverty cult to build a religion by adding in miracles. Life itself is as miraculous as anything I know. We shouldn't waste it.


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