ARTICLE - Malcolm Guite - Talking About The Imagination

Malcolm Guite is a poet, singer song writer, Anglican priest and academic. He is also one of humanity's natural enthusiasts, and even if you're unable to fully align with his religious perspective, you can find yourself being swept up in the sheer verve and lively momentum of his conversation. He has an unusual and engaging presence. Plus a phenomenal memory for poetry to boot.

In a hour long conversation available online (a link to which is at the bottom of this transcript)  he recounts the influence of his Mother reciting poetry at the drop of what, his own appreciation for Tolkien, C.S.Lewis, folk tales, and of his new ballad rendering of the Arthurian legend. He also talks beautifully, with great clarity about what the imaginations role in human creativity is. Here are a few salient extracts from that conversation on this subject matter, which I have judiciously edited where I felt necessary for improved comprehension.

"The world itself is a language."

"We have been so busy weighing and measuring (things) for the last three hundred years, we've forgotten what they mean."

" You could say your whole life could be seen as a slowly evolving poem.... You are God's poem."

"We live in a world where all kinds of analogies, parables, symbols and metaphors are naturally and richly available to us. But there is a reason why that rational analytical mind doesn't get how to do that, it can't make that leap. That is the imaginations business. The imagination is precisely to see the thing out there, and recognise that the visible thing out there, is more than itself. That it provides you with an image through which to think about what is in here ( in us)."

"The imagination is the faculty by which we apprehend meaning, not just information."

"How do we get from apprehension to comprehension, of things that are true, but not divisible or a weighable part of the material realm? We have been used to seeing the imagination as something that just makes stuff up. It's some airy fairy little whimsy of our own, that has no purchase on reality, as it really is.

And it is true we can make up things that have no purchase on reality. But it's also equally true that when we tell stories, when we paint pictures, when we write poems, we can create a verbal or visible form which embodies, which bodies forth things we need to know, and might not be able to know in any other way.

In fact, the idea that the poetic imagination enables a certain kind of knowledge, that it is a truth bearing faculty is clear when Shakespeare says 'imagination bodies forth things unknown.' They are there, they are real, but they are unknown to us, and we only faintly apprehend them."

"Essentially, when we read a great poem or look at a great painting, its as though things half known or reached after or faintly apprehended have suddenly come and made a home in this place. You walk through the door of the poem into the local habitation of the poem, and you meet them."

Malcolm Guite - Discovering Joy With The Imagination

ARTICLE - Flag Shagging For England

 

In recent years in the UK, there have been demonstrations by far right activists, swaddling themselves in St George flags, carrying them like medieval knights on horseback, hundreds of flags suddenly bedecking road lamp posts across the countries boulevards and roundabouts. The flag of St George have always been prominent at times of national and international football and rugby competitions. This recent development seems to further extend its use, in a defiant reclaiming of the flag of England as the representative emblem of not just national, but racial pride. This comes wrapped in unsettling ideas of brutish white supremacy and the inevitable intolerant stirring of the pot of racist anti- immigrant sentiment. Often further dressed up in pseudo Christian virtues, as though the St George flag is the first bastion of a new moral crusade.

As ever, the English have lampooned the thing they hate and that concerns them the most. Coming up with a barbed term to describe the sort of person who attended these rallies. It is still being grammatically determined -  To Flag Shagg = the act - Flag-Shagger = the person who commits the act - Flagshagging - the collective act. So 'flag-shagging' has been conceived from the very start as a derogatory one. There is a good deal of liberal middle class social prejudice behind all of this. A view of the far right being largely the purview of poorly educated working class football hooligans, bouncers, boxers and brickies, who live off benefits and have far too much time on their hands. It's the old working class as dangerous destructive demons, forever putting their over burdened backs to the service of fascism.

Most of the demonstrators, and the areas where flags were being shagged, it has to be said, have appeared to be working class ones. There has been a consistent vein in English politics, Moseley in the 1930's, then the National Front in the 1970's & 80"s and a further resurgence after Brexit, of far right politics speaking to the experience of the white working class when they are no longer just about managing, but feeling abandoned, completely left behind economically and ignored by political leaders. The ruling elites leave a wide open space vacant for the far right to move into, channeling disruptive anger and frustration into protest. Flag shagging, like fascism, is not at all new.  You could almost predict that something like this will happen, given the near collapse of neo-liberal democracy.

As adventurers ( invariably male) set out on journeys of conquest and consequence, when they reached their goal, climbed that mountain, conquered that castle, landed upon the moon, founded a new settlement, these acts of heroism were often topped with a flag being planted. And that flag has meant a great deal, we claim this, we've been here, this is ours now, now it belongs to us we shall be proud to live here. And as the flag is raised some may salute it, respect it, love it, have pride in it, as though this were etched upon the very shadow of their soul. The British Empire was the nexus for flag shaggers, past and present. There has been a long and venerable history, of flag shagging for England.

That our modern day flag shaggers say that the flag of St George, and flags in general, need salvaging from the twin curses of modern day cynicism and historical revisionism over English atrocities committed during Empire. This holds a very tiny grain of truth. Though in the end flags are just flags, they fly high, they fly low, they flag things up. We all need to feel confidence in our country. For some flags come dressed in that confidence, which others feel to be faux and misguided. 

If flags are to be the object of pride, then the country does have to prove worthy of it. Flagshagging cannot save us from our disappointments, frustrations and the loss of confidence in the history and institutions of our country. Those institutions need to be run by better people, we need to be better as a people. It is perhaps no coincidence that in this moment when our national morale is low, our national morals are low too. When the more scurrilous and opportunistic of politicians offer us solutions to this decline of our country, those solutions are inherently immoral ones. Our moral compass is regularly being fucked over for political advantage.

When morals are confused, damaged, or at a low ebb, pride tends to be too. There is a general race to the lowest commonality. Clinging to a flag does little to change the sense of a loss of moral clarity. Morals, pride and respect, as a triumvirate, interact, they all have to be earned, not assumed. The object of them has to be worthy of having them placed upon their shoulders. You cannot place pride on a wobbly pedestal nor fly a flag up a broken pole. That little today feels worthy of respect or pride, is undoubtedly one root of our problem. Raising the flag of St George can seem like an act of hapless optimism, however morally dubious the reason for it maybe when examined in detail. It's like hiding a deep purple bruise under a small transparent sticking plaster. I understand the feeling, even if I do not agree with the analysis of what's gone wrong in our country. Irrespective of our racial origin, ethnicity and immigration status, in the UK we all live in semi isolated ghettos of our own making, self alienating and selfishly individualistic, focused upon our own particular sense of identity.  Other people, other citizens of England, who hold other beliefs, express other viewpoints, differing from our own, they have all become 'foreigners' to us. And this is our self evident tragedy.

So, it is not just the flag shaggers who feel the sense of a loss of unity and pride. We all feel it. We all hold our pet theories about how and why this has come about, in our country and in our culture. We all spout our favourite scapegoats and hobby horses. Whilst there is common cause in its general theme - that there is an urgent need to renew the country as a whole,morally, economically, culturally and spiritually. Some look to a much mythologised past era for their inspiration, a time when things were rosier, apparently simpler and the country seemed to them to feel more united and cohesive. Others just wish we'd move on from such mythical nonexistent pasts and get on with forging a new reinvigorated sense of purpose and vision. This is part of what has gone wrong, that we disagree about these things in so polarised a manner, so we never get to work out how things might be collectively changed for the better benefit of everyone. 

Now, I'll admit I am not a natural 'flag shagger', if anything I am by instinct, wary and suspicious of such things, and have not felt hugely patriotic for literally countless decades, and yes, I could easily be catagorised as 'woke'. But both of these derogatory terms 'flag shagging' and 'woke' do not help any one. They don't actually explain or mean anything useful to know. They simply designate a response that closes a discussion down, it says - I'm not going to listen to you. Whilst we are all individually still seeking something or someone who will be a moral exemplar, give us firm leadership, in the midst of this sea of turmoil and animosity. Though that podium, as yet, remains empty.

Our knee jerk reactions reveal our need for moral clarity. When we encounter a moral failing or dodgy belief or action in anyone, we have become instantly heartless and puritanical, they are dead meat, persona non grata, banished from the kingdom, exiled to the online naughty chair. We are constantly trying to draw firm moral lines, but these are so prejudicial, so harmfully or hatefully judgemental, they seriously lack wisdom, the ability to tolerate or have compassionate understanding.  Though there are people, whether 'flag shaggers' or 'woke', who do hold hateful unconscionable views. England will be trashed if we cannot locate a way to transcend, or at least learn to live productively with differing viewpoints, and find common cause beyond the contentious nature of polarised positions.

We undoubtedly have a surfeit of nihilistic prophets of doom. And maybe the Flag Shaggers will always be with us, because they do come as an advance warning.

Where are the enlightened visionaries today, to bring us the hope we most need?

ARTICLE - Veils of Suffering

As human beings we suffer. We all believe we understand what that means, the excruciating angst of being slowly broken by some physical, mental or spiritual pain. Because of this, finding a reason to extirpate suffering, a way to relieve or spiritually go beyond suffering, form foundational base motifs of most world religions. It is one reason why atheism will always find itself existentially falling short, because it cannot offer anything more than pills and sympathy to alleviate human suffering. 

The fundamental issue asks why we suffer in the first place? And the many answers that have been offered have been endlessly debated and quarrelled over - it's due to godly intent or punishment, the result of past sin or karma, as an existential teaching, or simply the inescapable nature of how reality is. To name but a few.  Most of these do not make a precise fit as an explanation. Nor exactly make you warm towards the idea of any deity who would play such games with their own creation. And yet, humanity continues to reach out to a wide panoply of gods, saviours or spiritual gurus, who profess to be able to teach us how to transcend this suffering world. 

In times past, when a woman suffered a bereavement, she took to wearing widows weaves. It was a signifying outward expression, that everyone else recognised. She had suffered the loss of a loved one. Dressed all in black, her face shrouded in a dark lacy veil, to conceal the widows face from public view. It hid her suffering, so no one need see the pain, the tears, the person wracked with grief. Society could, nonetheless, acknowledge and mourn her loss. And the bereaved woman didn't have to risk the embarrassment of having her grief erupt and be exposed to public consternation. This prohibition to hide sorrow behind a veil, was placed on the widow alone. Men wore black, or black arm bands, their faces could still be seen. The perceived potency and unpredictable nature of female emotion, was considered far too unsettling and perturbing. Attitudes in the wider society, at that time, did not wish to see nor hear of any of that, thank you.

Veils continue to be used to this day in some societies to completely conceal a woman's face. To demonstrate modesty or lack of vanity, or to beguile, or that the woman is the possesion of their husband, and therefore not available for male fantasies or sinful desire. A bride can wear a veil before her wedding, as a virtuous metaphor for the mythic virginal chastity supposedly about to be revealed to her betrothed. People in the medieval period, who suffered from a disfiguring disease like leprosy or syphilis, could conceal themselves behind veils, so no one has to see the extent their bodily flesh was rotting or being eaten away.  Veils do that, they possess a self evident utility. Veils shield and protect. Veils mark in symbolic dress a human state of transition. Lives are transfigured behind the mysterious curtain of them.

There is a sense then that suffering is a response laid over the human pain, in a blanket of turbulent disruptive feeling. In ancient societies, and in some cultures existing today, it is not uncommon for wakes and funerals to be accompanied by an extravagant amount of wailing, crying and heavenly beseeching. You can see them vividly portrayed on ancient Egyptian wall murals. This public eruption of sorrow and grief, was frequently carried out by 'professional mourners' on behalf of the bereaved families. Private grief was kept behind the walls of their house, whilst the outward expression of suffering and the public process of grieving was in this case, a performative one. It was put on for show, often expressive of a certain degree of status.

All of which causes me to raise a slightly troublesome question - is suffering then entirely or at least in part a performative human behaviour.? Can we fully feel the pain of sickness and loss, allow ourselves to grieve, without the effusive eruption of suffering?  I know this may seem a tad absurd, if not insensitive.  And I emphasise at this point, that I'm not saying outpourings of suffering are faked or not genuinely felt. And yet, I can recognise in myself, that I do actively work myself up into crying. I hunt down the tenderest point of the suffering and exploit the moment, where I can become gushingly inconsolable about an issue. It's a bit like vigorously shaking a bottle of fizzy water, and then finding a way of letting it all burst out. It all feels better out than kept contained within.

Often when we are bereft, we feel at a loss what to do with the pain we experience, and might wish to find a way to diminish it, or a least find a consolation. The suffering desire only grows worse because you feel alone with it, because indeed you are always alone with your pain, upset or grief.  And there is an element to this suffering, I recognise, that could be viewed as artfully contrived, however functional it maybe. Simply so the build up of pain you don't know what to do with, that has nowhere else to go, to allow all that to be vented or expelled. It's how we as humans attempt to manage and cope with our internally turbulent emotions. We feel this compelling urge to expell this deep well of pain. We search for consolation in ones faith, or in familiar friendly company or a listening ear. I don't wish to trivialise the expression of suffering, but to view this as a veil we habitually assume the wearing of. It is not the fundamental pain, suffering is our distraught response to something that has occurred, which we have had little or no control over. Suffering is a bit like coughing up the pain filled residue of phlegm. 

What we chose to do, or not do, in the expression of our suffering, this changes our relationship with the original pain that lies beneath it.  That pain inevitably becomes self mythologised . We make it our individual unique pain, that we alone can understand the qualities and depth of.  And it is true, that no one else can really know what our pain feels like. Empathy requires exercising our emotional imagination, and supposes what that pain must feel like. The pain is certainly real enough for the bearer of it, even though most pain is not visible to the naked eye. Though other people can become disbelievingly sniffy about the existence or otherwise of some forms of psychological distress or chronic physical fatigue. Yet there are aspects in how we choose to express our suffering, that could be seen as unhelpfully dwelling upon it, and perhaps indulging in the unique specifications of our personalised pain. 

If I were to describe suffering as an emotional intoxication between our sense of our self and our bodily pain, this puts it extremely coldly. Perhaps to the point of being unhelpfully blunt. Because it's all very well for me to pontificate in the theoretical abstract about what the true nature of suffering is, when this poor suffering soul that is confined to bed. just wants you to listen, to care, to comfort, to have some empathy for them. Suffering has in most religious traditions been met with compassion not categorisation. No one wants to be prejudicially judged simply for being in pain, and hence suffering. As Dogen once said, you should never get too carried away by either the abstract or the practical. To attempt to keep our responses grounded and real, without losing empathy or perspective completely in the process.

There is not a faith in the world that does not have something to recommend to us by way of the transcending or at least the relief of suffering. Sometimes the relationship between our suffering and some idea of original sin, is an inescapable trap we fall into. The redemptive nature of Jesus's suffering on the cross, works for me purely on the level of metaphor, but I cannot get my head around how it realistically operates salvifically for everyone who believes in him. In Buddhism it's about going beyond suffering, a truly hard thing to concieve, let alone achieve. Suffering is couched in terms of a human response to an experience we do not want or desire. And in its characteristically plain manner of expression, points out if we desist in desiring for it to be otherwise, the suffering will gently part company from the painful experience. It can all sound like we are following the intricate instructions of a car maintenance manual. That with a bit of minor tweaking you can reach the destination of a world without suffering. Ah, if only that were so.

When Jesus said ' suffer the little children to come unto me' he was asking his disciples to endure or indulge these children's exuberant natures. To 'bear with' any discomfort or irritation arising from being around the chaotic ebullience of youth. So there is a way of couching human pain and discomfort as something you 'bear with', you endure it, you inhale your grief deeply, but resist being completely carried away by the surging paroxysms of it. To attempt to suffer the pain behind a veil of calmly contained silence. Its more usual, however,for the line between the pain and the suffering that arose from it, to become so blurred, that the two experiences burn together to the point of becoming indistinguishably, one all consuming flame that torches everything. Life can often become about the ' bearing with' the ' bearing with'.

Both Jesus and the Buddha, left this mortal coil, with what would have been for us ordinary folk, an excruciatingly painful demise. Jesus by being hung nailed like a piece of crudely processed meat to a high wooden cross, and the Buddha, reputedly by a culinary mishap, of being poisoned by some badly cooked mushrooms. In both cases, we must assume, they endured the painful experience, quietly resigned to their fate. These highlight the raw experiential quality of suffering as a veil that we find ourselves wearing. A more sage like perspective might allow us to put that to one side. However insubstantial it may be when viewed in absolute ultimate terms, however overshadowed it can sometimes be with sentiment and enforced pathos, suffering is still extraordinarily real to us, and resolutely human. If it teaches us to be compassionate and not indifferent, that's a step forward.

 

WORDS WRITTEN AT THE POINT OF GRATITUDE - Reflections on 2025

• I am grateful to still be alive. Last years HA! made a slow, but perceptible, shift in my views on life and what its for. As 2025 has progressed, I've felt encouraged to make the most of life, certainly, but that doesn't mean becoming excessively busy, I've found a particular peace in allowing the quality of what I do, and how I choose to execute it, motivate me, rather than a list of achievements, and tasks completed. Yes, I still have my creative projects, but they are not quite the central most important thing I do, they are just one thing I enjoy doing. I've come to realise that we all leave unfinished projects behind when we die, that's how it is. So, no need to hurry.
  
  
• I could have survived the HA! but with my mind and body impaired in some way, making life difficult not just for me. but also for my husband. I feel gratitude every day that I can go out for a walk, breath the air, feel more deeply connected to nature and the world. I still have my awareness, a fully functioning consciousness, that can find pleasure and enjoyment in even the most simple of sensations. That I still have my independence, my ability to reflect on my experience, it's a tremendous gift. For if you're unable to express your appreciation of your life, where can the gratefulness, where can the love come from? 
  
  
• To love and to be loved in return is a precious commodity to be savoured. And I've realised with greater cogency this year that the ability to love, lies at the core of feeling grateful. I lived a good deal of my early adulthood, craving to be loved and not finding it. And this had an ungrateful corroding effect upon my world view, there was an underlying bitterness, a consequent souring in any potential for gratitude. This changed in mid life when I first met my husband. Our life living together now, can feel such an easy going one, it can also be easy to forget that this has taken effort to get to, and still takes effort for love to be expressed and not to take anything for granted. I love my husband more now than I ever have. Such a clever, creative, loving, caring and considerate man, that I'm so grateful to have this one opportunity to share a life with him.
  
  
• I was sipping a breakfast cup of rose tea, a favourite morning drink. For just one fleeting moment I had this rush of pleasure, of feeling so grateful for this drink I was imbibing. The warmth, the aroma, its flavour, the sensation of comfort and reassurance. So often I am eating and drinking on automatic, I'm feeding my hunger, but not really fully present to the sensations and pleasures of it.  Much of what can feel vital in being alive, comes down to these small fine details of life. What I am unaware of, I cannot appreciate, what I fail to appreciate I cannot feel grateful for, and hence cannot value or love.

• In the West we take so much for granted. Recent years have shown just how subject to abrupt change, how vulnerable to the unexpected we all are. And it is in moments like these, when we can see more clearly the things that we treasure, to feel gratitude for what we already have. This is still a favourable time we are currently living within, and I'm grateful for that. If you are gay in this country you have been given more rights now than we've ever had previously, We are all broadly still able to live our life however we wish, without state oppression or harassment or violence.
  
  This zeitgeist is of course subject to change, their are premonitions of that already emerging, the potential for a reversal of our current tolerant progressive approach. Whatever has been given can be taken away. Tolerance, unfortunately, is conditional. Express your gratitude for what you already have, and one way of expressing the depth of that gratitude, our love for it, is by being prepared to defend it. Gratitude is an appreciative proactive love. 
  
  

ARTICLE - Advent For Non-Theists

It may appear strange for a Buddhist, or anyone whose spiritual affiliations are roughly in the camp of non-theism, to be buying advent related stuff. Advent is, after all, traditionally a significant Christian period anticipating the birth of God's son, is it not? It could, however, be reasonably asserted that advent, like the event it leads up to - Christmas - has decade after decade become primarily marketed as a secular consumer activity. Every year more and more really expensive luxurious advent calendars feature not just twenty four days of chocolates, from the merely chocolate flavoured to the high end chocolatier, but now you can have them with various over priced teas, coffees, jams, cosmetics, jewellery etc, you name it, there is seemingly an advent calendar for it. It's commercial range constantly expands.

Each year, during this period when Jesus is said to have been born, a Christian is encouraged to reflect on the meaning of the arrival of Jesus on earth, the significance of waiting, to maintain hope of salvation. Advent encourages you to reflect on three particular things - to revere what happened in the the past  - how the meaning of that event reverberates to the present day -  envisaging a future when Jesus will return in the glory of a second coming. And advent has been a period for such reflection for millenia. Instead of a period of self-indulgence, advent was once a time for the practice of reflection and fasting. So how did we arrive here at an advent season so predicated on Dionysian excess and Bacchus like indulgences?

As a Christian ritual, the season of advent has no specifically Biblical origin. As with many things now considered the epitome of Christmas, including its placing in the aftermath of the Winter Solstice, the rituals of advent have been adapted from paganism. What we now refer to as the Advent Wreath, came originally from a Scandinavian pagan practice utilising multiple candles and a wreath to pray for light and warmth throughout the coming Winter. In 1829 a German Lutheran pastor adapted that tradition, placing twenty four small red candles and four larger white ones on a cartwheel to mark out the approach of Christmas. Using this day by day step method to teach children about the stories and meaning of the nativity. This subsequently was stripped back to four candles lit on the Sundays before Christmas, representing hope, peace, joy and love, and the final central one marking the birth of Jesus, is lit on Christmas Day itself. This idea spread, and German emigres brought the tradition to the United States.

The tradition of the Advent Calendar, with twenty four doors opened up each day before Christmas Day, telling the nativity story, followed a similar 19th century German Lutheran invention, that then crossed the sea to America. Advent calendars became really big business after World War Two, When confectioners started publishing them in conjunction with their sweet selection boxes as part of their Christmas marketing. Today's advent calendars of twenty four doors with sweets behind them, began to emerge in this post war period, as the advent calendar and the confectionary box collection morphed into one entity.

If you are Non-Theist you could skip over the 20th century consumerism, unless you are a dedicated chocolate fiend. Avoid the Christian accretions of the 19th Century. Reach back to advent's origins in a Scandinavian pagan wreath practice with its multiple array of candles. Christianity in Europe very astutely chose the bleakest period of the year in which to place advent, so you would journey with hope towards the illuminating arrival of the son of God. You are simultaneously waiting on and marking the approaching weeks before the Winter Solstice, after which the days slowly begin to grow longer and the arrival of Spring lies at the end of it. There is always something shining brightly beyond advent, somewhere you need to cultivate faith in moving towards.

A state of advent, of sitting silently waiting in expectation, is the essence of the season. Some significant turn around event in our lives and awareness lies at the end of it, this is common to many traditions, whether theist or non-theist. We can all discover something about ourselves in this spiritual Winterreise, where the bleakness of the weather and the barren skeletal landscape, can result in a need for our faith and hope to be enriched. The perspectives and vistas of our life within Winter can feel literally more restricted and cramped. That people suffer from SAD in the Winter, is a clinical description of an extreme state, for what is a general existential human experience. Its a recognised phenomena that there is an increase in older people dying over the Winterval period, as they let go of the idea of seeing in another year of existence. 

We all find Winter difficult to some degree, as no doubt did our ancestors. What helped them, and may help us too, is when we are right in the very nub of it, to partake in a ritual involving candle light, to conjure up hope of future brightness when the Sun will begin to ascend and stay for longer.  An advent wreath marks out points on that cyclical journey. Advent could also be seen as this necessary seasonal retreat, a place where you look inwards. As the sun and moon continue to cycle through their orbits. To reexamine the transits of your own life cycle over the past year - how have you been? how are you now? What hopes have you for the year yet to come? Reflect on the transience of everything, whilst watching an advent candle burn. Be as if stilled by the candle flame itself. Consider this candle as analogous to your own life spirit, with its limited burn time. Consider how fortunate you will be as the nights draw in, if you also live to see them draw out again. Each moment of every day bringing the advent of something that is entirely new.

ARTICLE - Averting One's Face From The Images of Death

Medieval church walls were covered in very graphic paintings. Frequently depicting unsparingly Death and all the various things that might happen to you. Should you not face up to this image of death one day becoming a reality, then literally all Hell would break loose. So, be a good Christian, sort out your life and moral behaviour, be exemplary and The Jaws of Hell will recede and Heavens Gate will open up and God will intercede to save you. A medieval lifespan was thirty years on average. If you made it that far unscathed then there was a good chance you could make it to sixty even seventy, but this was exceptional. Disease, child birth and warfare were the primary causes of early death, happening with great frequency and in close proximity to everyone. Memento Mori simply just rubbed it in even deeper.

Its a world and a mindset that is hard to comprehend  today, because Death, Our Death is barely spoken of. Its almost a taboo subject. And yet, it is still inescapably everywhere, on the news, in wars, in genocides, in hospitals, on our roads and streets. We are all living a wishful thinking life, where death feels like its marginal. Until it isn't. Because death, is not really something we feel we can do much about. Death is outside our control. So why dwell on it at all?

But, then, if this were really so, why do some of us play let's pretend? Spend huge amounts of time and money having god knows what done to their faces, devote hours a day to working out in a gym, all simply to keep us looking fit and younger. To not look like we are aging at all. To not gaze in the mirror and be reminded we are nearer to death today than we were yesterday. Maybe we hold out a hope that science will find a cure for death before then, and arrange to freeze our dead body just on the off chance. Desperate evasion follows desperate evasion. We keep on averting our face from the images of death - because we believe we can.

However, it does not end there. Our denial of death informs anything else that appears to be a mortal threat to our life. I am coming to believe that our attitude towards the Climate Crisis is informed by our reluctance to face our death. It has the same evasions, the same denials, the same turning of our faces away from its apparent inevitability. It has also developed its own secularised version of the Apocalypse, that we are all doomed. Our concerns around the climate have become so emotionally loaded and heightened, it has the same feeling of helplessness, of lack of control, the inability to do anything concrete to avert it, so why bother doing anything? If it happens, it happens, if we die, we die. Almost as though it was predicted in The Bible, just bring on the rapture.

A self-fulfilling death wish has started to hang over the world, where some governments and political parties, are beginning to adopt environmental strategies that they know will only make the climate worse. There appears to be one risky approach being suggested, that maybe human civilisation as it currently exists should be allowed to collapse, and those elites who survive will reap the benefits from whatever is left. So for some there maybe method in their madness. But even if you put these sort of conspiracy like theories aside, there is still worryingly an awful lot of short term thinking around. The sort of considerations that have hampered effective action in the many decades before now. Delay has never made the costs to the climate go away nor get cheaper to resolve, quite the opposite. Averting our face from this particular vision of climate extinction, because we don't want to face the possibility of our death, will paradoxically only hasten its arrival.

Contemplation of our death has been a practice in many religious traditions. Because a deep understanding that we will die, curiously enhances the importance of grasping life whilst we have it. Until we fully face the possibility of human extinction from man made climate change, then we will never value life enough to want to preserve humanity's future existence. If we are apathetic about death, then we will be apathetic about life too.

ARTICLE - Houses In Motion

I was recently asked if I would give a reading at a family wedding. Either a text I thought appropriate, or something I might write. No particular reading came immediately to mind, but an idea did. And though that idea felt at first a bit eccentric. and I wondered how appropriate it would be. I stuck to its intuitive logic, faithfully following that to see where this would end up. And I was actually really pleased with the result, and so did many of those present, judging by the positive feedback I got from them. So here it is.

HOUSES IN MOTION

The American architect Buckminster Fuller had an idea for a portable house. Hexagonal shaped with a hole in the middle, it resembled a geometric doughnut. And this doughnut could be lifted on and off a central cylindrical pole that contained all the house's utilities. So should you want to move elsewhere, you disconnected the utilities, lifted the house onto a huge flatbed truck and took it with you. To another such cylindrical pole, in another county, in another town. Fuller’s ideas were often too revolutionary so rarely got developed beyond the trial mock up.

For a house in truth has no walls, it’s not bricks and mortar at all. An empty house is a sad building quickly declining into a ruin. A building is a house with a lack of meaning, until it contains a multiplicity of human ideas and desires within it. A place where living breathing loving people, through a shared closeness have, not just a history catalogued in possessions, documents and photographs, but a self sustaining evolving relationship. And without that reciprocity a house will feel to have no heart.

When you ‘house’ something you are providing a space within which it can thrive. A repository for ideas, aspirations and creativity for sure, but essentially it contains the people and things that we most love. Any house develops a particular ethos and distinctive reason for existing. So throughout history houses great or small embody a particular quality. Whether that be the House of Windsor, or the House of the Medici. In recent eras there have been fashion houses - The House of Chanel, Lagerfeld or McQueen. These embody one person's style and approach beyond even their living presence. In architecture there’s been The Bauhaus, in music the Haus of Gaga, plus innumerable publishing houses. Houses cluster around the happy serendipity of individuals sharing their particular genius, woven into a design displaying the pattern of a family. Whether that be a biological family, a chosen family, or a creative family, the intentions remain the same.

To make a house frequently requires some marrying In its broadest meaning ‘To marry’ means to bring two things together and to conjoin them. A new house is then molded out of two seemingly disparate individuals that chose to marry themselves to one combined sense of purpose. In this it is similar to the grafting of roses or trees in horticulture. Where you consciously bind two separate species of tree together. Over time individual qualities become married. If the winds of circumstance are favourable, and the graft holds, this creates an entirely new tree that embodies the leaf colouring of one, with the root stock of another. They share their individual strengths, durabilities and energies, support each other, compensate for failings and embellish the best of both individual elements throughout each aspect of the tree.

Whilst marrying does have its practical and utilitarian aspects, it is fundamentally a wildly impractical muse that motivates it - one of love. When it is so beloved, it can readily forge a more wide ranging vision, for what this new house’s foundation could accomplish. And this is as light, ephemeral and as portable as Buckminster Fuller’s dream house. You can take it everywhere with you, apply it to everything you do, now or in the far off hills of the future. Beyond what even the horizon and our imaginations presently envisage can be reached..

Written by Stephen Lumb 2025

ARTICLE - Can't You Show Me Nothing But Surrender

In 1975 Patti Smith's debut album Horses was released. Horses exists in a curious liminal space that it opened up between punk and performance poetry. Suddenly poetry was fashionable and hip, and was interacting with rock n roll in the same way The Beat Poets had with the druggy haze of Cool Jazz. The eponymous title track is written as though its taking place within the sort of woozy headed rush of a fevered dream, 'The Boy' who looks at Johnny ending up in a street fight with switchblades. And in the middle of this furious tussle the -

Angel looks down at him and says, 

"Oh, pretty boy, Can't you show me nothing but surrender?"

All because 'The Pretty Boy' in the heat of the fight, his heart pumping like 'Arabian stallions lapping into sea horses' seems suddenly to go compulsively passive, surrendering himself up to whatever is happening to him in the moment. Unsure even of the reality of the reality he is in. If he is in the middle of a drug induced hallucination, a psychological fight or an actual physical attack, or all three. And who is this Angel anyways? But the angel certainly believes 'The Pretty Boy' has other options, and surrendering? well this is just too easy, lazy even. Sometimes you have to fight your corner for what you want. Apathy can be a passive form of surrender. True surrender is always an active choice.

This points us in the direction of one manifestation of surrender. You recognise that you are not in control of what is happening to you, so you give up fighting it. Even if the result maybe, as in this case, potentially life threatening. You let down any defenses surrounding yourself and offer yourself up to some form of death, whether that be literal or metaphorical you cannot tell. Its an example of what I'm  calling - Nihilistic Surrender. A reckless and self regarding extinguishing desire. And in Patti Smith's Horses, we have references to one of its modern archytypes - of doomed self immolating individualism. Surrendering oneself up to being murdered, or to debilitating drugs, to the couldn't careless destruction of the boundaries of the self. A suicidal masochism. Quicken the pace and die young with an emaciated corpse, that they made from forging their own way in life

And whilst this might appear to be a modern phenomena, it does have its imaginative antecedents in the religious imagery of Catholic martyred saints and of The Buddha during his pre-Enlightenment phase of starving his own body to see what might arise from deprivation. The inviolability and sanctity of the body is being fundamentally questioned and tested, to find out what may happen when you give up trying to protect and cosset it. This element of Nihilistic Surrender exists at some level in many religions.

Surrender is then a familiar refrain in spiritual practice. It denotes some form of death, not necessarily actual, but certainly intended to be spiritually transformative. It makes saints and sages in this life or the next. The Self is seen as a form of corrupting influence upon the ultimate sanctity of existence, and its diktats need to be repressively denied in order to free yourself from them.You extinguish one thing in order that the whole of you is made available to be transformed. A religious re-configuration of Nihilistic Surrender preceding, and indeed preparing the way for the more elevated Transformative Surrender.

And yet, this Transformative Surrender also seems to be only the start of another process, of giving oneself up to something more ultimate and eternal in nature. Whether that be to a God, a higher state of consciousness or an elevating expanded perception of reality.  These seem to be examples pointing towards Eternalistic Surrender, of surrendering oneself to something that is above, beyond and transcending that of mundane human existence entirely.

Surrender shares qualities with renunciation, though it is a slightly different level of the beast. For to truly renounce anything you do have to let go of whatever you believe is an obstacle. The thing that is holding you back. You have to have had prior insight into your way of behaving, living or being that you wish to move beyond. And this thorough form of renunciation can be transformative, which nevertheless tends to be slow moving and incremental in nature. 

If you prematurely renounce without a substantial insight into the consequences of a behaviour and what damage that does to your 'soul', then this is really a self denial or punishment lacking in any higher uplifting trajectory. The worst sort of renunciation would be to do so because it says you should in a book, or a Pastor, Pope or Guru tells you that you should. This leans heavily towards Nihilistic Surrender in that you are very consciously knowingly punishing yourself. Its a flagellation of the self, that perhaps takes too literally the willful extinguishing of human desires.

Much of spiritual practice, whatever the religious tradition, is a very conscious choice 'to do this - instead of that'. We might not initially couch these in terms of renunciation. And in these primary stages of renunciation, surrender can have an unassuming cast to it. But there is something in the nature of  ultimate truly transformative and then eternalistic surrender that is no longer humble, its no longer consciously accompanied by a particular goal in mind. Even terms like letting go and surrender start to feel as if they have this acquisitive undertow, in that there is assumed to be something you are letting go into. 

In Buddhism stages of letting go are suggested by the teaching of Sunyata. Now, listen carefully because this teaching is often misconstrued. Though Sunyata's reductive meaning is emptiness, this is not the nihilistic emptiness of an extinguishing void. It is empty, in that existence is 'emptied' of any applied meaning we might wish to give to it  The four stages of Sunyata concluding with The Emptiness of Emptiness itself. Here existence simply stands, naked of any descriptive noun or verb. Its what Zen refers to as Suchness. 

Whatever the colour or tone applied to surrender, these are ultimately conceptualisations that loose their usefulness as the journey progresses. To suggest that there is both someone who can surrender, and something that can be surrendered too, begin to loose their traction. There is a lot of reference these days to the idea of Radical Acceptance, where you are encouraged to let go of any notion of control or desire for ourselves and of reality to be different from what it actually is. To let things be as they are. The danger in this is that people might mistake this 'letting things be' for passivity. Whilst accepting that this idea is also a human concept, I would like to suggest the term Radical Acceptance may have some value. It feels more in alignment with a state of just being Being. Of developing a Sympathy with Suchness, until that becomes you.

ARTICLE - Deconstructing Enlightenment A Little Bit

Many people who claim to have no particular religious affiliation still talk about Enlightenment as though it exists and can be a life goal. I talk about Enlightenment, as if I know what it is I'm talking about, as if I know where it is, as if I know where I'm going, what I need to do to get there, and what it will be like when the Buddha Bus arrives at its destination. But I do not know this from my own first hand experience. I've read about it in Buddhist texts and commentaries, and that is all. And the more anyone talks about it in this way, the more this spreads a misapprehension of it as an easily verifiable state of being. 

No one actually knows, and those who say they do are charlatans and liars. Enlightened beings apparently would always stay shtum about it. At least, so I have been told. I've only encountered one person who struck me as exuding an aura of being Enlightened. But how, as an un-Enlightened being how would I even know that? I just read the vibes, apparently. It might appear like I am propagating one un-substantiated assertion after another.

You can read the Buddha's discourses and the lives of sages and get the vaguest of whiffs of something that is at variance to life and reality as it is ordinarily lived. Unless you are Enlightened you cannot talk in any meaningful way about what that is or is not. Most likely Enlightened persons would refuse to talk about it, because you cannot put your state of being into words, because words are inherently inaccurate and misleading as a means of conveying what the state of Enlightenment is actually like. At least, so I have been told. Even the Buddha initially didn't know if he could, or should, attempt to teach what he knew. So the apocryphal story goes. 

Where does that leave anyone as a spiritual practitioner? What the hell do we think we are doing when we meditate?  Then you find this Zen story and all your worst fears become manifested in triplicate.

'One day Nangaku visited Baso's hut. Baso stood and greeted him. Nangaku asked, "What have you been doing recently?" Baso replied, "I've done nothing but sit in zazen." Then Nangaku asked, "Why do you continually sit in zazen?" Baso answered "I sit in zazen in order to become a Buddha." Nangaku picked up a tile he found by the side of Basos hut and started to polish it. Baso watched what he was doing and asked "Master, what are you doing?" Nangaku answered, "I'm polishing this tile." Baso asked "Why are you polishing the tile?" Nangaku answered, "To make a mirror." Baso said, "How can you make a mirror by polishing a tile?" And Nangaku replied, "How can you become a Buddha by doing zazen?'

So, are we deludedly polishing a tile, thinking it will become a mirror through our efforts?  It certainly feels like that. The more one examines meditation the more this apparent paradox resurfaces. Krishnamurti teased his followers by saying meditation was not a practice that was best served by you being conscious of a purpose at all. And when one looks at the way early Buddhist texts refer to the various levels of consciousness attainable - the four dhyanas of form ascending into the four formless dhyanas - none of these have a sign saying Here Be Enlightenment written next to them. 

Meditation appears to be a spiritual skill akin to upgrading the quality of your mind from fuzzy Beta Max to the radiant clarity of a Blue Ray video player. Adjusting your receptivity, responses and ability to calmly reflect on the nature of reality. Meditation cannot of itself make you Enlightened. The Zen story is just trying to manage the rampant delusion of your expectations.

And, before you ask, I accidentally stumbled into what I've always interpreted as First Dhyana on three occasions, a long time ago. My ability as a meditator lets say, has exhibited its limits, as I'm most likely resentfully over aware of.  Nevertheless - eight levels of dhyana - that could easily mislead anyone into thinking meditation practice was an elevation upward in the general direction of Enlightenment, wouldn't it? Say not so, well at least not so glibly. All these teachings are simply ways of modelling the territory, they are rarely literal descriptions of the territory itself. So we are told.

Once you encounter all these obstacles and inhibitors along the path of spiritual practice, it does cause you to question whether knowing of an idealised state of Enlightenment can serve any useful function at all. Tyler Staton, who admittedly is viewing things from a Christian perspective, does have some interesting things to say about the limitations, usefulness or otherwise of an 'impersonal force' to an individuals spiritual development.

'And the truth is I cannot love an impersonal force or be loved by one, I can't be loved by the universe and I certainly can't be loved by my own meditation practice. All I can do there is declutter my mind and slow down my internal world. Those are all good things, those are healthy habits, just like you should eat leafy greens and try to get some exercise and they will improve your life and help you become a healthier person and probably feel better. But they will not give you a life that is lived to the full, to fill your internal world with peace and will not offer you joy'

Well, I imagine a more experienced skilled meditator might want to question the assertions in that last sentence. I could only do so theoretically. Tyler does later assert you can only have a productive relationship with either Jesus, God or the Holy Spirit because they are all personified in a personal relatable way. Which no doubt makes logical sense if you approach things from his perspective, or any faith which embodies its Godhead to a degree. For me it does provoke a deeply furrowed brow, that says, yeah, how do you have any sort of meaningful helpful relationship interacting with an impersonal force, such as Enlightenment? Can Enlightenment even be fairly described as an impersonal force? And if not why not? - Discuss

In reality do we have to self consciously confect an indifference or dispassion towards the transcendental aspect of Buddhist faith, to sort of alienate ourselves from the stated objective of the whole of Buddhism ? What sort of twisted metaphysics is this? What in the end are we left to have faith in? In a man who reputedly died two and a half millenia ago, in ourselves, in our potential, in the spiritual process itself, in some sort of contemporary guru, in Beyonce? 

That Buddhism did eventually succumb to introducing imagery of Enlightened archetypes, giving Buddhas and Bodhisatvas identifiable form and characteristics, was this in response to a difficulty they'd encountered in maintaining faith in what was in essence impersonal, and counterproductive to actively desire. Once the Buddha was no longer around as the founding exemplar, Buddhism resorted to symbolic structures or imagery to provide devotional focus. Did Buddhism simply find itself in such a metaphysical dead end, that the rise of the Mahayana and Vajrayana's innovations was an attempt at fixing? And so they provided something to worship the ideal through, to offer our ineffective practice and ourselves up too.

When the thing you are ostensibly aiming yourself towards is Enlightenment, this experience is as remote as it can get from ordinary human life. You are orientating yourself towards an empty imaginative space. We take it on faith that Enlightenment can exist at all. When we allow ourselves to imagine how we might get to be Enlightened, it tends to fall into either acquisitive progressive steps towards something that seems external to us, or resides like an incubus within our being just waiting for us to stumble upon it and release it. Both require a moment of Awakening. Whether Enlightenment exists, or where Enlightenment exists, until we reach that Awakening moment is a reasonable question to raise.  The answer will no doubt turn out to be - unverifiable.

If the spiritual life is only ever about the Sisyphean task of continuing to push the heavy boulder of your practice up a steep hill with no visible peak within sight, then its no wonder there is little room for a joyful engagement with daily life. When I doubt, I doubt the effectiveness of my practice first, and the truth or otherwise of whether Enlightenment exists or not remains curiously untouched. Probably because it has never felt that real in the first place. You can't be angry, disappointed or despairing towards a complete void - can you? Or has my feeling for Enlightenment just been slowly corroding?

Enlightenment is nothing that is tangibly available to you right now to experience. I frequently find myself trying to cope with remaining acutely aware of the immense gap between my personal worldly experience and the impersonal nature of an unimaginable transcendental state. And I do wonder whether that is a healthy position to hold yourself in for too long, without any perception that that gap might in someway be closing. On a really bad day, Enlightenment can sometimes feel like it is the ultimate delusion of all delusions. Something even Dogen referred to as 'A Dream Within A Dream'

ARTICLE - Where Free Speech Is Useless

There have been times in my life where I have mistakenly thought myself a good listener. I've struck up a friendship with someone, who I later realised used their time with me to perform this weeks emotion dump. Having found someone willing to listen and not contradict them, they go straight for what makes them most pissed off and angry. Over time you realise its the same issue every time you meet them that they have a beef about - how wrong and pig headed other people are - being the favoured one. Once this dawns on you, you have then to consider, do I say anything about this, because you don't really want to become the object of this pissed off friend,  do you? 

So you gently venture into the outer border territory, just to see how they might react, but leave yourself enough room to back off quickly if it starts to look too tricky. Being extra cautious because this person has been known to punch out, when crossed. Experiments completed, you come to the conclusion that this friend of yours is not actually interested in your opinion, and if they heard the full truth of what you had to say, there would be some sort of violent response. If you're lucky, only verbal. 

You might say, well tell them regardless, its not much of a friendship anyway. Yeah, I've tried the nuclear option, and the one person I did that too no longer utters a word to me, nor even acknowledges me in the street. I did hurt them, because I got under their armour and prodded purposefully about. But it had no effect whatsoever on changing their behaviour, which had been my naive aim. People have to want to change themselves, frank interventions really only work when the object of them is almost at the point of realising the same thing for themselves. 

What I could chose to do in such circumstances, would be gradually increase the time between meeting up, until at some point perhaps these meetings might cease altogether. Because another thing about this type of friendship is that its you who has had to do the running all along in arranging to meet up regularly. Though you've had precious little airtime or personal reciprocal benefit from it. Now you might say, what has this little personal homily got to do with free speech? Well.......

Ideally, in a democracy, free speech functions as a way to express opinions, grievances and ideas, to put them in the public arena. There is always a consequence to speaking out, in that what you have said is open to challenge, exploration, condemnation or refinement in the process of public dialogue. Free Speech is an informal right, not an absolute one. I'm always a bit worried when governments want to legislate to support free speech, it gives off entirely the wrong vibes. Opinions which are slanderous, untrue, incite violence, libel to cause an affray, or are designed to undermine democracy itself, often have some form of legal redress or limit put upon them.  Free Speech is useful when used in this manner, its fundamental to a fully functioning democracy. Its not perfect and often its a difficult call when two conflicting groups fail to discover a way forward with an issue.

However, I have been noticing the concept of what free speech is has been adjusted online, one that is in danger of neutering its democratic purpose altogether. People are free to say whatever they like online, but can seem entirely unwilling to be subsequently challenged or enter into dialogue. In fact, any challenge, exploration, condemnation or refinement is often being portrayed as an infringement of their free speech, that they are being cancelled by the request to be accountable. Its no coincidence that this is the favoured cry of the far right, who might be wearing an acceptable democratic 'beard', but are no friends to democracy ideologically. This form of consequence free Free Speech is utterly useless, and is simply just venting and dumping onto the capacious clouds of the internet, poisoning the discourse.

There is much talk about free speech being in danger from left wing 'wokery' but stunned silence when it comes to the right wing travesty of Free Speech now taking hold in the US as we speak. Closing down accountability, banning journalists, removing minority rights etc. But to be honest the left is just as bad closing down discussions on contentious subjects, resorting to simple name calling, using offence as a reason to curtail an open conversation, insisting on particular language being used. There are difficulties society has around many subjects, trans rights is one. The right wing want to ban gender theory and its consequences, the left want to ban anyone who doesn't agree with gender theory. Thus any discussion or exploration of the issue by society at large is completely stymied, because the engine of free speech to explore what the issues are, is being encumbered by coercive controls.  

But in truth, a lot of what is making people unwilling to enter into dialogue, particularly online, is the level of violence and threat that you can suddenly find yourself in receipt of. One of the shared characteristics that my two examples of difficult friendships had, was they were both to a degree lonely and isolated people, both with bad quick tempers. And one suspects a lot of online trolling is by people who don't get out enough, have few real friends they can interact with, and have a lot of suppressed anger issues. Interacting with people online can be fraught with real difficulty, because of the semi-alienated nature of it. Without the body language and a lived sense of their mood and way of being. What you feel able to say online is very different to what you would say to them in person. There appears to be little room for nuance. No waiting for the right most opportune time to say something, its the 'nuclear' option straight away.

Recently there was an ARC conference. The Association for Responsible Citizenship is a broadly right wing, Christian Nationalist organisation. I glimpsed the beginning of one young chaps talk where he began by saying he felt free for the first time to fully express himself. The subtext was he was now in a context where he wouldn't be challenged or shut down, he was safe within the supportive bubble of that conference. What he went on to say was that all the moral ills of modern society could be laid at the door of homosexuality and gay marriage being liberalised. So you could instantly see why his experience would be that he was rarely heard out. I have little sympathy for his viewpoint, obviously being its target. But it also felt desperately sad that he felt unable to get all his shit off his chest elsewhere. Go to the gym man.

Some how we need to get Free Speech back into the real world, of real people, hammering out the issues in real time and real space, And, just as a polite addendum, don't forget that we all have freedom of choice. No one has to sit and listen to anyone off loading their half baked ideas, if they don't want to. We can make the choice to walk away. They don't dish out medals for endurance. Remember, no one will be willing to change their mind, if they don't first respect you or your opinions. Nor if you shout loudly at them does your rectitude appear more convincing. People are innately resistant to change their views, however wrong headed, until you put a lot of time and effort into winning their hearts first.

ARTICLE - Constantly Reimagining The Ineffable

In the aftermath of the Buddha's death, his followers were divided amongst themselves on how they should memorialise him. The Buddha believed his legacy was his teachings. If they were going to honour his life they could do nothing better than fully practice them.

The contentiousness was focused around the Buddha's relics. Who from the broad range of disciples would be allowed to have a relic and to construct a stupa to house them in? Because the demand was high, it was clear not everyone could have one. There followed a rather shameful tussle, literally a power struggle, within the strong factions that existed within Buddhism - monks and lay practitioners, the poor and the rich, the spiritually literal and the more metaphorically minded.

This proved to be just the beginning of two and a half thousand years of debate over, not just how you could inwardly imagine the Buddha, but outwardly represent the state of an Enlightened being. Making any image of the historical Buddha might completely misrepresent what he was, who had been born in Lumbini in the 5th or 6th century BC. As time progressed and there were no people living that could remember the Buddha, how were you to communicate what a Buddha, what an Enlightened person was like?

Relic containing commemorative stupas set the precedent. Stupas became a primary way to represent the Buddha. A spiritually inflected elemental symbolism being introduced into its architectural structure. Stupa's were the first real attempt, post the Buddha's death to grapple with the question - how do you represent not just the historical Buddha, but Buddhahood itself, of Enlightenment as a quality within the universe to which you could aspire? The first response was paradoxically the best one - to make it abstract. 

Venerating the historical Buddha was clearly not what The Buddha wanted, becoming the focus of a personality cult ran counter to his teachings. Hence during the first century after his death, there are no representational figurative images. The Buddha was to be suggested not by presence, but by absence - the empty throne - the Buddha's footprints - a riderless horse - the bodhi tree - the Dharmachakra wheel. You were visually being urged to sit where he sat, walk the way he walked, follow what he taught. Its as though the imagery was speaking to you, and saying -Look he's not here anymore, what are you going to do? Go away and practice wholeheartedly. 

And maybe this would have been how it would have stayed, had not Alexander the Great briefly conquered parts of the north western edges of the Indian sub continent. The influence of Greek Hellenistic art on representations of The Buddha, with its realistic emphasis on the spiritual imagination, cannot be underestimated. The classic Rupa form and styling, of The Buddha dressed in artfully pleated clothes and top knot, comes completely to define how an Enlightened being was to be represented. 

There would not be another comparable representational shift in Buddhism until the emergence of the Mahayana in the 1st century BC and later Vajrayana 5th-8th century CE. When folk stylings drawn from ethnic Hinduism and later exotic Tibetan and Chinese influences, vastly expanded Buddhist imagery, its archetypal symbolism, Cosmic Buddhas, Mandalas, various peaceful and wrathful forms of Bodhisattvas, alchemical spirits, demons and nymphs. You name it, it was all given visual form. 

The Buddha's archetypal form had always been multi-faceted, simultaneously historical, symbolic and cosmic. All Buddhist imagery, however we couch them, remain inaccurate facades behind which the ineffable state of Enlightenment resides. Imagery acting as a means through which to connect with the state of Enlightenment, as simple conduits, orientating us towards where the ineffable may be. Beyond any concept, mental construct or visualisation we may hold of it.

Buddhism is not unusual in having this initial tendency toward aniconism, to not allow representations of its founder, of God, or of an Enlightened person. This is common among many religions, whether theistic or non-theistic. Islam, Judaism, Christianity and Taoism all hold differing levels of antipathy towards the representation of God or whatever it is they consider transcendent and ineffable. At some point words, imagery and metaphor all fail them, they become as though struck dumb. In some, making an image of God or divinity becomes itself a sinful act, punishable by death.

Christianity, emerging as it did out of Judaism, undoubtedly inherited its disapproval of graven images. Idolatry being frowned upon. In the years immediately after the crucifixion, its unlikely any image of Jesus was produced. There is certainly no mention of it, and none have been found. The focus, as in Buddhism, was on promulgating and inculcating his teachings in new disciples, in new places. Symbolism in the form of the fish and the cross provided a unique sense of identity, of Christian unity in the often harsh circumstances of persecution, where you were obliged to be secretive about your faith.

As currently understood, its not until the 2nd century that specifically Christian imagery begins to be found. Even if that sometimes is based upon a very strange amalgam of Christian and Pagan beliefs. What is portrayed with regularity in this period are particular illustrated scenes from the life of Jesus, and this maybe because these were used as a teaching aid. Specifically Christian iconography, as we understand it, does not really begin to blossom until the early 3rd century BCE, just prior to Constantine making Christianity the Holy Roman Empire's established religion. Constantine's adoption of it, certainly turbo charges the production of church imagery. Images of Jesus, his family, disciples, saints and piously devoted rulers start to appear. God's presence, if indicated, is through visual symbolism, a radiating explosion of lines, from which the holy spirit in the form of a dove sometimes emerges. By the Renaissance, God can be explicitly portrayed by Michelangelo as your archetypal white bearded man, as a person just like us. But this is all prior to The Protestant Reformation where the prohibition on graven imagery reasserts itself.

These ups and downs in the use of imagery within Christianity all fall within the cataphatic tradition, that promotes positive encouraging statements, affirming and confirming beliefs. There is a law of attraction, that art can visualise the divine presence, extol a person's sainthood and portray good works as an inspiration to others. That the painted figure of the Virgin Mary can literally form an intercession between you, Jesus, and through him with God. But behind this there has also been the apophatic tradition, where Christian mysticism frequently finds a home. This says, that all visual imagery and the metaphors that are used to speak about the qualities of God in the cataphatic tradition, are false presentations of what the ineffable nature of God is. That God is essentially unknowable via the use of our minds eye. God's true nature is hidden beyond all this imagery, beyond what the power of the imagination can describe in words or visually. And finding union with this unnameable apophatic God is actually the real purpose of the Christian life of devotion, prayer and practice. Though the ineffable is beyond being described, portrayed or implied through metaphor - beyond our imaginative intellect - it can be 'known.'

It appears to be part of human nature to need literalistic imagery. This can help guide and connect us with religious practices and goals, providing a sense of purpose and direction in our spiritual life. In a Buddhist parable from the Lotus Sutra, The Magic City, a group of pilgrims are undergoing an arduous journey to the Magic City, only their guide appears to know in what direction it is. Many of these travellers have moments of huge doubt, some struggle, rebel or fall by the wayside. When the remaining travellers get to where the guide said the Magic City would be, they find nothing. The guide tells them he lied to them in order that they would stick with him on the journey. There is no Magic City. The moral being, that how we imagine what our religious goals are, will only take us so far. Beyond which continuing to be goal orientated becomes an obstacle, an impediment to making further progress.

Imagery then, could be seen as 'the necessary lie', a skilful means, that helps you aspire to move towards objectives that are greater than you can currently envisage. When you are travelling towards where the ineffable is said to be, its helpful to believe you know where you are going. We forget that we do need to constantly reimagine what the ineffable looks like to us. Even if, ultimately, where you are heading is unreachable or unknowable through ideas of making progress, of tangible goals, of actually physically travelling anywhere.