LIFE AS PILGRIMAGE - 5 - The Secular Search For Fulfillment

There is a fundamental flaw when we attempt to build a whole philosophy and system of self belief, that is all about the personal fulfilment of every individual need of one's Self. And the flaw is essentially, that it runs counter to what reality is actually like. Reality is not there purely to service our needs. It remains neutral towards whatever our desires and aspirations might be. The whole concept of personal fulfillment, puts an incredible amount of pressure and stress on you, as an individual to be your own fount of wisdom. You have to work things out, how you are personally going to attain that perfectly satisfying life. The possibility of failure becomes unconscionable, and has strenuously to be resisted. 

Today, social media has only made holding this ideal of personal perfection worse. We are currently all living through an era of semi-paralysing anxiety as a result. And even if, theoretically, we were for one moment to achieve that perfect level of fulfillment, there would be no guarantee it would stay that way. Conditions and circumstances change, they run out of our control. You lose your job, people die, you die, wars happen, climate catastrophe arises, cultures and civilizations collapse. The world is an inherently unstable and insecure place. 

But all of this, was only just beginning to dawn on me, whilst I was living in London in the 1980's. I was this unconfident introvert, that somehow would occasionally make bold intuited changes in life direction. And when these petered out or dried up, I'd move on to something else to aim for, to make my life about. I always appeared to return to the stable point of my own creativity as the point of departure. I had then, as I do now, a wide ranging interest in 'the arts'. I can see in retrospect, that this was a time in my life where the current lifestyle and aspirations I had for myself, was rapidly running out of road to travel on. Creatively and personally, relationships were just not happening. My self esteem and confidence, never that robust, seriously wobbled, and I felt a huge amount of insecurity welling up within myself. Life in general was becoming troublingly   meaningless, and lacking in purpose.

I was wandering quite aimlessly around Camden Town, on a day off.  I popped into a bookshop, that I think might have been called East-West. I'd been in it a few times before, it stocked all sorts of books, about alternative lifestyles,psychology, politics, cooking, art and spirituality in its broadest sense. I was scanning round the shelves, when one book title grabbed my attention - The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts. The paradox of juxtaposing wisdom alongside insecurity, made me intensely curious. And once I'd bought and started to read it, the book started to feel like it was written especially for me. It directly addressed my turbulent state of being at that time. 

The Wisdom of Insecurity is a quite basic exploration of the teachings of Lao Tsu,  the mythical founder of Taoism. It also has occasional side references to Buddhism, as both are non-theistic distant third cousins. On rereading it a few years ago, I was struck by how Watt's unhelpfully universalised every spiritual idea he touched upon. He was undoubtedly an inspired communicator, but one who unwarrantedly affected a guru like persona. Nevertheless, this book was responsible for opening my eyes to another way of seeing and interpreting the world, life, and upending the secular ideal of personal purpose. 

I remember avidly reading it during my lunch break. It was a beautiful bright sunny day. I was sitting on a bench near the clock tower in Crouch End.  And one particular sentence just leapt out and resonated with me so strongly, that I had a momentary experience of bliss. I'd had a deep realisation that I could simply let go of seeing insecurity as being a problem I needed to overcome or find a fix for.  Instead I could just relax and be more accepting of it. Embrace insecurity as just the way life can often be. Fundamentally you align yourself to the way realty really is, and cease trying to make it conform to what you would prefer it to be. If you can do this, however briefly and transiently, believe me it becomes a huge relief. 

Consequently I read more by Watts, but eventually found him a bit too much of a generalist. I craved more depth. I avidly read Lao Tsu's, Tao Te Ching, then Chuang Tzu, broached the more esoteric and dense teachings of Taoist Alchemy and the cultivation of Chi. I even had a phase of exploring microbiotics as a result of reading this book. The problem for me in 1980's UK was there appeared to be no living Taoist tradition or practitioners to be taught by, to learn from, or plug into. I read Taoist texts in translation, which, I can assure you, are the very personification of mystical spiritual ellipsis. It was all as clear as mud what you were actually supposed to do, on the level of personal spiritual practice. I learnt a few basic Chi circulation meditation techniques from books, and then felt that I'd got all I could then access. These days, in the age of the internet, finding a way forward would've been a whole lot easier.

Not entirely unconnected to this spiritual experience, I subsequently decided, after nine years of being the lone culture vulture in the ultra busy hub of a newly 24/7 London, I'd had enough of it. I was done with metropolitan life. I wanted to leave the city and it's manic psychology of keep moving quickly so you don't notice the purposelessness of it all. After a few recent summer holidays staying with a friend in Wells Next the Sea, I'd fallen in love with the place, and felt I needed to moved to North Norfolk. What actually happened was that I got as close as I could, by relocating to South Norfolk, to the small quiet market town of Diss on the Norfolk/Suffolk border. Where I got a job managing an art shop and stationers. My aim, in moving there was to start my life completely afresh, 

LIFE AS PILGRIMAGE - 4 - The Discomforts Of Agnosticism

No longer going to Chapel every Sunday, was a recognition I'd reached the age where I was allowed to make my own decisions about what I did or did not do. About what my beliefs were, or more precisely, it appeared mostly about what they were not. What followed was a vague period of neglectful agnosticism, which is never a place for a fully worked out belief system. It's more a holding position, whilst you decide. Though I may have sat there in a mellow vat of cynicism stewing, I never reached, or saw, the logical point of atheism. Atheism is a position of reactivity, subsequently rationalised into a point of principle. My leaving of one established religious institution was purely a reaction to disenchantment, I don't think I could have told you at the time exactly why in any great detail. Hence why this was followed by such a long period of uncertainty, of not knowing, and if I'm truly being honest, not caring to know. 

This state of spiritual prevarication lasted a good ten years or more. Set against a background of leaving home and going to art college, in the time of punk. As practical real life experiences began to forge my character into adulthood. I returned to a non conformist Chapel during this period on a couple of occasions as a student, when I was lonely and personally struggling, and needed a place where I thought I'd be unquestioningly welcomed in a congregation. And that search for a place to comfortably belong might be a more accurate reason for staying agnostic.

From my early teens I'd worked out my sexual orientation was a gay one. So I understood my journey from immature teenager to a grown adult, was in 1970's England, not going to be a straightforward one. Though this was certainly a cause of anxiety for me, I understood quite clearly that the problem wasn't with me. I wasn't the one who was deluded, wrong headed or morally dubious. Whether Christianity's attitude towards homosexuality was a factor in my disenchantment with that religion, my recollection remains curiously blank. I was at that time, not that worldly aware of anything more than the need to stay schtum about it.  Today, at the age of sixty nine, I'm very happily married to a man I love. I think you can safely say any 'gay phase' endured and prospered, despite anyone's expectations or condemnations otherwise.

If I'd stayed in my village,  I think the pace of these self realisations would've been - much slower. College life thrusts you into a context with a wider range of people, viewpoints, experiences, and ways of living. It's also an opportunity to reinvent oneself, to break free of accumulated assumptions from your childhood, about who you are, what you can be. Which I did begin to do. But the first thing I encountered was a personal difficulty - how painfully self conscious and shy I could be, how self limiting that emotional state was, how it clouded the horizons of my ambition.  I may have had aspirations to be consistently extrovert, but found more often I was this painfully introverted young man who lived uncomfortably and frustratedly with it  This was a futile tug of war I fought with myself, for a lot longer than I like to remember it being.

Any search for spiritual self knowledge would have to be read between the lines of one exercise book, where I'd decided in 1973 to write down all the books I read. Little knowing I'd keep this practice up all my life. But these days I find these note books a good corrective to the inaccuracies of memory concerning time and sequence. In amongst the Sci Fi worlds of utopias and dystopia's, and numerous Micheal Moorcock sword and sorcery fantasies, you'll find a scattering of psychology books, many by R D Laing, and the almost inevitable period of a young adult's enthusiasm for Nietzsche. It was during this period I certainly developed into an enquiring and self motivated reader. I followed up on my enthusiasms, for writers or investigating particular subject matters, picking up on new lines of interest and enquiry as I went along. Some of it was driven by me trying to make sense of who I was, and why, and asking similar questions of the world. Though it was simultaneously the simple enjoyment of being open to new ideas, experiences and ways of looking at life and reality.

I'd started writing poetry. Decided I'd become an artist, then a graphic designer. So there were numerous books about art and artists, design and designers. A similar pattern persisted when later on I became enthusiastic for theatre and started acting in amateur drama, eventually taking up performance art. I read books about these subjects voraciously. All of them became a way to explore who I could be, what my potential was, for making something good out of my life. A future that would personally be both satisfying and introduce something beautiful into the world. Having shelved the idea of a creator God, the perception of beauty through art or nature assumed an elevated sensory divinity. This was a spiritual search to locate the meaning and purpose of life, but relocated into a secular context.  

However, when myself or reality failed to meet my aspirations and expectations, the suffering that resulted inevitably became a more insistent spiritual prompt. A world without a Godhead can assume an impoverished desultory demeanor. Turning everyday reality into this dreary indifferent mechanism, and my mind towards the dead end that is nihilism. Discovering one specific book introduced me to a new way of looking at reality and my experience of it, that would provide the catalyst to set me off in a fresh, more positive direction.

Next - No 5 - Fulfilment & Insecurity

LIFE AS PILGRIMAGE - 3 - Breaking the Voice

During the years of being a chorister, my belief in God appeared to be solid, if not flourishing. I had a simple wooden crucifix on the top of my child sized writing desk, bookended by two tiny brass candlesticks, without candles. My parents had bought both my sister and I brand spanking new Bibles.  Frequently I imagined myself in the future becoming a Vicar. Such was my seeming devotion and youthfully naive aspiration. Meanwhile the chorister singing was proving ever more satisfying, as I was now one of the most experienced singers in the choir, and had begun to take solo parts in anthems. The choir master at Halifax Parish Church, recommended I attend a residential week for choristers, run under the auspices of the Royal School of Church Music at Rosall School, in Fleetwood, Lancashire.

My parents would certainly have struggled to afford this, but they did find the money, because singing was a talent my Mother understood and both my parents were prepared to support. Once I'd arrived at the school, I remember enjoying all the rehearsals and performances. The dormitories, the communal dining, the sheer number of people there, a lot of them quite posh, meant I felt very much a fish out of water. Being in the grounds of a public school, was a bit of a culture shock for a eleven year old boy from the terraced houses of Halifax, to take in. I had no friends with me there, I was really lonely. And I'd started to be picked on and bullied by some of the older boys. And I wrote a postcard to my parents. This was my first time living away from my parents, I felt homesick, and living in this strange place was freaking me out. And, in retrospect, I can see this was the beginning of a souring of my relationship with devotional singing.

As I progressed through my teenage years, people started preparing me for when my 'voice broke', as though this would prove to be of real significance. I'd never even thought of my boy soprano voice as having a use by date. This notion coincided with my new and burgeoning enthusiasm for glam and subsequently progressive rock music. Glam emerged after the late sixties hippie era, and was in part a reaction to the denim dressed idealistic worthiness that preceded it. Five years after gay relationships were permitted, being deliberately and ridiculously camp, suddenly made sense. In the midst of the 70's oil crisis, glam was light hearted frothy fun. And I fell in love with its sense of its own ridiculousness. Once I did become rather more earnestly into heavy rock, my having a sweet boy soprano voice, began to lose the kudos it might have once possessed for me.

About this time, I'd bought a copy of The Jesus Book, which was part of a late sixties phenomena The Jesus Movement in the US.  In response to the 'alternative' permissive culture of the era, this movement dressed Christianity up in some borrowed counter cultural garb and threw itself into the religious melting pot. And I'd thought  that this might be one way of, bringing both my music and Christian faith together. But I wasn't that impressed with it. For as my voice actually started to break, it began to dawn on me that my faith, such as it was, was rather strongly tied to my contribution to religious music. And I began to have doubts, whether my faith was based on anything more than just the love of singing. 

I was fourteen or fifteen I think, when I finally burnt my bridges with the Methodist faith of my parents.  Unconsciously, I was in the middle of some sort of crisis of confidence within Christianity. I booked myself on a Methodist residential study weekend, specifically aimed at teenagers. My parents must have paid for it, but my recollection was of it being at my instigation. I endured that weekend, like I have never endured anything before or since. I found myself reacting to the place, the leaders, other people, the way they dressed, the subject matter, the faux earnestness of it all, it really got right on my tits. My head got stuck in a groove of inner contention. At the time I was far too shy to voice a word of any of this, but internally I was a seething rebellion  It was going on that weekend which compelled me to tear up my card carrying membership of Christianity. On my return, I told my parents I no longer wanted to attend chapel with them on Sundays. My investment in the Christian faith appeared spent. What faith I'd had, left on a long round trip to Vegas.

LIFE AS PILGRIMAGE - 2 - The Performance & Dressing Up For God

Down hill from the family home in Dyson Road, a mere ten minute walk away, was St Augustine's Church of England Primary School. There I was presented with a daily assembly of hymns, prayers and readings. I don't remember this being particularly churchy or solemn, though perhaps a child never sees these things with such a jaundiced eye. St Augustine's had a monolithic Victorian stone built church, looming massively right next to it. In amongst the surviving momentos of my early education is a small exercise book. It has Scripture written in pencil on the front, in my infant handwriting. At some point in my early childhood, I wrote and illustrated this. And it contains  Christian religious instruction, a standard part of a C of E Primary School's curriculum, And this booklet definitely tilted more towards the Anglican, than the Non Conformist approach. Complex ideas of sin, original and actual, written out on a blackboard for me to copy in my rudimentary understanding of English spelling.  I learnt I was primarily a Child of God, though it's never explained what surrogate role my parents played in this.

I believe, because I was brought up Methodist, with chapels and services so plain and scarcely adorned, I had an appreciative response to Anglican, even Anglo Catholic, churches, rituals and ostentation, that was an eye opener to wonder and awe. After an upbringing starved with restrained aesthetic stimulation, you just blubber your face in the luxurious bubble bath of it's sensory stimulation. By comparison this felt life enhancing, conjuring up a response of being giddily thrilled. 

Whilst at Primary School, around the time I was eight, it was discovered that I had a passably good boy soprano voice. And the music teacher, Miss Gilliat, told my parents she thought I was good enough to be a chorister in Halifax Parish Church. Being good at singing, is something of a wasted talent in a Methodist Chapel. There was nothing more to offer a boy soprano than sitting up in the gallery singing along with the buxom ladies in the ad-hoc, who ever turns up sings, choir. Anyway, after a thorough audition by the Parish Church choirmaster, I was in. 

Being in a leading part of Church of England services, with it's candles and incense, felt rather exotic. It also gave me permission to dress up in a burgundy cassock, white ruff and surplus. There was an heightened sense of beauty, elevated through singing anthems, hymns, Festivals of nine lessons and carols, and on one occasion Bach's St Matthews Passion. All this was utterly exhilarating to a pre-pubescent choir boy, from a non-conformist background. From these experiences was born enduring lifelong loves - for church music and architecture, to name but two. The power of the human voice in song, to connect you, lays out a more transcendent relationship with divinity, however briefly experienced in the full flow of a performance.  Singing was the first thing I'd discovered that I was confident in knowing I was actually rather good at, 

And this flipping between austere almost minimalist aesthetic and the effusively baroque over the top coloured maximalism, remains a dynamic pull within me still. My Methodist upbringing, plus my art and design training, pull me towards the former, whilst my instinct, and the thing I adore most is the latter. Over the years, in my own artwork, I've learned to intuitively place more trust in the maximalist in me, and ignore any inculcated tendency to temper my expressiveness back to a more restrained, less emotionally indulgent form. You are taught at art school, that this is what serious artists do. The pursuit of beauty was an inherently distrusted motive, it was manipulative, even untruthful. And a similar dichotomy existed at times within my relationship with Buddhist practice. Either refined to the essentials, like a Zen monk, or the rich exuberance of Indian or Tibetan rituals. Restrain your engagement with emotionality, avoid cultivating intoxication or excessive indulgence. There was my habitual English upbringing in the Protestant moderation in all things, which became further reinforced by meeting a familiar friend in Buddhist restraint.

As a child, I had a passionate and exuberant side to my character, that I tended to suppress because I felt that it was unacceptable. But in my choices of music, my love of art, for performing, for OTT camp, and having made in later life friends from Latin American and Indian cultures, I discovered a way of being human, a joyful light hearted exuberance to be enjoyed in an uncomplicated way. I think if I'd been more self confident earlier in my life, this outgoing side of me might have found space in which to fully manifest. Instead I retreated into myself, and concealed this side. There has been times when I instinctually felt I had betrayed my personality. For within every closeted introvert, is an misdirected extrovert trying to find their way out of the cupboard.

LIFE AS PILGRIMAGE - 1 -The Creeds and Catechisms of the Infant

There are no pictures of me being baptised, but I do have one of me dressed in something approaching baptismal clothes. The ceremony would have been at West End Methodist Church, in Halifax. Like most Methodist Chapels, this was an unremarkable building from the outside. I have few recollections of its interior, other than it was dark. But if it went true to form, the interior would be plain, probably painted bench pews, an elevated organ and pulpit, with a small gallery. Nothing showy or smacking of ostentation or papacy. You were here to praise the divinity, not man. Turn up for God, be presentable, wear your best clothes. But it was undoubtedly here that I first heard the bible being read and commented upon. At some point in a Sunday service, the children would leave to attend Sunday School, whilst the adults received communion or a sermon was preached.

The God of my infancy seemed to me, to be a given. It came pre-packaged with my parents, and they presented it to me. And that God appeared to be an extension of them. God's relationship with me, felt very parental. God got exasperated with me, told me off, punished me for my behaviour, was pleased with me when I was good. I dutifully sang songs in praise of God, drew pictures of God, of the Infant Jesus, and generally absorbed the Christian teachings in their rudimentary child friendly versions. Encouraging me to behave better, and admonishing me when I was not. I learnt through this what you needed to be, to be considered good. The wrath of God was to be feared. The God of my infancy was definitely male gendered. And older boys and men I knew could be unpredictable and angry too.  I knew of no other way of perceiving God at the time. A child tends to absorb like blotting paper, who God is, how God is, what God does. They are passive receptors of teachings, imbibing unquestioningly whatever is fed to them. God seemed to me then to be similar to mother nature itself. God was just how it was.

Methodists are not particularly dour in their non conformism. At least, not the branch my family attended. My parents were quietly small c conservative, with distinct liberal permissive leanings. Tolerance and patience with others, were considered virtues. They were rarely strict disciplinarians about anything. Both were brought up within Methodism, and had imbibed it's prohibitions on drink and gambling, practicing moderation in all things. Very self disciplined about being respectable, and being seen to be by others. It was clear that my Mother was far too concerned, to the point of social anxiety, about what other people thought of her or her family. She felt the shame deeply, if her children misbehaved in public. When I came out to my parents, though actually quite understanding, my Mother became mortified by the thought of other people's judgements of me and of her, should they find out. 

Showing off, or being proud of something you'd done, were considered as you getting above yourself, and discouraged. Both my parents, though kind and loving, were pretty hopeless at openly praising or encouraging you in your abilities or talents. Talents ran the danger of making you bigheaded or worse than that vain or conceited about your self importance. There was a tendency in my family to ridicule or pull you down a peg or two, if ever you were to be proud, positive, enthusiastic or confidently enjoying something you were doing in your life. These are all things I have had to patiently learn to be for myself, and to be actively open to accepting praise and admiration from others when it is given. Though I can still feel myself inwardly cringe first, before I graciously and happily acknowledge it positively with a thank you. This remains a place of practice.