compressed infinitely into a multidimensional point of pain - a black hole from which there is no escape and to which all your life forces are sucked in.
I cannot describe the black hole to you, in it's awesome terror. No information can escape - the terror is locked in. All I have described, so far, is the outer reaches where my mind strays over the horizon of no return. The pain is the awesome tidal force, stretching living experience, as I am drawn inexorably towards the centre - the singular hellhole of nothingness.
Once inside, the world of pain is real to me but the rest of the world does not exist. We are two worlds never to meet. Mine is the world of indescribable unhappiness, and the other is the normal world of galaxies, suns and the blue planet earth with its teeming inhabitants - no longer accessible to me. All I have is my personal hell - the timeless pain sending my mind into a wild madness.
The great mystery is that I always escape. After an infinity of blackness, a tiny light appears. This is all that the black hole reveals. The tiny shining speck gets bigger and bigger, and then it suddenly explodes into a bright flaming ball. The heat is the first sensation I feel. My bones get back their life in the nourishing warmth. I am sucked into the light and become part of the whole. I am thrust forward with it, as it expands in a brilliant flash. I can hear the great bang of the explosion, as I re-enter time. I know that I am breathing. I begin to feel good. The beauty of the light nourishes my spirit. I feel pangs of elation. As I pass over the light horizon, I see a bright future beckoning. I am pulled along by the great thrust of positive energy. I feel warm and grateful to exist. I feel the future is a place I want to go to. I open my eyes. It is the rising sun dazzling in the east.
The attack had been shorter than usual. Maybe they were on the wane, or maybe it was the pills. I must carry them with me at all times, I thought. The sooner I took them, as I felt an attack coming on, the better they seemed to work. As my eyes took in the spectacle of the rising sun and the wild beauty of the cliffs, I felt a huge sense of elation. It was great to be alive. The life force surged back into my body and I suddenly felt ravenously hungry. Food had never tasted so good. Plain bread, cheese and a mug of tea, easily outdid the best gourmet experiences I'd ever had. The life giving nourishment was palpable and the energy coursed through my body. I was back in the real world.
When the stomach is sated, the mind relaxes. When the mind relaxes, the muscles of the body go limp and it is easy to sleep or to let the mind meditate.
I sat once more legs crossed on my mat overlooking the sea. I never tired of the wonders of this huge body of water that covered so much of our planet and gave it its colour. I watched the complexity of the waves as they rose and fell in a languorous crash onto the rocks below. The power unleashed had travelled who knows how far from the middle of the Atlantic, and now found release on the jagged rocks below me. Within this wild complexity, I wondered was there any purpose. Had the entire universe a teleology? That was the great question of life - of philosophy - had the world purpose? The word teleology is not used much used nowadays, perhaps because there are no definite answers - certainly outside the religious sphere. Its polar concept - eutaxiology, the idea that the universe has a cause, is equally rarely used outside of academic circles, but is equally important in terms of the great questions. Has the world got a cause?
The last few years were spent exploring and, like all the human race before me, I had reached no certainty, other than opinion or belief. This, in effect, was no better than the religious viewpoint that I so disdained. But that did not mean that I was about to give up. I believed that it is within the capabilities of mankind to decipher the mysteries of existence, and was convinced that the answers were more likely to come through scientific endeavours, rather than through metaphysics or theology. I was inclined to accept the current scientific offering of the so-called anthropic principle - that the universe must have those properties that allow life to develop within it at some stage because we, life, are here to witness it. This is more on the eutaxiological side of things. We are here, because we are here. A tautology. It doesn't do much for the metaphysical or religious posse. Some scientists go further and propose a stronger anthropic principle whereby they posit that life must emerge in our universe and will never die out. This stance has more teleological perspective, and is more amenable to those of religious leanings, in suggesting a purpose or design. I don't go so far in my own thinking because I see that, at the base level of life - the level of atom and molecule, there is no evidence of determinism. Rather the quantum theory, at best, gives a probabilistic view of the future, with no causal chain at all. True, that as you reach the macro level, the large numbers of particles involved leads to statistical laws, that seem to follow deterministic paths of cause and effect. But this is the illusion of our human limitations. If we could see and take in the world in all its teeming microscale, we would deny the concept of determinism.
But having said all that, I am aware that in nature there are, what seem to be, fortuitous constants that never change, through all eternity. Unlike life which is always subject to change through evolution, the basic fabric of the material world does not change, over the aeons of time. In fact, this is what in effect defines life - change. All life reproduces and changes in doing do. Why does it evolve - even though the basic building blocks, atoms and molecules, are time invariant and never change?
We, as humans, tend to see the development of the universe, before life was created, as an almost mechanical process. But once life enters the picture, we start to look for teleological explanations. The anthropocentric view sees the final end or goal of the universe as the creation of man. How conceited can that be? Man who has existed for such a short time, and who is fated to fade away from the universe, as the sun goes through its inevitable cycle, and kills off its life friendly planet in a ball of fire.
No, I think man has not such an exalted position. Life is rare and precious but its place in the overall scheme of the universe is not defined by this rarity. At most man can leave traces on his local solar system but, on the infinitely larger scale of the cosmos, he is invisible and whether he existed or not, has no effect or importance. Does this mean that life is pointless? Not at all. Life is still a wonderful, solipsistic voyage for each and every one of us lucky enough to be alive. We can still posit Kantian ethical goals as our ultimate final cause. We still fight for justice, equality, freedom from persecution, self determination and economic well-being. Those goals are more than enough to consume us, and give us reason.
It is curious that the goals that are relevant for the living world have no relevance for the material world. Maybe Kant was right in accepting that mechanical laws of cause and effect can be applied to the world of objects but, when it comes to the bio-world, cause and effect are no longer distinct. A more complex cause and effect relationship may be required - maybe involving teleology - a final cause. Once again the facile religious solution raises its head. But, we need to keep the more extreme forms of religion at bay. Perhaps the Chinese philosophical approach is more apt. The Chinese Tao and Confucianism lorded over two non-intersecting realms. Tao looked to the ordering of nature; whereas Confucianism looked to social order. Unlike the Kantian teleological view, Taoism is a spontaneous, ordering principle in nature. This is not that far removed from the modern quantum theory approach to reality at the macrolevel.
Where has all this theory got me so far? I admit that I am still very confused and searching. When I use the word searching to people, they immediately feel that I am searching for God. This is annoying as it is exactly what I am not searching for. I want a rational explanation of reality - not a metaphysical one, that can easily and unverifiably be posed by any crackpot - well-intentioned or otherwise. History has shown us that religions come and go, but we still persist as if they are fundamental to our understanding. True scientific theories come and go too, but they don't deny each other but welcome new and better hypotheses when they come along and are subsequently justifie
d by experimental prediction.
I tire of religious arguments. The closed mind is never open to new ideas, no matter how well proven and rational. The emergence of Creationism in the US is a real sign of how closed minds can infect the generations to come. When you firmly believe a dogma, you must fight for its acceptance by all, and therein lies the problem with religion. If one could have a liberal religion, along the lines of scientific theory whereby improvement and development is expected and sought, then the problems of religion might disappear, leading humanity into a new and greater phase of existence. Religion can never and will never be banned, but it must change. Alas, change is a threat to dogma and will always be. The only recourse is to take a relativistic view of belief and push dogma in the bin of history, along with other outdated or failed societal experiments.
But the dogma is deeply seated within us. I can remember as a child, unquestioningly accepting that I had a personal guardian angel. How could I not, when the towering presence of a figure, dressed in black robes and a white fringed hood, stood