Spiritual
reality: the open road to peace:
"We will drive them out and take their place."
David Ben-Gurion to his son, 1937.
"We
were supposed to be a light unto the nations. We have failed.
Avraham Burg,
Former speaker of Israel's Knesset, 2003.
Atrocities;
bombs; confusion; death; executions; hostages; killing; lies; murder;
orphans; prisoners; revenge; suicides; terror ..
And so on and so on, without end. For
the past ten years I have been trying to show that the two most important
secular developments in our history, mathematics and democracy, depend
on the same moral impulse: on sharing of knowledge, privilege and power,
whilst also - and this is the crucial part - allowing dissent. My own
belief is that this impulse comes from God - that it may even be the
direct effect of God on our evolution.
Progress is slow; but I and my colleagues
in Europe are getting others to notice that this connection is not only
important in understanding how best to teach mathematics, but that this
is important for democracy as well. Until recently it has not seemed
necessary also to insist that God may be involved.
But now our leaders have got us involved
in a war which they either do not rightly understand or, just possibly,
that they do not want us rightly to understand. Some of us are so cynical
and distrustful of their motives as to think it is really only about
oil. This has the merit of being simple as well as modern. Everyone
understands basic economics. The West needs oil. Clearly the West must
have what it needs. Payment is only one option.
Others claim that this war is really about
justice; that it is a very necessary war, a very moral, just and defensive
war against enemies both aggressive and immoral, people accustomed by
their history and their culture to conquer and sustain their power by
force.
Unfortunately exactly the same accusation
is made against the West by its enemies. When supposed opposites, which
actually are very different in all sorts of ways, choose to justify
their actions by describing the other almost identically, something
must be wrong with the analysis. There is no doubt that both sides see
the other as the enemy. But why? What is the real reason for their enmity?
Economic and military power are factors
traditionally thought most likely to determine their final outcome,
but the nastiest of wars have always been those in which both sides
have been willing to use any means to prove that they best understand
- and even control - spiritual reality.
This is what I think this increasingly
nasty war is about. 'Welcome to the real world,' was the mocking headline
of an Israeli newspaper reporting the carnage in Madrid. Welcome, indeed.
In this real world, the real war is about who best understands spiritual
reality. Anxious liberal atheists may fervently wish to believe that
religious fundamentalists are incidental to the plot. Actually they
create the plot, and are dragging us into a conflict which could be
terminally nasty for us all. This, by the way, is already in the stage
directions. Neither Das Kapital nor Mein Kampf promised the end of the
world. American Christians do. They have no fear. They call it 'The
Rapture'. They look forward to it. They do not need to care for a world
they are going to leave behind. But this danger is a very general one.
It is impossible to underestimate the capacity of religious zealots
to reduce others to the status of diabolized non-humans.
The simple question is, therefore: have
they actually got the plot right? The simple answer is: they have not.
Spiritual reality is all around us, and its influence, especially in
the modern world, is immense. It is not somewhere in another dimension
waiting for quantum physicists or cosmologists to discover; nor is it
a different level of consciousness yet to be achieved; still less is
it a special After-Death Resort reserved for an already chosen few.
The problem in seeing it is exactly the reverse of what most adults
believe. It is actually so easy to recognise that any child may enter
it and explore it - possibly finding this easier than most adults. It
is not that it is so small a part of life that only the enlightened
and adepts can perceive it. It is actually so big that they may wander
around within it all their lives without realising what it is.
Let me try to explain why this is so.
I was just 29 when I discovered, to my
very great surprise, that God really does exist. I am now 61. When I
first began to search for help with my new knowledge, the very first
of my advisers wanted me to lead a kind of national and even international
spiritual renaissance. He really thought I had that potential. At 29,
I did not. He was himself most impressive personally and, by my impoverished
standards, he was wealthy. He lived in a glorious old house on the Thames
at Kew and, although politically no longer powerful, he still had considerable
influence. He offered to place all his resources at my disposal. I refused.
I told him that I had too little to say. The world has always a surplus
of confusion. I did not want to add to it.
My friend at Kew continued to write to
me for years. I continued to disappoint him. Working alone to keep away
from 'the killers' that one very distinguished theologian warned me
lurked in every grove of academia, I was looking for something to say
that would be sufficiently obvious and powerful that there would be
no need for anyone to insist that it came from God. All the great philosophies
can be summarised in less than ten words. One might even argue that
no philosophy can become great unless it can be expressed in ten words.
I decided to limit myself to five. These five words should be as simple
and obvious and true a statement as possible. It should be able to do
good all by itself.
I failed. Nowhere at all could I find
any evidence for the truly awesome, joyous, exhilarating power that
I had experienced. Thirty years on it still thrills through me whenever
I think of it, as if I am still ringing imperceptibly, like a bell struck
hard long ago.
I was sure it must be possible to show
that this same power affects all human life: perhaps only over long
periods of history, no doubt with many setbacks and reversals, for evolution
works like this. It must also be mainly an unconscious effect; even
something that people might passionately argue is unnecessary! Somewhere,
I believed, I would find the evidence to argue that this effect assists
the evolution of mankind. In what way? Towards greater intelligence,
greater co-operation, and, of course, less violence.
And I failed. I found only anger, selfishness,
hatred, exploitation, misery, pain. You may say these have always accompanied
mankind; they are the dangers from which all civilisations must escape.
But here is our civilisation in which these monstrosities are claimed
to be essential as social and economic motivation. Even more alarming:
nowhere was any sign that science and faith - the two great universal
expressions of humanity's need for knowledge - might ever combine. Scientific
reason is clearly no more able to bring peace to all mankind than faith
has been. It has brought us the most frightful weapons, but the gulf
between the sciences and humanities is only ever deepening and widening.
Despite the exchange of sentimental offerings and generous gestures
towards reconciliation, neither feels that the other can actually teach
it anything.
Finally I decided there is simply no solution.
I had given up my search entirely, when I met again the love of my life
of nearly twenty years before, and she in her own way asked me to continue.
And within another year, I had found it.
I was never looking for a way to give
everyone my experience. It seems to require circumstances so special
that they cannot be orchestrated. Most crucially, it may not depend
on our decisions. We may not choose. We may be chosen.
My aim was therefore to find that something,
within the context of the most familiar and most obvious both to the
sciences and humanities, that no-one had noticed before. I thought that
calling attention to this oddity would at least start an interesting
argument between them. And this would at least bring them together.
The interesting argument I found is that
mathematics is fundamentally democratic. Every scientist and mathematician
knows that the sciences are only advanced by everyone freely sharing
their ideas, exchanging arguments, comparing proofs. Every citizen of
a free society should know that democracy is only advanced by everyone
freely sharing ideas, exchanging arguments, and comparing proofs. But
no-one but the specialist had apparently noticed before that this pattern
of behaviour is the same in both. Once it is noticed, the consequences
are inescapable. Taught properly, that is, as it should be, as intelligent
discussion, mathematics automatically advances democracy. Young people
grow up expecting to be informed, to be consulted, to be persuaded that
an argument is useful: not ordered to obey it. Since mathematics is
taught almost everywhere, changing the way that it is taught can advance
democracy almost everywhere; advancing democracy almost everywhere can
advance peace almost everywhere.
It was, and it still is, a sweet idea.
But it is too slow. It cannot happen soon enough. The belief that spiritual
reality can be reserved for a minority, that they alone know the path
to heaven, is wrecking the fragile balance of power and respect on which
democracy depends. The world, as usual, is not being governed by the
wisest amongst us.
Late last year I received a telephone
call from Dr Jean Staune of the Université Interdisciplinaire
of Paris. With doctorates in quantum physics and philosophy, Dr Staune
is an amazing man. Almost every year he convenes a grand conference
in Paris including a remarkable number of Nobel prize-winners to try
to find a better balance in the differences between science and religion.
He wanted to talk with me. We agreed to meet in Bordeaux. After a long
discussion there he suggested that I meet Dr Paul Wason, Director of
Science and Religion Programs of the Templeton Foundation. Born an American,
Sir John Templeton is now British. His foundation spends 40 million
dollars a year on character improvement programmes - and on research
into precisely these problems.
I met Dr Wason in the Green Park Hilton
in London in early December last year. I at once found him very friendly
and likeable, so that eventually I asked him a hard question. "So
the Templeton Foundation spends money every year on research, paying
hundreds of academics to create papers on science and religion for its
seminars and even subsequently publishing them?" He agreed that
the Foundation has done this for many years. "And how", I
asked him, "do you judge who is sincere?"
He admitted that this is sometimes difficult,
and I liked him even more for his candour. So then I asked him what
does Sir John Templeton really want.
He had told me that Sir John is 93. He
now explained that Sir John believes that only a fraction is actually
known at present of what may be called spiritual reality. By persuading
science to combine with religions, he hopes that this fraction may be
increased considerably, within the next hundred years.
This so astonished me that my own reply
was scarcely polite. "A hundred years!" I retorted. "We
do not have a hundred years. We have possibly 30."
"But," I continued, actually
without any further reflection, "if that is what Sir John really
wants, I can achieve it in his lifetime!"
"Give me enough money," I told
him, "and I will have every red double-decker in London, and other
buses in every capital city in the world carry a sentence that will
explain spiritual reality completely, to everyone, in a moment."
What I was realising - in this precise
moment - was that I had once again hit upon a fact that everyone should
see - and everyone does see it, for it is one of the most familiar facts
of our world. Yet everyone is too busy to notice what it means. I had
also not noticed, although it underlies everything that I have already
ever written about mathematics and democracy. And suddenly, in a tumble
of words, I was realising that it also underlies all the science and
religions as well. It is what unites them.
"Spiritual reality, you see,"
I told him, "is just sharing understanding. It is not difficult
to find, or difficult to define, or difficult to agree about. It is
actually everywhere and its influence is immense. Spiritual reality
only exists where people are trying to share understanding."
Giving instructions may appear benevolent.
It is actually taking control of someone else's mind so that they will
think and act exactly as planned. Instruction therefore always tends
to communicate certainties, and it is the collision of these certainties
that so often produces violence and wars. Good teachers do not just
instruct, they try to share their understanding with their students:
this, always together with their uncertainties..
The great discoverers in mathematics and
science have generally always done this. Openly, gladly, they have often
given away their most precious discoveries. But the founders of the
great religions have also shared their most precious insights just as
openly, generously, and gladly, in any way that they could, with all
whom they could reach. This is what connects the mystic and the scientist.
But at some time or other the same impulse connects everyone on Earth:
parents share their understanding with their children; children with
one another; every tea-house and coffee-shop is kept solvent by spiritual
reality. It produces every form of communication known to mankind.
I had reached about this point in my narrative
(this is only the 25th revision) when Christine, the lady who cleans
my classroom after school, appeared carrying her vacuum cleaner. We
often talk together, and she is not too proud sometimes to accept a
handful of the sherbet lemons I keep to bribe my classes. "I thought
you told me you was writing a book," she commented, seeing me tapping
away. "I was," I replied. "Now most of it is in a website.
I may still make a book of it some day."
And then I went on to tell her that this
writing is about spiritual reality, and how it is best understood. This
took only a few minutes.
"So," she said when I paused,
leaning on her vacuum wand, and shifting a sherbet lemon in her cheek
to make room for speech, "you mean that where there is spiritual
reality it is where people are trying to understand each other; and
where they are doing that, there must be peace. So - where there is
peace, there is also spiritual reality." She lifted her wand to
prepare for more cleaning. "It seems perfectly obvious, the way
you explain it."
I hope it is. The fact is that we and
our societies are the creation of spiritual reality intersecting with
material reality. It is all around us and within us. It can be found
wherever there is enough peace.
Go and tell it to others.
Colin Hannaford,
Oxford, March 2004.
(with thanks to my editor,
Herr J. L. Brosi)
The Seminars
Simply
because there is a clear and present danger that no-one amongst the
present 'leaders of the international community' can actually do better,
I am ready to talk about this 'open road to peace' at the Quakers' Meeting
House in St Giles, Oxford on a date yet to be decided later this year.
If you wish to attend, please phone 01865 793752 and leave your own
name and telephone number.
