image: donncha@inphotos.org

Rome collapsed and plunged the western world into a time of barbarism and the Dark Ages. No-one at the time thought “we are in the dark ages” and of course there were bright flashes within the Dark Ages but largely this was not a good time for the human race. Dogma, superstition and general ignorance thrived. Belief in an angry and malevolent Creator replaced the enlightened thinking and practices that the Greco Roman world had striven to implement and establish within the Western psyche.

Is our own culture or civilisation so well placed to ride the storms that will inevitably come as the looming energy crisis gets closer? Resources become more scarce and therefore more precious, oil breaks new records on a daily basis and the brief period of mass global transportation and the easy movement of millions of people looks to be coming to an end.

In order for our culture to continue it will have to find an alternative source of energy to the fossil fuel dependency that has come about since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. It began in England with the scarcity of wood that had been the fuel source for thousands of years and coal became the fuel that replaced it. Coal in turn fuelled the advent of the Industrialisation of human society and laid the foundations for the world that we now live in.

What is the alternative to fossil fuel as coal was the alternative to wood? Steam power created  levels of output and harnessed energy that had simply never been known before. What we face now is the apex of the Industrialisation of the world. Current levels of growth can’t be sustained as long as all the world’s people aspire to the middle class lifestyle of the developed world.

It may well mean that we return to the conditions more common in the nineteenth century, where travel was the preserve of the wealthy and the privileged. Our networks of roads on land and in the air may become obsolete as the fuel to keep them moving simply runs out. We may return to a more agrarian age when agriculture becomes the main occupation for most of the people of the world, seasonal eating patterns return and people return to eating only those things produced near to where they live.

Our huge metropolises and conurbations will, in these conditions, simply cease to be viable as the means to provide power and food for their occupants dwindle. This leaves us with the reality of huge overpopulation. A population that is massive, seven billion and rising, will need supporting and the means with which to do that will simply stop. I go to my local food store and pick up fruit from the other side of the world that has been flown to England in the depths of winter from New Zealand. Tomatoes from Israel, berries from South America, fresh produce from the four corners of the world. All this will stop.

Products that have been made cheaply on production lines in China will no longer fill the container ships that clog the world’s shipping lanes. The great container ports and hubs will cease to be viable. The disposable culture we have created, the one where it is cheaper to throw something away and replace it than repair it, will stop. The wardrobes full of clothes, the houses full of gadgets, all of this will cease. The acquisitionist culture whereby your success in life is determined by how many material things you can acquire before you die will be no longer tenable.

Should this scenario come to pass, how will the great nations distribute what is left among themselves? Will China and the USA sit down amicably and divide up the last few barrels of oil, tons of coal or cubic metres of natural gas? Will old grievances resurface, old resentments cloud the reasoning of negotiators?

Rome collapsed and the barbarians picked at the corpse of its civilisation. Destroying what it had become and plunging the western world into an era of chaos and anarchy. The stability and order that Rome had represented evaporated gradually and in its place came the barbarian hordes, Goths, Vandals, Visigoths, Huns, Ostrogoths and the various others who sought to fill the power vacuum that Rome’s demise created.

We cannot escape the fact that the world we now live in was forged and shaped by the Imperial and Industrial power of the Western nations. Revisionists try to wriggle out of this one but they can’t. The order we have experienced and benefitted from was built upon the anvil of  an inflexible will to grow and expand on the part of the West’s empire builders, whether nationalistically or capitalistically motivated. The politically correct cries of ’shame’ over this past are less than juvenile, they miss the point that in the urge for world domination, once the touchpaper was lit, someone was going to claim the podium, someone was going to get the prize.

Perhaps it oversimplifies the case but much of the anti capitalist, anti imperialist, anti colonial rhetoric is little more than sour grapes on the part of those who were not the dominant parties in this era of world history. The industrialisation of the world, more than anything else, shrank it. Suddenly the mills of Lancashire, the foundries of the Black Country, the shipwrights of the Tyne, Mersey and Clyde became integral to what was happening in India, China, Africa, the Americas, Australasia. Just as today a shopkeeper in Los Angeles sells goods from the Far East, Thailand is a playground for young Westerners, a social and economic model emerged that is based solely upon cheap and readily available energy sources that are about to run out.    

What will we be left with? The nightmare scenario points us toward the disintegration of society as we have come to know it, world history is full of such shifts so don’t be surprised at whatever the future may have in store, and a breakdown of the world order. Anarchy, chaos, competing fundamentalisms, and another ‘power grab’ by contemporary barbarians are possible scenarios. Some people are quite content to see this happen, but remember, when it goes, everything goes, not just the bits you don’t like, the whole thing goes up in smoke, good bad and indifferent. This is why sometimes it is necessary to endure the less acceptable facets of where we are in order to allow a smooth transition to where we want to be.

The case has to be made for a viable alternative to fossil fuel. Not something ridiculous, remember Mao’s initiative in the 50’s to build backyard furnaces as part of the Cultural Revolution and the damage done by that policy to the Chinese people. Remember the schoolchildren employed en masse to kill the birds that ’stole’ the crops harvested for human consumption and the subsequent plague of insects which killed millions through starvation because the food chain had been ruptured. So not some half cocked scheme, a windmill on every-one’s hat type thing, but a practical solution that is manageable and implementable.

One thing is certain, we will live through massive change in the coming decades, we will either advance because of it or it will confound us and we will witness social disintegration on a scale that we can barely imagine.

I see three viable options. The first is the sun, this is the giant furnace whose energy is, to us, infinite, let’s face it if the sun goes out we’re finished anyway. The second is tidal energy, I have written elsewhere of the huge power involved in lifting the planet’s oceans in some instances by as much as 56 ft. The third is the most controversial but, at this time, most viable and that is nuclear power; the huge stumbling block here is the volatility of nuclear waste which is extremely toxic.

If any or all of these three energy sources can be harnessed and a system of storage and distribution developed then our world may change for the better. Without this we are sleepwalking towards a precipice.  I don’t know what is at the bottom of that precipice, what I do know is that the world as we know it will disappear and be replaced by something none of us will recognise.    

image: jprowland

Understanding the internet is something that I’m trying to do. Of course it’s brilliant that we can interact with one another, there’s a kind of anonymity that allows people to be things that in the real world they’re not. I’m beginning to get it.

There’s a perceived safety that grows out of not having to commit yourself to anything. The brain is in its heaven here, it doesn’t have to do anything that it doesn’t want to. Including reading the next sentence.

So what is so compelling about this medium?

I think there’s an element of hide and seek. People trawl the net looking for answers. Some people allude to answers that they can’t provide and become thereby charlatans and fakers. There is always a ready audience of gullible punters.

As each new member of the internet family comes online they discover the Aladdin’s cave of treasures that awaits them. After a while they realise that it is just a circus. Another parade of smoke and mirrors.

Who in the human story has ever come up with the goods? If you know someone who has, then you hold tight onto the thing that they managed to capture.

If it’s some brainwashed version of some fantasy messiah then sorry folks, but that won’t do. I’ve got nothing against these guys but factor in the hopes and fears of thousands of years worth of devotees and you’re on a mainline to confusion. The opportunity for deluded perception is well in season where those magical figures of fantasy are concerned.

The internet is a place where there is a suspicion that answers or at least clues may be had. I find a lot of spin, a lot of marketing hype and a lot of less than honest representations. I genuinely hope that this thing may become a powerful tool for positive change in human affairs but at this stage, in its infancy, I find it a less than satisfying experience.

It’s great as a shop front. A salesman’s paradise but does it go any further?  If it’s a forum for people to be something they’re not then fine, providing they are something better and they can take the better person from cyberspace to the real communal world we all materially occupy together.

In this place, paedophiles can present themselves as twelve year old kids and access a world of innocence that they can only contaminate. I could present myself as being twenty one, six foot two and with the physique of an Olympic swimmer. Sadly, for me, none of this is true but you don’t know that. 

I think I’m slowly getting part of this internet game.

image: jorge sato

The Mechanics of Happiness is my blog. I am a writer who lives in England and this blog is a shoot from the hip collection of posts and articles all created to generate interest in the books that I write. I tend to keep my powder dry because, as a writer, I don’t want to throw away the keys to my kingdom, as I’m sure you appreciate. 

In this blog I post thought processes, ideas and recollections sometimes of the composite series of events and happenings that have come together to create the person that I am. The blog is unedited so I apologise to anyone who reads it who finds that the threads are sometimes off at a tangent but the themes are consistent and my sincere hope is that somewhere in this whole business there is something for you.

I value feedback and interaction. I will do my absolute level best to respond to anything you send my way as I believe that we are the beneficiaries of that which we issue into the world. Or: you get back what you put out there. I wish you the very best in your journey to personal growth and emancipation. It is possible, you are your own keeper and may absolve and free yourself at any time.

Be at peace, enjoy the ride, the road ahead is long but the rewards are infinite.

image: fort photo

Two questions, among the many, that are huge.

 How can a person to know anything? And how should they try to live?

To the former there are several answers according to various traditions. The most compelling for me is the empirical one, that is according to one’s experience. The only things you can know with certainty are those things that you have personal experience of. The call then upon any of us is to seek out experiences and to refine our own appreciation of the things that we encounter. This is not hedonistic sloganeering. The object is not to experience things merely for the sake of experiencing them, but to take oneself upon a progressive journey, one that leads somewhere and has definite objectives.

To the latter there are also many answers. Here I have alluded to The Good Life. The idea of right thought, right action or right being and right doing. Right in this context meaning most appropriate according to the level of experience and development of the individual. Not a pejorative right as opposed to wrong.

With age comes wisdom and the follies of one’s youth become clearer with the passage of time. An interval needs to pass between the action and the perception of the action in order for the membrane of connectivity to become weaker and have less of a hold upon you. Doing the right thing is often difficult at the point of issue, so much of  the journey into conscious being is about shortening the gap until there is integrity between the act and the motive. The act being the action and the motive being the reason why.

We live in a setting that clearly makes huge allowance for us given our apparent inelegance. We seem to make a mess of things and I suppose that is consistent with where we as a species or a race are in terms of our collective development. We bicker and fight, conflict with one another and generally seem incapable of harmonious co-existence.

Vast fields of assumption are cultivated by our indifferent and irresponsible attitudes. Pinpricks of light shine through the small acts of being that we are privileged to enjoy yet these things are subject to the whim of fortune and we proceed in an ever more precarious way given the continued unfolding of what we know.

If I look to a God for answers I see that there is none. There is no God that fits the monotheistic archetype, there is no omniscient being whose wisdom is imparted to me through special communion. Our age is finely balanced between the opposite ends of a pendulum’s trajectory. On the one hand there is a self serving hedonistic attitude and on the other is genuine opportunity to break through the membrane of the chrysalis that the human race is in.

A God that provides templates of stone and words to the wise is no longer an option. That may have been appropriate for a human race in it’s collective infancy but the landscape we occupy now is vastly different from the theme park that the monotheistic traditions sprang forth from.

There is only oneself in the Universe and the implications that arise from that. There is absolute consistency in the Universe and that is the greatest clue of all. There is an unchanging, inviolate set f holding patterns or templates around which the chains of molecules that form the Universe and the environment that we recognise form up.

We know this, and we know too that from the development of a child into its maturity there are specific stages that it has to go through. Consider the human race as a singular entity, like one person composed from the many billions of us. Each of our experiences is a small contribution to the aggregate of what the human race is. Where do you think, extending the growing child analogy, we are?   

I return to the opening questions, how can a person know anything? And how should they to live? There are answers and you will come to your own, what are they?

image: erik kolstad

Our lives are cathedrals of manifestation. Palettes wherein the colours of our experience are blended and what we do is daubed upon the canvas of our attempts to define ourselves.

We exist within a combination of fixed parameters with a fluid possibility. We have agency within our own lives and can be and do whatever we choose. Our early life is mostly spent in a churning maelstrom of confusion, chasing the prize - usually something indefinite and specific to each of us according to our own hopes and expectations.

With the onset of maturity we become more resolved to who and what we are and the thrusting urgency is replaced by a sense of tranquility. The true purposes of life may be contemplated without the external pressures of a world that is going slightly mad and demands that you go slightly mad with it.

Thank God that humans do not rule the Universe, or even the planet for that matter. There is currently some fantasy verging on mass hysteria doing the rounds at the moment about climate change and the influence that humans have upon this planet. The only thing you can change is yourself. You can surrender to the Universe and what made it but you cannot become a usurper and place yourself upon the celestial throne. Yet this seems to be one of the malaise of our time. An over inflated sense of the importance that we humans have in the scheme of things.

People\are told by an increasingly hysterical eco-lobby that everything they do has a consequence for the planet. True, everything does, a la James Gleick, have a consequence. The strain becomes more difficult to bear when one conclusion psychosis takes root in the collective mind of the human race. When the only conclusion for human activity is bad, when everything we do is a bad thing with dire consequences to follow.

At the end of the last ice age some eight to ten thousand years ago the sea level, as the ice sheet melted, rose by three hundred feet around the world. There were no cars, no industry, no bad humans to blame. Our lifestyle choices were not complicit within a sleepwalk into disaster, we did not author planetary change. If you study history you get a snapshot of comparatively recent events, always written, incidentally, from the perspective of the victors - study history and you will see quite quickly how the human story is one of conflict.

Study history in a broader context, that’s what we call prehistory, and you will soon discover that the planet we find ourselves to be upon has spent billions of years in a state of constant flux. Change here is the name of the game, the order of the day. Climate change, variation in the flora and fauna life here is an ongoing process. Latterly we have discovered this and like some child enthralled by a magician’s act we have concluded that we did it, we said ’abracadabra’ and set the whole thing up.

Responsibility has always been a marker of development. We have to be responsible for ourselves and the consequences of what we do. Hysteria has always been a marker of no development. We live in interesting times. Mass hysteria seems to be the hallmark of our age. Mass communication puts ideas into the arena that without foundation or context become like free radicals rushing around the bloodstream of the human race.

If you are to grow as an individual, if you are to escape the road to nowhere of arbitrary or random thought processes then understand the mechanics of the Universe. Study its laws, its cycles, therein lies the only true freedom. When you realise that you are powerless in matters pertaining to the planet’s own development or evolutionary journey then you can be free of the anxiety that the madness of misplaced culpability summons.

The human race will not be here for ever. It is not its destiny to be here for ever. We appear in a circumstance that we did not create and are sustained by a set of maintaining principles that we only fleetingly glimpse and have little comprehension of. We are here to grow and evolve individually and collectively. Having care for and respecting the setting we find ourselves in is a basic requirement, but understanding that we are visitors and guests here is a basic requirement too.       

image: bamboo village

Develop a strong moral compass. Base this upon consideration of what is appropriate or not. Ask the question, “What sort of person do I want to be?” You will have to build that person, create them, be them, fill their skin; nothing at the higher levels happens by chance.

Your experience is a series of returns, you get back what you put out there. Your attitude to your life will define everything that happens within it.

image: projectarchive.net

Normal is a state of mind. Whatever environment you grew up in was normal. This is why a full man can’t understand a hungry man, the rich can’t understand the poor. Not accurately. They can appreciate and sympathise at an intellectual level but true empathy requires for a person to have walked that walk themselves.

It is why rigid social structures prevail despite not promoting the best for everyone. It is, crucially, why we live in a world of such unequal opportunity. The imperative to change is not there in those who have power and those who do not have power have limited means by which to demonstrate their frustrations. Within each of us there is a desire to assert our own wants that manipulates us like a puppeteer does a marionette; what is necessary to bring about optimum circumstance is education.

A person with a strong desire but a weak education can easily become tyrannical over themselves and others. Without a sound education there is always the possibility of becoming the creature of whim or fancy. A sound education, in this context, is a well rounded interface between the individual and the world, an awareness of their situation.

This is why I assert that development is not a matter of where you are in isolation, but critically it is mitigated by where you have come from. Not in geographical terms although that is a factor too, but in the terms of the nature of the journey you have travelled between two points. Regarding biographical stuff, consider the following. 

My father was a violent criminal. A gangster who used firearms in the 60s, a time when gun related crime in the UK was a very uncommon phenomena. As a child I did not understand that not every-one’s father lived this way and I saw a world that for me was normal. The criminal underworld is a place of outlaws, a world within a world that has its own warped values, dispenses its own retributions for perceived slights and is a very unstable place indeed. It is composed of people on the make, on the run, looking over their shoulder, mistrustful of everyone and ruthless opportunists whose only loyalty is to themselves.

Not a nice place to be. My father spent very little time out of prison in my formative years and the time that he was out was always volatile involving the police, bail conditions, lawyers and a segment of society you would not choose to mix with . There is much written about criminality and criminal psychology and I do not intend to chip into that pool of knowledge. Suffice it to say that it creates a, retrospectively, strange perception of what life is about and how to be.

My earliest memories of my father were visits to various maximum security facilities around the country. These were surreal places usually located in the back of beyond that necessitated some huge effort to get to, we didn’t have cars when my father wasn’t around. When he was they were Jags, Bentleys and Rolls Royces but when we really needed good transport it was buses and trains and taxis.

It was strange to be searched, taken through seemingly endless locked doors and into various ante-chambers before actually meeting up with your dad. Sometimes it was through armoured glass and speaking through a handset and then other times, usually when a sentence had been passed, it was in  communal visiting rooms surrounded by prison officers.

Prison officers reacted differently to visitors, particularly children. Some were pleasant and seemed to understand the stressfulness of the situation and the uncomfortability of it. Others seemed to take an almost sadistic pleasure in demonstrating to either the prisoner or their family who was the boss and who was in charge. Perhaps as though they were demonstrating to you that they had your genetics sussed matey, and were ready for you. As a child it was impossible to understand when it came time to leave why your father couldn’t come too, if only just for a little time. This was raw, and the emotional roller coaster of being in a maximum security prison visiting room was always extreme because of the rapid peaks and troughs experienced.       

Strangely enough certain protocols exist between parents and children irrespective of circumstance. In a more traditional setting a parent might point out interesting features along the way. “That’s where such and such happened” or “That was where the xyz treaty was signed”, which then opens a dialogue and informs the child. In this setting it was pointing out notorious criminals or terrorists who had been on the national news. Murderers, rapists or IRA terrorists were pointed out just as famous buildings or landmarks might be.

In that peculiar world of bespoke moralities the terrorists resented being kept with the common criminals. Their crimes were, they reasoned, politically motivated and consequently set them part from crimes motivated by greed or psychopathic behaviour. I always found it odd imagining the conversation with someone’s parents whose child had been blown to pieces while they were out for an evening’s entertainment as opposed to the parents of a child whose misfortune had been to encounter some psychopath acting out their tendencies. The terrorists actually believed, at the time, that they occupied some moral high ground that vindicated their atrocities. Either way it was a disconcerting event to be in a room filled with these notorious murderers, rapists and criminally deranged individuals. Even more disconcerting was the eventual realisation that your father was ‘one of the lads’.

There are lots of individual episodes that I could recount, some of which are very harrowing, that created an extreme framework in which to grow up. All of which were treated by me as normal. I realised soon enough that visiting maximum security jails was not what my friends did and so I contrived the tale of an international businessman often out of the country and also a military man posted overseas. We moved regularly and I could count the number of schools in double figures before I entered a more stable environment.

I don’t wish to glamorize that world, it was and is a cess pit, the odds of coming out of it relatively unscathed are very long and the values and psychologies it fosters are not useful. To give it a context, when my paternal grandmother died my father was in prison. It is usual in such circumstances to allow a prisoner to attend the funeral of a parent on compassionate grounds. At the time the then Home Secretary intervened to block such a course of action on the basis that my father was such a danger to public safety that the risk of transporting him could not be justified. To me he was just my dad.

Why do I say these things? It’s simple really, a developmental journey is not a matter of where you are. It is a sequence of events that amount to a cohesive pattern. Crucially it is about where you have come from, success, happiness are all relative states. The journey you have taken is what defines your character, the experiences you have lived through delineate the trajectory of your life and add texture to the individual you are in the process of becoming.

This for me is a partial response, it is in many ways cathartic, to the enquiry why or how to you assess yourself as being able to comment upon happiness which, when all is said and done, is an allied state that travels among a conglomerate of positive and meaningful states that broadly define what I would call the Good Life. 

image: fotopusch

Happiness is not so much a destination as a journey. It is the culmination of a series of processes, namely growth and development, fulfilment and the inevitable state that summons. We struggle in the developed world with this equation because the pressures upon us are immense. The society we have created is far more complex than anything else that has existed so far in the human story and the need for success and to excel within that society is huge.

It baffles the best of us and you will meet few, if any, people who do not realise that there has to be a seed change in attitude, expectation and the method we employ to go about our lives. Happiness, it seems to me, is a fundamental requirement of all human beings. I believe that we are entitled to happiness but that this view is out of step with the engines that drive our culture.

Some philosophies would have you believe that the purpose of living is to suffer and to feel the suffering of all things. Some would have you believe that a messiah sacrificed their life to absolve you of sin and that you are therefore indebted to that messiah for your life. I believe that the purpose of life is to grow and to develop. To personally evolve and become the best that you can possibly be at whatever it is that you do. How you achieve that is a matter of choice, something else that I believe is a fundamental principle to being alive. Also that there is responsibility within that, responsibility toward others, to do no harm to other living things and to uphold a set of values that promote the best in others. 

Naturally I only touch base here. This area is, for anyone serious about their life, huge and requires a lifetime’s endeavour. Not a lifetime of graft and uncomfortably, but a lifetime of stretching to reach the next level from where you are at. It’s like a stairway, isn’t it? Each step has its preceding step, its step beyond and the step itself. They exist within an inter-connectivity that defines what they are.

There is an Irish joke about taking a journey. An old codger is asked the way to Kerry by some lost travellers and having given it some thought he says, “You know.. if I was going to Kerry, I wouldn’t start from here at all.” And that is what it’s like, development is a journey. We probably wouldn’t start from where we started but it’s our only point of departure and everything we do is relative to that originating point.

Why do I say that? Someone asked me what made me qualified to talk about happiness in a way that wasn’t a patronising, ‘I am happy, you should be too.’ It being that there is no formal qualification in happiness, no degree course or doctor of happiness PhD to be studies for the matter is one of subjective assessment. However happiness is, I believe, a fundamental requirement of all human beings in order that they flourish and prosper.

Development is not an easy option. Self improvement requires going through one’s life with a fine toothed comb and challenging whatever that process delivers up that is at odds with your intention to improve yourself. You are the author of your own story, you create your own reality and the truth for you is whatever you want it to be. That can be a main road to misery or reveille to wake up and live the life you truly want to live.     

image: josefnovak33

I grew up in the 1960’s/70’s. It was an interesting time. There was social reform and upheaval occurring all round. When you’re in it, you’re the last one to know it. What you encounter sets the parameters of your experience and defines for you what is normal.

It’s one of those big stick words, ‘normal’, because it means everything and nothing at the same time. Normal is for each of us an entirely different set of weights, balances, tensions, privileges, engagements and so on. Like everyone I grew up in a normal setting. What I was surrounded by was completely normal. In this I must establish a principle of third party anonymity, those whom I refer to whose opinions I have not solicited in this context. Normal in the sense that it was all that I knew, as indeed is the case for all children, irrespective of their setting.

This subject, as I have posted previously, relates to the context of my Mechanics of Happiness work. A kind of ‘who do you think you are?’ colours staked to the mast kind of engagement. I believe firmly that a person is measured by where they have come from not by where they are at any given time. It’s a bit like seeing someone as a two dimensional cutaway as opposed to a three dimensional being. If you only see where they are now, you miss the important part, the journey they have undertaken to be at that point.

Perhaps you are familiar with the old joke, how is it possible for an idiot to earn a small fortune? Start with a large one. I’ve always interpreted that as an inheritance joke, I may be wrong, but that has always put me in mind of certain people I’ve known who have managed to take a situation of privilege and abundance and create something very mediocre from that. Those who, in my assessment, have managed to turn something shining and bright into something dull and tarnished. Of course the counterpoint is also true.

There are those who have been dealt a duff hand and managed to extricate themselves from multiple impoverishments and place themselves favourably despite this. I refer here to their psychological. emotional, and material wellbeing and not just a reflection on their bank balance, which so often seems to be the only arbiter of success in our too shallow by far culture of materialistic values.

When I was older and had moved far enough away from the epicentre of my upbringing I began to understand it better and perceive it differently. The things that for me had become normal I began to understand were far from the western nuclear family archetype. But you only know what you know as a child, it is impossible to extricate yourself from your situation because you exist as the product of that situation and until certain faculties become active in the post-pubescent state, things such as critical reasoning, it is like trying to explain water to a goldfish.

My mother had me when she was seventeen. She was a product of, among other things, the Irish Industrial school system, a state run institution whose existence is something of a national embarrassment to the Irish. Essentially this was a form of social control and state sponsored slave labour whereby children were removed from their families for the most feeble of excuses and set to work in such areas as light industry, agriculture, laundry work and so on. The system was open to abuse, the children were themselves abused and an underclass was created in Ireland of those who survived the institution of the Industrial School system. Suffice it to say that these people came out the other end, and many did not, without an education and with a whole caravan of hangups and misconceptions about life and themselves in general. I cannot speak harshly enough about the monstrosity of this system and about the Irish authorities who have tried to minimise the phenomena and particularly the Catholic church who have been in institutional denial over the whole thing for decades.

My mother and her family fled to England to build a new life for themselves. I was ultimately a product of this. I shrink from calling them refugees but by definition this is what they were. It seems odd to call a family of Irish emigres to England refugees - there were no burning cities or war-torn wastelands - and there is such a relatively huge movement of people between the two countries anyway, but that is what they were. They, my mother along with her mother and brother, arrived traumatised by their experiences and desperate to make a fresh start.   

That my grandmother managed to get these two children out of the system is miraculous enough and took monumental tenacity and courage on her part. Many involved in the post Industrial School rehabilitation work had never heard of such a thing. My grandmother had been an orphan herself as a child and when her own family had been unable to keep her she was placed in the Industrial School system. So there were two generations of people whose experiences in their formative years had been less than ideal. My maternal grandmother held a healthy contempt for Catholic nuns and priests that I never understood as a child but became more clear as I discovered the situation they had all fled from. The Industrial School system was run by loosely assembled Catholic societies with such names as the Christian Brothers and the Magdalen Sisters that were, in many instances, no more than fronts for collections of sadists and paedophiles who sheltered beneath the veneer of respectability that these ‘religious societies’ were afforded by the Irish state.  

The detail of their story is a private one, though it is shared by many others who experienced similar indignities at the hands of this system. Suffice it to say that they took on board views, attitudes and psychologies that have stayed with them like parasites throughout their days. That they found themselves in these institutions was, bizarrely, a matter of shame for relatives who contrived to blame the children for their situation and shunned and disowned them. Indeed I only discovered this disgraceful history by chance well into my adult years and many relatives still deny point blank that it ever happened which is painful for those who lived through the Industrial Schools as it diminishes the validity of their experience.

These children were told that they were the architects of their own situation and that in many instances they were damned, destined to go to hell. I know that members of my family are still traumatised by this irresponsible indoctrination. They are very wary of the concept of heaven and hell, fearful of the supernatural reach of the church and shrug wistfully as if to say ‘it still goes on’ when the latest revelations about Catholic institutional abuse in children’s institutions hit the media as they wend their weary way through the courts.

The damage wraught by unscrupulous individuals in the name of the church or the common good or some other such spurious end has penetrated the psyches of these individuals deeply and left many of those children as damaged adults. I don’t really have words to summon the fullness of contempt that I harbour for individuals who can abuse positions of trust and responsibility they have been placed in ostensibly to care for lost children. If there is truly justice in this or any other world they will have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

OK so not a jolly post I admit but it has been said that a people who do not know their history can have no concept of their future. That is as true for an individual as it is for us all collectively. If we do not know where we have come from how can we know where we are and how can we know where we are going to?     

image: retro nerd

About happiness, it’s a state of mind. A self fulfilling prophecy that has little or no bearing upon external factors. It’s a strange, subjective place. The kind of place that summons images of Ingmar Bergman films and madmen laughing in the snow.

They do that because their own state is quite at odds with their situation. The art of living a fulfilled life is to marry the two states, internal and external, as closely as possible. The word is congruence, to have congruency in one’s life is a worthy and noble objective.

A wise man once said to me that true intelligence is knowing one’s situation at any given time. It is not about academia or even the school of hard knocks, it is the clear and certain knowledge of one’s situation. I know that I am a fool, lost in a structure of huge and awesome complexity. I also know that my life is sustained, supported and augmented by extraordinary grace and richness.

 Awareness of it is like synergy. A man can lift, say, 100 lbs. His friend can lift 100lbs also. Yet together they are capable of lifting 300lbs. There is a third and empowering force created by their co-operation, their working together. I believe that the Universe is like this. I do not want to get lost in the detail but suffice it to say that a human being who is aware of their situation and is open to the influence of the Universe becomes enhanced thereby.

They are capable of a far greater range than if they perceive themselves as being isolated and cut off from that which sustains and empowers them.  The devil, as the saying goes, is in the detail. When we become enmeshed in the minutiae of our own situation it becomes like a fog that traces our very being, a haze and a confusion. Did you ever see Enter the Dragon? Bruce Lee breaks off from his meeting with Mr Braithwaite to attend his student, Lao. The index finger is respectfully but firmly raised and the explanation ‘It is Lao’s time’ is given. 

Bruce Lee points and asks Lao if he sees it. Lao, playing the stool pigeon, dumbly asks about the finger whereupon Lee slaps him on the head with the admonishment, ‘Focus on the finger and you will miss out on all that heavenly glory.’ And this is profound, this is esoteric in the movie; in the world this was Bruce Lee hinting at the keys to the kingdom. Indeed certain sources have suggested that Bruce Lee was killed for pulling the curtain too far back, but that’s not for here, that’s a conspiracy theory for another place.

This is our situation. Focus upon the detail, miss out upon the bigger picture. You are familiar with the saying, ‘ X couldn’t see the wood for the trees’. The Universe is our home, it is the place we were built to handle, to deal with, yet so often the wit and faculties of an individual are poured into bouts of profligate navel gazing.  Surrender to the synergistic dialogue between ourselves and the Universe, draw strength, energy and inspiration from the certain knowledge that there is something greater between ourselves and the ultimate answer than we are yet capable of perceiving.

Because we do not see it does not mean that it does not exist. Love the mystery, love the enigma, it cherishes us and welcomes us as children of its purpose. If you are not inspired by this, you may be lost already.