The Phiroz Mehta Trust April 1995 Newsletter

A non-residential Spring School was held at Lillian Road on Saturday and Sunday 4th and 5th March.

Although 47 Lillian Road has been the centre for group meetings for some years now, this was our first attempt at a weekend School, and some doubts were entertained as to the size and suitability of the house, etc. In the event, however, all went extremely well. There was no overcrowding, the weather was kind, we were able to get out for walks, and at lunchtime we all sat and ate our sandwiches and salads.

We heard two tapes by Phiroz, those of 20th May and 3rd June, 1972, and we were also given a talk by Eileen Benson who spoke on the theme of personality, essence, and of our sense of “I”. This theme was continued on the second day by Ron Kett, who approached the subject from the viewpoint of the Gurdjieff and Ouspensky philosophies. Eileen also led a session of Chi-Kung. We had several general discussions about the work of the Trust, and there was also ample time for those who just wished for quietness and silence.

All in all, the School was a very happy time where we were able to meet together in fellowship and harmony. We hope to hold another, perhaps slightly longer School, later in the year.

Insight into Individual Living, a talk given by Phiroz on 27th March 1976, has just been published as a small booklet by the Trust. Each member is entitled to one copy free of charge, and should have received one with the last Newsletter, but if by chance you have not received it, please write in to the Editor to ask for one. The booklet is also available to download free of change from our website.

In the Aristotelian-Thomistic scheme, the soul of man is identified with the rational form of the living body, and God with the rational form of the universe. For Aristotle, “soul” meant the final form of the organism conceived as a causal principle determining its growth, development and characteristics. And for him, as it is also for the Thomistic Catholics today, the individual person was one substance, body and soul being its material and formal components. Aristotelian science shows also that the formal and final causes of all individual things fit together organically into a hierarchic unity and pattern. Goad conduct, “practical wisdom” as Aristotle called it, occurs only when man acts upon the basis of the scientifically verified hierarchical conception of his own nature. Since man, being limited, has only partly verified this conception, St. Thomas and his followers were able to express the distinction between reason and revelation in completely Aristotelian scientific terms. It is the function of revelation to make us continuously aware of the existence in perfection of the whole rational system or final cause of nature, which human beings, through science with its reason, know only in part.

We can now appreciate how the rational principle rises to dominance, in such a manner and to such an extent, that theology and philosophy and physical science, and the ordering of man’s everyday life come under its sway. To depart from the rule of Reason would almost be tantamount to treason against God. In Christendom, reason is exalted as man’s highest faculty, as the spiritual part of him, reflecting in some measure or other the Divine Mind. This contrasts with Indian teaching which postulates Spirit as something quite beyond the deep levels of the mind, something altogether over and beyond reason.

Modern science dethrones Aristotle. Copernicus, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and above all Newton found the new science. An atomic theory is once again propounded and Aristotle repudiated. According to the new science, sensed qualities like heat, colour and sound are the interpretations by the observer of different rates of vibration and do not reside in the external abject. So the question arises, what is the nature of the observer who projects back sensed qualities upon material objects, which in reality are devoid of these qualities? John Locke answered that the observer is an entity such that when the material objects in Newton’s mathematically defined space and time act upon it, it is conscious of colours, sounds, pains, pleasures and so on, in sensed space and time as appearances. This is precisely what Locke meant by a mental substance. It is a substance capable of consciousness which, when material substances affect it, is aware of qualities in sensed space and time as appearances. Thus reason in science and the philosophy of science provided Locke with “a new state of nature” and a new content for “the law of reason.” This prescribed a new idea of the good in religion and politics: namely, toleration rather than the theocratic rule of a Presbyterian magistrate or the divine right of the King’s Church of England, and popular democracy rather than Calvinistic theocracy or the divine right of kings defended by Filmer. As a consequence of the Lockean philosophical formulation of Newton’s mathematical science, the soul of man and the political person were identified with a single mental substance. The person’s body was, on the other hand, an aggregate of material substances or atoms moving in accordance with the mechanistic laws of Newton’s science. The person in his moral, religious and political aspects, and as the observer of nature, was the single mental substance. His body was his “property”, just as a house, similarly composed of material atoms, was his property.

Locke postulated each individual mental substance as being completely self-sufficient and independent. Hence each man, consulting his own soul introspectively, was the only judge of the correctness of his religion, and could not be shown to be incorrect by appeal to another man’s doctrine. Thereby Locke laid the philosophical foundation for the doctrine of complete religious toleration as a positive good, now taken so much for granted in several democratic societies.

Modem American democracy stems largely from John Locke. The celebrated author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, had scant respect for Aristotle’s political writings. J.C. Miller, in his Origins of the American Revolution, wrote, “If any one man can be said to have dominated the philosophy of the American Revolution, it is John Locke.” But Lockean philosophy also had its inadequacies, such as the impossibility of prescribing social. action for the good of the community, since each soul was a lonely mental atom quite unrelated to any other mental atom. Moreover, the philosophy had several other weak points. Locke and his successors — Hume, Berkeley, and the physiocrats Adam Smith, Ricardo, Bentham, Mill and Jevons — all influenced the shape and trend of Anglo-American culture in the direction of believing, and acting upon the belief, that good conduct, both for the individual and for the political and economic order, was free and independent individual activity, governed by the law of free competition. The ideas of Malthus and Darwin supported this view. Thus eighteenth and nineteenth century Christendom saw laissez-faire as perhaps never before or since in world history. America had no counter-influence derived from an ancient past. The only tradition governing the United States almost up to our own day is non-conformist Protestantism, and the Lockean and Humean laissez-faire assumptions of modern political and economic theory.

The contrast with Britain is stark. Graeco-Roman, Celtic and Teutonic influences, and both Augustinian-Platonic and Thomistic-Aristotelian Christian doctrine together with the rigidly authoritarian and hierarchic influence of the Church of Rome, went into moulding medieval “Merrie England.” Aristocratic socially, regal politically, and Roman Catholic in religion was English culture, like medieval culture generally. Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy in 1535 was intended to make the English people identify their religious loyalty with England; and with the inception of a Church of England with the sovereign as the Defender of the Faith, the severance from the Pope and the Church of Rome was sharply defined. But the attitude to religion as a whole — and this is the important point — was that a middle course should be steered between extreme Catholicism and extreme Protestantism. Edward VI’s reign exemplified the evils of extreme Protestantism, and that of his successor, Mary, of extreme Catholicism. But from the time of the great Elizabeth I, something like a tolerant, impartial attitude has prevailed, with a few exceptions here and there, during the last four centuries. And in Elizabeth’s reign, what was previously done for Catholicism by St. Thomas Aquinas with his Summa Theologica was done for Anglicanism by Richard Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity. This polity was anti-laissez-faire, and was organic and hierarchical; and though based on Aristotle, it also drew freely upon Greek and Roman classics, and Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Thus Hooker’s formulation was less rigid and more latitudinarian than St. Thomas’s, thereby marking the main difference between Catholicism and Anglicanism. The original ancestor in England of a Conservative was the Englishman who was a good patriot and a good Anglican, and who had a strong sense of responsibility for the welfare of all those who came under his wing. In fact, he contrasted somewhat with the Tory of later days.

Here we can appreciate the contrast between British democracy and American democracy. The culture of the United States, based so broadly on the Lockean idea of the equality of all men, tends to accentuate individual conformity and equality, and to regard government as a necessary evil. In Britain, partly due to Mill’s protagonism of individual uniqueness as being good, English culture fosters individual independence and differences, and regards government as a positive good, for it is the instrument for peacefully introducing and firmly establishing changes for the benefit of society.

Despite the changes affected by the advance of science upon political and economic conceptions, and upon social relations, hardly any change was made in religious beliefs in so far as belief in the Bible was concerned. Of course there had been changes in belief accompanying the theological changes marking the history of the Christian Churches. But it was not till the mid-nineteenth century that Darwin’s Origin of Species seriously shook belief in the literal truth of such matters as the Creation of the world as stated in Genesis. The materialist scientific attitude steadily gained ground, together with an ill-founded optimism that the mysteries of life would be unravelled in no long time, and the triumph of human reason would be absolute. Also, men’s confidence grew in what they called progress, a progress which would soon establish the millennium of happiness and peace and well-being.

The end of the nineteenth century gave man his first peepinto the new world of the atom, though alas! folding up the sky of this new world has been tantamount in some respects to lifting the lid of Pandora’s box. In the twentieth century there is Einstein’s Relativity Theory and his faith in the principle of causality, and there is Heisenberg’s Principle of Indeterminacy. Thus it appears that, whilst causality and predictability hold in the sphere of molar or macroscopic physics, indeterminacy and unpredictability hold in the sphere of microscopic physics. This does not mean that the world of the atom is a lawless world — it has its own mathematics, and mathematics lies under the sway of reason — but it does mean that the strict mechanical causality which we associate with the realm of molar physics cannot be associated in the same way with the atomic world.

I was somewhat dismayed when I was asked to write a brief report on my work as founder/chairman/teacher of the Elmwood Group for Human Ecology, established in 1954 and still functioning. How was I to convey in about 500 words a realistic picture of events in the following 40 years involved in teaching in so complex an area of human experience?

Obviously a historical resume is impractical and a full theoretical exposition impossible. I must, therefore, rely on a few snapshots of theory and practice in an attempt to convey something of the flavour of the work.

I came to see that there was a need to restate the ancient Eastern idiom into Western thought and practice. This led to a decision to teach by workshop method rather than by lecture.

Ecology is an established subsection of Biology which studies the evolution of natural environments and the interactions of the various species of vegetable, animal and human life-forms found in such environments. Human Ecology is a much later development of a specialized study centred upon mankind, working outwards to follow its interactions with the physical environment, and is about how mankind adapts to the constraints of the physical environment and modifies it to meet its goals.

In our group we extend the scope of the term “environment” to include the traditional view that mankind lives in three environments: physical, mental/cultural and spiritual. However, as the physical aspects are already extensively covered and understood, we concentrate on the less well understood aspects, known as mind and spirit. Hence the first three postulates upon which the framework of theory and practice are based are:

1. Infinite Beingness¹ is the sole absolute.
2. The primary attributes of beingness are awareness and causativeness.
3. The primary activity of beingness is the creation and organisation of energies.

I was astonished to discover in later years that the events in the story of Creation in the Bible, Old Testament, book of Genesis, chapters 1 and 2, follow this sequence.

My endeavour was to develop practical methods of enabling ordinary people to experience directly the reality of these postulates through learning and applying the techniques I devised in individual and group training workshops. The emphasis has always been on application of the individual’s discoveries to daily life on earth. As a result self-sufficiency is developed by members, making them independent of either myself or the group.

Within the limits set for this report, I can only close with a few examples of the outcome of this training.

In 1962 I was approached by two self-employed teachers of mentally and emotionally disturbed children to help them start their own school for “emotionally disturbed” children, based on the courses they had taken with me on Communication, Learning, Control and Perseverance. This gave rise to a recognised school called “The Link”, to which local authorities still send children who do not respond to other methods.

On one occasion, a housewife member of the group asked me for a book to read when going on holiday. On the spur of the moment I gave her a copy of the Chinese “Tao Te Ching” (circa 500 B.C.), although she had never heard of Taoism, nor any other Oriental philosophy or religion. When she came back after her fortnight with her family, she came round to me and excitedly waved the book at me and cried “This is what we do, isn’t it?”

An architect member of the group, employed in the Local Authority Housing Estate design department, of Camberwell Borough Council, introduced the, then, revolutionary principle of consulting intending tenants of the proposed estate as to their wishes for the provision in the design of facilities they thought essential. These were incorporated, and his article in “The Architect” journal describing his experiences and their outcome in the estate, aroused great interest, and changes of approach, elsewhere, from the usual “take it or leave it” attitudes current then.

In 1990 I demonstrated my meditation method to the assembled Abbot, monks and nuns at the Buddhist Monastery at Chithurst. Asked for reports on their experience with it, one senior monk said, “I have had this kind of experience before, but never so directly nor so simply.” In general it was accepted as a true expression of the spirit of the Buddha’s teachings. Others among those present at the demonstration have told me since that they use it during their daily meditation practices.

The same meditation technique is used in the schools in their morning assemblies. Recently one child in the school, aged 11, was particularly disruptive in class. No one liked teaching where he was present. However his dance and movement teacher, during his weekly lesson, took him through a simplified version of this meditation method. He loved it. Next week he rushed up to his trainer, bursting with pride. “Miss”, he said, “I did it at home all by myself and it worked!” Since, he has ceased to be disruptive. The youngest child practising at home is four years old, with his parents’ guidance, naturally.

Thus I have no new truths to reveal; only a simple method of revealing them.

Notes

1. “Infinite Beingness” may be equated with terms such as “The Ground”, “Tao”, “The Source”, “The Ineffable”, “Logos.” It was selected because it resonates with the familiar term “Human Being.”

We sit beside this pale seed
case left behind here…
wise husk, only the outer,
where if we looked carefully
we might still see imprinted
your folded spirit,
opened now, imago now,
never-ending,
neverwhere inwards but
all expansion,
all unfettered blossom.

Recently seen on the back of a tanker in the Ghanaian heartlands:

Highly Inflammable
Smoking Strictly Prohibited
Except God.