Cassandra Voices

Tag: Charles Dickens

  • Banksy and Protest Rights: The View from The Robing Room

    As I sauntered from the Old Bailey past the RCJ the Banksy painting caricaturing a judge attacking a protester was no longer even a ghostly shadow, but it very much remains in the public domain, after reports emerged that it had been reported as criminal damage.

    On September 25, on Old Brompton Road, a comprehensive exhibition of Banksy’s work opened, which brazenly included the mural stencilled onto a different surface. This raised all sorts of issues about the commercialization of art and the edge of protest, not to mention whether or not he should be prosecuted.

    Based on Fiat Justicia, Mr Bansky faces prosecution for the recent RCJ Mural as criminal damage. I also hear he may be charged with being in contempt of court, leading to his long anonymity being exposed. Being named and shamed is another feature of our hysterical times.

    Recently, a bit like the opening to a P.J. Wodehouse novel, an erudite discussion was held among learned friends in the robing room of Hove Crown Court, steered by the most venerable member, as to whether the t-shirts, now selling fast, of this auspicious work should be deemed the proceeds of crime. The consensus was that in the U.K., post-conviction, the seller is responsible. Perhaps that is fanciful, but you never know.

    Policy considerations were also broached, such as whether in prosecuting him would you create a martyr that would lead to more t-shirts being sold? Would the state then be complicit in facilitating crime not least by increasing his revenues.

    Charles Dickens, his work the subject of many copyright violations and thieving particularly by Americans in his lifetime, expressed the view in Bleak House that it was far, far better to have nothing to do with the law. Well, it is certainly far better for the law to have nothing to do with Banksy, or is it?

    The consensus in the robing room was that given he is profiting from the mural, there was a strong argument for a significant fine, with the trial perhaps being conducted through in camera proceedings, preserving his anonymity, with any receipts being diverted back into the criminal justice system.

    Further, the venerable member concluded that he was inciting protest. The discussion took place over an entire lunch, and if any of us were briefed it would have occupied many days of court time, but should it occupy any court time at all is the real question?

    Mr Banksy, I am reliably informed, arrived at around 4-5am masquerading as a delivery truck driver. There was just enough light to use his meticulously prepared stencil. It is not now simply guerilla art, but increasingly reflective on worrying times. Many people are in on the act.

    The recreated version of the mural by Diiego Rivera, known as Man, Controller of the Universe.

    Diego Rivera

    Among the greatest painters of murals was Diego Rivera. His famous mural in the Rockefeller Center in New York was taken down because of his cheeky insertion of Lenin contrary to the edicts of one of the citadels of world capitalism. They destroyed it in violation of copyright law. An integrity right protects a work from being destroyed, mutilated or defaced or put it in an inappropriate setting.

    Examples of violations include colorizing a black and white film such as The Maltese Falcon (1941), or including ad breaks during the Monty Python parrot sketch, or inserting cover ups of nudity, such as even in the Sistine Chapel, but outright destruction is rare. Indeed, there was uproar in Berlin when some of the murals on the Berlin wall were destroyed.

    The Banksy mural was an insertion of overtly political content in a work of art, and the destruction or censorship of protest art has always been a feature of oppressive regimes. So, was the reaction disproportionate or ill-thought out?

    Mr Banksy is a national treasure, and frankly as great an artists as any in England since Lucien Freud. I suspect any prosecution will backfire or has, revealing institutional incompetence and hubris.

    The Banksy mural has significant political implications and presents authoritarian judges and the state cracking down on protest, not least in response to legitimate public outrage over Gaza, but what’s good for the goose is also for the gander. It is legitimate political art, but the regulation of protest as opposed to protest art is more complex now.

    Jasper Johns’s ‘Flag’, Encaustic, oil and collage on fabric mounted on plywood,1954-55.

    Protest Rights.

    The flag of St George is also copyright protected, and very similar to the flag of Switzerland and indeed the Red Cross, but it has been traduced by maniacs spreading hatred and division. The visibility of the flag has increased significantly across England.

    It is now the case that English, Irish and indeed American national identity is as fragile as the American flag fractured and loose as in the Jasper Johns painting. The Irish tricolour is also a symbol of unity of green and orange, but is now potentially divisive. Extreme nationalism, along with racism, is one of the scourges of our time. It is a reversion in my view to the 1930’s – symptomatic of a new dark age.

    There is, of course, a marked distinction between genuine patriotism and the revival of tribalistic, exclusionary and racist nationalism. Not all patriotism to reference Jeremy Bentham is the refuge of the scoundrel.

    But racism and chauvinistic nationalism go hand in hand and generally morph into fascism. The target is the excluded other, now the immigrant. Nigel Farage is now proposing to remove those without a settled status.

    Timothy Snyder recently came off the fence in On Freedom (2024) labelling the alt-right fascists, after considering the etymology of the term. But is he also an enabler given some of the neoconservative views he has expressed?

    Let us cease bandying about anodyne terms like crypto-fascism and use language with precision and exactitude. There are now fascists and a gathering mob, but this has been engineered by, and is under the control of, others. Who then are the enablers is the crucial question?

    Is Banksy an enabler? I am not so sure

    Source: BBC.

    London Protests

    On the streets of central London recently I was reminded of three things: John Reed and Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), his blow-by-blow account of the Russian Revolution; the scene in Cabaret (1972) where, semi-fictitiously, Christopher Isherwood decides to leave Berlin after hearing a version of Horst Wessel being sung. Finally, surveying the hate-filled eyes I was also reminded of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935).

    I would argue that a similar species of Irish hatred is more vicious but far less powerful in electoral terms, bu there is now a real danger of the extreme right winning power in the U.K..

    Dozens of police officers were injured at the protests, yet only twenty-five arrests were made.  The counter demonstrators, understandably smaller in number, were non-violent, and let us be clear that a right to protest is intrinsic to democracy. Peaceful protest that is, an idea as old as Gandhi or Martin Luther King. Yet there were 500 arrests made at the peaceful Gaza protests in early October.

    This casts the right to protest into doubt, or at the very least demonstrates a need for greater regulation and proportionality. The insurrectionist riots and arson attacks on accommodation related to asylum seekers in Ireland in recent times is also a case in point, demonstrating the necessity of regulating (violent) protest.

    The Just Oil protesters, with others to come, were convicted under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 (PCA) of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance, in response to the M25 motorway disruption in November 2022. Judge Hehir dismissed the defence of mere political opinion and belief as excluded from the present English legislation.

    That decision undoubtedly opens a dangerous vista, but the crucial question is that of whether a demonstration potentially causes harm, and that one clearly could have caused harm, and it certainly caused a significant furore and inconvenience.

    “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”

    Orange lily

    In the famous common law prosecution orange lily case Humphries v O’ Connor (1864) plucking an orange order lily from a woman in the nationalist area of Belfast was deemed a justifiable police act and regulation of protest, as the offending lily had the potential to cause a breach of the peace. This occurs when an individual causes harm, or if it is likely that they will cause harm to another individual or property, or if it puts another person in fear of being harmed.

    As Shakespeare put it in Sonnet 94:

    For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
    Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

    But what harm or public nuisance has Banksy caused? He has frankly adorned RCJ with better artwork outside than there is inside. Is it really an incitement to protest in contravention of the law or a protest to survive?

    Ronald Dworkin, towards the end of his career, wrote an article on the Right to Ridicule peculiarly appropriate to Banksy. There are, for sure, limits, such as Enoch Burke silently or not so silently protesting outside his school. He is not an artist and most decidedly frankly a nuisance, disturbing children being educated. So perhaps certain forms of protest should be consigned to Mountjoy. But there are also demonstrators from Stop Oil, Gaza Extinction Rebellion residing, perhaps excessively, in custody in the U.K.. Now, perhaps a great artist in will be in there next. But that mural was created before 150,000 people turned up in central London.

    The great political artist of our time, a private and ostensibly decent man, should not be publicly prosecuted for making legitimate points of criticism, with a drawing that Goya Picasso, Schiele or indeed Hergé would have been proud of. Hergé’s TIN TIN books were about the Manichean divide between good and evil. So who is the demon today, the contemporary Captain Haddock?

    Banksy deserves an anonymous knighthood not public humiliation. He should be known by his self-designation and not outed by a magistrate’s court.

    Whether he should pay a fine for profiting commercially from the mural is a different question. After all, would he not approve of charges being pressed against the fascist mob that attacked the police?  Perhaps any proceeds should go to police wellness programmes?

    In the film Cabaret the Isherwood character says: “do you really think you can control them?” Well, Banksy do you? And are you encouraging them or inciting the mob, the robbing room sagely discussed.

    It is crucial to realize that the Populist alt-right and indeed at times the extreme left have served to reduce speech and protest rights in an increasingly vigilante age, and now use protest to destroy democracy. So be careful about admonitions of judicial crackdowns even through art. For many are using democracy to destroy the social democratic consensus. And fringe leftist protests such as Just Oil are not much better.

    So, the legal arguments about disproportionately cracking down on violent or even peaceful protests certainly are no longer as clear-cut as the mural might suggest.

    In the robing room the venerable member concluded that perhaps an arbitral solution might involve a private settlement, i.e. a charitable gift. But none of that settles the regulation of the right to protest, which is now increasingly fragile.


    Feature Image: Banksy mural, 8 September 2025.

  • Reform or we are Scrooged

    Often dismissed as ‘worthy’, but perhaps overly wordy, products of the nineteenth century, the novels of Charles Dickens retain great wisdom argues human rights lawyer David Langwallner, who explores aspects of the author’s work to inform an understanding of contemporary challenges.

    Dickens and the Law

    Jaundice and Jaundice drones on. This scarecrow of a suit, has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least; but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes, without coming to total disagreement as to all the premises.
    Charles Dickens, Bleak House, (1853).

    It remains the case that real compassion should animate my legal profession, not the enduring casuistry and competition that Dickens observed in his time. This is not fake compassion but such that reveals a refined understanding of the human condition. This should also feed into judgment. Above all else a judge should be compassionate, occasionally bending the rules to achieve a compassionate result in the circumstances of an individual case.

    People often leave courtrooms with a burning sense of injustice, having had their lives ruined. Compassion mitigates such unpleasantness, curbing the excesses of an imperfect system. Legal advocacy should not all be about winning, although in the heat of battle it may seem so. Ultimately, it is about the service of justice, and what happens to the poor misfortunates presenting in court, who are not so very different to those of Charles Dickens’s time.

    This idea was beautifully expressed by the legendary English barrister Sir Edward Marshall Hall In 1894 when he defended the Austrian-born prostitute Marie Hermann, who had been charged with the murder of a client; Marshall Hall persuaded the jury that it was a case of manslaughter. Although he made full use of his oratorical skills, the case is best remembered for an emotional plea to the jury at the end: ‘Look at her, gentlemen… God never gave her a chance – won’t you?’

    Of course the law of equity permits, indeed requires, a judge to do justice or equity. This involves finding a solution suited to an individual case. Thus, injunctions are discretionary remedies. Many, though not all judges, take this responsibility seriously. He who seeks equity must do equity.

    In a sense the maxims of equity are the moral bedrock of the legal system. They exist in principle but often in our Courts of Chancery alas – particularly in highly expensive banking cases – lawyers often behave like those observed by Dickens in Bleak House.

    But what chance today for the little person against the deep corporate pockets? Should the poor still have to submit to the humiliation of requesting for one more spoon of gruel? Charles Dickens may yet guide us through the spectral forms of the legal past, present and yet to come.

    Lawyers Abound

    Illustration for “The Children’s Dickens: Stories selected from various tales” (1909) London: Henry Frowde and Hodder and Stoughton by Gilbert Scott Wright.

    Lawyers appear in no less than eleven of Dickens’s fifteen novels. Some even resemble human beings, though not pleasant ones. Uriah Heap from David Copperfield (1850) is a ‘red-eyed cadaver’ whose ‘lank forefinger,’ while he reads, makes ‘clammy tracks along the page … like a snail.’

    Meanwhile Mr Voles from Bleak House is ‘so eager, so bloodless and gaunt,’ that he is ‘always looking at the client, as if he were making a lingering meal of him with his eyes.’

    Dickens, like Kafka, that other great writer about the law, was experienced in the trade. Aged just fifteen, he was hired as an ‘attorney’s clerk,’ serving subpoenas, registering wills, copying transcripts. He went on to became a court reporter: for three formative years commenting on the chaos of the Victorian profession. At thirty-two he filed his first suit against a pirate publisher, and would spend most of his life lobbying for copyright reform.

    Dickens’s response to one copyright suit, expressed to a close friend, might serve to encapsulate his entire view on the system of justice in his time: ‘it is better to suffer a great wrong than to have recourse to the much greater wrong of the law.’

    Greedy Businessmen

    Bleak House best presages perhaps our day and age. Spare a thought this Christmas not for lawyers, but lay litigants dealing with receivers and bankruptcies. Are we really saying to families this year that if their homes are repossessed that they and their children will be put on the street?

    Then there are the Christmas stories including the seminal A Christmas Carol (1843) with the notorious Ebenezer Scrooge, the archetypal dishonest and exploitative businessman, wholly dedicated to the pursuit of profit at the expense of others.

    Scrooge is not an isolated example. Dickens’s oeuvre is populated by an array of greedy Victorian businessmen, such as the infamous Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times, among a plethora of unscrupulous lawyers who, as a profession, are on the receiving end of the full force of Dickensian odium. It is the culture of greed and human exploitation that most strokes his ire.

    Famously in A Christmas Carol Scrooge Is visited by ghosts of past, present and yet to come. In an unlikely twist of fate, the miserly man of commerce recognises the perversity of his ways, especially in his treatment of Bob Crotchet and his destitute family. Scrooge repents –  deus ex machina – after a ghostly visitation by his ex-partner who he drove to an early death, and also a pitiful vision of the the Cratchet family should he persist.

    Scrooge and Bob Cratchet

    Dickens was the great chronicler of the instabilities and social malaise of Victorian society to which our current age of increasingly unchecked capitalism may see us return to. This theme was taken up by George Orwell in ‘How the Poor Die’ (1946) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and he lauded him thus in another piece:

    Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated, and, more than this, the very people he attacked have swallowed him so completely that he has become a national institution himself.

    Thus Dickens spoke for the poor of Victorian England, and is the prototype of a public intellectual, having not limited his writing to fiction.

    Debt Laden Age

    In terms of our debt-laden age David Copperfield is also peculiarly relevant. Mr Micawber defines the difference between happiness and unhappiness after he ends up in a debtor’s prison:

    My other piece of advice, Copperfield,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘you know. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.’

    David Home illustration from Character Sketches.

    The abiding message is to take care of the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves. It seems a foretaste of Thatcherism – the penny-pinching approach to government of ‘Forthright Grantham grocer’s girl’. This is the commoditization of everyday life, where one’s income is an index of one’s happiness. This idea has clearly penetrated into Mr Micawber’s consciousness, as indeed it has been largely internalized in our present age.

    Invariably still, it is the little man or woman who meets trouble, with ever disproportionate inequality and wealth cartelization threatening economic and ecological meltdown.

    And in Dickensian fashion, the super-rich or the banks ‘too big to fail’, the speculators and lawyers who have facilitated dodgy loan instruments work away safely in well-appointed homes at a far remove from the consequences of their actions.

    Since the last recession, especially under David Cameron in the UK – but perhaps especially in Ireland after the EU/IMF bailout – austerity measures were used to balance the books and pay for costly mistakes at the behest of large corporations that then preyed on the economic debris.

    Christmas Chronicler

    To revert to Dickens as the supreme chronicler of Christmas. If someone has the temerity to present themselves like Oliver Twist with an empty bowl and ask for more will our modern day workhouses permit another spoon of porridge?

    Or will they ask: ‘are you not happy with your existing pile of gruel – the charitable food banks that ease the conscious of the rich?’ Now with Covid-19 restrictions in full force diminishing most incomes – but especially those least well off – many now need a bit more, just to survive. This should involve chasing down the artful dodgers in the large corporation, who have picked a pocket or two avoiding paying their fair share of tax.

    George Cruikshank original etching of the Artful Dodger (centre), here introducing Oliver (right) to Fagin (left).

    Yet it is still open to those in authority, like Scrooge, to mend the error of their ways and reflect on how incompetence, greed and neo-liberal norms are destroying the social fabric. Indeed in some respects social distancing seems a perfect neo-liberal ploy, allowing elites to remove themselves entirely from the great unwashed, or diseased ‘other.’

    Copyright

    Finally, one of Dickens’s bugbears was the impact of pirate printers on his book sales, especially in the unregulated free market of America, where outright banditry took the place of copyright law. On his first visit to America Dickens incurred the wrath of the Boston press by lobbying in what was supposed to be a polite after dinner speech for international copyright regulation.

    In Hartford Connecticut, in a hushed voice, he revisited the theme. In a voice likened to thunder, he claimed Walter Scott would not have died in penury if such a law had existed. This brought howls of rage from the press galleries. Dickens was, however, defended by the legendary Horace Greely of The New York Tribune with the Delphic phrase: ‘who should protest against robbery but those robbed.’

    This is the situation that many in the music industry find themselves in today, as platforms such as YouTube and Spotify offer few rewards for artists, who are now no longer even able to play live gigs in our current time.

    Occasionally noble sentiments in preserving intellectual property are carried too far. Thus, as Irish Senator David Norris pointed out, the James Joyce estate sued the living daylight out of anybody who had the temerity to breach copyright. This allowed his grandchild to profit from the labour of a long deceased author. Joyce passed away in 1941, but the copyright lasted another seventy years until 2011. Author’s rights should be protected but not excessively.

    Dickens in New York, circa 1867–1868.

    Yet to Come

    At least this Christmas – which alas may be the grim version of Scrooge’s dark imagining – we might use the down time wisely and take a dusty copy of one of Dickens’s tomes from off the shelf. Readers are sure to find guidance for the times we are in. Then perhaps 2021 will be a year when we begin to mend our ways, like Scrooge himself.

    Featured Image: Dickens’s Dream by Robert William Buss

    Admirers of Charles Dickens may wish to support London’s Charles Dickens Museum Appeal. The independent museum has been forced to close its doors during the Covid-19 Pandemic.

  • A Voice from the Cocoon

     

    Here’s Mr Pip, aged parent”, said Wemmick, and I wish you could hear his name. Nod away at him Mr Pip, that’s what he likes.
    Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

     

     

    Dickens’s Aged Parent, or ‘the AP’, looks contented as he pokes his fire. Most of us locked-down septuagenarians, I suspect, are restless to escape to some kind of normality, albeit a ‘new normal’, that is largely unknown. Meantime we amuse ourselves with the supports of modernity, media, reading and the infinite offerings of the world wide web, as well as absorption in whatever tasks are necessary and permissible, gardening if we’re lucky. The bottle banks may also have a tale to tell.

    Few are free from undercurrents of anxiety, more or less severe. How long will this go on? What will the reckoning be? Mass unemployment, social unrest, collapse in asset values, savings emasculated?

    There are other fears. If this can happen, then what else?  The same or different? Fresh outbreaks of the virus? If world financial systems can somehow be made to cope with this emergency, suppose there’s another around the corner.?

    We can have a gnawing sense that our civilisation got things wrong, that it is being, somehow, punished. A year ago I heard a retreat-giver say that we had lost the ability to read the signs of the times.

    We had belonged, or thought we belonged, on a planet that although under threat, and although subject to disaster more or less randomly distributed, was broadly on a path of progress, of improvement, even for under-developed regions. Nature mostly provided balance and harmony.

    Modern science reinforces this optimism at the cosmic level. We now know that the total universe that includes our Milky Way as one of nearly a hundred million galaxies has been expanding since the Big Bang. But if the rate of its expansion had been even a millionth of a percent slower, the whole thing would have collapsed, imploded in upon itself. There was fine tuning.

    Now trust is at issue with a particularly severe jolt for the Western world.

    It could be said that most of our strategies of coping are in the nature of distraction. To the extent this is so, the underlying unease remains. Call it dis-ease in fact.

    Foreshortened Horizons

    Speaking personally, the experience of being herded into seclusion as a 70-plus, brings home as never before, the sense of foreshortened horizons. Are we to lose a whole summer, that we can ill afford to forego, before illness strikes or the grim reaper shows up? At times the lockdown can feel like a dress rehearsal for the real thing. Heretofore, our unconscious aim may have been, as I heard the poet David Whyte express it, to get out of life alive. Yet he also warned: “Reality can be terrible when there’s no time left to say goodbye”.

    Is there an alternative, some place where an AP can go, while staying put?

    Let nobody mention God in this largely post-religious society! The theology of the Deus Absconditus might be a fit?

    Willigis Jaeger, Benedictine friar and Zen master, died on 20th March 2020 in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis, at the age of 95. This is perhaps a suitable moment to invoke his wisdom.

    Jaeger was regarded as a mystic, and got into trouble with the Vatican authorities in the time of Cardinal Ratzinger, when it was said that he was subordinating dogmatic teaching to the mystical path.

    Jaeger’s declared aim was to unite the wisdom of East and West, incorporating recent scientific findings.

    In his book Timeless Eternal Wisdom[i], he wrote:

    A completely new religious sensibility is awakening in society today. We can only hope that the rigidity ingrained in many religions can be overcome, so that oneness, interdependence, inter-relatedness and love can be experienced … Love is the founding force of the universe. The individual can attain to this realisation by retreating to a place of peace and rest from time to time and, dare I say, by engaging in the practice of the spiritual way.

    In Buddhism the pathway is Zen, in Hinduism it is Yoga, in Islam it is the way of the Sufis, in Judaism it is the Kabala and in Christianity it is the way of the mystic.

    ‘Mysticism’ was defined by Jaeger as a state of ‘empty oneness’.

    Mindfulness Revolution

    This writer will not make the mistake of attempting to teach that which he has not yet learned. What might be called a ‘mindfulness revolution’ is well under way. Fundamental to all such practice is meditation and there are a variety of teachers on and off line who propose particular methodologies.

    As is well known, the invitation is to work towards a personal stillness, the development of a capacity to be present in the moment. It is perhaps fair to say that a core element of the practice is to still the workings of the intellect or rational mind, which is usually in alliance with the ego. In fact it might be said that in the Western world, the human being has tended to become a thinking machine, powered continuously by media in its various forms.

    Since our thinking capacity is virtually unstoppable, recourse is had to a device, a support – a focus on breathing, or repetition of a word (mantra) or, simply, inhalation and exhalation of the breath.

    So many people, when discussing the value of meditation, will say, I could never be still, my mind is too active. As one who has persevered with this for twenty years, I can only say that the same is true for me. What one realises in time, however, is that each time the subject becomes conscious of a new distraction, and returns to the support, something useful has happened. We have rehearsed what it takes to be less identified with our thoughts, more open to whatever it is that is more.  The goal, if there is one, is detachment.

    Detachment

    Detachment, it might seem runs counter to another stated aim, that of cultivating the capacity to be present, in the Now, as it is said. But in truth what is called for is a presence to self, to body, feelings and mind, and that is not possible save from a place of some detachment.

    Concerning the difficulties of attaining a level of detachment – or disidentification – Joan O’Donovan, O.P. has written encouragingly:

    We may not be able to disidentify, but we can become aware of how we are identified. That is to say that at the level of our everyday personal self we can begin to be aware of how identified we are with achieving, with seeking for affirmation, with self-justifying. We can practice becoming aware of all this in a non-judgemental way, without even trying to change or improve ourselves. We are simply aware. This simple act of awareness can be an amazing catalyst, because once we become aware of being identified, we are no longer identified.

    She stresses however that this kind of self-awareness is not something we acquire by our efforts, because it is already in us.

    It is an inner knowing that we can allow to emerge, a latent power of mind, a heart knowing of ourselves, a subjective knowing in which we uncover our own compassion, a compassion that goes from self to others. [ii]

    Inducements

    The direction that is being taken here does not promise any of the satisfactions of the world-ego.

    Yet Jaegar does express what might be thought of as inducements!

    We need to enter into a new dimension, a dimension of the unknown emptiness which is beyond all ego-activity.  Anyone who breaks through to a deeper all-embracing level of consciousness will find new answers and develop a new understanding of life. Only in this dimension, beyond all rational understanding, will we find real meaning and purpose in our lives. Only when we experience who and what we really are – a timeless being at one with the essence of all beings – will we find answers to the questions of life and death.

    The person who can enter this deep stillness will undergo a transformation. In this peaceful resting stillness something happens. The quietude changes us. This quiet is the place from which intuition arises. Decisive ideas are born here. They are not the product of discursive thought.

    Although emphasising the value of spiritual practice, Jaeger was in some ways dismissive of religion. He was much influenced by the teachings of Meister Eckhart who was both a mystic and a theologian (and, like Jaeger encountered condemnation from Rome).

    Jaeger defined spirituality as “a path to a trans-personal, trans-rational, trans confessional level of experience, where true reality is found”. But he considered that the true meaning of religion lies in the experience of this primary reality, a reality that has nothing to do with rational personal consciousness and lies deeper than all images and concepts.

    He saw rituals and ceremonies as important, insisting that religion finds full expression in our daily life and that the experience of the essence of our true being permeates all life. He saw the value of maintaining linkage with mainstream religious traditions as a protection against our going off the rails.

    He believed, however that a new language is urgently needed in the religious sphere. ‘I come across numerous people who can no longer understand the traditional language used in Christianity. The conventional images no longer speak to them or touch their hearts.’

    The Truth

    Part of the problem, perhaps, is that spirituality is a difficult subject to address: Mike Boxhall, a unique spiritual teacher who died in 2019 wrote: ‘Anything you can say about it is really not worth saying as what is said will be words about something, not the experience itself, and will therefore be a concept. A concept is about a truth and is not, and never can be, the Truth.’ [iii]

    A spell in the cocoon, perhaps – especially if fed with periods of silence – may afford us a sense of having made some little progress on the path, and perhaps initiate a practice that would serve us well in our residual time. We may have the possibility to discover a self that is more than our everyday self, and in so doing, to exchange New Life for Old. [iv]

    A Great Expectation for an AP, or any OAP?

    Kerina yin (wikicommons).

    [i] ISBN-13: 978 – 3466368877 706 4

    [ii] Unpublished paper:  The Way of Meister Eckhart

    [iii] The Empty Chair 2012,  ISBN 978 1 84624 706 4

    [iv] This is the title of a compact book on this whole subject by Vincent MacNamara, a great influence on my life. ISBN 978 1 78218 019 7