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 The Teaching Arm of St Francis Community                      

STATE  OF  THE  WORLD  FORUM

PURPOSE  AND  DESTINY

Lindsay  Mell

State  of  The  World  Forum
Occasional  Paper  2007/3

ACADEMY OF THE WORD
September  2007
‘People don’t believe in nothing – anything will do

Living’s the lie they tell, but they might as well 

When there’s nothing left to lose. 

If people don’t believe in mystery – then they don’t believe their eyes

So there might be more mystery in life than I can see 

And I might never have realized.

Some people live in fear of the mystery of dying

Some people give the mystery of their lives and stay alive.

Oh, but that seems so hard, and how I’ve been scarred

So I surrender and see the man survive.

Take hold of me, hold on to me

As I reach beyond the fantasy, take hold of me

The choice is mine, though I can’t define what I’ve found this time

Take hold of me …’ 

[Intended as a reflection on insights from Gilbert Keith Chesterton]

‘If Love Had Its Way With Me … 

It would weave a tapestry of rich and subtle promises

That would some day be untied.

If here in the dark of me, Love made its mark on me

If Love lights a spark in me – If Love has its way.

What has been won in me, what has begun in me

If Love has its way ? …  

So I will take these threads that time has left me with 

And I will bind them ‘round the dreams that life has blessed me with

Holding my future and my past, I will cast myself adrift upon this sea

Completed in the Love that flows around me …’ 

   People and If Love Had Its Way – songs written and performed by Peter Campbell 

Dedicated  to  Destiny  and  Purpose

There are many perspectives associated with the themes of purpose and destiny which I have already brought forward through these ‘State of the World’ Forum seminar presentation papers. 

The point of this particular contribution is not to attempt to review, or even provide an analysis, of this previous work. 

Rather, my quest through this current work is to reveal an implicit continuous and relatively consistent association of purpose and destiny – universally and personally. 

This association proceeds from an essential relatively common source of endeavour through which enough of a providential element is apparent for the distinctive contribution of each and every person to be cultivated, sustained, and realized accordingly. 

Consequently, from the broader dimension of human endeavour, banal notions of chance, luck, or even fate, are essentially irrelevant.  Rather, destiny becomes a quest realized through socio-personal cultivation and interpersonal interactive collaboration.  This then becomes the epitome of our personal and universal sense of purpose. 

All these deeper facets of human endeavour are ultimately sustained through whatever sense of faith in humanity and ourselves we can each and all muster to proceed with our endeavours – our life journey, essentially. 

Our respective beliefs will epitomize and represent the nature of our faith – collectively and personally. 

However, given the basic compromised complex aspect of humanity and collective endeavour, it is pertinent to consider this phenomenon of our life journey as a form of struggle lived in a context of somewhat fraught adversity. 

Recently, in May 2005, our good colleague Dr Carmel Davis of the Humanities Division at Macquarie University presented us with a marvellous overview of the principles inherent in, and social implications of, the classic iconic novel written by Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), entitled Brave New World (1932).  

This work has famously become a reference point in the extrapolation of social development since it appeared. 

However, it is noteworthy that Brave New World was certainly not Huxley’s final word on social and personal development, as I have already revealed in my consideration of his later work The Doors of Perception (1954) through my ‘State of the World’ Forum analyses. 

Actually, if we were to seek to cite a form of ‘last word’ from Huxley, the most pertinent source would inevitably be his novel Island (1962), which is far more extensive and comprehensive as an insightful projective socio-personal analysis than Brave New World. 

Huxley is positioned in a palpably substantial context as being basically among only a few ‘between the World Wars’ transitional social thinkers and intellectuals who retained something of an antecedent influence from the English/ European 19th century romantic ethos.  Yet, in proceeding from this background, Huxley was able to live substantially beyond the Second World War period.  Another social analyst from the Germanic tradition in this ilk, in a somewhat varied professional context, would be Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961).

Essentially, Huxley sought to carry forward this vital transitional ‘between the Wars’ element in socio-personal analytical continuity, which was substantially evident contemporary to Huxley through the work of D H Lawrence, H G Wells, George Orwell, and thence realised further afield in a professional sense through the work of Marcel Proust, G K Chesterton, George Santayana and Alfred North Whitehead, among others. 

The basic difference ? … All these prominent analysts/ theorists/ commentators departed from this life either before or immediately after the Second World War. 

Huxley lived on until 1963, and with his departure a whole facet of analysis whereby the prospect of deep aesthetic perception was blended with a robust socio-personal ethos as a predominant continuous transitional human phenomenon proceeded to diminish, from my perspective. 

Accordingly, we have reached enough of a palpable crossroads in our life journey collectively for this noble quest to be renewed from a humanitarian perspective.  The recent analysis proferred by David McKnight, which is entitled Beyond Right and Left (2005), through my intricate juxtaposition of this with vital excerpts from Huxley’s Island, serves to reveal how implicitly pertinent is this work from Huxley, even in the specific social, cultural and personal context of contemporary Australia.         

 

Spontaneous intuitive trust in the moral context

Throughout his work Beyond Right and Left, David McKnight configures what he terms ‘the culture war’ in Australian politics and society as ‘about dividing your opponents on the basis of issues about values’ (2005: 136).  

What this perspective basically relies on is an assumption through which the whole aspect of duality permeates contemporary notions associated with issues and values such that effectively these interpretive realms are polarized.  

However, given the restive fraught nature of public populist interpretation, during the 1990s ultra-pragmatic era, this ever prevalent interpretive scheme became a dichotomy whereby an issues-based method or disposition predominated. 

This was a phenomenon I examined comprehensively in my 1998 seminar presentation paper entitled Issues and Values – The Reality (March 1998) well before McKnight’s evocation of this theme in Beyond Right and Left.

Nevertheless, McKnight concedes, ‘It is rare for politicians to openly debate their success in terms of morality’ (2005: 137).  

Yet, as he points out, this seems to have become the contemporary ground of ‘political discourse’ (137). 

Meanwhile, by the 2004 Federal Election, the Howard Government had proceeded to ‘campaign on trust’ (138), according to McKnight.  

‘The strength of this powerful word [or what could be further posited as a term which implies an attribute and/or quality] was that it was capable of meaning both trust in ‘economic management … but also capturing a less focused public desire for this quality in daily life’ (138). 

Such reliance on a purified homogenized general sense and/or perspective of ‘trust’ is common in socio-cultural discourse.  Financial and corporate agencies purport inherent reliance on just such a generalized quality.  But what they are actually relying on would be better stated as commitment, loyalty, and indeed even more basically, investment and interest, or return on investment. 

However, actual trust can be considered further as essentially the spontaneous, intuitive and sporadic quality and/or attribute I have revealed it to be throughout the course of my ‘State of the World’ Forum seminar paper presentations to date.  

Then this would pose ‘trust’ as a much more profound, intricate, and often more substantially elusive phenomenon than perhaps most politicians, theorists, corporate and media commentators tend to presume or suppose it to be. 

This preoccupation with so-called ‘trust’ derives from concerns which pertain to ‘security’, or rather the perceived lack of trust, McKnight considers (139 ff).  

McKnight cites the late 1990s study of sociologist, Michael Pusey, which found widespread ‘moral anxiety’ among people considered representative of ‘middle Australia’ (139).  

This further served to substantiate my already cutting edge analyses in this field, researched and prepared for the then Safety House Association, nationally and in South Australia, from 1989 to 1992, particularly as published in my primary study report entitled Personal Security in the Community (July 1990). 

McKnight extrapolates on such concerns: ‘… people worry about their job security, but also about quite different, less tangible things [so-called] (2005: 139-140).  One is cultural identity … Globalisation has been seen as primarily an economic event, but its cultural impact is arguably more dramatic [for instance] … 

‘[There is] also a philosophical confusion and incoherence about which values and which ideas constitute a progressive standpoint in Australia today.  To win a culture war, a political force must exercise intellectual and moral leadership (140) …’ 

This sense of a quest for moral political leadership in the context of profound socio-personal insecurity is echoed or adumbrated through Aldous Huxley’s work Island in the form of the constant calls for ‘attention’ which permeate his novel, and the associated pragmatic injunction to persistently address the ‘here and now’ realm of existence.  Even though the complexity of interpersonal security in this transitionary time seems to basically render people as ‘climbing almost in darkness … by [blind] faith … [and through] sheer despair’ (1962: 12). 

Prospectively, if as people we could be encouraged through the appreciation of our circumstances, we would gradually become more aware of our plight, and realize that, although we each have ‘fallen’ as a people incorporated and included in our common humanity, nevertheless actually we have not fallen ‘very far’ (17). 

Then perhaps hopefully our aroused ‘memories’ would be ‘less painful’ and our earnest authentic expression would come ‘more easily’ (17). 

Cultural politics is about what I have termed ‘resonance’ in the socio-personal and political context – that is, ‘what strike[s] a chord with many people’, along with ‘feelings’ and ‘emotions’ (2005: 141), for McKnight.  While, as all these elements are about political considerations, they also thereby represent what I term is ‘relevant’ for people.  The dilemma is that hitherto such elements have been essentially politicized ‘through articulating issues’ rather than ‘values’ dimensions, perspectives and priorities, as I revealed through my 1998 Issues and Values ‘State of the World’ Forum seminar paper presentation (March 1998). 

Since then, values considerations and concerns have become primary elements of the predominant socio-personal political perspectives, but these are cast through dualised and polarized dichotomies of ‘ideas of right and wrong’ (2005: 141).  Just as the preoccupation with ‘issues’ agendas has basically stymied prevalent values interpretation, analysis and clarification. 

This phenomenon culminates in a deep pragmatism which infuses Australian and United States socio-personal and political perspectives which, for me, McKnight seems to skate over, and/or ostensibly doesn’t substantially appreciate. 

For instance, he maintains where these ‘nations’ are concerned,  
‘Both developed industrially and politically without all the weight of custom and culture of tradition-bound societies in Europe’ (142).  

Even though,  ‘Both are new nations in historical terms, which began as colonies of the British’ (142).  

For me, such a perspective and/or analysis belies the preponderant influence which particularly British colonial values have had, and continue to have, on the Australian and North American cultures. 

It is a common presumptive aberration that in these hitherto ‘late modern’ times we have somehow broken free of all our entrenched antecedent cultural influences into some form of grand socio-cultural independent moral epiphany, cast in the name of ‘freedom’, and less overtly of ‘national sovereignty’. 

However, any dilution, and therefore potential denial, of who we have come to be through the inexorable continuous, relatively consistent incremental cultivation of historical circumstances and situations will only eventually culminate in profound perplexity, confusion and resentment. 

This is why United States ‘conservative Republican, Patrick Buchanan, in 1992 was actually relying on a particular radical interpretation of such antecedents when he ‘… issued a call for ‘a religious war for the soul of America … as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as the Cold War itself’ ‘ (144).  

Further, this is why an element as fundamental to any socio-cultural fabric as ‘cultural diversity’ was ‘successfully portrayed as [a] conscious and zealous attack … on the values of Western civilization during Clinton’s presidency’ (145). 

Whereas, in Australia, Paul Keating’s ‘Big Picture’ of ‘… national pride to project a republic, constitutional reform, environment policy, reconciliation with Indigenous peoples and progressive social policy’ did not really languish because ‘it failed to strike a wider resonance’, or that it ‘felt imposed from above’ (146), as McKnight claims.  

Because indicators of the Australian voting constituency before the National Referendum on constitutional reform, and on the republic issue then, revealed broad support for the initiative but confusion over how it could be implemented.  

It is noteworthy here that many Australians are of Irish, rather than British, descent, and these would correspondingly probably favour an Australian republic. 

However, Labor’s ‘Grand Alliance’ of political and social interests ushered in essentially what I have termed an ‘Age of Pragmatism’ which served to sever the continuity, consistency, and therefore the relevance and resonance of the incremental cultivation and progress of the socio-cultural fabric and web.  Because,  ‘Unlike the ideology of class politics, this alliance was not based on any underlying philosophy or a unifying set of ideas’ (147). 

Socio-political pragmatism based primarily on issues perspectives and orientation enabled politicians who comprised the Howard Government to even jettison Westminster democratic convention and commit Australian resources to an ‘Iraq war’ for which there was minimal support from among the Australian people. 

Such evasion of the pertinent linkage of discerned values with issues, as the context of the profound and intricate socio-cultural fabric and web, or pattern, serves to emaciate the redolent perpetuity of destiny and purpose.  

Otherwise, the inherent continuity implied would serve to verify and vindicate the resonance and relevance of socio-personal and cultural contributions.  

While the emergence of any comprehensive interpretation which predicates how these contributions could pertain to the substance and continuity of the whole universal context would characterize how a providential element is evident as an antidote to mere so-called fate or luck. 

However, for such affirmative endeavour to proceed, memory and sentiment in the context of the continuous collective/ personal life journey must congeal and gravitate around the imperative to ‘perceive and understand’ not just through our ‘own eyes and mind’, but further seeking to recognize and realize the perspectives of others (1962: 28).  

Consequently, such perspective enables ‘the incomprehensible sequence of changes and chances that make up a life’ to be considered through the ‘divinely significant pattern of human destiny’ (30).  This constitutes the ‘great river of life … flowing silently and irresistibly into ever fuller life’ (33). 

When John Howard declared,  ‘We learn from our history, and we build on it …  But we should not deny or misrepresent it’ and accused Paul Keating of ‘attempting to rewrite it’ (2005: 147-148), what he failed to acknowledge in this respect was that each of us needs to be able to interpret our history in our particular ways so we each can be and become aware of our distinctive contributions to our history and heritage, and the significance of these, following Gadamer’s thesis. 

This distinctive awareness will thence necessarily influence and configure how we explain our history and expound it.  The point is for this endeavour to be continuous and consistent with the broad context of the socio-cultural pattern, fabric and web of human development. 

The historical ‘rebalancing’ McKnight considered was an initiative of Left ideology was analysed by him as ‘legitimate rebalancing [which] took place (and still does) in a situation in which nearly all Australians desired some kind of national identity of which they could be proud, or which held moral truths (148) … 

Unadulterated criticism of European settlement was seen as sneering at ordinary people who simply wanted something to believe in’ (148), according to right-wing commentators. 

Relying on a predominant notion and perspective of configured balance, prominent commentator, Robert Manne, argued,  ‘A test of our maturity as a nation will be whether we can find a language equal to the complex strands of our history’ (149).  

But such presumptive analysis as cited in this context still fails to come to terms with aspects of the derivation of perception and consciousness, along with reality and experience, as phenomena.  The significance of these I have interpreted and analysed extensively throughout my most recent several series of ‘State of the World’ Forum seminar papers.  

These works reveal that such perspectives and phenomena cannot validly be explained through language and associated codes, as the terms of such analysis are always open to interpretation and revision.  

Rather the phenomena in themselves constitute the valid, relevant and resonant ground for interpretation. 

Correspondingly, McKnight shows how Howard has configured the terms of the debate around socio-cultural developments by invoking the term ‘battlers’ – ‘… the families battling to give their children a break, hardworking employees battling to get ahead, small business battling to survive, young Australians battling to get a decent start in their working lives, older Australians battling to preserve their dignity (149) …’  

Whereas, as I maintained in my previous May 2007 ‘State of the World’ Forum seminar paper, what is really going on in life is more pertinently considered as a ‘struggle’ for survival and recognition among all people from all socio-cultural and personal situations and backgrounds.  Couching this phenomenon in ‘battle language’, as this is often termed, serves to misconstrue the essential nature of the original innate human sentiment. 

As quoted by McKnight, Judith Brett argues that notions and perspectives of ‘class’ no longer ‘connect with the lived experiences of people’s daily lives, when they provide them with explanations of their place in the world’ (150).  

Yet such a perspective serves to minimize the place of collective perception and consciousness in this, along with the fundamental subliminal influence of antecedent notions of class, which always influence the everyday experience of people as this comprises the socio-cultural structure in which they live.  

To ignore such influence is to misconstrue history by considering it through a reductionist lens and/or perspective. 

Moreover, paradoxically, so-called ‘political correctness’ (151) may well epitomize what is really the quest for what is good as the moral and/or ethical endeavour of the life journey.  This is therefore surely a noble mandatory quest in life.  While whatever is social, cultural, even personal, is by implication thereby necessarily political in nature and aspect. 

Therefore, it would seem justifiable to enquire of Phillip Adams, from this perspective, as to what would be the problem of being ‘urged to conduct our arguments within approved parameters’ (152), when, after all, we are only being ‘urged’ to do so.  

Indeed, as he then admits, ‘… much of this [‘political correctness’] was perfectly in order.  Discussions could be robust without being offensive … yet there were times when I grew impatient (152) …’ and so on.  

For me, such frustration and/or resentment would be eased if those concerned applied principles of equilibrium, along with dispositions and/or attitudes of authentic equanimity to their paradoxically fundamentalist response and reaction to what are basically often earnest and noble moral aspirations labeled cynically as ‘political correctness’. 

Construed through the narrow utilitarian form through which Phillip Adams is cited as interpreting such banal ‘political correctness’, such a form is thence often constrained into the realm of ‘good doing’, as Will Farnaby expresses this from the Palanese Notes on What’s What (1962: 39).  

Whereas, the corresponding affiliated perspective of ‘Good Being results in the most appropriate kind of good doing’ (39).  Otherwise,  ‘We can be virtuous without really knowing who in fact we are’, or simply be ‘just pillars of society’ (39).  Hence, through ‘… the reconciliation of yes and no bred out in … acceptance … we can realize ‘What [or Who] in fact [we are] (38), as we proceed through our life journey and/or quest. 

Thereby, paradoxically, this culminates in – 

‘Challenging the wildness, and … complementing it’ as we ‘come … to terms with it’ (32).  Because,  ‘Conflicts and frustrations are the theme of all history’ (39). 

This constitutes the context of ‘renewal’ through which ‘Good Being become[s] a continuity’ (39), as resonant with my interpretation of the continuous consistent trajectory of history and its significance through our life journey. 

So we are admonished to ‘be aware’ (40), intuitively and consciously, ‘in every context, at all times and whatever’ (40), thence to remain true to ourselves in authentic equanimity relative to what would otherwise become ‘the senseless ambivalence of history’ (40).  Thereby to remain ‘the complex strands of our history’ (2005: 149), impervious to our awareness and acceptance from our entrenched resistant perspective.  Such as through some notion that we are all ‘battlers’ inveighing and contending with our situations as if these represented arenas of entrenched competition, or playing fields, for instance (149). 

Rather, authentic awareness and realization is essentially intuitive and spontaneous in nature and aspect. 

Situations rather than circumstances in the social movement quest

Meanwhile, McKnight reviews the culture agenda of the New Left 1980s and 1990s socio-political developments which accompanied assertions of ‘political correctness’.  

‘Social change was blocked not by armed force, but by comfortable beliefs and values which in sum constituted capitalist culture and ideology (153) … 

‘By contrast … new social movements [and groups] … challenged the values and beliefs of dominant culture and ideology … [Hence] new ideas fed into policy documents and the platforms of political parties … [This] success was testimony to the power of ideas to change material circumstances.  But as time went on … Revolution became routinised; fresh ways of looking at the world became dogmas.  It became compulsory to be sensitive to gender, race and ethnicity’ (153). 

However, this was ‘… not driven by the pressure of a mass movement or a majoritorian party’ (154), as was noted as being a vital needed element throughout the material developed for the 1996 Community Project Large Life public awareness campaign. 

A ‘liberal strategist’ for the ‘1999 republic referendum’ put the ‘No’ case as ‘ ‘… [the] greatest chance ever [for people generally] to vote against all the politicians, journalists, radical university students, welfare rorters, academics, the arts community and the rich, that, deep down, they’ve always hated’ (154) … 

Symptomatically, in this context,  ‘Rather than experiencing liberation, some began to experience disintegration.  Rather than feeling free, they felt fractured … [through] the loss of stable families and stable jobs and the ebbing of familiar truths’ (154).  

Hence people questioned whether a secure society could be retained through the prevailing ‘social and cultural agenda’ (155).  ‘Would a secure society be stable ?  Cohesive ?  How would it hold together ? ‘ (155), Michael Walzer was cited as asking. 

While in response to Ken Wark’s perspective of people sensing socially and culturally through ‘aerials’ rather than ‘roots’, McKnight proclaims:  

‘People do have roots and their aerials often choose Golden Oldies, not the latest or trendiest tunes’ (155).  

Regrettably for McKnight,  ‘The libertarian impulse has been absorbed and magnified by the materialism of the post-war boom.  Personal gratification has trumped personal obligation’ (155).  

Invoking the work of Lindsay Tanner, McKnight considers:  

‘Our most pressing problems are a reflection of insufficient social order and security, not an absence of personal rights and freedoms … A rethinking is needed, based on new ideas valuing social relationships’ (156). 

Accordingly, advocating the cause of discretionary alcohol prohibition and tied welfare grants for ‘at risk’ particularly indigenous communities, indigenous leader, Noel Pearson, proposes that as quoted by McKnight,  ‘The irrational basis of the economy has inclined us to wasteful aimless behaviours.  Like other people who can’t see any connection between their actions and their circumstances, we waste our money, our time, our lives’ (158).  ‘This lack of meaning and purpose then compounds the effects of dispossession and trauma’ (159) McKnight further infers. 

Rather than seek the connection of ‘actions’ and ‘circumstances’, following the thematic tenet of my ‘State of the World’ Forum seminar paper entitled  Situational Perception (November 2006), people would be better advised to invest effort in the cultivation of their situations, rather than rely on their ‘circumstances’ in this.  Because circumstances only serve to provide the elements, not the means, through which transition and transformation can proceed. 

Correspondingly, ‘meaning and purpose’ proceeds through commitment derived from perception-based discernment as the substantiation of faith and belief (November 2006).  Such a process would be far more pertinent, relevant and resonant than dependence on mere ‘circumstances’.  People in general, not just indigenous people, would benefit from the application of such basic principles. 

Moreover, ‘Faith’ is what substantiates ‘confidence in our capacity to know who in fact we are’ (1962: 40), as stated in the Palanese Notes on What’s What.  While ‘Providence’ incrementally and progressively discerned and applied through our life experience and learning journey would clearly assist in this. 

However, when government incumbency is used ‘constitutionally’ to ‘rule’ by implication autocratically (44), such as to impair any palpable sense of broad public dissent, such confidence in ‘Providence’ is severely abrogated. 

Ultimately, such autocratic government processes really do serve to undermine ‘… the whole edifice of Moral and Spiritual Values’ (55).  

However, such a public morass and malaise can derive from meagre mutual public interaction among people collectively and personally in the social and cultural fabric and context. 

Therefore, we can seek to invoke responsibility and ‘personal obligation’ (2005: 155) potentially at the expense of jettisoned or emaciated ‘libertarian’ principles and values.   

Thus it is vital for us to consider the implications for our national intellectual and analytical heritage and contribution we have cultivated through the continuity and consistency of our collective life experience and journey.  

So it is little wonder we ‘experience disintegration’ and feel ‘fractured’ (154), as we proceed to ‘battle’ with each other and our ‘circumstances’ through such a ‘conflictual’ malaise. 

Moreover, little wonder that,  ‘It became compulsory to be sensitive to gender, race and ethnicity’ (153), when paradoxically lack of sensitivity to our humanity is palpably the essence of this dilemma. 

Reasoning forth from these perspectives, it is clearly valid and vital to realize,  ‘Self-respect, respect for others and moral responsibility for one’s actions are vital for any functioning community’ (160).  While for whoever is concerned, from this perspective, it is surely indeed crucial for them to be able to ‘exercise … moral agency’ and ‘be … capable’ of this (160). 

Accordingly, it is indeed important for ‘Indigenous people’ to be considered from the aspect of ‘moral responsibility’ derived through ‘respect’ and ‘self-respect’. 

Nevertheless, rather than consider dimensions of quality and sensitivity in the context of how perspectives are discerned through perception, McKnight prefers to invoke ‘social order’ as the primary element of socio-personal and cultural reform (161).  

Yet, astoundingly for such a structurally configured entity, he seems to consider this criterion as potentially ‘invisible’ and provides meagre, if any, analysis of how social trust is derived.  

‘Social order is underpinned by a social trust’ (161), he asserts.  

But what is the nature of ‘trust’ for him, as a quality and/or attribute ?  

He only provides instances of trust, based essentially on notions of ‘freedom’, which I have revealed to be quite a transitory deplete ideal through my various ‘State of the World’ Forum seminar papers. ‘

Actually, he probably more nearly means autonomy when he refers to freedom through trust, but this is not a relation which he clarifies.  What he does assert is a link of ‘social order’ and ‘trust’ with ‘function’, as implied in these being cited as basic ingredients of a ‘functioning community’ (161). 

‘On the social level, people need to feel a trust that … they can receive support or treatment … that they live in a civilized society which values all its members’ while ‘… the New Capitalism devalues trust and social order in favour of utilitarian, commercial and commodified relations between citizens’ (161). 

However, such predominantly structural-functional perspectives and/or notions of the social fabric and trust are so quantitatively based that they are not fluid enough to enable trust to be realized as an essentially intuitive, spontaneous, innate phenomenon.  As such a quality, trust is acquired sporadically in a context of equilibrium and equanimity, as I have revealed and substantiated throughout my ‘State of the World’ Forum seminar papers. 

Trust and the social fabric would thereby have form; but not the quantitative structural nature McKnight insists is prevalent in this. 

Moreover, McKnight further generalizes this tight structural-functional perspective through his disclosure that this approach ‘… needs to take place in quite separate fields of policy and reform’ (163).  

Although, he does admit,  ‘Acknowledging unpleasant facts should be combined with genuinely trying to rethink the intellectual foundations of a world view rather than just fiddling with policy settings … increasingly we are aware that happiness and meaning in life is not necessarily the result of … consumerism – a point made strongly by Clive Hamilton in … Growth Fetish … Pearson points to the centrality of civil society … networks involving families, communities and business which [are] not … bureaucratic [compare with Eva Cox’s work]’ (164). 

This sense of ‘self-respect, respect for others and moral responsibility’ based on ‘social order’ (160, 161) is redolent of the kind of behaviourist cognitive psychology and/or psychiatry Radha critiqued, as practiced by the American psychiatrist visiting Pala portrayed in Huxley’s Island. 

Omitted from the form of structural-functional perspective of ‘social order’ and ‘trust’ McKnight advocates is any truly holistic sense of how such elements derive from a social psychology and/or interpersonal aspect.  How such ostensibly conscious facets of mutual endeavour pertain to unconscious and/or non-conscious elements needs to be elucidated.  How would these qualities of self-respect, respect, moral responsibility and trust pertain in a social psychology context to ‘everyday life’ (1962: 69) ?  How does the ‘quality’ of ‘feelings’, ‘thoughts’ and ‘perceptions’ (70) relate to these predominantly structural social elements ?  Otherwise the perspective considered remains basically fixed in a tension of ‘Mind abstracted from body’ (69). 

However, an essentially fluid, intuitive, spontaneous and sporadic perspective of trust would render it as much more amenable to its acceptance from an holistic aspect, through which ‘… you accept the world, and you make use of it; you make use of everything you do, of everything that happens to you, of all the things you see and hear and taste and touch, as so many means to your liberation from the prison of yourself’ (75-76), as well as realizing the facet of perception of ‘the raw material for sensation that my not-self provides me with’ (78). 

These are the elements which enable us to realize ‘… how you feel about being who you are in this kind of world’ (67), which enables us to be who we are authentically and distinctively in our particular prevalent culture and generation. 

McKnight decries the efforts of ‘rational … social reformers’, either of the ‘strong Enlightenment heritage’ who ‘see the world of good and bad … with [an] emphasis on the virtues necessary to sustain social order, or of ‘pure liberalism and its emphasis on individual responsibility’ (2005: 165). 

 However, what seems apparent from this polarized propensity in McKnight’s analysis is that he tends to be somewhat oblivious to the reality most social reformers are inclined to represent an often fluid blend of these elements.  

Nevertheless, McKnight is justified in critiquing ‘social constructionism’ when applied as ‘an over-arching social theory’, as it blurs ‘the domain of individual moral responsibility’ and ‘that of social responsibility’.  

It thence ‘… discounts the ability of people to learn from experience and change their behaviour … discounts the actions and moral choices which individuals can make in given circumstances’ and ‘concedes little or no autonomy to individuals and families’ (165) … 

Meanwhile, Noel Pearson ‘… points out that a stable and functioning family is a crucial element of social order, and provides a moral core to a wider community’ (166). 

Yet, McKnight observes,  ‘A notion of the family in both real and metaphorical terms is central to the socially conservative world view in politics and life’ (166).  Ambiguously, he maintains,  ‘When the Right fights the culture war, its chosen ground is the family.  When the cultural Left fights the culture war, it[‘s] … about everything but the family as an entity’ (166). 

This is a potentially naïve perspective which ostensibly reveals an acute lack of awareness of the sociological and anthropological dimensions of family dynamics.  Whereas conservatives tend to enshrine the nuclear family, for liberals the family is realized in extended terms, and mostly is represented most authentically by ‘the community’.  

This is why Hilary Clinton could declare:  

‘It takes a village [that is, not just a family] to raise a child’, a notion she borrowed from the celebrated famous anthropologist, Margaret Mead. 

This perspective does inform ‘the progressive world view’ (168), and it does constitute ‘an holistic approach’ (168). 

These are the kinds of ideas Eva Cox explored extensively through her work, and which I have broadly considered through at least two of these ‘State of the World’ Forum seminar papers.  McKnight acknowledges the work of Eva Cox only once, and in a most tokenistic way. 

Conservatives also boast a redolent, but substantially different, idea of community, usually envisioned as highly secure stable intentional clusters of families.  These were cited and described extensively and famously by the communitarian theorist, M. Scott Peck, using essentially the Quaker model of ‘community-building’, which I have also explored and experienced most extensively. 

While both of the George Lakoff ‘Strict Father’ and ‘Nurturant Parent’ models are evident as general inherent metaphorical elements of all family dynamics it would be presumptuous to pose these as particularly indicative of any given political influence (166-167), although conservative policy does tend to embody paternalist parameters at times. 

These are among the opening quotes of McKnight’s section on ‘Rethinking family values’: 

‘The invisible hand represents the forces of supply and demand in competitive markets.  The invisible heart represents family values of love, obligation and reciprocity.  The invisible hand is about achievement.  The invisible heart is about care for others … The only way to balance the[se] successfully is to find fair ways of rewarding those who care for other people … This is not a problem that economists – or business people – have taken seriously’ – Nancy Folbre from The Invisible Heart (169). 

‘Being a mother is simply uneconomic.  In this sense the market denies motherhood and love … it cannot explain the non-economic decision to mother and to nurture.  Indeed, the market runs counter to this care’ – Barbara Pocock from The Work/ Life Collision (169). 

‘Reward’ for the form of ‘care’ to which Folbre refers would proceed only through a deep sense of fulfilment, authenticity, and the realization from those concerned of their distinctive contribution(s) in this context.  

While ‘the non-economic decision to mother and to nurture’ Pocock invokes would derive essentially through intuition, spontaneity, and would be innate and sporadic in character. 

What Susila describes as the ‘Mutual Adoption Clubs (MACs)’ (1962: 90) on Pala basically resemble the intentional clusters of family focused on ‘community-building’ inaugurated and auspiced by the likes of Scott Peck.  

The Australian Community Encouragement group experience and interaction, which I explored for many years, imbued similar aspects and attributes, but was limited to only occasional weekend community living encounters.  Whereas in the Palanese MACs those who partook in these mutual interdependence initiatives were also ‘aspirants to liberation’ (86), much in the way of the ‘liberals’ who affirm that  ‘It takes a village to raise a child’. 

For those living in the MACs, rather than  ‘Free as a bird !’ (92), as John Lennon declared – and, indeed, for liberated individuals ‘… and your bird can sing !’ – they could at least be,  ‘Free … as a developing human being’ (92), and therefore free from ‘Belief’ as ideology, so as to thereby have the relative autonomy to request  ‘Give us this day our daily Faith’ (86).  Thereby children could learn to ascertain and become aware of how to behave themselves – ‘Behave, you say.  But how ?  You never tell them’ (96).  

While, in the Western context, ‘… the present is so frustrating … because you’ve never been taught how to bridge the gap between theory and practice, between your New Year’s resolutions and your actual behaviour’ (96).  

Family and personal dynamics, along with marginalised movements

As he proceeds to describe his ‘one truly life-transforming event’ (2005: 169) – his six months of experience as a ‘house-father’ (169) after the birth of his daughter, Ilse – McKnight observes:  ‘… I became aware [then] of unexpected emotional and psychological changes in myself.  I had become more vulnerable’ (171).  Yet, while he describes his daughter as ‘… the most stunning and precious thing that had ever come into my life’ (171), how, then, does he feel about his wife ?  Wouldn’t she be just as ‘stunning and precious’ for him ?  

While, if being a father represented his ‘one truly life-transforming event’ (169), then how would he consider the experience and phenomenon of his life with his wife before this event, his marriage and their courtship ?  His ‘vulnerability and sense of caring extended to [what he assumes to be] unrelated parts of my life’ (171).  Basically, he was less inclined to take risks (171).  

Thereby, McKnight raises the phenomenon of the absorbing interpretive nature of family dynamics which thenceforth will be reviewed progressively here. 

However, McKnight soon notes another often prevalent broad phenomenon. 

‘History is littered with the sudden emergence of movements for social change which began with a very small core of people committed to a vision that soon strikes a profound chord among a broader number of people and then spreads rapidly throughout the society’ (172). 

Nevertheless, for every emergent movement which proves so resonant there are many others which people tend to lack the courage and fortitude to support and pursue wholeheartedly.  Among such recent developments is the broadly configured phenomenon of the so-called communitarian movement, through  which the United Nations Association auspiced ‘Year of Community’ Proposal and affiliated ‘Community Project’ derive their momentum.  

Currently, decision-makers, public agency representatives and commentators in general remain clearly reluctant to comprehensively consider the significance, relevance and resonance of the phenomenon of community as a tangible entity, as we notice in this contribution from McKnight.  Although he does briefly discursively mention communitarianism as basically ‘conservative’ earlier in his work (92).  This is a proposition I have here shown to be presumptuous. 

Yet, conversely, McKnight thence raises:  

‘The steady drift towards social conservatism has been going on for some time, summed up in the phrase ‘family values’ ‘(174), which implicitly surely indicates a corresponding retreat from communitarian values. 

Further, McKnight attests to a stalling of the momentum of the feminist ‘movement for women’s equality and … rights’ (174), which he considers to be characterized by certain ‘awkward facts’ (174).  

‘Women have not flooded into full-time employment … ‘the proportion of women 15 to 19 years employed full time is much the same today as it was 35 years ago’, notes economist Bob Gregory with puzzlement.  Also surprising is the fact that full-time employment has increased among married women and fallen among single women … Women have, however, moved into part-time work in large numbers (174) … three-quarters [of part-time jobs] are now held by women [which proportion constitutes] 44 per cent of working women’ (180). 

Unless this phenomenon is considered as a pure issue of raw equality, ostensibly the situation would seem to be one which reveals a lack of consistency in McKnight’s proposed analysis.  Because it indicates women are finding employment, even if it is mostly part-time in nature.  There are some notable sensitivities and contingencies evident in this situation, however, as McKnight soon explores.  Yet, in the context of raw equality and/or economic aspirations it broadly represents a palpably beneficent outcome for the feminist movement as it shows women are finding employment.  Nevertheless, as will soon be clear, there are other deeper considerations thereby implied. 

What soon enters the perspective implied here is the emotional dimension and phenomenon, which ultimately confounds purely economic, rational and logical considerations.  Just as Susila interprets Molly’s love for Will, Molly being his former wife, despite his affairs, as his making ‘her feel so damned sorry for [him]’ (102).  At the time of their marriage Will was ‘convinced’ he ‘really loved’ Molly, but he’d since become ‘confused’ about this (103). 

However, whereas, ‘pity’, rather than ‘compassion’, was construed by Will as the epitome of his love for Molly (103), the essence of her love for him was ‘commitment’ (104).  Hence, Will languished in ambivalence and prevarication.  

Susila observes that to appreciate, respect and realize the significance of ‘the past’ is not to ‘forget’ it, but ‘to be there with the dead and yet still be here … with the living … [but] It isn’t easy’ (107).  She questions whether ‘the beautiful sentiments connected with the sublime idea [of love] ‘have anything in common with the direct experience of the mystery’ (113).  

Yet there must be a deep connection and/or synchronicity of intuitive significance, sensitivity, resonance and continuity implied in this phenomenon, or else how would it come to be discerned, derived, retained and perpetrated. 

Correspondingly, Australian singer/ songwriter, Peter Campbell, explored these sensitivities through various deeply wistful songs, especially People, based on The Man Who Was Thursday by G K Chesterton, and If Love Had Its Way. 

Faith reverberates as the essence and perpetuated outcome of the ‘commitment’ Will realizes is so vital, as pointed out in the Notes on What’s What.  

Yet ‘perfect faith’ is something of an anathema to the human condition, despite being essential to it. 

‘Perfect faith is defined as something that produces perfect peace of mind … [which] nobody possesses.  Therefore practically nobody possesses perfect faith’ (114), Dr Robert realizes, appearing progressively more like the Doctor Robert of the iconic Beatles song so entitled ! 

Meanwhile, through McKnight’s perspectives, the contemporary plight of commitment, compassion, sensitivity, indeed therefore ‘care’, for women is thence explored further: ‘… in many major industrial countries, the issues of care for children, care for the aged and declining fertility have shot to the top of the political agenda’ (2005: 177), thereby effectively to become ‘canonised’ as ‘political and religious dogma’ as this process would be construed by Dr Robert ! (1962: 117) 

American feminist, Ann Crittenden, put it this way, as cited by McKnight:  

‘It never occurred to me that women might be at home because there were children there:  that housewives might become extinct, but mothers and fathers never would’ (2005: 178).  While,  ‘Even feminists are often reluctant to admit that many women’s lives revolve around their children’ (178).  

Although, in the contemporary context in which birth rates continue to fall and many women either delay or avoid having children, ‘many’ proportionately also presumably would not necessarily be concerned with children. 

Correspondingly, prominent feminist activist, Liz Windschuttle, rejected ‘… the idea that ‘all women’s problems will be solved if they join the workforce’, [as] she concluded that ‘the woman who stays at home, isolated from her sisters, financially dependent on a man, her ideas very largely determined by advertising agents and the other trivia merchants of the mass media, is least likely to be a force for any sort of social change’ ‘(179). 

However,  ‘While isolated feminist groups took up the fight for ‘wages for house work’, the most convincing argument to the majority was that the road to equality lay through unpaid work for all’ (180). 

Meanwhile, Barbara Pocock’s extensive work/ life study reveals:  

‘Of all of feminism’s goals, entry to paid work has been the most compatible with the globalizing market … But, at the time more women were entering paid work, the workforce was undergoing a transformation …. The price of efficiency and competitiveness meant that Australians started to work longer and longer hours, often including unpaid overtime.  Significantly, women’s share of these longer hours grew and is still growing.  The proportion of workers spending more than 45 hours a week at work increased from 18 per cent in 1985 to 26 per cent in 2001.  In many workplaces, work has intensified and working hours now often cover weekends and unsocial times of the day.  Australians, says Pocock, have a ‘long hours culture’ ‘(181). 

‘All of this has consequences for the 2 million couple families with children and the more than 750,000 single-parent families, most juggling work and care responsibilities.  As Pocock points out:  ‘Changes in workplaces have reduced the number of hours we have available to spend on our homes, communities and care (181). 

However,  ‘While much has been written about the super mum who can ‘have it all’, Pocock discovered this belies angst and unhappiness.  Working mothers are often full of guilt at not being a ‘proper mother’.  There is enormous pressure to be a ‘super mum’ and to develop an intensive style of ‘super mothering’ alongside paid work:  ‘Most women spoke of the remorse they felt at not being able to do it all …’  

Moreover, women are divided:  ‘Interestingly, women with jobs feel criticised for being working mothers … while on the other hand, women at home feel criticised for being lazy, incompetent or unable to ‘get a job’ … ‘Comments Pocock:  

‘Those who respect full-time mothering and those who do it, work against the grain of society where so much of personal worth, value and self is shaped by a worker identity established through the market’ … One of the answers for many families is commodified, market-supplied care … rather than engaging in the more complex exchanges with grandparents or friends which non-market care involves.  The market sets a clear rate for the job, free of this kind of reciprocity.  But the long-term social problem is that non-market exchanges – reciprocal favours, donations, help, care – are what build personal and community relationships:  ‘Mutual non-monetary exchanges have embedded within them – indeed create – personal and community relationships.  

‘These obligations are the stuff of community and generalized reciprocity.  

‘They create trust and long term witnesses to one’s life’ ‘(182). 

Yet, as I have revealed throughout the successive series over time of my ‘State of the World’ Forum seminar papers and analyses, trust is essentially an intuitive, spontaneous, sporadic element, and therefore not amenable to such stipulative interpretation.  Moreover, while mutuality and reciprocity clearly are vital elements which constitute socio-personal and communal endeavour, as affirmed through these foregoing perspectives, nevertheless the ‘complex emotional exchanges of close family relations can be typically difficult, often indeed impossible, to negotiate. 

Indeed, each of these preceding perspectives are infused with successive incremental ever complex and perplexing enfolding layers of paradox as ostensibly palpable sensitive antithetical elements blend inexorably into constrained mandatory coexistence. 

This is the kind of ‘wild improbability’ of the ‘universe’ to which Will alludes (1962: 125).  However, deeper facets of meaning, significance, relevance and resonance remain pertinent to the form, nature and character of this spontaneous speculative context of paradox. 

While, in all this, the prevalent reality Dr Robert discerns that – 

‘People … are at once the beneficiaries and the victims of their culture’ (128) remains prevalent, thereby intensifying this inimical plethora of paradox. 

Yet always the injunction and prospect of realizing ‘the best of all the worlds’ (129) in this remains a pre-eminent prospect.  Or, as Alfred North Whitehead put it, to seek  ‘ i) to live,  ii) to live well,  and iii) to live better’. 

Ultimately, the apex of all these several forms of paradox is construed through the realization of the struggle for any form of perfection through the aspirations of fulfilment in a basic human context of adversity.  As Dr Robert explains, all elements of life and reality are important.  Consequently, they each have their distinctive place and relevance, as I would construe this perspective.  

‘Nothing short of everything will really do’ (132) Dr Robert postulates. 

Consequently, ‘the road to equality’ (2005: 180) whereby ‘all women’s problems will be solved if they join the workplace’ (179) becomes an inevitable utopian aspiration because any such struggle for perfection eventually languishes in the prevalent human context of adversity.  Therefore, ‘the price of efficiency and competitiveness’ (181) is depletion in quality of life, at least comparatively.  

It means Australians progressively inherit a ‘long hours culture’ (181).  

While the prospective ‘super mum’ cannot ‘have [or ‘do’] it all’, and so will feel ‘angst and unhappiness’ (182) in the face of whatever she therefore forgoes. 

Why does it have to be this way ?  

‘How an earth can a set of events belonging to one order be experienced as a set of events belonging to an entirely different and incommensurable order ?  Nobody has the faintest idea.  All one can do is accept the facts and concoct hypotheses’ (1962: 138), Dr Robert astutely proclaimed. 

Among contributors on women’s issues in Australia, Anne Summers maintains that contemporary Australian government policy ‘… is designed to force women back into traditional roles (2005: 183) … the breeding creed … is a powerful new ideology that defines women first and foremost as mothers (183-184) … to subsume all of women’s other choices and ambitions into a motherhood mentality … As a society we ask women to give up too much when they have children and we give them too little in return’ (184), Summers proposes. 

‘Pocock examines the experience of women with the aim of being guided by the facts rather than by a preconceived framework.  By contrast, Summers operates within a preconceived notion of the meaning of equality (184) …’ On this basis, equality tends to be defined as awareness, and any significant variation from this must be avoided. 

However McKnight seems to flout the respected sociological principle that the so-called ‘facts’ Pocock has gleaned actually initially constitute raw research data and material.  Once these are interpreted, the inquiry proceeds according to a given methodology which is necessarily geared according to the perspectives and presumptions of the researcher. 

‘One likely meaning of the … figures is that most women work part time by choice because it suits them, rather than because of ‘political interference’ … women make choices, and sometimes those choices do not accord with employment-focused definitions of equality.  So is the problem with the women ? (186) … What do women want ?  Clearly many want different things at different times of their lives’ (187). 

And so McKnight poses the basic famous question of the popular film of the same title – What Do Women Want ? 

Or,  ‘What a girl wants; what a girl needs …’ as Britney Spears puts this entrenched dilemma. 

While a prominent national financial institution’s marketing management representatives can approve such a slogan as ‘Needs Versus Wants’, which implies needs are necessarily in conflict and/or are polarized with wants.  

Whereas, as I revealed in my 1988 work Motives – the source of fulfilment, ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ are distinctive, and therefore constitute respective forms of contribution.  Rather than being inherently mutually exclusive, they are different yet complementary, from my perspective. 

Quoting the research of demographer, Peter McDonald, McKnight continues. 

‘ ‘Gender equity needs to be promoted within the family itself.  Changes in cultural values are slow, and idealized family morality is resistant to change.’  

McDonald says the institutions have changed but the people are lagging behind ‘ (188). 

Consciousness through broad awareness, preference and cooperation

Moreover, consistent with my analysis and projection of distinctive elements and aspects of subsistence and aspiration, Will pertinently interprets the essence of the Palanese development trajectory.  

‘You can’t be a good economist unless you’re also a good psychologist (1962: 141).  

‘Or a good engineer without being the right kind of metaphysician’ (141).  

While Dr Robert interposes, ‘Most to the time we’re cooperators’ (145).  

For instance, we ‘teach’ children ‘to analyse whatever they hear or read – this is an integral part of the school curriculum … Nobody enjoys a [media] monopoly’ (147) … The reader’s in a position to compare arguments and make up his own mind’ (148). 

Then a principle which has gradually become a venerated precept over time is invoked.  

‘Sampling all kinds of work … [is] part of everybody’s education (148).  

‘One learns an enormous amount that way – about things and skills and organizations, about all kinds of people and their ways of thinking’ (148). 

Describing Western people as ‘inadequate [‘abstract’] materialists’ Dr Robert considers this materialist ideology to be ‘as bad as abstract idealism, it makes immediate spiritual experience almost impossible’ (149). 

Then, as Vijaya continues, ‘… all [this] … won’t get you very far unless you’re fully conscious of what you’re doing and experiencing.  You’ve got to be completely aware …’ (149), Dr Robert conceded that ‘complete and constant awareness’ was the agent through which all this endeavour became transformed into ‘concrete spirituality’ (149).  ‘Be fully aware of what you’re doing …’ (149) he admonished. 

Correspondingly, in the quest to remain ‘fully aware’ through the context of research methods and analysis, British sociologist, Catherine Hakim, applies ‘what she calls ‘preference theory’ relative to women and family issues.  

‘She uses opinion surveys to ask men and women to express their personal preferences for one of a few different family models (2005: 189) … 

‘Hakim concludes that government policies should be neutral, supporting a diversity of preferences on how to arrange the work/life balance (190) … 

‘By contrast, analysts influenced by employment-oriented feminism look at the rise in the number of women working part time and see the positives – a chance to broaden their outlook and essentially take steps towards equality’ (190) … which they would maintain is fostered most conducively through full-time employment. 

The Palanese model of ‘Sampling all kinds of work’ (1962: 148) would also contribute at all learning levels in this, thus to learn extensively about ‘… skills and organizations, about all kinds of people and their ways of thinking’ (148). 

‘Hakim can be criticised because her categories of preference are drawn too rigidly [through just a few models of potential choices], whereas the lived reality is blurred as many women make transitions in their life from full-time work, to full-time care, then back to part-time or full-time work.  What this means is that most women value the benefits of a paid job and also recognize the value of caring.  Their preferences vary at different times’ (2005: 190).  

Nevertheless, preference is the basis of intent and aspiration, wants and needs and thereby motives.    

‘The paradigm of feminism’ based on ‘equality’ through ‘long-term, full time employment’ philosophically expresses ‘a kind of liberalism that fails to capture the major ethical and emotional dimensions of human lives’ (191-192), according to McKnight.  

As Germaine Greer has reviewed the feminist journey throughout her 1999 work The Whole Woman:  ‘What none of us noticed was that the ideal of liberation was fading out with the word.  We were settling for equality.  Liberation struggles are not about assimilation but asserting difference, endowing that difference with dignity and prestige and insisting on it as a condition of self-definition and self-determination … Liberationists sought the world over for clues to what women’s lives could be like if they were free to define their own fates’ (192).  

While,  ‘Women’s liberation must be mothers’ liberation or it is nothing’ (193). 

‘Underlying much of The Whole Woman is a concern with how different women are from men – not only physically, but psychologically and in the values which they tend to express (193) … Greer’s recent work reminds us that, in the mid-1970s, a strong tendency existed within feminism which valued women’s special attributes, including the ability to give birth and a nurturing temperament (194).  

This ‘cultural feminism’ prized traits that might be described as maternal, ‘a certain consciousness of care for others, flexibility, non-competitiveness, cooperation’ ‘(194). 

Whether feminism is characterized by elements of either liberation or equality, the relevant context in which these aspects are sought is ‘the essential precariousness of existence’ (1962: 159), as Dr Robert propounds this, which corresponds with the basic life context of adversity, as I’ve discerned this, in which the struggle of liberation, and for equality, proceeds.  

However, cooperation is accordingly vital in this.  

‘Nobody wins anything … This isn’t a competition.  It’s more like an ideal’ (159), as Vijaya observes. 

For,  ‘The real thing isn’t a proposition; it’s a state of being’ (160).  

Just as is sharing ‘… to the limits of awareness … aware at the same time of all others, concerned for them … Life … more inestimably precious … consciously accepting what is given as it is given … to divine [discern], profound and enduring, within the twittering flux of your everyday thinking … the awareness of life in its glowing plenitude … life performing its miracles of birth and growth … suddenly you know there’s a reconciliation … A fusion, and identity (166) … the dance of endless becoming and passing away (167) … Jump out of the fullness of life into nothingness, out of nothingness again into life (167-168) … And in th[is] tenderness what depths of meaning … Eternity in love with time … the hardly perceptible, ecstatic smile that welcomes a sudden insight … What a timeless bliss !  But … this timelessness is transient … what will you do with this experience ? … all that Pala can do for you with its social arrangements, is to provide you with techniques and opportunities … It remains for you to decide whether you’ll cooperate (169) …’ was how Dr Robert eloquently expressed this bountiful phenomenon and/or prospect of mutual cooperation.  

What is implied here is the assertion of foundational principles which could form the basis of an ethic of care, from my perspective. 

Correspondingly,  ‘Like all liberalism, the … great strength [of feminist ‘currents’] was a recognition of equality in the face of backward-looking, ancient prejudices.  They assert a common humanity between men and women which gives these currents within feminism a continuing relevance.  Their weakness was that they tended to ignore difference, and leaned toward an identicality between men and women … 

‘In 1982, [Carol] Gilligan wrote a book, In a Different Voice, based on research on people facing difficult moral conflicts or choices … Gilligan argued that she had found ‘a different moral voice’, which she called an ‘ethic of care’ and which she contrasted with the traditional ethic of rights in political philosophy (2005: 195) … 

‘The naming of caring as a vital human activity based on attentiveness to needs and to sustaining relationships was an important conceptual advance which crystallized a widely recognized but ‘invisible’ social phenomenon (195) … 

‘Arising from Gilligan’s research has been an ongoing debate about the meaning of ‘an ethic of care’, largely applied to the fields of nursing, education and welfare’ (195). 

Moreover, ‘… what if women are biologically inclined to be empathetic and to value relationships more than men ?  This is, first of all, a question of fact – in the sense that either it is the case or it is not.  Eventually, knowledge of the makeup of humans will settle this question.  If it proves to be the case, then it needs to be faced and discussed … We are not talking here, by the way, of a rigid template of emotions and behaviour, but rather of tendencies which are magnified or minimized by culture and circumstances … Is it possible to spread the values embodied in nurturing and caring to men – indeed further, so that they imbue social structures, politics and our culture ?  This is indeed possible … and, in my view, represents a vital element in fashioning new ideas beyond Right and Left’ (196), according to McKnight. 

Further, in this context, Ann Crittenden ‘… argues that child-rearing is an extremely valuable – but under-valued – human activity.  It is the foundation on which sits ‘human capital’ ‘(197). 

Meanwhile,  ‘In fact, ‘the paid workforce and its entire product actually swims atop, and [is] wholly dependent upon, an unrecognized world of the unpaid … Crittenden also identifies this large sea of unvalued labor, and points out that it also has another characteristic:  it is largely selfless, and forms a reservoir of altruism in the world.  This is not an economic fact, but a social fact of the greatest importance … how can we ensure that care for our children, our aged parents and our friends remains genuine loving care and is not wholly supplanted by marketised and commodified care ? (198) …’ 

Because ‘… this caring labor works against the grain of a market-oriented society in which all values are increasingly reduced to commercial values (199) … 

‘Trying to resolve this dilemma has led me to two conclusions which I did not expect when I began researching (199) … The first is that caring must now be foregrounded as a vital quality in society (199) … But this will not occur until the value of care is radically raised in society generally’ (199-200). 

Moreover,  ‘The family is part of a parallel world of social reproduction characterized by altruism, trust and non-rational (but not irrational) values vital to human wellbeing’ (200).  

However, it is pertinent and vital for McKnight to realize the greater aspect of his perspective represented through the tendency to irrationality of the human condition, as revealed by Huxley through Will’s contrived review of the Palanese Notes on What’s What:  ‘We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality.  All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way’ (1962: 171).  

Thus the inevitable ubiquitous element of paradox seeps into this prevalent perspective.  

‘The thing in whose absence we cannot possibly grow into complete human beings is, all too often, the thing that prevents us from growing’ (172).  

Hence the imperative to realize ‘… the art of adequately experiencing, the art of becoming more intimately acquainted with all the worlds that, as human beings, we find ourselves inhabiting’ (172).  For it is vital to appreciate what each and all of us ‘… the ordinary as well as the extraordinary, can do and experience in every contingency and at each successive intersection of time with eternity’ (172).  

While, amid all this,  ‘The non-dualist calls the vastly deep into his spirit or, to be more accurate, he finds that the vastly deep is already there’ (175).  

Just as the essence of perception is already there and the human spirit draws from this and connects with it, as I’ve revealed through these ‘State of the World’ Forum seminar papers. 

Moreover, ‘the human brain is there … to turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols’ (178).  If these ‘correspond fairly closely’ to ‘external reality … you have science and common sense’ (178).  

Whereas, if such ‘connection’ is lacking ‘you have paranoia and delerium’ (178).  ‘More often there’s a mixture [what I have cited as a ‘fluid blend’], part realistic and part fantastic; that’s religion’ (179). 

However,  ‘A genuinely religious image is always intrinsically meaningful.  Landscapes can really remind people of who they are’ (182), Vijaya declares, which accords with the phenomenon of drawing from a universal common source of perception. 

While,  ‘Distance reminds us … that there are mental spaces inside our skulls as enormous as the spaces out there’ (183), consistent with the broad form of interpretation George Santayana provides in this context. 

Beginning with a quotation from Charles Darwin, McKnight then relates the politicized so-called ‘children overboard’ episode in a form which resonates deeply with these foregoing humanitarian principles from Huxley.  

‘As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him … [thence] extending [this consideration] to the men of all nations and races’ – Charles Darwin (2005: 202) …’ 

As McKnight reviews the ‘children overboard’ episode, through which it was reported ‘… the asylum-seekers had actually thrown children into the water (203).  

‘This statement was not true, but was judged by Liberal ministers to be extremely useful at the start of a federal election campaign … As the bow [or the ‘leaky … fishing boat’ Olong] went under the waves, its passengers began entering the water … several of the [‘HMAS’] Adelaide’s sailors spontaneously dived into the water to help save them (203) … [Commander, Norman Banks] told his sailors,  ‘These people are indeed human beings first [and] whilst we could not understand their plight, we had to treat them as refugees’ (203-204) … in the space of a couple of hours, the crew became compassionate and began to see the asylum-seekers as human beings (204) … 

‘Did Australia owe them anything ? (204)  

‘They were not citizens, they were not invited guests – they were not like us … The answer is often framed as a legal question about international conventions, but the issue is a moral one beset by the visceral politics of cultural difference (204) …’ 

‘The key word here is empathy.  Human beings are probably born with some innate capacity for compassion, but they develop this compassion in their family and in a community.  Love and its cousin, empathy, are learned in families, and those families are usually part of a larger ethnic culture.  We feel first for those closest to us.  That is why news stories of overseas disasters often focus on whether Australians died … To empathise with, and even love, those from another ethnic culture requires compassion of a high order … recognition of a thread of sameness and commonality … exists in the diversity and inconsistency to be found in the tapestry of humanity (205).  

‘While such universalism … in a country like Australia provides a source for a social renewal based on human values’ (206).  Yet, relative to the ‘children overboard’ situation, it would seem ‘… only a minority believe that, as humans, we are all in the same boat’ (206). 

Whereas, on the basis of our ‘common humanity … we are first and foremost all from the same species, all connected, all humans.  And … [this] is about moral beliefs (206) …’  

Earlier, in September 1996, Pauline Hanson expressed in her maiden federal parliamentary speech,  ‘I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians.  Between 1984 and 1995, 40 per cent of all migrants coming into this country were of Asian origin.  They have their own culture and religion, form ghettoes and do not assimilate’ (207). 

It could be proposed, in some sense, Hanson has the equivalent of some ‘talent for manipulating symbols’ (185) through her configuration of symbols pertinent to cultural concerns and patriotism, through her manipulation of migration data, and more overtly of the Australian flag, for instance, to garner support for her cause.  Such ‘talent … tempts its possessors into habitual symbol-manipulation, [which] is an obstacle in the way of concrete experiencing and the reception of gratuitous graces’ (185). 

Trust and compassion in universal personal relationships

Pauline Hanson tends to advocate on the basis of ultra-pragmatic interpretation, rather than invoking more sensitive and compassionate values.  

Rather than ‘Pavlov for friendliness and trust and compassion’ (1962: 190), she invokes the equivalent of ‘Pavlov for … patriotism’ (190).  

Consequently, where intelligence is concerned, it is preferable from this perspective to be ‘Not [so much] more intelligent in relation to science or logical argument – [but rather] more intelligent on the deeper level of concrete experiences and personal relationships’ (2005: 184).  

These dimensions are the more pertinent and resonant in the context of such qualities as empathy, compassion, morality and humanity which McKnight proclaims.  

Just as Shanta explains that in Palanese schools – 

‘We teach them love and confidence, but we expose them to reality, reality in all its aspects.  And then give them responsibilities.  They’re made to understand that … Pala [is] … a nice place … But will remain nice only if everybody works and behaves decently’ (1962: 191).  Therefore, in this enterprise, ‘… one has to run the risk, one has to make a beginning’ (191). 

Yet, as we seek to ‘make a beginning’, it is important to realize we are correspondingly interlinked and intertwined with whatever is already there, and always has been there, as the intricate profound web of the social fabric. 

There followed from the Pauline Hanson situation a Joint Parliamentary Statement on October 1996 around the ‘banner’ of cultural diversity’ (2005: 208).  

‘The statement was a reaffirmation of ‘the commitment to maintain Australia as a culturally diverse, tolerant and open society, united by an overriding commitment to our nation and its democratic institutions and values’ (208). 

Further to this analysis, McKnight comes to address his core proposition that ‘a traditional Right-to-Left spectrum [in Australian politics] is increasingly misleading’ (208).  

Whereas ‘the cultural Left’ now champions cultural identity and diversity, ‘the dominant neo-liberal Right trumpets’ an amorphous ‘anonymous market’ and ‘universal consumer identity’ (208). 

‘The traditional Left’s theoretical and practical adherence to social justice, equality and socialism in various forms were based on a philosophical universalism.  It saw all people as equal without significant difference (208).  

‘The Left’s world view was based on the universality of labour (208) … 

‘Overseas, it was the Left which welcomed and often led the anti-colonial revolts – driven by nationalism – in Africa and Asia from the 1950s to the 1970s … Apart from seeing the mobilization of ethnicity and nationalism as useful tools to fight colonialism, the traditional Left regarded it as a diversion from the ‘real’ struggle against capitalism.  Indeed, colonial rulers were skilled at using ethnic differences in a divide-and-rule strategy … By contrast, it was the classical Right which was fundamentally founded on ethnos, and believed in the differences and particularism of race and nation’ (209). 

Meanwhile,  ‘Th[e] classical component of the Right tended not to believe in such abstractions as the universal rights of man … In the wake of the French Revolution and its ringing declaration about the ‘Rights of Man’, [Joseph] de Maistre argued:  ‘In the course of my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians.  I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be a Persian:  but Man, I declare, I have never met in my life; if he exists he is unknown to me’ (210).  

‘In other words, humans as some abstract entity or essence do not exist outside of their culture.  They are entirely, as some say today, ‘culturally constructed’ (210) …’ 

Whereas,  ‘The new cultural Left combined its insights with a philosophical opposition to universalism, and made a fetish of cultural identity (210) … 

‘The consequence of this has been a deep alienation of the cultural Left from the mainstream culture … and the cultivation of marginality (210-211) … This loss of the universalist component of the Left has meant that the cultural Left often finds it hard to talk about politics in terms of an overall vision, a national interest or a common good … In the 1950s, left-wing intellectuals … In an Anglophile society … insisted that Australians should be proud, not ashamed, of their convict origins and of Australia’s pastoral working-class pioneers (211).  

‘They argued that the convicts, shearers and drovers embodied a spirit of rebellion and egalitarianism (211-212) … Though it had never heard of Antonio Gramsci and his concept of hegemony – that the Left advanced through its moral and intellectual leadership in a battle of ideas … the old Left practised hegemonic cultural politics (212) … 

‘The bitter paradox today is that the once progressive notion of an Australian identity rooted in equality and mateship is now most regularly articulated by John Howard and, in a cruder way before him, by Pauline Hanson … Labor’s … simple and unifying ideas of class and equality have lost the power to inspire because they no longer correspond to reality, nor to the felt needs of what was once called the working class’ (212). 

Given this ostensible stymieing of the socio-political and cultural landscape through polarized interpretation and analysis, the query palpably arises of how we may proceed authentically in the context of such ‘culturally constructed’ identity, which culminates in widespread alienation, marginality and the suspension of universality through socio-personal and political ideology and dogma. 

Whereas, as he describes the Palanese aspect and method of education, Huxley reveals how the alternative of seeking inclusivity of universal and personal principles, rather than pursuing strategies which either garner or culminate in exclusion and/or minimization, is by far the preferable policy orientation. 

Rather than being ‘for mass consumption’ (1962: 201) in Pala ‘boys and girls [are] for … actualization, for being turned into full-blown human beings … well what people really are [and can ‘become’] … that’s beyond individuality’ (202). 

Pertinent questions for enquiry of school students in this are: ‘… how does he do his thinking and perceiving and remembering ? … Does his mind work with images or with words, with both at once, or with neither ? … How can we reconcile analysis with vision ? … And there are all the questions that have to do with special gifts’ (203). 

Moreover, ‘… even very small children can understand the fact of human diversity and the need for mutual forbearance, mutual forgiveness (206) … Violent feelings, we tell the children, are like earthquakes.  They shake us so hard that cracks appear in the wall that separates out our private selves from the shared, universal Buddha Nature (207) … And meanwhile, of course, we’ve been giving the children systematic and carefully graduated training in perception and the proper use of language … What my ears and my eyes record is one thing; what the words I use and the mood I’m in and the purposes I’m pursuing allow me to perceive, make sense of and act upon is something quite different (208) … 

‘What we give the children is simultaneously a training in perceiving and imagining (208) …’ among other concerns. 

Meanwhile,  ‘Specialisation … is necessary and inevitable (209).  

‘No specialization, no civilization (209) … 

‘By themselves, the humanities don’t humanise’ (209) … Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation.  Make it plain from the very first that all living is relationship (211) … Balance, give and take, no excesses – it’s the rule in nature (212) …’ as proclaimed by the Pala Under-Secretary for Education, Mr Menon. 

Through his broad analysis, McKnight reveals how at least contemporary Australian Labor Party policy has figured as antithetical to such an holistic socio-personal and cultural trajectory. 

‘In effect, it has tried to crudely stitch together a coalition of social groups around a core of unionized workers.  The result has been ‘interest group’ tribalism – a patchwork coalition that is an alliance of convenience [or what I have termed the ultra-pragmatic ethos of this contemporary Age of Pragmatism], not one based on genuine common beliefs and an intellectual framework.  Each group simply relies on advancing its own interests.  The over-arching vision of Australia or of a national interest is thin (2005: 213) … The identity of ‘old Australia’ has been eroding for many years … because of immigration’ and ‘the nature of work’ (213).  

Although McKnight doesn’t present a thorough connective analysis of how he envisages this process particularly is underway.  He notes pertinently and importantly, ‘… a ‘common humanity’ is not a commonness of sameness, but of respect for others both because of and despite differences’ (213).  

Then McKnight adds perceptively – 

‘One of the main problems is that multiculturalism is a rather fuzzy concept (214).  

‘It is not clear what intellectual roots it has or what its moral content is’ (214).  

However, this is a critique which could be raised relative to the whole edifice of Australian culture and society, as I have explained comprehensively throughout my various ‘State of the World’ Forum seminar papers. 

McKnight seeks to elucidate this dilemma with reference to what he considers to be ‘hodge podge versus mosaic multiculturalism’ (214), which he configures in a compromised form from the outset by positioning these as oppositional, and therefore polarized in nature.  

‘ ‘Hodge podge’ multiculturalism is a celebration of the mixing of cultures in which people and cultural practices begin to blend, and [through] which ultimately the boundaries blur and new syntheses emerge’ (215).  

A problematic element in this interpretation is that McKnight fails to account for the infusion of paradox, whereby the ‘blend’ can be realized as representing distinctive contributions as respective influences in this, not just a banal melting pot or soup of amorphous elements.  While it is important for the deeper facets of meaning, significance, relevance and resonance to be woven into this pattern, to thereby form out the intellectual and socio-cultural fabric. 

Alternatively, rather than ‘blending and hybridisation’ the alternative ‘is a mosaic – a richly patterned society, but one in which each tile of the mosaic is a sharply defined and self-contained cultural group.  It advocates virtually no shared values other than absolute respect for difference’ (215).  

The basic problem here is really the reliance on structural functional parameters, which tend to the exclusion of more spontaneous elements, such as intuition and relativity.  The essential perspectives advanced through Mr Menon’s alternative to the Western education system, and through Huxley’s other insights about life in ‘Pala’ expressed through the characters in his work Island, clearly show how such cultural configurations  or descriptions do not have to be presented as polarized opposites. 

Further, McKnight maintains that ‘mosaic multiculturalism … encourages … ‘group thinking’ … Instead of treating individuals as having individual characteristics, we see individuals as representatives of categories or cultures’ (216). 

What McKnight skates over here is that this is characteristic of how individuals are treated in all group situations, at least to some extent or other – everyone ultimately becomes necessarily somewhat marginalised in some way or another.  

Correspondingly, McKnight argues –  

‘Mosaic multiculturalism elevates the rights of the group over the rights of the individual within the group’ (216).  While it ‘… also has the problem that emphasizing the rights and particularities of groups usually comes at the expense of emphasizing what all groups share (217) …

The pertinent realization required here is that qualities such as perception, imagination and the propensity to be able to live in ‘relationship’ are attributes to be nurtured, nourished and cultivated, as Mr Menon prescribed.  This would not be achieved through any sporadic analysis of where everyone and each ‘group’ is positioned in the ‘Palanese’ context of all these contingencies. 

‘Treat Nature well, and Nature will treat you well’, is how Palanese teacher Mrs Narayan puts this 1962: 216). 

As she describes an episode of teaching in her Palanese classroom, Mrs Narayan alludes to the existence and/or reality of a ‘direct’ source through which ‘communication’ is imparted from what is really a universal source of perception, other than through words and/or symbols. 

‘Perhaps, after all, there is some kind of communication … not in the way I’m communicating with you now, through words, but directly (216) … 

‘People, events, words – they’re all manifestations of Mind (216-217) … that one can’t speak these teachings [of the Buddha], one can only be them’ (217).  

The technique she advances as complementary to this insight prospectively also serves to explain why such a realization as the place and phenomenon of ‘cultural diversity’ is so fraught in the Australian socio-cultural political context.  

Students in the classroom ‘… get a whole morning of what we call bridge-building.  Two and a half hours during which we try to make them relate everything they’ve learned in the previous lessons to art, language, religion, self-knowledge  (217) … Every course the children take is punctuated by periodical bridge-building sessions … Training in receptivity is the complement and antidote to training in analysis and symbol manipulation.  Both kinds of training are absolutely indispensible … Why shouldn’t one choose to listen to both parties and harmonise their views ?’ (218) 

Moreover,  ‘The bridges have to be built in all directions … to be capable of teaching children to become more fully human in a society fit for fully human beings to live in, a teacher would first have to be taught how to make the best of both worlds (220) …’  

For instance,  ‘The Greeks were much too sensible to think in terms of either-or.  For them, it was always not-only-but-also.  Not only Plato and Aristotle, but also the maenads’ (222).  While,  ‘Redirecting the power generated by bad feelings is important.  But equally important is directing good feelings and right knowledge into expression’ (222). 

Transcendence in awareness and realisation 

– perception the source of feelings 

As a response to the phenomenon of ‘Pauline Hanson and the One Nation Party’, McKnight reveals how in 1997 ‘the Howard Government commissioned the National Multicultural Advisory Council to undertake a report ‘aimed at ensuring that cultural diversity is a unifying force for Australia (2005: 219) …’ 

The eventual report, Australian Multiculturalism for a New Century (April 1997), ‘… guardedly acknowledged that past practices had tended to focus on rights rather than obligations, but solved this [purportedly] by a simple assertion that this imbalance would now change, in accordance with the document’s new emphasis on inclusiveness and obligation’ (219).  

Yet ‘rights and obligations’, as moral concerns and/or imperatives would surely require reform of the ethos inherent in society and culture, which would not be possible only through some form of pragmatic structural-functional response any commission could propitiate. 

The report cited multiculturalism as a concept ‘… built on core societal values of mutual respect, tolerance and harmony, the rule of law and our democratic principles and institutions’ (221) and configured ‘the problem’ of multiculturalism as ‘all about ‘misperceptions’ ‘(222).  

Whereas, for McKnight,  ‘Hostility or incomprehension towards multiculturalism is about feelings, not about rationality … the feeling they experience is one of loss or siege.  And feelings … do not come from nowhere [my emphasis]’ (222).  

However, perceptions, in their form as universal awareness and realization, as I have proclaimed these to be, could thereby be accordingly cited as the source of ‘feelings’. 

Anthropologist, Glassan Hage, ‘… shows that much of [‘Hanson’s support’] is related to concepts such as ‘home’ and territoriality; it is a ‘discourse of undesirability, not inferiority’, he says, as well as a presumption of ‘managerial capacity over this national space’ ‘(222). 

However, these perspectives represent a form of particularly raw structural functional reaction to the continuity of a deeply socio-personal sense of place, and the ground of being, as I have put this. 

There is also a deep ‘sense of loss’ implied here.  

‘Dealing with this sense of loss rather than merely demonizing those who express it seems to me to be the beginning of a better strategy in the culture war’ (223).  

Miriam Dixson in The Imaginary Australia presses even further along this line of analysis:  ‘In being exhorted to welcome the new, its necessities and benefits, [‘Anglo-Celtic Australians’] were, and are, not given space to mourn the old and its losses … It is a truism that failure to mourn the past sabotages the future’ (223). 

Yet, if we accept the reality of what each group in society and culture provides for the whole as a distinctive contribution, as I have revealed and explored through these seminar papers, consistently invoking the perspectives of Chesterton, Whitehead and Santayana, among others in this context, then why should any such contributions imply any real sense of loss.  Part of the pertinent prospect here is to explore the potential for ‘social cohesion’, as McKnight thence advocates (224).  However, much more thorough fine-grained analysis is required than this. 

Broadly, the basic element which McKnight and this work he reviews here lacks, ostensibly understandably, is any sense of the spiritual or spirituality – or of any prospect of transcendence in awareness and/or realization other than through the human realm.  This could potentially provide a sense of ‘liberation’ from ‘the hauntings of your own painful memories, your remorses, your causeless anxieties about the future’ (1962: 225), as Huxley expresses these through Mrs Narayan.  

For those who are substantially preoccupied with any ‘loss’ of ‘home’, ‘territoriality’, ‘space’ and/or identity will eventually retreat inwardly and not want to face their plight.  ‘Hence you may have noticed my unflagging interest in art, science, philosophy, politics, literature – any damned thing rather than the only thing that ultimately has any importance’ (229), as Will Farnaby graphically expresses this phenomenon. 

‘I mean, it’s more than just feeling guilty (231) … 

‘It’s death itself, death as such, that you find so terrible (231) … 

‘So senselessly evil’ (231-232), Susila clarifies for Will.  

‘Yes … Nice comfortable people just don’t have any idea what the world is like … All the time’ (232), Will confessed. 

Then reviewing his own experience as he beheld the death of his aunt, ‘… as the body broke down, the soul began to lose its virtue, its very identity … she was somebody else, somebody … almost indistinguishable … People may stand by while you’re suffering and dying; but they’re standing by in another world (235).  

‘In your world you’re absolutely alone’ (235).  

As with the personal, so with the social.  

Will’s prognosis is a fairly pertinent corollary of how older Australian Anglo-Celts feel about their culture – severely marginalised, as do other people of other cultural backgrounds.  

‘Eating, drinking, dying – three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life … An enlightened person knows it, lives it and accepts it completely’ (236), Susila explained.  ‘And here you go, asking me to be even more aware than I am already … One thinks one’s something unique and wonderful at the centre of the universe.  But in fact one’s merely a slight delay in the ongoing march of entropy’ (237), Will offers. 

‘And that precisely, is the first half of the Buddha’s message (237).  

‘Transcience …’ (237).  While,  ‘This absence of a permanent soul is also the Buddha Nature’ (237), Susila adds. 

Yet, the Buddha Nature is the culminated realization for this realm of existence, for, most paradoxically, it is through this whole aspect of awareness and realization we each come to know how ‘unique and wonderful’ we each are through our distinctive identity, meaning, significance, relevance and resonance in the whole universal context – or through, in short, our authenticity. 

Regrettably, the notions of Miriam Dixson, as construed by McKnight, are indeed ‘Anglo’-oriented if it can be confirmed Dixson ‘… explicitly talks of the creation of a new consensual culture based on integration of Anglo and non-Anglo cultures’ (2005: 225), because the prevalent Anglo culture would surely remain the focal reference base in this context. 

Throughout the 1950s and 1970s, ‘Many came to believe that the basis for colonialism and racism lay in the universalist philosophies of Enlightenment Europe (226).  These philosophies encouraged a view that the glories of Europe were what constituted a civilized society, and other societies should be judged against this measure (226-227).  Western judgments of non-Western cultures were usually deeply flawed because of this Eurocentrism’ (227). 

Alternatively, the ‘relativist approach’ undermined ‘universalism and notions of a common humanity’ (229), according to McKnight.  

‘Democracy and human rights were therefore not universal goods, but could be portrayed as just another ethnocentric set of values in danger of colonizing the world’ (227).  

Eventually, however, ‘local prejudices’ came to ‘masquerade as universal truths.  Rather than distinguishing the falseness of these universalist claims, the whole notion of universalism was denounced, and a ‘politics of difference’ emerged … Universalist humanism, it was argued, necessarily produced oppressed ‘others’ – those who did not fit the assumed mould of universal humanity and were thus lesser beings’ (227).  

However,  ‘Taken to its logical conclusion, relativism tends to lock all of us in our own separate cultures’ (227), from McKnight’s perspective.  ‘The strong cultural relativist position undermines the notion of human empathy or solidarity across cultures because it argues that you cannot apply the same standards to one culture as another.  They are, as they say, ‘incommensurable’ ‘(227). 

Yet, here McKnight only presents an extreme ideological notion of what might be construed as relative – that is, ‘relativism’.  Patently, there could be logical interpretation and insights, such as say through Whitehead’s sense of ‘speculative reason’, which would enable such an entrenched dogmatic perspective to be suitably modified.  For the whole essence and aspect of what is ‘relative’ is inherently speculative and/or explorative in nature.  The problem resides in McKnight’s tendency to rely on extreme variant dichotomous or polarized perspectives to substantiate his analysis. 

As Kenan Malik, whom McKnight quotes, thence proposes – 

‘It is very difficult to support respect for difference without appealing to some universalistic principles of equality’ (228).  

Further, for Malik,  ‘What distinguishes humans from other creatures is the capacity for innovation and transformation, for making ideas and artifacts that are not simply different but also often better than those of a previous generation or another culture’ (229).  This is how Malik regards ‘social, moral and technological progress’ (229). 

However, what is truly pertinent in respect to social and cultural development is surely to realize and appreciate the thread of continuity among cultural and generational periods through which each of these is recognized as providing a particular respective distinctive contribution to the whole intricate socio-cultural fabric and web. 

‘Universal values have a central place in opposing racism and in justifying the central moral idea embedded in multiculturalism – which is empathy and respect towards other human beings (229) … Empathy is valuable because it is a deeper commitment than mere respect, and involves a level of emotional identification with other people’ based on ‘the idea of common humanity … Out of empathy, I believe, we are more likely to develop new, hybrid core values for our society’ (230), McKnight proposes. 

However, ‘empathy’ is not a substantial and/or robust enough quality, attribute and or emotion to epitomize profound deeply embedded feeling which is complex.  For instance, sympathy is a far deeper more acute emotion than empathy, in many ways.  

Indeed, deep friendship imbued with authenticity is a far more profound substantial quality and/or character attribute in this context, which is further augmented considerably through the realization and appreciation of equanimity resonant in this, as I have revealed comprehensively throughout this and my previous ‘State of the World’ Forum seminar papers. 

Deep feeling, as imbued in and expressed through deep friendship, authenticity and equanimity, is vital to awareness, realization and appreciation in the everyday context.  Mary Sarojini’s interpretation of the busker’s love song, quoted in Island, reveals this for Will. 

‘And the part that made me laugh was where he said the Future Buddha won’t have to leave home and sit under the Bodhi Tree.  He’ll have his Enlightenment while he’s in bed with the Princess’ (1962: 242).  ‘Do you think that’s a good idea ?’ (243) Will enquired chidingly.  ‘… She nodded emphatically (243).  

‘It would mean that the Princess would be enlightened too’ (243).  

‘You’re perfectly right.  Being a man, I hadn’t thought of the Princess’ (243). 

Moreover, as an instance of how intrinsic intuition and spontaneous awareness also serves to substantiate realization, Will’s response to Murugan summoning him to attend to the Rani is to prevaricate.  

‘Should he go back [to see the Rani] ? (252).  

‘It would be the sensible, the safe, the prudent thing to do.  But an inner voice – not little … but stentorian – shouted, ‘Squalid !  Squalid !’  Conscience ?  No.  Morality ?  Heaven forbid !’ (253)’  Hence he proceeded with his course towards the hospital to visit the ailing Lakshmi.  

While a deep sense of universality and common humanity infuses Lakshmi’s final mortal awareness and realization.  

‘Lakshmi asked Susila: ‘… what do you think [about the ‘sense of light’] ?’ (255)  

‘I think we’ve all come out of the same light, and we’re all going back into the same light … Is the pain bad ?’ (255) Susila enquired of Lakshmi. ‘ 

‘It would be bad’, Lakshmi explained, ‘if it were really my pain (255).  

‘But somehow it isn’t.  The pain’s here; but I’m somewhere else (255) …  

‘Nothing really belongs to you.  Not even your pain’ ‘(255). 

Ultimately, McKnight attests to the everyday veracity of such qualities as love, deep friendship and feeling, as he reflects through the perspectives of Robert Wright, as stated in The Moral Animal.  

‘ ‘We take for granted such bedrock elements of life as gratitude, shame, remorse, pride, honour, retribution, empathy, love and so on – just as we take the air we breathe, the tendency of dropped objects to fall, and other standard features of living on this planet … The more closely Darwinian anthropologists look at the world’s peoples, the more they are struck by the dense and intricate web of human nature by which we are all bound’ (2005: 231) … 

‘A growing scientific literature exists which gives good grounds for thinking that some form of human nature exists’ (231).  While, although this ‘has not settled the question … Many believe that any acknowledgement of a human nature implies acceptance of a rigid set of qualities which must exist in all humans in all times.  But the kind of human nature which those who have researched it talk about is rather a set of innate tendencies whose expression is tempered by historical and cultural, as well as individual circumstance’ (231).  

This would mean and/or imply intrinsic intuitive attributes and/or qualities are as basic and common to human existence, identity and experience as those considered innate, just as intuition and spontaneity are basic existential phenomena in themselves. 

‘Critics, however, see only the changing circumstances reflecting the dominance of what might be called the ‘social science world view’, which looks only for social and cultural reasons for the way we are … Nevertheless, even among social scientists, there is widespread agreement that humans are social creatures, meaning that they prefer to live in groups and are not naturally solitary (231) … 

‘These social groups are, specifically, families and local communities’ (231). 

Moreover, while it would be too preponderant to presume a universal ‘rigid set of qualities’ constitutes the nature and character of the human entity and human existence, yet clearly there are some attributes and/or qualitative elements, such as respect, mutuality, maturity, authenticity and equanimity, for instance, which maintain meaning, significance, relevance and resonance in each and all human contexts.  Otherwise there would be no reasonable and/or viable basis to substantiate morality and ethical principles, or a generic human ethos, as such. 

A vital perspective raised by McKnight is that certain human ‘dispositions and capacities’ serve to ‘moderate’ emphatic and/or volatile emotions and/or impulses, such as racial attitudes.  Among such moderational qualities is ‘altruism’ (233) …’ 

Further,  ‘Most importantly, there is accumulating evidence that altruism or caring for others is biologically based’ (233), while ‘… empathy and compassion begin as a local phenomenon (233) … American philosopher Martha Nussbaum made th[e] point … [regarding] the nature of compassion (which she argues is an emotion that is probably rooted in our biological heritage) (233-234), [that], Humans experience compassion most strongly when it affects people like themselves, and they often fail to experience it when tragedy is culturally distant … Most of us are brought up to believe that all human beings have equal worth.  At least the world’s major religions and secular philosophies tell us so.  But our emotions don’t believe it [my emphasis],’ (234) Nussbaum comments. 

‘But Nussbaum’s point is that compassion also has a reasoned element and can be educated.  Compassion can move outwards from its local family base (234).  

‘When it does, it begins to assume the characteristics of altruism, of empathy with others just because they are human’ (234). 

Actually, however, from a broader more substantial perspective, ‘compassion’ is a somewhat stronger, and therefore potentially more volatile and dynamic emotion than ‘altruism’.  It is this resonance in its aspect as a quality which enables it to be more deeply, and often more intensely, felt, even in a broad socio-cultural context, than altruism.  Altruism often seems most relevant in significance in the socio-cultural realm, yet often lacks the vibrant socio-personal resonance associated with compassion, and therefore often doesn’t figure as immediately palpable for people in an emphatic sense.  

Therefore such qualities as compassion seem to be more innate, intrinsic, intuitive and spontaneous than altruism and empathy, which imbue more a learned incremental aspect of realization and appreciation. 

Altruism and empathy as paradox 

– aesthetic appreciation and awareness

Realised from this aspect, altruism and empathy can have the essential paradoxical quality of being profound yet experienced in a somewhat mild sensitive form. 

‘Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly (1962: 257).  

‘Yes, feel lightly, even though you’re feeling deeply’ (257), was how Susila put this to Lakshmi. 

While pertinent resonant insights proceeded in the context of musical significance.  

‘ ‘It’s the Courting Dance,’ Susila went on (259) … 

‘Another gust of cool air brought with it a louder strain of the gay, bright music … ‘All those young people dancing together,’ said Dr Robert,  ‘All that laughter and desire, all that uncomplicated happiness.  It’s all here, like an atmosphere, like a field of force.  Their joy and our love … all working together, all reinforcing one another.  Love and joy enveloping you … love and joy carrying you up into the peace of the Clear Light.  Listen to the music’ (259). 

Thence from Will’s perspective, an associated profound yet joyful perceptual experience proceeded from a visual aspect.  

‘ ‘Luminous bliss’ (263).  

‘From the shallows of his mind the words rose like bubbles, came to the surface and vanished into the infinite spaces of living light that now pulsed and breathed behind closed eyelids … It was not only bliss, it was also understanding (263) … 

‘Being it.  Being’ ‘(263), as Will put this. 

‘ ‘The fact was the awareness, the awareness the fact’, [Meister] Eckhart called it God.  ‘Felicity so ravishing, so inconceivably intense that no one can describe it.  And in the midst of it God glows and flames without ceasing’ ‘(264), from Susila’s perspective. 

Correspondingly, while listening to some familiar music, Will ‘… sat there motionlessly attentive, following with ear and inward eye the interwoven streams of sound, the interwoven streams of congruous and equivalent lights, that flowed on timelessly from one sequence to another (267).  

‘And every phase of this well-worn familiar music was an unprecedented revelation of beauty that went pouring upwards, like a multitudinous fountain, into another revelation as novel and amazing as itself.  Stream within stream … Separate, distinct, individual – and yet each of the streams was a function of all the rest (267) … Spirit and instinct, action and vision – and around them the web of intellect’ (268). 

Such essentially intuitive, spontaneous, volatile incremental perception, realized through a broadly aesthetic artistic ideational perspective, derives from a much greater speculative exploratory form.  Certainly more so than the predominantly structural functional aspect of cause and effect McKnight primarily adopts to explain ‘ideas’, and the relevance of these as ‘ideals’. 

‘Ideas and philosophies evolve to address problems [this, implicitly, being their basic purpose and relevance].  For this reason, in the long term quite abstract ideas can have very practical consequences’ (2005: 237).  

Such a notion of cause-and-effect ideation is a common element of a political science orientation, which may not necessarily accommodate a more intrinsic humanities-based interpretation through which aesthetic awareness and appreciation are predominant.  Ideas can be intuitive; they don’t all culminate from, or address, ‘problems’, for instance.  Nor do they necessarily proffer solutions, but rather may basically derive from the notion of life as a quest. 

‘Liberalism is the source of ideals which value the human capacity for autonomy of the individual and of self-expression … Of particular importance is the strand of liberalism which emphasizes that the individual realizes their capacity within a supportive community.  The combination of the public good with individual liberty is the great strength of ‘social liberalism’ … [The] central belief [of socialism] is an ideal of collectivism and the common good, which today means that a strong sense of the public interest is vital to a good society (238) … a valuable part of the socialist heritage is its preparedness to challenge commercial self-interest which places profit before the public interest (239) … 

‘Conservative attitudes value social cohesion and the common good, in contrast to economic libertarianism and the lack of security which it generates (239-240) … As remarkable as human diversity and capacity are, they are not unlimited.  Any new political vision which assumes we can create societies without conflict or without self-interest is doomed to fail’ (240). 

Further, there are vital concerns thereby implied for the ‘terrain of New Capitalism’ (240).  

‘The New Capitalism is not a friend of the family, nor of the values which families embody at their best:  caring, altruism and love.  Such relations do not make any sense to a system whose logic insists that the truly valuable things are those that can be commodified – that is, bought and sold in the market’ (241). 

Even,  ‘The economic theorist of the New Capitalism … Friedrich Hayek … admitted that ‘if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order [the basic principles of ‘The Great Society’ of ‘modern capitalism’] to our more intimate groupings we would crush them [emphasis in original]’ (241).  

Hence,  ‘Rather than the[se] two worlds existing simultaneously [as Hayek envisaged], one world is slowly crushing the other … The invisible hand is clutching at the invisible heart and slowly choking it … Bonds of respect, civility and trust between people are being weakened, and relations based on competition, self-interest and suspicion are growing.  Social cohesion is strained’ (242). 

Yet, despite this profound stark quandary being as evident to Huxley, through Susila he was able to locate a ‘timeless dimension of quality and significance … Perpetual understanding’ (1962: 269), which for me is the ultimate source of perception – all perception – through which we each and all become aware of the phenomenon of whatever is as actual reality, through realization. 

Life was what could be realized as a process of struggle in a context of adversity: ‘… suffering would go on forever’ (276).  Yet,  ‘Nothing is forever … Except maybe the Buddha Nature’ (277).  

So, what would be the consequence of a perpetual ‘Buddha Nature’ ?  

Clearly, the interpersonal realm would become vital in this quest – sensitivity, intimacy, and compassion. 

‘One touches and, in the act of touching, one’s touched (278).  

‘Complete communication … Just an exchange of life, that’s all … but it’s also compassion.  Greedy contemplatives want to possess themselves of the light without bothering about compassion.  Merely good people try to be compassionate and refuse to bother about the light’ (278). 

Will’s awareness and realization thence formed out accordingly.  

‘What he was seeing now was the paradox of opposites indissolubly wedded (279) … 

‘He pressed her hands.  There was nothing, of course, that one could say, no words, no consolations of philosophy – only this shared mystery of touch, only this communication from skin to skin of a flowing infinity’ (280).  

Among the key perspectives McKnight considers is what he calls ‘… the battle to introduce sustainability’ which would ‘ultimately require persuasive efforts to change popular notions of progress and what constitutes the good life (2005: 243).  This debate has already begun, with studies by Clive Hamilton and others which indicate that, in spite of the increase in material wealth in the advanced industrial world, people are no more happy and are sometimes less happy than their forebears (243-244).  Consumption no longer occurs in order to meet human needs; its purpose is to manufacture identity, Hamilton says (244).  

‘Because of this, ‘there is an intimate relationship between the creation of self in consumer capitalism and the destruction of the natural world … it calls for the radical transformation of ourselves’ ‘(244).  

The dilemma here is to know what ‘being happy’ means.  

Again, as with other qualities considered previously, ‘happiness’ is a most nebulous disposition which seems to lack substance, cogency and depth in itself.  

Even the prospect of ‘the good life’ as a qualitative entity can tend to lack substance and significance from a prima facie aspect. 

‘The New Capitalism develops the instrumental values of rationality and efficiency in the economy to their highest level’ (244), according to McKnight.  

However, the situation actually is somewhat more inherently complex than this in that such ‘rationality and efficiency’ is overly entrenched in more grounded structural functional values, as Talcott Parsons revealed.  Hence the derivation of any viable holistic way forward from the human aspect becomes much less tenable. 

The ‘German sociologist Max Weber … [described] ‘rationalisation’ [as] a long-term process in which rational and scientific methods and values replace the non-rational side of life.  Initially, he applied this to the early years of capitalism in which the centrality of religion and religious values [‘the source of ethics’] were displaced and the society became devalued – or, to use his term, ‘disenchanted’ ‘(245). 

However, there is a world of qualitative difference which distinguishes being ‘devalued’ and being ‘disenchanted’.  Disenchanted presupposes a loss of aesthetic quality, loss of sensitivity and spontaneity, and indeed of wonder and intuitive awareness.  Whereas ‘devalued’ simply indicates a basic lack of value and/or worth, as such. 

McKnight cites ‘… a desire to revive notions of a culturally defined common good, and to value social cohesion and national identity (245-246).  On another level, there is a renewed search for spiritual meaning expressed in multiple ways from the growth of Buddhism and ‘New Age’ beliefs to the desire for spiritual certainty that comes from fundamentalist religion (246) …’ 

Yet, this is more profoundly also a quest for resonance, significance and relevance in a deeply experiential sense, not just a quest for ‘meaning’. 

‘More ominously, others who search for meaning in a commodified world support populist movements which look to the authenticity of their own culture and blame outsiders for their spiritual pain and unhappiness’ (246).  

Consequently, presumably in this context, ‘… old ideas, like liberalism and socialism, were elaborate philosophies which offered a key to unlocking the meaning of history and the future.  They proposed solutions that were relevant in all situations’ (248). 

Sorting through McKnight’s ‘vision’ for a ‘new humanism’ (248), he submits that – ‘Traditional humanism emphasizes a commitment to the interests and needs of human beings’ (248).  

While ‘commitment’ implies earnest endeavour, ‘interests’ differ from ‘needs’ in that interests derive from wants, rather than ‘needs’. 

‘Placing human needs’ into primary focus as ‘a concrete reference point for measuring well being’ cannot be achieved if any analysis of wants and/or aspirations is involved, as wants are essentially qualitative in nature.  Consequently, ‘inevitable complexity’ along with what I would hold to be profound paradox, and/or ambiguity at times, is implicit in this. 

So to infer this constitutes a ‘pull in opposite directions’ (248) is to assert polarity and/or duality, which is an inadequate impression of what is there.  

Accordingly, people realize their ‘autonomy’ in ‘community’, just as they recognize their ‘diversity’ through essential ‘solidarity’.  Hence, these do not represent some form of mutually exclusive form of endeavour (compare with page 248). 

Therefore, rather than an optimal ‘balance’ of these elements, which infers a necessarily essentially static situation, it is preferable for these to be realized as a blended phenomenon.  From this perspective, our ‘needs’ would be somewhat ‘plastic’, even ‘malleable’, although obviously not completely so (compare with pages 248-249). 

There is this element or sense of paradox and/or ambiguity even in the juxtaposition of ‘autonomy’ relative to ‘equality’ McKnight presents in asserting that ‘traditional humanism … favours equality of people and autonomy of individuals’ (249).  While ‘it’ also, as proposed ‘… expresses a moral idea of the preciousness of all humans’ through ‘a belief that human reasoning is a better guide to knowledge’ than what could be inferred as spiritual and/or aesthetic interpretations, such as through ‘custom or religious belief’ (249). 

Aesthetic humanist thinkers and analysts, such as George Santayana and Aldous Huxley, would clearly baulk at such a broad-swathed influential projection.  Both, as do many humanist theorists, broach and purvey substantial spiritual and aesthetic themes and principles while realizing the contribution and significance of religious endeavours.  They could be considered ‘traditional humanists’, but McKnight needs to clarify the scope, reach and meaning of this tag much more extensively as considered from his perspective. 

Whatever, as McKnight proposes – 

‘Reason and rationality are not enough to explain the world or to give humans a moral sense.  Emotions and instincts are real and central to the human experience’ (250), as are ‘creativity and an aesthetic sense’ (250).  

However, it is not essential that ‘opposite tendencies be balanced in favour of the feminine’ (250), as this would seem to impede the vital facet and orientation of paradox and/or ambiguity which pervades experience and existence.  

Any balance ‘in favour’ of anything is implicitly not a balance, as such. 

Further to these contextual considerations, McKnight alludes to and reviews the prospect of ‘caring’ as a broad ‘moral dimension’ (251).  

‘Caring is important because it names a human activity with a deep moral dimension which is often invisible in daily life, and which is ignored in most political and social theory’ (251), yet a ‘focus’ which would provide ‘a new concept to the idea of a good society involving emotion as well as reason’ (251). 

Through his enunciation of Will’s response to the caring of inherent intimacy shared by Susila, Huxley reveals his sensitivity to such a ‘deep moral dimension’ based on ‘caring’, through which ‘emotion’ is recognised as being as pertinent as ‘reason’.  

‘ ‘Who are you?’ he [Will] whispered (1962: 281) … 

‘He smiled back at her [Susila] – smiled back at a laughing girl with a weakness for kisses and the frankness to invite them.  ‘Thank the Lord ! … For having given you the grace of sensuality.’  She smiled … ‘So that cat’s out of the bag’ (281) … Then, raising her hand, she took hold of his extended finger and pressed it hard against her lower lip.  ‘Thank you,’ she said … ‘Why thank me?  You taught me what to do.’  ‘And now it’s you who have to teach your teacher … It isn’t possible:  But like everything else in the universe, it happens to be a fact.  And now that you’ve finally recognised my existence, I’ll give you leave to look to your heart’s content’ [Susila responded]’ (283). 

However, in the contemporary sense, it is elitist to label ‘care and compassion’ as ‘maternal’, and ‘autonomy and equality’ as ‘masculine’, values (2005: 251).  

‘As with the vexed notion of equality, there will always be a continual debate about what it [‘caring’] means in given circumstances’ (252). 

Basically,  ‘… Edmund Burke’s view that society was a contract ‘not only between those who are living but between those who are living, those who are dead and those to be born’ (252-253) really parallels Chesterton’s perspective that ‘tradition’ is about ‘giving a vote to our ancestors’, along with the importance of continuity in our sense of place and being – the magic of ‘hearth’ and ‘home’.  

Seeking to substantiate ‘conservation values’, McKnight proposes –  

‘Conservation values may actually have some basis in the human psyche (253).  

‘Some speculate that humans need to relate to nature … [and] that this innate need encompasses ‘the human craving for aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual meaning and satisfaction’ ‘(253).  

This palpably serves implicitly as a brief generalized statement which supports much of my ‘State of the World’ Forum research through my seminar presentation papers in this context over recent times. 

What McKnight then broadly enunciates comprises ‘a new moral framework’ which ‘means putting human values at the centre of a political vision rather than theories of rights or class or of cultural or gender identity’ (254).  

This corresponds with my perspective I have widely presented that institutional ‘class’-based analysis is inadequate as purportedly representative of those who collectively and/or individually are said to comprise any such structural-functional interpretation of so-called ‘class’ entities, just as the notion of ‘enough’ (253) is too broadly structural-functional in aspect to be reliable as a prima facie predominant moral criterion. 

McKnight’s ‘moral framework … means developing a language of right and wrong which both connects with the lived experience of many people and is tied to social reform’ (254).  This is a key prospect I have often invoked, particularly in considering Gadamer’s ‘hermeneutic’ principles and analysis. 

Consequently, McKnight asserts that ‘… at bottom most political philosophies are built on moral assumptions’ (255), and ‘When they do articulate their beliefs in moral terms, progressives are often shrill and unconvincing to all but the converted (255), while, ‘… some on the cultural Left seem morally relativistic’ (255). 

All these foregoing concerns remain reasonably palpable, and as ‘moral assumptions’ actually form the basis of all behaviour and conduct, while progressives necessarily will be ‘shrill’ in their expression because they believe passionately in, and commit themselves in faith to, their causes, as do all moral advocates.  Many great – indeed brilliant – philosophers and writers were also passionate polemicists who generally preached to the ‘converted’.  

However, their polemics did not detract from their art and/or analysis. 

Thence, further substantiating what has progressively constituted the broad trajectory of The Community Project group of the United Nations Association of Australia since the inception of this project, McKnight proposes that his ‘new moral framework … means connecting a moral stance – which begins at a personal level – to social goals’ (255). 

Clearly, McKnight does realize the significance, importance and relevance of ‘morality’.  ‘The challenge is to ‘define public morality’ and to set a moral agenda … Matters of social justice are moral issues and are part of a moral framework of caring and of providing security … [as are] the moral consequences of unrestrained markets and competition for society [my emphasis] (256) … Winning the debate on public morality means damning the further commercialization of sports, the arts, universities and the growth of ‘industries’ like advertising and gambling (257) …’ 

All this is about ‘…projecting a moral vision of the nation built around core values … Patriotism has been traditionally mobilized by the Right to the extent that the word itself is almost synonymous with a boastful pride and hostility to other nations … We need to strongly define the Australian way as one of equality, fairness and tolerance … [and] identify positive ideals and national values’ (257) … even though earlier McKnight had dubbed ‘equality’ as an ‘abstract notion’ (256). 

However, in alluding to ‘… high-minded and abstract notions that often fail to connect with many people’ (257), McKnight appears oblivious to the reality that substantial progressive ideas, ideals and reforms almost inevitably begin as such ‘abstractions’ and require encouragement, recognition and appreciation of the often eclectic and/or sometimes eccentric originators of such initiatives.  Moreover, it behoves us to realise the resonant place and significance of these pioneers in this context.  Ultimately, people generally often need to be aroused out of their tendency to torpid malaise enough to realize the considerable propensity of such beneficent endeavour, thereby to engage in a thoroughgoing social movement.  

‘A sense of national identity encourages social cohesion, which is a necessary condition for the continued operation of a welfare state based on the redistribution of wealth.  That is, if the middle class and the rich feel no sense that ‘us’ includes the poor, they will become very hostile to paying taxes to support ‘them’ … [Hence] it is vital to build bonds of commonality in a synthetic common culture’ (258). 

‘The third dimension of this moral framework concerns the centrality of caring and caring values.  Dependence is part of the human condition … So is caring for others.  But caring is devalued and largely invisible in our society (259) … 

‘But to achieve … [pertinent] changes [in this respect] requires a new kind of social movement, and the reframing of a popular debate.  What we need is a ‘right to care’ movement (259) … 

‘The fourth dimension … incorporates conservation values (260).  

These values … aim to emphasise the notion that we are part of nature, that we must act as stewards of a biological heritage … Conservation values also emphasise what we share as humans, both in nature and in communities, rather than simply what we may gain through self-interest.  Conservation values also favour prudence and careful scrutiny of the proposal that we should gamble our future on such risky things as unlimited economic growth and genetic manipulation’ (260). 

However, ‘caring’ values based on an ethic of ‘dependence’, or implied interdependence, would be grounded in a deep sense of ‘gratitude’ (1962: 283), as Huxley puts this through the perspective of Will Farnaby.  

Correspondingly, such an ethic of deep care and compassion would proceed from our mutual appreciation of the resonant place and significance of each and all of our respective personal contributions in this.

Such an ethos would emanate from the personal context of everyday experience, existence and identity, as Will realised through his appreciation of Susila in this profound personal sense. 

‘He stood motionless, gazing through a timeless succession of mounting intensities and even profounder significances.  Tears filled his eyes and overflowed at last on to his cheeks … He couldn’t help it because there was no other way in which he could express his thankfulness … Thankfulness for being at once this union with the divine unity and yet this finite creature among other finite creatures … ‘Gratitude is heaven itself,’ he quoted.  ‘… But now I see that Blake was just recording a simple fact.  It is heaven itself’ (283). 

‘And yet in spite of the entirely justified refusal to take yes for an answer, the fact remained and would remain always, remain everywhere – the fact that there was this capacity even in a paranoiac for intelligence, even in a devil-worshipper for love; the fact that the ground of all being could be totally manifest in a flowering shrub, a human face; the fact that there was a light and this light was also compassion (285) … 

‘He put an arm round her shoulders and held her close (285) …’     

Everyday music and cultural/ personal phenomena

Through reflections on the American composer, John Cage, writer Andrew Ford alerts us to the many sounds we hear in the everyday life context.  Among these would be ‘… the ticking clock, traffic noise, fragments of conversation, birdsong, a distant barking dog, a passing plane’ (1997 [2002 ed]: 1). 

Accordingly, in considerable deference to the hegemony of the raw anthropological imperative in Western culture, John Cage maintains such sounds collectively constitute ‘illegal harmony’ (1), because they do not comply with, or conform to, the ‘rules’ of the Western musical tradition, particularly of the ‘modernist’ genre, which he considers ought to be more inclusive.  

Hence Ford’s work in this respect is entitled – Illegal Harmonies (1997). 

Moreover, everyday sounds clearly comprise the development and formation of our cultural reality and experience, and thereby further form the substance of our cultural interpretation, collectively and personally, from my perspective. 

‘Cage stands in a paradoxical relationship to the Western 20th century (2).  

‘Many of his ideas regarding the inclusive nature of music have their roots in Eastern philosophy.  The notion that by listening to sounds, by learning to enjoy illegal harmonies, we might be experiencing music owes a lot to Zen Buddhism; equally, the attitude of calm acceptance that this demands is found in Hindu teaching.  The West’s growing interest in such matters is itself, of course, largely a 20th century phenomenon (2) …’ 

Consequently, ‘… in discerning the human behaviour and speech patterns of everyday life, in hearing them as they really are and in allowing them to colour and structure his music, Debussy’s ear resembles Monet’s eye (12) …’ for instance. 

‘By the same token, early 20th century writers such as Henry James, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf abandoned the serial story-telling of novelists like Austen, Dickens, Balzac and Zola, for something altogether more three-dimensional.  Perhaps I ought to say ‘four dimensional’, since the principal characteristic that unites modernist novels is a consideration of time and the ways in which we perceive it.  Not many of us live perpetually in the present, our daily lives are invaded by memories of the past – nostalgic and regretful; often, perhaps, faulty – and by hopes and fears for the future (12).  

‘Sometimes these moments are conscious, but equally they can occur spontaneously (12) …’ 

However, ‘memories of the past’ can further be profoundly poignant and sensitive in sentiment for us, even intuitive and insightful in their significance, depending on the pertinence of our interpretation of these phenomena. 

‘Probably the most significant of all the early 20th century writers to be concerned with time – certainly the one most closely linked to Debussy – was Marcel Proust.  In … Remembrance of Times Past, Proust deals with memory on a grand multi-volume scale.  More pertinently, Proust was aware of the ambiguous relationship between music and time; he recognized that while music exists in time, it’s also capable of distorting it when it cuts its listeners off from the ticking clock [for instance] (13) …’  

‘Gustav Mahler, who died in 1911, in some ways encapsulates the problem with form, if only in the symphony.  Mahler’s symphonies were grand in scale and sprawling in nature.  It was not that they lacked formal discipline – far from it – but these works were about more than music … Although he composed no operas himself – perhaps because of it – his symphonies teem with dramatic incident; themes and motifs stalk through his music like the characters in a 19th century novel … Mahler’s [symphonies] are inclusive, full of humanity’ (26). 

Further,  ‘Much as he resisted his publisher’s request for detailed programmatic accounts of his symphonic works … Mahler could hardly deny that his symphonies had non-musical meanings in addition to their purely musical ones (27-28) … Mahler gave a splendid twist to the 19th century conceit of the artist as hero.  His symphonies are heroic, and arguably Mahler himself is the hero of them, but he is a deeply flawed and tragic hero’ (28). 

Moreover, much later,  ‘With classical music and jazz aimed increasingly at listeners of some refinement, it seems inevitable that a new form of popular music should have emerged.  But that rock and roll would turn out to be the most influential and widely heard music in history could hardly have been anticipated’ (142). 

Yet,  ‘Rock and roll didn’t come from nowhere (142).  

‘Go to the ‘jump music’ that Fats Waller and Louis Jordan were playing in the 1940s, and you will hear the rhythm of rock in embryo … As with any oral tradition, it’s impossible to give a neat or even accurate history of the birth of rock (142) … 

‘Rock and roll was primarily a recording phenomenon (143).  

‘Wherever its stylistic roots were buried, it was the sound recording that nurtured it (143) … What mattered was the sound (143-144).  The 1950s teenager identified with the style of this music as much as its content, and increasingly with the style of the singer (144) … 

‘In [Luciano Berio’s] Sinfonia (1968), a voice from within the orchestra reminds us that music ‘can’t stop the wars, can’t make the old younger or lower the price of bread, can’t erase solitude or dull the tread outside the door’ (148) … 

Nevertheless, in ‘… 1963, when Bob Dylan sang ‘The times they are a-changing’, he was still really predicting events, rather than summing them up, but his song was quickly adopted as an anthem by the generation born after World War II (151).  

‘It was a generation that believed in progress in spite of the atom bomb; that believed in freedom of speech (151) …’ 

Meanwhile, ‘… in Liverpool, the Beatles were not unaffected by the blues, but they drew their inspiration from a wider stylistic pool … The Beatles were never merely rock and rollers.  Their early material, reflecting their versatility as entertainers, even included show tunes, Till There Was You from Meredith Willson’s The Music Man [for instance] (153) … 

However,  ‘Whether or not they knew it – probably they didn’t – the songs that John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote, had a harmonic sophistication that went well beyond the … formulas of the blues (154) … Sgt Pepper appeared in 1967, and was an early example of the ‘concept album’.  The Beatles’ albums had steadily become less like compilations of individual songs, and more like integral statements in which songs were related to each other (155) ... 

‘The crowd [pictured as faces on the Sgt Peppers cover] consists of effigies of Beatle heroes, including Karl Marx and Carl Gustav Jung, Aldous Huxley and Dylan Thomas, Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe … One of the more surprising figures on the cover … is Karlheinz Stockhausen’ (156).  

Meanwhile, the ‘… musical ‘voice-print’ [such as of The Beatles] became more important than ever in the pop music of the 1960s’ (157) … 

‘Jazz, blues, gospel, rock and roll; the popular musics of the last hundred years have gained international currency.  They quickly came to dominate Western culture; they provided the soundtrack of 20th century life.  More than ubiquitous, they were unavoidable (173) … 

However, ‘… the so-called ambient music that oozed out of many an ‘80s sound system was intended to provide little more than a temporary, womb-like haven for the busy yuppy.  There is something profoundly depressing about this ‘life-style’ music, designed to be heard but not listened to, like a painting that is meant not to be looked at.  This was not ambient music in that it was necessarily drawn from ambient sounds, it was music that established an ambience (213) …’   

The particular genre of popular epic narrative music and lyrical pieces which are known broadly as romantic, or more popularly as ‘love songs’, tend to exude a more profound form of ‘deep essence’ [cf Caputo in Michelfelder and Palmer 1989] grounded in substantial feeling and sentiment.  Such pieces are much more sensitively imbued than broad ‘life story’ or ‘journey’ epics based on a concisely stated whole life narrative. 

Those romantic pieces of this ilk which present as being most moving in aspect tend to have a rich wistful element through which the threads of the narrative tapestry blend through the ambience of the circumstances shared.  

These are then ultimately woven into the whole narrative situation. 

Often this wistful element serves to vindicate the intensity of implied expressed emotion and perception as indicative of a noble purely realized experience, even if the actual phenomenon of this experience is perpetuated through memory. 

Particular episodes which are associated with this phenomenon and experience thence become the means through which such reminiscence is perpetuated and often resonates through the facets of particular romantic lyrical pieces. 

Finely resonant romantic narratives which exude evocative sensitive facets of experience can become an emotional conduit which blends the personal with the evolved created experience purveyed through the song.  John Denver’s Lady serves to bring those who hear the lyrics into the realm of a highly attuned appreciation, realized through deep sustained faith and commitment in close intimate friendship, sentiment and devotion, for instance. 

While, John Lennon’s Woman is imbued with such intimacy of ethos also, although in more of the tentative spirit of personal vulnerability. 

Hence, through such a piece as Richard Marks’ Now and Forever this intimate sensitive sentiment is settled into a romantic narrative of sustained resolve in sentiment and sensitive earnest intent. 

While in Phil Collins’ In Too Deep, there is a profound intuitive realization of sustained sentiment, which is grounded in the context of personal experience.  Through this narrative experience a deep sense of having become lost in the essence of love and intimacy which constitutes this situation is expressed in a spirit of fraught ambivalence. 

Moreover, an associated wistfully pensive spirit permeates such songs as Tina Arena’s Wasn’t It Good?, where the nature of the expression gravitates around difficult explorative intimate experience realized through a context of struggle and adversity.  Although, in this situation, the romantic venture and aspiration concerned remains just too much of a broad ideal to be feasibly realized. 

Another further element which can intervene in such pensively and wistful reminiscence is realization derived from an awareness of the pertinently resonant significance of contribution and/or achievement.  This tends to emerge in the context of an holistic or broad perspective of (inter)personal cultivation and/or development. 

Hence, on this basis, the potentially tragic implication of such romantic pieces as Wasn’t It Good? and In Too Deep instead blend into a perceptually transformative outcome and/or culmination.  The infusion of such a sustained beneficent sense and spirit is abundantly evident in such pieces as The Wind Beneath My Wings, where achievement and contribution are realized collaboratively.  An augmented aspect seems to characterize the particular nature of the described phenomenon of being able to rise through circumstances in a spirit of ascendancy.  Given a perhaps somewhat more modest scenario, such a spirit resonates through the aspirational lyric of This Is It!, whereby from a simple humble friendship, the two people featured in the song are able to ascend to a culmination of their mutual endearment through the realization of the deeper significance and place of their friendship with each other. 

Many relatively contemporary lyrical pieces exude this common sense of ascendant attainment through struggle in the context of adversity, even in the face of earlier frayed or fraught mutual relations, such as expressed through the song You Saved The Best For Last.  At times, the perceived attainment doesn’t really manifest as a form of personal fulfilment, or at least as what may be presumed would transpire for those concerned, but the outcome is enough.  Lyrical pieces such as Anything For You and She’s Out of My Life express and exude a deep sense of blighted circumstances and emotion.  Yet still somehow there is a deep resonant sense of the tragic compromised realization having been enough as a learning experience for the life journey and quest.  

The prospect of beneficent cultivation and transition based on such transformational yet flawed providence remains a vital vibrant prospect. 

The lyrical gem True from Spandeau Ballet purveys an even deeper transformational character, derived through the prospect in this case of a comprehensive reorientation of a life journey through the auspices of a thoroughly reformative scenario.  Yet paradoxically this phenomenon is intrinsically and intricately blended and woven into the threads and fabric of former experience and circumstances.

While Justin Hayward brings a most wistful historical ambience to such elements through Forever Autumn from War of the Worlds, which is based on the famous H G Wells novel, with a similar ambience infusing the iconic Moody Blues piece Nights in White Satin, among others. 

These foregoing romantic pieces comprise lyrical themes which proceeded from resonant sentiments expressed in pieces emergent throughout the 1970s, which thence permeated many further pieces throughout the 1980s and 1990s. 

Popular music tended to reflect more street-wise existential themes with the advent of the 1970s and the derivation of ‘disco’ oriented pieces form the urban lifestyle situational musical narrative performances of which the lyrical pieces written for the musicals Saturday Night Fever and Grease were iconic forms, for instance. 

However, even from the early 1970s, songs such as Billy Joel’s You’re My Home exuded a similar basic most acutely sensitive romantic sentiment to John Denver’s Lady, cited earlier.  Yet the essential difference of the situational ambience of Billy Joel’s piece was inherently one of blatantly basic, even constrained, existential circumstances. 

Other lyrical pieces progressively purveyed such themes of existential subsistence and constraint throughout this decade, notably through Sir Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s work, for instance, as evidenced through such pieces as Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me, Yellow Brick Road and Tiny Dancer. 

Indeed, the lyrical work of the Bee Gees, which substantiated the ‘70s disco musicals cited earlier, similarly at times exuded deep acutely sensitive sentiment expressed through an epic existential situational narrative form.  

Particularly, How Deep Is Your Love?, More Than A Woman and Hopelessly Devoted To You were instances of such an elemental form.  

However, the Bee Gees already were experimenting with such distinctive deep sentiment through earlier pieces, such as Run To Me and Good Morning Mister Sunshine. 

The great Australian iconic piece which expressed the fraught and frantic existential aspect of the 1970s was Skyhook’s Living In The ‘70s, along with Sherbet’s One Summer and Summer Love.   

Yet other balladeers from further afield were able to imbue this primal ambiguity and tension with a much more deeply personal sense of poignant sensitivity and sentiment.  The deeply personal introspection of such pieces as Baker Street, All By Myself, Day After Day and Alone Again, Naturally resonantly evoke such an embedded personally focused aspect.  Expressed in more intricate epic narrative form, this romantic element further pervades such correspondingly resonant pieces as The Eagles’ Hotel California, Best of My Love, Desperado, and America’s Sister Golden Hair, for instance. 

Another vital formative element in many of the lyrical pieces emergent throughout the 1970s was the ascendancy of the conversational lyric whereby songwriters and performers tended to convey and present their work as if they were engaged in a basically intimate personal conversation or sharing session with their respondents. 

Among the primary exponents of this form and/or style for me was James Taylor, this being particularly inherent in his iconic romantic epic narrative Fire and Rain, which resembles a neatly condensed life journey love story. 

What is most significant, relevant and resonant in this context is that James Taylor conveys his sentiments as if he is having a quiet armchair-like conversation with a close precious friend, indeed with his live concert performances always feeling this way for me. 

Taylor’s pieces are thoroughly infused with deep profound intimacy and sentiment around closely personal romantic themes, instances of which include such classics as Shower The People, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight, Copperline, Carolina On My Mind, Sweet Potato Pie, Home By Another Way. 

The brilliant iconic Carole King classic You’ve Got A Friend, as performed both respectively by her and James Taylor, and collaboratively also, is a further piece in this ilk.  Carole King is another such foremost exponent of this form through such classic pieces as So Far Away, Beautiful, I Feel The Earth Move, It’s Going To Take Some Time, her version of Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow.  Essentially every song from her Tapestry album would be among these. 

David Gates with Bread was another who famously advanced this conversational form through a host of such idyllic romantic pieces as Everything I Own, Diary, Make It With You, Baby I’m A Want You, Lost Without Your Love, It Don’t Matter To Me and Sweet Surrender.  

While as performers The Carpenters, notably Karen Carpenter, purveyed this lyrical form throughout the range of their iconic pieces, including Make Believe It’s Your First Time, I Know I Need To Be In Love, We’ve Only Just Begun, Solitaire, Superstar, Masquerade, and so on. 

Cat Stevens provided his distinctive interpretation of the conversational form through classics such as Father and Son, Wild World, Where Do The Children Play? and I Long To Tell You. 

While Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were masters of this form throughout their years as a professional partnership, along with their lyrical pieces from their solo careers, as was Don McLean, particularly evidenced through such gems as Empty Chairs, And I Love You So, Vincent, Winterwood and Castles In The Air. 

The more grand romantic conversational form was most dynamically purveyed by Sir Paul McCartney throughout the 1970s, with the most emphatic expression of this in characteristic blues-rock idiom, evident through such of his songs as Maybe I’m Amazed and Oh Darling from the Abbey Road album.  While Another Day heralds the advent of the more quietly personal intimate conversational form which was to thence proceed.  

Previously, this form tended to be conveyed in more of a grand performance-based ambience redolent of such lyrical works as The Long and Winding Road and Let It Be from Paul McCartney, while he was with the Beatles.  George Harrison’s While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Something also represent the epitome of this lyrical form. 

Essentially from inception the deeply romantic lyrical pieces of the Beatles expressed the inimitable conversational form which characterized the blending of pop and rock elements channelled into palpably authentic soul-searching dialogue, cultivated through the auspices of the performer and listener respectively. 

Many of the early Beatles lyrical pieces were of this ilk.  

There is a sense in which each and all of these could be cited as conversation pieces.  However, some exude a somewhat more poignant intimate quality which really brings forth the sense of acutely personal dynamics. 

There are myriad abundant instances of how this is evident.  

However, such intimate pieces as Yesterday, Do You Want To Know A Secret, Follow The Sun, I’ll Be Back, If I Fell, I Feel Fine, Things We Said Today, Girl, Here There and Everywhere, And Your Bird Can Sing, Your Mother Should Know, Penny Lane, Fool On The Hill, I Will, Strawberry Fields Forever, Eleanor Rigby and All You Need Is Love, are just some of so many which evoke and imbue this quality from the early years forward to the fading of the 1960s.  

Indeed, notably the racy lyric of Lady Madonna, among some other Beatles pieces, even proceeds as a conversation with the character in the song itself !  

However, in 1967, with the release of the astounding Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, The Beatles, with Sir George Martin, infused their work with a most colourful pantomime epic narrative orientation.  This was broadly reminiscent of the satirical endemic parody amply resonant of the late 19th century Victorian era, when Sir William Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan applied this form through the emphatically staged contexts of their popular ‘operettas’.  

Indeed, the legendary Sgt Peppers creation really harked back to this ambient referential socio-cultural context as the imaginative source ethos of these iconic lyrical pieces.  

Yet the resonant conversation pieces derived from this referential source were impeccably relevant and contemporary for this time.  Almost all of these, from the grand epic A Day In The Life, to the wistfully poignant She’s Leaving Home, inclusive of Good Morning, A Little Help From My Friends, Fixing A Hole, Within You Without You, remain implicitly most pertinent in this respect. 

This ethos then proceeded to accordingly infuse other pieces and facets of the Beatles’ work, such as the Magical Mystery Tour album, along with such songs as Strawberry Fields Forever, All You Need Is Love, and so on.  This is inclusive particularly of the second side of the Abbey Road album, which really forms out as an extended epic life journey conversation, purveyed through such unlikely spontaneous pieces as She Came In Through The Bathroom Window. 

Blended themes of personal musical experience

Other than through the influence of the Beatles phenomenon in the continental European referential sphere, in the North American context the mantle of a primary conversational lyric to be realised through the popular idiom was notably taken up by Bob Dylan throughout the 1960s.  There were many other performers who virtually assisted the Dylan phenomenon, revealing a plethora of diverse folk-pop styles, from Peter Paul and Mary, Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez, through to the Eagles, America, Neil Young and his various associates, Janis Joplin, along with Simon and Garfunkel. 

However, the form of conversational lyric advanced by Bob Dylan and his ilk was far different in style to the more somewhat consensual endeavour inherent in the lyrical narratives of the Beatles. 

The conversational narratives which comprised Dylan’s work was much more stark, acerbic, emphatic, and perhaps in some sense broadly tended to be more confrontational.  While Dylan clearly presented his lyrical pieces as a form of conversation, there was such emphasis and urgency in his pieces that they came across as prescriptive – basically as forms of monologue which were tinged with the polemical aspect of mini-edicts and/or sermons. 

Consequently, there was this form of insistent element in many of the North American narrative lyrics proceeding through various folk-pop performers, even extending to the more urbane softly intellectual style of Simon and Garfunkel, Don McLean, and so on. 

Dylan, among others, further applied this form to romantic lyrical pieces which emanated from his direct prescriptive style.  Yet, profound deep sensitive sentiments exuded such resonant pieces as his Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright, Just Like A Woman, Love Minus Zero, Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, Like A Rollling Stone and It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.  These were all romantic lyrical narratives of some form.  

Yet, through these works, a hard definitive prospect is invoked, just as through pieces such as Peter Paul and Mary’s romantic pieces Single Girl, There Is A Ship and Reason To Believe, Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now, Neil Young’s Heart of Gold, Don’t Let It Bring You Down and Needle and the Damage Done, Janis Joplin’s Piece of My Heart and Ball And Chain – along with her own alleged story as this is said to imbue Bette Middler’s The Rose – America’s Sister Golden Hair, the Eagles’ Best of My Love and Desperado, Simon and Garfunkel’s Homeward Bound, Mrs Robinson and Still Crazy After All These Years.  

Even Canadian performers, such as Darryl Hall and John Oates with Sometimes When We Touch, provided profound lyrical pieces in this genre. 

Further to the iconic film documentary analysis of Dylan’s life entitled No Direction Home, compiled by celebrated film director, Martin Scorsese, it is evident the 1963 Newport Folk Festival clearly figured prominently in Dylan’s performative trajectory.  

Through the account of this event he is featured as being the anointed successor of the public promulgation of the grass-roots folk-blues tradition progressed through the sustained dedication of the legendary Pete Seeger over successive decades. 

There are many broad-ranging diverse strands of folk-blues antecedents which over the years incrementally blended and culminated in the work of Dylan and his associational contemporaries.  However, to track these through precisely and definitively would be quite a formidable prospect, perhaps even too much so. 

Clearly what can be affirmed is that each person will be aware of the distinctive trajectory of each, and somehow collectively all, of these respective folds of musical influence in each of their respective personal forms.  Just as such aspects of experience are realised through the particular life journey of each person, collectively comprising ‘Our Life Journey’, as a whole phenomenon. 

Correspondingly, at least I can hereby identify a broadly diverse collection of lyrical pieces which represent a vital trajectory for me of how I came to resonate with particular elements of these antecedent lyrical facets expressed through musical forms. 

It would not be feasible for me to track through all such influences, which would comprise palpable strains now only distant in my awareness.  Yet there are certainly themes and strands of lyrical orientation which do resonate affirmatively through my awareness and perception – some of these in predominant form. 

Many of these derive from a basically broad-based popular music idiom, not necessarily through particularly distinctive strands of folk and/or blues influence.  

Accordingly, for me, among such most prevalent resonant influences would be the deeply sensitive sentiment inherent in the lyrically resonant narrative pieces which proceeded from the Gershwin brothers, particularly George Gershwin. 

Such lyrical melodic themes as Our Love Is Here To Stay, They Can’t Take That Away From Me, Someone To Watch Over Me, I’ve Got You Under My Skin, These Foolish Things and Embraceable You, were all samples of iconic Gershwin classics which exude deep authentic earnest sentiment, couched in the context of intricate complex paradoxical interpersonal situations and socio-personal circumstances so resonant of my particular intimate journey through deep thorough sensitivity. 

Other various eclectic themes in this ilk include Hoagie Carmichael’s Stardust, Billie Holiday’s versions of Deep Purple Dream and Stormy Weather, Cole Porter’s Night and Day, Jerome Kern’s Lovin’ That Man, along with various Rodgers and Hart songs, such as My Romance, My Funny Valentine, Thou Swell, Where Or When, and There’s A Small Hotel. 

However, the Richard Rodgers orientation moved from poignant reflection to deeply pertinent and significant resonance for me with the advent of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s iconic Carousel, particularly through the classic piece If I Loved You, and The King and I musical, especially through the piece Something Wonderful, the Australian Doug Parkinson version of which I was to come to revere.  In similar vein, the Beatles/ Paul McCartney version of the poignant Till There Was You from The Music Man always aroused my deep sentiment and feeling, as did the Lerner and Lowe lyrical themes from My Fair Lady. 

Inspirational for me always were the wistfully sensitive pieces from Camelot, particularly If Ever I Would Leave You and the theme song entitled Camelot. 

There were various lyrical themes associated with particular poignant situational narratives through which I derived inspiration and encouragement for my personal life journey and experience.  Among these were True Love, Love Is A Many Splendoured Thing, As Time Goes By, Somewhere and The Shadow of Your Smile, for instance. 

Generally, the Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby lyrical melodies remain poignantly resonant in sentiment and significance for me. 

The basically performance-oriented pieces from these early eras tend to be less directly conversational than those of Dylan, the Beatles and many contemporary performers.  However, popular lyrical pieces of this ilk proceed from antecedents represented by such works as those of Gilbert and Sullivan, or other such lighter operatic works. 

What I’ve experience through my gradual awareness and appreciation of contemporary lyrical pieces from the 1990s and beyond is that these often resonate with these prevalent themes which have become so pertinent for me. 

However, the way through which such resonant forms of essence radiated forth for me were through particular circumstances, and ultimately therefore situations, which became the substance of my life journey and experience. 

Consequently, such lyrical gems as Darren Hayes I Knew I Loved You (‘before I met you’), performed with Savage Garden, evokes for me the acutely intuitive awareness through which I have realized an essence of perception as a palpable form of providence.  This substantiates the phenomenon of my life journey as implicitly blended with the resonant continuity and consistency of the broader life journey of each and all of us in this dimensional realm – our life journey. 

Therefore this song carries forth the implicit intuitive significance of Rodgers and Hart’s Where Or When for me, for instance.  

While, the determination, ‘drive’, even faith, to fulfil authentic aspiration in the context of struggle and adversity is realized through Savage Garden’s To The Moon and Back. This is further radiated through the fluidity of associated deep sentiment imbued through the ages variously through such classic narrative lyrical pieces as Stairway To Heaven, Hotel California, The Long and Winding Road, I Started A Joke, He Ain’t Heavy He’s My Brother, Song For You, and Sir Elton John/ Bernie Taupin’s Your Song.  Such inherent deep sentiment tends to stretch back to earlier narrative epics, such as Stardust and the Frank Sinatra gem All The Way. 

Correspondingly, this deep sentiment, embedded through such lyrical pieces, at times broaches the intuited perception of perpetuity which enables personal mutual belief, faith and commitment to be cultivated and retained through close deep friendship and/or love.  Thereby the vibrant sentiment of such relatively recent lyrical pieces as Reminiscing, Kiss Me, Rose On The Grave, The Way You Look Tonight, All The Love In The World, All I Need Is Time, How Can I Live Without You? and Angel Of Mine are lyrical instances of how such sentiment is sustained and perpetuated. 

Clearly embedded throughout many lyrical pieces is the intensity of acute poignancy which these are often infused.  Such poignancy truly really epitomizes the nature and character of the blues as a musical form.  

Therefore, where the traditional blues idiom is concerned, it can be most viably affirmed most such blues pieces retain the element of poignancy therein. 

However, many such songs progressively have become further imbued with intense reflection and passion.  Duke Ellington’s Solitude, performed exquisitely by Billie Holiday, epitomizes such sustained intensity.  This is further realized through such pieces as Buddy Holly’s Crying, The Carpenters’ Solitaire, The Beatles/ Paul McCartney’s Oh Darling, John Lennon’s Don’t Let Me Down, Eric Clapton’s Tears In Heaven, Change The World and I’ll Be On My Way, Elton John’s The One, Moriah Carey’s performance of the beautiful Jackson Five piece I’ll Be There, along with Michael Jackson’s own She’s Out Of My Life. 

Among Australian performers, Tina Arena’s Wasn’t It Good? and John Farnham’s Burn For You are clearly resonant in this context. 

Thence from a somewhat more fraught aspect this kind of intensity reverberates through the more profoundly obtuse lyrical creations of Crowded House, such as Don’t Dream It’s Over and Mean To Me. 

Sometimes such sentiment manifests through the more candid sensitive Crowded House romantic narratives, such as Whenever I Fall, It’s Only Natural, Weather With You, and When Our Seven Worlds Collide, and through the culturally diverse overtones which characterize aspects of such pieces. 

At other times marginalised emotional aspiration constitutes the contextual predicaments evident throughout such emphatic narrative pieces as Something So Strong and Better Be Home Soon.  While, Into Temptation and Sister Madly are more deeply insistent intense exploratory pieces in this genre.  

Moreover, Don’t Dream It’s Over expresses a profound exasperation with the entrenched mediocrity of contemporary life, much as Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel explored this theme more sedately through pieces such as Homeward Bound and Mrs Robinson. 

Among the most innovative phenomena to pervade popular music was the adoption of what is commonly termed ‘stop time’, essentially derived in its most lucid form from jazz. 

The inception of stop time enabled a pause to proceed in the context of the lyric and/or music, such that the listener could effectively tune in more intensively to the feeling, emotion and/or mood which exuded the piece, and/or the situation purveyed through it. 

Considered from my particular perspective, Janis Joplin was perhaps the exponent par excellence of stop time in the relatively contemporary popular idiom, as realized notably through her performance of Ball and Chain, along with her version of the Gershwin classic Summertime, from the iconic musical Porgy and Bess.  These were performed live at the Filmore Auditorium for the Cheap Thrills album with Big Brother and The Holding Company. 

Stop time is rather like the famous ‘Pinter pause’ in dramatic performance.  Actually, Andrew Ford refers to this pause propensity in the works of Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett.  Thereby the audience gets ample time for reflection throughout the performance or piece, and an extended emphatic propensity to relate to the poignancy and feeling of the manifest situation is encouraged. 

Basically, from the performance perspective, stop time allows the artist to accumulate energy to express the dynamics of any given situation with greater intensity, while cultivating progressively more profound synergy with the audience.  Comparable to this might be the effect and/or presumable raw intent of a baby holding its breath between each cry or scream. 

Brilliance in stop time performance was realised through Billie Holiday’s legendary improvisation of songs such as Ellington’s Solitude.

Paul McCartney applied this form with astounding virtuosity with The Beatles through this Oh Darling, and later independently through Maybe I’m Amazed and My Love.  John Lennon also masterfully conveyed the form with the Beatles through such pieces as Don’t Let Me Down, Come Together, and A Day In The Life from Sgt Peppers.  

Further, George Harrison adapted it to his piece While My Guitar Gently Weeps.  Actually, already The Beatles were applying embryonic forms of stop time early on through Love Me Do, which some consider to be among a few landmark pieces in popular music, and Twist and Shout.  Such pieces were departures from their earlier much more busy racy hectic rock pieces, such as Roll Over Beethoven. 

Meanwhile, Beatle protégés Badfinger use the stop time form with dramatic intensity, particularly through their songs Baby Blue, No Matter What, and Come And Get It. 

Leon Russell is another superb purveyor of stop time, both as writer and performer, evident through such pieces as Song For You, and as suitably conveyed with his collaborator Joe Cocker, through such songs as particularly Hello Little Friend, When A Woman Loves Her Man, [which seems to be an inversion of the title of the famous classic Percy Sledge stop-time song, When A Man Loves A Woman !] and more subtly through Delta Lady.  

Cocker’s versions of the Beatles songs With A Little Help From My Friends and She Came In Through The Bathroom Window are further breathtaking versions of this form as conveyed by Russell and Cocker. 

There may be some cause to accept the prospect that stop time in popular music is in recession in the wake of the racy less overtly contemplative vernacular of rap music.  However, stop time remains resilient and often emerges in the most intuitively ingenious forms, such as expressed through the fresh vibrancy and candour of former Spice Girl Mel C’s performance of Never Be The Same Again.  The New Zealand/ Australian performers who comprise Crowded House use the form impressively through their piece entitled Mean To Me.  Tina Arena applies it on her piece Chains, while Mariah Carey is a further consummate exponent through her renditions of I’ll Be There, My All and Love Takes Time, among others.  Elton John and Bernie Taupin apply the form to such pieces as his Don’t Let The Sun God Down On Me and The One, as does Sting impressively, while with the Police, to Magic.   

Moreover, much more pertinent than the sheer abundance of the ‘stop time’ form is the ambience of its significance in socio-personal and cultural relations.  

Just as it is expressed in popular lyrical pieces, as well as literature and poetry, this form epitomizes the importance of reflection periods, and time for the cultivation of awareness and appreciation of acute feeling. 

How this then proceeds is through the vital fabric and context of how we live.  Hence ample opportunity and space for reflection is crucial to this process.  

It is also vital for the manifestation of these deep human elements to be considered in the trajectory of evident socio-personal and cultural transition. 

Thence, along with the cultivation of awareness, the realization of what can be interpreted as the deep essence or source of perception, intuition and sentiment can become the means through which a sense of mutual maturity and communal responsibility may be nourished, although it cannot be presumed such an outcome will inevitably emerge in any given situation. 

Life flowing inexorably into reconciliation through Providence

Indeed, ‘attention’ is the vital state of being through which Aldous Huxley commences his novel Island (1962), as heralded emphatically from the first page.  Thereby bringing forward overtones of George Santayana’s quip:  

‘Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention’. 

Attention suggests, perhaps embodies, being ‘in the present’ or ‘being present’, which is redolent of Huxley’s other mimicked phrase at his novel’s outset:  

‘Here and now, boys’ (1962: 11, 12ff), the little island girl, Mary McPhail, soon confirms. 

Yet, as with the novel’s focal character, Will Farnaby, just as then, in this contemporary transitionary time of the new millennium in which we live, as people or human entities we are ‘neither here nor now’ (12).  

Reminiscent of Will’s climb and fall on the sheer island cliff-face, ‘the light’ has ‘begun to fail’ and we are ‘climbing almost in darkness, climbing by faith, climbing by sheer despair … at th[is] dreadful moment of falling’ (12). 

Once awareness eventually enables Will to realize just where he is, and in what situation, Mary assists him to orient his experiential journey through his memory and reflection, thereby to maintain the process through which he’d reached this juncture.  This process supports him in acquiring a thorough appreciation of his circumstances. 

Thence,  ‘The words came more easily and the memories they aroused were less painful’ (17). 

What Will then consequently came to realize most graphically and traumatically was that he’d ‘fallen’, and this was the trajectory of his demise.  Just as with human entities the sense of having fallen is prevalent, as humanity characterizes the nature of our particular universal/ socio-personal/ global situation.  

Indeed, our ‘fallen’ aspect may be represented ultimately through ‘The Fall’ from grace in spiritual terms we tend to consider we have endured collectively. 

‘I fell, I fell.  I fell …’ (17), Will repeats dutifully and mimetically. 

Yet Mary then consoles him,  ‘But you didn’t fall very far’ (17), confirming the implied palpable reality there remain ways for Will to proceed through all this, just as there remain such prospects for us in this contemporary time. 

Meanwhile, ‘the enormous joke of existence’ (18), which emanates from this pertinent reflection, remains reminiscent of the iconic popular Bee Gees song I Started A Joke, this being basically contemporaneous to this Huxley novel: 

‘I started a joke, which started the whole world laughing … 
Oh if I’d only seen that the joke was on me … 
I looked at the sky, running my hands over my eyes … 
And I fell out of bed, hurting my head on things that I’d said …’ 

There were intimations of an organic oriented perspective of existence and reality, perhaps romantic in essence, announced affirmatively by Dr Robert McPhail through his advice that St Francis would have proceeded more wisely by allowing ‘the birds’ to ‘preach’ to him, rather than vice-versa.  

‘What presumption !  

Why couldn’t he have kept his mouth shut and let the birds preach to him ?’ (21-22) 

‘Dr Robert’, so called, is a character most reminiscent of the Doctor Robert featured in the famous Beatles’ song of this title ! 

Meanwhile, early on, Will attested to a resolute embedded sense of confidence in the propensity of ‘Providence’ to fortify and support him, as he presumed was what proceeded from his fall from the cliff face.  

‘Remember the beginning of Erewhon’ (22) he proclaimed in this context to ‘Dr Robert’,  ‘As luck would have it, Providence was on my side’ (22). 

However, this would by nature be an empty ‘Providence’, because its existence as a phenomenon would depend on ‘luck’, rather than being grounded in the more substantial realm of assurance through existential continuity and the sense of a source of being.  Thereby, it could be vindicated through implicit faith, thence to be verified through the perpetuity of destiny and purpose. 

Will’s journalistic observation that ‘Moral Rearmament … goes down better in Asia’ than ‘The Crusade of the Spirit’ seems indicative of the decaying colonialist hubris of the time.  This was concurrently and ironically perpetuated among ‘developing’ nation-states through its more local versions of despotic materialism. 

Meanwhile, the perpetuity of perception realized through embedded sentiment and memory was instanced by Huxley through Susila McPhail’s plight, in her having recently lost both a limb and a son.  

For me this substantiates all lived phenomena and experience as significant, relevant, resonant and continuous in the collective/ personal life journey. 

‘There was no Dugald [her deceased son] any more; there was only this pain, like the pain of the phantom limb that goes on haunting the imagination, haunting even the perceptions, of those who have undergone an amputation (28) … 

‘If his absence was so constantly present, that was to remind her that hence forward she must love for two, live for two … must perceive and understand not merely with her own eyes, and mind but with the mind and eyes that had been his (28) …’ 

Moreover,  ‘Dr McPhail’ realized this perspective in the context of more immediate concurrent existential phenomena.  He ‘… thought of the incomprehensible sequence of changes and chances that make up a life, all the beauties and horrors and absurdities whose conjunctions create the uninterpretable and yet divinely significant pattern of human destiny’ (30). 

Yet, as Hans-Georg Gadamer later so pertinently discerned, indeed this, ‘pattern’ is ‘interpretable’, as Susila soon revealed through her sustained reflection.  

‘Floating on a great river of life (33) … 

‘Life flowing silently and irresistibly into ever fuller life, into a living peace all the more profound, all the richer and stronger and more complete because it knows all your pain and unhappiness, knows them and takes them into itself and makes them one with its own substance (33) … floating on this smooth silent river that sleeps and is yet irresistible (34) …’  

Rather like Henry Mancini’s Moon River from the famous song and musical ! ‘… and knowing all the time where it’s going is where I want to go, where I have to go:  into more life, into living peace.  Along with the sleeping river, the wildness, and at the same time complementing it, coming to terms with it in perfect reconciliation (32) …’ 

Correspondingly, this interpretation bears out the endemic perpetual quality and character of paradox which epitomizes experience and reality. 

Something truly vital, constitutive of what can be considered the essence of authentic life, is distilled into the basic principles of the Notes on What’s What text Dr Robert admonishes Will to consider as a guide to life in the island nation of Pala. 

‘Nobody needs to go anywhere else (38).  

‘We are all, if we only knew it, already there (38) … 

‘What in fact I am … is the reconciliation of yes and no lived out in total acceptance and the blessed experience of Not-Two (38) … 

‘Because [the] aspiration to perpetrate only the ‘yes’ in every pair of opposites can never, in the nature of things, be realised (39) …  

‘Conflicts and frustrations [are] the theme of all history and almost all biography (39) … 

‘Knowing who in fact we are results in Good Being, and Good Being results in the most appropriate kind of good doing.  But good doing does not of itself result in Good Being.  We can be virtuous without knowing who in fact we are (39).  

‘The beings who are merely good are not Good Beings; they are just pillars of society (39) … 

‘Good Being is knowing who in fact we are … [and] If we renew, until they become a continuity, these moments of the knowledge of what we are not, we may find ourselves all of a sudden, knowing who in fact we are (39) … 

‘But Good Being is in the knowledge of who in fact one is in relation to all experiences; so be aware – aware in every context, at all times and whatever, creditable or discreditable, pleasant or unpleasant, you may be doing or suffering … Translating Spinoza’s language into ours, we can say:  The more a man knows about himself in relation to every kind of experience, the greater his chance of suddenly, one fine morning, realizing who in fact he is (40) …’ 

Hence ‘awareness’ and ‘realisation’ become and are inherently intuitive in nature, indeed even spontaneous in this sense. 

‘St John was right (40) …   

‘In a blessedly speechless universe, the Word was not only with God; it was God.  As something to be believed in … Faith is something very different from belief.  Belief is the systematic taking of unanalyzed words much too seriously (40) … 

‘What happens is the senseless ambivalence of history (40) …’

While,  ‘Faith … can never be taken too seriously (40) …  

For Faith is the empirically justified confidence in our capacity to know who in fact we are (40) …’ 

Interpretation of such noble principles varies according to the perspectives of those applying these in the reputedly resplendent developing Pala Province.  

For the young soon-to-be Raja, Murugan, these are all about divine republican sovereignty.  

‘The Raja of Pala doesn’t just reign; he rules (44) … 

‘He rules constitutionally; but, by God, he rules, he rules ! (44) 

Murugan explains,  ‘Three sets of old fogeys run the country – The Cabinet, the House of Representatives, and then, representing the Raja, the Privy Council’ (44). 

Meanwhile, the Rani invokes Providence as her touchstone.  

‘Providence is always on our side.  Nothing happens by Accident (50) …  

‘There’s a Great Plan, and within the Great Plan innumerable little plans (51) …  

‘A little plan for each and every one of us’ (50).  

While,  ‘In the life of the Spirit …As one advances along the Path … all the psychic gifts and miraculous powers develop spontaneously … and, relative to the Path … Providence found it for me’ (51). 

Grounded in these moral principles, the Rani exuded ‘an expression of domineering calm, of serene and unshakeable self-esteem (53) …’ according to Will.  While the ‘Privy Council’ undermined ‘… the whole edifice of Moral and Spiritual Values, which I [the Rani] had so laboriously built up over the years …’ (55) in the cultivation of Murugan, her son.  

Yet, Rani lacked ‘truthfulness, humility, selflessness’ in her augmentation of ‘Purity’, as Will would have it (55).  Whereas, rather, ‘Purity is fundamental’ (55), Rani insisted. 

But Will remained unimpressed.  

‘This self-canonised world-saviour, this clutching and devouring mother – had she ever, for a single moment, seen herself as others saw her ?’ (57)  

While the ambassador, Mr Bahu, explained how the Palanese Government could be:  ‘Perfectly wrong … because [it is] all too perfectly right (58) … 

‘And meanwhile the outside world has been closing in on this little island of freedom and happiness.  Closing in steadily and inexorably, coming nearer and nearer.  What was once a viable ideal is now no longer viable’ (58).  

Further, of the Pala Government, Mr Bahu maintained it was:  

‘Not right … Flaunting your blessedness in the face of so much misery – it’s sheer hubris, it’s a deliberate affront to the rest of humanity’ (59).  

Moreover,  ‘Attention to avarice, attention to hypocrisy, attention to vulgar cynicism …’ (62) remained resonant in this. 

Will revealed his cogent astute appreciation of the relevance and significance of ‘commitment’ when asked by Mr Bahu if he was ‘ever interested in power’ (65).  ‘Never … One can’t have power without committing oneself’ (66) he replied.  ‘And for you the horror of being committed outweighs the pleasure of pushing other people around (66) …’ which Will conceded, thereby to reveal his penetrating insight into the dynamics of public socio-personal relations.  

This corresponded with the populist perspective/ expectation – 

‘Don’t try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good.  We’re all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat – and the boat is perpetually sinking’ (66) Mr Bahu observed pertinently.  While the nurse, Miss Radha, attested to the veracity of ‘… how you feel about being who you are in this kind of world’ (67) as a most resonant affirmation of the vital place of socio-personal authenticity. 

Moreover, ‘this kind of world’ constitutes our culture – the contemporary culture of our time and generation through which we necessarily derive our identity and experience. 

Soon Radha raised a stinging critique of a visiting American psychiatrist with a German accent who was on a lecture tour of Pala.  

‘But what sort of psyche [do they treat] ?  (69) … 

‘Obviously not the whole mind, not the mind as it really is (69) … 

‘Mind abstracted from body – that’s the only front they attack on (69) … 

‘And not even the whole of that front (69) … 
‘Not a single word about the positive unconscious (69) …  

‘No attempt to help the patient to open himself up to the life force or the Buddha Nature.  And no attempt to teach him to be a little more conscious in his everyday life (69) … 

‘Believe it or not, a normal human being is one who can have an orgasm and is adjusted to his society (69-70) … No question about the quality of your feelings and thoughts and perceptions (70) …’ arises from the perspective of these wayward pedants, whom Whitehead would describe as obscurantists. 

Forthwith, the young lovers Radha and Ranga explain the nature of their love relations as the epitome of the authenticity lacking in such Western situations.  

‘Will you make her promise to be faithful ?’ (73) Will asks Ranga.  

Thence he replies,  ‘I  won’t make her promise anything’ (73) … 

‘Even though she’s your girl ?’ … ‘She’s her own girl’ (73) … 

‘And Ranga’s his own boy … He’s free to do what he likes’ (74), Radha comments.  ‘And free above all … to do what he doesn’t like’ (74). 

Ranga thence proceeds to present an overview of something of the nature of his beliefs and spirituality, assisted by Radha. 

‘If you’re a Tantrick, you don’t renounce the world or deny its value; you don’t try to escape into a Nirvana apart from life (75) … No, you accept the world, and you make use of it; you make use of everything you do, of everything that happens to you, of all the things you see and hear and taste and touch, as so many means to your liberation from the prison of yourself (75-76) … 

‘Western philosophers, even the best of them – they’re nothing more than good talkers.  Eastern philosophers are often rather bad talkers, but that doesn’t matter … Their philosophy is pragmatic and operational (76) … 

‘Your metaphysicians make statements about the nature of man and the universe; but they don’t offer the reader any way of testing the truth of those statements (76) … What’s that phrase of Spinoza’s that they quote in the applied philosophy book ? (77)  

‘Make the body capable of doing many things’ [Radha] (78) … 

‘This will help you perfect the mind and so come to the intellectual love of God (78) … 
‘Awareness of one’s sensations and awareness of the not-sensation in every sensation’ – ‘the raw material for sensation that my not-self provides me with’ (78). 

Meanwhile, there were ‘… millions of us at the mercy of a few scores of politicians, a few thousands of tycoons and generals and money-lenders (81).  

‘Ye are the cyanide of the earth – and the cyanide will never, never lose its savour’ (81). 

Whereas,  ‘Here in Pala (81) … we’re not overcrowded, we’re not miserable, we’re not under a dictatorship.  And the reason is very simple:  we have to behave in a sensible and realistic way (82) … ‘Man cannot live by bread alone.’  But without bread [Ranga] now saw, there is no mind, no spirit, no inner light, no Father in Heaven.  There is only hunger, there is only despair and then apathy and finally death’ (83). 

Thence, Will continued his reading of the Notes on What’s What –  

‘Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief (86) … 

‘Me as I think I am and me as in fact [I am] – sorrow, in other words, and the ending of sorrow.  One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable.  It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, towards decrepitude and the certainty of death (86) …  

‘The remaining two-thirds of all sorrow is home made and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary’ (86). 

This whole broad perspective of ‘sorrow’ as elemental in, and fundamental to, existence and being integrates and blends with my advocacy of the reality of ‘struggle’ as the essence of life and experience in the inherent prevalent context of ‘adversity’. 

While in the observed Eastern context, relations of friendship are palpably much more fluid.  For instance, among family members – 

‘If they get on well together, they continue to see a lot of one another (89) …  

‘If they don’t, they drift apart (89) …  

‘Nobody expects them to cling, and clinging isn’t equated with loving – isn’t regarded as anything particularly creditable’ (89), Susila observed. 

‘Mutual Adoption Clubs’ – blending ‘science, intuition and humour’

All this happened in the context of what Susila described as ‘Mutual Adoption Club[s]’ or ‘MAC[s]’ (90), which collectively proceeded as – 

‘Hybridisation of micro-cultures – that’s what our sociologists call the process’ (91).  

Effectively, this entailed blending ‘science, intuition and humour in equal quantities with ‘Tantrick Buddhism’, then simmering these ingredients ‘indefinitely’, much as implied through the 1960s Melting Pot song ! 

MACs basically incorporated a myriad of diverse extended families in which any child could choose to stay whenever, and for whatever period suited them. 

Thence Susila described the outcome of this phenomenon as Will responded.  
‘That means that even in the nursery we enjoy a certain degree of freedom; and our freedom increases as we grow older and can deal with a wider range of experience and take on greater responsibilities (91) … 

‘‘How I envy you !  Free as a bird !’  ‘Not so lyrical ! (92)  

‘Free, let’s say, as a developing human being, free as a future woman [for Susila] – but not freer’ (92).  

Or what I have and would describe as relative autonomy. 

‘ ‘Holy’, ‘Healthy’, ‘whole’ – they all come from the same root and carry different overtones of the same meaning (92) … Duties and privileges in a big, open, unpredestined, inclusive family, where all the seven ages of man and a dozen different skills and talents are represented, and in which children have experience of all the important and significant things that human beings do and suffer (93) … Self-Determination [as in the Western context, becomes] … Destiny Control (95) …’  However,  ‘We know perfectly well that only a part of our destiny is controllable’ (95).  Hence, with the children,  ‘You just tell them what they’re supposed to do and leave it at that.  Behave well, you say (96) …  

‘But how ?  You never tell them’ (96). 

Whereas, in the Western context – 

‘You’re almost compelled to love [in an ‘imaginary universe’] … because the present is so frustrating.  And it’s frustrating because you’ve never been taught how to bridge the gap between theory and practice, between your New Year’s resolutions and your actual behaviour’ (96). 

Then Will responds,  ‘ ‘For the good that I would … I do not; and the evil that I would not, that I do’ … St Paul (96) …  

‘You see the highest possible ideals, and no methods for realizing them’ (96), Susila retorted. 

Will asked,  ‘ ‘Do you know what it’s like … to feel that nothing is quite real – including yourself ? (99) … ’ Susila nodded.  ‘It sometimes happens when one’s just on the point of discovering that everything, including myself, is much more real than one ever imagined.  It’s like shifting gears; you have to go into neutral before you change into high’ ‘(99). 

This description palpably corresponds with the contemporary transition time, and with the representation and imagery of To The Moon And Back, the numinous iconic classic contemporary song from Darren Hayes/ Savage Garden to which I have referred in this context earlier in this seminar paper presentation.  

Will then continues:  ‘Or low … In my case, the shift wasn’t up, it was down (99) …  

‘Not even down; it was into reverse (99) …’ 

Thence, Will construed his early interpersonal experiential ‘education’ as ‘liberal’, and in the broad field of ‘Pure and Applied Pointlessness’ (100).  

‘And a few weeks after the close of my private course in the subject came the grand opening of the public course.  World War II.  Followed by the non-stop refresher course of Cold War I’ (100) 

Susila suggested Will’s wife, Molly may still have loved and remained so committed to him, despite his affairs with Rachel and Babs, because he was ‘… quite an attractive kind of queer fish’ (102), and ‘… she might have loved you because you made her feel so damned sorry for you’ (102). 

Meanwhile, Will critically revealed his confusion, ambivalence and/or preoccupation on the vital love dimension.  

‘Were you in love with her ?’ (103) Susila enquired.  

‘Yes.  No, I don’t know.  But at the time I did know.  At least I thought I knew (103).  

‘I was really convinced that I was really in love with her’ (103), Will responded. 

‘By loving me so much and being so miserable about what I was doing – what she really forced me to do – she was putting pressure on me, she was trying to restrict my freedom.  But meanwhile she was genuinely unhappy; and though I hated her for blackmailing me with her unhappiness, I was filled with pity for her.  Pity … not compassion (103) … Pity was my answer, being sorry for her from the outside … And yet, on every level but the sensual, she loved me with a total commitment – a commitment that called for an answering commitment on my part’ (104).  

So, because he ‘wouldn’t’ commit, Will construed that ‘… even lovers sometimes hate the people they love’ (105).  

‘Naturally (105) …  

‘Because I always have the same nose and eyes, it doesn’t follow that I’m always the same woman.  Recognising that fact and reacting to it sensibly – that’s part of the Art of Loving’ (105) Susila proposed.  

Yet it would seem such vacillation would be anathema to the veracity of authenticity, in some deeper sense. 

‘Does one learn how to forget ?’ (107)  Will ultimately pleads in hopeless despair.  

‘It isn’t a matter of forgetting (107) …  

‘What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past (107) …  

‘How to be there with the dead and yet still be here, on the spot, with the living … It isn’t easy’ (107) Susila advised. 

Eventually, Susila basically maintained ‘an act of piety’ could express ‘a beautiful sentiment about a sublime idea.  But even the sublimest of ideas is totally different from the cosmic mystery it’s supposed to stand for.  And the beautiful sentiments connected with the sublime idea – what do they have in common with the direct experience of the mystery ?’ (113) 

Soon Dr Robert contributed his perspective in a further context.  

‘Perfect faith is defined as something that produces perfect peace of mind (114).  

‘But perfect peace of mind is something that practically nobody possesses.  Therefore practically nobody possesses perfect faith’ (114). 

However, he clearly does believe it is possible for such faith to become manifest: ‘… the Quakers … were heretical enough to believe in the Inner Light, and what happened ?  They gave up beating their children and were the first Christian denomination to protest against the institution of slavery’ (116).  

While, ‘… history is – the record of what human beings have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political and religious dogma’ (117). 

Will later commented,  ‘And to think … that people complain about modern life having no meaning !  Look at what life was like when it did have meaning’ (118). 

‘What one likes most about the universe is its wild improbability’ (125), Will later affirmed. 

This perspective augurs forth the essential spontaneous speculative nature and aspect of universal phenomena, which nevertheless is associated with facets of meaning such that meaning, significance, relevance and resonance remain fundamental to humanity, experience and the life process.  

Basically, these elements are not lost, as Will potentially infers.  

They remain the epitome of the historical phenomenon and trajectory Dr Roberts describes. 

‘People … are at once the beneficiaries and the victims of their culture (128) …  

‘It brings them to flower; but it also nips them in the bud or plants a canker at the heart of the blossom.  Might it not be possible, on this forbidden island, to avoid the cankers, minimize the nippings and make the individual blooms more beautiful ? (128) … To make the best of all the worlds – the worlds already realized within the various cultures and, beyond them, the worlds of still unrealized potentialities.  It was an enormous ambition, an ambition totally impossible of fulfilment (129) …’ Dr Robert mused. 

The struggle of perfection remains a vexed conundrum in the context of such aspiration, as any prospect of fulfilment in this respect appears ever more inaccessible and remote.  

‘ Patriotism is not enough.  But neither is anything else (132) …  

‘Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation.  Nothing short of everything will really do’ (132). 

For, true to the original condition of our humanity – 

‘ The serpent tempted me and I did eat (134).  

‘The tree in the midst of the garden was called the Tree of Consumer Goods, and to the inhabitants of every undeveloped Eden, the tiniest taste of its fruit … [brought] the shameful knowledge that, industrially speaking, they were stark naked’ (134). 

Yet, for the Palanese,  ‘They’ve got something that makes them think they’re perfectly happy, and they don’t want anything else’ (135). 

Consequently,  ‘An experience can be real in relation to something going on inside your skull, but completely irrelevant to anything outside’ (137), Will observed. 

However,  ‘You’re assuming that the brain produces consciousness (138) …  

‘I’m assuming that it transmits consciousness [which would indicate consciousness proceeds from a palpable universal source].  And my explanation is no more far-fetched than yours.  How on earth can a set of events belonging to one order be experienced as a set of events belonging to an entirely different and incommensurable order ?  Nobody has the faintest idea.  All one can do is accept the facts and concoct hypotheses’ (138), Dr Robert responded. 

For instance, he continued,  ‘Even if it doesn’t refer to anything outside itself … [‘music’ can still be] the most important thing that ever happened to you (139) … 

‘And if you give the experience a chance, if you’re prepared to go along with it, the results are incomparably … therapeutic and transforming’ (139). 

So,  ‘You can’t be a good economist unless you’re also a good psychologist (141).  

‘Or a good engineer without being the right kind of metaphysician’ (141), Will proclaimed, echoing the ‘Old Raja’s’ perspective. 

Some aspects of Dr Robert’s dialogue with Will about Pala epitomized the global socio-political dynamic of the early 1960s. 

‘Lenin used to say that electricity plus socialism equals communism (144) …  

‘Our equations are rather different (144) …  

‘Electricity minus heavy industry plus birth control equals democracy and plenty’ (144).  

‘Are you capitalists or state socialists ?’ (145) Will interposed.  

‘Neither.  Most of the time we’re cooperators (145) … 

‘Not being over-populated, we have plenty (145) …  

‘But although we have plenty, we’ve managed to resist the temptation to over-consume (145) … Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity (146) … And along with transcendental experience we systematically cultivate skepticism.  Discouraging children from taking words too seriously, teaching them to analyse whatever they hear or read – this is an integral part of the school curriculum (147) … 

‘Nobody enjoys a [media] monopoly (147) … 

‘There’s a panel of editors representing half a dozen different parties and interests.  Each of them gets his allotted space for comment and criticism (147-148).  The reader’s in a position to compare their arguments and make up his own mind … Sampling all kinds of work … [is] part of everybody’s education.  One learns an enormous amount that way – about things and skills and organizations, about all kinds of people and their ways of thinking’ (148), Dr Robert noted, as he detailed each feature of the Pala development trajectory. 

Thence he resumes his critique of Will’s Western cultural background: ‘… all of you are still Platonists.  You worship the word and abhor nature ! … you’re inadequate [‘abstract’] materialists … Abstract materialism is as bad as abstract idealism, it makes immediate spiritual experience almost impossible (149) …  

‘Sampling different kinds of work as concrete materialists is the first, indispensible step in our education for concrete spirituality’ (149).  

Dr Robert’s erstwhile faithful associate, Vijaya, then enters the fray in support of this perspective. 

‘ ‘But [all this] … won’t get you very far unless you’re fully conscious of what you’re doing and experiencing.  You’ve got to be completely aware …’ (149)  

‘Quite right (149) … 

‘It’s through awareness, complete and constant awareness, that we transform it into concrete spirituality.  Be full aware of what you’re doing …’ (149) Dr Robert continued, as he fortified this perspective. 

There followed an analysis of the phenomenon and anomalies of power and leadership in the historical and institutional contexts, such as evidenced through the penal system, through which reflections such as those later to be enunciated by Michel Foucault are broadly reviewed (149ff).  Certain prominent leaders from history were described respectively as either ‘Muscle People’ or ‘Peter Pans’ (151ff).  

Such categorization basically engenders a stipulative duality and/or polarity which appears as a divisive interpretation not conducive to Dr Robert’s intended perspective. 

When Will enquired,  ‘Do people do a lot of climbing in those mountains ?’ (156), the reply from Vijaya was ‘Climbing’s an integral part of the school curriculum … A little for everybody’ (156) was the response. 

At this juncture, Will was soon whisked away to witness a spiritually invigorating rock climbing expedition among the young. 

Asked if any form of prize would be allocated to the winner(s) – 

‘Nobody wins anything … This isn’t a competition.  It’s more like an ordeal’ (159) Vijaya chimed in. 

While Dr Robert reasoned,  ‘An ordeal that helps them to understand the world they’ll have to live in, helps them to realize the omnipresence of death, the essential precariousness of all existence.  But after the ordeal comes the revelation’ (159). 

‘ ‘The real thing ?’ (159) Will querulously asked.  ‘Is there such a thing ? (160) …  

‘I wish I could believe it,’ Dr Robert noted in response.  

‘The real thing isn’t a proposition; it’s a state of being (160) …’  

Sharing to the limits of awareness – reconciliation, fusion and identity 

– what we all can experience and contribute in every contingency 

‘We don’t teach our children creeds or get them worked up over emotionally charged symbols.  When it’s time for them to learn the deepest truths of religion, we set them to climb a precipice and then give them … revelation (160) …  

‘Two first-hand experiences of reality, from which any reasonably intelligent boy or girl can derive a very good idea of what’s what’ (160).  

Consequently, Dr Robert admitted Dugald fell off a precipice to his death.  

‘But if Dugald hadn’t made a habit of risking his life, it might have been poor everybody for other reasons.  Better court the danger of killing yourself than … of killing other people, or at least making them miserable.  Hurting them because you’re naturally aggressive and too prudent, or too ignorant, to work off your aggression on a precipice’ (160). 

Then Dr Robert enunciated his meditation for the young people assembled there.  

‘Danger shared with a friend, a group of friends (165) …  

‘Shared consciously, shared to the limits of awareness (165) … 

‘Each totally aware of his own straining muscles, his own skill, his own fear and his own spirit transcending fear.  And each, of course, aware at the same time of all the others, concerned for them … Life at its highest pitch of bodily and mental tension, life more abundant, more inestimably precious, because of the ever-present threat of death … the yoga of the summit … the yoga that consists in consciously accepting what is given as it is given, without censorship by your busy moralistic mind, without any additions from your stack of second-hand ideas, your even larger stock of wishful fantasies … the stillness of the summit permits you to divine, profound and enduring, within the twittering flux of your everyday thinking … And now it’s time for the descent … time for a renewal of tension and the awareness of life in its glowing plenitude as you hang precariously on the brink of destruction … the yoga of the jungle … that consists of being totally of life at the near-point (165) … 

‘Life bringing order out of chaos and ugliness, life performing its miracles of birth and growth … And then … suddenly you know there’s a reconciliation (166) … 

‘A fusion, and identity (166) … 

‘Breathe deeply … Know [this] in the raw (166) …  

‘Know it as a mystery … the mystery of mysteries, the One in plurality … the Suchness totally present in every appearance, at every point and instant’ (166) … Scanning those upturned faces, Will noted, now in one, now in another, the dawning illuminations of delight, recognition, understanding, the signs of worshipping wonder that quivered on the brinks of ecstasy or terror’ (167) …’ 

Meanwhile, Dr Robert proceeded with his oration. 

‘Nataraja dances the dance of endless becoming and passing away … this child is the Order of Things … at play within every living thing, every sentient creature, every child and man and woman … But now the playground is conscious, the dance-floor is capable of suffering (167) … Jump out of the fullness of life into nothingness, out of nothingness again into life (167-168) … [then] the image of Shiva and the Goddess … in their little cave of light … How beautiful ! (168) …  

‘And in their tenderness what depths of meaning ! (169) …  

‘What wisdom beyond all spoken wisdoms in that sensual experience of spiritual fusion and atonement !  Eternity in love with time …’ (169)  

Among the youths, Will recognized ‘… the hardly perceptible, ecstatic smile that welcomes a sudden insight, a revelation of truth or of beauty …’ (169) 

Dr Robert resumed,  ‘What a timeless bliss !  But, like everything else, it will pass.  And when it has passed, what will you do with this experience ? … all that Pala can do for you with its social arrangements, is to provide you with techniques and opportunities … It remains for you to decide whether you’ll cooperate with the grace and take these opportunities’ (169). 

Later, Will resumed his reading of the Notes on What’s What, with the palpable element and principle of paradox becoming ever more evident, resonant and predominant throughout these lucid insights. 

‘We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality (171) …  

‘All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way (171) … Buddhism and modern science think of the world in terms of music (171-172) …’ 

Yet,  ‘The thing in whose absence we cannot possible grow into complete human beings is, all too often, the thing that prevents us from growing (172) … 

‘Palanese superiority does not lie in symbolic expression but in … the art of adequately experiencing, the art of becoming more intimately acquainted with all the worlds that, as human beings, we find ourselves inhabiting (172) …  

‘Palanese culture … is to be judged by what all the members of the community, the ordinary as well as the extraordinary, can do and experience in every contingency and at each successive intersection of time with eternity (172) … 

‘Dualism … Without it there can hardly be good literature (175) …  

‘With it, there most certainly can be no good life (175) … 

‘The religiously minded dualist calls home-made spirits from the vastly deep:  The non-dualist calls the mostly deep into his spirit or, to be more accurate, he finds that the vastly deep is already there’ (175). 

As he conversed frankly with Vijaya, Will predicted wryly – 

‘After Pala has been invaded and made safe for war and oil and heavy industry, you’ll undoubtedly have a Golden Age of literature and theology’ (177).  

‘I have an uncomfortable feeling that my children will grow up to see your prophecy come true’ (177), Vijaya agreed.  

Later he perhaps inadvertently essentially explained this prognosis. 

‘That’s what the human brain is there for – to turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.  Sometimes the symbols correspond fairly closely to some of the aspects of the external reality behind our experience; then you have science and common sense.  Sometimes, on the contrary, the symbols have almost no connection with external reality; then you have paranoia and delirium (178) … More often there’s a mixture, part realistic and part fantastic; that’s religion’ (179). 

Vijaya described this process engendered in the child who bears the offering in the assembly. 

‘Everybody’s given a chance to go further (179) …  

‘You asked what that child thinks she’s doing.  I’ll tell you (179) …  

‘With one part of her mind, she thinks she’s talking to a person – an enormous divine person who can be cajoled with orchids into giving her what she wants.  But she’s already old enough to have been told about the profounder symbols behind Amitabha’s statue and about the experiences that gave birth to those profounder symbols (179) …’ 

Further, ‘good old repetition’, as Will described it, ‘gets you somewhere ... not because of what the words mean or suggest, but simply because they’re being repeated’ (180), Vijaya maintains.  

Correspondingly,  ‘Pseudo-religious pictures [paintings] always refer to something else, something beyond the things they represent – some piece of metaphysical nonsense, some absurd dogma … A genuinely religious image is always intrinsically meaningful’ (182), Vijaya proposed, adding that –    

‘Landscapes can really remind people of who they are’ (182).  

While,  ‘Distance reminds us that there’s a lot more to the universe than just people.  It reminds us that there are mental spaces inside our skulls as enormous as the spaces out there’ (183). 

Thence, when Will asked Vijaya if ‘… it helps one to be more intelligent’ (184), Vijaya responded:  ‘Not more intelligent in relation to science or logical argument – more intelligent on the deeper level of concrete experiences and personal relationships’ (184), which ‘is just as important … For the simple reason that a talent for manipulating symbols tempts its possessors into habitual symbol-manipulation, and habitual symbol-manipulation is an obstacle in the way of concrete experiencing and the reception of gratuitous graces’ (185). 

Whereas, rather,  ‘Food plus caress plus contact plus ‘good’ equals love ... Pavlov purely for a good purpose.  Pavlov for friendliness and trust and compassion.  Whereas you prefer to use Pavlov for brain washing, Pavlov for selling cigarettes and vodka and patriotism.  Pavolv for the benefit of dictators, generals, and tycoons’ (190), Vijaya noted in response to Will’s teasing remark,  ‘Pure Pavlov’ (190). 

After all,  ‘Friendliness evokes friendliness’ (191), Shanta later notes, even if not from those who are not friendly, as Will interposes. 

For, nevertheless, ‘… one has to run the risk, one has to make a beginning (191) … 

‘And luckily no one’s immortal (191) … 

‘The people who’ve been conditioned to swindling and bullying and bitterness will all be dead in a few years.  Dead, and replaced by men and women brought up in a new way.  It happened with us [in Pala]; it can happen with you [in the West]’ (191), Shanta proposed. 

Where teaching the young was concerned, they were taught what was real, according to Shanta.  

‘We teach them love and confidence, but we expose them to reality, reality in all its aspects.  And then give them responsibilities.  They’re made to understand that … Pala [is] … a nice place … But will remain nice only if everybody works and behaves decently’ (191). 

Further to his partaking of Palanese food rituals, Will queried – 

‘Isn’t tasting me [or something ‘I’m’ doing, so to speak] ?’ (198)  Vijaya responded,  ‘I’d say it’s half way between me and not-me.  Tasting is not-me doing something for the whole organism.  And at the same time tasting is me being conscious of what’s happening.  And that’s the point of our chewing grace [prayer] – to make the me more conscious of what the not-me is up to’ (198). 

Next Will witnessed the phenomenon of the children operating marionette puppet scarecrows arrayed along a clothes line, comprising figures which were basically emblems representing divine beings, such as ‘God’, ‘Adam’ and a ‘Future Buddha’ (199).  

‘It was the Old Raja’s idea (200) … 

‘He wanted to make the children understand that all gods are home-made, and that it’s we who pull their strings and so give them the power to pull ours’ (200). 

Will then contributed his analysis on the question.  

‘What are boys and girls for ? (201) … 

‘The answer depends on where you happen to be domiciled (201).  

For example, what are boys and girls for in America ? (201)  

Answer:  for mass consumption (201). 

‘ And the corollaries of mass consumption are mass communications, mass advertising, mass opiates in the form of television … positive thinking and cigarettes.  And now that Europe has made the breakthrough into mass production, what will its boys and girls be for ?  For mass consumption and all the rest – just like the boys and girls in America.  Whereas in Russia … [they] are for strengthening the national state’ (201). 

While, in Pala, they were,  ‘For actualization, for being turned into full-blown human beings’ (202), the Under-Secretary of Education, Mr Menon, advised.  ‘The Old Raja … was mainly concerned with what people really are on the level that’s beyond individuality’ (202) … ‘Become what you really are’ (202), Will suggested. 

There were various questions, basically raised as challenges, Mr Menon advanced in the context of the Pala education system, in response to the query ‘… tell me what you do about the fact that everybody’s different from everybody else’ (202):  ‘How harmonious or disharmonious is the mixture of his component elements, physical and mental ? … How great is his inborn wish to dominate, or to be sociable, or to retreat into his inner world ?  And how does he do his thinking and perceiving and remembering ? … Does his mind work with images or with words, with both at once, or with neither ? … How can we reconcile analysis with vision ? … And there are all the questions that have to do with special gifts’ (203). 

Many of the principles, methods and processes applied through Palanese education endeavours were then outlined by Mr Menon and school principal, Mrs Narayan. 

‘In the lower forms we do the teaching in terms of … animal parables … even very small children can understand the fact of human diversity and the need for mutual forbearance, mutual forgiveness (206) … Violent feelings, we tell the children, are like earthquakes.  They shake us so hard that cracks appear in the wall that separates our private selves from the shared, universal Buddha Nature (207) … And meanwhile, of course, we’ve been giving the children systematic and carefully graduated training in perception and the proper use of language … What my ears and my eyes record is one thing, what the words I use and the mood I’m in and the purposes I’m pursuing allow me to perceive, make sense of and act upon is something quite different … What we give the children is simultaneously a training in perceiving and imagining (208) …’ among other concerns. 

‘Specialisation … is necessary and inevitable (209) …  

‘No specialization, no civilization (209) … 

‘By themselves, the humanities don’t humanise 

– nothing ‘exists in isolation … all living is relationship’:  ‘bridge-building’

‘But you people [in the West] don’t educate the mind-body (209) …  

‘Your cure for too much scientific specialization is a few more courses in the humanities.  But … By themselves, the humanities don’t humanise (209) … Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation (211).  

‘Make it plain from the very first that all living is relationship (211) …  

‘Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and the country around it’ (211), Mr Menon postulated. 

‘Balance, give and take, no excesses – it’s the rule in nature and, translated out of fact into morality, it ought to be the rule among people … Treat Nature well, and Nature will treat you well’ (211-212). 

Some instances from actual classroom teaching situations then proceeded (215): ‘ ‘… what was he [the Buddha] talking about?’  

‘He wathn’t talking.  That’th why they didn’t underthand,’ was how one girl responded to this question from her teacher. 

‘But Mahakasyapa [a disciple of the Buddha] understood what he was talking about even though he wasn’t talking – is that it ?’  

‘They thought he wath going to preach a thermon … But he didn’t (215) …  

‘He juth picked a flower and held it up for everybody to look at.’ 

‘And that was the sermon,’ shouted a small boy.’ 

‘But nobody could underthand that kind of thermon.  Nobody but Mahakasyapa’ ‘ (215). 

The teacher then imparted her broad analysis for the children. 

‘Perhaps, after all, there is some kind of communication … not in the way I’m communicating with you now, through words, but directly (216) … 

‘People, events, words – they’re all manifestations of Mind (216-217) … 

‘What Buddha was implying  and what Mahakasyapa understood was that one can’t speak these teachings, one can only be them’ (217). 

Then Mrs Narayan explained, ‘… they get a whole morning of what we call bridge-building.  Two and a half hours during which we try to make them relate everything they’ve learned in the previous lessons to art, language, religion, self-knowledge (217) … Every course the children take is punctuated by periodical bridge-building sessions’ (218).  

Her advice to her young students in this – 

‘Liberate yourselves from everything you know and look with complete innocence at this infinitely improbable thing before you’ (217). 

Then there are some pertinent professional perspectives from Mrs Narayan. 

‘Training in receptivity is the complement and antidote to training in analysis and symbol manipulation.  Both kinds of training are absolutely indispensible (218) … 

‘If one chooses to one can always substitute a broad ready-made notion for the best insights of receptivity.  The question is, why should one want to make that kind of choice ?  Why shouldn’t one choose to listen to both parties and harmonise their views ? (218). 

Moreover,  ‘The bridges have to be built in all directions … to be capable of teaching children to become fully human in a society fit for fully human beings to live in, a teacher would first have to be taught how to make the best of both worlds (220) … [I’m] An optimist for the simple reason that, if one tackles a problem intelligently and realistically, the results are apt to be fairly good (221) … 

‘The Greeks were much too sensible to think in terms of either-or (222) …  

‘For them, it was always not-only-but-also (222) …  

‘Not only Plato and Aristotle, but also the maenaeds (222) … 

‘Without those tension-reducing hornpipes [of dance as an educative learning experience], the moral philosophy would have been impotent … being reconciled to one’s fate – that’s already a great achievement’ (222). 

‘You seem to take it all very calmly’ (222), Will interposed.  

‘What would be the point of taking it hysterically ?’ (222) Mrs Narayan responded.  

‘Redirecting the power generated by bad feelings is important (222) …  

‘But equally important is directing good feelings and right knowledge into expression.  Expressive movements (222) … It’s meditation in action (223) …  

‘It’s the metaphysics of the Mahayana expressed, not in words, but through symbolic movements and gestures’ (223). 

Later, Susila augmented this principle through consideration of the espoused purpose associated with it. 

‘The point is to get people to understand that we’re not completely at the mercy of our memory and our phantasies ... This technique won’t lead you to the discovery of your Buddha Nature:  but it may help you to prepare for that discovery – help you by liberating you from the hauntings of your own painful memories, your remorses, your ceaseless anxieties about the future’ (225). 

Yet the Rani was not convinced of this espoused legacy of the Old Raja. 

‘Murugan’s great grandfather was a very remarkable man (227) … 

‘Talking about Liberation (227) … 

‘Acting the part of humility … [yet] he refused to recognize any Spiritual Authority Higher than his own.  The Masters, the Avatars, the Great Tradition – they meant nothing to him’ (227). 

When they were blessed with some time to relax and share, Susila enquired of Will: ‘… do you really want to talk about yourself ?’ (229)  

‘Really, desperately.  Just as desperately as I don’t want to talk about myself.  Hence you may have noticed, my unflagging interest in art, science, philosophy, politics, literature – any damned thing rather than the only thing that ultimately has any importance’ (229), Will replied somewhat sardonically. 

Meanwhile,  ‘It was raining harder now … it seemed … on purpose, raining in such a way that he would have to go on remembering what he didn’t want to remember (230) …’  

Until a new perspective was interposed by Susila.  

‘Suppose that [Molly, Will’s wife] suddenly died without your having had anything to do with it.  Wouldn’t that have been almost as bad ?’  ‘What do you mean ?’ … ‘I mean, it’s more than just feeling guilty about Molly’s death.  It’s death itself, death as such, that you find so terrible … So, senselessly evil’ (231-232).  

‘Yes … Nice comfortable people just don’t have any idea what the world is like.  Not exceptionally, as it was during the War, but all the time.  All the time’ (232). 

Will spoke of his Aunt Mary’s demise through cancer in this context: ‘… as the body broke down, the soul began to lose its virtue, it’s very identity … she was somebody else, somebody … almost indistinguishable … People may stand by while you’re suffering and dying; but they’re standing by in another world (235) …  

‘In your world you’re absolutely alone’ (235).  

Hence Will reasoned,  ‘How can you take yes for an answer ? (235) … 

‘Yes is just pretending, just positive thinking (235) …  

‘The facts, the basic and ultimate facts, are always no.  Spirit ?  No !  Love ?  No !  Sense, meaning, achievement ?  No !’ (235)  Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.  ‘What impeccable logic, what sensibility, what ethical refinement ?’ … ‘And yet, in a certain sense the advice is excellent.  Eating, drinking, dying – three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life (236) … 

‘An enlightened person knows it, lives it and accepts it completely’ (236), Susila reflected in response. 

‘ ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’  What a blessed state of affairs ! (236-237)  But unfortunately I do know what I’m doing.  Only too well (237) …  

‘And here you go, asking me to be even more aware than I am already’ (237), Will protested.  ‘One thinks one’s something unique and wonderful at the centre of the universe.  But in fact one’s merely a slight delay in the ongoing march of entropy’ (237), he added. 

‘And that precisely is the first half of the Buddha’s message.  Transcience …’ (237)  And thence,  ‘This absence of a permanent soul is also the Buddha Nature,’ (237) Susila noted. 

‘Sunsets and death; death and therefore kisses; kisses and consequently birth and then death for yet another generation of sunset-watchers (238-239) … Knowing who in fact one is, being conscious of the universal and impersonal life that lives itself through each of us – that’s the art of living, and that’s what one can help the dying to go on practicing.  To the very end.  Maybe beyond the end’ (239), Susila continued. 

Then soon Will had the opportunity to ask Mary Sarojini what she ‘did’ about being scared of death. 

‘I did what they teach you to do – tried to find out which of me was frightened and why she was frightened’ (241). 

The one who did ‘all the talking’ was the vulnerable one. 

‘I suppose it’s because she gets talking about all the awful things that might happen to her.  Talking out loud or talking to herself.  But there’s another one who doesn’t get frightened … The one that doesn’t talk – just looks and listens and feels what’s going on inside’ (241), she shared. 

Mary Sarojini then discussed with Will the lyrics of a love song, performed by a busker they passed in the street. 

‘ ‘And the part that made me laugh was where he said the Future Buddha won’t have to leave home and sit under the Bodhi Tree.  He’ll have his Enlightenment while he’s in bed with the Princess’ (242).  ‘Do you think that’s a good idea ?’ … She nodded emphatically.  ‘It would mean that the princess would be enlightened too’.  ‘You’re perfectly right.  Being a man, I hadn’t thought of the princess’ (243)’.  

Meanwhile, the song proceeded,  Love – and your lips, her breasts will change mysteriously … Into Themselves, the Suchness and the Void (243)’ 

Soon, Mary Sarojini shared the Palanese version of the Oedipus legend: ‘… here’ – ‘He [Oedipus] only says he’s going to put out his eyes, and she [Jocasta – his mother], only tries to hang himself.  They’re talked out of it … Oedipus in Pala – that’s what the [Palanese] play is called’ (243) … 

Thence Will elaborated on the Western version.  

‘ ‘Dr Freud thought that all little boys really want to marry their mothers and kill their fathers.  And the other way round for little girls – they want to marry their fathers.’  ‘Which fathers and mothers ?’ Mary Sarojini asked.  ‘We have such a lot of them [in the context of the Mutual Adoption Clubs]’ (244)’. 

Further, relative to the performance, the featured Palanese little boy and girl partners declared:  ‘ ‘Listen !  The drone, the everlasting burden … But life knows more than one note,’ said the boy … 

‘Life,’ the girl chimed in, ‘can sing both high and low’ (246).  

‘And your unceasing drone of death serves only to make a richer music’ (246).  

‘A richer music,’ the girl repeated (246) …  

‘And with that, tenor and treble, they started to vocalize a wandering arabesque of sound wreathed, as it were, about the long rigid shaft of the ground bass’ (246). 

When Murugan eventually summoned Will, desperately beckoning him to leave the performance immediately to behold some vital news from the Rani, Will prevaricated. 

‘Should he go back [to the Rani] ? (252)  

‘It would be the sensible, the safe, the prudent thing to do (252) …  

‘But an inner voice – not little … but stentorian – shouted,  ‘Squalid !  Squalid !’  Conscience ?  No.  Morality ?  Heaven forbid ! ‘ ‘ (253) 

Hence he proceeded with his course towards the hospital to visit the ailing Lakshmi. 

Meanwhile, ‘… the Essential Horror was timeless and ubiquitous (253) … 

‘The nightmare was recurrent (253) …  

‘Foredoomed and conscious, he moved towards its horrible consummation.  Death, yet another version of death’ (253). 

Lakshmi asked Susila: ‘… what do you think [about the sense of light] ?’ (255)  

‘I think we’ve all come out of the same light, and we’re all going back into the same light … Is the pain bad ?’ (255) Susila enquired of Lakshmi.  ‘ ‘It would be bad,’ Lakshmi explained, ‘if it were really my pain.  But somehow it isn’t (255) …  

‘The pain’s here; but I’m somewhere else … Nothing really belongs to you (255) … 

‘Not even your pain.’ (255)’ 

‘ ‘About the Clear Light,’ Susila confirmed.  

‘Why do people speak of Mind in terms of Light ? (256) …  

‘Is it because they’ve seen the sunshine and found it so beautiful that it seems only natural to identify the Buddha Nature with the clearest of all possible Clear Lights ?  Or do they find the sunshine beautiful because, consciously or unconsciously, they’ve been having revelations of Mind in the form of Light ever since they were born ? ‘ … ‘I never knew anything,’ Lakshmi whispered (256).  

‘I could only see’ (256). 

‘And now remember it (257) …  

‘A butterfly on a green leaf, opening and shutting its wings – and it’s the Buddha Nature totally present, it’s the Clear Light outshining the sun (257) … 

‘Your own consciousness shining, void, inseparable from the great Body of Radiance, is subject neither to birth nor death, but is the same as the immutable Light, Buddha Amitabha … Remember what you used to tell me when I was a little girl … You’ve got to do everything lightly.  Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly.  Yes, feel lightly, even though you’re feeling deeply.  Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope … Well, now I’m going to say the same thing to you, Lakshmi … Lightly, my darling, lightly … Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic (257) … no self-conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Goethe or Little Nell (257-258).  And of course, no theology, no metaphysics … Completely unencumbered’ (258). 

There follow some pertinent resonant insights relative to music and its significance. 

‘ ‘It’s the Courting Dance,’ Susila went on (259) … 

‘ ‘Another gust of cool air brought with it a louder strain of the gay bright music … ‘All those young people dancing together,’ said Dr Robert,  ‘All that laughter and desire, all that uncomplicated happiness.  It’s all here, like an atmosphere, like a field of force.  Their joy and our love … all working together, all reinforcing one another.  Love and joy enveloping you … love and joy carrying you up into the place of the Clear Light.  Listen to the music’ (259). 

‘ ‘Luminous bliss’ (263) …   

‘From the shallows of his mind the words rose like bubbles, came to the surface and vanished into the infinite spaces of living light that now pulsed and breathed behind his closed eyelids … But it – this timeless and yet ever changing Event – was something that words could only caricature and diminish, never convey (263) … 

‘It was not only bliss, it was also understanding (263) …  

‘Understanding of everything, but without knowledge of anything (263) …  

‘Knowledge involved a knower (263) … 

‘But here … There was only this experienced fact of being blissfully one with oneness … ‘Not looking at it … Being it.  Being it,’ (263)’ as Will put this. 

‘But behind and around and somehow even within those flickering memories was the firmament of bliss and peace and understanding … From a praeternaturally wretched and delinquent self he had been unmade into pure mind, mind in its natural state, limitless, undifferentiated, luminously blissful, knowledgelessly understanding … ‘Light here, light now.  And because it was infinitely here and timelessly now, there was nobody outside the light to look at the light (264) …  

‘The facet was the awareness, the awareness the fact.  ‘Eckhart called it God.’  Felicity so ravishing, so inconceivably intense that no one can describe it (264) …  

‘And in the midst of it God glows and flames without ceasing,’ (264)’ Susila advised. 

Meanwhile,  ‘Unowned the Fourth Brandenberg [Concerto] had an intensity of beauty, a depth of intrinsic meaning, incomparably greater than anything he had ever found in the same music when it was his private property (266) … 

‘Between mind and sound, mind and pattern, mind and significance, there was no longer any babel of biographical irrelevances to drown the music or make a senseless discord (266). 

‘He sat there motionlessly attentive, following with ear and inward eye the interwoven streams of sound, the interwoven streams of congruous and equivalent lights, that flowed on timelessly from one sequence to another (267) …  

‘And every phrase of this well-worn familiar music was an unprecedented revelation of beauty that went pouring upwards, like a multitudinous fountain, into another revelation as novel and amazing as itself.  Stream within stream … Separate, distinct, individual – and yet each of the streams was a function of all the rest (267) … Spirit and instinct, action and vision – and around them the web of intellect.  They were comprehended by discursive thought, but comprehended, it was obvious, only from the outside, in terms of an order of experience radically different from that which discursive thinking professes to explain’ (268). 

‘These interwoven streams, which were the first fluid differentiations of an understanding on the further side of all particular knowledge, had ceased to be a continuum (268) …  

‘Instead, there was, all of a sudden, this endless succession of separate forms – forms still manifestly charged with the luminous bliss of undifferentiated being, but limited now, isolated, individualized … conscious patternings … lattices of living stars (268) … they went on growing into other lattices that filled the three dimensions of an inner space and changed incessantly in another, timeless dimension of quality and significance …’  ‘Perpetual creation out of no-what nowhere into something somewhere – is that it ?’ ‘ Susila proposed (269).  

‘That’s it,’ (269) Will responded. 

‘How was it possible that things so familiar and commonplace could be this ?  Obviously it wasn’t possible; and yet there it was … Then – at the end, not in the beginning – came the word (270). 

Eventually, what Will beheld as spectacular astoundingly graphic emphatic images became strangely synthetic, vulgar and cheap in aspect (274) …  

‘He became patently aware of distorted images of humanity realized during the course of his life so far.  ‘Knowledgeless understanding of nonsense and diabolism (274) … Immortal in its pointlessness, suffering would go on forever (275-276).  In all other respects one was grotesquely, despicably finite (276) …  

‘Not in respect to suffering (276) …  

‘This dark little inspissated clot that one called ‘I’ was capable of suffering to infinity and, in spite of death, the suffering would go on forever (276) … 

‘The awareness that one existed was an awareness that one was always alone … It was the end.  The end of everything for everyone (276) … 

‘Then an answer to the answers, and more answers in return (277) …  

‘A counterpoint of challenges challenged, of defiances defied …’ (277)  

‘This.  Here and now … Nothing is  for ever, nothing is to infinity (277) …  

‘Except, maybe, the Buddha Nature’ (277).  

‘One touches and, in the art of touching, one’s touched (278) …  

Complete communication, but nothing communicated (278) …  

Just an exchange of life, that’s all … The Void is light; but it’s also compassion.  Greedy contemplatives want to possess themselves of the light without bothering about compassion (278) …  

‘Merely good people try to be compassionate and refuse to bother about the light.  As usual, it’s a question of making the best of both worlds’ (278), Susila admonished. 

‘What he was seeing now was the paradox of opposites indissolubly wedded, of light shining out of darkness at the very heart of light (279) … He pressed her hands.  There was nothing, of course, that one could say, no words, no consolations of philosophy – only this shared mystery of touch, only this communication from skin to skin of a flowing infinity’ (280). 

‘ ‘Who are you ?’ he whispered (281) … 

‘He smiled back at her – smiled back at a laughing girl with a weakness for kisses and the frankness to invite them.  ‘Thank the Lord ! … For having given you the grace of sensuality.’  She smiled … ‘So that cat’s out of the bag.’ (281) … Then, raising her hand, she took hold of his extended finger and pressed it hard against her lower lip.  ‘Thank you,’ she said … ‘Why thank me ?  You taught me what to do.’  ‘And now it’s you who have to teach your teacher … It isn’t possible.  But like everything else in the universe, it happens to be a fact.  And now that you’ve finally recognized my existence, I’ll give you leave to look to your heart’s content’ (283). 

‘He stood there motionless, gazing through a timeless succession of mounting intensities and ever profounder significances.  Tears filled his eyes and overflowed at last on to his cheeks … He couldn’t help it because there was no other way in which he could express his thankfulness … Thankfulness for being at once this union with the divine unity and yet this finite creature among other finite creatures …  ‘Gratitude is heaven itself,’ he quoted.  ‘… But now I see that Blake was just recording a simple fact.  It is heaven itself’ (283). 

‘And yet in spite of the entirely justified refusal to take yes for an answer, the fact remained and would remain always, everywhere – the fact that there was this capacity even in a paranoiac for intelligence, even in a devil-worshipper for love; the fact that the ground of all being could be totally manifest in a flowering shrub, a human face; the fact that there was a light and this light was also compassion … 

‘He put an arm round her shoulders and held her close (285) …’ 

Conclusion: 

Prospective facets of Our Life Journey

As we seek to review the cultural and moral fabric of our social and personal trajectory – Our Life Journey – it is vital to realise and recognise the continuity of our endeavours as our distinctive contributions to perpetuity in this. 

Consequently, values need to be realised as qualities and/or attributes – not merely issues-based phenomena – with trust recognised as essentially spontaneous and intuitive. 

Personal security is vital in this as the antidote to moral anxiety.  

However, authentic trust can only proceed from thorough deep resonant awareness, grounded in attentive experiential perception, as realised through pertinent discernment. 

Thereby the relatively consistent incremental cultivation of historical circumstances and situations can proceed as a comprehensive mutual endeavour, through a broad context of rich profound intricate socio-cultural diversity, grounded in providential perpetuity. 

Generous interpretation of the corresponding significance of each and all of our respective distinctive contributions is be vital in this context.  

This epitomises our struggle to realise the essential benefits of our collective perception and consciousness in this ethical endeavour, realised through resonant principles of equilibrium, which can culminate in a deep sense of authentic equanimity. 

If we are to collectively truly realise the palpable thread of continuity which pervades the intricate socio-cultural fabric of our lives, and therefore our existence, we will progressively require a profound appreciation of deeply embedded feeling, realised through inherent complexity. 

Sympathy is a far deeper, more acute emotion than empathy, in many ways, in this context, for instance. 

While deep friendship, imbued with acute appreciation of authenticity and equanimity, broadly substantiates discerned appreciation.  

Intrinsic intuition and spontaneous awareness are vital elements in such profound realisation, in the context of a deep sense of universality and common humanity. 

Correspondingly, a generic inherent human ethos, based on substantive moral and ethical principles, becomes a feasible, somewhat stronger, more dynamic broad human phenomenon than altruism or empathy.  Although, paradoxically, both altruism and empathy can be experienced as profound or mild. 

However, rigid predominant structural-functional perspectives can impair the delicate nature of such sensitive beneficent qualities.  

Aesthetic awareness and appreciation are realised predominantly through the prospect of life as a quest. 

Actual reality is discerned through realisation in the context of profound struggle and adversity – sensitivity, intimacy and compassion are vital in this collective yet personal human endeavour. 

The so-called ‘good life’ must be grounded in authentic substance and significance. 

Otherwise, life becomes ‘disenchanted’, as Max Weber put this.  

Thereby, we lose our acute appreciation of the aesthetic and ethical sensitivity and spontaneity of our quest. 

The essential profound resonance, significance and relevance of our life journey is thence impaired. 

Commitment and earnest endeavour are therefore vital as blended phenomena in the context of the ‘inevitable complexity’ and ambiguity of our lives. 

A caring moral dimension infused and imbued with ‘gratitude’ is fundamental to our collective experience and everyday life context. 

Cultural reality and experience is a phenomenon realised through the everyday experiential context of blended sounds and music. 

‘Memories of the past’ can be profoundly poignant, sensitive in sentiment, intuitive and insightful in their deep significance, depending on the pertinence of how these are interpreted. 

Reality increasingly becomes ever more multi-dimensional, as instanced by the imminent pertinence and relevance of our musical heritage.  

Epic narrative popular music is realised broadly as romantic in nature, emanating from a sense of ‘deep essence’, and cultivated through rich wistful threads of narrative tapestry.  

These are informed through profound reminiscence and sensitivity, often sustained through deep faith and commitment, thence to be nurtured through an intimacy of ethos and the realisation of intimate sensitive sentiment. 

This explorative intimate experience forms out through the ascendency of a pensive spirit of romantic venture and (inter)personal aspiration, cultivation and/or development, which culminates through mutual endearment. 

Such experience, epitomised through substantial popular music and lyric pieces, can be potently transformational and/or reformative in nature, even substantiating the reorientation of a whole life journey.  

Street-wise existential themes serve to enhance the potential pertinence and/or relevance of these iconic forms. 

Primal ambiguity and tension, blended with poignant sensitivity and sentiment, are thereby realised accordingly. 

Many such contemporary lyric pieces resemble intimate personal conversations. 

At times, these can seem to resemble polemical mini-edicts, or even sermons. 

Yet these all constitute and represent ‘the soundtrack of our lives’, therefore in some sense – our life journey. 

They are resonant forms of essence for our mutual experience, existence and ontology … and often the source of authentic aspiration and deep sentiment.  They acquire acute poignancy in this sense, and can serve as the catalyst and context for authentic mutual maturity and communal responsibility.  

Memory and reflection remain resonant as our perennial source of support and affirmation in this process, through the providential perpetuity of our acute sense of destiny and purpose. 

‘Knowing who in fact we are results in Good Being, and Good Being results in the most appropriate kind of good doing’ (1962: 39), was how Aldous Huxley put this. 

Meanwhile, the culmination of a ‘Mutual Adoption’ Ethic (MAE), realised through blending ‘science, intuition and humour’ (90-91), among many various other elements and qualities, could be our resonant touchstone in this.  

This would provide a vital viable context through which the dynamic quality of mutual maturity I have proposed may be suitably acquired through an aspect of relative autonomy. 

Moreover, this would reform Huxley’s notion of ‘Clubs’ for ‘Mutual Adoption’, as this innovative alternative to the conventional ‘nuclear family’ unit, perhaps unfortunately, has not proved amenable over time to many people in the contemporary socio-cultural context. 

However, the primacy of the prevalent principles in this, which Huxley broadly enunciates, remains basically commendable. 

The prospective affirmative mutual moral process of broad relationship ‘bridge-building’ (217 ff) could be viably sustained as a universal collaborative endeavour through the promulgation of such a mutual ethic or ethos.  

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