June 10, 2024

Why the Whitechapel Fatberg is my Guru

I've been an on/off follower of meditation practices for the last thirty years. I've done so as a spiritual autodidact, sometimes attending sessions and seminars but never committing to a particular community or discipline. A lot of what I know and practice comes from reading books and watching/listening to talks. The distance created by physical and digital media didn't prevent me from getting attached to some teachers and meditators, some of whom I corresponded with online.

Ultimately, my practice has been a solitary one, which has often involved me going on a few sustained metaphysical benders before circumstances, rather than a guiding hand, brought me back down to earth. This has happened enough for me to become somewhat skilled in intercepting that particular lunge from the barest fact of consciousness to convoluted metaphysics –⁠ the backwash of insight.

I don't think of myself as an enlightened or realised person and have no inclination to foist my sense of awakeness onto others. There have been moments, always unbidden, where the construct of Niall has vanished, while the sounds, images and textures of the world continue to manifest. But this is never a permanent state of affairs and I don't ever expect that to change. I would even say that most people have experienced the same loss of self, often when they enter into some kind of flow state, but don't make a big thing of it like all of the seekers do. The furthest I go in trying to transmit these moments to others is through my poems, which I hope are engaging enough on their own merits in order not to triumph or fail by merit of what they awaken within others.

The reason for this preamble is that I saw a little video a few weeks back that featured the nondualist teacher Rupert Spira arguing that time (as we know it) doesn't exist. The reason why I spent so much time thinking about it was because it was one of the most pertinent examples I have seen of a spiritual teacher moving from a moment of genuine insight and shifting almost immediately into ropey metaphysics. So I want to take a look at this shift, but to make it clear in doing so that I am not coming at this from a position of being some truly realised guru figure myself. I don't currently have an ashram, unless you consider my premium subscriber tier to be a sanctum of spiritual ascendency (more about that later).

I will summarise the points in the video, but you can watch the whole thing via the link below if you want to hear it from the man himself. I really don't want to misrepresent Spira's words or beliefs.

So the video begins with Spira being asked by an off camera questioner (a thirteen year old boy called Alexander), "Why do we lose sense of time while we're sleeping"

I have no idea what inspired this question, but I know that Spira follows an idealist metaphysics and this is a good question to ask someone who posits that all that exists is fundamentally mind rather than matter. For instance, my wife often falls asleep next to me on the sofa and I watch her for a while until she wakes up and when I point out that she was asleep, she refuses to believe me. So, if my own experience posits that all is made of mind, what happens to reality when I am sleeping but not dreaming and no time seems to have passed if I suddenly wake up? I know that different kinds of idealists may have different ways of answering this, but still, good on Alexander for asking this question.

Spira answers this question by targeting time itself and provides a genuinely useful insight at the beginning of his answer. He conceptualises time as something with the "now" at its centre, with the past as a vast space that runs endlessly behind it and the future doing the same in front of it. He then asks Alexander and the rest of the audience to leave the now and visit the place that they call the past. Being that nobody appears to have travelled to the lecture in their Delorean or Tardis, they are unable to honour his request.

Despite my facetiousness, there is genuine insight here. Whenever we think about or remember the past, we are still in the present. This insight is particularly useful to those of us that suffer from trauma, the realisation that, when we are reliving a bad memory, we are doing so from the relative safety of the present. I think it's a good thing to make a habit of sitting (or walking or cooking or waiting) with awareness of the here and now, to know that all the little dramas can be dropped whenever we realise we are able to drop them.

But Spira doesn't leave it at that, oh no, for the aforementioned lurch into metaphysics follows in its wake:

"If nobody has ever been there, how can we know that this place called the past really exists?"

The logic behind Spira's question is based on the inability of his audience at that moment to hop into a Delorean or Tardis and head off to the past. Even if they did, Spira would probably (rightly) argue that the McFlys/Timelords are still experiencing the past within their now and the past moment they travel to would still be now for whoever lives there.

This might seem obvious but it’s worth saying: just because you cannot travel somewhere at will doesn't mean you haven't been there. My primary school no longer exists on the site it was at when I went there. It was combined with its sister middle school and the old site was sold off and demolished. Therefore, I cannot pay a visit to the classrooms, playground and nursery from the first decade of my life. But I know that I have been there. My memories might be unreliable and the evidence of the site might get sparser with time as photographs fade and records are lost, but the school was there.

So it's the same with the past. We can't go there because it is not a place, it is a temporal measure. We can't go there because it has already happened. But we can know we were there because the now that we occupy is its aftermath.

Spira underlines his point by saying "surely, experience must be the measure of if something exists?"

Partially, yes. There's a chance that the other schools I went to no longer exist. Google Street View seems to show that they are still there but I myself have not experienced for about a quarter of a century. By the same token, I went to the big Sainsburys this morning but, if I rely on my immediate experience, I cannot say with all confidence that it exists right now.

Similarly, I have experienced things that weren't there at all. Hallucinations, illusions, sounds. While the experiences themselves were undeniably real, that doens't mean that the thing that I thought that I was experiencing was real.

I should add that Spira, from what I've gathered, isn't a solipsist. He's an idealist, so he believes in an external world beyond people's finite experiences, he just believes that that world is ultimately mind, or part of a greater consciousness, much like Bishop Berkley believed that everything exists within the mind of God. Idealism is often opposed to materialism (or physicalism) –⁠ a monist metaphysics which states that reality is entirely physical and mind is an emergent property of physics.

Dualism is the belief that mind and physics are distinct and separate from each other. All of these (despite the assertions that some materialists make that materialism is science) are metaphysics and none of them can be proved or disproved because we cannot step outside of reality to observe it. Wittgenstein was particularly dismissive of metaphysics, considering them to be ultimately meaningless. He saw the problems of metaphysics as problems inherent to language, badly-formed propositions and questions that often consist of conflations and category errors.

Language about time often becomes badly formed because of the way in which we borrow from spatial terminology in order to talk about temporal events. Spira's initial concept of the past that he goes on to debunk conceptualises it as a place. He then goes on to say it cannot exist because we can't go there. But the past isn't a place, it is all the things that have already happened. It is the recognition that everything that is happening now is following on from a previous state of affairs. Of course you cannot go to it, it's gone. All you can do is read the uncountable instances of things in the present that speak of what happened before, be it a novel, the radiometric clock or a youtube video of a talk that happened five years ago about time not existing. You can no more travel to the past as you can sit in the same spot in London and hope for Paris to happen to you.

I think that it's easy to dismiss or see through Spira's lurch from insight to metaphysics and yet the comments under the video, and the rapt attention of his live audience at the time, state otherwise.

Perhaps it is the environment of the retreat with the guru on stage and the audience in front of him that makes them more eager to accomodate his argument. People often spend a retreat in a little cloud of bliss, feeling like they have finally worked it out before reality returns with a vengeance when they return to their everyday lives and routines. Their response is often to book a place at the next retreat so that they can rediscover the bliss again. Similarly, the people who watch these videos online are often looking for something to break them out of their online behaviours and doomscrolling. We all want to be liberated from our fixation with past events and our anxieties about the future. We all want to be content with whatever might be happening in this very moment.

But at the same time, everybody found their way to that event at the right time, everybody organised their travel and booked (purely illusory) time off from work. The buzz of the realisation that time doesn't exist is nice to sustain during a retreat but snuffs out as soon as the attendee has to book their next doctor appointment.

Which leads me towards a quote from a man who was just as much a sceptic of spritual practices and assumptions as he was an advocate for awakening, Jiddhu Krishnamurthi:

Memory is time, for there are two kinds of time, the chronological and psychological. There is time by the watch and as yesterday by memory. You cannot reject chronological time, which would be absurd –⁠ then you would miss your train .

Is psychological time an invention of thought? | J. Krishnamurti

Shall we go on with what we were talking about the other day, when we last met here. We talked about relationship, which is so important, because probably that's the basis of all society. When that relationship is in constant conflict, as it is now, our whole social and moral structure must inevitably be corrupt. And we said - if you remember rightly - that relationship, being of extraordinary importance, breeds conflict because our relationship is based on the movement of thought - the movement...

This simple distinction between psychological and chronological time rescues the insight about how we will always experience time within the now without taking that as a reason to throw the concept of time into the dustbin. Again, time exists as the recognition that everything that currently exists (up til the Big Bang at least) had a previous form and will also have a future form. It should be noted that this ever-changing quality of existence is found all over the place in Buddhist metaphysics. Focusing on an ever-present unchanging now, or saying that change is the mind moving within the pristine unchanging now, is the exact opposite. By the same sentiment, it is said that if the universe ends in the state of heat death, then time will also stop existing. This is because the universe will settle into a neutral, unchanging state and without any change there can be no time.

A clock is ultimately something that changes in a constant and reliable way that we can use it as a tool to help record the past and plan for the future. A clock could be a particular mechanism that is great for measuring seconds and hours but a clock could also be a radioactive isotope such as potassium argon that is great for measuring larger spans of time longer than 100,000 years.

When I first listened to Spira's talk I couldn't help but think of how much his experience of the present in that moment relied on the previous labour of others –⁠ the people who set up the stage and the technicians that made sure his voice had the right sonorous authority when it was amplified for his audience. How the frictionless qualities of our lives often require the outsourcing of friction.

I can't think of a better example of that outsourcing of friction than our sewage systems. Most of the time, we don't think about them, even when we flush the toilet every day. The only time we do think about the sewage system is when it fails, then the fact of its existence is unassailable. Or, to put it in terms we have currently been examining, sewers become real when they manifest in the now.

Currently, one of the leading problems with London's sewers if the phenomenon of fatbergs. A fatberg tends to form when lots of materials that aren't meant to be flushed down toilets or poured down sinks, come together to form a massive, pipe-blocking mass. Fatbergs tend to be primarily formed of fat, baby wipes, sanitary products, condoms, kitchen roll and oil which in turn mixes with all of the unpleasant stuff that we expect to find in sewers. Because of this, fatbergs are also dangerous to living things because of the toxic and noxious chemicals that they are capable of generating and emitting.

What is a fatberg in the context of idealism? Is it a mental projection of the resident rats before the blockage manifests in the human world? If everything exists in the mind of a divine being, which deity would be the biggest culprit for dreaming a fatberg into existence?

One particular fatberg that attained a degree of fame was the Whitechapel fatberg –⁠ one of the largest ever, comparable in length to Tower Bridge and in weight to a blue whale. It was chipped away and blasted with power washers and portions of it were later exhibited in the Museum of London. Regrettably, I never got round to seeing it and I hope it will be displayed once again when the museum has completed its relocation to its new home in the Docklands.

There's a story in The Gateless gate where a monk asks Tozan what Buddha is and Tozan replies "Three pounds of flax". In the same volume, Yun-men replies "Dried shit-stick" to the same question. Perhaps the fat-berg is making its own demonstration of Buddha nature, or about our habits for accumulation? The fatberg is also a clock of sorts, something that measures time as a constant flow of various substances and objects through an underground tunnel. There is something about it that mocks human claims towards ethereality. For all of our claims to not be a part of a crude world of matter, the fatberg grows within an unseen dimension like a painting in the attic of an ageless man.

Contrast this with Spira's conclusion to the talk, where he mirrors Keats's dictum on beauty being truth by saying "When you experience beauty in any form, that is reality". Spira's point appeals to how when we experience beauty, there is no separation in that moment. The example given is the view through a window of a mountain. But beauty has its own jagged edges and, for some, the experience of beauty is just as likely to lead to attachment and possessiveness too. Maybe Spira is alluding to beauty cleansing the doors of perception so that all reality, including pounds of flax, shit sticks and fatbergs, is revealed as it truly is?

I could very well be misrepresenting Spira in a number of ways. I can only say that one reason I have avoided retreats and their accompanying revelations is that I can't afford them and that whatever revelations they offer tend to snuff out at the first point of contact with our everyday existences. For me, if an insight cannot maintain its power in the midst of everything that the fatberg represents, it is not a valuable insight.

I should also give credit to young Alexander who, on hearing Spira's ideas about time, replies: "That's confusing but it makes sense." He isn't bowled over by Spira's metaphysics and, while acknowedging the sense that he makes, also acknowledges his confusion. I think that, in this instance, confusion is something to trust and keep listening too. It is often more truthful than sense.

Thanks for reading this

Well, this one took a while to write. I recorded a video on this a week ago but I wasn't happy with it at the time. The ideas needed a bit longer to develop and when that's the case, I know that writing might serve the idea better. So this ended up being a bit of a deeper dive but it allowed me the luxury of getting back in sync with my schedule.

The videos are going to take a bit of a different tac, I've wanted them to diverge from the essays for a while so they'll be shorter talks about smaller ideas that don't balloon into lectures, for now at least. I'm not saying the long videos are history, more that I'm not going to pressure myself into making one every week.

Incidentally, an episode of Philosophers Zone popped up on my podcast feed while I was writing this. It features an interview with the philosopher Heather Dyke about different theories of time. By this token Spira appears to be a presentist while I appear to be a deflationist.

Why time doesn't pass - ABC listen

Most of us experience time as something that passes, or flows like a river - or at least we think we do. Could it be that the sense of time passing is just an illusion? This week we're getting to grips with a theory of time that denies the reality of "flow" - and we're asking why time seems to speed up or slow down in certain situations. Guest: Heather Dyke, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Otago NZ Producer: David Rutledge Experience of Passage in a Static World - Heather Dyk...

As always, I appreciate all the reading and sharing that these essays muster. If you would like to support my continued work, or if you would like to have access to my weekly poems on top of the essays, then you can become a premium subscriber for £5 a month or £50 a year. If you don't want to commit to a subscription, then you also buy me a coffee via my ko-fi.

Cheers

Niall