R is for rainbow where the seven colours of light travel through the wavelengths of choice and acceptance of ourselves and others. R for rainbow is an icon of LBGTQI+ and diversity.. R for rationale can be abused when rational scientific methods are invented to justify inequalities which gives more power to the powerful. R for religion can be a cloak for power and corruption.

Religion

St. Brigid’s day is now an official Irish holiday to match St. Patrick’s Day invoking the strange spiral of past, present, and future time where the paganism in our Irish culture co-exists with the Christian. St. Brigid’s day on 1^st February, marks the  halfway point between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox. Whether we are aware of it or not we use Christmas to see us through the winter solstice and the time change in March is based on the Spring equinox. St. Brigid’s cross, made with rushes, is an icon of Christianity but she used it to convert her pagan father on his deathbed with hopes of passing through death to eternal life of the spirit. Institutionalised religion bound into government of the people has taken us a long way from our connection to oak trees or rushes growing in the fields. I am now in pursuit of a path through the grove of Oak and other native trees which we planted during the pandemic in 2021. This path is symbolic of the spirit of resistance to the binary split between humans and nature which endangers our human nature on this planet.

I am embarrassed to admit to belief in forms of energy which have not yet been fully scrutinised by science such as the power of prayer, of mantras or other forms of generating positive energy for healing. Fear of falling foul of superstitious nonsense and suspicion of control over our thinking by cults makes me wary of sharing ideas on what” spirit” means. For me spiritual connection comes from a sense of self which connects earth and its elements with human energy and awareness. I have  collected a series of esoteric approaches to spirit and psyche but keep them on a secret shelf out of sight and rarely share my idiosyncratic beliefs. Happily, it is OK to acknowledge the broad power of emotions like love for animals, wildlife or children.

Three of my closest friends, with whom I shared my secret thoughts on connection between mind, body, and spirit, died of cancer. In my endgame, I miss them so much, I reach out now into the emptiness of their loss. Inspired by Allende’s success in a democratic election in Chile in the 1970s, Ann worked with Chilean refugees after the Pinochet coup. She went on to work on the unionisation of miners in South America in the 1980’s and 1990’s in the International Union of Miners. She put priority on better material conditions for miners and their families. John Shiers was an early campaigner for Gay Liberation, we worked together on children’s rights with Save the Children in the 1990’s. John also persuaded me to join Manchester’s Global Forum where I met Jaya. Jaya Graves was an early environmental campaigner and poet with vast life experience. Her legacy lives on in Southern Voices (southernvoices.org), a network “committed to bringing the knowledge and understanding of Southern* and Black* people to the global issues that are central to education and to living in the world today.”

Ann and I started school together in 1955 and she saw me through many crises until her death when we were both fifty. On one of my visits to  Ann in Brussels we sat on cushions in her living room reading. I had a burn-out crisis in my work with Save the Children, she had recurring cancer. I was working my way through her Elmore Leonard collection; she was reading a book by the oncologist Carl Simonton. When she reached the passage on the importance of the spirit in dealing with cancer, she became impatient and threw the book at me and told me to read it for her as anything “spiritual” was more my “thing”. She was also a student of Clare Nuer at the time and I chose to take courses in Paris with “Au Couer de la Communication” on her advice. It got me through burn-out.

John Shiers and I bonded when I confessed one day at the Manchester Office of Save the Children that I had just spent a weekend on the Silva method of Mind Control. I picked up the book on mind control by Joseph Silva from the bedside of another close friend and poet. Turmoil in my lesbian relationships, the Catholic guilt lurking in my brain cells and the demands of working for the rights of Traveller children in England, followed by a generic management role had depleted my emotional reserves. Could my brain power offer some help? Could techniques of mind control help me control the unruly mix playing ball in my mind? To my amazement John had done the course before me. It reinforced  links and solidarity between us as we worked and networked together through the challenges of Thatcher’s Britain.

Jaya and John were both Buddhists in their final years. In addition to her work with Southern Voices, Jaya sought to bring together the warring factions in Buddhism in England in a bi-annual conference in Manchester. Jaya’s article in the Guardian newspaper 28^th October 2010 on Buddhism makes the distinction between religion as God worship and spiritual practice better than I can.

According to Jaya, “Buddhism is often defined as a religion. Books on the subject are tumbled into religious sections of libraries and bookshops. Occasionally, they appear on philosophy shelves. But how does it define itself? Buddhists refer to the “dharma” – the way. Buddhism is not a theistic religion. There is no creator god issuing commandments, judging or punishing. Nor is there anyone who promises salvation. Salvation is possible, even inevitable, but we will reach it through our own efforts. Neither is Buddhism a philosophy. It aims to go beyond concepts, the domain of western philosophy. To do this it uses a rigorous investigation of inner and outer phenomena that include ideas, emotions, actions, and interactions. Phenomena are unstable and impermanent – a dance of particles – an instability we are unable to control. We cannot create permanence.

Imagining we can control phenomena creates many of our current delusions and anxiety. And from this stems our conflicts with ourselves, with each other, between neighbourhoods and nations. Since the data of our human situation are subject to continual change it follows that our investigation must also be continuous and our conclusions must be adjusted. This personal investigation is central to Buddhist practice. There are no laboratories. No contrived replication. For this reason, the process is sometimes dismissed as subjective and unscientific. It is not “evidence-based”. I argue that it is in fact tested and evidence-based but not necessarily within the western framework of investigation. It is personal but it is not subjective. We have the support of teachings and commentaries. Investigative practices have been explored and established. Skilled and wise researchers have “peer reviewed” these over millennia and continue to do so. But in the end it is our own inner tenacity, our passionate intention through which we must judge our path and progress.

This core practice is undertaken not only to create a degree of ease in ourselves but through a commitment to everything that lives. The development of compassion for all things is part of being human and cannot be conditional. It must include those with whom we agree, whose belief systems are congruent to our own as well as those we may traditionally see as enemies, whose belief systems challenge our own or whose interpretation of life is alien to ours. We need to be judicious but we cannot judge the person, only the action.

Buddhism is moving from the fringes to centre stage. It offers strategies to deal with fraught lives. Meditative practices can be oases of calm at home or in centres. It is not a continuous assault to make choices, make judgments, accumulate information, juggle loyalties. It turns the attention inward.

The binary frameworks generally used to explain or explore our experience are flawed. Contradiction is the stuff of our human condition. We are not asked to repress and destroy this. Instead, it is suggested that they obscure our true nature. We are urged to investigate these obscurations and are offered methods to transform them. So anger can become energy. Pain can teach us sympathy and concern for all.

Buddhism recognises that suffering is our inheritance and will be our legacy. It makes demands in how we locate ourselves in the world. For me, in this context, it raises questions about the infliction of a model of infinite growth on a finite system; of our assumptions of entitlement to resources; our profligate use and treatment of land and water. It challenges the notion that our main concern is “the family”. It isn’t. There is a family beyond the family, beyond the neighbourhood, beyond the state, the country. Nuclear families are only a microcosm of this. Our care has to be embedded in the wider context. It is not a competition. It is reconfiguration.” Jaya Graves

I am not attracted to Buddhist rituals as Jaya or John were but it helps to have a non-theistic approach to the contradictions between material and technological progress, and solidarity with our common humanity.  The war rages on between the gravitational pull to assertion of power through aggressive self-perpetuating wealth and the  transcendent call to connect through commitment to the compassion in our human nature.