There are no souls
My aunt died yesterday. Well, in fact she was my second cousin, once removed, but my mother’s family is very close and so, throughout my childhood, she and her family lived just tens of metres from us and I called her ‘aunt’. I hadn’t seen her in over a year, still I felt sad. I still feel sad as I write this knowing what her children must be going through. In one of those coincidences the vast universe creates, and which human beings find so uncanny, two days prior, as I walked along a beach in the Canary Islands, I heard a little boy ask his mother “Tengo un alma?”…
Those hippie words we use
I was on holiday last week so I gave myself permission to write something a bit different; to discuss a topic that’s close to my heart though it makes a lot of folk squirm. Let’s talk about spirituality. I meditate regularly and have done so for nearly two decades. I have attended Buddhist events. I have read many English translations of Buddhist texts. I don’t believe everything I read, not least because I think a lot of the language is very metaphorical. I find myself fascinated. Buddhism in particular (which Alan Watts often described as Hinduism stripped for export) seems to be a highly advanced unscientific psychology. I believe a…
