Category: Joy

Paul McCartney’s The Space Within US; music of the human spirit

 

Just watched Paul McCartney’s The Space Within US tour. Accepting that it was edited for effect it must be one of the best rock n roll music & documentary DVDs to exemplify the universal and transcendent nature of music.

 

Audience shots show the high degree of basic positive human emotions- happiness, joy etc – but there are also shots that suggest reverie, awe, a sense of grace and even religious ecstasy. What we see in them, and flowing from them, is part of human nature – intrinsic before the holy breaks down into the fragments of negative qualities through adverse socialization.

 

There isn’t in this concert the sense of kinship through being paid-up members of ‘we hate X, Y or Z group’. Instead there is the joy of experiencing the joy and love of their higher Selves – in the midst of thousands of others experiencing the same pure life force.

 

In addition to words of praise from a range of notables, including President Bill Clinton, Bob Spitz says of McCartney and his music, ‘He brings joy to the world.’

 

The reason that commentators saw it as genuinely spiritual was that the responses were unladen with ideology and its thousands of ways of dividing us from ourselves and from each other.

 

It’s worth much more than a time-filling watch.

 

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All postings to this site relate to the central SunWALK model in the PhD.

Summaries are HERE

‘Definition of God’ – and it still leaves us with the job of living with each other through the unity of mystery

The nearest I have ever come across to a satisfactory definition of God is as follows;

God is a circle whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.

Anonymous, ‘The Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers‘ (12thC)

Of course it isn’t really a definition – it’s more like a Zen Master’s ‘pointing’ – but what a pointing!

Of course I like it because it expresses my theological perspective and worldview – that of immanence plus transcendence i.e. panentheism.

Of course unless we lie through assertion or dupe through self-deception we don’t really, unequivocally, know. The best we can have is reasonably high degrees of certainty – and then preferably by combining several ways of knowing including sense observation, reason, intuition and the precedent of community precedents. We in truth live with mystery. As it says in the Koran ‘Man is my mystery and I am his‘.

“We are united by our doubts and divided by our convictions.” Sir Peter Ustinov

Recognition of ignorance is strength not weakness as Saint Augustine pointed out;

I am in a sorry state, for I do not know what I do not know!

Because we have unique histories we have unique worldviews. In fact it is the fact that at our centre we need faith to bridge the gap that exists between knowing and not knowing between finite humanity and that other defining characteristic of God – infinity.

As I suggested elsewhere excesses of certitude cut us off from truth and can lead to horrors of cruelty – the Nazis were certain that Jews, and Gypsies were sub-human.

“Certitude divides and diversity unifies…..We have to elevate religion above politics…..”

H.R.H. Prince El-Hassan Bin Talal of Jordan BBC Newsnight 9th Feb 2006

All desire to be united is as the drop that longs to come one with the ocean – the rub, and the joy, is that the duality through which we learn is the dynamic that exists between oneness on the one hand, via contemplative letting go of the ego, and l-one-ly separation on the other.