City Of God 10

I have written elsewhere, Gentle Reader, on these pages about British author Doris Lessing and her marvelous and byzantine novel the Four-Gated City. In brief, it chronicles the life and development of a thirty year old woman who comes to postwar London from what is now Zimbabwe (previously Southern Rhodesia) and the next twenty years of her life there until 1969 or so. She becomes the live-in helper, secretary and sometimes lover of an upper middle class author to whom she divulges her vision of an ideal city that will not leave her imagination. It is situated in a great desert, perhaps in Northern Africa, in an oasis and several roads gradually lead into what becomes a beautifully ordered utopia of lovely buildings, gardens and public facilities, where everyone has a role for feeding and sustaining the city. There are no actual elected leaders, it is kind of a spiritual anarchy but one that gives birth to a kind of living order and balance. It is thought that there is a soul or spirit in the heart of this wonderful city that prospers and flourishes for many centuries, until a barbarous army overruns it and kills the inhabitants. They are from a rival city that is run by a violent and wealthy tyranny. They try to find the source of the mysterious power of this city they have just destroyed, because of envy, since there was nothing they could do to replicate this beautiful and magical place. They try to emulate the destroyed city, without success. All they can produce is violence, inequality and strife. One day they try to find what was once the heart of the original city. It is intuited that it is situated in the basement of the public library, in a small room. They open the room. It is empty. There is no easy explanation to this allegory, if allegory this is. But it is worth meditating and reflecting on. There is something about the still places. I am not thinking hear of inner peace, nor of the mindfulness industry and other Buddha babble. I do believe that there is a place of stillness that is inherent to nature. This brings to mind the structure of the atom. There is absolutely nothing between the electrons and the nucleus, there is nothing measurable that holds an atom together, yet perhaps by its un centrifugal force, it is held together. There is an underlying silence to everything that is. At first it would appear to be a dead emptiness, but anyone who has spent time at night in the wilderness staring up at the stars will know that this silence is something other than mere absence of sound. If you spend time in the forest and you listen carefully, behind the birdsong and other sounds of creatures, there is silence. It is very difficult to find silence in the city. I know this, living downtown in a rather troubled district. This sometimes is compounded by various kinds of racket inside my apartment building, for example from some kind of work that was being done near my unit. We live surrounded by noise, and the addicted dependence that most have on their smartphones keeps many people in a state of perpetual flight from the Great Silent Void. I think this could be why the mindfulness industry has become so lucrative. With so many people completely enslaved to the constant stimulation and information overload from their phones, along with their demanding jobs and careers, the level of anxiety and neurosis has become one frightening collective force. This is a calculable threat to our collective mental health. So, in come the yoga teachers and the mindfulness meditation instructors to the rescue, while they are laughing all the way to the bank. I am not against mindfulness, nor meditation or yoga. They have their uses, even if they are placebos or panaceas. I think of these practices as a first step, even if I feel discomfort that the popularizing of these ancient practices is cultural appropriation adapted to Western consumer society. What is troubling is the inherent narcissism in the way that meditation and mindfulness are being sourced. We need to do more to change our focus, to appreciate how interconnected we are with one another and the natural environment. We are all part of nature. We need a major social revolution where we will openly and covertly resist this mindless individualism that is fostered and abetted by the materialism and greed of capitalism and greed. I think that in order to get there then we have to start facing the silent void, to get past our fear of ourselves, our fear of silence, our fear of nothing. This very silence that is the very heart of creation, the spirit and soul of the universe. This silence whose name is Love.