The Surprising Abundance of Fire

Fire was once the centrepiece of the home. Now it is the television. Our centre of social gravity has moved away from telling stories round a fire to the black flames of a distorting mirror. We sit sucked in by pixels instead of recharged by light. It is rare to find a house in which people gather around the fire and not the television.

In my experience, fire brings us increasingly in touch with life, with ourselves and our environment. Screens have a habit of drawing us away from the present awareness, comforting in the short term but alienating in the long term. We switch off as our devices switch on.  

Maybe switching off is key to consumerist culture, which seeks to dominate our impulses, tempt our  hungers with sugar-coated products, coax our minds into synthetic mazes.

Loneliness is feeling cold, a lack of inner warmth. We are cold because our own flame has become small, lacking the fuel of others. Grasping after others doesn’t solve anything. Those whose warmth we seek can disappear if they sense a grasp.

We have to build the fire slowly, flame by flame. Perhaps we can start by turning awareness inwards and focusing on the breath. Once the inner light is lit, the fire burns with gentle confidence. No more grasping, only moments of sustaining wakefulness.

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“The mind is an excellent servant but a terrible master,” the old saying goes. Perhaps an understanding of space, that most fundamental element of mental processes, will help us transform this relation. 

Space is seemingly nothing, and yet nothingness is also something. Lines drawn on a piece of paper form a shape within space. The ink stands out against the white of the paper. Is that white background space? No, it’s just paper. But we call it space.

Imagination requires, even if only unconsciously, a conception of space, a place to project its meanderings. That space does not inhabit the three dimensional world of our ordinary perceptions. We cannot feel it, taste it, see it, or hear it.

In the context of the mind, what we call space is the basic matter of our minds. It is the dark area in which anything can be imagined. It is the raw material of creation, the substance that enables us to create new things. When we try to articulate the nature of this mental space, we encounter pure mystery, pure potential. The imagination is capable of both horror and beauty. Even images of god arise out of the depths of our own nothingness!

So what does all this space mean? How can understanding it help us improve our relationship with our own mind?

If mental buzz clogs our thoughts and nervous systems, if we find ourselves flitting between one thing and another, over anxious, filled with self-created stress, then there is a good chance we have fallen prey to the mind.

Perhaps it is useful to stop for a minute and evaluate the true function of the mind. The mind, whose basic material is imperceptible “space”, when used appropriately, is a great tool for exploration. We use our minds not only to solve everyday problems but also to ask ourselves those big, all-important questions, such as what is Being? Or, how should I live? Or when we meditate, the inherent emptiness of mental space can serve as a screen on which to visualise a beautiful natural scene, or perhaps some benevolent deity, to help us reach a state or serenity and fulfilment.

Instead of having our mind rule us, let us celebrate its potential, the unlimited potential of space.

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Even when we feel most alone air fills our breath and bodies. Without air, nothing would happen, life would collapse, breath would fail.

Our consciousness grows to fill the spaces we inhabit. We tend to spend our days indoors, where air is confined and divided into rooms, and sound barely resonates before encountering a wall.

Sheltered from the swirling winds outside, we think we’ve found the remedy to life. But comfort has its drawbacks. Our ears are muffled; our eyes squared. We think in boxes, separating ourselves from nature, and from others, harbouring delusions of self-importance. Thus grow the structures of our mind.

If our consciousness cannot expand beyond these walls, how can we reach new heights? Forgotten inside our small, invented worlds, we lose touch with reality.

Have you ever noticed how you feel after spending a long period of time outside in natural, verdant spaces? As soon as we leave our caves, and spend some time in the infinite, those mental walls begin to crumble. Fresh air connects us to a vital whole. Freedom comes. Tension goes. We feel lighter and more alive.

If we are feeling constrained, lost inside a self-created synthetic maze, perhaps it is useful to seek the natural flow and dance of change, the manifestation and dissolution of clouds, unafraid of wind. We can take step outside the castle walls by our own volition. Or wait until nature comes, knocking down the walls, forcing us to confront those columns of air that hold all things aloft for a moment before scattering in every direction.

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One way to control population is to build an ideology around doing something wrong. Misery is the individual’s fault. The individual is always “living in sin”. In a market economy, where inherited wealth and other factors of privilege create an uneven playing field from the start, the rich are lauded as heroes while the poor are ostracized as failures for not working hard enough to become rich, regardless of systemic issues. This is especially true for countries such as the US and the UK, where neoliberal capitalism and individualism is particularly potent.

Guilt, shame and frustration have a habit of eroding self-esteem, taking people  out of the moment, injecting them with anxiety, inviting them to condemn themselves for their apparent “failure”. Thus alienation sets in. Any attempt to challenge the status quo can be deflected as a loser’s desperation to shirk responsibility for their own ineptitude. Look at us, say the billionaire’s smiles, gleaming from the television screens. We made it this far without complaining. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t too.

This is history’s greatest distractive mechanism: transform an individual’s fight against actual oppression into a fight against themselves and the result is an angry and easily manipulated population. This general frustration, combined with a continuous deterioration in living standards, can then be channelled via political rhetoric towards the scapegoat “other”: usually a vulnerable minority or a foreign country. Demagogues excel at diverting the populace’s rage away from the usual schisms of ethnic tensions and inequality towards an enemy that cannot answer back. Blame is fine so long as it falls outside the castle gates and the castle stewards are the ones doing the pointing.

Work hard, be successful, spend money. These are the mantras that define our age. No matter if working hard means despoiling the environment, or success comes from exploiting others, or spending money leaves you without financial security.

After millennia of Christianity, repressive tendencies and submission to a central authority form a natural part of our psyche. Freeing ourselves from any sense of guilt or shame for who we are and what we do is perhaps an essential first step towards achieving wellbeing and forging communities based on more salutary values, such as compassion, creativity and solidarity, as opposed to the current schema of competition, conformism and hierarchy.

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Time is one of the first things we are taught: the relentless forward motion of existence. We are fascinated by the science fiction of time travel. We obsess over the past and wonder endlessly about the future. We even construct identity through time, fixing a sense of self to an inescapable past. So what exactly is this seemingly magical phenomenon we call time?

Before the invention of the clock, we would mark time by observing nature. Days were measured by sunrise and sunset; months by the moon’s appearance; years by the length of days and changing seasons. Time was just a way of measuring change in the same way that a ruler is used to measure the length of an object. Even the word time comes from the Indo-European root da, which means to divide. The clock is just a more advanced way of measuring those divisions of change.

Although time measures change, time itself is not change. Change is integral to reality; time is simply a measuring device. This begs the question: what are the past and future if not periods of time?

I would argue the past does not exist. Everything that exists happens here in the perceivable environment. So what is this thing that we call the past?

As a photograph is only a representation of the scenes it depicts, so our memories are only impressions of scenes originally perceived by our senses. Those impressions create an illusion of the past. Yes, we can prove something happened by checking physical reality to see if it matches our memory. Others might confirm something happened by matching their memory with our own. But that doesn’t mean the past exists. It only means that memory contains certain details that facilitate mental processes in the here.

Not does the future exist. “I know the sun will rise tomorrow, therefore I know the future.” This premise is based on the memory that the sun rose yesterday. The sun may not rise tomorrow. The future is just an illusion shaped by memory and imagination. What does that leave us with?

Here. The perceivable environment where you are reading these words. We do not exist in forward motion “time”, but as changing entities within the perceivable here. Memory is just a tool for unlocking the eternal present, sometimes useful, sometimes not so useful. The full flowering of identity and being only ever happens here.  Living in the here makes us happier in the long run.

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Our daily focus is predominantly forward and down. The latter even more so as our attention is increasingly drawn into the kaleidoscopic maze of pixelated computer or mobile screens. But to look up? Apart from space exploration, modern civilisation has little necessity to examine the heavens. We have killed the gods and replaced them with ourselves. The walls of the acropolis no longer feature humanoid gods: they are now simply humans.

The giant glowing embers of our cities have made it even less likely for us to gaze starward, the heavens obscured by the orange haze of light pollution. When we do finally look up lying in bed, we find our view impeded by the ceiling. It should be noted that ceilings are generally pretty bloody boring. So with a sigh and a million racing thoughts we close our eyes and retreat into the grey space of our minds to ready ourselves for tomorrow’s repetition bouncing around in the boxes of our lives. Upon waking, our consciousness, at its most relaxed and creative, must conform once again to the shapes in which we have arranged our lives.

Time spent in nature – whether it’s the forest, mountains, meadows, ocean or beaches –  has a deeply levelling effect. We relax into our bodies, slowing down as we orientate with the natural pace of life, as if we are finally plugged into a vital electricity that charges our deepest core. It is a completely different way of being from that of the standard rat race. Stress slowly dissipates and we find ourselves beautifully and simply here and surrounded by the breathing web of life. We settle into an atmosphere of stillness.

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Every atom is in a state of flux. One could even posit that movement and existence are the same. We are not separate from this rule.

The thinking mind is always one step behind, always trying to catch up and correlate the web of our knowledge with what we perceive in the ever-changing moment. But our ideas of reality are not reality itself but imperfect concepts based on impressions. This is a problematic tendency of the mind: always thinking and separating itself from reality. But the mind is no less a part of the changing reality than our own bodies and notions of selfhood. Suffering can arise when we identify too intensely with this inner world of thought.

“I think therefore I am” as Descartes’s famous statement goes. But we are not our thoughts, we merely identify with them. We think thought separates us from the rest of reality, making us a concrete entity relatively unaffected by change. We have a name and a whole web of ideas we can reel off when asked “who are you?” We even invoke impressions of the past and predictions of the future as co-conspirators in this game of chase for an immutable “me”. Perhaps a better configuration is this: perception, therefore existence. As we step into the warmth of the eternal here, we attune ourselves to the miracles of the minutiae of the everyday, the magic of the vast, yet tragically brief spectacles of nature and change in which our ponderous human forms have been stranded. It is not only the cold, inhuman cycles of change that define these transformative journeys of having bodies. We may also find a surprising abundance of fire.