Finding Destinations

One cannot see the same view of wild trees for over thirty years and not make a deep response. In this sense the wild-gardens of Cardiff’s Roath Park, opposite the house, are one of my sacred spaces. They set the scene for the meditation to follow. My intention is to explore some of, what seem to me, to be the more significant meanings of environment, and the ways these mental visions are communicated as spiritual universes in the context of human social evolution. The proposed structure follows the course of my own thinking regarding human development from man in, and against nature, to man as nature. We grow and age at the pace of planetary time, yet we are endowed with the mental faculty of thinking of spiritual continuity measured in cosmic eons. Before we reach whatever long-term spiritual destiny has been set for humanity, there has to be continuity from generation to generation, and this requires us to be comfortable with a spiritual system, which incorporates targets for managing environmental resources based on a unity of mind and nature. The bridges can be found in every personal sacred space, every holy city, every temple, every sanctuary, and every altar. Temples are cosmic mountains. The Mesopotamian ziggurat was a mountain joining Heaven to Hell. Each terrace represented a different cosmic level. As the pilgrims climbed they became closer to an entrance to the cosmos. As they reach the highest point they broke through into the ultimately sacred sphere transcending everything profane.

I call the wild-gardens a sacred space because in my mind they denote things that are not already understood. I use them symbolically to push forward the frontiers of knowledge and to grasp the mental nature of life, the stuff of existence itself. In this sense, a woodland or similar environment, like a pebble beach, with primeval connections with a non-human past is an obvious place to exit utilitarianism.

My thinking today that started with morning sunlight on trees is a fundamental mental activity by which I try to make sense of my day to day environment, and also position myself in the cosmos. Thinking in both dimensions, I do not encounter the world directly. I create a world of symbols through which I experience, interpret, and perceive "truth" in the objects, processes, people, nations and cultural heritage in my life. The only tools at my disposal are those that lie around me. In other words, I am not content with the mere handling of these physical things, but for better or worse I seem to be endowed with a passion for knowledge of the meaning that lies behind them, and of which they can be symbolic.

All of us communicate by taking images derived from the world of sense experience and apply them as symbols to communicate that which transcends them. This is a truth, which has long been recognized in the history of philosophy. Faith, for example, speaks in the language of one world, the world of sense and sight, concerning the things of another world, the world unseen and eternal. It maps the spiritual to us through images borrowed from the everyday world Father Christmas does exist. He will visit my grandchildren in a few days time, as a very old symbol of fatherhood grafted onto the celebrations of a divine birthday that took place relatively recently in human history. This father in a red cloak is a living symbol of the intangible family bonds of love, generosity and devotion, and his power will touch millions of adults with a happiness that crosses faiths and creeds. In that sense he is more real than Jesus.

I woke up today with thoughts about the symbolism of midwinter sunlight on trees. It is much easier to meditate on the trees themselves. ‘The tree’ is a symbol that holds a central place in the spiritual life of people from all over the world. This is probably connected with our long cultural development in association with survival kits assembled from the diverse resources of woodland and forest. To many native peoples, trees are living embodiments of cosmic powers whose life cycle far outstretches our own by as many as ten generations. Trees can grow to a great size, their branches reaching up into the heavens, their roots plunging deep into the earth; places we can never reach. This implicates trees in a symbolism of ‘levels of being’, as well as the cycles of generation and regeneration, which are the essence of life. If I distinguish the trees from the wood across the road, the oak emerges as the producer of acorns. Its fruit is the supreme symbol of maturation, growth and individuation. Each acorn represents the human capacity for spiritual development. It is depicted on the capitals of temple columns, in coats of arms, and is placed at the end of the red cords of a cardinal’s hat. The acorn also carries much older sexual symbolisms. The seed protruding from the cup resembles the tip of the penis, and also the child, all rounded, smooth and unblemished, emerging from the womb. The point is that symbols speak of many things at different times and places. On the other hand, signs, like the Cardinal’s hat, for example, must refer specifically to one entity.

The oak’s companion across the road, the yew tree is an obvious evergreen at this time of the year and so is more obviously alive. Like the oak it also lives to a great age, but carries death in its poisonous berries. The coexistence of life and death in one being gives the yew a symbolic message of life with death. As a symbol of death followed by eternal life it has been planted in graveyards since pre-Christian times.

However, civilization has long ago left such sacred places, such as the wild gardens, behind and replaced them with stage-settings, which imitate the symbolic models in which the spiritual connection with nature was originally made. In this context, the architectural setting of a people’s worship is likely to tell us something of their world-view, and the interwoven destiny of the worshippers, if we are able to read its symbolism. Usually, the architect of a symbolic building was required only to point towards or hint at the cosmic structure, particularly if he was building in a long-established tradition of symbolism. In Christianity the cruciform church was established very early on as an unvarying symbolic model, which was not abandoned until late in the last century. In Britain the break with tradition was made by the architect Basil Spence who designed and supervised the building of Coventry Cathedral. I am actually able to extend my wild-gardens symbol of human continuity through evolution into this building, not because of its architectural innovations, which people might say are marginal, but because the whole of its back wall is covered by Graham Sutherland’s great tapestry. The tapestry is the interface between the real and the supernatural. In its massiveness it is available for meditation to those seeking doors and windows from our ecological past to a cosmos that is being taken back by physics and astronomy to the first few seconds of its creation. Sutherland’s design in coloured fabrics transports time travellers straight from the wind-carved tree lines, estuaries and rocks of his Welsh county of Pembrokeshire to a mythical land of Biblical Revelation and the Crucifixion. With a few guidelines, it is relatively easy for cross-cultural meditators to travel through the tapestry, navigating with Sutherland’s symbolic use of natural motives, which he transformed into spiritual metaphors. Knowing Sutherland’s Pembrokeshire as I do, and also having stood many times before the Coventry tapestry, I can be transported seamlessly from one to the other; from the visible to the spiritual and back again

Our ultimate symbols push beyond the frontiers of empirical objectivity and encourage us to make a personal grasp of the transcendent. They attempt to get beyond the empirical to immeasurable meanings and values. To engage in this kind of symbolic thinking we need an aim that points to a predetermined end of our journey through our own thought processes. This day-to-day destination will be a new understanding of a problem through a personal project. It is likely to be a real entity such as ‘car ownership’ or ‘political leadership. Destiny, in contrast, is usually defined as a future end point that is reached through a power or agency that predetermines the course of events by which we arrive at a spiritual destination. However, in both contexts, human destinies and destinations can be revealed and communicated through symbols.

Having a symbolic destiny affords us access through the visible world into a higher transcendent plane of being. Here it is in the aim of religion to get beyond first appearances, but the language of religion has always found it necessary to make use of the language of appearances in order to speak of the supernatural. A religion is the structuring of a certain group of symbols, which portray an ultimate mental reality, and the manner in which meaningful life is to be lived in relation to it. The Bible in particular is recognized as a vast structure of symbols and signed events, which are expressive of the nature and purpose of the ‘it’ that created the universe. Its symbolic language constantly appropriates images derived from sense experience, and uses them as windows on the transcendent reality, which is the professional concern of priests and prophets. Sutherland’s tapestry is a map into the viewer’s mind, where a shoot of prickly Pembrokeshire gorse, becomes a crown of thorns.

Human life at a practical level has the aim of controlling nature through applications of science, using symbols in the form of mental maps called diagrams. The creation of these mind-maps enables us to produce new bodies of useful knowledge for the purposes of controlling human production. The map stands as a picture of personal discoveries, and as a guide for others to follow our thinking. Francis Bacon was the first to articulate the latter mode of metaphorical symbolic thinking. He described how he aimed to arrange all known knowledge of his time so that others could voyage to discover unknown facts and ideas, which could enlarge human well-being. Mind maps are particularly important in research and education to provide short cut routes between different facts that are not obviously connected. Educationalists use the terms ‘map’ and ‘web’ as metaphors for their symbolic diagrams that consist of interlinked topics. The actual detailed thinking required to reach their stage posts and destinations is omitted, and it is left for the learner to puzzle out the actual step-by step route as to make a personal body of knowledge.

Religion and science both rely on symbols. In this sense it is hardly surprising that conflict between scientists and priests in the late nineteenth century was characterized by the intent of many, both Christians and their opponents, to take all biblical statements as physical fact, and argue their validity on that basis. Only with the recognition that these writings were often poetic and symbolic could the misguided arguments of that era be terminated. The use of physical statements as a means of expressing spiritual reality was largely responsible for this confusion. It was an age that tended to look back on the biblical era as peopled by men and women who lacked their own poetic and romantic sense. Progress in understanding scripture may in fact be said to be proportionate very largely to the extent to which its symbolic character is recognised.

On the other hand, to those encountering materialism for the first time, it appeared to many that scientific progress had overcome the need for symbols, and we could at last know the world as it is. The success of science in its investigation of the nature of matter was so great that the intimate secrets of the universe seemed to be opening up. This attitude was often adopted not only in scientific but also in theological circles. Many philosophers were impatient of the concealment of ultimate truth and believed that the symbolism of religious language could be swept away as the archaic survival of a less capable era. Others, however, had already recognized the permanence of the symbol and not merely in the religious but also in the scientific sphere.