I was born in the south-east of England 17 years after the end of the Second World War, the most destructive conflict in human history. As a child, the 17-year gap seemed a lifetime; as a 64-year-old, it seems like the immediate aftermath. Everyone had fought in the war: your teacher, newsagent, headmaster, dentist, doctor. I met stereotypically moustachioed friends of my dad who had fought in Spitfires in the skies directly overhead. Or they had flown Lancaster bombers over Berlin: ‘I was just a taxi driver running a night-time service, there and back.’

Relentlessly propagandised to celebrate the great victory by films, TV series, documentaries, comic books and toys, I became an avid builder of model tanks. When I was thirteen, a middle-aged German businessman with a partially melted right hand visited our house. He had been a tank commander in the war. Knowing I would be fascinated, my dad ushered him into my room and showed him the tanks I had built. Clearly dismayed, the visitor shook his head and pointed to an electric guitar I had been playing:

‘Metal is better used for making those than for tanks. War is terrible, really terrible. Forget about all of that!’

Decades later, bemused by my youthful enthusiasm for war, I took a train from Bournemouth a few stops down the track to the tank museum at Bovington. I climbed inside one of the early Second World War German tanks that had invaded France and the Soviet Union. The inside of any tank is so brutal that to make contact with any part of it is to risk injury. Momentarily losing that awareness, I banged my head against a cluster of metal spikes poking down from the turret. It hurt. Even as a stationary museum exhibit, a tank can harm you. I struggled to imagine how anyone could be inside such a thing when it was moving or under fire.

I rapped my knuckles against the front of a Soviet T-34: Donald Trump’s claims notwithstanding, the tank, 57,300 of them, that defeated Hitler. If you rap your knuckles against the wall of a building, there’s a response - the energy resonates in the brick or concrete; you have some effect. When you rap your knuckles against a tank, there’s no reverberation, nothing; you have no effect at all. And you can’t lift the tracks of a large tank even an inch, they are like slabs of rock.

Rolling gently around the T-34 was an elderly man in a wheelchair. Old school, he was chatting to everyone, making friends at every turn. He was the right age, and I wondered if he had lost the use of his legs while fighting these metal monsters.

As I walked on, I had a growing sense that war was the quintessence of all that is anti-human, anti-life. The tank is perfectly symbolic of the ego, of its hostility, aggression, rejection, hatred. What I found staggering was just how much time, energy and resources had been devoted to the development of these weapons – the investment of engineering and other technical expertise defies belief. The power was impressive, but where, as a teenager, I had felt excitement, I now felt a queasy revulsion. And a deep weariness – there was nothing inspiring or enlivening in all of this; the whole focus of the museum led down a cul de sac of killing and death, which made it, in the deepest sense of the word, boring.

Why is it that wars are a perennial feature of human experience? The towering walls surrounding so many of the world’s cities are testament to that grim reality. Just this year, after the ruthless blitz on Venezuela, the US and Israel have waged a war of aggression on Iran, with Cuba also in the crosshairs.

Is war genetically hardwired, an inevitable product of nature ‘red in tooth and claw’? Is it something we could somehow choose to renounce, if enough of us chose to do so? Of course, I know the arguments: Perpetual War is the result of economic and political momentum that has built up over decades and centuries. If you don’t fire the missiles, the factories close. If you don’t have an enemy, you can’t fire the missiles. If the ‘Bad Guy’ doesn’t exist, you have to invent him. As the historian Howard Zinn said so well:

‘It seems to me that it only takes a little bit of thought to realise that if wars came out of human nature, out of some spontaneous urge to kill, then why is it that governments have to go to such tremendous lengths to mobilise populations to go to war? It seems too obvious, doesn’t it? They really have to work at it.... Most humans don’t respond to appeals to go to war on the basis of Let’s go and kill. No, Let’s go and free somebody. Let’s go and establish democracy. Let’s go and topple this tyrant. Let’s do this so that wars will finally come to an end.’ (Howard Zinn, ‘Power, History and Warfare’, Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, No. 8, 1991, pp.4-5)

But this reminds me of the ‘infinite regress’ problem of religion: Who created the universe? God. But then who created God? If wars don’t come out of human nature, what about the fact that so many people consistently fall for the propaganda manufacturing consent for war? Does that gullibility and indifference come out of human nature? And why are people willing to work for militaries operating at the whim of obviously barbaric, greed-driven governments and defence industries that kill for profit? And why do people work for fossil fuel companies in an age of catastrophic climate change? Why do they continue to participate, ignoring the evidence of their own eyes – literally, the obvious facts of their day-to-day experience, of existential catastrophe? Why are we so easily seduced by fake dreams of Star Trek to the Moon and Mars when the journey that really matters is ‘Earth Trek’? Are we somehow destined, designed, doomed to sleepwalk to disaster? But why? The questions echo across the universe… Sometimes, we receive a kind of answer.

Monte Cassino – ‘That Were Rough’

Because the previous service back to Bournemouth has been cancelled, the train is crowded, so I drop into the only seat available. To my surprise, I see that the person sitting next to me in a seat reserved for the disabled is the guy in the wheelchair I saw in the museum. Within seconds, I learn that he is called Billy. We have more room than people in the other seats because we are facing the curved wall of the toilet. Parked against this wall is his wheelchair. His legs are outstretched and he is holding a pair of crutches.

It slowly dawns on me that Billy, in fact, has two artificial legs. And it again becomes clear that he is one of those chatty types who knows that everyone is basically the same: everyone is friendly, likes a good chinwag. We are soon nattering, and Billy is 81 years-old and has had a ‘grand time’ in the museum.

He mentions something about Africa and the war. I take up the obvious prompt and ask him if he saw action. He looks me in the eye, ‘Oh yes,’ he saw action alright. ‘Apparently,’ I offer, ‘Spielberg’s film “Saving Private Ryan”’ gives a pretty good idea of what war is actually like.’

‘No, no’, he says dismissively, exactly echoing the German tank commander I met in my youth, ‘they never show it like it is, they make it look glamorous, exciting. It isn’t glamorous. War is terrible, really terrible.’

Words are such small containers, and something is missing from this: ‘terrible’ doesn’t seem to capture the extent of the awfulness. I want him to tell me how war is terrible, why it is terrible. I want to know just how terrible this life we are living is capable of being. I try again:

‘So, you were in the thick of it…’

‘I were in North Africa at Tobruk. They had us under siege.’

‘Must’ve been dreadful in that heat.’

He laughs and points at the carriage floor.

‘We used to dig holes in the sand at night and bury the beers, then dig ‘em up the next day, and we had freezing cold lager. Bloody marvellous!’

He laughs:

‘That kept us cool!’

This isn’t quite what I’m after, either – the refrigeration of beers! - but that’s what I get. Billy isn’t interested in communicating the terribleness of war; he’s interested in the scams, tricks, fiddles.

‘We landed at Sicily, and then, when we’d got them out of there, it was mainland Italy. We moved up to Monte Cassino - that were rough.’

Monte Cassino was one of the fiercest battles of the war – the Allies suffered 55,000 casualties battling up a mountain to eject German troops from a bombed-out monastery at the top. It was utter carnage. Billy says:

‘We were crossing this river, and we were just slaughtered. Out of a thousand men, 300 were killed crossing that river. It were so bad that people who’d got hit were getting hit again coming out on stretchers. It were that bad!’

I have to ask, feeling as if I already know the answer:

‘Is that where you lost your legs?’

‘Oh no!’ he says. ‘I got through the war without a scratch. They never touched me.’

I’m too surprised to be polite:

‘Then what happened to your legs?’

‘I was a smoker. I had circulation problems, and I went to a doctor when I were in Canada, and he said: “Forget about cutting down, if you have so much as one cigarette a day, I guarantee you’ll be back here for amputation.”’

‘So, what happened?’

‘I kept on smoking!’

‘You kept on smoking?’

Around us, silence falls as a dozen fellow travellers start paying attention.

‘My wife smoked. And my brother-in-law, who was living with us then, smoked, and it was so tempting.’

He points to his artificial legs:

‘I had this one off in ‘67, and this one in ‘68.’

‘My God, and do you still smoke?’

‘Oh no! I gave up in ’78. It were New Year’s Eve and I said to my wife, “That’s my last fag! That’s it!’” And that were it. I’ve never had a fag since.’

He pats a leg and looks out of the window:

‘It’s no problem, I’m used to them now. It’s no problem getting around.’

With that, he puts his hands into his crutches, struggles to his feet, positions his legs and does a near-perfect Tin Man impression in the direction of the toilet.

See also ‘A Lefty Progressive Goes To The Seaside’, part of the ‘Lefty Progressive Daytrip’ series.

David Edwards is co-editor of Media Lens and author of ‘A Short Book About Ego… and the Remedy of Meditation’, Mantra Books, 2025, available here. He is also author of the forthcoming politico-mystical science fiction novel, ‘The Man With No Face’, to be published by Roundfire Books in 2026.

In Part 1, we saw how even the most exalted stars in the celebrity firmament look on in dismay as their greatest successes – Wimbledon titles, World Cups, sell-out concerts - vanish into the magic begging bowl of their heads that can never be satisfied. No matter how many triumphs are poured into the bowl, discontented thoughts continue to blaze through the mind:

‘I could have experienced the ultimate satisfaction, glory and happiness of being considered the greatest tennis player who ever lived, but I blew my chance.’

And:

‘I’ve achieved fame and fortune playing rugby/golf/snooker and thereby missed the fulfilment of contributing something meaningful to society.’

As we have also seen, when these thoughts arise, they can become agonising fixtures for years and decades.

If we find this depressing – what possible chance do mere mortals like us have of finding contentment when even the rich and famous fail? – consider this comment from the American mystic Adyashanti:

‘When we get what we want, we experience this blissful moment - we got what we wanted. We don’t want anything else. The joy we experience, the release that we experience, the happiness, is not because we got what we wanted, but because we’re no longer wanting. We, for a moment, experience the great happiness of not wanting anything.’ (Adyashanti, 19 May 2003, ‘The Gift of Wanting’)

Why would ‘not wanting anything’ be experienced as ‘great happiness’? Why would it not be a state of grey boredom? Because the present moment is inherently blissful, because that ‘great happiness’ is always available here, now; but we, alas, are not.

Where are we, then? We are lost at the bottom of our begging bowls dreaming of the next moment, the next goal that will bring us ‘that final, complete thing that I don’t have now’ (McEnroe). Or we are lost in the past, dreaming of ‘the days when everything felt infinite’ (McKagan). In reality, that final, complete thing when everything feels infinite is here, now, freely available to all! It is not ‘there’, ‘then’.

From this perspective, winning a million-pound jackpot floats a million shiny lures drawing our minds away from ‘the great happiness’ of the present moment into misery-inducing thoughts of future happiness supposedly secured by all that money. From this perspective, wealth, fame and glory are fool’s gold tempting us into the mind and away from the blissful present.

It’s hard to believe the present moment is really this friendly - it’s always seemed a bit brutal. Is there any way we can check to see if there’s truth in any of this? By experimenting with directing our attention into our feelings and sensory experiences, we can temporarily escape the influence of immiserating thoughts and experience ‘the great happiness of not wanting anything’. Not because we have got something, but because we have won a respite from the begging bowl mind. That is all meditation is.

A complementary remedy is to subject the thoughts to inquiry. If we test the truthfulness of the thoughts luring us into the future, we can dispel them and again experience ‘the great happiness of not wanting anything’.

‘The Work’

It took me around ten years, with a large, ego-sized gap in the middle, to get my head around Byron Katie’s system of self-inquiry that she calls ‘The Work’. Eckhart Tolle has said of this method that it ‘acts like a razor-sharp sword that cuts through illusion’.

Born Kathleen Reid, it seems her mother was amused by Katie’s early passion for poetry, calling her ‘Byron Katie’. The name stuck.

If that sounds bizarre, so does the idea that revolutionary insights can be gained from completing something called a ‘judge-your-neighbour worksheet’ evaluating our complaints against existence, especially pesky humans.

In essence, the process involves identifying a stressful thought and subjecting it to rational challenge. But don’t we do that all the time anyway? Interestingly, no.

A good example of a stressful thought was offered from his own life by psychiatrist and brain scanning specialist Dr. Daniel Amen, a friend and admirer of Katie’s:

‘My wife never listens to me.’

Doesn’t sound like much, does it? A standard marital complaint, but this is exactly the kind of thought that can smoulder at the back of the head for years, generating misery for oneself and others.

The statement is to be written down and then challenged by the first two of the four questions on Katie’s worksheet:

‘1. Is it true? (Yes or no.)

‘2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true? (Yes or no.)’

Ingloriously, I initially fell at this first hurdle – why ask the same question twice? In fact, both questions struck me as surplus to requirement. Let’s say my statement read:

‘I’m upset with my friend because he never phones me anymore. I always phone him.’

Is it true? Well, I am upset because he doesn’t ever phone and I do always phone him – so, yes! There’s nothing to discuss. Can I be absolutely sure it’s true? Yes, I can – you can ask the question two, three, ten times, the answer will still be ‘yes’! A sobering insight into just how stubbornly and naïvely trusting I was of my complaining mind.

Having written our stressful statement down, we are to think back and anchor our minds in a particular situation when we felt upset about the problem we have identified. The problem may have arisen a thousand times, but we are to cast our minds back to a particular incident. So, in the case of Daniel Amen, he is to anchor himself in a moment – perhaps at home in the lounge or kitchen - when he strongly felt his wife was ignoring him. He brings the situation to mind: what she was doing and saying, how he felt, and he then challenges the statement:

‘My wife never listens to me.’

Is it true? Amen’s answer:

‘No. I’ve written 19 public television specials; she’s listened to every script.’

This is already remarkable – the stressful statement seemed powerfully true. Certainly, as we will see below, it seemed true enough to cause Amen intense suffering. And yet, here we are, having meditated for a few minutes on this most elementary question, and a powerful contradictory example has already popped into view. And if Amen can find one, he can surely find second and third examples of when his wife did listen to him.

The second question:

‘Can you be absolutely sure that it’s true, with 100% certainty?’

‘No.’

This is already clear enough. Even the single example of the TV specials means it is not ‘absolutely’ true ‘with 100% certainty’.

The third question:

‘How do you react, what happens, when you believe the thought, “My wife never listens to me”?’

Amen is again to meditate on the situation in which his statement is anchored, and he relives the pain of the experience. His description of how he felt:

‘Terrible. Isolated. Alone.’

How did his thoughts and feelings in this situation make him act?

‘Distant, irritable with her.’

And what was the outcome of the thought? Irony of ironies, Amen comments:

‘She’ll not listen to you!’

This is a common theme in ‘The Work’ – our stressful thoughts and emotions tend to provoke or aggravate precisely the problem we’re complaining about, even when the original complaint was baseless. Many a ‘jealous guy’ will nod sagely in response to that observation!

The fourth question on the worksheet:

‘Who or what would you be without the thought?’

Here we need to slip into a meditative state where we try to sense how we would have felt in that precise situation without the stressful thought. Amen’s response:

‘Fine. How would I act? Normal. What’s the outcome? Happier.’

In other words, apart from what he was thinking and believing about his wife, all was well – it was a beautiful day, they were having an enjoyable time together until the damning thought intervened.

The contrast between the third question, how the thought makes us feel, and the fourth question, who we would be without that thought, shines a bright light on the leading role played by the thought in making us miserable. It can also give us a glimpse of ‘the great happiness of not wanting anything’. With the thought: pain. Without the thought: bliss.

The final part of the process is to ‘Turn the thought around.’ In Amen’s case, an obvious turnaround from ‘My wife doesn’t listen to me’ is:

‘My wife does listen to me.’

We meditate on that thought, try to feel if it rings as true or truer than our original complaint. Amen can clearly see that it rings truer, adding:

‘And then I can list all the times she does [listen].’

He can doubtless remember any number of occasions when his wife has listened to him – helping with TV scripts, with personal and familial problems, through thick and thin – and suddenly, miraculously, the bubble of painful conviction that had left him feeling ‘Terrible. Isolated. Alone’ has simply burst. Amen comments:

‘And that way, rather than allow the thought to fester… I’ve gone into the heart of it and I’ve killed it. And now it doesn’t bother me. It’s so effective.’

This is pretty astonishing. We are haunted, tortured by thoughts of this kind for years and decades, and we never twig that they are not actually true! But how is this possible? And why are we suddenly able to see the truth when we ask these simple questions?

If It Hurts, It Must Be Real

A stressful thoughtful pops into our head. The very fact of its appearance lends credibility - it exists, seems substantial. The impression is reinforced by the painful emotions that arise in response - the fact that we feel upset and hurt suggests that the thought is rooted in reality. After all, if it wasn’t accurate, why would we feel hurt? It must be that we are upset because we really are unjustly put upon by our husband, wife, friend, life. The pain acts as a kind of shield protecting the thought – our focus, now, is not on evaluating whether the thought is true but on how best to defend ourselves, hit back, or avoid further suffering.

It is not that stressful thoughts seem to be influencing me, they seem to actually be me. My body is me - if you criticise my body, you attack me. But my thoughts are me, too. If you criticise what I believe about my country, religion, race, colour, gender, politics and even sports, I may erupt as if I had been physically attacked.

The thought, ‘I’m upset with my friend because he never phones me anymore’, is my thought; it’s part of me, of my capacity for rational thought. If you tell me my thought is rubbish, I may feel that my integrity, rationality and even sanity are being rubbished.

But this is the crucial point – because I identify with my thought and my emotional response to it, because I view it as part of me, my instinct is to defend it from challenge, including from my own challenge. So, our default position is that our angry, sad, resentful thoughts are justified and not to be challenged by us or anyone else. This is why, as Amen says:

‘If you don’t question a thought, you believe it. And then you act as if it’s true, even if it’s a lie.’

Even the simple question ‘Is it true?’ radically changes our perspective on the thought. From being an unquestioned part of me ‘here’, it becomes a separate object of observation ‘over there’. We have stripped it of its protected status and are highlighting its separateness. To emphasise the point, question 2 asks if it is ‘absolutely certain’ that it is true.

When we say ‘No’ to these questions – because, after all, Amen’s wife does listen to his TV specials – something astonishing happens. Our angrily simplistic bubble of resentment depending on a black and white view of the world - I am right, they are wrong - is burst by the contradictory evidence. The impact on our thinking and feeling can be instantaneous and dramatic. From my own life:

‘I’m fed up, she’s always giving me orders.’

The thought slips instantly, like a virus, into my chest – my heart drops. I may just be hungry or tired, or unwittingly upset by something unrelated, but in the moment, my irritation makes it seem true.

‘She’s always giving me orders. Is it true?’

A few moments of thought and reflection.

‘No, actually, she is often not pushy at all. In fact, I’ve often marvelled at the way she is wonderfully unpushy, the way she’s so relaxed about not getting her own way. But that’s the exact opposite of what I’ve just claimed about her in my statement!’

It is mind-boggling but I instantly realise that the truth has somehow been reversed by my irate mind, and I notice that I had in fact previously been upset by something completely unrelated. The bubble of irritation instantly bursts like a soap bubble with an almost audible ‘Pop!’ And what is left behind? Exactly as Adyashanti says, exactly as if I had got something I strongly desired, I am temporarily freed from my wanting mind, and I experience love and bliss. It is quite something to find that I am feeling love for the person who, literally moments earlier, was annoying me.

Or:

‘I’m upset with my friend because he never phones me anymore. I always phone him.’

‘Is it true?’

Again, it seems incontrovertibly, painfully true – I feel bereft. But when I question the statement, I am amazed to realise that the most recent contact with my friend was initiated by him, not me! I, in fact, have made less effort to stay in touch than he has. The turnaround is much truer:

‘I make no effort to stay in touch anymore.’

Again, along with surprise, a subtle moment of warmth and delight as the wanting mind temporarily abates.

I should add that it is not, of course, that the stressful statement is always found to be untrue. But even when it is found to be accurate, we learn a lot that was hidden by subjecting it to inquiry. For example, Daniel Amen is a big talker – his voice is all over social media. An interesting turnaround for him might be:

‘I don’t listen to my wife.’

I can’t do a worksheet for John McEnroe, but we know about one of his stressful thoughts from the autobiographical comment cited in Part 1:

‘A French title, followed by my third Wimbledon, would have given me that final, complete thing that I don’t have now - a legitimate claim as possibly the greatest player of all time.’

We saw how McEnroe had written, in 2008, that the belief that he had blown an incredible opportunity to be declared The Greatest in 1984, ‘still keeps me up nights… I’ll often have one or two days when I literally feel sick to my stomach’.

He may well have moved on from this belief by now. If not, we can imagine how he might subject his thought to inquiry:

‘I blew my opportunity to be deemed the greatest tennis player who ever lived. Is it true?’

In fact, no: Roy Emerson, Rod Laver and Bill Tilden had all won many more Grand Slams before him, and Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer have all won three times as many Grand Slams since. McEnroe may still suffer from the thought that he cannot be considered The Greatest, but the particular agony of believing that he threw away the chance cannot survive self-inquiry. Another stressful thought might follow:

‘I cannot ever feel peace and happiness because I’m not the greatest tennis player who ever lived. Is that true?’

A turnaround jumps out:

‘I was unable to feel peace and happiness as long I was trying to be the greatest tennis player who ever lived.’

And:

‘I can feel peace and happiness even though I’m not the greatest tennis player who ever lived.’

Conclusion

There is much more to ‘The Work’ than I have described here, but I would like to point to a crucial conclusion that becomes very clear on experimenting with the process. When we, the people around us, or the world, or existence generally, seem to be at fault in some way, our mind’s judgement cannot be taken at face value; it must be subjected to self-inquiry. As a result, many of the mental torments relating to what we lack or hate - to what we think we must have to be happy - simply evaporate. In their place, an experience of ‘the great happiness of not wanting anything’.

Self-inquiry is also a marvellous antidote to the storms of righteous anger and hatred that perpetuate ‘the nightmare of history’. To understand the extent to which our enraged ego is inventing and projecting freely in blaming some dehumanised ‘enemy’ for our woes, does not at all diminish our motivation to work for positive change. On the contrary, it clears away emotional torment and prejudice, allowing love and compassion to shine through.

‘They are all inhuman monsters who are full of hate.’

Is that true?

Now turn the thought around…

David Edwards is co-editor of medialens.org. For further discussion on these themes, see, ‘A Short Book About Ego… and the Remedy of Meditation’ (Mantra Books, 2025), available here. He is also the author of the forthcoming science fiction novel, ‘The Man With No Face’, to be published by Roundfire Books in 2026.

You can print Byron Katie’s free ‘judge-your-neighbour worksheets’ and sign up for her free, weekly ‘At Home with Byron Katie Podcast’ on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, here. Also read, ‘Loving What Is’ and ‘A Thousand Names for Joy (both with Stephen Mitchell).

‘One day a beggar knocked on the doors of a great king. By chance, the king himself opened the door. He saw the beggar: the beggar was not an ordinary beggar, he was almost luminous. He had such grace, such beauty, such a mysterious aura, that even the king felt jealous. He asked, “What do you want?” still pretending – “I have not taken any note of you” – “What do you want?”

‘The beggar showed the king his begging bowl and he said, “I would like it to be filled.”

‘The king said, “That’s all? With what do you want it to be filled?”

‘The beggar said, “Anything will do, but the condition is that you have to fill it; otherwise, don’t try.”

‘It was a challenge to the king. He said, “What do you mean by it? Can’t I fill this small begging bowl? And you don’t say with what.”

‘The beggar said, “That is irrelevant. Anything will do, even pebbles, stones, but fill it! The condition is: I will not leave the door if you start filling it; unless it is filled, I will remain here.”

‘The king ordered his prime minister to fill the begging bowl with diamonds; he had millions of diamonds: “This beggar has to be shown that he is encountering a king!” But soon the king became aware that he had been deceived. The begging bowl was as extraordinary as the beggar, more so in fact: anything dropped into it would simply be gone, would disappear. It remained empty. The treasures were thrown into it, but they all disappeared.

‘By the evening the whole capital had gathered. The king was now becoming almost desperate: the diamonds finished, then the gold, and then the gold was finished, then the silver, and then the silver was finished.... The sun was setting, and the king’s sun had also set. His whole treasury was empty, and the begging bowl was still the same, empty, not even a trace! It swallowed all his kingdom. It was too much!

‘Now the king knew that he had been trapped. He fell at the feet of the beggar and said, “Forgive me. I was wrong to accept the challenge. This begging bowl is not an ordinary begging bowl. You deceived me – there is some magic in it.”

‘And the beggar laughed and he said, “There is no magic in it: I have made it out of the skull of a man.”

‘The king said, “I don’t understand. What do you mean? If it is just made out of the skull of a man, how can it go on swallowing my whole kingdom?”

‘And the beggar said, “That’s what is happening everywhere: NOBODY is ever satisfied. The begging bowl in the head always remains empty. It is an ordinary skull, just like everybody else’s.”’ (Osho, ‘The Guest - Talks on Kabir’, 1981, pp.223-224)

World Cup Car Wash

In 2003, Ben Cohen was part of the only England team to have won the Rugby World Cup. Cohen commented on that great triumph:

‘It meant everything, winning a World Cup.’

It is easy to imagine the thrill of being part of that team when Jonny Wilkinson nailed that drop goal in the dying seconds of the match!

We can imagine the euphoria, knowing that the world is falling at your feet, knowing that people will forever say: ‘That guy won the World Cup!’

Remarkably, one might think, the magic begging bowl in Cohen’s head sees it differently:

‘The bigger issue for me was that I just didn’t get a skill set or a life skill, and now I think, well, OK, winning a World Cup doesn’t really bring me anything. It’s not like it’s a degree, you know.’

This is pretty astonishing: winning the World Cup ‘didn’t really bring… anything’… unlike a degree! It echoes a comment made by hat-trick hero Geoff Hurst who helped win the football World Cup for England in 1966:

‘There was a tremendous feeling of anti-climax when we got home… I cut the lawn because I hadn’t been home for ages. Then I washed the car. It was pretty much like any other Sunday afternoon… It might sound a bit pretentious, but for me it had been another football match, albeit a very important one… It’s just like another day at the office. People may find that hard to believe but that’s how I recall it, and so do many of my teammates at the time.’ (Geoff Hurst, ‘1966 And All That - My Autobiography’, Headline Book Publishing, 2001, p.18)

Cohen’s regret:

‘I probably wish I’d got a skill set and a steady job.’

To his credit, he understands how his begging bowl would have responded to that course of action:

‘Then I probably would have looked the other way and thought “I wish I could have been a sportsman”. But the reality is I would probably rather have been over [on the nonathletic side], because it’s going to suit me for the rest of my life, instead of a portion of my life. When you sort of get [to retirement] you think: “I’m in my 30s, who am I?” And at that point you think, I am lonely here, this is sink or swim.’

He added:

‘We’re all in a huddle and it’s happy days, “yeah great, we can do this”. Then you turn around 180 degrees and it’s f------ lonely. You go, “I’m out on my own, where do I go now?” And then you think “oh s---, am I fit for purpose?”. That whole journey needs to be a transitional phase into coping skills and deconditioning into civvy street.’

Being part of a World Cup-winning rugby squad sounds like a life lived at the exact opposite end of the spectrum from ‘f…… lonely’. It sounds like the ultimate social life: life-long friends bonded by glory, limitless grateful fans and admirers.

Spare a thought for golfing great Scottie Scheffler, who has been world number one for a total of 167 weeks and whose begging bowl has received total career earnings in excess of $195m. Echoing Hurst, after winning this year’s US PGA Championship, Scheffler asked:

‘Showing up at the Masters every year it’s like, “Why do I want to win this golf tournament so badly? Why do I want to win The Open Championship so badly?”’

His sobering answer:

‘I don’t know because if I win it’s going to be awesome for two minutes, then we’re going to get to the next week and it’s, “hey, you won two majors this year; how important is it for you to win the FedEx Cup play-offs?”

‘It feels like you work your whole life to celebrate winning a tournament for like a few minutes. It only lasts a few minutes, that kind of euphoric feeling.’

Doubtless to the horror of his corporate sponsors, Scheffler said he would not urge people to follow his path:

‘I’m not out here to inspire the next generation of golfers. I’m not out here to inspire someone to be the best player in the world because what’s the point? This is not a fulfilling life. It’s fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment but it’s not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart.

‘There are a lot of people that make it to what they thought was going to fulfil them in life, and you get there, you get to number one in the world, and they’re like, “what’s the point?”’

From the heart of corporate media Mordor, the New York Times described ‘this version of Scheffler’ as ‘Nihilist Scottie’.

Before last year’s Paris Olympics, Scheffler had already broken hearts on Madison Avenue when he was asked how he felt about the potential glory of winning a gold medal and joining the pantheon of Olympic greats. His reply:

‘I don’t focus much on legacy. I don’t look too far into the future. Ultimately, we’ll be forgotten.’

Ronnie O’Sullivan, Nihilist Ronnie, has won the World Snooker Championship seven times. Widely considered the greatest player ever to have wielded a snooker cue, this was O’Sullivan’s answer to the question, ‘Worst life choice you ever made?’

‘Taking up snooker. In some ways, I wish I had a different job. I’m fortunate in many ways, because it’s been good to me, but I wish I’d been good at something else. Something more educational, maybe a scientist or something more interesting. I don’t think my job is interesting. It’s more of an entertainment, more of a brutality sport. I’d rather have had [sports psychiatrist] Steve Peters’ life. Or to inspire people in a different way, like helping to cure cancer.”’

While you and I were gazing out of office windows dreaming of being the best in the world at something, Cohen and O’Sullivan were dreaming of sitting in an office contributing to the public weal. For Hurst, it was ‘just like another day at the office’. Clearly, ‘this begging bowl is not an ordinary begging bowl... there is some magic in it’.

‘Signatures Made On Water’

The same discontent has, of course, haunted generations of tennis stars.

World number one and teenage heartthrob Björn Borg bagged five Wimbledon titles in a row, before being brutally dethroned in 1981 by arch-rival John McEnroe, who defeated him in both the Wimbledon and US Open finals. Devastated, Borg simply walked away from the sport, aged 26:

‘All I could think was how miserable my life had become.’

After retiring, Borg twice came close to dying from drug overdoses: ‘alcohol, drugs, pills - my preferred ways of self-medication’.

Presumably, becoming number one on the planet by committing regicide on the guy previously deemed the greatest ever player was enough to fill McEnroe’s begging bowl. Alas, he wrote of 1984, his greatest year in tennis:

‘Except for the French, and one tournament just before the Open in which I had been basically over-tennised, I won every tournament I played in 1984: thirteen out of fifteen. Eighty-two out of eighty-five matches. No one had ever had a year like that in tennis before. No one has since.

‘But on October 1, 1984, I was standing in the Portland airport, waiting to board a flight to L.A. for a week off, and suddenly I thought, I’m the greatest tennis player who ever lived - why am I so empty inside?’ (John McEnroe, ‘Serious’, Hachette Digital e-book, 2008, p.228)

As discussed:

‘NOBODY is ever satisfied. The begging bowl in the head always remains empty.’

Having traumatised Borg in 1981, McEnroe was himself tortured by an emotional outburst that cost him a chance to win the 1984 French Open final against Ivan Lendl. McEnroe had been leading by two sets to love, sailing to victory:

‘It was the worst loss of my life, a devastating defeat: Sometimes it still keeps me up nights. It’s even tough for me now to do the commentary at the French - I’ll often have one or two days when I literally feel sick to my stomach just at being there and thinking about that match. Thinking of what I threw away, and how different my life would’ve been if I’d won.’ (McEnroe, p.83)

Why did it mean so much so many years later? Who cares about a tennis match that took place in 1984?

‘I had two Wimbledons and three Opens. A French title, followed by my third Wimbledon, would have given me that final, complete thing that I don’t have now - a legitimate claim as possibly the greatest player of all time.’

This was fantasy at the time, even more so now. McEnroe ended his career with just seven Grand Slam titles. Since then, his achievements have been dwarfed by Novak Djokovic who has won 24, Rafael Nadal who won 22 and Roger Federer, 20.

Thus, the cruelty of the begging bowl: while the euphoria of any success quickly vanishes, leaving us empty, our failures burn and blister for years and decades. Osho captured it exactly:

‘Your pleasures were nothing, just signatures made on water.

‘And your pain was engraved on granite.

‘And you suffered all that pain for these signatures on water.’

McEnroe was quickly eclipsed by big-serving Boris Becker, who went on to serve 231 days of a two-and-a-half-year sentence in Britain’s HMP Wandsworth and HMP Huntercombe prisons. Jailed for crimes relating to his 2017 bankruptcy, Becker identified deeper causes when asked:

‘Have there been times when you wish you hadn’t won Wimbledon when you were seventeen?’

Becker replied:

‘Yeah, of course. If you remember any other wunderkind, they usually don’t make it to 50 because of the trials and tribulations that come after...

‘I’m happy to have won three [Wimbledon titles], but maybe 17 was too young. I was still a child. I was too comfortable. I had too much money. Nobody told me “No” - everything was possible. In hindsight, that’s the recipe for disaster.’

Thus, the magic begging bowl’s reverse spin on St. Augustine’s famous plea:

‘Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet!’

Grant me everything I ever dreamed of, but not yet!

In similar vein, the life of golfing megastar Tiger Woods was brought low by partying, single vehicle car crashes and sex scandals. Woods confessed:

‘I thought I could get away with whatever I wanted to. I felt that I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me. I felt I was entitled. Thanks to money and fame, I didn’t have to go far to find them. I was wrong. I was foolish.’

Pop star Robbie Williams’ discography includes seven UK No. 1 singles, with all but one of his 14 studio albums reaching No. 1. Williams gained a Guinness World Record in 2006 for selling 1.6 million concert tickets in a single day. The BBC reported that Williams ‘paints a pretty poisonous portrait’ of his time in the band Take That:

‘There’s a pattern - boys join a boyband, boyband becomes huge, boys get sick. And I don’t think anybody gets to escape that.

‘I don’t know what it is completely about fame that warps. I just know that it does. I know that young fame, in particular, is corrosive and toxic. It should come with a health warning.’

Like Becker, Williams believes ‘young fame’ is a key problem. In reality, the problem is that no amount of fame, at any age, will appease the craving and discontent of the magic begging bowl. Biographer Lynn Haney commented on the failure of ‘success’ more generally:

‘Hollywood is filled with the most unhappy success stories in the world. Guys and gals who are making fortunes, being pampered and petted by any number of people, and basking in the idolatry of movie fans all over the world still manage to find in this pleasant situation big tears of sadness, moments of deep depression and that hangdog look that usually goes with complete failure. Why this happens, I’ll never understand.’ (Lynn Haney, ‘Gregory Peck A Charmed Life’, Robson, 2002, p.186)

If we are tempted to believe that the begging bowl can be filled with virtuous deeds, we might recall that the mysterious beggar in the story warns the king that, pebbles, stones or diamonds, it makes no difference what is thrown in. Award-winning photojournalist Don McCullin, veteran of numerous wars, commented:

‘“It’s been a cesspit, really, my life… I feel as if I’ve been over-rewarded, and I definitely feel uncomfortable about that, because it’s been at the expense of other people’s lives.” But he has been the witness to atrocity, I point out, and that’s important. “Yes,” he says, uncertainly, “but, at the end of the day, it’s done absolutely no good at all. Look at Ukraine. Look at Gaza. I haven’t changed a solitary thing. I mean it. I feel as if I’ve been riding on other people’s pain over the last 60 years, and their pain hasn’t helped prevent this kind of tragedy. We’ve learned nothing.” It makes him despair.’

Steven Bartlett, host of The Diary of a CEO, which Spotify ranked fifth in its list of the top five most popular podcasts globally in 2024, having had more than one billion views and listens, said:

‘Entrepreneurs like me get a lot of likes and followers when we tell people to quit their jobs and chase their dreams. But here is the context that we nearly always miss. Entrepreneurship can be really, really boring… If you’re lucky enough to be successful, the problems will get bigger, not smaller…You will probably work 3x the hours you do now, have 10x the stress and a tiny probability of significant success. A recent survey found 87.7% of founders deal with mental health issues. That’s not a bug. It’s a feature of entrepreneurship.’

Bartlett’s conclusion:

‘You’ll struggle to switch off. Ever. Your phone will probably become a prison. And here’s the punchline: If you succeed, it all gets harder. More money = more complexity. More growth = more anxiety. More success = more people depending on you.’

Duff McKagan, the bassist in the globally famous band Guns N’ Roses, commented:

‘Survival means you live long enough to watch the world change, to watch the people you loved drift away, to watch your own body slow down while your heart still wants to live like it’s 1987.

‘I miss the days when everything felt infinite - the music, the friendships, the laughter backstage, even the chaos. Now, those moments feel like ghosts haunting me, reminding me of what once was.’

Bruce Springsteen wrote a song, ‘Glory Days’, about begging bowls haunted by the past in this way, a form of suffering that is written all over the faces of fading stars like Borg and Woods.

As McKagan suggests, even if we were globally recognised as ‘The Greatest’ we would still be tormented by the comparison between who we are ‘now’ and who we were ‘then’.

Conclusion

In reality, of course, the begging bowl of the human mind is not made toxic by magic; it is made toxic by thoughts of how our lives are lacking in some way. We missed some great opportunity – the great love, the great prize, the great achievement. Or we succeeded, loved and lost, and now have ‘nothing’. Those of us who never approach the lofty summits of achievement described above are no different - our happiness is also swallowed up by thoughts of what ‘could’ or ‘should’ be different.

In Part 2, we will discuss an antidote to the suffering of the human mind supplied by spiritual teacher Byron Katie’s strategy of self-inquiry, ‘The Work’. Strange and counter intuitive as it may seem at first sight, the fact is that it works.

David Edwards is co-editor of medialens.org and author of ‘A Short Book About Ego… and the Remedy of Meditation’, Mantra Books, available here. He is also the author of the forthcoming science fiction novel, ‘The Man With No Face’, to be published by Roundfire Books in 2026.

The Successful Ego, of course, raises itself above others on its ‘special’ achievements. Football manager, José Mourinho, enraged egos everywhere by saying:

‘Please don’t call me arrogant, but I’m European champion and I think I’m a special one.’ (Richard Morgan, ‘Special One: Remembering José Mourinho’s first-ever Chelsea press conference’, Sky Sports, 18 October 2018)

Sports journalists have never forgiven Mourinho for this comment and love to remind him and us of it every time he’s sacked by a club: ‘Is Mourinho still “the special one”?’ The journalistic ego deeply resents being a mere commentator on the lives of ‘stars’ hogging the limelight, just as editors and publishers resent being ‘mere’ facilitators of their authors’ work.

While the Suffering Ego raises itself up on its own ‘special’ problems, the Righteous Ego’s ‘specialness’ lies in its unusual concern for the problems of others. The comedy series, Seinfeld, loved to nail this form of pride. After an uncharacteristically selfless act of generosity, Jerry thinks to himself:

‘I am such a great guy! Who else would’ve gone through the trouble of helping this poor immigrant? I am special. My mother was right.’ (Seinfeld, The Café, 6 November 1991)

Torben Betts has been described as ‘An uncommonly gifted playwright’ (Time Out) and ‘a political Beckett’. In his 2012 play, Muswell Hill, Betts’ character, Julian, is a fine example of a Righteous Ego. Julian’s widow, Karen, reveals that her tormented husband had committed suicide by throwing himself off the cliff at Beachy Head:

‘Sometimes he could be a right moody old sod, but I understood him, you see… Because he was such a strict vegetarian, he ended up despising all meat eaters and because he was such a committed cyclist he hated all motorists. And he’d get so wound up by people’s indifference and stupidity that he used to be so full of … well, hatred.’ (Torben Betts, Muswell Hill, Oberon Books, 2012, p.59)

It is not a small thing to rail at the lack of compassion in the people around us; it means that they are all morally ‘inferior’. On this basis, our ego will feel entitled to rage, preach and patronise — to assert its dominance over everyone — as brutally as any Successful Ego or Suffering Ego. It ought to be a thing of wonder that so many people ostensibly motivated by compassion for human and animal suffering, are ‘full of … well, hatred’.

The complexity lies in the fact that we can be absolutely right — human beings are often indifferent, the social system is structurally unjust, Western foreign policy is rooted in medieval-style greed and violence, and our egos can hijack being right to justify our own tyrannical abuse.

Others may be wealthier, more famous and beautiful, but the Righteous Ego can slip the surly bonds of ‘ordinariness’ and ascend to the moral ‘high ground’. If we have a political argument with someone we perceive as more conventionally successful (a parent, for example), our Righteous Ego may fight tooth and nail to establish our ‘superiority’ in at least this ‘ethical’ dimension.

In short, if the billionaire’s Successful Ego feels ‘superior’ because it has more financial credit, the Righteous Ego feels ‘superior’ because it has more moral credit.

Small gestures will do. Having spent decades working for a climate-killing oil company, or an international bank, we can point to our vegan diet, our meticulous recycling, or the fact that we read the supposedly left-liberal The Guardian newspaper as proof that we are nevertheless more ‘ethical’ than others. The flimsier the support for the Righteous Ego, the more fiercely that support will be defended. Even polite, rational questioning of the health benefits of veganism, or the left credentials of The Guardian, may set the fur flying.

A key problem is that the extreme, domineering behaviour of a Righteous Ego can easily be mistaken for extreme compassion — they’re angry, impatient and abusive because they care so much. In reality, predatory individuals and organisations have always understood that they can hide their crimes behind a screen of fake compassion. British readers will recall how, for 20 years, the BBC’s serial child rapist and abuser, Jimmy Savile, presented a TV programme ostensibly dedicated to fulfilling the dreams of children: ‘Jim’ll Fix It’. Tony Blair, who oversaw the Iraq oil grab costing at least one million Iraqi lives, made much of his party’s ‘ethical foreign policy’. The Italian philosopher, Machiavelli, wrote:

‘It is not essential … that a Prince should have all the good qualities which I have enumerated above, but it is most essential that he should seem to have them … Thus, it is well to seem merciful, faithful, humane, religious and upright, and also to be so; but the mind should remain so balanced that were it needful to be so, you should be able and know how to change to the contrary.’ (Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513, Dover publications, 1992, p.46, my emphasis)

The crucial word here, repeated twice: seem. What looks like concern may just be cover for a domineering ego. This frequently becomes obvious when The Righteous Ego is offered a choice between remaining ‘merciful, faithful, humane’ and winning ‘mainstream success’.

‘You Think It’s Funny Turning Rebellion Into Money?’

Righteous Egos pursuing political change, for example, are highly vulnerable to the temptation of transitioning to more standard Successful Egos. Time and again, I have seen young, idealistic writers start out on radical websites, only to succumb to the lure, not just of joining the ‘mainstream’ corporate press, but of doing so by self-censoring and compromising their message. I’ve seen wonderfully unique, clear-thinking voices mangled by their struggle to sew with a double-pointed needle — telling the truth while being accepted, embraced and rewarded by a heavily filtered media system.

We see this tendency throughout modern culture. Consider The Clash, one of the fiercest anti-establishment, anti-capitalist bands of the punk era. Their song, London Calling (1979) was an apocalyptic call to arms. The title mocked the BBC World Service’s tradition of beginning its reports ‘This is London calling…’, much as the Sex Pistols’ song, God Save The Queen, mocked the UK’s (then) de facto national anthem. The website Songfacts says of London Calling:

‘It was the song that best defined The Clash, who were known for lashing out against injustice and rebelling against the establishment, which is pretty much what punk rock was all about.’

In photo shoots, The Clash were often depicted as a menacing, grim-faced street gang in black leather jackets, Doc Martin boots and ‘bondage’ trousers (music magazines used to sell this ‘Clash gear’ to fans). The call from London was for popular insurrection:

‘London calling to the faraway towns, now that war is declared and battle come down.’

In the early 1990s, The Clash resisted a request from British Telecom to use London Calling in an advert. But by 2002, singer-songwriter Joe Strummer had sold the rights to the song to luxury car manufacturer Jaguar for use in an advert. Strummer explained:

‘Yeah. I agreed to that. We get hundreds of requests for that and turn ’em all down. But I just thought Jaguar … yeah. If you’re in a group and you make it together, then everybody deserves something. Especially twenty-odd years after the fact. It just seems churlish for a writer to refuse to have their music used on an advert…’ (Mark Vallen, ‘London Calling – Selling out the legacy of Punk’, Art For A Change)

‘Churlish’ or not, in the 1978 Clash hit, (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais, Strummer had sung:

‘The new groups are not concerned

With what there is to be learned.

They got Burton suits.

Ha, you think it’s funny

Turning rebellion into money?’

London Calling was used in an advert for the Jaguar X-Type — ‘a sleek four-door aimed at the “entry-level luxury” segment and retailing for a relatively modest $30,000’. (Rob Walker, ‘Brand new Jag — The Clash sell luxury goods’, The Boston Globe, 15 September 2002)

The song was later used in a 2012 British Airways advert and in the James Bond movie Die Another Day. At one point, Strummer actually worked as a DJ for the BBC World Service on a programme called ‘Joe Strummer’s London Calling’. After the band broke up, another Clash song, Should I Stay Or Should I Go, made it to number 1 in the UK, heavily assisted by its inclusion in a Levi jeans advert. The Boston Globe commented:

‘By now you could make a pretty good compilation of subversive music that’s been used in ads, with selections from Lou Reed (Perfect Day in a spot for the NFL), Iggy Pop (both Lust for Life in a Carnival Cruises ad, and the Stooges song Search & Destroy in a Nike commercial for the 1996 Olympics), the Ramones (Bud Light once used Blitzkrieg Bop), the Buzzcocks (Toyota), and even Creedence Clearwater Revival’s scathing indictment of America’s privileged class, Fortunate Son (repurposed by Wrangler) … The famously lefty British band Chumbawumba sold the rights to the song Pass It Along … to Pontiac, and then turned their earnings over to a progressive activist network.’

The Sex Pistols were a major inspiration for The Clash. Tragicomically, the Pistols’ singer, Johnny Rotten, later dressed up as a country squire in a commercial selling Country Life butter.

David Edwards is co-editor of medialens.org and author of ‘A Short Book About Ego… and the Remedy of Meditation’, Mantra Books, available here. He is also the author of the forthcoming science fiction novel, ‘The Man With No Face’, to be published by Roundfire Books in 2026. Email: davidmedialens@gmail.com

This is the second extract from ‘A Short Book About Ego’, the first was published last month here. An interview with J.J. Stenhouse on UK Health Radio is available here.

Some Comments About ‘A Short Book About Ego’

‘In this compelling short guide for the head-trapped, David Edwards shows us how meditation has the power to bring each of us a healing, personal bliss by dissolving our insatiable egos. But he offers a powerful, bigger message too: a politics anchored in the love and compassion released by meditation is the only effective path to healing our broken societies.’ (Jonathan Cook, winner of the Martha Gellhorn special award for journalism, author of ‘Israel and the Clash of Civilizations’)

‘I have learnt a great deal reading A Short Book About Ego, a thoughtful and gentle book about the change of consciousness we all need to go through. I read it just after reading the Bhagavad Gita while travelling through northern Pakistan, which gave me extra context.’ (Peter Oborne, award-winning journalist and broadcaster, author of ‘The Fate of Abraham: Why the West Is Wrong About Islam’)

‘The best way to transcend the ego is to understand it. This book shines a bright light on the machinations of the ego, and shows us a glimpse of freedom beyond it. Best of all, it highlights the clearest path to freedom, through the practice of meditation.’ (Steve Taylor, author of ‘The Leap’ and ‘Extraordinary Awakenings’)

Stanley Betts is a talented, 23-year-old video editor and filmmaker. His video, ‘Why Pascal Was Right – Benefits of Being Alone’, has been viewed 1.3 million times on YouTube. Stan began podcasting with a refreshingly honest interview with his dad, the playwright Torben Betts. The theme of the interview was ‘My Dad’s Advice For Surviving Your 20s’. A plan was mooted for Stan to interview me (DE) on related themes. In the event, the questions quickly became focused on how I had become interested in meditation and how I ditched my corporate career in my twenties.

Below, is an extract, edited for clarity, followed by a link to the podcast. In a second podcast, we will chat about Media Lens and my forthcoming book, ‘A Short Book About Ego… and the Remedy of Meditation’ (Mantra Books, June 2025).

Fleshy Robot Has A Rethink

Stanley Betts (SB): ‘And, what was the point where you came across meditation, and you came across its value? Was it in your twenties’?

David Edwards (DE): ‘Yes, it was in the 1980s, in my twenties. I started reading about Taoism, the ‘Tao Te Ching’, books by Alan Watts, who I know you’re a huge fan of.’

SB: ‘Like, how did you even get to the point where you’d be reading the ‘Tao Te Ching’? Did you just stumble across it in a bookshop, or did some friend give it you?’

DE: ‘At university, I read Jean-Jacques Rousseau… His argument was that if you’re in tune with nature, living in a natural way, there is a goodness and a bliss which you can’t find in our sort of society. And if you read his book, ‘Reveries of the Solitary Walker’, it’s a guide to mindfulness. He said the whole problem with modern men and women is that we’re never in the moment. We’re stuck in what he called ‘prévoyance’ – we’re looking forward, we’re totally focused on a time that may never come. We’re never actually here. And when I read that – his association of happiness with nature and a natural rhythm of life – it really rang true for me from my own experience. Although I didn’t really understand my experience at that point, it just made sense. I felt there was something there.

‘And then, actually, when I was living in Sweden, I visited a second-hand bookshop and found ‘Nature Man and Woman’ by Alan Watts, and he talked about Zen. Even the first paragraph of the book was very much about falling in tune with the natural world. And so, I just sensed that there was something real there. And once I read that, that was it – I was on my way, you know. And I didn’t understand Zen at all. I didn’t have a clue what Watts was talking about, but I sensed there was something there. And I just stubbornly pursued all of that as much as I could and have continued ever since.’

SB: ‘And when you discovered this, was this the same time you were working at that corporate job? Was this the job when you were, like, at a helpline?’

DE: ‘Yes. I worked in tele sales for an American company selling computer accessories in White City, London. I traveled every day an hour and a quarter on the Tube to get there and an hour and a quarter back. And there were 10-15 of us in an office, answering calls ordering accessories, which would then be delivered the same day. It was like an early version of Amazon, you know, rapid delivery.’

SB: ‘Okay.’

DE: ‘We had red lights and blue lights flashing on the ceiling. If the phones rang more than five times, the blue light would flash. If they rang for longer than ten times, the red light would flash, and people from accounts and sales were expected to rush in and hit the phones. So, I’m taking calls all day with this computer, inputting orders for computer accessories. It was awful. The people there were great, but it was such automatic, tedious work.

‘And I started reading, ‘The Tao Of Physics’ by Fritjof Capra. And a book that really hit me hard was Capra’s ‘The Turning Point’. Now, he wrote that in 1982, predicting a turning point that would see human civilisation move away from the madness of the fossil fuel economy to a solar economy, renewable energy. We’re still waiting for that ‘turning point’! It hasn’t come yet!

‘So, I was reading these books about Taoism and about alternative philosophies. And I was working in this computer accessories company as a sort of fleshy robot. And it was a huge conflict because they were two completely separate worlds… And people said to me, “What are you reading that stuff for?” My family said to me, “This is madness! Why are you reading about Taoism?” And there did come a point, actually… I left the tele sales job and went to work for British Telecom in the West End of London. I was managing a department of 12 people, mostly twice my age – I was 25. I had no management experience, no telecoms experience; so, I was, you know, completely out of my depth.

‘At the same time, I started reading books by Erich Fromm, who I absolutely adored. I read everything by Alan Watts, all these guys: Christmas Humphreys, Teddy Goldsmith, Jonathan Porritt. And I thought, “I’m finding my work really stressful managing all these people, and I don’t think this enthusiasm for alternative ideas is helping me because I’m kind of divided. I’m doing my job with one arm behind my back.”

‘So, there actually came a point where I literally threw my books away – the Taoism, Watts, Humphreys. I hid them away and even threw many of them away – I turned against the whole thing. But that didn’t last long because it was so bloody boring to just be involved in this business world.

‘Then what happened is the whole green thing. In 1988, James Hansen, a NASA scientist, stood up before the UN and said we’ve got a serious problem with climate change. So, then I started reading a lot about green politics and green philosophy. I started campaigning with Friends of the Earth in London. We were protesting around London dressed as energy-efficient washing machines. I’ve got the photos to prove that, by the way, and it’s hugely embarrassing! Everybody thought you were completely mad. I mean, people think you’re mad campaigning about climate change now – imagine in 1989!

‘The whole thing really came to a head when I read Joseph Campbell’s book, ‘The Hero With a Thousand Faces.’ Campbell said, if you put something dead at the heart of your life, you will experience life as a deadness. So, for example, if, as I had done, you put money at the heart of your life, you will experience a deadness in your life. And the further you go into that deadness, you’ll experience more deadness. You think you’re going to get through the tough times, the stress, to find happiness, but you just get more deadness, with added responsibility and stress.

‘You have to put something that’s alive at the heart of your life. And what might that be? Campbell said, “follow your bliss”, which sounds a bit twee. But he said, find the thing that doesn’t just give you pleasure but gives you such fulfilment, such delight, that you’re happy to do it for ten years, for nothing, without any reward.

‘You’re willing to devote ten years of your life, or whatever it takes, to do this, and your reward is doing the thing in itself; you’re not concerned about the results. You’re certainly not concerned about money. You’re not thinking about fame, status – you’re doing it because you love to do it. Well, I loved to write stories. I loved to write observations, philosophical thoughts. I’d done that a lot even at university. I love to write, and I love to read about mysticism, about following your bliss.

‘And I was in this management consultancy as a marketing manager in a company outside London, and one day I had an argument with the chairman, who said: “David, if you don’t know that, you shouldn’t even be sitting there!” And I thought, “Jesus Christ!” You know, it was hugely insulting, humiliating.

‘So, it was a lovely sunny, Friday afternoon, July 12^th, 1991. I was 29. I dropped off a resignation letter and walked home. It was the best thing I’ve ever done. And I just thought, “Okay, I’m going to write.” In fact, I told a friend, “I’m going to be a writer!” He said, “No, no, no! Either you’re a writer or you’re not a writer. You’re not going to become a writer, live as a writer! Be a writer! Don’t try to become one, you’ll never get there.” It was fantastic advice. I think I had £3,000 in the bank, and I spent the next ten years just writing hundreds of pages of stories and articles, reading everything. Joseph Campbell recommended that we read the people we love and then read the people they loved. So, then you widen your interest and go deeper and deeper into it.

‘And, actually, for ten years before I started Media Lens with David Cromwell, I just wrote and had no money in the bank, taught English maybe three hours a day. When I had enough money, I would go on the dole and continue writing there – when more students came along, I’d do a bit more teaching. It went on like that for about ten years. And it was fantastic because to go from stressful corporate jobs – where I’m managing people and there’s just so much pressure – to teaching Thai kids of, say, fifteen-years-old for three hours a day, and then going home and reading anything I wanted, writing anything I wanted, was just heaven. It was heaven, and I never missed the money.

‘You have to make something that you love the heart and centre of your life. This is what I was talking about before – you can’t make somebody else the centre of your life; you’ve got to find the centre of your life in yourself and follow it and follow it, and don’t give a thought to results. I know people hate it when I say it – I did a media alert on this – I got this wonderful backlash from journalists saying that I was a complete arsehole. I love it! It’s one of my favourite articles. They said, “You absolute plonker!” because I had tweeted you’ve got to just write what you love and give it away for free and don’t give a thought to making money. They said, “You’re just encouraging people to be exploited.” I think they thought I was some editor out to exploit young talent or something; they got the wrong end of the stick.

‘But if you just do what you love and aren’t goal-oriented, that’s how you find your bliss, and that’s how you make your life feel alive. And that feeling of aliveness is worth so much – it’s worth so much more than having a load of money, or a big car, or whatever, or a big house. But that, for me anyway, that to me is the right way to go.

SB: ‘Yeah. My dad’s philosophy is to bring down your outgoings, to live as simply as possible, so you can have more time to do what you want. Because the more – you know, the higher the rents – the more responsibilities, then you kind of get stuck in the nine-to-five.’

DE: ‘Thoreau used to make baskets and sell them for money, and he said: “Instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.” I think that’s brilliant. That’s what I did. I tried to live really simply; lived in a small room in Bournemouth, you know. Of course, that becomes immensely complicated if you get involved in a relationship. God knows what it’s like for your dad; it’s a hugely complex thing. But when you’re on your own, it’s a lot easier.

SB: ‘And, you know, with your colleagues, did you sense in your colleagues the same dissatisfaction, with them wanting to leave? Were they hating their work as well? And do you even know if some of them are still in that job or in similar jobs?’

DE: ‘I don’t know. I think everybody always complains about their work, don’t they? Everybody complains about everything, but I don’t think they felt the urge to escape the way I did. I mean, all the time I was living in London – I lived in London for five years; I was in my twenties; amazing social life, lots of friends, going out. It’s strange looking back, actually, because, you know, it looks like a fun life from the outside – but I was just desperate to escape from this work problem. I just didn’t understand that if I had somebody telling me what to do every day and I had to be in a certain office from nine-to-six for two hundred days a year, and to just have four weeks holiday… It felt like a dreadful way to live. I couldn’t accept it.

‘But I don’t think a lot of people had that urge to escape. I think their plan was to work their way through to achieve freedom. I think that’s probably what people do. And so, they dreamed of promotion, of having more money, moving to a nice house outside London, and maybe moving to a more comfortable job at a higher level. But, yes, I know people who, amazingly – I told you about that computer accessories company – a friend of mine has been doing that kind of work ever since, for the last forty years, which is mind-blowing to me. And my managers, I know that they’re still doing that kind of work. And life goes very quickly. I mean, from 0 to 30-years-old seems to last for an eternity, but 30 to 60 goes really fast. And if you blow those thirty years on work that you’re not enjoying… I mean, you know, I can feel, myself, at 63, that regret is a powerful force as you get older. It’s very easy to look back and think, “Oh my god! What have I done with those 30 years?” So, people need to be very careful about that. I mean, you don’t want to be there at 60 and think, “Wow, thirty years have been wasted!”

SB: ‘Yeah. I do occasionally have that kind of “deathbed anxiety”. I’m just, like, lying on my deathbed thinking, “Why did I do this? Why didn’t I do that?” And my problem is I’m always, like, second guessing decisions I make, which is not great because, you know, you’ve just got to make a decision and run with it. For example, I’m going to be moving to a flat, moving from my house. So, it’s a really big change. And I’m moving in with a friend, who’s been my friend all my life. But, you know, it’s a big decision. Choosing the city, choosing who to be in this flat with, sharing this flat with… So, yeah, I’m just kind of going with it, you know, like you quitting your job and writing. I’m interested to know: how did you know what your bliss was? Like, writing? Did you learn that over time, or was there a moment of inspiration where you’re just like, “Oh my god, this is me! This is what I want to do.”?’

DE: ‘I’ve got huge reservations about Ernest Hemingway – the way he killed animals, just shot birds for sport. But if you read his story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” – I think it was the favourite story of his that he wrote – I absolutely love that story. It’s very short, really simple, but you can feel that he’s feeling bliss when you read it. You can feel it. It’s like a meditation – he’s there. He’s totally at peace with what he’s writing, and it’s blissful.

‘And it was clear to me, early on, when I was writing my little stories, you know, my first attempts at observations and stories that I went into – especially with fiction, actually – you go very much into your feelings. If you’re doing it from the head, it doesn’t work. But if you’re going into your feelings and accessing some really strong emotions – of love, sadness, regret, nostalgia, or whatever it is – if you’re in your feelings, there’s a kind of a resonance that you can feel. And if you stay in it, you can transmit that to the printed page. If you’re communicating from the head, you can affect people at the head level. But if you’re writing from the heart, you can touch people at the heart level. And to me, that’s blissful. I mean, I could feel that that was a beautiful, meditative thing to do.

‘And that’s actually true also of political writing. Sometimes I’m writing from my head, and it’s just got nothing; it’s got no life to it. It’s mechanical, boring. If I’m feeling it, you know, if I’m writing from some passion or compassion – for example about the suffering of Gaza at the moment. I wrote an article recently about a little child who was dying of starvation – and if you write from the heart about that, even though you’re adding lots of facts and figures, it’s still a meditative thing, and you can feel that. I can feel the bliss and love as I’m writing. And, you know, I think, if you get it right, then people can feel that when they read it.

‘So, for me, there’s a double thing going on: one, you feel the bliss when you’re writing. But then, if you’re writing something that’s helpful… and, really, everything I’ve written has been about something that’s helped me in some way. You know, if I’ve read Joseph Campbell on “follow your bliss”, do what you love, that’s helped me so enormously. That’s blissful. But then, if I’m writing about that in a way that’s true to how I feel and it helps other people, then that’s wonderful as well. So, everything I’ve written – for example, my first book, “Free to be Human” – just the whole point of that book was to say to people who had been through what I’d been through in my twenties: “If you feel despair, understand that it’s based on a version of reality that’s been manufactured for you by interests that do not have your best interests at heart.” So, I was saying: “The despair you feel is based on a version of the world that is not real, not true.” And the whole point of that was just to say: “You’ve doubted everything else – now doubt your despair!”

‘But that’s how I felt when I read Noam Chomsky, Joseph Campbell, all of these guys… Howard Zinn, Edward Herman. I realized that, “Yes, you know, this version of the world that we think is reality, which seems to be a cul de sac – the idea that life is desperate, terrible – it’s actually based on a completely fake, manufactured version of reality.”

‘So, that’s what I’ve always tried to do: if it’s helped me, and I know very clearly that it’s helped me, there’s part of me that automatically thinks, “Right, how can I help people with that? Can I write that down in a way that helps people?” If I can, great! I mean, it’s just wonderful for me to try and pass that on. So, it could be any lesson I’ve learned myself, but often it’s stuff I’ve read from great thinkers and mystics. And so, for me, that’s just such a blissful thing – to write about these things that I love, that I find interesting, that I think can be helpful.’

DE and SB

You can watch the entire podcast here.

David Edwards is co-editor of medialens.org and author of the forthcoming, ‘A Short Book About Ego… and the Remedy of Meditation’, Mantra Books, 24 June 2025, available here. He is also the author of the forthcoming dystopian, Chomskyan, mystical, science fiction thriller, ‘The Man With No Face’, to be published by Roundfire Books in 2026. Email: davidmedialens@gmail.com

I don’t doubt that I have lived a privileged and sheltered life, but before Israel’s genocide in Gaza I had never seen a hospital patient on an intravenous drip being burned alive. I didn’t want to see it. Social media is like that – before you realise what you’re seeing, you’ve seen it. And it can’t be unseen.

I had not seen distraught fathers carrying their headless babies. I had not seen toddlers torn in half. I had not seen civilians being literally blown up far above rooftops by bombs. I had seen plenty of images of displaced refugees, but I had never seen 2 million people, an entire population – wounded, traumatised, sickened, starved – being herded from one side of their homeland to another, and then somewhere else, and then back again, and then somewhere else, and then back again, and then somewhere else – endlessly bombed, without any detectable trace of mercy from the rogue state hunting them. Examples in history abound, of course, but I had not myself seen human beings treated as hated vermin on this scale. It has changed my idea of who I am, because I am human and I see with a new clarity just what my species is capable of. This, again, can’t be unseen.

Knowing the traumatic impact on us at Media Lens of these images on social media, we have always been concerned about the effect of our own work on readers. After all, our aim is to draw attention to suffering and injustice, to dispel the illusions of propaganda and promote change away from violence and hatred towards compassion and reason. Our aim is absolutely not to propel our readers into misery, depression and despair. We have never agreed with the harsh reply that ‘It’s not my job to cheer you up’; if you can’t handle it, that’s your problem! So, we take very seriously all anguished responses from readers who have clearly suffered from paying attention to the crises we write about.

Having said that, one of the great joys of our work is precisely that it brings us into contact with sensitive, knowledgeable, compassionate people who care deeply about the issues we’re discussing.

A fine example was provided by one of our readers, Julia Turner, who responded to the latest cogitation: ‘“Resist Not Evil”?’ on Substack. In the exchanges below, it quickly became apparent that the sadness Julia describes is in part rooted in the horror we have all witnessed in Gaza. The discussion of how to manage this emotional distress is not an indulgence, as some stoics on the left seem to imagine – it’s a crucial question that concerns us all.

‘Hi David, Thank you for your lovely thesis. It brought up a lot of ideas and responses in my mind so I thought I’d reply (first ever on Substack). I may be odd but I cannot meditate. Still, I can relate to the idea of being love, bliss, watching that star from a distance. The idea of love in itself, not being relative to an object (of love), I think can also apply to liberty or freedom. When I was younger, I really needed to be free from a person who was damaging me and who I couldn’t get away from. Eventually I found a way. At first the freedom, as exhilarating as it felt, was definitively tied to that person: being “free from”. After some time it became freedom in itself, liberty that didn’t always refer back to the ancient chains. That way of being was very different. It sounds abstract but it was one of the brightest moments of my whole existence.

‘I have been thinking a lot about sadness these days. I don’t really understand how to separate myself from it and watch it. So there’s tension and suffering in fighting or resisting our feelings. Yes. For a long time I was struggling with the recognition of the sadness in me. I felt bad that it was there, as though somehow it was a betrayal of those who suffered and for whom I felt that sadness. I came to understand that resisting my feelings was creating stress, and everything was muddy and confusing. Through acceptance of the sadness things became clear. I feel so sad for what has happened to those close to me and I feel so very sad for what is happening now in this world. This acceptance is like coming home. I really feel that I am at one with all the terrible things and at one with those who suffered. It is a kind of becoming sadness. And I guess the thought of becoming separate from the sadness is jarring. Maybe I don’t know how to respond to life but I think I need to become the thing or just go mad.’ (Julia Turner, 11 May 2025)

I replied:

‘Hi Julia

‘Thanks for sending such a tremendously thoughtful and honest email; I really appreciate it. You write: “I may be odd but I cannot meditate.”

‘For a long time, I thought I couldn’t meditate.

‘Can you take a moment just to let your hands rest in your lap? Can you feel any sensations in your hands? If you close your eyes, how do you know you have hands? It’s because of the sensations, of course. Can you feel them tingling? Can you feel the tension, the energy pulsing? If you can feel these sensations, you can meditate because that’s meditation. You can do the same with your feet – do they feel tense, warm, cold? Can you feel the energy pulsing through them?

‘Spending five minutes feeling your left hand, your right hand, your left foot and your right foot can have such an impact that you fall asleep. In fact, when I wake up in the night and can’t sleep, that’s my meditation – I go from one hand and foot to another in a circle, feeling the sensations. If you do five minutes at both ends of the day, you’ll build up a habit that makes it much easier to detect the sensations. You could then try noticing when you feel sadness or anxiety in your chest for five minutes. The mind is so relentless – this endlessly spinning, grinding torture machine – that even five minutes spent directing attention to the body can be tremendously relaxing. You write:

‘“I don’t really understand how to separate myself from it [the sadness] and watch it. So there’s tension and suffering in fighting or resisting our feelings.”

‘Often, we’re feeling sad without real awareness – we have a dim recognition that we feel terrible, but we’re mostly focused on the mind machine generating endless thoughts about the sadness: “I miss him/her… This time last year, she was here… I should have… I shouldn’t have… They should have…”

‘The thing is to separate from that relentless thought process generating sadness – we turn from focusing on thoughts about sadness to feeling the sadness in our chests and bellies. I love this quote from Eckhart Tolle:

‘“There are many pseudo escapes — work, drink, drugs, anger, projection, suppression, and so on — but they don’t free you from the [emotional] pain. Suffering does not diminish in intensity when you make it unconscious… So don’t turn away from the pain. Face it. Feel it fully. Feel it — don’t think about it! Express it if necessary, but don’t create a script in your mind around it. Give all your attention to the feeling, not to the person, event, or situation that seems to have caused it…

‘“So give your complete attention to what you feel, and refrain from mentally labelling it. As you go into the feeling, be intensely alert. At first, it may seem like a dark and terrifying place, and when the urge to turn away from it comes, observe it but don’t act on it. Keep putting your attention on the pain, keep feeling the grief, the fear, the dread, the loneliness, whatever it is.”

‘You write:

‘“I feel so sad for what has happened to those close to me and I feel so very sad for what is happening now in this world.”

‘Me, too. Gaza, Syria, Libya, Iraq, climate collapse… it all constantly generates sadness and grief. Again, we can take a break from thinking about these things – from the hellish flood of images and footage on X, for example – and focus on feeling the sadness, which alchemises into peace, love and bliss. We don’t get overwhelmed by the sadness; we get overwhelmed by our minds thinking about the sadness. So, we’re ‘separating from’ overthinking about the sadness but actually joining with the sadness through feeling; going deeply into it. If we push it away, it remains and intensifies. I’ve chatted about these issues more here and here.

‘All best wishes

‘David E’ (12 May 2025)

Julia responded again:

‘Hi David, Thanks for your reply and your cogitations. You are very encouraging. I’m going to read them three times to let them sink in. It took some time for me to feel my hands. (It was somewhat alarming at first because I was expecting to feel them but there was nothing coming.) The signal is faint but, yeah, I got some tingles.

‘If you look at the photo on the cover of Norman Finkelstein’s book on Gaza you might see an image of “beyond sadness”. That’s not a cynical “moving on from sadness” type of beyond, but a kind of beyond that takes your words away… because it’s too much. Beyond, that place where we find ourselves in sadness that is so deep and it goes so far, you think maybe it doesn’t have an end. I don’t know what to do, what to think, or even what to feel, when the father in Gaza, who lately lost his children through traumatic death from a bomb, said that he was happy because now his children won’t starve to death. He wasn’t able to provide for them when they told him they were hungry.

‘I’m going to try to follow your advice. I don’t know if I can do it. The sadness, I think, is too much. So from my personal history and from what is happening now to the children, mothers, fathers who have become targets..there’s this great big surge in my belly and chest that is bigger than me. It’s like a bloody tsunami. I don’t have the words to express what I sense. I think it’s too much. This morning I sat down on a bench in the park and just slumped. That felt like all I could do. I’ll let you know how it goes.

‘All the best,

‘J’ (14 May 2025)

I responded:

‘Thanks, Julia.

‘“It took some time for me to feel my hands. (It was somewhat alarming at first because I was expecting to feel them but there was nothing coming.)”

‘Well done, that will improve with practice. You can also search for short, guided “body scan” meditations online – find one with a voice that doesn’t sound too irritating. :o) That really helps if you’re struggling with motivation or focus.

‘The initial difficulty you had made me think you’re doing a tremendous amount of intellectual work, because it does have that numbing effect on our ability to feel sensations. Then you mentioned Gaza and Norm Finkelstein – a brilliant, very intense analyst – and I’m sure you’re immersed in a huge amount of other analysis, too. For the last quarter of a century co-editing Media Lens, it’s been my self-appointed task to immerse myself in these horrors every day, so I’ve experienced similar symptoms. I’ve written about the problems suffered by Charles Darwin:

‘“My mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years … Now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry … I have also almost lost any taste for pictures or music … My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts …”

‘He added:

‘“If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week … The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”

‘A journalist and activist wrote to me last year:

‘“But reading your book, things I had sensed but not addressed came sharply into focus. I have over the years grown numb to feeling, except when it comes to my children… I’ve been noticing more how little other emotional engagement I have in my life. I’ve gradually stopped watching movies, once a great passion. I don’t read books. I’ve stopped long walks and cycle rides, where I loved to be immersed in nature. I rarely listen to music, even in the car. I’m happy sitting in silence, with my thoughts. I build in leisure time. I play badminton a lot. I’m fit. I do yoga. I see a small circle of friends, whose company I enjoy. I go to events where I live. But the love is gone. I’ve been hollowed out by numbness. Darwin and Maugham’s warnings were powerful for me.”

‘“But the love is gone”. Fantastically honest, but how sad. Not that sad, though, because the love is only buried beneath intellectual activity, not gone. Actually, peace, love and bliss are hidden just out of sight; it only needs a bit of meditation – we just need to experiment, grope around in the dark a bit, and we’ll get there. We are never a lost cause.

‘In the early years of Media Lens, I felt similar symptoms from time to time. Then, I was overwhelmed by the suffering in Iraq, where 500,000 children under five were killed by US-UK sanctions. The deaths of children in Gaza have been horrendous, but in Iraq from 1990-2003, child deaths were measured in the 100,000s. I met and talked to John Pilger and Denis Halliday about it, which made it even more real and personal for me. It felt almost unbearable. Then, in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion and occupation, at least one million more Iraqis died – Western politicians and journalists were completely oblivious. Staggering death tolls. When the US attacked the third city, Fallujah, in November 2004, they destroyed 75% of the buildings. We were spared the mobile phone footage tormenting everyone now from Gaza, but we knew conditions in Iraq were catastrophic. Other horrors have hit me even harder over even more years – particularly the very real prospect of human extinction from climate collapse. In this case, we’re not talking tens of thousands, or millions of deaths, but billions of deaths. You can’t get more catastrophic, bleaker than that! How to deal with the sadness of that? We have to find a way, and we can.

‘None of this is intended to diminish the horror of the genocide in Gaza, but it’s so good for our mental health to put it in perspective – similar horrors, on an even greater scale, have been erupting for decades and centuries. I found great sanity in the thoughts of a mystic who said: “The world is in a mess, it has always been in a mess, and it always will be in a mess.” It is not that there are a few terrible issues we need to resolve; violence, injustice and cruelty are deeply embedded in human societies. Why does that help? Because it does provide perspective – we do what we can to the best of our ability, but we shouldn’t let ourselves be overwhelmed by this basic fact of existence. We have to care for ourselves as well as others. That’s my feeling, now.

‘The compassion I have felt for people suffering under US-UK violence is real. But reading Osho and Tolle alerted me to the fact that my ego had a subtle investment in my suffering. I liked the idea that I was battling against an historic injustice. It gave my life a sense of purpose, meaning; it made me one of the Good Guys in a grand drama of great significance. It made my contribution seem crucial. And hopefully the work I’ve done does matter, but the truth is I am a tiny drop, a miniscule speck in an immense ocean of human thought and action stretching over years, centuries and millennia. It helps me to keep my own significance, and the significance of the efforts I make, in perspective. We should do our best but not get consumed, heartbroken by the suffering of the world. In an age of iPhones and social media, we can all too easily keep at it all day until we’re exhausted. It’s vital to take solid breaks and do all the things the anonymous journalist I mentioned used to do and does no longer.

‘All best wishes

‘David E’ (14 May 2025)

One of the great perils and pains of social media, of course – particularly in the early days, when none of us had any idea what we were doing – is what used to be called the ‘Twitterspat’: angry, escalating, often abusive exchanges with often anonymous interlocutors. It initially felt like it was vital to engage in these arguments, and, let’s be honest, to win! On related themes, we received a further interesting response from Edward in Bristol:

‘Thanks for sharing David – i’m really enjoying these series of cogitations :)

‘Clearly you covered many important themes in this essay, but the
following quotes from Robert Adams especially resonated with me:

‘“Something that usually makes you angry, before you would respond, and
you’d want to win the argument, but now your reaction is no reaction.
You simply smile and you watch.

‘“It’s just like arguing with a person. What happens if you stop
arguing? The person goes away”

‘Speaking from my own personal experience, I have found that people
often insult or challenge others in their social groups or at work
because they feel threatened or insecure (threatened about their
status, insecure about themselves). And, again in my experience, I’ve
noticed that the best leaders simply brush off these types of
challenges and barbs. It appears that staying calm and collected in
the face of adversity is an important trait that people look for in
their leaders …

‘Lastly, having spent many years practising various meditations, as
well as mindfulness, I can more easily take a step back and simply
observe arguments, rather than get sucked into them … it feels as if
it is our own internal dysfunction that often pulls us into conflicts
… being able to remain calm, it seems, affords a sense of emotional
freedom – a freedom to move throughout the world without getting
sucked into emotional whirlpools and be less perturbed by the
emotional ripples created by others …

‘Best, Edward in Bristol (Email to Media Lens, 8 May 2025)

I replied:

‘Thanks, Edward, interesting points. It’s something I’ve learned over many years of responding to fierce criticism of Media Lens. You receive the hit – you can feel the hit clearly in your chest – and you have a choice: you can react as you always did as a child and as a younger adult by receiving the negative energy and responding with the same negative energy, exactly as you might smash back a tennis shot (with interest! “I’ll show you!”). There is a definite decision to engage the clutch on your ego, so that you are hitting back with the same ego energy.

‘Alternatively, you can feel the pain of the hit, watch the urge to engage the clutch on your anger, resist the urge, and instead respond with a cool, rational energy that does not involve the ego. You can still stand up for yourself with strong counter-arguments, and even note their hostility, but you “don’t go there” in terms of matching their negative energy. As you say, there’s a great sense of freedom that comes with that. After all, when we just respond to their negative energy, we’re like their puppet on a string. The key is that we’re able to simply observe the hit, the pain, for a moment without automatically reacting. Tolle calls this “creating spaciousness” around the anger. As Osho says, the act of observation creates a tiny gap between ourselves and the rising anger – that gap is freedom.

‘The effects of not hitting back are so noticeable. When you react coolly to their heat, it’s almost impossible for them to respond with more heat – you’ve taken the heat out of their heat and if you don’t add your own, they’ve got nothing to fight back against! And for them to then respond to cool reasonableness with more angry abuse makes them look seriously unhinged – they feel that themselves! – and everybody needs to see themselves as fundamentally reasonable; so it’s almost impossible for them to continue being abusive. I find that they then usually also respond coolly and more reasonably, and the end result of the exchange can be that the anger and hatred have been absorbed, dissipated, leaving respect and even friendliness. That’s happened so many times.

‘Best wishes

‘David E’ (Email, 12 May 2025)

Thanks to Julia and Edward for such thoughtful replies. And thanks to all our readers for continuing to read and respond to our work.

David Edwards is co-editor of medialens.org and author of the forthcoming, ‘A Short Book About Ego… and the Remedy of Meditation’, Mantra Books, 24 June 2025, available here. He is also the author of the forthcoming dystopian, Chomskyan, mystical, science fiction thriller, ‘The Man With No Face’, his first novel, to be published by Roundfire Books in 2026. Email: davidmedialens@gmail.com

What People Are Saying About ‘A Short Book About Ego’

‘In this compelling short guide for the head-trapped, David Edwards shows us how meditation has the power to bring each of us a healing, personal bliss by dissolving our insatiable egos. But he offers a powerful, bigger message too: a politics anchored in the love and compassion released by meditation is the only effective path to healing our broken societies.’ (Jonathan Cook, winner of the Martha Gellhorn special award for journalism, author of Israel and the Clash of Civilizations)

‘I have learnt a great deal reading A Short Book About Ego, a thoughtful and gentle book about the change of consciousness we all need to go through. I read it just after reading the Bhagavad Gita while travelling through northern Pakistan, which gave me extra context.’ (Peter Oborne, award-winning journalist and broadcaster, author of The Fate of Abraham: Why the West Is Wrong About Islam)

‘The best way to transcend the ego is to understand it. This book shines a bright light on the machinations of the ego, and shows us a glimpse of freedom beyond it. Best of all, it highlights the clearest path to freedom, through the practice of meditation.’ (Steve Taylor PhD, author of The Leap and Extraordinary Awakenings)

‘A Short Book About Ego is a brilliant and concise call to arms. It shows us that those of us who wish to transform the chaos of the world we see everywhere around us must first learn to transform ourselves inwardly. Our ego is our enemy, the self an illusion (standing at the centre of a circle of mirrors), and the road to freedom lies in inner stillness and learning the ancient art of meditation. David Edwards is one of the most important writers at work today. In a saner and more emotionally wise society, he would be both a household name and a national treasure.’ (Torben Betts, award-winning UK playwright and author of Invincible, Muswell Hill and Murder in the Dark)

What, then, is the alternative to resisting ‘Evil’? And what on earth might be our motivation for doing something else? Three modern masters of meditation bowl us the same googly from left field. The Indian mystic Osho said:

‘Someone insults you. You just stand still, remain silent. The mechanism will start; it will bring the past pattern. The anger will be coming, the smoke will arise, and you will feel just on the verge of getting mad. But you stand. Don’t cooperate and just look what the mechanism is doing. You will feel wheels within wheels within you, but they are impotent because you are not cooperating.

‘This is one of the greatest secrets I am telling you. Try it: when anger comes you are not to do anything; just sit silently and watch it. Don’t be against it, don’t be for it. Don’t cooperate with it, don’t repress it. Just watch it, be patient, just see what happens… let it rise.’ (Osho, ‘The Path of Yoga’, Rebel Publishing, 1998, p.120)

Ordinarily, when we are angry, as the comment ‘I’m bloody furious!’ suggests, we totally identify with the anger – we believe we are the anger. The practice above changes the observation to ‘There is furious anger, and I’m watching it.’ This is a radical transformation – it suggests we can disidentify from the anger, which means we can disidentify from the political and cultural conditioning of the Colonel Heffners and their reflexive ‘eye for an eye’ rage and retaliation. We are not reacting to the person slapping our cheek, and we are not reacting to the ‘wheels within wheels’ of anger starting to grind within us – we are simply watching. So, what might the benefits be? Osho again:

‘When you feel that hate is there, close your eyes, forget the situation outside, and be conscious of what is happening inside you. The whole energy has become hate. If you watch it, then suddenly part of the energy will begin to transform itself into awareness. A pillar of consciousness will arise out of the chaos… And the more the pillar arises, the more the chaos inside will drop and disappear. Then, when you feel that you are, you will notice that hate is no longer there: you become a self, a center; the other can no longer be the center which either attracts or repels.’

If we forget the external situation and our thoughts about it, and instead focus on sadness, fear, jealousy, craving, anger, the painful energy will transform into ‘a pillar of consciousness’ that absorbs the chaos. The mind is at the periphery of being. When we focus our attention on feelings at the heart, at the centre of being, the chaos at the periphery subsides.

The German mystic Eckhart Tolle offers the same advice:

‘For example, when someone criticizes you, blames you, or calls you names, instead of immediately retaliating or defending yourself — do nothing. Allow the self-image to remain diminished and become alert to what that feels like deep inside you. For a few seconds, it may feel uncomfortable, as if you had shrunk in size. Then you may sense an inner spaciousness that feels intensely alive. You haven’t been diminished at all. In fact, you have expanded. You may then come to an amazing realization: When you are seemingly diminished in some way and remain in absolute nonreaction, not just externally but also internally, you realize that nothing real has been diminished, that through becoming “less,” you become more. When you no longer defend or attempt to strengthen the form of yourself, you step out of identification with form, with mental self-image. Through becoming less (in the ego’s perception), you in fact undergo an expansion and make room for Being to come forward. True power, who you are beyond form, can then shine through the apparently weakened form. This is what Jesus means when he says, “Deny yourself” or “Turn the other cheek.”’ (Tolle, ‘A New Earth’, Penguin, 2005, p.215)

The awareness, ‘through becoming “less,” you become more’, removes a key motive for raging at people who have insulted us – the painful superstition that we have been harmed.

The American mystic Robert Adams agreed:

‘Whenever you think something is wrong, someone has hurt you, someone has rubbed you the wrong way, when things do not go right at your job or at home, do not be like the ordinary person and react to it. And do not believe that if you do not react, things will get worse.

‘I cannot tell you enough that every situation that happens to you is necessary for your growth…

‘Do not get involved by arguing, fighting, trying to change things.

‘Just observe.’ (Adams, ‘Silence of the Heart’, Acropolis Books, 1999, pp.283-284)

Adams added:

‘That’s how you conquer your mind. By being aware of it, and no longer responding to it. No longer to react to the mind. Something that usually makes you angry, before you would respond, and you’d want to win the argument, but now your reaction is no reaction. You simply smile and you watch.

‘When your mind sees there’s no response, it will become weaker and weaker, until it disappears. It’s just like arguing with a person. What happens if you stop arguing? The person goes away. They don’t know what to think. They just won’t have anything to do with you. They just leave. So when you stop responding to your thoughts, your mind will go away, and become weaker, and weaker, and weaker, until there is no mind.’ (Adams, p.228)

As we will discuss below, when the mind temporarily disappears, even for a microsecond, something astonishing, liberatory, and in fact revolutionary, happens. This is the rationale behind the suggestion that we ‘resist not evil’.

Turning the Other Arm

Many years ago, provoked by my miscommunication and by her hormonal roller-coaster (her explanation, not mine!), my then girlfriend flew into a rage and punched me on my left arm, three times, hard.

In response, I sought neither ‘an eye for an eye’, nor an arm for an arm. Because I was not Jesus, I also did not turn the other arm or the other cheek – doing so might well have earned me a couple of bonus punches! But my shortfall in Christ consciousness extended far beyond that. Even if I had ‘turned the other cheek’, the reality would have been that I felt angry, confused and saddened by such contemptuous treatment. As Tolle says, I felt seriously ‘diminished’, indicating that I had not borne the insult with anything resembling cool, spiritual equanimity. And if Jesus’s advice was about anything, it was about an authentically untroubled response, not about gritting our teeth and faking it.

Later that day, my head played host to angry, confused, fearful thoughts about what had happened, what should have happened, about where our relationship was going. What was so noticeable was that there were no simple answers in my head. It was obviously good that I hadn’t hit back, but should I have defended myself with more force verbally? Had I allowed myself to be abused and walked over? Had she lost, not just all love but all respect for me; or was it just a tiff? Had I somehow provoked or deserved it? Did her PMT explain and even excuse her uncharacteristic rage? And anyway, are we ever to blame for the genetic and environmental conditions influencing our behaviour? Round and round we go… It all seemed so subjective, questionable, depending on what point of view I chose to take.

So, that was the head storm – the swirling mental goulash that delivers no clear answers, no solid conclusions. We’re sat there as judge and jury on a dispute in which we are deeply, personally involved. Can we really trust ourselves to be fair and impartial in our judgement of our own responsibility in such issues? As the physicist Richard Feynman said so well:

‘The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.’ (Feynman, ‘Surely you’re joking Mr. Feynman’, W.W. Norton, 1985, p.343)

Because we want to be fooled – we want to believe whatever best serves our perceived self-interest.

But there was also a second, symbiotic emotional storm in my chest, feeding and being fed by the thought storm. Just immersing myself in the thought storm in my head was doing me no good at all; if anything, it was making me feel worse. And the ‘worse’ was coming from the emotions in my chest. I remembered all the advice I’d read about watching emotional pain cited above and decided:

‘Okay, for as long as it takes, I’m going to conduct an experiment in watching this emotional pain. I am going to watch it for ten minutes, one hour, two hours and see what happens, even if it kills me. I’m just going to sit here, watch it and stare it out.’

And this I did. I held the emotional pain gently in my attention, settled into it. I let it burn me, on and on. I kept watching the pain, feeling it, on and on… Do your worst! These are my emotions! They’re part of me. Can I not withstand my own emotions? Why not?

A large part of our suffering lies in our resistance – it is the very fact that we are saying ‘No!’ to a feeling that hurts us. We don’t want to feel the pain! By voluntarily placing my attention on the pain, I was accepting it. The ‘No!’ fell away. I was now not resisting ‘Evil’. As this happened, the ball of pain started to soften, to change – a ‘pillar of consciousness’ started to arise and absorb the chaos. Eventually, I started to feel a sense of Tolle’s ‘spaciousness’ – the feelings in my heart became smooth, pleasurable. After an hour or so, perhaps 75 minutes, the agony had transformed into feelings of love and bliss.

This was not mere imagination; I wasn’t making it up. How do I know? Because, ordinarily, I would have been completely unable to prevent myself from carrying a burden of sulking resentment for hours or days. It would certainly have been a heavy, conversation-killing presence the next time I met my girlfriend. It was just not in my nature to let something like that go so easily. My whole conditioning was to not let someone get away with that kind of treatment scot-free – I had to hit back in self-defence, if only psychologically after the event.

But on this occasion, thanks to an hour of self-observation, the resentment had not merely been controlled by force of will, and it had not merely vanished. It had been alchemised into a loving, blissful energy. It wasn’t that I’d made a mental decision to forgive anyone; the angry energy had been transformed. It was astonishing to have somehow emerged into delight from a pit of despair.

As a result, not least because I knew and trusted my partner enough, I was able to see the whole thing as a misunderstanding, a kind of accident in which I had also played a part. Without the dark emotional baggage, I was able to see the event for what it really was – ugly, silly but not actually important.

On this occasion, the ecstasy was short-lived, but it offered a glimpse of the extremely important phenomenon that is meditative loving bliss. Osho described how it has three dimensions:

‘The first dimension is peace, absolute peace, as if the lake of consciousness is without any waves, without any ripples even.’

This is unknown in ordinary life. When attention is focused on the surface of our being, on our mind, there are always ripples, disturbances. Even in sleep, the mind does not shut up – it is always subtly bothering us.

‘The second dimension is joy: joy for no reason at all, joy not caused by anything from the outside, joy simply arising out of you mysteriously, for no reason, with no cause at all – uncaused joy.’

This really is uncanny, impossible – ecstasy arising as a result of sitting doing nothing.

‘And the third is love, love not as a relationship but as a state of being. Not that you love somebody in particular but that you are love.’

Intense love sitting on a sofa doing nothing where, an hour earlier, there had been a mass of angry, bitter resentment and fear. How can love simply arise without being a response to someone in particular? Because it is the other side of the bliss that also arises uncaused – it is the nature of consciousness freed from thought by directing attention away from thought.

As Osho said, the fact that limitless peace, love and bliss are present within us, but hidden, is a very big deal indeed:

‘It is because of this phenomenon… that man can hope, otherwise there is absolute darkness. There is only one small sight, a distant, faraway star…’

This distant, faraway star – our only serious hope in this difficult life – is buried beneath thought. And of course it is most hidden, most distant when we are furiously engaged in committing, or resisting, ‘Evil’. It is a big deal because, apart from this phenomenon, there is no hope in a mind that is intrinsically negative, critical, angry, dissatisfied, indifferent to the present moment, to what is.

Conclusion – ‘The Many Names Of Love’

‘Resist not Evil’? Of course, we can resist efforts made to kill and exploit us and other people. It is not that we should live as inactivist puritans in a world all too willing to exploit such idealism.

The advice is spiritual and psychological rather than political – sometimes we will choose to resist ‘Evil’. But if we are seeking the ‘small… distant, faraway star’ of hope that is the phenomenon of loving bliss, we will not find it in the thought storms that inevitably accompany our resistance.

We should not abandon our efforts to help others, but we need to see that our obsessive focus on changing the world politically has delivered much bleating but little wool – the world is not at all overflowing with peace, love and bliss. We need to experiment with the simple meditative practices that lead us to reappraise the vital importance of unveiling the love and bliss buried in our own hearts.

The journalist and activist Umair Haque commented on the power of ‘the many names of love’: of ‘Beauty, truth, illumination’, of ‘Mercy, gentleness, nurturance’. Haque asked how it is that societies actually change:

‘They don’t change just by bickering with the bad guys. Or even going to war with them, really. They change when people’s minds, souls, and hearts are expanded, elevated, transformed, by all those names of love. When so much love, in all those forms, surrounds them, that it’s opposite — hate — doesn’t stand a chance.’

And that love does not arise out of the thinking, activist, protesting mind. It arises out of the heart when that thinking mind – for once in its life! – falls silent.

Part 1 is available here.

David Edwards is co-editor of medialens.org and author of the forthcoming, ‘A Short Book About Ego… and the Remedy of Meditation’, Mantra Books, 24 June 2025, available here. The e-book will be available imminently. The book is currently listed at #34 for ‘Hot New Releases In New Age Meditation’. Email: davidmedialens@gmail.com

The illegal, unprovoked, full-scale US-UK invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 wrecked the country at the cost of at least one million Iraqi lives. It was waged on the basis of a supposed threat from ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that did not exist. Less well-known is the fact that everyone at the pinnacle of power knew they did not exist. The whole focus on Iraq as some kind of menace was an audacious fabrication. But ‘we’ got the oil.

As the war and occupation continued in 2006, prime minister Tony Blair was asked if he had ‘prayed to God’ over his involvement in the war. He replied: ‘Yes’, adding:

‘In the end, there is a judgement that, I think if you have faith about these things, you realise that judgement is made by other people… and if you believe in God, it’s made by God as well.’

US president, George W. Bush, Blair’s co-conspirator, also a Christian, said:

‘I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, “George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.” And I did, and then God would tell me, “George go and end the tyranny in Iraq,” and I did.’

Rose Gentle, whose son Gordon died while serving with the Royal Highland Fusiliers in Iraq in 2004, commented:

‘A good Christian wouldn’t be for this war. I’m actually quite disgusted by the comments. It’s a joke.’

That would certainly have been the view of Leo Tolstoy who tore down centuries of hypocrisy in a single sentence:

‘A Christian nation which engages in war ought, in order to be logical, not only take down the cross from its church steeples, turn the churches to some other use, give the clergy other duties, having first prohibited the teaching of the Gospel, but also ought to abandon all the requirements of morality which flow from Christian law.’ (Tolstoy, ‘Writings on Civil Disobedience and Non-Violence’, New Society, 1987, p.xiv)

Tolstoy’s argument was simple:

‘You are told in the Gospel that one should not only refrain from killing his brothers, but should not do that which leads to murder: one should not be angry with one’s brothers, nor hate one’s enemies, but love them.

‘In the law of Moses you are distinctly told, “Thou shalt not kill,” without any reservations as to whom you can and whom you cannot kill.’ (pp.40-41)

And Jesus, of course, said:

‘Resist not evil.’

More elaborately, he said:

‘You have heard that it was said, “Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.” But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.’

Resist not the US-UK invasion of Iraq? Resist not the Israeli genocide in Gaza? Resist not the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023? Resist not the fossil fuel industry’s subordination of people and planet to profit collapsing the climate and our prospects for survival?

Really? Is this to be taken seriously? What could have been meant by these words? Were they really intended as political counsel?

As we all know, in an attempt to make sense of them, the comments have been interpreted as advocacy for a righteous display of moral superiority: we ‘turn the other cheek’ to show how far above such primitive, face-slapping behaviour we are – we pointedly refuse to lower ourselves by replying in kind. The idea is that by offering another free hit we are delivering a lesson in dignity and self-control to someone lacking in both.

The common-sense understanding is that the willingness to suffer for our faith will have a sobering, Gandhian impact on our cheek-slapper – they will be impressed, elevated by our response. Thus, the world becomes a better place. We assume that this is what was intended, because how else can we make sense of the idea that we should not resist ‘Evil’? The problem with the argument is that it clearly involves an effort to resist ‘Evil’ by righteous example.

‘But Colonel, Shooting’s No Good!’

We think we know only too well where the determination to ‘turn the other cheek’ leads from the fate suffered by the Reverend Doctor Matthew Collins in the classic 1953 film version of ‘The War of the Worlds’. Though Martian invaders have already incinerated numerous Earthlings and are clearly bent on mayhem, Reverend Collins decides to wage peace on US Army Colonel Heffner stood in his bunker preparing to blast the aliens back to whatever hell they came from:

‘But Colonel, shooting’s no good!’

‘It’s always been a good persuader.’

‘Shouldn’t you try to communicate with them first, and shoot if you have to?’

The Colonel regards Collins with a mixture of bewilderment and contempt – he never saw a Martian yet that didn’t understand a good slap in the mouth or a slug from a .45 – and does not deign to reply.

Getting nowhere with the Colonel, employing the priestly intonation with which we are all so familiar, the Reverend turns to his niece, Sylvia:

‘I think we should try to make them understand we mean them no harm. They are living creatures out there. If they’re more advanced than us, they should be nearer the Creator for that reason. No real attempt has been made to communicate with them, you know.’

At this point, Collins decides to take matters into his own hands. Leaving the safety of the bunker, Bible held aloft, he strides boldly in the direction of the Martian warships. It is an ancient film now, but this remains a deeply affecting moment: the Man of God, alone, unarmed, literally staking his life on his faith. He is quickly detected by an alien machine, which turns a pulsing, serpentine heat-ray weapon in his direction, as he walks on and intones:

‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. Thou anointest my head with oil. My cup runneth over. And I will dwell in the house of the Lord… forever.’

As this last word is spoken, with great brutality: a blazing ejaculation of fire. Collins is incinerated. Dead. ‘Forever’.

Back in the bunker, the Colonel’s response:

‘LET ‘EM HAVE IT!’

Tanks, guns, rockets and mortars unleash a barrage of counter-fire.

The answer is in, and it is emphatic: Jesus was wrong! Reverend Collins was wrong! The Colonel and everyone like him – including us, most of us – are right: if you don’t resist ‘Evil’, if you attempt to placate ‘Evil’, if you try to reason with ‘Evil’, you will be annihilated. When fantasy meets the real world, fantasy is vaporised. And such has been and always will be the case, every time – ‘forever’.

It was just a film, albeit a highly successful one, but it had an immense impact on its audience. It certainly had an impact on me. The torrent of alien fire, and the military response, have the authority of Truth. What happens to the Reverend seems brutal, terrible. But the fire is cleansing, beautiful in a way; it burns away all childish dreaming.

In H.G. Wells’s original novel, and in the film, humble bacteria succeed in defeating the invaders where military force fails. It is certainly suggested that we might thank ‘The Creator’ for that. But the clear message, certainly of the film, is that ‘Evil’ must be resisted.

Crowded Sofas

And so, we have been resisting ‘Evil’, or claim to have been resisting ‘Evil’. Or we have believed that the only answer to ‘Evil’ – howsoever defined – is resistance.

‘Mainstream’ politicians and press have been resisting the ‘Evil’ of various Official Enemies – the Soviets, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden, Gaddafi, Assad, Putin… on and on. We are always Colonel Heffner and Reverend Collins facing an alien threat, and we are always told we have a choice to make between deluded, suicidal appeasement and ultra-violence; between fantasy and reality. Meanwhile, the progressive left has been resisting capitalism, corporate psychopathy, state warmongering for resources, and so on…

Even in our private lives, we know that millions of Reverend Collinses and Colonel Heffners are sitting beside millions of mini-me Hitlers on sofas (quite a threesome!). Here, also, we can choose idealistic, happy-clappy appeasement; or we can resist injustice and tyrannical abuse. We can demand that they also put their dishes in the machine; that they also clean the bath properly with that blue stuff and the fish-shaped sponge; that they also throw the rubbish from time to time. Who made us The Garbage Person?!

Or we can sit back, Bible aloft, and watch our happiness being trashed by escalating, limitless narcissism:

‘“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…”? No! You walk through the valley of the shadow of the shopping centre and get the groceries like I did yesterday!’

‘No real attempt has been made to communicate about this issue, you know.’

‘No, because it’s YOUR TURN!’

Well, it’s quite right, isn’t it? Like Barack Obama, we need ‘red lines’, boundaries. Like George Bush Senior we have to declare that ‘This will not stand!’ Order depends on us not letting ourselves be walked over. We have to resist the domestic version of, well, ‘Evil’.

And yet, and yet… despite all of this endlessly principled resistance, the world is full…. nay, flooded, with what looks an awful lot like ‘Evil’.

Everywhere we turn: ludicrously unsustainable over-consumption as if the next year and the next generation didn’t matter a damn; a factory farming system creating hell on earth for animals; a seething mass of military-industrial complexity gorged on war; manifestly fake political choices that are no-choice serving the same money-grubbing interests; fossil fuel fanaticism subordinating literally everyone – even, ultimately, the CEOs and their own families – to short-term profit; levers of power controlling economics and war absolutely cordoned off from public participation. Oh, we can talk the talk on social media all we like, but don’t even think about laying a finger on the levers of power. It’s a complicated game, and that outcome is not in the rules.

Noam Chomsky commented that he could not find a word to describe the climate-trashing fossil fuel interests willing to sacrifice the literal existence of organised human life for the sake of a few dollars more:

‘The word “evil” doesn’t begin to approach it.’

And… it feels almost incredible even to write it… almost no-one is doing anything meaningful about it!

The irony is exquisite – after decades, centuries, millennia of focusing on the need to resist ‘Evil’, almost nobody – certainly nobody with power – is seriously trying to resist the ultimate ‘Evil’ of human self-extinction. We are trapped in an airliner heading straight for a mountain and there is no-one in the cockpit who cares.

The effort to resist ‘Evil’ appears to have failed. And that suggests that we might like to take another look at Jesus’s advice. Perhaps we misunderstood him. Perhaps it is not him, but the likes of Reverend Collins – and all of us who assumed that people like Collins had interpreted Jesus correctly – who are naive. Perhaps something quite different was intended.

Part 2 will follow shortly…

David Edwards is co-editor of medialens.org and author of the forthcoming, ‘A Short Book About Ego… and the Remedy of Meditation’, Mantra Books, 24 June 2025, available here. The e-book will be available imminently. Email: davidmedialens@gmail.com

Left-progressives writhe in agony when the usual suspects to the right of the ‘mainstream’ media ‘spectrum’ continue to pour bile and abuse on the likes of Howard Zinn, Edward Herman, Harold Pinter, Robert Fisk and John Pilger in the immediate aftermath of their deaths.

Where is the humanity, decency, respect? Can politics not make allowances for human feeling even in the face of death?

No, because power politics is all about subordinating life to dead capital. The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ don’t tell us much; the fundamental problem with state-corporate power is that it subordinates people, planet, love, compassion, honesty, integrity, reason and truth to short-term profit and power. Some of us think that’s a bad idea: call us ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘up’, ‘down’, whatever you like.

A dehumanised response to the human condition must be the sworn enemy of all who promote more human priorities. Power politics can’t even prioritise human survival on a warming planet; a goal dictated by something other than the bottom line.

It is entirely understandable, then, that salaried operatives of such a system would behave in a brutal, uncompassionate way – that is the nature of the system by which they are paid. It is less clear why opponents of this system would emulate their behaviour.

On X (formerly Twitter), Australian journalist and activist Caitlin Johnstone, writing with Tim Foley, responded to news of the death of Henry Kissinger in November 2022 by posting a video clip of actor Denzel Washington smiling and clutching his heart with relief under Johnstone’s comment:

‘Phew, saw Kissinger trending and I was worried he still wasn’t dead.’

The post earned 1,700 ‘likes’. Beneath that, Johnstone wrote:

‘My birthday’s tomorrow. The universe loves me.’

Fierce expressions of moral certainty and bitter contempt play extremely well on social media. It’s not hard to divine why. The reason was indicated by Matt Kennard, then of Declassified UK:

‘Henry Kissinger came to Columbia Journalism School in 2008.

‘I put up my hand. “How do you sleep at night?” I asked.

‘There was a pause. Organiser got up from his seat.

‘”Do you think you’re morally superior to me?” Kissinger asked.

‘”Yes,” I replied. Lowest bar there is surely.’

Kennard had initially responded to the news of Kissinger’s death like this:

‘Burn in hell.’

This post received 1,100 ‘likes’.

Former British ambassador turned dissident journalist Craig Murray replied to a post by foreign secretary David Lammy:

‘Fuck off you murderous genocidal bastard.’

Johnstone also posted on the Gaza genocide:

‘Fuck you if you’re going along with this. Fuck you if you’re ignoring this. Fuck you if you’re trying to stop other people from opposing this. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.’

This is the all-pervasive atmosphere, the standard political tone, on X: anger and outrage expressed with total, damning conviction. X is always in Warrior Mode. See here for more examples.

Anyone posting on X instinctively knows that Warrior Mode will be well-received by their followers. And we know that references to compassion and love are going to produce something close to nausea. But why?

Firstly, like violence, anger initially, of course, feels immensely powerful, certainly far more powerful than embarrassing, drippy talk of love. When we rage at some terrible crime, we feel unstoppable, as if the sheer intensity of our feeling will somehow generate change.

Secondly, like other social media, X is a deeply dehumanised form of communication. There is no face-to-face interaction, no facial or verbal cues – no smiles, no eye contact – none of the reassuring body language that fosters warmth, clarity and trust.

Released from any need for self-restraint by physical separation and anonymity, egos lock horns in a Colosseum-like arena where thousands and millions are applauding and jeering. In response, many posters behave far more aggressively, harshly and with far more grandiosity than they ever would in ‘real’ life.

The gladiatorial aspect of social media is key. We were initially astonished at times when Media Lens readers who have been long-time supporters and allies, even friends – people who have always been amiable and polite in private emails – disagree with us on a particular issue, select Warrior Mode, and publicly denounce us on X in the most damning way. Having received warm words of support for years, we suddenly find ourselves receiving our five-a-day quota of fruit and veg in the public stocks. Even more surprising, when temperatures cool, our critics often return to their previous, friendly tone on email – a curious reversal of normal life where friends tend to be more critical in private.

To spend time on X is to be bombarded with a flood of often extremely painful, even traumatising information that generates a flood of mental activity in our heads. Thinking is not neutral – the more we are in our heads, the more we are disconnected from our hearts. This is momentarily thrilling, ego-boosting, and therefore addictive; but it is not a happy place.

As I have discussed with reference to the profound personal crises afflicting intellectuals like Charles Darwin and John Stuart Mill, overthinking causes us to become cold, loveless, harsh, negatively disposed towards others, and even suicidally depressed. One long-term journalist and activist told me:

‘I have over the years grown numb to feeling, except when it comes to my children… I’ve been noticing more how little other emotional engagement I have in my life. I’ve gradually stopped watching movies, once a great passion. I don’t read books. I’ve stopped long walks and cycle rides, where I loved to be immersed in nature. I rarely listen to music, even in the car. I’m happy sitting in silence, with my thoughts… I see a small circle of friends, whose company I enjoy. But the love is gone. I’ve been hollowed out by numbness.’ (Email to David Edwards, name withheld, 16 September 2024)

I have experienced this myself when working too intensively on social media and political writing.

One of the great pleasures remaining to the disconnected, headtrapped ego on social media is attention: we feel like ‘somebody’ when people support our messages and ‘nobody’ when they are ignored.

Alas, the whole effort of the human ego is to persuade ourselves and others that we are ‘special’, ‘unique’, ‘extraordinary’. Thus, humans have a long, ugly history of dehumanising other people as ‘human animals’, as ‘savages’, as ‘Untermensch’, because in so doing we implicitly confer superiority on ourselves. Thus, the ‘white man’s burden,’ ‘la mission civilisatrice’, because ‘it’s a man’s world’, delivered by ‘special’, ‘chosen’ people of various kinds pursuing their ‘manifest destiny’.

Ironically, in condemning someone else’s inhumanity, our egos may become ‘elevated’, feel more ‘special’, and thus become more inhuman. This can’t be done directly. If we say, ‘I’m a moral exemplar’, the self-serving bias is clear for all to ridicule. But we can achieve a similar result, uncontroversially, by criticising. Even when we say: ‘He’s never on time’, we are implicitly asserting our superiority. We would never behave that way!

Complaining can become an endless process of the ego back-handedly patting itself on the back. The whole game was famously summed up in socialist and philanthropist Robert Owen’s pithy observation:

‘All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer.’

Which is not to say that the people being reviled as inhuman did not behave inhumanly – Kissinger’s crimes were devastating. A lot of the anger felt on X is a response to horrendous violence and injustice, but really you can’t get more ‘mainstream’ than celebrating the death of ‘The Bad Guy’.

In October 2011, in response to the torture and summary execution of injured, blood-soaked, helpless Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, the front page of the Daily Star newspaper read:

‘Mad Dog Put Down.’

An article in the Sun was titled:

‘Dead dog.’ (24 October 2011)

The response of Hillary Clinton, then US Secretary of State, was to laugh gleefully and say:

‘We came, we saw, he died.’

British prime minister David Cameron also found mirth amid the gore in a jovial speech celebrating the Hindu festival of Diwali:

‘Obviously, Diwali being the festival of a triumph of good over evil, and also celebrating the death of a devil [audience laughter], perhaps there’s a little resonance in what I’m saying tonight.’ (BBC News at Ten, 20 October 2011)

‘The Facts Are Enough’

Noam Chomsky is a famously cool, untheatrical speaker. In conversation with David Barsamian, Chomsky explained:

‘As you know from having heard me speak, I’m not a particularly charismatic speaker, and if I had the capacity to do so I wouldn’t use it. I’m really not interested in persuading people; I don’t want to, and I try to make this point obvious. What I’d like to do is help people persuade themselves… I think there are a lot of analytic perspectives, just straight information, that people are not presented with. The only thing I would like to be able to contribute is that.’ (Noam Chomsky with David Barsamian, ‘Chronicles of Dissent’, AK Press, 1992, pp.159)

Chomsky also explained his opposition to rhetorical devices of persuasion:

‘It’s just kind of an authoritarian practice one should keep away from. The same is true for teaching. It seems to me that the best teacher would be the one who allows students to find their way through complex material as you lay out the terrain. Of course, you can’t avoid guiding, because you’re doing it a particular way and not some other way. But it seems to me that a cautionary flag should go up if you’re doing it too much, because the purpose is to enable students to be able to figure out things for themselves, not to know this thing or to understand that thing but to understand the next thing that’s going to come along; that means you’ve got to develop the skills to be able to critically analyze and inquire and be creative. This doesn’t come from persuasion or forcing things on people.’ (Noam Chomsky, ‘On Democracy and Education’, RoutledgeFalmer, 2003, p.376)

That, of course, does not mean that Chomsky cares less than the fire-breathers:

‘You can’t talk about the tremendous suffering that we’re inflicting upon people without having a good deal of emotion, either under control or actually expressed. I try to keep it under control, but it’s certainly there.’ (Chomsky and Barsamian, op. cit., p.360)

No-one has been more successful in persuading people to ‘persuade themselves’ to accept rational ideas than Chomsky. Would he have been even more successful if he had thumped a few tubs and banged a few tables? One of India’s finest legal minds, Dr Harisingh Gaur, gave this advice to his law students:

‘When you have a case which is absolutely favorable – the facts are with you, the case is going to be won by you absolutely – then be very humble before the court, very polite, just suggestive. Bring out all the facts, but don’t be aggressive; there is no need, the facts are enough…

‘But if you are one hundred percent certain that you are going to lose the case, because all the facts are against you, all the witnesses are against you – your client has been caught red-handed – then be aggressive, violent. Throw the law books, bash the books and beat the table. Be a nuisance – less than that won’t do. You don’t have any chance unless you are so violent and so aggressive, throwing the books and laws around and bashing them, that you create a confusion. Perhaps that may help.

‘Just confuse the court, and let the court know…. If a man is so assertive and so violent and so certain, then there must be something in it, that he is so bravely facing them; otherwise…. So, create the suspicion, the doubt, and take advantage of the doubt.’

Chomsky is so persuasive because he has a case ‘which is absolutely favourable’, so that ‘the facts are enough’. Millions of people have been convinced by him precisely because he doesn’t bang tables. We instinctively know that red-faced bluster is associated, at best, with egotism; at worst, with the kind of Machiavellian cynicism of ‘mainstream’ politicians who have no case at all.

In similar vein, in the video linked here, a sweetly smiling Professor Jeffrey Sachs responds to Piers Morgan’s provocative question with five minutes of truth on the history of the Ukraine war. Again, ‘the facts are enough’.

In response to Johnstone’s celebration of Kissinger’s death, I posted a sentiment that has been a civilising thread running through many human cultures for millennia:

‘There is, of course, the other argument: if enough people are able to feel compassion even for the likes of Kissinger, then we’ll be developing a level of compassion that can start to genuinely drain the hatred and cruelty from the world.’

A poster on X replied:

‘oh fuck off with that sanctimonious nonsense

‘that man was a demon and may he rest in piss.’

It was obvious from everything that appears on X that my comment would generate this kind of reaction. And yet, some of the most inspiring and least naïve humans who ever lived have made this idea their prime focus. Jesus said:

‘But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.’ (Matthew 5:44)

Buddha said:

‘Hatred can never put an end to hatred; love alone can. This is an unalterable law.’ (Cited, Eknath Easwaran, ‘The Dhammapada’, Arkana, 2009, p.78)

Indeed, the Buddha’s comment speaks to the strange impotence of the crazed violence currently being unleashed by Israel in Gaza and Lebanon. The longer the carnage continues, the more we sense its impotence in putting an end to the hatred, outrage and resistance it is seeking to crush. Every bomb kills one seed but sows a thousand more. This is indeed an unalterable law.

If we understand that our ego receives a backhanded boost when we revile Kissinger, then we can understand that anything suggesting doubt or complexity – that is, anything that keeps the ego from its trough – will be experienced as viscerally frustrating and, in fact, offensive. And notice, I did not question the truth or gravity of Kissinger’s crimes – I wasn’t ‘gaslighting’, trying to muddy the waters. More reasonably, another poster commented on my message:

‘It’s difficult to feel compassion for anyone whose “difficult” decisions result in the deaths of millions simply to satisfy powerful interests. It’s not as if he ever seriously repented or apologised for the outcomes of policies he advocated.’

This is true, of course. But in many spiritual traditions, it is the very fact that it is difficult to feel compassion for ‘The Bad Guy’ that creates an opportunity. After all, it is easy to feel compassion for a suffering child, or a beloved relative. But if we believe it is a good thing to feel compassion, if the capacity to feel unbearable compassion is a key difference between people willing to sell their souls to state-corporate power and those who don’t, and if we believe that compassion can be strengthened through practice, then ‘lifting’ the heavyweight criminal Kissinger is like a weight-lifter pumping a heavy weight to become stronger. The Dalai Lama commented:

‘It is like removing a huge stone that has been blocking the flow of water in a canal. Once you remove the stone, the water immediately starts to flow. Similarly, once you are able to cultivate loving-kindness and compassion toward your enemy, you will easily be able to cultivate loving-kindness and compassion toward all sentient beings. Therefore, if you are able to see the enemy as the supreme basis of the practice of patience, and if you are able to generate a stronger kind of compassion in relation to your enemy, this indicates success in your practice.’ (The Dalai Lama, ‘The Joy of Living and Dying in Peace’, Thorsons, 1998, pp.108-109)

In one of the foundational texts of Tibetan Buddhism, ‘Bodhicaryāvatāra’, the 9^th century sage Shantideva devotes a whole chapter to thoughts of this kind:

‘If those who are like wanton children

Are by nature prone to injure others,

There’s no reason for our rage;

It’s like resenting fire for being hot.

‘And if their faults are fleeting and contingent,

If living beings are by nature mild,

It’s likewise senseless to resent them –

As well be angry at the sky when it is full of smoke!’ (Shantideva, ‘The Way of the Bodhisattva’, Shambhala Classics, 2006, pp.82-83)

As a 15-year-old boy in the United States, Kip Kenkel’s brain was ‘full of smoke’ when he shot his father through the back of his head one morning, then murdered his mother, and then killed two students at his school, shooting two dozen others. Brain disorder specialist and psychologist Dr Daniel Amen, who has scanned over 200,000 brains, checked Kenkel’s for signs of damage:

‘His brain was so awful, like I’d never seen a 15-year-old that had a brain so damaged, and his life reflected it.’

Dr Amen described Kenkel’s brain as ‘shrivelled’, speculating that it could have been severely damaged by oxygen deprivation at birth, or as the result of an infection, or poisoning of some kind, possibly lead. Dr Amen’s clinics have scanned the brains of over 1,000 convicted criminals, including more than 100 murderers:

‘Many Amen Clinics patients who exhibited violence… had left temporal lobe abnormalities… Assault, murder, rape, arson, and other criminal behaviors are often associated with problems in this part of the brain.’

Having spent 30 years as a forensic psychologist and psychotherapist interviewing ‘hundreds of criminals who have committed terrible offences’, Dr Gwen Adshead asserts that ‘people who kill are not mindless monsters who are born that way’. Therefore, Dr Adshead argues:

‘… monstering people is not helpful. It is simply one way to deal with rage and fear. And we miss a chance to reduce and prevent violence if we write off everyone who has murdered or abused in that way’.

As Shantideva said, if Kissinger was born bad – if it was his nature to be destructive – then there is no basis for being angry with a helpless product of natural processes. On the other hand, if he was born good but was made toxic by familial, cultural and environmental conditions, then we would do better to blame the ‘smoke’, the conditions, not the initially healthy human ‘shrivelled’ by them.

This is all perfectly rational, but it is not popular with the ego at feeding time (and it is always feeding time!). It is a conflict which accounts for the remarkable phenomenon noted by psychologist Erich Fromm when he described:

‘… man’s capacity of not observing what he does not want to observe; hence, that he may be sincere in denying a knowledge which he would have, if he wanted only to have it (H.S. Sullivan coined the very appropriate term “selective inattention”).’ (Fromm, ‘Beyond the Chains of Illusion’, Abacus, 1989, p.94)

Alas, this ‘selective inattention’ tends to spread – we may end up complaining about everyone and everything, with miserable consequences for our close relationships and wider society. In a reversal of the Dalai Lama’s practice, if we decide Kissinger is to be loathed, we can end up bashing our car with a tree branch because it refuses to start or kicking a table because we banged our knee on it.

Another response to my message on X read:

‘It’s not “we” who need to feel the compassion it’s “they” who need to feel it. I’ve known a few psychopaths in my 74yrs, some were even friends for awhile. I listened to them many times, and I can assure you that feeling compassion for them doesn’t help their victims one bit.’

But the point is that it is important for us to feel compassion – it helps us. In ‘Altered Traits’, psychologist Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, sketch a miniature portrait of the master meditator Neem Karoli, known as Maharaji:

‘Maharaji seemed always to be absorbed in some state of ongoing, quiet rapture, and, paradoxically, at the same time was attentive to whoever was with him. What struck Dan [Goleman] was how utterly at peace and how kind Maharaji was…

‘There was something about his ineffable state of mind that Dan had never sensed in anyone before meeting Maharaji. No matter what he was doing, he seemed to remain effortlessly in a blissful, loving space, perpetually at ease. Whatever state Maharaji was in seemed not some temporary oasis of the mind, but a lasting way of being: a trait of utter wellness.’ (Goleman and Davidson, ‘Altered Traits’, Penguin, 2018, p.21)

Witnessing someone permanently living in this loving state was a life-changing experience for Goleman. But people like Maharaji are not extra-terrestrials; they are not supermen or superwomen. They are ordinary people who have spent time mastering the art of meditation.

This loving state – the natural state of a human being liberated from obsessive thinking – is completely indiscriminate. If our beloved is heard moving in the next room, love is felt for her. If a bird chirrups, the heart resonates with love for the bird. If some auld enemy on X comes to mind, even that name or face is embraced with love. In this condition, if Henry Kissinger’s demise pops into the mind, we feel compassion for a 100-year-old man helpless and alone in the face of death.

Does this mean we ignore, excuse or condone his crimes? On the contrary, it means we have a greater loving, dissident impetus to prevent similar people from committing similar crimes, to protect more innocents from suffering the consequences.

Hate certainly empowers the activist ego but it incinerates the compassion that was the motive for activism in the first place.

David Edwards is co-editor of medialens.org and author of the forthcoming, ‘A Short Book About Ego… And The Remedy of Meditation’, Mantra Books, 2025. Email: davidmedialens@gmail.com

In 1859, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote that China offered a ‘warning example’ to the West. Yes, Mill sniffed, Chinese culture had benefited from ‘men to whom even the most enlightened European must accord, under certain limitations, the title of sages and philosophers’, but the Chinese mind had long since lost any capacity for ‘human progressiveness’:

‘… they have become stationary – have remained so for thousands of years; and if they are ever to be further improved, it must be by foreigners’. (John Stuart Mill, ‘On Liberty’, Penguin, 1974, p.137)

‘Improved’ by whom? By ‘us’, of course, the ‘foreigners’, ‘the more civilised portions of the species’, whose ‘human progressiveness’ over the subsequent two centuries has generated record-breaking temperatures, storms, floods, droughts, wildfires, mass destruction of species and numerous other disasters to our ‘improved’ world whose climate is most certainly not ‘stationary’. Just a single, recent example:

‘Fuelled by climate change, the world’s oceans have broken temperature records every single day over the past year, a BBC analysis finds.

‘Nearly 50 days have smashed existing highs for the time of year by the largest margin in the satellite era.’ (My emphasis)

One thing is clear, for all our hubris, when we unleashed our industrialised efforts to ensure the world was ‘further improved’, we knew not what we were doing. Stumbling in the dark over a cliff is not ‘progress’.

For Westerners like Mill, and now much of the world’s Westernised monoculture, ‘progress’ has always been a matter, not just of change, but of change transcending natural limits. It has meant ‘conquering’, ‘dominating’, ‘improving’ upon nature, and ultimately moving beyond the Earth itself to new worlds.

This worldview was exemplified by Korean War fighter pilot and astronaut Neil Armstrong’s famous comment after he became the first person to set foot on the moon in 1969:

‘That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.’

The words are often matched with an equally famous picture of Earth viewed from the moon as a blue-green marble shining against the blackness of space. Noam Chomsky put this mythmaking in perspective:

‘NASA offered new ways to milk the public for private gain, while also helping the Kennedy administration to arouse badly needed jingoist sentiments, at least until people tired of watching spacemen stumbling about the moon to no purpose.’ (Chomsky, ‘World Orders, Old and New’, Pluto Press, 1994, p.105)

Armstrong’s comment clearly implied that we were on some kind of purposeful path – if it was a ‘giant leap for mankind’, it must have been in a meaningful direction. Indeed, the ‘leap’ into space is widely deemed as natural and right as birds flying the nest, as children leaving home, as Europeans sailing on a tide of ‘manifest destiny’ to ravage the ‘New World’. But can we really be sure these are valid analogies?

Certainly, it is right and good that both bird and child fly the nest, but they remain an integral part of the environment for which they are perfectly evolved. Would it be ‘progress’ for a human cell to permanently fly the nest of the human body?

Casting all such doubts aside, a million science fiction films, TV series, novels and short stories encourage us to believe that it is right and natural for an organism evolved on Earth to head off-planet. Astronauts are depicted traveling vast distances under unaccountably Earth-like gravity without ill effects. It is taken for granted that our ‘destiny’ lies ‘out there’, where we will find something more: answers, Truth, perhaps even God.

Consider Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 science fiction epic, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, released at a time when faith in the promise of science-based ‘progress’ burned a lot brighter than it does in our decaying time.

At the heart of the story are mysterious alien obelisks able to accelerate human evolution, initially stimulating primitive hominids to master the use of tools and weapons. In the age of space travel, a second obelisk, discovered on the moon, and a third orbiting Jupiter, trigger the next evolutionary leap, as an astronaut is transported to a far-distant world where he is revamped, refurbished and returned to Earth as a more highly evolved ‘star child’. The central, unquestioned conceit of the film: ‘progress’ means transcending ‘the surly bonds of Earth’.

‘Into The Stars’

Brian Cox, a professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester and a high-profile BBC presenter, commented recently:

‘Our civilisation must expand beyond Earth for so many reasons. It’s extremely important that we do it, and as quickly as possible.’

Reportedly a staunch advocate of ‘a collaborative approach between state-run space agencies and private enterprises’, Cox added:

‘If we don’t expand into the stars, no one else will. It becomes an obligation for us to take those first steps.’

The counterargument, of course: it might be that ‘no one else’ is expanding ‘into the stars’ for the same reason that ‘no one else’, perhaps, is infesting their planet with nuclear weapons or eroding their environmental life-support systems. In other words, perhaps because it is a bad idea. It may be a signature goal of an aggressively high-tech, expansionist worldview that quickly proves suicidal.

If Cox seems to, at last, be promising a Star Trek-like voyage to ‘the final frontier’, he brings us down to Mars with a bump, saying of the red planet:

‘It is actually the only place we can go beyond Earth.

‘In any plausible scenario, there is nowhere else that humans can go to begin their step outwards from a planet other than Mars, other than the Moon.’

The grand vision, then: mankind may one day stumble about Mars to no purpose.

Certainly, Cox’s expansion ‘into the stars’ will have to wait, given that the closest star, Proxima Centauri, is about 4.24 light-years away; one light-year being the equivalent of 5.88 thousand billion miles. How far is that? Well, NASA’s speedy spacecraft, Juno, travels at 165,000 mph. At that rate, it would take 2,958 years to travel one light year.

But there’s more and worse. Thomas Lang, a professor of radiology and biomedical imaging at the University of California, San Francisco, comments:

‘People think of technology as the limiting factor in space flight, but it’s not. Human physiology is the limiting factor.’

The problem:

‘We’re attuned to living in gravity.’

Not just to gravity, but to the precise level of gravity found on this planet, at this distance from the Sun, with this moon orbiting at exactly this range of distances. Even the waxing and waning of the moon has profound impacts on female menstrual cycles and other patterns of human and animal behaviour. Many people are strongly impacted even by the arising of a full moon. I myself have often noticed an unexplained restlessness. The mystery is often resolved the moment I glance up at the night sky.

Given this extreme level of sensitivity even to our small moon, what would be the result if all our usual gravitational influences were completely removed for years?

The impact of altered gravity on human physiology became very clear during the first Apollo space flights in the 1960s and 1970s. After just eight days in orbit, Apollo astronauts were so weak that they had to be pulled from their landing capsules. The common misunderstanding is that this is simply because muscles have been idle in the absence of gravity. Sonja Schrepfer, a professor of surgery, comments:

‘When astronauts return to Earth’s gravity, muscle weakness is only part of the reason they can’t stand up. They also don’t get enough blood to their brain, because their vessel function is impaired.’

A report in Nature adds some sobering detail:

‘Gravity ensures that the blood in our body maintains an optimum blood pressure level. While standing, the blood pressure in our feet is as high as 200 mm Hg (millimetres of mercury). In the brain however, the pressure is only 60 to 80 mmHg. Take gravity away and the blood pressure equalizes around 100 mmHg throughout our body. Our face puffs up with fluid and our legs thin out because the fluid drains out. The shift to higher blood pressure in the head triggers an alarm that the body has too much blood. Increased blood pressure can make the blood vessels bleed. Optic nerves can swell and this can impair the vision. High blood pressure can lead to a stroke that can damage that area in the brain that processes images. Thus, gravity acts as an important force that helps to maintain the correct pressure in the right places in our body.’

Schrepfer notes that the immune system is also affected:

‘Over half of the Apollo astronauts had some sort of immune problem. So, we knew back then that the immune system wasn’t working well in space.’

These are the same changes found in the less robust immune systems of the elderly. While on Earth the changes take 30 years, in space they begin to occur after 30 minutes.

Lang found that astronauts returning from a six-month stay on the International Space Station had lost between 6-9 per cent of the total bone density from their hips; about as much in a month as a postmenopausal woman loses in a year.

A September 2024 report by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found:

‘After a month at the International Space Station, a set of 48 bioengineered human heart tissue samples beat about half as strong as similar tissues that remained on Earth.

‘The tissues also became weaker and started showing genetic evidence of inflammation and oxidative damage that are hallmarks of heart disease.’

In 2016, an article in Nature described the fate of astronaut Scott Kelly, who suffered ‘loss of bone mass, atrophied muscles, and redistribution of blood within his body that has strained his heart’.

It seems the very size of the cells in our body are impacted by changes in gravity, with all manner of cascading impacts.   

But why would we not expect every aspect of our physical and psychological functioning to be massively affected by such a radical change? As Thomas Lang says, our entire organism is ‘attuned’ to our level of gravity. Is it too much to imagine that it is simply not possible for human beings to spend extended periods of time isolated from these precise gravitational requirements?

A Giant Leap Away From Hubris

Despite emerging out of a materialistic, militaristic, unspiritual worldview, the ‘space race’ has always been rooted in a quasi-religious idea: that human nature, or perhaps Life, is inherently expansive, extroverted (although, simultaneously, ‘progress’ is supposed to be about transcending nature). It is somehow our ‘destiny’ to move out into the universe.

The superstition is reinforced by astronauts who typically wear the beatific smiles of a priestly caste doing, if not God’s work, then the work of natural selection, of Life, as they prepare for our next ‘giant leap’.

But perhaps this version of ‘progress’ is a complete misinterpretation of the needs and nature of our life on this planet.

Can we conceive of a different version? Could ‘progress’ mean rejecting the idea that we can, or should, try to ‘conquer’ and ‘transcend’ nature? Could ‘progress’, instead, mean fitting ourselves in, as individuals and societies, ever more wisely and sensitively with the world around us? Could ‘progress’ mean understanding how nature functions and how to avoid causing catastrophic harm to both ourselves and others?

Consider the example of a key requirement for survival: food. The disastrous industrial product that we call ‘processed food’ might just as well be called ‘progress food’. Cardiologist William Davis comments:

‘Of the 60,000 products on the typical supermarket’s shelves, only a handful are truly healthy and safe. It’s a striking example of how, when misguided dietary advice and profit-seeking converge, unhealthy foods proliferate, growing the profits of Big Food.’ (William Davis, ‘Undoctored’, Rodale, 2017, p.141)

Davis adds:

‘Processed foods are landmines of sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, wheat and corn, hydrogenated oils, sodium nitrate, herbicide and pesticide residues, genetically modified ingredients with Bt toxin and glyphosate, bovine growth hormone, antibiotic residues, acrylamides, aspartame, synthetic food colourings, even arsenic.’

Carefully study the labels of processed food labels, Davis suggests, remove items containing these ingredients, and ‘there will be almost nothing left’. (p.142)

Our technologically ‘improved’ society is beset by epidemics of obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, cancer, depression, anxiety, insomnia and numerous other ills. In response, honest dietary and medical experts recommend exercise and food that are compatible with our evolutionary past. It turns out, we are best sustained by organic fresh food, freshly cooked, locally sourced, following a roughly Mediterranean diet. It turns out that ‘progress’ food is poison. Davis again:

‘Choose real, single-ingredient foods as close to their natural state as possible.’ (p.143)

A single-ingredient orange is good for us. Orange juice stripped of its fibrous pulp generates a sugar spike that is harmful to our hearts and brains. We need the fibre, the orange in its natural state.

It turns out that, when it comes to food health, ‘stationary’, after all, was good. What we have evolved to eat is good for us, while ‘further improved’ is bad.

There are other consequences, of course. Our ‘improved’ weather is hammering food crops around the world. In the UK this autumn, extreme weather has reduced grape harvests by 33%-75%, wheat 21%, barley 26%, and oilseed rape 32%. Colin Chappell, an arable farmer in Lincolnshire, said:

‘We’re getting into a situation where autumn planting is becoming unviable due to flooding and spring planting is risky because of drought.’

Other countries are being hit as hard, or harder.

An alternative version of ‘progress’ might involve exposing the truth that the science-based, high-tech version of ‘progress’, while profitable in the short term, is pyrrhic in nature, bringing longer-term disaster.

When we ‘improve’ the world with plastic, do we not poison the seas, ourselves included, with micro-plastic? When we ‘improve’ our lives with coal, cars and capitalism, do we not accelerate towards the abyss of climate disaster? When we ‘improve’ long-distance communication, do we not do so at the expense of short-distance communication, as infants, teenagers, all of us, vanish into our touchscreens?

Progressively Sitting Quietly, Doing Nothing

Enlightened mystics like Chuang Tzu, Lao tse and Lieh tzu – the Chinese ‘sages and philosophers’ (‘under certain limitations’) patronised by Mill – saw deeply into the human mind, and identified a fundamental feature: the mind is not interested in what it has, in what is ‘here’ and ‘now’. It is interested in what it does not have, in what is ‘there’ and ‘then’.

The human mind lives in the imagined past and future. It is hardly conscious at all of a present moment viewed as an obstacle to reaching the greener grass of some ‘better’ moment ahead. We are not really ‘here’, we are not truly awake; we are lost in a dream of elsewhere and elsewhen. And so, we hardly even notice that the actual world in this moment is falling apart.

The distant is a blank canvas on which the mind projects its dream of perfection, and no canvas is more distant and blank than the journey ‘into the stars’. But the promise is hollow – the ‘amazing’ future eventually becomes the ‘uninteresting’ present and is replaced by some other blank canvas on which to paint some new dream. It is an endless process of self-deception and disappointment.

Real progress is that described by the decidedly ‘stationary’ Japanese mystic, Basho:

‘Sitting quietly, doing nothing,

‘Spring comes, and the grass grows, by itself.’

When we finally return home from our endless voyages into the imagined future and past; when we just sit, fully focused on the experience of being alive ‘here’ and ‘now’, an amazing adventure into the present moment begins. The world finally starts to become alive to us. For the head-trapped modern with a cardboard heart, the spring comes, the grass begins to grow.

This is unknown territory – we haven’t been ‘here’, ‘now’, since we were small children. We relax, truly, for the first time. A surge of unaccountable bliss – and something else, love – arises in our heart and lower belly. It seems impossible, just sitting, doing nothing – but there it is!

In this moment, thoughts of ‘progress’ seem utterly absurd – what more do we need than love and bliss? We become as glorious as any ‘star child’ in any science fiction fantasy.

This is the real journey. True progress involves returning from our ‘improvements’ to a new appreciation of the perfection that already exists.

David Edwards is co-editor of medialens.org and author of the forthcoming, ‘A Short Book About Ego… And The Remedy of Meditation’, Mantra Books, 2025.

Email: davidmedialens@gmail.com