Letters to My Grandson , livre ebook

LETTERs TO MY GRANDSON
why the unexamined life is not worth living
P D Goldsmith
Non-Duality Press
letters to my grandson
First edition published July 2013 by Non-Duality Press
© P D Goldsmith 2013
© Non-Duality Press 2013
Cover photos by James Goldsmith
P D Goldsmith has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the Publisher.
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Softcover isbn: 978-1-908664-33-4
Hardback isbn: 978-1-908664-34-1
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Dedication
To my parents, who never spoke to me about most of the subjects in this book, but who somehow passed them on through their love.
To Diane, for being Diane.
To our children, Lucy and James, who somewhat to my surprise and in spite of my efforts, have developed into vaguely normal, well-balanced human beings.
To my grandchildren Olivia, Claudia and, of course, Sebastian.
And especially to Laura for acting as ‘secretary’ in Italy and who typed out most of this manuscript while I had the easy part of simply dictating it! Without her generosity, open-heartedness, unfailing support and love these letters would never have happened.
Table of Contents
- INTRODUCTION -
My dear Sebastian,
I am sitting in a wonderful Italian resort overlooking the sea at Santa Maria Sebastian di Castellabate and I decided, with considerable help and support from Laura, to start on a series of letters to you to express some of the possible wisdom that I have accumulated over my sixty-seven years. That is not an arrogant or egotistical statement; it is simply a matter of fact that as one gets older one does accumulate some wisdom, whether by exploration of oneself or simply through the experiences of life. These can be happy or painful at times, but actually are always rather interesting.
Nobody knows how long each person has upon this earth. One may think that one is in good health and everything is going swimmingly, but it does not stop the possibility that a disaster could strike at any time, as happens in so many places in the world. I hope my time on this earth will be a lot longer so that I can know you when you are older, but no one can predict how long one has and it is probably a blessing that that is so.
This series of letters is a distillation of the essence of my experiences on subjects which I hope you will find interesting in due course. Some you may not fully understand until you are quite a bit older, but at least you will have them before you.
You may well ask, and no doubt your parents will, why these are letters to you rather than to your sisters Olivia and Claudia. I hope what I have to say will be useful to them as well, but because I am a man what I say will inevitably have a male slant in the writing and may have more relevance to you than to them.
I should add one thing at the outset. There may or may not be some good advice in these letters. But nothing in them should be regarded as totally prescriptive. I have simply set things out as I see them. And some of what I have said may even, perish the thought, be wrong! So do not worry if you do not agree with any of what I say.
So to the letters. There is a generally held view that there are three aspects of knowledge: the spiritual, the emotional and the physical. In truth, I do not think one can make such a differentiation and I will come on to that in a later letter; but for the sake of practicality, I propose to start with the physical, then move on to the mind, then to the emotions, and end up with arguably the most important – the spiritual.
So let us make a start.
Your loving Grandfather.
- Letter One -
The Body and the Physical World
My dear Sebastian,
I suppose the first place to start in any exploration is with what is nearest and probably dearest to many of us – the body. What traditionally happens is that the baby comes out of the womb, the doctor may give it a slap on the bottom, the baby yells, and a new life is born. I was present at your mother’s birth, and I do not recall her crying very much but just looking at me with big wide eyes. Clearly everything must be very new and extraordinary to the new baby. Its needs are very simple: food and sleep. These needs remain fairly constant throughout our lives. The baby has extraordinary power, whilst being completely fragile. It has the power to cause its parents, and even other adults, to sacrifice their lives for its sake. How this is done is a bit of a mystery, but it also happens in the animal kingdom. The lion, particularly the female, will protect her cub in the most grave circumstances, even to the point of sacrificing her life. You also see the power that babies have over adults in the way that women so readily feel full of love at the sight of a new baby. So there are some pretty important forces at work here about which we really know very little.
So the baby proceeds on its way, becoming larger as a result of the food and rest that it has through its sleep. It looks at everything with an uncritical eye. It radiates love and that is why so many observers of the baby connect with it.
And then a strange thing happens. At about the age of two or three, things start to get a bit tricky. The young infant, who has grown up in this unconditional love, seems to become bigger physically, but smaller in the sense that he or she appears to feel more limited. A certain identification process starts and the infant no longer seems to be bathed in this unconditional love, but becomes identified, only to a slight degree at this point, with his name and who he thinks he is. The infant’s wants are very immediate and if they are not satisfied, he gets cross and may even have a tantrum. I should say, of course, that this is not confined to infants or children, but is how most adults operate as well.
Can this identification with one’s name and body be avoided? Generally speaking, it would appear not – this seems to be the lot of the human being, as though there is a move from unconditional love to a kind of sleep and identification.
We will come onto the question of the nature of this sleep in a later letter, but it is one of the fundamental questions of life when one becomes aware of the sad consequences of this sleep that the question may arise – ‘Is it possible to wake up?’
So what actually is the body? I am not a scientist or a biologist, and frankly the question does not interest me much. All I know is that I have this body, that it needs feeding, that it needs sleep and it needs something called sex, which we will come onto in another letter. The body is an extraordinary piece of equipment and far more advanced than any computer. There is no shortage of books about the miraculous nature of the body, how the heart pumps the blood around the system in an uncomplaining fashion and how the body only gives up, in due course, through old age or if it has been misused, principally through wrong diet and lack of exercise.
So here we have this wonderful machine: we don’t really know why we are here or what we should do with it, but more of that later.
There is a principle that I heard about many years ago in a school of philosophy that I attended for a long period, called ‘measure’. There is also a saying which states, ‘Nothing in excess’. This was inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi in Greece (together with another powerful injunction ‘Know thyself’). When one gets the hang of this and the right measure it is a very simple thing. The knowledge will arise as to what to eat, how to eat, how to live etc. The problem is getting the hang of this – it is not that easy. The general nature of the human being is such that if he enjoys one ice cream he will want another. He thinks that the second ice cream will bring him as much enjoyment as the first, but it never does. But if you are aware, the body will tell you when it has really had enough and you just need to follow what the body tells you. Personally, I have always found this very difficult. For example, one of the many possible principles of eating is that one should eat so that the stomach is one third full of food, one third water and one third space. I have always tended to eat until it is three thirds full of food.
You will find that in much of the advice I give you in these letters it will be a matter of do as I say, rather than do as I do. This is also human nature; people are very good at giving advice to others, but not so good at acting on their own advice or the advice of others.
So what food should we put into our bodies? This is a question that has caused endless debate and argument. If you look at Genesis 1, Verse 29, you will see that the Bible says, “And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.” You will note that it does not include killing animals in order to feed the body. Later on in the Bible it becomes apparent that man was unable or unwilling to keep to such a simple diet. There is a story that God said that, rather than kill one another, man would be allowed to kill animals for food, but the blood, which is the life force, should not be eaten. Hence, for example in the Jewish faith, the kosher laws were introduced so that the blood would be drained out of the animal before it is eaten.
I have been vegetarian most of my life and that is a personal choice. It is important that whatever views you hold about anything, including your diet, they are not imposed upon anyone