Letters to My Grandson , livre ebook

188

pages

English

Ebooks

0001

Écrit par
P.D. Goldsmith

Publié par
New Harbinger Publications

Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Découvre YouScribe et accède à tout notre catalogue !

Je m'inscris

Découvre YouScribe et accède à tout notre catalogue !

Je m'inscris

188

pages

English

Ebooks

0001

Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

New Harbinger Publications

Date de parution

01 janvier 0001

EAN13

9781626256514

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

28 Mo

A charming, wise and idiosyncratic series of twelve letters which give advice to the author's grandson on what it means to become a man. The letters cover fundamental, sensitive and profound matters such as the body and the physical world; smoking, alcohol and drugs; healing the body; character; culture; the role in society; the nature of men and women; relationships; sex; family and fatherhood; and religion. The book also reflects on why the unexamined life is not worth living, with the final substantial letter offering a radical approach to the philosophical and spiritual questions that all of us are likely to ask at some point in our lives.

Although the book primarily addresses the needs of young men moving towards adulthood, much of its content would be of equal interest to young women. In addition, the book contains a generous appendix with suggested reading, film and music lists.

Grandfathers will find this a useful handbook for discussions with grandchildren; parents will get a wider perspective of the problems their children are likely to face and what they are feeling; and if you are a young man, you are lucky indeed to have this book as a companion.

Voir

Publié par

New Harbinger Publications

Date de parution

01 janvier 0001

EAN13

9781626256514

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

28 Mo

LETTERS TO MY GRANDSON

whytheunexaminedlifeisnotworthliving

P D Goldsmith

NonDuality Press

LETTERS TO MY GR ANDSON First edition published July 2013 byNONDUALITYPRESS

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.

NONDUALITYPRESS| PO Box 2228 | Salisbury | SP2 2GZ United Kingdom

Softcover isbn: 9781908664334 Hardback isbn: 9781908664341 www.nondualitypress.org

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 sur prise 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.

III

TABLEOFCONTENTS

Introduction....................................................1................

LETTERONE: The Body and the Physical World ............... 3

LETTERTWO: Smoking, Alcohol and Drugs.................... 14

LETTERTHREE: Healing the Body .................................. 17

LETTERFOUR:Character ................................................. 21

LETTERFIVE:Culture...................................................... 46

LETTERSIX:Your Role in Society .................................. 57

LETTERSEVEN:............ 73The Nature of Men and Women

LETTEREIGHT:Relationships ......................................... 77

LETTERNINE:Sex ......................................................... 91

LETTERTEN:96Family and Fatherhood .............................

LETTERELEVEN:Religion .............................................. 101

LETTERTWELVE:Philosophy and the Spiritual Search....110

Appendix ....................................................................141

 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

LETTERSTOMYGRANDSON

interesting in due course. Some you may not fully under stand 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 

THEBODYANDTHEPHYSICALWORLD

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 extraor dinary 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, par ticularly 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.

LETTERSTOMYGRANDSON

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 con sequences 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 inter est 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 short age of books about the miraculous nature of the body, how the heart pumps the blood around the system in an

Voir