Where Does the Queen Keep Her Horse?

Body mind and Spirit 2

When I was a very small child my family spent holidays in what was, to me, the most wonderful place on earth, Pareora, a tiny village just South of Timaru. My grandfather worked there as chief shepherd at the freezing works and Nan and Pop had a house which seemed enormous to me. It had a swing and a place where Pop had set up an old motorcycle for us kids to pretend to ride. Nan cooked dinner and scones and sponge cakes in an old black coal range. A tiny green locomotive with a brass smokestack ran in a curve past the garden fence and the driver, Mr Gardiner (iirc) would wave and sound the whistle as he passed and occasionally let kids ride on the footplate. There were peas in the garden and apples on the trees, and a stony, inhospitable (and consequentially adventurous) beach nearby. But the most wonderful thing about Pareora was that the Queen lived there. Yes, really.

We used to go to the pictures at the Pareora Public Hall - the only time our family ever went to the pictures - and before every film they would play God Save The Queen and there she would be, sitting on the back of a horse, saluting, wearing a pair of white gloves which looked exactly like the ones worn by the lady in the foyer who sold icecreams out of a square box with a glass front. So, (obvs!), the Queen lived in the Pareora hall, sharing wardrobe items with the icecream lady. There was a room at the back where we kids weren't allowed to go, which was, no doubt, where she had her bed. But there was one puzzling thing: every time I saw her she was sitting on a horse, and although there was a paddock by the hall I had never seen a horse in it; just sheep, mostly, and once, a cow.

So where did the Queen keep her horse?

It was a bit of a mystery until I asked my brother. Alistair was 4 years older than me and knew pretty much everything - kind of a 50's version of Google but without the ads.

In retrospect I'm pretty impressed that, at about 8 years old, Alistair understood my question and was able to give an intelligible answer to a 4 year old. In the space of a few minutes, he managed to expand my world to include the intriguing new notions of London and motion picture technology.

Of course, nobody had told me the Queen lived in Pareora. I'd figured that out for myself from the data available to me, which is what all of us do, all the time. From our sensory interactions with the universe around us; from the things we are told, experience and imagine; using the ever changing connections in that astonishing organ between our ears, and the complex sensory organs of our bodies, we construct a personal set of thoughts about the world and everything in it, including thoughts about the Queen and where she lives.

When I use the word "thoughts" here, I mean more than just those little verbal narratives which constantly run through our minds. I mean the whole suite of mental activities: memories, dreams, reflections, speculations, feelings, intuitions, cognitions and all the rest of them. Our personal set of thoughts surrounds us in a kind of cloud, acting as a filter through which we are informed about the universe and by which we interact with the universe and everything in it - including other people. This cloud defines us and shapes us. It is what we mean when we speak of the self; when we speak of ME. It is what the New Testament is referring to in the word ψυχη (psyche).

When psyche is translated into English it is usually translated as either "Life" or "Soul". "Life" here means something similar to what we mean when we tell someone "get a life" rather than what we mean when we are trying to distinguish between something inanaimate like a rock and something living, like a platypus, so the sense of the Greek is more or less accurately reflected in English. "Soul" is a bit more problematic because, influenced by the heritage of classical Greek we tend to think of soul as a kind of essence or substance that lives inside us and which may, or may not have an existence independent of the body. If we are aware of the Bible's distinction between body, soul and spirit most people seem to think of these as being like a set of Russian dolls, fitting one inside the other and maintaining a sort of individual independence from each other. I think that the reality is more subtle than that. I think they are indivisible aspects of the same reality: aspects of being in a similar way that height width and depth are indivisible aspects of three dimensional objects.

When I observe my soul (and the ability to observe our souls is a significant phenomenon which I will comment on in a later post) there's some things I cant help noticing.

1. My soul is in a constant state of change. All the contents and constituent parts of my soul - ideas, dreams, intuitions, experiences and so forth - change, grow, develop, fade and die. Although I recognise a continuity in myself down through the years, in the soul of the 73 year old who is writing this, there is almost nothing remaining of the soul of the 4 year old who holidayed with his grandparents in the mid 1950s.

2. My soul is limited. My perceptions of the universe are only ever approximately true and sometimes they are downright false. My memories are often faulty and my intuitions misleading.

3. My soul and my body are deeply connected. Much of the content of my psyche depends on that part of my body which is between my ears, but it also seems to be connected to the rest of my body as well, so that I cannot do anything with my body which will not simultaneously affect my soul - and vice versa.

4. My soul isn't immortal. Or at least I don't think so. There was a time when this psyche didn't exist, and I expect there will be a time when it ceases to exist. Now I realise that this might be a controversial thing for a bishop to say, so I hasten to add that I do think that my consciousness will survive the death of my body. But my psyche won't have much to do with that. Or at least, I don't think so.

   
   

My soul is not a thing it is a process. My soul is the focus of my attention when I speak of "self development" or "self knowledge". If someone asks me "Kelvin, tell me a little about yourself" I will respond by describing various aspects of my soul. My soul is what I mean when I speak of ME. But there is a sense that it doesn't exist at all except as an impermanent construct - in much the same way as "Western Civilisation" or "The Romantic Movement" or "The Twenty First Century" exist as clearly identifiable "real " things, which upon closer examination reveal themselves instead as convenient illusions.

When I look back at my 4 year old self, nothing from that time remains. Nan and Pop died many years ago and in the 1980s their house disappeared under the parking lot of the Freezing works. My brother Alistair is dead, and so are many others who inhabited that never-never land of my past. The New Zealand we all lived in then continues, but has changed beyond recognition, as have I. But here's a weird thing. I look back and remember distinctly that conversation with my brother, and the I who was involved seems unchanged from the I who is remembered at 14 or 34 or 54 or yesterday. "I" seem to be unchanged and constant down all those years. Within the ever fluid, limited, finite "ME" there is an "I" which has observed it all. I will talk a bit about that, next time.