Something to Think About

“There is someone I want you to meet,” said Jamie.

Jamie took me to the lobby of a large hotel.

He looked around and headed to a table where a man was seated and talking on a cell phone.

The man smiled and gestured us to sit and wrapped up his call.

“So you completed the ride. Good.  The bicycle is a great invention. It amplifies our personal motion. It extends our home range. It is full of innovations. And it’s a great way to stay fit. That’s why I love the bicycle.”

That sounded familiar.

“I am hoping you can help us”, he said.

“We still have the brains of hunters who lived in tiny groups and hated every other group. Creativity, our unique gift,  comes out of the neocortex, but 85% of our behaviour is unconscious and driven by the old brain. It is a miracle we have got this far….”

“Religious fanatics now have the capacity to do terrible harm. If we understood better how our brains are seized by religions, we might find better ways of satisfying that need. Maybe humans need religions. If only there was a religion that recognises who and what we are, a series of connected life forms on a single planet in a huge universe…”

“Does any of this resonate with you?”, he said, after a pause.

I didn’t say anything. Where was this going?

“I know of your work. Believe it or not, I must have read your pieces when I was growing up, in Santa Barbara.

And Jamie tells me you have been part of a Zen practice..though I do not think you practice any more. Why is that?”

I said I was not sure, I would need to think about that.

“Intelligent people cannot believe in anthropic religions with gods who look just like us, but I think there is a hunger for something that is missing as a result. Buddhism is the only major world religion which has no god, but as its name implies, it is bound to the story of an individual and carries too much baggage. We have no  contemporary tradition of monastic practice.  At the heart of a contemporary religion must be the truth, the truth about who we are as a species, and we know the truth now but we have no structures in which to worship it…:”

He said he had set up a meeting for me the following day at the place he called The Centre.

It is August the 20th, the day after the American journalist James Foley was beheaded by a jihadist with a British accent.

“Let’s just call him Alan,” Jamie had said after we left.