This being human is a guest-house. Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness.Welcome and attend them all.

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture, still treat each guest honourably:

he may be clearing you outfor some new delight.

Rumi

Chapter Two: MEDITATION

Here’s to True ViewONE BREATH AT A TIME...

A sizeable part of Buddhism’s powerful intellectual appeal lies in the (apparent) cogent and tightly-knit structure of The Dharma. The first of Buddha’s Four Ennobling Truths is founded on dukkha, the third of his Three Characteristics of Being – anicca, anatta and dukkha. “Anguish emerges from craving for life to be other than it is.” * The Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path as the best means of quenching tanha and relieving dukkha constitutes his fourth and final Truth.

However, this whole magnificent edifice quakes at its very fundament when one considers that in addition to these three characteristics of being selected by The Buddha, upon further equally cogent penetration we can derive three divers, antithetical qualities: stasis, spirit and sukha.

It is true that everything changes. Never can we twice mow the same lawn or even cross the same street. We are genetically programmed by its evolutionary advantage to “Spot the differences”, to be sensitive to change in our environment. It is equally true that, moment to moment, even more remains the same as changes. Between the big bang and the nightly news, nigh on but not quite everything has changed; in the space of an expiration, relatively little. The unrelenting niggling pressure from an unforgiving surgical stocking relentlessly knifing the sharp hard shard of keratin it continuously secretes into the fifth metatarsal’s obtruding knuckle always keeps one mindful that the sensation is equally constant and ever-changing. The juggler’s three balls move; he maintains control over them precisely because his position – and everything else in relation to them – does not change, moment to moment. Bounce him on a trampoline so that he too is changing moment to moment, and his feat becomes impossible. So we must counter-balance anicca with the essential quality of stasis. Everything changes, but only to a degree; even more, it stays the same. “It never ceases to amaze me how over the years we learn, experience and grow so much and yet remain the same.” (Margaret Patricia McDougall) (Without this, no zazen is possible…)

It may indeed be true that nothing is permanent. And yet perhaps the majority of humanity, including Buddhists, cannot escape the conclusion that there is something that does abide, even after the worms or cremation. This I call spirit. The five selfless skhandhas are functional aspects of the self, just as matter & energy are functional aspects of those very real atoms which compose the equally real, unified & integrated organism. ** The human self is neither simpler nor more confused than a body harnessing its soul even as microwaves quicken a cell-phone. *** As a matter of sheer logic, the Buddhist doctrines of anatta and reincarnation cannot both be true, cannot stand together. One of them – perhaps even both, but one of them at least – must go. (As a matter of empirical psychology, considered as experiential aspects of the zazen Gestalt, these phenomena are both quite something else again…)

Few situations in life are totally frustrating, just as few experiences are total bliss-outs. Most of our lives are rich admixtures of varying proportions of dukkha and sukha. The bitter and the sweet. Even given this, it is largely down to our own mental attitude just how we respond to life’s inevitable disappointments: whether we allow them to overshadow or even obliterate the grey cloud’s ubiquitous silver lining; or become a challenge instead to excellence. Further, anicca does not necessarily lead on inexorably to dukkha. The dance, for instance, inherently

relies on its constant change and movement and flow and motion for its very joy and delight. (As does that potentially intoxicating corroboree of now-consciousness known as zazen…)

So perhaps we can see now that Buddha’s Three Marks of Being are in fact the negative poles of three primordial antipodal dyads: stasis & anicca, spirit & anatta, sukha & dukkha. For a self-styled middle way, this is not a promising foundation, conceptually. But The Four Noble Truths are not a philosophy. Or a religion. Or a world faith. Nor – perhaps least of all – a school of mysticism. They are a non-directive cognitive behaviour therapist’s self-discovered prescription to wake himself up from the everyday dream of comatose normality; to break our addiction to the daily treadmill, our unreflected entrancement into a repeating crazy cycle/roller coaster ride of starvation & surfeit, of depression & elation, of boredom & bedevilment, of failure & success that keeps us trapped inside this waking dream state.

It is difficult perhaps to summon an image of the sage of the Shakyas as a troubled and angry young man given to extremes and excesses. And yet immediately prior to his awakening experience under the bodhi tree, that is what he most daffynitely was. One of the inscriptions over the entrance to Jung’s Bollingen inner sanctum read: “Nothing in excess.” Sound advice. And yet, prior to his awakening, Gautama’s life had been characterised by the greatest possible ofinordinacies, in opposing directions. In no sense did he come to his enlightenment by any middling path of moderation. For his first twenty nine years, he lived a spoilt life of utter luxury wherein his every whim was indulged. After being unbalanced by sights of quotidian suffering all too familiar to our teevee-calloused eyeballs, for six years he practised the extremes of every possible austerity and mortification. Under the bodhi tree, he finally reached rock bottom, experiencing the same intense depths of despair and desperation as many addicts and alcoholics and disillusioned sybarites, before and since. The difference was that he experienced in addition a supreme & overwhelming determination to find his solution or die in the effort.

I experienced a similar shock of recognizing everyday evil in 1973 when I happened to study Mllirrpum v Nabalco, and distracted by a delayed adolescent’s anger and outrage, I reflected that men are reimbursed in gold and knighthoods for telling so ably such transparent communal lies on which our power is based, with total disregard for their far-reaching harm. That respected elders of my own tribe were venal and corrupt. “Somewhere, someone lied.” (Shane Howard) (Alas, ‘tis ever thus.) And I experienced real shock three years later aged thirty as in the sweltering Summer heat of 1976-77 I watched my beloved Aunt Kit on her deathbed, after a lifetime of selfless love and innocent suffering, riddled with cancer, excreta flowing unrestrained from her virgin’s vagina. My father’s death in comparison twenty years earlier had been clean & unmessy & dignified. I had not signed on for a cosmos where this was in the prospectus. Was this Gotam’s same emotional reaction when first he caught sight of sickness, old age and death? Perhaps you can recall a similar watershed experience in your own life. My solution back then was to turn to drugs and debauchery and delusional insanity. Not so our noble Prince Siddhartha.

Just as in 1935, the alcoholic Dr Bob bottomed out in Akron, Ohio, so too round 525 BC, 60 clicks south of India’s holiest river, and not too many clicks further from her holiest city, Gotama was bottoming out under the bo tree. Just as Dr Bob clawed his way to his awakening through his & Bill W’s Twelve Step program, so too did Guatama come to his awakening

through his own four step Noble Truths process. Neither awakening happened overnight. Each was the end-product of a long period of suffering and painful gestation. And ripened and developed further over their respective lifetimes.

The Buddha formulated his Four Ennobling Truths each with its own specific and appropriate challenge to action: “Anguish is to be understood, its origins to be let go of, its cessation to be realized, the path to be cultivated.” * (Condensed from The Deer Park Sermon to the Five Bikkhus). By implementing these four action plans in any real life difficult situation, and applying them to the circumstances, one can ‘work’ the Noble Truths just as the recovering alcoholic ‘works’ their Twelve Steps, and as a result, comes to experience an awakening. It really is that simple and practical. And, it must be stressed, that unmystical. Thus, each of the four truths has its own corresponding step:

STEP ONE: understand the anguishwhich leads to

STEP TWO: let go of the cravingwhich in turn leads to

STEP THREE: realise the cessation of cravingwhich in its turn leads to

STEP FOUR: cultivate the eight-fold path.

Step One, understanding anguish, leads to Step Two, letting go of craving. When we come to understand anguish, “the Horror“, that its only nature is to change ultimately into something else, that it has no substance, no inherent being of its own, unless temporarily we ourself lend it the pseudo-substance of our own equally unreal personality by identifying with it, thus subletting it a toe-hold in our consciousness, when we understand this, we can at that very moment in time let go of the craving it fruited from, that gave rise to it, understanding too that “craving is a contingent state of mind that once arisen will pass away.” * THERE IS NOTHING WORTH GETTING OR BEING OR HOLDING ON TO. “It only lasts while it lasts.“ (Elizabeth Magarey Faggotter) All of which inherently implies in its very own process Step Three, realizing the cessation of anguish. Understand anguish, let go of craving, and ipso facto we will be realizing the cessation of anguish. And when we come thus to realize, to convert this end of anguish into mental & biological fact, we come face to face with Emptiness, AND THAT IS NIRVANA. “Thank heavens… What a relief… The sun has gone down, and I don’t have to go out and enjoy it…”

Looking back over this awakening process, for that is what has happened – we have had a mini-awakening, our response will be to cultivate the eightfold path, thereby establishing this cessation of anguish and its innate sequellae in all nooks and crannies of our life. Which is Step Four in this process in which all these four steps are just aspects of the one phenomenon – the process of awakening. Just as The Blessed One himself first experienced it 2,500 years ago. Although obviously not as intensely. As Yossarian observed, in slightly different precincts: “That’s some catch, that Catch 22!”

Of course, there is a wide gap between this brand of awakening and those paradisiacal ecstasies limned in mystic tomes. To call this an awakening is presumptuous, perhaps, impertinent. Maybe the coinage of spirituality is thereby devalued & debased. Or maybe we have inflated beyond his own express intent what Buddha meant by awakening. He claimed himself simply to be awake, spurning attempts to glorify his status beyond that. (The more illustrious the Guru, the more prestigious the discipleship.) And as we have seen, his therapy is based upon three particular, limited & selective half-truths, deriving its very efficacy from an implicit denial & rejection of the positive poles of those three pairs of dualities. His claim was to supply the sufferer with a practical psychology that can free us from our anguish, not with ultimate truth. Wisdom and truth do not always coincide. One counter-intuitive instance: Sometimes it is wiser to lie. Necessary, even.

In his Four Enabling Truths, The Buddha employs a mental trick, a psychological sleight of hand. Once we accept & entrench one worst possible world scenario as our basic ontology, real life must come as a welcome relief. As the song says: “Been down so long it looks like up to me.” And yet his impact & legacy are so utterly profound. The other inscription over Dr Jung’s doorway read: “Know thyself.” There is no surer way of coming to the deepest of self-knowledge than through Buddhist meditation. The seventh and eighth steps in the Noble Eightfold Path, Right Mindfulness & Right Concentration, have no better been epitomised than by Dogen Zenji, when he wrote: “The way of the Buddha is to know yourself; to know yourself is to forget yourself; to forget yourself is to be awakened by all things.”

And so with every mindful “Now back to soft belly…” we activate & thicken the prefrontal cortex, buttressed by the insula’s collateral “Aha… Thinking again… Let it go…”; confirming in charge the silent witness as our inner storyteller, as at first s/he numbers & names & notes and then penetrates until finally there is wordless narration as it happens of every breath, every detail of the odyssey; chronicling mind-moment by mind-moment each our own neural serial edition of The Book of Life, that unique & species-defining project of human consciousness; updating, editing & saving it to hard drive nightly, while we dream. Thus constitutes one version of Socrates’ “reflected life.”

Ultimately, just letting go every belief and blinding prejudice. Relinquishing all those mental addictions and emotional crutches. Abandoning both vengeful fantasy and cherished daydream. Dismissing too those illegitimate children of desire and bastard offspring of ambition, achievement & success, failure & defeat, mediocrity & inadequacy.

Dimittamus… Dimittamus omnia… ****

“’Cos we’re goin’ out of business - Everything must go.” *****

FOOTNOTES:

______________________________________________________________________________

* Plagiarised from ‘Awakening’, the first chapter of Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs (Bloomsbury Publishing 1998). The four noble steps awakening process is distilled & concentrated from the following, more fully cited section of that sutra. In the previous section, Buddha explains to his five disciples how the eightfold path of moderation leads “to calm, to direct knowledge, to self-awakening, to Unbinding.” And yet in this (possibly interpolated) section he describes how his own awakening culminated out of an exhaustive working of the four truths. Even a buddha must take time irretrievably to fathom that dukkha arises as we look for something in this world not there – satisfaction in its own terms; yet then it takes even more time to apply the fourth truth’s antitoxic medicine by embracing & practising the eightfold path:

“Vision arose, insight arose, discernment arose, knowledge arose, illumination arose within me with regard to things never heard before: ‘This is the noble truth of stress‘ … ‘This noble truth of stress is to be comprehended’ … ‘This noble truth of stress has been comprehended.’

“Vision arose, insight arose, discernment arose, knowledge arose, illumination arose within me with regard to things never heard before: ‘This is the noble truth of the origination of stress’ … ‘This noble truth of the origination of stress is to be abandoned’ … ‘This truth of the origination of stress has been abandoned.’

“Vision arose, insight arose, discernment arose, knowledge arose, illumination arose within me with regard to things never heard before: ’This is the noble truth of the cessation of stress’ ... ‘This noble truth of the cessation of stress is to be directly experienced’ … ‘This noble truth of the cessation of stress has been directly experienced.’

“Vision arose, insight arose, discernment arose, knowledge arose, illumination arose within me with regard to things never heard before: ‘This is the noble truth of the way of practice leading to cessation of stress’ … ‘This noble truth of the way of practice leading to the cessation of stress is to be developed’ … ‘This noble truth of the way of practice leading to the cessation of stress has been developed.’

“And, monks, as long as this knowledge & vision of mine – with its three rounds & twelve permutations – was not pure, I did not claim to have directly awakened to the right self-awakening unexcelled in the cosmos with its devas, Maras & Brahmas, with its contemplatives & priests, its royalty & common folk. But as soon as this knowledge & vision of mine – with its three rounds and twelve permutations concerning these four noble truths as they actually are present – was truly pure, then did I claim to have directly awakened to the right self-awakening unexcelled in the cosmos with its devas, Maras & Brahmas, with its contemplatives & priests, its royalty & commonfolk. Knowledge & vision arose in me: ‘Unprovoked is my release. This is my last birth. There is now no further becoming.’”

from Setting the Wheel of Dharma in Motion translated by Thanissaro Bhikku

** The reason why the ten thousand dharmas can be described as empty is not because they

have no self – indeed they do. They are empty – so far as we are concerned, at least – because they all belong absolutely to God. There is no property in them for us. They are each utterly the property of their Creator and Sustainer-in-Being. And so we their fellow creatures can have no claim on them whatsoever. There is a void there in respect to us… and of our rights to exploit them to our own gratification. Any use we may make of them is entirely in their Creator’s gift. According to Her will, as we may have come to know it. But that is a matter separate from their own title to selfhood, dependent upon and deriving as it does from God’s own reality. In this respect, the poverty is ours, not the ten thousand beings’.

*** Sometimes when the crack is good, say when strolling home from the market, bags overflowing with Gaia’s luscious bounty, comes on a light inside, and I know I AM ATMAN. For a few brief minutes, I am jnana yoga’s light of consciousness, John of the Cross’s flame in the heart, the ‘spaciousness’ of contemporary transcendentalists.

I take stock of the premises. At this hour, my host is often still smelly, unshaved and unwashed from yesterday. First up, gently I nudge him to straighten his shoulders and carry himself a little better. Energize the hara. Breathe consciously. In short, to ‘Walk On!’ mindfully. Lungs, tar-clogged and emphysemic. Right leg, anoxic-white and withered, knotted with swollen and clotted veins. Slightly bulbous prostate, making of micturition a night-long vocation. Otherwise, my host is okay. Congenial government apartment and pension. A right cushy number, it seems. This is an abode with potential. Could of done much worse, the atman mutters to itself. And once again savours that exact same flavour of self a fifteen year-old schoolboy basted in, out alone on a cross-country run after classes, forty eight years ago. Some things do not change, it seems: this sense of “I” has remained constant over the decades. Replace the water, season by season, fish & plants, year after year, still the aquarium retains its same original jade translucence.

At such moments it is clear that I am not parivraj. Rather, I am Universal Consciousness, a spark of awareness which temporarily, randomly, accidentally, finds itself lodged here. May as well make the most of it… It’s really not so bad…

It is not always like that. Such moments are all too rare a treat. There are other moments, though. Like our Polish professor of psychiatry who joked that Monday to Friday he was agnostic scientist and on Sunday, good Mass-going Catholic. At such times, ANATTA RULES GOOD! Absorbed in the futonzen state, (zazen now ruled out by the dicky leg), intimately experiencing each breath, encountering me as beginningless & endless & constant flow of ever-changing mind-moments. All is flux. A river of consciousness, cascading torrent of different experiences. Nothing permanent or fixed or certain except that this too shall change. No atman there atallatall... Or so it seems to me… At such times…

When logical reason once again prevails, I find that, philosophically, I am yet an hylomorphist. Materia prima et forma principale. Body and soul. Safe, sound & rock-solid thomism. Makes sense at least of those out-of-body journeys reported by the genetically endowed one in three of the people who do make it back from the dead. And who obiter so often report something factual & verifiable they could only have learnt if – somehow, on some level of

reality – said journey actually happened. Was not just their dying brain’s final fantastickal juddering kenotic corybantiasm.

**** I am indebted to Ron Newbold, Classics Department, Adelaide University, for suggesting this translation.

***** Walter Becker and Donald Fagen

DUKKHA AS CBT

it is my mistake to project onto people, places and things a capacity to provide either suffering or satisfaction, a capacity no created being - impermanent, empty and imperfect, can ever possess. it’s all in the mind, you know… we already have all we need within, requiring our constant cultivation. so for now, back to soft belly. back to “Who am I?” and let go of that storyline! (let our nightly dreams take care of that…)

Who can explain it?Who can tell you why?Fools give you reasons,Wise men never try…

- Rodgers and Hammerstein

Chapter Three: MATRIMONY

Love is the cure,for your pain will keep giving birth to more pain

until your eyes constantly exhale love as effortlessly as your body yields its scent.

- Rumi

For a blessed majority of men, the most beautiful sight they can ever behold is the female

form: “There is nothing in this world that is anything like a dame.“ (Rodgers & Hammerstein) For many women, it’s their wee new-born bairn. The ultimate terrestrial end for homo sapiens is, according to biologists, family life; the family equates with earthly beatitude, our final evolutionary purpose. A person is a biological success when he or she gets their genes into the second generation i.e. becomes a grandparent. Or so Dr George Mayo taught us in first year medicine, more than forty years ago. The customary context for these activities begins with matrimony, which is the third ingredient of our prescription for schizophrenia, after the medicine and the meditation.

As I am a bachelor of long-standing, well may you object “Wot’s ‘e know about marriage!?” However, I was conceived and nurtured by lovers, my sisters became lovers, my friends became lovers. So I guess I’ve seen enough.

Enough to think twice about the allegation that sex is the most profound experience, the ultimate high, that most people will ever ‘get’ in a life time. Without underrating erotic love in the slightest, I suspect that God is far more profligate with her graces and her gifts. Even a simple pranayama – a repetitive mindful breathing exercise – such as zazen can afford the subject self-transcending experiences of bliss, without any great effort. But I will agree with authorities as diverse as sociologists and mystics that sexual communion can be one of the most profound experiences available to homo sapiens. I think the Italians put it rather well: “Bed is the poor man’s opera.” Or as the French say: “La vite est dure sans confiture…”

And what I’ve seen is, in particular, the healing effect that a God-given partner – and aren’t they all God-given? - can have on a schizophrenic. The power of friendship and of emotional support and of intimacy is nothing short of miraculous. A big element in my early recovery from the breakdown described in Chapter One herein was the fact that my attending psychiatrist never once brushed me off when he was virtually at my mercy, able to be accosted at will in hospital days. If he couldn’t see me when I approached him, he unfailingly took measures to see me and hear me out when he could, at the next available time slot. And what I had to say was far from deep and meaningful.

My religious upbringing included the belief that the sacrament of matrimony makes the expression of the sexual instinct a holy and a wholesome thing. A good and holy thought. Without, I hope, being in the slightest blasphemous, my current belief is that it is the total giving of one person to another, epitomised by union in the flesh, that makes marriage holy, beauty sacramental. I wonder what will be my belief on my death-bed, if I am granted that luxury.

Let me briefly quote from three philosophers, in chronological order. But first, I should point out that total celibacy for the sake of the kingdom of heaven was the ideal practised and preached by Lord Jesus. However, he did say that it was all a matter of God’s will for each one of us, in how God had created us, as to what each of us could “accept.” My own experience is that in general schizophrenics are created needing physical loving as much as we need medication and meditation.

Firstly, Plato. His value judgment states better than I could why marriage is healthy: “What

is beautiful and just according to nature I tell you is that in order to live well one must let one’s passions develop fully instead of restricting them.”

Secondly, Meher Baba puts the bottom line pro and con marriage: “To have loved one soul is like adding its life to your own. Your life is, as it were, multiplied and you virtually live in two centres.” “Human love leads to innumerable complications and tangles, but divine love leads to integration and freedom.”

Thirdly, Evelyn Waugh, himself a severe though apparently episodic psychotic has Charles Ryder say in Brideshead Revisited: “To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.”

I argue not from exceptions, but a couple of people with my illness substantially healed each other when they met and settled down together. Several of my fellow recoverers have tended to down-play the importance of their spouse in their recovery, but without them, they would have been homeless, shiftless and unearthed.

Let me close this chapter by reminding the reader that ‘luv’ really does make the world go round. Were it not for the love of the electron for the nucleus; of the moon for the earth; of the planets for the sun, this world would literally fly apart. The centre could not hold, and anarchy would be unleashed on the world, as Yeats feared. What keeps this universe together is attraction, attachment, duality, polarity, and love – except the last all of which one seeks freedom from. And it is in marriage that these phenomena coincide – the good and the bad – the human compromise which the schizophrenic must make. “The full catastrophe,” as Zorba described it… The great civiliser.

The gist of this chapter was drafted verbatim well over twenty years ago. More recently, I was sorely tempted to re-formulate this component of our prescription as ‘Mateship’ rather than ‘Matrimony.’ In my mind, the arguments lined up overwhelmingly behind the former genus of which the latter is but one, albeit paradigm, species. However, when I looked more closely at my fellow recoverers, I observed that their spouse and their family had so clearly played such a pivotal role, that the one relationship whose absence most certainly would disrupt and undermine their smooth day-to-day functioning was in fact their marriage. In the end, there really was no contest.

Which is not to say the generic mateship factor cannot be crucial, if not indispensable. Latest Australian research into post-natal depression indicates that without the supportive back-up of participation in exercise classes, mere exercise alone is not effective in routinely reducing by 50% the chances of post-natal depression. Those mothers who performed the exercise program on their own at home did not benefit from its prophylaxis, in contrast to the mothers who attended exercise classes and did.

In a similar vein, for many a recovered alcoholic, addict, and schizophrenic, early in their bounce-back the fellowship, support and lived example they experienced in the rooms of A.A. or N.A. or Grow proved to be their tutelary guardian angel and healing Higher Power. And continues so to be.

It is goodto have an end to journey towards,but it is the journey that matters,

in the end.

- Ursula Le Guin

Chapter Four: METAPHRENIA

The Milk and Water Embrace

Perhaps what is so wonderful about our lives is that its sum is so much greater than its component parts.

In the beginning, or shortly thereafter, there was hydrogen atoms: one single electron orbiting one single proton and neutron. Over billions of years, this gave rise to the scores of different elements of which we and our worlds are composed – ultimately lawrencium with 103 electrons orbiting its equilibrating nucleus of protons and electrons.

French onion soup is prepared from onions, butter and beef stock. Subtly simmered on a very slow stove over ten hours and more, with a little added seasoning to balance the resulting sweetness, these simple ingredients give rise to a sumptuously rich and nutritious meal. Accompanied by half a baguette atopped with roasted-on gruyere cheese, ‘tis peasant’s fare fit for a King.

The Last Post is composed of seven basic notes, their five sharps, and permutations thereof. Yet music like this from an Anzac Day bugler can stir the heart and raise the hair on the back of the neck like nothing else.

The simple unacknowledged combination of medicine, meditation and matrimony, daily and over time, transforms lives. In psychiatric wards and later, at home and in the community. In GPs’ surgeries and psychiatrists’ consulting rooms. In Twelve Step meetings and other therapeutic peer support groups. In the sacrificial crucible of marriage and the nuclear family. In old folks’ homes.

From our nappies to the shroud, and so it seems perhaps even beyond, we are so much greater than the sum of our parts. This is the mysterious alchemy of metaphrenia...

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to Dr William Chapman for his ongoing encouragement, long after the close of contractual relations, and for donating the device that delivered this document;

to Lloyd Owen Irving for his patient technical support and loyal back-up, without which this document’s realisation would have been impossible;

to the tribe – the heroic family members, friends and professionals who have stayed the course with a difficult person such as I am, “whom it would be invidious to particularise,” (John Jefferson Bray CJ);

and to that philanthropic Australian tax payer for the decades of financial sustenance which has allowed my most unDarwinian survival.

There is no escape for any man who is prepared to think honestly from the need to be a traveller always on the road to knowledge and understanding without any hope of ever arriving. In fact, to think that we can arrive at any final statement of the Truth here is to fall into a dangerous delusion. It’s to make ourselves believe that we’ve arrived when we merely should be taking our breath for the next advance...

- Rev Ernest Bergman, Bishop of Canberra