Many years ago, when I was still at school, my mother must have thought that the school I was attending in Liverpool and where I was incredibly happy as well as being incredibly naughty was not quite good enough. It was decided that my brother and I should go off to a Public School near Nottingham - on the grounds that it was the school that my grandfather had attended and also one of our cousins.
She never said why my grandfather had declined to send his own son there - my father. He was shipped off to Christ's Hospital in London and had to wear a strange uniform of black cassock and orange socks all the time he was there.
In the first term, someone had decided that I should be promoted from the first year class and move to the second year. I spent the rest of my time at the school out of my depth but my mother was pleased as it had saved her a years fees.
The consequence of all this was that I missed the first year maths lessons that taught us all how to prove Pythagoras’s theorem. ‘The square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square of the two adjacent sides’. It was the one question I could never answer in maths exam papers. (There are two ways of proving Pythagorus - which you may want to talk about over coffee afterwards!).
The truth is that it hasn’t made a lot of difference to my life but I am left with a lingering feeling of self doubt when the name comes up.
Pythagorus was a genius - not only a mathematician, and not only a poet - all scientists and philosophers were described as poets in those early days of the Greek empire, he was also a religious leader - perhaps a bit weird - perhaps rather too liberal about the conventions of human relationships. For some reason his followers were not permitted to eat beans, and they also believed that you should not leave the imprint of your body and head on the mattress when you get up - smooth it out straight away - I still do.
As a mathematician he associated numbers with shapes - hence we still have two squared and three cubed in our maths today.
He also believed that we were all aliens. He considered that humankind was so different from everything else in nature that must have come to earth from somewhere else - up there in the stars.
I don’t know why but I was reminded of Pythagorus and his alien idea when I was reading an article about global warming. The article was calling for everyone to make a resolution to completely change the way they lived their lives in order to save the planet. We have to reverse a process that has been going on for centuries and find ways to reduce global warming.
I thought about saving the world by recycling my carrier bags and putting a green roof on the kitchen extension.
Then a depressing thought came into my head - that we will never do it - we won’t save the world - because of Pythagorus. I saw the human race not as part of the earth’s own eco system but actually as aliens, parasites that have landed on it.
A parasite attaches itself to the host and feeds on it, taking nourishment from it , often infecting it with disease and ultimately destroying it. Parasites multiply and multiply until there is no room for anymore.
We could look at the world and say ‘Yes, this is true’. We humans, like parasites, have exploited the earth and taken from it without any thought for its future. We want to have the best conditions, the best parts for ourselves - so there is fierce competition. The successful become rich and have the best of choices - they prevent the rest of the hordes from reaching the best parts by trying to control them and stop them from being successful and taking those riches away.
The rich countries use economic power to control the supply of food and power for the parasites in the poor areas and they manage somehow to keep the people of the poor areas always fighting each other and not combining to supplant the rich.
So the rich countries sell guns and ammunition to one side or the other - or both and so there never is going to be a threat. What would have happened in Iraq if the Shias and the Sunnis had not set against each other? What would happen in Africa if they were not all engaged in civil wars? When they fight each other, they don’t really bother the status quo of the rich nations.
I spent a few days on the golf course thinking about all this and feeling that we human parasites only have one option and that is to build some big spaceships in time to find another planet to live off before this one finally dies.
Of course my pessimism is not quite all black and my arguments are flawed.
The most important one is that there is light within the blackness. But it needs a revolution - not a physical revolution with more guns and bullets but a spiritual revolution.
Each one of us is a person of two parts. We have our parasite half that is all for self and chopping down trees and we have a spiritual half - the higher self that is connected to the web and life of all creation. A spiritual self that is connected to all others by prayer and by charitable love - the love of giving and helping.
Too often the higher self is asleep. People have to discover it in themselves. It has to be awakened and once awake it has to be kept awake.
Loving is a function of our higher self.
Hanging everywhere throughout the world is the same message in all the world religions - that the way to happiness and the way to peace is through charitable love and devotion to ones God.
All the worlds religions, without exception teach, even Pythagorus taught it, that the way to live is to live in peace with your God and in peace with your neighbour.
And love for your neighbour, love for your neighbourhood, love for your community is the way forward.
When people are tuned into the spiritual dimension of their higher selves they discover that there is no need to be angry with others, because now they can understand them - understand the problems, work out the solutions. Lift the ‘have nots’ out of despair and their anger will fade and evaporate.
While the spirit of love that so many religions call God sinks into blackness - then we do behave like parasites.
When the name of a religion becomes nothing more than a tribe to belong to and a flag that they flock to fight under - when its rituals become war dances and its message is anger, contempt and hate, the spirit of love is pushed towards the blackness.
While humankind is reducing the world to a desert and complaining about CO2 emissions, we still have the means to change it to become more supportive of all its peoples. We could help Africa, we could help Palestine, We could provide water and electricity, we could have hospitals and clinics and we could eradicate disease and famine. There are the means to do it - but there is not the will. It is said to be too expensive. The lower self rules the world and plays God in it.
But the people of spirit, the people of light do not give up. Their faith is the faith of love thy neighbour, love thy God, live a life that is honourable to the spirit of love - the God of love which is in all religions.
One of the old Greek Philosophers, I think it was Heraclitus said that the spirit of truth, of life cannot be extinguished. It will begin to assert itself even when all seems lost.
I’m with him! There are people in the world, many thousands of them who do have the light within them, they are connected to the spirit of love. They live by their higher selves. They work in the places of blackness and they bring light and spirit back to them. They try to heal the sick and they try to feel the hungry. They try to teach the children and the angry that there is a better way to live . It is the way of peace.
Actually you do not need to know Pythagoras’s theorem of right angled triangles but you do have to have a feeling for the higher self - spirit of love that is within all religions. You do have to have a feeling of care for the peoples of the world who do not have carrier bags to recycle or homes to make green. When the higher self - the spiritual self is awake, the world changes, we cease to be parasites.
Amen
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