Where on Earth is Heaven

Jonathan Stedall

Description

Jonathan Stedall explores challenging questions about living and dying, looking and seeing, heaven and earth, and our human potential. He draws on forty years film-making experience, largely at the BBC, working with inspired artists, scientists and writers like John Betjeman, Laurens van der Post, Fritz Schumacher, Bernard Lovell, Malcolm Muggeridge, Alan Bennett, Fritjof Capra, Cecil Collins, Ben Okri and Mark Tully.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Diaries
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Hawthorn Press
• Date de parution: 25 août 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781907359552
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Where on Earth is Heaven?
J ONATHAN S TEDALL
Foreword by Richard Tarnas
Where on Earth is Heaven? copyright © 2009 Jonathan Stedall
First published 2009 Reprinted 2010
Jonathan Stedall is hereby identified as the author of this work in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. He asserts and gives notice of his moral right under this Act.
Published by Hawthorn Press, Hawthorn House, 1 Lansdown Lane, Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 1BJ, UK Tel: [phone]         Fax: [phone] Email: [e-mail] Website: www.hawthornpress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means (electronic or mechanical, through reprography, digital transmission, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Cover image © Miriam Macgregor Cover design and typesetting by Bookcraft Ltd, Stroud, Gloucestershire
Printed by Cromwell Press in the UK
Printed on FSC approved paper
Every effort has been made to trace the ownership of all copyrighted material. If any omission has been made, please bring this to the publisher’s attention so that proper acknowledgement may be given in future editions.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data applied for
ISBN 978-1-903458-90-7 eISBN 978-1-907359-55-2
For Thomas and Ellie

Jonathan Stedall by Saied Dai, 2004
Contents
Foreword by Richard Tarnas
Preface
C HAPTER 1
What I do is Me
Anne-Marie and the importance of every human story. Growing up and growing down. Memory and forgetting. Tappings from ‘the other side’.
C HAPTER 2
Quest and Questions
Listening to the inner voice. Our sense of the truth. Awakeners. Glimpes into the work of Leo Tolstoy, PierreTeilhard de Chardin and Rudolf Steiner.
C HAPTER 3
Take One
Early films with John Betjeman. Celebration of the ordinary. Inspiration, doubt and certainty.
C HAPTER 4
Footprints
Tilting at windmills. Road to a legend. Frankenstein. The Little Prince meets the desert fox. New horizons and a shift in consciousness. Creativity and vision at the BBC.
C HAPTER 5
A Fork in the Road
Confrontation with death. ‘Nothing can come out of nothing’. Inspiration without dependency. All Men Are Islands .
C HAPTER 6
Seen and Unseen
Steiner’s two worlds. Geometry, Goethe, and the herb gatherer. A philosophy of freedom.
C HAPTER 7
In Need of Special Care
Special needs, special children – a Camphill school in Scotland. Vienna meets Aberdeen. Relationships and empathy.
C HAPTER 8
Seeds for the Future
Adult life in a Camphill village. Work without wages. ‘A new Heaven and a new Earth’.
C HAPTER 9
No Ordinary Light
The end of an era, and a new vision. Gandhi’s life and work. Faith in our human potential.
C HAPTER 10
Worms and Angels
Schumacher’s A Guide for the Perplexed . The fourfold human being. Sleeping and waking. Correspondences between heaven and earth.
C HAPTER 11
Archaeologist of the Soul
Laurens van der Post on the life and work of C.G. Jung. Science, intuition and the psyche.
C HAPTER 12
The Pattern of God
Jung’s ‘memories, dreams, reflections’. His journeys into the past, and concerns for the future. The mystery that heals.
C HAPTER 13
Tolstoy’s Russia
War and peace. From riches to rags. Confession . Shoemaker, artist and conscience of the world.
C HAPTER 14
In Defence of the Stork
Myth and science. Physical birth and spiritual birth. The embryo, Creation, and the birth of Jesus.
C HAPTER 15
No Language but a Cry
Silence and the death of God. Betjeman ‘in quest of mystical experience’. The Management. Hope, doubt, and Sunday in London.
C HAPTER 16
Free to Love
Mythology of the bushmen with Laurens van der Post. A Golden Age – memory or premonition? Alienation, compassion, and the redemptive power of love.
The colour plate section can be found between pages 222 and 223
C HAPTER 17
Midstream
Challenges of mid-life. ‘Gate-crashing heaven’ in the Himalayas. Death of a Japanese admiral.
C HAPTER 18
Alone in the Desert
Medieval mysticism. The interconnectedness of God and Man. Alchemy and self-knowledge.
C HAPTER 19
Faith versus Reason
Astronomer Bernard Lovell’s telescope. ‘As a man is, so he sees’. Limits to knowledge? The devil in action, and that ‘disgusting paradox’ – a selfless self.
C HAPTER 20
A Question of Balance
Ying and Yang. Confucius and Lao-Tzu. Lucifer and Ahriman. The Long Search in Taiwan.
C HAPTER 21
The Living Earth
The Chinese earth god T’u-ti Kung. Clairvoyant consciousness and the supersensible world.
C HAPTER 22
Orthodox and Unorthodox
Easter in Romania. Old rituals, and the new physics. Is God dead, and did science kill him? Counterculture in California.
C HAPTER 23
The Everlasting Now
‘Making sense of our yesterdays’. Living in the moment. Only through time is time conquered.
C HAPTER 24
Ancient and Modern
Malcolm Muggeridge’s heaven. Disillusionment and faith. ‘Only dead fish swim with the tide’. Conversations with Solzhenitsyn, and with Stalin’s daughter Svetlana.
C HAPTER 25
The True Wilderness
John Betjeman in old age. ‘Eternity is around us all the time’. Idealism in India with Mark Tully. Harry Williams on loneliness, acceptance, ‘and the miracle of resurrection’.
C HAPTER 26
The Holy Fool
Life and work of the visionary artist Cecil Collins. ‘The saint, the poet, and the fool are one’. Walking among dragons.
C HAPTER 27
Seven Ages
Phases, turning-points, crises, triumphs and failures – the human journey with Ron Eyre. All the world’s a stage …
C HAPTER 28
Laughter and Tears
Does God have a sense of humour? Ask Alan Bennett or Posy Simmonds. Human creativity. Ups and downs at Camphill – fifty years on.
C HAPTER 29
The Emperor’s Clothes
The mystery of physical life. Evolution: God, Darwin and the exploration of new frontiers. The human being as microcosm of the macrocosm.
C HAPTER 30
Light in the Darkness
Another Christmas. Kings and Shepherds. Light and enlightenment. The tale of two healers.
C HAPTER 31
Inner Journeys
A search for meaning. Work and prayer. So Long to Learn . In the company of angels.
C HAPTER 32
In Search of Arcadia
A missionary in India. A voice from the bundu. By rail from London to the Peloponnese. Is travel an escape or a quest?
C HAPTER 33
Time to Learn
Amusing Ourselves To Death . The erosion of childhood. Education as a journey not a race.
C HAPTER 34
Our Ancestors were Us
Karma and reincarnation. One chapter in a longer story. Slaves of the past, masters of the future.
C HAPTER 35
Dying and Becoming
The Enduring Melody . Sleep as the little death. ‘Decay is the midwife of very great things’. Communion outside time and space. Guardians of the threshold.
C HAPTER 36
Heaven and Earth
Blessed Unrest – a global humanitarian movement. Compassion and eternal life. Individuation. Love as harmony made conscious. Christ’s sacrifice – ‘He made the earth his heaven’.
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Foreword
To read this book is like sitting by a fire on a long winter’s evening, listening with delight to a friend of many years who has thought deeply about life’s mysteries, and who is now looking back on his life’s journey to share, modestly and without pretension, its accumulated wisdom. This is a deeply humane book, by a deeply humane man. But it is also more than that.
For in his unassuming way, Jonathan Stedall explores questions and realities, and intimations of realities, that take courage to speak of in an age long ruled by that confident mindset which still believes it has more or less fully and objectively revealed the true nature of the universe. In many ways this is an old-fashioned book—unhurried in its reminiscences and reflections, rather like an intimate essay, full of treasured quotations, courteous to the reader, and sympathetic to its subjects. Yet it is also a strangely new book, radical in its willingness to push the conventional boundaries of received knowledge about what is real. It engages the big questions of life and death, of immortality and love, drawing on sources of insight that have not been accommodated within the narrow empiricism and rationalism of the orthodox modern mind. Without fanfare, without vaulting ambition, Stedall quietly seeks to understand those many more things in heaven and earth than have been dreamt of in our modern philosophy.
Ours is a time between world views, when the powerful assumptions that have shaped the modern understanding of the world and of the human being are undergoing a radical change. It is a time that C.G. Jung called the kairos : the ancient Greek term for the ‘right moment’ for a changing of the fundamental symbols and principles. Jung saw this change as happening with a kind of evolutionary necessity, beyond our conscious choice. Yet he also viewed the outcome of this great shift as in some way depending on how well we consciously participated in its unfolding. At the heart of this shift is a transformation in the spiritual condition of the modern self, which has long been grappling with the paradox of being a purposeful, meaning-seeking oddity of consciousness in a randomly evolving material universe lacking in intrinsic meaning, purpose, or soul.
In the conventional scientific world picture, the spiritual dimension of being must ultimately be seen as nothing but an idiosyncratic projection of the human subject. To preserve consistently this world picture requires the metaphysical dismissal of most of what is most intimate and precious to the human being. Yet to confront that contradiction is to take on an enormous existential task, a tension of opposites not easily resolved. That task, Jung recognized, and Stedall recognizes, defines the spiritual adventure of the modern self.
Jonathan Stedall takes on that adventure, and brings certain special gifts to the task: a calm integrity