The Necessary Condition is Love

29 May 2008:

Writing: The past week I have been writing pretty solidly. Since my last weblog entry I have written more than 54,000 words, which constitutes the main body of the new book. I expect it will be called "The Necessary Condition is Love: An other centred approach", or something like that. It develops the ideas first set out in the article that I published in my Beyond Carl Rogers fifteen years ago. This all came about because I was invited to give a day seminar on that paper at a psychotherapy institute on 15th May. It went well. Afterwards it occurred to me that the principles in the paper are still central to my conception of life, spirit and therapy and that perhaps there was the makings of a book, so I set to work and this is the result. Still quite a bit of revision and editing to do but the basic work is complete.
3c Network: I have been getting quite a bit of satisfaction from using the 3c Network as an arena in which I can float thinking about the arts and writing in particular. I am doing quite a bit of reading also which currently pivots substantially around T.S.Eliot, both his prose which is about the theory of culture and his poetry and plays which have a distinctive style that was very formative in the early 20th century.
Amida Community: It is quite satisfying to observe that we currently have little teams in France, Narborough and London while I can remember not so long ago being single handed in each place. We have been through a lot since then, and leant a lot along the way, but it is good to see overall growth. There is certainly a general sense of vibrancy here even though each individual must tell their own story.
British Scene: There seems to be a lot in our British culture at the moment that makes life difficult for any religious community. A kind of aggressive, almost bullying, atheism is suddenly enjoying a vogue. Multiculturalism, though still on the government agenda, seems to have slipped down in priority. There are substantial economic uncertainties hanging and many people suspect that a change of government may be in the offing, though a general election is not due until 2010. Perhaps all this signifies some shift in the national mood. People are uncertain, less ready to take risks and becoming more cautious as threatening cloud gather on the horizon. Whether we shall actually have to face a real economic downturn or not remains to be seem, but the mood of uncertainty is strong at the moment.

18 May 2008: Post Conference

The conference (5th Living Buddhism Conference, Narborough, 1-4 May 2008) went very well in the end. I say "in the end" as in the lead up we lost several speakers and attenders, in part to the flu epidemic which also struck down several members of the team leaving the conference organising group rather short handed. However, visitors started to arrive from several continents and the pre-conference turned out to be a sparkling event in its own right. Bringing together people of strong character and developed understanding and facilitating their interactions in a constructive way is something that Amida Trust now does extremely well - and I can say this without blushing since during the whole period of the pre-conference I was laid up in my sickbed and non-participant. In fact it was one of the worst bout of illness that I have had for several years, the flu having been compounded by bronchitis which I am even now not totally over. The conference itself as stimulating on a number of fronts. Alan oliver contributed strongly to making Buddhist Economics a significant theme and we also benefitted from Kazuo Yamashita's presentations of Shin-shu Counselling, as well as a range of presentations of various aspects of Buddhism and the arts, healing, and engaged Buddhism.

The Ning thing: Also during this period Amida Trust has set up a social network on Ning called Friends of Amida Network which everybody who is interested enough to be reading this weblog is certainly welcome to join. We only discovered Ning through my being invited to join another Ning on-line community, the 3C Network. The Amida network on Ning has grown quite rapidly in its first couple of weeks and promises to ease communication between people interested in Pureland Buddhism in lots of ways. The 3C network is for people involved in the arts who are "between cultures" - the term 3C stands for "third culture" meaning the culture of those who do not fit neatly into their country of origin due to other second culture commitments or experience.

Writing: I have been writing poetry regularly since I went on solitary retreat in December, though I seem to be gradually writing less pieces - the Muse is rather uncontrollable - if longer ones. I have a chapter in a book on dying coming out soon and another short one in a book critical of cognitive therapy, both due to be published sometime this year. I hope to get down to some more extended writing before too long, but there are many pressures on one's time. I very much enjoyed reading Peter Ackroyd's biography of T.S.Eliot (who was definitely a 3C person).

Psychotherapy & Spirituality

A monograph composed March 2007