THE EXTREMES OF SELF-CULTIVATION

1. As I have indicated, one can go in one of two directions from the world - either backwards to the instinctual idiocy, so to speak, of the id-self or forwards to the emotional sublimity of the soul-self; backwards to the alpha paradise of self-identity or forwards to the omega paradise of self-identity, the former apparent and superficial, the latter essential and profound.

2. People are going backwards and forwards all the time, even when they are recognizably of the world, and therefore more disposed to the not-self and selflessness in tandem with the ego-self than to either of the self-oriented extremes. In that event, they go backwards a bit or forwards a bit, depending on their natures, and sometimes they go both backwards and forwards at the same time or, at any rate, within the space of a short timespan.

3. Doubtless there are many paradigms of such departures from the world to either of the self-oriented paradises, and we know them or are ignorant of them according to our capacities for knowledgeable insight. Take parks, for example. Are they not symbolically Edenic in their profusion of plant life and plethora of simple creatures, from birds and fish to insects and small animals. The contents of parks may vary from park to park, but by and large it is not an omega paradise, but an alpha paradise, a paradise closer to primeval instinct that is signified by the existence of such places, with their tamed countryside for the town and/or city.

4. A person who spends time in the park, whether a little time or a lot, is effectively returning to the id-self and thus abandoning the world, with its buildings and streets, for an alpha paradise in which instinctual life urbanely proliferates. He is getting back to 'the Garden' in his desire to establish a closer relationship with nature, and for him parks are a necessary antidote to the city.

5. So going to the park, innocent as it might seem, is one of those things a person does when he is of a mind to put the world to one side for a while and return, no matter how temporarily, to the sort of paradise which is closer to the id than to the soul, being more alpha than omega. He may not know this, but that is nevertheless what a park is, and people spend time in them according to their needs and/or insights.

6. Now take the opposite tendency to going backwards from the world to an alpha paradise - namely, going forwards from the world toward an omega paradise, a paradise which is inner rather than outer, profound rather than superficial, centripetal rather than centrifugal, essential rather than apparent, and likely to accord, in consequence, with the self conceived essentially ... in relation to the soul.

7. At present I can think of no better example of this phenomenon, relatively crude though it is, than a shopping centre, especially when there is a certain amount of watery and/or plant life to be found in the more pedestrian parts of the environment and, tired of walking, one can sit in quite close proximity to nature without having to endure - shopping centres without a roof excepted - the inclemencies of the weather or otherwise put oneself at risk of becoming too 'open'.

8. Now shopping centres may seem to some people a curious choice for establishing an antithesis to parks, but they do, as a rule, contain nature, whether in watery or plant form, and nature is an important symbol for mankind of the self, to the extent that it is generally closer to self than to either not-self or selflessness, being fixed and self-absorbed in its simple, straightforward kind of way.

9. At the time of writing, early in the twenty-first century, I can say quite categorically that 'Kingdom Come' hasn't yet come to pass, and that the world accordingly still exists, to varying extents, in all or most countries, especially the West, where it has tended to peak, so to speak, in relation to economics, and hence commerce. The coming of a religious concept of or approach to 'the Centre' is still, to all intents and purposes (my own theorizing excepted), a thing of the future, and consequently it is not surprising that centres tend, like shopping centres, to be commercial, or places where one can buy and/or sell a variety of produce and products.

10. Hence the shopping centre is pretty much the 'state-of-the-art' situation as it stands at present of what I have described as an antithesis to parks, and is thus a kind of embryonic or crude omega paradise, a paradise that holds hope of future expansion and modification in the direction of religion but which, at this juncture in time, is still firmly commercial and thus centred around economics, specifically with regard to capital gain.

11. Nevertheless shopping centres provide a fledgling alternative to the world, with its buildings and streets, its urban not-selves and selflessnesses, and it seems to me that anyone who is of a mind to go forwards from the world toward an omega paradise can do no better, at present, than to visit a shopping centre and spend some time meditating or contemplating or whatever in proximity to a fountain or a boxed-in arrangement of plant and/or floral life.

12. Of course, one can meditate at home, just as one can sample plant life in one's back or front garden if one happens to have one, but on an analogue with parks it is to the shopping centre that one must go if one wishes to sample a taste of the omega paradise as it currently exists in the world, and thus go some way towards the self inwardly and essentially rather than, as with parks and gardens, outwardly and apparently.

13. And the more one does this, the less, it seems to me, will one want to visit parks, with their vast open spaces and Edenic associations. One will have become too progressive to have much time or taste for regressing away from the world in an alpha-oriented direction. One's devolution from not-self and selflessness will be forward-tending, not backward-tending, and therefore one will identify less with the id than with the soul.

14. For the soul-self can only be cultivated on the basis of an inward-tending orientation, and to have such an orientation one needs to be indoors rather than outdoors. Meditating in the park would, frankly, be a contradiction in terms!