Dear All,
We had a big family gathering yesterday prior to my wife’s nephew and his wife returning to New Zealand. Inevitably the subject of the World Cup came up in conversation. Apart talk about who was going to stay up to see the England versus Mexico match, opinions were offered about tactics, choice of players and above all our chances of winning. All this despite the gathered company not being exactly what you might call pundits.
The word pundit is an interesting word derived as it is from the Sanskrit term pandit (paṇḍitá पण्डित), meaning "knowledge owner" or "learned man”.[ The pundits conduct religious ceremonies and offer counsel to the king. Their wisdom refers not only to immediate concerns, but also things that don’t come to pass, the eternal truths.
Undoubtedly football matches come to pass, but for a while they generate delirious happiness for some and utter misery for others. Judging from the state of Harry Kane’s horse voice in the post match interview, he was in the deliriously happy camp.
Mind you there is often a price to pay. Jordan Henderson was injured, not during the match but in the post match celebrations. But the equanimity displayed by Thomas Tuchel, a proper pundit, in the decisions he made during the game will, I’m sure, be displayed in the team’s buildup to the next match.
Football is called ‘the beautiful fame; and regardless of of what happens on the ‘hallowed ground’, that beauty is impervious to the score. This is the sort of thing true pundits know all about.
Best wishes, William
PS This is the link to Jude Currivan’s extremely interesting document published by The Club of Rome: The Unitive Science of the Living Universe
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Players on the World Stage
So here they are, these footballers, players on the stage of life. We have our own teams of internal players. They come and go, stimulated by outside events. Sometimes they are in total opposition to one another and yet whilst they hold the stage we find them totally convincing. We are them and they are us. These are the real ghosts in the machine if ghosts can be called real. When we look back and consider the characters to which we have lent our identity they are legion. They may come in a moment of madness and lead us into the most insane antics but at the time they appear entirely plausible. Some of these acts are so popular they are always on. They have almost taken us over.
That is as it is, and we must gain some comfort from the fact that everybody else is in the same situation. They activate us. They can pop out of the situations we face: the delirious football fan, the angry man behind the wheel, the born loser, the petty dictator, the great down-trodden, the utterly certain and the totally unsure and more and yet more. They are legion and its possible to play them all without noticing where one ends and the next begins. Why because we are totally identified with everyone of these characters.
Play them often enough and they never leave, and every time we meet a situation from their point of view, seeing things as if through their eyes, their presence becomes reinforced. Each of these characters has a strong emotional quality, a quality that becomes engrained. And it doesn’t stop at the individual, travel from country to country and you’ll see a build up of qualities to the extent that they become national characteristics. This doesn’t mean to say that we don’t all have our individual oddities, but we also hold something in common and are proud of it. We are proud of being oddly English, peculiarly French, extravagantly American, idiocyncratically Dutch.
As has already been said, this is as it is and in a way we shouldn’t be overly concerned, much better to be more amused. The last thing we are concerned with here is some kind of ‘make over’, cultivating our better points and toning down the worse. In making philosophy a key factor in the way we conduct our lives we won’t have to tinker with externals. Indeed if we were to do so it would only lead to us cultivating another cast of stock characters. We do have our natures. We just don’t have to be concerned about them. To be so would be looking in the wrong direction. Change if it is to take place comes from revelation rather than manipulation. That change takes place by referring within to that which is not subject to time and place, but to the eternal principle of love. By making this our constant reference there will be an effect and those oddities of ours which might once have been the impediments to free and natural relationships become the very things which give us our own peculiar appeal.
PRACTICE: The next time you feel like reacting blindly to some attack on that which you hold dear, stop, and instead, return to that point of stillness from which all movement arises.
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