Tender Exchange with the Earth

Interview with Peter Young 
for WiserEarth online Magazine:
"Towards a Unified Perspective"

Peter Young studied anthropology at Cambridge mostly because he wanted to know what it means to be a human being.  Yet when the question ‘does an idea have a reality?’ presented itself to him, it persisted because he could not find an answer to it through academic study.  It was as though the question was beckoning a change in the direction of his education.  In 1975 he attended the very first 6-month course at the Beshara School in the Scottish Borders and in 1984 he became its principal.  But as Peter says, ‘the greater part of my life has been devoted to enquiring into another kind of knowledge which is not knowledge ‘about’, but is more like knowledge ‘from’.’ He necessarily considers himself, together with the school staff and those who attend the courses, a student.  Insightful about the mysteries of the unity of being and the vastness of the human potential – which he always grounds within the current global state of affairs with surprising freshness – Peter has given many talks the world over and run short courses in the UK, Israel, Jakarta, The Netherlands, Australia and the U.S.A

The interview was conducted by Narda Dalgleish

Narda:  Do you remember the release of the NASA image Earthrise, and what would you say about its perspective? 

Peter Young:  I remember it, yes, but it’s very difficult to separate a genuine memory from the imposition we put on it.  Once it becomes an icon and an icon of the era, we superimpose that on the actual memory, so it’s difficult to separate the two.  But, yes, a staggering shift in consciousness took place and that’s why this image is iconic.  For me this image is very tender, highly compassionate.  It produces in me a feeling of tenderness for the planet; a sense of the tenderness of the planet towards all of us that live on it; a feeling of tenderness towards the human beings that live on this planet and who are cared for; and also, the possibility of a tender exchange between the World that is the Planet and its atmospheres and waters and all of that, and the people who are nourished by it so that they too can give back tenderly to the planet.  I think all of that is in the picture.  We don’t see the people, but we know they’re there.  And we know that they’re there because it is they, actually, who are seeing this image.  So it activates our response to our home – to our Mother.  And that activates this reciprocity.

Narda:  This year also marks the 40th anniversary of the Beshara School.  Do you see a link between the two events?

Peter Young:  I don’t know about any causal linkage.  Certainly, at that time, there were also deep stirrings and an opening to a perception that life can be entirely different from what we had been led to believe; that there was wonderful possibility for us – in our lives and in our appreciation of our lives, way beyond what we had been educated to believe, perhaps even beyond our imagination.  That is what was awakening, although I personally didn’t have words for that.  It was only later that I found the words for it.  But, certainly, there was a longing there: a longing to be all that I could be and to be awake to the wonder of the Universe.  

Narda:  I very much liked your recent talk, ‘Education and the Self’ given at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, subtitled: ‘What kind of knowledge is necessary for an uncertain future?’  You made the distinction between knowing about something and knowing something from itself.  You also mentioned that as things are changing, we are changing whether we like it or not.  How are we changing?  Did you mean we are changing in the way we know?

Peter Young:  The way we perceive ourselves is changing and the way that we perceive the world is changing.  And this is an unavoidable process in that reality is presenting itself continually in a new way, both as the exterior world we think we know and in how we perceive it.  Not just yearly, but daily and even instant-by-instant, if we are awake enough to perceive it. 

 

 

 

 

Left: The Hereford Mappa Mundi is the largest intact Medieval wall map in the world and its ambition is breathtaking – to picture all of human knowledge in a single image.  The work of a team of artists, the world it portrays is overflowing with life, featuring Classical and Biblical history, contemporary buildings and events, animals and plants from across the globe, and the infamous ‘monstrous races’ which were believed to inhabit the remotest corners of the Earth

 

Narda:  We use the term ‘reality’ many times in a derogatory way; we say ‘yes, but the reality of the situation is…’ and mostly we mean ‘dire’.

Peter Young:  We do tend to use the term in this way, but it is most unjust to the term because, what we actually mean is, ‘my belief is that reality is like this’.  Whereas the way I’m using the word ‘reality’, I believe is more accurate in that it indicates a reality that I don’t necessarily know, that I have all kinds of beliefs about, but which is not the same as my beliefs. That reality is necessarily hidden to view, because it is obscured by the things that I believe about it. And it has very little to do with my everyday experience of life, which is what people call reality.  Reality might include my belief, but my belief is not the same as reality.

Narda:  You can find even among devoted peace activists who make every possible effort to bring about peace, that they get deeply demoralized by what they call the ‘reality of the situation’ or, what they observe as all the difficulties and things that seemingly can’t change.  How would you respond to that?

Peter Young:  Well, how I would respond to that is that peace activists have an end game in mind, and this is peace.  It is their belief that everything will be so much better if there is universal peace reigning everywhere.  And that presupposes that it will be better, as it were, from reality’s point of view, if there is peace reigning everywhere.  So naturally, they get upset when it doesn’t come about and they say ‘the reality is like this.’

Now, supposing that the end game for us as human beings is not that universal peace reigns - but doesn’t exclude that possibility – supposing that we have a destiny to fulfill, and that that is the end game that reality has in mind, as it were, for us. Then, if we say that universal peace is what we are after, we won’t find the destiny that reality has in mind for us, or that we have in mind for ourselves.

So, then, the fact that peace is not established, becomes not an obstacle, but something to help us on our way. Why is peace not established?  We haven’t tackled our human nature.  We have not put our humanity under scrutiny.  In other words, we don’t know ourselves, so, no wonder peace is not established.  If our destiny is to come to know ourselves – what we are, how we are, why we are – and we haven’t done that, is it surprising that universal peace isn’t reigning?

Narda:  We have mixed up pure ideas with ideals and then tried to realise them in ideological systems, which are unsustainable.  What ideas can be realised and be sustainable today?

Peter Young:  Well, perhaps we could take peace as an example: that peace is the experiential quality, which is manifested as a result of something arriving at completion.  So that once we are complete in ourselves, we’re at peace.  Until then we’re not.  So then, here we do have a pure idea of peace, which is actually knowable - we can experience it - but we can only experience it in its right place.  That is, when we’ve come to really understand, come to be what we are, then we’re complete and necessarily at peace.  If we were to make that peace not a pure idea but an ideal that we were to work towards, we’d be bringing it down from where it actually is.  So, I think that’s a very nice distinction that you made about pure idea or pure reality, because there is this peace, and the ideal. 

Narda:  And the corruption of it.

Peter Young:  Yes.  And then we get driven by a belief that things should be in a certain way, when quite clearly they’re not.  I don’t know whether that was an answer to your question, but it was more of a continuation of what was said before.

Left: Leonardo’s drawing of the Vitruvian Man where the body demonstrates the archetypal human perfection, exemplifying the beautiful symmetry and proportions found throughout nature and the workings of the universe.

Narda:  Yes, it was.  Could we just clarify what you mean by completion?  I mean it must be linked actually with what the potential of a human being is?

Peter Young:  Absolutely, we inevitably have some fixed idea about what a human being is, or what the reality of mankind is, and that it’s different from that of a plant or it’s different from this animal or that animal or this insect. And yet we have, it is said, all the realities of the entire universe in us.  But even then, if we added up all the realities of all the different things in the universe and the world itself, it still wouldn’t add up to being a human being. So, we’d be complete in one way, with the sum total of everything, but what was it that gave rise to there being a sum total?  There must have been something before even the idea of a sum total... yes?  That… that is our reality and potential as human beings: coming to find what was prior even to the possibility of there being a sum total of everything.

That, for me, is completion.  This is why we lay in our education here, at the Beshara School, such emphasis upon oneness.  So we say: ‘human reality is one reality’.  And from this one reality, how many billion people are alive at the moment?  How many billions have there been from this one reality?  And if you add all those people up together you still don’t get to that one, which there had to be before.  There had to be this one reality before there could be all these billions.  That one reality is what I mean by completion.  And when we find that one reality there will also be peace.  It stands to reason that if I am not one with my neighbour, I can’t be at peace with him.  So it is really an understanding of this matter in a deep way.  Finding oneness in myself is to find oneness with my neighbour because he’s just like me.  Then there will be peace with my neighbour.  When I will have found my oneness, I will be at peace and I will share that peace with my neighbour.

Narda:  Is there a difference between oneness and non-duality?  I mean, they both pose a paradox … If there is only one being, can anything other than itself perceive it?  Or, because there is nothing other, how can it not be perceived by all?

Peter Young:  I would put it slightly differently, and say that this oneness allows for all the dualities that you like.  If there was something that we call duality that wasn’t in oneness, it wouldn’t be complete.  And, what is completely and absolutely one is necessarily complete.  So, there’s all duality possible within oneness, just like I have two hands.  It doesn’t divide me up at all.  In fact, it’s not only more useful to have two hands, it’s even more beautiful to have two hands.  Just like you’ve got two eyes.  There would be something missing perhaps, if you had only one eye – although, thank God, it wouldn’t affect your spirit at all because you don’t have two spirits…

So, this oneness has all duality possible.  It is this, and it is the opposite.  It’s up and it’s down and it’s inside and it’s outside, and it’s you and it’s me, and so there’s a duality in you and in me and it doesn’t divide it up at all.  So, all duality is there, and the only thing that isn’t a duality is Being itself, which is absolutely one.  And that is how one being can have two hands.  One being can have two eyes.  One being can have an inside and an outside.  Then, once we’ve understood this, then we’ve seen that all we’re talking about here is duality of aspects, and not a duality of being.  If we can understand this, we have made great strides towards peace in ourselves, because we will realise that everything is present within us and everything is present without.  And essentially, things are at peace and we can be at peace with them.

Narda:  I wonder about the process that the students undergo here?

Peter Young:  The process as I understand it, is the removal of unnecessary or even wrong beliefs. What we thought to be the case we suddenly realise it isn’t.  And that’s invariably a great relief.  That belief we were so fond of was actually the thing that was holding us back.  It’s not that the belief was absolutely untrue, but there’s a much bigger truth behind it.  So, once we’re prepared to let go of that particular form – although there may be a temporary grief or sadness – there’s invariably much greater promise behind it.  So, of course, it’s much too simple to say that this is the process, but this is certainly of the process of education.  Until having let go of everything, and you know, I’m not claiming any completion in this, but having let go of everything, everything is just as it was before, only I didn’t see it clearly and now I see it clearly.

Narda:  So, to go back to the two kinds of knowledge you talked about earlier, what is this process of knowing myself from myself?

Peter Young:  Maybe we can just start in another place.  We’ve been brought up to believe in the ultimate difference between others, and ourselves. There is some kind of an invisible barrier between where myself stops and my other self starts.  Or, where my self stops and the Universe at large starts.  So, if we could just see that this is largely our view of how things work, and that clearly, there has to be some matrix in which those two apparent selves can be, then we could see that this self that I call myself and the outside world, including you that I call ‘other’, these are partial universes and neither can subsist without the other.  So, what we’re really talking about here is not one world out there and another world in here, but a relationship of inside and outside, yes?  It’s dynamic – it’s a conversation.  I see you, you see me, and each is necessary for the other.  In this, there’s nothing wrong.  There’s nothing to get rid of except, maybe, the erroneous view that, here, is one being and there, is another being.  In fact, if I’m prepared to let that go, then much more interesting situations open up which is the possibility of conversation, dialogue, vision, interchange, exchange … and where is all this happening?  And why is all this happening?

So, all of that is entirely positive, once I let go of this idea of two beings – at least, two beings in existence.  Okay, so now, I come to your question about your learning from.  There is a kind of knowledge possible for me to learn about the outside world, like a botanist, like a scientist, like a psychologist.  I’m learning about the way your mind works and hence, maybe I can learn a bit about how my mind works.  But even there, my mind is as if it’s something else.  It’s out there somewhere, it’s as if it were an object, and of course this kind of knowledge is extremely fruitful.  It’s about how things work in relation to each other, but, it’s as if they were objects, as opposed to stepping into the being, my being, and finding that that being is the same being of what I just called the outside world.  And I can ask my being about itself in the form of that plant.  Or, I can ask my being about itself in the form of Narda.  I can say, ‘how are you?’  And you can tell me.  And I can be informed from what you tell me …

Narda:  How?

Peter Young:  You can tell me and I have been informed from you about how you are.  I can ask that plant, ‘how are you today?’ and it can tell me.  And I noticed that it needs water.  It told me.  Its leaves are drooping – possibly they need dusting.  Or, it’s actually looking very nice.  It’s informing me about itself.  It’s informing me that it’s in the right position.  It’s getting enough sunlight, the soil is good – all of this it’s told me.  But it can tell me in other ways as well.  So, it’s not an object.  It’s a living thing that is communicating with me.  It’s very much more the case with you.  That’s much more obvious.  But supposing that just like you and just like this plant there is a consciousness which is prevalent, pervading everything, which can inform me about itself.  Obviously my belief that it’s an inanimate object is going to be a bit of a block to being informed by it, because my belief system doesn’t allow for that …

Narda:  In the invitation to the first ‘Self-Knowledge and Global Responsibility’ symposium you pointed out that the interrelated factors of the global crisis might be viewed as many symptoms of a single cause.  What is this single cause?

Peter Young:  I see the single cause as the necessity of mankind to get to know its own place.  Get to know its own place and responsibility and possibility with regard to reality as a whole.  So, if we take up our place, if we do change and step into service, step into responsibility and step into proper relationship with reality as a whole and humanity and the world, then, I think we could say ‘what crisis?’  ‘What crisis’ because it wouldn’t be the same crisis, and that all that we’re actually seeing here is the necessity for changing our relationship.  Changing our view of ourselves and view of what we call others.  Our relationship with the other is actually our relation to ourselves, or, our relationship with our self.  If we learn, if we look at this situation with that understanding, with those ears, we’ll be informed exactly where we are with regard to it.  There won’t be anything to fix, because fixing things is still from otherness in a way, it’s still mechanical.

Narda:  There is a noticeable increase in the number of young students who came both to the SKGR Symposium and attended the six-month course.  Are they more geared to perceive reality directly?

Peter:  I don’t know.  There are definitely changes, and that takes us back to your question right at the beginning.  How could there not be changes?  My own feeling is that they are starting in a different place from the one we started in the seventies.  But that view is a personal view and obviously it is governed by time, which cannot be ultimately true.  There’s certainly a difference and some things are now completely taken for granted, they don’t have to be explained.

Narda:  Like the relationship between oneness and the environment?

Peter Young:  Yes.  Everyone knows nowadays that things are interconnected; that there’s a connection between what’s going on in me personally and what’s going on out there.  Yet the nature of this connection may not be so obvious.  But the fact is that it’s in the zeitgeist that there is a connection that’s very much more established.  So, yes, I think we do see progress of a kind. I’m not saying better.  Because I don’t think there’s any better.  It’s simply that one period is not the same as the next.  There is a movement. 

Narda:  In your video ‘Change in the Era’ you mentioned two seismic shifts in humanity’s perception of the sacred – or reality.  How do you see this progression of our perception of the holy?

Left: The interior of the Temple of Apollo from above.  The final response of the oracle Pythia at Didime to the Emperor Julian: ‘Say to  the sumptuous residence of Emperor that the Gods are to be found buried in the bowels of the earth.  Apollo no longer inhabits these places.’ (361-363 AD approx.)

 

Peter Young:  Basically, I think, that point of change was a movement from the perception that we are the profane and God is holy and we are other than God; God is in his holy of holies and our connection with him is through the priesthood who is somewhere in between.  And then, with the coming of Christ, a new perception of ourselves as humanity came into play, which is that God is among us.  And when we come together in His name He is present.  So He is not in His holy of holies.  His holy of holies is within us collectively, and that is a very, very big shift.  But, of course, that was certainly taken on belief and maybe only realised by a few. 

But perhaps the possibility now is that we really have to take this on as our reality, and that God – or our perfection as humanity – is right here amongst us; to know that it’s present between my enemy and me; between me and my ‘other’.  And if we come together in the name of that and not in the name of myself, this is really the way that we, as humankind, need to know is the truth.  Look at the United Nations, where still everyone comes there in the name of themselves, or in the name of their country.  And that’s still, in a way, of the past. 

Because what’s been said is ‘when you come together in my name’, or in the name of the oneness of humanity, or in the name of the necessity of the planet, or in the name of the universal spirit that is beyond me, beyond what I can see, beyond my requirements – but it is absolutely necessary – this is a completely different way of being.  And we can approach that either with conviction, certainty, belief – all of which are very, very good – or, if we’ve been given some deeper vision, approach it with that vision, it doesn’t matter.

Narda:  Did you have any intimation in your early childhood … anything that has made an impact on your future direction?

Peter Young:  I was shown a choice quite early on while still a child.  The choice was between being true to myself and not being true to myself.  And, in one, there’s a sense of a promise and in the other there’s a sense of just getting lost.  And it was in between those choices that there were both the sense of great possibility and hope for that possibility, and the fear of not being true to myself and getting lost, and getting swept into the way we believe things are.

Narda:  So you had a sense of that very early, as a child?

Peter Young:  Yes, I could either be true to myself or I could be like I thought everyone else wanted me to be – it is literally being between hope and fear.  So, yes, that was clear to me, I remember at a point … when?  I couldn’t tell you.

Narda:  Do you have any questions?  Do you have a big question, any question that is sitting with you, or any question that you would have wanted to be asked?

Peter Young:  Ah … a question that I would hope that you would ask of me?

Narda:  Either … or a question you may have?

Peter Young:  All I told you is general.  And in a way what is much more demanding is to know what is required at any given time.  And for that, we need to lean on guidance.  And what I’ve been speaking of, hasn’t really mentioned our sheer dependency on being guided and being led, you know, one foot following the other and walking in a clear and blessed direction.  It’s easy to talk about the oneness of humanity and take that as an ideal as opposed to a pure idea – as you said.  And in doing that we bring it down.  But what we need to do, is walk to that area.  What I’m saying is that what is required in any particular moment, in any particular instant, we never know in advance.  So, the big question is ‘what is required now?’  And I can’t legislate on that even for myself, let alone for everybody else.  But that’s what we’ll have to be asking, so that’s my question and that’s, in a way, always my question.

Narda:  Are you hopeful for the future?

Peter Young:  I’m hopeful.

Narda:  You know, because some people question the very possibility of human survival on the planet …

Peter Young:  Ah, no, I’m extremely hopeful, more than hopeful.  There will be … you know, things need to complete themselves.  We haven’t completed ourselves yet, and that is what all that is happening, is for.  So I feel more than hopeful.  I feel certain.  However, how this is going to come about, of course, I have no idea.  And whether with ease or with difficulty, all that is in God’s hands.  It is also in our hands, in how quickly we take the point.  Whether we want to take the point and so on.  So, yes, I’m certain that we, humanity, will survive – basically because we haven’t yet come to our completion, nor have we, by the same token, come to peace.

Interview first published in the WiserEarth Magazine 'Towards' in 2011