In Physics, hot and cold are not described as two separate forces, but rather there is only one force: heat, and its absence is what we call cold.

In usual chatter, people do talk about hot and cold, and this is both useful and helpful.  Still it can be very satisfying to really get-down-to-basics and understand the abstract facts of still (absolute zero) or bouncing (warmer) molecules.

These abstract facts inform our strategies for staying warm, cooking, using cold, designing spaces, or gaining further understanding of chemistry and ecology.  When first really spelled out at the molecular level, the basics of heat-physics can be as delightful as a sort of magic, which is always working around us whether we understand it or not.

In the same way that people believe in hot and cold, it is conventional to believe in good and evil.  The actions and attitudes of human beings are often described in terms of balances between these two “forces”, but I have come across a few elegant theories of a simpler  ‘base-physics of emotion’ much more at-the-root-of-things than the unhelpful labels of good and evil, or surface evidence of actions and attitudes.

For example, Oliver Postgate* postulates that like the single force/scale of heat, there is only one scale for human psychology, and that is fear.  The absence of fear is the state of safety, wherein one can forget about the fragile self and just get on with whatever needs doing, easily believing in life, love and the possibility of change.  Outwith safety though, in the various measures of fear, human beings behave very differently.

In his autobiography, ‘Seeing Things’, Postgate writes:

“Fear is the blinder that closes our eyes to hurt and unleashes aggression… This meant that some of the actions and attitudes that I had thought of as morally ‘bad’ could well have been no more than a side-effect of fear, perhaps not of physical fear but of a more subtle fear of personal isolation – anxiety.  So I was reminded, not for the first time, that the key to the clearing of perceptions and the consequent elimination of potential conflict lies in the giving and taking of the safety that mutual acceptance can bring.”

 

Page 354/355

There is a lot in that quotation, which I leave you to draw out and discuss with friends, yourselves!

For this writing of mine, here and now, if I accept Postgate’s assertion that safety is the neccessary baseline to cut out conflict and aggression, then the recent development of “safer space policies” takes on more significance for me, than it had before.

If I accept Postgate’s thought that absolute-safety leads to effortless selfnessness, then it leads me thinking that in seeking to create “safer” spaces, we are aiming for the greatest possibilities of interaction.  The most pure and excellent mutual-aid.  If the agreements we make in such policies are not taken on with sincerity, then our cynicism or fears could utterly undermine the efforts for harmony, productivity, friendship and openness that such policies represent.

The tool of ‘the policy’ is so fragile, yet simultaneously, so potentially mighty.  It can be defeated with merely a flicked phrase of cynicism, but if it is held to with genuine colective-desire, it can crumple huge walls of cynicism, showing fear and aggression up as piffling, personal delusions.

I think it’s well worth exploring why people find it hard to use, refer to, create or uphold safer space policies.  If the group who wrote the policy can make the time to do it, I think it’s really worthwhile explicitly ask you group this question; why is it hard?

For the most honest answers, you will, of course, need the most safe space!  What that means in this context, is a space – a place and a time – where you are not interrupted, replete with food, drink and warmth, and listening to each other with an explicit invitation to talk about personal failings and defeats.  Very often, the spirit in which the “safer spaces policy” was written is crushed by the general unsafeness of our wider society, and the resulting anxiety, aggression and division that we carry within and amongst us, from the wider world.

Letting people express their individual stories of this ‘fear-pollution’, can have the effect of reducing the fear, and gaining perspective on the experiences, both for those speaking and those listening.

To return to the beautiful rambling working-outs of Oliver Postgate’s biography,  I shall end on an enormous quotation, which could bloom into many rich discussions amongst friends and colleagues.

“Jesus Christ, for whose philosophy I have the greatest respect, put it more succinctly.  He said: ‘Love they neighbour as thyself.’

 

I had always seen the truth of that injunction, but it had left me with a problem: where do I find, in myself, the love that I am to feel for the ugly sod?  I can command myself to love him but, unfortunately the only genuine emotion I feel is a sort of guilty inadequacy born of a muted exasperation with him (or her) for being so persistently and wilfully unlovable.

 

So love is not to be commanded.  It is essentially an effect, the result of some prior reassurance.  Consequently I can’t expect myself to be able to feel genuine love until after i have received some confirmation of my own acceptedness, in fact until after I myself have received love and been made welcome by it.

 

That seemed like a ring with no starting-point  [entry point] and yet I was sure there must be some way into it, sure there was  a simple possibility that I had missed…

 

…I had been grappling with a problem that appeared to have no solution, but [then] at last I managed to turn round and look at what I had been trying to solve it with!

 

I had been using the conventional idea of ‘love’ as the only possible starting-point and had been trying to engender it in myself.

 

That had been a nonsense!  There was no need for me to love anybody!  Indeed there was no need for me even to like them, no need to admire, condemn, compare or make any judgement of them at all!  All I needed to do was see them, recognise their presence and make room for them.

 

Was that really all that was necessary?

 

Almost certainly not all, but it was a starting point, and I had just seen, as clear as daylight, how it worked.

 

I know, from myself, that most of the anxieties I feel are caused by a hunger for something – a simple acceptance of me as a person.

 

That acceptance may be something which I need.  But it is also something which I can give, and give quite easily, because giving it only calls on me to do something.  It doesn’t call on me to be anything more than I am or to feel any emotions I don’t feel.  All I have to do is see you and greet the simple fact of your existence, acknowledging that it is the same as my existence, saluting the ‘thereness’ of you.

 

I can, by this expression of a perception that is so obvious to me, but which may be far from obvious to you, make room for you in the world, room enough for you to stand up and see how things are.

 

But then, if you accept my acceptance of you, I receive a greater gift because that is, in its turn, an acceptance of me, a confirmation of the reality of my existence.  Then, as fear and hostility evaporate, one’s attention turns away from oneself, life is good and one can do anything that needs to be done.  ‘Who one is’ becomes irrelevant.

 

But isn’t that what love is all about?

 

Yes, of course, but unlike what we call ‘love’, acceptance is not necessarily special, precious or particularly personal.  It is just a part of ordinary seeing!

 

page 355 / page 356

*Oliver Postgate was the dude who wrote, made and animated Bagpuss, Ivor the Engine, and The Clangers amongst others.  He was also a campaigner for international nuclear-disarmament and a gentle critic of main-stream politics.  If you are in London, the “banned episode” of the cangers, a smal satirical satire, can be watched for free at the BFI screening room on the South Bank! (True in December 2014, maybe still…)