Open letter to Philip Pullman

This is an open letter to the author Philip Pullman, the author of Northern Lights / The Golden Compass and many more books.

23rd October 2009

Dear Philip,

I wanted to share my deep appreciation of your work, and also your precious clarity as you answer questions about your work in interviews and on your web site.

I have always been taken by the story of the Garden of Eden, fascinated by the "if only Eve hadn't eaten the apple" position and the guilt that interpreters of the story have generated to control people with for millennia. Your "His Dark Materials" trilogy seemed to me to be a test of what it would be if we could be so powerful that we could force God to let us back in. The unfolding of the story becomes an explanation of why we are so lucky that we ate from the Tree of Knowledge for the opportunities that it gives us.

Being ill with tonsillitis and struggling to sleep I tried to find something peaceful to think about - something that did not set up a worry or a yearning that might become a lurid and unending illness dream. I thought of God as a possible subject and spent a while wondering how to visualise God - I sensed that he could look however I wanted him to. I became aware that I couldn't find a single image that worked. The obvious things like old wise peaceful man, snow topped mountain and so on weren't free of their own baggage and I couldn't think of anything inspired and original. However it came to me that if I didn't try to "see", but rather "feel" God then there was a very clear and satisfactory outcome. Straight away I knew that being near enough God to see him I could feel one thing: Love. This made sense and felt right.

So I contemplated my imagination of God and experienced being with His love and out of the blue a new possibility emerged, I could love God. It was the only thing to do but it was something that I had never done before. I am deeply wary of being told what to do, and in my 40 years my culture has befuddled me with so much God stuff and I was deeply suspicious of Him and of loving Him. I could manage gratitude and awe, but I'd never managed love. Yet here I was, loving God, being loved by God, God is love, I am love, all there is is love (bother, that stupid song, round and round, what a distraction!), everything is love, there is only love. I realised that in a sense it would be OK to stay in this place, to practice my powers of meditation and basically just return, on my own, to the Garden of Eden and sit in this place of non-doing doing, loving God, being loved by God.

That is a choice I have, but I only have that choice because Eve ate the apple. She made her choice and the consequences have been our history. Just like with all actions, whether consciously made or not, and consciously known or not, the consequences will follow. So, all that long time ago, Lucifer may have danced and we may have followed but even though we suffer the consequences not him, there is something exciting about being alive, about doing things, about experiencing myself as a separate being.

These days the devil seems to have changed, it feels like the dangers of the pleasures of the body are still there but the dangers of reductionist materialist science are new and fantastic and in their darkness feel... satanic. In our freedom we are pushing our knowledge of nature towards the point where one day we, or some of us, may be able to chose when to die or not. Huge moral dilemmas have already been created by science, the atomic bomb for instance, and every year genetic manipulation technology is giving us dramatic new powers over life. There is a parallel in architecture. We can pretty much build a building any shape we want, but that wasn't always the case. Once building materials dictated limits on the form and these held us within boundaries within which we had to strive for beauty. Today we have to chose the form without Nature having nearly so much say. We push Nature back with our technology, but what are we doing to strengthen our decision making so that we can cope with the power the technology gives us, the power we have taken from Nature?

Yet this technological power can not be simplistically viewed as too dangerous or bad - the potential of this power for healing and enhancing is staggering. Actually, the technology itself is neither good nor bad. What has moral quality is the things we chose to do with it. The technology is more freedom, more choices. This path that Eve started us on is extraordinary, is amazing, is fantastic. What sense could there be in denying this? To try to deny it or to put it back in a box - this is un-free, it is impossible. In this world I have the most thrilling opportunity to experience aliveness, to realise my physical capacity to do, to discover my potential. I, and only I, have the power to chose the balance in my life between self realisation through technology and Self realisation through living in the Love of God, in love of God. I can chose to live in the reality that there is only love or to live in denial of that. I can chose to strengthen and deepen my life, my being in these many ways. My choice. I accept that this means that I am responsibile for my Self. No one else. Only me. I thank God for the opportunity. I thank Eve for the decision she made.

You made these great works. You wrought this immense story out of your being and your journey. You have taken the opportunity offered by Eve and chosen to create something out of your own freedom. This action, like all actions, reverberates out in to the world and catches reflections and echoes which, in whatever strange ways, sometimes come back to you. This letter is part of that reflection and I hope that you have experienced it as a sparkle.

Thank you again,
With best wishes,
Sebastian

PS We love Sally L. too!