The festive season is coming – Winter Solstice, Christmas, the New Year. Rolling over into January, we have the 25^th in Scotland to celebrate with whisky and haggis the poetry of Robert Burns. Then there’s Bridgit’s Eve, or Saint Bride’s night, on the 31^st.

At the risk of bringing on refrains from Burns’ Tam o’ Shanter, pursued by witches, what all these share in common for me is summed up in an old expression, “a good funeral”.

I don’t know where your cultural reference points might lie, but in Scotland I’ve observed two things about a good funeral. First, there is the obvious: the provision of beverages. As a Ros Levenstein advert had it in the early 1970s, “I’m only here for the beer.” But second, and pressing deeper, there’s the spiritual spirit.

A “good funeral” can be a fleeting but enduring portal into deeper life. Human minds work differently when we come together round a common cause for constellation. The transpersonal realm of interconnection can kick in. Alternate ways of seeing and being may briefly be revealed. A subtle deeper light can fall upon reality.

Paradoxically, a good funeral can leave us uplifted, purged, and purified to glimpse realities more commonly denied. It’s not just funerals. The same is true of many rituals. I only mention funerals because they are less easily avoided.

Ritual, when it is authentic, not forced, when it arises naturally out of the life of a community, provides a portal into life’s deeper state. In the largely secular or materialist world of modern life, we tend to think of one another as individuals. Atomised as “rational economic man”, it makes sense to vie with one anther. Children are taught this from an early age with school prizes, placements in the class, and all the chimera of equality that pass as dog-eat-dog meritocracy. Cooperation is encouraged only inasmuch as it serves the needs of a competitive dynamic. Mainstream western culture canonises winning and in that respect, we may have decolonised Africa, but we have not decolonised our minds.

Therein lies part of our cultural sickness, for what if winning isn’t everything? What if there’s more to life than Bertrand Russell’s summation of humans: “accidental collocations of atoms”? What if there’s more than only random chance events within a meaningless universe, events by which, as he insisted, “no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave”?

What if the great philosopher got it very wrong? He concluded: “Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built”?

That statement – that strange Ground Zero appeal to “soul” - seems to me to carry in it seeds of nihilism’s own nemesis. I wonder if he had read Freud on tricks of the unconscious?

It seems to me that many people have a part of their persona that plays the cool materialist game, that gambles on fixed odds but crucifies itself on scaffoldings of half truths. A scaffolding fixed in space and time with no sense of stepping back into eternity, that admits no more of humankind than egos perched on legs of meat. In contrast, the spiritual question, the metaphysical question, is whether there’s a “meta” behind the “physical”? Whether there’s a Kantian “noumenon” or “thing in itself” behind the “phenomenon” of the outward surface of appearances?