In my early twenties, I fell into an elitist crowd of philosophers who liked to sit around pubs debating abstract intellectual things such as Wittgensteinian theories. These were my years as a student at uni in a “college town” in the southern part of New Zealand’s South Island. I met a lot of philosophers who were influential for the rest of my life, but none of them were so great at making an impact on my way of thinking as my thesis supervisor, Josh.
Josh was not just a philosophy teacher to me. He was also my band leader. He was a young, skinny, post-punk dude who always had a friendly demeanor no matter who he was speaking to.
He genuinely loved philosophy. You could tell how much he loved talking about it just by sitting in one of his metaphysics lectures. He could think about space and time almost from an outsider’s perspective and had a great way of discussing it without judgment or ego. His specialty was research in the area of the spatio-temporal existence of objects.
You see, it isn’t completely obvious how objects exist. We take it for granted psychologically, but in fact, we don’t know for sure what makes an object the same from moment to moment, especially if it undergoes changes. Are your bodies the same as they were when we were babies? How are we persisting through life shifts? Mentally, what makes me the same person as ten years ago if almost nothing seems to remain of that person I once was?
The same dilemma applies to objects that seem to exist outside of us. How is a house the same if I remodel it and give it a makeover, and at what point does it become a different object? What is time? What is space? What are qualities? What is anything.
Josh taught me about these things. This is why, twenty years later, I still often think of Josh.
I narrowed my focus to the study of metaphysics in my postgraduate years. Josh joined the faculty exactly when I was entering my Master’s studies in 2006. Could it be a coincidence that the universe saw an opening for a great mentor in my life and sent me Josh? I don’t know if there is any other philosophy professor, living or dead, who could have impacted the rest of my life so deeply.
After Josh had joined the philosophy department faculty, we held one of our many philosophy department dinners at a local restaurant in Dunedin and then checked ourselves into a karaoke club. I sang a Madonna song, and he asked me to be a singer in an 80s cover band that he was forming. Josh was the bass player, and two other philosophy students played drums and guitar. That year in our band was the most fun I may have ever had in my life.
Josh and I met at least once a week about my Master’s thesis and at least once a week for the band practice for most of 2006. I attended philosophy department drinks at the pub every Wednesday and had a desk in the postgrad office in the department. So, I was often blessed to be immersed in the thought processes of this brilliant philosopher.
Band practice was held in his apartment on the second floor of an old house at the bottom of Baldwin Street. We’d enter by going around the side of the gift shop for the “Guinness records’ steepest street in the world” and ascending the old, wooden staircase. After practicing our set list, we would chill around his kitchen and talk about extremely nerdy topics such as how The Human League got together as a band. Josh knew everything.
He would play clips of different 80s songs for us to study them, and our eyes would light up when we heard the intro from the song “Enola Gay” by O.M.D. or the chorus of “Opus Dei” by Laibach. He also owned complete DVD collections of the old Doctor Who and Blake’s 7, which he treated like a library, lending them generously to me so I could educate myself on 1970s British sci-fi television. Josh put wisdom in our brains.
It sounds crazy, but I am realizing now that everything he taught me was rich with messages about my spiritual journey and my life purpose. He is still advising me now from the past— on a thesis far greater than any I would complete in an academic setting.
Josh “passed away” in 2017 at the age of 44 after teaching briefly at Oxford University. It was far too soon and far too sad. I miss him and his existence in this world. Why do brilliant people die so young?
When I was having my major spiritual awakening in 2020, Josh seemed to be reaching out to me via our 80s music, such as the songs we used to play in our band. I found a totally new meaning in the song “Message in a Bottle” by The Police, for instance. I thought I was probably going mad, but I felt him watching over me and cheering me on in my spiritual evolution.
I am his student, still, even as he exists on the other side of the veil. In his memory, I press on through my life path to try to elevate the collective consciousness. In my toolbox, I have a higher perspective on space and time because of Josh — an advantage for anyone trying to transcend those things with altered states of consciousness.
After the past few years, I can proudly say that I have figured some things out. Having seen the world from a soul’s perspective instead of the ego’s, I can now explain how objects exist in space and time. They’re all manifestations of consciousness and they are either there or not there depending on our beliefs. In addition, the soul is what makes identity persist.
Without an understanding of spirit, philosophical topics will never make total sense. We can talk and talk about them till the cows come home (or until happy hour is over, as we used to do in the philosophy department.) But without knowing that there is a whole world of consciousness beyond the senses, there is no use in trying to solve many metaphysical problems. And yet, ironically, the world’s academic philosophers have a monopoly on the way we learn about philosophy.
We can never merge a spiritual and philosophical perspective on life until we do away with the “old way” of approaching philosophy totally scientifically.
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