image: denis collette

I’m often devastated by the mess we are capable of making of things. We turn up here, beautiful planet, Garden of Eden, all is well and then we start.

Where did the rot set in? What is the provenance of the malaise that afflict us? If I were a crude man I would call it sheer crass stupidity but I am not so I will refer to it as folly.

Here are the options:

1. The skills to sustain life are becoming more refined. This means an ageing population, but also it means a more foolish population because the basic tenets of human life are still an enigma to the vast majority. The longer you live in ignorance the more acute your old age foolishness will be.

2. Work out rapidly what it is you want, the credo by which you will live and the means by which you will enable that to happen. Where there is a shortfall, work out how you will fill the gap. Then do it.

3. Opt out. Disenfranchise yourself from the Universe. Take one of the three paths, i) hedonism - just enjoy yourself. ii) nihilism - nothing matters anyway. iii) rat-racer - climb the ladder and never mind whose fingers you step on to get up there, greed is good a la Gordon Gecko. 

Happiness, it has been said, is a journey, not a destination. If you’re still looking for the tripod in your life (growth/development - fulfilment/satisfaction - happiness) you’d better hitch up your skirt or breeches and start running.

Good luck whatever you choose. 

 image: eggman

The fundamental constituents of happiness or well being seem to revolve around an intrinsic stability. What we have at the moment is social instability writ large. it follows therefore that we will witness an increase in things like depression and the various co-states that accompany social instability. This is tied inextricably to finance and the relative prosperity of the world we are in.

It is, of course, a matter of perception. The sun will still rise and set, the seasons will still change and the natural worlds will proceed oblivious to the minutiae of our worldly woes.

The single most dynamic factor is where you base your axis. Around what issues does your life revolve? These are your choices to make. If you base yourself totally in the fickle world we have inherited then expect to be in for a rocky ride, if you make allowance for alternative perspectives then you may weather the storm more fortuitously.

As I walked through woodlands last week I was reminded of the Taoist wisdom to bend like a reed in the wind rather than be brittle and snap in the face of adversity. This applies to us all, the degree of elasticity in your mind and in your assembly will define the way you ride out any storm. Whether it is the looming credit crunch, disease, personal tragedy, infamy or great success.

There have been recessions before, there are cycles that this culture is destined to play out, the world is an arena of change, nothing stays the same. Lament not the passing of that which is impermanent, learn to observe, create your own state and be minimally affected by those things you cannot influence. 

image: legacy recordings

Be honest, don’t you wish you’d lived through the sixties in Swinging London or shooting the breeze up at Haight Ashbury? What would it have been like to be there when Elvis first gyrated and sent a tsunami of shock through the sensibilities of upstanding folk throughout the world?

Karl Marx, think of the effect he had on the twentieth century, worked away quietly and unnoticed in the reading room of the British Museum coming up with a thesis that would radically change our world.

Think of the great happenings in world history and how it would have been to be in the wash of them. Whatever for you are the high points of the human narrative thus far, would you have recognised them if you’d been there?

How many people actually recognised the uniqueness of Elvis, Karl Marx, or swung in the sixties? How many people would have stood shoulder to shoulder with Galileo as the Inquisition turned its gaze upon him and forced him to renounce what he knew to be the case?

Listen my friends, the only truth you have access to is now. I read that we are living in an age without ideas, without thinking and perhaps this is so, certainly the writer thought so but then they had copy to shift.

What chills me is the thought of being alive in an age whose only contribution to the human story was to exacerbate its difficulties with an age of unparallelled hedonism. What radical steps forward have we taken in your lifetime? Oh sure, they’re there, but mostly they exist as avant garde or underground movements.

What ideas do you think are going to come from our age that will alter the human story in a positive way?

It’s one thing to be a pundit or a commentator, it’s something quite different to actually contribute and try to create something new and fresh. Anyone can shoot the piano player or be a gilt edged critic, to bring something different to the table is quite different and requires courage, chutzpah, desire and to be driven in ways that don’t require a hedonistic prize at the end.

Life is such an indescribable gift in itself that it is the prize already before time. The greatest gift surely is to be able to add to the consciousness of the Universe. That is all of us who are sentient in whatever form we may manifest and wherever we appear. 

 image: ricardo sr.

What makes you feel good?

Go for, if you have the option, simple things. Simple things have a cleaner feel to them. Try, if possible, to feel good about things from the natural worlds. Why? Simple, the natural worlds do not recognise credit crunches, our egos, personality or any of the other paraphernalia that constitutes our world.

If it had a title, like a painting or a sculpture, we’d have to call it: The World What We Made. How many of us would actually be proud of it? I suppose it’s like the curate’s egg, good in parts.

There are fantastic things, there are things that aren’t so good and there are things that are horrendous. Terrorists, female circumcision - more properly called female genital mutilation, bureaucracy or red tape or even both are all things that can’t send out a wake up call through the sentient beings of the Universe with the shout ‘Good things happening here’.

The fantastic things make it worth while. What are they? They are those small packages of inspiration and magic, the light falling on places that have been in the dark, the symphony of causes that lead to profound moments you can’t quite put your finger on but know have happened.

Moments of genius, rarefied and complete and passing as distant glimpses of perfection. Being closer to the substance of life itself, touching precious things and feeling their texture with all your senses and knowing that you are mixed up in something beyond special.

This is to feel good, to feel the prana, chi, life-force flow through you and radiate out from your fingertips. To be vital, to be in the flow of something close to sacred, to sculpt force, to project an energy from oneself that is contagious. All of these things are confirmation that you live, you are alive and the proposition of your life is not done yet.     

image: jamesjyu

The fourth estate refers to the media in general and the printed media in particular. It is this esteemed institution that creates, drives and steers public opinion. Public opinion is a creature to be handled with care at all times.

Today a man in the High Court, Robert Murat, is handed damages of some £600,000.00 because the newspapers - or certain editors and certain journalists - decided he was fair game. They proceeded to tear the man’s life to shreds with innuendo, libel and general muckraking in the pursuit of a scandalous headline and increased sales. It became a free for all, a feeding frenzy carried out under the licentious veneer of ‘public interest.’

Know your own mind. Always deal in facts where possible. Always check your sources.

Once I was the foreman of a jury in a high profile court case. The details I cannot go into, but what this taught me was to always reserve judgement until all the facts of any given situation are known. It is only then that you are in a position to assess anything and draw a conclusion, where it is possible. A skilled lawyer will attempt to subliminally influence the minds of jurors, sow seeds of doubt, cast aspersions upon the character of an individual, their actions, challenge and confront assumptions and attempt to persuade them of the validity of their own argument.

You will encounter this regularly, though not in a court of law necessarily. I worked in television and the amount of behind the scenes preparation that goes into giving the impression of spontaneity is quite startling. The majority of viewers are oblivious to the massive campaigns behind every image they see, from make up artists to lighting technicians. All working to give the impression of something casually flung together.

The whole media is a carefully engineered mechanism, designed to influence, persuade and where possible control the free will of its subscribers. The most coveted space in the world is your mind, it is the one place where you can assert your own desires. Do not surrender it to outside influences without first assessing what they want from you.

Note: I enjoy nothing more than to read the papers on a Sunday morning, watch a good documentary or a movie. It’s a question of doing these things on your terms. 

image: joseph lane

Sitting in the sun room at home I am caught by the statue of the Buddha’s head on the marble floor. There is a graceful line to the nose from the brow that the sculptor has captured with skill and finesse.

I am reminded of the saying from Eliphas Levi, “Refine, all can be achieved by refinement.” Development is a matter of engineering your circumstances so that the outer portrayal of your life is a manifestation of the inner state that you occupy. This means creating a symbiotic approach to your life so that there is a resonance or a frequency of sameness throughout.

It’s about consistency, it’s about integrity. The outer state is a representation of the inner state. It is in this way that you can read people, you can tune into precisely what is going on in any given situation according to the outer expression of what is actually at play.

People make excuses, we all do it and that is a part of living, we excuse ourselves and among family and friends we make allowance for the imperfections of each of us. The question is, of course, how far do you go with it? And, critically, do you make excuses to yourself?

You are the one who knows your inner state best of all, you are the one who has the greatest insight and are best placed to assess whether you are being true to yourself or not.

What you choose to surround yourself with, what you are attracted to, who you mix with, the thoughts you have, the things you do are all expressions of that inner state. That place which is closer to you than anything else.

If you are cold reading a person you will observe textures, movements, postures, speech patterns, clothing, hairstyles and so on. All of this will give a picture of where the person is coming from and where they are in themselves. What’s important to them, what do they emphasise or even what do they make a big play of not emphasising?

Reflection is everything. To understand yourself better, use the method I have described elsewhere of detached viewing and then look at yourself and your environment as though it were the very first time.

image: pingnews.com

I have always thought that my time was limited. Limited by external factors over which I had no control. I understand now that my time is limited by internal factors over which I do have control. Perception is everything.

Consider the view that time is linear. It is how most of us think of it. A line that travels, and along which we travel, perhaps like being on a train. Another way to think of it is that time is like a stream or a river, the current is the direction it follows, where it has come from is the past and where it is going to is the future. Where it is now is the present.

Let’s expand that idea a little. We have a linear, directional perception of time as a three vectored thing, the past, the present and the future. This perception relies upon the idea of time as having a constant speed and direction, as in it will always be moving forward and it will maintain a regular speed. We go along with it as if we were floating in the current, perhaps as a leaf or a twig might float along in a stream or a river.

Where does a river lead to? All rivers lead to the sea. They merge back into the ocean from which they originated via the process of precipitation. The point at which a river enters the sea is an estuary.

Time is more accurately thought of in this way, that it is like an estuary rather than a stream. An estuary is a combination of currents, directions, eddys, vortices, whirlpools, sudden shifts and rapid changes. So there are temporal variations, there are alternative structures in the fabric or flow of time. Even to the extent that there will be points or zones where it appears to move backwards. There will be places where it seems to alternate its speed and even change direction.

The real leap in cognizance is your understanding that you can be where you want to be within that. Consider your own mind as being an intermediary between the different strata of existence that we are a part of. Your perception is a mediator between the various states that it is possible for it to occupy. It is limited by your beliefs which are essentially a distillation of what you have been told.

Remember the extraordinary young gymnast Olga Korbut who dazzled the world in the Munich Olympics of 1972. She pushed her craft to such an extent that many within the gymnastics world thought that the apex of gymnastics had been reached and there was nowhere left for it to go, perfection had been accomplished. Fourteen year old Nadia Comanici at the following Olympics in Montreal achieved an unprecedented six perfect ten scores. She was the product of a training and coaching system that simply did not tell the gymnasts the things they were being asked to do were unheard of.

These were children and so the luggage of later life did not hamper them. They simply wanted to please their mentors. By which process they became an unstoppable force in the world of gymnastics, achieving things that had been hitherto thought impossible.

Your mind is the same. It is limited by its beliefs of what is possible or not based upon very conservative thinking. The way that you think is not designed to allow you to become emancipated or illumined, it is essentially a means of surviving adequately in the modern world. That is what usually makes the biggest noise. The desire to conform, not in a pejorative sense, to the prevailing conditions is the most acute pressure source we as social entities find ourselves in the wash of.

It’s a little like having the most extraordinary supercar, being sat at the wheel with all the controls at your fingertips ready to respond to your instructions but being stuck in a traffic jam. That’s how it is for your mind, it is restricted and hampered by the situations it finds itself in. 

Like the perception of time as a simple linear construct, we understand most aspects of our lives in a very faltering way. Like Nadia Comaneci it is about believing that you are capable of producing giant leaps instead of tiny shuffling steps.

It’s interesting for someone who lived through the strange days of the 1970s to see the fear around the world at the moment. Fear of financial difficulty. Oh dear. It makes me realise how far we have become removed from the things that really do matter in life.

The dinner parties of the west have been obsessed by the cataleptically uninteresting topic of property prices for some years, it has become the refuge of the unimaginative, the bland and the complacent. I urge anyone to read Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds by Charles Mackay to see that what we are experiencing is far from new.

It seems that we have all thrown our lot in with the vagaries of the stock market and the never ending bull market since the 1990s. It had to come to an end, all things have their season, all things have a cycle. 

Our perception of relative wealth has been tied into the fantasy of a never ending bull run that would buy us a place in some nirvana like state of being. Yet we find ourselves swamped by a tide of psychosis, mental disturbances and the palliative medications that accompany them, and the symptoms of a deep a presiding unsettlement that holds sway over the urge to surround ourselves with material possessions.

The material can never fill the gap that has been created by a neglect of the spiritual side of our existence. Perhaps individually you are fully emancipated, I know I’m not, and witness the folly of humans as the Gods did on Mount Olympus, deciding the fates of those mortals who dared to step up to the plate.

Development can only be accomplished by a rigorous and thorough appraisal of oneself and the path you have taken to get to the place you are at now. No matter how huge the opposition you face, no matter what infamy has befallen you, there is a Universe within and without you that resonates on a different frequency. Your allegiance to the world is based upon an education that the world gave, it sold itself hard to you and then persuaded you to jump aboard.

Who would not do that? And yet, in the stillness of the night, in the majesty of the stars that swirl like a frozen wave in the heavens there is something that does not recognise the world we have made. We are the children of a system that we created, a reflection of ourselves, not of the Universe. 

Amid the teeming sea of influences there is a thread. A thread that connects you to your point of origin. This is the place to be, this is the thing to be connected to.

In the 1980s, Wayne Anthony was one of the big promoters on the rave scene in the UK. This particular scene, the UK has since the war been made up of various youth scenes that have produced a vibrant underground culture, was especially hedonistic and heavily drug dependent. Having seen so much crash and burn he says:”Rehab won’t sort you out; self-discovery, yoga and meditation will. I think a lot of the rave generation got into that stuff. They discovered something more to life and found something that could still give you a high, a natural high.”

image: edward dullard

Development. Fulfilment. Happiness.

I used to wonder about the size of the Universe when I was a child. I lived in an urban sprawl, right in the middle of a seething city, where millions of people lived out their various hopes, fears and dramas. At night sometimes I would listen to the sound of industry working non-stop. The stockyards and the trains shunting goods wagons about the place, the sound of steam, the noises of the urban night, sounds that get lost in the day becoming amplified and points of focus for my attention.

At these times I would wander through the various models of the Universe that I had constructed, shapes, sizes, boundaries, edges. I could never build an adequate representation of the enormity that I felt before I drifted off into sleep. It seemed impossible to comprehend quite what I was in.

The greatest mystery of all for me was just what it was all for. What purpose did it serve, what was my place within it? What reason could I try to divine from the fact that I had consciousness and was able to put the thought process together that resulted in the asking of the question?

I never fully understood, and if truth be told I still don’t, my place within the scheme of it all. What was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to be, what were the fundamental principles of living a life, did such things exist?

My initial response was one of hedonism. I heard people say things like, “You’re here for a good time, not a long time,” and I thought that was great. But then I lived the hedonistic life and found that it did not fill the gap in my reasoning that demanded to know why and how.

I did many of the things that young and misguided people do. I experimented, went too far, fell flat on my face, became involved in underground scenes - they still existed then. I was left with the feeling of the shallowness of it all, like it was some role play game and I found myself skeptical of friends and acquaintances who raved about drug and alcohol induced states that produced some allegedly profound result.

People that I knew crashed and burned. They died prematurely, or at least they died young. Wasteful deaths, and survivors who parked themselves in the cul de sacs of life, watching as the Universe went by, soaked in their own excesses. Who am I to judge? they may have been right, they may have had a point.

Yet I spoke to people that I no longer recognised. Miserable and shadows of the bright young things they had been. Cynical, lost and desperate. Desperate to reconnect to the initial vigour that they had felt as children. Desperate to reconnect to the mystery wanderings that told them life was a great adventure, that there was magic to be experienced and that it was all around. It simply needed a key to unlock it.

Try to avoid the pitfalls, the mantraps in the jungle. The world we discovered ourselves to be in is so far removed from the place that it could be. A child would call it unfair. An adult would try to explain it to the uncomprehending child and realise they were making excuses for the inexcusable.

Blake said, “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” There is no need to create a system, the system exists, a system of interconnected universal laws that define our existence. Creation of a system is not the way, understanding the system that already exists is.

True sanctuary is found in the contemplation of such matters. They are the springboard to an elevated level of perception. Getting it is not difficult. What is difficult is recognising the need and being able to act upon that. 

image: cesareal

Summertime and the living is easy. It appears that the fish are jumping and the cotton is high.

The song Summertime, paraphrased above, has the duality contained within so many of the genuine or faux spirituals. The element of an earthly travail alleviated only by the promise of a heavenly release. One of the classics of the genre being Swing Low Sweet Chariot wherein the lyric urges the singer’s companions that they’ll be coming soon, to the promised land. The idea is that death is the ultimate freeing of the individual from the burdens and troubles of the world and this is undestandable given the origin of the song.

The idea of a chosen people, a contract with God, a covenant is compelling. The concept that the world is a place of struggle, hardship and suffering from which the only respite is the certain knowledge of another dimension where these things are as shadows that dance upon a wall in the firelight.

This is the sanctuary of certain peoples whose life is affirmed by a transcendent state of spiritual ecstasy that promises and offers release from the constraints of the physical world.

It is unequivocally the case that within each of us there is a certain quality, a matter that is difficult to define because of its transcendent nature. It is the vital essence of life itself, that thing which initially gives animation and potentially offers illumination. To be at the core of a carousel of happenings whose occurrence constitutes your life is like being at the helm of a great craft. Your ability to surrender to the influence of these things will determine how your life unfolds.

Presumably you are not a slave. At least not in the classic sense as we in the west would understand it. So this means you are unlikely to be battling against physical hardship ad privations that render the self electing life an impossibility. Your liberation is in transcendence of the mundane. Your freedom is in escaping the cycle of repetition that becomes your habitual way of being and, in a sense, an enslavement.

Aspire to greatness. Approach your life as a one shot deal. Make it count.