Intolerance of Variations in Consciousness

I am guessing most philosophy students are aware of Alan watts seminars and workshops entitled ‘The Value of Psychotic Experience.’ And many people who are interested in an entirely new approach to ‘mental health’ problems are participating in these seminars and workshops. What they may not realise is that by doing this they are partaking in a new line of philosophical questioning which is extremely dangerous and in a way revolutionary. For this reason:

We are living in a world where deviant opinions about religion are no longer dangerous. Why? Because no one takes religion seriously anymore, and therefore you can be like Bishop Pike and question the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the reality of the virgin birth, and the physical resurrection of Jesus, and still remain a bishop in good standing. But what you can’t get away with today, or at least you have great difficulty in getting away with is psychiatric heresy. This is because in our ‘modern’ world psychiatry is taken incredibly seriously, and indeed i say modern as i would like to draw a parallel between today and the Middle Ages in the respect of this whole question.

Going back to the days of the Spanish Inquisition, we must remember that the professor of theology at the University of Seville has the same kind of social prestige and intellectual standing that today would be enjoyed by the professor of pathology at only the finest of medical schools. And you must bear in mind that this theologian, like the professor of pathology today, is a man of good will. Intensely interested in human welfare. He didn’t merely stress an opinion, that professor of theology KNEW that anybody who had heretical religious views would suffer everlasting agony of the most appalling kind. It is worth reading the imaginative descriptions of the sufferings of Hell, written not only in the Middle Ages, but in quite recent times by men of intense intellectual acumen. And therefore out of what they believed to be real merciful motivation, the Inquisitors thought that it was the best thing they could do to torture heresy out of those who held it. Worse still, heresy was infectious, and would contaminate other people and put them in this immortal danger. And so with the best motivations imaginable, they used the thumbscrew, the rack, the iron maiden, the cat-of-nine-tails, and finally the stake to get these people to come to their senses, because nothing else seemed to be available.

Today, serious heresy, is a deviant state of consciousness. Not so much deviant opinions as having a kind of experience which is different from ‘regular’ experience. We are taught what experiences are permissible in the same way we are taught what gestures, what manners, what behaviour is permissible and socially acceptable. And therefore, if a person has so-called ’strange’ experiences, and endeavours to communicate these experiences (because naturally we like to talk about how we feel) and endeavours to communicate these experiences to other people, he is looked at in a very odd way and asked ‘are you feeling all right?’ Because people tend to feel distinctly uncomfortable when the realise they are in the presence of someone who is experiencing the world in a rather different way from themselves.

Alan Watts says, “They call in question as to whether this person is indeed human. They look like a human being, but because the state of experience is so different, you wonder whether they really are. And you get the kind of–the same kind of queasy feeling inside as you would get if, for the sake of example, you were to encounter a very beautiful girl, very formally dressed, and you were introduced, and in order to shake hands, she removed her glove, and you found in your hand the claw of a large bird. That would be spooky, wouldn’t it?”

Indeed. But for me it would be a little more than merely ’spooky’. He continues… “Or let’s suppose that you were looking at a rose. And you looked down in the middle where the petals are closed, and you suddenly saw them open like lips, and the rose addressed you and said ‘good morning.’ You would feel something uncanny was going on.”

I can also add that in rather the same way, in an every day kind of circumstance, when you are sitting in a pub drinking, and you find you have a drunk sat next to you. He tells you, ‘indistinguishable drunken ranting’ and you sort of move your chair away from him, because he’s become in some way what we mean by non-human. Now, we understand the drunk; we know what’s the matter with him, and it’ll wear off. But when out of the blue he is giving a representation that he’s suddenly got the feeling that he’s living in backwards time, or that everybody seems to be separated from him by a huge sheet of glass. Or that he’s suddenly seeing everything in unbelievably detailed moving colours. We say, ‘well that’s not normal. Therefore there must be something wrong with you.’ And the fact that we have such an enormous percentage of the population of this country in mental institutions is a thing we may have to look at from a very different point of view, not that there may be a high incidence of mental sickness, but that there may be a high incidence of intolerance of variations of consciousness.

Now in Arabic countries, where the Islamic religion prevails, a person whom we would define as mentally deranged is regarded with a certain respect. The village idiot is looked upon with reverence because it is said his soul is not with his body, it is with Allah. And because his soul is with Allah, you must respect this body and care for it, not as something that is to be sort of swept away and put out of sight, but as something of a reminder that a man can still be living on Earth while his soul is in Heaven. A very different point of view. Also in India, there is a certain difference in attitude to people who would be called nuts, because there is a poem (an ancient poem of the Hindus) which says ’sometimes naked, sometimes mad, now’s a scholar, now’s a fool, thus they appear on Earth as free men.’

But you see, we in our attitude to this sort of behaviour, which is essentially in its first instance harmless, these people are talking what we regard to be nonsense. We feel threatened by that, because we are not secure in ourselves. A very secure person can adapt himself with amazing speed to different kinds of communication. In foreign countries, for example, where you don’t speak the language of the people you are staying with, if you don’t feel ashamed of this, you can set up an enormous degree of communication with other people through gesticulation and even something most surprising, people can communicate with each other by simply talking. You can get a lot across to people by talking intelligent nonsense, by, as it were, imitating a foreign language; speaking like it sounds. You can communicate feelings, emotions, like and dislike of this, that and the other; very simply. But if you are rigid and are not willing to do this type of playing, then you feel threatened by anybody who communicates with you in a funny way. And so this rigidity sets up a kind of vicious circle. The minute, in other words, someone makes an unusual communication to you about an unusual state of consciousness, and you back off, the individual wonders ‘is there something wrong with me? I don’t seem to be understood by anyone.’ Or he may wonder ‘what’s going on? Has everybody else suddenly gone crazy?’ And then if he feels that he gets frightened, and to the degree that he gets more frightened, he gets more defensive, and eventually land up with being catatonic, which is a person who simply doesn’t move. And so then what we do is we send him off to an institution, where he is captured by the inquisitors. This is a very special priesthood. And they have all the special marks that priesthood’s have always had. They have a special vestment. Like the Catholic priest at mass wears a stole (a long silk or linen scarf) and gown, the mental doctor, like every physician, wears a long white coat, and may carry something that corresponds, shall we say, to a stole, which is a stethoscope around his neck. He will then, under his authority, which is often in total defiance of every conceivable civil liberty, will incarcerate this incomprehensible person, he undergoes a ritual of dehumanisation. And he’s put away. And because the hospitals are so crowded with people of this kind, he’s going to get very little attention. And it’s very difficult to know, when you get attention, how to work with it.

Alan Watts gives his thoughts on the disguise of Mental health prisons as other seemingly harmless institutions.
“You get into this Kafka-esque situation which you get, say, in the state of California, if you are sent to such an institute as Vacaville prison, which is as you drive on the highway from San Francisco to Sacramento, you will encounter Vacaville about halfway between. You will see a great sign which will say ‘California State Medical Facility.’ The state of California is famous for circumlocution. When you go underneath a low bridge, instead of saying ‘Low Bridge,’ it says ‘Impaired Vertical Clearance.’ Or when you’re going to cross a toll bridge, instead of saying, plainly, ‘Toll Bridge,’ it says ‘Entering Vehicular Crossing.’ And when it should be saying, plainly, ‘Prison,’ it says either ‘California State Medical Facility,’ or ‘California State Correctional Facility,’ as it does as Soledad. Now Vacaville is a place where people get sent on what they call a one- to ten-year sentence. And there is a supervising psychiatric medical sort of social service staff there, who examine the inmates once in a while because they have such a large number. It’s a maximum security prison, much more ringed around with defences than even San Quentin. I went there to lecture to the inmates some time ago. They wanted someone to talk to them about meditation and yoga, and one of the inmates took me aside–a very clean-cut all-American boy. And he had been put in there probably for smoking pot; I’m not absolutely sure in my memory what the offence was. He said ‘You know, I am very puzzled about this place. I really want to go straight and get out and get a job and live like an ordinary person.’ He said ‘I think they don’t know how to go about it. I’ve just been refused release; I went up before the committee; I talked to them. But I don’t know what the rules of the game are. And incidentally, the members of the committee don’t either.’”

So we have these situations, you see, of confusion. So that when a person goes into a mental hospital and feels first of all perhaps that he should try to sort himself out and talk reasonably with the doctors. There is introduced into the communications system between them a fundamental element of fear and mistrust. Because I could talk to any individual if I were malicious and interpret every sane remark you make as something deeply sinister; that would simply exhibit my own paranoia. And the psychiatrist can very easily get paranoid, because the system he is asked to represent, officially is paranoid.

In the 1970’s Alan Watts talked with a psychiatrist in England….

“One of the most charming women I’ve come across, an older woman, very intelligent, quite beautiful, very reasonable. And she was discussing with me the problem of the LSD psychosis. I asked her what sort of treatments they were using, and all sorts of questions about that, and she appeared at first to be a little on the defensive about it. We got onto the subject of the experience of what is officially called ‘depersonalisation,’ where you feel that you and your experience–your sensory experience–that is to say all that you do experience: the people, the things, the animals, the buildings around you–that it’s all one. I said ‘do you call this a hallucination? After all,’ I said, ‘it fits the facts of science, of biophysics, of ecology, of biology, and much better than our ordinary normal experience fits it.’ She said ‘that’s not my problem.’ She said ‘that may be true, but I am employed by a society which feels that it ought to maintain a certain average kind of normal experience, and my job is to restore people to what society considers normal consciousness. I have no alternative but to leave it at that.’”

So, then. When someone is introduced into this situation, and it’s very difficult to get attention, you feel terrified. The mental hospital, often in its very architecture, suggests some of the great visions of madness, corridors in the mind. If you got lost in a maze and you couldn’t get back. You’re not quite sure who you are, or whether your father and mother are your real father and mother, or whether in the next ten minutes you’re still going to remember how to speak English. You feel very lost. And the mental hospital in its architecture and everything represents that situation. Endless corridors, all the same. Which one are you in? Where are you? Will you ever get out? And it goes on monotonously, day after day after day after day after day. And someone who talks to you occasionally doesn’t have a straight look in his eye. He doesn’t see you as quite human. He looks at you as if you’re weird. What are you to do? If you were to take society’s angle the best thing to do is get violent, if you really want to get out. Well then they say that’s proof that you’re crazy. And then as you get more violent, they put you off by yourself, and the only alternative you have, the only way of expressing yourself is to throw shit at the walls. Then they say, ‘well, that’s conclusive. The person isn’t human.’

Well, the question is always being raised on tv and in the press as to whether this is a sick society. Listening to the throngs psychoanalysts out there the Europeans will tell you that society is hopeless and the Americans say, ‘Most people in this society are good people, and it’s a GOOD society, but we have a very sick minority.’

Now, I understand it has been done since the dawn of thought, but I would like to call to question, very fundamentally, all of our basic ideas about what is sickness, what is health, what is sanity, what is insanity. I think we have to begin from this position of humility; that we really don’t know. It’s reported that shortly before he died, Robert Oppenheimer, looking at the picture of technology, especially nuclear technology, said ‘I’m afraid it’s perfectly obvious that the world is going to hell.’ It’s going to destroy itself, it’s on collision course. The only way in which it might not go to hell is that we do not try to prevent it from doing so. Think that one over. Because it can well be argued that the major troublemakers in the world today are those people with good intentions. Like the professor of theology, University of Seville, professor of psychiatry at wherever you will. The idea that we know who is sick, who is wrong. Now, we are living in a political situation right now where a most fantastic thing is occurring. Everybody knows what they’re against; nobody knows what they’re for. Because nobody is thinking in terms anymore of what would be a great style of life. The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There’s no earthly reason; there’s no physical, technical reason for there being any poverty at all anywhere. But you see, there are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it’s only money. They don’t know how to use it, they don’t know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.

If you want to be rich it’s easy.. Just be the first to write the book ‘Are You Rich and Miserable?’ because so many probably are. Some aren’t, but most are. Now the thing is that we are living in this situation where everybody knows what they’re against, even if they say ‘I’m against war. I am against discrimination against coloured people and so on. Yeah, so what? But it’s not enough to feel like that; that’s nothing. People have no idea what it is they really want. You must have some completely concrete vision of what you would like.

Before anyone is allowed to leave school they must be answer one question. “What is your idea of Heaven?” The answer given has to be absolutely specific. They are not allowed, for example, to say ‘I would like to live with a very beautiful girl.’ What do you mean by a beautiful girl? Exactly how, and in what way? Specifically. You know, down to the way she moves, talks, every kind of expression of character and sociability and her interests, everything. Be specific! And all answers like that… ‘I would like to live in a beautiful house.’ Just what exactly do you mean by a beautiful house? Well you’ve suddenly got to study architecture for a start. You see how it works. It would take years to answer. With his research, the travel, the reading, studying the ways of girls, finding out what makes them beautiful, the tracking down of happy people, the meeting with great and happy minds. Before he knows it, he hasn’t even had a chance to decide whether going to university is the path for him and he is finding this simple question is turning into his doctoral dissertation. (Much like this.)

So in a situation where we all know what we’re against, and we don’t know what we’re for, then we know WHO we’re against. We’re defining all sorts of people as non-human. We say they’re totally irrational. They’re totally stupid. People will say, ‘oh, those peasants, they’re completely uneducated, they’ll never learn a thing, there’s nothing you can do about it, they’re hopeless, get rid of them.’ It a case of pass it on and before you know it the ‘gossip’ has spread and ‘other’ people are saying the same thing a vicious circle of people misinforming one another till the point from which we have to begin, then, is that we don’t know who is healthy and who is sick. Who is right and who is wrong. And furthermore, we have to start, I think, from the assumption that because we don’t know, there isn’t anything we can do about it.

I’d like to quote a Chinese story, kind of a Taoistic story about a farmer. One day, his horse ran away, and all the neighbours gathered in the evening and said ‘that’s too bad.’ He said ‘maybe.’ Next day, the horse came back and brought with it seven wild horses. ‘Wow!’ they said, ‘Aren’t you lucky!’ He said ‘maybe.’ He next day, his son grappled with one of these wild horses and tried to break it in, and he got thrown and broke his leg. And all the neighbours said ‘oh, that’s too bad that your son broke his leg.’ He said, ‘maybe.’ The next day, the conscription officers came around, gathering young men for the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. And the visitors all came around and said ‘Isn’t that great! Your son got out.’ He said, ‘maybe.’

You see, you never really know in which direction progress lies. And this is today a fantastic problem for geneticists. They are called geneticists, you know, because they think have some degree of controlling the DNA and RNA code. With this they believe that it is really possible to breed the kind of human beings that we ought to have. And they say ‘hooray!’ But they think one moment and they think ‘eeerrrrrmm, but what kind of human being?’ So they are as we should be, slightly worried.

I was thinking about this not so long ago, standing on a busy Bangkok highway, looking at the main roads, and all these little cars going along them, I was wondering if I considered that the planet was a physical body like my own, whether I might not feel that this was some sort of an invasion of weird bacteria that were eating me up. Whether it may be that the birds and the bees and the flowers (animals in general) were a kind of healthy bacteria. You know, bees and birds sort of wander about, generally mix in with the forest and the fields and carry on a rather disorganised but very interesting pattern of life, whereas human beings cut straight lines across everything. Railways. They cover themselves with junk. A bird may have a little nest, but it doesn’t have to surround itself with automobiles and books and buildings and CD’s and universities and clutter up the whole landscape with a lot of bric- a-brac. Human beings pride themselves on this. ‘You see, this is culture!’ This is a great achievement. Build a building, you know? It’s all you can get money for. You can’t get money for teachers, but you can get them for new buildings. So we cover the Earth with clutter. And so the Earth might feel as if we might feel if suddenly we got a disease which instead of leaving us soft-skinned, covered us with crystalline scabs, and this would be coming out all over the place with pox! Are we a pox on the planet? Don’t be too sure that we’re not. Consider simply this:

There is a good argument (keep in mind I’m saying these things to provoke you, to make you a little insane by being in doubt of all the assumptions which you think are firmly true.) It is quite possible, you see, that the whole enterprise of man to control events on the Earth by his conscious intelligence, by his language, by his mathematics, and by his science is a disaster. You may say, look at his successes, look how much disease we have cured. Look how much hunger has been abolished. Look how we have raised the standard of living. Yeah. But in how long has it taken us to get this far?

Well, even if we say this started with the dawn of known history, it’s a tiny little fragment of time, as compared with the time in which the human species has existed. And if it’s the Industrial Revolution, it narrows down to the teeniest, weeniest tiny bit of time. How do we know this is progress? How do we know that this is a success? It may be a disaster of unimaginable proportions. It may be. But the truth is, we don’t know. Of course, it could be possible, that every star in the heavens was once a planet, and that planet developed intelligent life, which in due course discovered the secrets of atomic energy, blew itself up into a chain reaction, and as it exploded throughout various masses which began in due course to spin around it, became planets, and after a while developed intelligent life. After millions of years, as the central star started to cool off, they blew themselves up in turn, and that’s the way the thing goes on. That’s of course the theory of the Hindus. Not literally, but they do have the theory, you see, that life, every manifestation of the universe, begins in a glorious way, and then it deteriorates. But then everything does. Isn’t everything always falling apart and getting older and fading out? Why shouldn’t various species, why shouldn’t various planets, why shouldn’t various universes be going through the same course?

You see, that’s a totally upside-down view in respect to our common sense. We think everything ought to be growing and improving and getting better and better and better and better and better. Look at it the other way around, it might be quite different. Then there’s another thought. We know that in truth, the way being is an interaction, or better, transaction between the physical world and our sense organs, and that therefore, what we know as existence is a relationship. It is the way certain what we will call for the moment electrical vibrations make impression upon sense organs of a certain structure. Now that’s a limited way of talking about it, but it will do for the moment. Therefore, according to the structure of the sense organs, the vibrations will appear of be manifested in different ways. In other words, I can move my finger like this, and if it happens to pluck the string of a violin, it will go ‘plunk!’ In which case my finger and its motion will be manifested as ‘plunk!’ But if it should so happen that I should strike the string of a bass fiddle, it will go, ‘bunggggg’ and so the finger will be ‘bunggggg’ But if the same motion should strike the skin of a drum, ‘thunk,’ so the finger will be ‘thunk,’ now what is that motion truly? It’s whatever it interacts with. If it goes across somebody else’s skin, it’ll be something I can’t make a noise about. It’d be a feeling. If it does it in front of an eye, it will be a motion.

So depending on the structure of shall we say for the moment the receptor organs, so will the reality be. Now behind the receptor organs (the senses are not at all simple) behind the senses they are inseparable from an extraordinarily complex neurological structure. And not only that, but a system of cultural standards as to what events are to be noticed and what events are to be ignored. What is important for a certain reason such as survival, and what is unimportant, and therefore we further modify the selectivity of the sense organs and of the nervous system as a whole with a selective system of what is culturally accepted as real or unreal, important or unimportant. (This is all sounding a lot more complicated that i originally intended.) I am sure you follow.

So we end up you see, with the possibility that so complex a selective system may have a great many variations, and that people that we call crazy have a different system of evaluation. They may have a difference of neural structure, as would obviously be the case if there were lesions caused by syphilis, or by brain tumours. But what about something not quite at that level, but at the level of the selectivities they imply which would correspond to what we call social conditioning. Now we know the proverb that genius is to madness ‘cross the line. And how do we know whether a certain modification in the structure of the whole sensory system is a sickness or whether it is a growing edge (some kind of improvement in the human being.) Well we have certain very, very rough standards which we apply to this, but we can never be quite sure because what we call sanity is mob rule.

Sanity is simply the vote or organisms that recognise themselves to be humans and they get together and say ‘Well, the way we see it is the way it is.’ And you will remember in the ‘Jungle Book’ how the monkeys, are laughed at because every once in a while they get together in a meeting and shout ‘We all say so, so it must be true!’

But here lie the deepest political problems. How is the majority to tolerate, to absorb, to evaluate a minority? It’s an academic problem. We have standards as to who are sound scholars, reliable scientists (we give them a PhD;) And they all get together and uphold the standards. But then they suddenly realise that they’re getting a little narrow and that things aren’t going on, and suddenly somebody says one day ‘Old whats-his-name, who we always thought was quite mad and very, very unorthodox has suddenly come up with an idea that we’ve all got to think about.’ So one would say that every university faculty has to include in its membership at least five percent crazies or eccentrics. Every culture has to tolerate within its domain a lot of weird people. Now there’s no possibility that everybody in Europe is going to be a hippy. But the fact that a large number of young people are hippies should be a matter of congratulations, even if you don’t want to live that way yourself. Not to mention the various racial variations that we have among us: African, Asian, Chinese, Japanese, and so forth. All this is exceedingly important, this preserves variety. And a culture which is insecure in itself cannot tolerate this.

Now in England i think things are a little more secure than the world at large. When at school (not a very religious one i might add) and I announced that I was a Buddhist, nobody seemed to bother at all. But if i was to mention the same statement to my Italian and very Roman Catholic Grandmother i was looked upon as some sort of devil worshipper. It was a big problem and almost a case for the local exorcist.

A few individuals wishing to grow their hair and sport a beard is not going to disrupt the fabric of our society. A few students dropping out of Uni to undertake further education whilst travelling won’t collapse our fine education system any more than a few parents that wish to take their children out of school to educate them at home will.

And that is the attitude the general populous needs to have in regard to everything deviant, psychotic, and weird. Because we are not sure what’s right, who’s sane, which end is up. As Alan Watts says, “In a relativistic universe, you don’t cling to anything, you learn to swim. And you know what swimming is. It’s a kind of relaxed attitude to the water, in which you don’t keep yourself afloat by holding the water, but by a certain giving in to it.” And it’s just the same with relationships to people all around.

Bailing Out

Well this didn’t last very long.

I have decided to put this blog on the back burner. I suddenly realised i wasn’t writing necessarily everything I felt I should.

Looking around I can’t help but notice the many other bloggers that post their thoughts anonymously. This allows you to get a feel for what the person is really trying to say without any ‘look-at-me’ mentality seeping in.

In the same way I like to take pictures so I can enter conversations without words, I have decided at giving the anonymous blog a try so as i can try speaking without a face.

Anyone that has read this blog may well recognise it’s me on the other. If so, drop us a comment and say hi….

Bye for now.

Rowley Ford

 

I bumped into Rowley earlier tonight. I was walking home after a forced separation from my apple mac in favour of a couple of beers with an old friend. The night was warm and the Doors crooned in my ears as I saw the unmistakable silhouette of his wiry figure skittering, zig-zag fashion down the road towards me.

 

It reminded me of ten years ago when stumbling home from town i saw the same figure thrashing around in the bushes, his combats just visible in the dark as he wielded a stick in search of wild opium poppies. At his side was a satchel stuffed with his crop. I have no idea how old he is. Doctors say he should have been dead years ago. “A wonder of medical science”, others say. At least in his fifties, he looks older, much older than he did the last time i saw him.

Over four thousand Dexedrine have travelled down his throat since our last meeting. The same throat that has just recovered from cancer has remorselessly channelled his weekly prescription of 80 Dextroamphetamine.

There is talk of a trip to America in aid of medical research where he is the study subject. That’s if they let him in, or can even pin down his manic self long enough to get him on a plane. Fear and loathing in Las Vegas would have nothing on that trip.

Amphetamine therapy turned into addiction many years ago and Rowley understands the implications only to well. He understands an incredible amount of many things in-fact, as his I.Q. is high enough to baffle any mensa member. Tonight he was doing a very good job of explaining the reason behind his addictions, how they are directly related to the behaviour of his late Grandfather.

 

Originally a metallurgist, Rowley Ford’s life started taking a different turn when he took a trip overland to India with a chemist friend and a coke bottle full of liquid acid.

This event of which he only remembers two days is one of the few snippets I have managed to glean from Rowley’s psychedelic past as he talks faster than my ears can translate and is not the kind of guy you can pin down in a ‘normal’ conversation.

What takes me is his wit. As soon as a statement leaves your mouth he has a retort. Sometimes they are so clever you nervously laugh before it sinks in and you grin at the slowness of your mind in comparison to the rapidity of his.

Music seems to be his fulcrum and he has always moved about it. At gigs dancing like a shaman possessed, at the local studio mixing with the bands of now and gone. Even featuring with his statements, quotes and theories on massive selling records of the Spacemen 3.

 

Realer than real, he is one of the truly fascinating characters of this town, Rugby, and one day, probably sooner rather than later, a large piece of this town will die.

When that happens you will see amazing things. People you have not seen in an age, coming together, telling stories that revolve around an individual that single handedly maintained and lived within the counterculture of a local populous. A person that when he has gone will not have legends told about him. No. With Rowley Ford, the truth is far sranger than any tale our simple minds can construct.

 

All You Need Is Now

 

 

You cant move today for books and self help videos based on the teachings of eastern philosophy. Zen in particular has attracted attention over the years, since 1927 in fact, when Dr. Daisetz Suzuki first published his essays in Zen Buddhism, and he had a very odd fascination with Westerners. To begin with, very many intelligent Western people were becoming (or had already become) dissatisfied with the standard brands of their own religions, and this dissatisfaction had of course begun to take place quite seriously towards the close of the 19th century, and at that time, we began to be exposed to Oriental philosophy or religion, whatever you want to call it, because the great scholars were translating the texts of Buddhism and Hinduism. And already in 1848, the Jesuit had translated the Tao Te Ching, the Taoist texts from China into French, and translations into English then became available.

What happened was rather curious, because we were receiving Oriental tradition on a far higher level of sophistication than we were receiving the Christian or the Jewish traditions. The average person was exposed to an extremely low level of Christianity, and therefore immediately compared this to the highest level of Hinduism and Buddhism, much to the detriment of the former, because you could not go into your parish church, even if you lived in a very good neighbourhood, even in a university neighbourhood and find intellectual Christian teachings for sale on the entrance table. You found simple pamphlets made for simple minds. And so the comparison was overwhelming. It wasn’t really fair for the Christian tradition, but that’s what happened. Then something else happened, which was that in the year 1875, a strange Russian woman by the name of H.P. Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society, whose doctrines and literature were a fantastic mixup of the Western occult tradition, a great deal of Hindu and Buddhist lore, a smattering of Tibetan Buddhism and Chinese Buddhism, but it all was very romantic, and presuppose that the adepts of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and so forth were very high order initiates. The masters. And they had their secret lodges in the vastness of the Himalayas, and even such places as the Andes, and they were rather inaccessible, because they were in possession of the most dangerous secrets of occult power. But they every now and then felt safe to send an emissary out into the world to teach the ancient doctrine of liberation to mankind.

And so the West, through this, got an extremely glamorous impression of what Oriental wisdom might be. They expected Dr Suzuki to be a master in that sense, in that theosophical sense, or if not quite that, then at least in touch with those who were. And the whole idea of the Zen master, the way the whole word ‘master’ got attached to a teacher of Zen carried with it this theosophical flavour, and also a certain flavour which the Theosophical Society picked up from India where the great guru is somebody enormously revered. People would travel for hundreds of miles just to look at him, to have ‘view’ of someone like the Maharshi, or a lady guru, and there’s always the feeling that these people have tremendous powers. And so this is what was expected by many people from Zen masters. But the interesting thing about Zen masters is they’re not like that. They’re very human. I met a Zen Master once. Sat in an internet cafe much like the one i am in now. He was checking his email on a Hotmail ‘account’ and drinking a fruit smoothie through a straw.

So you mustn’t expect the Zen master to be like the Pope. They can come on very dignified when necessary, but there’s always something about them which is fundamentally lacking in seriousness. Even though they may be well-endowed with sincerity. They’re two quite different qualities. They are extraordinarily interesting people, as are their students, in the context of Japanese culture. Japanese culture is terribly uptight, because the Japanese are very emotional people, underneath. Tremendously passionate. But they have to hold that in, because they live in a crowded country, and space is the most valuable thing in Japan, especially living space, because 75% of the territory is uninhabitable. It’s forested mountains, and you can’t grow anything there, you can’t make much of a city. So they’re all crowded into 25% of the country. And so this feeling of being pressed in by other people is handled by and incredible politeness and by orderly behaviour. But this makes the average Japanese man and woman kind of nervous. When a Japanese giggles, it’s a sign not of being amused, but of being embarrassed. And you’ll find all sorts of funny quirks, such as people putting their hands over their mouths when they’re eating, or to conceal a giggle.

 

And they’re tremendously hung up on social indebtedness, whether it’s a debt to the emperor, or whether it’s a debt to your fathers and mothers, or whether it’s a debt to someone in the family, or whether it’s a debt to friends whom you visited and they entertained you. Well, you always take gifts with you when you go, but then that still embarrasses your friends to whom you take the gifts, because they have to consider the next time they go to visit you, they’ve got to take gifts of the same value. And so on and so forth.

 

So actually, what Zen is in Japan is a release from Japanese culture. It is getting rid of the hang-ups, but doing it in such a way as not to embarrass the rest of society. So the Zen monks come on as if they’re pretty stiff; when they walk out in the street, they almost look like soldiers. When they walk, they stride, they don’t shuffle, like other Japanese do. They don’t giggle, ever. They have no need to. Because the process of their discipline has liberated them from the social conventions. Only they are very tactful and don’t rush around like a bunch of hippies or something and say ‘Look, we’re liberated!’ They pretend they’re the very pillars of society.

So they follow a tradition which is very ancient, which is that in every society, there is an inner group who doesn’t believe in the fairy stories they’ve been told. He sees through. To whom everything becomes completely transparent. You see what games people are playing. And you don’t despise them for that. You see, they’re involved in that because of their whole conditioning. But you see through all those games. The game (the me game) that everybody is playing is of course the survival game. And we think we’ve got our minds rigged about this in such a way that we live in constant dread of sickness or of death or of loss of property or status. Well, so what? Supposing you do. Everybody’s going to die someday. It’s a little harder to take when you’re 20 than when you’re 50, but if you are entirely hung up on the idea that YOU are this particular expression of the universe and that only, you haven’t been properly educated. If you were awake, you would understand that you were the whole universe, pretending, projecting itself at a point called here and now, in the form of the human organism. And you would understand that very clearly, not just as an idea, but as an actual vivid sensation, just the same way you know you’re sitting in this room. And so the object of Zen, as of other ‘ways of liberation’… Taoism, Hinduism, you’ll find it even in Christianity in the Eastern Orthodox Church, Islam… The object of these ways of liberation is to bring you to a vivid, perfectly clear, even sensuous realisation of your true identity as a temporary coming on and going off, coming on and going off, or vibration as waves, of what there is, and always is, of the famous E which equals MC squared. And you are that. You will be that, and always will be that… accept that… This whatever it is… doesn’t operate in time. Time is a more or less a human illusion. If i may be so bold as to use my ‘me’ saturated blog to categorise my experiences in a hierarchal form… One of my greatest personal realisations it that there never was anything but now and never will be anything but now, and now is eternity. I hope I never lose sight of the meaning of that like I just did when I hoped for something in a future that doesn’t exist. That is Zen.

Zen is a little bit unlike the rest of Hinduism and Buddhism in that it’s summed up in these four principles: It’s a special transmission of the Buddhist enlightenment outside the scriptures. It does not depend on words or letters. It points directly to your own mind-heart and attains therefore Buddha-hood directly. Buddha-hood means the state of being awakened to the real nature of things. But you see, what IS the real nature of things? It obviously cannot be described. Just as if I were to ask what is the true position of the stars in the big dipper. Well, it depends from where you’re looking. From one point in space, they would be completely different in position from another. So there is no true position of those stars. So in the same way, you cannot therefore describe their true position or their true nature. And yet on the other hand, when you look at them, and really don’t try to figure it out, you see them as they are, and they are as they are from every point of view, wherever you look at them.

So there is no way of describing or putting you finger on what the Buddhists call reality or in Sanskrit, tathata, which means ’suchness’ or ‘thatness,’ or sunyata, which means ‘voidness,’ in the sense that all conceptions of the world when absolute are void. It doesn’t mean that the world is, in our Western sense, nothing. It means that it’s no thing. And a thing is a unit of thought. A’ think’. So reality isn’t a ‘think’. We cannot say what it is, but we can experience it. And that is of course the project of Zen.

 

Now, it does it by direct pointing. And this is what excited people about Dr Suzuki’s work when he first let people know about Zen in the Western world. It seemed to consist of an enormous assemblage of weird anecdotes. That these people instead of explaining had kind of a joke system, or kind of a riddle system. the basic secret of the Buddha system is simply this, and it’s explained by a great Chinese Zen master, whose name was Hui-neng, who died in the year 713 AD. And he explained it in his sutra. He said, “If anybody asks you about secular matters, answer them in terms of metaphysical matters. But if they ask you about things physical, answer them in terms of things worldly.” So if you ask a Zen master what is the fundamental teaching of the Buddha, he answers immediately, “Have you had breakfast?” “Yes.” “If so, go and wash your bowl.” Or such a thing as “Since I came to you master, you have never given me any instruction.” “How can you say that I’ve never given you any instruction? When you brought me tea, didn’t I drink it? When you brought me rice, didn’t I eat it? When you greeted me, didn’t I return the salutation? How can you say that I haven’t instructed you?” And the student said, “Master, I don’t understand.” And he said, “If you want to understand, see into it directly, but when you begin to think about it, it is altogether missed.”

 

They have also in Zen monasteries a funny thing. It’s a chin rest. If you spend a long time meditating, it’s sometimes convenient to have something to rest your chin on, and it’s called a Zen- bon. And so once a student asked the teacher, “Why did Bodidharma (who is supposed to have brought Zen from India to China ) come to China?” And the master said “Give me that Zen-bon.” And the student passed it to him and the master hit him with it.

A contrary kind of story. The master and one of his students were working, pruning trees. And suddenly the student said to the master, “Will you let me have the knife?” And he handed it to him blade-first. He said “Please let me have the other end.” And the master said “What would you do with the other end?”

There was a group walking through the forest, and suddenly the master picked up a branch and handed it to one of his disciples and said “Tell me, what is it?” The master was still holding it. He said “Tell me, what is it?” The disciple hesitated, and the master hit him with it. He passed it to another disciple. “What is it?” The disciple said “Let me have it so I can tell you.” So the master threw the branch at this other disciple, and he caught it and hit the master.

Now all these Zen jokes are much simpler in their meaning than you would ever imagine. They are so devastatingly simple that you don’t see them. Everybody looks for something complicated. When Alan Watts was visited by a Chinese Zen man, He had his little daughter with him, and the master said to her, “You know, once upon a time, there was a man who kept a very small goose in a bottle. A gosling. And it began to grow larger and larger until he couldn’t get it out of the bottle. Now, he didn’t want to break the bottle, and he didn’t want to hurt the goose, so what should he do?” And she said immediately, “Just break the bottle.” He turned to Alan and said “You see, they always get it when they’re under seven.”

So there’s that side of Zen, and that side of Zen we would call, essentially, in technical language, sanzen. That means, really, to study Zen in the form of an interchange with the teacher. The other side of Zen is za-zen, or the practice of meditation. You can actually practice za-zen in four ways, corresponding to what the Buddhists call the four dignitaries of man: walking, standing, sitting, and lying. Only sitting is the one most used. But you should not imagine that Zen mediation requires absolutely that it be done sitting.

Za-zen is very fundamental to Zen, in one form or another. And it is the art of letting your mind become still. That doesn’t mean that it becomes blank. That doesn’t mean that you have no, what we would call sensory input. It mean simply that you learn how to breath properly. That’s very important. And that you stop talking to yourself. The chatter inside your skull comes to rest. So what happens in some schools is this:

You have some difficulty in being accepted by a teacher, because Buddhism is not on a missionary basis. They don’t send out ads and invitations saying ‘Come to our fantastic church,’ you know. They wouldn’t dream of doing that. Because it’s up to you to seek it out. They’re never going to shove it down your throat. So it is difficult to get into a Zen school. It isn’t really a monastery as the west has monasteries, where the monks take life vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. It’s more like a theological seminary, and the monk, or seminarist, as he might more accurately be called, stays there for a number of years, until he feels he’s got the thing that he went for. The teacher, the master, is usually unmarried, but that doesn’t prevent him from having girlfriends. They are not uptight about sex in Zen, as they are in other forms of Buddhism. Everybody is sort of alive. They don’t dither around. They’re all working. But they’re very open. In some kinds of Buddhism, they have issues if you try to photograph something. “This is too sacred to be photographed,” sort of thing. In Zen, they say “Help yourself! Photograph! Anything! Go on, take picture!” No problems.

So then, they have these sesshins. You must distinguish between ’session,’ English, and ’sesshin,’ Japanese. ‘Sesshin’ means a long, long period of meditation practice, over say, a whole week. But especially early in the morning, and at certain times of day, they all meet and they sit cross-legged on their mats in meditation. In one set, they meditate on what is called a koan, and that means a ‘case,’ in the sense of a case in law establishing a precedent. And it’s one of these stories. When the great master Joshu, who lived in the Tung dynasty, was asked, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” he replied “mu,” which means no. Everybody knows that dogs have Buddha nature. So why did the great master say “mu”? That’s a koan. Or Hakuin invented a koan as a proverb in Chinese: One hand cannot make a clap. So the koan is “What is the sound of one hand?” Of course, it’s differently said in Japanese than it is in English. But, you see, it sounds like a very, very complicated problem, and so these students take this problem back for meditation. The average person would start trying to arrive at an intellectual answer. And if he takes that back to the teacher, the teacher simply rejects it out of hand, time after time after time.

So people get desperate about these things, and they go to all sorts of lengths to try and answer them, because they don’t realise how simple the answer is. That’s what’s always overlooked. If you were to answer that koan in English, it gives it to you as it’s stated. It says “WHAT is the sound of one hand?” . It’s very difficult for people to become that simple. And you can become that simple only through meditation where you stop all the words and you see all the things perfectly directly. And so accomplished Zen people are very, very direct. Their life is completely simplified, because they know perfectly well that there is only this present moment. No past. No future.

So what’s your problem? You know, you could ask this of anyone. Well, you could say “I’ve got all sorts of problems and responsibilities” and so on. All right. Don’t other people have some share in this? You see, we are always being spiritually conceited in thinking we have to take care of everybody else, and that can sometimes do people a peculiar disservice, because they get into the idea that everybody should take care of them. And so we go around making all sorts of promises about which we feel enthusiastic at the time, but the enthusiasm wears off and then we don’t keep them and then people get annoyed. And we go about telling people how much we like them when we don’t. And all sorts of things of that kind by not being direct, you see. This is the whole idea of Zen, is directness. By not being direct, we create a great deal of trouble. However, the primary concern of Zen is not so much with interpersonal relations, as it is with man’s relation with nature. In view of life and death, where are you? They have an inscription that hangs up in Zen monasteries, which says ‘Birth and death is a serious event. Time waits for no one.’ Which is sort of equivalent to the Christian ‘Work out your salvation with diligence.’ Or with fear and trembling.

So it begins in a clarification of our relationship with existence. With being. And therefore it lies in a more, I would say, primary or nursery level than an encounter group, which is concerned with personal relationships. But I don’t think you can set up harmonious personal relationships until you are happy with yourself. Until you’ve got with the sky, the trees, and the rocks, and the water, and the fire. Then you’re fundamental. You’re really alive. From that position, you can relate much better to other people, because you don’t come on as a kind of ‘poor little me, who’s in this universe wearing ‘L’ plates and doesn’t really belong’ attitude. And most of us do that, terribly apologetic for our existence. Just because we’re apologetic, some people are insufferably proud, because they feel they have to compensate for this inferior status in the universe by overdoing it with bigheadedness and with aggression towards others. But if you know that… Well, when Dogen came back from China (he lived around 1200 AD, and studied Zen there and founded a great monastery) they asked him “What did you learn in China?” He said, “I learned that the eyes are horizontal, and the nose is perpendicular.”

Now in all these things, don’t search for a deep symbolism. They’re NOT symbolic; they’re absolutely direct. So when somebody says, you see, that the fundamental principle of Buddhism is a cypress tree in the garden, you are not to understand this this is some holy doctrine in which the cypress tree is a manifestation of the godhead. Let me illustrate the point further. It can’t be illustrated intellectually so here is another story from Watts.

“There is a sect of Buddhism in Japan called Jodo-shinshu .Sukhavati?.. which means the true teaching about the pure land. And they have a method of meditation in which they call upon the name of a transcendental Buddha called Amida. So they say this formula, ‘Namu Amida Butsu.’ Namu means like ‘hail,’ only it means, in other cultures and other languages than ours, instead of saying ‘hail,’ they say ‘name,’ ‘nama.’ So ‘Namu Amida Bustu’ means ‘Hail Amitabha buddha,’ or ‘Amida’ is the Japanese. That formula is called ‘Nambutsu,’ or ‘Having the buddha in mind.’

There was a priest of this sect that went to study with a Zen master, and had made good progress, and the master told him to write a poem expressing his understanding. So he wrote the following poem:

When nambutsu is said, There is neither oneself nor Buddha; Na-mu- a-mi-da-bu-tsu– Only the sound is heard.

And the Zen master scratched his head awhile, because he wasn’t quite satisfied with it, so the student submitted another poem which did satisfy the master, and it went like this:

When the nambutsu is said, There is neither oneself nor Buddha; Na-ma-a-mi-da-bu-tsu, Na-ma-a-mi-da-bu-tsu.

The master was satisfied, but in my opinion it had one line too many.”

So you see that the Zen practice involves using words to get beyond words, where we might use words simply for their sound. Let’s suppose you say the word ‘yes.’ Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. You come to think after a while ‘Isn’t that a funny kind of noise to make?’ Everybody has done it. We are delivered from the hypnotic effect of words by this particular use of words. We learn they’re only words after all, but we hypnotise people by using words. And children, for instance, have no antibodies against words, so they get quite upset, you know. “Daniel called me an idiot!” So what? But children get absolutely desperate about it because we put this power of words upon them, these incantations. These are spells, you see. All magicians empower people in spells and incantations, because they use words to beguile. And so then, we are from infancy told who we are, what is our identity, what our expectations should be, what we ought to get out of life, what class we belong to. And we believe the whole thing. And having believed it, we come to sense it, as we sense the hard wood of the corner of the table, and we think it’s real, and it’s a bunch of rubbish. It’s an amusing game, if you know that that’s all it is, and can be played with eloquence. But the more you know it’s ONLY an illusion, the better you can play it.

In Chinese, their word for nature is ‘tzu-jan,’ in Japanese, ’shi-jen,’ at that means, ‘what is so of itself. We would say ’spontaneity.’ A tree has no intention to grow. Water has no intention to flow. The clouds have no intention to blow. And as the poem says,

‘When the wild geese fly over the lake, The water does not intend to reflect them, And the geese have no mind to cast their image.’

Now, that worries us. First of all, we think that spontaneity is merely sudden action. There’s nothing very sudden about the way a tree grows. It’s a highly intelligent design. So is the bird. So are you. But a lot of people who don’t quite understand Zen think that spontaneity is just doing anything, and the more it looks like anything, the more spontaneous it is. In other words, they have a preconception of spontaneity, that a person behaving spontaneously. Or would probably be vulgar, impolite, rude. It doesn’t follow; that’s merely a preconception of the nature of spontaneity. Spontaneity is the way i grow my beard or you grow your hair, it’s not the way you think you ought to grow your hair. It’s the way it happens. So that’s a really high order of intelligence.

What is happening, then, in the discipline of Zen is that we are trying to move into the place where we use that intelligence in everyday life, it’s just that you can’t get it on purpose. The purpose, the motivation always spoils it. So you would ask then, ‘How do I get rid of purpose?’ On purpose? That you ask that question simply shows how tied up you are in the thinking process. You cannot force that process to stop. You have to see it as nonsense. Babble. Continuous babble in your head. So we learns to listen to our thoughts and let the mind think anything it wants to think, but don’t take it seriously. And the idea of you doing this is also a babble in the head. And eventually, but without bothering about any eventually, because in this state, there is no future; you’re not concerned about the future. Purpose is always concerned with the future. Easier said than done and not at all to be done conciously.

Now what bugs Western people about this is they would say ‘Are you trying to tell us that life has no meaning, no purpose?’ Yes. What’s so bad about that? What sort of meaning would you like it to have? Give me a meaning for life. Anything you want. Well, when people try to think of what the meaning of life is, they either say “42!” nervously repeating the joke from ‘Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy’ or.. ‘Well, I think that we’re all part of a plan, and that working as if we were characters in a novel or a play, and we are all working towards a great fulfilment. One day, perhaps after we’re dead, perhaps in the future life, there’ll be a great amazing thing. There’ll be a the most amazing incredible realisation at the end of it all, see? And that’s what we are living for, see? And it will all be very, very important, because it won’t be something trivial. It will be something extremely holy.’ Well you must ask the question, ‘What’s your idea of something very holy?’ Nobody really knows. You know, they think about church, and medieval artists who used to represent heaven in the form of everybody sitting on clouds. And I must say hell looked much more fun. It was a kind of sadomasochistic orgy. But heaven looked insufferably dull. And when those little children sang hymns about those eternal Sabbaths, it sounded like a very, depressing future.

But you see, when you follow through these ideas, what do you want? What is the goal? What is progress all about? You realise that you just don’t know. So the question is immediately posed for the meditator, but aren’t you there already? I mean, isn’t THIS what it’s about?

An Original Thought

Trawling through old emails, thought lost, amongst the junk ads and messages from friends was the brief suggestion on what my thesis had to do.

In a nut… “The purpose of your thesis is to clearly document an original contribution to knowledge.”

Three weeks I have sat and thought amongst the general daily necessities. Twenty one days where all I have wanted is to find myself struck dumb with an original thought malformed and craving attention having suddenly been born in my mind.

It’s an interesting idea. The idea of Original Thoughts. Do we have Original Thoughts, or is it just the rearranging of information that we have heard before?

I consider the implications before I start some more serious thinking.

When we kick our mind into gear and the cogs start whirring aren’t we all just endlessly repeating what the Greeks said 2000 plus years ago?

Where did Darwin’s ideas on evolution come from? Come to think of it 2000 years ago where did Greeks get theirs from? There must be an original source. Right?

Perhaps the majority of ideas are only a recycled assembly of previously thought thoughts. Say… 99%. Just reused, recycled pre thought ideas, rearranged for different thinkers.

Now I am repeating my own thoughts.. I remember writing on a school exercise book. “You cannot say anything that hasn’t been said or read anything that hasn’t been read. You can only arrange it for different thinkers.” On reflection, I figure the latter part of that to be truer as I could probably speak in tongues right now with inferred meaning and although no one would have any inclination as to what I said I would have spoken original words.

But what about the Genii? Occasionally, a new one comes along armed with new idea’s. Are these people the original thinkers?

If that is true and it is genius that brings original thought into the world, were all the first people Genii? That would suggest that genius has nothing to do with being exceptionally smart. Unless the criterion for being a genius changes the more people that exist. Newer thoughts being harder to come by and all that.

Since ideas exist, and there was a time at which they didn’t (perhaps before even our first remotest thinking ancestors) all idea’s must have been formed as originals.

So if we admit that humans are capable of completely original idea’s, it does not seem so strange to admit that perhaps the universe is capable of bringing us into existence. If we can do it, surely the vastly more complex universe of ours is capable of it as well. (I must ask a full blown Christian who believes in free will and original ideas.)

So, in the hope that there are still original thoughts to think, I am guessing that I have to reach back through my conditioning, through all the bits of information my subconscious is still trying to assimilate and tap into the rawness of my cognitive skills. To think thoughts un-thought by a human mind. Or at least unrecorded as thought. I imagine that that any thought un-thunk is fair game to a potential genii. Which makes me suddenly ponder words from Richard Bach’s Illusions. “Learning is finding out what you already know.”

Now how does that leave any room for original thought? It feels so true. There have been many times when I have ‘realised’ things I thought I already knew. Can the moment of knowing be preceded way deeper than the moment of me understanding the thought? Perhaps all possibilities are contained in tangled strings of ideas built into our genetic code and our survival as a species depends on us unraveling and understanding as we spew thoughts like ticker tape out into the world to share and nurture others around us. To know being to grow.

So many spiritual beliefs state that the answers lye within us. Maybe I have just realised what that means.

That’s great but I would still like an original thought….

That Sunday Feeling

Why is it that just as the monthly cycle of the moon affects those among us with a potentially tidal mentality, Sunday nights also have a stange cylical effect on me?

Not only me of course, millions seem to suffer a dose of the melancholic mind as sunday lunch turns into a rapidly ebbing end of the weekend.

Today as i drove off across county to see my grandmother it was more for the space so I could wallow in the mild depression that often lives at this end of the week. As i drove, headphones playing a soundtrack that matched my feelings, I thought about this very state of mind and how it was that a certain perspective seems to live here. Here and in those precious moments before bed when you should really turn the computer off as every googled idea is one more thought keeping you from a blissful and much needed sleep.

My music acted as an almost effective filter on the outside world both in and out of the car as i swarmed with the sheeple doing Sunday things. Everything bothered me. The people and their shopping, the hanging LCD screens babbling their sales pitches above the myriad products I had to pass to get to the basic edible necessities of life. The ten of everything, the fake radio station designed to subliminally implant ‘great deals’ into my already tired mind. The non organicness of every identical red pepper.

It bothered me, but inside this Sunday feeling, I could forgive it all. I could let it slide on by because this feeling tells you on the one hand, it is all too late to worry about, just listen to the music, float ethereally through and past it all because there is no hope… And that’s ok.

I know thiis sounds defeatist, but in reality I truly think that this letting go, this depressed acceptance is something far more positive than any defeatist thought. That in fact i was experiencing another incredibly lucid state of mind where everything appears as it truly is, transient.

Perhaps the passing of the weekend in it’s own transience had once again given my otherwise socially programmed mind a rest, a reboot in safty mode. As it relaxed into a logical acceptance of here and now maybe it remembered all those ‘nice’ ideas it stumbled apon whilst travelling, wound down to an almost catatonic state of hippy bliss when the statement, “There is no permanence but impermanence,” bought a satisfied nod through a hazy gaze.

That Sunday feeling… The realisation that your time isn’t really your own… that our society is built apon rules you don’t always agree with… that Mondays come around all to easy and someone with less of an idea than you is about to tell you what to do… And if your lucky….. the realisation that none of this really matters.

Work, Rest and Play

Work bloody work.

I know when you work for yourself it comes in fits and starts but recently I have been non stop and I am not sure I like it. I decided to work for myself so I could work to live and not the other way round. Then you realise that if you are too picky and turn work down, you don’t get asked again.

So you start saying yes all the bloody time and find that you are living to work and have little time for the things you find solace in.

Don’t get me wrong, I love being a photographer and I have some great clients but tonight i got in at 1am and didn’t want to go to bed because tomorrow will be over as soon as it starts and then I will have another 12 hour job to do.

Sometime i wish the client realised that when I say my day is six hours max, That is pushing the shutter grabbing images. When I eventually get home there are many hours more of editing, CD burning, paperwork and so on.

Was it Freud who said…”No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. ” Of course it was.. I just looked it up.

What the hell was he on? I think it is only the week minded that need work as a mental crutch. I can find a million and one things to do in a day without work.

I would like to think that my portion of reality contained enough quality time for a person to be present enough not to think about money and wealth acquisition…

Strange how the days really go faster as you get older… Why?… My theory is that the more you fill your life with routine, the less datum’s and punctuation points your mind has to mark the passing time.

Work, eat, sleep.
Work, eat, sleep.
Work, eat, sleep.
Work, eat, sleep.
Work, eat, sleep.
Play, eat, sleep.
Play, eat, sleep.
Work, eat, sleep.
Work, eat, sleep.
…………………………..You see how it goes.. The weeks turn into days, the days into hours and so on.

Do something spontaneous. Make a day to remember that can bookmark the month so at least a hicup is created in the otherwise steady flow of time constantly ebbing away.

Time only seems to matter when it’s running out.

Ok. Take a deep breath and read this back.

Let’s look at this practically. Realistically and not so idealistically.

Yes, a work life balance is a wonderful thing to attain and when I really think about it… My work does come in fits and spurts. I really need to read this rant when I have had no work for a week. When I am desperate for a client to send me out on a 10 hour day.

Ok.. Well at least i still have time to gather my thoughts. Perhaps in the future I will come back to this post and chortle quietly to myself muttering.. ‘Oh Christian.. how worked up you used to get before you discovered the wonders of time management.”