My friend is missing in Iraq and I have done every damn thing I can short of calling the authorities.

I will give it another day or so. I know if I make the call he will in turn call me a fool for making him look like one.

Tags: friend, iraq

I am going away.. I may be sometime. Actually I may never be back, but we will.

The only adventure open to the cowardly?

Who said that?

Tags: Travel

It seems that for some of us we start in one room and work your way around the house until we get back to the first room we played with. Then we start all over again.

I am guessing this continues until your walls hold enough cd's, dvd's and trashy ornaments to earn a steady ebay income for the next 12 years.

Others do the house up till it is just how they want it... Then move.

Perhaps I belong to the last category. Kind of the very long term property developers approach. The only difference being that this home is being done up with personal tastes in mind and not that of any potential purchaser.

For some, the improvement of the house and the space inside the four walls directly correlates to maintenance of the soul.

This I think is a very dangerous mindset to fall into. I think the more we clutter our house, the more it clutters our soul. I am not saying we all have to live in a white space minimalist box. I just think we 'the consumer' tend to get carried away with all the pretty things we are told will make our lives fuller, happier... better.

Right, that said I am off out to buy a compost bin, a door bell and other ever so practical objects to clutter house and garden.

Tags: home, diy, Consumerism

I am moved... Not emotionally, physically... well, ok, a little remnant stress connected with another very ordinary house move.

It is hassle enough for me to contemplate burning the house down and starting again rather than to cram my cluttered life into boxes. Why do we hoard so? I have a pretty good idea but I would rather not go down the road of admitting those particular insecurities.

I won't bore you with a breakdown of the chaos endured during the homestead reassignment.

As far as the one small job of trying to get reconnected to the net goes... Jeeeeezussss... There are some severely dense individuals out there, bound down with so much bureaucracy that even a simple action nearly results in a brain meltdown and the deforestation of an area the size of French-Indo-China.

Still.. moments ago I managed to get reconnected 13 long days and 124 emails after the plug was pulled in the last house. Five minutes in and I have almost forgiven British Telecom and their incompetence.... almost.

The bliss of sitting with a glass of wine and browsing a 2d version of the world. It is so easy to get lost in it all and yet strangely, these last two weeks have seen me fall back in love with the 3d touchy feely version.. 'The Real World'. In fact I think I will go immerse myself right now................* (Don't be surprised if there is another ice age between posts)

Today i got a letter from the states. Franked with 'Par Avion' on the front which always makes me smile as we all know how much the Yanks love the French.

Turning it over i read the senders address...

The Thompsons
PO BOX 367
Woody Creek,
Colorado 81656

..Year right i thought... And i opened it...

"Dear Friend,
I want to thank you for sending the 'HST' Sticker. It means the world to us. I gave it to my husband today. He immediately placed it on our car.
My husband is Hunters Son Juan. I just wanted to let you know that your stickers are valued by Hunters family-
All the best yo you-

Jennifer Thompson

To love, friends & good neighbors

God... We Miss him..."


Oh My God!... I had to read it again.. and again.

Having just got in from a soul destroying job in London. That made my day... damn it... month!

That's better than any email..

I must write back.

Tags: hunter s thompson, fear and loathing, letter, sticker, hst

Whilst in Edinburgh last week I found myself running low on mobile phone power. A friendly German couple in a phone shop on Home Street kindly let me charge it behind their counter whilst i was out and about.

I had one of those weird heads on when you tend to see a picture in everything and wished i had taken my camera out with me.

On returning to the shop i sparked up a conversation on phone technology and in no time at all i had made the spontaneous purchase of a brand new phone.

Granted it had been one i have been looking at for a while.. this particular model had been tweeked and messed with and even had the next and latest models firmwear installed inside it's sleek black shell. I was chuffed to bits and ever since i have been snapping at anything that passes a train window or falls underfoot.

A two mega pixel camera in a phone... and no doubt this is only the beginning.

Well of course it is as the corporate giants obviously want us to keep on upgrading and as soon as we know it, we will have a five megapixel...eight... then who knows if a camera will ever be just a camera again.

There is talk of a five megapixel camera watch that uses bluetooth technology to beam the viewfinder onto the inside of your shades or glasses.

Half of me wants to leave all this life complicating technology behind and simplify things... the other wants to embrace it and just have fun...

Tags: phone, camera, mobile, sony, camera phone, edinburgh

'They' Say moving is one of the most stressful times a person can have...

Whoever 'they' are... They could well be right. It's taken so long in the happening i have forgotten where we are going and why, never mind what our new home will look like.

With the stress of all the paperwork that has passed hands I could easily have illegally built a log cabin in some isolated forest and said "sod it!" to it all.

Then there are the leeches under every passing rock. Everyone wants their piece of the action. "Well as you are borrowing this massive amount of cash you won't mind if we charge you this much as after-all... it will be absorbed into your 25 year debt and you won't even notice it..."

Yeah right.... Vultures.

We're hoping to actually see some movement in about 3 weeks... We shall see. The past couple of months have been so full of bollocks I fail to see how the house buying/selling system survives in the UK. It certainly needs some kind of reform.

Wow.. notice the angst.. Perhaps i should be writing more and letting it all out?

Tags: property, home buying, house, moving, home

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.

Tags: philosophy, psychotic, weird

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.

Tags: blogging, blog

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.

Tags: Rowley Ford, spacemen3, drugs, science, psychedelic, Dexedrine

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