EPISODE 87: THE END

Welcome to the last chapter of a novel which had a pre-ordained end; such a shame we have to get to the end to find out what the end is. Maybe I should have planned the end better by envisaging it more clearly. Undoubtedly the subplot, the Day of the Dead, took over. As a creative endeavour it worked, in as much as the final creation more or less reflected the vision. The flaws, not enough people attending or helping and far too much money spent, were almost unavoidable. Both could have been better but the result would have been much the same - I think. I did discover, or realized I had discovered once my eldest son pointed it out, that I had a talent for curating a festival of the dead.

If I had achieved the goal of the novel, for the hero to establish himself as a writer before his 60th birthday, then the ‘self-help reality’ part of the novel would be justified, i.e. marketable. (In theory, I mean.) As it is, it will join the cyberspace dustbin, as forewarned by the veritable Writers Year Book.

A reader may ask, but what about next year? The future in general? Why not just change the title to 61 or 62 or 92? Don’t you still want the things you wanted? Didn’t you enjoy the doing of it?

I have enjoyed writing the blog and it has been good to have that focus and discipline and to keep it going however many excuses I could have come up with for abandoning it. Also, the various influences in my life have all had a chance to express themselves and stunning books such as Peter Carrol’s, John Lash’s, and Wilberg’s, have been given a chance to be acknowledged and remembered. Of course I’ve never had a problem about writing about my own life and thought processes and I have to do that to get them moved on in my mind.

The idea that I could earn my living as a regular writer seems untenable. It doesn’t really appeal to me. Also I have to admit that I’m only a ‘good’ writer in patches. This doesn’t mean that I don’t think that either Boggy or Sam could make me money; in fact I’m sure they could. The reason I have long periods when I stop trying to be a successful writer is because I run out of things I can do as well as become reluctant to keep flaying the same dead horse. Admittedly the Day of the Dead took all my energy for the best part of sixteen months. But what else would/could I have done to become a professional author when even the articles I wrote about the day of the dead and death failed to elicit a response?

I do have a mind another novel although I only know the title and the theme. Hopefully some stories will come along that will hang it all together. What I don’t want is for my life to be disproportionally consumed by yet another creation of limited response. Nor do I want to depend on tea, THC, and tobacco to sustain my efforts and, perhaps, hinder the process that they appear to inspire.

Maybe it is time to stop striving. Having always thought of myself as lazy, I now see that I’m always trying, always driven, and when I’m not I’m becalmed rather than calm. Before Terri died her big complaint was ‘the moments’. I am reluctant to face the moments, the slowness of eternal time, and do everything to escape that awareness, most especially by thinking; thinking is my prime diversion. When I don’t smoke, I complain that I can’t think properly and that I feel my body too much. Maybe these are the issues I need to address before I make any decisions about anything. I have to enter the moments and wait.

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This week I have been reading tons of Peter Wilberg. I read through at a great pace, looking for exactly what, I don’t know. Yesterday I read so much about consciousness and awareness that my mind began to scream. I’ve been reading this stuff for forty years and still would flaff if asked to define anything. The day before I read a 300 page dialogue of letters between Peter and a female follower. Much of it was about her experiences and realizations. It reminded me of how frustrating I used to find ‘sharing’ sessions after meditations when people would tell of spectacular visions and cosmic journeys - none of which happened for me however ‘hard’ I meditated. Then, as now, I would just sit and think. Of course it isn’t really extraordinary experiences I seek, just the ability to perceive all experience as extraordinary.

The disadvantage of hurtling through Wilber’s work is that I make mental notes to go back to bits but rarely do because I can’t find them again. Sometimes I scribble something down on a scrappy piece of paper (why are there never biros when I need them) and then can’t read it. I did get these two down because they reminded me of what I realized in my last bout of insight;

We are forever unborn and already dead

Deepest reality lies in our unborn nature.

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It has occurred to me that I should actually read this blog as homage to the effort I’ve put into it. I will do at some point. I am surprised that I kept it up and am proud of myself. Over 80 weeks, there has been birth and death to record, a catholic priest to expose, a day of the dead to create, books to extol, hidden agendas to be hinted at, ideas to try out, a non-career to mourn and a whole lot more that I’ll remind myself of. My thoughts today, however, have been about feelings and feeling and the felt sense because when it comes down to it, it seems to me that these are ‘key’ to expanded awareness.

It is 15-20 years since I came across Focusing and Gendlin. Wilberg has been there too.

A felt sense is a bodily felt, implicitly rich “sense of some situation, problem, or aspect of one’s life.” It is “the holistic, implicit, bodily sense of a complex situation”

(Gendlin, 1996, pp. 20, 58).

When I originally read that, I understood it to mean to refer primarily to the physical body, and I saw the feelings as the feeling element of words as reflected in the body/mind organism. The Avatar materials took me to a new understanding of feeling and of extended awareness, the ‘touch’ (sparsa) of awareness. (I so wish I could find a way to teach the Avatar materials because in essence they are remarkably good.) Reading Wilberg this week has reminded me of this crucial point, the need to ‘feel’ rather than think one’s way into awareness.

…You know what? I should stop here. I have fulfilled my contract to myself.  From now on it is a different story.

THE END.

EPISODE 86: SIXTY

Welcome to the penultimate blog in this defeated but bold attempt to deliberately lay new track. The mood of the moment is one of being slightly more reconciled to the situation than I was a week ago.

How satisfying it would have been to have actually achieved what I set out to achieve.

Really that sentence above which I wrote with a wistful tone should really have a question mark at the end of it because the truth is I’ve no idea how satisfying it would have been. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, ‘You never know what might have been.’

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This week I’ve been bad backing and birthdaying, the latter somewhat handicapped by the former. At some point, actually at many points, it was suggested to me that I should take painkillers. The fact I didn’t shows that the pain was manageable. I even heard myself saying, ‘I don’t really mind this pain’ which wasn’t entirely true because I was grimacing and audibly moaning each time I moved. Half the amount of pain in my tooth would have had me dropping pills but the back was ok. It seems to make a difference where the pain is.

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5.30 on Christmas eve morning. Guess what; it is raining. A small river flows down the road once more. It has been raining all year and the ground is saturated. Some fields have been under water for the best part of four months. For those who came to Glastonbury Tor for the end of the world the other day, the surrounding floods which are turning the area back into islands must have added a sense of Armageddon to the proceedings. Apparently there were a couple of thousand people on the hill, marking the solstice in a traditional way but more than that, also hoping for something of significance to have happened.

It so happened that two of my more…what is the word?...credulous?...friends visited on that morning at the very time they believed the paradigm shift was occurring. 11.12 came and went. Did we feel any different? For Ken, who is 70, this shift is both real and important. For years he has been preaching about this time when humanity will be divided and the good right thinking folk will have a different end from the bad wrong thinking types. Of course such a script is an anathema for me who’s own sense of justice demands that the world is the same for everyone and that being born at a particular time in history gives you neither more nor less chance of a good life. The idea that we are somehow more advanced than humans before seems to me both arrogant and unjust.

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I have been studying the work of Peter Wilberg again. What a man! I continue to find his intellect so superior to my own that it is easier to quote him then explain what he is saying. He, in turn, points to Martin Heidegger who wrote:

“Language speaks.”

“Language is the house of being.”

For through these sayings Heidegger reveals how language as such is not, as it is ordinarily understood, a mere tool by which human beings speak and denote the ‘things’ they experience or the ways they understand them. On the contrary, language is the very matrix (Matrika) of experiencing that both speaks us as beings and that also speaks to us through every thing and being we encounter. It does so through the ‘pure’ and open realm of that capacity for a direct “receiving-perceiving” of meaning that Heidegger understood as the very essence of human being. (Wilberg).

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I have, no doubt, mentioned before that when I first had a child, at the age of 20, I had no belief in ‘family’ as such, especially what was known as the ‘nuclear family’. At the time, I wasn’t in touch with my own parents and siblings and my reading, Laing, Cooper etc, just confirmed that the family was a tool of repression. If you had told me then that 40 years later I’d be a proud grandfather and that my happiest moment would be to be photographed with my progeny, well, I would have laughed at you. Quite honestly, Im amazed by my kids who seemed to have brought real value to old fashioned concepts such as family and community.

Tomorrow our instructions are to go to Bristol to do the morning shift as grandparents. I want to be there as early as possible, between 6 and 7, whereas my partner, who loves the kids despite being unrelated, wants to go for 10 o’clock. I wonder what compromise we will reach. It must be slightly annoying for her because I always ignore Christmas until the 24th when I suddenly become enthusiastic and begin to unpick the plans that she has carefully and sensibly made. Sagittarius and Taurus, spontaneity versus dinner-time.

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Being 60, does it make a difference? The NHS thinks so because they’ve sent me a free bowel cancer testing kit. Of course 60 isn’t as old as it used to be (although a lifetime smoker like me is actually 70.) One could expect to live another 25 years. I’m not sure at all what I feel about that prospect. I guess that there could be a few sunny days here during that time unless we are to be entirely washed away by the rain. It does mean that the goal I set at the beginning of all this has not been achieved, though even as write that a little thought pops up in my mind saying, ‘hang-on, what if in the next week you received a contract promising you £500 a week for writing, wouldn’t that mean you had succeeded?’ So, okay, let’s wait until the fat lady finishes her song.

The song will be called ‘As Such’ and the words can be Peter Wilberg’s…

Being as such is not a being.

Existence as such is not any existing thing.

Space as such is not a thing or things in space.

Time as such is not an event or process in time.

Awareness as such is not any thing we are aware of.

Experiencing as such is not any thing experienced.

Seeing as such is not anything seen or seeable.

Dreaming as such is not any thing that is dreamt.

Redness as such is not any particular hue of red.

Similarly:

Being as such is not reducible to or derivable from a being or beings.

Existence as such is not reducible to or derivable from any entity or entities.

Space as such is not reducible to or derivable from any things or bodies in space.

Time as such is not reducible to or derivable from any processes or events in time.

Awareness as such is not reducible to or derivable from anything we are aware of.

Experiencing as such is not reducible to or derivable from anything experienced.

Seeing as such is not reducible to or derivable from anything that is seen.

Dreaming as such is not reducible to or derivable from anything dreamt.

Redness as such is not reducible to or derivable from any particular hue of red or red object.

In other words:

Being as such is not a property or product of particular beings.

Existence as such is not a property or product of any entity or entities.

Space as such is not a property or product of any thing or things in space.

Time as such is not a property or product of any events or processes in time.

Awareness as such is not a property or product of any thing we are aware of.

Experiencing as such is not a property or product of anything experienced.

Seeing as such is not a property or product of anything seeable.

Dreaming as such is not a property of product of anything dreamt.

Redness such is not a property or product of any thing that is red.

Finally:

Hardness or solidity as such is not a property or product of any 'physical' object or 'material substance' that is hard.

Reckon that will take a week to sing.

EPISODE 85: MORE WHIMPERING.

Welcome to my blog which is listening to cricket from India. It is a game which sane people would find hard to understand. They are on Day Four of a very slow match, possibly one of the slowest ever, and yet, for all the apparent stagnation, there is a subtle and important ‘great game’ being played.

 Recently cricket has devised a new form of itself with a game that lasts three hours rather than five days.  This new form has become very popular and threatens to become the dominant form, reflecting as it does a modern world where time seems to be limited. For some this is the Americanization of cricket, going for show rather than subtlety. In today’s game England and India are both doing very little for in the context of a twenty day series, of which today is the nineteenth, today is, as the commentator just said, ‘a test of patience’. Patience, in the western world, is not the virtue it once was. Everything has to be done quickly, even therapy which has to be either ‘brief’ or medically assisted for fast results. This short-termism, which no doubt has its virtues, goes against the grain of history as seen from the eastern perspective where time is endless. This perspective allows the recent victims of western military intervention, such as Afghanis, Iraqis, Libyans et cetera, absorb and respond to the brief efforts ‘to sort things out’ by hunkering down and waiting for us to lose interest. Once we’ve gone, they get back to the great game – unless we’ve killed them all first.

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I am writing this on a borrowed computer. I killed mine yesterday morning. The day before I had put my back out when I leaned over to bleed a radiator. It has been, and is, very painful. (Very painful in my scheme of things; there’s no telling how anyone else would describe it. My guess is that I have a low pain threshold.) The bleeding of the radiator resulted in the heating failing altogether and the subsequent summoning of a plumber. By time he arrived, I was virtually immobile. Fortunately he fixed the heating so at least I was warm when, after an uncomfortable night, I sat in my room at 4 in the morning to watch the cricket. At approximately 4.01 I lifted a cup of coffee to my lips. This movement triggered a back spasm which threw the cup from my hand to the computer keyboard. The result was fatal. Luckily I’ve always backed up my files…NO I HAVEN’T… So, all the work I’ve done for two years, gone.

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The umpire has just made a decision, a wrong decision that may decide the result of twenty days cricket.

So it goes. Life, eh? Why?

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Of late, I’ve been reading or rereading some classics. Graham Green’s Burnt Out Case was one, Steinbeck’s Sweet Tuesday (Thursday?) another, both of which were obvious in their class. When I was a teenager, I was really impressed by James Hogg’s ‘The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner,’ so coming back to it was intriguing. In fact I enjoyed is less this time but mainly because it was familiar and therefore less shocking in its radicalism. Nevertheless, it is a remarkable book. The quote below is from the author, not the book.

The one great error in life is to overrate our talents. When a man is astonished at what he knows, it may be a proof that he has stood on the brink of science; but it is also a proof that he has not discovered it to be boundless and unfathomable. The ignorance of such a person makes him loquacious and opinionative, because he has never known what it is to be beyond his depth.

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Ravi Shankar claimed that he needed relationships with different women to feed his creativity. Well, of course. I suppose your art has to be recognized for this story to work.

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With just two weeks to go even my most superstitious magical-thinking self has had to admit that it really would be a miracle for anything to happen in that time that could make this last year anything other than a fuck-up. Killing my computer accidentally with a back spasm just adds to the problems, financial and practical. My partner has just become unemployed, as I am now following the unfortunate collapse of my business. We are flummoxed. In fact not only have I failed to move towards my goal, I’ve gone backwards. This in the year of the Water-Dragon, the year of belief, my crowning sixtieth, the last make or break.

So it goes, so it goes.

Luckily, none of it matters

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The next ten days will be family focused. On Wednesday I will be sixty. I guess the Day of the Dead has interfered with my enthusiasm for celebration, perhaps because I wanted to show what I could do, and what I could do didn’t seem to be up to much. Hopefully by then I’ll have sorted my thoughts out and remembered to notice and appreciate the many goodnesses, such as my health and sanity, and the thriving of my children and grandchildren. I could also remember forty-five years ago when I was a rather miserable teenager who used to go to sleep at night imagining I was randomly massacring passers-by with a rifle. So lucky I lived in a society where I would never come across a gun. I don’t know how anyone could forgive their child being murdered whether by a lunatic or by a government dropping bombs from drones.

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This morning the test cricket series in India comes to an end with England the victors. Instead of listening to the familiar voices bringing me warmth and entertainment from India, I’ll have to return to my meditation and listen out for a different type of sound, that of the universe unfolding.