EPISODE 69: ON CHANGE

 Welcome to my blog which this week begins with the subject of change. As Palmer says: 

‘The only constant in the universe is change…Everything flows…Experiencing the flow permits you to direct it or to exist in harmony with it or to transform it. You welcome and experience the change – recognising new opportunities – or you struggle against and resist the change – thus experiencing suffering. Everything changes. Life and Death are both aspects of change. To live forever or to be dead forever are equally futile struggles.

Choosing to resist the experience you have chosen to experience (by your knowing or unknowing adoption of beliefs) creates the effect of suffering, of being swept alone, of being out of control. You create against yourself – feeling is replaced by thinking.

But when you change your attitude and experience what you have chosen to experience (acknowledging yourself as the source of the beliefs that attracted the experience), you may then create new beliefs as to what you experience you will attract next.

Those persons, places, events, conditions, viewpoints and ideas that you resist experiencing will continue to be created with slight variation until they are experienced as being in accord with the beliefs held by that particular stratum of consciousness that is creating them.’

I didn’t actually mean to quote that much but I was actually thinking about my friend Ella who recently has been somewhat ruthlessly dumped by her partner of six years.  I spent some hours with her yesterday and listened to and comforted her. It is always a delicate balance, of course, when someone is leaning on you for support and validation because you have to both absorb and acknowledge the suffering with genuine empathy while remembering this person needs empowering to get out of the situation that their body minded brain has got them into. As I was copying these words on change, I saw how I could help her reframe the story once she’s allowed herself to feel the feelings – something she is very reluctant to do.

Anyway, the change I wanted to write about is of a different variety. Until a week ago, the neighbour to my right was a slightly mad hippy woman who was almost entirely silent apart from when she drummed and wailed or was complaining about my complaining about her drumming and wailing. My partner had become intimidated by her and very disturbed by the noise and even wanted us to write to the Housing Association to see if we could get her moved – which I wouldn’t do for a number of reasons, not least because replacement neighbours could be much worse.

Last Monday, the hippy woman knocked on the door and said, ‘You won, John. I’m moving. Got a detached place where I can play my music.’ ‘That’s good,’ I said. And that was that. For the rest of the day there was banging and knocking and voices shouting and vans and cars arriving and going until at 6.00 pm there was another knock at the door and there was a small woman with grey hair and few teeth introducing herself in the broadest of somerset accents as Annie. By 7pm she was sitting on an armchair in the front garden, chatting to every single person who walked down the street.

On Tuesday morning, at about 10am, there was the sound of a chainsaw. A man was cutting down the hedge of next door’s front garden, so that her front window can see straight onto the street, and vice versa. This now means that my house is also revealed to the street; not absolutely, because I still have my own hedge, but enough to totally change how I lead my life, because up to now when I’ve opened my front door, I’ve been able to be in my front garden unseen, to sit in the sun (if there were any), to have a smoke, to breathe some air privately, to compose myself…not possible now. And if visitors came, no one would know which house they were coming to. Now they do.

On Wednesday, all the other neighbours came to chat and gawp at the damage.

On Thursday, my neighbour’s workman razed their back garden. First he chainsawed 18 years’ worth of miniature cultivated wilderness and then he set fire to the whole lot. It burned for twentyfour hours and has left my garden, and many others, smothered in black ash. The wildlife has screamed and it is like a burial ground. Throughout all, the cheery raucous somerset shrilling of my neighbours, chatting to her dog or yet more neighbours that she has known all her life.

Don’t they say, be careful what you wish for?

Tuesday Morning: The idea that grew too big for itself.

It is almost a year now since I had the thought, ‘I wonder what a Glastonbury day of the dead would be like?’ At this moment I seriously wish I’d noticed the thought, maybe played with it for a few minutes, and then forgotten it, as I do most of my thoughts and ideas.

For a start, I hardly know anyone in this town of 10,000 and the people I do know are mostly left of any centre you can think of, rarely do anything in the ‘real’ world and represent the tiniest percentage of the Glastonbury demography which is predominantly over 40, white, Christian and conservative.

Mind you, everyone dies. (Or no-one does.)

There is now some 10 weeks to go and the whole thing is insanely underprepared and unready. 

And I’m in panic.

Do something.

I have a megalist, some four A4 pages of things to do. I updated it last two weeks ago and not much has changed since.

So far I’ve not made one phonecall and basically everything has been done by email. Hence long waits not knowing if I’m sat in a junk box or have been considered and denied.

Here is a dilemma. A friend designed a poster for the event which I more or less liked. My eldest son has since designed a poster too. It couldn’t be more different. And it isn’t really appropriate, seeing as the event it advertises isn’t quite the one I’m designing. On the other hand, it is eye-catching and professional.

Here’s another dilemma. I really want to say yes to the brighton theatre group’s £1500 cut price offer. But there is no way I can recouperate that money. And it could take my potential losses up to 5 grand. (I’m already personally overdrawn.) I suppose all along I’ve been hoping someone will be inspired to hand over money because they are moved by the concept of the event. Nick Cage and mike Eavis have, so far, failed me. 

Friday morning:

So I solved my dilemmas by booking the theatre group and deciding to use both posters; one in glaston, one outside. Meanwhile, I made contact with a woman who had ideas about how to attract the death professionals and another woman who knows all about mask-making. A third woman, who had been going to put on an art exhibition before going incommunicado, has returned from her absence with an interest in honouring her committment. For a few days the panic subsides and I feel slightly excited. Who knows what changes next week will bring?

EPISODE 68: DIVYA DIKSHA.

Welcome to my blog which begins with the large size photo of Muktananda that dominates my small study and in front of which I do my occasional meditations. Last week I received a ‘Divya Diksha’ card from my friends in America which annually remembers August 15^th 1947 as the day that Baba Muktananda received the final initiation from his guru, the extraordinary Swami Nityananda. It is not untypical of Indian mythology that for most Indians this is the day of India’s independence from the Raj and the beginning of the dreadful mistake called Pakistan. Also not atypical is the local disputes about whether Muktananda was really the appointed successor or just seized the position for himself.

In his book, ‘Play of Consciousness,’ Baba describes his experiences in the most purple of prose. I no longer have the book because quite honestly a time came when everything in it seemed so far from my own experience as to be either lies or irrelevant. I was much happier with the down to earth Shaivism which was beautiful in its language and its truth without making me feel that my own meditations were feeble beyond belief. Why did Muktananda gets dancing goddesses and blue gods and all I got was a restless mind and lust?

Here’s an atrocious poem about Muktananda’s divya diksha written by a devotee.

Walking through a drizzle,
Muktananda sizzled.
 Nityananda had given to him
What was surely everything.
 

Into Muktananda's eyes, a penetrating beam arrived
That made his soul become alive,
And lit a fire inside his being,
So illusions would be fleeing.

Nityananda had also given him
His own sandals and prasad
And after this auspicious day
Muktananda traveled far

To the town of Sukhi
Where he meditated for hours.
He was absorbed
And could not ignore
The shakti's inner power.

Soon after he got to Sukhi
He saw the field outside ablaze.
“What,” he thought, “is happening to me.”
He was very, very crazed.

Then one day the inner fire rose
And, in meditation, he saw a naked woman.
He felt desire
From passion's pyre.
He did not know what was happening to him.


Distressed by what had happened
He took off his swami clothes
He left his hut and walked to Nagad
Where a landowner gave him a small home.

In that little hut in Nagad
Another yogi had lived.
“Read the book inside the cupboard,”
A voice said, and it had a lot to give.

The book describe the effects of shaktipat
Which he had received through Nityananda's grace.
And now Muktananda knew that all was good,
And light shone in his face.

So he went to see Zipruana
That naked avadhoot.
And Zipruana told him precious things,
Things he never knew.

Zipruana told him the woman
Was Kundalini herself,
And she was divesting him of sexual desire
So he could attain the greatest spiritual wealth.

Zipruana told him shaktipat
Would completely purify his being.
And he would become a supreme king
Since his essential nature shaktipat was freeing.


Zipruana told him that
What was happening to him was great.
Later, he would give grace to many thousands.
He had a blessed fate.

And the writer of this story poem
Was one of those many many folks.
If you asked me, “How important was
Muktananda's divya diksha day to you?”
My answer would be, “Of auspicious days to me,
It really was the most.”

After Muktananda died in 1982, his appointed successors, brother and sister Subash and Malti took over and then fell out. Out of the two, it seemed to me that Malti, who became Chidvilasananda and then Gurumayi, was the more impressive. A battle between the two ensued. By this time I was out of the movement and wasn’t that concerned to take on either one as my teacher. It was Gurumayi, however, who captured Ganeshpuri, Muktananda’s home ashram. I went to see her there once in the late eighties but felt none of the old magic and subsequently left and didn’t return until the beginning of last year. What I found then was emptiness. Where once there had been a thriving beautiful ashram was now dereliction, defensiveness and hostility. Gurumayi, I was told, hadn’t been seen for years. This I find extraordinary. How could a queen with two enormous palatial ashrams, in Ganeshpuri and upstate New York, simply disappear. How and why? It bothers me. Recently I was being told about a film, ‘Eat, Pray, Love,’ which tells of a woman’s spiritual meeting with a guru in India before a trip to Bali in which she ‘found’ love. The guru in the story was, apparently, Gurumayi.

A young woman I know is so influenced by the film that she now wants to go to India and Bali, with the hope of having the same experiences. She’s the same age I was back in 1976 when I met Baba. I have often said that I feel sorry for our young because they don’t have a generational alternative to the status quo like we did back in those days. Okay, most, if not all, the gurus turned out to be money-mad deceivers, liars, smugglers, politicians, and philanderers, but the things they talked about were of a higher reality than the normal greed and materialism in our societies. Nowadays even communism is an unknown, so no hope at all for ‘spiritual’ values.

So when I meditate in front of my picture, I’ve no idea if I’m just teasing myself with the idea that Muktananda was special or whether it even matters as long as I get something from what I do. But do I really think that on August 15^th 1947, Swami Nityananda passed his power and lineage on to Muktananda in the way it is described in the book? Not really. Does that matter? Not at all.

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This rather pointless reminiscing probably tells you all you need to know about my last week in which not a lot happened and I spent another three days in my grandson’s world where nearly all our communication is mediated through fantasy dialogues between Jedi Knights and Sith Lords. As these contain humour, philosophy, history, strategy and all types of life and death, they are not inconsequential, just difficult to maintain for ten hours a day. Not even torrential rain stopped him coming out into the back garden where my quiet smokes became unquiet and his pyjamas, which he only changes out of if made to, soaked.

___

On the day before going to the soggy midlands, I did in fact have a meeting with Alison about the day of the dead but no sooner had we started that she got a phonecall from her daughter’s father’s family in Wales, saying that the grandmother was about to die. Ten minutes later she and her daughter were on their way North to say goodbye and prepare for a funeral.

Death imitating art.

EPISODE 67: MY LIFE AS A DARK LORD

Welcome to my blog which has just spent two long days with a ten year old grandson spent mostly discussing an imaginary siege conducted by the forces of the Sith against the temple of the Jedi. As my grandson is the Jedi, the Siths are not allowed to actually win a war and any strategies they come up with are immediately thwarted by some awesome power just developed by his imagination which is pretty limitless. Consequently I have been forced to delve into Sith history to come up with new versions of old weapons, such as the Amulet of Invisibility, with which to temporarily surprise my grandson. Yesterday when he set his Walkers on me, I was able to momentarily silence him with my knowledge of three ways in which the Walkers have been defeated before. By 3pm I was getting pretty desperate with the conversations and was delighted for once to say, ‘Why don’t we watch the Olympics? The BMX cycling is on.’  

Although immune to the delights of football and cricket, my grandson does know sports that I don’t, such as canoeing, kayaking, archery, and BMX cycling who’s World Championships he had been to see. In fact the tv coverage was fairly dull because once they’d dropped down the first ramp it was impossible to see the whole of the race. The two british riders were favourites to do well in the final but trailed in last. It seems that the excitement is in watching the crashes.

Meanwhile the Olympian newspeak continued apace in the UK. Or is it GB now? There is much talk of Olympic legacy and the british Olympic winners are being put forward as models of perfect citizens, dedicating their lives and bodies to winning a freak show once in four years. Hard work brings rewards, we are told. Tell that to the labourers of the earth, to the factory workers, to the women of the world, to all those who know it isn’t true. Britain won a gold in a martial art. I watched the final; two women trying to kick each other in the head. Sporting excellence for our children to be inspired by? Or is that the dancing horses?

I struggle spending the day in a ten year old’s world. I want my own thoughts and to get on with my Day of the Dead but by time his parents come home, I am brainless.

The other day I was contemplating a row of nearby bungalows when I suddenly remembered my grandparent’s bungalow in stunning clarity. And there they were; grandpa, grandma and auntie bobbie, all smiling at me. In my grandfather’s garage which smelled of polished leather, was kept the mangle and I loved to push the washing through the rollers and feel it come out squeezed of liquid. 

Of course when I began to recall those days, I felt the tears welling up. But what was I crying at? Maybe one day young Louis will be walking past the house where he now lives and he’ll remember some of these days with his granddad and maybe he’ll shed a tear too and not know why. And maybe, for all my resistance, those interminable hours spent with him are the best thing I could be doing with my time.

Having written the above, I switch on the radio. For once, not the Olympics but the sick sad story of a 12 year old girl murdered by her grandmother’s lover, the man she called grandfather.

Okay, enough, lets watch the sport.

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On Monday I wrote this:

Today I was knocking out my begging emails and feeling good about my gig when I got a reply from Copperpiece, the theatre group I had surreptitiously allocated £500 towards getting. With them in place, I felt I had an event to be proud of. What they want is £11,000! I felt instantly mortified. I could feel it deep in my body, shame, foolishness and embarrassment. Small and stupid. Overeached himself. Got carried away. A dreamer. Fucking hate this feeling. (And a part of my mind adds them to a Day of the Dead of the future, maybe in Bristol next year. Or should I just realize that me and the Southbank, never the twain shall meet.)

Of course the temptation is to avoid feelings of failure rather than allow and expand the feeling to experience and discreate it. I’ve always been aware of my pessimism and negative internal chatter so it is no real surprise to find the self-critical voice of the non-existent person whinging loudly in my head. It isn’t having all its own way, however, for on another front, the writing one, I’m still expecting to suddenly make a fortune. Who knows? The man I sent my novel to may decide to publish it as an ebook or I may win that short story prize in November. Both are highly unlikely - the first guy isn't even a publisher. In fact I've got myself into a superstitious hole because although I want to finish doing this blog, which has served its purpose, I dare not for if I don't have a twist of success in the tale I'll always think 'if only i had kept doing the blog until the end of the year, what might have happened?'

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 We are plagued by mosquitos on the Somerset levels. Occassionally we can see clouds of them drifting above the waters. At night we have to close the windows, cover up the wrists and ankles, and burn citronella. If only the sun would shine it'd be like living abroad.

But the sun doesn't shine and the rain continues to fall.

 

EPISODE 66: IN WHICH THE AUTHOR DOESN'T SHOPLIFT, DOES WORK, AND CONTINUES TO NOT ENJOY XENEPHOBIA.

Welcome to my blog which is sitting in the kitchen where I can see the back garden which is abundant in flowers and vegetation that has become triffid like in the rains. The garden is such a treat because I never know what is going to appear next. Because it has been so wet, some flowers come and go between the storms and may never be seen. For me it is a quiet morning after a trip up North yesterday which became quite tiring as a 3.5 hour journey stretched into 4.5 both ways owing to accidents closing the motorway. This type of closure now seems to happen once in every three journeys and always there is the mixture of relief at not having been in the accident and of a reluctant acknowledgment that such a catastrophe could happen at any time.

What did happen was that at 8.30 in the morning, I called into the services for a cup of tea and to buy a pint of milk for the friend I was visiting who lives in a boat faraway from a shop. When I paid for the milk, the woman behind the counter said, ‘And what about the tobacco?’ ‘What tobacco?’ I asked. ‘The Drum Gold tobacco that you asked for and that I put on the counter,’ she said. ‘I didn’t ask for tobacco,’ I said, ’and I didn’t see any on the counter’. She wasn’t satisfied with this. ‘I put it there,’ she reaffirmed. ‘You can check my pockets, if you like,’ I offered as I began to empty them, only to find that the first thing I took out was a packet of Drum Gold tobacco. ‘This can’t be the one you mean,’ I explained, ‘look, it is half empty.’ For a long five minutes we repeated ourselves until suddenly a look of horror appeared on her face and she said, ‘Oh, I am so sorry. I remember now, it was a different man. Really I’m too tired for this job, I’m no good at it, I’d rather work with animals.’

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Nearly every moment this week has been focussed on the Day of the Dead. (Obviously that isn’t actually true. It just feels like that. The places where my mind has actually spent its week neither of us want to know.) On Tuesday morning I was despondent as I envisaged an ill-attended financially mortifying event losing me the best part of £5,000. This was always the danger of budgeting realistically. Fortunately, my friend Ali is an unmathematical optimist and she spent the best part of Tuesday and Wednesday rejigging the figures more rosily. A plan to increase the possible income by transferring the hip-hop event from one venue to another was scuppered by the ‘straighter’ venue which refused to have the vomiting and non-spending youth on their premises. I asked if we called the genre rural grunge rather than hip-hop, would we be allowed in but only got a wry smile in return.

Although I’ve resisted budgeting, the panic I’ve been feeling, ‘not enough people will come’ and ‘I’ll lose a small fortune’, are clearly budgeting thoughts that needed to be examined and, hopefully, discreated. The numbers I need not to lose money are quite considerable but not, I suppose, unattainable. In the meantime I’ve sent begging letters to Nick Cage and Mike Eavis. Once Ali had misaddedup me into a loss of £500, I found myself justifying a further allocation of £500 to the much desired (by me) Copperdollar n the grounds that this is my sixtieth year and I deserve to give myself a present I want.

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The temporary but Olympian North Koreanization of Britain by the BBC and the Tory government continues apace. As I speak the commentators are congratulating themselves that ‘the country has never felt like this before.’ It is truly embarrassing and seriously worrying. The same media are stirring the crowds to scream and shout idiotically whenever a british competitor appears, even though they probably compete in sports that precious few know or care about. This adoration of freakish brawn is positively primitive. When I say that we should have bigger crowds to watch scientists think about the universe, I am treated like Victor Meldrew. I’m not anti-sport and I felt really thrilled to watch the Ethiopian woman 10,000 metres runner storming to the finish with a big smile on her face but the combination of narrow patriotism and heroic hyperbole is driving me nuts.

(Incidentally, just heard Michael Phelps called ‘hugely talented.’ No; he’s a swimmer with big feet.)

For the past hour or so, I have been perusing my copy of ‘Deep Socialism’ by Wilberg to find a pithy quote to explain my disquiet with this abuse of intelligence called the british propaganda Olympics. (Which, by the way, has hastened the end of the adverb. Blair began it when he said ‘we will do it right’ but the sports world has taken the adverb abolition by storm.) Unfortunately there isn’t an axiom that says it all but basically it is to do with the market commodification of value. The nauseating sponsor-driven identikit ‘Team GB’, (cynically paid for by coco-cola and a host of other multinationals) is part of this turning of real human value into the symbolic value of a brand – the very economic Nazism that has allowed the fraudster banksters to impoverish the 80%, the huge global underclass, the under-nourished, the under-valued, the under-paid, the under-employed and unemployed.

So it goes.