EPISODE 78: THE BALLS ARE IN THE AIR, WILL HE CATCH ANY?

Welcome to my blog which this week will say very little because I am less than a week away from the Day of the Dead which has claimed my energy and imagination for months. The truth is that we have sold fuck-all tickets and there is little reason to expect more than a handful of people to the program. So it goes.

..

Is Monday morning. In myself I'm fine but as a promoter I'm freaking. Mainly about money. Yesterday I watched the zombie walk - which I should have been leafleting - with a mixture of feelings. I was comparing it to what might happen next Saturday. In fact it wasn't that impressive with a poorer turn out than I would have expected considering the amount of advertising and public support they have had.

--

This week I may write a daily update so keep checking. At night I have been spending an hour in the bath - hence have read four thrillers this week - and then gone to bed desperately trying to think of anything but the Day and each time my thoughts start making lists I try and persuade them to imagine a cricket game in which I'm playing for Yorkshire. But, by 3 in the morning, I can hear the lists been made again.

--

Monday night. The best moment was the printer saying, 'loads of people are talking about it.' Which seemed true when BBC Somerset left a message about interviewing them on saturday morning. The low point was Alison getting pissy when I didn't immediately agree to her idea. Earlier we went for a wmeeting with children's world, two guys who really care what they do. They were telling us what visiting Sri Lanka was like just after the tsunami. 
...
Slept badly. Got up at 5.30 to do my tax  return but coldn't focus. Went down to the centre at 6.30 to see if i could put the banner up. No way. Potteredd uselessly for a bit then met up with Alison and others. Fortunately Delphi found a way to put it up. This achieved at 5pm. BBC Somerset want me to go to Taunton at 7.30 Saturday morning. Unwise I think. At times today very very nervous about the public speaking - not to mention the money. Have to go out tonight; sounds like I need to address my thoughts in the morning.
---
Wednesday morning: the website is down, can't get my emails. This is because according to my 'server', I've exceeded my bandwith. For three days I've been trying to alert the server to this error and now it has crashed. Can't even try ringing them u ntil 10.00am because otherwise they charge £40 for the phonecall.
... 
wednesday pm: Alison sent messages saying in personal melt down, doesn't even know if she wants to go to the event. Can't blame her.
Having a crisis about ringing Copperdollar. Need to know if they are planning an act with live, rather than recorded, music. If so we're fucked. Haven't made myself ring. 
...In the end sorted it out by email.
Also today I went to visit a woman who has donated her house for the use of Copperdollar. I asked her why she was doing it and she said 'it is what i do to help.' She didn't want me to tell anyone her name or address. Amazing.
---
Thursday. Just back from radio interview with local radio. I'd been shitting myself all day but it went really well. I really wish I didn't make such heavy weather of it. Earlier in the day, Alison had sat in the car crying because she's scared of the time she has on her hands...Meanwhile I've begun to think of a novel called 'Without You.'
--- 
Friday 11am. Worse than i could have thought; one ticket sold for tonight, none for tomorrow. 
friday 9pm. Very quiet at the gig when i left at 9pm. 
--
Saturday 7am
maybe 60-70 people turned up last night, half the hoped for crowd. Today I am on the radio in 30 minutes and then the days begins. I rather think it is going to be an empty day but it would be lovely if glastonbury didn't let me down for the parade. 

Sunday 2am
All over. .. I must admit there were moments when the vision was created. Those moments were mainly created by Copperdollar who were extraordinary and, without whom, the event would have been a total flop .Their appearance at the Market Cross, where they were met by another fifteen foot puppet that hadn't expected to see, was stunning and there was just enough crowd to appreciate it. The party afterwards was great. The Mexicans were fun, Bob Heath was sweet and appropriate, Flipron sounded good to me and Copperdollar were again good value. So much more I could say but of course it is history and I must sleep.

.EPISODE 77: WHISTLING IN THE DARK.

Welcome to my blog which wants, for once, to genuinely uplift its thinking. Today (Monday) I applied some Avatar to my thoughts beginning by noticing both my (over) seriousness and my discouragements. The question was; What do you want to change? And the answer was, I want to change the feelings I have about the success of the day of the dead. The next question is ‘what beliefs do you have to have to have that feeling?’ For me the beliefs were, ‘no-one has bought tickets, no-one has contacted me as a result of the website or my articles, and there’s too much competition.’ These, to me, were entirely rational and provable beliefs.   However, on reflection I saw that the conclusions I was reaching were premature. I then tried, ‘I’m amazed by the interest already shown,’ which quite quickly was true because a lot of interest has been shown by people I wouldn’t normally make contact with.

BELIEF COMES BEFORE EXPERIENCE.

That is the key to Avatar, one that I forget on a daily basis. Only this morning I remembered that I wanted to apply this to death as well. What are my beliefs about death? What beliefs would I create? But before death, the day of the dead; tomorrow I must revisit this subject and deliberately create the beliefs I want to have.

Apart from thinking about my thinking, what else did I do today? Well I started with meditation and chi kung, both of which I have been neglected. Straightaway I felt better in myself. I then visited a friend, Marie, who was ranting about the ingratitude of her 18 year old daughter who has left home and all but dropped out of college. I told her she was being harsh and flailing her daughter with her opinions wasn’t really going to get her anywhere. ‘Don’t take it personally,’ I advised, ‘She’s talking to an imaginary you.’ Of course I added my usual rider about don’t listen to me what should I know.

What I didn’t do was postering. There is something I need to change my thoughts about. ‘through postering I make surprising discoveries and useful contacts.’ Or…no, better stop there.

Saturday

Suddenly it is Saturday morning. For the past few days my mood, bar one grumpy morning, has been generally good although how much work I’ve actually done, I don’t know. (The postering has remained slack.) Yesterday I met the local ‘carers’ ambassador’, as dynamic a woman as I’d ever want to come across. She was full of ideas for the future (which I’m not so keen on at this moment) and in the meantime will drag me on to the local radio with her a couple of days before the event.

 After seeing her I met an artist who was, with difficulty, conducting a free mask-making workshop. She had lots of tips and advice for our own workshop – including suggesting that we found a different way of doing it.

On Thursday I went to Bridgewater to attend a meeting of the Mendip Forum. There I managed to pin down a couple of people to talk about the Day of the Dead. This showed me that, should I ever do this again, I really would have to get off my arse and ring people rather than send out the endless emails.

Financially I’m struggling. I owe someone £2000 and he’s on the phone hassling. I’m behind on my bills and have sold no tickets I’m aware of.  This bit is hard to be positive about. I’m awaiting a miracle.

---

This week I read ‘Sea of Poppies’ by Amitav Ghosh. I began reading it four years ago but couldn’t get past the first chapter, a) because it is about boats and b) much of the language is arcane or in dialect. Every now and then I have begun again and still not got far. I’ve read other books by Ghosh, ‘The Hungry Tide’ and ‘The Glass Palace,’ which were excellent, so this time I stuck with it and found it very readable. Nevertheless, having whipped through the 450 pages, I was disappointed to discover that it came to no end and was to be the first part of an intended trilogy.

---

This is the reply I received to the letter about my brother’s illness.

With regards to your brother’s condition however, I think it would help if, before commenting, you could first tell me a little bit more about the onset, history, nature and severity of his symptoms, any medical diagnosis or important elements of his medical history (in particular any use of prescription drugs) and also something about his life history, current life circumstances and previous communicative environment (not least his own age). 

Different people not only inhabit different linguistic worlds, communities and environments they may also have a different inner relation to language. Then again, as emphasised in my new book The Illness is the Cure – an introduction to Life Medicine and Life Doctoring (see also www.lifedoctoring.org.uk ) there is often a close relationship between the onset of symptoms, preceding events in a person’s life, not to mention their underlying feelings and bearing towards life in this world.

As far as any general comments I can make at this stage are concerned, I can only say that for me the most primordial level of ‘speech’ is awareness as such – for the nature, mood, tone and quality of an individual’s awareness of themselves communicates in and of itself, both directly and through their bodily comportment and demeanour. As for the divine awareness, that speaks through the languages of the body, the senses and all that we experience directly as sensual qualities and phenomena  - even and above all without putting a word or name to them (this not perceiving things ‘as’ this or that being also what makes possible the wonderful experience of ‘Samadhi’ as a highly sensual form of ‘awareness bliss’ or chitananda).     

Partly for such reasons, I also think also that severe dementia in old age is often misinterpreted. You wrote of ‘dying before dying’. And indeed, as I understand it, death is not a point in time but a process – one which for some may involve different degrees and stages – more or less extreme – of withdrawal from the realm of language; in the case of Alzheimer’s disease for example, a type of free-flowing awareness across time that cannot be encapsulated in words, and that is more akin to the nature of time as experienced in the afterlife.

That said, naturally the most important question is how much your brother is suffering or feels depressed or isolated through his language loss. If he does, there are aware ways of being with those who can’t speak that can serve in a most powerful way to overcome this sense of inner isolation. Indeed some such ways of silently ‘being with’  another can allow depths of wordless inner contact and communication to be experienced that most people rarely experience in this life - and that verbal communication is itself but a pale echo and expression of. It is also such modes of wordless, silently embodied communication that form the basis of what I call ‘tantric pair meditation’ and the forms of initiation conducted through it.

On a practical level, do free to write again. I would also suggest looking at the section of my book and site on life doctoring entitled ‘What most doctors don’t ask’. If perhaps you could write answers with your brother, or on your brother’s behalf, to some of the questions listed there, this might also prove useful.

EPISODE 76: IN WHICH THE AUTHOR ALMOST CONSIDERS THE THINGS HE WOULD CONSIDER IF HE WASN'T DISTRACTED BY TRYING NOT TO THINK ABOUT WHAT HE SHOULD BE THINKING ABOUT.

Welcome to my blog which needs to think about wordlessness, or rather, a world without words. Is there such a thing? Is language innate? Even as I ask the question, I know I can’t begin to answer it properly because my mind is elsewhere and to casually contemplate such a subject, one the finest minds have dwelt upon and argued about, is pointless. This is why I have addressed someone who may be able to help.

Dear Peter

My question is this: my brother has the beginning of dementia and he is 'losing his language'. This is something to do with the functioning of his brain (I assume.) I have worked with people with dementia. In terms of matrika, or the four levels of speech, or whatever, how do I understand what is happening in his inner experience? Does the language go from that? Does the knowledge of knowing who you are transcend your ability to remember? 

We’ll see if he answers. 

---

Today I should be postering again but fuck it is difficult. I took myself off to Somerton, a small town some seven miles from glaston. Somerton turned out to be every bit as dull as Axbridge, maybe even quieter. I ended up managing just two posters and couldn’t find a place at all to advertise the hip-hop event. I woke up feeling bad tempered and during the day have felt physically achy. Is that good enough reason to come home? Maybe if my promised companion had turned up I would have pressed on to the next village. Maybe not.

Do I have reasons to be cheerful about my project. I suspect not. When I went into the record shop to see how the ticket sales were going I discovered that the woman there had forgotten she was selling them. I presume no customers had insisted that she did. Somewhat bizarrely, I’m suffering, my gig is suffering, severe competition from zombies who are not, as I thought, just doing a walk for charity, a child death charity, but also having a Halloween party. The local paper, which did print some of my press release, has been giving the zombies the big build up. So it goes.

It is possible that the Art Exhibition is taking shape. Fingers crossed. And maybe the kids program too. Meanwhile the costs escalate daily. Will anyone come?

…

I’ve been cheering myself up by reading more Peter Wilberg; maybe too much because I can’t take in all the ideas. Most importantly, he reminded me of the ‘felt sense’ (Gendlin), the ‘extended feeling’ (Palmer), which makes all the difference to getting out of the mental trap. I’ve never been much good at keeping up my meditation disciplines and only really turn to them for fire-fighting. This last month I’ve been ploughing through lists and neglecting all my resource building, such as Chi Kong, a walk, some Avatar; the result is a distinct lack of zap. Mind you, the weather has turned cold, 3 degrees tonight, and that always takes some adjusting to.

Both my friend Alison and her daughter, Beth, are presently on anti-depressants. I have always been prejudice against these drugs although I’ve witnessed, once, some help appearing to have been done. I’m quite amazed that Alison has allowed herself to be so ill-advised. She has also developed a yearning for valium which, it seems, she has passed on to her daughter. Now I’m reading up on the science, I’m appalled.

"The biggest drug-addiction problem in the world doesn't involve heroin, cocaine or marijuana. In fact, it doesn't involve an illegal drug at all. The world's biggest drug-addiction problem is posed by a group of drugs, the benzodiazepines, which are widely prescribed by doctors and taken by countless millions of perfectly ordinary people around the world... Drug-addiction experts claim that getting people off the benzodiazepines is more difficult than getting addicts off heroin. ‘

Of course, for many of us the pharmaceutical industry’s lying and maleficent control of the medical world is no surprise. What I need to do is fully understand, and then develop the tools to explain, exactly how fallacious is the ‘science’ behind this horrendous abuse of the brains of the people.

My own attitude has been – to quote Wilberg- ‘That an encircling mood or disposition, of whatever ‘depressive’ or ‘anxious’ quality, can either be felt to “confine man in his corporeality as in a prison” or can “carry him though corporeality as one of the paths leading out of it.” This depends entirely on how fully we are able to feel that mood or disposition in a bodily way, and do so with our body as a whole – our whole self or soul’. These anti-depressants make that inward journey more, rather than less, difficult.

---

Today I went to visit two of my grandchildren and it did me good. The little boy isn’t at all impressed by having a new sister. He’s cross and put-out. She’s just cross. When he noticed my holding her today, he walked over and tried to smack her. Clearly he’s upsetting his parents. Singling him out for attention doesn’t really work because if you take him away to be on his own he worries even more about how much attention the girl is getting from his parents at home, although we did in fact manage to take him to a café where we cheered him up only to be recalled by mum and dad because it was his lunchtime.

When I got home I was glad to have gone out and even gladder to spend a day not thinking about the Day of the Dead.

EPISODE 75: BITS OF LIFE.

Welcome to my blog which is cold this morning; yesterday we had rain which again made the garden so sodden could I hardly walk in it. Today I have to go postering, having first to drive to Bristol to pick up some tickets. So far, none have sold and I’ve had zero emails making enquiries. I’d like to be feeling positive about the whole thing but have nothing to grab hold of, nothing to comfort myself with. Meanwhile I get a bank statement which puts me £4,000 in the red. Today would be a good day for good news.

There again, it is all perspective. My brother, who already has cancer, is now being tested for dementia. I’d hate to be him and I’d hate to be his family. (Well, I am his family, but I mean his wife and children.)  Apparently he is doing okay with it all but surely the outlook is grim with increasing isolation and detachment likely to be his path. Whereas for me, I can be fretting about this project and how I’ll recover financially, for him the grand projects are over. Of course, having being engaged in ‘the world’ for most of his life, he has a string of projects behind him and may even be grateful to let all that go. 

Though I doubt it.

Mind you, reflecting on my good fortune as opposed to his, is not really positivity or confidence; more whistling in the dark than anything real. 

Have I done my best? 

I guess I have.

…

I was very surprised the other day that when arguing with Howard about the nature of things, I felt myself become emotional and heard my voice shaking a little, as if tears weren’t too far away. This puzzled me; why did I get like that? People that know him often say they become frustrated and angry with him because he won’t listen and cuts across them and indeed he kept doing this to me by assuming he knew my stance and what I was going to say - which did piss me off. My problem, however, was more my frustration at not finding the words and concepts I needed to explain what it was I did want to convey and I was wishing I had the intellect and reason of a Peter Wilberg to swipe away the midge of Howard’s ignorance.

Now I begin to remember what we were talking about – the origins of Shaivism and Indian thought which Howard seemed to think was animistic in its ‘religion’. When I think of the crafted classical darshanas of Indian philosophy compared with the trivia of the modern materialist (whose arguments were dismissed contemptuously a thousand years ago) I find myself wanting to shout some sense into my Dawkins disciple but as aggression is the mark of the fanatic rather than the gnostic, I must examine myself rather than my imaginary opponent.

---

Not for the first time, Alison points out the world around us. ‘That tree, this car, you say they are illusions?’ ‘Yes,’ I reply. Then, thinking of my shaivism, I add, ‘real illusions’. I shouldn’t have added that bit because it didn’t help.

---

I did put some posters up today. Not a lot. I drove through one, mainly bypassed, town called Axbridge. It was very strange because there were loads and loads of houses, old ones in the heart of the town, new ones all around, but hardly any  people to be seen and only a couple of shops to be found, those in ‘the medieval square’ at the centre of the  maze that now circumnavigates it. We asked, ‘Is this all there is?’ and the few people we found all replied ‘yes.’ The teenagers said there was absolutely nothing to do and that the town was ‘rubbish.’ They even thanked me when I said I was putting up a poster for them to look at when they were bored. Apparently Axbridge has a high rate of drug addiction. Pretty obvious why, a dormitory town in every sense of the word.

Cheddar, a few miles down the road, is totally different because it has the caves and hundreds of tourists buying shit for stupid prices. The cafes and shops there weren’t very poster friendly until Alison charmed a young man into putting five up in his shop and taking another five to put in his dad’s shop. Of course, once he’s stopped being dazzled by her smile and looked at the topic of the posters, he may well change or have it changed by his dad.

…

This week I reread one of my favourite novels, ‘Sacred Games’ by Vikram Chandra. I read it first four or five years ago and immediately put it near the top of my list. Earlier this year, my partner read it in Spanish and enjoyed it as much as I had done. I’ve been rationing my novel reading of late – in order to focus on the Day of the Dead – but the 900 pages of this book have passed in a flash, or rather, I’ve become so engrossed that my bath water has become cold by time I’ve forced myself to put the book down. (I do most of my reading in the bath.) It is a beautifully written story that sheds light on everything from murder and rape to the cosmic process. Amazing, and far superior to anything the west could come up with. (Though I shouldn’t forget Louis de Berniers.) Which reminds me that on Thursday I put Cervantes (Don Quixote) and Dickens (Pickwick) into the recycling.

Having said that, I hope I don’t have to explain to the authors why I’ve dismissed their efforts. I don’t suppose they’d be too keen on Boggy Starless either.