EPISODE 38: IN WHICH THE AUTHOR BOASTS OF HIS TALENTS AND LOOKS AT A TREE

Welcome to my blog which is in danger of becoming a testament to the foolishness of ambition rather than the record of unfolding authorial success that it was meant to be. Since I began this journal even the two pieces of my work that have received attention, the novel, Sad Sam, and the article about Spirituality, have failed to actually see the light of day and there appears to be nothing on the horizon. I’d give up, but if you give up the small hope that makes you make an effort, then what do you do?

This week I have spent four days writing an essay (for my partner) called ‘Teaching Collocations with high-frequency delexical verbs to Intermediate Students’. I’ve turned my mind to tedious things before but I’d like to congratulate myself on this particular effort which I crafted out of the DELTA handbook and whatever internet resources I could find which included studies from Japan, Germany, Australia, China, Lithuania, Bangladesh, Poland, Turkey and Greece. Over the years I’ve turned my unutilised intelligence to a number of essay subjects on behalf of various children and partners and in addition to my legitimate qualifications I should claim degrees in Latin American Studies, Family Therapy, and Creative Music Technology. Consistent in all my encounters with other people’s degrees is the lack of clarity in instruction. For all the spelling out and deliberate use of precise language, the student isn’t quite clear what to do and the teaching support appears to be lacking. In the end it is a matter of being able to play an academic game, rather than being an excellent therapist, historian, musician, thanatologist or teacher, which seems to matter. 

In place of having anything concrete to report, I’m going to focus on empty space and first, the ‘feel-it’ exercises on the Avatar Course of Harry Palmer which, if you were a regular reader, you would know to be of reoccurring interest to me, not least because Harry Palmer doesn’t want them taught to you by an unauthorised teacher to such an extent that he may take that teacher to court, as he did Eldon Braun.

I don’t know Mr Braun personally, nor what the truth of his relationship with Avatar was. Undoubtedly he produced his own (not very good) version of the Avatar Materials and this led to an absurd court case in Florida in which a judge tried to decide which techniques and words were common currency and which were uniquely Harry’s. The truth must be that none of it is uniquely Harry’s but the way he has packaged it is extremely original and, in my opinion, effective in a way that Braun’s course simply isn’t. 

One of the main and most crucial techniques in Avatar is the series of ‘Feel-it’ exercises which Braun (based on Heinlein) calls ‘grokking’. In both systems you begin by grokking inanimate objects, then animate ones, then people. According to Braun, ‘Observe inanimate objects one at a time. Just observe whatever it is, and decide to get the essential feeling of it. Try to become it. After a short time, move to something else.’  Palmer put is like this; 1) Observe some object, location or space that interests you. Observe it carefully for a few seconds. 2) Define the object by observing its periphery, edge or limits. Identify with it and feel it.

 

When doing an Avatar Course, one may spend a number of days doing varieties of the feel-it exercises. ‘For example, if you are identifying with a stone, feels its weight bearing down on the earth as your weight, feels its exposed surfaces as your surfaces, feel its density as your density, transform the stone into you the stone,’ says the instruction helpfully. But how do you actually do it? The Florida judge says; ‘It appears that the unprotected idea is to live life with feeling instead of thinking about everything that occurs or every path to take,’ and ‘Braun copied Palmer’s advice to students for approaching this exercise.’ What is obvious is that the judge never actually tried the exercises because if he had, and if he had grasped the essence of the exercise, he would have had to agree that the experience is uncopyrightable because it is simply a description of what we do all the time anyway. It took me many days of trying to feel like a stone for me to realise this; days of frustration and expectation as I kept hoping that any moment I’d somehow turn into a tree or be able to converse with dogs. Much of this time I was doing the course with a man called Clive and each time we’d meet we’d moan about how we couldn’t ‘do’ the exercise. Then we’d go back to our ‘master’ with various stories of our experience and then he’d send us out again for another couple of hours.

Somewhere along the line, there was a turning point, neither dramatic nor revelatory. I was sitting in a pub pretending to be a door, as you do, when the door moved and for the slightest nano-second I ‘felt’ that I was being moved. From then on I decided I could ‘do’ the exercise and my master seemed to agree. Of course I’ve no idea if I’m really ‘doing the right thing’ but this recognition of the feelingness of perception seems crucially important. (And also an excellent reminder that it is the engaging in the doing of the exercise, rather than the preconceived benefit of doing it, that one should remember.)

This week I came across an excellent work called the ‘New Spanda Karikas’ by Peter Wilberg. Here he talks here about perceiving a tree:

If you look at a tree and regard it as a mere illuminated object for your eyes, that it one thing –an ordinary visual experience. But if you now attend, with your whole body, to your awareness of seeing the tree, then you will begin to sense it as well as see it – and to see and sense something quite invisible to your eyes.

You will sense your entire body surface becoming ‘all eye’.

What you see with your eyes you will also begin to subtly sense within the aware inwardness of your whole body.

What you begin to sense and experience will not be the tree as a mere ‘object of consciousness’ but those qualities of awareness that manifest as the tree and shape its consciousness.

Now if Harry had told me to do that, I’d still be trying.

EPISODE 30; THE AVATAR PUZZLEMENT

Welcome to my blog which is feeling unloved.

Somewhere in a court in the UK there is an argument going on about whether it is god, or a mundane entity, which employs a vicar and therefore has the right to sack him (or her).  While I have no sympathy for that particular argument, I do have a comparable dilemma, as did the various courts that have adjudicated in the matter of Eldon Braun versus Palmer & Star’s Edge (i.e. Avatar) when Star’s Edge accused Braun of copyright and trademark infringement, unfair competition, business interference and libel.

‘The Avatar Course’  is clearly the creation of Harry Palmer, a man of great intelligence and charisma. What his real history is I don’t know but it is said that he used to be into Scientology and then found his own teaching based on his experiences and realizations as described in the book, ‘Living Deliberately’ (which, in my opinion, is typical of Harry’s writings, being remarkably lucid and elucidating in some places and confusingly opaque and unclear in others). His departure from Scientology was (rumoured to be) acrimonious and there were accusations that the new teachings were similar to the old ones. So it goes.

I did the Avatar Course in 1997, I think. I don’t remember how I came across it or what there was about it that persuaded me to spend £1200 on a 9 day course (not to mention the b&b and eating expenses). I did have money at the time and a lifelong fascination with how the mind works. No doubt I talked to John Ryan about it because he, more than anyone I’ve known, was always excited by finding out the truth of things. Given his tacit assent, I may have felt more emboldened.

I signed up with an Avatar ‘Master’ (teacher) and went off to Devon to do the course. My memory is that it was all a bit of a struggle, partly because having invested so much of oneself into the doing of the course there is a desperation to ‘get it,’ to grasp the prize that’s going to transform one’s life and to reach the journey’s end without paying attention to the scenery. The beauty of the Avatar Course, and the reason maybe I’ve treasured it, is that in Avatar your relationship with the scenery is the key.

How do I explain that?

In a rather cute way, Harry puts it like this. There are Word Lessons and there are World Lessons. (Called Knowledge by Description and Knowledge by Acquaintance by Russell or kennen and wissen in german.) Word Lessons are the understandings we have. People like me who pick up the Avatar Course books and read through them at a great rate looking for the key sentence that’s going to reveal it all, well we’re after the word lessons. World Lessons are what you actually experience. Essentially it is a simple thing, the difference between describing the taste of an apple and actually tasting it, yet in the Avatar Course it becomes crucial and is addressed constantly.

Basically the Course consists of a number of ‘mental’ exercises, or drills, and the words are there to give you enough reason to do the processes and, hopefully, to bamboozle you long enough to forget what it was you thought you should get out of doing the exercise. The majority of these drills are interactive, done with the eyes open and the world in view, rather than meditative – hence my mention of the scenery, the environment.

Anyway, back to Mr Braun and the issues at hand…The Avatar Course is expensive, as I have said. On the other hand, the rules were that if you wanted to repeat the course with the same or a different teacher, you could. And if you were dissatisfied, the money would be returned. It comes as quite a surprise that having paid so much money one is not allowed to keep the course materials and that the signing of some sort of confidentiality agreement is required. This can cause consternation, especially for those who didn’t take the opportunity to copy things down.

I progressed to the Masters Course and qualified as a teacher (another £1500). By this time I thought about 80% of the course was damn good and the rest a little incomprehensible and occasionally slightly embarrassing. The rules of Avatar were that as a teacher I was compelled to charge the full price and to pass on 10% (I think) to the Avatar Organization. I was uncomfortable with having to charge so much because although I had found the money, via inheritance, few people I knew could afford it – particularly my peers. It seemed to me that I had information that could help the lives of people I cared for and yet was being forbidden to pass it on which, to me, was immoral. I could understand, however, the desire to keep the teaching under control so that when Tom, Dick and Harriett claimed they were teaching Avatar this could be verified and guaranteed.

So I taught the course a few times and enjoyed it. Then I had one student down from London and learned it is a lot less fun teaching just the one person. I was always willing to teach the Course again but made no firm intention to do so and the years passed. Friends would say to me, ‘do your own thing; you don’t have to use Harry’s words and materials, you can just paraphrase them out of the stuff you have learned elsewhere.’

This is both untrue and true.

It is true because one reason I like Avatar is that it puts modern words to very old concepts. As I have written before, my own pet philosophy is Kashmir Shaivism. I have spent since 1977 studying shaivite sutras (pithy potent revelations about the nature of consciousness) and various commentaries written about them – time after time delving into their meanings and trying to relate them to my experience of life. The Avatar Course contains no Sanskrit, claims no lineage and argues no points, yet through doing Avatar many of these sutras, these word lessons, became revealed to me in a new light.

I would definitely say there is nothing new in the Avatar Course; everything in it can be found in Shaivism, Buddhism, Taoism, thisism and thatism, all long proceeding Avatar. I don’t doubt that I could put a course together, based on these and other materials, which might surpass Harry Palmer’s for its clarity and illustrative background sources. (And minus the embarrassing American bits, including the word ‘Avatar’ which now sounds like a computer game course and anyway hints unnecessarily of specialness.) So why not do it?

Suddenly I don’t know. I thought I did when I posed the question.

My answer would have been:

1) because I’d feel dishonest

2) because I liked the idea that a student could go elsewhere to review

3) because Eldron Braun thought he could do it and I’ve read his course and it doesn’t come together at all

4) because I don’t want to get sued by Harry Palmer.

5) because his (Harry’s) presentation of some of the exercises is much more structured, purposeful and practical than one at first realizes. To do (some of) the exercises out of order or out of context would be purposeless. Also there is something to the amount of time the student spends continuously on the course engaged with the teacher and the other students that deepens the feelings felt and adds intensity to the exploration. I don’t think dishing the techniques out every now and then would work so well.

I see that I have used up this week’s quota of verbiage. Must be time for further reflection.

EPISODE 28: IN WHICH A CHRISTIAN IS BATED AND AN ISSUE IS PARTIALLY ADDRESSSED.

Welcome to my blog which means to chart the coming to success of an author in the prime of his life (his fifties). I would have started by saying you find me in the doldrums but where  I am is nothing like the accompanying picture.

Most of this week I've spent either writing an article called 'The Shameful Dying or Old People Are Us' or working on material for a website on social activism and dying, or thinking of ideas for the first Annual Glastonbury Day of the Dead. On my desk throughout has been a Guardian piece by a man, Theo Hobson, agonising over whether to become a priest. For some reason his article irritated me in the sense that I couldn't quite throw it away without commenting on it. Therefore I wrote to him:

Dear Theo Hobson,

Last week I read your piece in the Guardian and it has continued to irritate me – although I’m not entirely sure why. First, with respect, and in case it was a genuine question and you haven’t already heard the answer a thousand times, I can tell you that you certainly shouldn’t dismiss your doubts and, even more certainly, shouldn’t become a whatever it is you can’t quite get yourself to call it, a minister.

How can I be so certain when you are not?

Let us begin with god calling you. Or rather, as you say yourself, your thinking that god may be calling you. Put aside god’s poor calling powers (can’t god raise its voice a little?), and the fact that all are called but few are chosen, and examine what this call feels like, ‘muddled, messy, mixed of motive, full of questions marks’. Sit with these feelings, young man, (please say you are young, for why else the hubris?), feel them to their very fullness. These feelings are your inner thoughts which you are trying to suppress through action. They won’t go away until you’ve faced them, felt them.

Have you noticed this is all about you? What’s wrong with ministering? You don’t want to be dealing with people, just with ideas, so you’ll make a crap vicar. And what will you say to batty old ladies when they say god is calling them, it feels rather muddled and messy but they’ve decided to become vicars in your church?

Once upon a time I was involved in Hinduism in an era when a lot of westerners decided that god was calling them to be swamis, renunciants. Few of them remain as such. I’m reminded of a friend of mine who 40 years ago got his knickers into a twist about whether he should be a Hindu or a Christian. Sadly he’s never managed to unwind himself and only last week was on the phone wondering whether the solution would be to become a Buddhist.

While not questioning your infantile view of god as an entity that calls you, shall we discuss belief? Does it really matter if you don’t really believe what you profess to believe? Answer, yes. If I believe something literally that you believe metaphorically, or ‘quasi-factually’, then we are believing different things, describing different realities and our common ground is not common. Also, I may die for my beliefs, you won’t.

It seems you love ritual. It isn’t the meanings of the words that count, you infer but their ability as part of ritual to… (I’m not sure what you mean but I’ll ad lib here)… to elevate your spirit, to give you a taste, at least, of the experience of transcendence. With my catholic, Hindu, and new Age background, I’m quite in favour of a bit of ritual myself and have been to quite a few that engage all the senses before transcending them. I think you’ll find the liturgy best remains as incomprehensible as possible because it is the mind’s (left?) brain analytical meaning-parsing that you need to escape to experience wholeness. Bear in mind that human cultural traditions of ritual – and their essential tripartite nature – were often greatly assisted by entheogens (alcohols, somas, nectars, mushrooms etc.). Quite what you want of your ritual, I don’t know, but I recommend you try mushrooms with a Peruvian shaman and take LSD during a 7 day Indian chant, before settling on your preferred form.

Of course I’m not getting the christian bit. Has Christ revealed himself to you in some way or have you arrived in this confusion all by yourself? What is to be gained by calling yourself a christian and what on earth is liberal christianity? Liberal is a transient, culturally and time bound position in a mundane continuum world; it is Caesar’s world and has no connection with religious experience which, one supposes, is the cultic centre of christianity.

I’ll stop there; my itch is scratched.

Well almost.  or could you not decide that those apparently social interactions and duties are the ritualistic and cultic centre of christianity. You raise people up with your love - that would be your vocation. Was it the teachings, the ritual, or the presence of the man that made people follow jesus? Did he not uplift them first?

AVATAR

Co-incidentally, or perhaps not, and much more important to me and this journal than the picked upon Mr Hobson, is the removal of one of the foundation stones of my grand plan, to resume my own ‘ministry’ in the form of teaching the Avatar course. (I gave this a mention a few episodes ago, as no doubt you recall.) What I hadn’t reckoned on was discovering that the rules have changed and that the Avatar Masters (i.e the qualified teachers) are no longer able to teach the course on homeground (as was once the case) and instead have to take themselves and their prospective students to larger courses either in Holland or Florida. As my whole creation was ‘Avatar in Avalon’, this news was, as they say in Avatarland, a rather massive ‘secondary’. Being a good student I wrote to ‘them’ and reaffirmed my goal. It is a bit like if Mr Hobson got a louder shout from god which said, ‘Stay away, we don’t want you,’ and decided to be a vicar anyway.

The Avatar Course is a great collection of exercises that I’ve wanted to share with people ever since I came across them but MONEY! Why does Harry Palmer need so much goddam money?!!

Time’s up, I’ll be back to this.

EPISODE SEVEN; IN WHICH THE PLOT MAKES AN APPEARANCE AND COMPASSION IS CONTEMPLATED

Welcome to my blog which purports to be the weeklyish update on the (extremely belated) ecloding of the literary career of a writer otherwise bereft both of income stream and job satisfaction. Think of it as a particularly extreme form of Springwatch.

Today I have news of the plot. Something happened to the writer!

He, I, noticed an ad on Gumtree for submissions to a publisher. Fiction or non-fiction. Whole works, bits of work. Presumably anyone with knowledge of the industry would know that someone is about to be flooded with uncountable wordage, shed loads of shit, and a permanent migraine. Or maybe they would smell a rat. 

Or maybe they would be so desperate they would join the queue anyway, just in case.

So I sent off my favourite novel and my period piece Pilgrimage to India 1976. To my amazement I received an email back two days later from the publisher saying how much he enjoyed the work and that it was the most compelling read he had received. And that as soon as I’d finished it he would like to publish it as an ebook.

Finished it? I only then did I notice the title he was referring to, a piece of writing I hadn’t meant to send him. It was the first, only, 15,000 words of a novel that I began last year and then put aside because I had a lot of doing nothing that I wanted to catch up on. Of course I was so excited by this response that I had to spend a couple of days lying down on my bed and staring at the ceiling until I calmed down.

Then I was contacted by a Right-to-die group who wanted to say they’d read an article of mine on the subject which they found ‘balanced, interesting, and helpful’. It all goes to show there’s a discerning public out there.

Doesn’t it?

On Compassion

In my self- appointed role as a very occasional Social Activist, I have spoken up for the health care model developed by Professor Allan Kellehear which he calls ‘Compassionate Cities.’  My support has been reasoned, meaning that I follow his argument and agree with the need, rather than zealous, which I think would have to involve some degree of belief that his vision is achievable. My assumption that this is not the case has been based on two counts:

1.     1.  That people aren’t compassionate

2.   2.    Communities no longer exist.

It’s been a lifelong tendency of mine to observe my own smallnesses and selfishness and then to presume others are the same and that if you scratch hard enough you’ll always find the inner bastard. My compassion tends to be self-indulgent and emotional, arising most often in the privacy of my own room while I’m listening to melancholic music and whimsying on the struggles of mankind in the face of terrible mystery and on how sweet every act of goodness and hope is. Then I cry. Then someone knocks on the door and I hide in case they want to do something I don’t feel like doing.

Like giving them time and attention.

Luckily, we’re not all the same. These last few days I saw my partner helping an old friend of mine who is ill. She didn’t have to do it and didn’t do it out of duty. I watched her do it and marvelled at this altruistic quality that can exists in us that we call compassion.

Rather than do anything helpful I then decided to contemplate compassion.

I looked it up in my Shorter Oxford Dictionary: ‘Suffering together with another; fellow-feeling. Pity that inclines one to spare or succour.’ 

And asked the Professor who gives a range of definitions but emphasises the mutuality, the co-ness, the ‘sharing with another’s suffering: to be patient in another’s suffering, to bear and support suffering.’

While I was scroogling for definitions I was initially surprised to come across a ‘you can have too much compassion’ brigade of articles written mainly by psychotherapists suffering from burn-out but also by women’s groups saying that their surfeit of compassion made them weak, and contemptible, in the eyes of men.

So can compassion be bad for you? Or is it something alongside the compassion? I’m not sure I’m keen on all that suffering and can’t really see the point of us suffering together. On the whole I’d opt for at least one of us not suffering and that one doing what they could to help the other out.

How then to stop compassion harming you? Inevitably I turn to the Buddha Wikipedia:

 Compassion is that which makes the heart of the good move at the pain of others. It crushes and destroys the pain of others; thus, it is called compassion. It is called compassion because it shelters and embraces the distressed.

 

At the same time, it is emphasised that in order to manifest effective compassion for others it is first of all necessary to be able to experience and fully appreciate one's own suffering and to have, as a consequence, compassion for oneself. The Buddha is reported to have said, "It is possible to travel the whole world in search of one who is more worthy of compassion than oneself. No such person can be found.

Although religions often like to claim their gods as compassionate, I cannot for a moment agree, whereas humans for no good reason, against all the odds, occasionally are amazing. We are, obviously, greater than the gods we create. 

Should you wish to experience Compassion, which is an antidote to anger, try the following exercise from the Resurfacing Section of Harry Palmer’s Avatar Course. Apply it to Petty Tyrants (cf last week) and to aspects of yourself.  

Or don’t.

The Compassion Exercise

Honesty with one's self leads to compassion for others.

OBJECTIVE: To increase the amount of compassion in the world.

EXPECTED RESULTS: A personal sense of peace.

INSTRUCTIONS: This exercise can be done anywhere that people congregate (airports, malls, parks, beaches, etc.). It should be done on strangers, unobtrusively, from some distance. Try to do all five steps on the same person.

Step 1: With attention on the person, repeat to yourself:
         "Just like me, this person is seeking some happiness for his/her life."

Step 2 With attention on the person, repeat to yourself:
         "Just like me, this person is trying to avoid suffering in his/her life."

Step 3 With attention on the person, repeat to yourself:
         "Just like me, this person has known sadness, loneliness and despair."

Step 4 With attention on the person, repeat to yourself:
         "Just like me, this person is seeking to fulfil his/her needs."

Step 5 With attention on the person, repeat to yourself:
         "Just like me, this person is learning about life." 

EPISODE THREE: IN WHICH AN ALTER-EGO SPEAKS FOR HIMSELF.

With great respect, with love even, I welcome you to my blog which tells the story of a 58 year old man who is revitalizing his life by realizing a childhood ambition to be a successful author. Those of you who have read previous entries will be aware that John Heston, the writer both of this blog and the incipient novel entitled ‘I’S NOVEL ABOUT HOW THE WORLD’S YOUNGEST BEST-SELLING AUTHOR (FAILED) ACHIEVED REDEMPTION AND MODERATE SUCCESS AT THE AGE OF 60 - HE BLOODY HOPES’, is a man divided in himself.

In part he has an eye on eternity. From this perspective the fiddliness of life makes him ache for the Elysian fields and his attitude to the happenstances of life is based on his guru’s description of existence as ‘a story told by a grandmother’ or, more poetically, ‘a play of sun and shadows’. In another part, however, he knows he has a power to create and while acknowledging that the shadows exist, he wants to make the most of the sunshine and have a good life.

I’m that part and I’m called Jack. I’ve been promised free range to express myself today so I intend to be as positive as I can for I never know when John’s going to come back and reimprison me in his Vedantic straightjacket. Ultimately, of course, I’d like to strike out entirely on my own, become individuated in my own right, because I don’t accept that I’m a foolish part of John. On the contrary I believe that I’m the real McCoy and he’s just the product of his upbringing.

Anyway I’ve only got a 1,000 words in which to appear before you so rather than slag off my host, I’ll get down to business.

But why does he have to call me his inner American? Wake-up, Bozo, the English can be positive too, just look at… (we might have to come back to this one).

So, tasked with turning john into a successful author, I turned to my learning tools, the techniques and technologies imparted to me during forty years of seeking for the keys of happiness. It is true, as John indicated, that, judging by results alone, little has been accomplished for all the hithering and thithering. However, I think we know whose fault this is. Now that the twin realities of having spent all his inheritance sunning himself on beaches and having to sign on for Job seekers Allowance have hit him, I can but hope, nay, insist, that I truly am allowed out of the box.

My chosen representatives of the ‘how to get your head sorted and your life together by learning how to create’ philosophies are Rebirthing, Avatar, and Robert Fritz’s stuff on Creating. Although at times I qualified to teach two of these courses, I’m not claiming that they are the best, just the ones I know.

Each in their own way addresses goals and each emphasizes the need for clarity and specificity envisioning the end result, followed by close inspection of the current situation. (NB to John: total pessimism, physical lethargy, and intellectual paralysis and are not considered helpful towards creating what’s wanted. Nor is whinging about next week’s cataract operation. It’s a minor thing, get over it. The way I see it, anyone can be miserable but being happy, for no reason, when one of your oldest friends is dying, for example, takes guts.).

So I’ve spent the last few days rereading all my old books and jotting down notes (which I wrote in such small handwriting I can’t now decipher them).  

From Rebirthing I:

Selected a specific, important (to me) and challenging goal.

Asked myself on a scale of 1 to 100, how certain am I that I am willing to achieve my goal?

Made a list of everything I could think of that might help me achieve this goal.

Used the list to make a logical plan with clear steps. (Only sort of done this.)

For at least 2 minutes said to myself, Something I have to give up to follow this plan is…

Have fitted the plan and into my schedule

And begun.

From Creating I

Decided what I wanted to create (and learned I shouldn’t create to remedy something that is wrong)

Defined Current reality in relation to the end result

Identified the action steps needed to get from here to there.

From Avatar I

Have assessed the rightness of my goal

Examined my beliefs regarding my abilities to attain my objective and have attempted to remove hindering cognitions and feelings.

Paid note to the following tips:

Increase attention on the goal: Plan backwards from the goal: identify sub-goals: utilize someone else’s energy: Work day and night.

In the past I’ve attended ten day long programs practising and refining these techniques from morning to night. If John thinks I can get all this done while he drinks tea, smokes and stares out of the window ‘having profound thoughts’  he is much mistaken. Once I’ve had time to digest the fruits of my psychic gardening, I will lay out a plan for him which I shall insist that he adheres to. Progress is being made.. Two days ago I hadn’t a laptop of my own, nor a printer, nor a scanner. (This last item was a rash buy and it now appears that it can’t produce the miracle I required, i.e. being able to translate my elderly typed documents into Microsoft Word.) Nor did I know how good I would find my writing to be when I dug it out of its boxes. Why oh why was I so easily discouraged?

Now I’ve at least three techniques to deal with downheartedness caused by rejections. The only question is, will John let me use them or will he stay within his habitual limits - as so many of us are tempted to do?

My time is up. I truly hope I will meet you again. In case not, here’s a poem to remember me by. I wrote it one day when I’d escaped my shackles and teased myself into a state of ecstasy. John hates it but sometimes I just don’t care.

 MAGIC

Magic in the starry sky

Magic in the birds

Magic in the trees

Magic in the seas

Magic in the rocks

Magic in the sounds

Magic in the views

Magic, power, and wonder.

Magic in the music

Magic in the rainbow

Magic on the beach

Magic in the dance

Magic in the dreams of the people here

Magic, power, and wonder.

Magic in the songs of my sons

Magic in the high-wire act of my beautiful daughter

Magic in my lover’s embrace

Magic in the moment

Magic in the breath

Magic in the love of things

Magic in the life

Magic in the silence

Magic at the end of time

Magic, power, and wonder.

__________________________________________________________________________________                 

EPISODE TWO; IN WHICH AN ATTEMPT IS MADE TO BE POSITIVE BECAUSE IT JUST MAY HELP.

 Welcome to Episode Two of the blog about the reality self-help novel entitled ‘I’s novel about how the world’s youngest best-selling author (failed) achieved redemption and moderate success at the age of 60 – he bloody hopes!’ which charts the inspiring, entertaining and deeply transformational story of a (late?) middle aged man, faced with economic challenge and intimations of death, surprisingly achieving his lifelong ambition to become a successful writer.

To those of you who visited last week and have now returned, gushing thanks. To newcomers who would like an update on what they’ve missed may I respectfully point them to Episode One 1 in which not a lot happens but you are given a good purview of the enterprise. You also get a small tension – resolution hit from discovering, or confirming, where I discovered the requisite 58 year old on the verge of turning his life around.

Here. Of course.

Now I admit straightaway that I’m not 100% ideal for the post. Hard-work, one pointedness, dedication to the end result – these are not my strongpoints. Yes, I can vow to make a change; yes, I can be very convincing at the beginning. A month or two later, however, and even a purblind observer can see that nothing has actually happened.

This is where the self-help element comes in because while it isn’t necessary for the hero of a story to succeed in his endeavour, the will he won’t he drama building tension of this reality show will be lost if he doesn’t at least make an effort to triumph.

How, therefore, am I to instil excitement, enthusiasm and purpose in place of ennui, inertia and discouragement? Answer, by embracing positivity.

To cut one of my long stories short I must point out that I’m not a neophyte when it comes to the field of positive thinking. I’ve dabbled since the 70s, attending courses, living in Ashrams, learning all the latest new age techniques and old age philosophies. It sometimes seems that my life has been a battle between two main worldviews or paradigms, each with its own Self and attitudes. In caricature one is Eastern, the other American. The Easterner has no time for the play of the world or the reality of the individual and his so called problems. All that matters is realizing oneness with the Source. The American wants to change himself by changing his thoughts and enlighten the world as to what he believes it needs. I swing from one side to the other, spending longer in the East than the West while feeling most of the time that I’m not quite grasping either properly.

What I’ve set myself here however is undoubtedly a task in the material domain. My Eastern Self has no respect for this for his only grail in life is to free his imaginary self from the whirligig of existence. Using one’s limited powers to achieve satisfaction and renown in a world of death is seen as somewhat shortsighted by the traditional mystics.

As ever there are other points of view. Take one of thousands, Harry Palmer, author of the Avatar Courses, for example, who advocates immanent action in a transcendent vehicle and writes: “If you wish to participate in life with any degree of deliberation, the primary action must be to set a goal. Goals are an essential ingredient of happiness. A person without goals is discouraged and unhappy.”

What to do?

Create goals that are right for you because “Believable, achievable, exciting goals are the grand prize of existence.”

On the scale Harry gives for judging the rightness for you of a goal I scored 30, which is plenty, with my choice, i.e.  To achieve economic independence through writing by December 31^st 2012. The next step is ‘to align your actions towards’ the goal. “Alignment of your attention and energies with the goal you want to achieve is called focus. Focus is one of the keys of success.”

Oh dear.  This means I have to remember to want tomorrow what I want today. Clearly if I don’t want to repeat past patterns I should try following the advice of my American Self rather than swim in the Eastern Sea which, evidence suggests, I drown in.

What I’m going to do now, therefore, is to split myself in two. Well, not exactly. To engage in goal-setting and belief rearranging cognitive exercises, I must release my inner American because, quite frankly, the rest of me won’t get it together

My inner American is to be called Jack. I’m going to try to be quiet for a while and let Jack speak for himself. First I think I should advise you that initially Jack may be a little hesitant to express himself. This will be because of past experiences of being allowed out by me. I don’t tend to be supportive when he’s ventured forth. I begin by telling him, ‘Bout time you got out there Jack and got me the things I presently feel are lacking in my life, money for example, or some other prop for the individual. Fill yourself with the required currencies of self-esteem and ambition then strike out.” Sometimes I’ve sent Jack on self-improvement courses. Hardly ecloded from my womb, Jack is despatched off, sometimes for two weeks on end, to sort himself out and learn the mechanics of personal creation.

For example, I made him do something called Rebirthing, a breathing therapy with big ideas. He became a qualified teacher, would you believe and ran courses himself. He also did a few weeks on Robert Fritz’s Creation techniques (to no apparent avail). His last new age adventure into the world of self recreation involved numerous courses, in England, Germany and America – the source! These Avatar courses would have been fewer if he hadn’t kept coming back home saying he didn’t like them and was homesick. Really it was hard for him to adapt from living with me and my negativity to exuding confidence and enthusiasm when totally out of his comfort zone and subject to bouts of deriding and name-calling from me. Nevertheless, he persevered, and would often he would come back from these psychological explorations bright eyed, bushy tailed and full of good intention.

So, I’d get him back into the old ways, my ways, as quickly as possible. I’d take him round to a friend’s house and we’d all get stoned together. On the first night Jack would say, “I’m not sure if I should. I don’t want to lose this space I’m in.” On night two he’d have ‘just one puff’ on a pipe. And then off he’d go, flying into a world of possibility and into an universe where everything is connected and he suddenly understands – ‘really’ understands, whatever it was he went away to learn. I do like this part. He becomes so happy that his happiness leaks into me and we become, briefly, harmonious.

Then I eat him up.

By the fourth night he can smoke as much as he likes but all that is left is a trace of light.