EPISODE 52: A BLOG'S BIRTHDAY AND SOME SLIGHTLY ODD PEOPLE.

Welcome to my blog which is one year old today. The story that it has told has not been the one I hoped it would tell when I began. I am not yet an author earning my living from writing. Or from anything for that matter. I do still have some 34 weeks to go so this isn’t resignation to failure. Actually I’m not someone who can resign himself to failure. Especially not when it comes to my writing. Do I expect to succeed? No. Could it happen? Yes.

It might have helped if I had stuck to my plan, which was to concentrate on trying to sell articles and short stories while making my novels available. In fact I have at no point sent an article or story to a magazine.  Seems a bit strange really, in hindsight, that I haven’t even sent one off. I did write a novel because Sam Wafe liked the opening chapters and said he would publish it when it was finished. Has he? No.

Everything else I’ve written has been about death or the day of the dead and stuck on a website. This Day of the Dead idea appeared in September and has absolutely taken over. Nothing else is being done. Even the rewriting of ‘Sex with Maggie’ ground to a halt after two chapters. I could of course change tack, or rather, get back on track – (boat to train, mixed metaphors indeed) – but I won’t because really it is too late to do so.

*****

As I write there is a gale blowing. The dustbins have blown over, there are bits of tree on the road and my garden fence looks like it could go down any moment. It is a thin line between being dramatic and exciting on the one hand and dangerous on the other. The storm raged throughout the night and maybe is just beginning to abate. Behind my back garden are two inappropriately large trees, an Ash and an Eucalyptus. If either of those fell, or even dropped a larger branch, they could do some serious damage. Being England, one tends to think that the weather will never really be that bad but add a few more knots to the wind and anything could happen.

****

Yesterday I went to a conference of a group whose core belief is the continuity of consciousness after death. The group has 77 members, of whom 17 turned up to the meeting in Totnes. I went to network and because I have sympathy towards their aims. It is hard not to think, however, that they are bunch of loonies, even though I know they are not. The problem (and I suspect they may know this) is that one of the founders lives in a community where they have developed gentle ways of dealing with one another. For example, rather than clap when they feel appreciative, they wave their hands in the air and when they’re in the mood they decide to have a sing-song.  

When the meeting began, we were asked to sit in the circle and introduce ourselves saying ‘what was stopping us from being present, what had fired us to be there and one thing that was wonderful about us. Now I’ve done my time as a touchy-feely encounterish type person and thus I understand where they are coming from but it is not a mode in which I feel that comfortable in, particularly if it involves singing and dancing, neither of which I want to do in a group of strangers. Also, those that are used to behaving in such a way don’t seem to realize that the one thing stopping some of us being present was having to wait in dread for our turn to be made to speak. Two of the women, who had not been before, clearly found the opening statements very challenging. When I spoke to them afterwards they both said that their work involves public speaking in role and that was no problem but in this circumstance they hated doing it.

I wouldn’t say I did a great job at networking. What happens to me is that I am half present during the day and then when I get home, have a few smokes and make myself comfortable, I then realize what I should and could have done. For example, the gist of the meeting seemed to be to plan a five day festival for the group. The fact that only 17 of 77 made it for one day seemed to be ignored. Last night I saw that there was no outlining of vision, or statement of current reality, and I felt their festival was doomed to failure. On the other hand, they believe in what they are doing, and in trusting, and who knows, their festival may be a damn sight more successful than mine.

I stayed until 4.30 when we were supposed to be having a final network session. I know I should have at least said my goodbyes but no, I just slipped out of the door, jumped in my car and drove 85 mph all the way home.

****

Monday morning. The storm has passed and we are left with rain and a certain amount of damage in the garden, with the fence on one side blown down and on the other side quite broken. The meeting on Saturday was in an ancient house that had two giant log fires but no warmth. I spent the day freezing and now have a cold. On reflection I could have done a lot better with my sales pitch. These were people ready and wanting to be inspired. I did condescend to leave some leaflets behind so we shall see if anyone contacts me.

And on that flat note, a year ends.

EPISODE 51: A SURPRISE VISIT FROM A DEAD PRIEST AND A SMALL LOOK AT TIME

Welcome to my blog which begins with a story about itself.

A few months ago I wrote a little piece about my schooldays and the recent death of one of the Catholic priests I had known forty-five years ago. I headed it, An Unsatisfactory Dance on the Grave of Father Peter Orr SJ.

On Tuesday I received an email from a man in New York. He told me he had been trying to track down a priest who had abused him in Philadelphia in the early 1980s. He’d thought the man’s name was Peter Ore but now he suspected it was actually Orr and that he was the same priest I was writing about. I then wrote back, explaining that I was talking about the mid-60s in London and there was nothing in the obit I’d seen mentioning time in America.

The following day he sent me an obituary that he had seen. There was Fr Orr’s picture. The man described his experiences, how Fr Orr had groomed him through his mother and then started coming around when his mum was out. Looking at the picture, I remembered the man’s diffidence but also his lips and expressions on his face which I now recognize as hurt sexuality.

I was amazed. The experiences of this man confirmed that I was right in my estimation and condemnation of the priest. I think that when I wrote my piece, I wasn’t entirely sure in myself that I was being fair. I can remember shouting at Orr in the classroom – and then being expelled for the outburst – but I can’t recall what had actually happened. My American correspondent, not surprisingly, thought I may be in denial about something, that perhaps events had gone further than I can consciously tap into. I’m pretty sure, however, that he is wrong about this, particularly as I was ‘assaulted’ or ‘interfered with’ by my sister’s boyfriend during the same period and I have had no trouble in acknowledging that episode. Probably I was just a bit sickened by realizing that there were predators out there that I was doing secret deals with in the sense that their predilection produced benefits for me, eg a trip to Russia from the priest, sexual experience from the boyfriend, and also made me realize that I had a certain amount of power over these men.

And not only these men: I’ve  written before that I used to be followed by gays from a Public Toilet somewhere in Leatherhead. I never interacted with any of them but again I was aware of some sort of sick latent power I had over these people. They wanted me but I wanted nothing from them, except some weird feeling of superiority.

I didn’t tell the American guy this stuff because it wasn’t relevant. I did say that although I take a personal delight every time I hear of a catholic priest being caught, I also know a) that inappropriate desire and succumbtion to temptation are human traits that I share and b) this scapegoating of individuals is a cover-up performed by us all: soldiers that torture, care workers who don’t care, priests that abuse, these people are us and, like us, are the product of our systems and beliefs. In this case, as I have written ad infinitum, the Catholic church itself is an instrument of abuse and the priests that play with your cock aren’t half as fucked up as those who tell you that you were born in sin and obedience to divine fascism will save you.

I suppose at the back of my mind when I wrote about this disturbed Jesuit was a thought that someone else may read it and respond. Now it has happened, I’m stunned. Maybe it shows that a story is never over.

What would we do if Peter Orr were still alive? I guess my answer is probably ‘nothing’ because I never thought to track down any of the priests. (I kind of assumed they were mostly dead long ago because to me they were always old.) Also the abuse I received was not sexual, just a continued brutal assault on my mind, body and spirit. Orr went further with the American boys than he did with me, so maybe if I’d known that when he was alive I just might have been tempted to write him a really nasty letter but, as I’ve said, it is the Pope and his ilk that I detest, not some minor pervert who had had his life ruined by the stupidity of the catholic priesthood.

Mind you, I did go on the Irish Times website where you can leave a message of condolence. Which I did. ‘Hooray, another perverted Jesuit bites the dust!’

 

Sometimes I decide to throw away things I don’t use. A book, ‘Shaiva Devotional Songs of Kashmir: Utpaladeva’s Shivastotravali’, was about to be one of those things until I decided to look at it. Opening the pages at random, I came across the thirteenth verse of the fourteenth song, as translated above. An asterisk by Great Death takes us to the footnote: The Great Death represents time (kaala), that is, mortality. 

Time, in both eastern and Kantian thought, is prior to the mind. The notion that time necessarily goes forward, and never backwards, is a hard one to undo. Kaala, time, is defined as the ‘cloak’ over eternality that produces the limiting perception of time. (Niyati is the limitation on all-pervasiveness, kalaa the limit on omnipotence, vidya on knowledge, raga is limited sense of plenitude).

Consider, if you want, these statements from the esteemed Peter Wilburg. 

Space is essentially co-presence with a field of awareness.

Time is the emergence or presencing within a field of awareness.

Space-time is linear or sequential presencing within a field of awareness.

Time-Space on the other hand, is the simultaneous co-presencing of all phenomena – whether past, present or future in terms of linear ‘space-time’.

Enjoy.

EPISODE 50: IN WHICH THE AUTHOR DISCUSSES MOOD, ACCEPTS PRAISE, RESENTS CRITICISM, AND CONSIDERS HISTORY

Welcome to my blog which is a mood enhancer; which mood depends on you. Strange thing, a mood. My Shorter Oxford defines mood as follows:

1. Mind, heart, thought, feeling.

2. Courage, anger.

3. A frame of mind or state of feelings.

Shakespeare is used for two telling examples: ‘Who, in my moode, I stab’d unto the heart’ and ‘Fortune is merry, And in this mood will gives us anything.’

Last week I received an email from the somewhat laid back editor of the magazine that I submitted to some while ago. To save you reading back, I’ll recap. My topic has been ‘spiritual needs’. At first I argued that the notion of spiritual needs, as different from religious needs, was so vacuous as to be useless. Those who were pushing the ‘spirituality’ line were, I said, were essentially christians who were disenchanted with christian practise or doubtful about some doctrines. 

In response I was told it was an good article, would be published and ‘was a debate that needed to be had.’ One of the reviewers, however, wrote that of we abandoned ‘spiritual needs’, we would lose one of the few vehicles of compassion in the Health Service. In fact, I was already dissatisfied with my thesis because it appeared to support the humanistic/materialist forces – something that was definitely not my intention to do. Also, by then I had read John Lash’s book and understood why christianity is so inherently awful. I therefore rewrote the article arguing that spirituality and Christianity were antithetical and that unless spirituality disassociated itself from religion, and specifically the Abrahamic ones, it would wither.

The Editor lost this article. This I found out after three months patient awaiting.

Resubmitting once more, I received a response a couple of weeks later. The Academic Advisor had said no. Would I like to read the reviews? Not really. And certainly not until I was in the mood. That took six days. What changed? Another mood.

On Tuesday I was feeling a bit frustrated and stuck (over planning the festival). Late afternoon, a friend came round and so happened to show me how to do something on my website. Suddenly my mood improved enormously but it was only when it did so, did I realize what had been getting me down – precisely the websites. That night my energy had returned and I spent half the night playing with my new skill and putting to rest my embarrassment over the appearance of these portals to my world. Thus relieved, I was ready to face criticism.

There were two reviews. First, from the head academic. Scathing.

This paper is a confused and limited account of spirituality towards the end of life, intermixed with a potpourri of some of the different claims that are made about the effects of hallucinogens on spirituality.  I found the paper very difficult to understand as it was not written in a logical way.  The writers seemed to be overcome by their subject and were very critical of religious faiths without giving the necessary data to support this view.

This paper is not set up in a format suitable for an academic journal. There is no abstract, no conclusion, no full reference list. I do not feel that the authors have a full grasp of the subject, or if they do, are able to express it logically and coherently.   However, I do feel that the authors have raised an important topic which does need to be discussed.

I would suggest that it would be helpful if they were able to find a mentor who is used to writing academic papers, putting ideas into a logical sequence and developing an argument. A paper along those lines would be very useful as it would direct attention to the way that spirituality could be enhanced in an elderly community and they could also link it onto the use of hallucinogens for the dying. 

The reviewers are anonymous, which makes reply redundant. I would like to tell this man that I have two Masters Degrees and was told by my professor to offer this theme to the magazine. The lack of abstract etcetera was because I was asking if the editor wold be interested in this as an opinion piece. I can add the song and dance later. Also, I would add, approaching this ‘academically’ would be academic, because there is no history of this discussion and bugger all evidence.

But also I’d admit, that I was consciousness raising rather than checking my logic and I suspected myself it may no longer hang together.

The second review began:

It is an unqualified yes from me. 

i found it both provocative and revolutionary. 

Now I admit I didn’t have to keep that font in the size that it arrived but hey, provocative and revolutionary: I could die happy. The very sobering critique of the abrahamic religions is both persuasive and powerful.

Provocative, revolutionary, persuasive, powerful.

I love this reviewer. (Though the spelling was poor, which is a little off-putting.)

But will the editor do anything, suggest anything, offer me a mentor? I suspect not. Will I come back and have another go? Probably not. Why not?  Because, as I pointed out in the conclusion that the academic missed, there’s not a lot that can be done. Again, why not?

Really I want to leave this subject alone right now, especially as you don’t have the article to hand – unless I’ve added it somewhere. It is late at night on a day where I went to Bristol to play with my grandson for a few hours and then went to see a friend who was talking such arrant nonsense about ‘the youth of today’ that I had to leave almost immediately. Even if what he said were true, how can any respectable 60+ year old let himself be heard saying ‘when I was young we…’? Especially as we didn’t.

Phew, got that article out of my head. Bed.

***

Six o’clock on a Sunday morning. I’ve had my tea and settled down at the computer. A car draws up outside the house and four twentysomethings can be heard disembarking: loud happy voices discussing the night’s events briefly fill the street as the drunk ones stumble back to their home. I ask myself, when did I last come back from a party at this hour in the morning and I have to go back nearly forty years and the acid days to come up with an answer.

***

I’ve never thought of myself as an artist; a writer, yes, an artist, no. And even though I’ve been calling the Day of the Dead, a creation, I still didn’t think of myself as an artist. This week I saw an amazing program about a play put on through and for the community in Port Talbot and I began to see my effort as an ‘installation’ done with humans and ideas.

Does thinking of myself as an artist make me feel better or different? Nope.

***

Knowledge is food. Vitiated knowledge is bondage. (Shiva Sutras.)

How have I lived so long and learned so little? This week I have been reading more about the Sumerians and the development of writing circa 4,000BCE. I guess I was taught much of this stuff at school but it has taken forty years to become interested. It has constantly puzzled me that the Christian myth still holds any sway at all after 2,000 years. One would have thought that the very fact that something took place so long ago would self-evidently have only historical interest to a society and world which consider themselves to be rapidly evolving and so ultra post-modern as to be contemplating the end of history. What I am discovering is that the opposite is true and thoughts  thought by our Sumerian ancestors are prevalent now and condition how we perceive ourselves five thousand years after they were first thought.

So it goes.

EPISODE 49: IN WHICH THE AUTHOR WRITES ABOUT YOGA AND DEATH

Welcome to my blog which began with an appreciation of the quietness of an Easter Sunday  morning in the rain but then deleted itself. On a morning such as this, sitting in a small room on a mostly tranquil street, one could almost believe the whole world is taking a breath.
But of course it never does.

*****
When I put on the TV to catch up on the cricket scores, I found myself watching an easter service from some christian church in the UK. Death and Rebirth are my trade these days, so I should have some sympathy with the resurection myth that I was subject to endlessly as a catholic child. What I noticed first on my screen was the people in the congregation. I suppose one could call them ordinary people, or normal people, or, in 1960s terminology, 'straits'. But what the fuck are they doing? Yes, it is nice and good for your brain and spirit to come together to have a singalong, but please, spare us the belief and the fairytale. Do you know you are worshipping a magic mushroom? Do you know jesus is a figment of your imagination and your priests are deliberately participating in a lie to fool you?

And this is televised by the BBC!

Anyhow, I'll stop there. I'm about to inflict an article on you about yoga and death. Headline news; Pot Calls kettle Black.

Not sure that makes sense either...oh well...no wonder i'm not getting anywhere...

Oh, the archbishop of christianity has just said, 'you can't blame religion for all the problems in the world'. For once, maybe, he is right.

YOGA AND DEATH

A few years ago, I went to University to study for a Master’s Degree in ‘Death and Society’. My reason for doing this was that I had discovered in myself a growing discomfort around the subject of death and a very definite discrepancy between what I claimed to believe and what I was actually experiencing. For more than thirty years, since meeting the guru Swami Muktananda, I had practised various forms of yoga, studied almost every new and old age philosophy and met numerous teachers, all of which assured me that I am not this body and that death should not concern me. So why, I wondered, was I waking up at night in the midst of panic and fear of dying? And why did I react to that by desperately reassuring myself that everything was alright rather than facing the fear? Clearly there was something to address. 

Although I only began the course to centre my attention on the subject, it proved to be endlessly fascinating. An advantage of tackling Death academically turned out to be the opportunity to take it all less personally. Maybe it is a tendency of those involved in ‘self-development’ to become over involved in themselves and their own process and thus lose sight of the bigger picture, of the others, or maybe it is just me, but I began to appreciate the entire human predicament when facing death, from our beginnings as hunter-gatherers with a bewildering short lifespan to our present medical sophistication that means our grandchildren will likely live to be one hundred.

 Everything in time changes, even dying. For us, dying is what you do just before, or more frequently, for some time before, your physical demise. For many of the ancients dying was what they did after physical death and it covered the time taken to make their posthumous way, frequently via terrifying Otherworld journeys, to a permanent position as an ancestor. Securing one’s place in the afterlife, and being properly prepared for the journey, were often the prime concerns of a person while alive -  hence the production of Books of the Dead which were guides on how to die, how to conduct oneself on the Ultimate Journey, and how to prepare during life.

For most of our history, death has been an individually meaningful and socially important event accompanied by significant and purposeful rituals with a set of purposes; to honour the dead, to make sure the dead actually go away, to add power to the departed’s onward journey, to acknowledge the damage done to the society by a loss of its member, to communally find the resilience to carry on and to adapt to new roles and identities, and to take advantage of the liminal state to explore altered states of consciousness.

The liminal state is that in which ‘any barriers between man and the supernatural are lowered’. Those of you who have been with the newly born or the newly died will know this state where the usual patterns of thoughts and grounding anchors are loosened and the emotional relationships between people, strangers even, are altered. 

Recently I attended a fairly typical modern British funeral, twenty minutes in the crematorium, a few hours in the pub afterwards. The liminal state plus alcohol tends to produce intense conversation between strangers, interludes of emotional expression, a possible fight and maybe an unexpected sexual encounter, all of which will end up in a general numbness. In the past, however, the liminal state would have people burning a fire, chanting or praying, imbibing inebriants or entheogens, and joining together both ordinarily and extraordinarily to acknowledge the rhythms of life and death.

 During the last century, Death moved from the family home to the hospital and from the care of the community to professional care. Our immediate contact with death has lessened and where once it was the children who died, now it is the elderly, and often their dying is poor one, medicalised and marginalised and seemingly meaningless. Back in the 1960s, death was almost a taboo subject and even now there is a reluctance to face it which has had serious consequences, not only for the dying, the grieving, and the elderly but for the evolution of our society as a whole.

In 1973, Ernest Becker wrote a book in which he argued that the denial and fear of death resulted in a society obsessed with self-aggrandizement and global rapaciousness. Interestingly, the majority of those who have near death experiences subsequently report both a loss of fear of death and a reordered sense of what is important in life. In the 1970s Stanislav Grof was permitted to give LSD to elderly patients dying of cancer.  Significantly those who reported ‘peak or mystical experiences on LSD, also lost their fear of death and even though they knew death to be imminent, their values rearranged themselves and their love of life increased.

So what has this to do with the practise of yoga? Well of course that depends on your understanding of what yoga is. Sai Bai of Shirdi used to say of his followers, ‘I give them what I want so they want what I have to give.’ Yoga is the same. It will heal your body, elevate your emotions and still your mind and then, if you let it, it will kill you.

Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras refers to the kleshas, the roots of our bondage, which include abhinesva – the fear of loss and the clinging to life. Sutra 2:9 reads, “Even for those who are learned, there is an ever flowing, firmly established love for continuation and a fear of cessation, of death.”  This basic fear, which even those with an intellectual understanding of impermanence suffer, can take many forms including fear of dying, fear of the afterlife, fear of the death of others (including one’s children), fear of losing some elements of life, fear of losing identity, fear of change in general, a reluctance to interact with the dying, ageism, enjoyment through acquisition and the seeking of gratification in wealth. Projected out in the world, as it in modern society, it means an unwillingness to give meaning to death, a fear of dead bodies, disgust with and scapegoating of the elderly, and an inability to be empathetic and communicative with those suffering loss.

When I began my course it was, as I have said, to address this fear in myself. What I discovered was the consequences to a society when the fear of death is pre-eminent as it is in ours. To truly embody yoga, it is not enough to meditate in the proverbial cave. In my local area there are hundreds of spiritual and yoga groups and a number of magazines devoted to their advertisements. The word death rarely, if ever, appears. Yoga, however, is learning to die. The mystic, Abraham of Santa Clara said, ‘He who dies before he dies, does not die’ and Muktananda wrote, ‘Only he can die joyfully and peacefully who, after having delved into himself, has experienced his own death while still alive.’

When once asked, ‘Do you believe in god?’ Carl Jung smiled, shook his head and said, ‘No, I don’t believe. I know.’ What do we know of death as opposed to what we believe or think we believe? It has been said that ‘a philosophy of life is most acutely defined by the way it successfully integrates death within its paradigm (or fails to do so)’. How successfully has the philosophy of yoga settled in you? For the medical materialists, death is extinction, and dying has become stigmatized, something to be conducted in private. In this system humane care for the elderly is frequently lacking and the grieving are abandoned to deal with losses no one wants to talk about because it makes them feel ‘uncomfortable’.

Unlike western philosophy, eastern thought is meant to be experiential. Transcendence of death is not a theoretical possibility but the reality. The clinging to live is the clinging to delusion and false persona. As long as we are ‘uncomfortable’ with death and its cohorts, such as grief and loss, then we are believing in them as threats to our peace of mind. The solution, as so often recommended by the Buddhists, is to immerse oneself in death and the business of death until such time as death throws a light rather than a shadow on our lives.

At the time of finishing my course, it was no longer possible for me not to think about death. But it was still disturbing me. Close friends died, as did family members. I saw that death caught most people by surprise and that they suffered for this. It seemed for a while that death was surrounding me and I felt depressed and somewhat hypocritical because it seemed that I still wasn’t walking my talk. I understand now that when we think about death we have the thoughts, the vrittis, of all mankind in our psyche, as well as the overpowering messages of our current culture about how life and death are. Once upon a time our journey through this miasma would be aided by the wise and by the stories a society lives by. Now it is our task to create new narratives and to demonstrate the truth of our understanding. This is why I and others are now running programs on talking about death and holding Festivals and Days of the Dead, not to tell people ‘how things really are’ but, in the ways of the old Books of the Dead, to remind ourselves and others of the value of occupying death before it occupies us.

EPISODE 48: PERSISTENCE AND FERTILITY

Welcome to my blog which continues to accurately express the success of an endeavour that began nearly a year ago. Unfortunately the accuracy of the expression is also reflected in my income (zero from writing) and my log stats (readership nil). Before I started today I asked myself, 'Why bother?' No one reads it, no one cares, no one will know if I stop. I have in fact other things I could be doing. For example I've been told to write two articles for an online yoga magazine in support of my idea for Days of the Dead.  I won't be paid for these articles, nor are they commissioned on the quality of my writing. They are there as PR for an event that, even if it works, is not designed to make me money. 

So why go on? Because I said I would, because I believed myself to lack discipline and this was to be my proof that I could set myself a task and complete it. Of course I didn't expect it so be so spectacularly unread because whatever one says at the back of the mind there is the candle of hope that won't quite go out.

While not achieving my stated goal, which was to sit in my room and write myself to a living, I have instead got myself involved in a different type of creation altogether, a town party celebrating the Day of the Dead. Why I have done this, I don't know. I can tell myself that it might be ultimately useful to me but that certainly isn't my motivation, nor am I passionate about the cause, yet having got this far, however far this is, my fear of half-heartedness and failure will drive me on. I am thinking about it most of the time because this is my public creation and I want it to look good.

If I thought this hard about getting my novels in a state that you could read them, the job would be done and dusted. I’m feeling conflicted about this and need to unconflict myself by bringing the various desires together with some variation of an affirmation such as; ‘the more effort I make with the day of the dead, the more successful my writing career will be.’ Or something like that. Another thing I should do is consult my guides in this venture, Robert Fritz and Harry Palmer.

Both would have me address current reality – which I think I’m doing on a daily basis. Since November I have known that the websites would be important and I have struggled to put these together. This week my eldest son agreed to help and to employ a designer he knows. Consequently I have spent most of this week working on the copy for each page. It is a laborious and slow process, and far from finished, but already better. I’ve also had to move stuff from one site to another because the Day of the Dead site has gone from being a begging (for help) letter to an advertisement for mostly imaginary events.

This Day is already changing my life and my experience of living here, where I have been for the best part of twenty years. When I came back here last year, I found Glastonbury physically depressing, drab, and uninteresting. For the previous six years in Bath I had, more or less, kept myself to myself and thus hardly knew anyone when I walked the streets. I came here with the same attitude but since starting this project, I have become more aware of my environment and more connected to it. Places which I’ve ignored, I’ve taken the trouble of visit and, of course, I’ve had to be more aware of myself because I’m never quite sure when I might be approached by someone to do with this.

For example, today I was walking past the Assembly Rooms when I saw a sign advertising a Mystic Fayre. Having seen a Mystic Meeting already this week, that itself a first, I was disinclined to go in but then I realized I needed to know what the Hall looked like with tables and chairs laid out for ‘stalls’ so in I went. It turned out to be a useful visit because I saw how small the room was with furniture in. This was both good and bad news because I had been conceiving of it as massive and was worrying about how to decorate it. On the other hand, it is so small I’m not sure how much we can fit in there. 

****

Three decades or so ago, I was persuaded to look at ‘The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross’ by John Allegro. I wasn’t impressed, not because I read it properly but because the general idea that early christians were some sort of mushroom cult seemed so evidently a hippy version of an urban myth that I never read the book. I was equally disinclined yesterday when my friend Barney foisted it upon me. In fact it is quite brilliant and far more likely to be true than what is actually believed. Of course I have no means to judge the scholarship and the philological arguments but the reading of it expanded my mind both in terms of how I now understand the development of written language and also of my feeling for the connectedness and brevity of human history. One of the most attractive parts of Allegro’s understanding is his description of the cosmic myth of the god in the sky ejaculating fertility onto the womb that is earth. Through this I have also had another understanding as to the relationship within Shiva-Shakti. ‘Fertility’ rites have always seemed so boring and rural to my mind that I’ve not previously grasped either the importance of fertility to survival or its correspondence to cosmic and individual creativity.

And now I have. So it goes. See you next week.

EPISODE 47: IN WHICH THE AUTHOR GOES FOR SOME WALKS AND WRITES A STORY.

Welcome to my blog which today can’t help but celebrate the arrival of the sun and its warmth. Living in England, especially in times of Tory government, can easily be depressing, especially if one allows one’s attention to be too focussed on the national narrative as dumped on us by the politicians and the media. Fortunate as I am, or sometimes make myself, in my lifestyle, I have managed two good rural walks this week. On one I went up Compton Dundon Beacon, an ironage hill fort with tremendous views of the Mendips and the coast. My friend Crispin’s ashes are buried there by a tree so I visited him there. The bluebells and primroses were out and some teenagers were quietly smoking weed, which Crispin would have approved of. As always, I told myself I must do more walking and more just stopping and lying in the sun. Bearing in mind these are the best bits of life, why do I have to remind myself?

A second walk took me to Windmill Hill near Baltonsborough where, for the first time in my life, I ran away from sheep.

A stroll, rather than a walk, took me to the White Spring at the bottom of Glastonbury Tor. This spot, I am told, is a gateway to the Otherworld. Outside the little cave were a collection of ‘types’; scruffy hippies rather than riff-raff. For a few moments I was judgemental but then I realized that at the entrance to the Otherworld, none of us have much to be proud about. Inside the cave, four  naked men were frolicking (and probably washing) in the pools there.

 A STORY; THE MEDIUM

1.

A voice. Into the silence comes a voice. Until the voice I hadn’t been aware of the silence; hadn’t been aware of anything. When I heard the voice, I became aware of being.

2.

She is in her late twenties; thin, dark haired, maybe of Chinese heritage, smiley with soft skin, wearing a floral red dress. I had watched her, between readings, slowly inspecting the various stalls and studying the cards and pamphlets. Sometimes they have already chosen and the looking is really a steadying of the nerve. In this case I saw someone still making the decision. When she came to me I was a little surprised because the younger women usually feel safer with one of the purple ladies.

“Take a seat,” I said, although she already had. “How may I help? Here I can do you a card reading or a brief trance communication. Alternatively we can discuss an appointment for a longer in-depth session.” I knew I was fidgeting and not looking her straight in the eye. Pretty women affect me like that. I’m okay once I start reading.

“It says mediumship on your card,” she said. “Does that mean you can talk to the dead?”

3.

Where was I before I heard the voice?

4.

“Yes,” I said.  “I can communicate with their spirits. Anyone can. I do.”

“Do they mind?” she asked.

“I don’t think they’d speak with me if they minded,” I said. “Usually they’ve so much to say I can’t shut them up.” She smiled at this but said nothing as she remained very still on the chair with her brown eyes looking at the pack of tarot cards on the table between us. “Is there someone in particular…?” I began.

“My mother. I want to hear from my mother.”

This is probably the request I hear most often in my professional life. Seven out of ten times I can oblige. “Did she pass away recently?” I asked.

For just a moment the smile disappeared and the pain showed. Then it was gone with a small shake of the head. “I don’t think so,” she said, “but I can’t be sure.”

5.

There was a time before the silence when I was. I can remember that. In the silence I didn’t remember that. Because the noise ended the silence, I became aware that there had been silence and to be aware that there had been silence, I must have been there when the silence was. At least for some of the time.

6.

“I never knew my mother,” she said.

7.

Before the silence, I died. Twice.

8.

“I don’t even know her name.”

“Then how do you know that she’s…not alive?”

“I don’t…not yet…not for sure. But I’ve been searching for twenty-five years and I’ve not found her anywhere on earth. Now you can help me find her on the other side.”

9.

The first time was moments before giving birth to my daughter. From the moment I conceived I felt as if I’d been invaded by a devil. Physical pain, emotional anguish and the darkest of dark thoughts filled the pregnancy. Even as I felt our two selves separate, hers into life, mine into death, I felt I had done a great wrong to the world.

10.

I always tell my clients that I never have to contact the dead because they are psychically forewarned and are waiting for them. All I really know is that when I close my eyes and concentrate hard, I hear voices in a certain part of my head and if I tell my clients what these voices say, they are often uplifted and relieved by the messages.

11.

The second time I died, it was after the great journey. I remember standing on a cliff’s edge admiring a palace of gold. And then there was nothing. The unheard silence. Peace.

12.

“How long will it take you to find her? Could you do it now? And give her a message?”

For the first time in my career I lied. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t feel her. It could be that she is still alive.”

13.

Now what? Before the voice, in the silence, there was neither time nor place. Now there is now and there is here and there is fear.

14.

The woman smiled as if it didn’t matter but I saw the blackness in her soul.

EPISODE 46: IN WHICH THE AUTHOR DEMONSTRATES WRITER'S BLOCK

Welcome to my blog which was meaning to begin with an esoteric discussion on mantra but has been diverted by an article listing the security costs of the London Olympic games. When I was a child I loved the Olympics, although even then it was the Athletics that meant something whereas the endless show jumping, swimming and gymnastics always seemed boring. It was then the best of amateur sport (give or take a few underhand payments). Now of course it is a bigger professional event and the athletics, Usain Bolt aside, so tainted by drugs as to not leave any real impact. The idea that hosting this absurd show is somehow meant to make the British people feel good about themselves is being promulgated so hard by the government and the BBC, that it is hard not to end up feeling hostile rather than indifferent. To then spend 24 billion pounds on turning London into a gargantuan middle-class version of the Gaza Strip seems to me to be a victory to Osama Bin Laden. Every day we are dealing with the consequences of our response to that attack in New York. Billions and billions have been spent on defending ourselves and our ways of life and travel have been changed permanently. I have often wondered how a tribe that sacrifices goats to god for comfort decides to change its policy. How many years go by with people saying, ‘Do we really have to bother?’ before the priests agree to take a year or two off, just to see what happens.

How long will we sacrifice goats to Osama?

***

While family life, the visit of my youngest son and partner for the weekend, has continued around me and interrupted any schedule I have, I’ve been racking my brains for something to write about. I have been grungy with myself, under-confident and disappointed both with myself and my results. In part, smoking is something to do with this. I fear oral cancer because my lips, mouth and tongue constantly feel like they are on fire. Yet I do nothing to cut down or stop; not even imagine it. 

My son made me look at the budget of the events I am planning to put on; my main earner in fact. He is right. My idea won’t work. This is quite dispiriting. I haven’t signed the contract for the Mexican band yet and my son says I should at least look to bring them down £200. Having verbally agreed the fee, I am unwilling to begin my business by going back on my word. 

So far my team of volunteers have not been evidently proactive or even communicative. Is this my not making an impression or not directing them properly? Perhaps I’ve not been coherent or direct enough in my meetings. 

Also this GDD creation has taken over my life and is not serving my original goal which was to make £500 a week through my writing. I think now I have to have a good look at what I’m doing and see what I can out right. This dragon hasn’t made a spectacular state to his period of pre-eminence.

***

Today I have spent a fair part of the day chatting to people about football and cricket. Having shewn me how to stream free sport, my son watched India and Pakistan play cricket with me. Although I began by dissing the Olympics and the government’s desire for us to be obsessed by sport, I do have to admit to hours and days of following distant cricket matches. There’s something so soothing and relaxing about watching and listening to cricket. I used to listen in the early mornings to Test Matches from Australia with my dad, back in 1962. I was born in Headingly and I was great Yorkshire fan in my childhood when Close, Illingworth, Sharpe, Padget, Trueman…I can name them all…were the heroes. I even got the autograph of the whole team once. Then along came Boycott, the antihero who taught me that not all my role-models would be flash-harries. He was dropped for scoring a double-century too slowly. What only I could know was that I was in hospital during that innings and the longer it went on the less I worried about my upcoming operation.

These days I support India. And am sad that Dravid has retired.

Football of course is all the rage now and I watch that too. I began with Leeds and now root for Arsenal and Barcelona. Guess I just like winners.

***

Someone told me the other day that they wake-up each morning either feeling like killing someone else or themselves. My own thoughts, as I observed this morning, tend to begin with the question, ‘Is there anything I have to do today?’ I suppose that compared with the majority of the human race, I am extremely fortunate in not knowing that most days I’ll have to do what I did the day before, i.e. go to work. On those occasions where I do have to do something specific, I’ll probably be immediately extraordinarily tired and reluctant to get out of bed. On the other hand if I have no need to get up, I will get up and I’ll come downstairs to meditate. 

This morning there was frost on the ground and the sun was shining in the window from 7a.m. Having guilt-tripped myself about smoking last night, my small aim today was to meditate before smoking a cigarette to see if my body felt calmer without. It did. It wasn’t a spectacular meditation, they never are, but somehow still feels worth it. I still haven’t worked out what I will do today but no doubt as the day goes by I’ll find some focus or receive a phonecall or email message that suddenly gives the day direction. What I want of course is someone or something out there to come and get me. Best would be something from Chris Wafe but I’ll not make the mistake of hassling him again.

Not yet anyway.