Young, heroic and lethal

Almost everyone is baffled by the strangeness of the world today. Not children, of course. They take as they find for adaptation is what they do. On the way to adulthood we choose either to swim with the tide, taking advantage of the way things are, or finding some token way to set ourselves against the prevailing culture: perhaps in personal ways, like becoming vegetarian. Before the exposure of Stalin as a mass murderer, communism as a way to channel idealism appealed to millions and terrified America.

Between the "outing" of Stalin and the collapse of the USSR, intellectuals could still toy with Marxism. These days rebellion often involves ecological awareness and humanitarian concerns, possibly with some New Age spirituality thrown in. Today I doubt if there are pockets of humanity in any remote jungle where adolescents are not caught up in some ferment of questioning their parents’ values.

In the town where I live, and especially this part with its mixture of small factories and Victorian workers’ cottages, there's a high proportion of Muslims from Pakistan and Kashmir. The first generation, attracted by factory work in the late Fifties, are now elderly and pious, many with patriarchal beards and dressed in white every day as if for the mosque. Many of the womenfolk, one suspects, have never learned much English. It’s as if a tribe of the Amish were living in our streets, adhering to ancient observances and not caught up in the worst of modernity. Their children and grandchildren have been born here and educated in local schools along with their white English peers. My landlord is one such, a young man who recently took six weeks off to get married in Pakistan to a girl he’d not previously met.

I’ve remarked before what a peaceful town this is, though it’s been exposed as a nest of terrorists*. There are those who find it unfriendly, compared with Glasgow for example, and I won’t say they are wrong, but as my 17-year-old-daughter said, who cares? She doesn’t expect to pick up new friends on the street.

For a young Muslim born in this town, I’d say there are three ways to go. You might follow in your parents’ footsteps, wherever they might lead. You might rebel against your cultural and religious heritage in favour of local customs, especially in relation to diet, alcohol, dress, the opposite sex.

The third option when growing up as a Muslim in an English setting is to deplore the trend towards lax Western ways; to resent the low respect that is given to your people; perhaps to deplore your own parents’ failure to be more proactive and proud of their traditions. As a young British Muslim, for whom can you fight and die? When the invasion of Iraq was taking place, I saw a poster in town urging young men to go and join in - against the British and American troops. It wasn’t strange, even though it was technically treason. It is in the genetic inheritance of young men to be ready to fight and if necessary to die for a cause they hold dear: a fact which rulers throughout history have exploited to recruit armies for their devious and ignoble ends.

“Ah, but they were fighting just wars, by legitimate means! They were not terrorists.”

It’s easy to be blind to the “other side’s” point of view. The Second World War was just, in the sense of defending against tyranny. But it set precedents for the mass killing of innocents. Recent wars, in their launching, their conduct and their treatment of captives, have lacked legitimacy. Every injustice, illegal act or biased policy by the strong against the weak is a toxin to poison the minds of the young and humiliated, who might be tempted to plan future vengeance.

Every child is an idealist. Some want to go on and be heroes. Flag and bugle, marching and learning how to kill, the same old training is used as when a power could afford to have enemies, and expect to defeat them in battle. Two powerful men, whose names begin with B, have not realised that times have changed. When they’re gone, I wonder if their successors will have learned to unite the ever-idealistic, ever-heroic youth of the world in causes more noble than those which divide us today.

PS
In today’s local paper a police chief announces that the search for terrorist weapons and evidence in woodlands around our town, involving 100 police officers, will continue for at least four more weeks. It has been going already since August 11th. They don’t give out details about what they have found or what they are still looking for.

Punishment or Happiness

the poor man at his gate
Picture Credit: Dan Colcer .

“Motivation is a major problem and one of the factors for people failing to meet their goals in life. So what do you do to get motivated?”

I saw this question, with ensuing discussion, in an internet forum that I know quite well.

Other participants didn't find it at all strange. They each had their own recipes. One listens to a little voice behind her left eyebrow. It’s her Mum’s voice, and it tells her to get started and persevere. Another is an “inveterate list maker which helps enormously . . .”. Another, referring to a speaker who advocates setting yourself MASSIVE GOALS (her capitals), has been training in sports massage and is now aiming at a role in the 2012 Olympics.

Why do people find it necessary to punish themselves? Why set yourself a goal at all, let alone one which does not intrinsically motivate you?

Why pursue goals, rather than happiness? “Ah,” comes the response. “You’ll be happy when you have achieved them!”

Firstly that’s not true. Secondly, do you value happiness so little as to postpone it so long? Thirdly, are you so foolish as to imagine that there is no other way to happiness than through achievements?

Commonplace ideas gain credibility merely through popularity, merely through repetition. This is nothing new. In previous centuries, other ideas held sway, for example “Don’t have ideas above your station in life.” Or,

The rich man in his castle
the poor man at his gate
God made them high or lowly
and ordered their estate

(from All things bright and beautiful, by Mrs Alexander, 1848. This verse is now censored out from hymn books.) Such ideas were hard to resist, because they were reflected in the way society was organised.

Can we really free ourselves from goals and motivation? Suppose my goal is to be a best-selling author, or perhaps a posthumously famous author. If I don’t actually enjoy each day’s writing, what am I doing but punishing myself? Let us not be confused by the example of many tortured artists who had a love-hate relationship with their craft and had to force themselves. The love was much greater than the hate. It was vocation. They were called and if they had ignored that call they might as well have been dead.

“Don’t you motivate yourself? How do you stir yourself into necessary action?” I hear you ask.

Well, it’s through sensitivity alone. The world impinges upon me and arouses in me some nagging emotion, that will not be silenced until I do something. So I find out what action I have to do to stop the emotion (which is my own authentic voice, not the internalised voice of my mother, wife or guru). Happiness now is my spur, nothing else. My compassion comes from the bad feeling I get if I harden my heart. It has little to do with principles, though like everyone I have those too.

I’m against goals altogether. Let’s do today right, in all its details, according to our sensitivity and conscience, rather than suppress our feelings to follow some abstraction.

Powys and the dead frog

photo credit: sibi/flickr

“When one considers how dependent we all are---especially such parasitic weaklings as artists, poets, writers, priests, philosophers---upon the hard one-track energies of the industrious producers and shrewd traders, it seems only fair to make our obeisance to enterprise, strength and cunning, before we proceed to show the limitations of such things. If we refuse to make such an acknowledgment, if we indulge in unqualified abuse of the solid, sterling qualities upon which our very existence depends, there is a danger lest our protests, instead of representing a free, detached wisdom, should represent a weak, violent, impotent rage.

“If we are not blinded by prejudice, we must confess to observing, every day, how many among the competent, energetic producers and traders are honest enough in their “deals” and prepared to show indulgence, at a pinch, to their less sagacious rivals. We must also confess to observing how there often radiates outward from one of these successful men a vigorous aura of general well-being, of which all sorts of weaklings living at the circumference, so to speak, of this centre of energy get the benefit. Let us therefore make our bow to these dynamos of unsympathetic force. But at the same time let us remain devotees of happiness.

“But what of those weaker and poorer than we are? According to what we call necessity, we stubbornly go on our way, leaving so many consciousnesses behind us obviously suffering from various degrees of tribulation, such as, if we stopped and took the trouble to concentrate upon them, we might, after repeated and patient efforts, materially relieve. It is according to necessity, too, that we pass by the dead---pass them by, and unless they be of our own flesh-and-blood, take small thought even so much as to bury them!

“I picked up a dead frog this morning. Withered it was to a veritable husk of hollow emptiness, like a snake’s skin bleached by months of burning sun. I suppose many a bird had hopped against it, brushing it with wings or tail, many a butterfly settled above it, many a rabbit spurned it with unstartled, jerky indifference. Why should they care?”

(From John Cowper Powys, In Defence of Sensuality, a self-help/philosophical book published in 1930.)

I don’t normally post extended quotes, but this---including the dead frog---expresses in more masterly language what I would have liked to write today.

PS When choosing today's illustration, I discovered that Flickr, the free online photo-bank, has 500 snaps of dead frogs, not including those about Dead Frog Beer, a Vancouver speciality.

Cause of insanity

Wycombe from Plomer Hill
Click to enlarge

I’ve been wondering today what mental illness is. There’s a propaganda campaign going on in the UK. You are supposed to accept the term as a neutral one, without stigma, like a broken leg---could happen to anyone, what bad luck, get well soon, pity you don’t have your cranium in plaster because then we could write comic messages on it in ballpoint pen.

But obscurely the sense of stigma remains. Never mind political correctness, what does it mean to be insane, crazy, lunatic, off your head, psychotic, catatonic, manic, depressive? I’m no shrink but I cannot help thinking it is caused by trying to blot out unhappiness with numbness or self-delusion.

But there are so many ways to blot out unhappiness which don’t get you labelled insane: alcoholism, drug dependency, overwork, sexual deviancy, junk culture & other forms of escapism, acquisitiveness, fame-seeking, gambling, risky sports, following a cult, sacrificing yourself to a cause.

If this list makes you think it’s a description of what normal people do to fill their lives, you’ve understood my point.

Meanwhile, even whilst blotting out the unhappiness as best we may, we have to carry on with the day to day business of surviving physically. I’m writing this from Plomer Hill, where you can see the panoramic townscape depicted above. From this distance, it doesn’t look dysfunctional at all: houses, roads, factories, parks, woodland, footpaths, churches and a mosque. Not like the newspaper today which shows 2 adjacent photos: a tank going through a devastated Saigon street in 1968 and a tank going through a devastated Baghdad street in 2006.

raindrops on web (Lord V/flickr)
click to enlarge

My point is that from moment to moment, a human being does what seems right at the time, whether creating hell in a city or in their own consciousness. To call acts evil or insane does not explain them. But there is always an explanation, whether it be fear, shame, anger or simply not having received enough human love and care to have any self-respect.

Nature is connected and balanced, cruel and beautiful. It has intricate complexity at every level. It looks after its own interests. We’re part of that. We can choose which parts to look at, because we can’t look at everything. But to be in denial – of anything, whether out there, or in me – is where all that mess, that Baghdad hell, that psychotic horror, begins.

The sacred

Picture credit Natascha2006/flickr

It’s taken me a long road to get here, but once arrived it’s perfectly obvious: everyone has their own view of what’s sacred. That’s what causes all the trouble. My garbage dump is your sacred land, or vice versa. You can be “rational” and tell me I’m deluded for what I hold sacred. All the while you hold your rationality sacred and are a mirror of me.

You cannot remove the sacred, you can only replace it. You can't critically examine your own attachment to the sacred---because it is so sacred.

I must tread softly here, for I’m dumping my explanations on your sacred land. But you and I contain a sacredness magnet. Just as a newborn goose chick thinks the first moving thing it sees is its mother, and automatically attaches its mother-magnet to that, so we behave too: less automatically, less arbitrarily, but it’s the same thing.

We think it’s that holy thing which seduced us with its intrinsic sacredness, but no. Our magnet stuck fast to it.

Knowing this, what changes? Answer in my next, perhaps.

Water

Over Downley Common, after rain

Some people plan out their lives, and desire to impose their will upon the world. I’m of a different persuasion now, more like a cloud, whose nature is to expand and constantly change its shape, and be evaporated by the sun and recondensed by colder layers of air and charged with electrical energy and made to fall as rain when its droplets gain in heaviness and yield to gravity. Is this fatalistic and passive? No it is the process of Nature, where everything is in flux.

We are often urged to “be in the here and now”, a phrase so easy to remember that it becomes a mantra with no clear meaning. That doesn’t stop me arguing with it, for I argue with everything. I often argue with myself---and lose. So I say, “What’s wrong with reliving the past? What’s wrong with imagining the future? What’s wrong with trying to blot out the present? What’s wrong with doing whatever I happen to do?”

I suppose I trust Nature, and feel gratitude for whatever is. I don’t believe in digging up seeds to see if they are growing yet, and I’m reluctant to pull out weeds till I am sure what they are.

I don’t have advice for anyone else, or even myself. All of us, out of the ocean of ideas, words, vibrations, smiles and frowns, intuitively pick that which influences us.

Half-waking in the night, I received a phrase as if it were whispered in my ear by an angel: “How to be New”. Why am I so ready to change? My nature is to be conservative: to look to the past, to revere the ancestors, to hate it when a building is pulled down or a road widened. I’m a hollow container, echoing with memories. I desire to smell all the remembered aromas of childhood, for I glory in being a human animal.

It’s the past that makes me ready to be new, just as the tree’s fruiting depends on its slow maturing over earlier seasons. Nature recycles its dead tissues. I don’t forget the past, but in old memories I come to new conclusions.

I don’t want to follow traditions, but to understand how they have arisen, like an ethnologist: appreciating, feeling what it would be like to be John Bunyan in his prison cell, or a tribesman with body paint. What if I were that ancient man I walked past today, inching painfully, leaning on his stick, destined to die far from the continent on which he was born? In suffering, pretensions are stripped away, but in glory and plenty, they multiply. Is that true? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. What we need to know, we'll find out.

I’m a cloud, brother to all water.

Uncertainty

Stubble field in morning, Gore Hill

I published an elaborate post on Sunday and pulled it back later. Self-doubt, self-criticism, the most important instruments in the artist’s bag, and what is life, if not a work of art?

A man walks down the street
He says why am I soft in the middle now
Why am I soft in the middle
The rest of my life is so hard (Paul Simon, You can call me Al).

We’re all a combination of soft and hard. I’m walking on a layer of mud, but it stands on a bedrock of certainty: I’m connected to the All as an active component. Herein lies my strength and my weakness too.

I am not a construct of my intellect. It's a relief to have realised that.

The post that I pulled was full of self-important certainty, but it was upstaged by doubts about really important things. In the grip of not knowing, I couldn’t act. I discussed things with someone who tried to fill that void and guide me to some positive action. They say “Nature abhors a vacuum”. It’s easy to condemn indecision, but though I found it uncomfortable to be in that place, I had a paradoxical certainty that hesitating, doing nothing, not knowing, agonising even, were right for me.

Dilemmas are universal. Only the descriptive language varies. I could bring in the word “God” but choose not to. “Bedrock of certainty” will do for now.

Drops of dew form on lush grass which has grown between the stubble-stalks, and a little fly takes rest and sustenance there.

By their fruits

Photo: a durian, favourite fruit in South-East Asia

I will tell you how it seems to me. That should go without saying, for what else can I truthfully tell?

Up to a certain time in childhood I was true to myself, because “I didn’t know any better”. Then I tried to learn the ways of my society, how to fit in, and was not too successful. So then I was waylaid by following my spiritual instincts and surrendering my common-sense to a guru. I meditated in the supposed protection of his satsang and his agya for thirty years. It involved (in the simplest terms) sitting with eyes shut and focusing on the breath. It was tedious, boring: without encouragement, left to myself, I would have abandoned it pretty soon. Whether I should thank or blame that guru is a finely-balanced point. Some would say it depends where I end up. But I definitely blame St Matthew’s gospel, Chapter 7, verses 15 to 20, where Jesus is reported to say: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing . . . wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.” I spent thirty years waiting for the fruits and trying to determine if they were good or bad, and I don't know yet. Saint Matthew, you’re a lightweight, who needs you? You’re fired.

During those years, my body rebelled against the steadfastness of my will, and gave me illness, till I could hardly walk. O how grateful I am to the body’s common-sense which brought me back, safe and whole after those middle years spent getting lost in the follies of this world and ignorant gurudom!

As Dante says at the beginning of his Inferno:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
  mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
  che la diritta via era smarrita

Ahi quanto a dir quel era è cosa dura
  esta selvaggia e aspra e forte
  che nel pensier rinova la paura!

Tant’è amara che poco è più morte;
  ma per trattar del ben ch’i’ vi trovai,
  dirò de l’altre cose ch’i’ v’ho scorte.


Midway along our road of life I woke
  to find myself in a dark and secret wood
  for I had lost the narrow path. To evoke

What it was like – how hard, I barely could
  this wood was savage, dense and strange! The thought
  of it renews those fears that I withstood

A place so bitter, only to be caught
  in death is worse. Yet there I found my share
  of good, so now I’ll tell what else it brought.

(Translation by Willis Barnstone, preserving Dante’s own terza rima)

Now I have found myself again, I correct my meditation and place it firmly in the world, with all senses awakened and myself porous to the Universe, for together we are the ecological whole. Let religions stand corrected! Our aim in this precious human life is not to escape from this world to some cloister, not to store up treasures in some vague future Heaven, but engage rapturously with the grim, gross yet ecstatic wonder of this earthly life. My meditation is to walk the earth under the shared sky, proud, grateful and joyous. And if I could not walk I would beg to be pushed in a wheelchair or deposited on a bench.

When I was ill and getting worse, I had the idea, instead of mouldering in a hospital or old people’s home, to hang out and take my chance on a tropical beach till Death tidied away my tattered remains. That plan is now on hold.

There is no better worship than to expose ourselves under the sky. Not in a house; not in that antisocial habit called the motor-car, not in the isolated bubble of a cellphone or mp3 player stuck to the ear, but fully present to the immediate environment. God is closer in street or meadow than cloister. Not that I have any recommendations to give anyone. If you want a religion, invent your own. You don’t need mine or anyone else’s.

After those middle years, of paying one’s dues to family and State, the old Hindu idea is to be a sannyasin. Yet that tradition is just another tramline, a rut that could lead me astray. I'll just follow my urge, let the fruits of my life swell and fall in their ripeness, till it's time to go.

Having no enemies

Many people supposedly educated don’t understand that the meaning of a word is in its use. Dictionary compilers know this of course, for their task consists in collecting usage as lepidopterists collect butterflies, pinning them to a board and labelling them. Dictionary compilers follow, not lead.

So, as Alice learned, we are free to use words any way we want:

‘. . . and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents --’
‘Certainly,’ said Alice.
‘And only one for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!’
‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory”,’ Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t -- till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”‘
‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument”,’ Alice objected.
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master -- that’s all.’
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. ‘They’ve a temper, some of them -- particularly verbs: they’re the proudest -- adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs -- however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!’
‘Would you tell me please,’ said Alice, ‘what that means?’
‘Now you talk like a reasonable child,’ said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. ‘I meant by “impenetrability” that we’ve had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life.’
‘That’s a great deal to make one word mean,’ Alice said in a thoughtful tone.

But can we afford to use words just as we want? We must have a care to what they evoke in the listener, what place they touch. When I studied Carl Rogers’ Person-Centred psychotherapy, I learned about “unconditional positive regard”. Too many syllables, I thought, and translated it as “love” for my own internal use. Had Rogers called it “love” in the first place, someone somewhere would have translated that word as “sexual predation”.

What is the secret life of the word “ecology”, within your understanding? For me, it has meant “recognising the interdependence of all things”. But now I see it also as “co-existence” and “balance” and “having no enemies, only friends”.

The nature of Spirit

“Money, health and wisdom are the three pillars of our existence,” says Alistair, whose blog, like Jim’s, often provokes me.

My disagreement is immediate and vehement. He invites me to ride my bicycle in the tramlines, but I’m not going there. Instead, I’ll obey the impulse to follow my impulse. I’ll ride my bicycle along a narrow path as I’ve always done, getting stung by nettles, torn by brambles and lost in trackless thickets. If there’s one thing I’ve become more expert in than anything else, it’s making mistakes. “If a fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise,” said William Blake, with no mention of the likely timescale.

I don’t seek advice. I don’t trust experts. I don’t read instructions. I don’t look before I leap. As an absolute beginner, I’m impatient to paint a picture like a maestro. I don’t have any proper technique and I can never do what the book tells me, but I do have a magical method, and this is to see in the marks I have made the essence of the thing I want to portray. When the mark doesn't show the essence, I must erase it. Magic, not logic.

I discovered a wonderful interview with David Abram which speaks of magic and the alphabet. To spell, he says, is to cast a spell, for both meanings have the same root:

“. . . to learn to write and to read with the alphabet, was actually to learn a new form of magic, to exercise a new form of power in the world.

“But it also meant casting a kind of spell on our own senses. Unless we recognize writing as a form of magic, then we will not take much care with it. It's only when we recognize how profoundly it has altered our experience of nature and the rest of the sensory world, how profoundly it has altered our senses, that we can begin to use writing responsibly because we see how potent and profound an effect it has.”

I congratulate my own instincts over these past months: my instincts to forsake the town and the babble of men, and follow Nature’s lonely, muddy paths. My truths have germinated under the ancient sky. I have fearlessly rejected the alleged words of Jesus and Buddha, not in a spirit of hubris, but on impulse, to avoid the tramlines.

And why do I trust my impulse? Because I am an animal. Other animals, non-human ones, have no choice in the matter. I've tried it both ways and made my choice.

What pillars do I propose, to replace money, health and wisdom as proposed by Alistair, to support my existence? Just one: that I am an animal.

“Animal?” you ask. “Do you then reject the spirit?”

On the contrary, I rejoice in the spirit and give thanks for its unbreakable link to the Spirit of the Universe.

For now I understand who I am, and what spirit is: that part of the animal that intellect can never understand.

Why am I alive?

Place where the question gets asked. Click for details

I approach this topic with trepidation, as it’s one which tends to get asked in negative circumstances only. In the last few days before Christmas, I was asked to stand in a shopping mall promoting a book, After five hours I felt I had lost the will to live. The book had my name on the cover as co-author but this didn’t help at all. If I could not sell my own stuff, I could not sell anything in this world. When you think of it, five hours is not a long time to learn the important lesson that “I am not alive for my sales skills”. Trouble was, I’d learned that lesson already.

The question, “Why am I alive?” was prompted this morning by someone in the blogosphere asking how to deal with the stress arising from working in a Call Centre. I’m sure we have all had occasion to call these “places”: here in England we sometimes find ourselves linked to one in India. I find the workers warm and friendly, but then I make sure not to blame them for the infuriating deficiencies of their organisation.

In 1998 I worked on a computer project to install Telecom call centres across Holland, to deal with directory enquiries and the like, so I am aware that the human operator is a captive cog in a huge robotic machine. The system was designed to shave seconds off each call and maximise the productivity of workers who were treated as battery chickens. Supervisors could monitor each call and even intervene. If an operator got upset by a caller there was a timeout button which could be used between calls. This was the only way the operator could get up and go to the rest-room. Like everything else, the timeouts were analysed for statistical reports.

So I said to the blogger that humans were not meant to work in call centres at all. I’d sooner be a rag-picker, road-sweeper, toilet-unblocker: anything where I can do things in my own time, reshaping matter with the skills of my own hands and eyes. Yet I was sad to see that in a research study the “customer service representatives” at these call centres, who are mostly women aged 25-40, have fairly good “job satisfaction”. They are only there to bring home money in a clean job where they don’t have to sell their bodies. As for their souls, they’ve probably mortgaged those already.

Naturally my previous two sentences are not taken from the research study itself. Most people, including doubtless its authors, take it for granted that you have to sell your soul to earn anything at all, by legal or criminal means. Civilisation has made Fausts of us all, even though my spell-checker complains there can only be one Faust.

“Why am I alive?” asks the person who stands on the parapet of a tall bridge, trying not to look down. “If I can’t find a good reason I’ll jump.” The question should have been asked long before.

Why am I alive? It's a question I ask my body, not my intellect, and rely upon its emotional response. The answers are surprising.

Being ready

Trucks ply below the clouds

On another blog someone says, in a comment: The keys to spirituality could not be passed on from the individual revelation if not for what becomes known as religion.

As the writer admits, spirituality begins with an individual revelation. Can the essence of that revelation be passed on? No, it has to be experienced individually. What people try to pass on is “the keys to spirituality”, that is, a recipe for following in someone else’s footsteps, and living in hopes.

The writer seems to accept without question that those who have individual revelations are rare beings like Buddha, Jesus, the Prophet Mohammed, and that they are the ones who issue keys to spirituality via the necessary vehicle, religion.

It’s a common enough assumption but I love to see these things neatly summed up in a sentence, for then they can be shared. One might add a new assumption: “Insights could not be passed on from the individual idea if not for what becomes known as language”. I have my doubts there too. Can insights really be passed on? All we can do is pass on a seed or symbol that represents our idea. It may or may not take root in the other person.

In both spirituality and ideas, I believe that the fertile ground is far more important than the seed. Seeds get around without intervention, for Mother Nature sees to that. As I write this, I reflect that when a pond is created, aquatic plants find their way to it, as well as snails and frogs. How? I tried to look it up on the Internet and found the topic of “self-recruiting species”. Does it mean you can dig a pond and fish will find their way there?

“When the disciple is ready the master will appear.” But since there’s an excess of self-styled masters, of doubtful credentials, I’d prefer to say, “When the person is ready, the revelation will appear.”

We’re unlikely to be ready without encouragement and inspiration from outside. I had a correspondent on Death Row in Florida. I’ve read the transcripts of his case and it seems he killed a woman for a few thousand dollars, which were easily found under a sofa cushion when the police came to arrest him in his trailer. But thanks to Bo Lozoff and the Prison Ashram project, he’s made his cell into an ashram for one. To keep himself alive, he’s always instructing lawyers to appeal against his death sentence. He’s a simple uneducated man. He was a criminal and is not a saint. But he’s had his revelation and it’s changed him and sustains him. Perhaps that's the reason he did it and why he’s there. Who knows?

What is life?

I’ve lived long enough to see lots of changes: both in the world and in me. I’ve been astonished in recent months, especially on solitary walks through the countryside, letting memories flow as they please, to discover that in essence I am the same person as I always was.

Same person? This is extraordinary. Had I known as a child what I know now, I would have avoided much suffering. From this I conclude that suffering is not knowing.

There have been so many gurus, priests, preachers, theologians, philosophers, psychotherapists and life coaches who have tried to fill the gap and help deliver whatever knowledge that removes suffering.

When I became seriously interested in Buddhism in 1963, and met Christmas Humphreys, President of the Buddhist Society in London, and listened to the discourse of a certain Zen abbot, the most important thing to know was about their own experience. If I seek Nirvana, let me see someone who has achieved it already. If I seek the experience of satori, whatever that is, let me see someone who has experienced that. Neither Mr Humphreys nor the abbot had what I was looking for. They were jolly people, certainly not unhappy in any obvious sense, but they did not instil in me any hope, or sense of vocation. A girlfriend at that time introduced me to the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, just as I introduced her to Zen. But we were both “lost souls” and for her, suicide seemed the only way out.

I see now that it wasn’t Buddhism that could have helped deal with my unhappiness (dukkha, suffering) at the time. According to the Four Noble Truths, suffering is caused by desire, so desire must be let go of. This aspect of Buddhism makes no sense to me. Desire may leave me, but I cannot leave desire. Desiring life is my essence.

I never wanted riches or fame anyhow. I was full of desire for women, but that was an expression of a genuine need for love. I smoked tobacco, but that was a habit. I tried to be like other people and conform to the ways of society as I saw them. That certainly led to much suffering, but its cause was ignorance, not desire.

When ignorance went, things fell into place. When I look into the eyes of my four-year-old grandson (pictured) I fancy that he already knows much that I've only recently learned.

Two absurd testaments

Above, a Blakeian sky
Below, the White Horse, notorious pub opposite our house

Once again I am summoned to an office for a couple of days' work. It's less strange this time. The more you get used to it, the more it seems normal. I can imagine a broken-in horse saying the same thing to a mustang. The effect is to make this free time even more precious.

I'd planned to write a "Testament" but dithered, and then the summons came before I had time to overcome misgivings and publish my draft. One idea was to answer the question "By what achievements would you like to be remembered?" To play this game, you say whatever comes into your head. My extempore answer was threefold: (1) I would like to be remembered as a cloud painter, regardless of my inability to paint clouds or even find a suitable medium for a lightning sketch that captures the essence of a sky. (2) as a calligrapher, even though my handwriting is universally execrated. I was asked in the office today if my notes employed some system of shorthand, and when I said "no" whether either of my parents had been a doctor. In my imagination, my handwriting is a work of art, poetry in motion. (3) as an illuminator of sacred texts. I haven't yet decided what texts if any are sacred, but to decorate them in gold and silver and vermilion and lapis lazuli and vert and verdigris is a compelling urge. All three could be superimposed on a single "testament" on a piece of vellum as an absurdist fantasy, meaningless on the literal level but profound in the realm of angels and dreams.

Another kind of Testament would be to write my beliefs or values. Lately I have encountered (over the Net) the Primitivists, who believe civilisation has been a mistake, correctable only by returning to the life of hunter-gatherers. Since I have been tending in that direction, it was a good thing to encounter their spelt-out doctrine as a salutary corrective. They fashion my lighthearted fantasy into a religion and a serious movement. They even have logos and priests, or am I confusing them with the neo-Gnostics, whose doctrines overlap with primitivism? They think that civilisation is ripe for collapse. Yes, but you cannot predict collapse to any accuracy - maybe six years, maybe a hundred, maybe more. Much as I respect tribal consciousness, I think the flower of civilisation is the recognition of individuality. Why? It's my experience that attempting to fit in and follow the crowd can result in psychological malaise and physical illness. Civilisation does not encourage you to be yourself, but it lets you. Yet I do not give thanks to "civilisation", whatever that funny word means. There is always an implication that beyond the outer limit of civilisation - the Pale - live grunting savages in nothing but loincloths with no table manners. That’s an impression my grandmother gave me, I suppose, when she worried about my own infant savagery. Despite her conditioning, I see that civilisation in all ages has depended for its supremacy on enslaving others - the excluded - to maintain its glittering standards.

It's a paradox, but individuality leads to universality. By being truly myself, not coerced into some community, I dig deep into soul and discover brotherhood to all mankind, and cousinhood to the animal and vegetable kingdoms.

By rejecting religions and teachers, I get closer to soul and ready to accept a kind of god. Not in the sense of a Lord or a Goddess that demands my worship, but a kind of fairness and purpose to life, and help in getting through it, so that events are never random. Perhaps my actual experience is close to that of many religious people, but the joy is all the greater for being outside any framework of beliefs. Why try to eff the ineffable? Though bereft of comforting faith and reassuring congregation, I seldom feel abandoned, for there is a kind of prayer which always works.

I'd planned to spend much more time in saying these things, but it's better to blurt the words than polish them. I had the idea, silently cherished for nearly two weeks now, of writing a book, of the kind where ink is printed on bound paper pages, entitled The Pedestrian, for there is great inspiration in walking the earth in bipedal mode under the transcendental sky like our ancestors, in spite of regulations and governments and sovereign borders. "There's no discouragement / Shall make him once relent / His first avowed intent / to be a Pilgrim" (John Bunyan)