The Secret Teachings of the Forest

i. Stone

A huge stone may wait 10,000 years without a quiver
until exactly the right moment
when it tumbles down the mountain
in an ecstasy of movement
hurling itself into the river;
for 1,000 years more
it may stand as a monument of will,
resisting the river's roar,
its fierce tear and relentless wear, until

exactly the right opportunity,
at the peak of the thousandth winter flood,
it begins its slow deliberate pilgrimage.
Down stony bed, through swirl of mud
and floating log, over ancient Cedar root
it crushes its way to the sea.

No hurrying.

An old man comes to the snow-swollen river,
carefully latys his body beneath a Cedar tree,
gazes in wonder at the huge stone surging
just under the surface of the urgent flood.
Rooted in his calm and steady gaze
he retires from his flesh and blood.

There is no need to hurry.


Red Hawk  (excerpt from his book of poems The Way of Power)


cf.  Erotic Rocks & The Spirit of Kentigern

http://wandersthroughwarsaw.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/warsaw-is-full-of-erratic-boulders-glaz.html

The Bookshops of Glasgow

I gave up buying books a few years ago when I realized

(1) how much they actually were

(2) how much space they actually took up

(3) how I could find them for free at the many Glasgow libraries I frequent...

etc..etc..

I have, over the years, in all aspects of my living, continued to run a self-editing program in the background. This more or less means that when a book comes in, one invariably goes out. This isn't exactly what happens, but it is more or less the protocol. Over the past two decades I have donated a shed-load of books to various Glasgow establishments, partly because I had already read them and they weren't worth reading again, and partly to free up space. Of course, despite having given up buying books, I still buy books! (on those rare occasions where I cannot find it in a library, and I convince myself I need to read it).

On certain occasions, I will actually read it in the bookshop instead of buying it. Waterstones in Sauchiehall Street is a pretty good shop for this kind of stuff. There is a good cafe in the basement, and, over the four floors, there are some pretty good books to be read. Normally, I buy a coffee, and then make like a cow, and start browsing... At least the philosophy section hasn't been relegated to the basement beside the toilets!

Yesterday, as I was chewing away, I came across this by Greenock-born W.S. Graham, for all those writers who wonder about the absurdities of publishing, and the joys of just writing for writing's sake:

What does it matter if the words

I choose, in the order I choose them in

Go out into a silence I know 

Nothing about, there to be let

In and entertained, and charmed

Out of their master's orders?...

[from Approaches to How They Behave] 

Many books should never be in print form at any rate. The amount of nonsense out there is remarkable. I'm very much with Kafka on this point where he says that if a book does not wake up some part of you then it ain't worth reading. Most of these books are simply soporific entertainment. And the result of carving out a career. There are few books in amongst them all that can lay the claim to truly 'waking up' the reader. Certainly, up there on the top floor, in the small philosophy and religion sections there are a few that can tease the sleeper awake but not many. Even the books here have been dumbed down and packaged to suit an altogether less discerning reader. But of course, I am confusing the idea of a 'book' with the idea of a 'product'. I should know better. I should know that the chances are not good of being knocked awake in a bookshop of this ilk. It's like a university where all the poets...

they start to sound alike
they hide behind the poem and they have
to publish more books for their
tenure and once they worry about the
number of books, there is no more poet.

[The Failure of the Poets, Red Hawk]

The Sun and the Eagle

What a beautiful flag the Kazakh banner is! A golden sun radiating above a golden eagle in full flight. The turquoise blue of the background sky combined with the penetrating gold of the eagle and sun creates a union of colour like no other.

I have rarely seen a flag so joyous in its approach to the fundamentals of what makes it a country. Nevertheless, as I have seen over the past six weeks here, things are changing, and Kazakhs are ushering in a new era of modernity (because they are seduced by the idea of modern conveniences). With this modernity invariably comes the whittling away of the attention span: the youtube generation, the incessant watching of clips and short videos, the iPads and iPhones, the video games, the whittling away of youth and mind. It's all about consumption in the end, and Kazakhs are consuming frenziedly. It's a tough thing not to be seduced in such a harsh regime (parts of Kazakhstan are still very much Soviet with all that that entails). And the weather can be quite brutal, especially in winter. So, mod cons are very appealing.

Yet, I have no truck with the seduced per se, but rather with those who are doing the seducing. They really should know better. Invariably, it's the old exploiting the young, raping their very being so they can finance a lifestyle of gluttony and greed, and set themselves apart from those they are taking advantage of. It's a class thing, a pecking order thing, a primitive and bestial thing, and we in the west are all at some point or another so immersed within it that we really can't see the wood for the trees.

In my lessons, I have seen first hand how brainwashed some of these youngsters are. It's tragic. By the age of 18, they have a philosophy of life more befitting to 50 Cent than of any sensitive and mature human. They play video games constantly, inevitably war games that involve a serious amount of warfare. That people actually argue that all this tele-killing (whether via video games or watching it on the internet via movies and media) does not affect people in what they do is a measure of how utterly demented this modern world has become. By the age of 16, most youngsters, now, have seen an unholy amount of killing. Media channels too have now taken to broadcasting it in an effort to 'appeal by appalling', and of course it works. People in this respect create the futures they purport to detest. And yet because of their ignorance, and their puffed-up pride, they cannot see it. Whether it's CNN or the BBC or simply idiots like Bill Mahler or Jimmy Kimmel, or Seth Rogan and James Franco (so much for all those degrees!) inciting world war 3 (in the name of freedom of speech no less), the modern world is drowning in imbecility masquerading as virtue.

And so, it comes to Kazakhstan, the age of the ass, and the age of oblivion. And I feel like a lone wolf crying in the wilderness.

But they do have a beautiful flag!

The Inability to Think

Man no longer thinks, he has his thinking done for him. Cogito, ergo sum has been replaced by cogitor, ergo non sum.    

Max Picard, The World of Silence.


The inability to think is one of the great danger's of our age. This inability is the result of a sort of vacuousness that penetrates our 'culture' and which permeates our minds. When I say 'think' I am talking primarily of a process that involves not just being able to join the dots but which implicates you and your being in the universe as a whole. That more or less means being able to decipher in amongst all the 'noise' - the exegesis of the media, the deception of advertisers, the lies of politicians - what is actually going on, and how you your self is implicated in these actual goings-on. Thinking then becomes a sort of 'karmic connecting' eventually leading to nirvana, whereby one, by virtue of working out one's actions (in the way that the body works out a splinter) one realises one's implication in the whole sordid mess (that had hitherto absorbed you), and does something about it. Thinking (like this) is not only intimately connected to a moral  and ethical codex but also to one's daily behaviour and being. Ultimately, then, he who thinks, is an enlightened being who has ejected his karma, thereby removing himself from the hellish cycle (of birth and rebirth); effectively, he has raised himself from the dead and achieved his own 'salvation'. His hands are no longer covered in blood, and his mind is clear of all the interference and distortion that infects so many people. Thinking is a tough thing to do, to be sure, but ultimately, if you want to be human (in the original sense), then you have a duty, and a responsibility, to think. Just as Heidegger wrote of questioning as a pious activity, insofar as it was one's duty, so to do I suggest that thinking be a responsibility of all human beings. 

Yet, in today's clamour of modernity, with all the various frequencies hammering us from every angle, it becomes increasingly difficult to think. I have been living with a 61 year old from London for the past six weeks here in Kazakhstan whilst on a teaching assignment, and it has been a revelation if only to see how incapable this man is at thinking. I have been able to see, in this experiment, how he works on super-imposed sub-routines (and second-hand thoughts, which have been handed down to him by conventions, the media etc.), and how his 'monkey mind' now requires noise, in order, paradoxically, to feel at peace. Silence and solitude themselves are threats. His constant skyping with his wife and whoever he can gets his hands on illustrates how tragically cut off (and bored) this man feels. And yet, cut-offness and boredom are simply indictments on one's self, one's lack of self-development, one's lack of a deeper understanding, and one's inability to be at peace (to read a book, have a bath, enjoy listening to some music, go for a walk), and to sit still 'Pascal-like' in a room. It is an indictment on one's shrivelled and dessicated nature, and the complete absence of any meditative factor.

But the most important factor in his inability to think is his complete inability to listen. I have seen it before where people, even after 'dancing' with them for some weeks, are still completely unaware of the physics of dialogue. This is because they are never really involved in a conversation with someone else (or something else), but only and ever involved in a monologue going on inside their own shrink-wrapped minds. When they are not speaking, they are simply thinking of what they have just said or what they are about to say. They are, emphatically, not listening. And it is this 'not listening' that causes most of the problems in not being able to think. 

By contrast, the images of advertisers, and of the media, does not require people to listen. Images work in a completely different way and penetrate the mind without the need for ears. This is the dastardly truth of how we become informed, and how we are formed. Emphatically, by not having to listen.  And here, I have a prime example in the form of this 61 year old deaf and dumb man. (One's inability to listen often precludes an ability to speak).

Yet, thinking fully also implies a thinking emptily. Again, we touch on the disaster that thinking has become, especially in the West: the inability to not think. The Zen Master Seung-Sahn used to call this 'before-thinking', which was simply not falling into the trap of having to think and find an answer. The answer he maintained was already there. We just had to see it as it was. So, it was more about 'seeing' than actually thinking. But the distortion that was our concepts and constructs, and our readiness to abstract, lead us away from this seeing and ineluctable state of 'just is-ness'. The mere notion that there was only one possible answer also came into the equation. Correctness itself is a construct. And so he tried to get students to enter a state of before-thinking, a state which was empty and clear like space, and broad and wide like the ocean. Everyone has felt this spaciousness when, let's say, they enter a food-trance, or gaze emptily out of a bus window and start thinking about nothing (itself a kind of contradiction in terms). It is this 'thinking about nothing' that is so precious in the overall art of thinking. But, gradually, it is being whittled away, by the limited and inhumane objectives of a money-centric (and hence consumer-centric) way of living. Soon, there will no nothing in our thinking, no space between our thoughts, and when that happens (imagine music without space, or indeed this article!!), it is no longer the 'fall' of man (a fall implies that there is a still the possibility of breaking that fall), but the complete and utter bludgeoning of his being.

It's our readiness to think that becomes the problem. But thinking isn't just about thinking. The thinking itself is the problem. 

And therein lies the paradox. 

The Human Route

Coming empty-handed, going empty-handed -

That is human.

When you are born, where do you come from?

When you die, where do you go?

Life is like a floating cloud which appears. 

Death is like a floating cloud which disappears.

The floating cloud itself does not exist.

Life and death, coming and going, are also like this. 

But there is one thing which always remains clear.

It is pure and clear, not depending on life and death.

Then what is the one pure and clear thing?

Seung-Sahn

And so it is: people cannot think.... therefore they cannot be. And if they are not (just is), then what is the point of ethics and morals? Being human is an ethical enterprise, being post-human is not. Thus, the hellish cycle feeds itself, until eventually it comes to the crunch. And you really don't want to be around for the crunch. So, as Zen Master Seung-Sahn (Tall Mountain) used to sign off in his letters to his students:

I hope you always keep a mind which is clear like space, soon finish the great work of life and death, and save all beings from suffering.

Full Dome, Empty Dome - Zero distortion on the Kilpatrick Plateau....

The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply: Create silence! Bring men to silence. The Word of God cannot be heard in the noisy world of today. And even if it were blazoned forth with all the panoply of noise so that it could be heard in the midts of all the other noise, then it would no longer be the Word of God. Therefore create silence.

Soren Kierkegaard

40 Days in the Wilderness

Being the Christmas period, and following exactly forty days in Atyrau, Kazakhstan, on a 6 week contract with the British Council, I can see the connections with JC's own self-imposed quarantine in the desert of Judaea.

Coming to Atyrau, a sort of frontier oil town on the northern edge of the Caspian Sea, is in many ways like coming to a wilderness. Indeed, as our very own Manshuk (Project Manageress) told me this afternoon in response to how degraded the environment here has become because of the oilers, this place is virtually 'a desert'.  Forty days is also a curious period of time. To be sure, this is the twelfth time I have worked (teaching English as a foreign language) and lived abroad (and the 11th country), and it is the shortest contract I have ever had (due apparently to visa limitations and not to my troublesome nature in stirring up the locals). Last year, I noticed when I was working in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia (more oilers; in my teachings I try to undo what they have done), that it took about five weeks for me to acclimatise to the way of living, to the shipping container accommodations, and to the moronic attitudes of my overseers. After this period, I considered myself 'settled in', but the first five weeks were, as I noted at the time in my journal, a trial by fire.

The five, six, week period is significant for the sort of thorough detoxification that it imparts upon the bodymind. A detox not precisely of drugs, but rather of the narcotic nature of society. The city is perhaps the most powerful drug known to man. The western city even more so. It is no coincidence that this period, known as a quarantine (from the Italian quaranta meaning forty), is the number of days Jesus spends in the desert fasting. The fasting though it may have included food, was primarily of a social and conventional nature, that is, fasting, as he remarks in the Gospel of Thomas, from the world of men and their distractions, not in the half-hearted Thoreauvian attempt (where Thoreau had daily contact with people and the town) but in a full immersion in the self, in solitude, space and, above all, silence. This exploration of the self, above all else, is the wilderness and the quarantine that Jesus sought out. Whether or not he actually went into the desert is neither here nor there. What is 'here and there' is the inner wilderness that he immersed himself in.

There, he was tempted by none other than the devil, but woe to those again who take this at face value. The temptations are the cracks which appear every now and then and which cause him to wonder what on earth he is doing. I believe everyone has these moments of self-doubt where we look at ourselves in the existential glass and ask: What the hell am I doing here? Whether you are referring to an actual place or the mind that you have come to embody is six and half a dozen.

According to the gospels of Matthew, Mark & Luke, there were three of these moments, which sounds about right for a forty day period. Each time he was preyed upon by this self-doubt, he saw that the city and its comforts, his family and familiarity, were only a short distance away. Should he cut and run? Or should he see it through? Of course, it was a no brainer, and of course, unlike Adam, JC made the right decision.

The reason why I mention this is that, now, approaching Christmas as we are, the run-up known as Advent should be something like this quarantine insofar as it is a fasting or antidote to the orgy of excess that has literally consumed this Christian festival. Instead, however, Advent has become a sort of warning siren that resounds to all to stock up, over-consume, and horde, in the run-up to the feast. The commodification of Christmas has led to it being called 'the civil religion of captalism' and is at complete odds with what it perhaps should be. Donald Heinz in his article Christmas and the Clash of Civilizations writes of the hypocrisy that lies just beneath the surface of Christmas. He writes too of the complete turnaround of what this festival actually embodies:

Christmas magnifies a clash of civilizations between Christianity and consumer capitalism - each making religious claims about the meaning of life and each creating an ethos that models how we are to live. A festival of consumption, especially without regard for the poor, is a blatant competitor to biblical religion. But many churches scarcely notice this because they are invested in a worldview that contradicts the Christian one. In the new and better Christmas, the Incarnation is reversed. Human attention turns to all the materials that claim to be good instead of the Good that claims to be material [...] In the jostling of holy day and holiday, the Incarnation is just another ornament... Christmas as holy day is a discontinued line.

In other words, Christ and the Church have become big business. It's as if our eyes, and our very being, has been veiled with the invisible prism of consumerism. Capitalism has, like the virus that it is, infected us at the deepest level. 'Consumerism is what we look through,' Heinz notes, 'the spectacles we cannot take off'.

'How complicit is the Church, and are individual Christians, in the unmooring of Christmas from its anchorage in sacred texts and history?' He asks.

And all because we have lost touch with the wilderness, physical and metaphorical. If we might venture 'into the desert within' more often, as we should do, perhaps at least twice a year (as the festivals of Advent and Lent suggest), we might reconnect with the precious cargo that is ourselves. Instead, we are duped and seduced by the treasures outwith us. And there continues the fall.

Mathew's greatest advice was to 'be alert for you don't know what day your Lord is coming'. It was a direct reference to the great self and its 'cargo precious'. In other words, if we pay attention to our self, pay attention to what we are doing and why we are doing it, 'your Lord' will eventually arise from beneath the nonsense and all the fruitloop philosophies that Satan (aggressive capitalism) has manufactured.

As Heinz concludes, rather succinctly:

'Getting Christmas right means getting ourselves right...'

A Kazakh fisherman 'walking on water' in the middle of the great Ural River, the dividing line between Europe and Asia (hence we can surmise that he is in a sort of nomad's land which is neither Europe nor Asia).

The Headlong Fall and Exile from the Garden of Eden

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. John 1:1

Res ipsa loquitur. (A legal term referring to a self-evident truth literally translated as 'the thing speaks for itself').

Names kill!

This is not merely a reaction against my botanist/ornathologic friend's pathology of naming every plant or winged creature he sees twice (in English and in Latin) but a statement against the ever-decreasing mind of an increasingly scientistic and logical positivistic society that cannot get beyond segregation and objectification, and the ruling modes of thought of logic and reason. To be sure there are some very eloquent names out there, even some rather poetic Latin binomials - Saxifraga rotundifolia, Circaea lutetiana canadensis, Carlina acanthifolia that are not entirely logical or reasonable, but there is a danger that the name, instead of becoming a door which is opened onto a wider world, is a wall which stops and separates the observer from realising a fundamental truth. [In all fairness to my obsessive compulsive botanist friend, he realises this, that the name is a door and not a wall, and that, as the Physicist Richard Feynman once said, the name is just one step away from knowing nothing].

I recall reading a poem by the Scot Alisdair Reid called Growing, Flying, Happening in which he laments the pathology of naming, reiterating what many natives before him had already said, that to name was to miss the essence of what was being named:

Say the soft bird's name, but do not be surprised

to see it fall,

headlong, struck skyless, into its pigeonhole -

columba palumbus and you have it dead,

wedged, neat, unwinged in your head.

Aboriginal names, the (pre) Celtic or Druid tongue which might reveal something greater (and more inviting) than just an oftentimes banal and self-important name. But he can't. And it is here that I believe something vital has been lost, and covered up.

It is true that native peoples (are we not all aboriginals who have lost their way?), whether the Hopi, the Inuit, or the Tengri, the Druids, Celts or Picts, who are still connected intrinsically to the environment (and not ostracised from it as we in the developed west have become) do not have 'names' for 'things', rather, they have 'descriptions' for 'connectors' (there are no 'things' per se): the tree that oozes the yellow gunge; the plant that paralyses and heals the skin;  the ice that speaks and is not walkable. For these indigenous peoples who embody their terrain and effectively co-evolve with their environments as a single evolutionary organism, to exile their selves from the land that fed and sheltered them was to die. [The word exile itself gives you a clue to this death, from the Latin ex + solum, away from the soil]. The environment they inhabited was an immune system which served every purpose possible: medicinally, metaphysically, and nutritionally. In the so-called developed west, the 'advances' of medicine and psychiatry, food science and physical education, are just large (and expensive) woolly covers that have been pulled over our eyes to distract us from the fact that in allowing our selves to be separated from our environments, in transforming our environments from living breathing immune systems into lumber yards and theme parks, having degraded our soils (and thus our souls), we have effectively killed our selves, and are thus now the posthumous, walking dead. Names too, scientific or other (emphatically non-con-scientious, that is, standalone and unlinked to anything else) have contributed to this mass suicide of the self. Moreover, education as a whole, as Masanobu Fukuaka writes in The One-Straw Revolution is simply there because we do not know how to behave harmoniously anymore.

Whether this is down to Newtonian mechanics or Cartesian dualism, Galilieo or Copernicus, or Thomas Edison or Tesla, is neither here nor there. It is no use persecuting the dead. Rather persecute those who have followed it through and who for the life of them cannot see beyond it. The conspiracy of exile is so thick that man is blind to the truth of his self (Forgive them Father for they know not what they do). Man himself has become a mechanism, mechanical in his automated responses to his increasingly meaningless and banal hedonistic lifestyle, a standalone, skin-encapsulated entity, emphatically called 'Me',  that is in fact a parcel of walking, yet mostly sitting, dead flesh.

Re-membering the Self & The Industrialization of Memory

It is a strange thing when I go into the hills alone and trudge across the plateau and across the braes and fells. It seems that time takes on another quality (or perhaps discards a certain quality) as each time if I later try to recall it I can barely remember anything. To be sure, I can recall 'a journey' and various markers along the way, but am hard-pressed to give you, at least immediately, any details or any specifics. The physical flow of the body translates itself into a metaphysical flow of mind. With the self completely involved in the moment, it is as if the self has stepped out of itself, whilst simultaneously stepping outside the strictures of space and time. Removed from all agenda, life itself dissipates, along with the self. All that remains is an unconscious ecstasy. The journey is, at best, a vague out-line, always outside of the carefully packaged self. And within that ecstatic vagueness, memories themselves dissipate.

There's a fine line, I once wrote in an essay on these very hills, between selfishness and Selfishness. Likewise, here, I believe there to be a similarly fine line between memory and Memory. 

Let me elaborate.

I believe that the rise today of dementia related diseases, and of cognitive collapse, is not just down to the changing ways of nutrition and ways of living, or indeed old age, but emphatically down to ignorance of self. People have been waylaid from day one, (and continue to be hit over the head with a rather heavy modernization stick on a daily basis), and as a result, find themselves someway down the line, in a situation, cognitively and ontologically, of complete despair as to who they actually are. There is a profound sense of failure at the most visceral level, at not having lived, (and logically not being able to die), and worse still, at having out-sourced this living to some thing else that they're not quite able to put their finger on. And there's the rub. This is what Shakespeare hit on so eloquently and yet so concisely: 'to be or not to be, that is the question'. And it still is the question. Indeed, it might be the only question and the only quest for man today. There may be no more urgent imperative than this quest for selfhood, and for re-cognition, a re-cognition that is at once and the same a non-re-cognition.

There is a reason why old people (age is a matter of arteries, not years) tell every young child they meet to take care of their health, that it's all that matters.

Thoreau, a human who removed himself from the distractions of society and went to the woods to live deliberately, remarked way back in the mid 1800s of the quiet desperation of people's lives; this desperation is still with us, but it is no longer quiet; all you need do, if you live in a congested enough city, is to walk outside, or look at the time-ridden faces of your neighbours, and prescription-dependent friends and colleagues. Read the newspapers, listen to the news - it will reveal in an instant the desperation Thoreau and others spoke of. 

Modernity, and its desperate ways, have compartmentalised the brain-body and filed 'them' away under 'B'. No longer are we an integral part of the process of nature, but rather just another product in the assembly line of man-made consumer capitalism. The body-brain has been loaded to one side like a ship with too much ballast. We become unstable, veer to one side, start to take on water, begin to sink... and all the while we are going off course. Our precious cargo slips into the water. Obesity is simply the physical mirror of this existential and ontological destitution. We have run aground, and now we are clambering about like fairground monkeys trying, impossibly, to retrofit our hindsight onto the past.

Our 'belonging' (just another way of recognising our place within the greater system) has been destroyed in the true sense of the word, that is, de-structured.  

So what about memory? 

Well now, we live in a society (sedated and sedentary) where memories are more 'important' than ever (in the same way that commodities are important), and where time and space (emphatically segregated) are not only packaged commodities themselves but, quite alarmingly, things to kill and die for. Indeed, memories have become 'imports' and 'exports', we collect and gather them as if they were sea shells and we can't export them quickly enough onto the panoply of social network platforms that we have constructed for this purpose. Memories have become a fully-fledged industry, and this industrialization of memory (and, by extension, of time) has torn us apart from our greater identity which is at once timeless and indivisible.

Experience, however, left to ferment at its deepest level and 'let be' from this hefty pressure of industrialisation-commodification, becomes instinct, becomes Memory. This fermentation process is a function of a moving-stillness, that is, slow-burning, moving meditations which in-source one's own energy and which inculcate a sense of contemplation. In delving in to the originary body, in sourcing one’s own auto-mobility, the self is grooved into the earth and the earth, likewise, is grooved into the self. On the ground, understanding becomes incarnate, not simply notional. Memory widens out, spatially, temporally. It leaves behind annotations. It becomes delineated and recondite within the earth herself.

Experience that has transcended the barrier of conscious identity, and which has thus embedded itself in the innermost part of the self, rises to the surface un-annotated, as mysterious and mystical notions that cannot themselves be pinned down. Experience has thus matured into memory, into instinct. This affords us the possibility of transcendence itself: expansion into nothingness (or, equally, the light), and harmony (and total identity-identification) not just with the living earth but with everything. Conversely, memories toyed with, and commodified, force us under the weight of the past and the pressures of the future, denying us the possibility of the present, and of any lightness whatsoever. Thus, one can say, as the German philologist Heymann Steinthal once remarked: The animal has memory, but no memories. And we can thus infer: Man has memories, but no memory.

It is this, I believe, that has caused the rise in dementia that we see today, a rise that will continue into the 21st century which will perhaps be the century noted for mental illness and disease on an unprecedented scale. Disease, you see, cannot be avoided at this rate of modernization. As a collective entity, our health depends on all, and we're not just talking physical health. Wholeness cannot be compartmentalised. The more global communications become the more aware we become (albeit for most on a subconscious level) of the intrinsic sickness afflicting mankind (and by extension, all other sentient creatures, and everything else for that matter too).

Reconnecting to memory, and not memories, is the way to health, for then it will lead to action and compassion. Only then will we truly be able to remember and recall the self in all its fullness. The membership of the All first begins with a reconstituting and a re-membering of the self.

A Trinity of Hills - Theos, Cosmos, Anthropos aka. Big, Middle, & Little Duncolm - 

The Reconstitution of Self on the Kilpatrick Plateau...

Upon the Plateau of the Raven: The Blessed Essence of Omni-nymity

 I feel myself swell and stretch, rarefy, become boundless...   August Strindberg

I am everywhere. Lucy

Flowing and flowering in the pungent woods of Pollok Country Park... the 'plant talisman' and natural antibiotic of wild garlic, originally a native of Central Asia.


This post could well be called The Satanic Act of Selling One's Name, or indeed The Deluded Act of Naming One's Self, yet to do so would be to focus in the wrong direction; instead, I prefer the mystical approach of a neologism that so far I have only found once in all the world wide web, that of 'Omni-nymity' (by a certain aesthetic and athletic Karin Spirn).

I once wrote a poem inspired by the dawning realization that, like Strindberg had realized in his painting excursions on the Stockholm archipelago, the 'I' was no longer confined to the small and closetted self that had been constructed and packaged since the day one was born. It was a momentous occasion on the Kilpatrick Plateau, up there above the city, one summer's day, amongst the wildflowers of Boglairoch and those far-reaching views northwards to the Highlands and Alps in the distance. There was a raven on the newly planted electricity pylon. It sat there, scoping out the landscape. I stood there similarly, and knew that 'Mike Roman' didn't actually exist. It was a 'momentous' feeling yet so subtle that it seemed like just another perfectly ordinary afternoon. Only later, upon reflections, with the momentum of that moment still gestating within, was I to understand what was happening to 'my' Mind that afternoon.

Something had been born. Or perhaps more acutely, something had been excreted.

I wrote a short poem which seemed, unlike some of the poems I write, to require no effort whatsoever, and no re-tinkering. It was a fluid waterfall of consciousness that poured rapidly from this new found self through my hand and through my pen onto paper. The revelation wasn't so much that Mike Roman no longer existed. It was the plain and now obvious fact that Mike Roman had never existed. Mike Roman had simply been a carefully crafted construct that was in fact an illusion that had been built upon (and tiered up) over the course of several decades. The name itself was, coincidentally, curious, as it implied a sort of micro-man (my surname is pronounced with the stress on the last syllable), a very small man in the midst of something very much greater, very much more macro. It's just one those coincidences I guess where the name may cause the question, and the question in turn may cause the revealing (of emptiness). All that now remained were the trace elements: rock, air, the silent call of the raven.... and space-time. Yet even the space-time dimension could not be said to exist, for I was, in the spirit of that momentousness, in the essence of that moment, extemporaneous and ex-spatial, and boundless. I now existed outwith space-time.... and I knew.... I was everywhere.

I continued to write poems with titles such as The 10,000 flowers, The Great Conversation, The Haptic Response, etc.... and put together over the course of the next year three emblem books (which of course, together, constituted one book) of poetry and photography called Contours, Contact and Conscience, with the emphasis firmly on the Con-, and that state of indelible withness that I had come to feel, oh so subtley, up there on the plateau of the raven. The self, although still slowly answering to the name of Mike Roman, was now bound up in a much wider domain, and re-ligioned to a much more healthy and sacred entity. Identity, I had realised some years prior to this in these self-same hills, was not what you put on, but emphatically, what you took off.

All this was omni-nymity (and equally ano-nymity) at work: the realization that, as the word suggests, 'I' was every name and no name simultaneously, and 'every creature-creation you can think of'.

This realizing is at complete odds with the topsy-turvy world that seeks to package the self, and brand one's name upon one's forehead (thereby marking it as the property of the marketplace). You need only look at the talentless mob in the film world to see this: people who by virtue of their name and little else, have made (and continue to make) obscene amounts of money, which they then continue to spend frivolously and vacuously. They readily self-promote, market, and finally sell their packaged selves as if they were just another commodity on the marketplace. And they are. This is what capitalism has done for us. It has commodified the self. It has fragmented and commodified everything. In this respect, the economic model most of us kneel before is worse than the most aggressive virus on earth, for it infects unprecedented numbers of minds in a very short time, minds that then go on to infect landscapes, animals, and 'every creature-creation you can think of'.

This 'speci-nymity', the anti-thesis of anonymity, - effectively 'The (Trade) Mark of Cain' - has cauterized the minds of so many fruitful young humans to the point where, by their late teens or early twenties, they have been so stigmatized that their packaged name is all they have got left. Their omninymous selves have (been) sunk to the bottom of their minds. They have been branded and marked, effectively enslaved, and are now set to be sold. The irony being that they are both slave and slavemaster, and the ones who will ultimately sell their own selves into bondage.

It is a deeply tragic situation, and I almost weep at the thought, but it is one that is not entirely irreversible and unfixable. It just requires a deep and long level of solitude and silence and a gradual admission, first and foremost, that the ways of selling the self that proliferate the marketplace are ultimately self-destructive, and a dis-ease (insofar as it reduces one's wholeness and thus health). Everyone can come to this realization by their own doing. It is there deep within all of us; in some just near the surface, in others deeper than the Marianas Trench. It just requires effort, effort that will not win them any friends or fame, but probably quite the opposite. It requires leaving the herd. There is no money in this self-imposed exile except for the wealth that will enter the heart and mind because of it. One's faith in 'God' begins with one's faith in one's self, one's faith (as openness) in every creature-creation there is. It is no coincidence that in all the faiths and religions of the world 'God' is multi-named (for 'God' like Walt Whitman, or any sensitive poet in the true sense, 'contains multitudes').

There are no gains to be had in this work on the self save for the gain of absolute one-ness, and a purity of vision. The sacrifice of one's self (one's small self) is necessary in order to accede to 'paradise'. It is, with all the hard work and 'suffering' involved, a sort of crucifixion. Yet, it will be worth it for the power of insight that will accompany this death. 'The seeing mind', as the Rig Veda proclaims, 'is at home in itself'.

All that has thus encumbered you will gradually fall off the sunken shipwrecked self, and slowly it will rise to the surface, titanically. Do not wait for the moment of your physical death to admit you to this realm.

The Wildflower Meadows of Boglairoch

[Mind and world arise together. Francisco Varela, The Embodied Mind]

Fritillary and thistle
At this time of year
Their names are one
Like river-gull
Heather-hill
Moss-rock -
The longest name in the world
Is also the only name in the world…
Not so much scientific as con-scientific:
Every creature-creation you can think of -

The Plateau of the Raven.

Health & Wealth

'There are, of course humane and intelligent people among the rich of Glasgow, writes Edwin Muir in his Scottish Journey, '...it would be absurd to deny it'. Muir continues:

But if one considers them as a class one cannot ignore certain things, and particularly what may be called their geographical position in society. They are rich in the midst of poverty. Their money is made out of coal, iron, shipbuilding, and various similar things. The coal-miner, the iron-worker, and the shipyard labourer are poor. Yet it is a popular fiction that such facts are merely economic and can be confined to one sphere, and that they have no influence on the moral character, the better thoughts and feelings and habits of the rich. That cannot be the case. Wealth accumulated in such a way does not only allow its possessors the opportunity to lead a more free and comfortable life; it brings all sorts of drawbacks with it. It brings, for instance, extraordinary conventions which every successful class erects for itself and insists on living within. These conventions are in the last resort barriers set up to shut it off as completely as possible from the classes beneath it. Though in appearance as irrational as the taboos of savage tribes, the quite practical basis for such customs lies in the desire, or rather the necessity, of the rich to close themselves off from the poor, or in other words to ignore the source from which their comfort and elegance are derived. Everybody who lives a little more comfortably than the poorest of all has to exercise this customary repression almost continuously, though for the most part he is not aware of it. Accordingly the rich have psychologically a far greater burden to bear than the poor; ostentation is one of the most obvious ways of blinding themselves to it; and in this way perhaps the lives of the Glasgow rich can be explained, as well as their behaviour on public occasions.

I have always thought the rich, like Muir (although he might not explicitly say it), somewhat demented in their grasping and clinging of wealth, and their reluctance to redistribute and share it. It is, fundamentally, an irresponsible attitude, but then, as Muir implies, the rich, whether Glaswegian or other, are hardly the most mature people among us. They have not just made their money from the harder work of others in iron, steel and coal, but in slavery and disease, in tobacco and human-trafficking.

That they seek to prey, and not to share, is evidence enough of this immaturity, as is the building of the walls of conventions to protect them. Having myself worked as an EFL teacher in many different environments and had to endure what may be described as hellish enough situations of work and accommodations, I have been fortunate enough since, not to ever take for granted life and how lucky I am to have been born into Glasgow and not some god-forsaken hole in the back of beyond. I came to the realization fairly early on in life, that the true wealth lay not in ostentation and ornamentation, and accumulation, but in simply health and wholeness, heart and mind.... and a derobing of all the regalia and conventions that closet us in.

I can recall as a very young and immature 28 year old (after year-long residencies in Naples and Istanbul, and 2 years living and teaching in Paris) embarking upon a teaching post in Dakar, Senegal, and being at the beck and call of young Africans desperate to leave their country and enable the opportunities that most of us born in Britain take for granted every day. Several years later, after a year in the hard-line state of Qatar at 32, I ventured upon Zawiya in Libya (later almost entirely destroyed in the uprising of 2010) where I discovered how utterly desperate most of my students' lives were (with abducted relatives, trade sanctions, and a dilipadated infrastructure that would make a crumbling Chernobyl look modern). None of them, between the ages of 20 and 45, had the opportunity to leave their country, except perhaps to neighbouring Egypt or Tunisia. I was told by Mohanned (who was a fisherman in Zuara), and others, of the coastal town's nocturnal raft departures to the Mediterranean isle of Lampedusa and beyond. Most of them asked me if I could help them attain visas to get them out of their country, aware as they were that the shit was about to hit the fan. I remember interviewing a few of them in my amateur role as a foreign correspondent (towards the end of an intensive five month posting there) and putting together some wonderful stuff on their attitudes towards Gaddafi, which I later sent to the BBC, but of course they weren't interested without the necessary conventional journalistic qualifications.

Again, later, after Libya, I saw and lived Morocco, Jordan, Poland, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, before coming here to Kazakhstan. I breathed these places, not as tourist, but as a teacher and traveller, and most significantly as a listener and a student. From all these experiences was born and nurtured a great sense of gratitude for whatever and wherever I was, and for the circumstances (my mother's forcing me back to University after my rejection of it, amongst others) that inexorably led to this unornamented state of mind I have now. The truth be told, I was an odious little snob when I was young, my father not entirely to blame for this, but also the plethora of little snobs that I attended school with at St. Aloysius in Glasgow. My father had always fancied himself as something more than he actually was and imparted this desire to escape his class (sine nobilitas) upon his children in no uncertain terms, telling us all, myself and my three brothers that we were better than everyone else, that the Romans were not just as my school motto proclaimed 'born for greater things' (ad majora natus sum) but born as greater beings. Consequently, it took me until at least my early thirties to realize my true nature, and to throw off this great orangutan that had been hitherto clinging to my back. My brother Phillip had just hung himself causing me to re-evaluate everything, most of all my self. All these countries too helped in waking me up, in stopping the snobbery and somnambulism, to the point now where having nothing, no assets, no family (at least not in any conventional sense), no mortgage, no car, but just my brother's bicycle, and a beautifully petite rented studio flat near the river in Govan (where people do not pretend to be better or superior or dress themselves up like demented monkeys), I can consider myself 'awake' and 'liberated' from the flurry of nonsense that the sleepwalkers and the walking dead embalm their selves with on a daily basis.

The centre that I could not for the life of me find when I was younger, but which had always been there, was now all over me, and continued to expand outwards. The great change was early on in 2006 when at the age of 35 I had spent the first 8 months of the year exploring on my bicycle the hills and lochs around Glasgow. It was an awakening like no other: the transformation of a (mostly) dead man walking into a fully fledged living human being, who, once and for all, realized, through the gifts of silence, breathing and solitude, and the great tranquility of the Campsie Fells and Kilpatrick Plateau, the true nature of the unadorned self.

In But for the Grace of God, J.W.N. Sullivan, describing how he felt when hospitalized in Serbia during the First World War wrote:

I can still feel at times that the transition from an overcrowded Serbian hospital, even to a life of one room, a bed, a chair... is so vast that the millionaire's extra advantages are hardly perceptible on tat scale.

And there's the crux, which Muir touches upon above. That wealth is actually a burden, not just of responsibility, but of psychology. The stuff that we surround ourselves with distracts us from the real purpose of our lives, to share and be compassionate. It convinces us that we are somehow more than we actually are. How many times I have heard the rationale (not least from my own father): I have worked hard and I deserve these treats. [It even makes me smile as I write it]. There are none so deluded than the self-made millionaire who has worked his way 'up' from nothing to all that wealth that surrounds and infects him. [I, on the other hand, started off with nothing, as did every living creature on this planet, and still have most of it left]. This nothing is the real riches; yet we in the topsy-turvy west are apt to see it the other way, that having nothing means being poor. Yet, this is the paradox that we cannot fathom (perhaps because our arrested development and our cluttered mind will not allow it): that through an impoverishment of conventions, one may attain a sort of existential wealth.

The more stuff we surround and ornament our selves with, the more insecure we show our selves to be, and the more distracted of our true purpose we become. 'Clothes' do not maketh the man. The more clothes, the less the man. The more we adorn the self, the more hollow we become. It is a vicious ever-decreasing circle, perpetuated by a spiralling society predicated upon profit and pomp. It is, in reality, a vortex that sucks the self in, and that has to be smashed if one is to wake up from the mechanical automata that we have allowed our selves to become.

The teacher-student with his Kazakh thinking cap on! [The hat is my student, Kuzya's]. I always tell my students with a wry smile that all my clothes are hand-me-downs (which they are!) from my brother Thomas' frivolous spending habits (he hasn't quite attained the realization that I had by his age). My whole wardrobe which probably amounts to a half dozen t-shirts, 2 pairs of jeans, 2 sports jackets, a pair of boots, a pair of shoes and sandals, and 2 pairs of trainers is the sole result of my taller younger brother's boredom, and the habit he has of washing his clobber at the wrong temperature. I do have a pair of cycling shorts and cycling gloves, a pair of tracksuit bottoms, and underwear, and two shirts, which are my own doing. One of the shirts which I bought in Qatar in 2002 is still going strong 12 years later. 

Ornament & Crime

Cultivation runs to simplicity; half-way cultivation runs to ornamentation. Bruce Lee

The famed polemic by the Austrian architect Adolf Loos is the title of this post because it resonates more than ever in a world that is so decorated and ornamented as to have lost itself beneath it all. But, equally, it might just as well have been called 'Please Think Responsibly!' for the cognitive dissonance that is at the root of this ornamentation, and which  lends itself not to an awareness of this as exploitation and 'crime' but to a delusion of it as 'culture of wealth and legality'.

The whole basis of the self-fragmenting capitalist machine is to ornament and decorate and convince the consumer that he is she is a better person for it. The implication of this is arguably worse than the actuality: that if we fail to consume we are less of a person for it. Whether its titles or awards, clothes or costumes, the capitalist machine thrives upon ornamentation, and covering the self up. Advertising, let's face it, has never actually had to convince us to buy anything that we truly needed: water, shelter, food, clothes. They have complicatedly fragmented these goods, and in doing so simply provided us with the illusion of choice, making us all the more the fool for falling for it. They, the advertisers, literally see us coming, then pave that way with messianic messages so powerful that they themselves, despite knowing all the tricks in the book, fall for these messages too. The magician, who is actually a charlatan if not entirely a snake-oil salesman, effectively falls for his own misdirection. The most aggressive attribute of the post-human, aside from his propensity for self-delusion, is his gullibility and tendency to be merrily led down the garden path.

This gullibility is a result of a lack of questioning - at the root level a lack of responsibility - and a blind acquiescence to all that one is told. I realized some time ago that just because someone was older than you did not mean that they deserved any sort of respect for it. Quite the contrary. It is the older generations (with few exceptions) who have, respectively, in ignoring this responsibility to question, left this world in a worse state than when they found it. Instead of being guardians of this earth, they have, through their kowtowing to the status quo (greed, need and fear), and dressing their selves up in all manner of conventions, allowed this planet and its myriad inhabitants to explode and suffer, and become mad, in spite of our so-called advancedness. And it is gullibility that has been their crutch. It should be a crime, in fact, not to think responsibly. Instead we are approaching an Orwellian nightmare, that is in fact the opposite of this: thoughtcrime, and the almost criminal act of thinking critically, and rupturing the conventional modes of thought.

But of course, man is a herd animal, and to leave the herd-like thinking that has been branded upon him (and which he has duly accepted), is to exile oneself from the herd and invite death. Security and safety are the most primitive instincts known to most living organisms, and man, in spite of his vast brain, is no different. Just look at the people, following a celebrity endorsement, who rush out to buy said product; it amounts to nothing less than mass hysteria. But this is exactly what advertisers prey upon, the hysterical, the neurotic, and the cow-like nature of the cluttered-thinking post-human. It's not that the post-human doesn't think - that might be a blessing! - but that he thinks too much and too trivially; that his brain and Mind like his body have been ornamented to the point of collapse. His mind is filled with the frivolous and the banal, the mundane and the unimaginative. All this of course leads to entropy and atrophy, to the point where like an overweight adult, the post-human's neural network is similarly disposed. Obesity is not just a state of body, but a state too of brain and mind. If only people could see this they might realise how they have squandered their opportunities for development. But man has arrested his development to the point of eco-philosophical paralysis. And one's own stupidity is a terrifyingly difficult thing to see.

Gone is the mature, patient, and non-impulsive human, who realises he is simply a system within systems, and in staggers the impetuous, clambering, completely demented post-human. As the South-African psychiatrist David E. Cooper once said, if you're going to go mad, at least do it discretely. The Scottish geologist David Hutton was noted as having said when faced with idiots imposing their vacuousness upon the landscape, 'let's not impose our imbecility upon nature'. However, now, in l'age du cul, where madness and imbecility are the norms, it seems as if everyone is eager to show how mad they are. We have made a business out of it. Most celebrities are in fact bundles of neuroses, wrapped up in narcissism. In a society that has clearly lost control on culture, and is too far gone with exploitation, fame and fortune, [decorating the self in the most self-destructive ways possible] madness is now a virtue. And the sane ones amongst us, save for becoming a hermit, have to put up with it or else.

The antithesis to all this neurosis and decoration is the nirvanic body, which having derobed the ornamented self, seeks to work not for others, not even for oneself, but to work-play on the self/no-self. If there is any selfishness, then it is the self as the whole and healthy 'synergy of synergies' (and not as the shrink-wrapped segregate). The nirvanic body needs nothing, is nothing, fears (and hopes for) nothing. It is, simply and resolutely, itself, at once whole (and thus holy) and sacred. Any attempt to thus decorate it would be like pouring water on a duck's back. The nirvanic body becomes impervious to artificiality, becomes bulletproof to death (for you cannot kill what is already dead....), is immune to desecration; glitter and bawbles will not take hold.

In an age when we are urged to behave responsibly, to drink responsibly, to drive responsibly, surely to hell, the first port of call should be to think responsibly? The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, himself a proponent of 'persistent, courageous thinking', writes at the end of his essay The Question Concerning Technology, 'questioning is the piety of thought'. This dutiful conduct, in the age of the ass, has sadly been relegated to the scrapheap with all our other waste products. It has been smouldering there for centuries, maybe even millennia. The real question we should be asking before all else is, is it not time we put the fire out? And begin again to question what on earth is going on?

 

'The Quest is the Question...'    -   The Crane at Stobcross Quay

The Babushka Syndrome

Everything that breathes is holy. William Blake

I am everywhere. The ocean is my blood, the hills are my bones. August Strindberg

It would appear that nothing is immune from man's pathology of shrink-wrapping and packing and boxing in, not the self, not children, not Christ or the Buddha, not anything. The Buddhists speak of 'monkey-mind', the grasping, attaching pathology of a mind that has been hemmed in too much by convention, construct and code. I believe it is now worse than that, because let's face it, in the Buddha's time, there was a lot less of the flurry of nonsense that we now see today, a lot less boxes. There was no IKEA or WalMart, or Amazon, or Ebay. 

Today, man suffers from a self-imposed 'Ikea-Mind' which, as it suggests, is flat-packed, filled with a set of abstruse instructions and a how-to manual, and is invariably missing a vital component. It also takes ages to put together. That's to say nothing of the box it comes in, which also, precluding a PhD in cardboard engineering, takes a lifetime to open.

Man hasn't just allowed his multiple in-boxing to happen by those out to profit from our soul's downfall, but he has positively egged it on, bamboozled as he is by the instructions and the promise of product. He has, furthermore, vacuum-packed it - this mind - so that it is a sort of standalone entity completely closed off from everything else. Gone is the open-flowing system - the healthy breathing (holy) entity - and in comes the hermetically sealed closed system, so closed that he actually encourages the destruction of the environment that feeds and waters him and allows him to breathe.

‘We live in an age in which the ground is shifting and the foundations are shaking’, writes Ronnie Laing in The Politics of Experience. ‘When the ultimate basis of our world is in question we run to different holes in the ground, we scurry into roles, statuses, identities, interpersonal relations. We attempt to live in castles that can only be in the air, because there is no firm ground in the social cosmos on which to build'.
 

More boxes to hide into, more boltholes, more corks and plugs...

In Glasgow, there is an expression to be 'oot yer box', usually referring to an ecstatic experience involving controlled substances. However, the controlled substances are not entirely necessary. When I myself indulged in taking ecstasy and other drugs, I often thought that the drug itself, the pill or capsule or tab, was simply a 'key' that unlocked the vital chemicals already present within you. To a large extent that particular insight was true, and it is thus possible to get oot yer box without taking drugs, to be ecstatic without the need to 'pop an ecky'. It requires, however, more than a few days to master this Way, more than just a little discipline to engdender it. In fact, it requires a complete turnaround of one's mind and an ongoing correspondance with the greater self which in turn involves the gradual unpacking and putting together of Mind, not one's own per se, but simply Mind all and one. To be sure, it's a lot easier popping a pill, and we only have to look at the state of our chemically induced society (the Pharmaceutical Companies are our real governments!) to realize how dependent we have become upon them, and correspondingly, how lost (mindfully) we have allowed our selves to become. 

The mindful person truly has to abandon society at every level, has to go out on his own, leaving behind pathology and sickness, and artificially induced health, to become whole again. He has to commune with birds and trees, collect his self at the coast and in the hills, if he is to understand his own naturally ecstatic essence. This all involves working for one's self, and thus giving up all work outside that might hinder this. The sage and the poet, and let's not forget the shaman, (and we're not talking in any commercial sense here), needs space to breathe, to allow his self to rise to the surface, fully; his relatives before all else are space and silence, solitude and song. The moors and the hills are his studies; his books more important than any of his two-legged friends.

Ecstasy is a long time in the making, but make it he will, and when eventually he does, it is there for good. No pills, no drugs, no boxing in is necessary. All becomes clear. Man becomes his essential self: the ecstatic visionary. Blake said as much when he referred to men living too nervously, locked in to the endless hellish cycle of 'getting and spending'.  Everything that breathes is holy, he wrote. But man is no longer so, because he has flat-packed his self; he has sold it out, desecrated it; he has had all the life sucked out of it. Man is no longer whole, but a set of instructions,  a series of pathologies on two legs. Mental Health is the new big business of the 21st century. Mania, now, like homosexuality, is an accepted flaw.

The madmen we institutionalise are not really mad. It's just that, through our madness, we think them so. But it is really us who are mad. Ronnie Laing made a case for this, as did Foucault, and Cooper and others. But no-one listened. Instead, they all went back to their newspapers and televisions. Camus was to write in La Chute (The Fall): 'A single sentence will suffice for man: he fornicated and read the papers'.

At roughly the same time, Ronnie Laing stated his case for the fall of the human:

[W]e have forgotten most of our childhood, not only its contents but its flavour; as men of the world we hardly know of the existence of the inner world: we barely remember our dreams and make little sense of them when we do; as for our bodies we retain just sufficient proprioceptive sensations to coordinate our movements and ensure the minimum requirements for biosocial survival - to register fatigue, signals for food, sex, defaecation, sleep; beyond that, little or nothing. Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest, and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited: our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of un-learning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love.

Within the howling busy-ness of the city, of the family, of the media, of all those frequencies forcing themselves upon you, it is nigh on impossible to hear yourself think, nevermind to find your way back into the exacting silence of Mind. The self becomes desiccated, shrivelled and shrinkwrapped in an eco-nomics devoid of ethics and ecology. Indeed, eco-nomics becomes so separated from everything else, it deserves another name. From the autonomous is born the automaton. Man is now a solid commodity, farmed and sold as a fully-fledged machine. Human experience has thus been colonized. We have the commodification of the experience of space, of the experience of time, the growing desensitisation of self through technology.

There are people in those institutions, some of the ‘schizophrenics’, the ones with monstrous conglomerations in their heads (look no further than Walt ‘I contain multitudes’ Whitman, or August ‘I am the hills’ Strindberg), who are the sensitive ones, the ones who know that deep down something is seriously wrong with the way things are, but ‘lack the mind’ (amentia), and the conventional cognitive wherewithal to express it. We think them mad for it. But really, it’s only that we, the sane ones, are more easily led, more outwardly subservient, often to the point of servility and obsequiousness.

I have always thought that we in Glasgow have no excuse for our madness, in spite of our industrial heritage and all that. We are surrounded by hills and lochs, by nature in abundance that hasn't yet fallen foul to the demented profiteers. We have some of the most exquisite coastline in the world right on our doorstep; we have some of the finest libraries too, Glasgow University (a cathedral of cathedrals), and The Mitchell (the largest reference library in Europe), as well as countless excellent smaller ones by virtue of Glasgow City Council. We have no excuse living in Glasgow to be so bloody ignorant of our selves. [We also have a very generous welfare system! that can help us in those time of unavoidable (!) unemploy].

So start stripping the layers that have been heaped upon you; tear them off these masks and constumes. Get into the hills, and down the coast; develop your relationships with silence and space, solitude and song. Question all who try to encumber you, for they are the enemies of Mind. Forget about the accumulation of stuff and money!

Identity (and Mind for that matter), you will soon realise, in your increasing nakedness, is not what you put on, it's what you take off.

Degrees of Separation

Evil is not extraneous to the order of the universe; rather, it is the result of this order. Not everything can have the same rank, and the further things are from the primal source which is the absolute Good, the more they are deprived of Goodness. Evil, therefore, is nothing other than the privation of Goodness. To accept the universal order is to accept the existence of degrees of goodness, and thus, indirectly, to accept evil. We must not criticize the order of the world just because there are consequences in it which seem bad to us.  
Plotinus


Quid ergo malitia nisi boni indigentia? [Saint Ambrose, On Isaac VII, 60].


The world is a masquerade. Face, dress, and voice are all false. All wish to appear what they are not, all deceive and do not even know themselves. So says Goya in his merciless commentary on social, political and religious hypocrisy, Los Caprichos.

Again, I am impelled to pen this short analysis by the fate of one of my childhood friends who, I discovered (after trying to find him with a few key words on the appropriate search engine), had been arrested and convicted of child pornography charges and subsequently sentenced to a year in prison for the ‘exploitation of children’ having admitted viewing ‘indecent’ pictures of minors on the internet.

Immediately I was summoned to wonder if I myself should not be prosecuted too for the exploitation of children, having once upon a time, during my dark and ignorant days, purchased clothing (and other sundry items) at retail outlets which, through a more deviously concealed network, succeeded in taking advantage of minors also. Moreover, I wondered if revelling in the human form was comparable to my revelling the other day in the natural grace and innocence of the juvenile gadwalls and teals I had observed on Baron’s Haugh Wildlife Reserve just to the east of Glasgow. I wondered too if it was not hypocritical, if not dangerously short-sighted, for those complicit in the exploitation of children (through their perfunctory daily expenditures) to cast a stone at those who were not protected by the impenetrable armour of a dozen degrees of separation.

The very act of spending money includes a complex matrix of interconnections, many of which result in the manipulation, if not of children, then of people, animals, and the very earth herself. The term ‘ethical shopping’ has thus arisen to placate our consciences, and ease the guilt that otherwise might have bubbled forth at our (more often than not) unnecessary and frivolous purchases. This neat little phrase, however, does not solve the problem.

But it doesn’t simply end with shopping. Every day, I see and hear instances of children being used and exploited. On the radio and in magazines, for example, there are commercials, whether political or other, whose creators that should be utterly ashamed of themselves for their using children to further their (not the children, since children are happily aimless) aims. Likewise, in cinema and television, children are routinely ‘employed’ (another euphemism for exploited) to further the aim of its producer, director or screenwriter. That their parents consent to this exploitation (presumably at the presentation of a rather large cheque) makes matters even worse not better. I can think of several notable instances where children having thus been exposed to adulthood at such a tender and informative age, have gone on, unsurprisingly, to graduate into a world of self-abuse, and self-loathing, and finally, for the unfortunate few, the ultimate in self-criticism: suicide.

I wondered, then, if we should not all be incarcerated for a year, to give us time to think (deeply) of our hitherto concealed matriculation within a diabolical configuration in which our own capital actions and expenditures invariably, albeit some way down the line, support child exploitation, wars and terror, torture and barbarity.  It is to this end that I believe consumers to be the true terrorists, who through their removal from the (admittedly often complex) process of consumption and their resulting blind acquiescence and action, expedite and cause  terrifying things to happen. The terrorists we like to think ‘terrorists’ are simply severely disgruntled reactionaries reacting against our terrorism. Insofar as this is concerned, we westerners, in our irresponsible orgy of endless activity and consumption, are the prime movers, and they the secondary.

In allowing our very self to become product and not process (this commodification of life is the crux of the fall of the human and the emergence of the post-human), we have been removed from the process of living and of the process of processes. The process of commodification (of reverting life to death) and of what we refer to as 'shopping' is a very significant one amongst many. It is the basis for our civilization - spending money, making money - exploit-ure masquerading as culture. 'Do you think money grows on trees?' is a rethoric every child has heard more than once for his frivolous use of it. But people still don’t know where money comes from, and where it goes when they spend it; we are (self) afflicted with the absolutely moronic logic involved in say the gambling industry and by super-rich poker players that somehow 'we are doing good'; the logic however doesn't extend much further than this 'somehow'. This moronic self-delusion is indicative of how commodified people have allowed their selves to become, and of how far removed they are from the reality of the process.

The truth be told, and the truth is all very ugly in this area, modernity and ‘economic progress’ are simply operating under the same veneer of civilization in which the holocaust and other atrocities took place. It’s just that here, and this is presumably the mark of an advanced civilization (in the western sense) we have learned how to conceal it and bury it beneath so much falseness and ficiality that we, the consumers, are blind to it, (though not entirely ignorant of it).

 I say that Auschwitz is an extreme manifestation of an idea that still thrives in our midst. It shows itself in minorirties in industrial democracies; in education, education to a humanitarian point of view included, which most of the time consists in turning wonderful young people into colourless and self-righteous copies of their teachers; it becomes manifest in the nuclear threat, the constant increase in the number and power of deadly weapons and the readiness of some so-called patriots to start a war compared with which the holocaust will shrink into insignificance. It shows itself in the killing of nature and 'primitive' cultures with never a thought spent on those thus deprived of meaning for their lives; in the colossal conceit of our intellectuals, their belief that they know precisely what humanity needs and their relentless efforts to recreate people in their own, sorry image; in the infantile megalomania of some of our physicians who blackmail their patients with fear, mutilate them and then persecute them with large bills; in the lack of feeling of man so-called searchers for truth who systematically torture animals, study their discomfort and receive prizes for their cruelty.

In all this wondering then, I thought of Dostoevsky, the Russian writer (and elegant re-appraiser of things), who had himself been incarcerated in the bowels of Siberia (and then placed in exile up there in northern Kazakhstan) for simply revealing to the great masqueraders their inherent hypocrisies. (Goya, in spite of his capricious caricatures, never ripped any masks off). I wondered and I wondered and I felt sorry for my old friend whose life had now effectively been ruined, his name dragged through the mud, the ‘unclean’ badge tattooed on his arm, for simply reacting with an increasingly post-human society, a reaction, admittedly, that had mutated through the hidden repressions of a society which was not yet prepared to confess to its own. Nothing is easier than to denounce the evil-doer, Dostoevsky once said. And nothing is more difficult than to understand him.

'From the Hide' - Baron's Haugh Reserve near Motherwell, August 5th, 2011.

Ethical Shoplifting

Our culture has long since banished such mundane necessities as cooking and eating to the realm of the profane; we are wholly without a nutritional mystique. But the 'wholefood freaks' among us have learned to respect the homely wisdom of the Upanishads: "First know food. From food all things are born, by food they live, toward food they move, into food they return". For them, the interplay of yin and yang in the daily diet has become a mandala of the kitchen sink, a sutra of the supper table.

Julius Evola

The other day, my brother posted a photo of a pizza (a rather expensive pizza) he had bought from M&S. He claimed, when eventually he had unpacked it from the reams of clingfilm of cardboard, that it was mostly crust. Instead of re-boxing it, and causing a whole lot of wasted energy, he decided to pop it in the oven and eat of it what he could. He would then take the photo in to the manager and establish his case. Which he did, and he was 'rewarded' with either another like-priced pizza for free or another product at a similar price. Not only was this an ingenious way of dealing with what is sometimes an infuriating problem, but it was the absolutely right way of doing it.

My brother later joked that one should do this at all times EVEN if the product meets your expectations! He wasn't entirely joking of course, and I applauded him on this insight. You see, what we are dealing with here, whether it's M&S or Waitrose or Sainsbury's are companies that profit out of exploitation: exploitation of foreigners, and exploitation of locals. That they masquerade this exploitation as 'the creation of jobs' and 'the delivery of choice' is nothing short of concealed BS. One of my co-workers the other day commented on how marvellous M&S ready-made sandwiches were. I could not let it slip. 'Are you joking...?' I asked him 'No,' he said. 'They're absolutely wonderful'. I then informed him of why they tasted wonderful and suggested that if he wanted to have a coronary heart bypass by the age of 65 (I think he was halfway there already, the bypass that is, not the age) he should continue munching on the saturated fats that these ready-made sandwiches are loaded with. Anyone with a brain in their head (and who uses it to inquire!) would know this. But sadly, my poor co-worker having outsourced his brain a long time ago to the status quo and primitive accumulation, didn't. So I told him. And he was a little shocked.

The point I'm trying to make is that these outfits are not delivering choice out of love for you, they're not creating jobs in Egypt and China our of love for these people either; what they are doing is exploiting people, exploiting resources, and capitalising upon people's lack of inquiry, and busy workaday schedules. I have often thought (should not everyone be there own food nutritionist?) that most of what passes as ready-made meals and sandwiches should be illegal for the high amounts of saturated fats, and salt, and other nonsense, within them. In my book, it is a crime to exploit others simply so you can profit out of them. And these companies are profiteers (and hence criminals) par excellence.... And yet, most people, if not all bar a few, think them the exact opposite.

So when it comes to ethical shopping, this sort of cunning (as taking a photograph of a sub-standard product) is actually playing them at their own game without, it has to be stressed, lowering yourself to their level. There are of course those companies who are fly to this way of 'shopping': Asda for example have already removed the offer of a two pound gift token if they overcharge you (which appears to be Sainsbury's remit); now you have to actively ask for the gift token, instead of it being offered to you automatically. So, another turn of the screw....Morrison's 'refund and replace' policy has been reigned back to now just simply 'refund or replace.' If it weren't bad enough using all the tricks in the neuro-marketing playbook to get us to consume more of what we just do not need, these companies are now short-changing even our genuine requests for compensation.

Here, in Kazakhstan,  at the local grocery store and supermarket, I am quietly impressed at the lack of seductive packaging and the like (no bogofs here), used to exploit consumers and by extension exploit the earth that feeds us. Where do you think all that packaging comes from? From factories which are built on land, which produce not just products but pollution and waste, tons of it.... When it doesn't come from factories, it comes from nature itself; trees are grown for the sole purpose of being felled and made into tables and chairs; whole landscapes are given over to a sort of industrialization of murder, a double whammy in de-wilding the land and all within it, and of course growing these live sentient beings in order to kill them. In the final analysis, it all comes under the guise of progress, and it would appear that progress unlike its products (which are not 'goods' but actually, let's be honest, 'bads') is the only process that has avoided the internal mechanism of built-in obsolescence. Our whole culture is obsolete, has been for centuries. What we have now is not culture in the true sense of cultivating the human being: culture as maturity, responsibility, reciprocity. What we have instead is immaturity, active irresponsibility, and a society based on self-absorption, narcissism, and acquiescence. People wander through the consumer landscape as if like zombies. I often think George A. Romero hit the nail on the head way back when, when he filmed Dawn of the Dead in a shopping mall. It was always remain one of the great ironic films of all time, and yet people are still oblivious to their walking dead ways. Especially now at Christmas time, you can see the hypocrites lining up, unable to wait to consume, and consume and consume... It is a hellish cycle as Raoul Vaneigm once wrote, living to shop, shopping to live. In the end, writes the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, all that will be left is shopping. And we will have consumed ourselves in the process, egged on by the likes of M&S, Waitrose et al. So, the next time you feel your produce doesn't quite live up to all that packaging, take a photo of it, show the manager, and see what she has to say. Or better still, don't pay for it in the first place. Just take it. It's your duty as a responsible citizen. The revolution first begins with inquiry, then with getting off your knees and standing up....

Mon the shoplifters!

The Agony & the Ecstasy (Against Activity & The Joy of Unemployment)

In the opening chapter of his book Meditations on the Peaks, the Sicilian philosopher Julius Evola writes: 

In the modern world there are two factors that, more than any others, are responsible for hindering our realization of the spirituality that was known in the most ancient traditions: the first is the abstract character of our culture; the second is the glorification of a blind and frantic obsession with activity.

Later, Evola espouses his concerns about the pursuit of emotional responses, what we know today as 'adrenalin junkies', in the act of climbing mountains at the cost of the 'experience of the mountain':

This pursuit of radical sensations generates, especially in the United States, all kinds of extravagant and desperate feats.... these do not differ very much from other excitements or drugs, the employment of which suggests the absense rather than the presence of a true sense of personality, and also the need to be stunned rather than to possess oneself. Even the technical component in mountain climbing may degenerate; we often find climbers who are automatically inclined, out of habit, to engage in all kinds of ascents, including that of skyscrapers.

This all sounds a little familiar: red bull gives you wings and all that, jumping out of planes, bucket lists, nonsense living, and the frantic obsession with activity for the mere sake of convincing one's self that you're getting the most out of life. Nevertheless, as the inimitable Alan Watts writes in The Book: Life is not a bank to be robbed.

Life is not a quantity survey. Whether it be longevity of life or getting the most out of it, life (and, more significantly, living - life is a verb not a noun!), has never been about quantity, but rather quality. I have met people, real human beings, who, in their limited life-spans, and in coming to certain realizations attained through an attainment of a qualitative aspect to life, have lived more in their short full lives than the longest lifers the planet has to offer. I have seen children who have lived more in their first five years of life than withered old centenarians. It would appear that as long as people are embroiled within the arena of activity and acting (the word 'act' is related to the Greek agein from where we get agony, and the Middle Irish ag meaning battle) they will forever be too busy to contemplate the meaning and purpose of their living, and consequently be condemned to repeat themselves, like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up and down a hill, ad nauseum and ad infinitum.

Our freedom, our very self, has been taken hostage by capitalism and a seductive quantitative economy that is always telling us to do more, to be more, to have more. The result is angst, agitation, over-crowding, noise, pollution, garbage, waste, illness and ignorance. All this has nothing to do with qualitative living. In his seminal text Small is Beautiful, a text that should be on the curriculum of any real school, the German economist Ernst Friedrich Schumacher makes the distinction between 'actively living' through independent and critical thinking and ‘being lived’ through obedience, acquiescence and kowtowing to a limited and self-destructive status quo.

The mere idea of ‘being more’ or ‘getting more out of life’ is entirely absurd. Either you are (you ‘be’) or you are not (you don’t be). The irony is as cutting as the obvious absurdity: that in ‘making’ a living, we have little time for living itself. The virtues of unemployment and being left to your own devices is given little credit in a society obsessed with work and money and endless unceasing activity. And yet, why is it that the most vacuous people I have met are the ones who have worked all their lives in some dead-end job (all jobs that do not have the self at its centre are dead-ends) that serves little purpose to their own being other than to finance their inane and frivolous purchases and to subsidize their own existential commodification? The ones who have had spaces in their living - spaces to breathe and to inquire - are the more interesting (inter + esse, between being) by far.

For those who work unquestioningly, the pearly gates to aim for, where that living and being will ultimately take place, is apparently at the point of 'retirement' (another absurd concept), but by then, one has been so exhausted and malnourished that to envisage any sort of qualitative living quickly disappears. But this is the fantasy that postponement breeds. It is a vicious, ever-decreasing circle, and one which eventually consumes the self whole.

The absence of this activity has the potential to lead to the ecstasy (ex + stasis, out of the static, beside the manufactured self), cleared of the interference.... pure and universal. It is a long road to be sure, of one's own work (the hero is the heretic, from the Greek haeresis 'he who chooses for himself'), of long hours of self-study, of self-education, of leading oneself out and in. But it is there, in this corona of breathing space around you, in these enchanted isles of 'unemployment', the ecstatic possibility of being. By activity, let me clarify, I mean that which is not spontaneous or in keeping with one's natural tendencies. The Taoists call it 'doing not doing' or wei wu wei: this occurs when one's self is in balance with one's surroundings and one's essence; one moves forth without even trying, without contriving, without any obligations or duties. Of course, there is still 'activity' but since it is spontaneous, and in tune with the Tao, it is effortless and therefore not deserving of the definition 'activity'. Within this 'doing not doing' there is a profound simplicity at work, one might even call it 'hardship', but it is this which furthers the self, and which derobes it of any artifice and delusion. Unemployment, far from being something negative then, is a virtuous 'act of being', which gradually strips the self of its constructs, by force if necessary. It is, along with 'poverty' and the nature of the self, one of the most misunderstood and maligned practices in the West. If one could see unemployment not as a curse but as a blessing, not as a slur but as an opportunity, one might begin to see it in the light of which I am speaking.

As we find our alignment with the Tao (as we realize our intrinsic religiousness) with the rhythms of the elements within and outside of our bodies – our actions are quite naturally of the highest benefit to all who we contact.

Our living is a sutra unto itself. One begins to live poetically. At this point, there is transcendence of all that has been forced upon us. We have become the embodiment of wu wei, without action; as well as of wu nien, without thinking, and wu hsin, without mind. We have realized our place within the web of inter-being, within the cosmos, and, knowing our connection to all-that-is, can offer only thoughts, words and actions that do no harm, and which are spontaneously virtuous.

The potential for this freedom is there in the midst of everyone, but as long as we work unquestioningly, unknowingly contributing to the world crises that further devour our selves, we will go nowhere other than stepping gaily towards the gallows. It doesn't help that the we are governed by this false sense of quantity, and of majority, (I had always thought it more than just a little queer that if 6 people were mad and voted yes, and the four who were sane voted no, then our government would be one of insanity and not of health). Since our very ways are infected with this dementia (the masses are asses), would it not follow that our governers too are demented? As Colin Wilson notes in The Outsider:

For all men have a herd instinct that leads them to believe that what the majority does must be right. Unless he can evolve a set of values that will correspond to his own higher intensity of purpose, he may as well throw himself under a bus...

I have heard those in power defend the capitalist system as if their lives depended on it (and they do!), and yet their inarticulacy with respect to 'living' a life that is not predicated on exploitation and 'screwing everyone over' is astounding. In other words, all they know is the system into which they themselves have been institutionalised. The prisoner comes to love the prison, even to defend it.

And yet, if they could only take that step back (oh wad the power the giftie gie us...), and to become ecstatic, they might see the toxicity of what they are actually defending: a self-commodifying mechanism that turns process into product, and anima into the inanimate. Marx was well aware of this when he was writing Das Kapital, of the subordination of the living into the interests of production. Why does man then continue to do it, he asks himself. Because he has to live. But, as Marx was aware, there was the danger that he may actually sell himself as if he were one of the products he were producing.

The seller of labor power and the owner of money meet in the market and enter into mutual relations as commodity owners having equal rights, distinguished only by this, that one of them is a buyer and the other a seller; so that they are equal persons in the eye of the law. Such a relation can persist only on the understanding that the owner of labor power sells that labor power for a definite time and no longer; for if he should sell it once and for all, he would sell himself, would change himself from a freeman into a slave, from an owner of a commodity into a commodity. . . .

The Lebanses poet Khalil Gibran would later poeticise this in The Prophet when he wrote:

They think me mad for not selling my days for gold; and I think them mad for thinking my days have a price.

If everyone were to stop working tomorrow, the world would not collapse in on itself as many would have you believe; rather, the self-destructive paradigm of the world would shake its head, open its eyes slowly, and wake itself up from a long and very deep sleep. Only then would it realize the madness that had consumed it.