The Insanity of Progress

This morning, the little leprechaun that I live with, a 61 year old man from Birkenhead, tells me he’s off to the gym across the way, presumably to swing his shoulders and kid himself on that he’s getting fit. I’ve told him in no uncertain terms, cardio, cardio, cardio, but no, it’s too much of a chore, so he swings his shoulders and deludes himself in the process, in spite of the fact that no-one has ever died from shoulder-itis (or cancer of the shoulder). It has been a revelation living with the leprechaun (by the age of fifty we all deserve the face and body we have), if only to instil a sense of self-control in my tolerating his agitations and vacuousness. If ever there was an example of a man who has been led down the merry path of convention, it is the little leprechaun from Birkenhead. He admits it later when I press him and he tells me, “It was all there, so I took it, we all did”, when referring to the gluttony, the money, the excess of the 70s and 80s. ‘So, you just went along with the herd?’ I ask him. After a pause, he reluctantly says yes. He can’t say no, he more or less just told me as much. I can see that I have rocked his boat (of delusion). He had previously told me that he worked for Heinz as a process manager, and taster, and that’s how he got fat (actually obese). But he’s constantly back-paddling as he tries to retro-fit his thinking now to his actions then. I can see that there has been little discipline, little thought of any future consequences, no consideration of karma. Indeed, with his extremely limited intellect, a result of no reading beyond the likes of crime fiction, and of following the herd and donating all his available hours to developing macaroni cheese sauce, I very much doubt he knows what karma is. But now, of course, having neglected his body-mind for so long, it is karma who ineluctably comes calling.

Unable to think for themselves anymore, people have to be made aware of their problems by ‘professionals’, but shouldn’t we be capable of diagnosing our own problems, of listening to that inner teacher who goes by the name of intuition, and sorting it out ourselves? Are we not our own doctors, priests and metaphysicians, who, by the absurd nature of capitalism and progress have been told to outsource this innate vital talent to someone external who cannot possibly know what we feel or how we have lived other than what we articulate, and thereby cannot adequately prescribe a treatment? But no, the absurdity of progress continues unbridled and out of control, and we (careering) along with it.

Insanity is surely this 'careering' and devoting your best hours of the week over a period of decades to developing a macaroni cheese sauce and 'making a living' whilst foregoing the opportunity to actually live in and for yourself. In a word, insanity is working 50 hours a week for 40 years until you are told to piss off, like our little leprechaun, who now at the ripe old age of 61 thinks of becoming an EFL teacher, perhaps to indulge his love of tourism (as a sort of one-upmanship on his well-travelled friends), or to delude himself further into thinking he’s making a contribution. It may seem a little harsh to say it, but what can he possibly contribute to these fresh young minds other than delusion, having spent his whole life in delusion?

Insanity is this and more. Remembering that ‘sanity’ means ‘health’ and health’ means ‘wholeness’ and ‘wholeness’ means ‘holy-ness’, insanity then is neglect. Neglect of the sacred. Neglect, first and foremost of your own body and your own mind. Oh, the excuses I’ve heard you would not believe - more delusion - but if there is one thing humans are exceptional at (asides from deluding themselves) it is adapting, and no matter how many slipped discs, or sciatic nerves you have, no matter how bad your asthma or brittle bones, there is always a way to keep yourself healthy. Our reliance on modern comforts, however, have seduced us into insanity, have created that matter of 'out-sourcery' that means tendering out our own vital energies to the lowest bidder (often for little more than the minimum wage)… or to escalators and elevators or desk-jobs and sedentariness.

Neglect and negligence, let’s not forget, is the anti-thesis to religion [neg + ligio, to unbind from; re + ligio, to bind back to (kosmos: the beautiful whole)], and today within an increasingly anti-religious and sacrilegious westworld, vacuous and satanic (where satan can be defined as those who exploit the earth and others, and prey on the weak and the wounded), neglect is everywhere.

It is the great tragedy of man that he has forsaken his humanity, sold it out, and that as a consequence he has to redeem his self, and that, as is invariably the case, he always leaves it far too late. There is no redemption when there is no negligence. As I often say, believing in ‘God’ is irrelevant What is relevant and of major consequence, is that you are religious (or if that word hurts your head, then pro-contemplation and anti-neglectful). The recipe to wholeness is actually quite simple: first, get rid of any dogmatic and authoritarian versions of religion you've thus far been hit over the head with, and then start investigating. Read the great theologians, the great priests and masters, philosophers and metaphysicians, transcendentalists and poets: Merton, Picard, Pannikar…Takahashi, Seung-Sahn, Aoyama.. White, Watts, Whitman... Thoreau, Berry, Olson...  the ones who write for and from the heart and not for fame and fortune. Stop working for outfits that have little to do with your living. Realize the significance and opportunity of being 'unemployed'. Makes use of libraries and their treasures! Develop and expand the self, instead of allowing it to be shrink-wrapped and vacuum-packed by the pernicious figures of profit and power. Especially question those who need to decorate themselves with awards and costumes and titles, and who need to put letters after their names.

Bind the self back to the universe. Meditate upon your ligatures and the flowing open nature of the self. The human is not just present in the context of man, but in the context of the cosmos. Existential incest and metaphysical inbreeding is a form of dementia. Your relatives extend far beyond your own kind. Reconnect with silence and solitude. These will be your true friends. Not possessions, power and profit. With the disappearance of childhood, the greatest travesty of them all, adults have become as infants who need molly-cuddling and constantly looking after, but, really, who, in their soporific acquiescent states, should be battered over the head with a great big meditation stick!

It is only through slowness, which leads to stillness and contemplation, that we will ever be able to question critically and independently all the claptrap that a picnoleptic society violates us with and shoves in our faces. It is only through slowness that we will be able to reconnect with the sacred and critically appraise the systems and conventions we are expected to follow. Society, with its over-reliance on science (and corresponding lack of conscience) simultaneously negating other ways of knowing, with its arrogant and single-tracked view of progress and civilization, with its social imperatives that distance the self from the non-human (effectively splitting the self in two), with its epileptic state of self-consciousness and overall small-mindedness that sees relations stopping with its own kind instead of with the cosmos as a whole, is clearly mad. The anti-contemplative nature of business (busy-ness) is the road to ruin, and yet it is the backbone of economic growth and by extension of society. So, what does that tell you? It tells you that there has to be another way of growing over and above GD bloody P.  And there is: it’s called work on the self, through self-study, solitude, silence… and space. No human is an island to be sure, but we all need a little breathing space to live fully and sanely.

The Secret Art of Travel

To the eyes only looking hurriedly to the goal,
The sweetness of roaming cannot be savoured.
Forests and streams and all of the magnificent spectacles waiting along the way
Remain closed off.

Herman Hesse

The beautiful and serene Ballagan Burn near Strathblane.

The Empty City [A Postcard from Kazakhstan]

For the last several years, during the sharp, luminous months of Glasgow's mind - roughly from the end of November to the end of February - when the earth collects the sun's rays at such an angle as to highlight areas of the city hitherto unseen, I have been compiling a photo-poetic volume entitled The Empty City. This emptiness is an allusion to the fact that a city like Glasgow spends much of its time, contrary to popular belief, in a state of emptiness and silence (think of the night-times, those wet and windy days, even the sunny days when people are crammed into their pokey little offices). It's like a desert that, again contrary to conventional wisdom (which of course isn't wisdom at all but mere cleverness), spends most of its time not in boiling temperatures, but, rather, in a state of sub-zero coolness.

Anyway, here at the end of November, I am not even in Glasgow, and yet it resonates across the continents to be with me. The map is not the territory, I am. 

I am in Kazakhstan, teaching.... and learning. And here the light of Central Asia is sharp, and reminds me of the too few days when Glasgow becomes super-still and clear, full-sun-skied. Because of the flatness here, there is little to disrupt the pattern of the weather, so for the last 3 weeks it has been full sun in a full blue, largely windless sky. It has also been around minus fifteen degrees celsius, which if you wrap up and take into consideration the absence of any wind-chill factor, is actually not that cold. Yet, as I am forever telling my students who have been weaned on the wasteful and soporific effects of too much indoor heating, is fantastic for being awake (or if you prefer, awake being).

And so Glasgow is with me, even here. But why shouldn't it be, if, after all, Glasgow, from years of roaming and embedding myself in her hills and moors and buildings, has become me as I it? Glasgow travels as I travel. Glasgow goes where I goes....

And here, across the vastness of the great Eurasian steppe, there is silence and there is emptiness:

"Being and silence belong together." Max Picard

Silence is the soil
in which faith can grow:
faith as openness
faith as con-science.
The reality of silence
is that
silence is reality:
a relief of immediacy
an immediate relief.
The tongue we speak today
is no longer a mother tongue
but an orphaned one,
we mumble and mutter
in a wasteland of words
meaningless patterns, vicious
circles, noise-filled networks
in mere mud-cluttered minds.

Being and silence belong together.

 Ice-fishing on the Ural River.

Cool, Calm, Collected: The Coolness of Nature & Living Less

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

Bruce Lee


The original way needs nothing to be added, nor is it clogged up. It perfectly suffices in itself. Because human beings have the ability to think, they always want to add something, and soon everything gets clogged up.

Zen Master Kosho Uchiyama

The epitome of cool alas! is not Steve McQueen’s ride in Bullit but something far simpler, far less mechanical, some-thing that is in fact no-thing. I am of course speaking about Nature.

NATURE at large, whether a river, a hill, or a wood, exudes a coolness that one can feel as one approaches. I’m talking here primarily of coolness as a temperature as opposed to coolness as an aesthetic of attitude. Although, the attiude of a forest to remain where it is against all the odds, to remain standing and not to flee in the face of its murderers, is probably the epitome of cool as that aesthetic of attitude.

This coolness (whether attitude or temperature) is the exact opposite of the city’s heat island effect (and cringeworthy self-infatuation) where the temperature of the metropolis due to all that ‘hot air’ and wasted energy (all that fashioning and manufacturing) is a few degrees greater than the surrounding countryside. It’s not that the wood feels cool in comparison to the city, but that it is cool in its own right. Approach a forest, a mountain, or a river, preferably during summer or spring, and you will feel it, this exudation of coolness which in itself is a vision of calmness, and collectedness (where all things are bound together in this wasteless, self-enclosed ecosystem). It’s attitude too - ‘better to live on your feet than die on your knees’, ‘we shall not be moved’ - is cool in its uncompromising tone.

Where humans seem to achieve coolness with self-conscious aplomb, trees achieve it without. In other words, humans try to be cool, and in so doing, negate the very essence of coolness. Trees (or equally, rivers, and hills), in their absolute nakedness make no such effort. They simply are, and as a consequence, they are cool. There’s no trying, no ornamenting, no fashioning. At least, not from without. Humans, on the other hand, appear to think that coolness only comes from without, from what you put on, from how you decorate the self from the outside. But it’s not. That, I’m afraid, is just the wool that has been pulled over your eyes (as well as over the rest of your body) by those keen to exploit you, to profit from selling you the bells and whistles. There’s simply no money to be made from decorating you from the inside out, naturally. It’s all about the glittering surfaces, the coolness of man. But this is artifice. Identity is not what you put on, but what you take off.

It is one of the great illusions of the modern world - the greatest trick the devil ever played - the standalone identity of man as a ‘unique’ individual. Even the word ‘individual’, for anyone that still has some command of language beyond the limited syntax of a metaphysically illiterate society, tells us in no uncertain terms of our essential undividedness. If there is an identity, in other words, it is not that of a disintegrated ‘unit’ as we have come to know it, but as an integrated unity that sees the self and its environment as a single evolutionary event. As the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz once wrote in a poem he entitled Learning:

To believe you are magnificent.

And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent.

Enough labour for one human life.

Real coolness needs nothing to improve it. Not even magnificence. Life itself is cool. Why should you have to add to it? Unless of course you’re under the illusion that you ‘need’. But ‘need’ is another illusion, another PR ploy that has been blown out of all proprtion for the sake of a self-destructive economic system predicated upon growth and greed.

If there were ever an adjective that could smite the coolness of man in one fell swoop it is ‘needy’. ‘Be more dog’ huge billboards scream out, the mantra of the west. Presumably, that translates as be more needy, be more dependent, be more excitable, and quite frankly, be more stupid.

‘Don’t ever tell me that you need anything’ a Zen master famously tells his pupil. Essentials like food and water, sleep and shelter, even simple clothing, is not need. It is essential. It is a necessity. But anything that is not essential, which is more or less the vast part of capitalism’s undertaking, is need. And need is not cool. Need causes dependency, pathology, obsessiveness, unhealthy attachment and addiction. It causes the brain to turn to mush.

To be sure, within the concocted lexicon of the modern day state (a modern day state predicated upon selling), ‘need’ is often portrayed as ‘quirkiness’ or ‘zaniness’ or simply eccentricity. In other words, need, like greed, according to the market, is good. Need helps the economy grow. Need makes you more comfortable. Need helps others. But of ourse this is just another fatuous rationalization on behalf of the market. Need may well help the economy grow but at what cost? Alas! the planet is not an infinite resource, and even if it were…

If there is a 'need' and an essential requirement for man, it is, as Theodore Roszak eloquently points out in The Cult of Information:

... our need to become serious human beings, people who grow by virtue of having struggled in the solitude of the heart to find both moral dignity and personal meaning. It is our need to live deeply, to take life in our hands, to weigh and feel it, to give it deliberate shape - our own shape, the shape of our peculiar experience. Debased consumer fantasies, selfish acquisitiveness, the careerist rat race, the corruptions of elitism: these are surely among the forces that thwart our need to grow.

So… man is not cool, for he is in a constant state of illusory need, whilst disregarding the essential requirement he needs the most. He is demented, for he has been removed of his own mind (the decline of civilizations begins with a decline in metaphysics and the eco-philosophic spirit). He is like a caged lion that has spent too long behind bars and has taken to chasing and eating its flea-bitten tail. Man now takes his cues not from the great teacher herself, Nature, but from tabloids, chat shows and corporations.

The human has lost his cool. And become Man (emphatically capitalised).

On the metaphysical front, man’s coolness has, by the looks of it, been destroyed altogether, coolness as collectedness and the ability to see events from an unself-conscious and wide-angled perspective. The Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus was a great believer in accepting one’s fate calmly and dispassionately and viewing life from a broad perspective, living one’s philosophy without making a song and dance about it. He is known for his essentialist manifesto and his eagerness to simplify life to the limit, stripping it of superfluities and non-essential ingredients.

With a global population now in excess of 7 billion people and still climbing, and in spite of the astonishing scientific advances and economic progress of the modern world, worldwide suffering and inequality is still commonplace. Indeed, it is now estimated, at the onset of the third millennium, and in spite of the last half century’s efforts to reduce the inequality gap, that just 80 people, with their combined wealths, ‘own the world’.

Writing in his autobiography, Joy in Living, in 1957, the Scottish Thoreau and life-long advocate for the simple life, Dugald Semple, remarks: It is said that the Persian Empire decayed when 1 per cent of the people owned all the land, and that when Rome fell, 1,800 men owned all the then known world.

Civilization is on the edge of the precipice (yet again), having, apparently, learned nothing. So much for science and progress, and ‘civilization’. But then civilization is, paradoxically, midst our image-blasted and ocularcentric societies, not so much the art of looking at but the art of looking away, or, at the very best, the art of tele-vising and watching from a (safe enough) distance. The commodification and packaging of the individual (physically through fashion and narcissism, and metaphysically through scientism and desecration) has led man to think of himself as a finite, standalone entity. He has removed himself (and allowed his self to be removed) from nature, whilst embedding himself in concrete. He has degraded the soils and seas, treated the land like a rubbish tip when it isn’t a lumber yard and theme park, and sold his self out to the lowest bidder, occasionally tax deductible. He has sold his wings for wheels, and his eyes for screens. He can no longer entertain himself but rather needs to be entertained. His work furthermore has no bearing on his living and his philosophies are garnered from cereal boxes and TV chat shows. A century and a half ago the German philosopher Nietzsche created a stir with his pronouncement of the death of god. But it wasn’t really god that had died. It was the human in which god had been living. As far as that’s concerned, it might not be so far-fetched as to suggest that the human (man + humus) is already dead, and that people, zombified by the seduction and manipulation of an economic system predicated upon patheticness, are simply grotesque versions of their original selves with little or no capacity for independent thought.

The coolness of being human has long disappeared beneath the nonsense of man.

So what to do?

Semple, like most apostles of simple living, advocated a living closer to nature, getting out into the open air, daily walking and contact with the soil, healthy eating, and what he called ‘living biologically’. ‘We must live according to the eternal laws of life, and get rid of all this false science and craving for stimulation…’

‘To make a better world, we must aim at creating not so much better engineers but better men and women’.

Before architects and teachers, what we need are whole men and women, healthy and open-minded. ‘We cannot have architecture embodying wholeness until we have architects who are whole,’ writes Henryk Skolimowski in Living Philosophy.

In other words, go out into nature and learn from it: learn from its coolness, listen to its calmness; observe its less-ness: its wastelessness, its anxious-less-ness, its PR-less-ness, its deathlessness - there are vast lessons to be learned here, lessons that you will rarely encounter in a grasping, dualistic, and fragmented man-filled world.

Collect your self beyond the nervous energy of the city, and the cling-filmed package that you have been fashioned into, and enter your self…

Get beyond the con-fusion that has elided the small self with the indefinite self…

Question the ethics of the city…

Question the difference between man and hu-man…

Live less. Be cool!

‘Frugality is not a depressing abnegation and self-denial’, writes Skolimowski, but a positive manifestation of new qualities; only then will it become elegant frugality’.

‘Self-limitation’, writes Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ‘is the wisest and most fundamental step of a man who has obtained freedom. It is also the surest path towards its attainment.’

The orgy of excess has gone on long enough. Growth is not simply the accretion of matter around a nucleus, but a matter of inner maturity. Coolness eschews the superfluous and extraneous. Existential growth is metaphysical not material.

True coolness is nakedness.

'All our troubles began', writes Semple, 'when we put on clothes'.

A Presentation of Humanity on the Autumnal Kilpatrick Braes.....