The Loss of the Slow & The Loss of Mind

If you do not fast from the world, you will not find the kingdom [...]  Jesus said, 'I took my stand in the midst of the world, and in flesh I appeared to them. I found them all drunk and I did not find any of them thirsty. My soul ached for the infants of humanity because they are blind in their hearts and do not see...' [The Gospel of Thomas]


The loss of the slow is the loss of mind. It is a form of dementia, this loss. Indeed, the prevalence of dementia and dementia related diseases (dis-eases, unease of the self) in the 21st century is perhaps a reflection of how estranged we have become from this essential way of being. Slowness as contemplation, slowness as an understanding of one's place within the great grand scheme of things. It's little wonder that people are running about like headless chickens, searching for this and for that, gallivanting across the planet as tourists with no concern for anything other than their own narcissistic meanderings. But there is nothing to be found, at least not outside the self, nothing to search for.

"When will the kingdom come"? his followers asked. "It will not come by watching for it"


There is nothing to be found,
   even if I search.
There is nothing to do 
   but to warm myself on my own.
There is nothing to do 
   but to burn my own body and
   light the place around me.

Jukichi Yagi (1898-1927)

Now embedded within an orgy of technology and mechanics that usurps our very vitality and which seeks to further estrange us from the environment (which constitutes our self), it is no wonder that our existential constitution is now at odds with that of nature at large. And yet, since environment and organism evolve together and are so interdependent as to constitute a single evolutionary phenomenon, by succumbing to the mega-comforts and hyper-conveniences of modernity, we are effectively allowing ourselves to be estranged from our more mysterious and indefinite selves.

The kali yuga is upon us: l'age du cul. The age of spiritual and religious oblivion.

People are so attached to their ways, to their possessions, that when it finally comes to pass, the loss of those we have come to cling to (not 'love', for true love is a delicate state of acknowledgement that is far from a grasping or a gripping) causes a further devastation of mind.

People, then, engorged with an anti-contemplative way of life defined by the prevalence of business and the state of being busy (that has actually exceeded itself and become a state of manicness), have become maniacs. I have known people who, having nothing to propel them into activity, find themselves 'bored'. They are literally 'at a loss' of what to do, having no-one or no-thing to entertain them. Unable to entertain themselves (entertainment is a sort of hypnotic indoctrination), since they have never had a spare moment to develop their selves, they scurry about like agitated animals on the verge of being hunted. It is deeply disturbing to actually see this, and yet it happens every day and we pay it little attention (because, as a result of being over-convenienced, we simply cannot attend). Attention itself, as the act of attending, has become something of an encumbrance, something that, if at all possible, should be avoided at all costs. Slowness, on the other hand, as an act of deliberate attending, is an essential discipline that, like our mother tongue, we have lost to the clutter and clatter of a noise infested and spiritually oblivious society.

Demented people are all over the place. They walk among us hidden in plain sight, concealed by the masks of technology and monkey suits. In an age of terrorism, the paradox of terror is almost as  terrifying as the terror itself: The real terrorists are the consumers, the shoppers, the hedge-fund managers, stockbrokers and bankers, snake-oil salesmen, all preying (through their actions and desires, some unknowingly, some very knowingly) on the weak and the wounded. The real terrorists are those who work without living, in other words, whose job has nothing at all to do with their philosophy of life, but only to do with putting money on the table. Then there are the less innocuous terrorists, the simpletons who have allowed their brains to be outsourced to a tablet or an iphone, burying their brains and bodies in technologies and machines at every available moment, for no more reason than to espouse their own trivial and banal lives. The incapacity of people to think coherently, to think beyond mere cliche and super-imposed thoughts terrifies me, and terrifies most people who can think beyond sub-routines, for these people outnumber us and it is these people who vote, who lead, who make the ridiculous decisions to order and manipulate our society into the shambles that it is. It is these people who espouse the virtues of multiculturalism only for us to find out 30 years down the line that it was never culture (a cultivating growth) in the first place but 'exploiture' (a metaphysically void and debilitating bloating), and that the multi- just meant more money, and more GDP. It is these people who, simply counting the money, sell our ancient and semi-wild landscapes to toxic and vacuous businessmen for the sake of jobs that never in fact transpire, (and even if they did...). It is these people with their inability to think at a distance, with their greed and desire for an instant pay-off who poison our land and infect it with their dementia. Might I remind you that when Hitler came to power, the whole framework behind which he worked created thousands of jobs.

Buyers and merchants will not enter the places of my father.

It makes me want to weep when I see 'grown' men and women gazing into devices, mesmerized as a fish is by the glinting mask of its harpooner. It is a form of cerebral masturbation this behaviour, a form of indecent exposure having private phone calls in open public,  with people walking about as if with their genitalia out, demented... gone.... lost....

Plugged into the artificial and life-absorbing matrices, people no longer know how to respond, or correspond, with the world in which they are. 'World' instead of the verb it once was, is effectively now a noun, and a commodity, like everything else, like being and experience, like men and women, branded, designed, cosmeticised... and awaiting flotation on the market, occasionally tax deductible. Responsibility, as an ability to respond, is at an all time low. Maturity, (as metaphyscial growth), accordingly, is also rock bottom. And yet, especially now, is the time when we need it the most.

In an age when we have never had so much information and access to knowledge, I weep at the readiness of people to abandon the nirvana that is simply life and death as they are. [The kingdom is here and yet you do not see it]. I weep at their franticness of decorating and ornamenting; of cosmetics and not cosmos. I weep at the ignorance: at the inability to add one and one and get two, to see how their actions, their energy and existential illiteracy, their complicitous behaviours, cause the crises and conflicts that constantly afflict the world today. Their stuff: their homes and families, cars and computers, bank accounts and balderdash, are the fruits of this ignorance, of this complicity, and it is all covered in blood. I pray for them simply through being my Self, but prayer (from the few humans left in this posthumous world) is not enough. There is no hope, and those who dare speak of such a thing are clearly demented and attempting to negate their own ingrained guilt, trying to burn away the tattoos by the scratching of words.

Δεν ελπίζω τίποτα. Δε φοβούμαι τίποτα. Είμαι λέφτερος.

There is no hope. There is only reality. And the deeper you go, the clearer you see that the human is an endangered species, and man and woman an invasive one. This is why we honour the child so much, because we know, conscientiously, that they are still human, but that soon, like we adults (infants), they will have been forced to sell it out.

You have destroyed your self and deep down you know it.

If you do not fast from the world, you will not find the kingdom.

We live in an orgy of excess, of fantasy, and of fetish.

Hence, the dementia...