The Ikea Table

I have an Ikea table in my living room that I overlaid with a space invader mosaic. It's rather nice I think. But what was it before it was a table? How did it become this rather flimsy looking product that is both popular and cheap? When you discover the answer (the Ikea table emerges from the industrialised, deformed, and sectioned tree) you will also discover how the aborigine became man. To the point where you will notice, if your eyes are open wide enough, that man is actually no different from an Ikea table.

 

Solitude as the Best Company You'll Ever Have

Sure, I've been around. I've lived and worked in twelve countries, speak five languages, and taught (and been taught by) thousands of students of all ages and backgrounds all over the world. I've had some wonderful friends in my time, great stravaiging buddies that have  at times accompanied me on my excursions hither and thither. But I have had no buddy as fine as my own good self. And this is because like making friends you have to make allowances for yourself. But you also have to discipline that self. And it's this discipline that makes of yourself a disciple of the great Self. This is is how you get to like yourself as a friend and a confidant(e), and someone you can 'talk to' (because they are always listening) at any time of day and night, no matter where you are. I've always been friends with myself because largely I have always done what it told me to. I have always stood up for the great Self knowing that the small ego-bound self is nothing without it. Indeed, even with it, the small ego-bound self is nothing. And so, making friends with yourself is making friends with solitude just as it is understanding who you actually are, outwith the collars and leashes and job titles, and all the enslaving-enfeebling devices that re-move you from your Self. But it means getting rid of the extraneous, getting rid of the tracking devices (that are hunting you), getting rid of the machines that carry and defile you, getting rid of the dolls, dummies and pacifiers, and getting rid of people (who are no longer human but 'infections', and algorithms of the great machine that modern life has become). Once rid of this paraphernalia, identity begins to shine through your nakedness and aboriginality. And it's this original identity (that you yourself have originated and renewed through Nature) that reveals solitude to be the best company you'll ever have.

Free Bird

Air flow is total protein. Ask any plant if you don't believe me. And since people are just deluded and confused plants, that's how you build your spiritual muscles. By flying, by flowing, by soaring...

The Madness of the Levitant

I recall reading a Zen poem where the poet, residing in the hills, spoke of the madness that came with the hills:

With a bit of madness in me

which is poetry

I hover like a kestrel

among the wails of the wind.

And so, today, among the wails of the wind, and with a little bit of madness in me, I levitated, with the kestrel looking on.

The Animal Dis-Tracted

This is what the human being is: the animal distracted, and the animal that has been re-moved by brainwashed people into another way of being that actually destroys being. This is what dis-tract means: the negation of the way. And there is only one way: the way of the One.

So, get that animal back by getting back into your own body and allowing Nature to guide you. Then, devoid of distraction, one will understand everything.

Cleaning Your Bowl: The Enlightened Bike

Cleaning your bike is one of those things that ought to be performed just regularly enough to keep you cycling. It should not be performed after every trip like my brother tells me. This is the problem with having an expensive bike (like my brother has) as opposed to an inexpensive one like my own. These days, people actually spend thousands on bikes when you can pick up a great one for less than a few hundred quid. And so, they treat their bikes like lambos: all surface, all glitter, all 'look at me'! This, however, defeats the whole and healthy purpose of wild cycling. The wild cyclist rarely cleans his bowl because it doesn't need cleaning. Like cleaning your frying pan it should only be done when said frying pan starts spontaneously combusting because of clog and only then should you clean it sparingly. A wild cyclist's bike is not supposed to be clean. It's supposed to be wild. And that invariably means a bit of mud if not a bit of the land itself upon the bike.

All bicycles are born enlightened and remain so even though they may look or behave unenlightenedly.

If you don't believe me, just scrape off that filthy veneer that has attached itself to you. Whether ideology or actual dirt you have been concealed beneath a surface. As such you are an apparition of your Self.

And so it only remains for you to clean your bowl and originate yourself.

An hour later, with just a bucket of soapy water and a sponge...

The Enlightened Bike...!

Look! Sky Walker

Following a beautifully serene and scenic bike 'n hike into the Kilpatrick Braes, I considered today, egged on by the skylarks and the approaching spring, that I was some kind of skylark myself larking about in the sky. I then thought of the word 'sky-walker' not as the fictitious character from the famous blockbuster movie but as a physical reality of the levitating hiker. This is the real 'Force' and the energy field that binds all living things together: being alive and awake and fleet of foot. And you can only get it by walking the sky.

Short Circuit 2 : The Natural Short-Circuit

Electrocute yourself through engaging the electric body. Electrify that body by moving, by ascending, by hiking. This is the short circuit which Nature provides and which will gradually with repeated practice reduce the ego and the unreal to ashes.

Civilization is a closed circuit. It operates through closing. Closing as its etymology suggests as 'making inaccessible and shutting off from'. Civilization shuts itself off from Nature by exploiting her and treating her as a supermarket. Civilization also makes inacessible, through this shutting off, the spirit, since its unnatural enterprise invents an ego to withstand it. 

Thus, when the person receives Nature by embracing her, that person also creates a short circuit by electrifying their bodies which have hitherto been rendered inert by an industrialised state of being.

This short circuit then 'starts a fire' which begins to burn the ego. And if you short circuit yourself regularly enough soon that ego, through constant exposure to Nature's powers, will be reduced to ashes.

I live near enough in the centre of Glasgow, about 8 miles from here, and yet with train and bicycle and foot I can get here in great comfort and with little expense in half an hour from my flat in Cessnock. Another half hour on foot and you're already a spirit-body moving through semi-wild hills. Give it another half hour and the short-circuit is complete.