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.

Long Live Death!

Death in the west, like the self, is one of the most maligned concepts if not practices known to man. I have yet to attend a funeral that is celebratory in the fullest sense without tears of misery and wishing that he or she had had a longer life. The truth be told, we just don't know how to die anymore. And if you don't know how to die, chances are you don't know how to live either.

Death has been exiled from us, and we men, like the gullible impressionable zombies that we are, have accepted it. Life is life, we say, life is all about living. Well, it may come as a surprise, but life is about dying too, and not just the local death that is occurring in our bodies at every moment of our lives, but the dying that is not an ending, or a finishing, but just a continuation of the way.

It is our dualistic ways which will, ironically, be the death of us, not death. Life and death, far from being sequestered in their own polar extremities, constantly communicate and engender each other. Without the one, you cannot have the other. Which of course makes all this talk of immortality (by supposedly grown up human beings) all the more absurd for this flagrant misunderstanding of this reality. Life and death are simply constituents of an ever-changing process. In the fabulous Earth's Insights, J. Baird Callicott writes:

The real world is a world of lice as well as butterflies, of horse piss as well as vintage champagne, and to the person who has truly realized this, one is as good as the other... This is difficult to accept... for it demands that one make room not grudgingly or fatalistically, but joyously and with profound gratitude, for the horse urine and lice that do in fact coexist with fine champagne and beautiful butterflies. The [holistic] view sees these as no less real, and no less wonderful, once we have transcended a petty, partial view of existence in which our comfort and unslakable thirst determine what has and has not a right to exist. In the [holistic] universe, which is one organic body of interacting parts, it is an act of self-defeating madness to insist on a never-ending diet of vintage champagne, sunshine and laughter, and to insist vehemently and with no small amount of hubris, that urine, darkness and tears be banished forever.... we cannot have one without the other.

'Simplify your life - Die!' Nietzsche used to proclaim... Naturally, for those unable to think beyond mere superimposed templates and sub-routines, this was taken the wrong way, as philosophers' remarks often are. But what he was actually saying was that by getting rid of all the tosh in your life, all the non-essential saturated fats that do nothing but clog the arteries of your mind, you will see death in a whole different light and learn to love it as you will learn to love life. In Zen, there is little difference between life and death, for they know this essential truth of simplification, and of true life-giving culture. Because we are deluded as to what life (and by extension, culture) actually is - we scurry about clamouring what it's all about - we are similarly deluded as to what death actually is.

Meditation upon death (meditatio mortis) should be a daily occurrence, Plato wrote. The Samurai had a similar saying in their Bushido.

It is more than just vaguely pathetic to witness the clinging nature of men to life when it comes to dying, especially when they appear to have led a long and fruitful life. It is the greed that gets me, the 'I want more LIFE!!' demanding, as if they had never had any in the first place. This is all very well if, as a replicant, you have a paltry four-year life span, but most of us, admittedly, have life spans way longer than that of a skin-job. To be sure, there are truly tragic cases of people dying before they've had a chance to clear away all the clutter and get to the root of it all, but if you're still talking about wanting more life at the age of forty or more, then there's little hope for you. I have one particular sixty-six year old friend who seems to think that if he doesn't 'get' his three score and ten, he's being short-changed; alas! if he could only see the greed behind such a demented statement, he might celebrate the time that he has already had.

The world is topsy-turvy to be sure (hence our need to examine it carefully), and it is something as simple as a 'birthday' (repeated ad nauseum in spite of the fact that you only have one, a second if you're disciplined enough where you awaken to your true essence) that instils within us this greed for life. 

In the final analysis, you have one birth-day and one death-day, both causes for celebration. Wake up to the deeper reality that involves you, simplify your life!, and maybe, just maybe, you will come to see as the Zens see, that there is little difference between life and death, indeed, that life and death are the same.

'To be alive is to embrace a dying life', wrote the Japanese educator Yoshio Toi.

Long live death!

The Underman (Decluttering the Superman)

It occurred to me the other night whilst reading Colin Wilson's The Outsider that the Ubermensch (Overman or Superman) of Nietzsche is actually my 'Hu-man'. In fact, it's a little topsy-turvy, as the human I am talking about (the man who has not neglected the soil for oil, and raped the mother that feeds him) is actually an under-man and not one which is, as Nietzsche implied, 'over'. The human's transcendence of man is actually an immanance, and a reaching inside, a reaching before man came upon the scene. Personally, I think Nietzsche made a big mistake with his choice of word. It is clear that he was against the idea of creating an idol or anyone that appeared superior to the ordinary human being. And there's the rub. Nietzsche's overman was not superior, and was not an idol. Like the human I espouse, he was just a human being who had rid himself of the dementia and the sickness that had infected all other men. He was a man who, in returning to the source of his self, had reunited (had re-ligioned) with what it mean to be human, and not what men had become in their brain-addled states, as pallid acquiescent zombies.

Nietzsche greatest proclamation was the death of God. What he didn't realize, or perhaps he did (!), for his forays into Taoism, Buddhism, or Hinduism, was that the death of God was in truth the death of the human. [The search for God is none other than the search for the divine in every one of us. Each of us has Buddha nature, and perhaps, unlike a tree, a dog, or a plant which also has Buddha nature, we are capable of realising it].

I am inclined to think that Nietzsche however like most people misunderstood the essence of religion, battered as they were with the bells and whistles that had come to conceal its true nature (the young Friedrich's father was a Lutheran pastor, and although he died when Friedrich was just five he had already influenced him a great deal). The bible too, is a minefield for anyone unable to decipher it. Jesus said as much about his own sayings in The Gospel of Thomas.

Whether Nietzsche or Kierkegaard, Hitchens or Dawkins, what they're riling against is not religion per se but the dogma of religion, what religion appears to have caused. But religion by itself, as it is, has not caused anything. How could it? It is the schisms and perversions, the aberations and mutations, that have been imposed upon it by man. Religion - Christianity, Islam, Judaism etc. - deconstructed (and removed of its constructs) is wonderful; it is the purest poetry of the soul. But much of it is in parable form, in koan form, and requires a before-thinking mind to unlock its secrets. It is not even good enough to inquire as a young Nietzsche wrote to his sister ('if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire') but to build upon that inquiry with enactive participation. The truth requires that one becomes religion in order to understand it. This! is the key. One cannot explain it away and then 'get it'. Religion eschews explanation and a flattening out of its royalty. Christ more or less repeated what the Buddha had said five hundred years previously when, in The Gospel of Thomas he says:

'Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death'.

There is no use trying to avoid religion, trying to dismiss it out of hand as the great instigator of wars and atrocities. It is not religion that is at fault, but man's failure to recognize it as the great binding force that unites all things, sentient or other. Religion is love whether you like it or not, whether you believe it not, for the truth can never be a matter of belief, but only the truth. If you do not accept it - if you are not it - then it is your self that is at fault, it is your self that is failing to see itself for what it actually is. The essence is still there, it cannot not be there; it's just that your present manufactured self has too much interference to tap into it, and to see it clearly. The self too has to be deconstructed.

To be sure, within today's noise-infested world it is nigh on impossible to attain a state of 'zero distortion' but that is why all the great body-minds have proclaimed the need to fast from the world, to go into the hills, to develop an intimate relationship with solitude and stillness. These are your best friends though you do not yet know it. John Locke used to say that what one needed to do was clear away all the clutter and nonsense, strip away the paint and wallpaper. And today, like no other, we have clutter in abundance: clutter of stuff, clutter of mind, clutter of body. Business is based upon clutter; news is clutter in disguise, sensationalist stuff that we do not need to see or hear, but which is there because it arouses us, and it makes money. We are constantly being preyed upon by those versed in the ways of the brain: neuro-linguistic programming, neuro-marketing, all manner of devious and unethical behaviours surround us, especially by those we least expect it from: our politicians, our priests, our teachers, our own parents. Indoctrination (of clutter) is par for the course it would seem. Our very economy depends upon clutter. And yet, as the eco part implies, in accepting this clutter, and not clearing it away on a daily basis (is this not the purpose of prayer?), we are effectively 'shitting in our own nest'.

There are actually professionals out there who call themselves 'decluttering consultants', but what one has to become is one's own consultant, one's own 'world editor' so that one might hear, see, and feel the essence of one's true and indefinite self. Left to the devices of the city or the world, one becomes deaf and blind, mute and dumb, by the age of twenty; life in the city, in man-infested world (without great space and great silence), is an apprenticeship in alienation and dehumanization.

So, in answer to anyone who might throw the word 'superior' my way. It is not I, the human, who is superior, for I am just an ordinary human being, an ordinary creature being human in the fullest sense possible, in the reality that the human is not just present in the diminished subtext of his own kind, but in the enlarged and indefinite context of the universe. Invariably then, it is he who uses the word 'superior', he who casts it at you, as if somehow you are responsible for this disease, who is confused and demented and diseased, and consequently who intuits his own disconnect from this sense of the human. In other words, it is you who is 'superior', and in your superiority, you have deluded your self, and poisoned it with your dementia.

Nietzsche's Zarathustra began as a reaction against the German philosopher's own dementia. Like Hesse after him, he preached the removal of man from the source of his self, his 'outsourcery' and sickness, and the need for him to acknowledge this if he was indeed to remedy it.

Verily a polluted stream is man. One must be an ocean to receive a polluted stream without becoming unclean. I teach you the Superman. He is the ocean; in him can your contempt be overwhelmed.

A few decades later, the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran would announce in The Prophet:

Like the ocean is your god-self;
It remains for ever undefiled [...]
Much in you is still man, and much in you is not yet man,
But a shapeless pygmy that walks asleep in the mist
searching for his own awakening.

Wake up to your oceanic ordinariness, to your pacific un-superness; only then will you realize the paradox of your self.

The Steppenwolf & The Russian Man

I "wolf" you! Inuit Saying

Being in Kazakhstan, and writing as I am of the end of the human, I thought it appropriate to mention Hesse not for the obvious choice of Steppenwolf which of course describes the confusions of a middle-aged man (I am neither middle-aged nor a 'man', nor indeed am I confused), but for a small volume of essays on Dostoevsky (who incidentally spent four years in exile in northern Kazakhstan in Semipalatinsk following four years in a prison in Omsk) called Blick Ins Chaos (In Sight of Chaos) which describes the collapse of belief and downfall of European morals (I am reminded here of the film-maker Carlos Reygadas' comments on Europe as a spiritually void place), and the concurrent arising of what he refers to as the 'Russian Man', an existential monster, post-human in the truest sense, who seeks only for his deluded self, and rejects all forms of thinking. He is a sort of beast divested of his own essence and ethic. 'It is the rejection of every strongly held moral or ethic on favour of a comperehensive laissez-faire', writes Hesse.

At the present moment, it is debatable as to whether the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, with his war-mongering antics, falls short of this description of the Russian man. But perhaps, more importantly, and what Hesse failed to foresee, is the rise of the American Man (who as we can see, needn't be hemmed in by nationality or borders). The American Man is a global phenomenon, and a toxic one. American Man, loud and brash, crude and inconsiderate, is the role-model of the new generation. He is desirous to a fault, his greed and want know no bounds. He stomps his way across the globe like some mechanical gorilla (the more divided the self, the more noise you make), unable any longer to control his self and his actions. He is marked by his constructiveness-destructiveness, his inability to respond to subtlety, his heavy-handedness in all matters relating to the heart and mind. He has been untethered from every life-giving network and instead has attached himself to artificial and life-destroying mechanisms, to scientism and certainty, to an absence of the sacred, to money and consumption. His most astonishing attribute lies not in his 'monstrous soul-stuff', nor in the fact that he is not awake or even alive in the truest sense (merely a function of proprioceptive sensations), but that he sees himself as an immortal amongst mortals, and as the epitome of civilization and progress. American Man is thus complete in his indoctrination, and his mechanization; he is entire in his dehumanization, and deadness. And this deadness continues to spread like a plague across the cool breath'd earth.

The steppenwolf here in Kazakhstan (Canis lupus lupus, also known as the Eurasian wolf or Russian forest wolf) in its plague too of overpopulation and destruction would appear to be an ideal comparison to the American Man, yet the wolf of the steppe has maintained a strict harmony with its nature in spite of its increasing numbers (caused unsurprisingly by interfering man). Hunting them, here in Kazakhstan, is almost a civic duty; there are more wolves here than in any other country, and the 'damage' they have caused to cattle and livestock (and children) is legendary. Their pelts are used as rugs and their fur for parka trims and coats the world over. Their skins are also worn by Kazakh wrestlers as if to defy theses beasts and show them who's boss. But the Steppenwolf, regardless of Homo poacher, will always be boss over man, wrestler or otherwise. The wolf of the steppe has blood coursing through its veins still, even moreso now than ever because of what man has done to it. The steppenwolf has not divided the self like man (and Hesse's Harry Haller), and confused itself with greed and gluttony and an outsourcing of its own vital energies. It makes no noise. It moves swiftly and quietly. Its howls are there to lament the death of the human (which of course is its own death too). The wolf of the steppe cannot be compared with man, indeed it would be a travesty to do so. Roaming the expansive steppe, following the herds of migrating saiga, the steppenwolf recognizes its purpose and follows it with his whole being. Man, on the contrary, boxes his self in, becomes unhealthy, becomes unholy, deludes and elides the self into thinking it is 'me'; packs it and bubble-wraps it until such a point where he is incapable of feeling anything anymore other than what he is told more often than not through the medium of sensationalism. There is no response. There is no blood coursing through him. There is no howling.

There is no wolf.

Wolf Hunt, 1862, Alexander Schwabe.

Rain-washed not Brain-washed: Waiting is Waking!

The meaning is in the waiting. R.S. Thomas


For some reason, I have tended to think of this blog as an autumn-winter thing, and not as a spring-summer one. I guess the slowness of fall and winter is more obvious than that of their more awakened counterparts. But, beneath the surface it needn't be the case, for even in the hottest season of the year, and 2014 was pretty damn hot for Glasgow, there is slowness and stillness and room for contemplation. I think the reason was that I was so invested in my Cycling Meditations (both blogs are interchangeable and should be seen as two limbs from the same body-mind) this spring and summer that I clean forgot (not about flowing slowly but) about this blog. Still, I keep a journal, and as I was flicking through it I found this rain-spattered entry for Thursday, August 13th:

[As a precursor, I have always been interested in language and the origin and relationships of words. In this case, the words are 'wait' and 'wake' and if you check out their etymologies you might find that they are not so different in their origins, coming from Old High German wahhon "to watch, be awake," related to Old English wacian "to be awake".... This has had a profound effect on me in several situations of waiting for several hours at a time: at a deserted Turkish-Greek border station waiting four hours for a train to Alexandroupoli, and at another deserted train station in Kashubia in northern Poland waiting for a train to Gdansk from Żukowo, as well as other similar points in time-space. The key here is the solitude and the silence with the actual waiting, which strangely allows the self to waken up to its surroundings in a way that is not normally evident. Waiting, thus, in such spots of silence, is actually awakening to the greater self, and should not be seen as some sort of chore as we have to view it in the west. It is perhaps more akin to an African waiting, where time-space dissolves into self and vice versa]. Anyway.... Thursday, August 13th:

Thursday, by the Kelvin - a light rain - a 'light' 'rain': can there be anything as fundamentally resuscitative? Light and water by the Kelvin, and a little cloud. And not a soul about. Even the birds have taken to the insides of trees, except that is, for the grey wagtail bobbing up and down on the river.

Utter peace. The rain seems to keep down the dust (not just of dirt and man, but of sound and echo). As a result, it is a peacefulness that is unequal to, let's say, the tranquility at the tops of mountains.

I'm waiting for big Ewan and a delivery of 'lemon'. The wood pigeons light up the sonic corridor  of this Kelvin gallery. It really is a little paradise. Indeed, my writing and my thinking (can one's thinking ever be one's own?) seem improved immensely by these few drops of rain. When I see the fools with their little designer umbrellas almost taking your eye out with their inconsiderate behaviour I have nothing but pity for them and their rain/heat/wind/ proof garments and add-ons. Effectively, they are, in their brain-washed (not rain-washed as it perhaps should be!) states, living proof that you can become life-proof.

Oh give me rain any day!

Waiting is waking!!

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...