I have my ear pressed to a metaphorical glass tumbler pressed in turn against the Kosmic wall and I try oh so hard to hear what is going on on the other side of it.

Truth is that there is graffiti splathered all over this wall telling me that there is nothing beyond this Wall...the Wall is what It Is.

But I do not read this because my head is at right angles to It jamming an acoustically-dead glass between Me and the Whole Sheboodle.

If I really try to listen, the obvious eludes me; I never read the Writing On The Wall.

I am soooootired at the mo, listening becomes easy.....and I'm picking shards of glass out of the soles of my feet.

Thanx for the question Siona.

Jon x

Nothing's on it...there's a lot in it....

Holidays!!!.....after all those exams and work and stuff I really need a break and have not had a week off since xmas.....Tam and Lewis and I are doing the seven hour drive to Cornwall on Friday....we have a cottage booked.....all week long i have woken up and thought "5 days to go....4 days to go...".....I don't ever remember being like this since I was a nurse and disliked much of my job....I'm lacklustre around the Institute at the mo and the fire's gone out of my writing these last few weeks......

I am tired and I need a rest....interesting how one gets to experience fatigue fully in the immanence of relief...it's like we can allow ourselves to experience it when we know we're doing something about it.....

>yawn< have a nice day y'all.

Thanx for the question Siona, Jon x

Well Joy Billingsgate who lives down our street actually got herself a job...and, I'll tell ya, I had to take a magnet to me pacemaker I wuz so shocked.

There's a poem by, I think, Octavio Paz about the last tear of sorrow being the one of joy.....

And I'm thinking, now, of what the difference is between joy and happiness...so I'm looking forward to scanning all your replies to this question tonight.

Enjoy your day.

Jon x

They inform me with the utmost sincerity that Dr Doolittle is having you all on...the guy doesn't even know any of the gorilla swear words.

I used to dislike Tam's first dog Rosie...she was just a lump of moving biomass that got in the way and turned meat into dogcrap.....then after a time I got to grok her humanness...or more precisely, the qualities of warmth, forgiving and generosity-to-younger-mammals which she evidenced.....

And this is not her humanness as such....when we show these qualities, we are manifesting our sentience. 

I have learned to watch animals patiently....the heron at our river can stand stock still for hours watching the flow for sight of a refracted fish then galvanise into action like a coiled spring....cats will do more things in a five minute timeslice than dogs do in an hour....snakes having rumpy-pumpy resemble DNA strands in  an amphetaminous petrie dish......

Thanx for the question Siona.

Jon x

To my mind, true communication occurs when the commnicator thinks s/he said what the recipient thought s/he heard.

Facilitated with clarity, directness, honesty, respect and  compatible worldviews.

Jon x

The deepest losses suck the energy out of me like reverse footage of a car exhaust....the ache in the sad, heavy occlusion of mental clarity monsoons into a primal gash of a wail and few but deep tears.....after I got divorced, I was so overcome, I fell like a stone down the stairs on two occasions....I was no longer living under the same roof as my son.....

Because my mother faded gradually, the process extended like pulled sticky toffee and felt milder but for longer...she died in my arms... I was full of joy for the ease of her passing....

When helping another through the task of mourning I tend to say less but make my breathing slightly more audible as an anchor tethered to my presence.

If you want some stuff on the tasks of mourning, I'll be happy to post up later.

Warmly, Jon x

Well I understand that we only use a third of our brains.

I wonder what we do with the other third.

There's only one moment, one breath and it is Now.....this is the only breath you will ever take. The ones which apparently came before it are memories in the Now and the ones you anticipate coming after it are fantasies in the Now.

What gets in the way of being alert to this fact is your identification with the memories and fantasies which cause you to absolutise them into a faux timeline...you are always in the present moment and the centrifugal drag of your identification throws you into a distributed being whose empty centre is the reality of the emptiness of the moment and whose circular field generates your identity.

The movement from empty extensionless centre into a sort of disc dilutes your presence here and now but is necessary in order to  manifest a circumference which allows you to connect and meld with other discs in the joyous spirographic dance of Kosmos.

Warmly, Jon x

You take one planetary ecosystem in all of its intricate dynamically homeostatic blueskyed  splendour...you evolve a neocortex in a simian enabling it to gradually achieve dominion  over that system.... and then you don't bother  endowing it with anything extra that sort of passively happens to the simian; the simian must work out the next step for itself.......

Only the simian... the human domesticated primate...does not work out its salvation with diligence...instead it settles for what it has which is a nice piece of hardware designed to make a whole heap of fuzzy approximations from one moment to the next which gets it through life as inelegantly as a myopic person from birth who has never worn eyeglasses takes the fact that everything looks like a Turner landscape for granted as sharp.....and, to boot, it is wired for local, horizon-bound activity.....so it's pretty good at preparing for and dealing with an enemy army coming over the hill but utter crap at dealing with mass terrorism or figuring out the implications of nuclear war....which are by turn are invidious and worldcentric threats....this same local-activity mindset also enables the domesticated primate to make a whole pile of plastic droppings which do not biodegrade as readily as his excrement...and bury it in a big hole on the other side of the hills that enemy army marched over and forget about the whole sheboodle.....

So given the primate's predilection for rumpy-pumpy and it's contraceptive ingenuity, it's only a matter of time before the primates overpopulate the planet with no consideration whatsoever for control....because if there's no room for my five sons and daughters here...well theres plenty of land over them thar hills...I mean there always has been....what's that?.....oh, no land over them thar hills, that army we half destroyed five generations ago have built a few housing estates around the large stinking plastic landfill where nothing grows....oh....er......well

Follow the bouncing ball;

-It'ssssss
Somebody Elses Problem
They'll Inevitably Cope
That's my SEPTIC Soluuuuuuu-shun
And my heart's land-filled-with hope

So we have pretty much overpopulated the planet, raped it of stored sun energy (only organic substances burn...Fuller described it as  stored sunshine uncoiling from  wood and oil as flame)...and taken a buzzsaw to the food pyramid....hackaroonie...TIMBERRRRRRRRRR....look mom, no bees.....

So how do we reverse this?

To my mind, we have to remember that we are wired for short-term  local activity and we have to train ourselves for the Next Step in evolution....which is not growing a superneocortex over the one we have....Nature has shown us that our heads cannot get bigger without killing our mothers in childbirth...no, the next step lies in actually connecting the bits we got...brainstem, limbic, two hemispherical cortices and neocortex up....and we do this

Try this experiment....starting right now.....every time you encounter another human being, however familiar they are to you, register whether your knee-jerk response is predicated from experiencing how different you are from that other or from how you are viewing your similarities.....at the end of the day, tote up  your scores "samed-out" or "differed-up".....if you tend to respond to the other as different to yourself a lot more than  experiencing your mutuality, you may want to examine what factors motivate you to do this...same with the  samed-out  acts......

Practices which encourage me to experience our mutuality rather than our differences tend to help me stay connected to all you others as a rule....many Buddhist meditations tend to emphasise the cultivation of our mutual nature and interdependence.....

Another practice I use with increasing frequency is meditating upon death...as Jack Kornfield writes, on one's deathbed, the question one asks is not "Kow much did I earn?" but "How well did I love?"....and when I think about all the mistakes I have made on that score through defensive indifference and withdrawal, I am more motivated to cut through what remains of crap when it comes to reaching out to others.

This impulse towards experiencing mutuality rather than difference in the initial encounter....it can be cultivated.......and I think this connects us more potently than need or ideology....without the familiar familial recognition...we is all cousins at play on the family Yggdresil....then attempts to build bridges to one another get washed away by the streams of paranoia, mistrust and selfgain.

Thanx for the question Siona.

Jon x