My Bodhisattva Vow. I'm always bleedin' well breaking it.....and lest ye think I'm breaking it through that mild slice of profanity in the last sentence, I'd remind ye that Buddha never admonished profanity but he did advise against using harsh words......so I didn't use "bleedin' well" harshly just then...or did I?....have i just created negative karma for myself and broken that thar vow?

And am i using skilful means to bend the rules justifiably? Is a middle path not being steered? Oh shi.......ahem.....

Yep it's a tuff one that Mahavrata.

J xx

Me, I'm going to grow a fuck-off Old Testament beard and wear loose purple clothing and prattle on about the molecular structure of the upper links of the Great Chain of Being until my devotees buy me enough motorised mechanical trinkets to take me so far beyond the carbon footprint that I'm up to my ajna chakra in soot.....and I'm certainly not going to go gently into that good night; I want to shoot out of  me mortal coil via me bindu visgara like a bulletand find a party or four in downtown bardo.

Jon x

A timeslice of about six hours betwen breakfast and work in which to bop around to my new Prefuse 73 download and catch up on the outstanding and voluminous correspondance I owe to many of you good Gaiaites..this timeslice to be spent on a Fijian beach watching the sift of white sand through the fingers of my right hand whilst watching surf cleft through the fingers of my left......

J x

If I knew the answer to that one I think I would have already learnt it.

And apart from the smartass oneliner, there's about fifty pages of dense object relations stuff on personality disorders I wouldn't mind osmosing before the sun sets fire to the western hills I look out over....

J xx

Two things...one for myself, one for others.

For myself, when my anger accelerates into white-core rage, it's ecstacy...which, as opposed to the interior bliss of "en-stacy", comes out of the experience of the fullest possible expression of that whom I take myself to be in the raging moment....Robert Masters writes eloquently about this somewhere, i don't recall exactly where right now.

For others; if I let others know when I am annoyed with their behaviour, I am doing them the service of letting them know where I am with them and I'm offering them food for thought regarding the consequences of their actions, inviting future empathic modification.

Jon x  

What isn't prayer when one lives from ones centre?

And when one does not, one garners the perspective of deciding there's a Big Person with whom one needs to establish rapport with...and until that Big Person is revealed to be onesSelf, one relocates the ultimate centre of gravity and evokes prayer as a form of pining.

Jon x

Offhand, the one which comes to mind right now is when I sat in my second psychotherapy marathon quite a few years ago now and Richard Erskine had been inquiring into my here-and-nowness... and I told him that I was frightened of showing my authentic self to him..and by extension, to others...and sought to connect as this dumb-ass kid brother smiley dribbly puppy instead......and he said "How can I connect with you if I cannot see who you are?"

Doinnnnng. I collapsed like a sack of potatoes in an empty elevator shaft and cried myself into dehydration in his arms.

After that, shame became less the contracted invisible aperture I lived life through and more the otiose vampire who shrivelled under the withering gaze of my loved one's loving light.

Jon x

PS Sometimes therapy marathons can be useful imo but only in conjunction with regular ongoing therapy.

That last exhalation...no... wait....that one...

When dwelling in that limitless equanimity free from distinctions and desires and aversions and lusts and charms.....a no-self floating in a not-place and yet here I am dwelling in the Image with, of course, no idea whatsoever what the surface of the mirror actually looks like when not reflecting this Image...and therein lies the Happy Mystery we braille forth into and within from one extensionless moment to the next...because, as the mahayana Buddhists remind us, form is emptiness, emptiness is form....in other words, the surface of the mirror can only ever look like that which it cannot help but reflect....and yet wanting to know thie unknowable, the Face of the Mirror is the luminous carrot which keeps us winding on up that path which hath no destination but Here and Here and Here and Here and Here.........and to have this pure knowledge in your bones (not just a bunch of concepts you think about from time to time) and I mean deep in the fibres of your being and the mitochondria of each cell that begets you....to have this will sustain you, limned in eternal bliss and you will  (different from blissful) remain happy during those time slices you move out of duality and reflect on that bliss.

Shanti J x

Well...when you're on a 747 and streaming and screaming through the solid air at subMach velocity with the starboard turbine aflame and everythings gone end-of-Alien with the alarms cawing like bad electro house and people pray in blind panic and the oxygen masks are dropping from their fitted-plastic fittings and you have your four infant kids around you and the 39k metre altitude oxygenlessness is being felt courtesy of the new crack in the plane's transverse fabric...well whose oxygen mask do you don first?...your own, right?....because, lets face it, you could faint after fitting up the second of your kids and so the other two are going to turn blue whilst you fall into the second bardo......look after yourself in a way which enables you to reach out beyond the preciousness of your own flesh-limited, flesh-fallible self..this is how I recommend you live out your span....all the literature attests to the happiness of altruists and the misery of the self-centered....read, for example, the Dalai Lama, Balzac, Czsentmihalyi, Kant, Seligman or Durkheim and that's just a scratch of the pelt of the wisdom animal we create and inhabit by virtue of our embodiment.

Warmly, Jon x

Increasing darkness, decreasing temperature, consequent challenges to my equanimity.

And that I consider myself to be in early September in the calender of my life. Winter approacheth. I'm blanketing myself in yoga and am stoking up the dharmic fire to see me through to the new year bardo. Even if it's springtime for yourself, I suggest you start stockpiling now. Summer passes swiftly as a nuclear firerocket.

J xx

Well, given that the love of my life is holed up 150 miles distant with virulent flu and is too ill even to be transported back here by me and Franzine (my 110k-journeyed car)... and my ailing father requires a lot of support...and my son is evolving Spore creatures on his new laptop and is deaf to all else in the world....and my ex-wife whose house we will all eat at is exhausted from xmas eve (long story) and the consequent stew of emotions are frothing out of my skull like bubble bath poured into a too-small font at the wellspring of an opennned-ish bindu visarga and left to percolate...changeing hues in ever-thinly-sliced time-portions........given this, what I am relearning is that nothing ever goes to plan and flavours of disappointment  unfurl like UN flags in a stiff breeze and I can wallow in futility or pay attention to it...and choosing the latter course of action...then the best form of refuge is to grok the fact that although all sorts of things crop up to thwart my narcissistic pleasure, the frame of reference itself never changes...and here and only here is the real font of abiding compassion, love and equanimity which the world needs of me..

So have a cool Yule people. Don't eat too much.....eh?..what's that?...I can't understand, you'll have to swallow that mouthful of pud first and then repeat....no!!!...repeat as in reiterate....not belch.....bugger...gonna have to change my sweater now.....

Jon xx

J xx

Well Lew and I went off to the cinema and watched Jim Carey cavort around in Yes Man which had an unexpected and, I think, inadvertant moral to the story; I  shared my view with him and i'll do so with you now...

Jim plays this divorced man with plenty of personability but a losing script who says no to most things, eschewing social engagements with a sort of awkward pleasingness covering grumpiness covering a deep sense of worthlessness like a three-tiered enactional cake....the table this cake is set upon, of course, is his true deepdown worthiness which he will not allow his friends to mirror because he is compelled to follow the losers script.....anyways, one day, he encounters the Terence Stamp character who is one of those charismatic inspirational speakers who write books full of platitudinous crap and who hold Tony Robbins-type rallys to hypnotise folk into a faux feelgood ambience which, naturlich, wears off after three days at most.....anyways, Stamp does an evangelical-conversion job on Carey ...(the film depicts Stamp with a stamp of only the faintest irony...he is seen as a paragon of material success...his mission statement is to say Yes to everything which makes his speil quite amusing...and the one follower we do get to see has done a load of globetrotting stuff so we assume that he was more affluent than most of us to start with..)...anyways Carey now decides to say Yes to every request.....

Most of the film deals with the consequences of his decision which I will not spoil for you if you have not seen it....his yesness generates physical pain, success, frustration romance etc.....and all of this enables him to feel alive...like Rhinehart's Diceman, the act of binding oneself to a categorical imperative in the samsaric seastorm is a clunky- yet -highly -effective cognitive-behavioural intervention which shakes him out of the life-negating rut he has carved for himself...and it's all good clean fun (although he does get a blow job from a pensionner who takes her false teeth out to accomplish the deed, dunno whether that's clean...looked like fun tho, given Carey's guerning face)

The point of all this as I saw it.... and maybe Hollywood didn't...was that Carey, in saying Yes to everybody, discovered that gratifying the needs of others was actually an enjoyable experience and his mentor, ironically, did not.....and when he gets the Yes/No balance settled at the film's resolution, he is seen to perform wonderful acts of charity for the homeless and is viewed as a man who can make things happen and who can love and be loved.....whilst Stamp continues to live in an empty world of inspirational rallys and white-suits and expensive cars......who does Stamp gratify?...I'd be interested to hear comments on that one...

Above our writings, we see banners depicting the likes of Michael Beckwith with his Ocean of Gratitude Cruise....how many of us can afford to indulge in this way?....the cost of that cruise would probably support an entire region's ground-water projects in a third-world desert country.....the new-age holy-rollers may prate Universal Whatever as they globetrot giving seminars that wear off but the Real Action lies elsewhere, grassrooted in local acts of genuine compassion and kindness.....

The man in the picture above? That's Arthur. Arthur lives close by and I've chatted to him at least once a week for twelve years now. Arthur doesn't know what a bodhisattva is. Nor does he go to church. He has not heard of the Tony Robbins types.  Arthur goes around Hebden Bridge doing up the gardens of the Old Folks Homes. It costs him a lot of his pension to buy the plants, although Holts, the local plant merchants, know him well enough these days to give him a substantial reduction....I have never seen Arthur without a genuine smile...and he has bags of energy..and is locally well-loved...and sort of punches my upper arm when he sees me, like Brad's friends in the Rocky Horror Picture Show......

Now there's a true source of inspiration in my opinion.

So hey folks what say you we perform a few acts of guerilla goodness today and every other day? It is only through sharing ourselves with others that we achieve lasting happiness.

I'll start by working on my anger towards all them new age holy-rollers.....

J xx

The clamp that holds up that ole gin bottle behind the bar at Shameslaya Villa

I wasn't smiling there, I was breaking wind....

I suppose it would be flying off to Slovenia, undertaking a set of psychotherapy exams in stifling heat, passing with more comfort than was evident in Siddhatha's youth, flying home endorsed to teach and supervise, getting back together with Tam and Tam moving in......work and relationship are big adventures for me..next year I start writing....

Happy new year folks. All the best for 2009.