Where do I not find the sacred in my life?

Probably when I make the effort to consider something or someone as being sacred. The imputational effort dilutes and distorts and demeans the omnipresence of Spirit.

Jon x

I don't very much, frankly...I'd much rather watch football and get drunk and tell sexist jokes and grok the rest of the cultural heat-death of the banal and hang out with blokes who have those haircuts that change style dramatically at the mid-temple level...and talking of levels, the mortgage interest rates have dropped through the floorboards here in Auld Blighty so,since my mortgage deal is up for immanent renewal, I'll have even more disposable income to vent my unreflective spleen upon......

..what the hell am I doing writing this crap????..I guess I'm feeling hostile that I have so much work to do and am sublimating it into this blog which plays for cheap and unsubtle laffs on the face of it ...
                                                          (the polemicised-view  stand-up comedic thang died in the late Thatcher era here in the UK and I cannot really flounce it about as I could were I wearing classic clothing like an open shirt with big big collar wings or a safari jacket or whatever..and why it died I cannot be bothered to explain but it has to do with the pressures of rank greed coupled with critical-mass subcultural fragmentation rendering polemicism - most frightening imo when watching policemen beating on striking printworkers - seriously unfunny.....wups..I suppose I did explain my reasonning there...)
                                                              .......but whose humour is underscored with inyerface passive aggression threaded with unironic inverted snobbery.....

Ah...economics, workaholism, humour, death.....it's all in the mirror's reflection today...

Well yesterday I posted up that I'd be founding Psychoastralism and my respondees got all bread-headed about the thang...don't know why that happened.......anyways, the Good Book sayeth that the labourer is worth his hire.....and if you marry that one up with tony Robbins' Giant Within dictum that you have to come up with a unique idea to sell the hell out of.....(and his, of course, was to sell corporate pyramid-climbing tactics to people who were not, in fact, in corporate climates)......then Psychoastralism enables you to eat, drink, have sex and non-exercise  what you want when you want and you still get enlightened!!!...all you have to do is decide FROM THIS MINUTE ON that you are a Buddha and every action from now on will be the action of a Buddha......you must eat and drink and have sex like a Buddha would.....my training manual is a Gampopa/Shawn Phillips crib full of self-contradictions but who cares???....so are koans!!!!!...so sell your houses and send me your spondoolies asap and I will enlighten you in return...

My attitude to money? Oh, it's essential but not that essential...it's relationship with human beings is exactly the same relationship manifest existence has to the absolute noumenal notion of absolute existence...it exists, but not in the way we think it does.....Wittgenstein; "What does a pound note represent?"

Gotta go earn some money now

J xx

How is it possible, given the fact that the human psyche is tuned up to recall/retain a mere seven-plus-or-minus-two facts, or perhaps embeds in a sentence, such as the one you are currently reading, although Aurobindo or Hegel or Lacan make this here postmodern self-referential endeavour of mine look like a kintergarden scrawl in terms of sentence construction,  and Gerald Manley Hopkins did the same thing in poetry only it is seen to be a literary device for which he is lauded; a fertile coiled spring ready to sproinnng through the relief offered at the end/resolution in the final release from the parenthetical embeddings, a device used in teutonic music from Bach to Wagner and lacking in the derepressed pastoral tones of a Debussy, much to the chagrin of lovers of a dynamist like Von Karajan or Bernstein, although this sentence is less coiled and now more torturous as you have now here reached the core of inner embedded parentheses which we will now leave like newlyapprehending left-bulging brackets in a cyber-hug cypher, although I adore the dulcet French Impressionistic tones, and Bach's geometrical sonic mandalas turn me on also, the minor-key climaxes like lovers-beads timingly released from the anus, notwithstanding the purple edges of the Life Divine or Ecrits, although you may have given up now, and they may also be occupatio-style reasonnings, and maybe we can retain/recall more, that we, or perhaps I, should want to concoct such a waste of your time in the first place?

I would imagine that my life proceeds much like everybody elses; a dialectical brailling-forth whose depth of tao is measured by my receptivity to All The Stuff Outside Me impacting upon All The Stuff Inside Me with resultant quasispontaneous  felling-based actions designed to optimally retain that sort of gyroscopic stability which I tend to think of as Holding My Shit Together....

For me, it's the quality of awareness which enables me to feel those pinging little rivulets of prana in the nadi boondocks of my lower koshas which, when opened, make tiny tiny little nudges and relaxings in my deep muscular and fascial tissues enabling them to succumb to gravity with ever-increasing parity on both sides of my spine enabling that finer and deeper balance which sits as the psychospiritual plinth upon which this mental-emotional-astral-causal edifice is kalaidoscopically deployed.

Jon xx

In utero with mummy completely surrounding me and dripfeeding me with squirty biofood like an astronaut and probably vibrationally getting me to resonate with her emotional vibrations....

After that, our trustbond frayed like rotten hemp and my rapproachement crisis was, I think, poorly navigated although i believe mum did the best that she could...depend on nobody was my weighty internal tombstone for the first 24 years of my life....I grew up trusting nobody with my feelings or compensatory fantasy world or the samskara-fuelled maybe-dream maybe-pastlife-recall which condensed from its vaporous childhood latency and madness into, at 24, an identity as a sadhaka.....a rivulet of transpersonal lust pulled by a teleological gravity towards reunion with that thar Kosmic Sea....

It took a lot of time, energy and money for me to learn a social interdependence congruent with that socioeconomic interdependence we none can avoid...and I love that Covey-sired word interdependence.....to be completely dependent, I'd have to get immersed in one of those Matrix pods and have lots of tube sockets perforating my body like a cartoon shot-up cowboy......and have my faux-reality telescanned into me in wraparound transsensorial 3D.....now there's bondage.....makes a black latex catsuit-and-whip look as bongageur as a set of angel wings......tho', come to thjink of it, Milton made a point about predestination in Paradise Lost.....

Happy Obama....J x

I am brought to peace by my dog not barfing up and diahorreaing all over the bedroom carpet and so I am not at peace at the mo...I was dreaming that I was watching Poppy eat crap dogmeat in a field and i woke up and I was still smelling the dream smell and there were the contents of her gut awash before my bleary gaze like a cross betwen Jackson Pollack and sixties Mary Barnes.....mustard on blue wool.....so I've not meditated or yoga-stretched or pranayama'd or anything cos my space has been invaded......

Anyways, this bloggic outpouring  is a better way to cathart than beat the dog or get mad with todays roster of clients....I do struggle not to act out with them and mostly succeed but there's the very subtle transference stuff......there's always the very subtle stuff......

My practice...essentially abhinasyavairagya ("praxis-nonattachment"...essence of yoga....see my blog on this...second most popular on my bloglist and used, I understand by a lot of yoga teachers in the U.S. which feeds my narcissism as it also, curiously, erodes it) combined with vipashyana...this is what brings me peace in that my train of thought evaporates like dew lit by a roaring sun of evolutionary urgency....but then I flip back on again and, although I remain in Witness-to-the Life-Carnival mode much of the time these days, there's no peace here, although a modicum of equanimity (unless you shit on my carpet) but equanimity is debatably not peace...and actually I'd love to unpick that debate right now but I gotta work....Franzine, my car, is now in her last year of my ownership having taken me 100,000 miles in seven years...that's a lot of music, podcasts and audiobooks I can tell ya.....she cost me £500 in MOT repairs yesterday and she's worth every penny...like Poppy our dog, she needs respect...we all do do we not?.....and i guess a climate of mutual respect is what brings me the purest peace in this wartorn Eden of a fractured and fractallised shambolic existence where much (though thankfully not all) social intercourse is as uncomfortable and unwelcome as sitting on sodden garden furniture with the expectancy of more rain to follow......

Fronting two unfisted fingers at ye, people.

Peace unto you all in whatever definition of that word.

Jon x

A more accurate question would be "When do you feel most free" because my recognition of freedom does not involve some Julie-Andrews-over-the-hill gleefulness which precedes her bursting into The Sound Of Music.....if absolute freedom was dependent upon locale, I'd relocate to that place.....

I think of freedom as boundlessness of consciousness, the widest open Being I can Be.... this is not the same as the notion of liberty  which is being physically and morally unrestrained in a schools-out sort of way...pure liberty is that frightning sort of narcissistic psychopathy that Hollywood was fond of investing its baddies with in the bunny-boiling nineties...pure freedom, by contrast,  is buddhata, or buddha-nature, characterised by immeasurable compassion, sympathetic joy, lovingkindness and equanimity....these qualities are said to be uncovered by practice, rather than generated by it although the way we experience the developmental process does not, in the initial stages, enable us to differentiate between the two.....the dirty shirt that is me is always a clean shirt with dirt ingrained upon it, not an endemically dirty shirt....that's why we canm clean it....it being the grime or delusory elements or, technically, the defilements of our personality......

Stretching and breathing mindfully and meditating and living ethically and restraining myself from narcissistic acting-out optimises my ability to experience this freedom of consciousness because in mirroring the way this Kosmos we are and inhabit works enables us to grow more and more to behave as kosmos does before we become that Kosmos and this is the essence of Vajrayana or Tantric Buddhism...or the Hindu variey come to think of it....Kosmos does not kill or exploit  anything for there's nothing outside of Itself to kill or exploit..although murder and exploitation occur within Its compassionate embrace....likewise, Kosmos occurs within the free and limitless awareness which you are rather than vice-versa...once you realise this, that you never go anywhere,( this being an illusion generated by the at-a-distance self-objectifying viewpoint (which Kosmos cannot do except by diversifying into the likes of you and me, reader))...once you realise this then you are free as you ever were and can be, this extensionless space of consciousness, this mahakasha, this basinless basin this gateless gate this place you always were....this looking out through your pre-birth face in the knowledge that this is the face you will never see, the irror reflection being just that and not the face itself...this Pure Subject.....

And this freedom is won by binding yourself and disciplining yourself to relax in precisely the right way and it is nothing more and nothing less than this....and the right way has nothing to do with serving that couch-potato-mentality-of-an-ego either....

And maybe you will need some therapy as well because meditation and Right Conduct will not burn off all those maladaptive karmic patterns...you need a different sort of restitutive experience for that....

Anyways, to answer the question; I feel most free when I get those deep flashes of nonduality and I like it when they come on those hilltop walks.

Forgive the obfuscating hopscotching between absolute and relative perspectives.

And have a fun weekend. I'm on retreat for the weekend practising all this stuff I passionately preach...

J x

PS. I am not a Wayne Dwyer Body Double. Tho I was thinking about answering this question by saying that i feel least free when crammed into my book-promoting banner.

Who sez I don't live forever?

And there, if I'm not mistaken, is a spontaneously-generated pointing-out instruction...but maybe it doesn't count, cos I was sort of addressing Siona.....

But...but then faux gurus don't own up to that sort of gaff so maybe I'm a true guru...

Okay, I'll stop here.

j x

My blessing-in-harpie-drag would be last night's break in to my car with the resultant messy smashed window necessitating a freezing homedrive over the hills and the theft of my hefty iPod.....given my recent sojourn in Buddhaland osmosing myself yet further into Mahamudra territory like  blind-but-warm Davy Crockett, I experienced a fragmented response which combined the usual shockwave-with-furiously-sad-afterglow with a curious and somewhat new experience of exhileration that my cactus-slow growing ability to rejoice at the arrival of a spot of bad karma fruition was an excellent opportunity for practising containment.....

This Tibetan exercise of transmuting emotion into a sort of wisdom-reaction....transducing anger into patience for example.....does not sit well with me in the form in which it is currently taught, which is a wee bit monochromatic...all due respect to the Rinpoches and lay teachers......not enough attention is given to the ambivalence one feels when one is engaged in such a practice.....when I discovered the theft last night, I drove home through finely-diced timeslices, some of which contained sadistic revenge fantasy, a cold dry fury to strike fear deeply into the heart of the thief like a sharp icicle melting not-too-fast into the pericardium encountered....and other timeslices contained a crudely-manufactured mudita or sympathetic joy that the thief would now have some cool music and audiobooks to listen to....the fact that this was hard to maintain accounts for the fine-dicing of the timeslices, see-sawing between strong anger/desire and a cardboard joy.....

...And this joy has to be about my fortune in having the opportunity to deal wholesomely with this resurrection of some theft I undertook in a previous reincarnation or whatever...I cannot bring myself to feel joy for a thief who in all probability is spending the morning turning my iPod into collateral for his drug habit....somewhere down the line, he's going to find somebody has stolen from him some fifty lifetimes down the line...(maybe being pranged by Bruce Willis's flying taxi as an attractive Fifth Element drops through his roof causing a momentary lapse in avial concentration...)...I guess that's not my business...my business is in seeking to contain my experience without the little trauma causing me to shrink-wrap my awareness around it so that i identify with poor little iPodless me....

Well....I'm waiting for a call from the glass merchant right now..may have to go to Bradford (20 miles away) to get glass refitted missing my monthly massage, luncheon date and ostponing my computer man to sort out the first part of the transfer of all the stuff on this PC I'm typing this up on into the sexy top-of-the-line Mac I've just bought off our work administrator....then I'll have the capacity to blog with all sorts of groovy frills and bells this creaky cyberdinosaur could never dream of.....

Blessings-in-disguise are, in the words of a colleague of mine referred to as AFGOs...Another Fucking Growth Opportunity......yep, that sums it up for me..

J xx

 

Whispered Martin Luther King sample with early Phillip Glass backdrop.....