Write a blog... that steers clear of becoming yet another positive-psychology manifesto that you readers must now have become poster-blinded and thus desensitised to...and yet which opens up your vision of what is possible for you to actualise in your life today...right in this moment in fact....without falling into the adaptively rebellious compromise of being outre for outre's sake....(myself, I like a bit of holy roller/new age bashing which veers dangerously into the territory of the outre)....

Such a blog needs to facilitate rather than proclaim, respect rather than proselytize, be light in its gravitas and be practicable in a nondirective way.....

Those who would be capable of writing such a blog are those who recogise in the deepest possible way that  the Open Ground of  Mind and the Compassion of Heart are the very same thing... like a marble carving of two snakes fucking, a helical intertwining  generating the thrilling illusion of two separate beings whilst being hewn from the one undivided substance....all thoughts, words and deeds issuing forth from this recognition are saturated with what a Japanese flower arranger would refer to as Cha-no-yu....an intentional construction of ephemeral art reflecting Suchness with a congruence which feels absolute through the felt impact of its perfection....it is this cyclone-centre behubbed dynamic stillness which strikes the pitchperfect note in the samsaric gyroscope as a recognition of the perpetual one-handed clap we live through and as....and those wise souls who are capable of striking this note create such a strong reverberation that the reader/beholder cannot help but resonate.. as purely as a tuning-fork...with its manifestation....

And therefore, when we are grounded in and as this Struck Note, we will automatically gear our thinking and feling and action in the service of limning it into the last vast morphogenic chord strummed by a desparate humanity... who sound an off-kilter minor chord on the evolutionary symphony which, like most of the best Germanic operas, keep you hanging on in pain and passion until the last resolutionary major key denoues the emotional chaos into a new-order finale...such that we collectively restructure the way things are into a new and accordant celestial harmony...which begins to decay into the higher chaos at the moment of its conception, the next movement of the Suite....

And the positive difference we make comes out of the music we are... and if the things we choose to do which come from our unconscious frame-of-reference are discordant... we need to relax our frame-of-reference and face the world we are free from fear and this dissolution of the contractive mindset requires a transmission from a more accordant being so my advice to you is go find one in the molecules if you can and if you do, check out the mental health of that being's offspring becuse their state of being will say a lot about the quality of that trnsmission.

Phew! Got quite carried away there! Off to work. Puppy photos tomorrow!!

J x   

Good question!!...I can make a good stab at defining myself, or who you are to me but that ephemeral 'we' that transcends the two of us..as 'wetnesss' is an emergent property of the yoking of two atoms of hydrogen to the chariot of the oxygen atom but not endemic to any of the three atoms....well, there's something ineffable....and if it's ineffable, you can't eff it....

Talking of wetness, we have a cute new pup in the family......I've put a pic in....

Finally, here's one I made earlier;

Four antique brass baggles

From the day of my son's birth...this was the first time I really took seriously the nature of responsibility ...despite floating through  corporate and nursing careers with reasonable success, I never put much sustained effort into anything that did not gratify myself....Lewis changed the lot....I have been where my own parents never travelled. 

Scavengers.

The colour of that bead of sweat which dripped from the theandric brow of that big mythic-creator bloke who got his image transmitted onto many an ecclesiastical ceiling with all the obese cherubs and the bolts of lightening and stuff whilst he embedded the multiverse within manifold subtleness vibrationwise....

Days are not colours and Big Blokes do not fulminate the Kosmos but I love to indulge in the archaic worldspace of my childhood without losing sight of the sense of indulgence....and the Blind Watchmaker  meets the Implicate Fractal and His head blows apart in a gory psychaedelic rainbow whose colours he sadly cannot grok.  

HOW DARE YOU IMPLY THAT THERE'S SOMETHING IN ME I DENY OR REJECT...I'M THE MOST OPEN-HEARTED, MODEST AND LEAST SELF-ABSORBED DUDE I'VE EVER MET AND IT'S MY LACK OF PERSONAL SHADOW THAT KEEPS ME PERPETUALLY CALM AND FREE OF NEGATIVITY GODDAMMIT!!!!!!!!!....

Actually, it's an interesting question. Could any of us really know that which is, by definition, concealed? Retrospectively, I suppose. But this kind of information tends to be assumptive and peppered with self-righteousness  in my experience. Not that I'm criticising this process..it's the essence of human social adaptivity to gyroscopically stabilize ourselves with such distorted narratives.

Long work day ahead to get involved in the shadows of others. Off I go for the fortifying cappucino.....

HOW DARE YOU IMPLY THAT I AM NOT GROWN UP...I'M EASILY AS GROWN UP AS WHAT YOU ARE AND PROBABLY A DAMN SIGHT MORE SO SINCE I POSSESS EQUANIMITY WHICH MEANS I AM UNCOMPETATIVE AND PEACEFUL!!!!

Oh hang on, that was yestedays rant.....I've not moved on...which is a hallmark of healthy adulthood imo.....I guess growing up is a process and I just wanna keep on keeping on and, in the words of Bill Nelson "Stay young/And keep in touch......

Well me, I'm already dead deep and stuff, what with my nightly readings of Tony Robbins and Doris Stokes and my astounding ability to quote Paul Mckenna's briliantly-named "I can Make You Confident" chapter and verse.....other things that make me stand out as a local guru include my propensity to say exactly the right thing as the right time (e.g. Elsie Marrow down our street ws having problems with her 30 year marriage and wanted to know what makes love last and I said to her Elsie luv Luv makes YOU last and she divorced her husband there and then and wanted to mary me but I'm married to my Higher Self so I said no and now everybody refers to her as Else the Town Bike whatever that means)........another thing that gains me attention is my Primal-Screaming-In-The-High-Street hobby...I'll just scream and swear loudly to let out the demons in a totally spontaneous way whenever I get stressed which is usually when I'm hemmed in by crowds of shoppers...I've been arrested 23 times for affray and treated for Tourettes about fifteen of these but only sectionned once but the ayahuasca my Higher Self slipped into my breakfast cereal may have had something to do with that little escapade.....

Anyways, don't wory, I'm not deep all the time...I do have hidden shallows as well as my Shostakovitch CD collection attests to.

This gantry of a bodymind that that falls away as the fiery lifeforce blasts the earth into cinders as the very-subtle kosha rockets skywards into the next bardo....this garment of biological miraculousness I walk around in gets shed to mulch the biosphere at life's denouement.....and I'll be surrendering this and my family and libraries and house and all the habits enmeshed in all of these...and my dreams and memes and memory scenes and schemes and the reams and reams of emotional strata and data and errata..they all drop away as I go skywards skyclad.....

The prospect of death used to scare the living shit out of me but then I did what Kaufman sez we all do in his new film Synechdouche NY...which is to construct self-referential narratives about our lives which shelter us from what is really going on which is what we see when we fold the moment-to-moment diary into our laps and sniff the air....and these narratives dumb us down and glaze our pallates with the bland buttered taste of the banal....these days, I write less and look around more and there's Cape Canaveral on my horizon and there I am or there is a part of me strapped into the Saturn 5 waiting for the last seconds of countdown....

Sogyal Rinpoche and Rollo May and quite a few others have suggested that in order to die well we must live well and to dothis, we must live with the ineluctable future event of our surrender.....yup, I go for that one because, at 50 (fifty fucking one next month!!) I am facing at very best another four or five decades of physical senescence however my practice bails out the leaky boat of encroaching winter...and I must say, the air has never smelt so sweet as it does in this late summer of my life.

I would like to chose betwen having everything I think I want and knowing what I really want because to my mind that's kinda win-win and thats the way aha aha I like it aha aha

How the bloody hell should I know? Stupid bleeding question!!!! Good job I never get irritated by such inanity, or get judgemental...otherwise I'd be in danger of sounding like a right old git.

That the week a-head she get a-strengthened by a-paracetemol or a-NLP or a-vinegar and a-brown paper.......and don't a-phrase your questions in a-crap Italian cos a-this ain't a-Super vaffing Mario Brothers....

Echoing John (Satya Seer), I go with Tara on this one; are you paying attention?

Ayya Khema once said that we only ever take one breath and that is the breath we are taking right now; the others are either memories or fantasies.....if we're not actually present RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW then we are not actually living...not breathing, adrift in an arid otherworld of other breaths somewhen else.....

To be truely attentive in a moment of encounter with another is to sit on a fence...on one side is the apprehension of the raw presence of the other where one loses oneself...on the other side is the attempt to make sense of the impact which that apprehension makes on us in which case we go too far into ourselves to actually be with the other, looking away in order to fully taste the impression s/he has made on us in the previous breath....

I vault over this fence several times per minitimeslice, increasingly catching myself doing so....the act of witnessing this mental fluctuation is not so much sitting on the fence as floating above it....in order to sit on this fence so that I am aware both of you and the impact you are making on me is to widen the aperture of my awareness, a gestalt click borne, not out of nonattachment, but out of a genuine and deep compassion for self, others, world......it is in the harnessing of the twin engines of a compasion-based ambiverted attention and a nonattachment that the movement of an integral, integrated attention is built and this is what I have been training myself to experience for some time now. I welcome being asked this question. I am not always comfortable with it.

J x

At about four in the morning when my cortisol levels have fallen through the floorboards, I ease myself out of bed so as not to disturb the lovely Tam...I slip on boxers and a sleeveless vest and feel my way downstairs in velveteen darkness....I get to the cellar and turn on the light...click....I'm in a warehouse-sized space full of stuff I'm not going to tell you about....except for the walk-in cupboard which houses my costumes.....

I dress in my Giant Leek outfit on early sunday mornings, moving from my cellar into the sewer system to arrive out of a half-mile distant manhole onto St George's Square, Hebden Bridge.....others are already present; The Potato, The Carrot, The Onion, The Garlic Clove....slowly we circle one another like sphagetti-western desperados and, with a squeak and a jump, launch into the Rite of The Vegetable Soup, stirring ourselves into a frenzy in the predawn chill.....

Not many people know this but Alan Moore used to live here and he used the concept of this most ancient and secret rite as an inspiration for Watchmen.

Ten minutes on, we come to the boil in a flurry of taffeta and lycra......by four-fifteen I'm back in bed hot and stirred but not shaken....of course nobody knows about this because the penalty for breaching silence is instant d

Frigging ghastly and therefore a wonderful opportunity to walk me talk.....we went to Cornwall and it poured with rain and I was laid up with flu for five out of the seven days....I stayed with it....Tam and Lew were wonderfully supportive......we played boardgames and watched Heroes and made Warhammer figurines and if yr milk goes sour you put fruit in it and eat excellent yoghourt....and flowers grow best back of the outdoor shithouse nyet?

I would like to play this human instrument more melodically, with greater economy, efficiency, grace, tact, wisdom, compassion, happiness and patience.....the more one practices, the more potent the performancet.....that's why I undertake a daily formal sadhana and view life as a retreat whenever I recollect the fact....I want to grow into a maestrohood of bodhicitta. 

Well now that depends upon how you define the question and what exactly
you mean by 'procrastinating' because i couldn't possibly settle down
to offering a reply until we get these sorts of issues straight
although I suppose I have launched into an answer through writing these
three lines and so what began as a jokey thing whereby I procrastinate
around scribing an answer I actually am scribing an answer which means
that I am not procrastinating although the lack of solid content in
this paragraph suggests that I am actually procrastinating because I
have not actually said anything yet although the self-referential
context sort of spells out a metameaning although its all as boring as
concrete poetry....

So lets talk puppies....we have a new one..this is Bella...a ten-week-old Lhasa Apso...I got her for Lewis on his 12th birthday.....

Oops forgot to rotate pic...too much procrastinating...thief of usefully-spent time....

Well I have this issue about how I never manage to finish a sentence properly, what with going off at odd tangents and stuff....., so what happens is that I lose the plot of ground I would like to pitch a tent on this weekend although I'd much prefer one of those camper van Beethoven's tenth symphony would have been a goody had he got his shit together with the hearing aid and all