Inclusion

Much as I'd like to prate on about being happy all the time cos I'm full of love sweet love, truth is, I'm not sure when it is I peak out with a happiness jag....bliss and ecstacy on the med cushion yes, happiness no......

I think happiness is that steady-state energy we bathe in when nothing seems to need to change...those brief moments of having done something or being with someone which lend a feeling of completeness for a few minutes before the tide washes the manicured castle away leaving the littoral planed smooth for more sculpting come next ebb....I get these thin timeslices of warmglow several times a day.

It would be a fiction to say that I'm always happy with my family....I have fantastically elated moments of lovingkindness and humour with my little clan.....and if I have a timeslice in which I contemplate my lot, I embrace the feeling that I am by and large a happy and contented man...but this is a sliver of time in which I contemplate the whole span and in that wide delta of years and decades, there is plenty of tarnished silt featuring despondancy, grief, abrasiveness, certainly not happiness.....but that sliver of time in contemplating a happy life shines so brightly, it spills into this dark salty flow and covers it with a faux perception of sunlight and clear water.......

I like Czsentmihalyi's work on Flow....that we are most satisfied in life, not when happy, but when immersed in an activity or an encounter dharanically....yep I like happiness and feel it several times a day but gimme bliss and Flow over Mr Smiley anyday....

Oh I was happy this morning when reading my copy of Integral Ecology in the loo (its my loo book and given its 800 pages will be my loo book until 2011..)..fine book that...recommend it to all of ye....

David Loy once said that anybody who needs to get something out of their play cannot, in fact, play.....I take this as a very valid perspective, and, if I apply it to myself, then I guess that there are lots of timeslices in the day when I'm not lusting after results.... I'm noodling and tweaking, intrapsychically, interpersonally and praxically in this big playground of artifacts thrown up when mother earth gagged and threw up human stick-wheeling innovation.....

This daily blog of mine is play by Loys definition....I sit down and write, as I am now, with very little pausing or correction and I want nothing more out of doing so than to enter a flow state and see where I go when I ride on my own back.....quite a few folk have written PMs to me disbelieving my motivation and referring to me as highly narcissistic and arrogant and stuff...one man wrote several times early last year and informed me that I was attempting to start a cult!....he is right of course.....Cult of Shameslaya...I'll charge serious money for a peruse of my blog and issue you with some magnetised fetish for your fridge in return....you American cousins have those big Smeggie fridges dontcha!!...love them, you can sit in them during the long hot summers of our imaginations....

My blogs dont work on those occasions where I dry up and actually try to think up a way of being original or meaningful or whatever....no playing here...lust of result......

Loy also talks about 'meaningfreeness' which is what you get when you see that there isn't a self.....it is not meaninglessness s Kierkegaard once said....and there's a maligned bloke....ole K was suggesting that if we got to unwrapping the skein of meanings which hold us in captivity then we sort of spill out into wide open freedom and angst is the natural fear endemic to this unweaving....I agree that things start that way but then there's a joy that shines through this dread like one of those magic eye pics which reframe into 3D the minute you quit trying to see the animal in the psychaedelia...play as result gained by not looking for the result....

Gotta go...end of pay..got stuff to do, results to get...

Jon x

In every area....we're not in Kansas anymore,Toto; it's a new world where everything is moving faster, all forms of knowledge (intrapsychic, intersubjective and systemic) are fractallising wildly and manifesting life experience like multiple sexual partners on acid speed and vaseline.....to think that as a 14 year old, I thought that Starsky and Hutch and T.Rex was cutting-edge......

James Hillman suggested that we sped up in the late 1940's due to the faster beat of Bebop, the ENIAC proto-computer and the Stanislavski 'method acting' style vanguarded by Brando and Cassavetes....whilst I think that explanation is a bit trite, there's some measure of truth in it....maybe the rave beats, jump-cut digitalisation of increasingly-hallucenogenic teevee (made by executives who took drugs in their youth and maybe onwards and replicated their experiences onscreen), the Holywood fast-forward plots designed initially to entice cinemagoers to buy the DVD six months down the line, digital tek moving business practices at a ferocious pace necessitating new personal sadhanas for overenthusiastic execs...maybe all these conspired to give us the quantuum leap of speediness forward......many septaugenarians and upwards find difficulty in fully appreciating the 21st century I find, because few younger folk empathise sufficiently enough to tone down life around them to the Starsky-and-Hutch place.....

I wanna stay in touch and educate myself in most personal technologies so i can be a crinkly 90yr old ashtanga yoga practitioner who leaps around like Lear on MDMA and knows about the latest SymStims cos he didn't refuse his great-grandaighter's offer of a trial occipital implant.

Jon x

Well I sort of grew up like a tree with my roots in amniocentrically-bathed trauma and domestic shutdown violence and  whole spectra of other nutrients ranging from the loamy stand-him-on-the-widows-piano-and-get-him-to-sing to other stuff I will not get into.....and for years I lived as this tree and blossomed as a series of self-bonsai'd happenings according to the parameters set by these roots......then I woke up and uprooted myself in my late thirties and turned the tree upside down so that my roots lie in the future and now I happen as a Flying Tree unmired by history and internal Critical Parent opinion....over the hilltops of social conformity I fly like a big breezy mushroom dropping leaves of myself into the soggy fields of the banal and the gorgeous and I sing as I fly cos I'm a Singing and a Flying Tree;

Look at me
I'm a flying tree
I love rappin'
As I happen
But cos I'm a tree
I can't do clappin'

and other really good stuff like that.

My review of James Dean's 45th great film 'Rebel Without A Mortgage' hasn't made it to Rolling Stone.

My report on Colonel Eisenhower's  rescuing of Elvis Presley from his 25 year ordeal in a Central American jail and the subsequent deposition of his fat imposter in Las Vegas sold enough to let me have molto Hindenberg jaunts over the Atlantic to watch the Beatles storm the US time and time again....my favourite is Pete Best. ....still hard-driving stuff at 68...

I was just about to meander on about what this word 'value' means but then my attention was drawn to the child outside...why is she not in school?....making a noise like an ambulance on steroids and running down the street in which I live....and for a moment I felt a frisson of irritation at the breaking of a much-relished quietness...then I remembered something R.D.Laing once wrote about how to reframe a child's noisy behaviour as the sound of her imagination flexing.....so as the sound of this little soul's spirit growing into her skin fades out, I am left with the treasuring of the values of patience and equanimity and how these enable that sort of clear-sightedness which results in benign, nurturing acceptance of how things are.....I wonder what the world would feel like if everybody took a step back and thought about what it would be like to inhabit the shoes of the most irritating person in their lives.....try doing that now and let me know what happens.

Jon x  

I generally put a makeshift soapbox in the middle of our High Street and shout through a megaphone at industrial strength, quoting chunks of the latest tome I've been reading as fast as I can before being clubbed down by road-raging motorists whose journeyway I have blocked.

And I teach by living as an eccentric-although-mindful exemplar of all that I understand to be sacred in life.

It takes all the willpower I can muster to prevent myself from clutching my own adonis-like body when I gaze into the full-length mirror each morning.

Tried it once. Shredded my forearms on the sharp frame-edges. Now folks give me ostracising 'Get lost Borderline Bill' looks when I sport short-sleeve teeshirts.

I wasn't sure which beleif to give up since my belief system is so grounded and realistic...so I asked Flautus, the thirteenth-century Mongolian shamen whom I channel on a daily basis....and he said that for him it would be a toss-up between my unerring faith in Zippy the Healing Angel who gives me all the right moves, like telling me to take Anadin when I have a headache or eat grass when I'm constipated...and my unswerving devotion to King Aetherius of Mars who is still blasting the Venusians to shit and who also tells me all kinds of wise stuff like what kind of food I should buy for my puppy and which new age course I should next attend....he's not made up his mind yet as to whether to ditch Zippy or The King but I'm waiting on his airy wisdom.

Not the same thing as liberty, that's for sure...freedom is the experience of the insubstantial self moving within insubstantial goop and knowing it and living it out as faux-condensate.....

I'm not fully present when I'm so pulled into The Game that I take it to be reality.....and this tends to happen when I take one element in the environment....my lover's body for example..and abstract this lovely figure from the ground from which it emerges...the shower....I react with indifference to the streaming water coming out of the nozzle (that's the water coming out of the shower head reader, okay?)....but I'm very much into the body that's reaching for the towel (into = attracted, okay? I'm not there yet.).....so I got nice nice bod and neutral background and so now I got this horn the size of the Rock of Gibralta and no way am I going to be doing anything other than thinking about how I can make love to this bod over the next 30 minutes.....

In these 30 minutes, I will be in the grip of lust..in other circumstances, it could be rage or grief....we tend to react emotionally to the stuff we pluck out of the environmental basket and cradle in the palm of our hand...and then we have lost the ability to be fully present (although many make a case for being present whilst having their emotions but that's another debate)........

In order to be fully present, it is necessary to view the Whole Sheboodle with equanimity which means thwarting the impulse to break stuff down into the likeable and dislikeable....this state makes one far more prone to experience what is really happening rather than whatever meaning one shades into the phenomenologiccal colouring book....and what happens, what is always happening, is that The Game unfolds frame by glorious frame dripping with a seductive form-glory......and, in fact, the Game is not Life-snakes and ladders but Hide and Seek and to be fully present to emptiness hidden by a form which is inseparate from it.

I hire 150 ashtanga yoga students to assemble on a beach and make 10 foot high letters spelling out "I love you truely" and bring in Gary Neuman in his skywriting plane to spew out a  pink cloudy heart-shape above the spelling....then I commission Phillip Glass to write a romantic oevre for Bjork backed by Nordic Choir and Tim Exile synth....then I photograph the beach and send it to my beloveds as an audio-visual email...

If you want to be one of my beloveds and receive this email you have to prove you love me and send me £100 cos I'm really broke.

I love you all. Click here for link to my bank details.


Seriously, though; I show my love with smiles, kisses, givings and 24/7 compassion.

I like it that...right NOW...and NOW...and NOW....I don't have a clue as to how it comes about that I'm writing what I'm writing.....I like it that I don't know where volition comes from.....

The more I investigate this in meditation and post-meditation, the wider and more inclusive my experience of What Is...but I'm still no closer to that volitional carrot pinned to the end of this inflexible stick of a sometimes urgent desire.....I still don't know how it is that this moment arises on the tail end of the last although I could ream out a heap of intellectual stuff I read about in the Buddhist canon but that's fabricating reality out of faith and therefore nothing like reality at all.....

I like that I keep my fabrication to a minimum.

If what you give me, strokewise, drops through my veneers into the firm raw authentic part of me then I'll probably feel a mixture of elation and sadness... a joy of being seen, heard, recognised.... suffused with a grief misted around all those times when, as a child, I was not seen heard and recognised and would have loved to have been....

If, on the other hand, you deliver what Eric Berne referred to as a  'marshmallow stroke', namely a load of old inauthentic bollocks, then this will bounce off me like water off taut clingfilm and I will reply by devastating you with either sarcasm or a Stepford-like confrontation according to whim and mood.

If I say to Tam 'you are fab' or words to that effect, she tells me off for sloppy judgemental compliments.....she wants to know exactly what she has done that I want to give her the compliment in the first place...I used to get annoyed at this....you're my partner and I'll fucking well call you fab if I wanna, you know all my reasons for doing so and this is us at the kitchen table not an unpacking therapy session goddammitt!!!!!........although gradually I am coming round to resonating with her mindful means of communicating (she is active in the NVC scene hereabouts)...and when she delivers a positive stroke, I am accordingly inclined towards that elated/grief reaction.

And this is why I don't give blanket strokes to all you wonderful gaians out there.....oops, performative contradiction....I would want to say why I think you are 'all' wonderful and that would mean blogging out a biblesworth of justification inclusive of disqualifiers for those whom I do not consider wonderful..call me obsessive but I don't believe myself to be so...

WHUP....ouch...'scuse me....my chair just got sucked up my bottom.....

Jon x

In an absolute sense, everything......each new instant kills off the previous superthin timeslice like a chef dicing something phallic in a swanky hotel kitchen....

...and yet every moment, gone the instant it arrives, is ungraspable and so there's nothing to lose since we never 'had' it as such....

In a relative sense, I could catalogue my losses like you, O reader... my youth, my mother, my cigarette-smoking habit, my virginity, my instability and fear...

..how many of us will read this question and catalogue those losses which cause us lamentation rather than rejoicing?....is this borne of the fear of loss because of the openness and wisdom loss engenders in its post-turbulent wake?....don't we fear spontaneity more than we fear recycled neurotic patterning?

...grief is a great teacher....the depressive side of grief hems us into a pen of mourning and the intense part of grief gets us to prate our proud hoofs into the mud, churn it into something siftable....and if we do grief right, we'll get insights into the nature of our relationship with the lost object......what we idealise one moment, we demonise the next.....who we love we're also angry with for leaving us.....who was a generous soul and gave their all to us was also maybe a royal pain in the ass, a saltshaker sprinkling mini-manipulative strategies throughout the encounters....what was an ultimate toy became dead tek fit for the kind of museum you'd never visit...

...acknowledging the many strands in the braid of our relationship with the lost begets wisdom in the conventional sense....it's only when you've stabilised recognition of nonduality that loss will be accepted with equanimity and how many of us have achieved that?....

...so I'll be reading the responses to this question tonight and hoping I find a lack of stepfordised answers that involve that faux-spiritual flatness that is grief-denial in drag....cos if I read it, I'm gonna get me plastic ruler out and rap knuckles and you can hit me back if you want to and then we'll roll down the grassy bank and tussle madly as we fall into the moat and then we'll stare up at the molten sun and laugh and forget that this moment will fade to snow like a teevee station tuned to a dead channel....

A CD of groovy tunes goes to the reader who can spot the four literary quotes in this blog...I'm serious.....yeah, let's talk gain.....

When in witness mode I open up the gap betwen the self I take myself to be and the no- self  that I AM.....in this gap, the spears adversaries chuck at me turn into flowers and fall at my feet.

None of us are safe when we identify with these frail bags-of-mostly-water we wear cos they are easily splooshed.

J x