That would be the platform I have constructed on the roof of Shameslaya Villa...I like to stand there skyclad on the little ramp in its centre and play crackly old Caruso records and shut my eyes and pretend I'm Fitzcarraldo...I throw up handfuls of bread for the starlings to catch in their beaks as they fly by and it looks like reverse footage of some manna-from-heaven Old Testament garbage, the sort you'd see Charlton Heston shoot his way through........and I sing along to Roger Daltrey's "I'm Free" only I'm tone deaf so I attract crowds of townies with pitchforks and air pistols taking crack shots of me as they call out their boos.....and I prance around my platform throwing bread and singing and dodging the bullets and starling shit adorns my shoulders like nature's epaulettes and guys in helicopters whizz by with camcordrs recording it all for utube and why the fuck am I writing this crap when the cafe is open and I could be sipping cappucino and talking about why Spiral Dynamics Integral needs to separate its UL with its LL....

The place where I'm free is the place where I'm safe....here in the referenceless open ground.

J x

I believe in interdependence rather than independence.....we exist in and as this nexus of physical, emotional and morphogenic finely-grained goop and not as this little island of figure in a ground of separate otherness.....seeing life in this latter way as you vs 'the world' will likely have you carrying fear and angst and anomic desparation and smothering this trembling emotional mess with all sorts of inauthentic personnae....whilst to view yourself as connected to and as and with this great stream of vomit thrown up out of the mouth of Brahma as He gags on emptiness will engender neurosomatic rapture as every cell in your heart and mind breathes in constant release....

In another sense, and quite ironically so, this Open Ground in which my world plays out its tragicomic karmascript  is Not-Two......it is a seamless unity without edges and therefore no 'outside' and therefore, if independence is about not being connected with anything that is 'other' and there is no other then I 'have' no independence and yet I 'am' independent in that here is no other for me to rely on....bloody curious stuff for a Saurday morning....I'm off for a coffee and game of Ingenious with me son and heir......

J x

I'm thankful that the three paragraph extravaganza I just wrote got swallowed by the oops demon thus interrupting this quasi-mindless stream-of-consciousness process i engage in daily and enabling me to review just what I am doing when I cyber-ritualise this blog.....and...er...er...what was I talking about again?

I'm thankful that I manifest optimism, clarity and integrity in an age when the lizards dress up as ringmasters and run the desert circus......mammals of the earth unite!

Well there are three dimensions to the breath; length, depth and smoothness....long deep smooth breaths induce calmness by sending delightful sinewaves to the thalamus...whilst short sharp staccato breaths are what I take whilst watching films with Lewis in which big bloody robots knock seven bells out of other big bloody robots....

To breathe, to me, is to live, and to live with some sort of pervasive, fluctuating emotional state which influences the dimensions of my breathing.....it has been part of my practice for years to breathe slow and deep and smooth whenever I can.....I tend to take only five breaths per minute on average and use a fifty-six second breath cycle when practising pranayama....this keeps me calm for much of the day, allows the prana vayu to lift in my chest, develops strength in my intercostals and upper back....

What that feels like is something I have no words for..it's THIS (he types whilst attending to his breath)....breathing is ostensive.....

Or, put metaphorically; breathing, when it's conscious, makes my body feel like the inside of my mouth feels after I've brushed my teeth.

Anther thing folks; never learn pranayama breathing from a book. You really really need to get taught by somebody who knows what they are talking about.

Jon x

Uh..could ya repeat the question please?..not sure whether I got it straight...were you referring to what in my personal life I am unsure of or what in the collective cultural we-space I am unsure of?.....because if it's the former I'm not really sure so until I get clarity I cannot really answer you...and then of course I will have acquired certainty and so I'd render the response redundant....and then if you're asking about the we-space then maybe somebody could help me out but then if they were sure about whatever it is I'm unsure about they wouldn't necessarily know exactly what it is I'm unsure about cos I might be unsure about something different to their perception of......yeah right...off to the cafe....may the pelt of the pet of your uncertainty never moult for thereby you wear your evolutionary frontier with mensch on samsara's catwalk.

Jon x

The fact that the earth will not open up under my feet in the next five seconds and the Brysbard Of A Thousand Toxic Tentacles will not drag me down into the sort of hell where its nice and warm and the guys sport groovy pitchforks and the gals wear fishnets and I have a choice concerning whether its the guys or the gals who get to ravish me silly and then, tired out from being thus shagged vigorously (I choose the gals) I get to dine on roasted unicorn with Big D himself and we get to swap weightlifting tips and photos of Victoria Beckham because, this being Hadesville, it's all a bit banal....yep I'm pretty sure this will not happen.

Pity, I was quite excited about being ravished by Donna and the Demonettes.

Enlightenment is self-realisation and I think there are two dimensions regarding what it is to realise the Self.

Firstly, there is the aspect of transcending the small self/other distinction in which the empty centre of my Being and the forms which arise within that emptiness are not-two....the idea of 'being-one-with-everything' doesn't quite summate it for me because one-with implies a subject united with an object and the way things are... when one has moved through embracing all aspects of the small self both gross and subtle...is that this distinction is illusory.....think of it as lila doing the smoke-and-mirrors thing...which allows novelty to emerge from one moment to the next so that The Game of Hide-and-Seek holds our interest for as long as our embodiment leads us into in here/out there delusion....

Secondly, there is the evolution of our embodiment from premodern mythos to modernist absolutism to postmodern pluralistic relativism....whether you are a christian fundamentalist/absolutist or an ecumenical relativist who sees truth in all belief systems (along with a bunch of crap) you can train yourself to have nondual enlightenment experiences....I would argue that the more developed the worldview...which transcends and includes its predecessors, the postmodern transcending-and-including the modernist for example...the more of the Kosmos which is embraced and therefore the more enlightened one is....

All this here recapitulates the current thinking of Ken Wilber, whom I generally agree with...he refers to nonduality as a state and the worldview as a stage and defines enlightenment as being one with all states and all stages....since his Integral Worldview transcends-and-includes postmodernism, then  a nondual integral worldview represents the highest enlightenment currently attainable....until integralism is superceded by something beyond it and/or some state currently inconceivable by 21st century us supercedes nonduality...enlightenment itself is evolving and not static (this is a premodern misconception expressed by ancients (writers of the Upanishads, Nagarjuna, Lao-Tsu to name a few) whose nondual state enabled them to write some profound and wonderfully inspiring stuff but whose premodern stage limited their contextualisation of this state into a fluid, evolving, dynamic, expanding Kosmos....so that many folk who read and revere such sages tend to unconsciously incorporate this rather one-dimensional misrepresentation of the enlightened state into their awareness....causing definitions of enlightenment to be platitudinous, over-succinct and not really personally relevant....

Of course, this makes Ken Wilber the most enlightened being currently walking the surface of the planet...which is one of various elephants in the expanding integral revolution currently underway...whose critical mass of participants will trigger the Twenty Teens revolution in a sixties-style mushroom-cloud of enhanced state'n'stage proliferation....

So read Ken people....I won't hyperlink in order that you google and seek out those parts of his kalaidoscopic thinking which most turn you on.....Ken Wilber, folks....stages and states.....      

My tardis which is now fully operational again....last June I traveled forwards 14 months and scoped this blog response my future (or herein present) self had/has/is in the process of typing.....o dearie me, I thought, me tardis is gonna be in need of repair sometime in the next 14 months...anyways I memorised this very blog you are reading word for word so that I could/can be typing this now so that in a months time my former self can travel 14 months forward to read it without the universe disappearing or whatever......anyways last month some rogue centurion  (from an Ancient Rome adventure) stabbed the big white plastic bit in the centre  of the Tardis that goes up and down (don't know the names of the Tardis bits; I call it the ding-dong) with the tip of his cohort granfalon and severed the time dial cable thingy after which I  creamed the bugger with me sonic screwdriver...which I knew I was going to do because I've had this blog memorised for fourteen months now....anyway, here's the hard-science bit... SO WISE UP FUTURE SELF....YOU NEED TO SOAK SOME NEWSPAPER IN VINEGAR AND WRAP IT ROUND THE TIP OF THE CABLE THEN WEDGE IT IN THE ANVIL-SHAPED WIDGET...BUT FIRST DISENGAGE THE TIME CLUTCH OKAY?....so anyways I read what I've just written 14 months ago whilst in the future and did just that yesterday and the tardis she fine... and now I'm awaiting my own arrival from ten minutes into the future because I just decided to go thank myself for the advice but I do not know how that bit turns out because the blog stops here.


Now I'm typing something new cos this sentence didn't figure when I first read the blog...let's hope the universe doesn't

Ted Hughes wrote this fab poem called The Ornamental Pond if memory serves....which begins with an adoration of the nice pond surface with goldfish and potted palms frilling the shores..then dives deeper into the depths of the pond wherein lurk the carp in a dank darkness...always ready to nip up to snag one of the prettier fish ...[enter Jaws soundtrack].....

What I think of as the dangerous stuff lie in the depths like the carp....but with a direct interface with the adaptive surface everydayness.....a good example found in Reservoir Dogs...bloke being tortured, torturer goes to get gasoline from car...opens garage door, steps out into sunlight...suburbia;dogs barking, birdsong, children playing in nearby garden....then back into the garage with the tied-up bloke with blood cake where his ear used to be...here is where the carp dwell and it's right next door to your pond......

This is an extreme cinematic example....more everyday ones for me are new clients who are volatile blokes who come see me in smart casuals or business suits to resolve anger issues...sometimes these sorts of men, if they are physically large, scare the bejesus outa me....there's the goldfish sartorial exterior and a bunch of toothy carp barely restrained from punching my lights out, reined in by flimsy leashes of situational convention....

Other examples....the coldcalls you get from shucksters who want to take your money (UK Google resell bandits)....the street drunk who asks you if you can spare change....the ruthless boss of a recession-hit firm who gives you mission impossible and tells you with nod and wink that he's counting on you....the smiling assasin of a seducer on a sunlit park bench...all sheepskins with wolvish interiors....posing more danger than a streetgang because of the lone amoral renegadeness in innocent drag....

Also puppies are dangerous. Mine just chewed my toes.

What pain feels like depends upon the extent to which you can embrace it....on the outside pain is spikey as a quilled golfball driven up the green of your awareness, tearing up the course with narratives of denial or plea-bargaining.....but if you can rest into it, then beyond those spikes lie a hard heat.....and within this, a white-hot core of energy which you can become.....when folk give up trying to resist pain, they break through to experiencing this energy...which can be hard if you experience chronic sharp physical pain....or if a relationship has ended leaving you dangling like bacon rind at the end of a pair of cosmic scissors.....

Me, I don't journey into the heart of my pain...I put on a fedora and run into the street and wail hysterically and tell everybody about my pain and hope the ever-popular-tortured-artist-effect will win me new friends and women will love me and God will kiss it better with his lovely tickly beard and I'll win the lottery and never have to worry about anything again......it mystifies me why this approach never works.

When I'm happy I have this allover somatic experience which is different from those spikes of rapture, lovingkindness, bliss or ecstacy, all of which originate at some point in my spine and then move around a bit......by contrast, when I'm happy I have an open quality like an empty door jamb in a wind tunnel,letting life blow through me..... it's not a steady state though.....I have moments of enjoying my happiness and not wanting anything to change.....then clouded timeslices of disappointment as The Show doth change agaist my Canutelike narcissistic desire....these sorts of experiences send my happiness into fibrillation without infarcting it overmuch.....

As I write, I am noting how happiness and openness go so hand in glove.....and how these depend upon letting go of expectations....those perpetual shorings and bracings of the character up against an impersonal environments that will not intentionally gratify...how our spiritual paths depend upon cultivating a willingness to accept how things are without being driven by the desire to be happy....how drugs keep people emotionally immature because the happy buzz insulates against the wisdom-cultivating disappointments in the lebsenweldt.....how all this could seem like a cynical rant to anybody who polemicises happiness with angst.....

So I guess one has to let go of the need to be happy in order to be happy and therein lies the way in which karma can be harnessed in the name and deed of a grounded evolution. 

I don't own anything. Property is illusion. I don't own the house I type this blog in; by magical consensual decree I exclude others from occupying this space. Ownership is a form of magic.

heh heh heh.....you really want the granular details?...okay.....you'd have to be a woman of course cos I'm strictly hetero......and you would have to have a large jar of peanut butter and a sixteen metre square sheet of polythene...then you seductively unscrew the peanut butter jar and..and...

Bet you thought I was gonna talk rumpy-pumpy here.....if getting lots of visitors to yr Q&R blog makes you happy, as it does myself, although I'm not really sure why since the number count could be suggestive of that number of folk visiting or half that number of folk each of who give you two brownie points or whatever.....anyways, I note that your number counter is bound to increase if you get sexy which intrigues me given the values which the Gaia community upholds.....not that sexuality is contra-spiritual but when I break out the riding crops and tutus we usually get a lively little conversation going nyet.....anyways, that often makes me happy....when folk drop in to chat.....

Anyways, what does make me happy are those rare occasons when I manage to confound and enmirth the expectations of others with resut that their minds open up and out in just the right way for them to understand that life's a gas that doesn't last....and if they don't get that then just confounding them....like writing three lines of sexual suggestiveness that will be seen on the response precis page and then volte-facing into this self-referential monologue...weelllll..that'll do as well.

[smiling]

J x

What?

Getting a yoga centre up and running in Hebden Bridge....I shifted my sadhana to focus specifically on undoing some of the subtle tension on the left half of my body so I've been practicing ashtanga yoga daily for 13 weeks now.....me and Tam and our friend Jaqui have started renting a space from 5;30-7;30am for this purpose and we are joined occasionally by our friends and we get quite a bit of energy going.....and now we are thinking about renting a space full time and enabling all the yoga teachers to converge in one bastion of practice space.....I am currently figuring out what I need to give up to make this happen.....maybe it's time to hang up the sandwich board with "Ken Wilber Saves" on the front and "But Deepak Chopra lobs it in off the rebound" on the back....that'd free up three hours a day.....