RAW reflections ...

After a break from writing, though not from reading, inspiration resurfaces with a rereading of Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger (volume 2) ... a battered copy which somehow survived the wandering and renunciation of stuff, including all books ... and books have been, perhaps, the objects hardest to release ... some of them ... once upon a time, various lodgings in London had shelves with Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Enver Hoxha ... and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, of course ... the next library, coming together for the new base, on the edge of the village, is unlikely to hold any of those ... J. Krishnamurti, Alan Watts, HHDL will feature ... and RAW, whose style and content manages to inspire, educate, entertain and amuse, whilst leaving space for the reader to interact with the writing ...

RAW is a polymath, who draws from a range of subjects of which he has quite deep knowledge, along with varied life experience and a close relationship with hallucinogenic substances ... and the courage to create crazy narratives from facts and factoids usually found in the basket marked "doesn't fit currently accepted versions of normality" ... wonderful!

Having embraced and embodied the essentially playful nature of the universe, and displaying the sense of humour characteristic of those lucky enough to avoid taking themselves too seriously, RAW proposes, and practises in places, eschewing the "is" and its relations, due to the inevitable danger of language leading to conflating the word with the thing described ...

Perceptive readers may have spotted the inspiration for the attempt to write the blog without reference to "me" and its relations ... a possibly pretentious ploy to decondition the receiving/transmitting apparatus from its tendency to take life personally ... advanced practitioners like HHDL and Jeff Foster are happy to refer to me, my, mine and I, comfortable in the illusion of the separate self as an illusion with roles to play in this round/act/chapter of the Great Story of the Universe ... maybe ...

Polymaths are under ever increasing pressure, of course, since information is expanding exponentially ... subjects sub-divide and specialisms become deeper and narrower ... all fine but tending to separation unless regular attempts are made to re-unite the parts into the whole ... the question posed here some years ago was: "Is there a person alive today who knows everything about everything?" The short answer is no, probably ... the response received suggested the question itself was more typical of a small child than an adult ... which was taken as a compliment, of course ... and such people almost certainly did exist centuries ago between the times of the extinction of the advanced civilisation of Atlantis and the so called Enlightenment of the Middle Ages ...

Education systems, meanwhile, morph from the beneficial banishing of ignorance to the malign cramming of facts and officially sanctioned factoids and the conflation of knowledge and wisdom. Inevitably following the cramming is the testing, to ensure that sufficient has been retained and regurgitated to enable a certificate .... and following the testing, the gaming, since, as wittily observed by Craig Larman, what gets measured gets gamed ... and not only in education systems ... and if we are to be blunt, in this context gaming is synonymous with cheating ...

And cheating is where we may go, when all the incentives point there and the heart has been ripped out of whatever it is we are engaged in ... education, health, social care ... has this writer ever engaged in such scurrilous behaviour? Where shall we start?!

window shopping ...

Having emerged from the simple delights of the decluttered life experiment, with a small cottage almost bought, the need to consider what stuff to assemble in the space arises ... the editor teases about trips to IKEA and suchlike ... so a trip to Durham on the bus(es) takes in the Library for a new membership card and a wander round the Retail Park with cursory glances at cars, for which there is no enthusiasm, though such a thing would extend the range for social activities, Stanhope being well served with buses Monday to Saturday day times, evenings and Sundays not so much ... next stop is the fridge, freezer, cooker and washing machine shop and sensory overload from so much choice ... a quick trip to view beds, especially sofa beds for flexibility, then a whistlestop tour of B&Q for no particular reason ... so much stuff, so little desire for it ...

Enthusiasm revives in the Oxfam Bookshop as the library expands with some novels and a copy of Anam Cara, featured at the very beginning of this blog as the light but profound choice as the only book in the rucksack ... given away en route as weight reduction become more and more obsessive ... the ascent of the Pyrenees concentrating the mind wonderfully ...

Meanwhile HHDL addresses the question of no-self, discovered last summer in the Casa ... subtly explaining that while commonsense suggests the existence of a separate self, deeper investigation reveals that an object arises dependent on causes and conditions, on its parts and on thought ... and has no inherent existence ... however the trap of nihilism is avoided by seeing things in their context, including the individual self with all its cooperating cells and mind created roles ... and opens the possibilities of each life immeasurably ... personal insight storied it differently, with the great paradox presented thus: You are the centre of the Universe; at the same time almost nothing on the cosmic scale ... playing with the paradox the opportunity for all of us .... and everything connected to everything else somehow!

World events are observed, political and meteorological ... hurricanes in Florida somehow more newsworthy than those decimating Caribbean islands ... the anniversary of the alleged attack on the World Trade Centre passes with fewer and fewer folks buying into the frankly ludicrous official version ... and declining to buy in wholesale to all the conspiracy theories ... Joanna Macy offers a more subtle story of changing times from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition ... suggesting the fault lines lie not so much cosmically, theologically, politically or economically but through the hearts of each one of the six billion humans, harbouring hate to some degree or other and projecting it onto the world ... relating back to previous explorations of the holographic nature of reality ... interesting times! Especially as the potential for each of us is to project love instead ... bringing us to HHDL and his simple religion of kindness ... worth a try ...

Show

Three trips out with the elders last week feels almost like full time work, though very satisfying ... and voluntary ... maybe one reason for the lack of blogging, which prompts another nudge from the editor, still languishing in the Correze in temperatures rather higher than Stanhope in Autumn ...

This weekend is showtime in the village and the street is taken over by the fair, whilst the showfield by the river hosts all sorts of entertainment and not only of an agricultural nature. An early visit to browse and mingle has only one firm objective - good bread ... as it turns out, though sweets, cakes and pies are abundant, craft bread is absent ... more than compensated with spiritual nourishment from Ben, a regular stallholder with his Aloe Vera products and currently into Sufi wisdom ... an invitation ensues, a good connection ... next a stall raising funds for vulnerable women in India and another warm connection, a prayer bell and an invitation ... two consecutive philosophical discussions plenty and time to return to the cottage before the rain.

The Dalai Lama is current teacher and great value ... though some of the philosophy is questioned, mainly around his staunch defence of organised religions as helpful for spiritual development ... making him very liberal and open and a champion for the simple practice of kindness ... other readings of the history of organised religion suggest corruption and abuse ... a topic much mused upon along the Camino to Santiago, with its locked churches and murky past ... a blog thread on Ivar's Camino Group investigates the spiritual and religious nature of the phenomenon, with general agreement that the traditional Catholic Camino is by no means followed by the majority of pilgrims.
Facebook provides daily commentary from a group of women, including the friend of a friend (hence the link) walking from Porto to Santiago ... tempting to do that route and call on the folks at the Quinta Estrada Romana Albergue ...

Meanwhile, Buddhists in Burma (now known as Myanmar) commit atrocities against their Muslim compatriots ... drawing criticism from HHDL, though previously sainted Aung San Suu Kyi declines to step into the fray publicly ....

Krishnamurti, consistent critic of organised religion, told a story of the Devil and his friend walking along the street and seeing a man in front bend down and pick something up ... What has he found? asks the friend ... Just a fragment of the Truth, replies the Devil ... Bad news for you my lord says the friend ... Not really, says the Devil, I'll help him organise it!

So, Life unfolds leisurely, summer limps damply towards autumn, though optimistic forecasters predict a possible return of warmer weather ... and October in Spain and Portugal are mostly warm and sunny ... November too ... let's see ...

luck ...

Following further fellside philosophy, the subject of luck arises ... how some folks appear "born lucky", others not so ... whether our attitude affects these ostensibly random outcomes ... whether our perspective simply stories them differently ...

Leading to an exploration of the word itself and how useful in scrabble ... how many consonants adhere to the stem of uck, not itself a word in the English language, apart from a covert smuggling of its censored friend into conversation ... buck, duck, huck, muck, puck, ruck, suck, tuck, yuck ...

Life resumes its flow as house buying proceeds, along with minibus driving, reading, writing, musing ... Retreat House, having itself retreated, is left to mature whilst energy rearranges around the vision ... meanwhile information arrives indicating a holographic universe as frame for otherwise unrelated phenomena ... if a frame is possible in an ever moving reality ... Gregg Braden proposes holographic consciousness in a computer metaphor, where feelings and emotions are the software programme, consciousness the operating system and reality the central processing unit, screen, printer ... while the Dalai Lama reports on conversations with scientists, who suggest mood is generated chemically and struggling to accept that maybe it's the other way round ... maybe both, but denying the possibility that mind is the driver is hardly scientific ... perhaps the current orthodoxy is unduly influenced by the purveyors of pharmaceuticals ...

In other conspiracies, the last day of August was widely commemorated as the 20th anniversary of the murder of the Queen who never was, the lovely Diana ... maybe in a parallel universe ... and in another the idea of royalty in a mature democracy dissolves ... as far as history goes, this was a tale of power, emotionally absent princes, racism and cynical, sinister shenanigans to preserve the Anglo-Saxon (maybe just Saxon) purity of the bloodline ... herstory tells it different, as the wronged and vulnerable princess, hooked on love and blind to consequences ... anyway the drama goes on and one day maybe a rounded version, ourstory, will be told ...

Stories, it seems, are a major theme in collective consciousness, and wallowing in them via newspapers, television and the daily discourse which so often echos them ... the removal of these sources of stories no longer serving soul needs seems prerequisite to receiving and transmitting new and more wholesome tales ... engaging with concerned friends sometimes attracts criticism for ignoring the daily dramas and declining to have an opinion ... for this fragment of the whole consciousness right now, the new stories of compassion, added to millions of others around the world(s), eventually, immediately, create a more convivial reality ... in a holographic universe(s) it can be no other ... with luck ...

suicide and other ways to die ...

This morning's early walk produced fellow walkers for brief philosophical interlude, and this quote from Robert Webb:

"Life is a struggle between Love and Death ... Death always wins, but because of Love it is a hollow victory ..."

One to ponder on and timely after Monday's conversation on Death, specifically Richard's ... still seems strange that we will not meet again in this life ...

Another local person and sometime visitor to APtB in its brief manifestation at number 7 was in mind recently ... a beautiful and suffering soul with a background in the military and as an adherent of the Osho cult and its orgiastic practices ... though whether either or both of these led to the psychosis is unclear ... anyway, after much ideation and many rehearsals, she succeeded in exiting this incarnation a few weeks ago ... who knows whether to be happy or sad for her? A friend who has seriously considered the final option reported that she was told that suicide would not relieve the suffering ... that she would reincarnate with the very issues she had not addressed ... whether that's true or not, who knows? She is still alive and still suffering it seems ... as for personal experience, suffering is not recalled as so intense as to prompt such radical action ... a half-hearted attempt many years ago after the premature end of a love affair ... a brief moment, in a stressful period, driving along a motorway, seeing the approaching bridge as a possible ending of the problem ...

The topic entails a little research and leads to some interesting results ... a general preponderance of males as expected, due to emotional repression (as examined by Robert Webb in his recent book), but also a high rate in supposedly happy nations, such as Sri Lanka and Bhutan ... poverty and war play a part of course and existentially maybe the increasing atomisation of society ... statistics skewed by cultural and legal  influences too ... and the thought that there are slower ways to kill oneself which are not defined as suicide yet might as well be ... excessive eating, smoking, drinking of alcohol, drug taking ... less obviously, life denying existences, negative thinking and so on ...

In the context of eternity, which is infinity of time, or a dimension beyond time, life and death take on another perspective altogether ... our mechanistic world view producing an illusion of beginning and ending ... our wonderful National Health Service (having morphed into a National Illness Service) blurring the edges of living and dying ... increasing longevity as if prolonging the dying period was a good thing ... ongoing consciousness a topic hard to comprehend, but worth exploring nevertheless ...

Debunking debunking ...

One of the perils of walking the precipitous path between all possibility and all delusion is the occasional skirmish with fellow Facebookers ... and being quite eclectic in the choice of "friends" opportunities often appear to share contentious content ... "friends" on FB, of course, having a different meaning than friends in real life (whatever that may be) ... amusingly, FB has coined a new and rather clumsy word to remind us about FB friends we may have known virtually for a while - Friendversary as in Happy Friendversary ... such reminders sometimes unwelcome, in the case of deserting lovers for example ... still, FB only knows what we tell it, though its memory is superior in many ways ... possibly useful when dementia sets in ... albums packaged as Christmas presents ... or Friendversary gifts, if the concept catches on ...

Venturing into heretical positions in territory such as Climate Change, leads to swift responses from orthodox champions and the introduction of the "debunking" word ... apparently used to denote distaste for the proposition along with a superior style refutation ... and whilst mostly eschewing opinions and invitations to spurious debates, it is sometimes fun to explore uncharted territory, or the road less travelled ... and if friends or "friends" are moved to engage in dialogue, whether refuting or asserting, then this may be helpful ... though assuming a superior air is probably not ... hence the need to debunk debunking as a method of furthering knowledge ... and the word itself has such a firm resonance, so why not employ it twice in a row?

Meanwhile, Autumn in Weardale means heavenly heather purpling on the fell, hiding grouse, anxiously awaiting murderous sportsmen in plus fours, armed with guns and legalised to fire them at defenceless birds ... fungi shrooming, offering a more peaceful pastime and tastier healthy alternative (as long as you know which ones won't kill you, of course) ... some varieties even offering glimpses of other dimensions of reality, a trip yet to be taken ... blackberries abundant after July's rain and August's sun, themselves an exercise in patience, avoiding pricks from bramble bushes and stings from nearby nettles, working together to upset the unwary ...

So, after an unusually dry Bank Holiday weekend spent walking, musing, reading, writing and visiting neighbours and friends for deep conversation on death and other topics ... today's trip with the elders for lunch reinforces the pleasure of feeling useful in the community ... which, combined with occasional adventures in the parallel universe of pilgrimming feels like some kind of recipe for living ...  wholesome anyway, maybe time to spice it up a bit ...

role adjustment ...

After neglecting the writer role while reflecting on incoming information as well as changing circumstances, the editor requests resumption .... somehow validating the illusory entity "writer" and encouraging an effort to arrange words in a more or less coherent pattern which may communicate notions worth sharing, whilst avoiding too traditional linguistic forms and thus challenging reader(s) to participate in the exercise ...

The editor, meanwhile, having made a guest contribution, resumes his summer sojourn in Ciblat, leaving the writer to unmangle recent ramblings on infinity, parallel universes and other topics ... speaking of which, the recently mentioned book "Infinity" points out that the three dot punctuation style practised from the beginning of the blog as an attempt to indicate the lack of full stops in Life, is used in mathematics to indicate ... Infinity! Mathematically literate (numerate?) readers will already know that, though none shared the fact on here ... though who knows whether mathematicians read this blog ... sometimes it feels as if the readership is a handful of friends and family .... google metrics report on page views and even location, though it is of little interest to the writer, who plods on regardless ... the exercise helpful in its own write (sic) to develop thoughts and record for future forgetfulness ...

The role adjustment in the title refers to the arrival of resources, presenting a problem to the nomad persona carefully cultivated over the past few years ... the Retreat House project planned for the windfall languishing for want of energy and co-creators is replaced with an investment in a small cottage nearby ... an idea encouraged by sensible and caring friends and embraced without much investigation, after two chats and tours ... asking price offered and accepted ... subject to contract, as they say ... though, being handily located on the Weardale Way, on the outskirts of the village, it looks like a handy bolt hole in the place which seems more like home than anywhere at present, and well set up for holiday letting, AirBnB and so on ... a few weeks to complete then maybe a pilgrimage to celebrate ...

Daughters, sharing in the windfall, are of a better age to enjoy the benefits ... to be honest, it's more of a bother than a blessing in many ways and the adjustment is taking a while, since simplicity and lightness was aligned with slim, albeit adequate, resources ... anyway, equanimity is maintained ... and the Retreat House is still waiting ... being useful noted as key to Life and there is enough energy for a big project as well as a few thousand miles of walking ...

Being house based for a while means the library grows again (and a new home for it soon) ... Kate Atkinson's novel A God in Ruins inspires a search for its prequel Life After Life ... both taking full advantage of their fiction status to stretch readers' minds with notions of parallel universes ... yesterday's trip to Durham turning up a good quality hardback version along with two books from the Dalai Lama and a timely find in the science section by Gregg Braden - The Divine Matrix ... where it has more validity than Dawkins, still sneaking into the spirituality section ...

Facebook provides another piece of the jigsaw with a video from Robert Lanza on Bio-Centrism  ... another scientist sticking his neck out and challenging the orthodoxies of scientism  ... who knows who's right or wrong? Certainly not your scientifically and mathematically illiterate writer ... though experience, albeit processed through a still conditioned brain, points to everything being connected, consciousness being participatory in reality and the universe(s) being benign somehow ...

Of course, none of this is new ... yet somehow the insights of the ancient philosophers, often corrupted by organisations formed around their ideas, are not convincing enough ... indeed any conceptual understanding of someone else's truth is suspect ... this stuff has to be integrated and embodied and that is perhaps the work of all of us in some parallel universe ... certainly a joy for your blogger in this one (which may, or may not, be the one inhabited by any reader ...)

Time for lunch!