other lives ...

Reincarnation is a topic fairly frequently considered, since anecdotes abound and allowing the possibility opens the mind to explanations of otherwise inexplicable phenomena ... as well as offering comfort to those of us entering the third phase, though thought may disturb equanimity if an entity entertains memories of evildoing and fears the coming karma... Roman Catholics officially reject the concept these days, though they do have an arrangement for adherents to confess their sins and wipe the slate clean ... hasty research suggests many folks signed up to the "one true faith" don't bother so much with the confessing but do believe in reincarnation .... kind of pick and mix so common these days ... our sceptical times undermining orthodoxy, along with the behaviour of so many of the clergy, finding the rules of celibacy too challenging and allowing the blocked sexual energy to manifest in ways not only immoral but often cruel and abusive ...

Anyway, this Sunday posting is not meant as yet another attack on organised religion, which, after all, does bring solace and companionship to so many ... and if folks are prepared to sacrifice their freedom for some hope of salvation, then that's their business ... if it turns out their version was correct, good luck ... if it turns out reincarnation is a thing and each entity needs to sort out their own understanding of what's going on, there are plenty of lives available, after all eternity is beyond a very long time ... if it turns out the Atheists are right, nothing is lost in the end and believers can meet their demise happily deluded ... renouncing sin and evildoing is always worthwhile, whether to mitigate karma and dodge rebirth in hell realms, as described in some Buddhist texts, or just because of the intrinsic benefit of living an ethical life this time round ...

Recent reading material enriches the concept of reincarnation ... Claire Sylvia's 1997 description of her experiences after a heart and lung transplant ... the donor being a young man ... her uncanny knowledge of details from the deceased boy's life and her meetings with the family ... suggesting, as well as reincarnation, memories held not only in the brain ... in fiction, David Mitchell's wonderful debut novel, Ghostwritten, tells the stories with reincarnation (and transmigration) implicit throughout ...

Such are the joys of synchronicity and confirmation bias ...

Meanwhile, sunny, Sunday, Stanhope offers Dances of Universal Peace with Nicola in the Church Hall .... always a joy ...

seeking sangha of the formless ...

Well, here's a conundrum: recognising the desire for connection with like minded folks .... in Buddhism the Sangha, Christianity the Congregation ... and declining the labels, naming being the first step on the road to perdition (perhaps) ... how to attract the lovers of the formless?

Wandering the pilgrim trails solves the problem temporarily, since amongst the many different seekers on the caminos rarely a day passes without connecting with a lover of the formless (which has no name and maybe better stay that way!) .... first clues are non-verbal .... the eyes, the smile .... key words and references like Love, non-duality, Krishnamurti ... the K centre at Brockwood, of course, a place to find folks as well as Findhorn, The Barn at Sharpham and others to be discovered ... and at these places, folks speaking of second hand truths sometimes neglecting to live them, whilst out in random mainstream places people living their truth without speaking much about it at all ...

Maybe time to pay attention to the Angel Card reading from Susie several years ago: Your relationships are a reflection of you .... relevant to pretty much everyone ... and since the default mode here is solitude, hardly surprising that maintaining a Sangha of the formless is so elusive ...

Meanwhile, in the community of Stanhope, energy grows for a return to service design and community development, specifically building on the success of Wheels to Meals, and the clear need for new models of housing for seniors .... maybe including juniors in a multi-generational project ... anyway Social Care is struggling, what with budget constraints, raised expectations, increasing numbers of elders ... hospitals desperate for safe places to send recovering patients ...

So, all that excites and balances with ongoing attraction to the moving sanghas on the pilgrim ways ... but first the new base, which is taking longer than expected, on the back road on the edge of the village ... and interesting to observe the mind musing on the objects needed to furnish it ... maintaining freedom amidst home-owning the next challenge ... the hopefully ironic message at the temple of Mammon that is the MetroCentre mildly amuses momentarily, though many mesmerised shoppers suggest the irony missed the mark ...

Revisiting the recent RAW reading and a reference to Wilhelm Reich, the psychotherapist whose groundbreaking work on orgone energy attracting the attention of the Powers That Be (or were) in the Land of the Free back in the 1950s, found himself out of the frying pan of Nazi Germany and into the prison of the US of A ... the FBI smashing his equipment and burning his books ... as RAW remarked, this guy must have been onto something to elicit such an extreme reaction ... Reich died in prison and his work was suppressed ... though still available in the UK ... remarkably, two friends with degrees in psychology from UK institutions have never heard of him ... brief research (as always) shows those practicing his methods in the USA to this day are flying under the radar of the AMA ...

Reality tunnels

Remaining with Robert Anton Wilson, another legacy was his borrowing of his friend Timothy Leary's expression - reality tunnel ... suggesting that each of us experiences reality uniquely through our filtering of incoming data through previous memories .... the creation of new memories being built on existing foundations, or fitted into existing patterns and itself a participatory exercise .... maybe ... maybe being another favourite of RAW, who wisely eschewed certainty after accepting the evidence of experiments in quantum mechanics ... he also proposed a new word "sombanall" made up from four words in current usage "some but not all" as a device to avoid over-generalisation ...

Consensus reality, sometimes called common sense, is just an agreement in any given culture and era of the key components of acceptable versions of what's going on ... which is why an open mind and a variety of life situations tends to lead to wider tunnels ... perhaps the ability to hold more than one tunnel as true at a time .... another name for this game is frame ... where our frame of reference may widen as we learn more, but at some stage the frame itself cannot contain the data ... hence the expression "reframing" reality ... psychologically necessary when old frames frustrate and cause brain pain ... leading to a question of what reality might look like without any tunnel or frame .... possibly impossible to cope with except for the most highly advanced practitioners ....

Alongside RAW, HHDL's book Advice on Dying provides a very broad perspective .... Tibetan Buddhism being a very big frame indeed ... HHDL himself, of course, is currently famous for his simple message of kindness across all faiths and none, making the depth of this book all the more compelling with its implicit acceptance of many lives .... making the cause and effect or karmic chains quite challenging, especially for those of us unable to remember all the events of this life, let alone all the others ...

...bringing us to the pressing question of how to lead a good life, given the cool, clear insight that this mainstream world is becoming crazier by the day allied with the heat of compassion for all those suffering and stuck in this round of existence ... Buddhism offers its eightfold path: Right Insight (understanding or view), Right Intent, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, Right Concentration ... leading the end of suffering and the need for rebirth .... for those spotting a cop-out there is the option to return enlightened and work in the suffering world until all beings are enlightened ...

Dear reader(s), please note that there is a lot more in Buddhism worth studying, but at this stage the topic goes off piste and enters the exciting realm of parallel universes and reality tunnels ... which may just possibly be the same thing ... in this hypothesis/delusion each of us has the potential to polish up our realities and align them into a lovely wide tunnel, which attracts folks away from the world they don't want (but energise nevertheless through their attention) and the new tunnel/frame or maybe holon subsumes the old and decrepit one ...

Moving along and still off piste, the question of an integrous and integral life seeks examination ... this time in the context of illness, sometimes contrasted with wellness and the strange interchangeability of the "I" and the "We" ... stranger still is the use of the word "complaint" to stand for ailment as well as criticism ... the switching of the i and the a to produce compliant may need further investigation .... but on with the story .... which is going downhill fast ... a proposition that failing to act upon a thought which felt right and when spoken aloud also felt right, may lead to mental and physical dis-ease ... that a consistent complaining attitude may lead to complaints ... and that human entities, seeking attention energy, may develop victim roles if nicer roles are denied, any kind of attention being better than none at at all ...

Fitting all this speculation into karma is dangerous ground ... karma so often being conflated with revenge ... ironically an action akin to shooting oneself in the foot ...

Meanwhile, the weather in Stanhope's early morning walks has ranged from clear and sunny, misty and mystical to today's  sunshine and blustery showers, producing a wonderful rainbow ... though no photo to share ... sorry!

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 ...