The Glaroon Slipped Up

Wednesday morning and Back on the Bus.

I'm the only passenger on the first bus out of Monte Casino and the terminus circle is oddly devoid of late/early revelers. It's just the bus driver, a couple of security guards hiding in the warmth of the carpark and three cab drivers snoozing behind the wheel.

When I get off the bus - in solitary splendour - at Sandton Station, it's cold. A feral pigeon and two glossy starlings have taken advantage of the dearth of humans to forage near the taxi rank, but flap away at my approach. The station guards, who I normally greet at just before 5:30 am, are nowhere to be seen.

Heading out of the station, the chill bites down a tiny, gentle bit. As if to warn.

The streets are dark and streetlamp-lit, but there are no people on them.

An empty taxi minibus cruises past.

Well, the streets and trees and shrubberies are all where I left them. But where are all the pedestrians?
There should be at least some precinct security guards posted at intervals along West Street. There should be passengers alighting from the minibus taxis pulling over every few metres. There should be folks exiting the Michaelangelo Hotel towards the station. There should be a small group of vendors coming up the road with their wares on their heads.

But there is no-one on the street.

I cross the road at the robots - admittedly dodging another non-stopping taxi - and make it to the office, having seen not one single pedestrian for the last 10 minutes. It's a bit eerie, but then it's Winter and fairly chilly so maybe everyone is getting up later.

That was Wednesday. Thursday, it was like Wednesday never happened. There were three more passengers on the morning bus, the circle at Monte Casino was fairly full of loud-mouthed drunks, the security guards were all back at their posts in the station and on West Street, and people were getting out of taxis like nothing happened.

I may sound crazy - and no doubt by this time I am, pretty much - but I had a distinct feeling of the heavy velvet curtains having been twitched aside prematurely 24 hours ago, before the scenery was all fully in place.

Spider Dreams

Can we take a single step which we have not mapped out for ourselves?

Is this Creation entire, without the possibility of stepping outside of its bounds?

Are we simultaneously dreaming and being?

For if we are both the dreamer and the dream, no misstep is possible - it's not even possible to formulate that possibility.

Creator and Creation entire, whole, flawless and without boundary.

Escape From a Schwarzschild Radius of Insanity

I have finally become a refugee.

From Twitter and Facebook, that is.

Last night I deleted both accounts before I went to bed and woke up this morning with such a sense of relief that I knew I'd done exactly the right thing.

I started out years ago on Twitter with 40 followers and ended up with over 1.5K of the buggers. This is not a good thing, as anyone conversant with the horrific phenomenon of Twitter can attest.

Twitter. It's a great tool for keeping up-to-date on whatever news you're interested in; you get the latest breaking stuff first, plus much of the as-yet-unverified speculation. But with that comes a clamouring clinging of hanger-on demons which will eventually deeply wound your sanity if you're even halfway in your right mind to start with.

Some issues, let's face it, are bound to be emotive. Transgender Rights, the Patriarchal control of the globe, Donald Trump...So you make a resolution to rise above the gutter-wiping of the basest Tweeps. I'll just observe, you tell yourself, and take in arguments from both sides - to which end, you include a broad spectrum of class, race and political affiliation in your Follow list. Sounds about right.

But gradually, over months and possibly years, you find yourself taking sides. taking umbrage at the others. Taking seriously the emotionally immature rantings of a faceless archon who uses 140 characters to inflict as much pain as possible. And you find yourself doing this, too; becoming habituated to being as pithily nasty in as short a text as humanly possible to someone you don't even know.

This is the template for all 9 rings of Dante's Hell to coalesce and eventually collapse into a screaming, barking mad black hole of insanity.

And Facebook? With even the best of intentions of keeping it confined to family, you find yourself scrolling through endless reams of photographic saccharine memes, brain-deficient repetitions of somebody else's endless idle time...nope. Just Nope.

And so I left those places. Threw them to the West, iconic icons and all, turned on my heel and walked away.
Because I can't be having with this any longer.

Pic: Paul Kidby's rendering of Esmerelda Weatherwax

The Deep Mid- Winter

A colleague at my (new! 3 months only!) place of work mentioned this week that there were only 12 weeks until Spring.

Being the new girl in the district, I hesitated to make a 'thing' of it - although I was tempted.

You see, it's one of my triggers : how we mark the seasons of the year. It irritates me that many people can't see how beautifully simple it is.

We have 52 weeks in a solar year, with 4 seasons. That's 13 weeks per season

When each season starts appears to vary from person to person. Here in the southern hemisphere, the Winter Solstice is celebrated on or around June 21st. Now here comes the nub of the whole "season" matter:

If you call this day "MidWinter", you have just fixed a point around which you will have to configure all the other seasons.

I have no idea what's so hard to understand about "mid" and "Winter" coming together in one word. It's the mid-point of Winter, right? So in another 6 and a half weeks it will be the end of Winter, right? That's around the first week in August, and I get to call it Imbolc.

Unfortunately for me, most Seffricans believe that Spring starts either at the beginning of September, or else on the Vernal Equinox, around 21st September.

But how can that be? Unless you are counting Winter as starting either at the beginning of June or at the Solstice...which we've agreed to keep calling Mid-Winter, OK?

"Mid" does not mean "start". It means the bloody middle, people.

So, figuring from this fairly rock solid premise (and assuming 4 seasons of roughly equal length, unlike the Celts, who really only had Summer and Winter), the Vernal Equinox would be the middle of Spring, the Summer Solstice the middle of Summer (or MidSummer!) and the Autumnal Equinox on around March 21st would be the mid-point of Autumn.

That leaves 4 points as ending/starting days for each of the seasons. And as luck would have it, many Pagans already celebrate on these days - Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnassad and Samhain. The start of each season.

So pardon me while I revere the very depth of Winter - when the apparent Sun reaches its lowest point in the heavens as seen from Earth - as MidWinter. That's in just one week from today.

And Imbolc, the start of Spring, a scant 6.5 weeks later, in the first week of August.

Makes frighteningly proper sense to me.

More sense-making goodiness here.

Just In Itself

Sometime in this week, between the enforced observance of a holiday which has little meaning for me and the knuckling down to some real, meaty work at my new place of employment - somewhere in there I suddenly realised, with a bit of a shock, that I was actually happy.

I know that sounds a little strange. Sure, I've had my periods of deep grief, spiritual torture and incandescent rage. But I'm still a highly privileged person, able to make my way materially in this culture without too much pain. Although that ability has, let me not deny, come at a price.

But it seemed to me, sometime last week, that I had paid my dues in great gobs by now, and that there was absolutely no reason for me to be a miserable old fart any longer.

Certainly, this culture is killing its landbase -and thus itself - at a rate which will cause us, and all the other life forms on the planet, much sorrow well into the future.

Certainly, the Patriarchy is clinically insane and we are turning on each other like overcrowded lab rats.

That's all very true - and yet...as an individual, I have my health, enough wealth not to have to worry about it, beautiful and beloved companions to share my personal space, and -lately - a job which I take great joy in doing, in an environment which doesn't stretch my survival resources to the limits every single day, the way they were stretched at Osiris Trading.

There is no necessity for me to be grumpy and depressed in my personal self. And yet I think I was giving the impression - to myself - that I was.

Let me face it: I can work to take down the culture as well -perhaps even better - in a happy, joyful frame of mind as I can in an enraged one.

And so I shifted my attitude.And in that shift, I noticed that the veneer of the world became a little more hazy than it had been. Outlines wobbled, and perspectives shifted. Starting to see the illusion of what we're walking around in, from a clear and deeply contented soul-set, has become much easier. I listen more deeply and see more clearly to what is real. And that is the essential god-ness , the precise and unmistakable mark of creator divinity of every last living energy we're swimming among. And that is a further joy, just in itself.

Autumn Garden Round

Over in the North, the giant Coleus has put forth spikes of violet blue flowers.

The sun is mild and low but it's pleasantly warm in the garden, here in Joburg in Autumn.

In the East, tangles of Parasol Tree and Winter Jasmine crowd around the lower trunk of the Very Big Cycad - which lately held an Owl, and several Louries screaming at it.

The West quarter holds another giant: a Yucca well over ten feet tall. Here is one of its babies, sprouting out near ground level.
A couple of very interesting-sounding birds are calling in the garden. The dogs are dozing inside.

There's nothing much going on in the South, however. There's heaps of flaked-off wall paint, part of the preparation for repainting the outside of the house, and steel gates taken off last weekend and waiting to be re-welded and put up again.

This is my favourite time of the year. Rushing Dark Water, as the life river flows swiftly, for me, past the Tree and under the Bridge. Heading Westward, inscrutable and comforting in its opacity.

Falling backwards, I feel the water accept my soul and carry me away to the land from where we leave this life.

I'm not dying, and yet I'm very much dying. It's blessed and peaceful.

In times like this, I can see the liminal place between states fairly clearly. And I am transported.

It Can Not Be Otherwise

A 7 hour planned electricity outage this morning caught us by surprise.

When I say planned, of course, I mean planned by City Power and not communicated to the end users.

So, from 1 in the morning - as Warren was defragging his desktop - until almost precisely 8 am, we had no electric power in the quiet suburb of Bloubosrand.

We had somewhere to go this morning, too, and showers were sketchy. Apologies to anyone who chanced to encounter us out and about.

It was to Woolworths we headed - after stopping at the bank to draw an unusually large sum of money - to pay our Woolies account up in total and close the bothersome account. Woolies weren't always a pain in the arse, either. There was a time when their quality was good and their financial management above reproach. No more, alas. After completely failing to send me statements which actually arrived in my postbox for several months, and after sms-ing me incorrect information on my payment amounts, and after displaying a total lack of regard to South Africa's clothing manufacturers(opting for the glittering, cheap Chinese products which have a lifetime shorter than a disintegrating meteor)...after adding all this up, I decided I didn't care to do business with them anymore.

I've been mulling over the fact recently that good old homo sapiens is getting stupider by the year. Not just according to this entitled, privileged,university-educated middle aged woman, but also according to several sources with much less biased points of view.

It seems that one of the problems may be the environment we've created for ourselves. An environment poisoned by pesticides, replete with high fructose corn syrup, petroleum products toxic to the brain, and a culture where the possession of those afore-mentioned cheap, glittering tawdries is a major marker of worth.

Well, sigh. We surely never set up this earth-plane to be a cake walk, did we?

 My middle-aged Pit Bull, Scylla, displaying her hunting prowess earlier today by catching and then consuming a baby Lourie - something she doesn't do too often, especially the eating part - has reminded me that actually, this plane was never supposed to be a dimension of sweetness-and-light. We eat each other. And kill each other for no apparent reason - worse. And heap such pain and sorrow upon each other all the time, that I wonder why any of us think that peaceful non-harm is a natural state of being.

I have carefully avoided saying that this plane is devoid of Love. For that is not the case.
All sorrows, all he pain, all the seeming unnecessary hurt is all there as part of our plan.
And Love informs that plan, in every shade and shape of its coming-into-being.

It can not, I submit, be otherwise.

The Grey Lourie, mourning loudly even now for its massacred offspring, reminds me of this.

Pic: courtesy Wilkinson's World

Prized Possessions

Since I was very small, I have had two besetting shadows: anger, and grief over others losing their physical possessions.

How odd is that? Not the anger, so much. I can vividly call up white-hot anger from as young as four years old - some people seem to come into the world that way and I'm one of them. But fear of people losing their stuff? That's just messed up.

I can recall one of my earliest emotions as being very anxious that my family didn't lose the things they valued. I would have visions of getting all my loved ones' prized possessions together in my embrace and whisking them to safety - the things, not the people. It often took the form of a long wooden toy train which I would remove to a safe place to stop the anxiety.

Now, I suffered most of my life from one form of anxiety or another; most marked and longest-lasting was my agoraphobia, which only fled from me utterly after I was taken apart completely and re-assembled.

I have scoured the internet for some mention of this very strange fear, but  all that comes up is the fear of losing one's own possessions. That doesn't worry me much. I tend to throw stuff away rather than hoard - I'm not much for keeping material possessions and I feel better with fewer. But the thought of someone close to me losing, failing to gain, or hungering for some...thing causes a great ache in my heart.

Deep personal anger is common enough that it was among the first shadow-puppets to arise in me when I went looking. I continue to deal with it on a daily basis. But this bizarre fear for the attachments of other people is just...loopy.

I have no idea what this is. Just that I've always harboured it. Time to haul it out, I think, and expose it to some light.
Or some Ancestors. You listening, my People?

Pic: from Lolsnaps.com

Ego Membrane Of The Self

I think I've mentioned before (wow, that many times, huh?) how a dose of 'flu can be quite an enjoyable time - if you don't mind pain and nausea - for exploring "natural" altered states of consciousness. And so it is, and so they are.

This one, however, was not so much fun. Not fun at all, really.

The water or the ether or the other-named medium which occupies every dimension of space and time, from which we all were called forth and into which we eventually re-dissolve...a section of that medium is partitioned off, wrapped around in a translucent membrane we call ego, when we individuate on Earth.

Holes can be punched in the membrane between small self and Self at any point, or great big wounds formed by the use of psycho actives or trauma or meditation.Or infection. And we get to see - partially and in a somewhat distorted form, often - What It Is We Are, really.

And then the holes may be mended or the lid glued back on, if the experience frightened us enough, and we may go through our whole lives with only an uneasy "what was that?" feeling back in our subconscious.
But sometimes, the light streaming in does inform our lives in ways which can be described as enlightening.

I have been through about 36 hours of wondering - really - if I was losing my mind.
My dreams were like none I ever remember having before. A mixture of past experiences and experiences I know I've never had in this incarnation, all equally real. And they did not confine themselves to my sleeping consciousness, oh no. I walked around a good while in a superficially Beta state with those same dreams resurfacing and frankly scaring the crap out of me.

The breaching of the individuated membrane around a (small) self can, like the melting of ice fields over methane gas, release some hairy pockets of trapped ego. I saw the escape of rage and fear at various moments - nothing so big as to pose a danger to my loved ones but enough to piss them off royally, I think - from where they had been trapped inside my small-self membrane. I saw those little puffs of rotten, decaying human effluent escape into the Field.

 And dissipate there.

To be materialist about it, I believe that I harbored a viral infection for a  while, there. My body responded by - among other things - raising my internal temperature. The heatwave we've been having in this part of the world didn't allow for quick cooling and my brain overcooked a little.

Or, you can say that I tore new holes in the ego-membrane of the self and let the light in. For a little while.

Pic: from Core Individuation

From The Centre

Speak from the Centre and always truly from the Centre.
Say that which is un-sayable in the words of men, say it as you speak from the centre of your being.

You'll know when this happens, for - not leaning left or right, not tending forward or back nor above or below - your essence will radiate from the point where it lies concentrated in the meat body.

Of course, speaking from the centre involves getting there first and recognising where you are.
It's a place and an experience which I cannot in all truth English on this blog. But that's OK.
For I am neither teacher nor bodhisattva to guide others to their core.

What I am is a reporter, in common with thousands of souls both like and unlike me.

And the view from the centre, while it can be reported on, cannot be described in any way that would make any...err...sense.

So I would urge us all to seek this place out. And sit awhile, with folded hands and quiet heart, if only to be able to say I've been there.

Namaste.

Completing A Circle

Park Lodge, Binfield in the county of Berkshire.

Even before I fell into that cauldron of  indelible love for Wokingham, I lived here in Binfield.

Dad had just taken up a post with Imperial Chemical Industries as a Research Microbiologist - they recruited him straight after his PhD at Rutgers - and a handful of ICI families lived here, in Park Lodge.

It was heavenly. I was about 7 years old, and my little brother about 5. The Anderson family occupied that low-roofed extension jutting towards us in the photo, plus a sliver of the 2-storey abutting it. Grant and I slept in the room to the right of the chimney on the upper floor.
The stairs were wooden and tight, the floors wooden and squeaky, the ceilings plaster and, one night,entirely fallen to the floor.

The kitchen and bathroom were on a level below the visible ground level. These rooms smelled of mildew and ancient plumbing, and there was almost always a huge spider in the bathtub. I can smell the bathroom now: damp and iron rust and English chill.

There was an orchard of apple and pear trees in our garden, a stand of pampas grass, and a woodland lot at the bottom. This was a child's fairy land.
And when the little birds of village and field pecked the foil tops of the milkbottles left on the doorstep in the morning they left a cream-rimmed hole which was sometimes also frosted with ice.

Further into the two-storey wing lived Serena Wise and her family. And at the top of a broad staircase - smelling of white gloss enamel paint - lived the McKenna family,fresh from Scotland, whose apartment overlooked the huge pines behind the lodge.

And here I am today, rambling like the ageing woman I am. But I am deeply happy, you see.

That forgotten dog I have now upon a leash, I will be stepping out into the relatively unknown in less than a week, and I feel the core divinity living and leaping within this meatsack of a body all the time. I feel ...almost...as if I am completing a circle.

Anonymous Dissolution

How the memory can slay us.

Idly watching an old episode of Mr Bean when a memory of a way of being cuts in forcefully.

As Mr Bean unlocks the door of his hotel single room, I am slammed back more than 20 years in time.

I remember needing to go - from time to time - to such an anonymous room in an anonymous hotel.

The very atmosphere of such places - scrupulously cleaned, vacuous smelling, devoid of character - seeming to call me to the most bizarre acts of Self annihilation I have ever encountered.

For, taking with me a fresh, raw pigs heart which  had purchased at the nearby butcher , or else a sheep's head, also raw, I would cocoon myself in this sterile environment and drink a couple of bottles of vodka until I passed out. I would awaken some time later, pay my bill and walk home.

I am horrified as I remember these incidents. Shocked into cold stillness at my core at the self loathing these memories represent. My need to utterly destroy myself seems revolting, pitiful and..strange.

It is as though I have nothing in common with this woman of twenty years ago - not character nor mind nor soul - except for memory.

If it wasn't for the force and clarity of these remembrances I would probably be denying that I could ever behave in such a shocking, self-destructive manner. And yes, I know this is the sine qua non of the alcoholic - the need to somehow kill the Self. I find it so painful to accept that this was indeed me a couple of decades ago that I wrestle and writhe within the recollection. How could I do that?

I don't know, and don't know and may never know with any crystal scientific clarity the reasons and the mechanism behind this. And perhaps it is enough not to know. Just to realise that I have travelled so far on this road that I feel the only thing connecting me to that strange and awful woman is continuity of memory. For  I do not recognise her at all.

Creators Or Hosts?

For most of us, growing up with the conventional paradigm of history, civilisation is something peculiarly human.

We learn about the dawn of agriculture and the rise of the nation-state as if these things are incontrovertible facts, not open for discussion. We are enculturated to believe that human civilisation - in particular, western civilisation - is something good, something to be proud of, something we humans can point to with a glow of satisfaction. Something ours. It sets us apart from the animals. And the plants, mycophites, bacteria, insects and viruses, too. Many of us really believe that human ingenuity, backed by human technology within the ordered structure of hierarchical civilisation, can truly set us free.

But who is this us? For civilisation as practised by homo sapiens not only expressly excludes, but also enslaves and murders non-human species in a breathtaking sweep of greed and consumerism, which sees the human being caught in the act of destroying the very planet which produced her..there's nowhere to run, when we've trashed, poisoned and made sterile or toxic the whole earth, with all her bio-systems.

So I was thinking - and this is just me at the very start of a good old ponder - is civilisation, or the control system to use another symbol-set, the product of human beings, or are we the product of civilisation?

Stay with me a minute. What I'm asking, as preposterous as it may seem at first, is this: did we create the system, or did the system take us over? Is Civ in fact some non-physical meta-entity which requires a conscious species to live off and which is possessing us, even unto our utter destruction?

Odd though the question is, I would really like to give it some head room over the next few days.

Is Civilisation Ours, or are We Civilisation's?

Todd and Susy

Some (increasingly rare) down time at work this afternoon, and I found myself listening to Todd Rundgren's 1972 album Something/Anything while reading about how Supersymmetry is on the ropes and looking groggy.

I didn't know that Something/Anything made the list of 500 most influential albums of all time. But it's not such a stretch. From the infectious ditty I Saw The Light to Hello It's Me and the (apparently) highly influential Couldn't I Just Tell You, it's an album I first bought in 1972 or '73, when I was 12 or 13, and which I'm enjoying again today - not without the almost obligatory time travel, though.

So, I'm temporarily 12 years old, and reading about how the Large Hadron Collider has just about dissed the idea of Supersymmetry (affectionately known as SUSY) being responsible for all that Dark Matter. In fact, the idea of Dark Matter is in question, too. Pretty radical.

Then I come across this paper, which postulates the idea that good old homo sap. is in fact getting stupider.

Couldn't I Just tell You. I've been remarking on it for the last 10 years, godsdammit.

Back to Todd, and the slipping away of more than 40 years' worth of Time.

Oh, and don't forget the transformative power of the solar eclipse in Scorpio tonight!

Pic: Todd Rundgren, musing on Susy.

Me, Surprised

I'm quite surprised.

It strikes me that an awful lot of people are just not getting the beautiful video short I,Pet Goat II at all.

This morning, while waiting for the washing to cycle, I idly flipped through a few sites where it was being discussed. And came away scratching my head a bit.

I thought it was fairly do-able - although not easy as such - to garner meaning from the symbols sometimes strikingly portrayed by Lefebvre. But may be it's just that the place I'm at on my own path makes the meanings clear. To me, and relative to what I've experienced. Almost certainly others, at different points of their journey, will see different things.

(But not this load of rubbish masquerading as discussion, by all that's holy.)

So, as I wait for the second load of week's washing to finish, let me give a synopsis of how I received this - now viral - piece of enlightenment.

To me, the bloody talons holding the puppeteer's tools near the start are quite important. They are dangling American presidents from their strings and dollar-bedecked claws. That one president is no different from another should be no surprise to any of us, by now.

The figure of Innocence, seated with the apple is a lovely bit of imagery. She lets fall the symbol of the Fall, and it rolls away, splitting open to reveal the lotus of higher mind within its flesh. Scaring, by the way, the crap out of a generic colonialist leader.

The manipulation of the children of Africa, the drowning of the agriculturalist scum of South America, the facing and accepting of the figure (boojum) of Death by the activist -each is a little cameo of living at this point in time in this distorted version of the All. The Pagan child (l'enfant bleue) keeps dancing around the fire the while...

Islam rediscovers its roots and destiny in transcendence, Sufi-style, and ascends to the Moon Goddess. But not before it has shown its own unique face of evil within the world.

The uniform ranks of corporatism line up, and behind them, Kali begins Her final dance...

All the while, the Christ consciousness which resides in each living being sleeps as it traverses the 3D world. Rains of fishes, catastrophic strikes and mass destruction fall all around the barge of the Sun, but He does not yet awaken.

Only at the end, as the vessel leaves the tunnel of unreality, does the sleeping super-conscious awaken, and beholds the sun. Just as it is setting.

There are many more things I haven't mentioned here - but behold! - the washing machine has fallen silent, and I must tend to it before it starts its annoying beeping. Until later, then...

Strange and Compelling Lesson

I seem to always have trouble with the concept of evil. I'm known for throwing epithets around like murderous, sick and disturbed, not to mention stupid when it comes to describing the actions of many of us in this..well..stupid,murderous,sick,disturbed culture. But the real heart-stopping face of evil I believe I have yet to see.

Now, having thoroughly neglected my daily sitting practise for some weeks, I should not have been surprised when a combination of stress and the strange weather we've been having - a week of heat wave followed by chilly, rainy days - caused me to come down with a virus. On a Saturday.

I spent most of the day sleeping and entertaining nightmares of the most vivid form, only getting up to hang the washing and pay the TV dish re-alignment man (we lost our TV signal last weekend when the Internet connection was fixed.So it goes, and not a great loss, but for Warren's horsies). At sunset, feeling a little better, I headed for the Hecate altar, lit the oil burner under some Neroli oil, and settled in.

The panorama of eyes, faces and swirling star fields which I have become accustomed to, more or less, over the last decade or so started playing across my inner vision. I centred myself and checked on the health of my major chakras before opening my eyes and staring into the black mirror, supporting an icon of the Lady, which backs the altar.

I was quite surprised - although not disturbed - to see a large black shape behind me in the mirror. It had fairly well-defined edges and didn't appear to move as I turned my head slightly from side to side. It was puzzling. As I sat there, trying to figure out what it was, an idle thought crossed my still-quiet mind: was this some form of entity, an (evil) presence? I felt nothing like fear. But maybe that's what an (evil) entity would want me to feel - calm.

As the last of the sunlight disappeared from the room, I suddenly made sense of what I was seeing.
It was me. Or rather, the reflection of something I had clothed myself in - a dark t shirt.

My own covering artifice had caused me to wonder - briefly - if I was at last beholding the face of monstrous evil.

What a strange and compelling lesson that was.

Sacred Smell

This study at Macquarie University in Australia seems to suggest that people who exhibit the traditional psychopathic personality traits also have an impaired sense of smell.

Since my partner Warren quite famously can't smell very well, this has led to all sorts of jokes in this household. And it had me wondering, not for the first time, if I would actually recognise a psychopath if he or she bit me.

Because I find it surprisingly hard to process the idea that some people may just be born rotten.

 I tend towards saying, with Neil Kramer, that "there are no bad guys, just disturbed guys". I do find it difficult to accept the idea of ground-in evil. I've even flirted with the thought that perhaps the reason why I can't identify psychopaths is because I am one. But that makes no real sense.If I were a psychopath I would be denying the reality of genetically callous people, not wondering why I can't spot them.

Wouldn't I?

Well, this impairment of olfactory senses in those who show a complete lack of empathy resonates with a  sort of reason outside of the scientific explanation of some kind of damage to a specific part of the brain. It speaks of a tightly-throttled input of some essential data which makes us normal, feeling humans. The sense of smell, it is said (by Douglas Adams in one of his Dirk Gently novels, if I recall correctly) is one of the very last to leave us as our bodies disintegrate. It's certainly a powerful stimulator of memory. It may be that we pick up clues which aid our feeling-with toward other beings through our noses (and our skin) which bypass the neo-cortex all together and act directly on some more essential part of our spirit. Thus not having access to this information could produce humans who have no idea of what it's like to suffer as another.

And me? My sense of smell, even though I smoke fairly heavily, is pretty acute, thank you very much. Gives me that much less of an excuse and prods me to open my soul even wider to the myriad ways of being and creating, suffering and rising above which marks this space out as such a sacred place to inhabit at any time - and especially now.

Pic: Basil, a sacred smell to me

Hey..

..don't mind me.

I'm just having a, you know, psychotic break, OK?

As you do.

The thing is, when you start seeing the Field in all (or at least some of) its glory, everywhere visible and invisible at once, and when you see the embedded Forms interacting within -or rather with - this Field..

..and when you go back to the office after 10 days doing nothing but training yourself to see the Field and its wonders everywhere -and nowhere - and you see the ligatures binding the human forms off from the Field...ties put there by the ego...well...you're in a hellish locus of Walking Dead.

Air conditioned, screen-glowing, coffee guzzling, keyboard pounding Hell.

So excuse me awhile as I go and scream in the corner.

Be back shortly.

Tendrils In

For the last 24 hours I appear to have been hosting one of those temporary hitch-hikers; you know, the ones too small for the human eye to see and made entirely of RNA.

Probably a form which was dormant through the cold winter and now has woken up, singing and dancing, in my tissues. Wrecking the normal functioning of my immune system and providing me with an interesting day.

Being a Monday, it's difficult enough for my beleaguered colleagues in the Fraud Department without having to manage minus their data provider, however grumpy she may be. So I went in to the office.

At times I really wished I hadn't: I was sweating and shivering by turns and pretty faint at all times. But what was really interesting was my introversion.

"Normally", I'm a near-perfect introvert - an INTJ with heavy emphasis on the I and the N - but today I felt as if all my human-communicator tendrils were pulled in, wrapped around my core. I could hardly say a word to any human - when I did, the interaction was fascinating; unusual and entirely honest. Which caused me to appreciate why we have social conventions, sometimes. Or is appreciate the right word? I felt today that when I did have something to add, it was of greater value than what usually passes for social lubricant in our culture.

On the other hand, my interaction with the non-human world was unaffected, or slightly clearer than normal.
Towards the end of the day, I was at a loose end, so I plugged the iPod into my ears, put on POCO (a sort of proto-Eagles, mostly good with outstanding soaring patches of divine radiance)..their Rose of Cimmaron album. I called up the blasted FreeCell user interface and played a few rounds.

Now, I don't know how common this is, but I find that playing FreeCell on a monitor puts me, after a while, into a softly altered state of consciousness. Add to this that my brains were being fried by the waste products of a bloody virus, and perhaps what happened next was to have been expected.

I found myself recalling the felt flaying-open of my heart the night before. This civilization breaks us open on so many levels that we tend not to notice it until it has reached a critical point. Then it becomes painful.
Well, as the words go, that's how the light gets in. And I had felt a filling-up with light the night before.

Now, however, I was holding seemingly every single human I had ever known in my heart-chakra, and knowing how they strive so utterly to be something when they already are something, how they knock themselves out to gather more learning, more money, more prestige...and then find it was all an ashen illusion. That there was never anything in the bright beckoning of industrial civilization's phantoms which one does not already have -in fuller and truer measure.

I was overwhelmed in that instant by a wave - just one wave - of sorrow, love and compassion that I nearly cried out. You know how a complete, sudden wave of deep sorrow washes you sometimes? Perhaps it's called "the blues". This was like that, but so much more intense. A lifetime of hurt and understanding in a split second.

Actually, I'm doing a bad job of trying to explain it, because it seems the words aren't. It was one of those moments which sweep in, change you forever and then leave. While you grope for meaningful ways to describe it.
Never mind. Maybe having no words is the essence of a peak experience.
If we could capture it, I'm pretty sure this culture would've made a roaring trade out of it already.

Pic: Tendrils in the Dark by Imajilon

Jumping Through Hoops

"Science boosts its claim to truth by its spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command, and to predict what will happen and when."

Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden (New York, Basic Books, 1995)

 I'm finally ready to call bollocks on this ...this way of thinking.

I'm not disputing that science has created some wonderful toys for us, or that it predicts the consensus reality to a T- almost every time.
 But that's just it, you see - the consensus reality is scientific materialism. And if you don't go along with the consensus, well you're obviously mad.

 Science, lest we forget, is a method - one we created and have used for the past few centuries. Or 6,000 odd years, if you prefer. It is a way of interrogating the 3-D world so that the answers seem to make sense, justify our equations,and repeat themselves on command.

 It's a collapsed waveform. Or, as Derrick Jensen puts it, a gun held to our heads.

I'm not saying that truth is relative. I think that there are many kinds of truths, and many levels for them to operate on. But once a truth is accepted generally (and by generally I'm tending to the mathematical usage of the word , meaning universally) on a level, it will hold on that level - and maybe on a level or two in close proximity to it - for as long as that acceptance goes unchallenged.

And while it holds, those of us cleaving to that level of reality will maybe find something of the rock-solid comfort of fundamental religion in statements like Dawkins'. I know, for I have been there, too.

But when the consensus is challenged - by any of us starting to remember Who we are for example - the truth seems not to hold quite as firmly. Other truths start breaking through and touching us deeply on entirely different planes of Being.

Plants communicate with us, in dreams or waking consciousness. Beloved family members come to say goodbye as they are dying. Birds become comic geniuses. Ancestors speak.

And we realise that we are not, as the distortion would have us, off our rockers. We are not making all this up, or hallucinating (an odd concept in scientific materialism!) or trying to fool others or ourselves.
These pure personal experiences - these knowings, these gnoses - are the marks of wider realms and other levels knocking on the doors of our souls.

We can cling to the arrogance of materialism and believe we are cracking up, and so never get up to answer the door, or we can open up, explore these other states with all their richness of communication, and leave the kindergarten of science(with all its wonderful toys) behind.

Pic: from Total Translucency