Back from Holiday...

Returned from an excellent holiday walking the South West Coastal Path which takes around the coasts of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall to Land's End and then back again. (Finished in Exeter so not the complete walk). Excellent because for the first time since 2003 I had been alone for 3 weeks just walking and taking the world in without any distraction or "habits" or commitments forming apart from the simple action of walking. This has been amazing for straightening out my thoughts. Have made great progress in a number of places. There is a notebook from which I will expand but just a few important results and notes...

Smiling & Talking
A great thing I discovered was the importance of smiling and talking. Meeting people with a smile, being positive to everyone, ignoring negative thoughts has a profound impact on people. People who are unhappy will become happy, people who lack motivation will be motivated and oneself? we get what we want from people - but that is not the cynical selfish purpose of smiling - that is the result of removing hindrances - everyone gains and it is a glimpse of what heaven is like. Also I realise that people are not happy to be in silence with strangers. A quick word of greeting, a joke, an observation break the ice and allow people to see ones personality - which if it comes with a smile reinforces the energy and positivity. Dressed like a tramp, holes in my walking clothes, dirty, unwashed and unshaved I was worried that people might shy from me, but with a smile and casual communication I saw people naturally see right through my exterior. We mostly don't see the exterior of people, only the inside - what a fool I've been to believe in external appearance. (We are conditioned differently to uniform may be.) These are such simple things that I have seen others master, but I have failed to understand what the secret and reason is until now.

Positive thinking is not actually positive
It is common knowledge these days that to succeed one must learn to be positive. To see the positive in one's failures or in what seems bad, so that it becomes the corner stone of the better kingdom. I was cynical of this because understood like that it seems artificial. It became clear that positivity is actually simply the removal of negativity. A true person has no negativity and no need for artificial learned positive thinking. It is only when we harbour negativity that we must take the medicine of what has been called a "positive approach" to counter the negativity and restore our true self. Put this way it makes sense to me and the apparent positive gains then have a true and "real" value.

A central narrative
It seems the problem I face and the reason for this blog is not so much the discovery of anything - this has mostly been done and if the great sages haven't done it then it doesn't need to be done! But rather the looking for a way to organise the vast amount of imformation and advice that exists about life. It is not the case that everything one thinks is correct, but it is proving extremely difficult to find a way to organise and express the opposite!

Politics & Society
It is hard to discuss contemporary society without being negative. This is a trick I must discover. I've heard many religious people speak about modernity and post-modernity and almost always despite their greatest efforts it becomes negative. An example I thought of yesterday regards that issue of the Law. Politicians need to be making laws else we have no need for them - it follows naturally then that as more and more laws are created the legal system is going to get more and more complex. Doesn't this process have to have an end? In which case we'll have to lose laws as new ones are made... and does this process have an end? Are there a general set of laws? If so then we don't need politicians just philosophers and wise people to discover the timeless laws.

General/Specific Desire
I saw a couple that gave me an opportunity to meditate upon what life with "my muse" would have been like. In that meditation I finally put to rest that issue to rest. The mistake I had made was not to make this distinction above. We can say of a species that they have general desires - like food and shelter. But for an individual particular objects must be found to meet these desires - and these desires have particular instances also. Thus one must realise - especially in the case of finding a sexual partner or soul mate of which we envisage only one desire and one object - that the desire is particular to us, and it almost impossible for the the object to perfectly match. Now "my muse" was so perfect in my eyes but I wanted to believe that she was "so perfect" in reality so that my desire might have real true satisfaction. I imagined that she was "so perfect" to everyone and so didn't make a play of my desire thinking it was her choice that counted. In reality however she was nothing and it was the strength of my desire that made her so special, and where I failed was to prove that. However in proving that I also prove that she is nothing outside the walls of myself and that the object of my hearts desire is no more than a self delusion of no true substance. Realising this deeply at last the phantom evaporated and I was free from the lure of my muse and women! Now I see that if one wished to express the general desire of our species one must face the dukkha of particular existence - nothing wrong in that - but only if we see that there is no salvation from imperfection of illusion in marriage or any such personal-desire relationship.

The World is Mad
Without criticism I can say that were world sanity and insanity to be put on the scales they would tip far toward insanity. Returning to the city from the walk and the simplicity of the sky, the land, the animals and the people who work the country you notice how shut down everyone is. I guess because we see so many people in such a confined space all communication stops to ensure that we actually get around! But it leads to an odd unnatural environment of neutral interactions. Its ok when you get thrown into it because you can see that it is odd and unnatural - but when its all you know (as it becomes after months of habituations) - then you normalise odd and unnatural. And, this is just regarding conduct in the open spaces. How much else is unnatural? We'll almost all our existences in dense cities has taken on a life of its own with no guide and no root and it can't just be me who is bewildered about what is true anymore. The Iraq war was definitely a total shift to insanity and that was what finally taught me that pursuing the other direction was right. I'm beginning to see that this was right, but it involves undoing centuries of normalising what is odd and unnatural. Milk comes from cows not supermarket tetrapacks. Cows make it from the grass they eat which grows from the sun and the rain - all are free if you can find them. There is no economics, politics, property, buisiness, labour to be done here - only God. We are in an age where this has been almost forgotten, even while the books tell us vastly more than ever about the process! Insanity is the norm these days, so it shouldn't be a worry that things don't make sense. The only thing to decide then is whether we're gonna try and get sane again? Sadly I made that decision when I was a kid before I realised what a huge job it was.

OCD, Depression & Demons
Speaking of insanity I finally got to grips with this mental illness that I realise I've had my whole life. I guess the moment to realise you need help is moment you are cured. Well this might have been quicker with a map, but I realise that I would still have to walk the distance of curing it regardless. It begins with depression (which in my case always begins with failed love, or is the love because of the depression?). Depression removes one's motivation. Then we are weak if there are any other problems (demons). I say demons because problems are not passive, they will try and get you (even without a paranoia demon ;-) and we must work against them wisely and critically. I see the same action now in personal issue demons as in quitting cigarettes. Cigarette demons try's all the tricks - a favourite is "you've done really well in resisiting cigarettes this week, why not celebrate now by having a cigarette" - stupid when you see it, but this thought will be sugar coated and make real sense when the demon strikes. A real problem I have is OCD - that is Obsessive, Compulsive Disorder. It was trivial as a kid making me tidy up my room too much! But when depression strikes then suddenly it becomes powerful. Combine this with a misunderstanding I have. I did a few bad things as a kid and then thought I must be a bad person deep down so therefore I must cover up this badness by learning to be good - the fear then being that one day that deep down badness will break through the repression again and make me do something bad - the worst being to kill somone. Reading the papers I explained other peoples horrible behaviour in the same way and so became fearful that repression was all that lay between me and being a murderer! Then you discover the compulsive part of OCD and think that it is the repressed evil side and the obsessive side can have a field day. Throw on the petrol of depression and the fire gets out of control. So the mind goes around and around in circles and you have no idea what is going on. Oh and I did some drugs which really helps too :-) Well over a very long time I've unravelled this, but not without finding a very useful webpage a few years ago which explained in perfect detail what is impossible to see for oneself : that the compulsion cannot become real. It is not actually going to end up in physical action. This is a brilliant way to intercept the OCD cycle, because it is that fear that we are just about to do something which fuels the obsession.
Listening to the Russell Brand show on Radio 2 they joked about meeting the queen and strangling her and how when you are faced with really important moments the reality can make you freak a bit. This is OCD. Its obviously a common thing, just gets out of hand in some people (maybe during depression). (Infact aren't all mental illnesses just extreme versions of normal abberations? Its not like the mind is rock solid all the time!). I put a lot of OCD and ADH etc down to reduced Omega 3 in our diets these days! This really does take the edge of these mental events.
Anyway, what evolves from OCD worries is a host of misunderstandings, fears and behaviour patterns which in my case I'm only just beginning to shake off. The main one is the fear that an OCD attack will occur on a plane or busy train and I obsess about punching or hurting someone or shouting. This I don't actually want to do (that's a clue as to what is happening if we think about it). The fear that it will happen then becomes much more crippling than the OCD and creates almost continual anxiety and fear, which leads especially when depression has weakened us to agoraphobia when we are afraid of it happening almost all the time in public and even sometimes in private! Its a real maze of issues all stemming from misunderstandings at the outset. A good way I found to face anxiety on the holiday was to understand that we must do something really frightening every day! So that when fear is happening, rather than try to get away from it like a depressive who can't be bothered, we take it as an opportunity to do our days frightening thing.
OCD has it's good side though because it makes us very perfectionist and aware of being good. By the time I throw this off I should have almost perfect morality (will have to see if that lasts; demons are very cunning!). But it is important to throw away Freud and realise that the human brain is always changing and with persistent training we can evolve our brains in favourable directions - just as with carelessness we can let our brains get clogged up and go bad. It is also important to realise that the true-self is neither a thought, nor even our brains themselves and that with wisdom we have the power to completely mastery of that organ. The true self is pure-goodness which we must work to reveal with wisdom and attention to positive thinking and living a good life. This is not negotiable, this is the only way to happiness. Important to understand if we are to escape the confines of bad habits, brain weaknesses and demons. Demons won yesterday, but on the score card I'm still well up for the holiday :-)

Work and Fascism
Finally got this old problem under the spot light. The issue is that people have basic needs and so they need to work and most do so quite freely and with good attitude. Sadly however (people being what they are) doing an honest days work is not as simple as that. To do an honest days work we have to accept a system of control and in so doing we hand power to the establishment. Thus the establishment exploits the needs of people to gain control over them. This has riled me ever since I faced the job market but I could not see clearly where the problems lay. Looking deeply into the system then "property" is one of the central lynch pins of this explotation. Now this sounds like standard left wing criticism but when I get through this (this is the one part that didn't get far on the walk) it will be not anti the hegemony but hopefully supportive of it - not wishing to be negative that is. There that novel out of this too - Anura (in progress).

Wise words
These words got me through a lot on the walk. "The difference between one route and another when walking is oneself". Often there were many routes to the same place around the coast and one day I realised that the only difference between them was myself. The hard one is only hard when we are weak and negative. Thus when I was tired and exhausted or the day had gone badly I saw that it was just myself that had changed not the world around me. Despite this the demon often raised its head of criticising the terrain, the weather or the world when things got hard - but through this process I got quite good at seeing that really it was just me I was criticising. My positivity failed hugely at a critical moment when I bit a wasp and got stung on the tongue - so much anger was generated by the pain that I had to camp early that day. These demons are strong and we need to work very hard with clarity of mind (which we must get by walking or whatever) to retrain them.

Calories+Sun dials
Realised that all my dietary considerations need to be updated from 2003, I just don't get 5Mcal (5000Kcal) a day. Also my sundial information on the webpage is slightly wrong. The shadow cast from a sundial is only correct when the arm is parallel to the axis of the Earth. Need to update my webpage on both counts.