The lure of sexuality

Two tuesdays ago (14th October) I awoke from a dream in a state of peace and bliss. I had been in a hospital bed and a dark haired nurse had come to my bed give a bed wash. I grabbed her and pulled her beneath the bed sheets and kissed her ... and it is complete satisfaction. Within the dream I was then questioning in this state of satisfaction would I still write and express the thoughts that I write in this blog. A question reminds me of the state that I experienced while transfixed by "my muse". My thoughts stopped in this state. Thoughts I can only conclude are the searchings that arise through the unease of dissatisfaction. The dissatisfaction for me being sexual.

So why this dissatisfaction? It is that sexual satisfaction comes with a huge price attached. It is wishful thinking to believe that sex exists by itself, it is part of the much greater game of worldly involvement - it includes status, possessions, money, labour, winning/losing, birth and death. I have only one desire in this whole game which it seems is sexual satisfaction. So I have decided to forgo the game... were it that easy.

My experiments with celebacy are in disarray. I can find no peace, only anxiety, unease and profound destabalisation in the state of sexual repression. It simply will not leave me alone. To end the sex drive, is to end my own life it seems. I have to find another way.

Of course this means reopening the case of "my muse". I realise that I have indeed made the biggest mistake of my life in not engaging with "my muse" with an intention to "win" her. This morning I remembered that indeed I have played out the crisis of my hero at the time Kierkegaard who inexplicably and to his eternal regret called off the marraige to Regina. This seemed at the time to be a perfectly noble act - now it seems like a huge mistake with no gain at all.

There is but one happy resolution to this: probably as mad cap as the idea of self-fulfilling romance: I will engage tentatively with sexual desire BUT my attitude to the rest of worldly matters will reestablish a posture of criticism. The last 9 years of being uncritical has been profoundly unfruitful except that I can afford to shun it for a few years as a result. Instead I am studying and writing a book on it instead. So my thoughts don't end, but they address the question which seems to schism life between that which does seem necessary and the weight of worldly attachments and burdens which seems unnecessary.

Jesus Blood Never Failed Me

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prA4MDX9T7Q

Wow! it is 12 years since I was told about this piece of music and finally I've come to listen to it... the story was that Bryars working on the music left it on repeat while he went to make tea. On returning he found people from adjacent rooms had come to see the music for themselves all moved to tears.

Fleshing out some of last nights rant...

Why is it that we are not paid work-tokens every time we consume? Since what we buy needs to be made the two are sides of the same coin.

You might argue that manufacture must preceed consumption so logically we can only consume what we have made, so it makes sense to get spending tokens every time we work.

But as we see in the current economy we often spend tokens that we have actually worked for yet (i.e. debt). A promise to do the work tomorrow suffices. So why can't that work in reverse? We promise to consume tomorrow for work we do today.

In this world a doctor has to consume £50 worth of goods before they can do an hours work (or promise to condume). The road sweeper on the other hand only has to promise to consume £10 worth of goods before they are allowed to do their one hour of work.

The obvious result of this economy, and the reason for the question, is that everyone would just consume and never cash in their accumulating work tokens.

It illustrates an obvious but seemingly forgotten fact that we don't actually like working. Kings and aristrocracy characterise themselves through their non working, and the social heirachy is manifest in making other people work for you. They hardly pay people to sleep with their wives, it is the things they don't want to do which are passed on.

Employment is characterised by doing something we don't want to do, and we receive not consumption tokens as an economic balance, but a reward that encourages us to do such a thing. At its root the cost of not-working is starvation; the aristicracy force employment by threat of death.

This is enabled through a concept called "property". This is intrical to the system of illusion that has evolved which I was suggesting yesterday is the wrong direction in the wrong ocean for Mankind (where Man is genus Homo not sex as opposed to woman). Property is a subtle one that I was making some in roads into understanding this summer, and can't complete here, partly because as is so often the way these days I'm actually short of time! ironic since I don't "work" anymore. Must leave for London in an hour.

Shopping in todays society is not just about consumption, it is about ownership. Thus the manufacturing industry has to make copies of everything so that everyone can have one. This is the absurdity of property system - the endless duplication of things. In my life at the moment I use a jacussi, steam room, shower, sauna, swimming pool, library (with 100,000 books), internet, am chauffeur driven, and have millions of square miles of lakes and fields in which to spend my time. All this for a few pounds a week - because I share it all. Public swimming pool, library, toilets, transport, parks and gardens etc. I have never bought any clothes in my life. I simply wear other peoples unwanted clothes that they give me. Infact the only thing I must secure for myself, the only thing I actually consume is food and energy. I use solar power for the meagre high efficiency lighting in the garage and wind up radio etc. Am working on an easy way to burn veg oil, so still use 8L petrol a year in fuel. Food is minimal - porridge oats, potatoes, beans etc. I do virtually no shopping because I don't care for ownership.

In aristocratic times the primary ownership was land achieved through war. When William invaded England in 1066 he took the land and put the Saxons into slavery. Thus he had his workforce and his taxes. This essentially is the system that exists today. It is biggest yoke around Mans neck, and the biggest flaw in our view of what Life is about.

There is no reason why we can't share everything. John Locke tries to argue that property is logically deductable from Reality. When we eat and assimilate food into "our" bodies then we are at the same time exluding "other" people from "having" it. Such a conception evidently already presupposes an essentialist view of reality - with notions of "my" body, "your" body and the question of "who" "has" the food. The thing which holds Mankind back is this essentialist ignorance which I accept is profound and hard to enlighten from. I struggle myself, but at least intellectually can see the profound wisdom of people like Jesus and Buddha who preach a carefree attitude to the worldly forms. Jesus did not die on the cross to teach us concern for our own bodily welfare! He took our place on the cross to show us that "our" place is not really Ours. This is the foundation of the concept of Love. Amazing that in English that word has almost exactly the opposite usage meaning instead "I want".

We are all familiar with the thought that when starving it is a greater man who gives his food to another than takes for himself. Deep down no-one will argue that the man who makes a sacrifice like this for another is even equal to one who does not, let alone of lower merit that the man who takes for himself. It is profoundly known to our spirit that sharing is the True Nature of Reality. Yet the same twisted logic that gets us to college to study for a job we think we actually want, when deep down we know we would rather not work, gets us to hoard private property believing that this is the way the world is.

I need to make a distinction to clarify something. I tend to call Work the general activity of Mankind, while Job is the contractual agreement with an employer. Basically it is in our nature to work, but we don't want a Job. So it is work to write this blog, it will be work to take a shower in a moment, and it will be work to walk to the train station and visit a temple in London. However I don't even notice it as work, and won't notice a time when I do not work. On the other hand the train driver, who could drive the train as part of his Work, instead probably thinks of it as his Job and will notice the time when that Job ends.

Most of what we do in our Jobs is actually then just Work and we would do it if we were paid or not! How much more absurd the system of property and ownership! And the employers, how do we explain them? Are they just lazy passing all this work onto their employees as Jobs? That I agree is a mystery. I've noticed at work however that managers get very fidgetty and are always looking for things to do, or at least deligate which is their understanding of "work".

I need add also that this discussion is not just an internal critque of the logic of the economy. It began years ago from the issue of the environment. Mankind's labour is the greatest treat to the planet, but the planet is only factored into the economy when it goes wrong, when the damage has been done. Economy and economically driven labour are dangerous. The more I learn about this the more I realise that it is not a new problem, it is just that global economies are so huge now that the problems are blindingly obvious. Small hunter gatherer tribes could overhunt the environment and then more on, and if they failed they would simply die out and be replaced by other tribes. Today we don't have second chances like this. Whenever we work we change some part of the environment. Even typing this blog, while it is a low energy computer, I am using carboniferous sunshine released from oil, I am depleting global resources. The best answer is to work less, and that means have fewer jobs, and that means consume less. Yet economies are only interested in expansion and you look at why and you see the huge gaping holes in our imagination.

So as time runs out I'll recap quickly... looking at "hat life is about" on the local scale we enjoy friendsly relationships, we enjoy games and working together on projects, sharing toys and tools, ideas, free time, we are often very communal, caring and social. But then you look at the "official" picture and it could not be more distorted. It is about individual ownership, power and status, individual success, responsibility and achievement. In the "official" space we face armies of people who have been literally brainwashed to throw all that away as soon as the uniform goes on - people who ultimately manage the concentration camps of global destruction (to put the point over in its harshest form). The live in fear of starvation, and will cut their fellow man down to escape the wrath of their employers, or to gain the shallow praise and status that this affords. Thus wars are fought and Man is set against Man and ignorance prevails.

Yet the right ocean and the right direction are as taught us by the Great Teachers. I speak of my own great teachers Jesus and Buddha. Others have their own. I am ignorant, I do not follow the teachings well, but I know the ocean and I know the direction, and that is why I know I don't follow it very well. Man belongs in a world where ... it is so hard to explain because we have to completely escape the current paradigm... and I am doing that and I don't have time right now. I can't even say that we should not seek private possessions because what is a "private" "possession" when you understand Love? If you need food then you feed yourself, if another needs food then contemporary wisdom says they feed themselves. But does this thinking really exclude the situation where you feed them and they feed you? What in Reality is the difference? In Reality we don't see a difference! How then can we explain the meaning of "private" or "possession"?

This week I saw maybe the time has come for a radical world shift

What has been just disconnected ideas and a spectral mist suddenly took the form of a solid something that could be believed in last week - that the human race is on the cusp of change - and astronomical change. The more I take a stand for what I see as true the more I see almost everything to be wrong - subtle not wholesale - but infected by the disease of falsity in every direction.

The root is that we are grounded in a history and past which is no longer relevant. We are descended from people who lived under the authority of kings, whose understanding of the world was limited, whose lives were dominated by inefficient material production, who conceived in terms of small tribal and familial associations, who were governed either by the wishes of their masters or their own needs.

Today those old ideas manifest in what are becoming increasingly irrelevant entities like nation, government, job. The struggle by governments today to reign people in with intense propaganda is becomming progressively desperate and at the same time transparent. The conspiracy theorists talk of "double speak" and the manipulation of states by a proposed illuminati when it seems the opposite to me; that the illusions we have lived under forever for example in the days of Queen Elizabeth or the Vatican or Lincoln - these great personality cults, these great "images" - are more transparent and ridiculous than ever before. The absurd belief that a handful of men can really manage the mass, a belief that has given them the apparent ability to do this, has in reality only hyponotised the mass to forget itself. It is the drugging of the mass by ideas (not by an illuminati but by its own innate ability to delude itself - after all the leaders are born of the mass themselves) which is evaporating before my eyes.

Realities are pressing and breaking the myth that man made "laws" have any standing in the world. Each person has direct access to the Laws, to what was once called God, using their own being and existence to examine - this is the message of Protestantism, of the Buddha, of good science of the most learned Aryans. It stands in contrast to the message that the mass must be controlled as taught by Nazism, Sunni Islam and the Catholic church. If there is a conflict here it will come from the latter as they are amassed by their leaders. But, who they will attack will be harder to determine as there is no mass who belief the opposite and no leaders who represent them! Even as someone choses to submit to a worldly manifestation of "islam" (as opposed to the divine Islam which has no worldly name or association) this choice they make is made by them - they already enact the Law in their very choice of which written law to follow.

Government can talk but the realities of the economic system are coming out. Governments can talk but the realities of the environmental system are coming out. Lies, deceit and false belief can not supress Reality forever. Each one of us, once the illusions of deceit have washed away, has our own eyes that can see truth as easily as for any man who bears eyes.

So the questions that fundamentally arise when for example we see that employment was a system that belonged to kings and feudal systems, where taxes were taken from people by force to support the non-productive lives of the rulers - who claimed to protect the people from invasion by other rulers, but who were more interested in protecting their own right to take taxes: a system which with hindsight seems self justifying. Nothing has changed, only the names: and now we are taxed in stealth by central banks printing money and causing inflation, by bank bailouts claiming like our once Feudal Knights that we could not live without them and therefore had to pay for them: ruling is non-productive - and today where we have more rulers than ever before we must work in an age of machines paradoxically harder than ever before to support them. Or the question that arises when we realise in later life that absolutely nothing we were taught at school had anything to do with Life itself. And, worse schooling is being transformed to prepare people not for life, not even for the world these days but simple for a job. Is that all we can imagine their life has become, a robot in the economic production system?

It is a world following a vector set long ago with almost no creativity and no imagination for what life is about. Put bluntly we imagine we are still like animals. We forage for whatever we can get and when the opportunity arises or our cunning affords we steal from our fellow creatures to make as big a nest as we can get away with. That is all our lives really amount to: bacteria in a petri-dish.

But, goes the cry this is hopelessly hyperbolic! there is humanity everwhere: people helping each other out on a daily basis, artists struggling to birth the beautiful and inspiring or thoughtful, people like myself writing about something with no apparent gain, people battling to be the Best they can be - not for personal greed or gain but for an ancient instinct in some Virtue, some Goodness, some Nobility, some Enlightenment. Even that guy in my last post struggling even at his lowest moment not to be violent. Where was the gain? Exactly! this is the very struggle which lights up the rest as ignorance. This is the nature which gives Life its name.

It really seems to me that the tide has shifted this week against the backdrop of the ship of imaginary wealth lurching and heaving open upon the storm rocks, battered by the fury and thunderous arcing spray of the midnight waters: the papers say it was the bow timbers which split first, that is why water came aboard, but had the ship not been heading the wrong way in the wrong sea things would have been more different than ever can be imagined. And, we think this storm is bad, it is already nothing compared with the storm raging in the environment and worse still the storm that rages in the hearts of Man - but were these ships not sailing the wrong way in the wrong seas things would more different than ever can be imagined.

Indeed just a glimmer of belief that maybe I do have a destination here, and that my own journey to understand life has not been mistaken in the vast expanse of ocean. That it does chart a reasonable course. That life is not about endless production, days of toil, making and spending of money, struggling for status and social heirachy, struggling to gain that which we want, or even the crayoned imagined opposites dreamed by some in the 60s: but rather the discovery of satisfaction and peace and the kind of Love which is boundless and can be given to anyone and the realisation that these alone fully satisfy in every way with no remainder all that transpires in that word Life and which sets us at once ready to accept Death in the same breath free from the mascarade of shadow puppets and worldly phantoms which populate our current waking fantasies.

Pain causes Violence

Was accosted in the street last week by a young gentleman accusing me of taking the piss out of him and looking to cause some violence. Turns out he was actually a very restrained guy whose 'Buddha Nature' shone through the drunken haze as he realised very quickly that I was simply calm and well mannered and the chaos lay with him - an amazing achievement given the state he was in. The estranged mother of his child had set the child against him and he was about as rejected as you can get. In parting I made the casual mistake of wishing him a "good one" and this cut deep. He was back at me wishing to cave my skull in. All he wanted was his pain to be respected and he was paranoid that people would make fun of him. Interesting on many counts but primarily because he felt a fool to be hurt, and secondly because the response to his pain was defence and violence. Writing this I see maybe my analysis at the time was wrong (I was on the phone at the time and you don't expect to handle issues like that in the parentheses of another conversation!) that the issue was not that the pain caused the violence but the sense of wothlessness that he had been vulnerable to pain, that his girlfriend had wounded him so easily and successfully, and that he ever got into this situation at all.... ok the original point that pain causes violence as a means of expressing that pain externally and making it tangeable will have to remain on hold... 2 analyse another time

Status & Health

Last post for a bit. Caught this stat yesterday, that life expectancy is linked to the "sense of control" we experience in our lives. Thus people who have position and wealth who thereby feel that they are in control live longer than those who are dependent, the example given being on the dole.

This trend could be explained in many ways for example that people who are more sickly are going to have less control obviously skews the data. But, I felt the implication of the statistic was that psychological pressure alone contributes to lower life expectancy.

This links to a huge chunk of what I've analysed of late and adds some weight to it. The analysis of depression was that it is a psychological strategy to lower desires to avoid the stress that comes from competition. It is an essential mechanism in social animals then in that it reduces conflict and limits resource consumption. It seems then that dying early by individuals who are squeezed out by completition is a similar psychological derived mechanism which actually aids the group as a whole.

It means however that as I was beginning to realise, position and status are not arbitrary but are actually linked to life! When people look for job promotions its not so that they can contribute more to the company, its not even so that they can get more money to feed more mouths, the status itself confers psychological well being! Now I never understood that, maybe I don't have this sort of brain.

So I need to factor this in to my list of life essentials that for most people social status is a "necessary". Sexual activity still has a question over it. The others are the obvious biological ones + the most important one: love (as in altruism).

It beggars belief though that my fellow man is so ignorant though. I mean if you gain status by being "above" another person then doesn't it mean that in the same move they are therefore equally "lower". So the net gain is zero. Nothing has changed in Reality. And a hidden implication is that there is an absolute top and bottom. For example on the scale of salary. Some say that the bigger the salary the higher the status. Some however say that the happier the higher the status and we know that salary and happiness don't equate. They are different scales. There is no absolute high and low. And in any case on any measure be it height or popularity or wealth etc there will always be people above you and people below you however high you rise. So it is a futile quest really.

I believe that this is an affine space with no origin, and while you can trace vectors between individuals in many dimensions (niches) there is no centre or top or bottom. Does the Earth have a top and a bottom. By convention we take North to be the top, but we know that space has no Real orientation, its just an illusion; as by the same measure is money.

Where money is different is that it affords us more purchasing power and this has a real effect because it means that we can buy people (who said slavery was dead). Thus we buy people to make our food, do our washing, drive our buses and train, clean the water etc. This can make a real difference... but only as long as there are people who accept the illusion. When famine breaks out then people want food not money, the space reorientates.

That is unless "control" itself is the feature. Are we all control freaks? Or is it as analysed most recently the underlying desire which requires control to manifest, and which causes suffering if not manifest. Not managing desire then really will kill us maybe! This is more urgent that I thought!

It no wonder then that the world is such an unhappy place if we are all secretly seeking to be one up on our neighbours. It can be quite innocent like in X-factor where you wish to be the best in the sense that you have the best voice and singing talent. But it is a small step to wanting to be first irrespective of your singing talent, and worse simply not having anyone ahead of you. My most recent ex-bosses all suffered from this pathologically.

Actually I see it is simply a matter of ego which separates the person who simply wants to be the best, from the person who wants to be first. Then is ego the issue in feeling in control? And a factor which makes causes poor people to die earlier than rich people? To be discovered...