ThisLife

Hiya Isimsiz, Don't worry too much about the misunderstanding,... my feeling is that that is actually the 'norm' in almost all human relationships. As for cultural differences, just as they do with food, they often add a rather exciting spice and interest to relationships. But unfortunately I feel that there just isn't enough common ground shared between our belief systems to allow for much of an exchange of ideas between us. From extracts like this in your post : (1) About your question Satan, please be informed that it was not created as Satan. It had been the highest Archangel, Ramza. It failed about its test about Nafs, it was cursed and it became Satan, or (2) we have to make a new decision in the light of Holy Quran. ....... it is quite clear that you feel absolutely certain that your particular belief system has all the answers. For me, this feels quite similar to meetings I've had with Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons as they try to peddle their certainties door-to-door. They are clearly happy with their beliefs, but it is NOT a discussion that happens with them. Just an endless repeating of a deeply entrenched beliefs. I know this is virtually impossible to see when one is a staunch believer. I have been in that position myself during the many years I was a Buddhist. The world and difficult questions became so simple,... there was just 'Us', (the ones with the correct point of view and the perfect answers), and the 'rest', who needed our compassion and saving, (if they had enough good karma to hear) If you cannot see that Islam is an organized religion, (I,e, having a hierarchy of priests, doctrine, dogma, lists of encouraged good behaviour and forbidden bad behaviour, criterion for heaven and criterion for hell, etc, etc),....then it is clearly quite impossible to have a "discussion" about anything outside that closed loop. Unfortunately, I have far too much of a tendency to go on, and on, and on. So perhaps the best thing I can do is contribute some thoughts on this subject by a teacher who strikes up a chord of resonance for me with almost everything he says. Moreover, he writes and speaks far more eloquently than I do : Wayne Liquorman wrote : "My ultimate feeling about teachers and their teachings is summed up in the fact that none of them are telling the truth, so it’s not a matter of reconciling one teaching with another to determine which one is the truth. None of them is the truth. The truth cannot be spoken. The truth cannot be known in its entirety. It can only be known in its aspect. I hope to be clear on the fact that what I say is not a refutation or a rebuttal to what another teacher may say. Each of us has our own set of pointers, and they may be quite different one to the other. Often it is impossible for these contrasting pointers to be integrated. They may ultimately be pointing to the same destination, but each may point around opposite sides of the mountain, and it is not easy to walk in two directions at once. Different teachings are suited to different seekers. My sole discomfort is with teachings that claim to be the only Truth or suggest that competing teachings are wrong or dangerous. I am offended by the absence of a fundamental humility in such a stand. Every Teaching is simply a collection of conceptual pointers – nothing more."

* {1} AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN FIVE CHAPTERS By Portia Nelson (1) I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost.... I am hopeless. It isn't my fault. It takes forever to find a way out. (2) I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don’t see it. I fall in again. I can’t believe I’m in the same place. But it isn’t my fault. It still takes a long time to get out. (3) I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it is there. I still fall in... it’s a habit. My eyes are open. I know where I am. It is my fault. I get out immediately. (4) I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it. (5) I walk down another street. * * {2} Extract from : THE VELVETEEN RABBIT By Margery Williams Bianco, "Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.' Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit. Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.' Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?' It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand." *

* As fascinating, evocative and life-changing as Asia was for many of us, the trouble was,... you just can’t stay there. It’s like a visit to an exotic wildlife sanctuary. Enjoyable though it may be, eventually we all had to pack up and go back to wherever ‘home’ was. Since that’s the way “Reality” seems to be scripted for most of us, this morning I’ll throw in a story which reminds me that the ordinary isn’t necessarily the boring and mundane. Those epithets come purely from the mind of the person who first experiences them inwardly, then tries to pin them on the outside world around, in an effort to convince others. The story below at first struck me as highly unlikely to be anything more than a cute, kitschy tale of niceness. But, it was so highly recommended by friends and Amazon reviews that I bit the bullet, bought the book,…. and then surprisingly, opened myself to a very different experience of ‘joy in living’ than I’ve personally ever known. It was a hoot ! Briefly, the snippet extracted from the book below, humorously answered questions I’ve long mildly wondered about myself regarding people who leave all their money to animal charities. I don’t think this is by any stretch a uniquely British phenomenon, but perhaps the particular one they visit, does exemplify a certain 'queerness' about the English. Anyway, before launching into it I’ll add a short autobiographical paragraph about the author, then two reviews which give a generalised background description of the book, ( “Are We Nearly There Yet ?” ), as a whole. * * * The author, Ben Hatch was born in London and grew up there, in Manchester and also in Buckinghamshire, where he lived in a windmill that meant he was called Windy Miller at school for years, though he's not been scarred by this experience at all. He now lives in Brighton with his tiny wife Dinah, and two children, in a normal house. He likes cheese and is balding although he disguises this fact by spiking his hair to a great height to distract people he wishes to impress. * "They were bored, broke, burned out and turning 40, so when Ben and Dinah saw the advert looking for a husband and wife team with young kids to write a guidebook about family travel around Britain, they jumped at the chance, ignoring friends’ warnings : “One of you will come back chopped up in a bin bag in the roof box.” This is the story of a family's 8,000 miles round Britain in a Vauxhall Astra. With naïve visions of staring moodily across Coniston Water and savouring Cornish pasties, they embark on a mad-cap five-month trip with daughter Phoebe, four, and son Charlie, two, embracing the freedom of the open road with a spirit of discovery and an industrial supply of baby wipes." * * Ben Hatch writes : 'It is not just the number of donkeys, I tell Dinah. ‘Although there are more donkeys here than anywhere else in the world. It’s the presentation. You wait. You’re going to love this.’ The sanctuary, a couple of miles past Sidford, the next town along from Sidmouth, is home to all manner of donkeys. In the fields surrounding the main block there are donkeys with eye patches, limping donkeys, moulting donkeys. There are donkeys that are perfectly all right. There are donkeys who look all right but aren't all right. There are mentally scarred donkeys, happy donkeys, sad donkeys, worried donkeys. There are donkeys that don't give a damn, donkeys that do. Donkeys with damaged tails, donkeys with poorly ears. There are donkeys that have seen too much. Donkeys that have not seen enough. I lead us through the fields of donkeys into a barn that has on its inside wall pictures of each resident donkey. The wall is like the galleries you get in reception areas of small businesses showing photos of their employees. Except, as well as their picture and name, there's also a brief biography of each donkey listing salient facts about their lives and, for instance their ability to smell polo mints through coat pockets. Also, entertainingly, you're told who they hang out with at the sanctuary, ("Nelly is big mates with Daisy and Teddy - they are quite a little clique.") Dinah starts to chuckle. Phoebe stands on the bottom rung of a fence to stroke the wiry back of Clara T. 'See what I mean. You get to know the donkeys. To understand the donkeys.' She moves on to Fred Morgan. "Fred Morgan has settled in nicely with the other donkeys since his arrival in 2005, although he still doesn't like his ears being touched. Jenny Collins, meanwhile, came in 2007 and always enjoys a mince pie on Christmas Day". In the Haycroft restaurant afterwards, while the kids eat flapjacks, a debate ensues about the mindset of benefactors who leave everything to donkeys. It's inspired by the board outside the restaurant listing their names. There are dozens catalogued in the sorts of columns you get dedicated to the fallen on war memorials: Enids, Bettys and Maudes are honoured for leaving their life savings to donkeys they've often never seen. It's a sad fact more people donate to the donkey sanctuary than to the local RNLI. 'Do you think they're mad?' I ask Dinah. 'Of course they are’. 'All the Maudes and Bettys. All of them are mad’. 'You wouldn't do that,' says Dinah. 'No, I wouldn't.' 'And nor would I because it's verging on criminal.’ 'I agree.' 'They've got more money than sense. I mean, how many people are employed here? Look around you, Ben.' She swivels around, staring into the courtyard. 'They're painting doors that don’t need painting, they’re cleaning up the donkey shit before it hits the ground. It's bonkers.' 'It is and it isn’t.' 'OK, explain, Mr Enigmatic.' 'You just don't understand the donkey.' 'What?' 'I understand the donkey.' 'You understand donkeys?' 'I do.' 'And what don't I understand about donkeys?' 'Their nature.' 'And that explains your point how?' 'There is something poignant about a donkey.' 'Poignant?' 'Something hangdog that appeals to our sympathy.' 'Give me an example.' 'Donkeys barely lift their heads. Unlike horses. Horses are cocky. Donkeys always look meekly at the ground. Have you ever been looked in the eye by a donkey? No. Because they wouldn’t dare. A donkey is what Mary rode to Bethlehem on. They’re so meek, they've become symbols of meekness. When a footballer is considered unskilled you call him a donkey. And when they bray the noise seems to come less from aggression like the mule and more from a deep pit of self-pity.' 'You should work on the sales team. The Maudes would love you.' 'Old people recognise this feeling from being overlooked themselves in post office queues. They have communality with donkeys.' And this is why old people disinherit relatives and leave their cash to Eeyores?’ 'Exactly.' 'What a load of shit!’ 'Have you got a better explanation?’ 'They're bonkers.' We leave the restaurant and wander around a few fields before popping into the visitor centre, a glorified gift shop, were you can buy almost everything you'd need to conduct a dinner party with donkey sanctuary merchandise including place mats, plates, bowls, candles, mugs, tea towels and salt and pepper pots. We buy Phoebe a story by Elisabeth D. Svendsen called The Story of Eeyore, The Naughtiest Donkey in the Sanctuary that Dinah reads to the kids in the car. Based on a true story, it’s about a naughty donkey that came to the sanctuary and upset a fire bucket and nipped a farrier before escaping into a paddock it wasn’t supposed to be in. It isn’t exactly The Shawsbank Redemption but it keeps the peace on the drive back to Sidmouth. *

* This morning I’m still feeling the base notes of that low level, (but ever-present) nostalgia for the vibrant spiritual life of Asia. Probably anyone who has spent time living there, will know what I mean. I haven’t been back there for almost thirty years now, but that soft call has never left me. I imagine it will be with me for as long as my mind endures. But as a temporary antidote to wall-to-wall grey skies and the dreary rain which has been falling since sunrise, I’ll switch locations in Asia from the icy, frozen plateau of Tibet to those much warmer climes further to the south-east. The following account is one of Ajahn Brahm's stories from his time as a forest monk in Thailand. Perhaps it stayed with me because I actually happened to have been travelling in Thailand at the same time as this drama was unfolding. But I'm not politically inclined and was over there simply as a hedonistic hippy exploring South East Asia. I just took everything for granted the way it was, and didn't have access to any of Ajahn Brahm's inner information. Nevertheless, I think this is truly quite an extraordinary 'real-life' story which deserves to be far more widely known. (It's from his book, "Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung ?") * * Ajahn Brahm wrote: HOW TO STOP AN INSURGENCY When we realise that there is nowhere else to go, usually the most fruitful alternative is to face the problem rather than running away. The majority of our problems have solutions that we can't see when we're running in the other direction. As the people of our world come to live ever closer to each other, we have to find solutions to our problems. There's no place to run away to. We simply cannot afford major conflicts anymore. In the mid-to-late 1970s I had personal experience of how a national government found such a solution to a major crisis, one that threatened the very existence of their democracy. South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia fell to the Communists within a few days of each other in 1975.The "Domino Theory" current at that time among the Western powers, predicted that Thailand would soon fall next. I was a young monk in northeast Thailand during that period. The monastery in which I mostly lived was twice as close to Hanoi as it was to Bangkok. We were told to register with our embassies and evacuation plans were prepared. Most Western governments were to be surprised that Thailand didn't fall. Ajahn Chah was quite famous by then and many top Thai generals and senior members of the national government would travel to his monastery for advice and inspiration. I had become fluent in Thai, and some Lao, and so gained an insider’s understanding of the seriousness of the situation. The military and the government were not as concerned with the Red armies outside their border as they were with the Communist activists and sympathizers within their own nation. Many brilliant Thai university students had fled to the jungles in northeast Thailand to support an internal, Thai, Communist guerrilla force. Their weaponry was supplied from beyond Thailand's borders, as was their training' But the villages in the "pink" parts of the region gladly supplied their food and other requirements. They had local support. They were an ominous threat. The Thai military and government found the solution in a three-part strategy. {1} Restraint : The military did not attack the Communist bases, though every soldier knew where they were. When I was living the life of a wandering monk in 1979-8o, seeking out the mountains and jungles to meditate in solitude, I would run into the army patrols and they would give me advice. They would point to one mountain and tell me not to go there - that was where the communists were. Then they would point to another mountain and tell me that was a good place to meditate, there were no Communists there. I had to heed their advice. That year the Communists had caught some wandering monks meditating in the jungle and killed them - after torturing them, I was told. {2} Forgiveness : Throughout this dangerous period, there was an unconditional amnesty in place. Whenever one of the Communist insurgents wanted to abandon his cause, he could simply give up his weapon and return to his village or university. He would probably experience surveillance, but no punishments were imposed. I reached one village in Kow Wong district a few months after the Communists had ambushed and killed a large jeep full of Thai soldiers outside their village. The young men of the village were mostly sympathetic to the Communist soldiers, but not actively fighting. They told me they were threatened and harassed, but allowed to go free. {3} Solving the Root-Problem : During these years, I saw new roads being built and old roads being paved in the region. Villagers could now take their produce to town to sell. The king of Thailand personally supervised, and paid for, the construction of many hundreds of small reservoirs with connected irrigation schemes, allowing the poor farmers of the northeast to grow a second crop of rice each year. Electricity reached the remotest of hamlets and with it came a school and a clinic. The poorest region in Thailand was being cared for by the government in Bangkok, and the villagers were becoming relatively prosperous. A Thai government soldier on patrol in the jungle told me once: "We don't need to shoot the Communists. They are fellow Thais. When I meet them coming down from the mountains or going to the village for supplies, and we all know who they are, I just show them my new wristwatch, or let them listen to a Thai song on my new radio - then they give up being a Communist." That was his experience, and that of his fellow soldiers. The Thai Communists began their insurgency so angry with their government that they were ready to give their young lives. But restraint on the part of the government helped to prevent their anger being made worse. Forgiveness, through an amnesty, gave them a safe and honourable way out. Solving the problem, through development, made the poor villagers prosperous. The villagers saw no need to support the Communists anymore: they were content with the government they already had. And the Communists themselves began to doubt what they were doing, living with such hardships in the jungle-covered mountains. One by one they gave up their guns and returned to their family, their village, or their university. By the early 198os, there were hardly any insurgents left, so then the generals of the jungle army, the leaders of the Communists, also gave themselves up. I remember seeing a feature article in the Bangkok Post of a sharp entrepreneur who was taking Thai tourists into the jungle to visit the now abandoned caves from where the Communists once threatened their nation. What happened to those leaders of the insurgency ? Could the same unconditional offer of amnesty be applied to them? Not quite. They were neither punished, nor exiled. Instead, they were offered important positions of responsibility in the Thai government service, in recognition of their leadership qualities, capacity for hard work, and concern for their people! What a brilliant gesture. Why waste the resource of such courageous and committed young men? This is a true story as I heard it from the soldiers and villagers of northeast Thailand at the time. It is what I saw with my own eyes. Sadly, it has hardly been reported elsewhere. At the time of writing this book, two of those former Communist leaders were serving their country as ministers in the Thai National Government. *

* As an example of an occupation which is a very mixed set of blessings, before retiring I used to make my living by teaching secondary-school-aged children in the state system. One of the advantages of getting older is that one now has a wider panorama of events to look back on, and, in so doing,…. unforeseen patterns often begin to emerge. The one I frequently find myself thinking about is the widespread and dramatic decrease in the number of our youngest generation who are able to unlock the treasure chest of enjoyment which can be found in written stories. For me, (probably because of the pre-television age I grew up in), books have always acted like an entrance-way into exciting worlds of adventure,… stepping through the back of a wardrobe into the magic of Narnia. Now, many of the young people that I taught seem so completely dazzled by all the glitz of our current age's technological gadgetry that they've hastily carted the dusty old ‘Narnia wardrobe’ off to the council tip. Cheerfully, many people across an increasingly wide age range seem eager to fill every available moment of leisure time in their life with the latest iPhones, X Boxes, or whatever. To all outward appearance, this ever-expanding catalogue of gadgetry,.... is without end. Anyway, like a dinosaur mired and sinking in the mud I manage to find pleasure in my doomed flailing about by posting on this thread some of the best stories that I've personally come across during my life so far. (Just in case there are other dinosaurs out there who also enjoy reading from this same, rapidly-disappearing language.) Clearly, it’s a pretty questionable activity for anyone to spend hours of their ‘precious human rebirth’ doing. But for me, many of these stories are like rare and beautiful flowers. The times that I’ve asked myself, “What is the ‘purpose’ of a flower ?”, the answer that always comes to me is,… “Simply to be enjoyed for its beauty.” Trying to follow that noble ideal, today I’ve brought a high mountain bouquet of Tibetan life stories to this forum. * The set of stories I’m going to drop in here now are from an absolute gem of a book I came across unexpectedly in an airport bookstore when it was first published eight years ago. It’s called “Tibetan Voices ; A Traditional Memoir”. It is a coffee table book of world class photos accompanied by a collection of stories gathered together by an author who, (like myself at the time), was absolutely smitten by Tibet, its people, its culture, its heroic-yet-tragic plight, and its preciously preserved religion. Brian Harris woke up one day to the realisation that forty years had gone by since the Chinese had invaded and set about systematically dismembering the magic that then was Tibet. Even though there were still people alive who had been living in that pre-invasion, mountain-ringed Shangri-la,…. they were rapidly disappearing forever as the grim reaper continued taking his inevitable toll. So, for several years Harris travelled the world interviewing Tibetans who had lived their lives in that country before China brutally smashed forever that isolated, fragile, inspirationally-precious island of one nation striving to live out the purest of Buddha's ideals. Afterwards, our writer/preserver gathered all these rare and precious stories together and made them available to the world in his lovely book. In order to share these rapidly-disappearing ‘flowers’ with anyone who has had sufficient patience to wade this far through such a swamp of verbiage, clearly a drastic winnowing process had to be done. What I’ve done is taken nine personal favourites from Harrison’s collection of fifty stories, and divided them into three groups of three. I’ll intersperse the resultant three separate postings with other writers’ stories over the following few days, just to avoid dulling the palate with too much of a good thing all at one go. First though, I’ll add a condensed extract from the author's Introduction,… then let the first three stories speak for themselves : * * Introduction by Brian Harris : Tibet symbolizes for many the archetypal holy land that we all seek. Until recently, Tibet was, in a sense, just such a living icon and the Diaspora of its people and traditions an auspicious blessing to the world. Tibetan society revolved around a profound metaphysical and cosmological axis. It was a civilization deeply rooted in a sacred worldview. Providentially, Tibet was cloistered high up in the Himalaya Mountains and for the most part was unaffected by modern ideological and technological developments. During the early years of this century the storytellers within this book were living in a land that had little in common with the world outside its borders and that, (up until the occupation of Tibet by the Chinese army in 1959), was a continuation of that of their ancestors. Seventy years ago, few Tibetans suspected - although some prophesied - that they might be the last generation in their country's ancient history. “Tibetan Voices: A Traditional Memoir” is a portrait of these last years, or rather a sketch, since the memoirs and photographs published here are but glimpses of what was once a varied and complex society. Tibet was not a land largely populated by the meek and holy, by people purified of all human frailties and follies. Our storytellers were exceptionally candid when narrating their memories and I feel that their stories can help us to maintain a balanced perspective through acknowledging the more down – to - earth aspects of many Tibetans’ everyday life and human character. Clearly a return to old Tibet is impossible, regardless of future developments, but it is both my hope and my belief that the principles and qualities which were the foundation of Tibet's Buddhist civilization can, at any time and place, be reclaimed. * * {1} LIFE IN THE POTALA The Potala is such a huge place it was easy for visitors and newcomers to become lost. I remember, as a young student, how we were teased by the older students in the first few weeks after our arrival there. They’d say, "Now you have been here a month, tell us how many rooms there are in the Potala Palace." At the time we didn't know, so when the order students said, "There are 1, 2, 3, 4 rooms,” we didn’t understand. "Figure it out," they’d say. What they meant was that there were 1,234 rooms ! Eventually I knew exactly how many windows and steps there were in those parts of the Potala that we were permitted to enter. We came to know the number of steps on each staircase from the courtyard to the big gong, and from the gong to the foot of the palace, because of a game we used to play. We would race all the way down the many stairs, then immediately back up to see who could come first. During the daytime this was easy, but at night it was very difficult because we couldn't see anything. We had to remember the exact number of steps or else we'd fall. So, as I ran up the steps in the dark, I’d repeat to myself,' 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2,3, 4,” counting each of them off. I entered the Potala as a student in 1942 and after completing six years of study I continued to live and work there as a government clerk. Our school was on the palace's eastern side, across the courtyard from the Dalai Lama's residence. In the winter most of the Potala was very cold since the lower parts of the palace had small windows and walls of stone that were five feet thick. But our school and the part of the Potala where we lived had wide windows - without glass, of course - which let in more sun. In the winter there was no need for heating because we wore heavy clothes. In our classroom we sat in rows on long, rolled-up cushions and, from time to time, our seating positions were rotated so that each could have a turn near the windows. Although we all enjoyed the warmth of the sun, the elderly and those with poor health were particularly advised by the doctors to spend more time by a window. Not far from our school was a public toilet with about eight long, narrow holes cut into the floor. The waste dropped all the way down to the base of the Potala, at least six stories below-so dark you couldn't see down. At certain times of the year farmers would arrive to take it away for their fields. The ashes from our section of the Potala were put down these holes as well, by sweepers especially assigned to the toilets. This toilet room had a number of windows and it was quite windy in wintertime. We'd squat there, often two students on one hole, with scarves wrapped around our faces and ears, passing waste and talking. When we washed our bodies in the winter, we did that together as well. We'd heat up some water and take turns pouring it over each other. Some people, even old men, would use only cold water to bathe, saying that afterwards they felt warmer. One of the fondest memories of my life in the Potala are of the many birds who shared our lives. There used to be many pigeons there, until the Chinese army forced people to kill them in 1959. There was also a big owl with a huge head like a cat who lived in the palace, calling "OooOooOoo" throughout the night. But above all there were the large ravens; they would gather together in assembly, almost like human beings, to talk and play and, like us, to compete in different kinds of sports! We played with them a lot. We'd shape small disks from tsampa dough and toss them up in the air for the ravens to catch and eat. Both the students and the ravens liked this sport very much and we all became experts at playing it. Our raven friends would come to our windows at certain times of the day to be fed. Though they didn't let us actually touch them, we could get very close and they would take food from our fingers. Most of the monks and students had a raven friend. Ravens have a great sense of humour, as I learned from one particular resident. He told me that one day a raven brought him a necklace of turquoise and coral and put it on his window ledge ! Also living with us in the Potala was a type of orange duck. These ducks made their nests on the lower front windows. The babies would drop down onto the ground from the window so that their parents could take them to the water behind the Potala. It was the duty of the sweepers to protect these birds - particularly the young babies - from the hawks that soared all around. Carrying a long stick to ward off danger; the sweepers walked alongside the ducklings while the parents followed behind or flew above, calling “anh, anh, anh.” Residents of the Potala were permitted to keep pets, including Lhasa Apso dogs and sometimes a cat. Even students could have an animal, though only if their sponsor permitted it in his living quarters. As in the rest of Tibet, each night all the dogs would be set loose to run free. But at the Potala they didn’t bark very much; they seemed to sense, “I should keep quiet here." The Potala was a very quiet place, especially at night, and we could hear the barking of the dogs and all the other noises that came up from the village of Shol at the base of the palace. We heard everything very clearly - the sounds of people praying, as well as their fights and arguments, and, behind it all, the Lhasa River rushing along. From parts of the Potala we could even see what was happening down there. In the winter, people often sat on the rooftops and played a game of dice called sho. We heard and saw people singing and dancing, and sometimes we even listened to conversations about lovemaking. One person might say to the other “Now let’s go and sleep together,” or someone would try to get his or her partner to hurry up so they’d have more time to enjoy each other. As we', as the constant sound of the wind blowing through and around the Potala, there was the tinkle of thousands of bells that hung everywhere as decorations, mixed in with the distant clang of horse and cow bells from the streets below. Initially it was disturbing, this tinkling twenty-four hours a day, but over time we became used to it. Then there were the sounds of rituals being performed and the sweepers saying prayers-"Om Mani Padme Hum, Om Mani Padme Hum." And there were the students - we could even be heard down in Shol village ! At four o'clock in the morning and again at nine in the evening we'd gather and chant loudly. The villagers said they enjoyed listening to us, and that our chanting had a very pleasing melody. There were big gongs at the Potala, and every evening at seven o'clock a gong would sound. This meant that anybody who wanted to leave the palace should set off, and anyone who wanted to enter should come in. After ten minutes the gong would sound a second time, and then we'd have to hurry ! After a further ten minutes the gong would be struck a third time and immediately all doors would be closed. Nobody could enter or leave until the next morning! Women never stayed inside the Potala at night, though in the daytime they carried water, food, and various supplies to the apartments. Of course, women would visit and come to the palace on pilgrimage, but officials who were married had a duty to stay alone in the Potala. They could visit their families in Shol and elsewhere, but wives could not live in the palace. Even the Dalai Lama's family lived outside the Potala. Beggars came to the Potala as pilgrims whenever they wanted. If we saw a visiting beggar who asked quietly, "Please give something," then we might give alms, but public begging was not allowed. Anybody could come to the Potala on pilgrimage from ten o'clock in the morning until four or five o'clock in the afternoon. There were no guards. It was the sweepers and managers of the different sections of the Potala who were responsible for making sure people didn't go into areas closed to the public. lf a person was found straying, then a sweeper would approach him and quietly say, "Did you lose your way? Please, not that way. This way, I'll help you," and he would guide them along. Each entrance to the Potala had a gatekeeper who opened and closed the gate and who answered people's questions. Each gatekeeper lived in a small room right beside the gate and would sit on a cushion outside his little shelter, saying prayers or turning a large mani prayer wheel. Occasionally local farmers arrived with whatever fresh produce they might have that month. Never speaking loudly or hurrying, they would walk around selling their goods, perhaps saying quietly, "Fresh radish, fresh radish." Since the Potala did not have any shops, we either acquired what we wanted from these sellers or went down to the village to buy our daily needs. I remember we always eagerly awaited the broom vendors, who sold really beautiful brooms made from grass. Sellers didn't come often, but when they did perhaps two would arrive together, each with small things for sale, never anything too big. They would always know just where to go to sell their wares quietly. * * {2} CONTROLLING WEATHER For many generations my family’s job was to protect crops from all forms of destruction by natural forces. My father came to me when I was twenty-two years old and told me that he was entering a meditation retreat in the mountains and that it was now my duty to take over his role. I was worried when I first attempted to control the weather and was afraid that all the crops would be destroyed, but after two or three years I came to trust my vocation. I practiced at a monastery where there were eight other nagpas, shamans who performed rituals. We were supported by the Tibetan government with money and food, and each of us was designated a “controller of weather" and given an official government stamp. At the start of each planting year we held many retreats in which prayers and rituals were performed to Vajrakilaya. Afterwards, all around the areas to be protected, wooden phurbas, or ritual thunderbolt daggers, were placed in the ground. The area for which I was responsible was large, and it took many, many days to put these daggers in the ground. During this process all the farmers would participate by performing ritual ceremonies. Since we took great care to fulfill all the requirements, we were successful each year in protecting the crops. As a weather controller I had responsibilities throughout the year. Much of my time was spent in a three-story red house; this was a special building, constructed solely for my use by the people of our region. The red house was built in the very centre of the fields I was to protect; from there l could see any clouds approaching. It is well known that, through the study of cloud movements, it is possible to determine the kind of weather that is approaching; what is not well known, and what I cannot reveal, are those skills and practices through which clouds can be moved away. I would enter the red house just before the seeds began to appear on the plant and I would stay there, throughout the harvest, until the fields had been completely cleared of the crops. Though my residence was a form of retreat, I had a servant who saw to my needs and I received many visitors. At times there were requests to protect regions outside my area and I was able to comply with these requests also without leaving. On occasion, people would come to make incense offerings. People also came and asked me to do divinations - especially in the event of sickness, when they would want to know which doctor to visit. In fact, until the Chinese arrived, I was kept very busy. I stopped hailstorms for twenty-two years, until I was forty-four, and on no occasion did hail fall on those fields for which I was responsible. There are nagpas who possess the skills necessary to bring rain, but my practice only permits me to stop hailstorms. In fact we never needed rainmakers in our region because the rains always came on time. I escaped the Chinese military when they invaded Tibet, only to learn later that my father had been caught and had died in prison. The crops remained safe for one year, but then the red house was completely destroyed by the invading armies. In the following year, hailstones fell throughout our region and the crops were completely destroyed. * * {3} RETURN FROM THE DEAD There were several highly realized lamas in each generation of the Tromge family, and my mother, Dawa Drolma, was the most famous in hers. She was one of Tibet's five great wisdom dakinis - female emanations who spontaneously benefit other sentient beings by their activities. It had been prophesied that she would be born as an emanation of the longevity deity White Tara, an incarnation of Tibet’s most revered female practitioner and the spiritual companion of Padmasambhava, the master who propagated Buddhist teachings in Tibet in the eighth century. Dawa Drolma was also a delog, one who has crossed the threshold of death and traveled in realms of existence beyond those visible to humans and returned to tell about it. One day, when my mother was about sixteen, the goddess Tara appeared to her, not in a luminous vision but in person. Tara told my mother that she would soon fall ill and die, but if she followed certain instructions explicitly, she would be able to revivify her dead body and benefit others by teaching about her experience. Soon after, Dawa Drolma had a series of bad dreams about three demonic sisters who were robbing all beings of their vitality. With black lariats and silk banners they tried to ensnare Dawa Drolma around the waist, but the deity White Tara prevented them from doing so by surrounding her with a protection circle. Eventually, however, the menace in the dreams was so strong that Dawa Drolma knew it foretold her imminent death. She went to her uncle, the great Tromge Trungpa Rinpoche, and with his help made the necessary arrangements for her death, just as Tara had instructed. Then she became extremely sick and died, despite the efforts of the many doctors who were summoned to care for her. Exactly as she had stipulated prior to her death, Dawa Drolma’s corpse was washed in consecrated saffron water and dressed in new clothes. The corpse was carefully laid out in a room and left without a morsel of food or a drop of water. The door was draped in blue cloth, padlocked, and sealed with the sign of the wrathful fire scorpion. A man dressed in blue stood guard outside. All the local people were warned to refrain from ordinary chatter, and they were instructed to recite prayers and mantras. For the next five days and nights Tromge Trungpa, along with several other lamas and monks, did prayers and ceremonies in the adjacent room. At the completion of this vigil, Tromge Trungpa entered the room where the corpse lay, cold and pale just as he had left it, and he recited powerful long-life prayers to summon Dawa Drolma’s mind stream back into her body. In the account she dictated several days after her return, she described her re-entry into her body: “When the consciousness re-entered my physical body, I sneezed violently and experienced total disorientation. An instant later, I was in a state of faith and joy at the visions of the pure realm, and horror at the karmic visions of hell. I felt as though I were waking up from sleep. Uncle Trungpa was standing in front of me, holding a longevity arrow and looking at me with concern in his bloodshot eyes. I was unable to say a word, as though I were a bit shy. Everyone was crying and excited, and saying things such as, "Wasn't it difficult?" "You must be hungry!" "You must be thirsty!" They were almost pouring food and drink over my head. Although I protested, saying, "l feel absolutely no discomfort due to hunger or thirst," they didn't believe me. Everyone was saying, “Eat ! Drink !" They all felt joy as immeasurable as a she-camel who has found her lost calf. We all partook of a feast to celebrate.” During her five-day journey as a delog, my mother’s consciousness, unhindered by the constraints of a physical body, traveled freely through all the realms of mind, from the hell realms with their ceaseless, unbearable suffering to the most exalted pure lands of the wisdom beings. For the rest of her life, whenever my mother taught, she drew from her experience as a delog. Her descriptions of the misery of the other realms were very vivid, and tears came to her eyes as she spoke. “No matter how difficult your life is in this human realm,” she would say, “there is no comparison between the difficulties here and those in other realms.” No one doubted that she spoke from direct experience, and her credibility was enhanced by the messages she brought to people from their deceased relatives. *

* What attracted me so much about Riktam Barry’s story yesterday was the self-evident honesty and sincerity in his recounting of it. For me at least, it added a subtle but unmistakeable flavour that elevated his words far above the apparent simple ordinariness of the events described. Actually, it’s been the search for that ‘flavour’ of honesty that has underlain much of the searching for answers in my own life. Yet, strangely, I am well aware that I have most certainly NOT led a particularly honest life myself. Perhaps for many of us, it’s the things we deeply regret and feel that we lack which become the qualities, possessions or status that we either admire most in others, or pour much of our energies into trying to attain. For myself, and probably most of the people drawn to this forum,… the search for spiritual answers has been of great importance to us – often being one of the principle motivators of our life. Yet paradoxically, (and I’m sure that I am not alone in experiencing this), even though every one of the religions, philosophies or practices that we end up following,…. though EVERY single one of them without exception claims that it has access to truth and can lead us there if we have the faith, energy and dedication to follow,…. so often these self-proclaimed “organisations of virtue” suddenly get exposed as merely yet another collection of masquerading, flawed human beings exploiting others for money, power, or sexual favours. The recent world-wide scandal and cover-up of all the years of child abuse by Catholic priests, is an obvious case in point. Yet even more 'philosophically refined’ religions can end up in this same mundane and unforeseen cesspit. The Tibetan Buddhist organisation that I was part of for 18 years was so riddled with sexual scandals by senior monks and nuns, that it beggars belief. (Though of course, every case which came to light was IMMEDIATELY swept out of sight and never spoken of again). It wasn’t even necessary to put up a ‘Business as Usual’ sign in the window for so much as a single day. This immediate cover-up and silence certainly does allow many followers to keep their faith. But personally, I think that since this experience is so widespread in virtually all religions, (particularly our Western culture's numerous 'attempted adoptions' of more ancient Eastern belief systems), that if we keep suppressing our awareness of these kind of unpleasant and unwished-for experiences, not only are we leaving ourselves open to major future disillusionment, but we also risk missing out on some very helpful insights. The four extracts below are each stories about this most forbidden of topics,… religious scandal. They are each based on actual, personally-experienced events in the spiritual pathways of different seekers like ourselves. The first two are by Richard Sylvester, (a writer on Non-Duality, taken from his book, "I Hope You Die Soon"), and the second two by Hugh Milne who was the personal bodyguard to Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh,…. (the guru at the heart of one of the biggest religious scandals of our modern times). Both the latter were taken from Hugh's superbly honest and well-written book, “Bhagwan -- The God Who Failed". Below these four extracts I’ve included interview links with each of the two writers for anyone who may find some interest in either of these accounts. Personally, I find that 'watching' a person talk is a far more accurate way to pick up a subtle quality like honesty, than is simply reading their words in a book or on a computer monitor. * * {1} Richard Sylvester wrote : “Guru Raj was short, plump and charismatic with dark soft eyes. He wore smart Indian clothes and a shawl embroidered with gold thread. His name meant The Teacher Who Is the King of Bliss. To his devotees he was not just a guru. He was the avatar of this age. He had been Krishna, Buddha and Jesus. At least four other teachers claimed to be the one and only avatar at this time but his devotees scoffed at them. They knew theirs was the one. Then the shit hit the fan. The guru, it appeared, had seduced three different women, all high up in his organisation, by telling each of them, “I am the reborn Jesus and you are the reborn Mary Magdalene. Two thousand years ago we were lovers. Now it is time for us to be lovers again.” As a line for the seduction of the credulous it is hard to beat. Each woman in turn had believed him and followed him to his bed. One day the three Mary Magdalenes discovered that each of them was not unique. The game was up. They felt seduced, traduced and scorned. Outraged, they decided to expose everything. A hasty meeting was urgently convened. Phones rang and devotees were summoned. The three Marys had been covering up many others of the guru’s peccadilloes, hiding them from his public, sweeping empty whisky bottles under the mat. Now it was open season and all the bony skeletons tumbled out of the cupboard with a rattle that would have wakened even the dimmest of chelas. The guru had been indulging in prodigious bouts of drinking. He sometimes consumed a whole bottle of whisky before going on stage to address his devotees. Another bottle might be downed later in the evening. The inner circle of devotees had been busy keeping him supplied, hiding the evidence, smuggling out the empty bottles from the retreat centre. On at least one occasion he had to be helped onto the stage and onto his red velvet throne by an acolyte on each side propping him up to hide his stagger. Perhaps his remarkable ability to weave impromptu a coherent tapestry of spiritual ideas while pickled in scotch was evidence of his divine status. The avatar of the single malt. The alcoholic godhead. Guru Raj had occasionally given out spiritual names, but only to particularly special devotees. These names, he said, were arrived at in deepest meditation when he tuned in to the most refined spiritual essence of the person and emerged with the name whose vibration exactly suited their unique dharma. Then someone noticed that these names were the names of the houses that the guru passed in an Indian quarter of Cape Town as he drove from his house to his office each day. He had been enormously profligate with money, spending lavishly on himself. There were even accusations that he had been seen beating his wife and her daughter. Why had his acolytes kept all this to themselves ? By the time they had realised what they had got themselves into, they were too far steeped in blood to draw back. They had given up careers, lovers, families, friends and homes to follow this man. They had devoted oceans of energy to what they believed was the divine plan. In this way the guru gave at least some of his devoted followers the gift of inoculation against gurus for ever. There is a place for charismatic charlatans. They can remind us not to take this seriously. In this story more may be learned from a charlatan than from a saint.” There are hundreds of these stories. And there are hundreds of practices and many of them tend to produce real phenomena. Guru Raj’s practices produced astonishing phenomena. But that has nothing to do with liberation. If these practices didn’t produce phenomena they wouldn’t be so seductive. In using the word ‘seductive’ I’m not implying that there’s anything wrong with them. Of course there isn’t. I very much enjoyed following my whisky guru for a few years. It was delightful. * * {2} Richard Sylvester wrote : Setting out on a spiritual search is a very sensible thing for a person to do. When everything else has failed us, why not try that ? The car, the house and the job didn't make us happy, the soulmate didn't make us happy, God didn't make us happy. Even healing our 'inner child' didn't make us happy. I could go on listing for the whole evening the things that we accumulate to try to finally make ourselves happy, but I will stop there. When all else has failed and we still feel separate, we still feel that something is missing, it is intelligent to start searching spiritually. It can also be very exciting and colourful to change our name to something exotic like Devananda and put on orange robes, shave our head and eat alfalfa sprouts rather than go on being Jim Brown with a suit and a mullet eating hamburgers. But nevertheless, after ten or twenty years of spiritual searching we may well still feel separate and inadequate. I would even suggest that spiritual searching fuels our sense of inadequacy. The very fact that we are on a spiritual path indicates that we feel inadequate as we are right now. And if we are on a path looking for liberation, (whatever we think liberation might be), we cannot possibly notice that everything is already liberation right here, right now. If we are looking for liberation over there, we can't see that it is already right here. The awful reality is that we will never find liberation either over there or right here,... because 'WE' will never find liberation. We could say that 'WE' are the problem. But there is even a problem in saying, "We are the problem" because it sets us thinking that we must do something about ourself. This feeds our sense of inadequacy once more. We start to think, "I haven't meditated for long enough", or, "I haven't cleared my chakras sufficiently", or, "I haven't shown enough dedication to the guru - perhaps I have held back just one little bank account from him", or, "I haven't spent enough time in countries without toilets - I haven't had enough diarrhoea in the Himalayas." We feel, "It must be my fault. There has to be something wrong with me, because I can't find liberation." Yet the awful joke is that there is not only nothing for me to find,... but there is also no "me" to find it. That is why sometimes, when the person disappears and this is simply seen for what it is, as 'already liberation',.... there can often be so much laughter. It can be seen as such a joke that we were always looking for this, yet this was always what we were. For some people this creates despair as they contemplate the ruins of their spiritual life and begin to wish that they hadn't sold their house and given the proceeds to their guru. But often it causes laughter, or at least a quiet smile, because it is such a joke that what I was searching for was always closer to me than I am to myself. There is no "I". There is no "self". When this is seen, it is suddenly realised that all the incomprehensible philosophical sayings such as "I am that", "There is only oneness", and "Everything is unconditional love", are not philosophical sayings at all. They are simply descriptions of what is seen in the natural state of being when the person isn't there getting in the way any more. * * {3} Hugh Milne wrote: I continued to meditate, and on several occasions reached that true bliss and abundant joy which comes from a deep meditative state. This meditative space was incomparably beautiful, and worth anything to experience. Those who dismiss ‘evil cults’ have no idea at all how rapturous this state can be, and how no pleasure can begin to compare with it. Most people who have spent any time in a religious cult will have tasted this bliss. And it keeps them coming back for more. Whenever I touched this deep sense of peace I knew I could have no greater happiness, and during my time at Poona it began to happen more and more often. * * {4} Hugh Milne wrote: In the ‘energy darshans’ the noise and vibration would sometimes approach the threshold of pain, and the flashing lights and tribal rhythms would induce a trance-like state. These sessions had an electrifying effect on me. When Bhagwan called me as the subject for one of the first ‘energy darshans’, he sat me down opposite a medium who was directly in front of his feet. Then, after the lights had gone out and the music reached its tribal crescendo, he touched the point on my forehead known as ‘the third eye’. I felt a new energy flowing through me like molten honey. It rose in intensity until it felt as though I was caught in a long dark tunnel with an express train rushing towards me. Then it dissolved into peace, light, and the scary but exciting promise of the unknown. As that train of his energy passed into my being, some kind of internal fuse blew, and I floated blissfully in a sea of nectar, quite unaware of my surroundings. I heard Bhagwan calling, as if from a great distance : “Shiva, come back, you have to take the photos now.” I remember thinking : how could he be serious ? How could I take pictures in this state ? He repeated his directive, and as I stumbled to my feet Krishna Barti handed me the Nikon. If this was his energy, I wanted more of it. Many people have asked me how a sensible, independent person could be mesmerised by someone like Bhagwan. The answer, as many sannyasis would agree, is that once you have been affected by his energy and experienced the sensation of being touched by it, you knew that there was nothing like it, no bliss to compare with it. Once you had experienced it, you had to go back for more, to try and regain that feeling of harmony and being at one with the universe. It is similar to a drug-induced high, except that there is no artificial chemical at work. Bhagwan’s touch could be just as addictive as the strongest drug. _ * * (1) INTERVIEW LINK WITH : Richard Sylvester http://bcove.me/rdk2imyu * * (2) INTERVIEW LINK WITH : Hugh Milne (Bhagwan's Bodyguard) http://bcove.me/24b8wphh *

* I've just finished re-reading a book an Australian author who came into my life completely unexpectedly. While absorbed in reading a book by one of my favourite Non-Duality writers, (Richard Sylvester), my standard train of linear thinking had suddenly found itself derailed by a curious, three-line quotes that Richard had used as a chapter title : *********** Relax. Have more tea, walk, whatever. It won’t make any difference, do what you like …… If you like, go find someone awake and talk. *********** I simply had to find a further explanation of those words. Happily, when Riktam Barry’s, "The Telling Stones" arrived from Amazon, it turned out to fulfil every reading-need I was feeling at that time, such that now, (less than a year later), I find myself re-reading it already. It transpired that this previously unheard of author is an ‘over-sixty’, former Australian hippy who lived the magic of those years to the fullest when they were happening. Now, many years later, he had gathered together a collection of anecdotal stories written about some of the people and experiences he had in the Swingin' Sixties, and interwoven it with up-dated and ongoing descriptions of what he and many of these present day friends are doing now. I'll copy a bit of what it says on the back cover as I don't think the description could be bettered : "I love this collection of hippie anecdotes, with memories of VW Kombi vans, acid trips, experiences of Transcendental Meditation, and many, many cups of tea, shot through with Non-Dual insight. Riktam's no-nonsense punchy Australian style is a joy to read,....", etc. The story I've added below is the one that, for some reason, stayed so firmly lodged in my mind that it was the main cause of my deciding to re-read this book. I wanted to have the pleasure of reading once again such an honest account of an experience which is probably similar to one which many of us have had,... but which, for obvious reasons, we rarely talk about. It's the longest extract I've ever copied out. But I thought it might possibly strike a chord with others here. So many times I've found that it's very often highly enjoyable to offer something of real quality to others. * * Driving on an early Saturday morning to a Greek Orthodox Church. An old friend is dead. I don’t go to funerals much. Much more now that I am older, but still not much. The first problem is what to wear – special occasion clothes are a thing of my childhood. But this one is different, so I bought something. I really loved Athena and she liked things right, so I went and bought a sort of loose trouser and blousy shirt. All white, for some reason. I hate shopping for clothes now. Shop assistants are all children who lie about what you look like and think you are a bit odd. Athena was a Transcendental Meditation teacher, one of those in the first group ever taught in India by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. I learned it from her in the late Sixties sometime. Unlike the TM movement now, then you got quite amazing after-sales service when you took your fruit, handkerchief and comparatively few dollars to swap for a mantra. We were a dramatic lot, prone to freaking out, paranoia and the fruits of narcissism – or just being fucked up on bad drugs. The time of day or night irrelevant, I and many others just fronted up to her door more than once in some state of mental disarray, to be made welcome with Greek sweets, short, strong coffee, and a listener without equal. After that, a bed made; then in the morning, breakfast. You can’t respect that enough. So, I suffered the clothes purchasing. I had known she was dying for some time and decided not to visit. Every time I thought about it I could hear her saying, “So twenty-five years – we never see you. Now I am dying, you come.” I knew there was no proper answer to that, so I stayed away. So, here I am. At five minutes before the 10am start, I arrive at the church and park my old Ford in some small underground car park at the back. Around the front and at the door is an array of old TM practitioners all in white blousy clothes, and TM teachers in suits. I am made welcome by everyone. We are older, but that’s all. Nothing else seems different. I feel pleased to be recognised and sort of belonging to a group again. Inside the church the walls are all painted with saints and halos in bright colours. I am enjoying this very much when Al comes to sit next to me. I want to jump up and hug him, but am being funereal. Al is one of the nicest people in the world. His little beard is gone, but his eyes are still alight. He seems, as always, to be an active member of some church that joyously looks upon everything as if God is about to jump out from behind it and surprise us all. Peter describes him as ‘the only person I know who seems to be just naturally wise.’ Al is a joy. I speak, he answers; and I hear from his voice that he is tremendously shaken. Lots of people love Athena. I look up as someone goes to the pulpit and looks ready to speak. He starts after realising nobody was going to stop talking until he did. He talks about Athena being born in Egypt and migrating here, about five languages and translating for people in trouble, about social work, much loved by all, and general ‘she sounds nice but I didn’t know her’ funeral priest talk. At the end he gives the floor to Jeff, an ancient meditator, who gently describes her from the soul outwards. We all love it. Then there is a sort of walk past the coffin, nice photo on top, taken about the time I knew her best, and deep silence in the place as we move slowly along. Al is in front of me in the line, very quiet, a namaste palms together salute – and then out the side door. I do the same, speak my thanks to Athena in Hindi, and with rolling tears, follow Al’s exit. He makes his apologies, invites me to go visit him and leaves. I will, too; I haven’t seen him for ages. The rest of us move into a nearby outbuilding, where there is a beautiful European feast set out on long tables. So we eat. All sublime as expected. I have a little trouble at funerals changing gear into social mode straight after, and so am awkward for a while with everybody. Maybe I should do what Al did; just go. Barbara is there, an old lover, talking loudly and with confidence, seemingly successful in the 90’s way. Somehow I don’t believe it, God knows why. I don’t trust her. Everybody is old friend-ish and I am feeling a bit ‘moment before an accident’, all separate and distant. Then I am stunned with the joy of hearing Carmel laugh in the back of the room. All rich and full; a lovely earthy woman, properly pagan. I stand up and look. Then I remember that she is dead too. Ah, fuckitall. Looking anyway, I see Kate, Carmel’s twin sister. Looks nothing like her, but laughs exactly the same. Already shaken, now I am thrown completely. I go to see Kate and get a giant ‘pleased to see you hug’ and am asked if I am okay. ”Well, I was just doing alright until I heard you laugh.” She interrupts me, sounding a bit hurt; “I don’t think Athena would have minded a bit.” “No, no, I’m sure of that. It’s because you sound like Carmel.” I can feel tears moving down my cheeks again. Kate wipes one and says, “She loved you a lot, man.” “I know, she told me. I miss her today, you know. Now.” I knew Carmel loved me. I loved her, too. Petite, and alcoholic, and with little confidence in herself, still she was one of the brave people who always looked me in the eyes and told the truth. Years ago, not long after I had first met her, she rang me and said to come visit. When I arrived she asked if I would be her lover. Shit, I didn’t know what to say. She went on to explain that, after a while without one, she always got drunk and grabbed the first man who would come home with her. A few very bad mornings and a bit of stalking later, she thought she needed a regular lover, a friend whom she could ring up to go places and sleep with when she felt like it. I said yes, that would be nice, and we went to bed just for fun. For years, according to circumstances, we were friends, companions and lovers. Somehow we lost touch. Carmel drank. I went to India. When I came back she had moved. Gone. Not in the phone book, her mother not sure, Kate interstate and unfindable. Too hard. Some years later I was being a social isolate. It was the 31st of December and all around me people were merry-making for New Year’s Eve. I ran into Kate at the city market, we chatted, and she directed me to Carmel hiding in a cottage in the hills. That afternoon I drove along ever-narrowing roads and tracks, to finally arrive at a fence covered in blackberries and a gap just big enough to squeeze through. Old fruit trees. A tiny white cottage with vines and a little verandah. All a bit run down. I knocked and heard movement behind the door. Carmel opened it. She had lost weight, thin with jeans and T-shirt. Still nice-looking, but a little haunted. She was glad to see me, and we had tea, no milk. No fridge, you see, and not liking to see people much she didn’t use the supermarket unless she had to. There wasn’t much food. I invited myself to eat and went to shop for the stuff. Carmel hadn’t planned anything for New Year, so this was okay with her. I asked if was okay, too. “Why not ?” she thought out loud, grinning; “it’s New Year’s Eve.” I spent extra for a bottle of nice Shiraz, cigarettes too; then I cooked. We drank and laughed a lot, filled in the gaps, and then went to bed. It was all lovely. Next morning, after we ate toast and drank coffee, I left. When I went back a few weeks later she wasn’t there. That was the last time I saw her. I say to Kate, “I was in Tasmania teaching when she died. I didn’t know until I got back months later. I went to the cemetery, just a little brass plate in the ground in among dozens of others. I stood on top of it, trying to get close. Not warm. Nothing growing.” I am crying again. Kate was there when Carmel died of pneumonia on the floor of their shared flat. She said not to bring the ambulance; she just wanted to go home. So Kate didn’t and Carmel went. Twins. I reckon they have rights with each other. Kate is looking at me cry, comes close for a big hug, then we cry together a little. She says, “Hey man, we are getting old. People we love are dying.” *

* Due to the clinging minutia of day-to-day living I somehow haven't managed to progress very far my with annual re-reading of Gerald Durrell’s, "My Family and Other Animals". But a few days ago I re-launched myself back into the warm waters of Corfu and have remained blissfully afloat there ever since. Yesterday evening I found myself vicariously in the midst of this wonderful experience extracted below,.... one that was so lovely that I simply had to search out, find, and copy something of its endearing, (and enduring), magic for anyone here who enjoys this kind of experience as much as I do. Doesn't it just make you want to put down your teacup and immediately stroll briskly off to your favourite travel agent to buy a One-Way boat ticket for Corfu ? : * * * In the summer, when the moon was full, the family took to bathing at night, for during the day the sun was so fierce that the sea became too hot to be refreshing. As soon as the moon had risen we would make our way down through the trees to the creaking wooden jetty, and clamber into the Sea Cow. With Larry and Peter on one oar, Margo and Leslie on the other, and Roger and myself in the bows to act as look-outs, we would drift down the coast for half a mile or so to where there was a small bay with a lip of white sand and a few carefully arranged boulders, smooth, and still sun-warm, ideal for sitting on. We would anchor the Sea Cow in deep water and then dive over the side to gambol and plunge, and set the moonlight shaking across the waters of the bay. When tired, we swam languidly to the shore and lay on the warm rocks, gazing up into the star-freckled sky. Generally after half an hour or so I would get bored with the conversation, and slip back into the water and swim slowly out across the bay, to lie on my back, cushioned by the warm sea, gazing up at the moon. One night, while I was thus occupied, I discovered that our bay was used by other creatures as well. Lying spread-eagled in the silky water, gazing into the sky, only moving my hands and feet slightly to keep afloat, I was looking at the Milky Way stretched like a chiffon scarf across the sky and wondering how many stars it contained. I could hear the voices of the others, laughing and talking on the beach, echoing over the water, and by lifting my head I could see their position on the shore by the pulsing lights of their cigarettes. Drifting there, relaxed, and dreamy, I was suddenly startled to hear, quite close to me, a clop and gurgle of water, followed by a long, deep sigh, and a series of gentle ripples rocked me up and down. Hastily I righted myself and trod water, looking to see how far from the beach I had drifted. To my alarm I found that not only was I some considerable distance from the shore, but from the Sea Cow as well, and I was not at all sure what sort of creature it was swimming around in the dark waters beneath me. I could hear the others laughing on the shore at some joke or other, and I saw someone flip a cigarette-end high into the sky like a red star that curved over and extinguished itself at the rim of the sea. I was feeling more and more uncomfortable, and I was just about to call for assistance when, some twenty feet away from me, the sea seemed to part with a gentle swish and gurgle, a gleaming back appeared, gave a deep, satisfied sigh, and sank below the surface again. I had hardly time to recognize it as a porpoise before I found I was right in the midst of them. They rose all around me, sighing luxuriously, their black backs shining as they humped in the moonlight. There must have been about eight of them, and one rose so close that I could have swum forward three strokes and touched his ebony head. Heaving and sighing heavily, they played across the bay, and I swam with them, watching fascinated as they rose to the surface, crumpling the water, breathed deeply, and then dived beneath the surface again, leaving only an expanding hoop of foam to mark the spot. Presently, as if obeying a signal, they turned and headed out of the bay towards the distant coast of Albania, and I trod water and watched them go, swimming up the white chain of moonlight, backs agleam as they rose and plunged with heavy ecstasy in the water as warm as fresh milk. Behind them they left a trail of great bubbles that rocked and shone briefly like miniature moons before vanishing under the ripples. After this we often met the porpoises when we went moonlight bathing, and one evening they put on an illuminated show for our benefit, aided by one of the most attractive insects that inhabited the island. We had discovered that in the hot months of the year the sea became full of phosphorescence. When there was moonlight this was not so noticeable - a faint greenish flicker round the bows of the boat, a brief flash as someone dived into the water. We found that the best time for the phosphorescence was when there was no moon at all. Another illuminated inhabitant of the summer months was the firefly. These slender brown beetles would fly as soon as it got dark, floating through the olive-groves by the score, their tails flashing on and off, giving a light that was greenish-white, not golden-green, as the sea was. Again, however, the fireflies were at their best when there was no bright moonlight to detract from their lights. Strangely enough, we would never have seen the porpoises, the fireflies, and the phosphorescence acting together if it had not been for Mother's bathing-costume. For some time Mother had greatly envied us our swimming, both in the daytime and at night, but, as she pointed out when we suggested she join us, she was far too old for that sort of thing. Eventually, however, under constant pressure from us, Mother paid a visit into town and returned to the villa coyly bearing a mysterious parcel. Opening this she astonished us all by holding up an extraordinary shapeless garment of black cloth, covered from top to bottom with hundreds of frills and pleats and tucks. 'Well, what d'you think of it?' Mother asked. We stared at the odd garment and wondered what it was for. 'What is it?' asked Larry at length. 'It's a bathing-costume, of course,' said Mother. 'What on earth did you think it was?’ 'It looks to me like a badly-skinned whale,' said Larry, peering at it closely. 'You can't possibly wear that, Mother,' said Margo, horrified, 'why, it looks as though it was made in nineteen-twenty.' 'What are all those frills and things for?' asked Larry with interest. 'Decoration, of course,' said Mother indignantly. 'What a jolly idea! Don't forget to shake the fish out of them when you come out of the water.' 'Well, I like it, anyway,' Mother said firmly, wrapping the monstrosity up again, 'and I'm going to wear it.' 'You'll have to be careful you don't get waterlogged, with all that cloth around you,' said Leslie seriously. 'Mother, it's awful; you can't wear it,' said Margo. 'Why on earth didn't you get something more up to date?' 'When you get to my age, dear, you can't go around in a two-piece bathing suit. . . you don't have the figure for it.' 'I'd love to know what sort of figure that was designed for,' remarked Larry. 'You really are hopeless, Mother,' said Margo despairingly. 'But I like it... and I'm not asking you to wear it,' Mother pointed out belligerently. 'That's right, you do what you want to do,' agreed Larry; 'don't be put off. It'll probably suit you very well if you can grow another three or four legs to go with it.' Mother snorted indignantly and swept upstairs to try on her costume. Presently she called to us to come and see the effect, and we all trooped up to the bedroom. Roger was the first to enter, and on being greeted by this strange apparition clad in its voluminous black costume rippling with frills, he retreated hurriedly through the door, backwards, barking ferociously. It was some time before we could persuade him that it really was Mother, and even then he kept giving her vaguely uncertain looks from the corner of his eye. However, in spite of all opposition, Mother stuck to her tent-like bathing-suit, and in the end we gave up. In order to celebrate her first entry into the sea we decided to have a moonlight picnic down at the bay, and sent an invitation to Theodore, who was the only stranger that Mother would tolerate on such a great occasion. The day for the great immersion arrived, food and wine were prepared, the boat was cleaned out and filled with cushions, and everything was ready when Theodore turned up. On hearing that we had planned a moonlight picnic and swim he reminded us that on that particular night there was no moon. Everyone blamed everyone else for not having checked on the moon's progress, and the argument went on until dusk. Eventually we decided that we would go on the picnic in spite of everything, since all the arrangements were made, so we staggered down to the boat, loaded down with food, wine, towels, and cigarettes, and set off down the coast. Theodore and I sat in the bows as look-outs, and the rest took it in turn to row while Mother steered. To begin with, her eyes not having become accustomed to the dark, Mother skilfully steered us in a tight circle, so that after ten minutes' strenuous rowing the jetty suddenly loomed up and we ran into it with a splintering crash. Unnerved by this, Mother went to the opposite extreme and steered out to sea, and we would eventually have made a landfall somewhere on the Albanian coastline if Leslie had not noticed in time. After this Margo took over the steering, and she did it quite well, except that she would, in a crisis, get flurried and forget that to turn right one had to put the tiller over to the left. The result was that we had to spend ten minutes straining and tugging at the boat which Margo had, in her excitement, steered on to, instead of away from, a rock. Taken all round it was an auspicious start to Mother's first bathe. Eventually we reached the bay, spread out the rugs on the sand, arranged the food, placed the battalion of wine-bottles in a row in the shallows to keep cool, and the great moment had arrived. Amid much cheering Mother removed her housecoat and stood revealed in all her glory, clad in the bathing-costume which made her look, as Larry pointed out, like a sort of marine Albert Memorial. Roger behaved very well until he saw Mother wade into the shallow water in a slow and dignified manner. He then got terribly excited. He seemed to be under the impression that the bathing-costume was some sort of sea monster that had enveloped Mother and was now about to carry her out to sea. Barking wildly, he flung himself to the rescue, grabbed -one of the frills dangling so plentifully round the edge of the costume, and tugged with all his strength in order to pull Mother back to safety. Mother, who had just remarked that she thought the water a little cold, suddenly found herself being pulled backwards. With a squeak of dismay she lost her footing and sat down heavily in two feet of water, while Roger tugged so hard that a large section of the frill gave way. Elated by the fact that the enemy appeared to be disintegrating, Roger, growling encouragement to Mother, set to work to remove the rest of the offending monster from her person. We writhed on the sand, helpless with laughter, while Mother sat gasping in the shallows, making desperate attempts to regain her feet, beat Roger off, and retain at least a portion of her costume. Unfortunately, owing to the extreme thickness of the material from which the costume was constructed, the air was trapped inside; the effect of the water made it inflate like a balloon, and trying to keep this airship of frills and tucks under control added to Mother's difficulties. In the end it was Theodore who shooed Roger away and helped Mother to her feet. Eventually, after we had partaken of a glass of wine to celebrate and recover from what Larry referred to as Perseus's rescue of Andromeda, we went in to swim, and Mother sat discreetly in the shallows, while Roger crouched nearby, growling ominously at the costume as it bulged and fluttered round Mother's waist. The phosphorescence was particularly good that night. By plunging your hand into the water and dragging it along you could draw a wide golden-green ribbon of cold fire across the sea, and when you dived as you hit the surface it seemed as though you had plunged into a frosty furnace of glinting light. When we were tired we waded out of the sea, the water running off our bodies so that we seemed to be on fire, and lay on the sand to eat. Then, as the wine was opened at the end of the meal, as if by arrangement, a few fireflies appeared in the olives behind us - a sort of overture to the show. First of all there were just two or three green specks, sliding smoothly through the trees, winking regularly. But gradually more and more appeared, until parts of the olive-grove were lit with a weird green glow. Never had we seen so many fireflies congregated in one spot; they flicked through the trees in swarms, they crawled on the grass, the bushes and the olive-trunks, they drifted in swarms over our heads and landed on the rugs, like green embers. Glittering streams of them flew out over the bay, swirling over the water, and then, right on cue, the porpoises appeared, swimming inline into the bay, rocking rhythmically through the water, their backs as if painted with phosphorus. In the centre of the bay they swam round, diving and rolling, occasionally leaping high in the air and falling back into a conflagration of light. With the fireflies above and the illuminated porpoises below it was a fantastic sight. We could even see the luminous trails beneath the surface where the porpoises swam in fiery patterns across the sandy bottom, and when they leapt high in the air the drops of emerald glowing water flicked from them, and you could not tell if it was phosphorescence or fireflies you were looking at. For an hour or so we watched this pageant, and then slowly the fireflies drifted back inland and farther down the coast. Then the porpoises lined up and sped out to sea, leaving a flaming path behind them that flickered and glowed, and then died slowly, like a glowing branch laid across the bay. *

* I recognise that each one of us will have different authors who will 'resonate' with us in a way which is unique to ourself. By including the two extracts below I am not trying to suggest that what the quoted author says, (or whatever I may feel about what he says), in any way make this account “the truth” about anything. It’s rather that, for me, the first time I read Wayne Liquorman’s account of the sequence of events in his life which led up to his, so-called, 'awakening’,…. it had a tremendous personal impact. At the time it was actually a longer, much more detailed transcription of his retelling of this event that I read. However, this shorter version I believe, still captures the exquisite, rare flavour of that experience. Again, purely for myself, it was completely unlike any other ‘enlightenment story’ I had ever come across. Liquorman was certainly NOT one of those admirable spiritual questers that I had become so familiar with meeting in books during my many years of seeking. Nevertheless, for me his story carried such a force of sincerity that it felt like someone had thrown me a lifeline after I had suddenly and quite unexpectedly found myself washed overboard from my trusted, 'good ship Buddhism,' during a storm. Since then, following the line of reasoning which Wayne threw me almost six years ago now has very much led me, (philosophically), to a belief in 'the-things-that-I-find-myself-believing-in' today. The extracts below were taken from two different Question and Answer talks he gave : * * {1} {Wayne} : All right, we have some time so I’ll tell you the story. I had virtually no interest in spiritual matters my entire life. I was an alcoholic, and I was a drug-addict from the time I was sixteen till I was thirty five, and that was my basic field of endeavour. (laughter) And that’s not as funny as it sounds. My whole premise in life was that I was the centre of the universe, that I was in charge of my life. I believed it was up to me to make things happen in this world, that I needed to establish my goals, my priorities, my wants, my desires, and then set about getting them ! And if I wasn’t getting what I wanted, I just needed to try harder. Those were the principles I lived by. And it was so incredibly painful to live that way, that the only way I could survive was to drink and use drugs. But it was killing me. I was drinking a fifth of alcohol a day, and doing a gram of cocaine nearly every day. I had been doing that for a number of years, and I was not getting any healthier. I had to drink in the morning to stop the shakes. I had the dry-heaves every morning while brushing my teeth. That was how I was living. And one day I was lying in bed at the end of a four day binge, and this obsession that I had had for so many years went away. "Poof ! Gone ! GONE !!" And I felt it go. It was really gone ! And I was faced with a bit of an intellectual problem here. (laughter) If, in fact, I was the master of my destiny, what did this to me ? I didn’t do this to me. This happened to me. It was clear that it had happened to me. And I set about finding out what power in the universe, if you will, had done this to me !! So, I started reading, and I read the Tao Te Ching and Huang Po and Chuang Tzu. I was reading everything I could get my hands on. I took up T’ai Chi and tried various kinds of meditation. I was doing all kinds of spiritual things. Then, after about a year and a half of that, a friend came and said, “There is a guy coming from India, and he’s giving a talk in Hollywood, and they’re only charging a buck. Why don’t we go ? What have we got to lose ?” If they’d been charging ten bucks, I probably wouldn’t have gone. (laughter) But they were only charging a buck, so I went. Ramesh got up and stood at the lectern, and he gave this incredibly, mind-bogglingly dry talk. (laughter) It was horrible. He was talking about noumenon and phenomenon, and Consciousness in movement and Consciousness at rest, and I had no background in any of this. I didn’t know Nisargadatta Maharaj from the Easter bunny. I didn’t know any of the biggies. I had never heard of Ramana Maharishi. I didn’t know any of this. And I didn’t follow a word that Ramesh said. Yet there was something about the guy that pricked my interest.… I wasn’t sure what. I went off on a business trip and when I came back two weeks later, he was giving talks up in Hollywood at Henry Dennison’s house. I went up there, and I sat down in front of him. There were only a few other people in the room, and when he started talking I was just absolutely bowled over ! In that context, in the intimate confines of that living room, I saw a window into the Infinite. There was resonance there that was unmistakable. I fell in love ! No one was more surprised than I that this had happened. I had fallen in love with a retired banker (laughter) from India, who is fortunately a lot less dry in intimate surroundings than he is when he’s lecturing. I mean, it was a whole different atmosphere. And I was hooked. I went back to see him every day. He was there for three months. And I was there twice a day. I was making every possible excuse to be in his presence. I was scheming to get to the house early to ask him some lame questions, just so I could be with him. It was really pitiful. (laughter) And there was one guy there, who in Ramesh’s presence, had gotten the Understanding. This guy was very close to Ramesh, and he was taking him for drives and meals. And I hated this guy. No lover has ever been more jealous. I would have killed this guy. (laughter) When Ramesh left Los Angeles, a small group of us were at the airport seeing him off. We were sitting around in the café, and the talk turned to all the tapes that had been made over the three months, and it was suggested that a book should be made. “We’re going to make a book, and we’re going to do this, and transcribe, and print, and publish, and it’s going to be great !” I’m listening to this, and I’m a businessman, so I say, “You know, you’re talking about starting a business here. You’ve got inventory, you’ve got cash-flow, you’ve got order processing.” And Henry says, “Wayne, have you ever been in the publishing business ?” I said, “No.” And Ramesh turns to me and he says, “Not yet,” (Laughter) {Q} : Okay. Just to finish your story, your personal story, if I may. For your body-mind mechanism, after some tine with Ramesh, the penny dropped, didn’t it ? {Wayne} : The penny dropped ! {Q} : And then, um, what would that be like ? {Wayne} : It’s a good question. The question was, “When the penny DROPPED for me, when I grabbed the brass ring, when I got the WHOLE THING, when I MADE IT to what you ALL WANT, what was it like ?” (loud laughter) Because that’s really the question, isn’t it ? What am I going to GET, when I get this thing. What’s it going to be like ? If I have to put up with all this crap, what am I going to get at the end of it ? And the fact is, that NOTHING HAPPENS. In my case, there were a variety of experiences when the sense of personal doership fell away but the ultimate Understanding was that nothing happened ! There was a tremendous feeling of relief at that moment, an experiential feeling that something had just changed. Yet, when the identification shifts to the Total there is no movement,.. and there is no ‘subject-object relationship’ functioning to give an experience. Subject-object experiences only happen through body-mind mechanisms, and what I’m saying is that the body-mind mechanism does not get enlightened. After the ‘penny drops’ the body-mind mechanism experiences phenomenality directly, according to its nature; according to its genetic, its psychological, and its environmental conditioning. And thus, it reacts according to its nature ‘just as it did before’. What is absent is any sense of personal doership. {Q} : One person whom I’ve heard is enlightened said that he went through a period where he just kind of kicked back and enjoyed life, which was followed by a time of feeling a lot of fear. I remember you saying some time back that you also went through a certain amount of what seemed to be emotional turmoil just prior to this impersonal event of Awakening. Did you experience any fear ? Can you talk about that ? {Wayne} : Well, I prefer not to emphasize the ‘event’ because it’s not pertinent to anything. It’s a story, just as the person you mentioned told his story, but there is nothing instructive about the story. {Q} : I’m just wondering if there’s a pattern. {Wayne} : That is why I said that there is nothing instructive about the story. You’re not going to determine a cause-effect relationship between these various events. The event of Awakening is an impersonal event. It happens through a body-mind mechanism, and it can happen in all kinds of ways, and there are probably as many stories as there are body-mind mechanisms through which it has happened. But the impulse is always to focus on the experience, in the secret hope that, “Okay, if we can identify what it was that caused the Awakening, then by diligently applying ourselves to duplicating this feat, we can get what we want !” {Q} : It’s not that,… {Wayne} : It is that, precisely ! {Q} : I was just wondering if your experiencing that emotional turmoil could have been a precursor… {Wayne} : And what I am telling you is that whatever comes before,… it is NOT causative. {Q} : It’s not ? It’s different in each case ? {Wayne} : Yes {Q} : Okay,……So if this Enlightenment is purely a matter of Grace, then why should we seek ? Why should we not just give up ? {Wayne} : Try giving up ! (laughter) You didn’t ask to become a seeker. The seeking started. So you can’t give it up ! It’s the same as having sex with a six hundred pound gorilla,… you’re not done until the gorilla is done. (laughter) * * {2} {Q} : When you look at all the millions of searchers, and how few are self-realised,… {Wayne} : Yes {Q} : So how did you earn that ? {Wayne} : Let’s see,… I was a very nice guy. (laughs) I worked very hard. I was very earnest. I was kind and loving to all. You’re not buying this are you ? (laughter) It’s Grace ! {Q} : It’s Grace ? {Wayne} : It’s pure Grace,….and the definition of that word which I like best is, “Unmerited favour from God.” I was a pig for much of my life. (laughs) “Give me more !” Period. Give me more. I want more. More is not enough. There’s not enough booze. There’s not enough drugs. There’s not enough sex. There’s not enough money. There’s not enough strokes of recognition. There’s not enough ! So I will do whatever I need to do to get more. And so I was not a nice person. I was not helping others. I was not being generous. I was not being kind. I was not being loving. I was out there for me. And that’s incredibly painful. That’s a very horrible way to live. Not one that you would choose if you had a choice. And it’s one that kills many people younger than me. But for me, for this body-mind mechanism, there was Grace. Go figure. So that’s how I did it. So, if you want to follow my ‘path’ you’d better start drinking. (laughter) You have a lot of catching up to do. You’ve got nineteen years of hard living still to go ! *

* Today I thought I would open up a much shorter, more traditional story. When I'm making a choice of which to put in this thread the principle decider for me is that the story should have, for some reason, stuck memorably in my mind for many years. The extract below most certainly fits that description. It's taken from "City of Lingering Splendour", a book by John Blofeld, who was my favourite author for quite a number of years during my Buddhist period. It is an account of the author’s early years spent living in Peking during the 1930s. Blofeld had arrived as a passenger on a tramp cargo ship after completing his degree at Cambridge, and was making his living by teaching English. All his school holiday time he used to travel around and explore China. The people he met in that pre-war, pre-Communism period were truly extraordinary. There were still many carry-overs from the days of the last emperor. The short, anecdotal story below describes one of his encounters during this period and is taken straight from the book, just the way Blofeld experienced it : {But first I’ll throw in a bit of biographical background information cobbled together from his obituary and the flyleaves of some of his books … for anyone who may, like myself, be interested in these things.} * * Biographical Details : Mr John Blofeld, who died in Bangkok on June 17, 1987 at the age of 74, was an Englishman who, after his education at Haileybury and Cambridge, spent almost twenty years in China. Speaking many different Chinese dialects and achieving a scholarly level of their written languages, he published authoritative books on Zen and Mahayana Buddhism; mystical and yogic Taoism; the Chinese deity' Kuan Yin; and a well-respected translation of the ancient Chinese classic, I Ching (Book of Change). His interest in the Far East began early, and was a far cry from the surface fascination with things oriental which has, in all ages, been fashionable in some circles. For Blofeld, many of the happiest years of his life were those spent in pre-war Peking at a time when that city still preserved much of its ancient way of life. He became intimate with all sorts of colourful people,…silk-clad scholars, Buddhist monks, Taoist sages, actors, courtesans, professors, students -- all of whom he describes against a background of fading splendour, with moving descriptions of a city which, in some ways, must have been among the loveliest in the history of the world. His knowledge of the language and mode of life enabled him to achieve a deep understanding of the Chinese people whom he loved and admired, and he subsequently devoted his life to the study of Buddhism and other Eastern traditions. During his early years in China Blofeld was extremely young and open-minded and his books above all absorb us because they provide vibrant pictures of a graceful wav of life which has perished from the earth. It is as though one familiar with Florence in the days of the Medicis or with Athens just before the conquest by Sparta had lived into the present age and given us eye-witness accounts of the pleasures he enjoyed. His earliest books are, above all, a record of many-coloured pleasures. * * John Blofeld wrote: The party that night was to be given by Professor Lee Wen-Liang, who, as Head of the Foreign Languages Department in the university where I was teaching, was my boss. An Oxford man belonging to a generation largely brought up in the traditional Chinese way of life, he was someone whose friendship I particularly valued because he knew so well how to interpret Chinese behaviour in terms which a 'Westerner like myself could understand. As the autumn evenings were still warm, Professor Lee had selected a small restaurant in the Pei Hai or North Sea Park, loveliest of all the former imperial pleasure-gardens within the city walls: and second only to Tzu Hsi's Summer Palace some miles out along the road to the Western Hills. If the night were fine and there were no wind, we should be able to sit out and enjoy our dinner close to the margin of the lake. Soon after dusk, and early enough to have plenty of time, to spare, I made my way through the south gate of the park and strolled across the graceful marble-topped bridge leading to the chorten-crowned island which rises steeply from the lake to a height of several hundred feet. Above me I could see the white chorten, a great bottle-shaped Tibetan-style pagoda, glimmering faintly against the starlit autumn sky; its pale radiance was only just perceptible, yet it drew my gaze like one of those half-seen figures haunting the darkness in lonely places which compel our furtive glances though we would prefer to turn our heads and hurry past. At the foot of the hill stood a tall pailou or triple archway of lacquered wood roofed with coloured tiles, but now its rainbow colours had been swallowed by the darkness; it loomed blackly against a flight of white stone steps from which an intricate network of steep pathways led by devious routes upwards to the chorten's base. Disdaining the steps, I chanced to follow a route that took me among pinnacles and fantastic caverns artfully fashioned from rocks carried there centuries ago from distant provinces to imitate the grotesque rock-formations famed by poets from China's southern regions. On reaching the top of the hill, I walked slowly round the chorten's base, trying to make out familiar objects now blurred and shadowy beneath the soft starlight. Adjoining the chorten to the south and facing out over the vast black contours of the Forbidden City stood a small temple with outer walls composed of thousands of porcelain tiles, each bearing a figure of the Buddha in bas relief; but these details were disappointingly lost in the darkness, for the moon which was to illumine our banquet had not yet risen; so I walked round to a small tea-house on the north side where, on hot afternoons, the Empress Tzu Hsi and her ladies had been wont to sit gazing over the water while eunuchs plied their jewelled peacock fans. The lake, stretching from the shore of the island almost to the northern boundary of the park, now gleamed oily black except at the margin where golden pools of light reflected the lamps along the .water's edge. At the farther end I could see a bright blur, of illumination coming from the Five Dragon Pavilion. These marvellously graceful buildings jutted into the lake at a point where, in the old days, the lacquered barges used to nose up to a flight of steps to disgorge their precious load of chattering ladies attended by obsequious eunuchs dressed only a little less gorgeously than themselves. While I was picturing the scene, an unknown voice said quietly : “In her day there was no electricity. The attendants carried lanterns of scarlet gauze.” I swung round startled. I had been so sure I was alone; the soft, almost feminine voice, emerging unexpectedly from the darkness and seeming like a continuation of my thoughts, was disturbing. “I beg your pardon ?” A shadowy figure, his face barely visible above a dark robe which blended indistinguishably with the night, was standing so close to me that I might have touched his hand. Perceiving he had startled me, he apologised and added: “I saw you gazing across at the pavilions by the landing-stage. They are beautiful, are they not ? But that yellowish light is out of place and garish - like so many things these days.” “Do you mean to say you were here then ?” He laughed, or rather tittered, musically, his voice so feminine that, could I have believed it possible in Peking to encounter a woman walking alone in a solitary place at night, I should certainly have taken him for one. (The Manchu-style gowns of men and women were, even when seen in daylight, not greatly dissimilar.) 'Yes, indeed I was here then. You are a foreigner, but you speak Chinese well. Doubtless you have heard of the T'ai Chien?' “The imperial eunuchs ? Of course. But they vanished long ago.” 'Long as a young man sees things; short enough to one well into the autumn of his life. I was already middle-aged when the Revolution dispersed us. Now I am sixty.' ''Were you with them long ? In the Imperial Household, I mean ?” “Not long. I was castrated in the seventh year of Kuang Hsu [1882], so I had only twenty-nine years in the Forbidden City. How quickly the time passed !” “Castrated by your own choice ?” “Why not ? It seemed a little thing to give up one pleasure for so many. My parents were poor, yet by suffering that small change I could be sure of an easy life in surroundings of beauty and magnificence; I could aspire to intimate companionship with lovely women unmarred by their fear or distrust of me. I could even hope for power and wealth of my own. With good fortune and diligence l might grow more rich and powerful than some of the greatest officials in the empire. How could I foresee the Revolution ? That was indeed a misfortune. I have sacrificed my virility and my hope of begetting children for a dream which, passing fleetingly, stopped short and can never return.” “And so now you come here sometimes in the darkness to recapture an echo of your dream ? But how do you live ?” “I manage well. I am a guide - not one of those so-called guides who live by inventing history for foreigners and by making commissions on things they purchase. I have not yet fallen to that. Discriminating Chinese gentlemen arriving from the provinces prefer to obtain their guides through the Palace Eunuchs' Mutual Prosperity Association. Often they have heard my name from their friends and are kind enough to ask specially for my services. I charge highly, for I am able to tell them many things they could scarcely learn from other sources. You must have heard of the Grand Eunuch Li Lien-Ying ? Of course! Well, I was one of his men and among those placed in charge of the Lord of Ten Thousand Years during all the time he lived in confinement after that occasion when he tried to circumvent the Old Buddha [the Dowager Empress].” After chatting with him longer, I asked if he and his fellow eunuchs were happy in their old age. “Happy ! How could that be ? We have no wives, no sons to bear us grandsons and sacrifice at our tombs. We manage to live. We are not often hungry. We dare not ask for happiness'' It was time for me to leave the island and hurry round to the other end of the lake where Professor Lee and his friends were expecting me. I parted from my sad companion, having found nothing encouraging to say to someone so irrevocably linked to a vanished epoch. Gradually the melancholy thoughts accompanying me on my walk along the ill-lighted east shore of the lake were dispersed by the rising moon, which gave added light to the cheerful scene awaiting me in front of the restaurant. Some lanterns and a round table had been set out near the water's edge, where the other nine members of the Party were already seated over saucers of melon-seeds and bowls of tea. * * .

* I have a great affection and admiration for Kurt Vonnegut. Without a doubt I've read more books by him than any other author and, in the process, collected a great many 'gems' of what I take to be his creative genius. In case there's anyone who isn't familiar with him, Kurt Vonnegut was an American writer who was born in 1922 and died six years ago in 2007. His best known book was "Slaughterhouse Five", … loosely based on his actual wartime experiences as a POW imprisoned in Dresden during the three days it was carpet-bombed by the allies into a flaming holocaust of annihilation. Many years after the war he was still struggling to write a book about his experiences there and, as part of this process, he went over to visit one of his war-time friends who had been with him throughout that time. The second of the two connected 'life-anecdotes' below eventually formed the introduction to the book which grew out of this meeting. In them the author describes the seminal events of that evening which he spent with Bernard O’Hare and his wife, and their young family. As always, I am completely in awe of the simple perfection of Vonnegut’s style: * * {1} I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big. But not many words about Dresden came from my mind then - not enough of them to make a book, anyway. And not many words come now, either, when I have become an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls, with his sons full grown. I think of how useless the Dresden part of my memory has been, and yet how tempting Dresden has been to write about, and I am reminded of the famous limerick: There was a young man from Stamboul, Who soliloquized thus to his tool: "You took all my wealth And you ruined my health, And now you won't pee, you old fool.” And I'm reminded, too, of the song that goes: My name is Yon Yonson, I work in Wisconsin, I work in a lumber mill there. The people I meet when I walk down the street, They say, "'What's your name?" And I say, "My name is Yon Yonson, I work in Wisconsin . . ." And so on to infinity. Over the years, people I've met have often asked me what I'm working on, and I've usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden. I said that to Harrison Starr, the movie-maker, one time, and he raised his eyebrows and inquired, "Is it an anti-war book?" "Yes," I said. "I guess." "You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books?" "No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?" "I say, 'Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?’“ What he meant of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too, And, even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death. * * {2} A couple of weeks after I telephoned my old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare, I really did go to see him. That must have been in 1964 - whatever the last year was for the New York's Fair. My name is Yon Yonson. There was a young man from Stamboul. Before arriving my daughters and I had dinner in an Italian place, and then knocked on the front door of the beautiful stone house of Bernard V. O'Hare. I was carrying a bottle of Irish whisky like a dinner bell. I met his nice wife, Mary, to whom I dedicate this book. Mary O'Hare is a trained nurse, which is a lovely thing for a woman to be. She admitted my two daughters, mixed them with her own two children, and sent them all upstairs to play games and watch television. It was only after the children were gone that I sensed that Mary didn't like me or didn't like something about the night. She was polite but chilly. "It's a nice cozy house you have here," said, and it really was. "I have fixed up a place where you can talk and not be bothered," she said. "Good, I said, and imagined two leather chairs near a fire in a paneled room, where two old soldiers could drink and talk. But she took us into the kitchen. She had put two straight-backed chairs at a kitchen table with a white porcelain top. That table was screaming with reflected light from a two hundred-watt bulb overhead. Mary had prepared an operating room. She put only one glass on it, which was for me. She explained that O'Hare couldn't drink the hard stuff since the war. So we sat down. O'Hare was embarrassed, but he wouldn't tell me what was wrong. I couldn't imagine what it was about me that could burn Mary up so. I was a family man. I'd been married only once. I wasn't a drunk. I hadn't done her husband any dirt in the war. She fixed herself a Coca-Cola, made a lot of noise banging the ice-cube tray in the stainless steel sink. Then she went into another part of the house. But she wouldn't sit still. She was moving all over the house, opening and shutting doors, even moving furniture around to work off her anger. I asked O'Hare what I'd said or done to make her act that way. "It's all right," he said. "Don't worry about it. It doesn't have anything to do with you." That was kind of him. He was lying. It had everything to do with me. So we tried to ignore Mary and remember the war. I took a couple of belts of booze I’d brought. We would chuckle or grin sometimes, as though war stories were coming back, but neither of us could remember anything good. That was it for memories, and Mary was still making noise. She finally came out in the kitchen again for another Coke. She took another tray of ice cubes from the icebox, banged it in the sink, even though there was already plenty of ice out. Then she turned to me, let me see how angry she was, and that the anger was for me. She had been talking to herself, so what she said was a fragment of a much larger conversation. “You were just babies then !” she said. “What ?” I said. “You were just babies in the war – like the ones upstairs !” I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood. “But you’re not going to write it that way, are you.” This wasn’t a question. It was an accusation. “I –I don’t know.” I said. “Well, I know,” she said. “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs. So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn’t want her babies or anybody else’s babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies. So held up my right hand and I made her a promise : "Mary," I said, "I don't think this book of mine is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honour : there won't be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne. "I tell you what," I said, "I'll call it The Children's Crusade' " She was my friend after that. *

* The following are two separate stories extracted from, "Nine Lives", a modern-day, factual collection of spiritual biographies by William Dalrymple which he subtitles : "In Search of the Sacred in Modern India". The author is an Englishman who was born and grew up in India during the last years of the British Raj. As a writer he continually finds himself drawn back, both physically and mentally, into exploring the incredible richness of India's age-old history, culture, and religion. The blurb on the inside cover says, "Nine people, nine lives. Each one taking a different religious path, each one an unforgettable story. Exquisite, mesmerising and told with an almost Biblical simplicity, 'Nine Lives' is a modern Indian Canterbury Tales." * * {1} As I clambered up the track, I fell into conversation with an ash-smeared and completely naked sadhu of about my own age. I had always assumed that most of the Holy Men I had seen in India were from traditional village backgrounds and were motivated by a blind and simple faith. But as soon as we began talking it became apparent that Ajay Kumar Jha was in fact a far more cosmopolitan figure than I had expected. Ajay and I walked together along the steep ridge of a mountain, with the great birds of prey circling the thermals below us. I had asked him to tell me his story and after some initial hesitation, he agreed. “I have been a sanyasi [wanderer] only for four and a half years,” he said. “Before that I was the sales manager with Kelvinator, a Bombay consumer electricals company. I had done my MBA at Patna University and was considered a high flyer by my employers. But one day I just decided I could not spend the rest of my life marketing fans and fridges. So I just left. I wrote a letter to my boss and to my parents, gave away my belongings to the poor, and took a train to Benares. There I threw away my old suit, rubbed ash on my body and found a monastery. “Have you ever regretted what you did ?” I asked. “It was a very sudden decision,” replied Ajay. “But no, I have never regretted it for a moment, even when I have not eaten for several days and am at my most hungry.” “But how did you adjust to such a change in your life ?” I asked. “Of course it was very difficult,” he said. “But then everything worthwhile in life takes time. I was used to all the comforts : my father was a politician and a very rich man by the standards of our country. But I never wanted to live a worldly life like him.” We had now arrived at the top of the ridge and the land fell away steeply on every side. Ajay gestured out over the forests and pastures laid out at our feet, a hundred shades of green framed by the blinding white of the distant snow peaks straight ahead. “When you walk in the hills your mind becomes clear,” he said. “All your worries disappear. Look ! I carry only a blanket and a water bottle. I have no possessions, so I have no worries.” He smiled, “Once you learn to restrain your desires,” he said, “anything becomes possible.” * * {2} In the midnight shadows of a forest clearing, lit only by a bonfire and a carpet of flickering camphor lights, a large crowd has gathered, silhouetted against the flames. Most have walked many miles through the darkness to get here. They are waiting and watching for the moment when, once a year, the gods come down to earth, and dance. Behind a shrine, on the edge of the clearing, there is a palm-thatch hut, and this has been commandeered by the ‘theyyam’ troupe as their green room. Inside, the next dancer to go on, a fanged female figure representing the goddess Bhagavati, with a red-painted face, supporting a huge red-gilt, mirrored headdress, is getting ready to summon the deity. The young male dancer who is about to take in the goddess is putting the final touches to his breastplate and adjusting the headdress, so that the facets flash in the flames. Prostrate on a palm mat amid the discarded clothes, the unused costumes and the half-made headdresses, immobile at the rear of the hut, lies the dark and muscular figure of the man I have come to see. Hari Das, one of the most celebrated and articulate ‘theyyam’ dancers in the area, is naked but for a white ‘lungi’, and he is lying on his back as a young boy applies make-up to his face and body. His torso and upper arms are covered with yellow paint, and his cheeks are smeared with orange turmeric, which gives off a strongly pungent smell. Two black paisleys are painted around his eyes and a pair of mango-shaped patches on his cheeks are daubed with bright, white rice paste. On these, using, using a slim strip of coconut leaf, the make-up boy is skilfully drawing loops and whorls and scorpion-tail trumpet spirals, then finishing the effects with a thin red stripe across his cheek bones. I sit down on the mud floor beside him, and we chat as the make-up boy begins the slow transformation of Hari Das into the god Vishnu. I ask whether he is nervous, and how the possession comes about : what does it feel like to be taken over by a god ? “It’s difficult to describe,” says Hari Das. “Before it happens I always get very tense, even though I have been doing this for twenty-six years now. It’s not that I am nervous of the god coming. It’s more the fear that he might refuse to come. It’s the intensity of your devotion that determines the intensity of the possession. If you lose your feeling of devotion, if it even once becomes routine or unthinking, the gods may stop coming.” He pauses as the make-up boy continues applying face paint from the pigment he is mixing on the strip of banana leaf in his left hand. Hari Das opens his mouth, and the make-up boy carefully applies some rouge to his lips. “It’s like a blinding light,” he says eventually. “When the drums are playing and your make-up is finished, they hand you a mirror and you look at your face, transformed into that of a god. Then it comes. It’s as if there is a sudden explosion of light. A vista of complete brilliance opens up – it blinds the senses.” “Are you aware of what is happening ?” “No,” he replies. “That light stays with you all the way through the performance. You become the deity. You lose all fear. Even your voice changes. The god comes alive and takes over. You are just the vehicle, the medium. In the trance it is God who speaks, and all the acts are the acts of the god – feeling, thinking, speaking. The dancer is an ordinary man, but this being is divine. Only when the headdress is removed does it end.” “What is it like when you come to from the trance ?” I ask. “It’s like the incision of a surgeon,” he says, making a cutting gesture with one hand. “Suddenly it’s all over, it’s gone. You don’t have any access to what happened during the possession or the performance. You can’t remember anything that happened in the trance. There is only a sensation of relief, as if you’ve off-loaded something.”

* An extract from Joe Simpson's, (climber and author of "Touching the Void") excellently crafted autobiography of his childhood : "This Game of Ghosts" * * In the summer holidays of our last year in Northern Ireland my mother drove Sarah and her school friend and me out to the coast to see the Giant’s Causeway. On our return we noticed a sign advertising a wildlife park near Bushmills. I don’t know why they allowed us in. The 2CV was a noisy car with an exposed soft roof and Ma’s gear changing left much to be desired. Sarah and Louise chatted in the back while I sat beside Ma in the front clutching two milk bottles. We all remarked on how bored the animals looked. It was a hot, torpid sort of day and even the baboons seemed to prefer sleeping to their main enjoyment of tearing cars to pieces. By the time we reached the last section, the lion area, we had become so bored ourselves that we had opened the two front windows and were laughing at the groups of anaesthetised big cats. The large male lion nearest to the car lurched to its feet when the two-stroke engine made a sudden screeching sound as Ma changed down into first. “Ah well, at least that one’s still alive,” Sarah remarked from the back. The lion loped toward the passenger side of the car. We were travelling at about ten miles an hour when I reached outside, unhooked the window catch and let the glass section drop shut. “I think you’d better speed up, Ma,” I said as the lion increased its speed. “It’s getting a bit close.” Ma accelerated but forgot to change gear. The engine howled in protest, and the lion broke into a determined canter. She got a quick view of it as it angled in from the side. The car faltered. “Don’t stall,” Sarah and Louise chorused from the back. The car was barrelling across the safari park to the distant exit gates, rolling in the peculiar way that 2CVs do, with the engine noise reaching crescendo pitch. Suddenly it felt vulnerable and flimsy, with its thin tinny body and soft roof. Sarah and Louis started screaming when the lion drew level with us. I simply gawped in horror as it galloped alongside. The beast’s huge head was made all the more impressive by its thick dark mane. It drew level with my door and raced along less than a couple of feet from me, fixing me with a baleful stare from merciless golden eyes. I had read enough Wilbur Smith to know that the three hundred pounds of enraged muscle, fangs and claws wasn’t about to listen to reason. I clutched the milk bottles in both hands, wondering what to do if it sprang on us. It could easily leap on to the roof, in which case I might be able to fend it off with the bottles. Perhaps I should break one ? No, if it came through the roof I would leap out the door. Then it would be so preoccupied with Ma and the girls that I might be able to leg it. I reached for the door handle as Ma, with her foot flat on the floor, headed for the gate. “They’re shutting the gates !” Sarah howled from the back. “Open the gates, open the gates !” We all screamed at the two men who were hurriedly pulling the high chain link gates closed. The car seemed full of frantically waving arms and screams of anguish. “Don’t stop, Ma, for God’s sake don’t stop. It’ll have us if we stop.” Ma crouched over the wheel and aimed the 2CV remorselessly at the gates and the donkey rides and picnic area on the other side. We were going through. Oh my God, we’re going through. I know now how cats mesmerise their prey with their eyes. Since the lion had drawn level with us I had been staring fixedly into those huge yellow eyes, the maned head completely filling the window of the car. There were flecks of gold in the dark stiff mane and its fangs seemed huge and stained nicotine yellow. I was so transfixed by the stare that I felt as if I had been paralysed, injected with some lethal narcotic that froze every muscle. The lurching ride, the screams and the frantic waving arms seemed to be outside my world. All I had was this beast’s awful demented eyes. I knew with absolute certainty that it would go for me first. Suddenly a shot rang out, like a car backfiring. The lion flinched and swung away. A zebra-striped Landrover flashed past us. Ma, at top speed in first gear, was not to be distracted. The surprised keepers had barely swung the gates open before we surged through, flashed past a startled group of toddlers on donkeys with a kangaroo lurch as second gear crunched into place, and on out of the park to the main road with the four of us still wailing hysterically. *

* Yesterday, the settling in of torrential winter rains where I live, (and the thought of at least three more wintry months of it), has already got me dreaming of warmer and sunnier climates. And each year when that happens I take it as a sign that it's time to find, dust off, and settle into a comfortable chair with my much-loved hardback copy of Gerald Durrell's "My Family and Other Animals" For me, ever since I first came across a copy of this book in 1971 lying on the top shelf of an aging VW van that a friend and I bought while touring Europe,.... it has been the most perfect antidote I know of for whatever form of the blues may have temporarily laid me low. It has NEVER failed to set me up with days of laughter and bonhomie with the world. Today I'll just slide in the first two pages of Durrell's introduction. Not only is his mastery of writing displayed to perfection here,... but he also captures, (as so equally perfectly does the film "Shirley Valentine") this growing, annual desperation to escape the grey and drear of England in winter : * * Gerald Durrell wrote: * The Migration July had been blown out like a candle by a biting wind that ushered in a leaden August sky. A sharp, stinging drizzle fell, billowing into opaque grey sheets when the wind caught it. Along the Bournemouth sea-front the beach-huts turned blank wooden faces towards a greeny-grey, froth-chained sea that leapt eagerly at the cement bulwark of the shore. The gulls had been tumbled inland over the town, and they now drifted above the house-tops on taut wings, whining peevishly. It was the sort of weather calculated to try anyone's endurance. Considered as a group my family was not a very prepossessing sight that afternoon, for the weather had brought with it the usual selection of ills to which we were prone. For me, lying on the floor, labelling my collection of shells, it had brought catarrh, pouring it into my skull like cement, so that I was forced to breath stertorously through open mouth. For my brother Leslie, hunched dark and glowering by the fire, it had inflamed the convolutions of his ears so that they bled delicately but persistently. To my sister Margo it had delivered a fresh dappling of acne spots to a face that was already blotched like a red veil. For my mother there was a rich, bubbling cold, and a twinge of rheumatism to season it. Only my eldest brother, Larry, was untouched, but it was sufficient that he was irritated by our failings. It was Larry, of course, who started it. The rest of us felt too apathetic to think of anything except our own ills, but Larry was designed by Providence to go through life like a small, blond firework, exploding ideas in other people's minds, and then curling up with cat-like unctuousness and refusing to take any blame for the consequences. He had become increasingly irritable as the afternoon wore on. At length, glancing moodily round the room, he decided to attack Mother, as being the obvious cause of the trouble. «Why do we stand this bloody climate? » he asked suddenly, making a gesture towards the rain-distorted window. «Look at it! And, if it comes to that, look at us.... Margo swollen up like a plate of scarlet porridge... Leslie wandering around with fourteen fathoms of cotton wool in each ear... Gerry sounds as though he's had a cleft palate from birth.... And look at you: you're looking more decrepit and hag-ridden every day. » Mother peered over the top of a large volume entitled Easy Recipes from Rajputana. «Indeed I'm not, » she said indignantly. «You are, » Larry insisted; «you're beginning to look like an Irish washerwoman... and your family looks like a series of illustrations from a medical encyclopaedia. » Mother could think of no really crushing reply to this, so she contented herself with a glare before retreating once more behind her book. «What we need is sunshine, » Larry continued; «don't you agree, Les?... Les... Les! » Leslie unravelled a large quantity of cotton-wool from one ear. «What d'you say? » he asked. «There you are! » said Larry, turning triumphantly to Mother, «it's become a major operation to hold a conversation with him. I ask you, what a position to be in! One brother can't hear what you say, and the other one can't be understood. Really, it's time something was done. I can't be expected to produce deathless prose in an atmosphere of gloom and eucalyptus. » «Yes, dear, » said Mother vaguely. «What we all need, » said Larry, getting into his stride again, «is sunshine... a country where we can grow. » «Yes, dear, that would be nice, » agreed Mother, not really listening. «I had a letter from George this morning – he says Corfu's wonderful. Why don't we pack up and go to Greece? » «Very well, dear, if you like, » said Mother unguardedly. Where Larry was concerned she was generally very careful not to commit herself. «When? » asked Larry, rather surprised at this cooperation. Mother, perceiving that she had made a tactical error, cautiously lowered Easy Recipes from Rajputana. «Well, I think it would be a sensible idea if you were to go on ahead, dear, and arrange things. Then you can write and tell me if it's nice, and we all can follow, » she said cleverly. Larry gave her a withering look. «You said that when I suggested going to Spain, » he reminded her, «and I sat for two interminable months in Seville, waiting for you to come out, while you did nothing except write me massive letters about drains and drinking water, as though I was the Town Clerk or something. No, if we're going to Greece, let's all go together. » «You do exaggerate, Larry, » said Mother plaintively; «anyway, I can't go just like that. I have to arrange something about this house. » «Arrange? Arrange what, for heaven's sake? Sell it. » «I can't do that, dear, » said Mother, shocked. «Why not? » «But I've only just bought it. » «Sell it while it's still untarnished, then. » «Don't be ridiculous, dear, » said Mother firmly; «that's quite out of the question. It would be madness. » So we sold the house and fled from the gloom of the English summer, like a flock of migrating swallows. * *

* Thanks for your posting your shared appreciation of that story, Thelerner. You've encouraged me to throw in the second of the stories from Ajahn Brahm's collection which had the strongest, most ''snapping-my-mind-out-of-in-its-habitual -sleepwalk'', effect on me. For my tastes they were both incredibly powerfully written, clearly expressed, and piercingly honest pieces of writing. In my opinion, they are a gift to everyone who has the good fortune to come across them. * * Ajahn Brahm wrote: Grief is what we add on to loss. It is a learned response, specific to some cultures only. It is not universal and it is not unavoidable. I found this out through my own experience of being immersed for eight years in a pure, Asian Buddhist culture. In those early years in a Buddhist forest monastery in a remote corner of Thailand, Western culture and ideas were totally unknown. My monastery served as the local cremation ground for many surrounding villages. There was a cremation almost weekly. In the hundreds of funerals I witnessed there in the late 1970’s, never once did I see anyone cry. I would speak with the bereaved family in the following days and still there were no signs of grief. I came to know that in northern Thailand in those days, a region steeped in Buddhist teachings for many centuries, death was accepted by all in a way that defied Western theories of grief and loss. Those years taught me that there is an alternative to grief. Not that grief is wrong only that there is another possibility. Loss of a loved one can be viewed in a second way, a way that avoids the long days of aching grief. My own father died when I was only sixteen. He was, for me, a great man. He was the one who helped me find the meaning of love with his words, “Whatever you do in your life, Son, the door of my heart will always be open to you.” Even though my love for him was huge, I never cried at his funeral service. Nor have I cried for him since. I have never felt like crying over his premature death. It took me many years to understand my emotions surrounding his death. I found that understanding through the following story, which I share with you here. * As a young man I enjoyed music, all types of music from rock to classical, jazz to folk. London was a fabulous city in which to grow up in the 1960s and early 1970s, especially when you loved music. I remember being at the very first nervous performance of the local band Led Zeppelin, at a small club in Soho. On another occasion, only a handful of us watched the then-unknown Rod Stewart front a rock group in the upstairs room of a small pub in North London. I have so many precious memories of the music scene in London at that time. At the end of most concerts I would shout “More ! More !”along with many others. Usually, the band or orchestra would play on for a while, though eventually they had to stop, pack up their gear and go home. And so did I. It seems to my memory that every evening when I walked home from the club, pub, or concert hall, it was always raining. There is a special word to describe the dreary type of rain often met with in London : drizzle. It always seemed to be drizzling, cold and gloomy as I left the concert halls. But even though I knew in my heart that I would probably never get to hear that band again, that they had left my life forever, never once did I feel sad or cry. As I walked out into the cold, damp darkness of the London night, the stirring music still echoed in my mind, “What magnificent music ! What powerful performance !How lucky I was to have been there at the time !” I never felt grief at the end of a great concert. And that is exactly how I felt about my own father’s death. It was as if a great concert had finally come to an end. It was such a wonderful performance. I was, as it were, shouting loudly, “More ! More !” when it came close to the finale. My dear old dad did struggle hard to keep living a little longer for us. But the moment eventually came when he had to “pack up his gear and go home.” When I walked out of the crematorium at Mortlake at the end of the service into the cold London drizzle – I remember the drizzle clearly – knowing in my heart that I would probably not get to be with him again, that he had left my life forever, I didn’t feel sad, nor did I cry. What I felt in my heart was, “What a magnificent father ! What a powerful inspiration was his life. How lucky I was to have been there at the time. How fortunate I was to have been his son.” As I held my mother’s hand on the long walk into the future, I felt the very same exhilaration as I had often felt at the end of one of the great concerts in my life. I wouldn’t have missed that for the world. * Grief is seeing only what has been taken away from you. The celebration of life is recognising all that we were blessed with, and feeling so very grateful. Thank you, Dad. * *

* I've just finished reading a book that was recommended to me by two different people on a Buddhist internet forum that I sometimes pop into. It was called, "Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung ?", and was written by a Buddhist monk named Ajahn Brahm. He was trained in the Thai forest monk tradition, and is now the abbot of a monastery in Perth, Australia. Personally, I no longer have much attraction to the Buddhist path but the recommendations of this book were given to me because of its 'human values', rather than for it being simply yet another promotion of religious doctrine. The book comprises 108 anecdotal stories, and I was happy to find that quite a few of them had something worthwhile to say to me. Two or three, in fact, had such a profound effect that it seemed I had no choice,... I had to copy them out and share them here. When you discover a priceless inspiration, what else could naturally arise than the desire to share it with others ? * * Ajahn Brahm wrote: I arrived early to lead my meditation class in a low security prison. A crim whom I had never seen before was waiting to speak with me. He was a giant of a man with bushy hair and beard and tattooed arms; the scars on his face told me he’d been in many a violent fight. He looked so fearsome that I wondered why he was coming to learn meditation. He wasn’t the type. I was wrong of course. He told me that something had happened a few days before that had spooked the hell out of him. As he started speaking, I picked up his thick Ulster accent. To give me some background, he told me that he had grown up in the violent streets of Belfast. His first stabbing was when he was seven years old. The school bully had demanded the money he had for his lunch. He said no. The older boy took out a long knife and asked for the money a second time. He thought the bully was bluffing. He said no again. The bully never asked a third time, he just plunged the knife into the seven-year-old’s arm, drew it out, and walked away. He told me that he ran in shock from the schoolyard, with blood streaming down his arm, to his father’s house close by. His unemployed father took one look at the wound and led his son into their kitchen, but not to dress the wound. The father opened a drawer, took out a big kitchen knife, gave it to his son, and ordered him to go back to school and stab the boy back. That was how he had been brought up. If he hadn’t grown so big and strong, he would have been long dead. The jail was a prison farm where short-term prisoners, or long-term prisoners close to release, could be prepared for life outside, some by learning a trade in the farming industry. Furthermore, the produce from the prison farm would supply all the prisons around Perth with inexpensive food, thus keeping down costs. Australian farms grow cows, sheep and pigs, not just wheat and vegetables; so did the prison far. But unlike other farms, the prison farm had its own slaughterhouse, on site. Every prisoner had to have a job in the prison farm. I was informed by many of the inmates that the most sought-after jobs were in the slaughterhouse. These jobs were especially popular with violent offenders. And the most sought-after job of all, which you had to fight for, was the job of the slaughterer himself. That giant and fearsome Irishman was the slaughterer. He described the slaughterhouse to me. Super-strong stainless steel railings, wide at the opening, narrowing down to a single channel inside the building, just wide enough for one animal to pass through at a time. Next to the narrow channel, raised on a platform, he would stand with electric gun. Cows, pigs or sheep would be forced into the stainless steel funnel using dogs and cattle prods. He said they would always scream, each in its own way, and try to escape. They could smell death, hear death, feel death. When the animal was alongside his platform, it would be writhing and wriggling and moaning in full voice. Even though his gun could kill a large bull with a single high-voltage charge, the animal would never stand still long enough for him to aim properly. So it was one shot to stun, next shot to kill. One shot to stun, next shot to kill. Animal after animal. Day after day. The Irishman started to become excited as he moved to the occurrence, only a few days before, that had unsettled him so much. He started to swear. In what followed, he kept repeating, “This is God’s f…ing truth !” He was afraid I wouldn’t believe him. That day they needed beef for the prisons around Perth. They were slaughtering cows. One shot to stun, next shot to kill. He was well into a normal day’s killing when a cow came up like he had never seen before. This cow was silent. There wasn’t even a whimper. Its head was down as it walked purposely, voluntarily, slowly into position next to the platform. It did not writhe or wriggle or try to escape. Once in position, the cow lifted her head and stared at her executioner, absolutely still. The Irishman hadn’t seen anything even close to this before. His mind went numb with confusion. He couldn’t lift his gun; nor could he take his eyes away from the eyes of the cow. The cow was looking right inside him. He slipped into timeless spaces. He couldn’t tell me how long it took, but as the cow held him in eye contact, he noticed something that shook him even more. Cows have very big eyes. He saw in the left eye of the cow, above the lower eyelid, water begin to gather. The amount of water grew and grew, until it was too much for the eyelid to hold. It began to trickle slowly all the way down her cheek, forming a glistening line of tears. Long-closed doors were opening slowly to his heart. As he looked in disbelief, he saw in the right eye of the cow, above the lower eyelid, more water gathering, growing by the moment, until it too, was more than the eyelid could contain. A second stream of water trickled slowly down her face. And the man broke down. The cow was crying. He told me that he threw down his gun, swore to the full extent of his considerable capacity to the prison officers, that they could do whatever they like to him, “but that cow ain’t dying !” He ended by telling me he was a vegetarian now. That story was true. Other inmates of the prison farm confirmed it for me. The cow that cried taught one of the most violent of men what it means to care. * *

* Well, for anyone who does love stories, how long would it be until the time came for the inescapable and uplifting experience of adding one of Bill Bryson's priceless anecdotes. To my tastes he is one of the most perceptive observers and uproariously witty chroniclers of this experience of 'life' that we all find ourselves immersed in. The world would be a much sadder place without his wonderful, light-hearted American contribution to 'literature for-the-fun-of-it.' But his own words are by far his own best accolade,..... * * . . . . . . . . . . . A Day at Riverview Amusement Park . . . . . . . . . . . Even the dodgem cars were insanely lively. From a distance the dodgem palace looked like a welder’s yard because of all the sparks raining down from the ceiling, which always threatened to fall in the car with you, enlivening the ride further. The dodgem attendants didn’t just permit head-on crashes, they actively encouraged them. The cars were so souped up that the instant you touched the accelerator, however lightly or tentatively, it would shoot off at such a speed that your head would become just a howling sphere on the end of a whip-like stalk. There was no controlling the cars once they were set in motion. They just flew around wildly, barely in contact with the floor, until they slammed into something solid, giving you the sudden opportunity to examine the steering wheel very closely with your face. The worst outcome was to be caught in a car that turned out to be temperamental and sluggish or broke down altogether because forty other drivers, many of them small children who had never before had an opportunity to exact revenge on anything larger than a nervous toad, would fly into you with unbridled joy from every possible angle. I once saw a boy in a broken-down car bale out while the ride was still running – this was the one thing you KNEW you were never supposed to do – and stagger dazedly through the heavy traffic for the periphery. As he set foot on the metal floor, over two thousand crackling bluish strands of electricity leaped onto him from every direction, lighting him up like a paper lantern and turning him into a kind of living X–ray. You could see every bone in his body and most of his larger organs. Miraculously he managed to sidestep every car that came hurtling at him – and that was all of them, of course – and collapsed on the stubbly grass outside, where he lay smoking lightly from the top of his head and asked for someone to get word to his mom that he loved her. But apart from a permanent ringing in his ears, he suffered no major damage, though the hands on his Zorro watch were for ever frozen at ten past two. *

Some years ago I came across a book called "I Hope You Die Soon" by Richard Sylvester, that made an extremely powerful impression on me. He is a Non-Duality teacher that first came to my attention after watching an interview that he gave on Conscious TV. I'll throw in an extract from one of his talks that, for me, seems to have relevance to the topic we are discusssing here. If what he has to say below happens to catch anyone's interest the way it did my own, then I'll also include a link to this same interview : * * You cannot earn liberation. I have not earned liberation. No one will ever earn liberation. You cannot become good enough or work hard enough or be sincere enough to deserve it. Liberation has not happened to me and it will not happen to you. Yet there is liberation. There is only ever liberation. Perfection is already here. What you are is already divine. Searching will not get you anywhere, but there is nothing wrong with searching. In this apparent process it may be heard that searching is meaningless,…but searching cannot be given up until it stops. Then it is over and it is seen that what you were searching for has always been with you, in fact it has always been what you are. But to suggest that you give up searching in order to find is pointless. It does not matter whether you get drunk, meditate, read the paper, sit with the guru or go to the races. None of these will make liberation any more or any less likely. Searching or not searching, misses the point. For there is no one who can choose to do any of these things. If meditation happens, it happens and it will go on happening until it does not. It is the same for getting drunk. You may as well give up the belief that you can choose anything. Except that you cannot do that either. Until it happens. * * http://bcove.me/rdk2imyu *

I'm afraid I've exhausted all the poetry I know concerning the expulsion of excess wind, and I don't know any verse whatsoever about silk sheets. But if it's beauty you're after, well, to my way of thinking, true beauty has always to be allied with also having a worthwhile purpose. Actually I know very little about poetry, really, (hence, undoubtedly, my attraction to Richard Brautigan). But I do have a feeling that somehow poetry has a close connection with music. Perhaps it's that they both tend to have rhythm as an indispensable part of their nature. Now, if I were to throw in an apparently complete non-sequitor here by saying that, being a child of the Sixties, one of my favourite albums of all time was Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon",.....perhaps the connection will become apparent if I add two extracts below of what I think of as truly beautiful poetry, (even though there isn't a silken bed sheet or the slightest breath of flatulence to be found anywhere in either of them) : * * * Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town Waiting for someone or something to show you the way Tired of lying in the sunshine Staying home to watch the rain And you are young and life is long And there is time to kill today. And then one day you find Ten years have got behind you No one told you when to run You missed the starting gun. * * * "Breathe, breathe in the air Don't be afraid to care For long you live and high you'll fly And smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry And all you touch and all you see Is all your life will ever be." *

That, of course, is precisely the problem that underlies all our human disatisfaction. This feeling of separation, not only from others, but from the source of our being. And to try and bridge that separation, endless theories, philosophies, and organised religions have sprung up since 'who-knows-how-far-back'. The trouble is, they all profess to know the answers to this question, and they all make promises of what you'll get or achieve if you join them. (Plus frequently, also a dire list of nasty things that will happen to you if you don't) YET, curiously,... (1) all these theories say different things. (2) none have a consistent track record which could be described as having a success rate much better than "rare" So, as lovely as it is to hear as these descriptions of heaven, or this world without the sense of separation, are,.... without a reliable means to experience it for oneself, the descriptions on their own are about as satisfying to a hungry man as the glossy colour pictures on a menu card. If this ever-present human situation is ignored, then I believe one's spirtual search will become nothing more than trying to find the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. As disappointingly inconvenient and 'bringing-to-earth' as this aspect of reality may be , I feel that to try and disregard it in our calculations for achieving spiritual success will result in exactly that : a path outside reality. Wishful thinking, in other words.

* When I read your extremely perceptive reply to my earlier sample of Brautigan's poetic smorgasbord, I knew instantly that I was in the presence of a potential devotee. You are clearly someone standing on the threshold of a world of wondrous new insights, just as I was all those many years ago. Welcome, dear brother, welcome. It was the way you immediately grasped the essence of what Brautigan was trying so desperately to communicate to the world when you asked your double-barrelled question, " Why is morning important to the smell of a fart , and what significance is this subjective assessment supposed to be to me? " But it was my first startling initiation to your own poetic inner nature when I read your own breath-taking verse : "Her eyelids trembled , a quiet signal in tune with the rising day , a shoulder lifts as muscles tense and a sqeezing fart lifts lifts the sheets to welcome it." that tears were literally brought to my eyes, (as I'm sure they were to yours on that spell-binding occasion you wrote so beautifully about, and so kindly shared with us.) I could clearly see that I was undoubtedly in the presence of a man of impeccable taste and insight. Though we have never met, somehow I feel that the sages and avatars of past, present and future must surely have arranged the synchronicity of our meeting like this inside a Tao Bum. In light of that, (because, above all one desperately does need a light in a meeting place such as this !), the only appropriate action,.... based on my own experience way back in the 70's,.....was to cook you up another fix of Brautigan's poetic insight. I have calculated that by now you most assuredly must be going through the first stages of that dreaded demon, the increasing agony of poetic withdrawal. So please, feel free to take yourself a deep, life-giving draught of the following. May it answer all your questions, and then may it quickly lead you to the bliss of full and complete enlightenment : * * "15%" She tries to get things out of men that she can't get because she's not 15% prettier. * * THE MEMOIRS OF JESSE JAMES I remember all those thousands of hours that I spent in grade school watching the clock, waiting for recess or lunch or to go home. Waiting: for anything but school. My teachers could easily have ridden with Jesse James for all the time they stole from me. * * POSTCARD I wonder if eighty-four-year-old Colonel Sanders ever gets tired of travelling all around America talking about fried chicken. * * "Milk for the Duck" ZAP! unlaid / for 20 days my sexual image isn't worth a shit. If I were dead I couldn't attract a female fly. * * "A Good-Talking Candle" I had a good-talking candle last night in my bedroom. I was very tired but I wanted somebody to be with me, so I lit a candle and listened to its comfortable voice of light until I was asleep. * * "Nice Ass" There is so much lost and so much gained in these words. * * "Automatic Anthole" Driven by hunger, I had another forced bachelor dinner tonight. I had a lot of trouble making up my mind whether to eat Chinese food or have a hamburger. God, I hate eating dinner alone. It's like being dead. * * DEATH IS A BEAUTIFUL CAR PARKED ONLY For Emmett Death is a beautiful car parked only to be stolen on a street lined with trees whose branches are like the intestines of an emerald. You hotwire death, get in, and drive away like a flag made from a thousand burning funeral parlors. You have stolen death because you’re bored. There’s nothing good playing at the movies in San Francisco. You joyride around for a while listening to the radio, and then abandon death, walk away, and leave death for the police to find. * * "The Final Ride" The act of dying is like hitch-hiking into a strange town late at night where it is cold and raining, and you are alone again. Suddenly all the street lamps go out and everything becomes dark, so dark that even the buildings are afraid of one another. * * "Melting Ice Cream at the Edge of Your Final Thought" Oh well, call it a life. * *

I found your post very interesting. To accentuate the first impression it made on me I have above stripped away a lot of its packaging to kind of expose the framework that the whole structure was supported on. What was left was a list of five seemingly absolute and unquestionable truths. Two about the Tao, one about reincarnation, and the remaining two explaining the nature of existence. I wish I had the same confidence regarding the very few answers I've been able to find in my search for truth and meaning in this life. And yet, from the little I know about Taoism, I do know that the very first line of Taoism's most sacred book, (The Tao Te Ching), is : "The Tao which can be spoke is not the eternal Tao". If that is true, where does this leave your five unquestionable truths listed above, then ? Please don't take my questioning the wrong way. No offence, or questioning of your sincerity was in any way intended. It just seems to me that, from my own life's experiences, every time that I have felt that I have have attained an answer to some question,... inevitably I have been well satisfied with my success and completely ignored the other side of the 'coin' of my hard-won answer. That is,... that answers are the end of questioning. I guess I thought that that was self-evidently a side effect of no importance. In fact, if anything, it was something to congratulate myself on,... one more question dealt with. Put a line through it and bring on the next !! Personally, for quite a while now I have found myself wondering whether spiritual attainment is, as so often claimed, a static state that comes as a reward for diligent practice, loyalty, virtue, and all the other spiritual attributes we are familiar with. We usually see them listed and applied to whomever happens to be our spiritually 'most-admired-man', Buddha, Lao Tzu, Christ, etc. Or whether it may, or may not arise, UNRELATED to any spiritual path or belief system we may have. I'm afraid I have a tedious inclination to going on and on and on. And moreover, as I said earlier, my stock of personal realisations and reliable experiences is extremely low. But I have long been searching for answers, and have great respect for what seemed to me at the time, certain jewels I found along my particular path. To cut to the chase I'll just add two quotes by Wayne Liquorman, again below. For me, he not only expresses these things with far better clarity than I ever could,.... but of far more importance, he actually claims to have experience of what he is talking about. Any words I could add would simply be second-hand repetitions of someone else's experiences. But, since you did ask for discussion,... to me these ideas certainly started up a lively internal questioning in my own mind when I first read them. Perhaps they will for others. * * [1] In terms of established spiritual traditions Taoism is most to my tastes. The history of Taoism is unique in that a viable religion never developed around it. As a result, its non-dual essence remained intact. And it remains so to this day. All the rest of them have turned into major corporations. They are concerned with perpetuating themselves, as is any corporate structure. So none of them do much for me, which is not to say that they aren’t useful for lots of people. Lots of people find great solace, great comfort and great value in them. I’m just not one of them. * * [2] [Q] Do Non-Duality teachings believe in affirmative prayer ? [Wayne] : Non-Duality teachings don’t believe or disbelieve in anything, because there is no Non-Duality doctrine. There is no principle it claims is true. It is a series of pointers that always point you back to find the truth for yourself. All of the statements in Non-Duality are simply pointers. You are encouraged to question them all, and to test them all. [Q] : Self–enquiry then ? [Wayne] I even hesitate to call it self-enquiry. I prefer to talk about it as simple curiosity. By calling it ‘self-enquiry’, we’ve labelled it; you then think you know what it is, and can say, “Okay, I’ve been there, done that, got the Arunachala T-shirt. Now I’m on to the next thing.” It’s not self-enquiry in that way. It is a simple curiosity about the nature of ‘What Is’. [Q] : By accepting ‘What Is’ ? [Wayne] : Acceptance of ‘What Is’ may come. It may not come. It is not about practicing acceptance of ‘What Is’. [Q] So it’s simply the mind of enquiry itself, that’s important ? [Wayne] Absolutely. But, even when you come up with an answer and you say, “Aha, I am indeed not the author of my actions, I’ve concluded by investigation that I do not exist,” Non-Duality teachings says that that knowledge, which you now have, because it’s quantified as knowledge, is limited. It has been stripped from the Understanding and is now a representation. As a representation it is ultimately an obstacle, because once you know something, the enquiry is dead; such knowledge is the booby prize. All that qualifies you to do is give satsang, write learned treatises, and hold forth in online chat rooms about how things truly are. *

44, by my reckoning, makes you a spring chicken with still a few charming bits of egg casing clinging to your new feathers, (I am 62 now.) A less than pleasing experience every morning when I first get up and face this wrinkly old geezer, (myself), in the bathroom mirror. I simply used the term 'old Isimsiz Biri' as a term of comfortable familiarity, as in "Well, well, my old friend". I'm also aware that this is more than a tad incorrect, since you and I had never clapped eyes on each other, or even traded internet words up to that point in time. I guess I was just horsing around a bit with another person whom I'd also never clapped eyes on, but who seemed to feel that unplanned interruptions were NOT OK,...(unless they were his own.) The whole thing is really a bit of a laugh really, isn't it ? Like a modern day party game where everyone wears a blindfold and sits in separate rooms so they can never see who they're communicating with. The rules of the game are that each player has to each talk deep philosophy with the others, completely without any contact whatsoever other than by 'mysterious and profound' illuminated words which will appear in front of each combattant. Each player also has a device which allows him to translate finger taps into that same arcane set of symbols and which have the power to fly unerringly around the world, straight to our opponent's device and cause him/her to gnash his teeth and pull his/her hair out, (assuming he is still young enough to have any) As for my comment about pubs in England being places for worthwhile social contact twenty years ago, it's not that the dialogue there has changed now, in our 21st century. It's just that, at an ever-accelerating pace pubs are closing down all over the country. Like Bob Dylan told us, the times they are a' changing. There's so much entertainment available to us at the click of a button,... computer games, DVDs, CDs, wide screen, surround sound Televisions with a gazillion channels,.... chatting with your mates down at the local has as much chance of competing with technology as someone turning up at a Play Station 4 Convention, carrying an old Snakes and Ladders game and a pair of dice. But, as pleasant as this brief, introductory chat undoubtedly is, we mustn't neglect our duty to the game ! You said in your previous post : “The Universe is uncaused, like a net of jewels in which each is only the reflection of all the others, in a fantastic interrelated harmony without end.” I also agree with that last sentence limited to God's creations only Well,...I'm afraid I, personally, would have serious difficulties trying to get that lead balloon to fly. If all there is, is Consciousness, (which can be seen as synonymous with God, if you prefer),.... then how can there logically be anything which is NOT God's creation ? We've already started out with the interesting notion that God is all there is. So, where does this Not-God' come from ? Where does he hang his hat if God made the very ground he stands on and every last fibre of his Satanic black silk trilby itself ? You're up against a serious flaw in logic here. Could it not be that rather, our human abilities are so seriously inflated beyond belief that we actually believe that our minds are capable of understanding the whys and hows of the universe's existence ? Our egos are so monstrously swelled up that it rarely crosses our minds that just possibly, what we are actually seeing when we look at some act and decide it is an evil, Non-Godly act,... is simply the projection of our own mind, (which we first convince ourself and then tell others, is in reality "God's words, His Thoughts") just to hopefully add power to our words and make us feel we are in close with God,... one of his trusted lieutenants. A man on the inside. More peculiar human mind games, IMHO.. Sad, but repeated tirelessly since men first came out of their caves, rubbed two sticks together to make fire,.... and then had time to sit down and think about what to do until the pubs opened. (This was before the days of computer games and wide screen tellies.). Thus was organised religion born.

No need to apologise for interrupting. I t hink that for chat rooms like this to have any beneficial effect whatsoever for participants, then they will do so when they best approximate a genuine social interchange between 'live' people. This forum, of course, is NOT a 'live' interchange. It is a modern day, technological similitude of a social exchange that's sometimes called "virtual reality". Here we can chat, but no one ever sees, or actually 'knows' anyone else. So we don't get anything like the same degree of benefit that comes from a genuine , face-to-face meeting and dialogue with friends,... the way things used to be twenty years ago, say, down at the local pub, (in England). In a pub setting people stand around and chat. Different ideas come and go. People come and go. A good evening is a 'fluid' evening, (and that analogy isn't referring simply to the beer !) When I scrolled through the menu list of topics on discussion, this was the subject that appealed to me most, so I popped in. Reading the most recent posts it looked like old Isimsiz Biri had probably said everything he wanted to say on the topic, (Judging both by his closing words, "Does not matter", and by the fact that a week had gone by since he said that.) Regardless, nothing is preventing him from popping back in the pub door and carrying on, just as nothing prevented me from throwing in my two bits' worth, or you throwing in yours. Letting things go where they will isn't necessarily a negative experience in life. If it's difficult for you,.... just think of each of these little speech bubbles from a myriad of different posters living in different places all around the world that randomly appear on your computer screen,.... just think of them as different shaped clouds that come sailing over the horizon. They really don't require analysis, evaluation, or controlling. Unless , of course, you like to do that sort of thing. In which case, I'm happy enough to see a cloud with that shape cruising past. But, time for me to shut down this computer and take a stroll outside. Reality beckons. (Though it certainly is enjoyable to hang out here in this warm chat room, especially now thaty the evenings are so long and the weather so cold).

The first time I can honestly say that I came to think that there might "just possibly" be something worthwhile to be said for poetry, was when I was in my early twenties at university and someone who lived in the dorm room next door loaned me a collection of poems by a 60's, San Francisco 'beat' poet named Richard Brautigan. It was enigmatically called, "Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt". I'll add three extracts from it below in hopes of providing a cross section of the extremely wide range of subjects that Brautigan turned his most unusual eye to : * * [1] "Alas, Measured Perfectly" Saturday, August 25, 1888. 5:20 P.M. is the name of a photograph of two old women in a front yard, beside a white house. One of the women is sitting in a chair with a dog in her lap. The other woman is looking at some flowers. Perhaps the women are happy, but then it is Saturday, August 25, 1888. 5:21 P.M., and all over. * * [2] "Love Poem" It's so nice to wake up in the morning all alone and not have to tell somebody you love them when you don't love them any more. * * [3] December 30 At 1:30 in the morning a fart smells like a marriage between an avocado and a fish head. I have to get out of bed to write this down without my glasses on. *