@RealSteveHolmes – – 40 years of exploring ideas and now for 20 more

It’s called “In the Cut” starring Meg Ryan and half penned by cult writer Jane Campion and it made me sick with its relentless, menacing, sordid, anti male propaganda.

Plenty of atmosphere, all of it nasty. Plenty of sharp dialogue without one single moment of human decency ever poking through the total gloom. Nice pointless plot in which all men are suspected of everything and not to be trusted. Possibly the most utterly objectionable film I have ever seen after Silence of the Lambs.

You must see it, as an education in pure, unadulterated prejudice masquerading as interesting psychological complexity. And Meg Ryan really got into it, as you can see from the Parkinson interview on YouTube, and Nicole Kidman co-produced it, so these babes think it really says something about sex, love and men – which is simply terrifying.

Because no mysoginist, no matter how bleak his world, no matter how many women had cruelly rejected him, could ever turn out an image of woman as utterly hating and completely negative as the men portrayed in this film.

What it tells us, that a bunch of rich, attractive, powerful and intelligent women in the most cosseted country on earth could make such a movie, what it tells us is that something is terribly wrong…

It’s called Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which is a title so bad it hurts; the plot is a tapas bar of clichés about romance; the “characters” are at best half a dimension and in most cases considerably less; the acting is school of Johansson, who dominates throughout, except for one brilliant protagonist who holds the entire thing together: the voiceover, which is simply stunning, on a par with the gentle irony of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe.

This voiceover enables Woody to illuminate the easy lives of a bunch of stupid American clichés, to mould them this way and that around a bunch of stupid romantic and life clichés, to foil them with a bunch of stupid cliché Spanish stuff - and yet to extract a dry laugh from a jaded and hostile viewer (me) at every single turn.

I have never liked the guy, never liked his arrogance, never liked his antics, never liked his strange family relationships and never liked the adulation he used to get from dunderheads starved of anything more meaningful. But if he had learned to step back sooner, as he does here, if he had broadened his field of vision like he does here, my God, he could have been almost half a contender.

For American humour, this film is brilliant, almost European in its almost sophistication. A very enjoyable romp, though the sex could have been more explicit and the Cruz identity almost spoils it by overacting to put  Scarlett in her place when actually the third woman, the incidental, woman, the Spanish artist and the voiceover are the real stars, especially the voiceover.

You have an oldish but still sturdy car which is due for its MOT test and needs an oil change. The aircon is not functioning properly and you fear for the worst.

Choices:

1)          mesmerise yourself while passing dingy garage run by yobs offering a “free safety” check and recoil in panic when they discover worn shocks and offer to fit a reconditioned aircon something or other much cheaper than the main dealer; knowing nothing about cars you think it has to be done now and leave the car for three days; after hassling them on the phone twenty times, the final bill is about £700, less for cash; drive away and wonder if the aircon really is working or if they even changed the oil, let alone the front shocks

2)          opt for safety and book a luxury coffee break at the main dealer’s gorgeous showroom while a brittle woman plastered with make-up who knows nothing about cars but everything about billing patiently wears down the customer before you; glance at Daily Torygraph and National Geographic while trying not to admire the gleaming coupe next to your comfy leather armchair; speak to brittle woman for five minutes and depart in loan car for the day, desperate not to scratch it; return at teatime to see gleaming old car in parking lot and glimpse of beautiful workshop area where uniformed engineers are looking at computers; endure even longer wait for brittle woman’s assistant, hairstyle woman, who has a white Afro that surpasses description of any kind; drive away in immaculately valetted vehicle with £1, 287.67 plus VAT less in your bank account; this is fine if you have loads of money but the aircon still isn’t working like it used to

3)          learn something about cars and spend time tracking down the last real garage for miles, where Sid answers the phone after he’s crawled out from under an old Jag; book in for vague list of possible things that need doing and arrive early on appointed day to find Sid and Bill already on their bacon sandwiches after starting work at six; they don’t say much and they wave you away so you catch the bus home and hope for the best; at lunchtime Sid phones to explain something you don’t understand but it’s not that expensive so you say yes; when you turn up at closing time Sid and Bill are still at work on a treacherous Alfa, swearing at each other and obviously exhausted; your car is parked behind several others they must have done that day; you wait, wondering when they retire and why anyone would fancy Miss July 1983 for so many years; Bill arrives, because he is the communicator… explains that you are very lucky because they found a something that had worked loose from the aircon lying in the oil-pan where it could have fallen in the road and been lost, oh dear; he’s sorry but they had to change the brake pads and I didn’t answer when he rang me; apologetically hands over grimy scrawl bill culminating in the sum of £312 inc. VAT and tells you the shocks can wait another year; they don’t take credit cards but it’s OK to bring the rest of the cash tomorrow, when you can collect the MOT cert., OK?

Many years ago I remember the birth of large, out-of-town DIY stores, meaning that instead of paying what seemed like a lot to an ordinary shop where the owner had dedicated his life to becoming a helpful expert who would sell you a couple of screws and a tap washer if that’s all you needed… you could now waltz round with a shopping trolley grabbing massive buckets of magnolia matt coloured water that needed at least three coats to cover anything. An era was born. Anybody with half a brain ascended the “property ladder” because not to do so would leave you stranded for ever in poverty. Whether we liked it or not we all had to try our hand at being handy…

This evening I witnessed what must be the death throws of that business model, at a depressing warehouse where flabby women waddle and spotty youth “manages” to be as completely unhelpful as possible, knowing zero about their own stock and not even trained to say “good evening” in response to polite customers who recognise them as human beings, which is a waste of time because they are not. From the financial pages I know that this chain of sheds is on the rocks and about to go bust, but have they learned anything about customer care in thirty years, have they used their huge sourcing muscle to bring quality goods to the public at reasonable prices? Have they fuck. The retail space consists of acres of crap bath and bed room layouts, all of them nasty but few of them cheap, followed by acres of own brand shite, all of it nasty but none of it cheap, followed by acres of garden furniture, most of it nasty and some of it cheap as well as nasty. The stuff you actually want, like a halogen bulb, a decent paint brush with proper bristles, some carpet tacks, whatever… it’s all carefully hidden away so you have to ask a confused assistant who waddles around for a while before saying she’ll ask the manager, who is busy with a queue of irate consumers returning trash and arguing about special offers that didn’t scan as such when they got to the checkout.
Finally you have your stuff and in a murderous mood you join a long line for the single open till that has broken down while fat waddlers and spotty managers whine at each other and look at their watches. They’re people, you tell yourself. Say good evening and engage in sympathetic banter about what a long day it’s been. Waste of time. The best you get is a grunt, blank incomprehension when you mention the lovely evening sunlight and the interesting breeze that is blowing the bags away, no thanks for keeping them in a job so they can buy some more junk food to exacerbate the spots and improve the waddle, not even a goodbye.
Personally, I’m sad that the excellent hardware store where I could have done this in five minutes for about the same price and had a jolly amusing chat with a friendly person about how well Arsenal are doing this season – has long since closed to be replaced by yet another fucking money-grabbing optician charging a 600% mark-up. But we asked for this when we were seduced by having the spending power of proudly rising house values and were able to improve our own homes meaning that decent workmen had nowhere to go and the world filled up with last minute cowboys who rip you off and the only way to get a plumber these days is to be insured.

Ugly, greedy, slimy-suited capitalism 5, ordinary people and consumers, 0. Quality of life index, minus 30%.

One day in 1742, when Diderot was passing time in a café, he was introduced to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a young man coming from Geneva who had just arrived in town. Rousseau had moved to Paris to get rich. He had developed a complicated mathematical system that according to him could be useful for musical notation. He planned to sell it to some of the great musicians in Paris. However, nobody was interested in his ideas and Rousseau had to work in other ways for a living. He tried to do so by being a copyist of musical notation, before he became famous as a philosopher and writer.

Diderot and Rousseau liked each other. They were about the same age, around thirty. They shared several interests, for instance they both liked to play chess (although most of the games were won by Rousseau who was a much stronger player); they both loved music and mathematics. Later on Rousseau became one of the contributors to the Encyclopedia, for which he wrote a series of articles on music. The friendship lasted for fifteen years.

Gradually they drifted apart. Then Rousseau, suffering from paranoia, publicly broke off his bonds with Diderot.

The other fundamental friendship in Diderot’s life was with the German Friedrich Melchior Grimm who was ten years younger. Before Grimm arrived in Paris, coming from Regensburg, he had developed a keen interest in music and drama. He became the secretary to various aristocratic persons. Later he wrote a gazette for several royal courts in Europe. Diderot and Grimm stayed friends for many years and it is only three years before Diderot died that their relationship came to an end, because of a deep disappointment from Diderot’s side with regard to his friend’s political ambitions.   

We could say that Diderot has practised fully his ideas concerning friendship; we can see how his friendships sadly ended because of the habit forming part and when it came to interference with each other’s lives.

Apparently these are the touchy issues and not only three hundred years ago…    

14

For a change of mood, then, in case things are getting too heavy, let’s try conjuring up a little dream. It won’t be easy because we aren’t trying to recycle other people’s stale images and narratives within the restrictive meme and we’ve got an overbearing parental figure chiding us, demanding: “if you don’t like this system, then what would you put in it’s place?” and adding: “I never realised that you felt so little respect for me and how ungrateful you are…” As all parents do, and everyone acting like parents to control us: teachers, politicians, people at parties, friends whose internal structures you are challenging, their friends who invited you to dinner so they could see you perform and in whose company you are now trapped for three hours…

To which I respond thus: in my dream the purpose of conversation is pure, untainted by persuasive definitions, argumentation, challenges, spurious and covertly aggressive questions, patronising, ironical put-downs or the hard, cold, mortar fire of supposed facts and logics, all of which are nothing of the sort, by the way. Formal logic renders only the tautology meaningful and factoids are always superseded by better facticity next year, according to fashion and the evolution of their enclosing meme. All meaningful language is symbolic, in flux, experimental, a touch poetic and licensed. As in off the leash, almost certain to contain ambiguity and absolutely certain to include some paradox if it comes anywhere near speaking a truth, which will in itself change very soon and is not to be pinned down by the machine conversationalists of the intellectual meme group who can only ape academic method, which is all about destruction by challenge.

No, in my dream the purpose of conversation might, for example, only be to exchange useful information with no emotive content, for example. Sounds easy enough, yet it rarely happens if you listen to the voice tones. Admittedly, even in the Climate of Lie, something approaching this sometimes happens when nice people meet for the purpose of teaching and learning. So we can leave that one aside because it is common to both Step 1 and Step 2 worlds, that simple, clean, passing of information with no added manipulation, rare but possible.

Much more of a challenge to the average Mind is the truer, purer function that expresses the deepest wish of the human soul, which is to acknowledge, appreciate and rather than posses to pull alongside and make fellowship with those wonders and gifts that life notices about itself through us and for which we and maybe dolphins are the only conscious channels and celebrants… Within this experience nestle the companions of pure observation such as curiosity, exploration, appreciation, wonderment, happiness, playfulness, sensuality in all its forms, a kind of certainty that comes from feeling OK, the wonderful gifts of giving and receiving, the even more wonderful gift of having distance from your creaking Mind so that the soul may be experienced and the most wonderful gifts of all, namely love, sometimes ecstasy and even that warm, mystical, mysterious energy rising and spreading like the love of god would be if there were a god, the only existing word for which is kundalini. If you haven’t felt it, you can’t get it by trying; if you have felt it you’ll know that it’s a place you never expected to be, even for the short while it lasts and the following hours of wonderment.

Pure communication is, I believe, one possible doorway to the land where these feelings can exist in untainted form, received as a gift as you give yourself into the light with no thought of status or reward, no being wrong or being right, no attempt to influence or resist, no nagging sociological backdrop or grating emotional babble attached. It’s tough to get there but you don’t achieve it by being tough. It’s a real challenged to The Mind that’s running you, but you can’t do it by being grim and correct or chanting mantras devoid of humour. This new place is good fun, sometimes amusing in a harmless way that is not laughing at anyone else, potentially joyful, even abandoned, and the energy flow is going to be shocking when you first get there because the stress and strain and dis-ease that dog you normally are simply not going to be felt.

Oh, and since there are no lies in this garden because at that level of involvement of soul only truth telling is possible, you are finally going to know the absolute certainty that you never achieve with all your Climate of Lie attempts to manipulate life, only you won’t know it in triumph, as a success, you will only know it as a congenial twin to yourself, alongside you, where you is in a fascinating, oscillating, moment to moment migration, as by osmosis, between your conscious intellectual appreciation and your profound, poetic, bottomless and restful twin: your soul.

The Buddha famously discovered enlightenment by trying to stifle his own breath. Some people touch their soul in times of extreme pain, shock and loss. I have touched it in a time of deep grief and paralysing depression with an exhausted body, following the death of my wife from a long and painful illness. It was taking me an hour to mount the stairs and I was struggling for oxygen, not realising that my heart was under breaking strain, forced to pause and sit after every two steps and unable to remember what I did five minutes ago or even why I was stuck on the stairs. As I sat there, just about ready to die, I asked myself what was left of me with everything I used to be destroyed. No money left because I spent it all on caring for her. Hardly any friends left because they all ran away from the horror. No energy whatsoever, no appetite, no strength. No hope, no stratagems, no solutions, no methods even. And not that much sanity either, nor enough memory to complete even simply tasks. So what was left of me?

The image was of a toy gyroscope, like the one that fascinated me as a child, the one I used to spin on a small Eiffel Tower until it leaned at a crazy angle, the one that seemed to take on a life of its own once you set it spinning. That’s something like what I had left, a dynamo inside me, spinning at a dangerous tilt but still on the tower. That’s me, I realised; that is my soul and it is still alive and it can recover and it can lift me along with it, back to life.

The breakthrough we each need to make in order to recover our purity is something like that. Each person’s will be different. It may have an image like mine did or many images or it may just be a ball of bright light. We are talking about touching the unknowable and there are no rules but once you have this sense of self you will no longer be your status, your money, your work, your relationships, your faults, your perfections, your good taste, your clever jokes or what other people think of you. You will be you and it will be wonderful. And others like you or moving that way will recognise you and be drawn to your side and the differences will not matter. You will live in truth and love but there will be no religion perverting it. And you can retain your earthly foibles and tolerate yourself as you drink too much coffee, eat too much cheese, slightly overdo the wine, make slightly stupid jokes, spout daft opinions ‘cos you just can’t stop, think too much about sex and sometimes act on that in ways you don’t want to be ashamed of but have been. You’ll still be that asshole you’ve always been, in fact, but this time your soul is standing next to you and you know for certain that you are also something more than the idiot who lives at your house and walks in your shoes.

Roughly speaking, in answer to the sarcastic challenge of the sold out, this is where I would start to “put something in the place” of your lousy, meme-ridden world of lies and brutality.

previous parts of Touch are here

to discuss this please go here

13

Uncertainty and anxiety are deeply connected and almost universally co-present in human interactions. Picture a feisty teen schoolroom: the teacher maintains order by keeping the students on their toes; the students vie with each other and test the limits of the teacher. Sometimes they use tricky questions; sometimes they make ambiguous remarks; sometimes they snatch moments of humour at the expense of another. No one ever gets to relax; no one can trust what’s happening; no one really knows where they stand; everyone is watching their back all day long. It’s in such an environment that we learn to be adults and for many people it carries on for the rest of their lives in ever more refined forms: the cocktail party; all day at work; the drama club; the social networking group, whatever.

But it starts much earlier than that. Even very young children soon learn that they can manipulate their parents by asking loaded questions and that parents start cooing at your early signs of intelligence and then wrapping themselves in knots to please your every whim if you dress it up in a cute question and whine slightly. Parents fight back by asking overbearing and embarrassing questions to impose discipline and morality. Pretty soon the word “why” is a cosh and every interchange is loaded with behavioural uncertainty as the kids test adult authority and parents try to establish civilisation. You don’t notice it when you’re locked into it but I’ve never seen a young family who weren’t playing many complex, interlocking variants of this game in which everyone is damaged, some terribly so and the usual results brought about: loss of trust, peace, certainty, even love. This also never ends and usually drives our adult close relationships, not to mention our own families in due course. Similar patterns, more grotesquely played out, can be observed in relationships with domestic pets.

By the time we reach independent adulthood it’s pretty much impossible not to be living in repetition compulsions relating to games you are still hoping to win and it’s extremely rare to find anyone whose behaviour is not tantamount to a set of strategies to establish their own primacy or at least protect themselves against domination by others. Entitlement culture is born and we become suspended in the climate of lie where nothing has a genuinely innocent purpose any more and except in the early stages of endless love no-one ever lets anyone relax into knowing where they are and that who they are is totally appreciated. This only lasts in the best of times until the sex runs out and you have to design a modus operandi about household routine and how to hold conversations in order to go any further. Welcome to the negotiated relationship, that everlasting, all pervasive purgatory for our souls – now cut off from any chance of heaven.

And don’t forget that in such a world your home life is supposed to be a refuge from even worse threats to emotional stability posed by the “rat race” in the “concrete jungle”… A land where your dress code, your smartarse talk, your clever politics, your blood curdling submission in the face of bullying and favouritism, your deliberate lying to make the sale and your acquiescence to the incredibly low moral standards of the marketplace – all of these things are a poison to the soul, all day, every day, until you no longer notice and may even become a champion for the whole disgusting “system”, especially if it brings you personally a measure of success as you claw your way over the hopes of others.

In such a world love is very rare, friendship is simply a joke and the chance of anyone feeling genuinely good about themselves is almost nil. The best you can get is fake bonhomie, uneasy political truce, confused ideals, negotiated relationships, a desperate need for distraction and a pile of consumer goods to reward you for selling yourself. Thank God you’re so stylish and you never make an aesthetic, ethical, ecological or political faux pas!

The special people who run things actually want all this anomie, of course; it’s an ideal divide-and-conquer strategy and they didn’t even have to think it up because it arose naturally from the ping pong game of truth and power fought in advanced societies between old moralities and social controls and the new, liberal, correct ideologues that infest our media. The soft government regulates to give kids more rights so that teachers can no longer bully them into submission; the kids take more freedom than was meant and threaten the stability of the system; so the incoming hard government imposes ridiculous new standards on the teachers forcing all the good ones to go mad or leave, bringing in mediocre people with no standards themselves who can’t even organise education, let alone make it inspiring. Result: billions spent each year to deliberately produce social chaos and letting in threats to the whole culture through violence, drugs, unwanted pregnancy and teen megalomania generally. Result two: the next generation is even crazier and huge ghettos of untouchable subhumans eating only junk food develop in all major cities, where no one else dare get out of their car.

Groovy film makers sometimes stir the pot by making the downtrodden masses look like victims who are really very nice people but they aren’t. Nor are the global billions living in filthy slums. Some of them are sometimes OK but the culture they produce from within themselves is generally cruel, brutal, selfish and even more devastating to the soul than the dead culture of Stepford suburbia. Anyone with any sense has already left town, no matter what the price, because nothing good can ever grow there. Even the people in Hollywood know this, so obvious it is, Obi Wan, yet the media liberals, hiding in their groovy inner city wholefood trattoria, somehow feel the need to deny it. This is hard to understand, but I assume it is form of denial that makes a nice clashing paradox with their apparently non-judgemental memes, such as the one where only fascists are bad and capitalism can be cool, you know…

Anyway, I don’t really care to discuss “society” because it’s an infinite debate, going nowhere forever, so many vested interests generating endless memaganda (propaganda for their memes), everyone in denial but guarding their own little privileges, even among the poorest of the low, obviously among the would-be specials, desperately among the suburban slaves and dishonestly among the city slickers. They’re all right, all the time, and you simply can’t argue with that. They right even ten years later when their views have changed. They’re so right they can smell that you’re a troublemaker from the very first sentence you speak…

No, what interests me is the ontology of all this and just for now my attention falls upon the challenging interrogative as a basic unit of inter human commerce. People could ask genuine questions, seeking information, understanding and knowledge, yet they hardly ever do. I am not opposed to all statements that could be transcribed with a question mark. Instead, my target is the false question that is intrinsically a challenge and may also express itself merely in voice tone or body language, and may hide itself in affable humour. The Mind (not the intellect, the heart or the spirit or even the brain or a collection of electrons but The Mind, the guardian of the entitled ego)… The Mind never, ever hears a pure statement of question and never reposts in purity either. It does not know how and was never designed to do so. Its purpose is to weigh all incoming and outgoing traffic for status and like a bad email filter it sometimes deletes the good stuff and sometimes lets in attacks. In fact it lives in training mode for the whole of your life, constantly trying to figure out what kind of conversation, representing what kind of status relationship, will finally make you the supreme being it wants you to be.

Someone like me can rattle virtually any Mind within a couple of minutes because I transmit strange messages on unusual frequencies, which drives The Mind immediately to escalate to red alert status. I can see it in their eyes, the questions: where is this guy coming from; what is his status; is he taking me seriously; am I being respected for all my knowledge and achievement; does he admire my beautiful personality and fabulous taste in clothes; is he making fun of me… and on it goes.

Luckily The Mind doesn’t get to meet someone like me very often so it normally has a much firmer grip on its environment and can blank unwanted intrusions without straining its ironical-putdown and raised-eyebrows-in-scorn modules. And if that’s not enough it can walk away, though it prefers to give intruders a good kicking first so they’ll never forget the day they dissed the Mighty Mind.

But all minds will meet people bigger than themselves who make them feel like small-time outsiders and all minds will begin to perish when life hits them with divorce, failed ambitions, job loss, treachery, debt, sickness, cancer, heart attack, ageing, not to mention in poor countries political upheaval, war and natural disasters. And traffic accidents, the mechanism of tragic change that is so obvious even to Hollywood scriptwriters. All minds will reach for the bottle, the pill or the meditative trance one day, either that or they blow a fuse into depression, Aspergers or Alzheimers to take themselves out. Everyone will know devastating loss and shock and depression to add to the rejection and resignation they already know and have been trying to forget.

previous parts of Touch are here

to discuss this please go here

12.

One of the most interesting but largely unremarked and certainty not analysed everyday human behaviours is acting with a Sense of Entitlement. Sometimes it is a very obvious behaviour, like pushing to the front of a queue or trying to beat you on the highway when the road is about to narrow; sometimes it is embedded in the culture as a privilege for the would be special, such as private clubs, VIP lounges, access to superior education; you often see it in groups of fashionable people and it is ubiquitous in teen culture; but in many people, in the downtrodden, it often comes across as stifled anger when they say things like “I have a right to my opinion”, “we are as good as they are”, whatever… On a mass scale it breeds redneck racism, religious persecution, jihad, alternative politics and correctness, consumerism, artistic taste and fandom, imposed sexual and other strict moralities and the power of propaganda, among other variants of dis-ease in the Climate of Lie we live in.

It doesn’t matter that the themes, motifs, banners, costumes, artifacts, ideas and issues that are used to build this complex emotional meme are all nonsense. What matters is the emotional release, the effortless capacity to self-deliver a moment of smug satisfactionthat this behaviour achieves, even when only in a thought, even in a minute gesture like a raised eyebrow of superiority and scorn.

I once observed at a dull party two plump north London princesses who obviously thought they were really somebodies but in reality were not attractive enough to have males slavering over them: they arrived, looked very obviously around and discovered no one important, then left. On their way out they used stabbing fingertips to push people they were walking straight through out of the way. Had they stayed, like countless snobs in every sphere, they would have been looking over your should while talking to you, desperate to find somebody more important. If you set these two girls down at a lousy party with their favourite pop star present they would be down on their knees worshipping his manhood but if the guy was a schoolmate with a Saturday job in Starbucks they would probably treat him like dirt. And somewhere between those extremes of subservient adoration and utter contempt lies all human behaviour whatsoever, alas, because we don’t understand what equality means.

I find it entertaining sometimes to listen to perfectly healthy young black guys with good looks, girlfriends and a wasted free education behind them, moaning about how white society robs them of opportunity. Or middle class women with unlimited budgets and domestic help from their truly downtrodden sisters, moaning about “the glass ceiling” at work. There is no glass ceiling for the filthy manual drudgery that most of the world’s males perform to survive, including white males in advanced countries. But then the moaners don’t want the fate of everyone else: they want to be special, which is entitlement speaking in its purest tone, as the twisted voice of grandiosity. Think of the once pretty TV newscaster who had years of celebrity and wealth out of looking good, now complaining that she’s been replaced by a younger model; think of the six million dollar a year black sportsman, still harping on about his childhood in the slums; think of the PR consultant who lives in a ten million house in the trendiest part of the city, moaning about how hard it is to get back where she belongs after taking time out to raise her own children. It’s a joke, frankly, entitlement, but it’s there in all of us when you look. Hell there’s even people reading this now who are furious that my tone seems to be “talking down” to them and that I’m not giving them any obvious opportunity to cloud everything over by arguing and asking clever questions…

The Mind (your mind, our minds, everyone’s mind), the mind adds something to everything it comes across. It isn’t the intellect in all its purity that does that; it isn’t our native curiosity; it’s The Mind, which is the sentinel, mouthpiece, PR spokesperson, stand-up comic and narrator for the tender parts of the ego, the megalomaniac, grandiose, thirsty, lusting, cruel, outward acting part, the one who’s always on patrol at the helm. Whatever it encounters it is thinking out loud: Am I getting my share? Am I high in the hierarchy? Am I being respected? Do they know who they’re talking to? I shouldn’t have to wait in line. Do I have enough (of the best) and with some to spare? How can I avoid any loss?

Notice the excessive use of the interrogative that The Mind makes. In fact it’s constantly asking aggressive questions. It can’t hear anything without adding a thumbnail to the file about it’s own status. In fact it never just hears anything pure and clear and it thinks everyone else is doing the same so when you ask them the time they fire back with “why?” instead of just telling you the time. Most people’s entire conversation, including the most elevated parts about poetry and metaphysics, is nothing more than an endless rolling cannon fire of vaguely aggressive interrogative burst where the only true purpose is to establish their importance or complain that you’re not respecting them enough. Unless you’re a hero to them, in which case they get down on their knees and start praising you, much like the two young princesses at the second party. Even the greatest rebels bow to the Queen and show subservience to the great Captains of the economy or the Stars of screen and stage…

So, you talk to people because you’re a gregarious ape who needs their tainted company and is vaguely hoping that one day you’ll see a gleam on insight in their eyes and hear the first faltering splutter of an original observation coming from their own true and creative and buried soul… What you should be listening to is not the shit they speak: language isn’t referential; the content barely mattersin a Climate of Lie. Listen instead to the true message contained in the voice tone: is it commanding and imperious with a gleaming hint of the charming ringmaster; is it commanding, aggressive and butch like a tough guy who isn’t sure of himself; is it thin and precisely cutting and very very factually correct, a style used by would-be dominant women and middle strength men who don’t have the pure charm of the powerful or the gorgeous; is it apparently good natured but actually monotonous, repetitive and self-obsessed; is the speaker trying to smother you in a homely, condescending way; can you hear the many whining notes of protest, woven with Mozartian genius by the huge number of middle-ranking, middle-brow, middle income, ineffectual nobodies who are the backbone of our society? I know you can hear some voice tones, such as the corrupt obsequiousness of the swindling workman, the crushing overdrive of the charming salesman trapping you into yes at every turn, the nasty stench of threatening, jeering youth. Even you can hear the really obvious ones, so why not extend your range and start noticing the others? Why not stop answering like a frightened deer caught in the headlights of someone else’s interrogative? Why not stop playing the game of relationship negotiation and start responding to what the fucker is actually saying which is never anything more than “I am more important than you”, “I am more right than you are”, “I am complaining that you don’t give me the respect I deserve” or any one of a zillion variants of these themes.

Then remember that it’s not their fault because they too have spent their entire lives impaled on the interrogatives of parents, teachers, bosses, friends, lovers, and even strangers met at parties, all of them trying to impose their own sense of entitlement over the top of yours. That’s human life as it is lived, folks. Very little else is going on. The rich tapestry of infinite entertainments is just a side effect of the fact that no plain truth ever comes from our souls, spoken with real love and genuine respect for the being of the other. It just can’t happen the way the world is now. Everything is doomed to be a muted, second hand conflict of allergic reacting egos, no matter how large or small the stage on which it is played out from the US presidential election to the murmur of a lover who isn’t in the mood for sex right now. You are simply not allowed to be straight with anyone about anything and you can absolutely guarantee, whatever they claim, that they don’t know how to be straight with you.

previous parts of Touch are here

to discuss this please go here

10

Sorry, but it’s time to labour the point that what passes for human life on earth at the moment is simply not good enough and does not represent all that is possible to us. Getting most people to accept that is like trying to leverage a mountain with a tyre iron but one has to keep trying no matter what level of fake maturity sneers back at you. Because that’s all it is, you see: resignation, masquerading as world-weariness, cynicism, sophistication, adulthood and indifference to the bewildering complexity of our lives. How else could we live as we do in huge crowds, working all day at pointless tasks, saturated by useless communication, nerves stretched to breaking point, underlyingly exhausted and emotionally defeated while superficially pretending to party. We have to be faking it and when we do, we have to be lying – and when we lie what we start with is the huge one that this really is the life we wanted and we are in charge. One day more evolved beings will study our history and find this idea simply insane, because it really is a mass mental illness, a plague that has already claimed every sentient creature as victim.

You can see that I’m right by observing people under even the slightest stress, let alone what happens when the going gets tough, let alone when there really is something to worry about. Anxiety clouds every moment of every “normal” human interaction and it is cleverly covered by learned behaviours which are sometimes negatively referred to as “ego” or “character” and which supposedly constitute the rich and interesting entity known as “Me”. Most people can only talk in the first person, prefacing every remark with “I think…”, “I saw…”, “I feel…”, “I like…”, “I believe…” and whatever launches their presence into my space for another sound bite of pure, self-centred drivel like the ten million others I’ve had to endure since I got here. Very rarely does a conversation get started from a We, You or Us intent, though intellectuals like to create the impression that they are neutral, abstract, scientific and emotionally mature observers.

The word “mature” is extremely important here because it represents the key goal of all young people and it never leaves us because we never quite get there until, like Nelson Mandela, we really don’t care and can revert to “childish” play once more. Very few people are going to beat the Alzheimer’s and decay like he has, though, but then the guy has suffered a lot without selling his soul, which perhaps contains a clue as to possible methodology…

The obsessive quest for maturity is what leads spotty, sweaty, megalomaniac adolescents into ludicrous parodies of savage adulthood, though late developers, the painfully shy and the losers that the rest of them victimise have some chance of remaining true while the rest congeal into hierarchical and tribal groupings that are hostile to outsiders, patronising to adults and desperate to big themselves up by acting cool.

Now that I’m of retirement age middle aged business cabals look like teenagers to me and I simply marvel at the sublimely creative ways that rich people, media folk, intellectuals, freemasonries and religious zealots, recently “networkers”, the fashion conscious and those who think they are rebels have fine tuned their dress codes, languages and behaviours to instantly define Us and exclude Them. I speak as someone who can never interact with any social group because I don’t belong and they smell it immediately, so I have noticed this more than most people and I do know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t noticed it yet, then you simply have not been looking. Either that or it’s so all pervasive that you assume life must be like that and ignore it…

Life need not be like that. We cannot retain our original selves but we can try to return there by noticing when we aren’t. We can rediscover our soul’s own morality, vision and creativity when we stop being carried along by the memes of our social status and the tribes we belong to. It is possible to find the good (and bad) in every place on earth, but rarely do we even look outside the safe havens of people like us. The simple word for this is “conformity”, but it is hierarchical and driven by the fierce energies of the need to be significant, accepted, respected, a “somebody” – even though you never can be certain because everyone else is competing with you for those same things all the time and even people who say they love each other dominate, submit and complain, arm wrestle each other emotionally and cause each other thoughtless pain…

It’s not much good being a dominant, powerful, extrovert, alpha, “persecutor” (after Eric Berne) type if the people around you actually hate it and spend their entire lives plotting, resenting, bitching and making snide remarks. It’s pretty useless being the rebellious, angry, self-righteous “rescuer” type if everyone around you is fixed as what they are now because they’re trapped in it. And it sure as hell is no fun at all being a victim, tied to the wheel of some ringmaster who makes you jump all the time and winds you up into a fury which you can only assuage by losing yourself in grovelling submission. Do I hear sex in all that, perhaps? I’m pretty sure I do. I’m pretty clear that the biological prize for pushy men is permission to mate and for pushy women permission to be queen, where everyone else is subservient. I’m pretty sure that every teenage gang, like every wolf pack, has a dominant male and female both, though in advanced societies the boundaries are so blurred that everyone gets a chance to pretend they are the alphas over somebody, often their employees and their children…

What the dominant strive for is to become untouchable, at which point they can rest and act smug. Most would-be winners act smug in any case, on the fake-it-till-you-make-it principle. I see smugness in the behaviour of most of the people I meet and I see resentment, anger, sometimes fury, bubbling under the surface in them too. Usually, both smugness and anger are there to read in the voice tone, every time a person speaks, if you know it is there and are tuned to noticing it. Once in maybe a hundred people I hear genuine gentleness and appreciation in the voice tone and see it on the face but often those least spoiled individuals, those who could be leading the way are so cowed by the smug-angry-happy dominants and the whining-furious-triumphant submissives that they just keep quiet and resort to subterfuge, isolation, hobbies, trees, animals, art and alcohol to survive.

It’s not that simple, of course. No one is just one type of person as psychology tends to imply. No one is one sign of the zodiac. Everyone is a moving, broiling, changing, swirling, vortex type mass of solid, liquid and gaseous humours or qualities or energies – interacting in body, mind and mood, in various degrees of self-consciousness that also change on a scale from candy coloured dream machine to the almost perfect focus of an Olympic athlete and every shade in between. This fascinates us and is the subject of much enquiry and meme generation, yet we rarely stop to ask the reasons why. Actually it is because hardly anyone knows how to be themselves and even fewer people know how to recognise other selves and fewer people still even acknowledge any need to share the space with other selves. No wonder the world’s in such a mess that tragedy, comedy and Waiting for Godot sometimes seem like all that is possible…

previous parts of Touch are here

to discuss this please go here

9.

The Climate of Lie is all pervasive, tantamount to a plague that pollutes everything that is possible for human beings. It’s like a form of deadly radiation that imprisons the spirit, dis-eases the body, perverts the emotions, addles the brain and directly causes the mood of resignation that is the unmentionable presence among us – as we nevertheless try to make the best of life: to pretend, to be cheerful, to find excitement, to plan for something better that never comes.

There is nobody alive who is not hoping to be happier and there never has been. Contentment is a myth created by eastern religious memes and available only as an illusion through rigid discipline and thought control, let only body control. For most of us, moments of bliss and peak experiences are just passing accidents that we cannot repeat, even with drugs, dangerous sports, ridiculous sex, unbelievable wealth, total control, a semipro handicap, an immaculate home and our perfect children, designed for an even happier future life. It all goes nowhere and we still suffer shock, loss, disappointment, fear and eventually cancer.

Yet most people, believing already that they are sufficient unto the day with their hard-won, hard-baked imitation “personality” locked around them as armour, most people will attack you viciously if you suggest that they may not be OK as they are and that things could be otherwise. Their happiness, which they parade to themselves during the good days, is so very shallow and brittle that they will murder the messenger who brings them any different news. Most of the time it is all they talk about: their plans, their achievements, their cleverness, their wonderful things and children, the brilliant decisions they have made. Or, if life is not so good, they embroil you in their issues and problems and creative solutions. And then they start giving you advice you never asked for. That adequately describes most of the conversation I have ever had, except when I’ve been with a joker who laughs at life, a vampire who murders everyone around them or a person who really does have cancer and needs to hear the sound of their own denial in order to find it more convincing.

In the Climate of Lie people are locked inside themselves. They don’t share the space with your soul, our space, the common space. They find ways to control and dominate, sometimes by being kind and motherly with good advice, sometimes by obviously dominating “male” behaviours and frequently just by talking on automatic about themselves. Anyone who can do more than this is a rare gem; someone who can consistently stay in the shared space and actually share it is a miracle; a being who can inhabit shared outer, perceptive space and even wax inventive with the discovery that is perhaps the greatest gift of all that mankind is refusing, well that person is, for the time being, blessed. If you aren’t there, for at least a part of every single day, then you are missing out on feeling truly human.

Why does everyone know this but hardly ever act on it? Why does serious shock and loss bring people closer to the great truths about their own nature, only to subsequently cover them over as soon as they begin to feel OK? The obvious answer that even Freud could have given was repetition compulsion by conditioning, a state of being where you have unconsciously learned behaviours that revolve around the traumas of your childhood so that they secretly haunt you ever more, causing inexplicable, self destructive, repetitious responses, which, like a gambler on a losing streak, you think will finally rescue you this time.

Wilhelm Reich would say, “Oi, Sigmund, hold on there guy. It’s a bit worse than that because the dis-eased responses pattern themselves in to the body structures and congeal, harden, tighten, tense and cause to malfunction vital pathways and organs so that free flowing life energy is blocked…” Jung and his countless admirers might say that it’s all a trip through our own mythical stories where everything is both good and bad at the same time and life is life a narrow path where you fight your way through a dangerous jungle being an archetypal hero.

In fact lots of gurus have said lots off stuff around these issues of happiness and Werner Erhard himself, not realising what he was doing, finally admitted, over and over again in monotonous drawl at an unscripted “Special Guest Seminar” for the faithful that he didn’t really believe in the hope he’d been peddling as he salted the cash away in Switzerland but had now almost realised that, erm well, he didn’t quite know, but he implied as usual that if you didn’t get it there was something wrong with you. As I said, ontology is a treacherous game, handled best obliquely by great literature, not pseudo scientists.

So, are you starting to accept that there really is a climate of lie to be dealt with before any progress can be made? Because I have seen the promised land, oh yes, and I think I can show you the door to a state of being that fully engages your innate curiosity in such a marvellous way that you will actually be able to feel like the creator you sometimes dream of being. But it won’t be easy. Stick with Guru Tolle if you want to treat it as a game.

previous parts of Touch are here

to discuss this please go here