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

It’s about the impact of shock, any shock from a mysterious occurrence, through a friend surprising you with something they said, a loss of any kind, a bad dream, a disappointment, accumulated resignation that turns into drama, any kind of series of life changing or life threatening events, something bad happening to someone close, your cat being run over, the loss of your savings in a pension scam… Whatever.

People who know more than me have claimed that our memories contain so much shock and loss that we can never process it all before the system clogs up with more happening, that we only get some brief relief through separation.

But here is my theory for your consideration: as you have probably realised, your consciousness is not all rational, not all alert, not all even awake. Much of what takes place in the being you call home consists of daydreams, fantasies, speculations, theories, creative images, drifting responses to beauty and music, powerful desires both physical and behavioural – not to mention the third of your life you actually are asleep. I believe that this consists of enough experience to claim that all that stuff, which I shall call for now your “inner narrative”, forms a crucially important part of your life. In fact we generate narrative all the time and we live within its gripping sway most of the time, while we plane, wait, expect, examine, experiment, investigate and draw hypotheses about what is going on.

My theory is very simple: when you overload with shock your mind defaults immediately to narrative drive to protect you against unacceptable truth.

That’s why shock creates grief, madness, despair, depression – all of which are complex negative stories we impose on life. That’s why hope creates hysterical longings and great expectations, also narratives, because the infuse of hope is also a kind of shock. A stable person would feel neither loss nor impending gain; they would treat all experience as equal. We cannot be that person. We must manage our lives. And to achieve that we must manage our narrative lives. People under long term stress commonly develop odd behaviours, sometimes known as mental illnesses, in order to cope. But I’m saying we all do that to a lesser extent….

Someone responded: It would seem to me Steve, most of our inner lives are made up of these inner narratives which are positively designed to keep us asleep. To keep us from seeing ourselves as we really are. Internal lies that play all day everyday, to prevent that bubbling cauldron of ugly reality of self from being faced. So in that sense, I dare say for most people the narrative is always uncontrolled and lulling people into a false perception of themselves and life.

…I’m sitting with it all the time, waiting for things to come forward and wondering how to integrate what I know about the potential healing power of moments of truth. Perhaps sleepwalking in narrative is an imaginary friend who can hold us back in some ways, certainly it is when a person makes up life completely, like a paranoid does, losing all contact with the ability to read motivation and see rational routes to outcomes.
On the other hand there must be an intrinsic de facto narrative that begins as a young child when you differentiate yourself from others and start to realise that your own life is yours alone and has a path that is different from other lives. I think perhaps that process remains confused for a very long time in most of us. And I note that the peoples of the east often subscribe to mental disciplines intended to mesmerise themselves out of the desire, judgement and motivation that might fuel narrative, this finding a safe space in a passive and self-chosen contact with unspecified, meditative reality.

To me their results seem lifeless and I think of westerners who go that route as space cadets who think they have risen above the turbulence of life but are more correctly in denial about what’s going on.

On the other hand, trying to ride the dream world I inhabit and function effectively requires a lot of strength and would be much easier if I found more resonance in the world at large. I do note, however, that whenever I sit down with people, whatever they claim about their point of view, what they do is commence to bleed out narrative. And that it is almost impossible to get them to be congruent, here in the room, so strong is the energy of the narrative, tantamount in force to a sexual desire that they cannot control. If they flirted with me the way they tell me their lives the room would be seriously charged and for me, after a relatively brief period, listening to narrative does begin to feel like a lover who comes on strong only to push you away and then comes on stronger when you try to back off and then cries rape at the moment of truth.

I can’t tell you how many people I have taken right to that moment in my life, only to see the portcullis slam down just before the final, painful release of the lies they live in. And wham, back comes the pulsing narrative, the story, the justification of the way they have lived and the things they have done, all the mishaps that were never their fault and the malaise they suffer that just happened, without warning, over 30 years or more !!!!

The thesis is that there are aspects of our lives that we never really share with others, possibly courageous and even heroic aspects, as we toil our way through the hand that destiny dealt us, making the best of who we are and the opportunities that come along. We aren’t in charge of anything and we actually know that, but within the limitations we do pretty well.

Think of the guy who left school at fifteen yet rose to a position of authority in the corporate world. Think my my CV client from the Kabili region of Algeria, a woman who fought her way to university in France and then ran away to the UK to avoid servitude. She started as a bookkeeper in Rainham, Essex and now project manages the installation of investment bank trading floors while living in SW3 with her Danish husband and two children.

Those are the big heroics, and there are countless smaller ones: people who overcome disabling illness and pain; people who fight their way past tragic childhoods. People who deal with stammers and dyslexia. People who know they aren’t that bright but work hard enough to do very well. people who give a lot to others, even though it costs them dearly in time and personal success. In fact the world is full of minor acts of heroism.

Yet, and here is my thesis: very few of us ever receive the acknowledgement, the thanks, the respect and in some sense the justification for being themselves that these marvellous but invisible achievements actually deserve.

So we all share a kind of debilitating hunger, to be known as we truly are, to be allowed to be that person, to be celebrated for our gifts and contributions. Perhaps because a competitive society where everyone is starving for recognition (and only the stars ever get it) – perhaps because this culture will not allow it.

However, as a minor gesture of revolution against loss of person-hood, I think we should all be doing something about this issue and telling those that we care about how very much we celebrate them just as they are. This would be so much better than coaching them on becoming better, so much kinder than giving unwanted advice that makes them feel incomplete as they stand now. And especially, when they are down, when things are bad for them, when they are enduring loss or grief, that particular time in their lives would be the best time of all to see them and let them know that you see them as whole, perfect, acceptable to you and, frankly, heroic.

Don’t fix anybody; find them marvellous instead. It’ll do a lot more good to both of you.

The main reason I want to move to the seaside is that when I stand there on the beach in the bright sunshine I always feel good no matter what. The first time I ever test drove an Audi it just felt right compared with the car I thought I wanted, a Merc, which felt awful when I rented one for a week to check it out. For twenty years, since before Windows existed when DOS was a big deal, I’ve been struggling with the “wrong” feel of Microsoft blockware, which is the main reason I want to try Apple.

Some things feel right; they relax you, but with energy in hand. Some things feel wrong; they make you nervy and drain your spirit away. Like dealing with call centres and writing to the tax man. Like queuing in the rain at Hammersmith to get into a Ricky Lee Jones concert where she only sang for 45 minutes. Like making a date with the wrong girl at school but feeling you have to go through with it not to hurt her. Like being five years into the wrong career before finally understanding you have to scrap it all and start again.

In my wardrobe I have clothes  I so much love to wear that I save them for a special time and never wear them, choosing instead things that I don’t like so much because it doesn’t matter if they wear out. How stupid is that?

I mean, I know it’s supposed to be the path to wisdom to control your desires but I like my desires, very much. I like clean cotton sheets. I like machines that work first time and do exciting things. I always end up glad I had sex even when I thought I didn’t feel like it. I love my food but I don’t want that much of it these days and there’s a range of tastes that feel good to me, such as asparagus and haddock but no longer beef, which feels harsh. So why do I still eat stuff I don’t like, because of a “balanced diet”?

I think I shall put more emphasis on how things feel from now on and less on what might be the sensible thing to do. Sensible hasn’t been such a great success. It doesn’t make your skin tingle and your heart leap.

In the last few days I’ve had contacts with people whose lives are falling apart, contact with people whose lives are always challenging, contact with people who are facing the spectre of death. In the past I usually would have had something glib to say but increasingly I find myself speechless, only able to listen rather than suggest anything, overwhelmed sometimes by the sheer weight and complexity of what others are going through and in the final end simply impressed by the courage shown by so many in different ways, also the resourcefulness, persistence and humanity.

I long to tell these people that I respect and admire how they are in facing their lives – far more than I would if they were blustering through with phony optimism. But it seems that there is a kind of guilt in the air, that people feel slightly ashamed for not being at their best, that they would rather not be showing their “negative” feelings, that they long for it all to be over and soon… Which is reasonable.

Only when it isn’t over soon, believe me, I really really don’t mind anyone going over their honest feelings time and time again. It doesn’t bug me in the slightest that someone is or feels they are less than perfect. In fact I feel honoured that they would trust me by telling the truth. It’s like a spark of humanity in a world full of lies…

I did tell someone today that admired his courage and he replied: “I haven’t got any other choice, have I?” Completely without self pity. How magnificent.

- is upon me, you know? That sense that everything is not well with the world really but there’s nothing you can point a finger at. It doesn’t feel personal and it’s not a premonition. I just have a buried nausea, a slight unease, a hint of panic, a desire to find safety, a hint that something wrong is approaching from a distant, hidden place. Normally I would bury such a feeling under a brisk call to activity over something trivial but tonight it stays with me, despite a successful day and a week that was far better than expected.

I know there is intelligence living in our guts but I do not know what mean the messages it sends me, often sends me, usually unheard, while my mind tries to control everything.

I think it’s time for this theme to emerge into the daylight because during the six years of my online “community” life I have so often been accused of having a hard, heartless, sarcastic or even brutal tone – which is absolutely not my intention, nor my character. The Real Steve Holmes is kindly, generous, amusing, amiable, thoughtful, intuitive, supportive in a crisis and always the first to recognise and celebrate the talents of others, often before they get there themselves. This it not a boast, just a fact. Every month several people travel for hours just to have lunch with me because I am not strong enough to meet them half way and usually they go away full of possibility. That’s how I really am.

So where does this apparently confusing and supposedly brutal tone come from? Why do so many people find me aggressive?

Historically, the turning point of my life, in 1981, was my participation in Werner Erhard’s EST training, which was a very challenging 4 day and 4 evening event in which people were not allowed to leave the room except for designated breaks and the eventual catharsis was essentially produced by breaking down the facade of the participant. Some people would hate that but I adored it. I felt I’d come home to the truth at last and I watched in spellbound amazement as one “Asshole” after another gave up the struggle and turned back into a human being. It was exactly like a mass exorcism and I still believe in that method today, no matter what a shyster Erhard himself was. He was a natural, primitive and profound philosopher and he understood the underlying ontology of emotions and behaviours as no one else has ever done, Shakespeare included. Because Erhard set out to “make a difference”, not just to observe and dangle pretty truth that would further enhance the egos of his audience. He went for their egos like a Terminator, and in most cases it worked. (Life does this to you anyway, but very slowly; Erhard saves you many years.)

So to me, what appears to be brutality means nothing at all. If someone else has the best truth in the room I will acknowledge that, no matter how they speak to me, even if they find me exasperating, even if they talk down to me, even if they are sarcastic. Providing I know they aren’t merely trying to triumph over me…

But almost everyone is trying to dominate, covertly or blatantly: all those nice people out there, all those jokers with all their social grease, all those clever businessmen, all those nice ladies with smotherly advice, the superfit, the superstrong, the tasteful and informed, the chess players who argue well and the Little Professors who know their stuff, the logicians, the creatives, the sad people who challenge you not to be able to help them – almost everyone you ever meet is trying to gain advantage over the situation and has no concept whatsoever that the space of soul was meant to be shared.

This infuriates me, ongoingly. And, since I have survived two killer cancers against millions to one odds, lived through the tortured death of a wife, succumbed to heart disease from the ensuing stress and got absolutely nothing left to lose as the world throws away what little interest it had in real ideas… I tell you honestly: I don’t care what you “think” or feel about my tone. I can’t do anything about your feelings – they belong to you.

Those who know me, love me. And those who don’t need to learn something. End of rant. I imagine you feel something similar but express it more pleasantly and covertly. But if you still don’t even know what a cruel, vicious and grandiose Asshole resides underneath your surface then you desperately need to learn because you haven’t reached step one of the awareness you are here to develop and your life has passed in a perfumed dream. Suffer. Rage. Grieve. You must do these before you find joy. You must break down to build up. There is no other way.

Watch your own tone, will you, and leave mine alone.

Today I hit the kind of mood that would drive most people to drink or drugs or some kind of diversion like going out to eat a disappointing meal or even hiking in the rain to the point of exhaustion. And I’m lousy company, but what’s worst of all for me is the loss of the core feeling of my very life, which is inspiration.

Normally, for most of the time, I am thrilled by my impressions, fascinated by everything my attention latches on to, stupefied by my own ability to express my thoughts, buoyant in mood and fairly fascinating to be with. That’s how I spend my life, except on days like today, following weeks like this, which in turn followed a dull week. I haven’t felt like this since I was deeply depressed after the death of my wife, in fact, and I have absolutely no reason not to feel as cheerful as I was three weeks ago.

Because I have a new love in my life, a new plan for where and how to live, plenty of projects to keep me occupied – and my health is gradually recovering.

What most people do at this stage, as I said, is attempt to divert themselves. When that fails they may take it out on those around them. Or they may want to talk about it to solve their “depression”. Or they may start looking for causes in the hope of finding a remedy while secretly cursing themselves for not having grown out of feeling this way.

I happen to know that none of those things works even to the slightest degree. “Fun” is never fun for me unless it occurs spontaneously. I do not inflict my emotions on other people. I do not believe in the concept of a personality that can be worked on. I never expect to unravel the nature of myself for the better because I know for certain that much of what I am is genetic and beyond my control.

On days like this my only pleasures are bitter ones: it’s a perfect time to work on tax returns, filing systems, catalogues of stuff you can’t find, a weeding project in the garden, ironing the pile of shirts that’s been waiting for almost a month… It’s a rotten day with rotten feelings attached so I might as well do something I hate instead of spoiling a great day with it.

Normally I refuse to tell anyone about having a grey day because people start to offer patronising advice, positive thoughts, banal diversions, reassuring platitudes, all the stuff you really don’t need to drown you deeper in hopelessness. But today I thought I’d write it here, to make a record of it, to remind myself later of what a blessed life I normally enjoy.

Some people feel like I do today for much of the time. How do I know that? I know that from the way the waste their lives on diversions, from the way they can’t stop talking about being happier, from the way they can’t share a conversation but insist on acting out their own world, from the misery and hostility in their eyes and the resignation in their slouches, from the hysterical tone of the behaviour they generate to cover over the fact that they aren’t ever feeling that good about life, which is tragic, and stems in my view from not letting yourself feel lousy when you do feel lousy.

Some day soon I’ll be inspired again, for no reason that I can control in future, so until then I’m just going to have a decent lunch, try not to depress Cora, take a long evening nap and continue sorting out the Mozart section of my music collection.

Have a nice day out there.

For sheer ecstasy and ultimate aliveness, nothing else on earth beats the wonderful feeling that you personally originate your own world. You are not a wage slave; you are not behaving yourself to please the inner parent; you are not watching your back for criticism; you are not trotting out stale memes. You are the source of your own living.

The reason we look at life with the open, feeling intellect is to see ourselves more deeply and begin to have some power to originate the existence we live. But it doesn’t work if you already know the answers, having ingested the successful memes of your culture, because then all you can do is try to fit your experience into a framework. Naturally, you will also attempt to fit the feelings of everyone else into that framework, not noticing that your framework evolves to the point of transformation as your life moves on.

Hands up everyone for whom everything that passes through their mind is fresh and new as if it comes from themselves and no one else? I guess there won’t be many takers, but it is possible, and it’s not the same as that feeling of triumph when you pounce on the right answer and start blabbing it all around you. If you’ve never felt ecstasy when you’re confused and stuck in the question then you don’t know what I’m talking about yet and you have no understanding of what creativity really means.

Creativity is when your very first reached-for assumption is not that you are right or good or popular or successful or clever, artistic or sexy, but when your very first feeling is that you are unremittingly, whatever is happening, however you feel, the huge and powerful dynamo of light that is being alive.

Nobody can hold that state every second of every day in such a stressful world as this but it can be your default living experience and it’s a whole lot better than living in a head full of other people’s opinions.

Forgive me, but I always intend anyone to see some of themselves in it when I write stuff like that, because it’s in all of us and the more we get that the faster we evolve towards the joy that would be there if we were the origin of our own extences and not the victims of dominant memes.

The first thing I’d like to say is that holidays are disruptive: you get thrown out of your usual routine which if you have a great little life like I do is a drag; then you lose your privacy and have to rely on people who can’t cook and think synthetic sheets are OK; plus you have to endure the sheer agony of travel, with all its expensive and irritating privations; then finally you come home, somewhat relieved but plunged back into missing the blazing beach yearning for excitement that was awful while it was happening.

Having said all that, I very much enjoyed my break in Cornwall: I enjoyed driving down at unreasonable speeds; the sea air was refreshing and pleasantly tiring; the sea was stimulating and the sun blazed. My heart held up reasonably well, though the experience underlined the fact that I am almost an old man with a bad heart.

On one beach we sat on rocks in the sea watching the sunset and eating mediocre fish and chips while some Latvian surfers gambolled in the waves. At Tintagel we watched the sun set over King Arthur’s castle while eating supper in the eccentric restaurant of a wacky hotel numbering movie stars among its ex patrons, the most exalted of whom was Al Pacino, impossible to imagine in one horse Tintagel but never mind. At St Ives we shouldered our way through the narrow streets and cheated cloudy weather up the rest of the coast with a burning day on Porthmeor beach at the foot of the Tate Modern where surfer dudes compete to be cool and girls hang around showing their wares to the cool dudes who pretend not to notice. You can also buy a pretentious Italian snack from the most expensive beach cafe in all of Europe but we didn’t do that…

I am a snob but I’m not a toff. I like my proles to be good hearted and know their place but I don’t like sitting among show-offs from the chattering classes. So what I look for in a beach is kind of distinguished ordinary: people who are kind to their children and not too obese; wholesome snacks that could be worth the money, washed down with a decent cup of tea; yes some rockpools for the homeschooling mode dads to show off their parenting but not so many that you cut your feet on them.

I like a beach that’s not quite tame but not too dangerous, not deserted but neither crowded, a few geriatrics toasting away their speeding-by years but also some gauche teenagers trying to bury each other in sand to dissipate their lust. I like the odd mysterious beauty in a skimpy bikini, head in a book, ignoring the stares. If possible I like to see dogs digging up the sand and barking at the surf. I like the beach. In fact I could spend the rest of my life on the beach, quietly observing people not in cities or workplaces or shopping malls…

We found that beach, on our last day, the final town before you quit North Cornwall, a place of traffic jams on the lame bypass where I’ve been stuck for hours so many time before so never turned left into the town. We found the perfect beach, which I must return to, more and often, now I know where it is.

Just flailing around here. I don’t have any answers. Say what you like but please try to notice the difference between your own heartfelt feelings and mind-driven tosh that seeks to be an impregnably right opinion.

This space is for discussion of this thread… which you can open in a new window by right-clicking your mouse.