Fuel price hits a record high! But who cares?

Resistance is futile (the Daleks)

Around this time last year, I was writing about the rising price of fuel, and about it being a proxy for a general feeling of unease regarding the future. I don’t know if it was my own personal future I was talking about, or if I was picking up on the zeitgeist of the western fuel-driven world – in other words picking up on what the news-media were telling me to get upset about.

My alarm was not unjustified, I thought – the price of petrol having hit a record high, at around £1.38 per litre, and it seemed incredible to me that it was costing more to fill up my car than I was paying for the mortgage on my house. Last weekend though, the price of fuel reached a new high of £1.42 per litre.The difference now however, is I’m finding it harder to get upset about it. Even the sight of long queues of panic buyers on the petrol station forecourts this afternoon – result of government “advice” to top-up just in case the proposed strike of fuel-tanker drivers goes ahead – leaves me unmoved.

I don’t think this is a sign of world-weary fatalism on my part. Fatalism implies a resignation to one’s fate, while retaining the awareness of an ongoing menace, like sitting with an unstable bomb in your basement. You know it’s going to off at some point, and though you tell yourself you can take it – that life is but vale of tears, and then you die – subliminally, we still resist and resent the presence of that bomb. It still gets under our skin, and eventually it makes us angry and ugly, and ill. No. Fatalism isn’t an attractive way to view the world; it’s more of a last resort, I think, when the way we see the world refuses to shift out of bottom gear.

What I think I’m feeling now is more of a letting go of those things I cannot control. To stick with the motoring metaphor, we’ll call it getting into second gear. We accept the world changes, that fuel, like fine single malt whiskies, become prohibitively expensive and occasionally scarce, that rich nations become poor, that the healthy fall ill, and those we love are taken from us.

But second gear is still a long way from cruise control, and we might worry that in becoming so passive and withdrawn from life’s events we also risk losing our essential passion for life. We no longer rant, we no longer cry, but equally such passivity can insulate us from all the things that remain in the world to be joyful about; we no longer laugh at jokes, we no longer take the time to stand and stare at the beauty of things, we become dead from the neck up, we become impotent, incapable of a bone-hard arousal, let alone making love to the world with the all the spirited abandon of our youth. And who wants to live like that? It’s inhuman.

It’s not about being passive then – not entirely. It’s more about not resisting what happens – which isn’t the same thing. We hold an image in our minds that defines what we think is good for us, what we think we want for ourselves, and if we’re not careful anything that doesn’t fit that narrow minded model, we try to protect ourselves from. We resist it. We reject it. We throw up the shield of our ego in an attempt to deflect it, but it breaks through with a force equal and opposite to the strength of our imagined defences. So, we take the blow and absorb it as a dark energy, which transforms into an imagined injury. But imagined or not, we take it deep into our bones where it make us weary and sad.

So, rather than remain in passive second gear, we need to snick our mind quickly into third gear. Rather than being simply passive, we must redefine our state of mind as being one of no longer offering resistance to those aspects of life that don’t fit in with our narrow view. We open our arms and welcome the whole of life, the good and the bad of it. And in not resisting life, we find there are more things to be joyful about, rather than less. And the bad things? We no longer label them as bad, but more as object lessons on the road to a growing awareness of the nature of life and how we can best relate to it.

When the wind blows, the meadow does not stand firm; the grasses part and sway, and the wind passes safely through, leaving the grasses upright. I’m sure Lao Tzu has a better aphorism for the same thing, but you know what I mean.

Getting into third gear is difficult of course, because – to stretch that motoring metaphor possibly to destruction – there’s no syncromesh on the box we were born with and we have to spend a while grinding those gears before we can find it. But when we do find it, we get a kick, and a sense of movement like no other. Of course third gear’s still a long way from the fabled luxury of cruise control, but at least it comes with a sense we’re finally heading in the right direction.

If you resist what happens, then you will always be at the mercy of what happens, and your happiness or unhappiness will be determined by the world.

Ekhart Tolle. (A New Earth)

Michael Graeme

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I think, therefore I forget who I am.

The question of identity is one that reaches to the core of who we think we are, obviously, but it also has a bearing on how we view the nature of reality and our place within it. It’s unfortunate then how we often misinterpret our identity, mistake it for the mask of what we think we are, or even what we think we’d like others to think we are. We parade this mask every day and we sell it on the world’s stage, trying to convince even our own selves it’s the nearest thing to who we think we really are.

When seen through the eyes of this mask, however, the nature of reality becomes distorted, our vision clouded. It renders us vulnerable to seduction by things we should value the least, vulnerable to injury from things to which we ought to be naturally impervious, and it renders us prone to discarding as worthless the keys to unlocking a deeper understanding of the authentic nature of our selves.

When tested, when challenged by life, our imperfect mask can slip, it can tear, fall apart, disintegrate. If we identify too closely with the mask, we imagine it is our own selves under threat, our own selves tearing, falling apart in the face of the seemingly insurmountable pressures reality imposes upon us. We see it as a battle for our lives against a myriad unseen foes. It can be a terrifying experience.

We lose our footing, and we fall.

It’s important then that we pause occasionally, lift the mask and look beneath in order to get a glimpse our original self, our immortal and indestructible self. We needn’t worry; we are none of us as ugly as we fear – unlike the mask which is guaranteed to be a misshapen parody of our life’s potential, our true self.  Seeking our original face, remembering who we really are, and being content with that, is the only way of being truly grounded in the world and, being grounded, impervious to its storms.

I’m reading Eckhart Tolle’s “Power of now” again, a much thumbed copy, one I borrowed from a colleague who has already loaned it out to various people, countless times, but always seeks its safe return. In its current condition, you wouldn’t get ten pence for it in a charity shop, so battered and creased it is, but I take its fragile state as a testament to its resonant power, that people want to come back to this precious little book, time and time again, in order to refresh themselves, and remember who they are.

Like many spiritual teachers, Tolle is at pains to point out that we are not our thoughts. He tells us it was Descartes who coined the phrase: “I think, therefore I am”, but he urges us not to listen, that who we are is actually not defined by our thoughts at all. A more accurate phrase then might be: “I think, therefore I forget who I am.”

This is a difficult concept to grasp in a culture where we are taught from an early age to identify very strongly with ego consciousness. Ego is easily bruised, and then we find ourselves pointing fingers at the bruiser, seeking redress or even financial compensation for our woes. I’ve read and written about, and pondered on this over the years, but reading and writing, and pondering aren’t the same as getting it. I’m still in the process of getting it, and it looks like being a lifelong journey.

When we sit down to meditate, we are immediately confronted by the rush of our thoughts, chattering, nagging, slipping in under the radar of awareness, so that suddenly we wake up in the middle of our meditation, realise half our time is already gone and we’ve been lost in a storm of anxieties, instead of forgetting them – which is what we originally sat down to do.

Once in a while though, we catch ourselves. We say, no, I don’t want to think about that right now, and we brush our thoughts gently aside. They always come back, but in the between times we eventually become aware of a mysterious part of our selves observing our thoughts. This silent observer seems to sit in the background, watching their ebb and flow from a perspective that is one step removed from the self we think we are. This observer, this silent watcher, is clearly a part of who we are and it’s interesting to note how disconnected from the material world this normally hidden part of our selves is.

To this mysterious, and possibly higher self, all the worldly goings on are no more than froth; all the wars and the famine and the strife are no more than the fleeting interplay of a moment’s light in the deep, dark stillness of eternity. Finding our way into the unambiguous presence of this almighty sense of inner knowing is one of the hardest and most ambitious adventures any human being can undertake but, unlike climbing Everest or voyaging to the moon, it is an adventure open to any one of us.

Such existential musings have been brought into sharper focus for me recently – this business of who I think I am. It started when I saw some of my self-published novels for sale on the Amazon Kindle Marketplace. They were being sold under my name, but I’ve no idea how they got there or who was really selling them. For a moment, it was like staring at myself from across the threshold of an alternate reality – and even though I knew someone had simply stolen them, my sense of identity had been sufficiently shaken to make me think again about who I am and what my purpose is in the world.

The novels – three in all – were the sum labour of about five years work – pleasurable hours gleaned in the evenings and weekends of my day to day life. I’m not saying they’re great novels. They are what they are, I write the way I write, and when I’m done with my stories, I give them away. Certainly, they are of personal significance to me, but only in so far as the events and dialogues they describe are the roadmap of  a personal psychical journey. They plot my trajectory from the immature and egoic masks of youth, to this middle aged guy who sits blinking up now into the starry skies of an evening, partially unmasked at times yet still, it seems, none the wiser for any of it.

That someone else came along, cut and pasted those five years into a hastily cobbled e-book, called themselves Michael Graeme, and tried to make a few bob by pirating stuff I give away for free, should be neither here nor there to me – that is if I’m thinking straight and can avoid my ego feeling bruised. Even the fact that I have to prove my identity, and my legal right to call my thoughts my own, to the almighty Amazon, again, should be of no account to me,… that is if I am sufficiently secure and grounded in the knowledge of my own identity.

On this matter, the muse quietly takes my ego in her arms. She soothes away the angst with the warmth of her embrace, then she brushes off the dirt and reminds me I am not my thoughts, not my words. I am the silent watcher, she says, and like her, always a few steps removed from the tangled web of collective hope and expectation we mortal beings cling to, and which we call reality.

My mysterious Amazon doppelgänger did not make that journey. Their actions betray only the fact that they have not evolved emotionally, spiritually, or philosophically very far at all in human terms. Their life’s journey has been perverted by a misidentification with a mask they take as being the most fitting, but sadly one which makes them only ugly to the rest of us.

One of the hardest things to grasp in the quest for  maturity, and a sense of groundedness is that the right thought, the right deed, is right whether anyone bears witness to it or not, whether you profit personally from it, or not, whether the intrusive cameras of that reality TV show are switched on, or not.

The existential contract outlining this, our three-score years and ten of material reality, requires no verifying witnesses, and the presence of only two signatures, in order to make it valid and spiritually binding – our own, and that of the eternal sense of being rising beyond even the silent watcher of our thoughts.

I am, but what I am none cares or knows (John Clare, 1848) – we are each the self consumers of our woes. For “woes” here, we can read “thoughts”, which are for ever poised ready to warp into woes at a moment’s notice. We must all try therefore to remember we are not our thoughts, otherwise we end up consuming what we perceive to be our only self. This in turn results in a distorted vision of reality, one in which we see only a barren wasteland of broken promises and ruined hopes – or to quote John Clare again – the shipwreck of our life’s esteems.

But much as I revere John Clare, it really isn’t like that.

The times when reality comes most sharply into focus are the times when we are thinking about it the least, when our thoughts are stilled. Then a truer vision comes rushing in, presenting the nature of all things in their sublime glory – not as separate, but as an integral part of who and what we think we are.

It’s always been this way. It’s just that we’ve forgotten.

Good night all.

Graeme out.

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Tai Chi and the importance of the “Now”

It’s been a while since I read Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, but I’m still pondering upon it, letting it inform the seething mass of my thoughts, and I’m finding it sheds light upon aspects of Tai Chi and Qigong practice.

I’ve read that the practice of Tai Chi and Qigong has a number of distinct phases. First comes the initial enthusiasm, sparked by the interest of doing something new, and something that apparently produces unexpected benefits in the mind and body. I don’t think there’s anything mysterious about these, in spite of the mystical hype perpetrated by self-styled masters in their various self-help programmes; you simply feel more relaxed, and even though the exercises don’t seem very strenuous, you also find yourself feeling physically fitter, healthier and more energetic – less likely to nod off on lazy afternoons. You just need to practice – preferably in the company of others because the social aspect keeps your interest levels up as well. I’m sure many at my Tai Chi group get as much out of the cup of tea and a bit of a natter as they do from the practice, which has them laughing – and that’s also good.

But then your body adapts, and if you’re only putting in the same amount of practice time as before, you may find that while you retain the fitness levels, you lose that lovely tingly feeling at the end of your sessions. I began to wonder if it was no longer working for me, or if I’d started doing something wrong. For me the initial, enthusiastic phase lasted about a year. Then you’re into the dead space of simply turning up for practice, going through the forms and trying to convince yourself that you’re not deluding yourself.

Many students drop out during this phase. You wonder if you might be better off with another teacher, or taking up a different style of Tai Chi, or maybe it’s down to such minutiae as the fact you’re not holding your palm/arm/leg/head the right way – but really there’s no need to fuss. You’re fine as you are, and in fact after learning the basic forms, if it’s the health aspects you’re after, rather than the technical skills of the martial applications, I suspect you become your own best teacher at some point. If it’s martial skills you’re after, then okay, you need to spar against another student and learn from the bumps and bruises under the guidance of an expert bone breaker.

I don’t know how long this second phase lasts, because I think I’m still in it, even though I’m in my fourth year of practice now. But I’m still fairly regular – turn up for class once a week, and do the daily Qigong forms in between,… but I still find myself wondering what the hell I’m expecting.

Tolle’s book answers this question.

When looking for happiness, for satisfaction, for enlightenment, or whatever, we always fix our minds on some point in the future. The experience of meditation pulls us back into the present moment. Thus, centred in the present, we’re no longer interested in whether another form of Tai Chi is any better for us, or if yet another Qigong book from Amazon will contain that one useful gem that will transform our lives. Of course it won’t.

Practicing Tai Chi with a slow deliberation teaches us “presence” of mind. On bad days, when I’m doing the form, maybe with a hangover, from the night before, I can drift off into cloud cuckoo land and find myself lost. My head moves into the future or the past, daydreaming – while the rest of the class, more focussed in the present, stick with the correct movements and make me look stupid. So here’s the first insight this idea of Nowness grants us into the value of Tai Chi: it brings us into the present moment and teaches us a means of holding onto it. In the Yang style for example there’s something deeply relaxing about focussing on the palm as it moves into the Single Whip posture. Practice enough and you start getting the same feeling when drawing the curtains, or loading the dishwasher (all right maybe I’m pushing it a bit with loading the dishwasher, but you know what I mean).

The other thing Tolle’s ”power of now” talks about is the value of attaining an intimate sense of the inner body. The inner body can be felt in Tai Chi as a kind of invisible skeleton, or an inner ghost, an energy form, if you, like that occupies your body space. Awareness of it comes most readily to mind when we focus down on the Dantien, this spot in the lower abdomen, but we also get a sense of it in our arms and legs when we concentrate, or when we practice the forms in a relaxed way. The energy body may be imaginary, a figment of  the mind, but it is also “real” in the sense that we can actually feel it – whatever it is.

Awareness of one’s self from the inside out is something I’ve written about before, without fully appreciating its fundamental value. This awareness goes hand in hand with a sense of the Nowness of things. You can’t feel your inner self if your mind is preoccupied with the past or the future. Tolle speaks of the importance of discovering this sense of one’s inner self and cultivating an awareness of it at all times. It’s another thing that stills the mind and brings you back into the present moment, the place where you belong.

Emotional pain, anger, frustration,… all of these things have their roots in our tendency to live with our heads in either the anticipation of some future event, or the regret of something we perceive to have been irretrievably lost in the past. The Power of Now reiterates in very simple language, the message of Zen Buddhism. It makes sense of the idea of an enlightened glimpse or moment of sartori, and grants us the means of approaching it, by teaching us what it feels like.

An hour of Tai Chi, no matter how imperfectly performed will reward you with the feeling of yourself from the inside out. You will feel your arms, legs and abdomen warm and tingling. You will feel them buzzing with an electricity which, if you like, you can put down to your imagination. Whatever it is, it’s a lovely feeling to sink into. This awareness of oneself, is in itself energising. Tolle speaks of its restorative, its rejuvanating properties, and this this sounds like Tai Chi to me.

The forms, be they Chen Style, Yang Style, Sun Style, they all have a set sequence to them, a choreography if you like, but I no longer believe their secret lies in completing the form, in memorizing it or repeating it. The forms are derived from their martial applications, and if all we’re interested in is our health then, a pernikerty adherence to their correctness is no more than dancing.

In Chen Style, it seemed the most important thing to me to gain a knowledge of each of the 72 forms, but having completed them, I now know that all the health benefits are effectively contained in the first five moves – but that repeating them over and over would be boring, so the 72, the Lao Ja or old frame, mixes them up to make them more interesting to practice.

In fact, I suspect it doesn’t matter what you do, so long as you try to achive the Tai Chi basics of an “open” body, wide stance, shoulders rounded, chest sunken, arms relaxed,… then you can make it up as you go along, so long as you can remain focussed on what you’re doing. I’ve begun to experiment now with a mixture of the Yang and Chen forms, mixed in with a bit of Silk Reeling and Qigong moves, just doing whatever the inner body seems to gain the most expression through.

In such free-style practice, the Nowness becomes the essential thing. The blood and the lymph circulate freely, stimulating the body and enhancing the feel of the moves, so that when you stop, this inner ghost continues to tingle and helps you to remember what it feels like, at times when you’re not practicing – like sitting in a ten mile tail back on the M6, or when pushing your trolley around the supermarket. You just take a breath, push it down to the Dantien, and it wakes up. You remember it. You remember your inner self, you are pulled back into the now, and you no longer feel anxious, frustrated or bored. You still feel good, relaxed, aware.

So there seems to come a point when everything is Tai Chi. Maybe this is the third stage. No! Hold that thought right there, you’re letting your mind run off into the future again.

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Lessness and Nowness on the Conveyor of the Living Dead.

I recently heard about this thing called Generation X. They are basically people born between 1961 and 1981 and, unlike the baby boomers who preceded them, and  knew at least a decade or so of optimism, Generation X has known only a long period of  decline, which after a brief blip of money grabbing madness in the mid 1980′s has been accelerating into economic oblivion  ever since. For Generation X, there is less of everything than there was yesterday, less opportunity, less work, less money, less confidence, less hope. I’m not a sociologist and I don’t know if this is true – I trust it’s not, but Wednesday’s news didn’t exactly offer any hope.

France is currently crippled by strikes, has run out of fuel, and is about to run out of electricity. Ordinary people have taken to the streets to protest at the austerity measures which seem targeted at them rather than the high flying cocktail-swilling idiots who brought the global economy to its knees. The last I heard they were about to send in “specialist” police teams to break the blockades. Vive La France!

Here in the UK we can’t be bothered. Even though we’ve just been hit with the most draconian cuts in public spending since the 1940′s, and the futures of even the most hard working and hard saving citizens are now well and truly screwed (well perhaps theirs in particular) we somehow feel in our bones that resistance is useless – not that we can’t admire the sheer Gallic ire of our brothers and sisters across the channel – we are apathetic, so the richest in our society continue to get richer. It’s a simple fact that the moral standing of any nation can be judged by the standard of living and the life expectancy of the poorest of its citizens, not its richest. In the grimmest of regimes the rich will always be comfortable, yet as Blake taught us: the dog starved at its masters gate, predicts the ruin of the state.

Anyway,… I had all this on the hourly BBC news bulletins,  on my way to Coventry last Wednesday. It was a grim commentary for a grim run down a grim stretch of motorway. I’d hired a car, and the day-job had let me out to visit a conference and exhibition at the impressive Ricoh Arena. It’s a journey of about a hundred miles down the M6 which, even at a sedate speed should have taken me no more than a couple of hours. It actually took me four, locked into a convoy of  heavy goods vehicles that spent more time in park mode than actually moving anywhere.

Richard Hunter, the hero in my novel “Durleston Wood” calls the M6 the conveyor of the living dead, a dreary motorway, the most congested in the UK, along which has shuttled generations of business travelers.

Anyway, sitting in park mode around Cannock, my ETA nudging ever further away from me, I had another first hand glimpse of Eckhart Tolle’s insight – namely his power of now. At one time a journey like that would have left me so screwed up at the end of it I’d've been fit for nothing, let alone traipsing around an industrial exhibition for a couple of hours and making some intelligent analysis of current trends, before driving home again. Anxiety, tension, frustration,… all of these things make you want to grip the steering wheel and scream. But that’s only because your mind’s running ahead and asking all those what if’s. What if I don’t make it in time? What if I can’t find my way at the end of this nightmare? What if? What if? What if?

But then I heard that wise old voice asking me: “what’s wrong with the present moment?” and I had to say, well, nothing master. I was sitting in the plush interior of a brand new (hired) Peugeot 308, new car scent, delivery mileage, and when I had the sense to turn the radio off,  I was able to listen to a podcast from Frisky Radio, sexy rhythm, lovely vocals. There was nothing I could do to change my situation, so I had to be accepting of it. Anything else was simply illogical. Pulling myself back into the now, the anxiety disappeared, and I actually arrived at Coventry after four hours in decent frame of mind.

That said, after 30 years of cruising the M6, I have to agree with Richard Hunter, it really is the Conveyor of the Living Dead – especially that bleak old stretch through the midlands.

Anyway, a little poem of mine from way back when:

Businessman

What are you doing business man,
So far away from home,
With trouser legs all wrinkled,
As you sit there on your own?

Customers in Newcastle?
Board meeting in Slough?
Then four hours traffic hotel bound.
What are you doing now?

Fish and chips at Corley,
On the M6 motorway,
And a quick read of your paper,
At the ending of the day?

And is your paper comforting?
Somewhere to hide your eyes?
To keep your thoughts from straying,
From that corporate disguise?

Or are you really unconcerned,
And merely passing through,
Oblivious to the rest of us,
Who barely notice you?

Your wife, your kids, forgotten,
In some bland suburban place,
Her parting kisses fading fast,
Upon your weary face.

A ‘phone call from the hotel,
On the ten pence slot machine.
“Hi Hun. I’ll see you Friday.”
“Keep it hot – know what I mean?”

Or is it not like that at all?
No solace from the roar?
Just passion grabbed like fast-food,
With a wolf outside the door?

Meanwhile you sit there don’t you?
Indigestion on the run,
A headache from the red tail lights,
And the week barely begun.

Still four hours traffic hotel bound.
A nightmare in the rain.
With just an Aspirin in your pocket,
To soak away the pain.

……
Parbold
October 1992

Good night all, and keep safe.

 

 

 

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The Power of Now

So,… I’m currently reading Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now”.  Books are mysterious things. You seem to come upon them randomly but, like the hexagrams of the I Ching, I’ve found they can also be meaningful, and timely. Although not elusively a guide to Buddhist thought, there’s much in here that reconnects me with the paths I trod years ago through Buddhism and Taoism, but only half understood them – and essentially this idea of living in the present moment. On the one hand it ought to be a very simple thing, but just try it and the mind screams out to be released from it and wander about once more in the past or anticipation of the future.

It’s often puzzled me, the idea of a present moment, and at one time I came to the conclusion that there was no such thing, or rather that the present moment was a period of infinitely short duration so as to be practically unobtainable. Indeed our conscious awareness seems mainly caught up in the contemplation of things either in the future, or in the past, and this is interesting because neither the future nor the past can actually be said to exist in any tangible way at all. We spend our lives in contemplation of something we think of as reality, but which is in fact is not. We live in a kind of fantasy. The past is gone, and we distort our memories of it, we make the bad things that happened there worse and the good things rosier than in fact they were. And the future? Well, that’s where our happiness lies – at some point in the future when we have done this or that, for then we will finally be content – it’s also where our deadlines are, either actual or imagined, and it’s also where we die. But the future has a funny way of never quite materializing as we expected it to, and with it our happiness. Indeed I’m sure there are people who wait their whole lives for their lives to begin, so caught up are they in this idea of chasing an imaginary goal, a point in the future when everything is finally going to be in its place and they can relax and begin doing what they always wanted to do.

I’m generally a decade behind with these things. I have a dozen books on Zen, all of them with pretty pictures of Zen gardens and Bamboo, but fairly light on explanation. Tolle’s book was published in 1999 and has been on the reading list of every new-age flake since, but it was only a few days ago I saw it on a colleague’s desk, after he’d picked it up from a charity shop and, noting my interest, he passed it on to me. I’m about half way through, and wishing I’d read the book years ago. It’s not a program, or a trite self help guide, but a very simple thing that Tolle is offering us, something he hammers home time and again, as if in the hope that eventually we’ll be able to escape from our programming and achieve this one simple thing that is the key to everything.

What is it?

It’s that infinitesimally, impossibly small point between past and future we call the present, that thing I’ve struggled so long to grasp and to understand the significance of. You have to find it. And to find it, I suggest you read “The Power of Now”.

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