Outsiders

How to be Creative

Alternative Ambitions

Who Wants the World? is, at last, available at amazon.com or .co.uk. 

The Vibration Doctors

The Vibration Doctor is interdependent because this interdependency is the forum for the work of shoring up good feelings against bad. Only interaction in the real world as it is enables them to do their work. But these men and women who have made the decision to live according to what I believe is the only rational and natural purpose, and live the only meaningful expression of existence that can bring a deep understanding of the human experience, are also independent from the myths that predominate in mainstream culture. They are not however a cult because they are in resonance with the earth and the body and the sun and the cosmic hangover of truth in the moment. 

They are not fantasists or believers but simple expressions of sentience in the world, troubled by the same fears and distortions of all who have ever lived but always favouring truth over myth, no matter how unpalatable the truth may appear. The Vibration Doctor has no impulse to use any other man, women, child or other sentient being because this is in opposition to their primary purpose which is to propogate good feelings over bad feelings wherever they have the opportunity to do so. 

They do this because it is the only rational path, brings an indisputed inner peace to themselves and a healing energy to others. These actions do not avoid the fact of pain and suffering and death and wrap them in myth and mystery, but accept them as part of the cosmic code of sentient experience.  The energy of myth and belief and senseless ambition is redirected toward those who did not ask to be born but are struggling with the shock of experience and the feelings conjured by consciousness on a daily basis.

The Physics of Truth

If we all saw the world the same way, the way as it really is, we would experience nothing but energy, wavelengths and quantum particles in all places at once … and the sky would not be blue but a seething mass of supercharged ultraviolets and infrareds like some CGI creation by James Cameron … and objects would cease to be solid, all matter would be seamless and in chaotic juxtaposition.

Luckily, (because the truth is bigger than us) the enormity of the true universe is shrouded, blinkered, diffused, mellowed and filtered by eyes and ears and mouth and fingers and noses that block the enormity, the horror! of it all and leave little but sugared tea, and TV.

We seek truth, but when it stares us in the face, when it appears to us in night sweats, we pray for morning and the illusion of light. We weren't born to know all there is, it's not our genetic disposition ... we have not inherited this burden from our forebears but brought it upon ourselves ...

Since the age of enlightenment, when thinking disguised as science and philosophy became the filter of experience, the concept of thought as a progressive weapon of survival has dominated.

Yet rational thought is the enemy of zen, which favours the science of no mind, the urgent intuition. And new age gurus like Erkhart Tolle propose the Power of Now and the negation of thinking. After all, he says, thinking provokes anxiety about the future and regret about the past. We think in words, prose and verse. Aren't there too many words in this place?

I tried thinking in visions and the visions became dreams. The dreams were as real as the landscape from the kitchen window, once the soaps and bleach and the apidistra had been cleared from the sill. The hills ahead, the craggy chalk face of the mountain, the tall pines like soldiers, taller though still in awe, if we are honest, of the forest oaks in the valleys, the blue skies above laughing at its own deception, deceiving us with pure vibration in to believing that blue exists in the world … when there is nothing but waves of energy … the energy fields developing in our head are no more real than my dreams of an imaginary union that solves the puzzle, shatters stone, that is somehow eternal, in some way.

Negative Aspirations

If I read another  aspirational blog by some young net savvy pretender to the Anthony Robbins throne I will eat my laptop. I won't advertise the chief troublemakers but I am talking about those guys (they are always guys, pumped up with natural steroids and Starbucks triple expressos) who write ebooks on how to win everything, get motivated, get girls, awaken the power within or be a millionaire in 7 seconds.

The combination of these twits and the Hollywood storytellers, or rom com writers like Richard Curtis are doing humanity no service except to froth us all at the mouth with the idea that we are not good enough and that everyone else is having all the fun and we are only a book away from being George Clooney, Lady Gaga or Steve Jobs.

While we are all frothing at the mouth at the possibility that we can change from animals into mythical powerhouses by page 7, I do wonder where we think we are going in this sprint to perfection.

I see that there are now books entitled  How to be a Perfect Human Being (you know who you are). As if we are born to be crap until we get our hands on a copy? This reminds me of the seed of the protestant work ethic, Original Sin, which is the order that we are all sinful by nature and there is nothing we can do about it but endlessly apologise and atone by being slaves.

There is NOTHING human about these so-called positive aspirations. There is nothing in nature that needs endless positive aspirations in books, sites and post-it notes stuck on the fridge. We only need these worthless soundbites to get through each day because of the poverty of our beliefs, and the poverty of the political world that shapes our beliefs.

The single currency of sentient beings is feelings - either good or bad. Orthodox success and ambition, and all that goes with it, is not index linked to the currency of feelings. We are just educated to believe that this is the case.

It is no longer even legal to be human, and it's certainly too expensive!

Modern life is clearly here to get in the way of  LIFE ITSELF, to trip us up with so many minor problems that even some of those with a great vision are in no position to enact it.  

Julian Cope

Back Soon

sorry i haven't been able to post recently but I have had no internet connection for some time ... I am hoping to resume posts soon as the new line has been set up ... thanks for your patience.

SUPERFEELINGS

Do not give in too much to feelings. A overly sensitive heart is an unhappy possession on this shaky earth.
Goethe

Feelings are complex. In fact they are so complex that we build entire languages in order to attempt to understand them and there are a thousand words for what is really just a single sensation. We can easily obsess about our feelings as if they are a justified response to a fairly brutal existence - an existence that constantly challenges us to REACT to it and UNDERSTAND our relation to it. When we obsess about our feelings, when we are thinking about them, trying to work them out, trying to be judge and jury on whether our feelings are honest and true or deceptive and false, real or imagined we are intellectualizing a single universal sensation.

We use vast amounts of our positive human energy, (henceforth referred to as PHE) in attempting to rationalize our feelings as if they are the most important thing in the world and are our guiding lights. But our feelings are just like butterflies in our stomach, flying into our minds at the slightest cue or trigger. They are real but they are not beasts which need trouble us when we have what I call SUPERFEELINGS.

In psychological counselling it is general practise to encourage  patients to express their feelings and for good reason. Feelings need to fly, like those metaphysical butterflies, and flutter freely between the pit of the stomach, where they are born, and the mind where they are actioned upon, considered and rationalized. However, we need no more be at the mercy of our feelings, than we need be at the mercy of the external agencies that wish to induce our feelings - often negative feelings of inadequacy or danger to sell us something or belittle us.

Feelings can infect the mind if we take them as honest messengers of the soul. They can take us to dark and lonely places. Human and institutional vampires sometimes want to engineer our feelings to make us useful to them in emotional or economic ways. Superfeelings will make us immune to these demands.

Superfeelings are one of the 7 forgotten powers that together will enable us to be impervious to the myths that sap our PHE so that we can get on with our real work.

the noose

There really is nothing new under the sun. Despite the waves of new generations of humans - the ideas, beliefs, questions and debates about what it is to be human today are largely the same as found in the earliest oral traditions of the first sentient beings. From the Hindu Upanishads and the earliest sacred texts that founded the all great religions, to the Greek and modern European philosophers, soothsayers, sages, gurus and self help and personal develoment books, the quest for a potent formula that will relieve us of our condition on earth rages on ...

I've read them all only to learn less than I knew before ... and I always return to the painful truth that is before us each day but to which we avert our gaze ...

My favourite quote:

More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to utter hopelessness and despair, the other to total extinction. Let us hope we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

Woody Allen

That we can laugh nervously at our extinction, and our silly endeavours, and still make jokes on our deathbeds is all the evidence we need that there is still a faint mystic impulse in a crass and accidental world ...

Nevertheless, the formula, like the mythical elixir of life, is the obsession ...there never was a formula, nor ever will be, and that is the formula ... sorry

but there is still that very faint mystic pulse ...

SUCKCESS

Our own concept of success ebbs and flows as our goals change and the goalposts move,

luck shows itself, misfortune and chance lay their cards.

Our defnition of success changes as we grow and evolve, and as our environment changes. Success is an obsession and the world is full of books about how to be successful and seminars on how we can be the best we can - that is how to be successful relative to others in terms of wealth or power or status.

We are urged to 'awaken the giant within', 'win friends and influence people', or share in the '7 secrets of the wealthy'.

We get hysterically excited at even the thought of success,

we pump ourselves up with positive affirmations,

we get employee of the month,

we seek victories, even tiny ones, anything will do

we stock up with achievements until our CV's reach that magic third page of puffed up triumphs.

Why?

We all begin with grand ambition and then this ambition seems liquid and transparent as it approaches fruition until what we thought was the success that would change everything becomes less concrete and more abstract and evaporates into the vapour of the next ambition.

And on and on it goes ... and it can never end ... until you know what ...

Eventually, where once we wanted to rule the world and captain our country, we end up wishing for nothing more than a peaceful life with a hint of meaning ...

an apparently gentler ambition ..

but even that seems elusive, no matter the trophies on the glass fronted cabinet, the certificates, the children long gone, the photographs to prove it all happened.

Where have we been? What have been doing?

For every winner, for all the trophies, there are a hundred losers - so even the victory is a hollow one - for what kind of person would celebrate success in the rational knowledge of the misery of a hundred other losers?

Success is a sickness

Scared to Death ?

I have spent many years in fear of death, and there have been other times when I might have welcomed it, like during reruns of Diagnosis Murder. The fear of death is the price we pay to have chanced upon life and there is a certain amount of scrabbling about in the dirt of life trying to find the elixir that will make us immortal in some sense. We hold onto myths, archetypes, beliefs and ideas about death to ease our journey through life. Though none of these ideas can prevent our own deaths or ease the pain of loss and the trials of grieving that the death of a loved one will inevitably provoke. But mystical and irrational ideas about death do soothe the sore, along with distraction and a new woollen coat.

Nobody who has ever lived can claim to know any secrets that may surround death, if indeed there are any, which there probably aren't. Equally no authority can say with certainty that death is the end. The knowledge then is that we cannot know of this mysterious realm that relates so closely to our life that it affects and infects all we do. We are, each of us seperately or in groups, entitled to believe anything we wish, in order to get through this life. Getting through this life is all this life demands of us, even if our parents wished we were doctors.

GUESTHOUSE

A boy is painting the guesthouse with me after reading The Anatomy of Melancholy

Nobody has ever read from cover to cover that great tome: The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up by Robert Burton

... mainly because it was written in olde englishe in 1621 and is around 1600 pages long ...

This scholarly investigation, the largest ever undertaken of its kind, investigates the curse and the causes of medieval melancholy ... or what we now call depression, low mood, sadness, nostalgia, anxiety, self-pity, indolence, misery, stress and despair - or what I call Tuesday.

But give the Mr Burton credit - after spending over ten years in writing and research he does actually come up with a practical cure for the condition in six words ...

... Be Not Solitary, Be Not Idle