the wizard

My laptop, a high energy light portal into the dimension of communication and information. I picture a wizard opening his portal of light; watching him from a distance grappling and grinning, fingers spinning in the gate of light, his whole body involved; like a wind of light, a gale from the whateversphere blowing through his head; he can do it for a period of time. it is essential that he stay grounded. He is in the light world. His feet clamp the floor

My morning problem - can anyone help?

Each morning I wake up and try to figure out what 'I' want to do. I don't know, because I have nothing I have to particularly do - no time constraint, no job, no kids, a freelance, a creative. My time is my own. So each morning the problem is the same - trying to guess what I want, as if I were a difficult girlfriend with obscure needs. Do I want to get out of bed? Do I want to stay in bed? Do I want to put some music on and start dancing around? Do I want to go outside for a walk to wake myself up? It doesn't take much to see that the reason I don't know is because my mind is so busy trying to figure it out. The obvious answer is to stop it - How can I know what I want when I'm already occupied with thinking about it? But how? How can I stop thinking about what to do next? After all, I have to do something - don't I? There's a choice. Can I simply refuse to think about what I want? Doing nothing also counts as doing something. Or do I just observe this habit of my mind, see it, watch it, accept it. Watch its inane and constant guessing; be grateful for the moments when I do something from pure impulse. OR I could just do nothing. Do nothing. Nothing.

"If you don't know what to do, you do nothing, don't you? Absolutely nothing, Then inwardly you are completely silent. Do you understand what that means? It means that you are not seeking, not wanting, not pursuing; there is no centre at all. Then there is love." - J. Krishnamurthy

Mano and the orange

At what point does an orange become an ex-orange? I asked Mano, pacing up and down the kitchen. it had been a hard day. for a variety of reasons I felt as if I were going mad. I stared at the orange peel in the compost bowl. This orange i said. It's peeled and almost all eaten, but is it dead? When could one say that the orange was killed? When it was picked, when it was sliced, or when its bits started to decompose in the compost bin? That would just be more life wouldn't it - life of a different variety? And how does that relate to us? Mano looked at my hands, as if I were holding a knife instead of just a segment of orange. You'd better go upstairs he said, and write all this down before you go nuts. Because I'm not about to have a conversation with you about a dead orange. So I wrote it down.

True romance?

I sit down for slightly longer than is comfortable. (No choice - I'm waiting for latihan and I'm stuck at the Amadeus centre - far away from my house - for nearly 2 hours). I've just spent 24 hours in Brighton with photographer and mystic Bjorn Vaughn, and now I'm... just don't know what I'm doing. Waiting. The body is restless. The body calms down; I find myself staring with blank eyes at the shape of trees. With my eyes open my thoughts get distracted. I can trick them into shutting up; harder when my eyes are closed; too much pressure. Better with the windows open...

So I sit there, and after a good ten or fifteen minutes, just slightly longer than I'm comfortable with - just after ignoring the itchy fidgety feeling in my arms and legs for long enough - I feel a laugh gathering in my belly, it gathers strength and then just comes out. I laugh with merriment. More laughing. For no reason at all. Then it stops. But I feel good, and justified in sitting there doing F-all while the rest of the world does purposeful and productive things. I keep saying to myself:

-- what do nothing? not even take a walk, do some exercise, go shopping?
-- We talked about this remember?
-- yeah, um.. ok

Ooof. It takes some discipline. But then that laugh comes out. And then... as if channeling some comedian from the underworld I suddenly conceive an entire stand-up sketch/joke and write it into my notebook. Blam! It comes out - just like that. No thinking or preparing. It writes itself. I have enough energy to do it. I can be bothered. Unlike almost everything else, it is not premeditated and I don't have to worry about it.

True motivation? true energy? the source I've been waiting for? Is it as simple as sitting still and doing nothing.

I think so.

Maybe it's the same for everything - career, love, holiday plans. Just sit and let em come

(Though then, 'course, I spent the rest of the evening fulminating because I couldn't sit still...)

let it roll

Maharshi

Make no effort either to work or to renounce. Your effort is the bondage; what is destined to happen will happen.

Energy surfing

I get to the British Library, after spending all day at home. I start to feel different - playful, talkative. The same happened in New York, though that was a vibration of its own, with its own challenges. As I get more tuned in I start to notice different energies. I realise it's not me, it's the surroundings, the people, maybe even the groundrock. I start to feel the atmosphere of each place in my own body.

I could spend my life surfing the different energies of different places. Just for fun.

The Ant

I'm now on an upswing. i wonder - since my knowledge of my moods is limited, as if I were a landscape viewed from an airplane with strange colourations visible on the soil from 30,000 feet you have no idea what mineral or rocks are responsible... i wonder if this is because I cut out caffeine two days ago (probably) or for some deeper reason of energy clearing and deep emotional process (ideally) or just because I had a good sleep (most likely). If I look anatomically at yesterday - the moment things started looking up - since my privilege as an unemployed writer is to analyse my moods minutely at all times - I would have to say it all started with the ant.

I was sitting on the Victoria Line on my way to Camden Town to meet Adam, a fellow comedian - crowded in by shoppers and commuters - when I noticed that there was an ant crawling on my hand. Where did that come from? And what to do? Keep the ant safe until we reached dry land, or flick it off my hand? As a sentimental insectist I had no intention of abandoning it to its fate - furthermore there is always the superstitious suggestion somewhere in my mind that fate has sent me these things - so I spent the next fifteen minutes ushering it around my fingers and away from the black hole of my coat sleeve so that it wouldn't meet a grisly fate up my armpit. I was so intensely concentrated on the task of keeping the ant - which was crawling fast and with a definite sense of purpose - at the top of my hands, that I didn't have time to even look up and wonder what the other commuters thought of my strange antics. Oh, get it - plaeese. And the fact that I had an insect on my hand. It briefly crossed my mind that they would think I was some kind of sinister bag lady ant keeper. but I didn't have time to care

And it was in that moment that I realised something. I had forgotten to think about myself for more than a minute. The mental relief was palpable, the lightness of being. I formed a theory, even as the ant grew exhausted and paused momentarily on my palm. Responsibility relieves the mind. So simple.

We changed trains and the ant slowed down again. I think it sensed that I needed its cooperation as we walked through the windy tunnel. Finally I deposited it in a garden in Camden Town.

Incidentally, the interchange between the Victoria and Northern Lines at Euston is one of the best in the world. Alongside the Bakerloo and Victoria line at Oxford Circus, of course. Of course!

After that things only looked up. It may be because of my happy meeting with Adam; it may be because of the latihan I did afterwards, or the cheese sandwich I bought from Pret a Manger to slake my sudden hunger; it may have been the crystal healing I experienced later that evening with a trainee healer called Abigail in a gorgeous flat in Lauderdale Road. It may have been an accumulation of all those things. But I think the ant did it.

why I'm on strike

Last night I woke at 4am wondering if i had hit the mid point in the two stage cycles of sleep (since I've been reading the Head Trip). I was woken by a particularly vivid dream - that my publicist Angela was performing a surgical operation - cutting off my hands and then my feet and sowing them back on again, a little shorter. I was allowing her to do this. In fact, I was absolutely going with it. The hands came off quite painlessly. The foot though, was something else. Before she cut into my leg above my ankle I asked her if it would be painful, and she winced sympathetically - yes, it's a bit harder, but it doesn't last long. You can make noise. As she cut into the leg I started to holler and scream to distract myself from the horrifying feeling. But then it was done, and she had stitched them back on again. Then I was driving down a very steep road in some kind of car, with my new tenderised, shorter legs - wobbling and sore on their stitches, cautious not to break them off. There was antagonism on the road, pushy people.

I woke up alert in the middle of the night and with a feeling of absolute certainty about what this meant. The feeling reminded me exactly of the sense I had when going along with the PR for the launch of my book. The willing victim, eager even, ready to undergo LEG SHORTENING for god's sake! not for god but for my product...for the sake of the product, my book. I felt the force of this lie, a product becoming a person, a person making a product. I saw that I have gladly been a prostitute for it; and I could feel the damage in my body, the literal physical ache - not only the memory of my fragile bone and muscle being cut and separated but my jaw aching mysteriously in the middle of the night (it still does now, 10 hours later). I lay there and let it sink in and felt with certainty that I had to remove the book photo from my profile in facebook, fast. I was in danger of becoming my creation, of disappearing into the lie for good.

No wonder I haven't been feeling motivated. No wonder I've been sitting in a funk each morning trying to figure out what to do. I'm unwilling to do anything - there's this rebellion going on inside me. I CAN'T SEE THE POINT OF DOING ANYTHING. And I see now it's true - there is no point. 'Point' = product = something that will make me feel good tomorrow = a lie. not a reason to do anything, not a genuine creative spirit, not a motivating genius, not a being in action. Not... anything.

And it doesn't mean I don't want to create, but this is it - the biggest block between me and creating anything. Sitting in a cafe yesterday I could feel the fog starting to clear - and this was before the dream - I had been in this cloud for three days - three weeks maybe, maybe thirty years - and I thought to myself - "what if the purpose of life is to waste time?" What if my aim is to be the opposite of productive? What if productivity is not the aim, but in fact the opposite...

The distortions it creates... always thinking "what should I be doing now?" Am I doing enough? Doing the right thing? how do I use all this time? To make myself better, to be happy, to survive, to get ahead, to get fitter, to make money, to meet someone, to be someone, to write a book, to get enlightened, to .. to.. to...? I want my reward - for all the work - I keep wanting my reward. Because I've been slaving. So I want the slave's reward. And then the next one and the next, because it's not ever enough, because I keep going back to my slaving. That's why I'm always checking my email, glancing at my phone - where's the next piece of action, the next treat? where's my reward?

So my resolution is this: no productivity. Productivity over. Productivity to be banned. Creation only by accident. Work only for fun. Breaking free. Not as a cute idea for a book or a film or a new quest to save the world. Not as a piece of wisdom to make me a guru or to write down in my next book. No thinking about cute ideas for books or films or saving the world - ENOUGH! they are just more products. Produce, produce. See what I've done! Tell me I'm ok! Give me money so that I can be ok! It's alienation - the very heart of alienation. And if I waste time enough (and energy) then maybe I will understand one day that time cannot be wasted. Maybe I'll just wake up one day and be an actual human being.