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.