Last FM

Just discovered the joys of last FM on the web. Been finding some nice old beats from the Mo Wax crew. Used to listen to a lot of that stuff when I had not much else to do.

I never thought watching birds would be so transcendant. Rilke talks of the way birdsong affects the heart making walls of self dissappear. Watching them through those little binoculars has the same effect. World gone, problems gone, total focuss on unselfconscoius beauty. Lovely. Also, I drank wonderful champaign. This was a treat, my partner said it was like drinking an oak tree. Full of lightness and substance. I said that wine is a communication from the soul of the earth, it is a communication of the love of quality and nature. To drink and not become drunk with it is the joy.

Trip Bubbles

Maybe I have commited a great blog crime by not posting anything for 6 months!
Maybe some people have actually read this!
Anyway. There are a few topics I am thinking about slowly.

One is about delusion. It is actually based on a fragment from Heraclitus.

The waking have one world in common. Sleepers meanwhile turn aside, each into his own darkness.

This got me thinking about Chogyam Trugpa's use of the word hallucination, when talking about the six realms. Six styles of hallucination. Six styles of darkness, some brighter than others. The metaphore of hallucination is very effective because of suggests that a true reality is distorted by our minds. The fact that we are all in some kind of hallucintion or other is quite powerfull. Especially when you get close enough to somebody to start to see how your own trip is working. The way you interpret a sentence or gesture to mean one thing when quite another is intended. This is going on all the time. Just this morning somebody came into a room where there was a meeting going on. They said they were struck by the depth of spiritual atmosphere, wheras I just felt really tired! There trip seemed to be that they were in this really electric spiritual group, but where they? Our style of hallucination is the filter through which every event is made meaningful and is falsified. Each of us is in our own trip bubble. It does seem that there is also an awake state which is devoid of this delusion, and as Heraclitus says, it is actually common to all.

I wondered whether this was why Buddhism was seemingly more popular in the 60's. The language and notion of hallucination was more commonplace. There was a zeitgiest which was affected by the acid trip experience, even to people who never did any. Today we have a different notion. There isn't a prevalent myth about liberation. It seems to be much more about security and health. This leads to a spirituality concerned with self improvement and health and being safe. But not to seeking out the sources of delusion. There is a lack of challenge to our perception because we can all have our own truth (our individual darkness) but there is no notion of an ultimate truth ( the common world of the awakened).

Maybe in traditional Buddhist language, our sprituality is about the god realm. Purity, ideals, study, intelect are all very godlike. We have to watch out that we don't just desire a lovely bright darkness.