Chanting is a whole body experience – you feel it. First comes the gathering in the belly, and the swell of the chest and the awakening of the throat; then the soft cavity of the mouth shapes and sends the sound forth as the bones of the head resonate and the pulses in the skin tingle. This is embodied devotion. The listening deepens, comes alive. Sounds, tones and mind spread out within the heart-field of benevolent causes and effects, the ‘sacred Cosmos’. Yes, there’s a domain we can evoke and enter – and as it supports us, we support it. From its innumerable and mysterious causes and conditions, benevolent influences have come into my life just as they have guided the lives of others; and so awareness must be extended beyond me and time and incident into the domain of love and integrity and self-surrender that is the source of our lived-in truth. We are fragile, we are resilient; we are separated, we’re connected. In the language of the heart these are not contradictions. The sense is of embracing the entirety of our humanity.

Ajahn Sucitto

I went for chips with you in 2016 in London, Frances
You died in 2019
Yet your memory and presence permeate my being
How is it that memory and presence continues, if the body does not?
Physical death is a monumental transformation, yes
A return to the elements
But not an end
No beginning, no end

Jean-Paul Sarte analyzes me, his loopy eyes
Peering through crooked glasses

He’s half right about the rupture in reality of subjectivity

And the vertiginous nausea of our freedom/responsibility

Bland, “lift” music floats through the BFI
I’ve taken a minimum wage usher job

I leads people to their seats as though I’m a hotel porter

Putting on all the charming airs and graces I can muster

The call of the rooster at dawn has faded
Barks of dogs in Thai village streets are distant

Krapp listens to recordings of his younger self,
bemoaning the fragmentation of time

K is lost and confused
condemned by a faceless authority

Where are the Theban women now?
Where are the Danaids?
Where are the Dionysians who dance in chaos?

My father simmers in his library
Compelling me from above – an abstract superego

In a Catholic boarding school in the 1960s,
he rebelled against the treatment of friends by Catholic brothers

A life spent holding down the hungry body
Bran reigns in Westeros

A challenger in the school classroom and in the church yard and on the picket line
Slicing open Tories and kings

Modern consciousness is hard and cutting
The swerving oscillations of postmodern technology
Have curved it into a looping haze

Society enjoins me to produce and generate output.
My mind enjoins me to create
Sartre enjoins me to create

Biz once said that my head was cut off from my body
Asphyxiated
Alalaho

Urizen is dominant
Los is forgotten.

There is a fire in the heart.
It crackles with longing, burns with ache.
Desire rises like smoke,
sometimes sweet, sometimes choking.

The Buddhist looks at the fire and says:

“This fire is not you.
You are clinging to the warmth,
but it will always burn your hands.
Step back.
See the fire for what it is: impermanent, empty.
Let the smoke rise and fall.
Let the coals go cold.
Peace is not found in feeding the fire,
but in ceasing to need its heat.”

Zizek crouches closer to the fire and says:

“There is no outside this fire.
You are its smoke, its flame, its hunger.
The fire is your home.
Don’t dream of escape.
Instead, learn to dance in the sparks.
Let your skin blister.
Know the pain is not a mistake,
but the price of being real.
If the fire hurts, so be it.
Truth is found in the burning.”

Both see the fire.
Both know it’s dangerous.
One seeks to cool the heart.
The other says: “Let it burn – but burn consciously.”

You can walk with either.
Or, perhaps,
just sit by the fire and listen to both.

[Thus have I heard]

At one time the Blessed One was staying near Gayæ at Gayæ Head together with a thousand bhikkhus. There the Blessed One addressed the bhikkhus thus:

“Bhikkhus, everything is burning. And what, bhikkhus, is everything that is burning?

The eye, bhikkhus, is burning, forms are burning, eye consciousness is burning, eye contact is burning, the feeling that arises from eye contact, whether it is pleasant, painful, or neutral, that too is burning. With what is it burning? I declare that it is burning with the fires of passion, hatred, and delusion; it is burning with birth, ageing, and death, with sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair.

The ear is burning, sounds are burning, ear consciousness is burning, ear contact is burning, the feeling that arises from ear contact, whether it is pleasant, painful, or neutral, that too is burning. With what is it burning?I declare that it is burning with the fires of passion, hatred, and delusion; it is burning with birth, ageing, and death, with sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair.

The nose is burning, odours are burning, nose consciousness is burning, nose contact is burning, the feeling that arises from nose contact, whether it is pleasant, painful, or neutral, that too is burning. With what is it burning? I declare that it is burning with the fires of passion, hatred, and delusion; it is burning with birth, ageing, and death, with sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair.

The tongue is burning, tastes are burning, tongue consciousness is burning, tongue contact is burning, the feeling that arises from tongue contact, whether it is pleasant, painful, or neutral, that too is burning. With what is it burning? I declare that it is burning with the fires of passion, hatred, and delusion; it is burning with birth, ageing, and death, with sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair.

The body is burning, tangible objects are burning, body consciousness is burning, body contact is burning, the feeling that arises from body contact, whether it is pleasant, painful, or neutral, that too is burning. With what is it burning? I declare that it is burning with the fires of passion, hatred, and delusion; it is burning with birth, ageing, and death, with sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair.

The mind is burning, mental states are burning, mind consciousness is burning, mind contact is burning, the feeling that arises through mind contact, whether it is pleasant, painful, or neutral, that too is burning. With what is it burning? I declare that it is burning with the fires of passion, hatred, and delusion; it is burning with birth, ageing, and death, with sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair.

Seeing thus, bhikkhus, the wise noble disciple becomes disenchanted with the eye and disenchanted with forms, disenchanted with eye consciousness, disenchanted with eye contact, and the feeling that arises from eye contact—whether it is pleasant, painful, or neutral—that too they become disenchanted with.

They become disenchanted with the ear, disenchanted with sounds, disenchanted with ear consciousness, disenchanted with ear contact, and the feeling that arises from ear contact—whether it is pleasant, painful, or neutral—that too they become disenchanted with.

They become disenchanted with the nose, disenchanted with odours, disenchanted with nose consciousness, disenchanted with nose contact, and the feeling that arises from nose contact—whether it is pleasant, painful, or neutral—that too they become disenchanted with.

They become disenchanted with the tongue, disenchanted with tastes, disenchanted with tongue consciousness, disenchanted with tongue contact, and the feeling that arises from tongue contact—
whether it is pleasant, painful, or neutral—that too they become disenchanted with.

They become disenchanted with the body, disenchanted with tangible objects, disenchanted with body consciousness, disenchanted with body contact, and the feeling that arises from body contact—
whether it is pleasant, painful, or neutral—that too they become disenchanted with.

They become disenchanted with the mind, disenchanted with mental states, disenchanted with mind consciousness, disenchanted with mind contact, and the feeling that arises from mind contact—
whether it is pleasant, painful, or neutral—that too they become disenchanted with.

Becoming disenchanted, their passions fade away; with the fading of passion the heart is liberated; with liberation there comes the knowledge: ‘It is liberated,’ and they know: ‘Destroyed is birth, the Holy Life has been lived out, done is what had to be done, there is no more coming into any state of being.’”

Thus spoke the Blessed One; delighted, the bhikkhus rejoiced in what the Lord had said. Moreover, while this discourse was being uttered, the minds of those thousand bhikkhus were freed from the defilements, without any further attachment.

Thus ends the Fire Sermon.

The wooden floorboards creak beneath my cushion
As moonlight pours in through the window pane
And though the kuti is free of disquieting devices
The cabin hums with electric night.
A discordant orchestra of cicadas
Fills warm dark with buzz and boom and drone
And prana shimmers through exhausted body
After days of duties and chores in sala.

Wat Pah Nanachat — Ajahn Chah’s monastery —
A training ground where minds learn to open —
— the place where Buddha consciousness meets
The wiry, slithering jungles of Thailand.
Budd – ho. Budd – ha. The sound itself leads the way.
Not replacing phenomena — existing within/without phenomena
Not replacing forest — existing within/without forest
Not an adding on, but a letting go, an unbinding.

The jangled jungle is my jangled past;
The snake and rooster wrestle with phantoms.
Atammayata means to allow and open to.
Allow the image of her face to flow through
— the moment missed, the jump not taken —
contraction in heart, shockwaves spiral —
What hurts more than the event itself
is years of identifications which clasp on.

The selfing process wends like branches of Mirkwood,
fed by the cankers, fed by the asavas.
To be an incarnate being is to feed — uppadana.
The fed “self” is a snowball rolling downhill
— recurring patterns, solidified habits —
New snow which gathers has same whiteness.
But clothes of action (karma) can be restitched,
Even unstitched, stripped back to naked awareness.

No longer shaken in London’s skittishness
But roaming free in rhythms which breathe.
Crickets gargle; frogmouth cries; owl hoots —
Instruments playing dissonant counterpoint.
‘Nature’ is boiling over here with craving
— fornication and asphyxiation and choking —
But I’m no body-phobic Victorian puritan.
Lean into the vibrant, vital green.

Cat is coiled up on porch like a mobius strip.
Her belly breathes. Her heart pumps.
Underneath the street, the beach.
Underneath the questions, the doubts, the identifications,
the scientific mindset: the life force (orgone energy).
Open senses to the forest’s energy,
When contact is easeful, the body relaxes.
Somatic refreshment. Rapture. Samadhi.

Grief is a strange thing. Some people howl —
some people cry — some people go numb —
My rigidity (autism?) blocks doorway of feeling;
It triggers panic attacks and anxiety spirals.
Of the six elements, I am earth and air.
Can I loosen into water and fire,
Allow agitation to dissolve into sadness,
flowing through my being like a river?

During walking meditation in sala,
Roof recedes above and Buddha statue looks on.
To my right, a gentle Israeli monk, smiling subtly;
To my left, a tall, beautiful American monk,
Eyes distant, contemplating. Venus as a boy.
At the end of each length, I pause.
Between inbreath and outbreath: an open field —
A stillness — an awareness — a knowing.

Sankharas rush into the mind with certainty:
The positive ones — Jackson’s compliments of me;
The negative ones — regrets and lamentations,
The disappointment of false starts in London,
My mental handicaps and self-judgement of those.
In the space of the open pavillion,
Can awareness open around sankharas
And restrain itself from pacing these tracks?

The uphosatha hall is a white jewel,
Its terracotta roof slanting downwards,
Sun rays ricocheting off it into the blue sky:
Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome lifted off the page.
The hall loops, curves and unfolds, inside-out,
Like Einstein’s curved space-time,
Like the double helix of DNA structures.
Uncanny convergence between science and spirit.

Bring awareness to the stuck places,
To the sankhara which utters: “I am unlovable”,
To the blockade against goodwill for oneself.
Clinging is fixating on a point in a wave
— in this case around the statement: “I am unlovable” —
Because it feeds upon an image of solidity.
Let hard rock of clinging erode into ocean;
Let awareness know the wave passing through.

After trying to let go, and failing, in the failure,
Something beyond my volition gives up —
Then there is an involuntary shift:
Unconscious, automatic and spontaneous — like breathing.
A woman strains when she’s giving birth.
She wills the baby to be born. Nothing budges.
She gives up. Her body involuntarily releases.
Transformation and creativity lie in surrender.

In a yoga session
I put my body into cobra pose, upward facing dog and tree pose

Transitioning through asanas
Letting all absences of the past
Fade away for now

All that could have been and was not
The memories, the sadnesses

Unlived lives

Elegant, expansive, physical states

A butterfly emerging from the cocoon

Yet I notice a black shame
An energetic blockage
dragging me inwards
Black oil

My inner Daniel Plainview
The maniac
Explosions of turbulence
Amidst the oil fields of California

My inner Captain Ahab
Pure ego

Lacanian death drive?
The obscene master of jouissance?

Be wary of anger
It has life’s strength in it
But it acidifies quickly into cyanide

Consciously I’ve been telling myself that I’ve released the shame
The body (unconscious) signals otherwise

The inner critic is a well known aggressor
Less well known is inner passivity

Pulsation = a natural flow between expansion and contraction
Optimal functioning

A lion, charging along the Serengeti
Overtaking the instant
Moves free through eternity

A peacock spreads its feather tail
All glory and colour
Resplendent in its being

Nowhere in pulsation are there blushes of embarrassment
Nowhere in a flower is there a refusal to blossom

I am a new practitioner of yoga
A devotee to I.K.S Iyengar

I’ve become a spiritualist wellness yogi
Oh dear

I put my hands over my ears
When the instructor tells me to enjoy myself and be happy, that’s all

Who knows, maybe there is a way to tether happiness to existential meaning?

For a while I thought anxiety was authentic
An anti-liberal flag of rebellion
Pitched in a landscape of sickness

Now the Buddha’s appeals
To health and confidence
Ring truer

Tuning into chemical, sensory signals of the body
Brings more presence than rationality

Ruth, Sraddhagita and Athos are skilled and elegant in their asanas
Their personalities follow suit

Stay firm in warrior one
Uncomfortable sensations rise into awareness
Wanting to be felt

Transmute psychic tension
into physical and emotional energies
And release
Through the shining heart
Through the deathless realm

All dharmas converge on feeling
Learn to navigate the realm of feeling

The Buddha recognized the temptation to go abstract
And refused it

My empathy, such as it is, is cognitive and philosophical
not affective,
not acted out

Soma – feeling – affect – action

I have been ploughing through a 50-episode history of the French Revolution. I read a long book about the whole thing the last time I was in prison but it is always refreshing to be reminded that there was a time when ideas meant something. Today nothing means anything. Words are just thrown around and have no effect – crisis catastrophe apocalypse– whatever. Netflix is still running so we can stay asleep.

The sacred function of leaders is to remain awake. This means being able to differentiate between the noise and the real. This ability has traditionally been forged by two social processes:

First is the experience of suffering. Leaders – real leaders that are – lead their troops into battle. They were the first over the top. This made them serious people. The leaders that came out of World War Two had many faults, but they knew what it meant to die for democracy. They had seen their brother’s and sister’s bodies being blown to bits in the battles against the Nazis. They knew what killing looked like.

Secondly, leaders would be taught classical history – meaning the stories of how power corrupts the great and good and leads to their destruction. The purpose of these stories is to make leaders constantly on the lookout for delusion. Pride comes before a fall.
What the classics teach is the central importance of virtue – that is the belief that some things are good and to enact them is an end in themselves. The corruption of the elites begins with the degeneration into the calculation. To act not out of honour or duty but out of expediency.

The ecstasy of the Enlightenment was the discovery that there could be something else other than arbitrary force and plunder- the endless murderous cycle. People were no longer the playthings of Gods and Kings. Up to this point the rich and powerful thought nothing of slaughtering and raping those who were considered outside their moral community of kin tribe or nation. The “other” was fair game – in the same way as most people think about animals today.
The Enlightenment created a new category – the Human. And this category had intrinsic rights – that is rights that were inalienable- meaning not open to negotiation. Inalienable Rights are twofold – the Right to Life and the Right to a Livelihood.
The notion of Rights is inseparable from the notion of War and Revolution. The reason is clear and simple: if rights are inalienable then, if they are violated, the human, more especially the citizen, has a right, and indeed a duty, to rebel. This is not a vague or voluntary matter. Modern history is packed full of hundreds of examples of where this violation has triggered the revolt.

In other words in the modernist period of history from approximately 1780 to 1989 there were clear lines in the sand. If an elite or regime or foreign power violated the Right to Life and the Right to Livelihood it was clear what a human was to do.

In the post-modern period since 1989, all of this has broken down and this is the primary reason for the accelerating collapse of liberal civilisation in its widest meaning. There are no lines in the sand, only “positions” and verbal clashes over positions. Action – that brutal intrusion of objectivity, is a taboo for the post-modern cultural elites – hence the horror that XR and JSO do things “that could cause harm”. It is inconceivable to these postmodernist critics that “harm” is already going on in the world because they don’t believe there is a real-world – only views and perspectives.

A leadership culture which cannot draw a line in the sand is a culture which will soon collapse under the weight of its cowardice. This is the culture of contemporary academia, the administrative professions, the NGOs, the political parties, and the pillars of the present regime.

The classic example here is COP26. It is now blatantly obvious that the corporate class has no intention of stopping the world from going over 1.5C – no surprises there. This inevitably means the destruction of both sovereign states and the lives of billions of people. If this is not the most obscene violation of Inalienable Rights then god knows what is.

The modernist response is clear. Make an ultimatum and then, if it is ignored, declare war and/or rebellion – in our context engage in civil resistance. This is not a calculated act, it is not a matter of winning – it is a matter of virtue: honour and duty. If you violate the sacred I will fight you to death. Remember the resistance in World War Two. When the very basis of civilisation is threatened you are either in resistance or in collaboration.

Let me be very concrete and specific about what has to happen here. As we go over 40C this week a letter has to be written by key leaders and organisations in the liberal class giving the UK government a date whereby they have to undergo specific and concrete reductions in life-destroying emissions of the deadly poisonous gas which is CO2. If this response is not substantially responded to by this date, signatures to the letter make a proportionate and constitutional response to the regime’s treasonous betrayal of its primary responsibility in any democracy – the preservation of Life and Liberty. The leaders lead their people into central London, or the capital in other democracies, and blockade the transport systems and government buildings until they are imprisoned or are successful. That’s what believing in rights demands of you. Don’t use the language of Rights unless you are prepared to act to protect them. Virtue signalling about rights in the present context is beyond contempt.

The inability after COP 26 of the liberal class to rebel desecrates the very essence of the Enlightenment proposition: that Rights are Inalienable and thus Non Negotiable. The infinite criminality of this class is this: their unwillingness to defend their core values is most likely to usher in a 10,000-year-long return to the era of plunder, slaughter, and rape. There is no greater example of moral vandalism.

Let me say that again: there is no greater instance of moral vandalism – than to stand by in 2022.

And this is why I experience hatred for these people. After all, the main reason we have not got to a critical mass of mobilisation is because they are sitting on the arses making lame excuses for their cowardice. They are the greatest traitors to our sacred traditions.

But what I think is pretty irrelevant. The point is this: they will be seen by the next thousand generations as the vile creatures who stood by and let it all get thrown away. They will be the contemptuous idiots in future movies like the Nazis’ collaborators are in today’s films. In the key scene where the heroes plead for support against evil, these are the people who just turn away and the audience goes WTF. Think of the top journalist in the Wall Street Journal scene in the Big Short. If you haven’t seen the film watch it – or watch it again – it shows actually what I am talking about here. Everyone in authority is shown to have zero brain cells and zero sense of duty.

Here’s the deal: In End Times you are either a rebel or a collaborator. That’s what End Times means – a time when there is no middle ground. If you are in doubt, read about the French Revolution or any other history of the collapse of an elite under the unbearable weight of its hubris.

There have been many Marie Antoinette’s in history but never more than within our present-day elites.

What I want is to open up. I want to know what’s inside me. I want everybody to open up. I’m like an imbecile with a can-opener in his hand, wondering where to begin – to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I’m sure of it.

I know it because I feel so marvelous myself most of the time. And when I feel that way everybody seems marvelous. Everybody and everything. Even pebbles and pieces of cardboard, a match stick lying in the gutter, anything, a goat’s beard, if you like. That’s what I want to write about. And then we’re all going to see clearly, see what a staggering, wonderful, beautiful world it is.

Nihilism actually means that nothing has intrinsic meaning, which is not out of line with Buddhist thought. It was a response to the Christian idea, which developed further during the Renaissance, where everything is infused with the mind of God, so that some things have intrinsic meanings. Then the nihilists came along and said that there is no intrinsic meaning. If you attach that in the direction of Buddhist thought, then the meaning that we create and assign to things is based on our conditioning.

Nihilism has of course drifted in our culture of fastness, where nothing is very deep, into an idea that nothing has meaning. But “nothing has meaning” as a concept is very different from the concept of “nothing has intrinsic meaning”. So in some sense, the nihilism of “nothing has meaning” would have you justify detachment from things – it doesn’t matter what you do because nothing matters. It’s very different from the way in which we make up meaning that we assign to things. Because each of us assigns different meanings to the same thing, there is no single meaning to something.

We know that we live in a body that will grow old, we know that we live in a body that is subject to sickness, and we know that we live in a body that will die. On that side of things, where nothing ultimately matters, it can be paralyzing, in terms of our willingness to explore what it’s possible to find out about this human life. So I do not mind the nihilism of things not having intrinsic meaning, where each person’s sense of meaning has value in it. I am not for the Renaissance evaluation of things that are holy and things that are not holy.

I have never resonated with the idea that there is a cosmic meaning to things which is fixed. I did not really have much of the experience of sacredness, until I started to do the Six Lamps practice, a Tibetan Bon practice, which opened up the experience of sacredness for me. But one of the things I know from practice is that you tend to have the kind of insight that is related to the kind of practice that you do, that if you engage in practices that typically produce a sense of sacredness, it’s unremarkable that you would have experiences of sacredness doing those practices.