Martin's space

Now the pumpkin plants are coming along fine and some are a considerable size, with dark green leaves... but all seem to have a little of disease - various forms of fungus, deficiency, or worse, and they have not all got the same thing. Feed makes quite a difference, and sunshine makes a vast difference - the plants that grew with the most sunshine are robust and have the least disease.  But issues are more complex... the marauding neighbours (illegal immigrants, mafia, needy east europeans, etc) from a couple of doors up seem to be absent most of the time now (presumably to escape the Police), but have left one of their number in the house, a mild friendly chap, fond of animals and a good gardener.  However, despite my incensed protest at the ruthless destruction worked on the garden plants by our 'home-grown local housing coop' (a ladder got stowed on top of one pumpkin planter position), with the right opportunity, I'd be on my way, non-attachment, leaving it all behind.

    

Polymorphic - means capable of taking many shapes or forms, any one of which, however may not show you anything about the underlying complexity. I met a couple of researchers planning a bat survey in the local wilderness.  To get to the point, in noetic, i.e through process of mind, terms, it most often means working ones way back in time, which is not always a safe thing to do when having to work in a weighted, loaded hierarchy of stereotypes, and that is before any consideration of politics.  TM teachers recomment short sessions of meditation - that way the meditator does not get bogged down with too many absorbtions.

 

I attended the Enfield Homes meeting, and found it a little odd to find myself at a meeting with so many of the tenant participants looking so old and so large, as if they could be all members of a sedate workers' rugger team.  I was surprised also to see a line up of so many council members (6 or more...) and official council workers all with a card on the front desk giving their names, but evidently wrongly assigned, and some of whom were actually falling asleep due to the balmy weather and banal agenda.  The overall administration did, however, give a sense of cordial attention to the fact that we all (almost) live on housing estates, and the meeting did not quite give rise to anything like the rather too fashionable expression of campaigning in the streets which we see so often in the news.

 

 

Fashionability, yes, that is why I was so careful not to get involved in discussions about my cultivating the garden of the disused house next door. People have to do the same because the news makes sense - and it was so long ago that Sikhs rights were infringed in Austria, and so angry campaigners in India set alight cars and fought with the Police. The latest news we get from Iran is that campaigners are out on the streets, furious about the unfairness of electoral process, and that same one - what is his name?... atomic track record... dinner jacket - got in somehow... although the country has a quite strong, and evidently active in voice, liberal traditions.  Meanwhile BBC and other TV reporters were sending abysmal quality footage from their mobile phones.  In bygone times, that would not have been acceptable for airing, but apparently people must have a direct impression as they must be able to suppose themselves free of repression.

  Where was I ?  Elaborating on a philosophic hobby and a combination of interests that has become my lifestyle.  About basic factors of persuasion in a modern society... and, of course, an Eco-monk has to be about as basic and canny as you can get, simply in order to "fit".  With an ecological understanding of wholeness now so widely understood as a responsibility, not merely philsophic nicety (but civilisation would deteriorate in human terms if Philosophy were somehow eliminated as a subject and endeavour - we would only have compressed categories working without meaning or value) perhaps we need a little more insight than that 'whole-view' that Christianity has from the Ancient Greeks. Whereas competitive prophesy is always a basic human activity, with evocation of higher, more impressive imaginative potentials amassing to dizzy limits of available god-inspiration, humanity is, of course, ultimately saved by the son/innocent-child/next-generation or unforseen yet-to-be-believeable context ...whatever such means in practice.

  There was a sense of foreboding before [local culture] Easter. An earthquake in Italy. Neighbourly antics. Extending a set of daily tasks to start the day, your local eco-monk went round to dig the garden of the derelict house next door (for yet to arrive squatters?  Well the builder-neighbour had been asked not to dump rubbish, the TFL owners of the property came to clear up, if not secure, after Council pest control...).  Nevertheless, the verve-excited  neighbour on other side wanted it all for own (carpentry?!) use, put own locks on door, gate.  Hm! Perhaps I had a little bad karma left from a previous incarnation as a drowned rat in a watering can. I reported a 'mafioso' face seen in intensive discussion above a fence to Crimestoppers - a relict of BBC Crimewatch TV.  About as anon as the weather (which turned foul); one blogs as at a public service payphone, almost "anon", but in public as public concern requiring initiative. At the phone booth were three security men dealing with cash box on adjoining web connection terminal - unruffled, smile on face, normal???!  I succeeded in getting a photo of a crowd outside a fuel station after a violent Police incident.  The national and international TV news reported that, after chaotic anti-G20, and anti-Nato demonstrations, a gang of would-be protesters had been arrested prior to attempting to break into a power station.  Meanwhile blogging remains a popular activity... despite the fact that this blog appears not to get to be read by anyone but The Police.  Maybe the seeker of the modern spiritual way begins to realise why appreciation of technological mechanisms and persuasive processes is insufficient in an advanced civilisation: where doctrine or tradition of persuasion lacks power of explanation, a philosophy or spiritual tradition of meditation and insight opens the way to a true sense of possibility.
      
  Could gardening be my hobbyhorse?  I was having to do something about the slugs in the garden: organic policy or not, they become a problem when warm wet weather sets in, but I cannot really so easily blame housing coop stalking policy for the fate that has afflicted my pumpkin seeds up until now... the slugs fall into the booze-filled pits, nocturnal winged rats steal the individually planted pumpkin seeds, but my left-over strawberry plants look oddly healthy (after pulling off/up the afflicted leaves/plants).  Despite the fashionableness of gardening, and shops selling garden products, chemical treatments for plants are not really to be recommended - from memories of over 30 years ago, working in a garden shop, I remember the old guy, with dribbling home-roll fag hanging from his lip explaining to customers what I know from experience, i.e. that fungicides are not really a remedy, just a temporary control, that the only real answer to potato blight is harvesting early, getting rid of the affected plants or soil.  Farmers inadvertently maintain the illusion of control that short-sighted middle-class suburbanites are prone to spending on.  Of course, in a big field with one crop, there is no escape for the disease-causing organisms, but towards the peripheries and suburbs the next breed of superbugs evolves, paradoxically the long-suffering worker bees apparently thrive on the variety there, too.
       
  The (plastic) compost bin tipped over in the rain over night, I forgot to mention that - maybe urban foxes, cat making a heroic leap from the fence, crazy neighbours, or just a combination of drenched conditions, bin on a slope, and the fact that much compost had been excavated out of one (access hatch) side of it...  result... one hundred weight or so of partly rotted compost which would simply not fit back into the bin, which could not be set back on its base.  So after much fork work I now have a few small heaps of compost around the garden; some of it naturally went over the garden fence, and the rest eventually got shifted and mixed, put back into the bin, on its base, and now on less of a slope.  That was over a week ago... rain storms have come again and gone...  Progress. 
  Went down with headache - various explanations, as an annual reminder of hell, but also possibly due to food poisoning, having eaten several cloves of garlic with sage the night before, or eventually getting down to shovelling masses of compost with my bare hands, not a very natural experience on a subjective level, and certainly a way of coming in contact with vast numbers of bacteria. Anyway, the headache set in after breakfast, and since losing temperature, I decided I did not want to die of cerebral aneurysm so slept it off under bedcover.  After six blood tests, which apparently went missing, and a biopsy that was probably never tested, and many other tests some of which I can only claim to imagine, I suppose, this body continues to behave as if more than averagely healthy, and in the present climate one would suppose one should dismiss spiritual seeking and consciousness as a form of rheumatism. A brisk walk improved matters, and I had my first jog as alternative to swimming for this season.  Those healthy activities, and improvements in my music making greatly restored the sense of unruffled well-being.  Meanwhile, on recent TV... not the Good Life but Reggie Perrin, not Survivors again, but The Flight of the Phoenix (remake, I think), not more demos and earthquakes but news that we are now waiting for swine 'flu.   
 
  I am a profound believer in economic advancement.  Having bought a little solar-powered garden pathlight locally for £1, I am now able to use it without spike to navigate between kitchen and sitting room, as it sits on my tray just nicely, and recharges from lamp power.  Just think, were I to buy twelve, it would cost about the same as a small car photovoltaic battery charger, but would give at maximum half as much light as the removeable battery powered LED lamp I have in my kitchen. The next lot of pumpkin seeds are coming along fine, with a little boost, as they get a privileged position after dusk, directly under my low-energy lamp.

 

The garden is growing oh so slowly, but I've plenty of compost to add, and cactus fruits mellow in the kitchen window by the solar panels. The corner of my tooth broke, chomping on a piece of raw "Daucus carota", so I visited the best dentist for miles around, in Muswell Hill; now my angle on the Buddha's Tooth relic no longer scrapes my tongue, after, during meals, etc.  Pope Benedict was on a trip to Africa.  What a world full of marvels and encouragement world those christian-inspired people suggest, if not logical connections.  My websites "multi-links" page now has a search facility that finds your choice of links from a HTML database (some might have preferred an XML approach, like I now have for both London Arts & Futures, and Eco Music & Festivals news, but it works a whole lot faster than some people's cumbersome server based PHP).

 

Attending the Unitarian evening gathering, the previous weekend, was a little more embarassing for a self-styled corruption-transcending monk, however...  New Scientist magazine had set forth a serious explanation of how the higher, more advanced, symbolic and relationship processing areas of the brain are activated when people think about and discuss religion; in chapel circles we always seem meekly cajoled back to the lowest common kindergarten denominator, conversion, each time (for the very first time!?) to simple loving relationship. Arriving a little late to a packed circle, I found the one remaining neglected seat, right by the preacher's lectern, and, around the circle, old and new faces, no trickster-inspired campaigners ready to fling #B9FF77 colored custard at any diligent mortal with remaining business credentials.  Democratically represented as included were the good variety of ladies inspired by various moderated/enhanced pagan persuasions, glorious music, and sharing, two young schoolgirls across from me, and on one side were poised, or entrenched, the stalwart taciturn UK Independence party rep with chapel choir representatives also, while from opposite I had an impression that men were somehow reducible to a combination of silent potentials - BBC/media, futures, gay and army advocates. With no opportunity to discuss the seriousness of the week, what remained was that I would not wish our good old Dutchman inundated, despite news of great increase in the rates of sea level rise - nor were any of the german speakers there ready to discuss recent shootings in a school in Germany, apparently.  If you  are a meditator, and you choose to attend such a meeting, you have to take the people and situation as you find it; thus, I did not have occasion to discuss the urgency of the common factor of furoré that we have seen so much of in militant crowds portrayed by the media on TV.

 

Relevance?  It would not have provoked any relevant sense of personal liberal agenda for me to have spoken of how the fate of western civilisation may have been pivotted on Police  officers being able to find a sufficiently advanced answer as to what to do about my website webmail being inundated with spam viruses and bots, while serious life and death matters previously mentioned to them had not so far been aired.  With the purchase of a short draught reciprocating bicycle pump and an extra connector to fit neatly in my new rucksac, on-going Eco-transport seems a little more assured.  Now I know how value is created and annulled on the world's markets - it just requires confidence and two connectors.

 

Another logic trap is all that business arising from the fact that people often seem so ready to dismiss onesided religion and augment equally bizarre forms of practicality. I noticed that in my diary for 15 years ago, there was a short note, about how organisation is created in understanding via a difference in levels of expediency - but of course it is all too obvious that God is not simply a higher class of more powerful schemer.  If you consider that christian teaching has never really been about whether structured competitive prophesy would mean teaching or management, but about humanised symbolic reference to dynamics of persuasive process that must exist in any advanced organised and knowledge-based society, then the feat of Science that appeared in the news recently yet requires some explaining.  A team had nobly organised themselves with an expensive ship and large quantities of iron filings and set out to stimulate growth of algae in the Southern Ocean, so as to try to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere.  But, they found that increased algae rapidly meant increased CO2 producing beasties feeding on it.  They might have been better had they started with some understanding of what is implied by the Buddhist idea of karmic cycles.  But then, a sordid event in the news on TV, a human foot with blue suede shoe found in river, reminded me of 1979.  At that time, I was working at solar heating installations and our small enterprise of fiendish directorship and ambitions was under test of gross conformist pressures, with the job of fitting a water-filled panel and tanks to the roof and loft of a Richmond home, under the outrageous leadership of a newly hired guy with blue suede shoes and the erroneous conviction that Baker's fluid would prove an excellent leakproof alternative to standard plumbers' flux and heated, soldered pipe joints... Well, I do hope that he did not meet a tragic end simply due to over-investment in a superficial attitude; unlikely to be the same blue suede shoes after all these years.   
Well, there is also a problem in that you cannot expect ordinary simple people to calculate or appreciate the results of augmentation of action in complex situations.  If you have 40 M squared of floor and you want to know how many square feet, then just knowing that 39 inches is about one quarter short of a meter will not help if you try to be accurate by adding 0.66% to one dimension, because the result is actually a 1.324356% increase in the total number of square feet.  Time I got out of this pokey old flat, I suppose.

And then we have the real answer to role differentiation and the wipeout of monetary value in stock markets worldwide.  One guy has the job of being a specialist in computer games, another has the job of being a specialist gambler on the stockmarkets - or so he thinks, and it is only later you get to find out that he was supposed to be working a in a respectable institution called a bank, or investments. I have that insight into why I did not bother for years as to whether my brother was manipulative or not. 

 

Alot of intelligent people miss the point entirely when religion is the subject - after all, are we not all potential philosophers, having been through school, and with natural tendency or ability to refine particular localised details of a subject?  However, call for religion (or mysticism) remains because other descriptions of net persuasive process in the big wide world fail when intelligence is a minority concern and crude logic fails mass inter-generational training requirements. Were one to prefer a generally available education in universal principles in persuasive processes, it would be difficult to imagine an advanced society existing without the understandings of necessary factors in persuasion, i.e. the ability of those "initiates" who awakened and inspired the formulations of organised religion to make good use of the means to knowledge extant in the society of their times.

Well, the good news, or "middling", at least, is that I've come out of hibernation, despite world recession not being at an end so far.  Slow moving, with much insulation, due to cold weather, but there are signs that spring has sprung.  Bulbs in garden are coming up; I put a few good shovelfuls of that dark rich compost (plenty of banana skins and collected leaves go into it) on the garden.  Strawberries look to be no good - spots are persistent signs of disease, so they'll have to be thrown out, crop rotated (pumpkins probably)... but I seem to be free of disease myself, so can look forward to a change of diet from the garlic, dorian & kiwi fruit purges and rye bread stop-gaps.  Time to look forward... to a political log-jam, I expect.   

The weekend was a moderate ordeal of new beginnings, so a somewhat spiritual, somewhat intellectual beginning to the week ...and with a cold wind from the north bringing snow, much rain, then leaving a little sunshine.

 

The Dalai Lama has warned of great dangers in the next 20 years, but there can be optimism of practical progress in dialogues.  BBC World service also gave us David Mamet on air giving the Alistair Cooke memorial lecture, mainly about how a playwright, as writer, can advocate free speech. Cooke formerly gave regular reports about USA on the radio and edited "The Vintage Mencken", although one cannot really say why, since Mencken's work "The American Language" was, apparently motivated by a dislike for the ways of the English in commentary and influence.  For people who take a systems view of things, Mencken's much quoted comment on how in every complex situation there is a simple answer - but wrong - really says so much.  Mamet promoted his skills, giving some sense of relationship, however, as we now know that Yeats is the next best thing to Shakespeare, and he declined to give comment on what his best expletive might be.

 

We were also told that political correctness is a form of totalitarianism. Hm! As for what is art - yes, and what remains of freedom - I'm not one to get involved in public debate in journals, TV or website, as to whether some artist has a right to display toilet facilities in a gallery as art. On the lee-side of drama, but with more impact, a priviledged writer with a disease could have made a visit to Bed ford shire with much the same effect, giving rise to concerns about the nature of art.  Presumably whoever did that thinks it is. A mundane level of artistic skill is rarely worth a koan, but one thing I found is that each book I've read can be summed up in one simple aphorism.

 

I remember commencing on Frank Herbert's Dune wondering if the work of reading it would be worthwhile. But vintage mystic works have been important to me in exploring or estimating the scope of such endeavour, probably why, years before the gate to the Internet reduced possibilities of reading, I read through all of Carlos Castaneda's engaging encounters with what can only be described, surely, as an alternative dimension to reality ...also not missing out on Richard de Mille's critical commentary. The mystical approach to life can be paradoxical in sense of directions, because often it is a paradigm that is opened for exploration.  In Colin Wilson's "The Philosopher's Stone" the interface of brain and imagination was seeded by a small piece of metal that dissolves, while in the film sequel to his book "Life Force", it was total vampire lust draining vital energies that was transcended by total lust of Life for itself. A more calming, mature influence for Wilson's entourage, "The Outsider" was quite influential in its time, as a hypothesis suggesting that the theoretical side of things may exist. What literary style for a limited public blog! Not relishing a bike trip in rain and gusting, I missed the Unitarian chapel meeting on the book of Job... ...the chapel book club has also been reading, for discussion, Barack Obama's  book, "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance".  What a noble effort! What good intentions!

 

Well, a humble eco-monk can get things right occasionally, and as skillful wayfarer points the way to alternatives.  I piled up the bags of clean recycled cans and plastic bottles for collection, and took those books back to the library - mostly on XML and PHP.  However, I did try reading some of "The Insider", by Piers Morgan, who does write quite alot, as well as eventually winning out on TV reality shows. Quite an insight into the 'influence saturated' chaotic world of a newspaper editor: 10 years of 'diary' including some events of momentous cultural impact (until he was sacked for official reasons, in 2004, I think it was).

Perhaps my little work "A Day in The Life of an Eco-Monk" will be published again in different form.