First Reformed [2017] by Paul Schrader

In 1976 Paul Schrader's script, made into the film Taxi Driver by Martin Scorsese, was released.  This was a powerful cinematic moment that reverberates into the present.  Last year, Lynne Ramsey's You Were Never Really Here covers similar ground; a broken isolated man uses extreme violence to liberate a child from sexual exploitation.  It was hailed by critics, particularly for Joaquin Phoenix's deserving performance, but for me it lacked truth.  It wanted to deal with the real stuff, the difficult stuff, like Taxi Driver had, or at least it wanted to give that impression.  It showed an unequivocal evil, child sex slavery, something that would justify the extreme violence perpetrated by the film's hero in the process of liberating a particular child.  But what was it really confronting?  The violence that perpetuates violence that justifies violence, a violent man damaged by violence who commits violence to stop violence.  Meanwhile, we the audience, who may not yet have been damaged by violence, are exposed to it.  To what end?  Is it artistically rooted, philosophically grounded, ethically justified?  Is this film really the modern installment of the true wake-up call that Taxi Driver delivered?  No, it is not.

In 2017, 40 years after Taxi Driver, Paul Schrader offers a film of equal weight, difficulty and integrity.  It may not have the same stylistic originality as Taxi Driver, but at its core it is the film's contemporary incarnation.  Ethan Hawke inhabits his character at least as fully as Robert De Niro did his.  He is Reverend Toller of First Reformed, 250 years old, a museum but not really any longer a church.  Abundant Life, with seating for 5000, is the local affiliated modern church, with a full congregation and corporate sponsorship.  Toller is asked by a woman to speak to her husband, an environmental activist overwhelmed with the destruction of the world and in despair at the prospects of the future, particularly about bringing a child into the world, as his wife is pregnant.  Toller finds the conversation very stimulating and in his own emptiness he takes on the man's vision, his disgust and his despair.

The delicate complexities of the situation are woven through the richly portrayed character of Reverend Toller, his internalisation of this despair and his response.  How does one choose to live in the world, engage with the world, having fully accepted that our culture is destroying the planet at a rapid rate.  Will God forgive us?  Or, more importantly, how do we choose to respond ourselves?  There is no prescription of course, there is no naive hope nor unrelenting despair offered, just the masterfully laid out texture of an intricate spread: what Toller sees, what he doesn't see, what is obvious, what is bewildering.  And how do we choose to respond?  With integrity?  What does that involve?  With denial?  What crutch will facilitate that?

In Taxi Driver we were presented with Travis Bickle's solution: kill all the people associated with this girl's sexual exploitation and take her out of the situation.  We saw this violence in graphic detail not to revel in it, not to be entertaining or give the film a gritty realism, but to see it for what it is.  If this is the solution, we need to look hard at it before we choose it.  You Were Never Really Here is an inferior film because it doesn't present the protagonist's response so dryly that we can see it for what it is, it presents it like a thriller, we are there with him, smashing skulls, saving the girl, being the hero, surprised by the plot twists along with him.  There is no philosophical complexity, no ethical integrity.  But in First Reformed we are presented with a situation - repugnant, complex, problematic - and although we have deep empathy for Toller and can relate to his anguish, we are not drawn into his psyche, we can see his strengths, we can see his faults.  We can see his thinking, we can see the solutions he has reached, we can map and trace his mistakes if we choose to.  We can contextualise his decisions.  And thus we have not an easy answer nor a nihilistic despair, but a complex tapestry, an invitation to engage, to think and feel, to make our own decisions; we have an extraordinary central performance and a masterful film.

Quinoa's Symposium Podcast - Ep 1: Death

The first episode of Quinoa's new Symposium Podcast.

A philosophical discussion recorded live in the Western Australian wilderness, in the tradition of Plato's Symposium or the Native American Talking Circle.

The topic of discussion in this episode is death. What is death? What happens after death? What does this tell us about the context of life, and therefore how to live?

Please make a donation to cover the costs of making this podcast happen. Quinoa is an independent artist with no income offering his work online, accessible to everyone.

https://www.paypal.me/QuinoaChrisKirk

Please feel free to contact me with any feedback or response.

https://www.facebook.com/chris.kirk.7503

For further great listening, check out my 24 minute spoken word performance about my experience of grief. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqQ6S3GrwRg

Perfect Mathematical Symbols

The mythology of our culture is that we are special in an unprecedented way; we have finally attained the rosetta stone, the ark of the covenant, the holy grail, the knowledge of good and evil, objective science.  We look back in pity at the civilisations of the past; theistic, superstitious, foolishly believing that their peculiar mythologies held any weight in the absoluteness of reality.

We believe we are very lucky to be alive right now.  We are secular, we are educated, we no longer believe in the futile mysteries and rituals of the past that seemed to separate people from the banal mundanity of reality, that which we find so undeniable and boring.

We understand that we can look back on the past with objective processes and make pretty good judgements in our ignorance of what fits into each of the grand poles of our sacred binary, true and false.  We can categorise all literature into fiction and non-fiction, as if some words contain perfect holographic pieces of reality and others are merely fantasies of the human mind.

We know intuitively what language is and how to experience it.  We go into a theatre and sit down; the lights go down, the lights come up, and we totally identify with the world displayed before us, we have a full emotional and intellectual response, remaining aware that it is theatre.  The lights go down, the lights come up and we resume our lives, having neither rejected nor been deluded by the play.  We are moved or inspired, we integrate the language of the play into an understanding that is the basis of our universe.

The universe is as we imagine it to be.  That is why we call the arbitrary constructs of our bureaucratic institutions the "Real World"; whereas to create a life in the wilderness, serving and depending upon the processes of nature, is to live in our own personal fantasy.

This is the world demanded of us by the Reptilians, by the One Percent, the world we consent to whenever we send our children to school.  The world of the ages, of mythology, of magic, of mystery, of entities and astral dimensions, of divinity and sacredness, has been proven to be a self-delusion.  It's not true and it never has been true.  All past humans were ignorant and only now are we on track.  We know we don't know anything, but at least we know what we don't know now.

At least we can completely shroud our lives in information and entertainment until we don't have to experience them anymore.  At least we can capture reality, from the atomic to the astral, in perfect mathematical symbols.  Those symbols may be too complex for us to understand, but it's nice to know someone understands them and can thus hand down the tablets of reality from the holy mountain of the laboratory.

One day, we hope, all of reality will be contained in perfect mathematical metaphors, all mystery will be explained away.  Safe from ambiguity in our perfect world, all the jargon of science will have trickled down into common language.  The world will make sense.  We will be perfectly conscious of our irrelevance, we will have become provable abstractions, no longer succumbing to subjective experience, no longer experiencing the world at all, no longer merely human, the perfect world conforming to our perfect models.

The loving power of attraction

I am a pervert impeded only by my respect for those I am attracted to.  I want to consume them like a delicious meal whose intense scent makes my tummy rumble, but it has to be voluntary.  It's really not fun unless the intimacy is a mutual desire to know each other, to protect and nourish each other.  There's nothing wrong with a bit of exuberant sweaty sexiness when everyone understands and is comfortable with its meaninglessness, but I'm reaching for something deeper.

Why am I sexually attracted to straight men?  Some masochistic desire to deny myself?  Some dangerous idea of a challenge?  Or maybe I know that when a straight man allows me to gently graze my fingers down the tender sides of his torso, or lightly touch my nose to the open pores of his neck in naked embrace, then the purpose of our encounter really is to communicate, to open ourselves, to touch another human being across the tortuous divide of our individual incarnations.  It is not enough for me to find someone whose peculiar fantasies match my own so that we can get each other off pleasantly for an hour or three.  I'm looking for something else, but I'm still letting my sexual desire guide me.

Perhaps our attractions, momentary though they often are, are deeper and more profound than we usually acknowledge.  Maybe our beings are interconnected in ways that we cannot fully know or comprehend.  Maybe beauty is a form of communication, and when someone is beautiful to us they are demanding our respectful attention.

I have the utmost respect for the messages my body sends me, surely the only reliable source of information about how to exist in this world.  When someone's beauty draws me towards him - I don't know why I am mostly attracted to men in this way - I feel an empowering surge of energy, love and focus.  I give this man a focused attention I would not bother with if my attraction had not drawn me towards him.  I try to breathe into the intensity of this feeling, to not scare him away in his civilised vulnerability, and whether I like it or not I respect him enough to not leap on him and consume him like an overripe mango or a stolen block of chocolate.  I look into his eyes and wait to see if he's brave enough to match my gaze.  I move towards him to see how proximity feels.  I want to touch him, I want to talk to him, I want to smell him, but what I want is not important.  What's important is that which moves between us.

During the summer, when I was strong, confident and full of lusty joy, a young man smiled at me at a festival and I was instantly in love.  I saw him leaping around like a big dumb kid, two metres tall, 19 years old, surely as horny as me.  One day I finally approached him, I gave him a head massage, he relented further into a back massage before we finally spoke.  That night, with my heart pounding and my genitals filling with warm blood, we snuggled together and talked.  He had a lot to share with me and for some reason I was the exact right person to tell.  For hours we talked and I listened joyously in the warmth emanating  from his clothed flesh.  He allowed me to press up against his unspoken but unambiguous boundaries and I was happy to give every particle of love that my attraction provoked.  When the conversation was finished he said goodbye and rushed off into the night.  Though I was still so horny I had to masturbate to relieve the tension, I felt totally satisfied that our connection had been completed, that the mutual moment that my sexual attraction had drawn me into was fulfilled.

Apparently we had a mutual need that his beauty made apparent to me, I confronted that beauty, uncertain of what would be required of me, but comfortable in our mutual ability to see and hear one another's needs and feelings.

So what if I develop a trusting friendship with a straight man with whom I am sexually attracted, whose painful and delicious beauty compels me to give him the attention I would otherwise not bother with?  Is my love real or am I just trying to get him naked?  Will he trust me that my love is stronger and more real than my perversion?  That my respect and desire are totally indistinguishable?  Can we fully embrace each other and what is emphatically real between us?  Or must we fear the confusion of moving beyond the cultural roles that are supposed to define our relationships, as if every needy, joyous and sacred moment we share can be correlated to a series of distinct categories?

I cannot relate to any of these categories, so if my behaviour disturbs you you have to tell me.  To me, every moment of genuine connection is something new, a step beyond a culture that separates with words from the world of experience.  It is entirely unknowable, rather it is tangible, we can smell it, and feel it in our belly.

If we feel safe, if we feel so inclined, we can draw closer together.  We can find a place where the state will not charge us with obscenity and we can enter fully into the surrender of trust and intimacy, whether sexual or emotional or linguistic.  In this moment, my perverse sexual fantasies are profoundly irrelevant, and yet it was my insatiable sexual attraction that drew me towards you initially.

Why do I call myself Faggot or Queer in this lifetime?  "Faggot" comes from the fagus tree, branches of which were used to burn witches or heretics at the height of European theocracy.  At this time "heretic" was indistinguishable from "homosexual" and so it is that faggots like me are the heretics of a culture that seeks to homogenise our diversity.  Even gays are supposed to get married and get mortgages now.

Having failed to destroy homosexuality the theocratic culture we all continue to perpetuate is seeking to draw all faggotness into its narrow bubble of normal.  They tell me my faggotness is supposed to separate me from the luminous beauty of your relative straightness.  I refuse.  I am not gay, the opposite of straight, I'm a faggot, which has no opposite.  Perhaps I'm lucky to not live in a time when the stake is my opposite and burns me at the state as a heretic.  Perhaps for this reason we need not be so brave to reach across the divide and touch each other.

Why do I call myself Queer?  Because my role in my tribe is to queer the straight, bend the rigid and blur the boundaries; to confuse the rational, to embody the ambiguity and to kiss you if you want me to.  I won't tell anyone.

Fight Club

Fight Club (1999) is considered a cult classic by those who praise it for its brutal critique of the meaninglessness of modern urban life. It is condemned as “irresponsible” by some critics who claim that it advocates violence. I claim that both of these positions reveal a total lack of insight into what the film is actually saying, and an unwillingness or inability to read the text of the film as a whole.

It seems that all criticism of the film focuses only on the first half. The first half depicts a man living a consumerist lifestyle in an anonymous American city who meets a powerful man who inspires him to make radical changes in his life, primarily through all-male meetings of consensual bloody violence called Fight Clubs. The debate about whether violence is a legitimate response to a suffocating culture of submission is a legitimate one, but not one that will ever be meaningfully discussed in mainstream media. State institutions have a monopoly on violence. End of debate.

The film is stylishly designed, charmingly performed and its philosophy is quotable, the only problem is the second half, in which Fight Club becomes Project Mayhem. The second half appears to be nonsensical but a rather cynical message can be drawn from it.  Whether the destruction of credit card companies to erase personal debt without loss of human life is a legitimate response to capitalism is not a debate the film encourages. These men are not depicted as free-thinking radicals liberated from wage slavery, but as a mindless army blindly following the orders of their deified leader.

Maybe the anarchists, activists and eccentrics are feeling validated by Twentieth Century Fox for offering them entertainment that presses the alienated buttons they have been sullenly nurturing and so resist a critical examination of their beloved product. The revelation that the two main characters are actually the same person is merely dismissed as bad plotting, but is much more self-aware and manipulative.

There is a tiny clue to the true “twist” in the film. There is a comment in the narration that we hear but do not understand, and so forget. This is an effective method of subliminal messaging that is demonstrated in the film by Brad Pitt's character inserting single frames of pornography into children's films. “It's called a change-over. The movie goes on and nobody has any idea.”

Everyone knows that different genres are designed to induce different feelings in an audience; horror movies scare, comedies make you laugh and thrillers thrill. Fight Club starts off as social commentary, designed to make you think, and moves into thriller, designed to cease thought by getting you excited. Most thrillers have completely inane utilitarian plots. I worry about thrillers that have actually raised serious and complex issues.

The hero of the film, who has spouted all this quotable philosophy, is completely insane. It seems the story so far has been an episode of acute dissociative schizophrenia and if you are on the protagonist's side you will stay on his side as he wakes up from this episode, realises that he is Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, and attempts to stop the progress of the destruction he has instigated – blowing up the credit card companies – because it is obviously wrong.

The film successfully negates everything of interest that has been presented, and does it all in the mindless thriller genre, so the cult followers of the film can remain willfully ignorant to how they have been manipulated.

When the protagonist realises that he is unable to stop the destruction of the credit card companies, he decides to kill himself. He shoots himself in the mouth, both killing himself (Brad Pitt) and not killing himself (Edward Norton). He has thus liberated himself from the man who liberated him and so is now free to watch the destruction of the buildings he tried to save.

For the first half of the film we are Edward Norton and our minds and lives are opened up by Brad Pitt. The second half of the film then reveals that Brad Pitt is a lunatic who must be stopped and that actually he is a part of us, he is an aspect of ourselves that we must destroy. We enjoy the destruction vicariously through this film, we buy the DVD and maybe even the t-shirt. Our inner anarchist is stimulated, excited and finally subdued; put back to sleep for another decade of employment, consumption and the thought-provoking philosophy of Hollywood studios.

from The White Goddess; by Robert Graves

My thesis is that the language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry - "true" in the nostalgic modern sense of "the unimprovable original, not a synthetic substitute".  The language was tampered with in late Minoan times when invaders from Central Asia began to substitute patrilinear for matrilinear institutions and remodel or falsify the myths to justify the social changes.  Then came the early Greek philosophers who were strongly opposed to magical poetry as threatening their new religion of logic, and under their influence a rational poetic language (now called the Classical) was elaborated in honour of their patron Apollo and imposed on the world as the last word in spiritual illumination: a view that has prevailed practically ever since in European schools and universities, where myths are now studied only as quaint relics of the nursery age of mankind.

Living in houses

It's time to get back to the earth. Living in houses destroys us in more ways than we can comprehend.

For example?

Sleeping patterns. There is one reason why we don't go to sleep when it gets dark and wake up when it gets light. Houses (and electric light). One example.

Partying and live music is another good reason we don't go to sleep when it gets dark.

I guess if things were different we would party and perform live music during the day, or at night under the stars and especially the full moon and around the fire (rather than in houses).

They promote compulsive behavior. They disengage us from reality; earth, air, water, sun, other plants and animals. They separate us from our neighbors and even our friends. In houses we sleep in different rooms and different beds; when we sleep on the earth we naturally sleep together, if only to keep each other warm.

Agreed Chris, I am completely off balance after coming back from Mexico, main reason being where I'm living.

If you clean up your house sufficiently, you will be vacuuming the floor until you are back on a healthy living soil and you will be dusting the roof and walls until they no longer protect you from reality and the air flows and the sky is visible in all its beauty.

I am a fat slob.  I live in a house.  I may not be actually fat, but I feel like I am.  When I eat a big meal I look at my stomach, it juts out rudely.  After eating a big meal, I feel like eating.  While eating I feel like I should be doing something, like reading or watching TV.  I want my food to be cooked and heavy with carbohydrates, specifically crude grains; fried rice, tortillas, bread or pasta.  I eat because there is nothing else to do.  I eat because I can't relax.  I eat because my environment is entirely uninspiring.  I create my own space, I cover the walls with beauty, I keep it clean and I fill it with comfortable furniture and meaningful objects.  I enclose myself in this space, surrounded by these objects, alone.  Here I am able to create a fantasy world, in my thoughts perhaps, or when asleep in my dreams.  At my best I create stories to reach out to the world from this space, but usually I don't have the energy.

I remember when I used to be alive.  I used to sleep on the beach.  I used to make fire before going to sleep at night.  I used to fall asleep looking at the stars.  I used to breathe fresh ocean air, cleaned by the salt.  I used to run naked up the beach when it was empty and leap into the water with exuberance and submission.  The ocean would always deposit me back on the sand, safe and refreshed; reborn.  No matter how many hot chlorinated showers I enjoy I cannot recreate this type of cleanliness.  No matter how many times I masturbate down the drain pipe I never have the feeling that I have entered the vagina of the Earth and been accepted.

I am a filthy smelly bum.  I sleep in the park.  I carry bags around with my everywhere I go.  I have everything I need on hand.  I sleep in the bush, surrounded by trees, cosy on a yoga mat in a sleeping bag, wrapped up in a woolen blanket.  When I wake up in the morning I eat my stolen breakfast on a picnic table in the sun.  I wash my hands and face and collect water from the public toilet.  I rarely shower.  Sometimes, when I am on a crowded bus or in a crowded cinema, I feel self-conscious about my smell or wonder if I have dirt on my face.  In the park this does not matter.  I love being in the city, I love to meet people and to have experiences and to expose my self to cinema and theatre and live music.  But public transport and shedules are so stressful in comparison to the world where the clock is the sun and the moon and the agenda is sitting on the earth and urinating on a tree.

When I am in a house I crave to be alone, to have my own room, to be able to close and maybe even lock the door.  When I am outside I love to sleep with everyone, in a row, to snuggle, to keep each other warm.  I look at the pigs I live with, sleeping in piles, and I envy them.  I sleep alone in a bed.  I sleep on the earth by the fire beside all my friends.  I sleep in a pile of humans in the bush. 

The Homosexual Solution

There are too many people in the world; too many human people to be precise.  Derrick Jensen suggests that with six million human beings on this planet, we are actually taking away available biomass for the life of other species, all the non-human people who are dying rapidly.  Aside from the denial justified as morality, the morality that it is wrong for humans to die, even more wrong than other species dying, there are solutions to the population crisis that are worse than the problem, reeking of the worst totalitarianism.  Some people claim these solutions are already happening, that the governments are poisoning us through our tap water.  Others resign themselves to the necessary unpleasantness of some mass natural disaster, like a tsunami or earthquake.  Some people stress the importance of solutions allowing the economy to grow, some value solutions that adhere to pre-ordained codes of conduct, such as laws and dogmas.  No one seems to suggest pleasure as a guiding principle, or love as a process.

Why are there too many people on the earth?  Isn't this a silly game to be playing?  Surely one billion is more than enough human beings to praise Economy and Yahweh.  There is evidence that in previous human societies, tribes that lasted sustainably for thousands of years, population was controlled.  Some people hear that they killed foetuses and infants and disabled people and are horrified at the idea of human beings dying.  There is also evidence of very simple birth-control methods involving simply awareness of a woman's menstrual cycle, surely the sort of information that was violently repressed by the Catholic Church during the Holy Inquisition, or women burnings.

My suggestion as to why there are so many people on the planet is the same reason that we created all these civilisations that are merging via globalisation into the mega-culture that will digitise the planet.  Grain.  Civilisation, and therefore ever-growing population, is a result of the addiction of an entire species to grain.  Look around the world, every civilisation is defined by their grain.  There are the American corn cultures, the Asian rice cultures and the European wheat cultures.  Apparently 75% of the food eaten by humans on this planet is these three grains.  When we were gatherer-hunters, back in the garden, we would have eaten a wide variety of plants, whatever was available in our environment, taking a little from each plant so the plant could continue to flourish and provide.  We would never have eaten huge amounts of one thing as agriculture allows.  But then we discovered grains, wheat being the most popular in the world, native to the Fertile Crescent as civilisation itself is.

Why would we create agriculture when we were living a balanced life in which nature provided us everything we needed, we did not take too much and we did not threaten our environment with over-population?  Grain.  We discovered grain and the more we ate the more we wanted to eat.  I have noticed that when I start the day with a big bowl of satisfying comforting nutritious organic oats I am hungry again an hour or two later, much hungrier than I would otherwise have been.  It is no secret that these things that we use to bulk out our meals, to "fill us up", actually expand our stomachs and therefore fail at the one task they are given.  We grow up in a culture of lies.  I was told throughout my childhood by advertising and all my elders, that dairy is a source of calcium.  Scientific tests show that cow milk contains calcium, they conveniently do not mention that the human body cannot assimilate dairy and the accumulation of dairy in the body actually leeches calcium out of our bones.  There are many lies around, but the greatest lie of all is that grains "fill us up" when they actually expand our stomach.

We are addicted to grain and we can't stop ourselves.  Why would we create agriculture when it is so much easier to gather?  We decided to work hard stripping the land and planting monocrops of wheat, rice and corn that require a lot of maintenance, simply so we can eat more grain.  This is very hard work, so to take some of the burden we make more children to help.  With all these additional human beings we need to grow more grain to feed them.  Thus, expansion.  More expansion equals more work equals more people equals more grain.  Soon there are so many people it is necessary to form cities, where we can organise ourselves and divide labour so we can enjoy everything more comfortably and easily that facilitates the growing of grain.

If you do not believe me, give me another reason why we would go to the hassle to create civilisation.  "God said, "Be fruitful and multiply.""?  I do not believe you.  A page or so later he curses us with having to toil with the earth and watching as the earth becomes dust; after the beauty and simplicity of the garden.

There is one solution that has been overlooked, that will enable our population to slowly decline, reduce violence against women rapidly, allow us to value and honour the children we already have and bring great pleasure to everyone who participates.  The solution is Homosexuality.  Women have been the victims of male violence for generations and it is going to take generations to perform essential and necessary act of healing this pattern of behaviour.  Why have women been the target of such violence - domestic abuse, sexual violence, witch burning and marriage?  To oversimplify, because they are women, because they have vaginas, because they threaten men's ability to control.  The solution is homosexuality.  Not only have marriage and heteronormativism removed vast areas of sexuality from human life, but the simple act of touch has been channelled into violence as its only suitable expression; wrestling being the healthiest form of this, war being the least.

All violence is a form of sexuality, and mostly it is men fighting men.  The solution is Homosexuality.  I believe that it is necessary for all men to be sodomised at least once in their life, otherwise a fundamental human experience has been lost and an entire aspect of the psyche has not been allowed to develop.  To empathise with those who are temporarily weaker or submissive to us in some way, we need to experience the receptive.  To experience the intensity of being penetrated is to empathise with the person you penetrate.

The solution is joy and love and freedom and sexuality and humanity and can be started and enjoyed immediately.

In the beginning was the word; in the end will be the word

In the beginning was the word.

In the beginning of the story is the word; in the beginning of the world the story depicts - the world the story inadequately conveys, the universe that the story dishonestly embodies - is the spirit, the unmanifest, formless, unspoken, the unspeakable, that which simply is.

On this particular day God, or someone without a name, spoke into existence the form in which he would temporarily experience the spirit that hovered over the surface of the waters.  The waters, it seems, are the conduit between the spirit and the form, the unmanifest and the manifest.  The water is receptive and selflessly conveys messages between these two dimensions, often bringing spirit into form through life in the material world.

God is like us humans and his every motivation, his compulsions and his true nature is largely hidden by the incessant noise of the voice in his head, obscuring everything but its own insanity.  Because of this no one remembers why God did what he did, any more than we know why we speak religions, wars and industrial economies into existence.

Often after doing something and not knowing why, God will simply wait for it to finish, knowing everything manifest is limited in time.  Or he will use the time to figure out why he might have manifest such a thing and what lesson it could possibly teach him about himself and about he universe.  At what point are we now in this process?  I suppose we are deep within this lesson of God, anticipating the end but with no idea where the end might lie.  It seems we've lost sight not only of the beginning of this process, we have lost sight of our present position, so desperately focussed on the end as we are.

If God can speak into existence the beginning, can we speak into existence the end, we wonder?  Or can only God speak the end into existence?  And if God can do so, why has he not yet done so?  Surely he's figured all this out by now and can end it all and inform us of the punchline.  Surely, we say.

So perhaps it is us who must declare the end, like we declare war.  In so many ways we have already attempted to say the right words, to declare the end, to announce to the manifest world that the story ends here, or at the end of this sentence, this paragraph, this chapter.

In the end was the word, and the word was spoken by the species who suffered the most, and who caused the most suffering, and the darkness on the surface of the waters was permeated by light, and the light illuminated and revealed all the curves, all the rhythms and vibrations of the waters who make up the living systems of the manifest world on the Planet Earth.  The waters know what time it is, and when the time is right the water will flow with an unrelenting momentum along the most gentle path to the vastness of the ocean, that of which we humans know so little, that of which we respect and fear much more than we would admit.

How can the beginning and the end be so close together?  How can the beginning and the end be so far apart?  Has this God abandoned us?  Is he observing dispassionately?  Does he love us and wish the best for us in some vague ineffective manner?  Is he the image of our own distant all-too-human father who we project onto the dark panel of our forgotten?  Is he the will and the intention and the powerful creator within us, obscured by the symptoms of our schizophrenia, falsely externalized and objectified to avoid the responsibility of manifesting our own necessary apocalypse?

In the beginning was the word, at least as I remember it, because I do not remember the beginning, my culture and my education have obscured the genetic memory that connects me to my ancestors.

In the beginning was the word, because all I remember is the story told about the beginning, made fully of words, revised and retold very recently.  When I truly listen and try to comprehend these words that reverberate through my body as the rhythms in which they are spoken, I become very confused and disoriented.

These words, this story, are like a nasty paranoia, separating me from the world in which I was born with my own resistance, my own anxiety about my inability to resonate with the vibrations offered to me.  I listen to this official story again, it is the same story, I notice, that is told in the schools, in the cinemas, in the speeches of presidents and parents.  It is the same story told in 99% of our books, 99% of our conversations and 99% of our laws.

I am trained in the perpetuation of this story, so when I don't listen, when I do not notice the vibrations moving through my body, the vibrations which may or may not manifest the first cancer cells to consume my earthly form, I can correlate the story with all the buildings, all the institutions and all the expectations in my environment.  Everything which does not correlate with the story falls into two categories: that of which we can deny the existence, and that which we can dismiss as "Nature".

"In the beginning was the word," I read in a weighty underrated overemphasized book that blatantly defies everything that is said about it.  I feel strong and confident and I dangerously allow the words to reverberate through my body as the spoken vibrations which they transcribe.  I am briefly confused by my inability to correlate the official interpretation with the intelligence innate in my body, my manifestation in the manifest world, my conduit between my home-universes.  I realize the words I am reciting in my head, read from the pages of this exceptional book, tend to create an image in my mind, like a projection onto a blank canvas, and do not seek to acquaint me with the reality I experience through the conduit of my body, therefore there is no reason why these words should resonate with my body.

I breathe easier and the paranoia eases off, I relax and am able to perceive my environment more easily.  I observe with my senses, create images and theories with my mind, and constantly try to place myself in relation to everything I find.  I test everything against the body with which I experience reality.

"'In the beginning was the word'?" someone says.  "What a crock of shit!  In the beginning was genetic determinism."  They tell the story of the determined Gene who made us all in his own image, who loves us and compels us to be fruitful and multiply and spread his good news around the world, subduing and repressing all other species in favor of the One True Gene, on Gene to rule them all.

In the beginning was the word remains because God must have used some word to speak this process into existence.  The best I can come up with is AUM and I get together with hundreds of people in nature and we hold hands in a circle and chant our word long and slow, with a full deep prolonged breath as a single word.  We focus and we respect the process and afterwards, in silence, we check the resonance with our body, with the sky and with the earth.  We notice the calm, the peace, and the acceptance with which the elements receive this syllable.

But the dream from which so many of us are aware we need to wake, this unusual and unknown and now unconvincing process that God spoke into existence at the beginning, persists and we must continue to live within its bounds.  We know little about this process or the reason for it, but we know that it is unacceptable because we are experiencing it as humans and the world we have culturally manifested does not promote human life.  We notice our dependence upon and interconnectedness with all life on this planet and we notice the cultural process persist in destroying all life on this planet and the environments in which life flourishes.  We notice the love we use to orient us, to stabilize and guide us in this world subjugated in favor of money as a guiding force and how love makes us feel beside love.

This world is unacceptable, we tell God, and he does not respond.  We tell our peers and they stare at us blankly; they don't care.  We gather together with others who have noticed and who care and we no longer need to state the obvious.  We do, however, need to continue living in this world, and moving through this process.

In the beginning was the word and in the end will be the word, but they may not be the same word.  We attempt various formulations and keep record of our closest approximations to the word that will finally bring about the ending that we're all anticipating.

In this world, regardless of the relationships we have with this or that deity, anticipation is not enough.

We are responsible beings, intelligent, creative, empathetic, adaptable, and we all must manifest this word in whatever form comes most naturally to us, that correlates with the innate responses of our body, our connection to the manifest, our connection to the unmanifest, the conduit for spirit and life and finally truth, that Holy Grail, that elixir which may just bring down this whole unholy edifice, this Babel Tower, this false god, this refuge from responsibility; the resonant realization that will release us from ourselves, from Jahweh and Allah and from the selfish gene, these demons who do not exist and therefore we cannot understand.

~

Don't tempt me with the few insidious myths that provide futile solace to my often overwhelmed heart.

When we breathe deeply we not only calm and centre our body and its modulating emanations, but we inhale the scent of our environment, we smell the hormones and the pheromones of each others' bodies, released via our pores.  We inhale the particles of light that we cannot see surrounding each of our bodies and we learn a lot that we cannot necessarily speak or think about with the language of our birth.

We are present for each other and that's all that matters.  I can feel the warmth and scent of your body and I feel love though I do not examine the conditions that accompany that love or the timeframe during which it is allowed to bloom and blossom.  I do not cling to it any longer than necessary and if I do I simply experience slightly more pain before inevitably letting go.

Smiling fully and submissively with my famiy

I travel from across the ocean because I dedicated my life to the human species, and I seek the most pure expression of human nature I can with my imprinted culture and language.  I seek to wash myself of this culture and language to the extent that suits me at any one moment, and I succeed only so far.  When an old man who only speaks Q'eqchi' grasps my hand with some unknown intent and I look into his eyes and can only say, "No entiendo," I realise I have shed little of what was given to me by my culture as a child.

I have found a culture full of refugees of the same culture I try to escape.  They come from North and South America, Europe, Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand; and almost never elsewhere.  They are my brothers and sisters and I do feel comfortable to express myself exuberantly and joyfully when I feel inclined.  We meet only temporarily and always in a different place because we share a distrust of permanence and an avoidance of responsibility.  We meet under many names, but there is a banner that has developed and which many of us wear with pride.  Under this banner many gatherings occur all year round across the planet.

I have met eight times under this banner, for one month at a time.  Over this time I have noticed our own culture developing, some of which is 40 years old, some has developed over many years and some emerges from the experience of a single gathering.  Like the culture that offered us concepts and objects to believe in and buy, this culture is utilised as a limiting factor for the maintenance of a shared experience.  How can a man who is embedded in a culture that he loves use such a cold sentence to describe the sight of 100 people singing, dancing and drumming around a fire under the fullmoon?  The night sky is thick with clouds and the ground is wet with mud, but this is not the reason; perhaps it is the waves of digestive disturbance that I haven't figured out how to avoid.  Perhaps I have cultivated an alienation from my own culture that facilitates the observations that the thoughtful appreciate reading on the internet or in a book at quiet moments.  When I am strong I throw my joy and my love around our Sacred Circle as an alternative to whatever else is going on and the more smiles I give, the more I have to give.  When I am weak I have nothing to offer and cannot accept the oat and hash "blissballs" that circulate as a pathway into the mindset of the crowd, my family, the culture we collectively cultivate and unconsciously consent to at every moment.

It is my job to contradict any culture I see developing around me, I tell myself.  At times of hysteria I promote calm and at times of cultural haze I provoke chaos.  But I also like to sink into the lap or into the gaze of a beautiful person who simply accepts me as I am, lazy or busy, poet or person, sad or happy.  I sleep alone surrounded by too much food and ants who often respect the space I borrowed from them.  My eyes open so wide sometimes that it must seem like a blinding headtorch in the night, perhaps this overwhelms the beautiful I most seek connection with.  I do not know how they respond to my rejection of the drugs - wheat, rice, marijuana, tobacco, hippie slop in huge pots, spiritual noise and new age chatter - or whether they internalise the rejection as if I believe in something different.

I believe only in love, not in The End of the Mayan Calendar or The Law of Attraction or the need for excessive consumption of overcooked grains.  I came here to open my heart and to have the most beautiful people open their hearts to me, I tell myself.  I came here to experience disappointment and love and ecstasy and whatever else I haven't found yet.  I came too far to be able to turn back when I feel sad from eating too many tortillas and peanuts.  I am here and I don't know who will invite me or where, but I will go where the most beautiful lead and I will be ready for whatever I have never experienced before and warms my heart and brings smiles to those around me and allows me to smile fully and submissively with my family.

Pain and beauty

I can only assume God gave me a human body for a reason.  I can only assume that my desires and compulsions serve some purpose.  Perhaps I differ from other people in that I decided that everything I do should benefit me in some way, as opposed to destroying or numbing myself.  This is a life-long process ending inevitably with death.  I have heard theories that the self-fulfilment process continues after death, that after death you transcend these concerns to a higher level or that you cease to exist.  I do not know, I only have memory of experience this side of death and I do not pretend to speculate further.
    I propose that it is possible to know and respond to a personal truth so complete that I can only assume that it benefits me after death, on inconceivable levels and throughout parallel universes in which I may or may not exist.
    You are reading this with a particular mind, a mind that seems to be strongly embedded in a body that is strongly embedded in an environment, this universe.  It seems to me that for most people most of the time they have limited their awareness to this double-layered reality of body and universe.  We struggle as a species and as individuals to maintain and expand a valuable applicable understanding of this body/universe reality while simultaneously aware of an incomprehensibly larger and more complex reality, experienced most commonly through dreams.  We perform many convoluted experiments to understand this body/universe but we primarily get our information through the five senses; taste, smell, hearing, sight and touch.  There is also an intricate network of psychic interconnectedness, but for the purposes of this chapter I will maintain focus on the relationship with the body.
    It is impossible to separate the body and the mind, but what does promote separation is the consciousness.  Unlike the body and the mind, indistinguishable, the consciousness can choose whether or not it listens to the messages of the body.  The body communicates with the consciousness in myriad ways, but today I reduce them to pain and beauty.
    We all know that when we touch something hot the body will send a message of pain to the exact part of the body that requires conscious attention and thus the consciousness disengages the surface of the body from the excessive heat.  Pain is extremely important in knowing how to keep the body alive.  Without pain we will never know we are killing ourselves.  Pain is designed to be avoided.  We don’t want to touch the fire because the pain makes it repulsive.
    However, when we combine this natural pain avoidance instinct with the intellectual superiority complex of the human consciousness we come up with the bizarre idea that pain is “bad”.  It thus becomes a moral imperative to stop all human pain on this planet.  Being a completely hysterical process disguised as logical and with the power of human organisation and technology, this anti-pain campaign causes a lot of pain.
    There is a tendency for governments to ordain themselves with the responsibility of ending human pain and so it is the governments who maintain “defence” forces who are constantly searching for a potential enemy to attack.  Ironically this process causes a lot of pain and despite the evidence that suggests that this process does not in the long-term create peace, it is important for the survival of the governmental organisations that they maintain the appearance of stopping pain through this incredibly painful process.
    The pain of poverty is a pain that seems to span all life-forms and all time.  In the same way that a tree in poor soil, lacking the nutrients to sustain life, will slowly and painfully die, a family who can no longer extract food from their environment because the soil is barren or the animals have emigrated following the destruction of their habitat or because they have forgotten the wisdom of their ancestors about how to live with the land and have the land provide will experience the pain of hunger or starvation.
    I have never felt the pain of true hunger.  This is because I grew up in a culture defined largely by the massive feat of organisation and technology known as Capitalism, a noble effort of humanity to cease the pain of poverty forever.  However, it seems Capitalism has a few painful side-effects.  Primarily, it requires a massive amount of organisation.  It requires the sustained efforts of almost the entire human population from age 18-65 to keep the mechanisms of Capitalism moving.
    To maintain this strict regime of working 40 hours a week for 47 years is apparently very exhausting and leads to alienation, depression, stress, cancer, addiction and of course the feeling of the meaninglessness of existence.  I have memories of some of these painful experiences and tend to link them back to my own behaviour, rather than blaming the system, but I do not experience them anymore and thus do not feel comfortable talking about them.  It seems the above painful symptoms are unavoidable side-effects of those who choose to dedicate their lives to Capitalism in the hope that they never experience the pain of poverty.
    From the moment a child is born into this world they begin to learn.  They learn about their world and their place in the world.  For depictions of a natural, chaotic human education read the novels of Hermann Hesse.  This process, known in Australian tradition as Walkabout, involves a confrontation with nature, where Chaos reigns and the individual must rely on the inconsistent support of synchronicity, God and the kindness of strangers.  One can never predict what will result from this individuation process, destruction, realisation, simplicity or corruption.  It is irremovable from the rhythms of life and the movements of nature and thus fits awkwardly with Civilisation.  Thus Civilisation has provided Education.
    The purpose of Education is to send every child to an identical structured environment to memorise an identical curriculum and thus iron out, as much as possible, the natural variations and discrepancies in the children’s responses to the world.
    It is possible that some children, precocious in their examination but short-sighted in their ignorance, feel some confusion about the state of the world maintained by their culture, seeing the control structures’ apparent anti-human behaviour but not seeing the pain that it alleviates, the equality of thought and behaviour, the alienation from the dangerously chaotic nature of an uncontrolled earth.
    A successful education therefore relieves the child from the pain of self-examination and potential confusion by embedding them deeply in the rhythms of Capitalism, repetitive and therefore reliable, smoothing out the defects and deviations of nature.  Having completed a successful education a successful child will have successfully managed to find a way to contribute while maintaining an arsenal of logical explanations and entertaining distractions from urges encouraging their spiritual fulfilment outside of the civilised mechanisms of Capitalism.
    Just as war can be a painful road to peace, so can Education be a painful process for the child, channelling frustration into bullying, channelling confusion into conformity and self-expression into drug abuse.  But this pain is inevitably necessary to maintain the cultural unity necessary to perpetuate Capitalism and obviate other natural forms of pain.
    The most commonly accepted form of pain is, of course, physical pain, caused by illness or injury.  To alleviate physical pain completely humans have organised the impressively complex Health Industry.  Health, in this context, is painlessness, because pain, deep within the fundamental unexamined belief systems of the Health Industry, is “bad”.
    Pain is manifest as “symptoms” which can be repressed with the aid of drugs like antihistamines, for the repression of the symptoms of allergy, anti-depressants, for the repression of the symptoms of Civilisation, and of course the epitome of the Health Industry, pain killers such as paracetamol and morphine, all of which help the civilised man continue for as long as possible in an unhealthy environment without pain.
    Sometimes it is necessary to target the source of pain by cutting out a cancer or removing an individual from society and placing them in a mental institution or prison and thus tackling the root of the problem and allowing the continuation of an unhealthy environment.
    One of the unavoidable side-effects of the Health Industry is the dependence on drugs and experts that alienates the individual from their own body, what it needs to maintain healthy and heal itself, how it responds to its environment and the substances it consumes.  The Health Industry, it can be said, is addictive.
    The primary intention of the Health Industry in relation to pain is to overcome death, an aim not yet fulfilled.  In light of this failure the Health Industry compromises by withholding death for as long as possible, desperately clinging to the last seconds of life, regardless of their quality.  It seems death, inevitable though it is, is the shameful failure of our anti-pain culture.  Death is the most painful thing of all, the prospect of death, the process of death and the results of death are unbearably painful for a society in so much denial about reality and what it means to be alive.  Who could argue with the necessity of stopping death when it confronts us with our temporality, our deep involvement with the processes of nature, loss and loneliness.
    My mother’s death was the most powerfully transformative pain of my life, stripping me naked of the supportive nurturing aura of love I had experienced since birth and thrusting me fully equipped with the responsibility and autonomy of adulthood into a world far vaster than I anticipated.  My mother killed herself 25 days after my 21st birthday, for which she organised a surprise party for me, designed to lift me out of the depression into which I had sank.
    The depression was caused by a new realisation of the personal and social possibilities of the world and a simultaneous lack of change of lifestyle to match my realisations, excessive use of marijuana and obsessive love.  My mother’s death, unlike her surprise birthday party, rocked my world to the extent that all my foundations collapsed and I was left alone in a terrestrial environment that I slowly discovered was not as dangerous, chaotic or lonely as I had been warned.

Pain has been one of the guiding forces of my life.  Unlike a recurring dream that repeats again and again if not acknowledged I don’t seem to need so much pain to listen and understand and make appropriate changes.  But sometimes I need a jolt of pain like a dose of ECT.
    Seven years ago I wandered down to the beach one Sunday after work, alone.  I met a group of people who excited and fascinated me, I went home with them and they became my friends.  One man in particular, Darius, 21, I found particularly fascinating and disgusting the first time I met him.  The second time I saw him we realised an intense unspoken connection between the two of us.  We were young and stoned and could not have imagined that this intensity between us was years of evolving friendship stretching backwards through time.
    We were all stoned and Darius cornered me alone in the kitchen.  He picked up a knife and held it towards me and he asked me to lie on the floor so he could cut me open and eat my intestines.  I refused, semi-erect and scared of death.  From this moment on his presence or lack of presence was my only concern, I was in love, I was obsessed.  The deeper I got into this obsessive love the more pain I felt at the slightest rejection, the more impossible it became to tell him how I feel and thus diffuse the situation.  My silent intensity increased, along with my marijuana intake and the pain of his absence would cause me to bang my head against the wall and to punch myself in the face.  I resolved the situation by finally sending him a desperate intense email about months of repressed feelings that I could not possibly say to his face like a human being.  He sent me a short, dismissive callous reply that stabbed my heart figuratively and provoked me to break my relationship with him completely, banish him from my life for a few years until I calm down.  His reply seemed exceptionally mean-spirited at the time but it was just what I needed, a shock of pain, because I had built mental structures and lifestyle structures to facilitate the feeling of a lot of low-level pain.  For some reason I needed that pain and I found a way of manifesting it.  Finally, I felt it intensely enough to change my life, to ease the pain.
    Somehow I knew that I would not see him for years and then our friendship would somehow be renewed.  He moved in with his mother and girlfriend not far from where I was living on the far north west coast of New Zealand and we reunited, free from the need to experience the pain we had caused ourselves and each other six years earlier.
    I fell in love again though, shortly after banishing Darius from my life.  My flatmate’s brother came to visit and he was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.  Samuel was 15 years old, with long blonde hair and soft white skin.  I wanted to raise him on a pedestal as an artefact of extreme beauty; I wanted to make love to him, fulfil my desire, worship his body and bring him pleasure.  I felt desire, admiration, shame and delight and I didn’t know what to do with this bundle of conflicting emotions and so I did nothing, again repressing my love as a shameful object.  I hid, I made outbursts, I ran away and I mumbled my desire and of course with such chaotic unstable expressions I created no manifestation of our mutual love.
    Three years after the instigation of this internal affair I had only one option left.  Samuel was working as a body piercer and so I decided to have him pierce my nipple.  I sat on his bench and he pushed his sanitised needle through my nipple.  I felt no pain, but a wave of heat passed over my body and I almost fainted.  He laid me back and lifted my legs until I returned to normal.  I invited him to have a drink with me and we had a nice talk; but I told him I “care about” him when I should have told him that I want to make love with him.  This initial meeting became nothing and I made another appointment for my second nipple.  I approached my second piercing differently.  My brother told me that having his nipple pierced was the most painful thing he had experienced.  I wasn’t convinced that my yearning for this beautiful young man was a lesser pain than having a needle shoved through my nipple.
    I lay down on the bench, I closed my eyes and I focussed on my breath.  I felt no pain, no discomfort, just the intensity of the moment wash over me like a single wave from the cleansing ocean.  I stood, thanked him and left.  He was surprised by my abrupt behaviour but I had determined to move on with my life, to provide that last dose of pain and then make room for a new love.  I got the pain I somehow needed through frustrated love until the pain was sufficient and then I chose for it to end.  Why would I cause myself so much pain?  I don’t know, all I know is that I created all the necessary variables to experience and prolong that pain until I was finished with it, then I orchestrated a rather convoluted symbolic situation in which to end the process.  Three years later I have fallen in love many times since and he is but a memory and my friend on Facebook.
    This was 2008, my final year in Auckland.  I truly tried my best to live the life I was educated to live.  I got my degree, I paid my rent, everything was taken away from me when I lost my mother, my home and my life purpose, I wandered around in confusion, I came back to Auckland to try again.  I tried again with Samuel, I hung out with the Hare Krishnas and I wrote and performed poetry.  I returned to Auckland for two full years after my depression and lonely wandering manifested nothing tangible.  A fulfilling life failed to materialise for me in the city, despite my honest attempts.
    I found myself, towards the end of my second year, experiencing the same marijuana-fuelled depression I had run away from last time.  There was so much existential pain in my meaningless life and I had no idea why.  I didn’t know it at the time, having spent my entire life living in houses, but I was suffering from what I would go on to call Domestic Compulsive Disorder.  I didn’t know what I could do differently, all I knew was that my life was meaningless and I had to do something about it.  I smoked more marijuana and stayed home more, with the comforts of television, internet, the bath and my bed.
    I found myself, late one midweek morning, cowering in a corner of the living room in a foetal position, my last cone of marijuana packed into my bong, unsmoked, the banging of my head no longer providing relief from the unavoidable noise of the pain I had made for myself, non-physical but tangibly palpable.  The pain hurt but I can’t say it was bad.
    I saw life as a wave of fluctuating ups and downs, rather than the steep climb from unconsciousness to enlightenment and at that moment, in that room, in that foetal position, I saw clearly the exact moment I hit rock bottom, as I had been aiming for months, and thus began the ascent up the other side.  I instantly felt my energy come back, so strong I felt indignation at my pathetic position and I channelled this manic energy into immediate life change.  I ran around the house smashing my belongings, the useless objects that weighed me down to a life that did not satisfy.  The pain had finally reached a sufficient level to provoke action.  That night I filled two rubbish sacks with useless objects I had accumulated and that sucked up the space around me.  I smashed my bong on the driveway, throwing it from the balcony and unintentionally baptising myself in shit-stinking bong water as it flew from my hand and momentum took the bong and not the water inside.
    So quickly and easily I was free and could spend the next few months clearing out the practical considerations before leaving Auckland for my first invitation to paradise.
    Living a healthy lifestyle in a nurturing inspiring environment I would lay in bed at night in utter peace, I would feel emotions moving through my body like blood, like water.  I tried to understand these feelings, to name them.  I felt happiness and sadness overlap until they were indistinguishable.  I couldn’t look at my life and decide whether I was failing or succeeding and therefore whether my emotions were happy or sad; my life was a blank slate.  I felt confident to do anything, to go anywhere, or to stay put and do nothing.  If I felt sick I would fast and go to bed, but I lived under a skylight on a mezannine and it was too hot there during the day.  I was always happy to get out of bed in the morning and face the brightness and the vast ocean and the sound of its waves rolling up the hill like an amphitheatre.  If I felt depressed or tired I found work to do or I walked the dogs down to the beach and I would return hungry and tired to eat and relax.
    Pain would pass through me quickly and easily.  The dogs would kindly and lovingly lick my wounds without me having to ask.  Every morning I would feel new, every time I dived naked into the ocean I would emerge refreshed.  When my hair was cut it would rot back into the earth, along with everything else that could not be recycled or fed to the pigs.  I would kneel on the earth to weed the strawberry patch, I would bend down towards the earth to pick my salads, and I would lie down on the earth in the long grass and masturbate looking at the sky.  Pain was not an issue.
    I had lots of friends, Auckland was a good place to make friends, the social networks were well-defined and interconnected.  I described my paradise to them and they told me they would come to visit, but mostly they did not.  Nothing was more special than the days when my friends did come to visit and I accommodated them in my bed or on my floor.  To bring friends to share paradise with me was all the joy I needed and taught me what the next step in my life was.
    The two friends who came to visit me, the only two not trapped by the accumulations and commitments of their lives, inspired me to travel freely with them.  I had all the time in the world, but still there was only time for the most beautiful people and so I dedicated my life to them.  I followed Bill and Lauren until there was more beauty this side of my horizon.  I followed beauty to Australia and returned to paradise to find the dogs dead.  I could not maintain paradise and pursue beauty simultaneously, so I chose beauty, dreaming that one day I would return to paradise with a precious friend to share it with.
    I met four Swedish men in Australia and travelled with them.  We experienced so much joy together, I fell in love with them all and they invited me back to Sweden with them.  I flew to Sweden, I saw my friends and I have not 15 months later returned to New Zealand.
    In 2007 I was searching for a new home and I was blessed to be able to choose from two delightful prospects.  I was shown around one house by a beautiful young man, sexy, friendly, and for this reason only one decision was possible.  I never made love to this sexy young man but somehow I knew when I first looked at him that I was being offered something in him.  Now, four years later, we are about to be in the same country again, drastically different people both, but a persistent connection, manifest in my experience of his luminous beauty and the continued potential of our friendship.
    The world is so open and giving to me.  I do not earn money and yet even material objects are abundant.  Because of my freedom and joy there is a lot of room in my life to pursue what is meaningful to me, to change my mind and pursue the best option, to not know where my actions will take me.
    I marvel at this world’s insistence that pain is bad when it continues to provide me with invaluable information about the world I am living in.  Beauty is the most important thing in my life and I pursue beauty relentlessly, though I don’t know what to do with it when I get it.  It is painful to be rejected, though only for a moment.  When I am accepted the joy can be so overwhelming it could be called pain.  When I’m feeling strong I can lie under the stars, lonely but at peace, feeling the pain of my yearning for my absent lover and smiling at this delicious pain.  Only when I hold my breath is the pain unbearable, when I breathe well I can be sure that I can go outside and urinate and it will soak into the earth.
    When I slash open my thumb or am attacked by Police I can’t help but ask, “Why have I done this to myself?”  “I didn’t mean to,” some might say.  “It was an accident.”  But it is never accidental.  When my presence, my actions and my relationship to my environment are entirely in my control I cannot claim that the results of these variables are accidental.  When I tell my friend that I would like a good cry because I never cry, and then I forget the comment completely, and then I move on with my life and orchestrate a series of events that results unexpectedly in me crying in the rain in Stockholm alone and then I return to my friend and she reminds me of my comment, I wonder if my dedication to the meaning and purpose of my life is entirely the responsibility of consciousness.
    When I am not making conscious plans, pursuing them and succeeding, am I a failure, am I failing to realise my potential, am I being led nowhere by no one?  That cannot be true when I find myself in increasingly surprising and beautiful places with so many exciting and beautiful people.  I have never been able to conceive of plans as complex and delightful as the turns my life has taken.  I would never dare hope for so much love and beauty and my imagination is not great enough to conceive of the wonders I have seen.
    Like Alice following the white rabbit down the rabbit hole I am ready to jump at the right offer and abandon everything I know for the unexpected.  I have been warned of danger by people who barricade themselves in houses but my experience consistently contradicts their threats disguised as advice.
    When I sleep on the bare earth I am safe from snakes and crocodiles and Police.  Even rain usually gives me the night to rest beside the fire.  I find beautiful people and I am not scared of them like I used to be.  I naturally give the most exciting the most attention.  Perhaps I will tell them how I feel, if appropriate, or maybe I will just touch their shoulder and look into their eyes.  Even then I have discovered it is difficult to look into both eyes at once.
    When I do what I am compelled to do I don’t see how I can fail.  My purpose, after all, is to realise myself fully in this world and then dissolve into another world via death.  If I notice a beautiful human my conscious mind may tell me I want to make love to them.  The truth of my body cannot be translated into language however.  Maybe I’m not going to make love to this person, maybe we are simply going to share space with the knowledge that I want to make love and he does not, and maybe this is sufficiently intense and valuable.
    I go to temporary Edens where my tribe gathers and the true movements of life, emerging from the earth, emerging from the space between the humans that excite and terrify us the most, emerging from the subtleties of our bodies, become our guiding forces and are intensified in the natural environment and the familiar social structure of the tribe.  The concept that some emotions or situations are “good” and others “bad” becomes too ludicrous to entertain.  The ups and downs are rich and dynamic, they are my life and I value them.
    One day I am feeling lonely and horny and want to make a connection.  I walk to the waterhole to swim under the sun with my tribe and my frustration is exasperated by my observation that everyone seems to be ignoring me.  I stand amongst the people, interacting with one another, thinking I want their attention but I’m too sad and weak to ask for it.  Eventually I storm off up the path alone.  Everyone else walks slowly together, but I charge ahead, angry at being ignored.  It occurs to me that I obviously want to be alone and thus I walk alone despite my habit of togetherness.  It occurs to me that all day I have wanted to be alone and successfully I have manifested this through the pathetic conscious idea that I desperately need someone to validate me with their attention.  If my intention was personal space then I am amazed that I manipulated my own consciousness to such an extent that I repelled those around me with desperation.  Am I ever not manifesting my intentions when my true will is this powerful and my conscious mind so irrelevant?
    I am not alone in this world.  When I follow a beauty I can only assume he wants to be followed.  We have chosen each other to share this experience.  We have chosen each other before our lives began, we chose each other in another dimension or outside of time, we chose each other via the unconscious psychic network that connects us all.  I don’t know, but I know that we choose beauty to communicate with each other.
    Why am I staring at this child I do not know, how we could be friends I cannot imagine, but your beauty singles you out like a spotlight and rest assured that I have noticed and I am ready to honour or love you the second the opportunity arises.
    The more carefully I listen to the messages of my body, the more it tells me.  It seems there is always a deeper and richer and more complex understanding to be gained from real communication.  Words may be limited in their capacity, but pain and beauty hold an infinite depth of perfect contextualised truth.
    I guess if I calmly and confidently pursue this beauty who presents herself to me I will understand what we mean to each other.  If I respond to the subtle pains of my body with respect and love then I may not need the gross extremes of pain I have created for myself in the past.
    Life is an ever-opening flower of incomprehensible beauty.