Once again I have been shamefully neglecting this site for a couple of months whilst I fried other fish. Well, not shamefully, as I feel no shame on this matter... and there will be rampant additions before too long.  Nevertheless, if I fall silent for a while and you wish to touch base or find out if I am still alive (I am) then as an experiment I am going to suggest that you search for me on Facebook and request friendship.

IMPORTANT: My facebook page is a personal page, not an author page, and I do not wear my carefully edited public face in this arena.  If 'bad'language or outspokeness, adult content or terrible jokes are likely to be offensive to you or would be frowned upon by those who rule your roost, you should not become a Facebook friend.  Having said that, most of it is actually very benign and uplifitng

PLease, nobody try to sell me anything or ask me to read their 1000-page novel-in-progress with unpronouncable elvish names (though I am sure it's fabulous).  Thanks

With the speeding up of the story many people are likely to feel increasingly confused, frightened and (therefore) angry. Anger and aggression are always fine distractions from what's really happening (ask any government!).

But not you! For you, this is an ideal time to become a world leader by keeping your cool, remaining loving and centred, not getting caught up in such goings on. If someone in their ignorance and fear burns your holy book, for example, don't play their game. Send them love and a wish for their confusion to subside. This way, the unbalanced negative energy they sent out is healed.

It's not always easy in the heat of the moment, but you can motivate yourself a little further by reminding yourself that if somebody is trying hard to provoke you (book burning, planes into buildings, or whatever foolishness) then their dearest wish is that you lose your cool, your temper, your wisdom and humanity - above all that you lose your control over your choices - and get sucked into an equally negative response. So if you want to 'beat' them and at the same time earn the right to be rather smug and superior (privately is best for being smug and superior: five minutes in front of the mirror?) then you will not play that game.

Kipling's lines are quite the thing here:

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,

Or being hated, don't give way to hating... ...

Then you will be flavour of the month!

(If nobody is burning your holy book right now, don't worry, plenty of other manic and aggressive behaviour about to try out these principles:))

Whether or not you put any faith in ancient dire prophecies for this approaching time in our joint story, the journey is certainly accelerating.  We are privileged to live in times of huge change, upheaval and challenge. Like DiCaprio and Winslet we are at the prow of the mighty ship leaning over the fresh waves, face into the wind, flying into the adventure, whatever it may bring.

The temptation might be to look at what’s happening in Japan, in Libya and the rest of the Middle East, in the ‘global economy’ (read previous blog to see why this doesn’t exist) and in our own personal lives – for no doubt you are also feeling the vibrations of the ‘new’ arriving, some sort of vague disquiet in your belly - and to think: Oh God, it’s all spinning out of control, and I am so powerless in the face of these great events, some so far away!

But YOU, my friend, have never been so powerful. And it is with your help that we are gonna get through this in splendid style. Trust me.

More importantly, trust yourself, for you are a little piece of the divine, with a personal inner hotline to all cosmic answers.

Feel yourself right now as standing (sitting, lying, hopping, making love*... etc) at the exact centre of the universe. Wherever you go, that centre goes with you, oh great and all-powerful one. Access to unlimited opportunity and creative potential. Fill the centre (you) with. for example, love and the universe is also filled. Simples, as the meerkats say in Britain.

This may of course all strike you as gobbledy gook, the ravings of a man sliding into some sort of delusional meltdown.  Or you may need a little practice to master the centre-of-the-universe feeling.  In the meantime, as a shortcut, every time you see a world event that makes you feel powerless, commit a random act of kindness just where you happen to be.  Just like paying money into your bank, it doesn’t matter where you are.

There!  You got the power, so relax.

(*If you happen to be making love on this cloudy, drizzly Wednesday morning in early Spring, you maybe don’t need any reminders of what an alchemist you are!)

Where were we? 

Ah yes.

Cooking your small fish lightly and lovingly. (See fishy blog below)  Working with the flow of all that is and not against it.  Accepting without judgment the endless playful movement between the expansion, noise and heat of Yang and the contraction, silence, emptiness of Yin… these are a great set of tools for almost anything that might come your way on Planet Earth, if you happen to be looking for a set of tools (or even if you aren’t)…

Fortunes, relationships, empires, even life forms: they all go in cycles. Our ancient four bears knew all about this and celebrated it with many festivals later appropriated by organised religion.  (But why on earth were they bears?  And why only four? Answers as ever on a stamped, undressed elephant please)

Around 1776, however, some ideas were born which hinted that Yang and only Yang was possible in economic terms.  I heard the British Prime Minister referring to these ideas only this past weekend.  It went something like…

How are we going to get out of our dire economic situation? Why, by growing the economy, of course. 

The ‘economy’ in the sense that politicians usually refer to it is, of course, an illusion (see ‘Collective Economic Hallucinations’ in an earlier blog for more illumination).  Regardless of the belief that houses, pork bellies, countries or currencies might today be worth one thing and tomorrow something quite different, the number of people requiring the necessities of life does not change drastically overnight, and – barring war or natural disaster - nor does the apparatus of production, the amount of farmland and so forth available to provide these necessities.  It is all a confidence trick.  By which I mean that the supposed value of the food we eat or the clothes we wear or the money in our pockets ostensibly depends on the (neurotic) confidence of those who work in the handful of major financial centres of the world.

The belief system that is paper money – no more than ‘a promise to pay’ – was once upon a time based on the idea that the national bank issuing such money would hold in its vaults enough gold bullion to cover all those promises, should everyone arrive and demand settlement at once. Aliens landing at such a point in history might have scratched their bulbous, headlike appendages and questioned why a particularly malleable and awkwardly heavy yellow metal should be the magic ingredient that allowed entire populations to play this game of belief and confidence, but this is all now academic as many decades have passed since those stacks of bullion bars sat in our capital cities as a guarantee of anything.

Global economics in this sense is a fantasy.  A bowl of rice has the same value today (should you be consuming that rice for your energy, health and delight) as it had a hundred years ago or will have at any other time you care to name.  No amount of sweat and heart attacks on the trading floors will change this.

Let us not be naïve, though. The fantasy is not without consequences in the real economy, in the everyday world where people grow things, make things, eat things, wear things.  A theatre full of people roaring that ‘yes, of course they believe in fairies’ is enough to bring dear Tinkerbell back to life, and believe me, a global population getting sucked into the grand economic fantasy is certainly enough to ensure that supposed fluctuation in ‘values’ is translated into real jobs, real standards of living, real day-to-day experiences… as far as anything is real in this world of magnificent illusions.

Because of the attention we give it – because we are all magicians whose ideas can create realities – money is energy. Here (you guessed it) we come back to our lightly-cooked fish.  How are we to nudge and coax that energy to our advantage? How are we to ensure that the REAL economy that pervades our daily lives is a sustainable and dignified and human place?

One way might be to get away from this post-1776 idea that indefinite self-sustained economic growth is possible.  Another might be to stop feeling so trapped by ‘the global marketplace’ and the need to compete therein. (yes, ironically and nonsensically the endless expansion idea goes hand in hand with a concept of competition, where every winner must have a loser)

Armed with the knowledge that wildly fluctuating values of things belongs to cloud-cuckoo-land (the trading floors and investment banks) and reassured by remembering we never have to subscribe to another’s illusion, no matter how large or bold, we might find as we look about us that our economic answers and power lie (not on some global stage, but…) in what is with us today/here/now; the skills, the relationships, the land, the produce, the collective responsibility of the place in which we live, the people with whom we interact every day.

After all, what would really get those appendage-scratching aliens boggled is that we are on the very threshold of the point at which the balancing act of available natural resources, population pressures, damaged eco-systems, desertification that threatens farmland etc.etc. could easily come crashing down…. And still we get all flustered about the price of oil and wonder how to ‘grow’ our economies

Gn kdsoudnlkak krkek krek  they would say.  Which, roughly translated, means ‘Cook your fish lightly, brothers and sisters, and the meal will go further’

During a recent period of illness I found myself awake on and off throughout a series of nights.  Mostly I just left the radio switched on next to me and allowed my consciousness to drift in and out of focus, sometimes swimming passively with the shoals of information, sometimes retreating to greater, shadier depths. Not only a restful way to get through painful, difficult moments, but also a chance to hear snippets of the most amazing things…

… and best of all these serendipitous chances was to wake almost fully at 4am and hear that one of my very favourite authors, Ursula Le Guin, was being interviewed.

Le Guin is, I guess, now in her eighties and had a host of fascinating tales to tell. She is the author of the only children’s fantasy series  - the Earthsea books – that can rival Tolkien in the sense and consistency and sheer intelligence of the background world imagined.  Her science fiction is just as accomplished and has won many prizes. (Check her out, if you haven’t before! Start with A Wizard of Earthsea)  What I had not known, though, was that she (like me) was keen on many aspects of the ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism.  She had quite a lot to say about world events during her long life and mentioned in particular one of the sayings attributed to Lao Tse:

Governing a large country is like cooking a small fish

Through the intervening weeks and into new health, this phrase has stayed with me, swimming in the depths and shallows of my own mind in a similar way to my own thoughts during that time.

You might ask: Why should governing a country be like cooking a fish? Well, the Tao is ‘the way’, the free-flowing spirit and energy of all that is, and if one wants to achieve the best results in anything, one does not fight this flow, one works with it, using the lightest of touches to bring about great things.  One observes neutrally, without a great clumsy personal agenda to stamp over the unfolding miracle.  One loves the seemingly good and the seemingly bad equally, as the ends are often so beautiful and surprising.  One allows inaction and silence as well as action and noise.

Cooking one’s small fish or governing one’s large country requires the same light, loving, balanced touch.  Do not overcook.  Do not drown with flavourings.  Allow the thing to come into its true nature with the minimum help from the chef.

We don’t learn a lot about such things in the West in 2011.  Emptiness, quiet, neutral, unjudging watchfulness are not popular things.  The Yang of action and noise and expansion and me-me-me is constantly preferred to the Yin of contraction and absence and quiet.  And the fish turns black and inedible in that Yang heat.

Of course this is a nonsense. One can’t have a thing without its opposite.  Any scientist will tell you that, Newton himself will tell you ‘til he is blue in the face (should you have a time machine or medium handy) and the Taoists knew is as surely as anyone.  Expansion requires contraction.  Heat requires cold, full requires empty.  It’s something that I am teaching my beautiful eight-year-old son, whose sharp mind rattles at such a pace and who fears the silence of not sharing all those thoughts and questions.  ‘Only if you make a space, can something wonderful come along from the universe to fill it,’ I tell him.  ‘Only if you stop sending messages out, can new messages from outside reach you, surprise you, delight you.’  It is not always easy to explain and I am also sometimes susceptible to too much Yang time… too much to let him see by example what I am teaching.  But if there is one thing above all else that our children can benefit from learning as they grow into their adult beauty, it is not to fear the Yin, the silence, the emptiness, the absence, even death itself.  For however much noise you make, silence will come in the end.

Cook your fish lightly and whilst you do, refresh your spirit, let it breathe and rest.  The taste will be all the better.

Across North Africa and parts of the Middle East right now amazing things are happening.  I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what they are. Oh, the temptation we feel to charge in there in the name of democracy, to send fleets and squadrons and shout ‘Freedom’! Trouble is, we in the West have overcooked our fish for so long now.  Nobody would want us to offer to share that meal. Our noise has deafened half the world.  In another reality we might have reached for the Yang, for decisive action and be lauded as friends and heroes.  In this one, we are not welcome, let us be clear about that.  Someone else’s story is unfolding.  It is fitting now that we choose loving silence,  quietness, calm without judgement, medical or financial aid (when asked for) without agenda, without fear of the unknown.  Can we do it?  Can we show how we have grown?

It really behoves those who have meddled and armed and interfered for so long now to be quiet.  Quietness that could be as pleasant and effortless as my own swimming consciousness whilst I was letting my body heal through those long nights.

One thing is sure.  Whether the Yin is chosen or not, it will have its day.  Let us make it an easy, shining one that brings our little world to ever brighter things.

Oh gods above! What are they up to? What don't I know?

There's an awful lot of conspiracy around this season it seems (is it the new 'black'?) and correspondingly an awful lot of fuss about who might be conspiring and to what ends.

Take, for example, the questions that were raised in the UK House of Lords a few times over 2010, which touched upon secret power blocks, possibly a front for the famous 'Illuminati' of history, possibly the people behind the people behind US Intelligence, having bottomless funds in gold bullion which they were offering to make covertly available to Britain possibly in return for certain favours and undoubtedly to shore up the fragile western economic system. One Lord who raised these matters is now dead. Google away if you like this sort of thing and come to your own conclusions:)

Then there's been all the business of The World Cup, the BBC's accusations of corruption amongst Fifa bigwigs, the opaqueness of the actual voting procedure and the lack of clarity around what criteria might lead to success in one's WC bid (football, not toilets). What hellish secret deals were done to lead to those results, many are wondering?

Most prominently of all, there's the ongoing Wikileaks melodrama. Need I tell you anything about it? Have you gone early into hibernation and missed it? No, I thought not!

Listen, my friend, if you are feeling a little wobbly and worried about all this, feeling powerless and not in the know and subject to murky forces... if you are growing bitterly suspicious and resentful of them, then these 5 simple facts might help lower your heart rate...

1/ Yes there are and have been throughout history blocks of people with money and power who are interested in influencing events in secret. Happens now more than ever.

2/Yes, governments are always up to their eyeballs in the murkiness of secrets and plotting, hand in hand with big business, intelligence agencies, religious bodies and so forth. We will be right up there with the other nations in this, my lovely fellow Brits.

3/ Yes, where there are big bucks you will find those who feed on corruption (Definitely applies to football too, sorry!)

4/ Yes joining secret clubs makes lots of people feel special and powerful, whether they are my boys, aged eight and six in their garden 'den' or big cheeses of the Freemason, Intelligence and Illuminati variety. And they get awfully cross if someone tells.

5/ No, it doesn't seem likely that the extradition to Sweden of Julian Assange is anything to do with sexual allegations

There, you knew all of that already, didn't you? 'Course you did. Like you knew or guessed more or less all of the supposedly top secret Wikileaks stuff. It doesn't take much thought to come to these conclusions. So, really, none of it is worth getting too worked up about.

Truth is, your attention is like one of those infra red dots on a rifle sight. Where the red dot comes to rest, that is where energy will be pumped. Your precious personal energy, the energy of those around you (for you have influence!), the energy of society. Rubbishy newspapers love to get people all placing their red dots on all kinds of spurious subjects in unison. Plots, celebrity tittle tattle, suspicion and hate of others etc etc.. They like their readers to feel small, vulnerable, angry, suspicious, shocked, titillated and at the same time miraculously in-the-know thanks to whichever rag has peddled the so-called information to begin with. Since we are talking conspiracy, one could ask what covert, conspiratorial motive lies behind such tabloid behaviour? Is it all about sales or are you deliberately being misdirected, having your energies drained away like a man being leached of all lifeblood? You decide.

Coz the thing, is, as each of these stories receives our multitudinous attention, as each one like Frankenstein's monster gets a big enough electric current to come to life and seem important, you are in return trading away your own power.

So if you really care about conspiracy, say, right now, 'I take my attention away from this endless circus of distractions and reclaim my energy. I trust myself to know the truth and I realise that whatever games other people like to play, I am never diminished by them.'

Oh, and you football fans, if you feel stitched up, spend a moment thinking about how the people of Russia will benefit from new transport infrastructure and economic boost, think about how a major sporting event in the conservative Middle East could ease worldwide tensions and (now you feel personally strong and in control again and calm) send all the beneficiaries of.these murky decisions your blessing.

It's all part of the magic! Ripples of sanity and love, you dig?

There, well done, you've lost the plot !!
 

Change is in the air. Can you feel it? Economically, politically, ecologically, socially... Something is moving. There are vibrations, tremors, tectonic plates getting ready to shift. Stored energy ready to break free.

Nobody can say where this change will take us. Maybe that is the reason for the fear and anger that are also in the air, for the people taking to the streets in Europe, for the even more dramatic expressions further afield. Change can be damned scary. People want to make a statement, assert themselves, be heard at such a time. Or just to let out a reassuring cathartic noise on a grand scale, the equivalent of the expletive an individual might scream when hitting his/her thumb with a hammer.

That is not to say that there aren't issues out there to be addressed, whether it be the strain upon the Welfare State in many EU countries – which will always be a question of whether we are prepared to pay a high rate of taxation and so reduce disposable income in order to have good universal education, healthcare and pensions - or the way we conduct and regulate our global economy, the care we give to our environment or the more violent tensions that one can find elsewhere in the world. But feeling the heat of change, it is always a good idea to cool yourself down.

The heat analogy here is partly is response to a recent post on Twitface (did I mean SpaceTube? I get confused) by a friend of a friend. In response to debate on the student riots in London he wrote: “The time is NOW. Burn Muthafucka burn!”. Which I sort of thought might well have been similar in sentiment at least to what Catholics and Protestants might have cried in Britain four and a half centuries ago as they built pyres for each other. Or Bosnian villagers in the 90s torching their neighbours' houses with children still inside. Or Hindus and Muslims in the pre-partition India of the mid 40s. Etc etc.

Talking India, Ghandi always had a wise word or two about such things, but who can better this:

You must be the change you want to see in the world.

It's that old microcosm-macrocosm thing again, isn't it? (Surprising how often challenges lead back to this). Cool your own personal universe, cool your kidneys, breathe, be. Take control inside. Now more than ever be the change you want to see. You want to see justice? Be just. You want to see love and understanding? Be loving and understanding.

Change is breaking loose and you can feel it. But if you wonder, fearfully, where it is going, what might happen, then let go of the shouts, the anger, the possible bleak futures and, relaxing your belly, give change a big smile and a big welcome. Enjoy the ride.

And find that now you really are in the driver's seat, steering us all safely back to the centre we never left.

(Is this blog getting too spiritual and philosohical?  We can just go back to talking about sex if you want!)

Hey...

Just received a mail from a young lady, Ayla, who has to do a book review/paper on SHARP NORTH and was asking about inspiration and personal involvement in the book.  As I get lots of these, I thought I would draw attention to the FAQs section of this site, which may well help with such points, but also, here below is my reply to Ayla.  (But don't let that stop anyone mailing with more questions!)

It is always hard to answer what inspires a particular book. In the case of SHARP NORTH of course I was interested in some of the background issues, the rapid ways in which our world is about to change in terms of climate patterns, the results and implications of these changes regarding power structures, societies, populations, migrations etc... plus also some of the developments in technology that are occurring, especially the (for me) disturbing trends in genetic science. But ultimately Mira and her own story are what I am concerned with, immersed in and what I care about most.

Did you ever see the Star Trek movies with the original cast? Mr Spock was fond of saying 'The needs of the Many outweigh the needs of the Few or the One.' But in (I think) the third movie, when Spock is dying or dead - please hard-core Trekkies be gentle with me if I am remembering this all wrong! - Kirk risks the crew to save him and tells him later that sometimes 'The needs of the Few or the One outweigh the needs of the Many'

For me, the two are the same thing. All our possibilities as humans are contained in an individual, and true change, true power, true love comes from that level, rather than from the larger social or global level. It is the power and life force of what is inside Mira that leads to so many external repercussions and events, and even provides the catalyst for major changes within other individuals.

So... main characters, heroes and heroines if you like, are the foundation of my craft. And yes, I dig deep inside and let part of myself flow into them, even give them some of my own characteristics or preferences from time to time (the joy of running is one, not going to list all of them, that would be telling!!:)) but ultimately I give them their head, their freedom, and let them write their own stories.

Does that make some sense?

Hey, I see this title is for sale on Amazon UK... just thought I would alert British readers to the fact that THE SELECTED is the new title that has been given to the US edition of BLOWN AWAY (as there was already a book in existence in the States with that title).  It is NOT a new book, though there are books in the pipeline 

Delighted to have just received first US review for this title:  "Constantly gripping, always fascinating and completely compelling" (Kirkus)

Thanks, lovely reviewer.  The cheque (US sp. check) is in the post, promise!

 A favourite wise expression of a certain psychotherapist I know is “Do what you always did, and you will get what you always got.” i.e. ...How are you going to interact with the apparent reality of the moment? What tools are you going to use? What next moment are you going to shape. What kind of results do you choose? What ingredients are you going to bung into the sausage machine of your life as you crank the handle?

Ready for something new? Then you need new tools, new responses, new ingredients.

Of course in psychotherapy terms this is often about how we attract the same kinds of situations again and again until we are wise or brave enough to live our personal groundhog day differently and allow the universe to send something even more splendid. We might, for instance, always seek out a certain sort of partner and find that similar issues plague each of our relationships, responding again and again in the same sorts of ways. At the root of this repetition we are usually blaming someone or something else for events.

'Oh I am so unlucky! Why does this always happen to me?!'

or

'Why does X always behave like that towards me?'

On the international stage, our leaders are also, of course, cranking the handles of each of their giant create-a-new-planetary-moment sausage machines. And they seem as addicted as the rest of us to a stale old set of ingredients, the product of which we have tasted many times. This is not a criticism, but an observation.

The return of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi to Libya by the Scottish government and the possible construction of an Islamic cultural centre and mosque near 'Ground Zero' (scene of the destruction of the twin towers of the WTC in New York) are two events that have been hovering in the news recently that have set certain world figures reaching for their handles. And what results do they hope for, I wonder? What new moment do they intend to shape?

I am not a subscribing member of any religion, yet the teaching of Christianity is clear, unambiguous, decisive. One should meet and negate all negative energy with forgiveness, love, compassion. I am you and you are me. Love for one means love for the other. It is as revolutionary and challenging a message now as it was 2000 years ago. It doesn't mean you have to be a victim. Quite the reverse, it means you take control, you show your strength.

When I witnessed the planes flying into the towers, quite apart from the shock and sadness for all those who lost their lives, I was filled with foreboding. I said to my partner of the time 'All hell is going to break loose now”. And one person who no doubt hoped and intended for that hell was Osama Bin Laden. How he must have licked his lips as the same old predictable ingredients went into the machine and the handles started turning.

Two wars later and with tensions still high, the good news is that as individuals and as governments, nations, populations, we still get to ask those magical questions each second. How are you going to interact with the apparent reality of the moment? What tools are you going to use? What next moment are you going to shape?

If you ask the universe for something new, it will certainly send it. Are you brave enough?

(Check out the D.H.Lawrence poem TRUST... it's a gem)

(The psycho/hypno-therapist is Angela Jullings.  She deserves a plug... she's the best out there! www.angelajullings.com)