Bioconversation: the purpose of communication.

Bioconversation: how to create the purpose of life. 

I’ve always been fascinated by how and why people have become involved in the work they do. Complementary therapists are a case in point. I don’t think any of them are in it for the profit. I wouldn’t generalise about their reasons and purposes, but I’d like to point out a very valuable tool to which they have free access, unlike most other professions. 

When you visit your dentist, conversation is extremely restricted for obvious reasons: although your mouth is open almost all the time, you can’t talk. And even if you could, what would you speak about? 

Those in the legal profession don’t waste much time with pleasantries. When you’re wanting to be paid by the minute for the minute, and the purpose is more about extending the problem than reaching a solution, fear is the key. 

My opinion of talk therapies is that they’re limited not by but to their formal identities. CBT, Jungian, Gestalt and every other talk therapy has its own code the stamp of which proves its case, patient by patient. 

The coaching industry, on the other hand, goes in the opposite direction, achieving the only and excellent master class, niche by niche. Whatever works for you works for me. 

We assume that conversation is about talking, but it’s so much more than that: it’s communication or the lack of it at every possible level. When I began researching for this article, I was taken to the work of Judith E. Glaser. She had put in a nutshell exactly what I was trying to establish: you can’t separate language or conversation from biology, physiology and science. “Kotodama”, the Japanese notion of a word having energy or power is also relevant in this context. To return to Judith Glaser, her observations of hormonal patterns and effects as the result of different kinds of conversations led directly to an improved grasp of how healthy or toxic organisations can be as the consequence of how people talk to each other within the organisation. Very specifically, a brief verbal message changes so much of an individual’s motivation, purpose and sense of meaning and satisfaction: a heartfelt “Have a good day!” has virtually cosmic possibilities in how far it can reach. 

To describe this in greater detail, think not only of the words, but of the tone in which they’re spoken, the amount of consideration behind the utterance, the practised reasonability, heart-awareness, general purposefulness and the real intentionality of the one who speaks. If you have the good fortune to experience these things you should know that the conversation started long before you entered it. Just as you can’t separate a plant from light from photosynthesis, you can’t separate human conversation from human interaction from human purpose, either pleasant or painful. I find the physiological connectedness really interesting: we thought we were using words, but here we are, brainwaves mimicking and resonating with each other, hormonal tides washing each others’ shores, hearts finding or not finding mutual congruence (check HeartMath) : our bodies really seem not to end at skin boundaries but to engage in what has become known as the biofield, the science of which has become undeniable. If you want to read up, Shamini Jain’s “Healing Ourselves” is a good place to start. She bases her work on psychoneuroimmunology, if you’re into long words. When I taught literature, both students and colleagues were surprised when I found it necessary to include a module on psychoneurotransmission, but there you are. The cosmos has more than one face, and the freedom to read more than one kind of writing leads one everywhere. 

Bioconversation is my word for the kind of conversation that seeks, deliberately, growth. I’m not sure how or if life grows, but to be sure, people do, and in due time, you’ll see a course on Bioconversation for your attention for complementary therapists in particular and then for more groups, depending on how the Bioconversation forms. 

Bioconversation is distinct to social media chat, political recruitment, preaching of any kind, advertising, propaganda and empty yet formal education. 

It’s a quick slogan, but you’ll get the idea: “You know when you grow”. Whereas chats on social media or in parties and pubs are fun, this is a different feeling. It has interest, purpose, movement, meaning, direction, desire and above all, the clear hope of a better destination that you can’t achieve on your own. If you’re interested, please let ThinkTree know. We’re better off as a tree than as individual leaves. Think of autumn and spring. And how fortunate we are to be part of the biggest conversation of all. 

Why your story is important.

 

The brain, heart and guts work closely and quickly to create myriads of stories that you tell yourself about everything. It's a magical ability. None of these stories are ultimately truthful: you've got the power to decide which ones are for you. That's a difficult daily process, And no-one is really going to help you to simplify or make sense of what and how to choose. I came up with The Story Clinic because I feel it's really important for everyone to grasp that they have an advocate for authenticity. 

That means that testing your story by getting it out into conscious expression is a significant step: just about everything in contemporary society strongly suggests that we repress what's in the heart. Economic, cultural, social and educational requirements stifle your real voice. 

The body can't work like that, it needs to breathe. If you stifle what needs to be said, denial leads to disease. 

So what is your story that really wants to be said? 

You'll find it probably doesn't need too much digging: there's something you want to say to a listening ear and an understanding heart. 

And as you speak, your guts will be testing for authenticity, your brain for coherence, and your heart for clarity. 

You can't bullshit yourself unless you want to, and therein lies a straightforward simplicity for the test of truth. 

Your story is important in many ways, and one of these  is that it dovetails with your body's health. I'm sorry that I've come across people who actually do prefer to bullshit themselves. 

Then again, there are others who are so confused, they can't get enough coherence together to feel a sense of purpose. 

Be assured: you have three good friends under your skin: heart, brain and guts. Together, they are your strong story advocate, and your mission is to allow them to speak your voice. They know what's important, what's missing, what's required and how to get it. Yes, you do need supportive friends, and maybe a wider mirror of compassion, but your advocate is smart, quick, wise and wonderful. If you want to pay more attention to this, communicate via www.story-clinic.com     

The cosmic unconscious

 

Jung posited individuation, individual consciousness, the individual unconscious and the collective unconscious. Without doing much careful explanation, I'd like to suggest the addition of the cosmic unconscious. Here's a rough idea of what I'm saying: 

There's no end to approaches to human consciousness and mindfulness, so I'll skip past that and go to the individual unconscious. To simplify this as far as I'm able, I'd say that doing your own shadow-work is unavoidable. What I was taught within the context of fundamental Christian evangelicalism is, from my perspective, spiritual bypassing, which is not a term anyone would have known about in those days. No-one is going to save you from your own storms, hidden or evident, past, present or future, and that's a useful truth to accept. You have to face your fears, sort your family constellations, get acquainted with all your selves and do the research your experience asks for and treat your brain with at least as much disinterested intelligence as it treats you. Doing the shadow-work is hard going, but you're not going anywhere without it. And if you meet someone along the way who refuses to be challenged, chances are they haven't done their shadow-work, and that's why they don't like the feeling of humility which is closely related to the feeling of kindness. So the shortcut to approaching the individual unconscious is doing the homework of shadow-work. 

I've an equally easy recipe to approach the collective unconscious: cultural criticism, not of some-one else's culture, but all of your own. Take a good, hard, uncompromising look at all your group identities and see what emerges when you dare to do that. It's not easy. Humans are weird about being leaders and following leaders. If you can speak for the collective, you own the collective, and if that's what the collective wants, it won't have a time-frame for how long it's gong to be hungry. The longer political lives are, the less likely the collective is in charge. The more vehement religious voices are, the less likely is collective coherence. Notice how cultural art forms are capable of escaping the time-trap. They are more likely to express the collective unconscious. 

Quickly to the cosmic unconsciousness and the approach I'd suggest here: get out of time. 

Here's the thinking: since time is a human construct, let's consider what happens when you take it away. Time implies irreversibility, like being born, having life-changing experiences and dying. Time and irrevocable change influence each other, as emotions declare, and expressing such profound emotions has produced endless philosophy, good music, drunk singing, and wordlessly gazing beyond the horizon. By definition, strange things happen when time disappears, or at least, becomes less relevant. The corollary of what I'm saying is that the more conscious one is of time, the more conscious one is. In Switzerland trains are time. That's a lot of infrastructure. Sometimes I wonder if tourists of the paranormal want more consciousness or more unconsciousness. The intrigue with with life after death, psychokinesis, channeling and clearing chakras doesn't really know what it wants except more. Perhaps dissatisfied consciousness needs to go the other way and become more mineral, more rock-like. More inanimate. Or if that's not so appealing, then perhaps try to be as unconscious as a waterfall. There are many options suggested by the Romantic poets. To tease out the idea of the cosmic unconsciousness, I'd point out that organic chemistry can't escape the basis of inorganic chemistry: the table of elements is about as neutral as Switzerland could ever be, and has no interest in being either the fire of a distant star or your beloved cat. The language of quantum physics is baffling: all that there is exists and does not exist at the same time, it's just a Mexican wave of unreality that passes the here and now infrequently. If I and my pet rock are one, in the sense of belonging to the same table of elements, which is the only given I can think of, then once and for all, let's allow that carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, potassium, sodium and traces of more elements than these work together to allow their voices to upgrade - maybe downgrade? - to human voice. Language is a mere code which has unfortunately tended more towards real folly than artificial intelligence, but nonetheless does have the ability to reach for felt aspirations. What we feel is about as real as we can get, but these feelings are so quick, that more often than not the heart is more truthful than the brain. How quick is that? 

Well, it's not in time. As I write, breathe, think, feel and fumble my way, oxygen and hydrogen are doing what they do, and are part and parcel of the consciousness I pretend at. The KNa pump, that rather ridiculous way of describing the amazing dynamics of neurons, sits at the very ability of whatever my ego believes it's directing. In this sense, the living body can be said to be out of time. And if we take the mathematical subway out of quantum physics, who knows what language would point us to which platform? And if death is a point of departure, perhaps so is life? 

It's been said that we've reached the stage where science and spirituality should be holding hands. My opinion is that they always have done so, all 118 of them, sub-microscopic miracles we don't notice and take for granted while they stand and knock on the door of our inner skin of sensitivities requiring to be worded in ways we have yet to discover. 

Learning to read the moment.

 

Literacy isn't what they said it is. Sure enough, the alphabet is really key to know, words, vocabulary and sentences relevant to recognise, and text, context, author, purpose and place all necessary to determine what's meant in any communication. 

Ask anyone what it felt like to learn to read, and you'll have a point of contact to know what it's like to read the moment. 

In the moment, anything is happening. The miracle is, your brain is capable of grasping the moment. The pity is, it seldom does. 

The open door of each moment is usually slammed shut as it opens. 

That's not natural, that's human-inspired. 

The heavy-handedness, intellectual clumsiness and emotional stuntedness of humanity are not good teachers. 

Be comforted: there's a perpetual, really good teacher within: a natural, cosmic voice and presence that defies description. 

It offers you your own language of truth, an imperative of kindness that's all about the moment. 

Do you kill spiders spontaneously? Consider for a moment: does that make you a bad Buddhist or a normal survivalist? 

You can see where this is going: in the moment, there's, data, desire, choice, decision and action. Also totally, really totally unconscious neural activity, which is the actual basis for the action in the moment, conscious or unconscious. You can't escape biology. 

There's a process and a story to this: the moment is a bridge between the decipherable and the indecipherable, and consciousness is key. 

Unfortunately, there are no hard rules to this literacy. The art is more than the discipline. 

But how do you read your own consciousness which is the bridge, key and cargo?

Here are the steps:

notice, articulate and know your subtle emotions

allow your obvious and immediate attitudes

test the range of your choices

decide on the personal acceptability of possible actions

scale your influence of acting

reflect on each step you take. 

Reading the moment has become a literacy of real importance, with not many knowing how to do this. Hence the plethora of coaches, most of whom are learning their own self-literacy, and not so sure how to pass this on without a well-founded sense of humility well-disguised by words and attitudes that don't quite cut it. Leadership? Don't make me laugh. You got there randomly. 

The moment is yours. 

It's a quiet, tall, immense moment, quite cruel, really, unless you sense presence greater than your own. 

How is it to be read? 

So the learning is the actual process and purpose of the moment. And the core aspect of that organism you recognise as yourself. 

I'd offer these new ABC's of reading the moment: 

quietness

observation

reflection

truthful communication

closure. 

Closure is important. The timing and honouring have to be right. That's a whole literacy in itself. 

The moment is fluid. 

You have to be quicker than that. 

Leaving the country.

 The four words are really inadequate: I've left the country. 

But I have. 

The Covid 19 was the main cause, wiping out our hospitality business, yet the Covid canal, like the Suez and Panama, can experience ships going sideways rather than forwards. So there are more reasons to leave the country. 

Take a thief, a scoundrel and a stupid person like Zuma, protected by the ANC. 

Take a hollow, expensive suit, like Ramaphosa, protecting the ANC. 

Take the electorate, the subservient, uneducated, impoverished, unprotected, ill-advised supporters of the ANC. 

And then take into account the crumbling national infrastructure: electricity, education, water, municipal delivery, post office, deeds office, and each national office you can think of. 

The formal, legalised national-speak has changed from my growing up years to the present. If I had published this blog in the seventies or eighties I would have been arrested before blogging off. 

Not now. The ANC and its leaders really don't care, so long as their pockets are kept full. Their reputation and honour mean nothing other than internal party political manipulation for the sake of power-survival. It used to be called petty cash, and it was possible to steal this, in petty ways.  But the national cash cow is  the main target, and it will be eaten alive. No bull. 

That's my swan-song in connection with the political rubbish. The NP leaders were bullies, the ANC leaders are supremely greedy and the next lot, no matter the party, will be ruthless. 

But that's not about leaving the country. That's about the country leaving itself. 

I will remember running along Cape Town streets, train journeys to Johannesburg, learning to learn in what used to be schools and universities, which is what I've loved most, apart form the steaks, Cabernet Sauvignons and my old Volksie, the city and its styles, the sky-scapes, mountain-scapes, and my solitary walks on Kommetjie beach, in the sun and in storms, coming back to the warmth of whiskey and a cigar.

I will remember all of this and so much more. 

My homes, the wind, rain and wishful thinking, and the mountains: Table Mountain, Twelve Apostles, the Amatola and the Cederberg. 

And Devil's Peak. 

And how love, conversations, scrutiny and care have followed me in my path in that country, thanks to so many, many people. 

I have left the country, yes, and am amazed to find out how much has not left me. 

I understand very little about love, but its stickiness, like honey, is difficult to wash off. 

Where does my story start?

 I grew up with the given idea that biology explains everything. You start at conception, you do whatever you can to live a healthy and well-lived life, if something goes wrong, the doctor will fix it, and eventually the body fails because of something organically malfunctioning, and then you die. 

You have a beginning, a middle, and an ending, as stories are supposed to. 

There's a lot to be said about this, but let's pay attention to the start, the beginning of your story. 

By way of a preamble, your body and your being is more like a story than anything else.

Some pointers before we begin: emotional imprint, genealogical predisposition, historical context, natural communication. "Natural communication" means that neurons behave as neurons in spite  of anything else. 

If you're able to grasp that you're part of a cosmic process rather than an individual person, you're more than halfway to knowing that your story has no discernible beginning. To make it easier I could say "as well as an individual person" but this individuality is more of a hindrance than a help. 

Sure, your body was conceived, gestated, born, grew up, and here you are. 

It didn't do that in any individual way. Bodies look individual because they can move about on their own, but that's as far as it goes. Not even thinking is really individual. 

The emotional imprints from mother to foetus, historical context to formation of attitude, and genetic predisposition to physiological conditions, and the way your neurons get set up, all add up to the mystery we call consciousness. 

So you can decide where your story begins. 

Mine is cosmic, but I would advise a smaller nest than that. It's better to know your mind than to get lost in it. 

In Story Clinic we suggest that you begin spontaneously. Don't start formally with "I was born....etc, etc."

Attention is crucially important, probably the most valuable attribute of humanity, in focusing cosmic capability. So we would ask, what does your attention seek right now? Let's slow down out of the normal stuff of dailiness, and allow your body to speak and attend to what's being communicated or required to communicate now. 

"I'm hungry."

"I'm tired."

"I'm angry with..."

"I'm frustrated with..."

"I'm enjoying..."

"I'm thankful for..."

Or we could allow for some moments of imaginative reflection, and begin with a spontaneous memory. This is a fruitful kind of beginning. The neurons are good at doing it for themselves. 

So your birthday is a milestone, not a definitive beginning, and the Akashic records are a library, not a book. 

And the Alpha of the alphabet was an invention, not a discovery. So even the language that you use to decipher yourself is not a totally adequate tool, although helpful. 

Your story starts where attention engages. Where it engages is up to two things, as I perceive it, what your imagination presents, and what you choose to do about it. For Tolkien, it involved a ring, for C.S. Lewis a lamp in a snowy world where animals spoke, and for Emily Bronte, a rattling at the window, and a haunting dream. 

If you give your imagination that same gift of attention, a unique, strange, strong and valuable beginning is very likely to emerge. 

The Waterman Practice and Story Clinic.

Everything is a story, so here's the connection between The Waterman  Practice and Story Clinic. I thought hard about what I'd like the rest of my life  to mean, and I took the things I've built: qualifications and experience in homeopathic medicine;  qualifications, training and experience in energy medicine; a doctorate and a lifetime of dealing with stories, what they are, what they mean, how to listen to them and tell them and understand them; and qualification and practice in poetry therapy. 

I've spent sixty-five years living and being both patient and impatient, and now, quite frankly, impatience wins. 

For now, let's look at The Waterman Practice umbrella and Story Clinic. The Story Clinic is older. 

Stories gripped my entire being before I could read or speak. I grew up in the Christian meta-story, and my soul recognised the currents of reality that the close people couldn't articulate. People need to believe stories to work out their practical ways through life. The vast majorities of these stories aren't true, just vague approximations of journeying. 

The work of the Story Clinic is about the balance between respecting and challenging deeply held stories. From gender to ethnic to faith to scientistic stories, people hold to what they think they can tell themselves, because they feel they can't go further. 

Of course they can. And one's health is more dependent on this than you realise. 

The Waterman Practice is about approaching healing, health and wholeness through contact, connection, communication,  clarity and comprehension. 

These are more like feelings than concepts, and the feelings that your stories articulate reflect an underlying reality rather than the superficial chatter.

We seldom give ourselves the time and space to examine this. 

There are many, many approaches and stories out there to grip your attention because you have a need for better health in one way or another. They all clamour for attention. 

The Waterman Practice is different because it pays attention to your attention. That's challenging because that's the very thing that's baffling. You want attention because you don't feel well with your own attention? 

But I don't want to get complicated. 

The Story Clinic is about listening to your own language, telling your stories, realising your limits, chosen and unchosen. 

If you want borders, you'll stop there. If you need passports, they can be obtained. And if you require new languages, that's possible. 

Awareness of your evolving story is a magical thing. 

So The Waterman Practice shows you how to move from being an unconscious author to a purposeful narrator. Your voice, biological and metaphoric at the same time, is able to say much and in many ways. This is just one of the basic tools of the Story Clinic. 

There's a lot to put to good use in The Waterman Practice. 

Four questions I'd like to be asked.

One. 

What touches you? To answer this question you need to be aware of what really does touch you, and if this is the case, your self-awareness is taking you towards self-knowledge. If you can quickly list more than five things that touch you, you know your feelings quite well. If you battle to find the first one, you should spend more time in your heart. 

Two. 

What do you fear the most and when did you first begin to experience this fear? To answer this one, you would go back to pre-consciousness, as an infant, a newly-born, perhaps even a neonate.We tend to think that language describes reality. It is more the case that the sense of reality and perceptual formation work together from pre-conceptual and pre-conscious experience through the whole of life, giving us an amazing power of perception, if we freed ourselves enough to use it. 

Three. 

What do you choose to feed your soul? Choosing to feed your soul deliberately gives you the insight to know that your emotional reality is entirely up to you. Your focus is your soul-food. Snakes use this to get their literal food. 

Four.

How has love imprisoned you? If you can make sense of this question, you should notice that your most profound and urgent feelings are capable of trapping you rather than setting free your vast capacity for constructive creativity. 

Your name, your date of birth, your profession, your favourite colours, your preferred food are easy details: try a few penetrating questions to get to the interesting stories. 

Covid-19, the end, and what I'd say.

Our stories of what's happening are what we believe . I've taken some moments to consider what might be said about what's happening in the world at this time. Most of what's going around is stupefying rather than clarifying, and there are some things that we could learn. The first that comes to mind is that what's gripped human imagination is the fact and fear of mortality.

The stats that produce fear are what they are, and there are plenty of other stats, too. In Peter Porter's poem "Your Attention Please" the somber words "Some of us may die. Remember, statistically it is not likely to be you" come to mind. But I think that what's driven the realisation of this pandemic is that you and I could well be dead quite soon. Politicians want a nice, quiet, obedient crowd of voters, and if they don't do something to allay fears, they won't be seen to be leaders. So act they must.

But in my view, what we call leadership produces nothing but followers. And in following we become nothing.

Doing what we are enforced to do, believing the stories that we're supplied, accepting rhetoric that's designed to make us accepting, we walk into the nothing of ourselves, and thus, when I regard the end of what we've accepted util now, the end of capitalism as it's been driven by forces no longer sustainable, the end of shallow communication, the end, I hope, of hollow values disguised as democracy and practised as political will, all I can really do is regard the end my this, my own organism, and ask as dispassionately as I can what it's aliveness has been for.

Let's assume I'm going to die in six weeks. Reaching as far as I can into soul-speak, what would I say?

I'd say:

Choose your stories as consciously as possible. Go back to the oceans that allowed you to build, launch, navigate and berth your boat. No one has to be trapped by the trappings of leadership. Learn to hear what your voice says by engaging in clarifying conversations rather than vehement creeds. Learn to hear hearts as well as words, and don't assume for one moment that the heart is full of love and light. It's more holographic than moral, and encompasses the entire spectrum of turbulence and connections made possible by the table of elements. So I'd say get to grips with your own heart, allow it to express what it desires most to utter. That way you make your self vulnerable to your mind, and can act more wisely and decisively in respect of your more informed choices. At worst, we're a bundle of competing instincts, at best a conscious narrator of aspiration. And beware of premature statements of triumph as the journey unfolds.

I'd encourage the conversations, those stories that release the living energy that's specific to you. These are what create the newness that's upon us. What feels like the end is obviously never the end. Somehow there's always a narrator who observes, and turns the chaos into a craft. 

Love is a verb

Many problems are linguistic rather than real. The idea of love is a good example. In English "love" is an abstract noun: "I am looking for love" as well as a verb: "I love pasta".

Let's get rid of the noun. If you're looking for love, you'll never find it. It doesn't exist as a thing, or as a state of mind, or emotionality, or spirituality, or anything like that. Or even an understanding, or a contract of affection. If you're looking to analyse, seek, define or otherwise nail love down, I say it's not going to work.

You do it.

We talk of making love as in sexual or erotic communication, and that's fair enough. Good physical feelings shared are good to do. But to achieve that you have to do something. Staring into your lover's eyes tend to go to the next level of action.

Love isn't something you tap into. It's more like something you intend, create, achieve, activate, enact, inspire, work, design.

You do it.

The motivation is relevant. Whether indifferent, compassionate, caring or efficient, if it fulfils the need that's there, it's what has driven the action. When my plastic surgeon is paying careful attention to the BCC on my forehead, having removed, replaced and sews the skin, and I notice his totally focused eyes as he darts those really fine stitches, is he thinking ching-ching, his supper, his cycling or does he simply love what he's doing? And is he really thinking about me at all?

I don't know, but the need is fulfilled.

So I sense that if you pay careful attention to what's needed, required and relevant to solve an emotional, spiritual and otherwise real problem, you're doing love. So long as you do it. I have killed a few animals on purpose, to cancel unnecessary suffering. So you understand what I mean.

To do love is not easy. This requires discernment, discipline, courage, conviction, honesty, truthfulness, clarity, conviction, and at the end of the list, action.

So if someone can tell me what that feels like, for them, that would be a story worth attention.

10 reasons why the sense of story is important.

1. There is no such thing as reality. Human neurology posits n amount of stories in a second, and settles on an aggregate which is a shared hypnosis, useful for the time that it remains useful.

2. That which communicates most strongly and persuasively uses the sense of story to do so.

3. One's own sense of purpose and power arises from engagement with one's sense of one's own story. That's why conscious engagement with being alive is story-based, and largely unconscious until you start checking your story for real.

4. It's unlikely that there's any ultimate story. What happens after you die isn't necessarily factual. Any kind of stories may arise, and we can't be decisive from our current limited knowledge of what the cosmos is.

5. The stories that you tell yourself have a way of cascading into more of themselves. So a decision to follow a particular sense will take you in that direction. No decision means the likelihood of random default.

6. The stories that politicians and preachers tend to purport are suspect. Any authority figure should be testable for credibility. Doctors, too.

7. Facts in themselves are not always evidence. We are able to create stories about facts.

8. Most theories are unproven stories.

9. Conscious awareness is an evolving story.

10. The sense of connection is a neurologically- based shared story, seriously enmeshed with shared sensitivities and emotions, sometimes worded embarrassingly ineptly.

11. If you read the story sensitively, intelligently and alertly, there will always be more to it that you think.

Intuitive communication: the cosmic connection.

Humans tend to believe that language is communicative, whereas words actually obscure more than they reveal. I read the other day that language arose as a result of the need to hide feelings, and this made some sense to me. Language is a later development, a highly manipulative system of signals to both conscious and unconscious aspects of awareness in connection with self and sociality.

With and without sound, animals communicate with greater immediacy and intuition. Studies that show how dogs know when their owners decide to return home, how shrimp know when another one dies, how plants read intention may be found for all to read and know, and the implications of these are huge.

How humans communicate beyond words is what interests me.

The bafflement with which we are born and the instinctive fear of death is an instrument of power for those who seize it.

I should emphasise that a few times.

Our natural ability to communicate with ourselves has been hijacked since it could ever be hijacked: the thing to be said about power is that power is taken.

I have a particular issue with Christian narratives and its leaders: those who would pretend to know God better than others: back off, back down, and learn love.

That said, the cosmic connection is overwhelming, once grasped.

Have you ever grasped that your feelings are God-based? However humans have come into being, the sense of aloneness, aliveness, alertness, joy, jadedness, melancholy, mediocrity, even madness and the spectrum of what humans can feel is based on the lightning speed of your body's neural system responding to an ecology that's emotional as well as everything else.

Ecology is not only green, it's the entire spectrum. Butterfly wings creating hurricanes is in ratio to a thought putting out VX2A21, which is a star some million light years away.

Consciousness is indivisible.

For humans, the big issue is do I get to be aware after I die? And is it a good awareness or am I gonna burn?

I could give a trite answer to this, but I'm going to go the long way round.

Learn to communicate in a cosmically connected way.

Do you see the trees, plants and patterns on your garden? If you have one? Do you notice how stars navigate the wide sky? I should also ask have you ever seen the colours of the wind, but Pocohantas would laugh at me.

Simply, stop withholding natural communication, and allow wildness to bewilder you.

That's who you are once the normalising narratives are stripped away.

It goes the entire way: this little bit of communication we think we have now, it's a highway to everything that has ever and will ever exist. The table of elements is a trustworthy witness. How does it feel to communicate cosmically?

For me, it takes two to three seconds to switch to that awareness. The it takes a sense of acceptance and peace because the ensuing chaos is total.

And then the stories pour, and poetry gets so impatient with language, that so slow expression of human spirit.

To be in contact with not only everything that's in this beautiful natural world, and sad, sad, human world, but also reaching to visions of impossibly distant yet real galaxies, and nano-atomic infra-galaxies of intrinsic imperatives of which our neurons are made: how would this feel?

It feels that same way you know, in your conscience, your helpless desires, your needs, your reachings, your self-imposed wretchedness, your self-chaos, your attempts to garden to wildness that which you've been given, to husband the house of your unthinking choosing.

And feelings?

We tend to go with the obvious ones like irritation, anger, passivity, patience, purposefulness, and there are so many, but they actually come in layers. They are currents upon currents, and honesty is a very vague grasp of what's really going on when it comes to emotional intelligence.

The cosmic connection is there. From feelings of abject fear to courage in the core. We should wonder less about a God and consider more about an infinite connection that has nothing to do with language.

Intuitively, humans are more than capable. That's how to let the dogs out....

Seven obvious (meta)truths to deal with.

One.

We are cosmologically connected: an ecology of atomic structures, at the end of the planetary day. Yes, organically we die, but there's something that impinges on what we call consciousness, or perhaps in our consciousness we impinge on that field of which consciousness is.

Two.

Language seldom helps. It's a later development and mostly obfuscates rather than assists communication. Humans lie a lot. Instinctively. Clarity of intent helps, and especially in respect of kindness.

Three.

Fear rules unless it's dealt with. Bullies know this. Thugs have this as a way of life. In the western world, fear of hell, death and God has been used for power purposes, and now that the general psyche knows that hell isn't a serious threat, meaningless has taken over.

Four.

No-one exists. Which means to say that your sense of self is a construct, and certainly, as fragile as the next leaf to fall. What you do with this fact, in respect of choosing a basic attitude to being alive, is crucial. In fact, cosmologically important and urgent.

Five.

Money has come to mean security. Sure, money and especially more money means we can live comfortably, even supremely, but it's a totally artificial security. Can't buy you one hour of natural life, can't grant you one iota of genuine like-ability or respect, or love.

Six.

Your self-knowledge will always be incomplete. Your own story, the most important one, goes largely undetected. This is weird. Get to grips with yourself.

Seven.

Good feelings are better than bad feelings, and turn the human world the way it goes. It's just that we don't agree about whose good feelings are better than whose bad feelings. Start communicating for real.




Happy journeys and happy landings......

South Africa's terminal illness.

Sometimes you have to recognise what the numbers say. Sometimes you have to measure what your soul desires against what the tide of reality pours against the skin of your desiring.

Last night I stood holding the hand of a terminal patient. His eyes looked back into mine, but without the sense of any outcome. The last time I saw that look was in the eyes of a dog I had to put down.

I see the same look now in the eyes of the country in which I grew up.

I hate being told what to think, feel, act, decide, love. Especially love. Because love means connection, and if you love your country, you feel connected to it, at an important level and in an important way.

These obtuse so-called leaders of South Africa, vying for power and position as they are, really do escape that sense of love for the land that we intuited as we grew up. And I use that word "we" advisedly. We were free to love. The landscapes, the skyscapes, the city-smells, the tastes and tests of home, the loneliness of truthful language, the erotic expectation that life would always be good and fruitful, the touches of hope that held out important expectations that have now come to nothing: when you love a country, you honour something that is felt , known and grounds itself irreversibly. African sunrises and sunsets.

This is all valuable and romantic.

But the soul of the city has overcome the country's soul. The politicians have fulfilled their promise of emptiness and disappointment, and worse, destabilisation, death and eventually, the total destruction of what once was a powerhouse of discipline, desire, purpose and punishment for failing.

Failure has become the purpose now, in this weird, dry and spiritually bankrupt country. Maybe JM Coetzee could write more novels: I don't have the time.

He lectured me and I walked out, really bored. Another kind of lesson.

Sometimes you have to recognise, not suggest.

What do you do when a country's pulse fails, when breath becomes too expensive, when heartbeat accepts a flattening landscape, when skin shudders away from a purposefully dark cruelty?

Well, what I do is count years, watch what youthfulness does, and reckon that human yearning is for something, but nobody knows what.

Let me tell you that youthfulness is a wrecking-ball in South Africa. The education system promotes bullies. That's the truth. I've been in the classroom. My leadership was destroyed exactly so that thuggery could be freed. I'm against thuggery, myself. No chance. The thugs are designed to beat all.

This is the actual curriculum for education. So you can see what's coming.

I'd like to smack the well-paid faces of educationally employed hypothetical humans. They're educated enough. They know what I mean.

With others, they've killed the country.

The terminal illness boils down to incoherent, deliberately truncated consciousness, diminishingly focused on rhetoric that breaks artificial ideas. Rail against colonialism, but destroy paintings, #everythingthat isn'tmemust fall, while trains burn, buses burn, trucks are hijacked, farmers murdered, mob justice dispensed, brazen robberies race on, and best of all a rogue ex-president resurrects ?

South Africa's corpuscles can't cope with dreams against this kind of counter-reality revolution. I was taught to fight, taught to kill. It's just that now I have the freedom to choose my target whereas in the apartheid years I found I had to choose against the target they gave me. Which I did. Whereas the enemy they described was something I couldn't find, now I can.

n the one hand I could attempt an aggressive path, hector the perpetrators of corruption and incompetence and kill them one by one: it's tempting, but needs an effective stealth which eludes general affirmation. Bit like chemo, you take out more than required. Stray bullets and bullies  speak the same language.

You mustn't become part of the terminal language.

So for now, I simply point it out. I do the Story Clinic. The real story is important to know. The situation in South Africa has turned a corner, and become terminal. There's no return to a previous health. Sorry about that.

So do we kill or heal? Is it chemo or counselling talk?

Tough call. Depends on who's listening, or purposefully not listening.

I'm for holding the patient's pulse and listening, intuiting the tide that the body uses to move on.

I hate being told how to love. I do not love what this country's so-called leaders use as rhetoric to call anyone to offer their sacrifices. I sacrifice nothing to Zuma and Silent Cyril. They offer no love, you can sense that. And as for the spoilers, Malema Inc, with them trade love for lucre.

The usual.

Most unfortunately, the diagnosis is there. Terminal.

Nothing left.

Sorry for all.

Biofocusing, smudging the self, and health.

Please don't leave out the comma. I don't want to smudge health, just the self.

I've worked for some time on biofocusing,  a healing modality, and the time seems to have arrived. As I sit in my garden, listening to birds apprehending spring, even though it hasn't arrived according to dates, they certainly sense what's in the air.

The living body is part of a fierce yet delicate ecology, and I've been grappling with Martha Beck's sense of "oneness". I get all her four steps, and I wish I could have articulated them myself: wordlessness, oneness, imagination, formation. I knew them before I read her book, and I'm stuck on the "oneness". So I'm writing this to help myself either into or out of "oneness".

Authentic writing always comes with a dose or tinge of vulnerability, and I suddenly recognise that my entire academic career has been motivated by the need to get away from vulnerability. I don't want to spend my life weeping in a corner, and I haven't. I've spend my subterranean life watching the tides come and go, hiding from floods and fear, using my energy to move between swimming, suffering and sinking, and now I've come to the realisation that these human skins are more like live cell-phones than semi-conscious containers of the self.

There is no "self". Gilbert Ryle hit the button when he referred to "the ghost in the machine". I've had the experience of being selfless, and it wasn't like a Mother Theresa moment. It was just a swirl of images that came from everywhere and moved everywhere, and the madness of that very small momentary me, experienced itself gone, and the waters of watchfulness were complete, and entirely unmanaged.

The point of biofocusing is to grant attention, as fully as possible to another being, and to hold the intention of healing and wholeness. To know more check Lynne McTaggart. I've followed her class for six months. Much works. It's like asking is it just me or is there more? The more is the answer.

In fact, the "me" has to accept that smudge that I don't know how to do because I've had to fight so hard to be a "me". Obedience was a prerequisite, politeness a necessity, niceness a passport to acceptability and acquiescence a way of turning me into a parting-with-money candidate.

Biofocusing means to turn attention to the simplicity of being alive and what this imparts. My interest in this respect is about health and healing. I'm not sure that illness is necessary, and to the extent that it isn't, I'd like to remove it. Medical science has its own way of approaching this, but is often hijacked and distracted by corporate interests. Doctors are educated and trained in certain ways but not others. Biofocusing uses as much human attention as possible to achieve as many healthy solutions as possible. The ecology of who we are and how we work as organisms is relevant here.

And these two notions smudge. Here's to saying "I'm an ecology" rather than "I'm a person". Or "my name is Walter".

My organism is identifiable, especially for tax purposes, but its delimitation is non-existent, if that's not too ironic to contemplate. We could think that the elements of our living are simply placed on an orderly table of rows and columns that know all about our mass, molecular number and availability to bond, and that's true enough, but the subjective suddenness of the whole thing isn't neat at all. The smudge between living and more living has never yet been put into words without making us startled and scared.

The story of humanity is ours to create, not something to follow as a slave would accept shackles. Instead of rambling on, I'd say that the self isn't a priority, it's a smudge between all possible worlds and the reason and purpose why we're alive is to create whatever makes sense. And a necessary part of that purpose is our wholeness, our health. Much has worked, if not conspired, to allow us to arrive here in all our linguistic splendour, talking both clarity and crap in equal measures most of the time.

Biofocuisng wants wordlessness, and then oneness. I begin to recognise that some aspects of oneness require honesty that has been shut up by early influences. It's up to each one of us to identify and explicate those to ourselves. I have Martha Beck's book "Leaving the Saints" waiting to be read next. Perhaps that will help me even more. My own journey was to leave the Christian Brethren. I look at that wavering path with disbelief, now, wondering how words could possibly interfere with wisdom to the extent that they do.

So I'd recommend biofocusing, especially to those whose bodies are demonstrating stories that aren't readily decipherable. Maybe we can deal with sickness, illness and pain on levels that include but aren't limited to medical science. That's my purpose.

Naming death.

I feel that we are under a terribly false impression about death. Have a look at the small poster I came across while I experienced my death as a professional educator in South Africa. While there were many teachable adolescents in that school, the thugs simply turned their backs and swore my mother, as the saying goes, made it impossible for me to teach anything, and the principal preferred her salary to reality. That's the way it goes in South Africa. The situation could not be helped to heal or blast into a better reality.

That's the background to the poster.

To name death we have to name more, or nothing. I grew up in a death-defying context: the Christian Brethren who had triumphed over death in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour.

No way. I felt their grief before I learned to speak, they weren't any different in their sense of loss to the rest of the world. They hurt, and hurt badly. And I wanted to do something about that, because, in spite of their tight and truthless belief system, they were kind, careful and caring people. And many of them taught me love. So the gap between their dogma and their intent lives was big, and I took that gap, being myself.

To go into the gap between language and experience, I'd say, learn to wait, and see which words emerge. As a poetry therapist, I recognise there's a sense of truth that's possible, but not always applied to words.

Leaves die each autumn, the tree remains for years and years. Cycles die down and return, solstice, equinox, and there are many kinds of time in the cosmos, star-time, sun-time and whatever cycle of time you prefer to set as default.

Our terror of death is largely because of human-inflicted trauma, the effects of which are hugely underestimated, no matter the historical time-lapse. Fear is a human construct as well as an instinctive impulse, and the instinct has been hijacked as often as possible, from an escape from hell, to insurance against everything.

So I'm going to rename death. We do not die. Sure, this organism goes to dust, once the heat and liquid go to the next cycle, but the thing to grasp is that the awareness of awareness is not so important as a permanent agency. I've had the experience of disappearing as an agency. It wasn't fun, but it was real. For some bewildering time, there was neither subjective nor objective experience. It was all one. Bliss? Forget. More like the weight of the cosmos resting on one horrified human who recognised that being in the flow was not being there at all.

We tend to pin much on personality and affection.

It goes.

Death is not like that. The music of the cosmos bounces. Counterpoint is important. Melody seems to lead, but chords are really, really strong. And then you have voice. Pop sells, hey, and rightly so. What I'd name death as, is Presence.

I feel that Presence doesn't die. When you go, you magnify and are still there, a few times more than you were before. What was you fills up a whole lot more. So it makes sense to be fruitful and beneficial. And if you don't like these ways of being, stay away from me.


I don't identify with the word and name of death. To me, it's not the opposite of life. So far as I'm concerned, you get life, more life and very much more life. It's the meaning of life that we have to name, and use the gift of language to do so.

The easiest way to name life, to my way of thinking and feeling, is to communicate. Language finds a way if you really want to communicate.

So do bodies. Bodies, far from being matter, mucous and movement however slow, emit light.

That light vibrates at a particular wavelength and makes a unique sound.

If you listen to your voice, its often embarrassing.

So I suggest you use your voice to name death differently. It's not that we're going to disappear forever. Part of that is true, thank God. But the bigger thing is just as true, that we come back with more comprehension, more communication, more connection.

Check just three sets of eyes in the next twenty four hours. I do think they'll tell you this.

The language of healing.

The language of healing is a lateral staircase. Often people want to adhere to one or another set of words, be it esoteric, Christian, mystic, strictly rational, nutritional. Take your pick. But healing isn't language bound. The body doesn't use language to keep itself healthy. The layer of language is a late and complex development and doesn't create communication as much as it formalises communication. That's not so helpful, because the body is not a formal item. It's part of a wild ecology, and one of the least helpful things we can do is suppress that wild ecology by attempting to contain it in formal language. To contain what does much better on its own.

I've found a way to bypass language in respect of healing, and the name of this is biofocusing. We simply pay attention to what's happening in the living body, and attempt to decipher the sensitivities that emerge, and to respond accordingly. It's a bit like making love without touching. Total respect, sensitivity, vulnerability and sensation. Certainly not sexual, just exactly as subjective as can be.

I've found this to work in many cases. I have the good fortune to be able to walk in and out of our local hospital whenever I want and to pay attention to patients in this way.  I don't always have the opportunity to ask them what they experience, but I sense that there's much unburdening, and movement.

The language of medical science is certainly not like this. Medical science is strictly quantifiable, explicable, efficacious and accountable. At least in theory and sincere attempt. Naturally, there are many glitches, skid marks and deaths, yet the language of medical science holds sway, at this time, having reached a place of industrial purpose since the Renaissance, and that's a fruitful direction, but not a widely authoritative one. Doctors speak with authority because their role wants them to. That's okay with me so long as they know the limits if their authority. If you have a look at www.wddty.com you'll see what I mean. Lynne McTaggart and Bryan Hubbard do penetrating work.

Healing is more intentional than linguistic. Treating an illness is not the same as paying attention to the body, because the body holds really important emotions that are usually completely overlooked when it comes to medical science. Read "In Shock" by a doctor, Dr Awdish. In my experience, the body is an unfolding story. That's how I experience my own body. In my experience the body is a complex vibration, a chord of energetic focus. That's what I experience on an hourly basis.

So I've come to realise that the thousands of ways in which the body keeps itself healthy, unconsciously, automatically, persistently, arrive as images and impart crucial things to which we ascribe sincere yet inadequate language. As a doctor of holistic medicine I try to hear what the body declares, as well as what the person is saying. When there's a major discrepancy, it's more difficult to deal with the real issues.

The language of healing isn't triumphal. Witchdoctors, gurus and gods don't play a role. And always beware if you have to part with a load of money for a promised miracle. To know more, and especially if you face a difficult diagnosis, or a burden, make contact. www.story-clinic.com and www.biofocusing.com.   

How did you lose your intelligence?

"Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains". Jean-Jacque Rousseau.

A major part of being in chains is losing your intelligence. Being alive and being human carries an almost automatic consequence of losing intelligence. The formal world is a frightening thing. It makes you comply. I have a total hatred of compliance yet I understand instinctive obedience. It's always good to fit into the bigger picture for the greater good, but the stories these humans tell about the greater good are deadening.

Neurons have a way of working as they are meant to work. So do synapses. Each element in the human body and on planet earth has a job to do, and it simply gets on and does it. So where does it all go wrong with sickness, disease, illness, poverty and bad behaviour?

And what's the actual problem with conscious awareness and the deep feelings that are linked to being alive and aware?

Work out where you lost your intelligence.

I had the good fortune to re-make contact with a teacher who never taught me but was a presence in my primary school. Miss Marsh. I'm sure she won't mind me mentioning her name. In those days she smoked, was blonde and pretty, and according to the church in which I grew up, unsaved, and going to hell. I am deeply embarrassed that at a very young age, even though I'd written my first book of poetry, and bound it, too, I gave her a tract one morning, explaining how to get saved. I can sort of remember the half-silly smile on my face as I explained what I was doing, and I very clearly remember the studied blandness of her voice as she replied, although I can't remember exactly how she replied. I do remember that she was very diplomatic in her response.

So many years after, thanks to Facebook, we linked up on that primary school's page and I asked her if she remembered me. Yes, she said, I wore glasses and I was intelligent. That made me think. Yes, I had high marks all the way through primary school, and into high school, and then they dropped. The headmaster called me, and asked why. I couldn't answer.

I had lost my intelligence for the time being, and would not regain it until very much later if ever.

What was supposed to happen during the hormonal rush called puberty did not happen effectively. Sexuality hit, and hit hard. Emotions lurched into heightened sensitivity and could make no sense. And I wasn't allowed to be intellectually curious and intelligent. My thinking went underground because it had to. If I didn't agree with the current in which I happened to find myself, I was going to hell in a basket. If I spoke out against the current in which my awareness wavered, I would be an outcast. Both my parents had no doubt about that, it seemed. The entire tribe, the church known as Christian Brethren, and here's the difficult part, many wholesome good people, some of whom I'd grown up trusting, and talking to spontaneously, agreed to that verbalised current of belief. It was dangerous for me to speak. Having a rebellious streak, I spoke. But not for long. It felt fruitless, futile and deadening. Which it was. Today I am still angry with morons in a pulpit, enjoying the publication of their own versions of their fears disguised as faith.

I've had the good fortune to live long enough to work out where I lost my intelligence.

It never dies, it simply goes underground, or in other circumstances, never grows up. When I observe others, it doesn't take long to work out if we are going to communicate intelligently or not. It seems to me that not I, but the body, is extremely intelligent, intelligent enough to communicate beyond the ultra-violet and infra-red frequencies in which we live, and right into the quantum realities which begin to become apparent. For example, read Paul Levy, Joe Dispenza, Brain Weiss, Rana Awdish, Gill Edwards, Tim Freke and many others. In one's own story, the place, time and manner in which your intelligence has been hijacked is important.

It's good to know that your body's intelligence is intact, no matter what they do. And if you happen to feel a deep, desperate sadness that this is what life has presented, as I have today, feel glad that your body mourns, and knows how to mourn spiritual futility. Because that means that spiritual awareness persists, despite human interference.

I have a great interest in the table of elements, because more than the social construct , of who they might think I am, that's who I choose to be. I am a lot of oxygen, hydrogen, quite a bit calcium, I depend totally on the KNa pump, and plenty of other traces. And all of these speak, loudly and coherently into the sin of humanity, which misses the mark.

What kind of a fool misses the mark on purpose?

I think not many humans are as stupid, evil and abusive as Hitler, Zuma and others. I am embarrassed
to live in a nation which has tolerated Zuma. We did our best to get rid of Verwoerd and PW Botha. Then we tolerated Zuma? And our educational system has utterly collapsed, on purpose. And silent Cyril is going to do better because he knows when to keep his mouth shut? Does he have the guts to open it and speak truth occasionally? This one isn't a leader. It's a cash flow manipulator.

Not on my watch.

When we accept shyte, we lose intelligence.

As a six year old I gave my heart to Jesus, because it was expected of me. A good, compliant child. And I was baptised at twelve, because it couldn't be postponed. The water was cold, the ritual dead at one level, and very much alive at another. The body knows.

Bread and wine mean nothing to me when I'm alone, but everything when there's conversation and communication.

I have a really alarming intelligence when it's allowed to work. The network is huge. In fact it's overwhelming.

I want to make this clear: cognitive intelligence and emotional intelligence work together, absolutely. They're supposed to communicate with each other, and if they don't, their diplomats are sent out.

When diplomacy fails, and communication is refused, human communication might be rubbished, but the body remains intact. There's something very special about the human body, and we haven't yet honoured that. Our general intelligence needs to recognise itself, but there are quite a few who work against that, for their own purposes.

That's irritating.

I don't like the feeling of not being intelligent because someone prefers it that way.

And todayI rejoice in the body's intact wisdom. It chooses how to action intelligence. 

Stories, success and getting honest about secrets.

Ask anyone who they are, and what they want to tell you is all about their success. That's normal. Good feelings are better than bad feelings, and success is supposed to feel good. Achievements, confidence, powerfulness, likability, esteem. I've known these, and yes, they do feel better than fear, timidity, rejection and disappointment.

But I'd recommend a short-cut to knowing and owning your story: get honest about your secrets. This seems to be contradictory, and so it is, but it's a requirement in respect of getting to the heart of the story. Many stories are about a pivotal secret, and I'd think that one's life has a few pivotal secrets that  are kept far away from the public persona that we prefer to exude. In a story clinic, an exercise that I'd work through is to invite participants to draw, not write, their very private secrets. Symbolically. To revisit those formative secrets that we try to keep from consciousness, since consciousness is a shared thing. Consciousness is a strange combination of physiological and spiritual awareness and it's true that when severe trauma happens, consciousness shuts down, steps aside, changes shape. Spiritual awareness in contrast to physiological awareness sharpens up, not as a rule but as a strong possibility. Near death experiences, rape, death of a loved one, prolonged cruelty and so many other happenings can lead to enhancement of spiritual consciousness. And because this kind of consciousness is not easily shared, it remains secret, which is a pity.

So if you have secrets that go deep, and scare you, and you certainly would not be honest about them,  get to grips with being honest at least with yourself. Draw a picture, create a simple symbol to focus your attention on a secret, one at a time, and then write down the feelings you felt or feel, and be sure to recall a mix of better and worse feelings. They can't all be good or bad, because that's not how deep secrets work. The shock of loss implies the closeness of relationship. The stolen sweet versus the fear of being discovered.

Pivotal secrets are the hinges on which cosmic doors open. Humans have a way of trying to close that which is eternally and ultimately open by using words unwisely. We need to remember that words are the froth, not the currents of communication. We tend to leak, copiously, that which we vainly attempt to hide. The body doesn't lie. That mad construct we call the self gets up to all sorts of tricks, not realising the currents that throw up froth.

In short, I'm saying: it's not necessary to confess secrets to the world at large. A friend or a priest could work very well. Your choice, your trust. Primarily, let your body talk openly to itself. With emotions, attitudes, words, beliefs and choices. Get to know how your feelings flow. Give yourself permission to change key words. Get sceptical about your beliefs and make choices about your doubts. If you hate, ask exactly why, if you love, ask how. Test what knowing feels like, and when you experience that animal-like veering back from the secret stuff, deliberately take your attention away from it, and feel the wind, heat, spray, or whatever is in your face. Let that remind your heart that another step in your story is possible. Because it is. Your heart knows that. Secrets are important, not damning. They arise when danger is implied. Obviously a thief hides for reasons different to those of a bullied child. Yet the glass behind which both hide is not to be polished but removed so that the actual stuff can be dealt with. And the irony is, no-one is able to hide behind themselves. I've come to notice that each twitch of the face is a dead give-away.

The reason for South Africa's demise has nothing to do with colour and everything to do with calibre.

The numbers in and of South Africa aren't gong to crunch well. My actuarial instinct says sorry, but the prognosis is poor, and time is running out. And the country's thinking and feeling is not about getting the story right but about believing the unworkable stories that the politicians want you to accept. We're heading for a watershed election in May this year, where official opposition parties are likely to change lanes, after which the rhetoric will become even less sensible.

So the Story Clinic wants to make a statement here: change the complaint about colour to the call for calibre. Sure, there are so many valid points to make about slavery, colonisation, colour-bars, prejudice, and perverted social purpose, yet decisions are what create movement at the end of the day, and if you decide to get victimised and lost in a fruitless verbal vomit, you might get the dregs of your imagined emotions out, but that won't necessarily cure the sickness.

Colour-blame is not a fruitful basis for analysis. That way there's always an us and them, and you can tweak the numbers to make it now, for the imagined future, or for the whole of history. And colour is too obvious. You can plaster a label on a colour because you can see it. Turn the lens inwards. Test yourself. No matter your culture, colour or climate, that's the real call.

How does a democracy keep a Zuma president? How does an ANC try to silence its obvious secrets of abysmal corruption? And how does Cyril pretend not to know? And really, a DA banishment of all things that might smack of colonialism while classrooms are allowed to collapse with righteousness? All the while the unfair treatment of blacks and the unfair treatment of whites colours thinking and feeling overwhelmingly. An EFFing mess....

Calibre has to do with being fit for purpose, exactness of execution, proof of character and some evidence of stepping up to the plate when called. This seems doomed in South Africa, and I'm simply being actuarial, not pessimistic. Add news headlines, which admittedly are not exact stories, to the litter, crime, corruption, untold carelessness and casual attitudes that have replaced good sense, and you won't need the political or economic analyses that columnize our pretended characters.

Let the Story Clinic be clear: if South Africa is to move out of its red light zone which isn't sexy at all, but really and dramatically dangerous, it needs to stop thinking and feeling colour, especially the black and white rubbish, and to start getting calibre. Which means beginning with oneself, and doing what one can. And truthfully, not merely strategically. And a combo of these would be good, if we could possibly get it on the menu.

Maybe Cyril could meet me at Ocean Basket. He could lose his gloss, which will go, in any case, and I might get the three-way calamari, all white at bottom, but with different tastes. And the house wine, if I'm not mistaken is Two Oceans. Hey Cyril, let's beat EFFing Julius and sue them for not being One Planet! The attorneys would love......and all the parties could use green as another camouflage....