Chaos, cosmos and biofocusing

The distinction between randomness and order is similar to the differentiation between chaos and cosmos, and for humans, it's a good idea to pay attention to the difference between controlling the smaller picture for one's own benefit and creating the bigger picture for general benefit.

More food and money for today at the expense of whatever's missing from tomorrow and people to come is a short-sighted view of what's supposed to work for humankind.

You do not have to protect yourself from lack.

I'm not sure if I believe this, myself, but it's a worthwhile thought. All around me, I see people protecting themselves from lack with financial foresight and wealth-building. It makes good sense, because I wouldn't want to run out of time, money or life, and find myself, and especially those I wish to protect, in a bad place.

So, out of that chaos of living, I wish to create a cosmos of safety for those whom I love, and if I were I good politician, the general populace.

Applying this persoanlly, I am up against the balance of personal chaos and cosmos.

Chaos is imagination run riot. No control. No steering, yet total freedom of association. It's daunting when you do it, especially when your nightly dreams merge with waking practicality. When you get to the point where you ask what the point is of your being alive, you're doing biofocusing. To answer that question, you move between chaos and cosmos to find this temporary identity you call yourself, which truly, is only a matter of some decades, which means nothing in the ultimate scale of thiungs, but a great deal in terms of responding to the here and now.

My policy, to prevent my so-called mind from losing all sense of reality, is to reduce the invitation to chaos less, and appreciate the cosmos more. Chaos is real, it's like the sea and its movement before you get the waves, shores, and people happily paddling. Something passes between the moments of perception and the moments before those, and our bodies, which form a temporary cosmos within the greater cosmos, know the difference. Some say the body creates mind, some say mind creates body. I would say language fails to descirbe or explain, at this point. Go pre-verbal, and stay there, and see what happens. It's not a funny or comfortable place to be.

The experience of being alive has no text-book, not even a sacred book. Raw intelligence, which is a coming blog, is ever-present, where you have to think on your feet, for yourself, at total risk, rather than depend on any kind of over-cooked nitelligence, the words and wisdom of which you think you can buy.

Which is what academia and religion have become.

Sort out your own life, determine your cosmos from your chaos. Yes, these are really immense dimensions that defy understanding, yet the task is there, it's part of being alive. That single point of connection between the two, your living body and concommitant mind, which is your living awareness is the real thing. You can grow it, constrain it, reduce it, domesticate it, even deny it. It will always obey that mysterious agent which is yours to command. There is a you, that commands, and another you, that obeys. One is cosmos, the other is chaos, but the communication between the two is not obvious. One would assume that cosmos orders chaos, but then again, chaos energizes cosmos.

There's more to be said about this, but this is a worthwhile reflection. For myself, I am content to be both, the chaos of storm, the cosmos of abatement.

Gravitational waves, middle C and the eye of the storm

Gravitational waves, postulated by Einstein, have been verified in the past weeks. Two immense black holes circled each other very rapidly, disappeared together, and we heard the chirp. I listened to it three times this morning.

So what?

Well, the implications for daily living are not huge. Nothing will change your luck, income, or Valentine's import for today. The real difference is about understanding that time and space are alterable, and that we can hear it, albeit expensively. Apples will still fall towards the centre of the earth, even though your head will impede the fall if it's in the way. As the report put it, the fabric of space and time can be torn by major events.

What struck me most in the report was that the sound itself, which was captured inadvertently, was musically described as beginning down there somewhere, rising to middle C and then disappeared. I'm not sure what, but something absolute has been sounded. Now we know that middle C is at least close to the centre of the universe, if not the keyboard.

I once asked the director of Living Sound, Larry Dalton what his favourite key was. "C major," he said, without a moment's hesitation. He's in heaven now, so perhaps he would have more to say on this subject.
None of this is intended to be flippant. Gravitational waves, musical absolutes and human experience overlap to a dramatic extent.

To my increasing dismay, I have been forced to admit fixation with the need to discover an absolute narrative for human experience. I was challenged by the Gospel, and took it on. I would like to back off, and declare myself inadequate, but I'm not. Life isn't plain sailing, and from time to time, we find ourselves in the eye of the storm.

That eye of perception strikes when trauma does, and alters our sense of reality, which is key, here.

Not only is Newtonian physics not sacred; neither is anything else.

This understanding is not helpful when a hurting human presents and wants comfort.

Pain, death and loss are the key problems that present impossible solutions.

Can you change these for real?

Physical pain can be managed to an extent, emotional pain can be relieved to a greater exent, unfortunately death is unavoidable, and loss can be re-interpreted to a huge extent. Gravitational waves, being more than a discovery relating to theoretical physics, may be able to press one's middle C, and assist with that difficult re-interpretation.

Anyone who listens to, and better, loves music, would probably not realize how the keyboard is structured. Middle C is in the middle, a nondescript white  L-shaped key with a scientific description of the waves it produces. It sounds kind of flat to me, I prefer F sharp, or E flat, but that's a matter of personal attunuation.

The point is that the universe produces sounds, and that sounds are absolutely evocative and provocative.

Sounds have meaning, that's why we miss voices when we can no longer hear them when we want to.

The eye of the storm is in there, the subjective status of the realm of theoretical physics which becomes a practical problem. We can't bring back the dead, we can't reduce the experience of living to something controllable, we actually can't do much at all except pour another whiskey.

On the other hand, check biocentricm a la Robert Lanza. Check biofocusing a la WH Willies.

What determines what in this confusing universe? The question probably isn't one, and con-fusion is the only way to go, as we gather, parrot-like, mimicry of the closest thing to us. The furtherest is going to be far too weird.
Are humans relevant?

That's up to them.

Making up your mind, breaking up your mind

The two things we take most for granted in my opinion are health and mind. The first is tangible enough, and when it works well, we don't pay that much attention until something goes wrong, and we experience pain, fear of death, and usually, we are prepared to go for help to relieve these.

The second, mind, is a lot more tricky because it's very slippery, and has to be made solid on purpose, usually for the sake of others, and not for oneself. Once it's solid to the limited extent that this is possible, we accept the solid stuff as the sense of reality. I have worked really hard to make my own mind solid enough to deal with the slipperiness of life, and was very surprised when I learnt that I had to decide to break down a lot of what I had built because it wasn't fruitful.

Once I took that decicion, breaking down happened quite rapidly. Being intellectually strong does not necessarily mean being fruitfully intelligent. Emotional sensitiviy does not necessarily result in emotionally intelligent action.

There's more than enough mind-bashing that we encounter as we make our way through life and resilience is required to conquer bullies, fools and enemies. External antagonism can be expected. I'm referring more to internal constructions of habits or even loyalties that are fruitless, unnecessary and self-destructive. And no-on is going to break them down except oneself. I don't think there are gentle ways of doing this: you take the decision, and once you do, a kind of auto-pilot kicks in and you begin to recognise the false perceptions and deregister them.

Here are a few examples of era-related perceptions that don't work:

The priest knopws more about God than you do.

What's on the cell-phone/tablet screen is more worthy of your attention than the person you're with.

The doctor knows more about your body than you do.

You're so very special that you don't ever deserve to be punished.

The better the feeling, the more the love.

The law is there for our good.

Education is the backbone of civilisation.

Never judge anyone.

Whites are superior to blacks.

Blacks have been abused by whites. 

Death is the end.

Death is the beginning.

Love is the most important thing in the universe.

I am a man/woman/gay.


Once emotions are locked into a perception that works against fruitful action, there's going to be a tug of war until something gives. That seldom feels like a joke. Families splt, marriages fail, nations battle against themselves and each other, and individuals die needlessly.

Breaking down bad habits of intellect, emotion and decision are as requisite as building habits of fruitfulness, and it's confusing and dismaying to realize that the relationship between these can be indistinct unless you have an extremely sharp and humble sense of clarity.

The real needs of the day are usually right in front of our noses. They are the ones requiring insightful thoughts, integrated emotions and clear decisions resulting in fruitful action.

Biofocusing and creating love

One of the most misunderstood words I know is "love". We assume it's an abstract noun, the definition of which is something you can't see, smell, hear, taste or feel. This is back to front, because the next assumption we make is that it's the most important feeling of all, and everybody knows what that feeling feels like.

It would be interesting to survey a global linguistic reference to love. Greek, for instance, makes distinctions between four kinds of love: affectionate love, love for a friend, erotic love and divine love. Biofocusing challenges a lingusitic approach to love by asking and answering questions about what one actually means and does in respect of that which is most important to you, which goes to the core of living. Love should relate.

It's commonly understood and accepted that family and friends are the most important aspects of our living. Through them, we are greeted into earthly living, and when our bodies die, they grieve and mourn. These feelings are mutual, communal, inescapable and go as deep as deep goes. The implication is the sense of profound connection which we don't want to be broken. Another truism is that if you love money more than you love people you're on the wrong track, and if you love yourself much more than others, it probably isn't love.

I am convinced that our primary task as a species on this planet is to create love. To make sense of such a statement we need a little bit of analysis, a lot of synthesis, and a great deal of fruitful action. I also need to point out that the actual process doesn't start with us humans, but with where we pop out of. There is a verse in the Bible that says "Herein is love, not that we love God, but that God first loved us".

We are indeed greatly loved, which means that a huge amount of energy has gone into the creating of our bodies, and we should honour that by putting all possible energy into being fruitful in this world.

As I have become older, I have become cautious of accepting that heaven is sheer bliss. Spirit is where we come from, spirit is where we go back to, spirit is where we are, in the present. So we know about heaven, or spirit, or whatever word is relevant. But we don't do it.We are distacted, seduced, commanded, narratized away from the feelings of that path we're really on.

Check your best feelings: favourite team won? Anticipation of favourite food? Sex? Friends and chat? Party? Walking with your best friend?  I wonder how common or uncommon mine are: when I meditate or write poetry, study intensively to find connections, or come across something beautiful and allow it to reside, I experience really weird and amazing rolls of ever-increasing energy pulsing through the me of my body, if that's graspable.

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment" wrote Shakespeare.
"Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds,
or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests
and is never shaken...."

I don't think he meant a light-house, but rather the stars that made navigation trustable.

But in respect of creating love, a light-house is a good metaphor. It's purpose is ultimately one of safety, and my point in this particular writing is that our purpose of creating love is not far from this agenda.

The human spirit has proved to be cruel, as well as loving. It's a knowing, a sense and a choice. Just as light houses have been built on purpose, so does very much more have to be built on purpose. Many inventions have proved to be convenient yet destructive. It's difficult to differentiate between the human element and the material element in some cases. Motor vehicles are a great convenience, yet have killed many, mostly because of human error or negligence, the cell -phone has destroyed much social fabric, and military apparatus, from the rifle to the bomb yet to be invented speaks for itself.

Let's stick with the light-house.

Each life is such. The chaotic ocean is a given. Storms are inevitable. Peace returns. But over the moving surface, there's a job to be done, whether walking on the water, or shining the way. Love is not one thing, but the many actions that create a rare movement designed to be communal. I can't think of one material thing I've built in my life. I was booted out of wood-work, tried to make a small shelf-system that went hollow in the middle, and all my gardening attempts went to dust quite quickly. I do remember, I once put together a model boat that stayed together, and I even painted it, so carefully. That's about it. I admire people who know how to build bridges, engines, buildings and real boats. I often wish I had these skills.

Each life is something built on purpose for achievement, in one way or another. Whether it's to survive one more day, make a massive merger, plan a new surgical procedure, or discover an unknown element, or teach your children well, if it passes the test of acceptability, something is gained.

If the result is shock, disappointment, horror, trauma, pain, disbelief and self-doubt, something is lost.

How to create love goes live for sixty minutes on 10 February 2016 on www.learnitlive.com 

The world we should live in won't arrive unless we build it, life by life.

What biofocusing can do in respect of grief

Here are a few ideas of what happens in Biofocusing: the Grief Workshop. No explanation can replace experience which is what the workshop is about, but a few points about how biofocusing works will help. The sub-heading for biofocusing is "choose a point of attention, and then act in respect of it". Attention, focusing and intention are closely linked. These seem to be cerebral words, like encouraging, persuading or forcing the brain to go somewhere. Once you pull emotion and volition into the mix, something holistic happens. Like falling in love, you don't do it with part of yourself. Everything about both of you is involved. Biofocusing is like stepping back, or perhaps forwards, into your livingness and experiencing it with a different intensity, perhaps more, perhaps less, allowing the focus that presents what arrives. Biofocusing is about managing attention, which is a good thing, because humankind hasn't learnt how to do that. We believe too much and we know too little. I have often been intrigued by how children follow their parents' careers. From farming to law to medicine to business, the pattern is re-presented. The management of attention is achieved almost completely unconsciously in this way.

Attention is also hijacked by illusions of reality: centrality of money, depth of love, power as freedom, solitude as prison, and many more. Where our gaze goes, our sense of reality persists.

Aunty Carol who was my Mary Poppins, used to sing to me:"Be careful little eyes what you see, there's a God up above, looking down in love, so be careful little eyes what you see". It's a child's ditty, but really, I can't help seeing what's put in front of me. Yet I can certainly choose where I look. And where I fix my gaze.

Similarly, I can choose what I hear.

I heard what they called the Gospel so frequently as a child that I knew the jist of it from back to front. It has taken me close to sixty years to make any sense of it. In fact, much of the motivation to develop the Grief Workshop arises from my experience of people using words that didn't help, deep words, to convince each other that they weren't grieving, although they were grieving as much as anyone ever has. That has bothered me a lot, because, intuitively, from the beginning, I knew that grief can be transformational. Grief is the signal that part of our mission as humankind is to create love, not to miss it.

Being alive is surprising, mysterious and often baffling. Grief lets us know it's also deeply painful. Taking a step into livingness involves getting closer to emotions. The pleasant ones feel better, the painful ones are best avoided. The worst ones are shattering and we prefer not to go there. Yet, as C.S Lewis pointed out, pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

Grief is not a singular emotion, but a vivid and multi-faceted experience that emphasizes uniqeness. What grief does to me is pick up all my understanding, drop it so that it shatters, turns my body into a spasm of unbearably awful pain, and then, after some time, reminds me that I am not only able to choose where to put my attention, but that in fact I am forced where to put my attention. Don't misunderstand the "force" of that. It's not about coercion, but about the sense of truth.

It's weird: what you choose as truth is a major factor in creating your sense of truth. Politicians and attorneys know all about this. Biofocusing involves choosing living. Choosing living is not the same as not choosing death. An early lesson they mistakenly teach at schools is "opposites". Life and death are not opposites. And living is not temporary. If you attend to the experience of grief you will learn something unique. Attending to grief is not about becoming ever more grief -stricken. It's about going where the exeprience wants to take you. There's no recipe, and no generic outcome.

When I turned thirty, Uncle John, who had been my Sunday School teacher, joined the party. He had become a friend whose company I valued and enjoyed. On that birthday, the most ubiquitous gift was ice-buckets. But his was something different. I unpacked a small, dense parcel, and unravelled a message that read:

"out of the eater came forth meat, out of the strong came honey: things are not always what they seem to be".

 It was a Lion matchbox, and into it and around it he had managed to pack R50, which was a significant amount in those days.

The elephant in the room is also not always what it seems to be. Temporary and eternal are not opposites either. The drama neither ends nor begins when we stop breathing. It's in the here and now, and the meaning is not a given but what we create.

So far I've been addressing biofocusing more than grief. I'm saying more than "life is paradoxical" and I'm certainly not saying that grief is illusory. I'm pointing out that attention is malleable, even fluid, and that when one is offered ways of managing one's own attention, very much can change for the better. I had two outstanding mentors, Ken Dovey and John Gibbon: one taught me that life is for living, and the other showed me how to manage living. Now that I've combined the two for myself, I'm in a position to share the praxis.

What we do in the Grief Workshop is attune emotional attention, just as perceptual attention has been stimulated by the last three pictures. What you experience isn't all that there is. It's difficult to run when you're weeping. But it's not difficult to weep when you're running, especially when its towards and not away.

Joy and grief arise from the same place, and this is not a linguistic trick.

More in the Grief Workshop. Thank you for your interest, locally and globally.

Biofocusing and grief: announcing the Grief Workshop

I could say that my very first impression of being alive was an awareness of grief. It's a large and scary experience to find yourself in, when you're about three, and trying to make sense of the world. Although my mother and I were not close as two people, or even mother and son, we were close spirits, and her grief at her father's early death, though not discussed, hung in the air, an unspoken balloon of fear and anguish, that delicately refused to do more than merely touch surfaces of silence before moving away.

She grieved her father's early death, she grieved her brother's death, she was badly homesick for her Swiss homeland and I would guess that she also grieved for each baby that had died in her hospital. But she seldom wept, she simply became ever more severe in speaking of the love of her Lord and Saviour, whose death she also grieved.

It gets worse. Every forty-eight hours, at one or another Christian evangelical meeting, I encountered deep grief in others, concerning the suffering and death of Jesus on their behalf, their own sinfulness, and the desperation we face as we must make that awful choice between eternal life and eternal loss, hell, death and damnation.

I was a scared child who learned to control my fear, and created layers of confidence. I survived the fear, but in the end it outwitted me.I waited for some months for my heart to stop, but it didn't. I survived that, too. We're wired to live, not to die, but in the end all of us die.

Living stands for something we don't quite grasp.

I had to learn that my very sophisticated thinking, and to put it simply, I am among the world's most educated, means absolutely nothing when it comes to working out grief.

What sort of feeling is grief? I have a strange contrbution to make: it's what angels try to impart to us when we aren't listening or don't want to listen. We are not going to go to heaven: we're there, we're present to heaven, as well as to earth, we are "a little less than the angels", we have not learnt to calm our intensities and reflect passages of heaven that we walk, knowingly and unknowingly. Our bodies are of this planet, our awareness is of this planet, and for the sake of simplicity, heaven. By "heaven" I refer to the rest of the knowing cosmos.

There is something that my body knows, but really, it won't easily go into words or stories. We have some sacred stories for which some have lived, some have died, and some have killed. These sacred sstories are still warring with each other. It's time to say that something about them doesn't work. At my most needy point, when I wasn't sure of anything but death, failure and ultimate disappointment, the feelings of which were utterly breaking, I searched for my most holy words, and found them to be "the Spirit of Christ".

There I learnt that the Spirit of Christ is wild, and touches us in our most primituve state of awareness. The Spirit of Christ has to do with where we come from but, unhappily, where we have not gone. Our cognitive efforts are noble but not sufficient. We need to go the other way, and state our helplessness before pretending our heroism. If grief is an important signifier of humility, and it is, joy is the way beyond grief. I have a ridiculous confession to make: when I learnt this one, it was because I heard the muse while I was listening to Goldfish performing "Moon Walkaway". There was such a prepostorous joy to this utterly peripheral, inane, going-about shout of drama declaring local yet cosmic freedom, that I had to agree, because something in my cells grasped that movement is better than logic.

Not everyone else has had that luxury of knowingness.

Grief is a symptom of baffled awareness. True, loss and missingness are not easy. But that deep cellular posing as cerebral intensity has more to say than we think, or feel.

Everyone experiences grief, and we would try to be kind, and prevent our children from this. First, the hamster dies, and parents explain something, before we get to grandma, grandpa or closer.

Truth is, who knows what to explain?

Biofocusing is about getting real about living. And most truly of all, living is about living in the here and now and living eternally, infinitely, joyfully, adventurously and gratefully.

Careful science, severe religion and self-conservation have little to do with living.

Biofocusing is pleased to announce the first event of the Grief Workshop. Here are the details:

Healing begins with consciousness and the will to move beyond an emotional given. All the thinking in the world will not help us until we have decided that we are going to do something, no matter how small or insignificant it may seem.

Let's see you there! And those in other countries, your interest is appreciated vey much.

Biofocusing, stories about the universe, and beyond.

Biofocusing, as I have said before, has a lot to do with paying attention. Now I'm going to take it a step further, and say that it's also about creating attention.

When we pay attention to something, we give it enough importance to get real. Take Facebook, for example. Once upon a time it was only an idea but now it's fundamental to many daily behaviours. Or, one single item of behaviour, like an assassination, becomes a world, even an historic moment. An epic story is contextualised around that one finger pulling the trigger that sends the bullet to the target.

When attention is paid, a story is created. The more attention paid, the greater the chance of credibility. And therein lies the rub. Stories and the sense of reality impinge upon each other. The trouble with this adjunction is that people commit themselves to both the story and the sense of reality it brings without realizing, as a hypnotist would know for sure, that whatever story you tell, there's another that is just as true.

The sense of truth itself, is merely that: a sense of truth, and the truth of that is that it can always be improved upon.

Before anyone shoots me (I'm not in the league of those worth assassinating) here are the points I want to make:

stories reflect self-conscious management, usually poorly executed

the stories that arrive in book form cheat time, the subjective-objective split and run the risk of being regarded as discrete enities, like numbers

stories that arrive as movies do the same, but popcorn dampens the overall effect

stories that have not been released by the human organism into communal domain are privately motivated, the power of which is gravely underestimated

stories that are released into communal domain, no matter how selective or all-embracing such domain may be, are mostly granted the status of being real, largely because of obeying linguistic rules

stories that are told in a serious tone tend to be taken seriously 

stories that are told humourously tend to be taken humourously

stories that are told authoratatively command esteem more easily than others.

Tone, an important element of which is volume, sets much.

The universe began with a big, loud bang.

Oh, it did, did it? I've read about the evidence for that story, and then found another story, for which, apparently, there is also evidence. This one says that the universe is breathing in and out.

The truth, which is a collapsible word, is that no-one knows for sure. Are we entirely thwarted in the mission for a grand grasp of our existence? The cosmologists are not going to agree, for the time being. Then there are those who go another way, and suggest, demand, require, kill us if we don't agree with an already recipe-d story, which is the way of general religion, expecially the crazy, fervent ones, the emotional glue of which is alarmingly sticky in current times. We may be living in what is a definitely post-reasoning world if we can't find a way to de-enthuse fervency and expose it for what it is: synaptic overkill, physiologically and literally.

For too long a time I believed what people had told me about the Bible,and I tried to work my way into all the stories set out there, until I made the effort to sort out something understandable for myself. The fear of hell which was drummed into me before I could think for myself was quite a tough one to chuck, but in the end this simplicity held:

Be more than your instincts because you are more.

The "more", I discovered is entirely negotiable. It's a story you get to author yourself. The odd thing is that once you start authoring for real, sync happens.

If you describe your beginnings, you'll go back to mom and dad, early memories, what was going on around you, a bit of objective history, in retrospect, that really truthful stuff collated, corroborated and communciated which makes it all for real. You got into an organic but badly-languaged world, and listened to the words, and got hypnotized by the tones. The thing about thrillers is that they keep the same tone, but take off every now and then to go a little bit deep, strike an instinct and come back.

So I was born, and my story began. Let's try again. I began before I let myself get pulled in once again. This truly pitiful level of consciousness called human is a wail in the cosmic night. Who can resist? It's supposed to work right, and fit in with the beautiful world to which it belongs, but it's a total fuck up. The Bible uses the word "sin". It means that the arrow didn't hit the target. The assassin missed, but that's my version. Don't mess with the truth.

Bottom line: truth is created, never owned, and humans have the opportunity to create.  Because they aren't so clever, they quickly drop to instinct.

Now for the big one: love. Is it bigger than instinct or just an empty word?

Well, check the wind for movement. The eternal waft, and certainly it's there, you might try to fool your own mind, but your mind isn't there to fool anyone, least of all you.

Last time you checked for truth, how was it?

Note to self. becoming non-self: you're gonna die.Perhaps comfortably, holding hands with family, perhaps really sore, hurting, anguished, tortured. Screaming.

Then what?

You then lose you. All your organic stuff starts to work. What your body is, is something else, but going another way.

So let's tell another story. Let's say that there's more going on than we can say, but we'll try to say it.

God save human consciousness. But who is God? And how does God work?

Who do we choose to listen to?

Science will try a certain  kind of story, religion another. A third option:

just tell the story, and let it tell itself through you, no control of how it goes, it will link up the way it does, the way worlds and wills match is so different to what we think:

Humans are cruel, abominably cruel, that's how it is. It's in their corpuscles, cells, and neuroreceptors. They fail to kill that old enemy, the false self, as soon as it stands. They haven't the heart to assassinate their weakness. They believe in their own strength, forgetting to honour their source.

Why?

It all comes from a random mind that could be focused, but the motivation to focus waits, wanting something that reduces the access to something less:

there are worlds and universes waiting to land on our human platform, humble though it should be.

We have grown blunt, we need to re-recognize the drama in which we participate. As many as possible will create a new season. The issue is to recognize it.