That life and death are not opposites.

I wish that they hadn't taught me that life and death are opposites. I learnt about opposites early on in school. Antonyms, they said, and they worked in pairs, one word meaning the opposite of the other, like hot and cold, wet and dry, up and down, and even boy and girl. It was a rule, even a law, that things worked in opposites. Later on I learnt that this is not dissimilar to Kantian logic, where a thing can be only what it is, not something else. Logical positivism.

I learnt about death before I went to school. I was taken to many funerals because my parents were very supportive of bereaved people. The coffin lid was frequently left open, and once my mother was really cross with me because, as she said, "Why do you want to put your nose in there?" The truth was that I was supremely curious, and not scared of finding out.

But what they taught me at church was a big problem: I soon grasped that although they pretended to know what happened when you die, they didn't. They were heart-broken, no matter how much they believed in Jesus. And the more I asked, the more unsatisfactory were the answers.

Now that I'm over sixty years old, and have kept on asking, all the time, I have to say that life and death are not opposites. Crucifixion and resurrection work together, every autumn covers our garden with leaves and beauty, each spring returns flowers and grace.

The awkward truth about dying is that you know, even if you believe in reincarnation, that you, yourself won't come back. It's a real ending. I have thought about this sad feeling a lot, and the following answer has come to mind: I have ten unique finger-prints on the ends of my fingers, and I feel nothing special about them. Not even one of them. The knowable cosmos is filled with infinite uniquenesses, from snowflakes to stars.

When it comes to people, the same is true.

The feeling of being alive isn't any one particular feeling. It's a magnificent range, the pattern of which is unique to any individual. I have found  that few people go the whole length to the available depths. When they get put out there, they quickly want to move back to a safe place.

There is no safety in music. If you listen carefully you will hear the stuff of cosmos, the knowing of heaven. Strange that it's beautiful and heart-rending at the same time, comforting and turbulent, knowing yet stretching to what seems unattainable.

The story of being alive is just that, glimpses into the greater narrative that we don't control, individually or collectively.

I was brought up as a Christian, and I don't think that that collective has got too much right. The rogue priests who speak truth to pope and arch, the protests, the faithful and fervent, the silent kindness of the ordinary people and the earnest intellects of those who attempt to overcome pomp: these impress and inspire me. And those who show that God and art are in relationship. And those who reject dogma for freedom, fearlessly.

Two things tell me that life and death are not opposites: music and the table of elements. Both are absolutely neat, predictable, explosive, creative. One creates awareness, the other makes creation aware.

In that creative activity, each unique human is caught up in a web of counter-point: feelings that pour through us, from us, to us.

Our individual uniqeness is one thing, the wording and experience of living another. It's a pity that we have kept language and living apart. The formal world is responsible for that. At bottom, humans are intelligent animals and creative spirits, not formal units for political and economic purposes.

The sense of aliveness is most keenly experienced when we embrace the depths we fear. That means when we cease to fear, and to wonder more, and accept more. Just as we do from the moment we're born, until we're forced to accept opposites.

That's why I say life and death are not opposites. I am not a lone story that stops. I can't tell where the next wave will take me, but I can sense the planet's water move through each cell that makes me who I am.

Focusing on truth

It's difficult to be truthful.

There are a few reasons for this: mankind is technologically advanced but not spiritually enlightened, also not philosophically clever, morally evil, verbally stuffed, to put it politely.

We speak and do not know of what we speak.

I have learned a little about respect, which means that you recognize and act appropriately to what's in front of you.

Reality is the stuff you don't argue about. I had the opportunity to learn about medical hypnoanalysis, and the one thing that has stuck is the injunction "Physiology, physiology, physiology". Thank you, Jeffery Rink, for this.

Physiology is truth. It's worth pondering, because everything boils down to experience, at least on this planet, and concepts are concepts, and birth is birth and death is death. Woody Allen said that there are three real things, birth, sex and death. My brain registered that, too.

The  Buddhist system of belief is based on the respect of truth. Taoism is based on thre balance of truth. The Christian approach is to recognize the personification of truth. There are many approaches to truth.

This is why I don't like truth. In the end it boils down to a sense and formalization of truth.

It's not a helpful word.

But it means something really big and unavoidable.

Like birth.

Like death.

Sex is important but not as important.

If you talk to me about truth, be prepared to walk across a few boundaries of soul, and to declare. One of the fun things I've learnt about truth is that as well as being for real, it's also about joy.

As a child, I enjoyed going into the docks ts Cape Town harbour. The customs officials required us to stop, be looked at, and then waved on. Sometimes we had to open the boot, just for fun. We always had nothing to declare, we were just going for a joy-ride.

But then another way of attention crept in: truth was a total commitment, a no-return ticket, an eternal embrace from which there is no return. A very religious way of defining the ocean of emotion. I had to buy in, there was no other way.

If you focus on the sense of truth, you will soon discover your limits, learning and heart-language. Your heart-language is what you say before you say it. Your heart is God's, naturally, unless you deliberately choose otherwise, which is a little bit stupid.

So what does your heart say? What is it's truth? When my music teacher died, I thought I'd try to be psychic. So I practised a bit and then asked him what was going on. He said it was beauiful where he was, that he'd died of heart medication, and then, the important bit, that heaven necessarily involves spontanaeity.

Truthfulness, when it comes to words, as any child can tell you, is spontaneous. Reflection comes after, purpose follows, action results, maturity is learnt, wisdom is born. Maybe without words.

I have huge respect for educationists who know what they're doing - thank you John Gilmour, Graham Nolan, David Knowles - and for medical practitioners - there are many - and for a few priests. Some of them are not formal, and don't know they are priests. Julius Smeets was a friend, a formal priest.

Back to truth. What a word, and I wonder about the story behind it. Of it.

I think that if you want to experience truth, tell your story to someone who knows how to listen. Or even to someone who doesn't. In the heart, there's something really fierce. And clever. And intelligent. We're not taught about this in schools or universities.

I am not a woman, and I don't know about giving birth. But I will tell you about the fierce things in my heart, and about arriving on this planet, and about re-cycling, which is green and good. Although the humans can be so evil, there is a cosmic capacity for redemption. Shoreshank is good for that, so are many other stories, and that fierce and lonely thing in your heart which wants and avoids words is also good for that.

The ultimate story is not about repeating but by creating daily, even minute by minute. And really, it doesn't have to be as solemn as some would have it. Thank you Anthony, for making that clear.....(he's a priest).

For truth, go to heart.

For heart, go with truth.

In between, there's language and story. Good luck! Better, good birth.....bodies are born,
mind arrives, meaning is made.

The ethics of story-owning: South Africa, a case in point.

The Story Clinic is deeply perturbed about Jacob's assumption that he can own South Africa's story. Story-owning has been practised since humankind woke up to itself, and is probably the original sin. The story that anyone owns is the one closest to that organism you call yourself, and is limited. The limitations are linked to your experience, and that's where they belong. The moment you extrapolate, believe, assume and otherwise declare for others, the story expands to where it doesn't belong.

Jacob has no idea that I exist, depend on his role, experience the repercussions of his actions.

Whatever story he believes about himself, his role, his background, his identity, his value, his meaning, has not only done me no good, it's done me harm.

I'm prepared to speak for myself and my family: I am willing to stand for my own story and those close to me.

This man is harming the entire nation, and his denial of that is plainly evil. I wouldn't trash univesities and burn private property as the so-called students are. I would ask a quiet assasin to politely pull a trigger, and trash the political game. I do not hate Jacob. I have looked into my soul, and asked what the appropriate reponse is. Jesus says to love your enemies. Jacob is not my enemy. So I do not love him. I do not hate him. I have nothing against him for being black, that's irrelevant. as much as anything could be.

I hold him in utter contempt, for thinking and assuming, and feeling, that he owns my story.

He hasn't the first clue of what my story is, and that's what makes him disrespectful.

He really doesn't care.

He is uneducated, and that's not his fault, but as an uneducated person, he should admit to his limitations, and not push against the tide of common sense, into the swamp of self-indulgence, which is his basic policy, dressed up as national policy.

To take sides with corrupt and cruel African leaders, and take sides against the hard-won sense of justice just because it's seated in the West becomes obvious for what it is: juvenile side-taking with a continent that struggles to emerge, not because of economic bullying, but because of an intrinsic cruelty that has to own the story.

Let's uncover the story-owning: economically, a hostile take-over is a good exampe of story-owning, an excellent one.  Politically, a coup is on the same par. Religiously, well, leave your intellect at the door. In the market for something? Buy into our story......it's the best, the most, the only.

Don't underestimate the unconscious power of narrative.

So The Story Clinic desires to send Jacob's ownership of South Africa's story to hell, where it belongs.

You've manipulated unbelievably cleverly, Jacob, you've bought and paid for (with my money) your people, but never their loyalty once the money runs out (watch that), your organism baffles me with its huge need and greed (I'll give you a free consultation if you want to deal with that).....

You need to know that your story has nothing to do with South Africa.

It's just personal.

I'm sorry about that, but I'm more sorry for South Africa, because the entire country is suffering the shyte
of your personal story.

I don't hate you Jacob, you're a really poor man.

Free consultation any time you want: The Story Clinic.

Where stories are born

There's a strange place in the human soul where not many people tarry. It's the no man's land between experience itself and language. It's the starting block before the pistol fires, that moment before you say "I do", the instant when you admit to something really big, those few times when you use the word "love" for real, the utter smudge of time after some-one close dies or goes away, or the sense of falling far away from who and what you are because all possibility of control has gone.

It's neither a good nor bad place. It's a place that's pre-verbal, pre-rational, pre-lingual. If Broca's area, Wernicke's region and the angular gyrus are the language axis of the brain, perhaps the skin is the entry point to where stories are born, because it's literally the edge of ourselves.

At various stages of development from neonate to adolescent through adulthood, subconscious emotional filters create platforms quite independent of human choice and preference. These platforms are where we stand, metaphorically, and when they collapse, we do, too.

But the moment I write about platforms, I have made up a story. We enter the conscious world on the back of a story. One's own narative has begun, regardless of who's telling it, what inspired it, how the chapters will be divided, how it feels as it goes along, what drama and desire prompt necessity and purpose, and what sense of ending prevails.

Let's take away the platforms, strip away the "cool web of language", remove rational thought, eternally distance ourselves from reasonability and totally obscure belief. What we have left are the neurons, the synapses, and the messages that race, meet, connect, reconnect and resume racing.

What's it all saying? Well, he who has ears to hear, let him hear.

I used to tell my Irish friend about the dreams I had at night. He always looked at me with goggle-eyes and his mouth slightly open, and his response was always the same: "Shit!"

When I asked him why he was so rude, it turned out he was jealous. "I wish I had dreams like that," he said. "Tell me how!"

I have learnt to beware of anyone who fervently and finally believes anything, from scientists to salesmen to socialites. Interestingly enough, scientists can be the most closed-minded of all. My life is no doubt based on a true story, but I wonder if anyone will ever tell it, or indeed, if it can be told. Like rain after falling, words evaporate. Their energy remains, but dissipates unless someone with ears hears and recognizes. The power of story is that it connects. If I am convinced of anything, it glues my sense of self more strongly.

Then again, something severe happens, and it all falls. Painfully, sometimes never, we reconstruct and re-tell ourselves, moving through no man's land. If it seems I tell a sad story about no man's land, it's not my intention. No man's land is to be claimed. Humankind has blasted sensible meaning as well as meaningful sense out of the water, and has greatly contributed to establishing no man's land. The no man's land where stories are born is however, a fecund place.

Out of failure, new beginnings are imminent. From separation and divorce, it's possible to divine a newness of love. From loneliness, great giftedness is recognized. Careers change, not always for the worse, and if we are to contemplate the seasons well, life and death are not discontinuous. Something is always afoot.

To move out of no man's land at least just start a new story. To make a claim, you have to stake it. Read Amy Cuddy who re-ran her own story to arrive at her admirable work. Write your own journal and see what happens. One paragraph a day. One word of change at a time.

The place where stories are born is the heart of imagination, and that's not an unreal place. To the contrary, if anything is to be taken very seriously, it's imagination, because image, mood and story feed each other, and communicate that heart directly.

We experience that heart, our own heart, each other's heart on an hourly basis. Certainly, we are interrupted, usually overwhelmed by formal narratives, accidental anecdotes, unwanted messages and a thousand acts that are unnecessary to our own drama.

As a service, The Story Clinic offers short jouneys to the heart of no man's land and back again. It's a safe trip. Anyone coming?

The Story Clinic

Biofusing is pleased to team up with The Story Clinic.The purpose is to make biofocusing more concrete and accessible. Biofocusing began with the awareness of how to manage attention, since we tend to take attention almost entirely for granted. Paying affective attention has been largely ignored in favour of paying cognitive attention, and how we pay volitional attention is a conundrum, because how can you choose to attend or ignore when you're wired to and for instinctive response? The body has its own story to tell, and that's a large part of The Story Clinic.

Stories do not come in books. That's a side-story. Stories and awareness work together to explain experience, and experience is multi-layered, ambiguous, slippery, and mostly uncontrollable. The nuts and bolts of story are words, sentences and paragraphs, and the machine is fascination, the basis of which is focused emotion.

Emotion is the problem as well as the solution. Good feelings are nice to experience, bad feelings are better avoided, and the movement from one to the other is bitterly difficult to control.

The difference between a story and a lie is often too difficult to tell. How do you know when you're telling yourself lies? At a personal, social, group, community and national level, this is part of what The Story Clinic does. Put more kindly, the story that you tell yourself about everything is the hinge to everything you know. This is not a trite remark. When I discovered that truth, I did not expect to survive it. I waited, every hour, for the heart attack or stroke that would result from the psychological and physiological tension of testing every story I thought I knew. I didn't die, but it took me two years to calm down.

More and more, companies and conglomerates begin to realize that their myth might be about more than money. One significant aspect of the real story is that we live in heaven and on earth simultaneously, and so a good question is why money is so important on earth when it doesn't exist in heaven.

The Story Clinic is versatile because biofocusing is a living tool. The alive things are scary, and thus we try to make them friendly. Stories. Are they friendly or fearful? Well, they're full of energy, bursting into systems of structured concepts, inconoclasting beliefs into better nothings. It's too bad that humans are more rational than animals and can't deal with nothings. So, all the time we have to come up with a story to sort out experience.

The Story Clinic knows how to listen, reflect and return a response if not a solution. The solution is never far away, but depending on how serious it is, it may take a narrative or two, and at least a bit of honesty. I have the sense that this will grow because it's how things actually work. In the meantime, welcome, and thank you for taking the time to touch something here.

Writing the cosmic story

 
The title is metaphoric: writing is one of the earliest bio-technologies, using the body's abilities to create signification. Human consciousness gradually put together a system of making marks to signify what was going on within itself.

"This is what I am thinking; this is what I feel; this is what I have decided".

And hey presto! the cosmic story has produced a writer. Out of the table of elements, the atoms, protons, neutrons, electrons, quarks and gravitational interruptions, conscious thinking and feeling prowl and ponder. They hold hands; they do not hold hands. They look at each other, then they look away. They try to be an "I", but this is too big a riddle. So they tell stories, from myth to romance to history to scientific sequence in order to get a handle on who and what this "I', this subjective being is. That persona, temporary cloud of atoms held together by an unknown story, takes wondering walks across strange valleys of imagination, climbs hills of whispering secrets, sleeps in forests of fecundity and wakes, knowing and unknowing, in a world where strangeness can't be tolerated for long.

Writing is a metaphor of action. Everything we do could be construed as writing, because every mark we make is evidence of the cosmic story writing itself. We know that writing often is a form of activism.

All our living is a response to the fact of being alive; the marks of our responsiveness are making the world what it is, from our smeared finger-prints on our smart screens to a de-greened re-greened planet, to searing bits of screaming metal in newly-raw human flesh. All the financial gains and losses of today are tomorrow's losses and gains.

By reaching into this conundrum, I perceive that presence is construction, sometimes forged, often accidental. I am not always that which I want to be, neither do I want it to be the other way.

Can the cosmic story be uttered in silence?

The waves rolling and crashing in the background make it difficult to hear the sound of a finger in the sand. When I think about the cosmic story I am tempted to be afraid, because what impells the finger to write is indecipherable and inscrutable. Thus, should I flee in fear, or embrace the unknown?

And then I realize that the cosmic story is at least legible. You may not be able to get the whole thing in one reading, or even one lifetime, but the marks we notice and read in one hour and make in one day are significant enough to deal with. Our stories and the cosmic story are co-authored to a surprising extent.

The child, the sand, the finger, body and beach....who can say where one ends and another begins?

Raw intelligence, biofocusing and vulnerability of mind

Explication of intelligence abounds: beginning with IQ tests, discovery or invention of emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence, ecological intelligence, the lines of expertise on intelligence with be redrawn many times, with many purposes and effects in mind.

From the point of view of biofocusing, I have an idea that all of this is overcooked. We are born: we grow in body and mind (and maybe the two are different only so far as language permits) and we die. I have a simple view to offer on what to me is raw intelligence. Bodies wave hands, walk about, construct artefacts, destroy them, too, kneel, jump, leap, bow and peform, generally. Make a distinction: minds create ideas that become concrete realities, like creative compositions, feats of engineering, productive business, grandiose aspirations, stories of redemption.

Raw intelligence is that animal in the middle, figuring things out, allowing energies of creativity to come out of corners, and play in these lifetimes. Figuring out is different to riding on populist rhetoric, which is the domain of devious politicians, or diving into hypnotic rhetoric which is the wont of religious and other preachers of enthusiasm. It's also different to the carefulness of scientific discourse which often crosses the boundary to cowardice. That's not the purpose of science.

"Mind" is the simple and obvious assumption of awareness, as it breathes and battles to work with, overcome, disappear into mystery and inscrutability.
These aspects of existence, mystery and inscutability used to terrify me until I realized that they, in themselves, are not so terrible. It's the people who cloak them in ignorance chosen on purpose.

Read Papa, Snake and I.  One fearing mind echoes another until the chain is broken.

It's one of the biggest mistakes ever is to think that the colossus known as education is a bulwark against vulnerability of mind.

Vulnerability of mind does not relate to timidity, although timidity would always be trapped in vulnerability. A shouting, robust mind is as vulnerable to ignorant protest and violence as a baby is to abuse. A monolithic system of educational delivery has nothing to do with respecting raw intelligence finding a way. And don't mistake sensitivity with timidity. Awareness is not a tame animal, humans have really forgotten this. The child who struggles to put bricks together, and can't do it, may just start hurling them at you, and the heavier they are, the more likely this is to happen.

The generic "Im thinking about it" is bland, "I'm figuring it out" is more pragmatic, "I'm working it out" could be purposeful, "Leave me alone, can't you see I'm busy with something important!" as in George's father of the Famous Five, always struck me as being a character who was worth listening to in spite of his short temper.

The sensitive mind, receptive, is, in my view, a permanent fixture.

Whereas we may grow to be emotionally balanced, intelligent and instructive, believing ourselves to be well-instructed, the neurons tend to convey nervousness, which is their business, rather than knowingness, which is the business of that elusive number, the mind.

If pragmatic intelligence works things out so that they work, raw intelligence is like the light-house beaming out pulses of purpose to create safety.

There is no safety in being alive, it's a short-term experience. So, what is the deal?

I like my logo. Take a careful look What is the focus? A letter? A zero? A nothing? Please visit the page and hover the mouse over the logo. The eyes look within, without. What stays the same? What changes?

My old friend Spock had a saying his author never heard him say: "What you believe doesn't make it so." It's a saying I have come to believe, and I hope my logical friend is no believer in sub-atomic entanglement, and the two-slit experiment, otherwise our logical positivism is done for.


Raw intelligence means making a decision based on limited evidence based on the need to act. One of my favourite movies, Fugitive,  which I saw at least five times, was about working out whether he was trying to get away or get to.

The clever mind isn't clever because of accolades and recognition. The clever mind survives and grows into kindness and generosity.

That, for me, is raw intelligence at work.