Gospel According to Max.

How old are Rupert Murdock and Max Clifford? 1,000 years, 2,000? Just watched a doc on the origins of Islam. Overlooking its producers spinning out a few sentences into an unknown historian’s 70 minutes of fame a possible truth emerges. That is if truth ever emerges. The Christian Gospels were written around a hundred years after Christ’s death and hammered into a form we know as the Bible by Eusebius for the Roman Emperor Constantine around 330AD. To prevent ‘splitters’ Eusebius discarded and largely destroyed several gospels from Mary and Thomas and others and created a single text to base a single religion on which conveniently also unified his kingdom. Now this Islam program also couldn’t find any written evidence from the time of Mohammed. When he lived the Arabs were busy taking over the Middle East and dispensing with the Christians and Jews. Under strangely similar circumstances the first mention of Mohamed and the Koran occurred some sixty years after his death on coins of the ruler of the time, I forget his name. Here again the ruler appears to have ‘found’ religion at a pretty useful time and possibly promoted Mohamed from an unknown mystic into its prophet. And like the Christian Bible the Koran was created. Questions emerge. Are religions the second hand creations of states to unify their population? Are these holy books the expedient creations of PR consultants like Max Clifford and moulded into Sun editorials by the likes of Rupert Murdock? That is a very shabby thought; I’m sure Jesus and Mohammed were great guys, but I can well imagine the current Max and Rupert of the day getting together, “Guys we can’t sell this as it stands. There has to be a unique selling point. Nobody knows this guy from Adam, we have to give him star billing.” And as there was no X Factor or Britain’s Got Talent at the time they plumped for the next best thing, a prophet, the Son of God or the actual son of Simon Cowell. And it worked. I mean Buddhism took a ‘think for yourself’ approach and look where Tibet is today. I’m sure with a little work the teachings of Mary Whitehouse could be massaged into a decent gospel by Max and extolled in the Sun. Yes, Saint Mary, it’s got a familiar ring to it. So Max and Rupert may not be that old but their profession is.

And Again Mr Lion.

Out from the radio came a US debate, video games v creativity, a games designer v a theatre director. It was like two complex characters in a play, both curate’s eggs. My take is there are two forms of activity, creative and recursive, and that computers in general beckon recursive activity. I have used computers professionally for words, accounts, mathematical modelling, design, draughting, graphics, music and 3D model making and in each case once you know what you’re doing the activity comes down to doing the same thing over and over again. In a real sense all these things were creative, and computers have proved an amazing tool in every case, yet one does it by following the same procedures ad infinitum. Not just mouse clicks and button pressing but the prescribed methods of doing every action within a program. The results can be seen in music, magazine presentation, design and architecture. What wasn’t doable now is, which is great, but as everyone learns Cubase, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, SQL, Autocad, etc, even Powerpoint and Excel, we all learn the same methods, apply the same filters, reverbs, fades, cuts and pastes and achieve the same results. Even though we’re being creative we’re being recursive. Compared with the ‘live’ parameters of voice, guitar, pencil, appraisal and presentation the use of these seemingly miraculous binary concoctions is akin to doing surgery with a thousand spoons. And all the time we move in the direction of recursive thinking like a lion pacing a cage wondering, ‘can I get out this way,,, can I get out this way,,, can I get out this way,,,’ I guess it passes the time. But I also guess the lion would prefer its natural habitat given the choice.

White Diarrhea.

Stephan Sackur interviewed South Africa's Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies on HardTalk yesterday after the shooting dead of 34 mine workers. Well at least he tried. Mr Davies is the epitome of a Boer, likewise boar and bore, who speaks in sentences without end consisting of stock empty phrases cut and pasted in innumerable meaningless permutations. After twenty minutes I was depressed to hear a human being, and one in a position of considerable power, presumably believing his answers had any meaningful value. It would be a compliment to liken him to a trained pig, which Mr Davies has a passing resemblance to, able to oink on demand for a measly tray of putrid cabbages. It appears though that this is South African Democracy. The whites, unable to maintain their social apartheid have changed to a commercially based one. White inward investment coupled with white management coupled with irritant blacks silenced by well-paid positions and interminable sentences guaranteed to glaze over any rational mind let alone the uneducated black indigenous people. It seems Africa as a whole is as focused on bling as the English neuveau-riche of the eighteenth century before common sense and the unions required workers to not starve to death and the realisation that a little shared profit and education would lead to even greater profitability. Unfortunately as rappers have convincingly proved, wealth goes to the head of a previously oppressed minority like crack. Well not like crack, the substance itself. Mr Davies’s sentences should be played 24/7 to every prospective politician as aversion therapy. Hopefully they’ll never be able to speak in meaningless platitudes again.

Inspiron Dim Screen Fix.

Speaking of Lazarus, the dead beggar that Jesus brought back to life and who went on to create the well known chain of shops selling all things ‘Laz’ I now have one such laptop: A Dell Inspiron 1545 ex of Daughtermouse. I already have a 32Gig iPod that was left for dead in a drawer liberally smeared with eyeliner and other cosmetics. That took several hours web browsing to bring back to life. Anyway this Inspiron 1545 suffered from dim screen sickness. It would be bright for half a second and go dim, rather like a Y9 being asked a question. We took it to the menders who replaced, amongst other things, £80 from my pocket into his but it only worked once before the sickness returned. Further web browsing suggested inverter board, back light, screen, motherboard fuse or the motherboard herself. All these things would require expense and major surgery, which I and my fellow resurrector know are not strictly necessary for a bona fide resurrection. I read on. There is magnet and ‘hall effect’ switch that come together when the lid closes and send the machine into a date rape like stupor. I wondered if the hall switch was the problem and opened and closed the lid several times in quick succession and on the severalth time the screen stayed bright: Jubilation! It seems the hall effect switch was OK but the logic circuit it triggers was only holding the new ‘on’ state for a second before falling back to ‘off’ due to residual charge or something. So if you have a dim screen laptop open and close the lid 10+ times and/or take out the battery and charger chord and hold the on button down for 2 minutes. (to dissipate residual charge) And if you have an Inspiron 1545 waft a magnet an inch to the right of the mouse pad and you’ll magically turn it on and off. And if I might suggest to believes, take heed of the Bauhaus motto, “Form follows function.” Belief often leads to the reverse.

Day 4.

Day 3 was cut short, it started spitting. Today I find I can pedal up the second uphill walk and often use a higher gear, progress: A circular route of about seven miles. As a fledgling cyclist I’m as sensitive to loss of altitude a pilot landing a Cessna and Twentywell Lane is a diving crime against potential energy. All that hard peddled rising lost in a flurry of hot, juddering brake shoes. I try not to cry. I feel like Mark Zuckerberg watching Face Book’s share price. But another first, I stop for a cup of tea on the way home. I sit in the middle one of three picnic tables outside Abbeydale Hamlet’s café. To my left a family is teaching a cross between a husky and a polar bear table manners. It seems incongruous to be teaching etiquette to a beast that could tear any child under ten limb from limb. To my right is a very late Queen’s centenary street party with the table piled high with every sort of edible snack. An overspill chap places his plate on my table with ham and cheese sandwich, sausage roll, pork pie and crisps. I feel taunted. Back home I eat the overspill from yesterdays pizza in futile retaliation. I am now waiting for a kitchen sink and tap to arrive, apropos nothing.

Post Olympic Fitness.

Yesterday I cycled for the first time in, well no need to be specific. Six miles, basically three up and three down, this is Sheffield after all where pedalling horizontally is not an option. And amazingly when I got back I actually ‘wanted’ for lunch an apple and a banana. What’s that about? I’ve never had an apple and a banana for lunch in my life. Feeling healthy I decided to visit Decathlon between cigarettes. I bought a crash hat, a water bottle and puncture repair outfit largely due to being surprised by my desire for fruit, and that no endeavour is complete without a purchase. This morning, further. Due to a missed turning and falsely remembering the ‘further’ bit was flat I ended up in Holmesfield some five miles away and more importantly a few hundred meters above my start point. I did walk the steeper bits, not because I couldn’t but because exertion makes me dizzy and dizzy might be confusing to passing traffic. As I shouldn’t have got to Holmesfield I turned round and came home. This route was five miles up and five down and being incrementally fitter I reached 30mph at times which showed up some deficiencies in our road system. The yard of road nearest the kerb is a mass of patches, gaps and drain covers. At speed on skinny suspension-less wheels and a seat not unlike a leather anvil one’s eyeballs quiver and one’s vision becomes impressionistic. AND all those broadband users might have considered before signing up for their personal portal to the www that it would result in the road outside their house becoming a railway track without the lines, each connection ending up a one foot wide mound of tarmac. And my desire today was for a yoghurt. Is my body telling me it likes being healthy? But after a shower and a cup of tea that wore off and I had a pork pie.

Thinking in Numbers.

This week’s book of the week, BBC R4 9.45am, has this title. Its author has found many strange facts. In China the word for four ducks is different to the one for four pens is different again for…. Each word covers a category, for instance long thin things like rivers, trees and presumably super models. Many primitive tribes only count to two. One word for one, one for two and one for more than two or a word for ‘and one’ so five becomes, “two and one and one and one.” One tribe describes amounts by indicating the height above the ground of a pile of what’s being counted by a hand gesture. One tribe has no concept of numbers at all and one that it is positively bad to count things, particularly people. Almost all have no concept of negative numbers or fractions. A chronology of numerical concepts begins to appear each building on the last. The concept of similar items without which no counting can occur, one, more than one, names for more than one, grouping of numbers to shorthand larger numbers in tens and hundreds: And then the more esoteric concepts of zero, negative numbers, fractions and decimalisation and the measurement of things by units of length, weight and time. We have built these concepts of numbers into our awareness of everything when there are people alive today on this very same planet whose awareness contains none of them. Each concept as it arose was grabbed, utilised and spread as ‘being useful’ yet it’s rarely asked why we considered them so. What underlying imperative made them appear useful? My only conclusion is insecurity. When no fruit means famine, one fruit means food, two means enough and more than two just means more than enough what other than an undefined insecurity would lead us to inventing concepts of more than more than more than enough? What undefined insecurity would lead us to there being less than less than less than none? In reality there is no need for quantification because quantity is evident, a large fruit will feed two, a small one only one. Fast running will catch, slow running won’t. Everything is evident without numbers. Numbers feed hypothesis and hypothesis builds hypothetical constructions that aren’t reality. So what is the undefined insecurity? And again my cat chips in, “Interesting question.”

A Short Story.

After anti-gravity was achieved by electrostatic capacitance and zero point energy used for propulsion close to light speed was achieved and space travel became far easier. On an unmanned mission a probe hovered low over the surface of a planet in a distant galaxy. It was distinctly inhospitable, poor atmosphere, high temperatures and levels of radiation, but a lot of what seemed like mobile phone traffic. The probe listened in. Back on earth people tried to decipher it as the probe sent back pictures. They showed cities and towns but no inhabitants. Though aged they had an almost Disney Land cartoon look. Incongruous amidst the beautiful coloured building were shiny metal monoliths, rectangular and featureless emitting masses of microwave activity. On earth the signals appeared to be like online gaming. They would have remained a mystery if it weren’t for a single man, James Fitch, recognising his own name in one stream of code. He recorded the code and studied it. Working on the assumption it was character moves in some game or other he began to plot the likely moves, walk, speak, lift and turn of head, and much, much more. He struggled with the meaning of all this, and all from an uninhabited planet that obviously had been. Perhaps the inhabitants had somehow converted themselves into electronics as the planet became uninhabitable, that would make sense. But there was his name in the code. He began to decode more, his wife’s name and then his children’s, where he worked. This was not coincidence. Then an accident, his son Jake broke his leg. But his son had broken his leg weeks ago. This gave him more insight into the code. He followed the events, hospital, a holiday to recoup, back to school. The code described his life like a delayed TV program. Weeks later he was still following the code in disbelief. The code was now showing him working on code from an uninhabitable planet sent back by a mission probe. It was him in every detail. How? He checked the time delay, 17 days, 5 hours and 25 minutes. This was shorter than the time the probe had taken to get there but when he recalculated for the speed of light it was the same. So the signal reached earth the exact same time as ‘his’ present. He was living the code as it arrived. His life couldn’t be creating the code because the code came first so was he, his life in all its happenstance, being created by the code? Might he be a game character, an avatar? He decided to send a message via the probe, “Who are you?” The answer came back, “We are you.” Then another message, “How? Why?” “Our planet was dying, we became silicone from carbon life. A few of us found your planet, not all could go, and as your numbers grew we became you. We needed a beautiful place to live in to fulfil our dreams and you are those dreams. And in time as you evolved you have found us. We are happy.” “But you’re saying my life is being written on a games console seventeen light days away!” “Oh come on, don’t take yourself so seriously.”

Dirty A Listers.

Just re-watched Ewan Mcgregor and Charlie Boorman’s epic trip round the world on BMW R1200 GS Adventurer motorcycles. At 256Kg most people’s biggest adventure is to hospital for a hernia operation but they did it with 50Kg of luggage too. They would have been better off with Yamaha XT’s though. Episode 4 was in Kazakhstan where the roads are as suitable for wheeled motor vehicles as the Pennine Way. They were around ten days in and had left asphalt behind days ago. After three hard 20mph days Ewan does a piece to camera. He had lost sight of were they were going, where they were, their schedule, family, friends and the rest of the world. All that was left was the holes, mud and sand and not falling off. All that was left was the here and now. From much lesser trips I know that feeling. It’s wonderful. It’s like all the fibres that connect one to people and places, plans, even time have stretched to breaking point and one is clean. Fleeting conversations consist of gestures, expressions and footballers names; life is passing scenery and getting petrol. And then there comes a moment when that here and now throws a whole heap of what it’s got at you and in a fit of hysterical laughter you realise the wonder of simply surviving. As Ewan Mcgregor put it, “I could have been in Canne” but his being said that would have been a poor second best to lying exhausted, wet and dirty in the middle of the middle of nowhere. So this bill of goods we’ve been sold, glamour, celebrity, red carpets and a thousand products? If you like, but remember they’re all second best, and that’s from an A lister.

Rude Boys Ink.

Just read in the Guardian of a mother grieving over her son’s first tattoo. Irrational, prudish, pitiable old age angst? Isn’t it hip these days to get ink? Well probably not hip, that’s just showing my age, but it’s fashionable. In my teens the rare tattoos were on rude boys, aggressive underachievers, rockers with something to prove. The rest of us just wondered why. Each generation has its particular circumstance. My parents straddled two wars, WW1 and, as an unbelievably stupid teacher put it recently, World War Eleven. I was post war ‘never had it so good’, my sons are ‘good jobs pre 2008’ and the latest are lost. Not lost like misfits but lost from the home of a social role. They have drink, TV, iPads, iPhones, the debt from a pointless education and low paid part-time servitude. And they’re doing a good job of making the best of it. But what can you make from a ragbag of scraps? Like a batch of graduate astronauts on the day NASA pulled the plug on manned space flight they struggle to find a place. Somehow a tattoo is a part of the world under your skin, a bit of out there in here, an indelible bridge linking the two. Piercings become captured shrapnel from a skirmish with reality. Maybe that mother was in her eyes seeing her son becoming a rude boy underachiever, maybe his tattoo said, “Give my generation something to hope for.”

Let Your Skinny Out.

As a teenager I was awkward and thin as a rake, compelled to play a guitar, go fishing, ride my bike and fight my mother tooth and nail. As I remember there was no decision in any of it, it was just that way and I had to carry it out: Strange then that this is about obesity. I believe it’s about holding in. But what and why and how can that result in more physical weight? American Indian tradition suggests we are body, mind, spirit and emotions working in seamless tandem as a being. I can look down and think OK that sounds about right. So ‘holding in’, what’s that about? Might there be or have been some instance where this being decided to hold in? A long forgotten barely conscious decision the result of some circumstance of others. A circumstance where one of those four elements moved away from its natural outward flow. Examples. Where your mind, blocked from its outgoing curiosity, was turned to inward passivity: Where your emotions were unwelcome or swamped or channelled inward: Where your spirit, bent on its unruly progress, was snubbed by some rationality: Where you body, ever eager to show its prowess, was governed into servitude. Consider the Olympics. Have you seen body, mind, spirit and emotions writ large in each competitor? And have you pondered that it’s so evident because they’re giving it out hugely like a beacon and not keeping it in. Sure they’ve trained physically but they’ve trained their mind and emotions and also their spirit to carry on and give out. In a sense maybe we’re all involved in our own personal Olympic marathon, training daily to let our energies, enthusiasm and dreams out or snubbing them, holding them in. If we do then our body will do the same and we’ll become obese. Don’t count calories, count opportunities to express your being.

Olympic Running About.

My only success in athletics was at primary school when I came third because I was desperate for a pee. In a parents race many years on I was way behind our neighbour, a 5’6” woman, when my legs just couldn’t move any faster. Apparently some of us have fast reacting muscles and some slow so my inability is genetic. My other is lethargic hence my leaning towards motorised sport. Flying for example is not an Olympic sport though most of us can do it with the aid of a jet engine. But how many Olympic sports are there? There appears to be millions. It seems like any physical movement either unaided or with any lumpen object is now a sport. Where bicycles are carbon fibre and as light as possible weights are as heavy as possible. I mean with a little high tech ingenuity a shot-put could weigh grams and be aerodynamic and go much further, and you wouldn’t have to be built like a giant meat pie to throw them. And synchronised swimming. Elegant but you don’t see many ballerinas smiling like they’ve just seen John the Baptist with a nose clip. It’s all quite arbitrary. But rather like Swedish Spirit camp that’s not the point. Codify some arbitrary activity until everyone knows what’s required then work your balls off to achieve your best and your “I’m so important” lower self will be occupied in what it’s good at; the arbitrary, whilst somewhere else some unfathomable progress occurs. It’s been suggested we have three brains, reptilian, mammalian and human due to our long evolutionary ancestry. The first is pure emotion, the second instinctual reality and the third a constructional, imaginative unreality. I spent last evening in the company of three lovely cob ponies and if they were saying anything it was, “Get real guys, run about.” So maybe that’s the Olympics in a nutshell.

Loose shorts, no nickers.

A little light Sainsbury’s on a sunny Thursday afternoon and I have to say loose shorts with no knickers is a little thrilling; freedom tinged with apprehension. Quite the opposite of the black lycra clad Olympic athlete who, had I bought a decent sized Taste the Difference courgette, I could not have competed with. Strangely though no attractive women, plain at best. Anyway uni applications are down 8.8% due to increased fees so there are now only slightly more places than applicants. That sounds fine but as applicants for textile design aren’t likely to change to criminology unis are likely to have a similar drop in income, and if university economics are as tight as that athlete’s lycra suit some unmentionable tackle will become evident. That, the elephant’s todger in the room if you talk to anyone involved, is money. Universities are as corporate as Microsoft or Man U. It’s not ‘all about the fans’ or ‘all about the students’ or all about Windows 8 for that matter, it’s all about the money, or more accurately about the wage bill. In these last two weeks UK Inc has won more Gold Medals than the USA and everywhere else in the world apart from China, won by enthusiasts who love what they’re doing not for the £1++,000 a week of footballers, who incidentally last won World Cup gold in 1966. There’s a clear message here. Don’t shop at Sainsbury’s on Thursday afternoon unless you can subtly display elephantine equipment. Loose shorts and no knickers may be comfortable, even thrilling, but they can’t compete with showing the world the best of what you’ve got.

Spirit Camp 5 2012

http://www.ted.com/talks/aaron_huey.html

Spirit Camp 4 2012

And personally I had less desire to be keen, strong, resolute, skilful and capable. I put a good shift in but no panting at the bit to do more. The food, though wholesome and generous, I didn’t digest well. I muse that we don’t take into consideration the emotional element of digestion and focus on calories and nutrition. What my body does with food irrespective of those numerical counts is possibly a more subtle business, that fat or thin is a systemic choice of what needs to be held, that thin people hold a need to run and fat people have a need to hold against the needs of some emotional famine. All I know is I had a little belly by the end. In the midst of all the jolloping back and forth to the tree a young Estonian woman danced like the queen of swans in high-armed elegance, power and precision. Here again the body holds and expresses itself without the clutter of words and counts. I may not look like her but in dance I experience the same sense of perfection that only my body knows. So often the servant to my daily mundane actions, if let rain it can fill me with the sense of perfect grace that I know no other way of experiencing. At the final impromptu concert I sang a song. I was feeling quite confused but had to step into it. Out in the open, night falling to a grassy bank full of people I could hardly see. My choice of thought was to fill the night with my voice. Not be loud, not project to the people or act as might a performer just fill the night air. I think it sounded OK but more importantly I achieved what I wanted; I brought it into being. Like the young woman dancer, I hope, I was with practice able to bring it bodily into being. Later that evening a man, Stephan who runs a recording studio in Berlin, asked me enthusiastically to come to Berlin to record something, anything. So here’s a question. What did he hear to be that enthusiastic? Me, the night, my body or something higher that I was calling from? And what was he calling me to do from that something higher? As a cat might say when you command it to heel, “Interesting words.”

Spirit Camp 3 2012

The Deer Tribe way is in need of a dramatic spring clean. It is drifting towards the Baptist church or some other Godly institution. It could end up being niceness. The people at Spirit Camp are all lovely which is no bad thing but I sense no chaos, no awkwardness. If it is Shepard-ing towards a uniformity of smiling I spit in its face. Personally the teaching of wisdom has always troubled me. I have come to the consideration I have a donkey head (conscious) and ‘it’ will conform what is given to suit my lower self. This lower self will strut with the confidence of ‘knowing’ whatever peculiarities it has knitted together and attach to them the credibility of the source. The aural tradition of Two Bears when written down and printed out in Swift Deer’s manuals becomes a very different thing. Aural requires ‘being with’ the teacher and all that that entails. Manuals have none of that. It may seem like a good idea for fast tracking knowledge but it is not appropriate to wisdom. Even my lecturer at Art College where I was learning design refused to teach me how to design. My personal process towards becoming a designer was sacrosanct, inviolable. A whole bag full of contrariness, failures, fun and discoveries would have been bypassed by a few simple instructions. But he did threaten to throw me off the course if I chose the wrong exam project that would have lead to my failure. He could have taught me and I could have become a good designer but that’s not the point. I hold that teachers of wisdom only produce more teachers of wisdom. This is very evident at Spirit Camp where I couldn’t pick up a stick without at least two people offering me advice on how to hold it. “Fuck off and pick up your own stick!” And all the self-congratulatory speak of the high-ups, ‘You have all done a great job, thank your arse for getting you here’ etc. Bin it! It’s bollocks. I witnessed our Dog Soldier leaders, with one leaving, speak with focus from the heart. That was an honour to hear and be included in; it was not PR to boost membership.


But how might it change from a moderately challenging holiday camp? Oh dear that’s’ me ostracised at dawn. J What comes to my mind are many diverse opportunities to ‘be’ outside ‘the box’ of one’s comfort zone through dance, clowning, theatre, trance and meditation, but these are way outside the tradition. I must simply conclude I belong to a different tribe. But then after all this arrogance I must also conclude that the Deer Tribe creates many beautiful people, and that’s a wonderful gift to the world.

Spirit Camp 2 2012

This opening of the higher self to the lower self applies to the dancers of the ceremony too. Without discipline the chattering monkey of the lower self holds sway. It is thought, a continual stream of self-importance that must be followed like the orders of a Sergeant Major. In order to maintain who I (think) I am these things must be done. “I am keen, strong, resolute, skilful, wise and capable” along with the clutter of roles we or others have assigned our self; to be a good father or mother, a breadwinner, a star, an alcoholic etc. Because our lower self continually confirms all this in its internal dialogue we become fixed, we fail to see outside the box we have created for our self. There are many ways to break this box, meditation, mundane stressful endurance or constantly attempting different unexpected things driven by perverse curiosity. The dance is the second of these. It works because it uses the strengths of the lower self against itself until it breaks down. Those who dance and are not stressed to this breaking point miss the point, like the woman who apparently sat in the arbour, didn’t dance much and complained about everything. I find that beautifully amusing. Why did she come? Why didn’t she stay at home and have sex with the window cleaner? The difficulty with this approach, the woman being an extreme example, is that the lower self can learn to cope with the dance. It can come back year after year assuming being there will in itself contribute to raising the shamanic energy of human existence in some airy fairy way. No! that is the chatter of our individual monkey. We are not individuals; we are not ‘special’ humans though we have a particular part to play in the continuum. This is the realm of the higher self, hearing the flow of the continuum and giving life to our role in it. There is no more to magic than this. To the lower self the higher self will appear a mad thing, a clown, a ruin-er of dreams, a breaker of the plans you have made for yourself, and ultimately the destroyer of the self you cherish so much. To choose it is madness or wisdom; be careful. But it can be the end of misery also.

Spirit Camp 1 2012

Well, back from another Swedish Spirit Camp for a second year. Last year I had the grace to keep my mouth shut but this year I found it drifting open. It’s an odd event based on ancient American Indian Shamanic traditions. Odd in that it somehow doesn’t do what it purports to do yet in a sense it does. That needs explanation. As a Dog Soldier for example we are well organised to do numerous different tasks to support the ceremony. We all eagerly pitch into every task with enthusiasm and the leaders of the team lead with the same fervour. It requires considerable focus over long 18 hour days. Our orders change and conflict due to changing circumstances but all the tasks are very simple and one very soon learns initiative is not required, just obedience, though self initiative is lorded as a virtue. Countless arbitrary rules of ceremony are to be obeyed that can be changed on a whim by the higher-ups and make no apparent difference if they’re broken. This, as anyone who’s worked in a large corporation will attest, leads to stress. One begins to rail at the stupidity, the inefficiency, the blocking of any personal input. All this is in the name of doing what needs to be done. Over days this regime creates strain where it purports to be quiet efficiency. At some point or another individuals give in to this strain and ‘can’t take it any longer’ and at that point they’re left to recoup with no mention that that is the purpose of the exercise. It purports to be a support role yet its real role is to break the lower self of the individual. With enough ‘breaking’ the lower self opens its awareness to the higher self. It’s a sort of ancient boot camp principle. One chap made very valid comments on how the working system could be improved and the work made easier and more fulfilling but in a way that would make the whole thing less effective. One could argue that human progress is built on that chaps suggestions and that we would all feel much better if our work was easier and we felt good about ourselves, it’s definitely been the basis of my self development, but being a member of an ancient tribe where daily life was a matter of survival one needed to be tough and resolute. Though today life is much easier they’re still necessary virtues.
Whether this is spiritual is another matter. The modern variant of this ancient tradition doesn’t call for teenagers to do this once or twice as needed but for people of all ages to do it yearly time and time again. I find this strange. I mean if Battymouse has done 43 Spirit Camps does it mean he is very wise or the world’s slowest learner? Either way I’ve done two now and I’ve figured it out and needn’t go again.