I wake up at 6 o’clock when the sun is not long before appearing in the sycamore east these autumn days when the apples outside my window have all been picked and the sounds scents & colours are settling into a dreamy haze. And then with complete lack of thought heron heading south white as […]
From The Outsider onwards, published in 1956, Colin Wilson was concerned to investigate the nature of human consciousness: an ‘outsider’, a term he sought to refine later, was/is a person with a cast of mind different from the norm. In The Age of Defeat he is explicit about the way consciousness can be defined as […]
Having hunted through the tons of files in my computer as I sometimes do, I seem to have addressed the issue of ‘consciousness’ many times for one purpose or another. My renewed enthusiasm for pursuing the subject of ‘consciousness’ has been stimulated by finding the writing of haiku dumbed down by the popularity in some […]
We amble along living from day to day, whatever the circumstances, locked into the prison of a long succession of present moments which we don’t normally think about; they add up to what we have grown into the unexamined habit of calling ‘consciousness’; because we have the word we take it for granted that ‘consciousness’ […]
Discovering Haiku I arrived at haiku sometime in the 1960’s while I was reading Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen. I was very drawn to his argument that went something like this: in Western philosophy (and, as a result, pervasive throughout western thinking processes) there’s a habitual cognitive dichotomy between thinker and thing-thought, between mind […]
Under a Spell My struggle to come to terms with the concept ‘God’ goes back fifty-five years. In those days, I had not long emerged from a very severe bout of attendance at all the Sunday services in the quaint & homely early 20th Century suburban church where my parents had, before this, insisted on […]
Make a determined effort to capture it, right now! It’s a slippery customer, isn’t it? As soon as you shift your attention from this flow of words and begin to stretch out your hands (as it were) to capture whatever it might be wherever it is it eludes your grasp, doesn’t it? If you deny […]
‘A haiku a day keeps the doctor away…’ James Kirkup [RIP]—who also said, ‘I follow no path; the path follows me…’ At the beginning of 2012 there was talk on Facebook of putting up a haiku a day for a year. Half way through the month of January I decided to give the idea a […]
In this dream I was running the kind of drama class I used to facilitate over thirty years ago: strange drama, dream drama, mirroring the assumed ‘reality’ that went on outside the room we regularly used for an evening; the virtual question was always, ‘Which was the drama—outside or inside the dream?’ In this particular […]
Current Tweetable Sound-bite: The Brain begins to decline at 40 Actually the brain begins to decline at birth: neurons start dying as soon as we are born but since there are around 15 million of them at the last count I made it doesn’t really matter for a very long time; unchecked and with the […]
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