On Battles

I bring you a battle today - mostly because it is a theme I need to revisit this month for my own purposes. War, violence, domination, winning - all part of the human psychic cocktail. Over the years I have found the odd occasion to fight a battle, and have found that my pacifist upbringing had left me with few tools to engage profitably in battle. Those childhood battles amongst siblings and on the playground left me with more of a distaste for people than a toolkit for survival - and I am still surprised when I come across bullying in any form.

I watched Ghandi on DVD the other day, and chuckled to be reminded that he used guilt as a lever to manage his followers in India via his hunger strikes. I smiled: so much like parenting ("So, when you leave the bath running, it's because you think it's OK for me to spend yet another hour working to pay for the water you've wasted?"). This works when you have a bedrock of love, as Ghandi did in his followers, or as I have in my family.

But in those times when the battle you approach is entirely hostile, entirely about needing to win, what do the mysteries say?

Pinkola Estes celebrates wildness - the knowing and the timing of the wild thing that knows when to stalk, knows when to wait, knows when to spring. Instinct. But this is too simple and little understood. Ultimately the behaviour of the wild thing is based on the desirable outcome: survival, advantage. The actions of the wild hunter / warrior is not chaotic or random. It is discrete, considered, strategised. It is based on interrogations into the nature and habits of its opponent, the lie of the land (read the Art of War), tallying of resources.

Casteneda speaks of remaining unavailable, invisible to your opponent, even as you stalk him. He speaks of storing power so that it can be used to devastating effect when you need to. He speaks of moving an individual via his circle of influence, never directly. He speaks of alertness, avoiding assumptions, applying force to a lever.

Battles in my adult life have shown me this: I am the only one who wants to fight with gentlemen's rules, so they likely won't work for me (and they haven't). I have never fought to dominate, my battles are generally about protecting my family, my home, my turf. And most soldiers who have gone to war leaving families behind know that there is nothing more worthy fighting for. Where stakes are high, the art of battle is the most important skill to have mastered. The last, most precious advantage I will not gain until my children are off my hands: having nothing to lose.

Is it food?

Several years ago, a friend of mine gave me a book to read - all about the history of the trade in tea, coffee, tobacco and sugar. The book (don't recall the title or the author - sorry), written somewhere in the mid 20th century, described these 4 commodities as narcotic, and the commerce around them as economic parasitism. I was somewhat surprised, never having looked at these things in this way, but the book made a strong case. A memorable example of the economic parasitism argument was the Boston Tea Party. The author proposed that the colonialist / imperialist / profiteering situation that gave rise to this event had not been appreciably changed nor resolved since then, but had simply gone into hiding behind front-businesses.

This feels too big for me to do something about. But what stuck with me was the peddling of addictive substances as food, creating a media-hype about the benefits of these non-foods: main-lining and normalising them into the thinking and lifestyles of people world-wide. Nutrition and medical media reporting still relates most "new findings" to our craving for sugar, tea and coffee. As tobacco became successfully demonised, so in the face of similar pressures on the other 3 culprits, we learn that it's OK to have coffee daily, that tea has anti-oxidant properties, that children need sugar for energy. The proportion of media messaging around these commodities it exaggerated compared with other foods and drugs. And, since as a race we are addicted to these substances, we are only too ready to have our consciences appeased.

On top of that sits the historical burden of the conditions of production of these substances, often resting on the shoulders of slaves, child-labour and the like. The string of middle-men is entrenched and long, and the end-user prices bear no resemblance to the cost of production.

So the book ultimately proposes this: that the business of bringing these commodities to market is all about creating a demand through creating addiction, then making as much profit as possible by driving prices up and forcing down costs of production.

This made me annoyed. I thought I would test the hypothesis that I was addicted to coffee and sugar (the others never featured much in my lifestyle). I went cold turkey on both. I felt horrible. I craved, I raved, I walked into walls, I shouted at people, I cried. Then after 2 weeks, I felt fabulous! I had energy to spare, I was wide awake first thing in the morning, my post-nasal drip disappeared, my acne improved, I slept well. I noticed that coffee and sugar were my comfort foods. When I was sad or tired, I craved cake and cappuccino. So I ate nuts, cheese, and watched movies instead. My favorite meal: stir-fried lamb tossed with fresh basil, avocado and olive oil.

Then I lapsed. A couple of years later I had systemic candida. I went on a diet to fix it - off the allowed list: sugar, coffee, tea, alcohol, starch, natural sugars of all kinds, meat from animals older than one season, ground vegetables  Added to my diet: Warburgia (Pepper Bark / Isibaha) tincture. 6 Weeks later I had lost 10kg and I was candida free - no more nasty mucus, no more acne.

I'm weaning my little children off sugar (the big ones have migrated there themselves to fix their own health issues). They are cross about it, but not when they're eating other good things.

Stevia was a great help to satisfy the remnants of my craving for sweetness, but my drug of choice is now a cup of chicory (25% coffee added) with a dash of lactose-free milk. And sometimes, expensive, thin slabs of chocolate.

Strange reality

"The world is a mystery. This, what you're looking at, is not all there is to it. There is much more to the world, so much more, in fact, that it is endless. So when you are trying to figure it out, all you're really doing is trying to make the world familiar."

Don Juan words from Casteneda's "Journey to Ixlan".

I have this problem all the time - trying to encourage people to consider that what I describe in my experience has reality, context and relevance. That old buzz-word, 'paradigm' comes into play. It's as hard as getting a 6-year-old to understand why she can't have that pink toy in the supermarket today.

It's like this: the reality of each of us is unique. In those places where we agree to share an idea about reality, we seem to have common ground. But we are talking only "seems" here. This leads us into the dangerous territory of feeling safe with making assumptions about the world and about one-another. Having fewer expectations about the world, people, life, days lead to fewer surprises. We remain more open to grasping a situation in its totality rather than just those things about it which seem to correspond with our reality of the moment.

If I experience something that you have not experienced, this does not make my reality wrong, simply strange. And it is in the lands of strange that adventure, growth and evolution lie. Our fear of the unknown keeps us safely tucked behind closed doors, perhaps reading books, probably believing that we know how the world works. TV, the internet, books - these are repositories of the realities of others - a pity it would be to not excavate your own. It is only through going in amongst the unknown that we can gain new knowledge.

This takes some courage. The conformative pressure of commonly accepted reality has some devastating tools for the ego that attempts to describe something new.

What are your unusual experiences? What is the strange reality you walk in?

On not knowing

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old
 
may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young
 
and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile

ee cummings

After that, it seems to be just too much arrogance to claim to know something, and that the act of knowing something excludes the discovering of many other things. Human beings are too quick to think that they have the corner on knowing things, classifying things, understanding how things work. But the fact is, their primary senses (smell, sight, hearing etc.) are inferior to that of many other species. And their interpretive faculty is dependent on the sorting practices of parts of the brain that reject most of the information coming into the frontal lobes (our super-processor). Just like a computer - what goes in is what comes out. 

Perhaps the alertness and nimbleness of little birds is a clue to how human beings can improve the flow of data into the brain. Perhaps, like them, we can be surprised by everything. And perhaps our quality of mental life will improve?

The new Artful Dodger

I bless Terry Pratchett - while I wasn't looking, he released another novel this year entitled, "Dodger". Every book that comes new on the market now is ever greater treasure - Prachett's battle with Alsheimer's makes every new book a miracle. And though his books fly off my shelves into the dungeons of my daughters’ bedrooms, I never feel hard-done-by buying and re-buying Prachett’s books. If, by the time I die I have managed to have a full set in my bookshelf for a month, I will consider myself the winner.

Much has been said of Prachett’s skill at satire – and I do love that. But more, I find on his pages life-lessons to grow by. Any teenager that crosses my path instantly gets a grubby copy of a Tiffany Aching novel thrust upon them. And certainly “Equal Rites”, followed by the Wyrd Sisters series. If ever I was to give a course in shamanism, Pratchett is where I would begin.

And “Dodger” is no exception. Drawing from Charles Dickens’ London and grasp of character, as well as Mayhew’s documentation of living conditions there in the time of Victoria’s reign, Pratchett spins a story with his ever-compassionate apologies for human nature. And had I not been reading some Casteneda alongside, I might have missed this: Pratchett’s Dodger carries two shamanic themes with him across the pages. The first is the creation of “fog”. That is, the weaving of a projected image that others, with the help of their habitual expectations, will believe and make real. The second is how habitual behaviour make you easy prey to those who want to find you, and make use of your resources.

In Don Juan terms, this is the skill of the art of “stalking”. Which means, if you avoid slipping into habitual ways of moving through your day, you are likely to find out interesting things about yourself, and others. And by understanding how others see the world and designing a suitable character disguise, you can manoeuvre through their lives projecting an image others will believe.

The important question to answer here is why you would want to do either. And when you see how Dodger, the hero, moves between the world of sparkly chandeliers and high-powered wealth, and the subterranean labyrinth of London sewers, the answer suggests itself.