Author: Andrew

RUN AWAY

…is what most human beings would like to do a great deal of the time. Running is the flight part of the ‘fight or flight’ deeply in our bodies and our past, it has been our protection, an evolutionary momentum and a biological memory deep in the human body that allowed our ancestors to survive to another day and bequeath to us, generations later, this day. 

To want to run away is an essence of being human, it transforms any staying through the transfigurations of choice. To think about fleeing from circumstances, from a marriage, a relationship or from a work is part of the conversation itself and helps us understand the true distilled nature of our own reluctance, thus allowing us a deeper honesty and sense of presence.  

Strangely, we are perhaps most fully incarnated as humans, when part of us does not want to be here, or doesn’t know how to be here. 

Presence is only fully understood and realised through fully understanding our reluctance to show up. 

To understand the part of us that wants nothing to do with the full necessities of work, of relationship, of loss, of doing what is necessary, is to learn humility, to cultivate self-compassion and to sharpen that sense of humour essential to a merciful perspective of both a self and another.

In the wild, the best response to dangerous circumstances is often not to run but to assume a profoundly attentive identity, to pay attention to what seems to threaten and in that attention, not to assume the identity of the victim. 

Through being equal to fierce circumstances we make ourselves larger than the part of us that wants to flee while not losing its protective understandings about when it might be appropriate.

We decide not to run not only because there are many who would be left behind who cannot run as fast as we can, but also because in turning to the source of the fear we have the possibility of finding a different way forward, a larger good, through circumstances, rather than away from them in some supposedly safe area where threats no longer occur. We know intuitively that most of the time, we should not run, we should stay and look for a different way forward, despite the evolutionary necessity. 

Rarely is it good to run, but we are wiser, more present, more mature, more understanding and more thoroughly human when we realise we can never flee from the need to run away.

‘Run Away’ taken from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words By DAVID WHYTE

‘No one wins. One side just loses more slowly.’  

Dennis Lehane and Ed Burns -THE WIRE

What did one wall say to the other? Meet me at the corner dude.

What happens to rebellious rainbows? They get thrown into prisms.

If you were ever in any doubt…

The Director Of The Music Video That Predicted The Kendall Jenner Pepsi Ad Speaks Out

WIZ prophesied Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi ad with Chemical Bros video in 1999

Pepsi advert remarkably similar to Chemical Brothers 1999 music video for single ‘Out of Control’

‘Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.’  -Terence McKenna
psychedelicsociety.org.uk

‘To live outside the law, you must be honest’

-Bobby Dylan recipient 2016 Nobel literature prize

‘I’m on a whiskey diet. I’ve lost three days already.’   -Tommy Cooper

But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence,… illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness. – Ludwig Feuerbach

This is not a joke. If the Beatles had been black, what would they have been called? Niggers.

(It’s suggesting that because the Beatles were white (like Elvis) they -particularly in America- were able to transcend prejudice of the essentially black music styles they’d appropriated.
If they’d been black no matter how successful they were they still would have been called ‘niggers’.)

‘I asked the producer what the budget was, the producer said: ‘I’ll tell you what the cocaine budget was $750 00’. 
I thought for a second and said: ‘Well, its all up there on the screen’   -Michael Caine 1984

Louise Michel, ‘the grande dame of Anarchism’ was born on this day 1830.
‘Since it seems that every heart that beats for freedom has no right to anything but a little slug of lead, I demand my share. If you let me live, I shall never cease to cry for vengeance.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Michel

‘Pizza is the staff of life. Without pizza and other fine Italian foods, there is no happiness, okay?’  -John Goodman from ‘Fallen’ 1998

‘But consider, tis true I have committed crimes but you’ve committed far worse atrocities in your dreams’  -Dr Jekyll/Hyde

‘Your dark sunglasses, won’t make you Lou Reed,
Your dark sunglasses just make it hard to see…

Your dark sunglasses won’t make you look like…
John Cale,

Sterling Morrison, 

or even…

Doug Yule…’

-Bill Baird mp3

‘Bangers and Mash’ by Sellers and Loren mp3

‘Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. I warn you. Look at every path closely and deliberately, try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone. One question. This question is one that only a very old man asks. My benefactor told me about it once when I was young, and my blood was too vigorous for me to understand it. Now I do understand it. I will tell you what is: Does this path have heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through bush, or into bush. In my life I could say I have traversed long, long paths, but I am not anywhere. My benefactor’s question has meaning now. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has heart, the other doesn’t. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.’  

-From ‘The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge’ by Carlos Castaneda

On artist Leonora Carrington: ‘Those respectable people, who for a dozen years, had invited her to dine in a prestigious restaurant have still not recovered from the embarrassment when they noticed that, while continuing to take part in the conversation, she had taken off her shoes and meticulously covered her feet in mustard’ -Alejandro Jodorowsky

Kill Hope!
‘How hard it is to kill hope! Time after time, one thinks one has trodden it down, stamped it to death. Time after time, like a noxious insect, it begins to stir again, it shivers back again into a faint tremulous life. Once more it worms its way into one’s heart, to instill its poison, to gnaw away the solid hard foundations of life and leave in their place the hollow phantom of illusion.’ -Dorothy Strachey

UK Mothering Sunday, March 6th. For mothers everywhere. John Lennon ‘Serve Yourself’ mp3

‘you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land…’

from ‘HOME’ by Warsan Shire http://seekershub.org/blog/2015/09/home-warsan-shire/

‘Cinema is not a sausage’  -Walerian Borowczyk
+ 2015 review

White out x9  http://gizmodo.com/listen-to-100-white-albums-played-at-once-1469731580

‘I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls’. -Henry David Thoreau

‘I want to make heaviness light and lightness heavy’ -Jean Cocteau

As Tony Benn was fond of saying about grassroots social change: ‘First they ignore you, then they say you’re mad, then dangerous, then there’s a pause and then you can’t find anyone who disagrees with you.’

Tony Wilson (Factory Records) asked Sid Vicious if he wrote for the man in the street. He replied ‘I’ve met the man in the street and he’s a cunt.’

‘A kind of tartar builds up over your consciousness, and you think this is the world. This isn’t the world; this is just tartar, a wall, a buildup of scum and shit. People come along who have the great power and knock a hole in that. 
And through that hole comes this blinding bolt of light, and you see it and you remember, Oh, I FORGOT about that.’ -Ken Kesey