My Identity status is full of craters

Been spending the gorgeous summer we’ve had, mainly at home coming to terms with my new status as a ‘full-time Shaman’. I’ve been sitting out as much as I can in an old-fashioned Deck Chair reading books on the science of Spirituality from such authors as Tom Campbell and Graham Hancock, listening to great ‘World Music’ compilation CD’s that have arrived through my door with the awesome ‘Songlines’ music magazine, and generally trying to heal myself of my various ailments both mental and physical out in the sun and down among the plants and weeds. As Confucius is said to have once uttered; ‘If anyone could be said to have affected proper order while remaining inactive it was ‘Shun’. What was there for him to do? – He simply made himself respectful and took up his position facing south’.

Went to a talk last night by respected journalist Seumas Milne about the dodgy dealings of the British Establishment during and after the Miner’s strike of 1984/5. I didn’t think for one minute that I would experience such powerful emotions and sense the presence of so many departed old souls crowded round among the rafters of the Old Library in Mansfield, hovering there above the few living heroes of the strike action who staggered up to the rostrum to tell breathless stories from the way back days. That night I dreamt of my old school friend Ian (‘Army’) Armstrong who worked at Bentinck Pit, Back in the 1990’s I met him at a Miner’s Welfare in Sutton when I was playing a gig with my old band ‘Monkey Business’. He told me that he was one of the few strikers to stay out till the end and recounted some of the crazy antics he got up to including throwing chunks of paving slabs onto the coaches carrying Scabs to work from off motorway bridges. You never knew how much ‘Army’ was bullshitting when he told you such tales but he was certainly capable of such diabolical acts. In my dream I was showing him a book of Seumas’s called ‘The Enemy Within’ and explaining how little any of us knew at the time, and indeed how little we realise while anything is currently ‘going off’, just what underhanded skulduggery goes on in the corridors of power. It’s only later, when it’s usually too late, that it all starts to come out in the wash. Sadly ‘Army’ died not long after that after falling down a flight of stairs after having too much to drink, at least that’s what I heard.

When we were at school we were given a career talk by some reps from what was then called the British Coal Board, and we were told that we could be guaranteed a job for 50 years if we chose mining as a career. We were also told by our teacher that we would all be working a three day week and our biggest problem would be how to fill our leisure time, Both predictions were wrong even though there is still plenty of coal to be mined and there is no reason at all why we couldn’t share the work out more evenly between us all if we were all paid a decent wage.

I spent a year or so during my trouble d teenage years working both above and below ground in the Coal industry before I ‘got out’ and travelled these Isles looking for alternative ways of living my life. I spent about 2 years ‘dossing’ ‘on the road’ laying on beaches and tripping at festivals, sleeping under hedgerows, and in derelict houses and crashing on the floors of grubby makeshift communes. In those days in the early 1970’s we still believed in the Hippy ethic of sharing our last crust and because of this I think we fared far better than homeless street people do in this day and age.

At the talk I found myself sitting next to a bloke whose voice and appearance seemed familiar and I realised later that he was one of the main guys who ran the Mushroom Bookshop in Nottingham back in the day. We chatted about the shop and other ‘radical’ bookshops like ‘Compendium’ in Camden, ‘Forum’ in Derby, and ‘Scarthin Books’ in Cromford, all places where I found books that guided me in new directions that changed my life and shaped my thinking in profound ways. Before the internet this was about the only way you could become exposed to the kind of Spiritual teachings I deeply craved without taking yourself off to some ashram in Rishikesh or somewhere. At bookshops like these I found works of wisdom by the likes of Alan Watts, Matthew Fox, Timothy Freke, Peter Gandy, Elaine Pagels, and Karen Armstrong -books that helped to deliver me from of the Spiritual abuse I suffered among the Pentecostal Christian Fundamentalists I encountered in my youth. Like a Homeopathic remedy these writings acted sympathetically to empower me with the wisdom to face my fears of Hell Fire and damnation and to discover that deep down among the toxic doctrines lay hidden teachings of great beauty and power that could be extracted and transformed via a magical alchemical process into a genuine Spirituality to live your life by.

Autumn’s now kicking in major big time with old hurricanes passing through.. Time to batten down the hatches and get a pile of books to study over the winter months. Just discovered a new author to me.. ‘Geza Vermes’ who is one of the world’s leading authorities on early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls. He seems to have a pretty clear perspective on how the mainstream ‘Jesus Movement’ grew over the first 3 centuries and much of what he writes about is confirming what I already suspect went on during Christianity’s development from the teachings of a Charismatic Jewish prophet to becoming the primary ‘death cult’ of the Holy Roman Empire.