FROM The Telling Stones
KOMBI GOTHIC
We all need an old friend or two to help us through.
"I had forgotten how seriously uncomfortable these are."
This from my old mate Neil, a once famous Volkswagen guru, now middle-aged and a bit cynical about his hippie past.
We are driving on a dirt road in a 1964 VW Kombi Van as run by one of the current crop of what I internally call neo-hippies. The van delights me. It has been painted with a brush, pastel green bottom half, and purple top. The stripe in the middle is white with a bright green, Celtic-style graphic all round. I think Neil would be embarrassed if anyone were out here.
Supposedly we are looking for the solution to a fault that is driving the youthful owner nuts. The generator light never quite goes out. I am driving.
"You know, these are the only vehicle I know of that the driver can safely roll a joint in while you’re going along."
The steering wheel is huge and sits flat like a proper little bus.
Neil is not impressed. "The anaesthetic effect is critical to being in here for more than five minutes." He goes on to postulate that as the only real reason for their hippie popularity.
We both know what is wrong with the van. It has to do with the distance between the electrical action at the rear near the motor and the light at the front. We also know there is no harm in it and the traditional solution is to paint the offending light with fingernail polish or something you can’t quite see through. So if that is the case, I wonder out loud, why is he a co-operative participant in this afternoon’s unnecessary activity?
We are going to a country pub in Michael’s Kombi and he isn’t expecting it back until evening. "I dunno mate, I must be mad."
I can’t help loudly noticing that the steering and brakes are both in need of attention. Gear stick is loose too.
"And it’s bloody noisy in here. The thing’s got more rattles than a millionaire’s baby."
I have brought with me several tapes that will complete the period piece we are doing and slip one into the stereo. Van Morrison starts at proper volume, "She’s as sweet as Tupelo honey." Something I hadn’t even recognised as tension, relaxes in me. This is good. I can’t quite understand what is happening with Neil. Some of the Sixties don’t travel well to the present, but he seems to look at it all as though he was a cynical outsider. I begin to sing along with the tape.
"She’s an angel of the first degree…."
In fact he is deeply involved in the caring ethic and together we had returned many Volkswagens to the world for almost no financial reward. I must ask him about this.
We are coming up to the pub that is destined to have us sit in it for the next hour. It has Guinness on tap and a beer garden with a view of a nice little creek. Great place. I press hard on the brakes long before it could possibly be needed and just manage to slow down enough to slew into the car park of the Brothers Hotel.
I turn off the car. Van Morrison dies, the tape spits out, and after running on a bit, the motor stops too.
"These things are getting old," I say. "Almost dangerous in today’s terms."
"Definitely, I’d say," replies Neil, with some panic in the voice I think. "Let’s have Guinness."
We can’t lock the van, so we decide to trust existence and go to the bar and order a half of Guinness each. As we wait Neil reminds me of an old girlfriend of his whose van also wouldn’t lock, so whenever she parked it, she thought a pyramid over it.
"Did it ever get stolen?"
"No."
I think that is at least proof of the possibility of it being effective, but Neil isn’t having any.
"She was a head case man, all sweet and easy, but her mind was like a can of worms. I never met anyone who could avoid responsibility for what she did as well as her. Not even you." I’m not hurt.
The Guinness has arrived. We take it out the back, avoid all the umbrellas and sit under the tree. I put my feet up on an empty chair.
I remember Chrissie. She was little and pretty, big round glasses and long brown hair. Cute. She’d lived with Neil for a long time, went to a course in some healing thing and left him for someone else straight after. It pissed him right off. Not because she left, but that it came to light in the breakup administration that she had been going with this guy for a couple of years yet saw no reason to say anything to Neil. Her Kombi was nice though. When I say so to Neil, he reminds me of its birth.
"You sold that to me. You only had it for a couple of weeks and it was the wrong body type for you. It had two sets of double doors in the back."
" Oh, that bloody thing. It wasn’t the doors. I got rid of it because of all the letters."
Only a couple of days after I had registered it in my name, I started getting weird mail from someone’s insurance company claiming that one morning I had driven over his toe. Further, that he had consequently lost his job and might I be interested in compensating Mr. Victim for his trauma and loss? I decided to sell it because at the time I wanted nothing to do with heavy vehicle karma. I had never explained this to Neil. He seems pleased when I tell him now.
"That explains the guy coming up in the street to admire it after I’d fitted it out..........
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FROM The Mad Bastards Guide to Enlightenment.
MEDITATION?
Lots of people do something of the sort. Some for reasons of coping and some to gain quiet. Then there are those who see a direct path to awake with meditation as a process of continuous refinement of thought and physiology, until finally, later, some bridge to the beyond opens and there they are.I know a good few awake people now, and none of them would hesitate to say that this experience has no linear connection to anything else.
Including meditation.
Now having said that, I met a woman recently who had the misfortune to wake up while doing a meditation course of some sort. She has a few people following her, as if she is going somewhere, and tells them that the only thing to do is to meditate endlessly and wait. To me this is total bullshit and thank god she didn’t wake up in the spa, or there would be these poor wrinkled sods waiting wetly for the skies to open for them.
There seems to be a logic in it. But... I meditated in one form or another for years, it did not bring awake one tiny bit closer. And it wont.
With that in place, the experience of meditation itself is strangely similar to awake in a distant way. Some objectivity, some connectedness, quiet, silence even. The difference is that the awake experience has no centre, none. A decent meditation gives something similar, but with a false centre. Like watching the breath, or using a mantra, not uncommon forms of meditation. The old self watches breath or gently mumbles like Patanjali said, all other experience gravitates toward what seems normal to me. But the mind is now being trained to watch as an observer and the experience that is watched becomes the observed. Then we have cleverly trained one bit of the mind to watch another.
Too messy for me.
It’s only possible function seems to have experience that enables you, should you awake, to not fear it, or to accept it as familiar in some way.
Well, it is familiar anyway, it is all that is. You never left. So there is little point to meditation in awake terms. Except to perhaps lessen the shock to the body should grace take you. ..............
