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The Last extract of all... From The Telling Stones..

"....just like I remembered from some Robert Crumb cartoon. I
thought he just made it look like that, but it is real.
I went walking to find Ashbury, looking along it for
Haight. At first the wrong way – a long way – and finally
asked at a corner liquor store. All corners have ‘likker’ stores,
each one run by some person looking middle eastern. How
are they treated since 9/11? I wondered.
As I moved toward the corner of Haight and Ashbury
Streets, I was excited, really felt like some sort of pilgrim.
There it was, a corner in a city…nobody there at all. I took a
photo and went into the shop on the corner, a sort of a head
shop but it was almost all shirts. I chatted to the guy, who
told me he’d been 30+ years there and business was fine.
There were artefacts of sorts; stickers to display on your
car, and mostly in that script I call “Acid writing”. Mostly
good. I bought a Grateful Dead T-shirt and spoke of them
a while, of their integrity in the day and through the years.
The house they lived in was just up the road. Why not
look? I remembered Phil Lesh speaking in front of it sometime
on TV – good stories.
A couple of hundred yards up the hill there it was, 710
Ashbury Street, a nice little inner city house with a set of
steps up. The gate post had “If my words did glow” and
“Thank you Jerry” in black marker. I was blown away for
some reason in that soft feeling place, a centre of subcultural
evolution. Felt like a power place that fills the senses and
feeds the soul. Stronger than Sedona.
I took photos at the gate.
A 4WD drove into the attached garage, and the man
driving smiled as he went in. As he came from the car to the
front of the house with parcels, I asked,
“Does all this drive you crazy?”
“No. Such nice kids most of them. It happens all the
time.”
I asked “What happens?”.
“They say, it’s Jerry’s place, and I say, no, it’s mine now.”
“They sound too young to have been Sixties kids.” I say.
He went on. “We bought a couple of years after. It was
empty and a real mess, lots of little cubbies and ruined bedding.
We fixed it over the years and always there were people
coming to see it. Outside, sitting, on the day he died there
were a thousand there mourning I’m sure.”
I marvelled at his patience. His own home a shrine for
Deadheads and he had no affiliation; yet all he sees is nice
kids.
At one time there were TV interviews on the house after
Jerry had left, and he was sent tickets by the Dead to a concert.
He said he loved it. So many people, having such a lot
of fun, “and the music was nice too”.
“I am jealous,” I said, as I missed the concerts. He put the
parcels on the car.
There was a Rumi calendar diary dog-eared under his
arm. I pointed. “One of my favourite people,” I said........"

And  from The Mad Bastards Guide to Enlightenment...
Drugs.
".....All is welcome in consciousness. All and everything.
With drug use the process is reversed, the physiology
is changed and the view of the world changes accordingly.
Temporarily. In itself an experience of something apparently
greater.
But.
The body takes a smacking. And if the drug is made by
amateurs, then who knows what extras are there? If not,
then there is doubt that the entire effect is known. This is a
subtle science, if it is science at all, and twisting the physiology
to shape conscious perception in this way looks brutal
and unnecessary. It costs the body, and then after, there is
recovery and attempts at integration on a massive scale. The
perception of what is real can become suddenly a long and
non-integrated distance from where it was yesterday. All so
that a twisted out physiology can produce the fantastic ideas
the unconscious holds away. Including whatever you think
the beyond might be.
Now it seems possible that under certain conditions and
“expert” supervision, that the experience can loosen cultural
ties, adjust decently and be a useful trigger toward reality..
But I see no such experts. A small number of talented amateurs
and a lot of collateral damage.
I have had bliss and silence from chemical interference,
and it is not the same. It isn’t real in the sense that awake is.
A momentary gift from the subtle mind. And the wrapping
is crap. I look at......"

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..........
..................................................................................


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. ..............

From Part One,            "The Telling Stones"

MAX GOES TO WOODSTOCK....

I’m always a bit sad to have missed the moments that have become the centres of hippie memory, but although the wave broke a little later in Australia we didn’t really miss anything relevant.The entire impetus for the rejection of the straight world’s bathwater and babies was the same media input in the whole of the western world.


       I love to visit Max. His house is perfect. A stone cottage with small windows, not too tidy outside with its random wood-heap and falling tin shed, but stepping inside is like getting out of a time machine set for the mid-sixties. There are pretty little found objects catching the light on the windowsill, sari curtains, wooden surfaces everywhere, all the colour of honey. The chairs are square wooden affairs, each painted a different pastel colour. Sometimes a plain tablecloth, but mostly, like today, a clean wooden table top.
       There is always a pot of tea to be had. So we have one.
       There is an unstated conversational convention here that keeps a stream of consciousness going forever. Max simply starts talking wherever he left off last time.
       “I nearly went to Woodstock,” he says, in a slow, mellow voice, a considering-things-in-the-background sort of sound to it.
       Last time I visited him, there was a friend with us who was living near Woodstock at the time but didn’t bother going. He had told stories of his neighbour who had arrived there several days early and camped for the duration in her Kombi-van. She had been hassled from day two by people begging for water, and robbed of most of the van’s removable contents when she stayed away overnight – nearer the stage.
       The whole thing sounded awful, but according to him she just loved it. “Wouldn’t have missed so much positive one-purpose collective consciousness for anything.”
       The young of the Sixties were cursed with the huge contradiction between the world events of the day as depicted on their brand new graphic television, and the values insisted on by their parents. It was all a bit much for some, and from the rejection of straight world, its madness and constraints grew the field of vast possibility. I never feel confident that Max is telling the truth, but it’s always a good story so I don’t insult him by wondering this aloud.
       “I was in Afghanistan about three months before, camped near the mountains, waiting for a bloke to meet me for a little business.”
“Ah, business Max,” I reply in that special affirmative, get-on-with-it voice.
“I wasn’t buying dope mate; I had a few rifles to sell, early Kalishnikovs. This American bloke I was with had bought them at a market, with my money mind you, that sort of committed me to helping him sell them.
” Jesus, Max is a gunrunner! He just looks like an old hippie.
“We had a lot of faith then man. What we did was wander into the mountains looking for some bugger to buy these guns. We ran out of food in a couple of days. The Yank said he was going to a music festival after the money came. Woodstock in New York State, via Kabul and London. I was a bit interested so I decided to go with him. He left sometime that night, must have walked. I still had both the camels in the morning. The guns too.”
       Max is telling this story in a monotone, slow and careful. No dramatic intonation, no emotion, only a little grin and nod between sentences. This is why I can believe him. He fits my idea of an old Australian storyteller. No campfire, no bush; it all happens in little kitchens with tea and a smoke.
`      The cat comes in, sits on my lap and starts to purr. I pat. We have more tea.
       “When I woke up, there was another camp about two hundred yards away, a lot of people, noise and camels, even a fire. I was a bit worried; I thought they might have killed the Yank when he went for a piss. I sat there wondering what to do with these rifles and no food when this fantastic smell of fresh coffee hit. I was going to introduce myself to next door when someone came up, no English, pointing at me and at the empty cup he was carrying. I reckon they took pity on me huddled in a blanket. So I went over.
       "I have to take a leak."  Tea. Everywhere you go in this time warp there is tea. I reckon the strongest bladders in the world must belong to hippies. Max for instance, never goes. Maybe he’s got a bag. I’ll ask. I’m not having another smoke, that’s for sure. The toilet is perfect too. White paint on walls of stone, textured with dust. The cistern is attached high on the wall with a chain. On the end of the chain, the large knob from a brass bed. I flush.
Arriving back in the kitchen I am overwhelmed by the need to explain to Max how I am seeing his house and where it fits in my personal anthropology. I sit down.

“Always good to see you, man.” I say. Max looks up from rolling another joint.
“Yeah, you too.” ..........


From Part Two.  "The Mad Bastards Guide to Enlightenment"

                                    WHAT'S IT LIKE?....      
        It’s not like anything. Sadly, sounding like everyone else that speaks on this, I go on. I will say some stuff.

        It’s quiet. No more dialogue chatters in the mind, all vanished. It seems like bullshit if I focus on "before", but it stopped. In a microsecond. Less.

       It doesn’t inform behaviour. Yes, that’s right, it does not inform behaviour. More a sort of non-influence really, a noticing that certain doings, based on stories, are pointless, so they don’t happen, this not happening is noticed in retrospect, mostly by other people.

      Everything is the visually the same, seeing the same things everywhere as always, and there it is, just is. This gives a sort of non-motivation status really. Not that I don’t do things, more that they get done, by nobody. Ambition, ha! I see typing now for instance, it happens and that’s all. Nobody in here in the terms that I vaguely remember defining self.

       Memory is shot. Buggered beyond belief, going shopping requires a list or supermarket-ness is happening. No idea what for, even the what for is not there... linear simply doesn’t function in a regular way. Everything gets done it seems, but just done, by nobody.

      There is the centre of it really. Nobody is in here. That is the reality. Mind, physiology and language used to collude, and throw an illusory story of self on the screen of consciousness, but not now. Consciousness couldn’t give a fuck of course, it is there for anything, .......