Guy James » pingfm

How Spain’s 15-M movement is redefining politics | Diego Beas

Guy James — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 10:14:39 +0000

This is relevant to everyone, not just people here in Spain.

Kill Your Practice

Guy James — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 14:53:42 +0000

Buddhists call what they do when they sit down to meditate ‘practice’. Of course all words are imperfect when we enter the tricky realm of the non-dual but I really feel this term is misleading if we are wanting to enter the Absolute in our meditation. The idea of meditation being something one practices and gradually becomes good at creates the feeling that in the future, when we are ‘good at meditation’ we will enter the Eternal Present. On reflection, of course this is absurd- the Eternal Present is present in this normal, workaday moment we have here, with me writing these words and you reading them. There is no greater opportunity than this.

The idea of ‘practice’ creates a false self with its own hopes and expectations and all the sense of future which goes with it. Although we may indeed improve in some sense with more time and more practice: stilling the mind, controlling the emotions etc., we are in fact strengthening this false future-dependent self and ultimately getting further and further away from fully experiencing the present moment. Enlightenment or fulfilment remains tantalisingly out of reach.

The solution for me, at any rate, is to forget everything, forget that I know how to meditate, forget any idea of getting better at it, and just totally surrender. By the way, surrender is not something that can be practised!

Winners

Guy James — Wed, 25 May 2011 11:36:20 +0000

“O gifted men, vainglorious for first place,
how short a time the laurel crown stays green
……………………………………..
A breath of wind is all there is to fame
here upon earth: it blows this way and that,
and when it changes quarter it changes name.”

- Dante.

It’s a shame that the winner in Formula 1 no longer gets a laurel wreath like they used to. Perhaps because we have forgotten that success is inherently transient.

The Simonsound: The One that Got Away

Guy James — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 11:04:42 +0000

http://ping.fm/elZAN

Incoming search terms:

JC

Guy James — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 09:54:36 +0000

“Religion is a popular misunderstanding of poetry” – Jospeh Campbell.

VAMPIRE SQUID ECONOMICS by Paul Levy

Guy James — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 11:41:34 +0000

“The wetikonomys fiat-currency is not backed by real value, but rather, is a system in which, as if by magic, money is created out of thin air. Having fallen through the rabbit hole, we now live in a world where money materializes simply by decree (fiat) of an elite cabal of Big Wetikos, who can exchange the tokens of value they have conjured up for the time and natural resources of everyone else. The wetiko-economy is basically a legitimized counterfeiting operation.” – http://tinyurl.com/39xd9aj

It’s time for a new colour on earth!

Guy James — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 17:43:44 +0000

It’s time for a new colour on earth!

Incoming search terms:

its time for a new colour

THE GREATEST EPIDEMIC SICKNESS KNOWN TO HUMANITY

Guy James — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 15:11:11 +0000

“Our lack of imagination of the evil existing in potential in humanity is a direct reflection of a lack of intimacy with our own potential evil”

http://tinyurl.com/3xqcoqk

Incoming search terms:

@words txt

Guy James – Sweet Nothing

Guy James — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 19:50:27 +0000

Army of Slaves

Guy James — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 08:59:10 +0000

“Given there are already people who remove graffiti and pick up litter but who’ll now be unneeded, we can sack them, put them on the dole, then re-employ them on unemployment benefits at a third of the price. ” – http://tinyurl.com/33qo285

Four Tet Remixes

Guy James — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 12:49:43 +0000

http://ping.fm/Dba5Q

Incoming search terms:

creative white ads

Yusef Lateef – Portrait by Mati Klarwein – 1958

Guy James — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 14:36:06 +0000

love it!

Dan McPharlin

Guy James — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 10:33:46 +0000

visionary art.

This is the News

Guy James — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 10:43:12 +0000

I just realised what ‘The News’ is – it is not primarily a record of the day’s most important events but is actually a presentation of a point of view about a single subject. That subject is Death and the opinion you are invited to have is that it is a Bad Thing. Look at the grim faces of the newsreaders as they describe how many have perished and in what way. There is never the suggestion that death is part of life and that it might not even be worthy of mention. As we don’t know what happens after we die, to assume it is a bad thing is just as ignorant as assuming we all go to heaven and should all therefore be happy about it.

Why is it presented as such? Because as Alan Watts pointed out, people who are afraid of death are easy to rule. The constant grim and scaremongering coverage of the various deaths around the world shows people what might happen if they venture too far out of their comfort zone (the ending of the film ‘The Truman Show’ brilliantly satirises this). Fear of death creates the chains that bind us and we tune in every day for a fear top-up. This allows us to feel better about our petty and uncourageous lives – ‘look at all that death out there, better not step out of line in case I become one of its victims. I will postpone what I really want to do and do as I’m told to do as this seems to be the safer option’.

Why, especially on British TV, is death not shown in all its gory details? Let’s say another American bomb hits a wedding party in Afghanistan- we are shown the debris and maybe some blood on the ground but never all the mutilated corpses. The issue is not really protecting the Americans, it would be the same if US soldiers had been killed. The programme makers do not want to show the full horror and thus risk arousing the righteous anger of the populace which might in turn, if unleashed sufficiently, lead to a change in the status quo. We are to fear death as a shadowy unknown, something constantly at our side, but which must never be turned and faced. If we did face it, we might discover a different countenance to our gaoler than the one we have long feared.

Proud to be British

Guy James — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 11:48:06 +0000

The only time I’ve *really* felt proud to be British in recent times was watching the recent Bill Hicks documentary. In the USA Bill was playing tiny clubs and people just didn’t ‘get’ him. He came to the UK and was soon selling out the 4,000 seater Dominion Theatre in London. His relief at finally being understood makes me proud of our ‘black’ sense of humour.

Eleusis – estados modificados de consciencia

Guy James — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 19:32:38 +0000

http://tinyurl.com/2fa3rcw

Poetry

Guy James — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 18:27:14 +0000

All can be poetry when you are in tune with the present moment.

Incoming search terms:

Guy James Poetry

Adam Curtis Interview

Guy James — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 14:16:47 +0000

“What they need to do is take the internet, and instead of portraying it as some sort of platform in which they just show people’s dogs falling down stairs, they should use this and find a way of imaginatively constructing new things out of it. It’ll be complicated, because the internet is quite anti-narrative, it goes all over the shop, but I know full well someone somewhere will take that and turn it into something like a Dickens novel, and use it to take people out of themselves. And I tell you, there’s no one at the BBC thinking like that. And it’s about time they did. ” – http://tinyurl.com/3xmlxgj

Incoming search terms:

Holotropic Breathwork

Guy James — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 11:29:10 +0000

“The psyche has an almost relentless tendency to create and draw toward itself experiences that match the experiential quality of the unconscious inner material. Thus, a person with leftover trauma from choking in the birth canal will unconsciously create situations of high stress, with no room to breathe or the world closing in. These patterns can persist indefinitely until the material is faced on the level from which it originatesas powerful leftover emotions from within the psyche.” – http://tinyurl.com/2wstzw4

John Sinclair Interview!

Guy James — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 10:09:38 +0000

“SINCLAIR: Thats exactly what it is: unity of government, industry and the banks. And no one is doing better right now than the banks. Because they had that deficit down, you see? The banks cant make any money without a deficit. So now theyve got the biggest deficit of all time! So that means theyre just shoveling millions and billions of dollars into the banks in interest. I havent read my paper yet today, but maybe theyve taken the prime rate down to 1/2 or 3/4 of a percent. Can you imagine how much money theyre making on that? To buy money for half a percent and sell it to you&for, you know, whatever. If its a credit card company theyre selling it to you for 29%! I mean, those are UNBELIEVABLE profits. ” – http://tinyurl.com/35xfwyp

Alan Watts on Leibniz and the I Ching

Guy James — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 21:22:20 +0000

“We are trying to get better. We seek out those types of experiences that we call the positive, the good, the light, the living, and we wish to avoid the negative, the evil, the dark, and the dead. Unfortunately, we are equipped with a nervous system in which the neurons either fire or don’t fire. Everything we are aware of is created out of an extremely complicated arrangement of yes and no. We can put colored television on tape so that it is all reduced to a matter of yes and no. And that, you will understand, is the philosophy of the Chinese Book of Changes, the I Ching, which represents all the situations of life in terms of combinations of yang, or the positive principle, and yin, the negative. Interestingly enough, the Latin translation of the I Ching was read by the philosopher Leibniz, and from this he invented binary arithmetic, in which all numbers can be represented by zero and one, which is the number system used by the digital computer that lies behind all our electronic ingenuity. Our great extension of the nervous system is based on the same principle.

Can you see, then, what we are trying to do when we seek the positive and avoid the negative? We are trying to have yang without yin. We are trying to arrange a life game in which there is winning without losing. How can you arrange such a state of affairs?” – http://tinyurl.com/2uajsbt

Incoming search terms:

Beautiful Video

Guy James — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 10:05:14 +0000

John Hopkins: Vessel (Four Tet Remix)

via Scott Hansen: http://ping.fm/41gvG

A Dream

Guy James — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 09:26:42 +0000

Dream: i heard a noise coming out of the bean bag. i undid the zip- i sensed that this was the place all my songs came from. out came a big black spider, which started spinning a web. the spider changed into a panther with strong piercing eyes. i was repulsed by the spider, but was less afraid of the panther. i put my hand out, and it jumped at it, but more playfully than anything. it cuddled my arm in the way cats do when they’re play-fighting. in the morning i found a large spider in the flat, the first one i’ve ever found in here. i flattened it.

photo credit: Upshaw Imagery

Nothing is Sacred

Guy James — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 09:12:06 +0000

nothing is sacred
look above the clouds
the wind blows in the space between you and the distant stars
nothing is sacred… no one knows where it will go
the wind is silent until it touches you
you are part of the wind
the stars are in your brain
a black hole in your brain
nothing is sacred… no one knows how long
the sun is cold until it touches you
you are incandescent
you are the space between the notes
the distance is in your brain
you are part of the sun
nothing is sacred

Now is the Happiest Time of Your Life

Guy James — Fri, 14 May 2010 09:04:13 +0000

“Your primary purpose is to be here fully, and to be total in whatever you do so that the preciousness of the present moment does not become reduced to a means to an end. And there you have your life purpose. That’s the very foundation of your life.” – Eckhart Tolle

Incoming search terms:

quotes on happiest time in life

Musical Dissonance

Guy James — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 11:17:55 +0000

Just pondering how rubbish it is when you meet someone new and they look through your cds or iTunes or whatever and say ‘oh wow, you’ve got this’, referring to the one song or album you absolutely hate which has somehow remained within your collection due to your being too lazy to get rid of it, and ignoring everything else which lights up your life with its brilliance and which you have painstakingly collected over many years.

‘Yes’, you say ‘I have got that, but I hate it.’

‘And now I hate you too.’

Harsh but fair.

Help Haiti — drop the debt

Guy James — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:26:08 +0000

I’ve just signed a petition for the cancellation of Haiti’s US$1 billion debt. Haiti’s people should not be made to pay back loans made to unelected dictators years ago even as they struggle to recover from the earthquake.

You can read more and sign the petition here:

http://ping.fm/3xtlV

Thanks!

(copied and pasted from above website)

Using the mind…

Guy James — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:11:59 +0000

…to transcend the mind is like starting a war for peace.

Popular Paintings, Artwork and Pop Art Gallery

Guy James — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 07:29:03 +0000

(http://ping.fm/hpe4f)

Incoming search terms:

popular pop art paintings

I’m a Photographer, not a Terrorist

Guy James — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:13:10 +0000

Against the bizarre UK tendency to view all photography as potential terrorism…

From: http://ping.fm/ktAys