The Lotus Position: It's not About Shagging in a Sports Car.

Let’s build a person.

Let’s make them articulate. Let’s give them a bookshelf filled with lefty tomes, feminist literature and Lonely Planet guides. Let’s subscribe them to Amnesty International with a £5 monthly donation. Let’s cover their bedroom in dream-catchers, fabric drapes sourced from a Bedouin trader and a wall adorned with postcards depicting ying & yang or quotes from Anais Nin. Let’s give them the propensity to buy organic foods. Let’s give them a smattering of creative flair. Let’s give them a bi-monthly trip outside of their urban environment to connect with nature. Let’s give them the ability to understand the basic dictionary understanding of ethics just in case it pops-up in conversation.

With me so far? Good. Let us continue and make them a familiar western creature.

Let’s give them sparkling neurosis. Let’s give them a validation complex. Let’s give them a large glut of vanity. Let’s give them a bulging bank account ready to deck-out the 4 bedroom Bovis home with marble statues of Buddha. Lets drape them in clothing that costs more than the average total-wealth of an African villager, but looks ‘ethnic cool’. Let’s educate them enough in spirituality and morality to help offset their raging guilt when it’s made perfectly clear to them that they are – in fact – a knob.

Oh, and let’s give them a scarf. We mustn’t forget the scarf.

Okay, we’ve finished. So, now let’s all stare with fiery judgement at our newly forged Champagne Hippy. Sorry, I typed that incorrectly. I meant to say fucking Champagne Hippy.

Jesus Haych; please stop me from chewing off my own tongue when I read those words. As a fully paid-up member of club-cynic, I have an innate ability to dislike the majority of you. But the Champagne Hippy (sorry – fucking Champagne Hippy) has a unique pedestal of my hatred to stand on, which – if I had the choice – I would stand underneath and shake violently or set on fire until they plummeted to the ground; leaving nothing more than a sticky pool of half-digested chickpeas and corduroy.

General arseholes can be forgiven for simply not having the opportunity to know better. Your average weekend piss-head will smash windows and sing Beyoncé songs full-bore at 3am because they are utterly frustrated with their lot in life. I mean, I’d do more than kick-in the door of Greggs the Baker if the entire sphere of my existence was a 9-5 job as an estate agent and catching a different exotic urinary-tract disease each Saturday in an alleyway behind Wetherspoons. We can put this ubiquitous stupidity down to social environment and the lack of real education prevalent in a culture such as ours. But the fucking Champagne Hippy has - at the very least - a working knowledge of ethics, yet bloody chooses to live a contradictory existence that uses clichéd morality as a cleansing-lotion.

And at the top of the fucking Champagne Hippy pyramid stands the fucking Spiritual Champagne Hippy. Possibly the most annoying of creatures ever envisaged by a groaning universe, this subset of utter bastards can be frequently found dousing themselves in patchouli whilst sitting opposite a gold-encrusted shrine, meditating on a cushion with such an ornate detail that the Indonesian child that made it has to spend their diminutive wages on cataract and arthritis treatment by the time they hit 30. And I’m not even going to mention the pissing joss-sticks.

Usually, the fucking Spiritual Champagne Hippy will have a self-confessed affinity to Buddhism – you know, the bastardised philosophy that has been murdered over the course of time by people selectively taking its teachings and using them as an excuse to sound sanctimonious and smug whilst chowing-down on Waitrose Fair-trade pickled-onions at dinner parties.

To any fucking Spiritual Champagne Hippy reading this; here are the hardcore basics. Buddha did this a little while ago after many years of self reflection, but it obviously didn’t get through. He never had a blog. So I’ll state the five precepts in my own little way in the extremely vague hope that you grow a pair and actually live by them. Either that or you put away the pan-pipe CD’s and oust yourself as the excuse-ridden, guilt-laden, materialistic arse that you really are.

‘I will be mindful and reverential with all life’.
This doesn’t mean that you simply draw the line at waxing lyrical about dolphins caught in tuna nets. It means that you have respect for those poor bastards who live in the tenement block down the road, who can’t afford clothes for the kids because you help perpetuate a society that devalues welfare and rewards profit.

‘I will respect the property of others, I will not steal’.
This includes exploitation. You know; that thing the company you work for does when you sell needless shite to people who’ve had their self-esteem bludgeoned by your marketing campaign.

‘I will be conscious and loving in my relationships’.
This one is simple really. Firstly, don’t feel proud about that situation during your gap-year travels to Botswana, when you knobbed that person who looked at you like a God for the duration of your time together, but died a little inside when you told them to fuck-off for being clingy after you’d finally come. Also, it is not cool to have an open-relationship, no matter how ‘contemporary’ it makes you feel. But most importantly, it means that you should never ruin the happiness of someone you are close to for your own personal gain. Even if they burn the lentil bake.

‘I will honour honesty and truth, I will not deceive’.
The implications of this would be SO mind-bending to you right now that if I explained how this relates to you and your life, you’d explode in a cloud of indignation and demonic laughter.

‘I will exercise proper care of my body and mind, I will not be gluttonous nor abuse intoxicants’.
Gluttony includes that designer handbag and the expensive trips to five-star yurts with the hand-woven ‘rustic’ bed-linen. Do I need mention the wine suggested by Oz Clarke that you keep in a false-aged wicker wine-rack?

So there we go. Buddhism 101. Now that you know how the whole thing works. Ish. It obviously runs a whole lot deeper than that. But now that you have the general gist don’t you dare open your gob about your spiritual ‘connection’ with humanity if I can see a Coco Chanel label or a Mini convertible parked outside. That’s like talking to me about your understanding the painful plight of the third-world whilst beating a Cambodian to death with their begging-bowl.

Now, I’ll be very surprised if any fucking Champagne Hippy has read to this point. They’ve probably retreated to the chaise-longue where they will discuss my bad language whilst valiantly thinking of excuses why I’m ‘obviously wrong’ to avoid having to self-reflect. And fair play to them. Who would want to have to reinvent their life from the ground-up because some jumped-up little prick with a laptop and colourful vocabulary has pointed-out the flaws in their existence with a 1000-word swear-fest? After all, they have a large enough social group to find comfort in each other when they feel threatened – a group of people who will sagely nod in agreement at the ‘injustice in our world’, then open a bottle of £30 Chablis and have a pissing contest about who spent the longest time in a kibbutz when their parents finally released their trust-fund.

I’d have switched off after the first paragraph.

More fool you if you didn’t.

Dee.

How to Alientate Your Entire Readership: Atheism is the New Religion.

The Poor Widow's Offering.

While all the people were listening, Jesus said to his disciples, "Beware of the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and love to be greeted in the marketplaces and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honour at banquets. They devour widows' houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. Such men will be punished most severely."

As he looked up, Jesus saw the rich putting their gifts into the temple treasury. He also saw a poor widow put in two very small copper coins. "I tell you the truth," he said, "this poor widow has put in more than all the others. All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth; but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on."

Luke 20:45-21:4

And that was me in the corner. That was me in the spotlight, losing my religion. To coin a lyric that probably doesn’t make all that much sense in this context.

Don’t take it too literally and we’ll be fine. ..

I must’ve been about age 6, sat in my Sunday best, quietly thinking about He-Man as a lovely old vicar explained the parable of the widow to a congregation who were in turn thinking about their rickets / the football scores / dealing with the arse-itch that only appears during silent moments in crowded rooms.

So, after picturing Battle-Cat diving off a cliff to bite Skeletor on the face and He-Man jovially dancing at the prospect of no longer having to put-up with being attacked by a bony-faced squealer every time he went to the shops, a slow trickle of clarity entered my little mind. The vicar’s words seeped through the multicoloured cracks of my childish imagination.

The pew I was sat on looked bloody expensive with its intricate carving and deep, waxed lustre. Poor Jesus - hanging there in a mid-YMCA dance-off - was covered in gold leaf; this also looked bloody expensive. The stained-glass window looked infinitely pricier than the three-inch-square door panel that I once smashed for an over-exuberant ‘trick’ during a fateful Halloween excursion. And my Dad explained that replacing that was ‘bloody expensive’. As did the policeman.
In fact, the more I looked around the Church, the more I came to realise that the money we were asked to donate at the end of each service was being spent on making this place look like an incredibly opulent fairground house-of-horrors. Which would’ve been fine if a gore-covered Joseph of Arimathea leapt up from behind the alter during each communion to scare the living bejeezus out of the kneeling masses, before throwing the ‘body of Christ’ at the congregation in the form of dismembered body parts. But this didn’t happen. And I lived in a freezing terrace with a coal fire and was sustained via a diet that consisted of stew, stew and the occasional curry (stew with curry powder in it); so my disillusionment with organised religion sat down, crossed its arms and made itself entirely comfortable.

It wasn’t so much the inequality that bothered me; more the contradictions in the above parable. Firstly, this old lady was giving her money to a temple when Jesus himself was basically saying that accrued-opulence breeds wankers. Jesus then goes on to condone it. If the ‘lawmakers’ were to be distrusted, why give money to a religion that sets ‘law’? Ipso facto the Church then becomes opulent and therefore as distrustful as the wealthy folk he’s criticising. And before you start thinking that a six-year old couldn’t interpret such things, believe me when I say I was a smart kid. Only ONCE did I get a piece of Lego stuck up my arse. Well, okay, there WAS a dinky traffic-cone / nostril incident, but it was all in the name of science. And I probably didn’t discern such thinking via the smart-arsed wording used above, but I certainly had a grasp of the implications.

Maybe it’s counter to standard expectation, but it was at this point that I started to listen to the readings at church. I also spent time reading the bible. The more I read, the more I actually began to understand the concept of the good Christian, and how every single Christian I had ever met had missed the point entirely.
As much as I knew that these people were decent (they were heavily involved in charity work, used to run a meals-on-wheels service, organised bi-annual collections of clothing to ship to Africa), their ‘goodness’ was only ever displayed through their attachment to their religion. They could only work through the cultural collective - ‘in the name of Christ’ - and the rules dictated by it. Not once was humanity mentioned as a stand-alone reason for them to do anything. The religion was the primary objective – a self-imposed segregation that had a tendency to condescend anything outside of itself. Which is entirely un-Christian.

Now I could go on about the negative aspects of Christian thinking (views on homosexuality, reluctance to accept scientific discovery, etc.), but if you think about it, we’re talking about a book based on a 2000 year old philosophy. It’d be like criticising Pythagoras due to his admission that he could ‘write on the moon’. As silly as this statement is, it’s based on his naive understanding of the universe over two millennia ago. It takes nothing away from the brilliance of his theorem. Same goes for Christian philosophy. It misses the mark occasionally due to outmoded understanding, but is sound in its general focus of being nice to each other.

The problem we have is that a good idea is taken, beaten, reshaped, packaged and pitched to become something entirely different and of less use; usually due to a rather unsavoury motive.
It’s like taking a piece of Soap-bark from a tree to wash with. Then adding ammonium lauryl sulphate, glycerine, citric acid, sodium benzoate and perfume, packing it in a lime-green bottle shaped like a thigh and calling it something like ‘Elvino-Lushsalon’. And charging £5 per bottle for an allergic reaction. The original purity is lost in a swathe of added nonsense.

My analogy is closer-to-the-mark than you might think. The motivation for the organisation of religion is not much different to the motives used in corporations. The hierarchical structures are exactly the same, and almost all ‘mainstream’ religions have their workers (church goers), middle-management (priests) and CEO’s (bishops). Also, as with corporations, the original idea of ‘providing for the people’ gets lost in the haze of money & power. Organised religion is the politicisation and manipulation of philosophy for the sakes of control, power and wealth.

Now I really don’t want to sound like I’m Christian-bashing here. The same naivety can be applied to anyone who staunchly attaches themselves to any religion. If you live in fear of a supreme-being and exist to do whatever you can to placate its wraith, then I’m sorry, you’re just being a bit silly. If however, you live in fear of dying before you can truly consider yourself a good human being, then you’ve probably discovered what the majority of religious philosophies were trying to tell you in the first place. Kudos to you – email me and I’ll send you a packet of congratulatory biscuits.

So, you atheists. Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Agreed with me so far? Smashing. Now, wipe that stupid grin off your face whilst I explain to you that you really piss me off.

Now, I suspect that this is going to make me very unpopular, but if (as you so vehemently state) you can only live via universal ‘truth’ and scientific thought, you really need to start educating yourself on the concepts of both. There is NOTHING more frustrating than an atheist with thinly-educated reasoning behind their position. It’s not good enough to state that all religions are bollocks, therefore when you die you simply become a rotting corpse and nothing else. Because what you’re really saying is that you have ‘faith’ that this is the case. Without proof, we have faith. And if you try to tell me that you can prove the non-existence of anything outside of the basic nuts-n-bolts of populist atheist opinion, then you aren’t at all savvy in current scientific thinking and are – again – just having blind-faith in something that has a lack of scientific proof. In other words, you’re talking out of your arse.

I agree with Darwinism. I believe in the theory of relativity. I agree with the physicists who state that our universe in its current form is around 14 billion years old. I also think that believing in a deity through blind faith is stupid.

But most importantly, I know for a FACT that I haven’t really got a clue. And neither do you. Talk to someone on the cutting-edge of particle physics and they will tell you the same thing - even science can’t understand its own theories any more. It’s all becoming extremely strange. Don’t believe me? Well, take these 'facts' on board: Everything in our universe is subjective and becoming more so the further we try to understand it – the simple process of human beings observing the universe changes it. Sub-atomic physics tries to explain things that aren’t actually explainable – we have no language to possibly illustrate how mad it all is. Current thinking states that we exist on multiple levels via infinite dimensions, and at the same time don’t exist at all. Any single particle has been discovered to be able to be in two places at the same time. Literally. Things that happen in the future have been proved to directly affect the past - causality can run backwards. The universe is thought to provide all possibilities a fraction of a second before observation dictates the outcome and therefore the physically interpreted ‘reality’.

And these scientific facts are... well... facts. And I haven’t even got into the bizarre interactions between thought & matter. So, is it so hard to believe that there could possibly be ‘something’ that could fit into the realm of us being closely connected to a universal consciousness? Alongside the above, I don’t think it’s too hard at all. Although I’d rather have an open mind and state the only thing that I can truly state as a fact:

As a human being I haven’t got the faculties to prove or disprove my existence in a greater universal sense. And until someone can, I’ll just make the most of now and be a decent human being.

Religion and atheism can both kiss my arse. I'm subscribed to common-sense.

Dee.