Crazy Life Stories

  One day people asked Jesus one more stupid question: What is the Greatest Commandment?  Jesus gave an impossible answer - He didn’t come up with it, he repeated some old stuff tracing back to Moses:   “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. This is the first and greatest commandment.”  Was it a joke?  In the Bible, it’s written in Deuteronomy Chapter 6 after a caveat about fearing God and complying with his various commandments and prescriptions. Fear, Obey, Love! In that order!   In the same chapter, the Good Lord tells the people of Israel that he will give them, I quote “a land with large, flourishing cities they did not build, houses filled with all kinds of good things they did not provide, wells they did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves they did not plant”  As for the people who lived in these cities and houses, just destroy them, says the Lord.  If Moses was in touch...

  When I was twenty-one, I found a job in a psychiatric hospital. I worked there for two years as an auxiliary nurse. Auxiliary was the lowest rank in the hierarchy. Lower than that you’re just sick!… Let me introduce some of   the people I met there  to you.    Mauricette was about thirty years old but she looked sixteen, the age she was trapped by schizophrenia. She wore that kind of dull clothing you wear when you’re an inmate in a psychiatric hospital, she wore socks but no shoes, she had shoulder length dark and untidy hair and she was perpetually possessed by acute anger. She spent her days walking to and fro in the doorways or turning round the tables- always anticlockwise. Her fists clenched, she was churning out an unceasing string of the angriest and crudest words… Her anger is my anger.   One day Mauricette stood in front of me in the middle of the path, hands joined over her head, on one leg as if practising a yoga stance ca...

We can create happiness out of thin air. I love Greta. I love that a teenage girl finds herself riding a wave which she did not create, that nobody engineered but the collective psyche. She was just doing her bit, at the right place and at the right time for her seed to grow. The collective psyche is the greatest power. We come from it and even as individuals we remain rooted in it. Of course, dear conspiracy theorists and friends, of course governments, secret services, financial powers and big corporations keep doing whatever they can to influence or confuse public opinion - and confused we are. Some people believe that the earth is flat. Some people believe crop circles are man-made, and that it’s possible without a line in wiki leaks about it. Some people believe that climate change is not happening, or if they accept it does, they believe it’s not because we have been burning coal and oil in huge quantities, along with breeding, in conditions that are comparable to conce...

Are you ready to die? I'm not. Of course I'm not. But I'm preparing myself, slowly, because I'm not in a hurry. Now, you never know...  I was not very brilliant at the shamanic ceremonies. Ten years after my experiences with the Church of Santo Daime in France (at a time when the lawmakers hadn't heard of Ayahuasca yet) I came across Arutam, a NGO dedicated to supporting the indigenous medicines of the Amazon and organised Shamanic immersion journeys in Peru and Ecuador.  That's how I found myself in the jungle near Iquitos. I call the shamans over there "business shamans": there are a few who know how to get rivers of dollars flowing towards their centres. Never mind, the plant is the plant, your body is your body and once the plant is in your body, the plant is the teacher - that's how you're supposed to take it.... I loved these little huts in the jungle so much!.... I remembered these adventures on Friday morning, ...

I started practising intermittent meditation in my thirties. I'd bought a book by Shunryu Suzuki, a Japanese zen master...      I expected something deep and philosophical, and I was quite disappointed: the book started with pages about how important it is to sit straight.... I am not sure why I carried on reading, but I came to appreciate a spirit quite different from anything I expected. It turned out to be deep  once I got used to it. I really liked the book and the author. I started spending some time everyday sitting straight and focusing as much as I was able to focus, which was not much, on my breath, feeling that I was wasting my time being bored. I stopped, started again, forgot about it, came back to it... It was actually once of the most precious thing I would offer to myself. One day, sitting doing nothing for nothing, I spontaneously smiled... . It was not a big feeling, there was not much intensity, there was just a smile. My own hell has always...

Leela, Leela... The word sounds like a beautiful girl, dancing, almost out of reach, almost embracing you. But Leela is not a girl. Leela is a colourful though invisible spirit moving with the music. She makes you drunk, gently. She is medicine for broken hearts. She slips into the feelings and the pain becomes almost sweet. She dissolves it; it flows like water out of a broken vase and the roses are beautiful lying down on the carpet. I vote myself the right to be as corny as my inner critic is shouting I am. Maybe I am not. Maybe I am. And then? Leela is a Hindu name. It means "divine game". Hearts can't be broken but they can feel like they are. A separation has happened and maybe it's an illusion, but as we live in this illusion, for us the separation is real, and it hurts. There were, there could have been smiles and hugs, there could have been love making in so many ways, mixed voices resounding together, peals of laughter, presence, smells...  There...