26

Apocalypse Survival Kit

 

 

To Sam, whose copy of The Multi-Orgasmic Man I pilfered.

It is still changing lives as it completes the circuit.

 

The weeds have taken over the garden and truly disturbed its usefulness beyond repair - it is time for the civilisation to be recycled - ‘spaded under.’

from the Heaven’s Gate website

Perhaps the weeds have taken over, but is that any reason to dress up like Mr. Spock and beam yourself up with sleeping pills? Negative captain! Here we are and here we will stay, plugged into the cosmic intercom, awaiting further orders. The end is Nigh-ce, man! We are blessed to be born in interesting times. With no future, we are obliged to focus on the present, and when else in history could you find ayahuasca all over the world, and download information on nearly everything onto your mobile?

We have plenty of knowledge, but for the moment we are not intimate with it, and our world is finally filling up with bullshit. One of Hercules’ labours was to clean up in one day the turds of thousands of cattle that had been neglected for years in the Augean stables. One day we will justify our intelligence by doing the same, but in the meantime, there is going to be a lot of muck flying. Things will, in my opinion, go extremely wobbly in the next few years, even without a nuclear catastrophe. For the overdeveloped world, all it would take is a breakdown in infrastructure, a collapse in the national grid, or a financial crash.[i] Imagine London after a week without dustbin men, or Mexico City without a sewerage system. An hour of summer sun would turn the skyscrapers of Hong Kong, Chicago and Cape Town into greenhouses if a power cut knocked out the air conditioners. We would be overwhelmed by hungry ghosts screaming for a fix if the coffee or tobacco supply dried up, but what if the petroleum supply was cut off? The blood of Western civilisation would freeze, the monster would crumble, and shortsighted demagogues would fight over the carrion. Politicians have their fingers on the button and their heads up their arses, and populist brigands are on the rise. Movements are moving, cults are expanding, enviro-mentalists are screaming and the fear is setting in. Whatever bandwagon you are on, it is crashing, so jettison any bulky opinions and man the emergency exits. One day very soon, the horsemen are going to charge, with the Angel of Death is the sky above them, doing loop-the-loops, writing ‘I TOLD YOU SO!’ in poisonous smoke.

Fundamentalists of all stripes are preparing for a rumble, but we’ve fought holy wars before and we’re still here. Epidemics are shaking up global demographics, but we’ve had plagues before, and we're still here. If the seas rise, we will climb a little higher, and we'll still be here. A little warmer, a little hungrier, a little sparser, and with our memories wiped, perhaps, but we'll survive, as a species. The sun may never rise again, but I’m still doing my homework for tomorrow. The illusion is collapsing, but we’re still standing, and it’s no fun shuffling along as the living dead.

Can we save civilisation, or are we going to have to pick through the ruins for vacuum-packed scraps? I suspect it is too late, that we have become too dependent. Our culture is a Jehovah junky, and the cold turkey is going to be horrendous. Without a paternalistic state, who will drive the buses and manage water supplies? Without security guards, who will stop the looting?

What to do, what to do? Wait out the Kali Yuga pyjama party behind the sofa, until Brahma finally succumbs to his yawns, and Shiva blends the universe into a cold grey soup for his midnight feast at the end of time? Become a Jehovah's Witness and piss people off until Kingdom come, or go apocalyptic environmentalist and wait with short breaths for the calm to break? Convince yourself that it is going to be fine, and sedate the wolves of your intellect with alcohol, Prozac, or the tabloid press, or descend into a putrefying world, eating the cheese and drinking the wine of decay until your insides rot with the outside? Is that the answer? Negative captain!

There doesn’t seem to be any hope for the enterprise, but we can break away in groups. For the moment, we are stuck with our society to a greater or lesser extent, our minds are our own. We need not take pleasure in, nor give credence to the system. Boycott YHVH, and make a creative anarchy of life. If it is only the police that keeps your neighbourhood in order, move out! Take to the hills or the rainforest with a stash of guitar strings and a permaculture book, find a community with a sense of community, or make one. All over the world, groups are experimenting with self-sustainability and self-regulation. Some, such as transition towns, work in cooperation with the state, whilst others are completely off-radar. When the clash begins, the kings of the world will be too busy fighting Armageddon to go chasing freethinkers up the Amazon or into the Australian outback. Whilst there is still relative calm, whilst there is infrastructure and the free transfer of information, we can build lifeboats to survive the coming space storm, and get ready to pluck runaway slaves from the vacuum by their neckties.

When the medical system collapses and you can’t get your inhaler or your antibiotics, you are going to be shafted, so sort out your immune system immediately; you will be eaten by wolves if it takes you two weeks in bed to get over a cold. ‘What about me?’ asks my friend, a diabetic sushi chef. Ideally, he would have thought about that before getting pissed six nights a week for 30 years, but there is always a cure. The rainforests contain plants for diabetes, for cancer, for depression, and possession, other natural habitats do as well. Our second-hand theories are what cripple us, not our physiology. As I complete my book, and despite the aggressive pleading of almost every expert I talked to, my leishmaniasis is well and truly gone, having taken away ten kilos, one wife, and a set of rose-tinted spectacles, leaving me with invincible faith, and more happiness than I had ever imagined I was due. Exercise, diet, and faith will keep you far healthier than pills, so get up off the sofa and do some yoga! Food may become scarce, so prepare yourself to go without. A five-day fast will clean your blood and organs, and leave your intestines better able to absorb what little food is available, and hunger will never again have an urgent edge to it. Faecal plaque will not make it through the apocalypse, but we can, so get ready. Pay attention. Take control of your life. The terrors will pass like a bad dream, and you will wake up somewhere fantastic.

Baked bean tins and bunkers are all very well, but the most important preparations are internal. Time is short and the natives are restless, but we divert our energies into busy nothings, daytime TV and surfing through waves of electronic trivia. Japanese watch pachinko balls drop through pins until the house is gambled away and the baby is burned to a crisp in the car. For the English it is joints in front of Eastenders, or pints and patter in the pub, but all over the world we are drawn towards consumptive consumption, whether of alcohol, another pair of shoes, football scores, or news that is not new - anything to fill our time and our minds. Men use pornography to siphon off vital energy into sewers, socks, and wastepaper baskets, sparing our circuits the discomfort of creative tension. Women without the easy release valve drift towards depression or hysteria. Wankers and alcoholics, tranquilizer junkies and couch potatoes, we save ourselves from ourselves by diminishing ourselves. We save ourselves from the spinning mind, but the price is the colour of life, and the power of the imagination. If we were free, we could imagine tomorrow as completely different to today. The sage follows Tao, and Tao is going through a wormhole into another dimension. Hold fast to the centre, or be torn to shreds. Only the lucky will survive, but here is a secret: luck, like health, can be cultivated.

Dogen was asked why one should meditate, seeing as animals never do. He answered that it would be better for us to behave like animals, walking and eating and going about our business naturally, but we don’t. We think about food while we walk, about work while we eat, and about sex while we work. We rarely concentrate on the matter at hand. Dogen’s preoccupation with meditation borders on the obsessional, but he does have a point; our scattiness makes us suffer, and meditation trains us to focus. It also slows the pulse and the breathing rate, lowers hypertension[1] and cholesterol,[2] lengthens lives,[3] and sharpens the senses.[4] All of these will preserve life on the dangerous planet we are about to inherit.

The Buddha likened the training of the mind to the training of a young elephant. He is tied to a post in the ground, and though he tries to run, he only goes so far before the rope stops him. He tries another direction, and fails. He persists, but he becomes exhausted. There is no reason to chide him or beat him, or to despair of his restlessness. With time, he learns that there is no use in running, and he returns to the centre. When he grows, he continues to obey the rope, even though he is much stronger than the rope, stronger than the man holding it. When we start thinking about dinner during meditation, there is no reason to berate ourselves or to despair. Just return to the centre. Keep coming back to the object, and with time, the mind will go where it is lead, even in more charged situations. When it has to deal with an exam, a belligerent drunk, or the impending apocalypse, it will respond calmly and skilfully, without obstructive thoughts, and without panicking.

There are plenty of ways to meditate which may suit you more than staring at a wall. Zen Buddhists maintain that one can become enlightened without ever hearing of the Buddha. Krishnamurti argued that a practice is not necessary, that the key is moment-to-moment awareness. He was a sage and a brilliant writer, but personally I find a path without a practice less rewarding, and Krishnamurti practiced various meditations for many years before deciding they were unnecessary. Besides, if he was so enlightened, why the comb-over?

There are many paths up the mountain, and though the summit is the same, the scenery on each is different. You can meditate upon anything, a mantra or the hiss of traffic by the window, a drumbeat, a tarot card, or the sensations on the soles of your feet as you walk. Mandalas are beautiful, Zen landscapes are even better for me, but you may prefer to lose yourself in the face of your lover. Breath mediation is very powerful, but some of us do not sit still well. I prefer to move, to practice chi kung and devil sticks, especially when there are mosquitoes about. If you lose concentration with drums or nunchaku, you know about it immediately, and so does everyone watching. With sitting meditation, however, you can sit daydreaming until you are so thin that the bones of your spine poke through your belly. Juggling reveals your weaknesses. When I am spinning fire and a cute girl stops to watch, it requires exquisite concentration to keep my devilish balls out of the way of my devil stick, and if someone praises me I’m in danger of singeing my hair. My ex-wife used to clap obstructively when she caught me showing off. She was a magnificent teacher. She is now an accomplished hula-hooper.

I watched a breakdancer fall flat on his face once in Regent’s Park. He stepped forward in formation with another guy, did a few seconds of body-popping, and launched himself into an abortion of a windmill. He looked like a fool in front of a big crowd, but he picked himself up with bags of charm, pointed at the girls in the crowd who had distracted him, and started again. The first step is to become detached, and not take yourself too seriously. The second is to enjoy it.[ii]

One empowering and pleasantly kinky meditation is Tao sex, as the Yellow Emperor’s adviser explained:

When a man loves once without losing his semen,

             he will strengthen his body,

If he loves twice without losing it,

             his hearing and vision will become more acute.

If three times, all diseases may disappear.

If four times, he will have peace of mind.

If five times, his heart and blood circulation will be revitalized.

If six times, his loins will become strong.

If seven times, his buttocks and thighs may become more powerful.

If eight times, his skin may become smooth.

If nine times, he will become immortal.[5]

Taoists were less bashful than Judeo-Christians, and the secrets of the Jade Chamber are described in immaculate detail in Chinese pillow-books, which were common wedding presents. In The Multi-Orgasmic Man, a good set of exercises is described with all the poetry of a corporate strategy manual, but the first step is simple. Train your perineal muscle. Whenever you take a leak, stop the flow several times. The muscle you engage is the key to some delightful experiences. Spend a few weeks working on the muscle like a bodybuilder, tensing as hard as possible, for as long as possible, as often as possible, whenever you can, in the morning before you rise, sitting on a bus, or reading apocalyptic literature. You may begin now.[iii] Squeeze!

The Chinese never made a division between the sacred and the profane like we did in Christendom, so sex is a health issue rather a moral issue. To spill or not to spill: that is the question. The Yoga Sutras written over the other side of the Himalayas make a similar point:

Death arises through the falling of semen, life when it is retained.[6]

The first half, but not the second, is recalled in the story of Onan in Genesis:

and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother's wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother. And the thing which he did displeased the Lord: wherefore he slew him[7]

Moralism crept in, as it did everywhere in the Abrahamic religions, leading to a serious fetish. Graver than any sin in the Torah,[8] punishable by death in Puritan New Haven, masturbation made Victorian boys go blind, whereas the Taoist take is that saving seed improved one’s eyesight. The idea is the same, but the moral weighting is different. Priests invested the whole wanky problem with neurosis, causing a split between nature and behaviour. The result is that a pillow-book is far too racy for a wedding present, but an enormous empire of porn has grown in the darkness, as millions of devotees perform their daily devotions to hot succubi teens. It is not immoral, but it is unskilful, and a terrible waste of potential. The concept of vital energy is a heresy in the Churche of Scyense, so whilst we still have these taboos, we have forgotten why. We have also become numb to the currents in our bodies, and blind to the energetic streams moving through the world. A sensitive wanker, however, knows he is weakened. Footballers and boxers avoid sex the night before matches to conserve vital tension, and Balzac’s post-coital sweet nothing was ‘oops, there goes another novel.’ Tao sex stimulates rather than depletes the creative juices. Much of my book was drafted postcoitally, and sometimes I have to get up in the small hours to play music or cook a stew to channel the energy into something creative.

Teenage sperm fountains can afford to let some go, but dirty old Taoists should know better. Ayahuasqueros abstain for a few days before and after sessions, and also for the duration of an initiation or cure. In Indian medicine, physiology is the alchemy of refining food through a series of stages: plasma, blood, muscle, fat, bone, marrow, and finally bindu, or sexual fluid. As the material is refined and the coarse removed, the humours become closer to spirit, so one drop of bindu is said to be made from 40 drops of blood. Leakage wastes vital energy and cuts short your life, explaining why women live longer than men, and also why men tend to roll over into oblivion immediately after sex. The ideal Indian sexual regime is to dedicate one auspicious day per month to unbridled nookie, outside of which one endeavours not to fiddle, and not to think about fiddling. I’m a fiddler, and so I ended up a Taoist.

Fiddling is fun, whether alone or with one of your concubines, and exploring the meridians is positively exhilarating, even when you spill a little. In the early stages, before the muscle is toned and isolated, you will have to tense your entire body, teeth, neck, eyelids, arms and legs. It is a truly Herculean effort keeping in your fishies, but the first time I managed, I was quite astonished. When the pressure eventually passed and I allowed my love muscle to relax, I was floored, sent into a vibrating, whole body ecstasy. When I could think again a few minutes later, it occurred to me that this is how a woman feels when she comes. If she is lucky.

Minutes afterwards I let one go in a manner most unyogic. It is not easy to cope with the increased energy this practice taps. This chakra, called mulachakra, is the highest of the beasts, and the lowest of ours, which are a higher octave. Engaging it awakens the beast, but the beast must then be yoked, integrated with the higher centres. Territorial instincts become exaggerated, and you may struggle to restrain yourself from shouting in the bank queue or growling at policemen. Women real and imaginary can drive you to distraction; my friend confided that he was ready to copulate with a hole in the wall after three weeks. Your sleeping patterns may also change, but concentrate on the muscles and the meridians, and soon the mind becomes toned as well, and the benefits are definitely worth the effort. If it gets too much, let one go without a Victorian conscience, because a splash now and again is all part of the process, but be careful to limit yourself to one, lest you fall into a pit of fists, where you will stay until your poor wand produces nothing but smoke. The Yellow Emperor’s adviser recommended the adept allow a leakage once in nine visits to the Jade Palace, or twice a month, which is very good going. His own regimen was said to be one splash in 100. Are you still squeezing?

Accumulating bindu without doing the practice is a very bad idea, as many alter boys discovered the hard way. Wilhelm Reich argued that blockages in the natural flow of orgone were responsible for nearly all psychological problems, and also societal illnesses such as fascism. This energy, which is the only energy there is, can be manipulated with relative ease, with orgone machines, chi kung pushes, Hawaiian dances, or Hitler Youth parades, and the results can be spectacular, or spectacularly catastrophic. The beast is there, whether we like it or not. If we don’t learn to ride it, we can expect to be ridden.

Once the body is accustomed to its natural vitality, colds will bounce off you and fatigue will not assail you. Your mood improves and your will firms up along with your perineum, making it easier to give up habits, whether cigarettes or vicious cycles. In an old Chinese story, a boy looks down his street and asks his father why the young Mr. Wong is always arguing with his wives and concubines, but little old Mr. Chang has a peaceful household. His father explains that Mr. Chang knows the secrets of the bedroom. With mindful nookie you can orgasm again and again until your partner is well and truly fucked, and this is perhaps the most satisfying result, for all concerned. With the leak plugged, your charge becomes magnetic. People are more drawn to you, and they listen more carefully. Men think twice about standing against you, and women look at you differently. It is a male’s path to alpha (or better), and it can make you rather cocky, because multiplying thy seed exceedingly is YHVH’ s gig. But the wrong side of manhood is far more debilitating. I began the exercises when my life was falling apart, when my magick wand wasn't working properly and my ex-wife was bullying me. I have never looked back. With kinky Tao I feel better than ever, calm but energized, inspired, creative, happy, and horny. I roll with the punches better, and my pecker is my firm, but not fast friend.

Studies on the physiology of mulabandha have found that contracting the love muscle decreases the heart beat, blood pressure, and respiration rate, whilst regulating nervous and endocrinal activity. It benefits asthma, arthritis, piles, anal fissures, constipation, it sharpens the instincts and the animal senses. The good Swami doctor also believes it tackles phobias and awakens sleeping parts of the brain, stimulating the unconscious mind and allowing suppressed energy to surface in bursts of creativity. He goes further, suggesting that duality falls away, and the pathway to infinite bliss unfolds, though he stops short of The Yoga Sutra, where it is written that the yogi who perfects mulabandha can levitate and produce any fragrance, sweet or foul. Jung put it in his own terms:

When you succeed in awakening the kundalini so that it starts to move out of its mere potentiality, you necessarily experience a world which is totally different from our world. It is a world of eternity.

To penetrate the veil, and spread seeds in the astral rather than the bed sheets, a man’s best friend is a full sac.

And squeeze…

Ω

 

                                   My good reverend...

Yes, my child.

Did you begin a sermon on the end of the world, and end up talking about your knob?

Yes, my child.

But what about the end of the world?

 

The monkey steps tentatively into the street. He sees no sign of life, and the silence is like nothing he has ever heard, but he reasons that if he survived, there might be others. He finds them at the Tesco superstore, crowded around the fridges, trading confuzed stories as they eat Kettle Chips and breadsticks with humous, with spicy humous, with humous with roasted red peppers, with humous with caramelised onions. Soon the milk and the meat begin to rot, as the fridges are not cold. The survivors break into the cheese store, and share nightmares for a night before moving onto cereals in the morning.

The taps were already dry when the first survivors arrived, and water imported from springs with fancy names is gone by the fourth day. Soon the freshly squeezed orange juice is gone, the cranberry juice is gone, and they are on to the fizzy pop. By the end of the first week of the New Age, survivors are soaking rice grains in Coca-cola and grinding them down with hyper-caffeinated teeth. Then they move onto the beer. There are no cigarettes left by the time they crack open the Special Brew and the White Lightning super-strength cider, but the party goes ahead all the same. Someone replaces the burnt out fuses of the fuse box, and hooks up the speakers into a super-cell made of batteries. He powers up the office as well. The party goes wild to the sound of Now That’s What I Call Music 1 through 83, a history of decay set to the beat of a drum machine. The party is a wake for a dead civilisation, and the mourners wail for what they have lost, and in anticipation of the hangover.

These are the towniest of townies who don’t own tents; the survivors with contacts in the countryside fled long ago. A group of drunken romantics come up with plans to locate the farms pictured on egg-boxes. The survivors sleep where they fall, stinking from a week without showers, but a few are still awake and parched when the sun rises.

And then the phone rings…