Tim Booth radio interview

Tim Booth is the singer in the band James. In the 1980s he was part of Lifewave in Manchester. I remember sharing a bus journey into Manchester with him. I also remember fellow band member Jimmy and his wife Jenny.

Tim recently did an hour-long interview broadcast on the radio a few days ago. He mentions Lifewave but only briefly. He said he did long hours of meditation. These days he is more interested in drugs such as psilocybin, mostly for its therapeutic purposes.

The interview can be heard here.

There is another interview in the Independent newspaper James: ‘We were so hopelessly indie-schmindie it made Belle and Sebastian look like Whitesnake’. They have a new album. This interview has 3 paragraphs about Lifewave, mentioning John Yarr by name. I didn't realise that one of the ‘enlightened teachers’ went round and beat him up.

narcissism

I came across something in an article in The Times (saturday review 09/01/21 by David Aaronovitch). It is a review of The Act of Living by Frank Tallis.

"It seems appropriate at the moment when I'm writing this to end with one of the key personality traits identified by psychotherapy: narcissism. We are born thinking we are the alpha and omega. However, Tallis writes, "the infant learns that he or she is not the fulcrum around which everything turns. Other people are not there simply to meet needs and there are limits to his or her powers." The child learns that this is so and has to accept it.

"But Freud warned that it is always possible to slip back, to regress and suddenly find that we are repossessed by the megalomania of infancy." And there we have the narcissist. Whose condition, as the child psychotherapist Melanie Klein wrote, can "mutate into something more monstrous. Narcissistic entitlement can become so grotesque that the affected individual covets more or less everything. The narcissist becomes envious and hateful... Only the narcissist has a right to exist."

Occasionally the worst happens. Such a person becomes a leader and projects his narcissism on to an entire people. And can you imagine what would happen if such a person was to be elected to the most powerful job in the world, the presidency of the United States? You sense it wouldn't end well."

I've never been a big fan of Freud but sometimes he had an insight into human nature. When someone becomes enlightened, it seems to them that everything is part of them. Does this mean that when someone becomes enlightened they become narcissistic, as if only they exist?

The Theosophical Society always said that when we come to know our unity with other human beings we will treat them with respect and the world will be a better place without the problems of violence, manipulation etcetera. Perhaps the opposite is true, that enlightenment makes people manipulative.

Then you have the question of why some enlightened people say they don't have emotions when it's obvious to anyone who meets them that they do. As Daniel M Ingram has written:-

"Why is it that even the few people I do know who claim to have eliminated the internal feeling of all emotions (e.g. Gary Weber, a Vedanta practitioner, who I have just met briefly, and he seemed to be a very nice guy with an interesting message), still totally seem to manifest emotions externally?"

If someone sees an ice cream they may have desire for it. How does that work though for someone who perceives themselves not to be separate from the ice cream, or anything else? Perhaps they have problems registering their own desires. They have problems registering other people's desires and needs. Then they don't care if their actions cause others suffering.