a few years ago i lived in a communal house, a bus-station of a residence, all EarthLoving, PartyFreindly, New Seekers and Believers. at the time, i was connected to a series of media installations using mobile phones, the idea being, if people saw mobile phones being used as documenting tools, it may encourage self-discovery and exploration.a very grimy-inner-city-outer-suburb tech and communication friendly lifestyle
the advise i herd so many times was...'Get back to Nature, you will find Balance'.
well, i tried it, and it was true, the natural cycles of the Farm promoting vitality, clarity of mind and a reaffirmation of the Beauty that is Nature.
the trick i encountered was this...how do i maintain that Inner Connection when i was back in the city. how to maintain the Zen in the City
the only martial art you Have to learn in the city.
SuScience is what CityZen runs on, a quest for self-sufficiency and success engaging a life within an urban environment. its punk, its beat, its hip-hop, its Life.
SuScience has levels of activation, as it is a lifestyle/headspace that requires one to tap into the potential of the intuitive, while grounding skills and techniques to minimise the amount of time one spends gathering and hunting the 'SurvivaLine'
"But yet, but yet, woe, woe unto those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality ... woe unto those who attack it on the grounds that they simply don’t understand history and the yearning of human souls ... woe in fact unto those who make evil movies about the Beat Generation where innocent housewives are raped by beatniks! ... woe unto those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind’ll blow it back."
Most people regard the writer Jack Kerouac as the king of the beats. It was Kerouac who coined the phrase beat, by proclaiming that his was a beatgeneration. By this he meant downbeat, but also beatific and beautiful. Kerouac and poet Alan Ginsberg, along with the writer William Burroughs, formed the nucleus of the beatgeneration - a group of people who broke the mold and changed writing forever.
Kerouac and his group scoured Times Square in New York, looking for new experiences. They sought out drugs, girls, booze, crazy people and crazy situations. Kerouac was the author of the bible of the beatgeneration, On the Road, published in 1957, the tale of two free spirits seeking adventure while riding across, and questioning, the heart of America. It was his spontaneous prose that turned the book into a breathless roller coaster ride that still inspires people today.
The ethos of the beatgeneration had influence across all of the arts. It seemed as if, at the time, the young were breaking free of the old constraints. Marlon Brando and James Dean were ripping through film screens. Jazz musicians such as Charlie Parker and Dizzie Gillespie were playing their music without barriers. Lenny Bruce was questioning racism and sexuality through his comedy routines. Artists such as Jackson Pollock were exploding onto the canvas and ripping apart the Old Masters.
The beatgeneration was really a response to the Second World War that had just ended. Questions arose about the old way of life and social rules that people were supposed to adhere to. A lot of the questions that the beats asked were greeted with court trials and the attempted banning of their material. Ginsberg’s and Burrough’s literature was subject to bans. One of Ginsberg’s most famous poems, Howl, still cannot be played on daytime American radio.
The beatgeneration was not questioning society, authority and its rules just for the sake of it. As Dylan sang, the times they are a changing. People were crying out for something new at the time. There was a new sense of freedom after the war, and the beatgeneration led the way in exploring it.
By the late 1960s, the beatgeneration had all but imploded. Stick-on beatnik beards were being sold in shops, and the hippies had arrived to take on the mantle of the beats. Kerouac died in 1969 after disassociating himself from the beats. Ginsberg, Burroughs, Neil Cassady, Gregory Corso and many other writers and leading lights, male and female, from the era are gone.
one of the sites that you can access this article, also search for the author Alan Watts and Beat Zen...
here are sections of the article....
Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen
It is as difficult for Anglo-Saxons as for the Japanese to absorb anything quite so Chinese as Zen. For though the word "Zen" is Japanese and though Japan is now its home, Zen Buddhism is the creation of T'ang dynasty China. I do not say this as a prelude to harping upon the ncommunicable subtleties of alien cultures. The point is simply that people who feel a profound need to justify themselves have difficulty in understanding the viewpoints of those who do not, and the Chinese who created Zen were the same kind of people as Lao-tzu, who, centures before, said, "Those who justify themselves do not convince."
In Buddhism there is no place for using effort. Just be ordinary and nothing special. Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water, and when you're tired go and lie down. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand.
The "beat" mentality as I am thinking of it is something much more extensive and vague that the hipster life of New York and San Francisco. It is a younger generation's nonparticipation in "the American Way of Life," a revolt which does not seek to change the existing order but simply turns away from it to find the significance of life in subjective experience rather then objective achievement. It contrasts with the "square" and other-directed mentality of beguilement by social convention, unaware of the correlativity of right and wrong, the mutual necessity of capitalism and communism to each other's existence, of the inner identity of puritanism and lechery, or of, say, the alliance of church lobbies and organized crime to maintain the laws against gambling.
Beat Zen is a complex phenomenon. It ranges from a use of Zen for justifying sheer caprice in art, literature, and life to a very forceful social criticism and "digging of the universe" such as one may find in the poetry of Ginsberg and Snyder, and, rather unevenly, in Kerouac.
everyone is an agent of something. ideas, desires, missions, emotions, jobs, lifestyles, choices, belief systems, somehow, we are through living, being an agent of some force or dimension.
this is not an option, rather a selection as to what moves you to do the things you do. they call it intent, a powerful concept for allsorts of intruiging things. some of us know what this is, this motivation behind our lifestyles. some of us think we do. some dont know. others dont care. fair enough.
within the CitiZen Lexicon, there is the word, the AJENT
it is apparent that this is a shift of headspace around the idea of being an agent. Ajents establish themselves as being people who are aware of the idea of intent, and are focused on focussing their intent on working towards a peaceful and harmonious future. theya re the people who choose to plant organic, the distrubutors who take a cut on the 'projected full revenue stream' to provide more environemtally friendly packaging.
they are agents of positiv.change... ajents within our lexicon
