John Dolan

Desire is a chameleon.He blends into the brickwork and the rocks of those lanes and pathways down which we walk. He lurks like a highwayman at the crossroads of our lives, waiting to rob us of our reason.And he does so for sport.

My job is to assist you in finding the answer that is right for you. Not the answer that would be right for me.

How often _ I continue reflecting _ is it that we see what we want to see, rather than what is really before our eyes. In the trade we call this confirmation bias, and our brains are riddled with it. We take a position on something and thereafter only see whatever confirms that position, ignoring all evidence to the contrary.

The American educational psychologist Patricia Alexander has expressed the view that fear paralyses and curiosity empowers. Accordingly, she reasons, we should always be more interested than afraid.

Our children form a large part of our Immortality Project. This is one of the reasons a child__ death cuts so deep; some of the future dies with them. Through them and their descendants, part of us lives on forever, just as it does in the friends we touch and the ripples our actions cause in the world. All these effects are conscripts, earthwork defences against the finality of extinction.

I waited for the Earth to stop spinning, for the rift to open and swallow us. Yet the ash tree remained framed in the window, refused to fall. Rain streaked the glass. Blood throbbed in my ears. Preternatural silence. The cruellest April.I was not deceived. What I saw was samsara, illusion. The world had ended. I was sure of it.

Time. So much of our human experience is bound up in time, I muse. It reflects in our everyday colloquialisms, and drives so much of our activities. Yet this obsession with the passing of the hours is a relatively modern phenomenon; an inevitable product of the Industrial Revolution, and its fixation on efficiency. A new master exported by England across the globe, so that in the developed world at least everyone has one wrist on which is clamped the new and unforgiving shackle we call a watch. In less pressurised days, men observed the ageing of the universe through the more sedate changing of the seasons. But no more. Now the hour is king, or the minute and sometimes even the second. We are all people in a rush, where speed is of the essence, and slow is often deployed as a term of abuse.

Everyone burns, as the Buddha says, in their own way. Some burn with anger, some with lust, some with a desire for vengeance, some with fear. But inside us burn many fires, not just one. We are legion, we contain a multitude.

You have compassion but by itself it is not enough. It is almost as if you carry around inside you some dead thing. Some heavy black cinder in your heart that burdens you; a ponderous anchor that tethers you to the past. Until you can burn it away, you can never truly live in the present, in the now. Until you can live in the now, you cannot see things as they really are. Meantime you are a man who is wilfully blind. You have eyes and yet you will not use them.

Karma means __ction_. Like many, you misunderstand its nature. Past misdeeds can be corrected before your karma ripens: it is not some pre-determined fate. It is what you do now that counts.

I took the plug out of the chemical bath of lust that my wits were soaking in and waited for it to empty. I smoked a cigarette while I contemplated the return of reason.

Do you know, by the way, that German is the only language in the world that has a word for __leasure derived from the misfortune of others_? Schadenfreude.