As a general rule, misanthropy is a bit of dead end. Sure, there are plenty of interesting misanthropes (speaking personally and historically) and a lot of them are very funny. But for the most part, hating humanity is such a boring dead end, and most misanthropes are such pretentious wack jobs undeserving of the title, that any suspected misanthropy is enough to make me roll my eyes so hard I almost have a seizure. Not really, but you get the point.

If we want to speak in spiritual terms, then I think misanthropy is one of the last boundaries before the birth of loving-kindness or compassion or universal love or whatever fancy name you want to give it. Having rightly rejected previously limited self-other boundaries (racism, sexism, homophobia, political snobbery et al) then the only thing left to do is to hate absolutely everybody; one gigantic self-other barrier (and usually there's a lot of thinly disguised self-hatred going on).

And that's why I hate New Year's Eve: It turns me into a brooding, snarling misanthrope. Not that the festivities last Saturday night were bad; they started well enough and I was drunk enough to give the taxi driver a 75% tip, but when one of my happier moments was reading Lynne Truss's politeness manifesto Talk to the Hand then the mood of the night is firmly established. At one point, walking through a city awash with loud, messy youth, a very drunk but friendly tattooed man came up to me and proceeded to stick his fingers into my mouth, eliciting a very bizarre fishhook smile. Funny at the time, and still funny now, but he must have somehow sensed my inner grump was on a rampage.

Now, I'm all for boozing it up when the mood strikes, and I've done my fair share of stupid things when drunk (including probably my all time top three stupid things) so I have no credibility when it comes to anti-drunkenness ranting. Still, the huge collective mess that is NYE is enough to tip me over the edge from poseur drunk-savante to misanthrope.

The whole "hey let's get absolutely shitfaced!" vibe, the roving packs of young men who take it as their cue to put civilization in a box for the night, the endemic goal setting and subsequent breaking, the rudeness...

Paradoxically, NYE is probably one of the safest nights to be out and about, because with so many people on the streets, cops are everywhere. Still, there are things I'd rather be doing.

So, hopefully 2006 will be misanthropy free. I'll stick to being a Curmudgeon.

If you were some kind of wannabe spiritual pop culture savant aspiring lawyer and all around nice guy and you had a band you'd probably call them something like LOVE IS ALL. And then you'd make the lead guitar into a saxaphone with your bare hands.

So, tell the Arcade Fire to eat shite and die, because the band of 2006 is going to be love is all.

That has to be the worst blog post title ever.

Anyways, I was thinking that there's a certain strain of anthemic post-rock that lends itself to spiritual comparison. gy!be, Sigur Ros, Explosions in the Sky, Mogwai... all the build build build build build build tension release style music that I just can't get enough of.

Curiously, these bands rarely display any outward sign of spiritual affinity, even when being explicit about other contexts (generally political). It's usually left to the reviewers to wax lyrical about immanence, transcendence and really loud guitars.

But that's my spiritual music as such. Sure beats listening to Enya. Not that there's anything wrong with Enya. Not that I own an Enya CD.

I can understand the same kind of reaction from others in other forms of music (dance music, classical), particularly where the focus is non-verbal and thus potentially transrational.

Finally, if you're still reading, go ahead and post your spiritual musical kick in comments. I'll do five that spring to mind, in no particular order.

1. Sigur Ros - Takk/Glosoli
2. Mogwai - Yes! I am a long way from home ("the sneaking feeling of existing")
3. Explosions in the Sky - Yamin the Light
4. Godspeed you! black emperor - Storm
5. Sonic Youth - Diamond Sea ("15 minutes of static can't be wrong!")

For the past two years, I've made a conscious decision not to listen to music whilst working. I did this because a) my walkman broke b) walkman's are awkward c) it allows me to try and stay in the present moment whilst working, and as working generally involves having a sore back and lifting a heavy bucket in stifling, the challene of staying present is exacerbated.

However, I have recently begun to listen to music again. I am doing this because work has slowed to a crawl, meaning the ol' monkey mind is going heall for leather with complaints, complaints and yet more complaints. Also, I got an mp3 player (officially the last person on earth to do so, and no, not an Ipod) and I wanted to try it out. I lasted a single day without using it, so I just gave in, on the proviso that I should try and do me some fancy book learning whilst I'm at it.

The books in question being, of course, audio books.

Here's a sample of what I've been listening to:

Zen mind, Beginner's mind.
Shambhala, sacred path of the warrior
David Icke: The Reptillian Agenda (Turns out the royal family are all space alien reptiles. Don't act like you're surprised. But seriously, this guy is a hoot. Ex professional goalkeeper for Coventry City, now a fully certified nutcase).
Ross Noble Goes Global
Stephen Hawking: The universe in a nutshell
Learn Spanish in your car
Giants of Philosophy: Schopenhauer

Listening to the Schopenhauer stuff has been great, but for the fact that they're read by Charlton Heston. Not that he has a bad voice or anything, it's just that I keep imagining the following: "Let us compare Schopenhauer's notion of idealism to his German contemporari...What's that? Get your paws off me YOU DAMN DIRTY APE!"

Also, any direct quotes are read out by a voice actor with a very cheesy German accent. WE GET THE POINT, Schopenhauer was German. He didn't however, speak in English with a dopey German accent. It's hard to mull over the pro's and con's over theory of the will to live when you have "We Germans are not all Flowers unt Sunshine" repeating ad infinitum in your head.

It's quite weird when your heart chakra and heartburn decide to open at the same time.

"But then something incredible happened. My body convulsed with a spontaneous, enormous, "NO!" A feeling of unprecedented intensity erupted in my body in protest against this kundalini-driven, central nervous system event. A sensation of fear of an intensity I had never known possible sprang from my heart muscle. A three-inch long swath of energy rose up out of the upper right portion of my heart, going upwards toward my throat and diagonally toward my sternum. It was an instantaneous pulse of overwhelming energy. It lasted but a second or two. It was like a claw of fear tearing into my body, anchoring all my attention to the heart. It was in direct response to the impending implosion event in my brain. Though it was a non-verbal communication of profound feeling, my mind gave words to it, recognizing it as an unprecedented shriek of fear and reprimand, as if to say, "NO! DOWN HERE, YOU IDIOT!" It was the most intense sensation I had ever experienced. It easily overpowered the events in my brain, bringing immediately all my mental attention to my body and heart"

- From singing mountain.

From all the talk about Sufjan Stevens' latest album (Illinois) you'd think that he's gone over and above his previous efforts. However, Michigan is just as good in my opinion, and Seven Swans is something else entirely. It's his most overtly religious album, and paradoxically (or perhaps not) his darkest work, in tone if not in content. It certainly kicks off with some cheery sentiment: "If I am alive, this time next year". The dark tone peaks with the penultimate track, Seven Swans, as sombre a song as you'll want to hear this year.

"I saw a sign in the sky, Seven Swans, Seven Swans Seven Swans / I heard a voice in my mind, I'll try, I'll try, I'll try". Doesn't sound too bad, but add some pyramid song piano chords and a banjo that sounds like it's being played by a ghost who hung himself, and you have a thing of genuine spiritual terror.

This is something I've written about before, encapsulated in this Stephen Fry quote: The sheer lack of intelligence and insight, and ability to express themselves and to enthuse others, of the priesthood and the clerisy here, in this country, and indeed in Europe... God once had Bach and Michaelangelo on his side, he had Mozart. And now who does he have? People with ginger whiskers and tinted spectacles who reduce the glories of theology to a kind of sharing. You know... that's what religion has become, a feeble and anaemic nonsense. That's a very harsh quote, but it's partially accurate, in my opinion.

But back to the album. Seven Swans ends with The Transfiguration, the only track that concretely references a biblical event, in this case, the Transfiugration of Jesus (duh). Regardless of what you think of that particular Biblical story (Moses and Elijah appeared, et al) but it's a beautiful counterpart to the previous song. "Lost in the clouds, a voice, have no fear, we draw near".

Anyway, to make my point, after much meandering: I don't thinl spiritual transformation can be divorced from terror. Real, boneshaking fear and terror. I think it's something that the whole Integral approach tends to gloss over, particularly in regard to the effects of a contemplative practice. I'm not referring here to the downplaying of the potential negative effects of meditation, although that's a problem. It's not that meditating too much will inevitably lead to Zen sickness, or psychosis, or anti-social behaviour. It's that transcendence itself is absolutely fucking terrifying, or at least, it has been for me. Of all the "spiritual" experiences I've had, only two have been comforting or peaceful. The others were unbelievably scary.

Now, we can get in to the ins and outs of why this so later. For mine, it's because of our very instinctual death terror, and what is transcendence other than death really? Dying before dying. My point is, we shouldn't gloss over the terror and the fear. One way to help is through the various stories, myths and motifs, which the various monotheistic traditions do a pretty good job of invoking (not that they have a monopoly on them, but the concept of a wretched man/woman before God is pretty much enmeshed in the Judeo/Christian/Muslim canon).

Sitting on a cushion and doing lots of situps and working really hard and being totally excellent to each other isn't a bad thing at all. In fact, it can be unbelievably powerful, particularly if you're as cynical as I am, to get off your arse and contribute whole heartedly, in all senses of the world. But it's ok to be scared as well.

Mosey on over to Vomiting Confetti and let me know what the worst movie you've ever seen is.