THE STREATHAM BODHISATTVA

Saving the world is the easy part. Living in the world with others who he considers perpetually straitjacketed by the constraints of dualistic reality is a little more tricky. Nonetheless, honouring the bodhisattva vow which he has sworn to uphold means that he is dutybound to maintain his daily practice of vigilantly watching our suffering whilst mining his endless reservoirs of compassion to save each and every one of us from the existential trap ad infinitum.

But where does all this selfless compassion leave Peter Waller exactly? Well, if you were to sit down with Stroud's high priest of karmic salvation in the temple (cafe) which he attends each and every morning as part of his strict spiritual routine, he would tell you that there's more than one Peter Waller.

Well then, you might ask, how many Peter Wallers are there exactly?

Let's begin with his one for starters.

So far as I understand it there is Peter Waller's Peter Waller.

Then there is his beloved wife Angela's Peter Waller. 

Followed by his three sons Colin, Reuben and Max's Peter Waller. 

And their children (his grandchildren) Sunny, Alexandra, Findlay and Ruby's Peter Waller. 

Continued by the numerous other family members and friends, which is to say nothing of the wider Stroud community's Peter Waller, Gloucestershire and London's (specifically South London's) Peter Waller and finally (at least for now) the world's Peter Waller.

Phew! That's a lot of Peter Wallers!

But what is the one identifiable common demoninator that maintains some semblance of continuity for all of these many Peter Wallers?

The answer is deceptively simple, at least to Peter Waller, by which I mean Peter Waller's Peter Waller.

None of them inherently exist, including Peter Waller's Peter Waller.

Lacking inherent existence whilst at the same enjoying the is-ness of things means that to his mind the poor deluded souls who point out the contradiction (as they see it) of him enjoying things in reality (mostly biscuits), zealously accusing him of fierce attachment clearly understand nothing of the exquisite paradox that is explained in the teaching of the Two Truths.

"What's better than one truth," Peter Waller likes to ask routinely of his subjects drowning in 'dualistic porridge' ...

"TWO TRUTHS!"

If such a thing as an existential lawyer existed then Peter Waller would make a fine one, constantly finding loopholes out of others' absolute agreements of perceived reality as a permament phenomena. To my mind (do I even have my own mind PW?) he would be something like a cross between Atticus Finch and Groucho Marx, defending and prosecuting existence and non-existence in equal measure, stopping for a leisurely cup of coffee inbetween the on-going case for permanent impermanence.

I'm sure you can already tell that to truly know Peter Waller is to know nothing.

Nothing, or emptiness, is apparently the thing for us to attempt to realise in the time limited span of our current incarnations in the fleshy human biped forms we cart around with us for threescore years and ten or twenty, thirty, forty.

How old is Peter Waller exactly? No one knows for sure. He has claimed to be 130 years old, while others have him at least half that. By refusing to let his beard grow to Father Christmas like proportions, he continues to defy the old man (otherwise known as the man in black) knocking on his door, even though some of us think he looks pretty good with a full on scruff.

It's true. He can be stubborn when it comes to taking advice from others.

And perhaps for good reason.

While most of us are consigned to grazing lazily in the dualistic gulags of the "spiritual supermarket", Peter Waller luxuriates in his Gelug, as in the Gelug school of buddhist dialectic, gorging on the abundant feast of riches offered up by his teachers Nagarjuna, Tsongkhapa, Milarepa to name just a few from the Tibetan lineage.

It must be exhausting having to oscilate between duality and non-duality as much as he does, but never forget, he does it to save us all.

Some might say the road to enlightenment is simply paved with compassion, but it can also be a little rocky at times. For all the lofty, mountain cloud thinking that goes on in his rainbow workshop, Peter Waller occassionally has to get his hands dirty, invariably by fixing a loose step, or in decades past, building a house he's designed for his family to live in.

The genius of Peter Waller the buddhist architect is that he can design and build a house of what would appear to us as seemingly permanent component materials such as cement and Cotswold stone and still understand that they lack inherent existence. It is I imagine a bit like being the Wizard of Oz, knowing that the Emerald City everyone so admires is just an illusion. It surely would defeat many of us deluded mortals to be able to line and set a breeze block, knowing full well it is fundamentally impermanent and yet still persist in commiting to the action of doing it anyway, but this is just one of the many skills that Peter Waller has available to him in his karmic tool chest.

His other skills include making a robust cup of English tea ("Streatham's finest") and mastering for the most part the ancient art of biscuit dunking, meditating on those brief few seconds where the whole thing threatens to break off into the tea and become dissolved into formless particles that ruin both the biscuit and the tea.

Perhaps then, there is no better metaphor for the existential tension between existing and not existing than a broken off digestive biscuit which would explain Peter Waller's devotion to the mastering of this ritual. He has tried to encourage others to follow this lineage tradition, but so far he has only managed to convince McKenny the dog to join him, and only then with great difficulty due to his paws being highly impractical for the dunking part.

Now, although we would assume that Peter Waller exists the way he appears before us, he is in fact both nowhere and everywhere at the exact same time. Living a life of pure totality means that he is as much the chair he sits on as the body that sits in it, just as the endless centuries of architecture he admires belongs to him and the store house consciousness of the universe equally. So, ultimately, Peter Waller is all of us and none of us simultaneously.

Are you following?

Good. I'll continue.

Occasionally, when reluctantly volunteering to cook for others, he will revert to a more dualistic impression of Peter Waller as one of us, banging pots and dropping plates heavily onto the table. It would be wrong to assume he is angry or annoyed at these seemingly 'causey' moments when all he is merely trying to do is teach us an important lesson which is simply that all life is suffering and shepherds' pie is a pain in the ass to prepare and cook on a Sunday afternoon when all you really want to do is watch Manchester United on the television.

Growing up as a young man in 1960's London, Peter Waller still refuses to let the mad hatter's tea party of that age end anytime soon. Just so long as he has to hand his Beatles, Bob Dylan and Incredible String Band collection of albums from that mind expanding time, he is forever able to enjoying his 'sunny afternoons' and 'Waterloo sunsets'. Defying the tasteless cultural gruel of subsequent decades, he allows only on rare occassion a Keith Jarrett or Tadeo Ando to be initated into his personal store house firmament, not forgetting his Edwardian heroes Lutyens and Voysey and of course the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright who are the foundation stones upon which his own architectural legacy is built.

So as I merely scratch the surface of Streatham's most diligent and perhaps only true Bodhisattva, I can only say that those of us who have so far been lucky enough to tag along in this spirtual layabout's perpetual life groove should count ourselves truly blessed that our karmic paths have happily converged in our present incarnations together.

In summary ladies, gentlemen and deities, I believe we're finally left with just two Peter Wallers in the end.

The one who exists to others the way he appears, and the one who doesn't exist to others the way he appears.

In short ... totality.

And just so long as we can tell them both we love them I guess it doesn't really matter eh?

Happy 80th Birthday Dad!

12/01/2022