Well, despite the media's suspiciously sudden fascination with Rory Stewart, he wasn't in the running today. Coincidentally, Ascot Ladies' Day has banned fascinators this year.
I'm glad Javid is out. I see him as someone who is prepared to throw third parties to the wolves - the dumbish teenager Shamima Begum, the heavily oppressed Julian Assange.
As in the last leadership contest, Gove outsmarted himself. He was making noises about preventing the possibility of a No Deal Brexit, when that is the strongest card in our negotiation with the intransigent EU. I think the Remainers' star is waning as we get closer to the deadline: the WA is completely unacceptable and there is neither time nor the slightest sign of willingness on the EU's part to refurb it; my suggestion to our side would be to prepare a fresh trading-focused agreement from scratch and offer it to them as a last chance.
My objection to Hunt is visceral - he's so cocky (even in the Debating Chamber) that one clenches one's fists. But the noises he is making are about having been for Remain and now being prepared to accept Leave, as a pragmatist.
Johnson? I think he has the energy and bullishness to get what he wants, and the skill and experience to build and lead a team. Goodness knows where he'll lead it, though.
I wonder what (should he win) his Cabinet lineup will be? Surely Eeeyore Hammond and some other blockers will have to go.
Perhaps you can tell me.
Thursday, June 20, 2019
Wednesday, June 19, 2019
Brits have ***no idea*** about US-style Christianity! - by Paddington
My observation, based on the 40 years that I have lived in the US, is that the average Briton does not grasp what religion means to so many people here.
If the subject comes up, people might tell you that they are Catholic, Mormon, Jewish, Methodist and so on. But, if they answer with “I am a (Bible-believing) Christian”, they are almost certainly Evangelical Protestants, and very likely Southern Baptists, or the more extreme Pentecostalists, Seventh Day Adventists or one of their offshoots.
The short explanation that I can give as to the significance of these identifications is to imagine that 10% of the British population were following clones of Northern Ireland's Ian Paisley, but a little more aggressive. This is not an accidental comparison, as he was educated at the Fundamentalist Bob Jones University.
For the longer version, we need a little history.
The precursors of the Evangelicals were the Pilgrims who arrived in 1620. They had been thrown out of the liberal Netherlands for being intolerant, and encouraged to leave England, after they tried to tell King James how his church should be run. They came with beads to trade, and guns to steal with, but no skill in construction or farming. Had it not been for a few skilled sailors who landed with them, and the help of some local native tribes, they would have starved, and nearly did. A few generations later they had almost exterminated the local native tribes, and were starting to persecute and kill fellow Christians, like Quakers.
Their descendants were quite happy with the idea of slavery. So much so that the Southern Baptists were formed to support that very issue. Racism and exclusion have been a hallmark of the sect ever since. As late as 1916, there were Church picnics in Southern towns, centred around lynchings of African-Americans (https://www.cvltnation.com/nsfw-american-terrorism-lynching-postcards/).
Just as Voodoo and Santeria took African animism and combined it with Catholicism, the Southern states took Christianity and made it American. Take generous helpings of Genesis, Exodus and Leviticus, plus the nastier writings of Paul, throw in the miracles of the New Testament, but ignore the Beatitudes, and you have some of the flavour of the typical teachings, delivered with the energy of a used-car salesman in a bad hairpiece.
I did not understand the adherents and their views of a hateful God until it was explained to me that all of the vengeful ideas and proscriptions were for other people. Members of these churches believe in the idea of faith over deeds, which is expressed as “Once saved, always saved”. In theory, it is supposed to mean that followers of Jesus will be good thereafter. However, followers will tell you that once you are saved, you are going to Heaven, no matter what you do. Hell is gleefully reserved for everyone else, especially Catholics and Jews. While there are current alliances with both, the former are used to get their way with the government, the latter because Revelation describes a massive genocide of the Jews in Armageddon, and they need to be kept around for that.
In short, the whole belief system was a shock to me, having been raised nominally in the Church of England, complete with required Religious Education and church services 5 days a week.
If the subject comes up, people might tell you that they are Catholic, Mormon, Jewish, Methodist and so on. But, if they answer with “I am a (Bible-believing) Christian”, they are almost certainly Evangelical Protestants, and very likely Southern Baptists, or the more extreme Pentecostalists, Seventh Day Adventists or one of their offshoots.
The short explanation that I can give as to the significance of these identifications is to imagine that 10% of the British population were following clones of Northern Ireland's Ian Paisley, but a little more aggressive. This is not an accidental comparison, as he was educated at the Fundamentalist Bob Jones University.
For the longer version, we need a little history.
The precursors of the Evangelicals were the Pilgrims who arrived in 1620. They had been thrown out of the liberal Netherlands for being intolerant, and encouraged to leave England, after they tried to tell King James how his church should be run. They came with beads to trade, and guns to steal with, but no skill in construction or farming. Had it not been for a few skilled sailors who landed with them, and the help of some local native tribes, they would have starved, and nearly did. A few generations later they had almost exterminated the local native tribes, and were starting to persecute and kill fellow Christians, like Quakers.
Their descendants were quite happy with the idea of slavery. So much so that the Southern Baptists were formed to support that very issue. Racism and exclusion have been a hallmark of the sect ever since. As late as 1916, there were Church picnics in Southern towns, centred around lynchings of African-Americans (https://www.cvltnation.com/nsfw-american-terrorism-lynching-postcards/).
Just as Voodoo and Santeria took African animism and combined it with Catholicism, the Southern states took Christianity and made it American. Take generous helpings of Genesis, Exodus and Leviticus, plus the nastier writings of Paul, throw in the miracles of the New Testament, but ignore the Beatitudes, and you have some of the flavour of the typical teachings, delivered with the energy of a used-car salesman in a bad hairpiece.
I did not understand the adherents and their views of a hateful God until it was explained to me that all of the vengeful ideas and proscriptions were for other people. Members of these churches believe in the idea of faith over deeds, which is expressed as “Once saved, always saved”. In theory, it is supposed to mean that followers of Jesus will be good thereafter. However, followers will tell you that once you are saved, you are going to Heaven, no matter what you do. Hell is gleefully reserved for everyone else, especially Catholics and Jews. While there are current alliances with both, the former are used to get their way with the government, the latter because Revelation describes a massive genocide of the Jews in Armageddon, and they need to be kept around for that.
In short, the whole belief system was a shock to me, having been raised nominally in the Church of England, complete with required Religious Education and church services 5 days a week.
Friday, June 14, 2019
FRIDAY MUSIC: Golden Olden, by JD
Thought I would offer some more by the mostly anonymous composers of olden times. Good music is timeless!
Monday, June 10, 2019
Give It To Me Now, by Wiggiaatlarge
Tim Worstall found a piece in the DT which provoked a sledge of similar comments…..
http://www.timworstall.com/2019/06/06/no-you-cant-now-bugger-off/#comments
Not surprisingly they all came down one way or another on the side of the father who was “squandering” the son's inheritance. I can’t add anything to the comments as I agree with nearly all of them, yet there is a theme that runs through all this and it was not mentioned as all commenting assumed that what they said was the norm. It isn’t.
In recent years I have met many people and have family members and friends who somehow believe their offspring should receive everything and often before the parents die.
I could give various examples and not anecdotal, but I will for detail regale you with one in the not so distant past concerning a friend and neighbour who herself had been the beneficiary of as her father said “a good divorce” - not the first, either.
The father did more than his bit in the RAF as a pilot and then was successful in business. From all I gleaned over time he and his wife when alive had done everything to help their children and grandchildren.
His rather splendid house in need of serious updating took second place to financing the grandchildren and that was after he cashed in a large part of his personal private pension to help buy a house for one of them who married - that went well, as a quick divorce followed .Gifts of cash when needed went out on demand and the house was subjected to equity release to carry on funding all and sundry.
Was he helped when he became frail and ill? Only to a degree as help had to be on hand and this cost money, “their inheritance” and of course the longer he held on to this wonderful world the more the equity release ate into their remaining inheritance - it was spoken about in those terms. He did fortunately get put in a very good nursing home for his last days, some sort of solace I suppose and the daughter did really care about him but in the same breath would talk of this entitlement. There was a lot more that is not for these pages, still I think you can get the drift.
Isolated case? Hardly. I have found this attitude to be quite common. Another I know has a daughter who speaks to him like sh*t in front of strangers, me, and yet they do way over the top in helping her. It's not their fault she and her husband have over-reached themselves with a ladder-climbing house; and the demands on them which they never refuse means that (despite their limited means) all their spare time when they should be having a holiday on their own is spent taking the children's kids on holiday - and they do not live round the corner. Every time they return the stress is etched on their faces. Part of being a parent? There are degrees of of commitment in everything. I can assure you they go way beyond what is required and yet are treated as though that is the way it should be.
Another was a lovely lady we got to know years ago who after a divorce that devastated her returned to Kenya where she and her husband because of his work at the time had lived for twenty years. Her children still lived there and persuaded her to come back and make a new life there; big mistake.
I knew it was going to be a disaster after meeting them a few times in England. Nice enough to talk to, yet as anyone who has spent time in places like Kenya with ‘colonials’ knows the lifestyle is such that everyday things like chores are for someone else and a form of idling one's life away with the least effort is quite normal. My wife and I spent two long holidays out there with her and we had a marvellous time, with the exception of anything to do with the children and the extended family who were milking her dry.
The lady ran an upmarket safari business and the youngest daughter (who if she ever got her finger out of her backside would have been an asset as she spoke Swahili and local dialects, but no) just used the business for her own purposes, appropriating food and drink purchased for the safaris for parties and taking the Range Rover on a regular basis to go to Tanzania to see her boyfriend - she had her own car but preferred to use the gas-guzzler on company petrol.
The other daughter and her husband actually had the cheek at dinner one night to present a bill for milk used by the family. They had a smallholding, the mother was paying for the private schooling of their two offspring and when she said something about the bill and the school fees were mentioned the reply was ‘It is what mothers are for'; we left, as I would have said something.
I have a cousin who has a small legacy but has refused to touch it despite only scraping by for some years. When I asked him one day why this was, he said he was saving it for the children. Not one of them gives the proverbial about him and they all have good jobs and homes of their own, he hasn’t, so why this almost masochistic attitude with parents who even when abused by their offspring and milked for the majority of their lives still believe they should be a money box to be dipped into at will?
Me, I am of the bugger-off variety, but many are not. My oldest friend in Australia is not rich but they gave their son, who at best can be described as morose, their last 10k of cash after the son divorced. He for reasons only he knows has not spoken to or seen them since, an utter little sh*t as he has been all his life.
So why does this being a parent trump all common sense? The belief that parents are duty bound to hand over when they go - or before, in many cases on demand - anything they have is a growing trend. I hear older parents speaking more of this in the last couple of decades. pressure is being put upon many to pay for things the children won't save for or work harder for. Somehow it is seen as a divine right that it should all go to them and the sooner the better.
Ah but blood is thicker than water, the call of duty, the ties that children have to their parents and all the other clarion calls for one to be seen and do the right thing even when the parent knows it is not the right thing. Times have changed: there is little deference to the old. The young today, openly in many cases, call it their right, their inheritance. The modern child who is raised in many middle class families never goes without, has only to say ‘I want’ and it is delivered; no "thank you", no appreciation of any work or effort on the part of the parent to supply the goodies, just a simple expectancy it will happen and it does. When they are raised like that it is hardly surprising that the calls for more go beyond childhood.
I had a wonderful example of that in a customer of mine whom I got to know quite well over the years. The only son was lavished on: as a young child he had for example every single piece of Action Man, when he played football with his friends in the garden he would continually stop to go inside and change into the endless football tops his father had got for him, signed shirts from Brazil and Italy through his business collections; he even had his own fully-stocked fridge with lollies and ice creams. He was spoilt to the point of smothering. He also turned out in his latter teens to be a little sh*t, but the parents were blind to it. Private school, private sports coach in various sports in an attempt to find something he was good at, failed. They even got him a girlfriend as he was so obnoxious no normal girl wanted to know. How can anyone brought up this way ever appreciate what the parent did to reach this level of wealth? It is always there to be cashed in on demand.
If this sounds like a down on the modern younger generation, it is. But the parents are the ones who have create this mind set: it is they that believe giving all will make them more loved, more complete as a family. How wrong they are.
Sunday, June 09, 2019
Old Age and Beyond, by JD
Bruce Charlton asked the question recently "What is the purpose of old age?"
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2019/04/what-is-purpose-of-old-age-romantic.html
He asks the question in the context of his observations that so many people are trying to maintain their youthfulness by various means, by having facelifts or engaging in vigorous (and inappropriate) exercise, by behaving as they behaved in their youth with drinking and partying or trying to climb Mount Everest. That last one is not a good idea as we have seen recently.
He partially answers his own question when he observes that these efforts to stay forever young are a fear of old age and ultimately a fear of death, which is a recent phenomenon. The Victorians had no such fears or doubts, they accepted it as a fact of life and that acceptance lasted well into the 20th century for most people. All four of my grandparents died in their own homes with family members at the bedside, the last one in 1973.
But there are far worse fates than death -
Bette Davis was correct because old age brings with it new and unwelcome problems. We all begin to creak and crumble and fall apart with aching limbs, arthritis, rheumatism etc. In my case it is sciatica and a mysterious ache in my right foot which turns into pain if I walk too far. Also I find that I can no longer do the things I used to do; climbing a ladder is now inadvisable, running up or down stairs is no longer an option, and as for moving furniture - is it a lot heavier than it used to be? And then the unspoken difficulties like trying to cut your toenails or struggling to remove the tops from jars. Rescuing food from its packaging has undoubtedly prompted an endless stream of profanities on a daily or weekly basis up and down the land!
But we have to adapt to the infirmities and the difficulties of old age because the body lets you down, eventually.
Old age brings other worries of course. Not least who is going to look after us all when we need it. The latest statistic I can find (for 2017) shows almost three million over 65s living alone. But that is another story for another time. The question here is 'what is the purpose of old age' and the cold hard truth is that old age is a time for facing up to the inevitable end of this life and to prepare ourselves for death and transition to the next life. The poet John Donne (1572 - 1631) expresses it here very clearly-
"Since I am coming to that holy room,
Where, with thy choir of saints for evermore,
I shall be made thy music; as I come
I tune the instrument here at the door,
And what I must do then, think here before."
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44114/hymn-to-god-my-god-in-my-sickness
If you will allow, I shall burden you with my own understanding and how I have approached old age and death. My father was 58 when he died after a short illness and that was too soon but we, the family, had to accept it. Thus began my own search to try to make sense of it all and I rapidly became aware of my own mortality and very quickly came to terms with the fact. So life went on but with a slightly different perspective on anything and everything. Like Bruce Charlton, I would read a great deal and travelling and working in other countries and cultures added fresh insights into how other peoples dealt with these things.
Many years later a very close friend of mine had a severe stroke and was left unable to talk and was in a wheelchair having been paralysed in her right arm and leg. I say close friend but in fact she was by my side when my father died and was very much the shoulder to lean on. After almost five years in that condition she died, coincidentally on my father's birthday. Her sister said to me "she didn't want to be here any more" She had decided to go and she did.
It is difficult to explain how I felt at the news of her death because the feeling was and is beyond words. She was here and then she was not here. Science holds that energy can be neither created nor destroyed so what happened to her life energy, that which animates the body? Where did/does that go?
The effect on me was profound and lasted a long time and may well have been a contributory factor in my subsequent epilepsy. And then one day, a few years later, she came back! I know that sounds absurd and you can dismiss it as wishful thinking if you like but I know what I felt and it was not brought on by thinking about her. But it happened and it happened during what I now understand to be a lucid dream. She was here with me and it was real, in fact it was much more real than everyday reality in a way which cannot be explained. It was real but there was no 'great revelatory message': the content was fairly mundane, as in real life. In a way it was shocking because it was beyond any normal experience, bewilderment is the best word to describe my feelings. I had some very long conversations with the neurologist at the hospital but she could not offer any explanation. She knew of the concept but had little experience of it with patients or among colleagues. Science is, after all, just another belief system, a secular faith.
F C Happold in his book Mysticism writes -
"An experience of the sort which may, without justifiably stretching the meaning of the word, be called mystical may happen to anyone, sometimes quite unexpectedly; but when it occurs it is clearly recognizable. It may happen only once in a lifetime; but, when it does happen, it brings an illumination and a certainty which can rarely, if ever, be reached by the rational consciousness and may change the whole tenure of a life."
And change me it most certainly did. I still cannot articulate how and why it has changed my outlook on life, I just know that it has. For a time I genuinely lost the will to live but it was replaced by a feeling of being more alive than before. Over recent years I have relaxed into a sort of low level reverie and now have a form of hyperaesthesia making colours more vivid and visual awareness is heightened such that I am aware of things actually vibrating, usually described by poets or art critics as shimmering. I have even tried to depict the vibrating nature of reality in a few paintings. Perhaps I am just going mad, I don't know but it is a delightful, divine madness.
It may be that we need some kind of shock or a 'revelation' to remind us why we are here. If it happens in old age it helps to focus the mind on what is important and to realise that there are more years behind us than ahead and this is not necessarily a bad thing.
“To die will be an awfully big adventure.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
This is my own personal response to Bruce Charlton's question. You may have a different view, you may have a different experience or possibly none at all. No matter, we are all different and we must all deal with old age and beyond in our own way. There are many roads but only one destination.
And finally from Bob Dylan a beautiful meditation on our final years. As always with Dylan the meaning is ambiguous and we can read into it what is most meaningful for us. There is an interpretation of the song on Dylan's website and the writer speaks of a Taoist concept of “Darkness within Darkness, the way to all understanding” but I prefer the words of the metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan (1622 - 1695) -
"There is in God (some say)
A deep, but dazzling darkness;"
- and I know that dazzling darkness is a darkness filled with light!
References:
"Disobliging Reality" by Frank Juszczyk, PhD
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Disobliging-Reality-Heckling-Illusionist-Here/dp/1480826154/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
"A Dog's View of Love, Life and Death" by J R Arnold
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dogs-View-Love-Life-Death/dp/1786770113/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=a+dogs+view+of+love+life+and+death&qid=1559919620&s=books&sr=1-1
"Gifts of Unknown Things" by Dr Lyall Watson
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gifts-Things-Nature-Healing-Initiation/dp/0892813539/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
"Lucid Dreaming" by Celia Green and Charles McCreery
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/104135.Lucid_Dreaming
"Mysticism" by F C Happold
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1611728.Mysticism
Henry Vaughan's - "dazzling darkness"
https://www.bartleby.com/105/112.html
Spiritual Science
https://www.spiritualresearchfoundation.org/about-us/
N.B. My reference to science being a belief system, a secular faith is not some throwaway insult. In F C Happold's book there are quotes from St Augustine of Hippo, Nicolas of Cusa and Max Planck all saying exactly the same thing.
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2019/04/what-is-purpose-of-old-age-romantic.html
He asks the question in the context of his observations that so many people are trying to maintain their youthfulness by various means, by having facelifts or engaging in vigorous (and inappropriate) exercise, by behaving as they behaved in their youth with drinking and partying or trying to climb Mount Everest. That last one is not a good idea as we have seen recently.
He partially answers his own question when he observes that these efforts to stay forever young are a fear of old age and ultimately a fear of death, which is a recent phenomenon. The Victorians had no such fears or doubts, they accepted it as a fact of life and that acceptance lasted well into the 20th century for most people. All four of my grandparents died in their own homes with family members at the bedside, the last one in 1973.
But there are far worse fates than death -
Bette Davis was correct because old age brings with it new and unwelcome problems. We all begin to creak and crumble and fall apart with aching limbs, arthritis, rheumatism etc. In my case it is sciatica and a mysterious ache in my right foot which turns into pain if I walk too far. Also I find that I can no longer do the things I used to do; climbing a ladder is now inadvisable, running up or down stairs is no longer an option, and as for moving furniture - is it a lot heavier than it used to be? And then the unspoken difficulties like trying to cut your toenails or struggling to remove the tops from jars. Rescuing food from its packaging has undoubtedly prompted an endless stream of profanities on a daily or weekly basis up and down the land!
But we have to adapt to the infirmities and the difficulties of old age because the body lets you down, eventually.
Old age brings other worries of course. Not least who is going to look after us all when we need it. The latest statistic I can find (for 2017) shows almost three million over 65s living alone. But that is another story for another time. The question here is 'what is the purpose of old age' and the cold hard truth is that old age is a time for facing up to the inevitable end of this life and to prepare ourselves for death and transition to the next life. The poet John Donne (1572 - 1631) expresses it here very clearly-
"Since I am coming to that holy room,
Where, with thy choir of saints for evermore,
I shall be made thy music; as I come
I tune the instrument here at the door,
And what I must do then, think here before."
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44114/hymn-to-god-my-god-in-my-sickness
If you will allow, I shall burden you with my own understanding and how I have approached old age and death. My father was 58 when he died after a short illness and that was too soon but we, the family, had to accept it. Thus began my own search to try to make sense of it all and I rapidly became aware of my own mortality and very quickly came to terms with the fact. So life went on but with a slightly different perspective on anything and everything. Like Bruce Charlton, I would read a great deal and travelling and working in other countries and cultures added fresh insights into how other peoples dealt with these things.
Many years later a very close friend of mine had a severe stroke and was left unable to talk and was in a wheelchair having been paralysed in her right arm and leg. I say close friend but in fact she was by my side when my father died and was very much the shoulder to lean on. After almost five years in that condition she died, coincidentally on my father's birthday. Her sister said to me "she didn't want to be here any more" She had decided to go and she did.
It is difficult to explain how I felt at the news of her death because the feeling was and is beyond words. She was here and then she was not here. Science holds that energy can be neither created nor destroyed so what happened to her life energy, that which animates the body? Where did/does that go?
The effect on me was profound and lasted a long time and may well have been a contributory factor in my subsequent epilepsy. And then one day, a few years later, she came back! I know that sounds absurd and you can dismiss it as wishful thinking if you like but I know what I felt and it was not brought on by thinking about her. But it happened and it happened during what I now understand to be a lucid dream. She was here with me and it was real, in fact it was much more real than everyday reality in a way which cannot be explained. It was real but there was no 'great revelatory message': the content was fairly mundane, as in real life. In a way it was shocking because it was beyond any normal experience, bewilderment is the best word to describe my feelings. I had some very long conversations with the neurologist at the hospital but she could not offer any explanation. She knew of the concept but had little experience of it with patients or among colleagues. Science is, after all, just another belief system, a secular faith.
F C Happold in his book Mysticism writes -
"An experience of the sort which may, without justifiably stretching the meaning of the word, be called mystical may happen to anyone, sometimes quite unexpectedly; but when it occurs it is clearly recognizable. It may happen only once in a lifetime; but, when it does happen, it brings an illumination and a certainty which can rarely, if ever, be reached by the rational consciousness and may change the whole tenure of a life."
And change me it most certainly did. I still cannot articulate how and why it has changed my outlook on life, I just know that it has. For a time I genuinely lost the will to live but it was replaced by a feeling of being more alive than before. Over recent years I have relaxed into a sort of low level reverie and now have a form of hyperaesthesia making colours more vivid and visual awareness is heightened such that I am aware of things actually vibrating, usually described by poets or art critics as shimmering. I have even tried to depict the vibrating nature of reality in a few paintings. Perhaps I am just going mad, I don't know but it is a delightful, divine madness.
It may be that we need some kind of shock or a 'revelation' to remind us why we are here. If it happens in old age it helps to focus the mind on what is important and to realise that there are more years behind us than ahead and this is not necessarily a bad thing.
“To die will be an awfully big adventure.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
This is my own personal response to Bruce Charlton's question. You may have a different view, you may have a different experience or possibly none at all. No matter, we are all different and we must all deal with old age and beyond in our own way. There are many roads but only one destination.
And finally from Bob Dylan a beautiful meditation on our final years. As always with Dylan the meaning is ambiguous and we can read into it what is most meaningful for us. There is an interpretation of the song on Dylan's website and the writer speaks of a Taoist concept of “Darkness within Darkness, the way to all understanding” but I prefer the words of the metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan (1622 - 1695) -
"There is in God (some say)
A deep, but dazzling darkness;"
- and I know that dazzling darkness is a darkness filled with light!
References:
"Disobliging Reality" by Frank Juszczyk, PhD
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Disobliging-Reality-Heckling-Illusionist-Here/dp/1480826154/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
"A Dog's View of Love, Life and Death" by J R Arnold
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dogs-View-Love-Life-Death/dp/1786770113/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=a+dogs+view+of+love+life+and+death&qid=1559919620&s=books&sr=1-1
"Gifts of Unknown Things" by Dr Lyall Watson
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gifts-Things-Nature-Healing-Initiation/dp/0892813539/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
"Lucid Dreaming" by Celia Green and Charles McCreery
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/104135.Lucid_Dreaming
"Mysticism" by F C Happold
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1611728.Mysticism
Henry Vaughan's - "dazzling darkness"
https://www.bartleby.com/105/112.html
Spiritual Science
https://www.spiritualresearchfoundation.org/about-us/
N.B. My reference to science being a belief system, a secular faith is not some throwaway insult. In F C Happold's book there are quotes from St Augustine of Hippo, Nicolas of Cusa and Max Planck all saying exactly the same thing.
Friday, June 07, 2019
FRIDAY MUSIC: The Band, by JD
The Band were originally a backing group called The Hawks for the rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins. After they left Hawkins they were 'adopted' by Bob Dylan and were with him on the world tour of 1966.
The rest, as they say, is history.
http://theband.hiof.no
The rest, as they say, is history.
http://theband.hiof.no
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