I’ve read another book. Judging from the very neat pencil underlinings it looks as though I’ve read it before sometime. Since I often wonder why it has been my habit for sixty-odd years, I was interested to find that the underlinings were very helpful generally but especially during the course of more or less skim-reading […]
The dynamic concept of the Figure of Eight was introduced in my Blog ‘Somatic Markers’ dated 16th November. The bottom half of the Figure of Eight represents the ground of our being—core self—that which we can become more aware of in meditative exercises of one kind or another: the rush of blood in the ears, […]
walking now where those who passed the café window walked ten minutes ago * from the train window glimpses of village streets I shall never tread * brief conversation at breakfast during which a whole life is aired * longing for the fountains that play in other people’s gardens (Fernando Pessoa) * today a colony […]
the soul can either build of itself a work of art or sit and watch the Barbarian inversion of old certitudes— mask of Evil that entices into the wilderness of the future; or it rides out of the Wasteland tramples the vineyards demolishes the shrines giving over soil to sand and the mind to this […]
an angel visited the Earth: for many years he thought everybody on Earth was mad because he could not understand what it was they were enjoying; then he caught the Earth disease and began to enjoy Negative Emotions just as they had always done and he could no longer see the madness; when the heavenly […]
I write haiku to suit myself: they come from the relationship I imagine I have with the world out there in the here & now. They reconstruct something between me & it – I’m never quite sure what that might be. One can so easily fall into the trap of producing standard formula haiku – […]
The Mainstreaming of Libertarian Theories of Social Darwinism and Apartheid by Nafeez Ahmed (the gist) (Byline Times 14th October 2022) The fundamental intention behind so-called ‘Trussonomics’ was to make the rich richer, in the absurd belief that wealth will ‘trickle-down’ to inspire economic growth. What’s really going on however is that current ‘Conservatism’ is secretly […]
A PERSONAL JOURNEY My early inner life was a gift to myself alone – always on my own. Father off in India somehow defending the freedom of UK, as they say about foreign escapades nowadays; mother consumed by worry for my sister who was starting the awful disease from which she eventually died in 2005. […]
What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men – each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature – are shot down wholesale. If, however, we were not something more than unique human beings and each man jack of us […]
Anonymous article from Socialist Worker 18th September 2022 Politicians and the media drove the mourning for the queen. And those that dared to protest against the monarchy faced arrest. But nobody actually drove people on to the streets to join the long queues to view the queen’s coffin. And nobody lost their job if they […]
“We talk too much,” he said with unwonted seriousness. “Clever talk is of no value whatsoever. One merely gets further and further away from oneself and that is a crime. One should be able to crawl right into oneself like a tortoise.” Hermann Hesse: Demian On the 19th August 2022 I followed the local doctor’s […]
It’s well worth taking some time to… ponder the idea that we consist not just of one single ‘I’ but of a large number of ‘I’s that constantly compete for attention. For example, the reader may well now be in Reading-these-words-I but also feeling the urge to get into Wondering-what-the-first sentence-means-for-them-I while being dominated by […]
I have often tried to recall how I spent my days before the advent of the damned computer. It did seem to be something of a minor miracle when I acquired a primitive word processor (Amstrad 8256) around 1994. Working on it provided me with a valuable systemic relationship after thoroughly digesting which my fountain […]
In One Dimensional Man (1964), Herbert Marcuse bewails the ‘lost dimensions’ – dimensions of existence that, in the crass technological dash for conformity, have faded in human life . Lost dimensions exist in areas of the spirit that seem to have no place in the one-dimensional world where opposition to prevailing ways of seeing things […]
What a strange problem now that after so many thousand years I should still wander to & fro, spiritually unsatisfied… Notebooks May-June 1887 In the 1987 Symposium booklet entitled Richard Jefferies: a Spirit Illumined, John Pearson wrote an excellent essay called Bevis: A Natural Education in Time and Space in which he traces an […]
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