h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Another quick one I was reminded of shopping 2 days ago..

A few years back our school day was thrown into confusion because "Westlife" were going to be in assembly to publicise a charity (just before a new album release).. It involved re-sceduling the school day and having assembly later,, and the hysteria in an -all-girls school as the girls waited to be called down was something else.

Anyway that was another story-to some extent.. I rushed home at lunch time to see if the school made lunch time news- some mention but nothing substantive.

At the end of the school-day I gave a colleague a lift home, stopping as usual to buy the TV papers. I came back to the car and said to Margaret what a strange photo of the TV presenter Victoria Bravo to put on the front cover. She looked just like a ghost.

When I turned on TV to watch our school on the News, the whole BBC coverage was about Ms Bravo's murder that day.

Cass

Are you talking about some kind of premonition there Cass?

I had one of those, years back and I was deeply discomforted by it, as an experience. I still can't quite resolve it on some levels

Willem, good to see you, even if you are on the

jwf

Thanks for that.. I had tried to catch up with the thread--

Another interesting book is "The Character of England" c1947 which makes a point that here is a the regular sense amongst the English that there is an inter-activity with their countryside. [Blake etc]..I suspect many more of us than just me, Prince Charles and George III talk to trees, in fact I suspect many "green fingered" gardeners are also green-tongued.

As my wife is French and I have had quite a lot of French experience over the years, I am not sure that the different attitudes to Nature between England and France has not impacted on Nature's attitude to human beings.

At this time of year we are always astonished at the incredible sociability of robins in England. When I am digging my allotment I fear for the robins that dash in for worms etc. I was just saying to my wife today that whereas most animals instinctively feel unsettled by the human (or is it English) predilection for looking right into the eyes and seeing down to the soul.. I know that, as my gramp worked with farm horses, I often make this mistake.

But our robin seems to come to our feeders just when it sees us in the kitchen feeding, and it will perch prominently and look me right in the eyes.

All of this endlessly fascinates my wife since in France the robin is known as a very shy and timid bird that keeps away from people..

But then the French wage a kind of war against Nature- even the plants in their gardens.. My wife must constantly cut them and saw them-etc bending them to her will. And she can not see flowers in Nature without wishing to harvest them and take them home rather than leave them in peace.. Mind you D.H.Lawrence said that this was a female thing.

Cass

Peanut

Well I am not sure that Margaret really saw the photo the same way, or that it was more than a revelatory shock. By the way as you are from that neck of the woods, did I get her name right. It worried me. She was a Weston Super Mare girl.

Back c1967 the police released a photo to the press that they claimed was a photo that they had managed to find some undefined place near a corpseless head that they had found. It was very obviously the severed head with a collar round the neck and perhaps a little mortuary treatment. No way was there life in those eyes.

By the way in 2006 when we were house-hunting in Burgundy we found ourselves in a hilly region with dry-stone walls etc like my mother's Cotswolds, the sedimentary rock seems to fold under and come up there: and when we found a house to visit I saw the view that I had seen in my dream that made me try to look for some clue of just where it was. We have not yet called our house in Burgundy Darlingworth, but I may do in time.

Cass

It was Jill Dando, Cass, and I wondered if that was who you meant

I think you're right - feeling connected to landscape changes consciousness. I could see that with my older relatives who lived in the rural Tennessee mountains. The place speaks to you as no suburb ever will.

This is one of the reasons Tennessee people have so many stories about revenants - people who have died, but are seen going about their business, because they're so much a part of the place they don't know they're gone.

When my youngest uncle was a boy, his grandfather died. A few nights after the funeral, he woke up to find his grandfather standing by the bed. My uncle swore all his life that my great-grandfather held his hand and left a mark where he'd dug in his fingernails. Make of it what you will.

Others found themselves confronted by those who had passed on...not in a frightening way, just looking out the window and finding one of the old folks rocking on the porch, that sort of thing.

Susan Cooper and Hume Cronyn wrote a play about the phenomenon once, called 'Foxfire'. City people like the NY and LA Times didn't like it. But country people identify.

Peanut

Jill Dando of course..I think that Victoria Bravo was one of my pupils.. So many names.. I think she is the cousin of my next door neighbour who said that she remembered me teaching her for five years.. And I have not been able to put the face to the name.. I wonder whether she was not the girl who was always "bright eyes" in my mind. Dark brown intense eyes takin everything in, but small and quiet like a rabbit.

Cass

Dmitri

Your story of the "reincarnation" of your great-great grandfather- was it? reminded me of reading "The Autobiography of a Yogi" by Paramahnsa Yogananda (1946) -- all kinds of things that he retells and claims to have experienced. It was quite a struggle to stretch my thinking into such a different cultural percetion.

That actually reminds me of something about my oak tree. Yogananda's book was the trigger that sparked off George Harrison's interest in India.. and therefor led to his friendship with Ravi Shankar.

In his autobiography RS describes the escarpmemt in those Chiltern Hills down close to G.H. home near Henley as the most spiritual place that he has found in the whole world.. and he hasd travelled a lot of it.

Cass

I'm sorry to intrude in such a personal and interesting thread. But I need to try something for test reasons, and that's why I'm posting.
I might come back to read more in a while

Milla

No need for apologies if you are the one who has sorted out what went wrong.. If so thanks a lot..

Looking back a bit earlier I saw Effers? post about "thrashing out problems under oak trees"... This may well have been the origin of the "beating of the bounds" ceremonies, that I discovered were far from unique to my native Oxford.

A local history down here in the North-wood South of London recorded how still in the nineteenth century there was an annual procession in which people from both sides of the local boundary-lines processed those lines on both sides from significant oak tree to oak tree.. And at key points choirboys were beaten I suspect (a) in the same way that the Egyptians I read once had only one word for teaching and beating. The old idea that you give a boy a good reason to remember something by associating the knowledge with physical pain is based on fact. Once you have been severely beaten near such a sign-post, your subconscious and your body will tell you where it is even when your memory has gone.

(b) that this punishment handed out to the young may well have been some way of resolving disputes between the neighbouring communities, and, as I remember from my own caning days, there are boys who take it as a matter of pride to be able to "take it" and -as Flora Thompson wrote of mothers in labour in "Lark Rise"- not flinch. It was the opportunity to show "the others" that the next generation were up to the standard of their ancestors.

And of course oak trees were so old and venerable that doing such things in their presence was tantamount to later practice of doing things before the Cross (hence the Market Crosses of the Middle Ages).

Cass

All I did was to post via the Pliny test system... but if it works for everyone, then excellent.
Did you all have the last two pages coming up as "Error, there has been an error with the page"?

No it works here for me now with Brunel. But not my PS yet. But I know you're working on it. Why did it have to be an impatient uppity sort like me? It's a sign

Nah I'm very really but I hide it well.

Oh, cool, Milla, now I know why I was getting that error message last night. I thought I broke something.

That's a fascinating story about the oak trees. I'm suspecting that long-lived trees - which used to be used for groves, outdoor worship places, all over Europe back in the day - were thought to absorb energy as a sort of virtual memory, the same way perdurant structures like houses do.

I've stood in the remains of such an ancient outdoor worship place in Romania.

Of course, the silly early Christian missionaries had to prove how tough they were by cutting them all down. Vandalism akin to destroying those buddhas...

Belief in the ability of wood to absorb psychic energy persist. Here's a story:

Back in the 90s, I was involved in a community theatre production of 'Macbeth'. The community theatre was based at a Benedictine college, and the director, a devout Catholic, refused to kowtow to the 'myths' surrounding the play. He flouted all the taboos, saying the play's name in the theatre, etc.

Until the night of dress rehearsal, when Lady MacDuff was in the emergency room. She'd been helping the stage director to make props, and there was an accident with the bandsaw. (Not life-threatening.) Then Macbeth and MacDuff were practicing combat on an empty stage. A sword flew out of the unhappy thane's hand and landed in the third row. It was a metal sword - an hour later, and this mishap could have had consequences.

Mad call to the next city's Shakespeare theatre. 'What do you do about the Curse?' Help was also enlisted from our Witches - one of whom was a practicing Wiccan.

Result? We all started opening night with cedar chips worn next our skin. It seemed to work, too.

Dmitri

Re trees- and non-oak ones..

A few years ago we were doing one of our regular 'Easter' walks- a circuit above a small bay on the Med coast of France.. The region has been invaded over recent years by a very virile and alien form of mimosa.. Towards the end of our walk in the calmness of the spring evening, for some reason, I noticed one of these young trees that was really beginning to assume a tree identity.

So I approached it, put my hand around one of its trunks and tried to empathise with its life rooted here. One of my things about plant life is that plants have no need of our kind of intelligence because they can react in all directions simultaneously, our intelligence is a condition of our survival need to make choices. A tree has no choices. It can do everything it needs to do in the place where it is rooted.

So there I was trying to "tune in" as it were to this tree, and I had to let go because the response felt like some kind of electric shock- as the tree started to check me out to see whether it could grow out into me. I suppose plants only have a "forward gear".

Reminds me of Paramahansa Yogananda's account of the work of the Indian Nobel Prize Laureate Chandra Bose who devised equipment capable of measuring the way that plants react in what we would see as 'real time'- that is not the time-lapse that people who film Nature are so fond of.

Cass

PS

On the relationship between people and trees..

As something of a tree/Nature lover I was always shocked by the story of Jesus cursing the Fig Tree-but it seems likely that the word "season" was used and interpreted in too English a fashion. In Judaism Humankind has been given stewardship of Nature and is required to look after it and treat it properly. This means (I believe) allowing all fruit trees one year off every four years.. It may well be that Jesus was looking for figs "in season" as we would understand it, but in a year when the tree was entitled to rest..

Cass

>>..cedar chips worn next our skin. It seemed to work, too. <<


Yes, charms, mojos, pentangles, even crucifixes are very often
seen to work. I know from experience that voodoo dolls, divining
rods, dream catchers and other sympathetic magic have been
seen to work.

For me the big question is whether these things promote or engage
an external force or inspire some internal and subconscious energy.

To put it another way - is the Magic (gods, faeries, ectoplasm) an
external force we can call upon with prayer and ritual or is the
Magic inside us, something we dredge up from our psyche.

That's one reason I often speak about the physical act of prayer,
the putting the palms of the hands together. Is it invoking the
ethereal forces of a spiritual whirled?

Or, more likely, is it focusing our internal psychometrics to alter
our consciousness and expectations that somehow brings about
desired changes and effects.

Like the whipping of young men in the oak forests described above
there does seem to be some reality to the ritual. And belief in the
power of prayer can at least ameliorate our negative emotions
and perhaps it does redirect physical and emotional energy.

George(also-mentioned-above)Harrison's 'Within You, Without You'
seems to suggest that the Force is both all around us and inside us.


~jwf~

Wow. If those mimosas are the ones I know, I can well imagine this. My grandmother in Memphis had one in her front yard. We called it a 'tickle-feather tree' because of its flowers, which are like little pink tutus with gold spangles. A lovely tree, and very responsive. If you stroke its leaves, they contract.

jwf, I agree. I think we're being interactive here. Not always a bad thing. May the Force be with us.

Now, let's come up with a ritual to channel energy to the Pliny engineers...

jwf

I do not believe that there is any inherent contradiction between within and without.. There is infinity in both..

At uni I wote a poem about Introspection, wandering off and getting lost in my internal country.. I suppose it depends upon powers of imagination to some degree- though I think that those who have physically enjoyed just wandering can more easily do so in the mind..

In my poem I get totally lost until I encounter someone who greets me and brings me back from the depths to that active interface that we learn to relate to as being who we are. The feeling is similar to swimming up from deep underwater- a favourite thing of mine in my youth - without any equipment just adopting that now alien habitat as one of mine too. Silence and calm away from it all.

I was musing on this unity of deep within and deep without - the Heavens- earlier when I remembered attending the funeral of my wife's uncle in France..

When we went to the cemetry I was walking at the back, and I suppose most people had their heads bowed- closing in and around their social interface, perhaps playing the role that insists that we must be bowed and cowed before Death. I (as I am prone to do) wanted to look all around, and so I was looking at the sky above the coffin when a French Red Arrows team from the local air base shot up vertically as if from the coffin itself. They were streaming red, white and blue, and having climbed some altitude they turned to the right as I saw it, came down and across the upward trace leaving a massive cross in the sky.

They were, I believe, in practice for some display- but the practice made perfect for Uncle Michel.

Cass

And that was an unexpected altered state of reality.

jwf

As for the physical reality of prayer.. closing your eyes, putting your hands together, kneeling and bowing your head- goes contrary to all our survival instincts, and therefore- once you overcome that initial shock of putting almost all your defensive systems down you become aware of the fact that you are trusting something greater than you.. And being able to trust is such a great thing to give and receive.

In one RE lesson this whole question came up with the whole key question of feeling able to just fall backwards in full trust and confidence of being caught.. Immediately one girl ( a vicar's daughter- but with a difference) volunteered to come out and fall back for me to catch her. Then I think that just about everyone in the class of 27 or so wanted to do it one by one..and did.. It was a wonderful feeling to be trusted- for I myself have never learned to trust people in that way... The last time that I used that "trick" one of the two girls (about 17 this time) was the child of alcoholics I believe- she had responded to the word "Counselling" some years before by asking "You mean like family counselling?". She could not do it,though she tried and I sympathised entirely.. The other had full confidence in me and could not understand the other one. She must have finished her Medical degree by now. I wonder whether she might have gone into psychology.

Cass