Journal Entries
The choice to be... ?
Posted Oct 6, 2005
There but for the grace of ...
Take a walk to "needle park" or some other part of (your) space and (your) time where life's derelicts congregate. This is not ostensibly your world - not your way of life - but there they are - people who live, eat, drink, drug, breath, hope, fear, dream and go to the bathroom. They inhabit a place that God has forgotten. However hard you might try to deny it you live there too!
There but for the grace of ...
In the street, nearly every day but especially at weekends I am approached by seemingly needy people some of whom I have discovered park large comfortable cars before they assume their position on the corner near the Lotto Office or the Post Office or outside the Supermarket TO BEG. There are frauds and cheats living among us. This fact does not negate the reality of the poverty and misery which must be admitted and cannot be denied.
Do we see it or do we imagine it?
In this sordid world, so heartless and duplicitous, we function, knowingly and unknowingly, in a ideological duality, where "rich" has no meaning less there be "poor". If the dirt smeared, homeless, bag-person does not exist then the Midas rich, Master of the Universe, has no lower parameter by which to define himself. No fear to power his upward mobility
All of you who consider yourselves clever should perhaps consider that there is no such thing as stupid just some people are momentarily less clever than others. There is no such thing as rich only some people are less poor. There is no such thing as bad sexual intercourse ( I 'm thinking in the vernacular) just that some sex is better than others! There but for the grace......
With the "book and its cover" adage to guide us we are all just the same - a mystery until opened - the garbage collector who quotes Shakespeare, studies Mandarin Chinese, has a minor obsession with the "Fatima Prophecy", eats only organically produced food and is almost a vegetarian - like an onion has many layers of being most of which would pass completely unobserved but for the grace of ...
I have not seen ghosts but in several paranormal experiments I have channelled the spirits of people long since dead: one a young boy soldier who marched beside the Standard beating a tattoo on a side drum. He was so young and yet he gave not the slightest sign of being afraid. When the Standard bearer fell he simply picked up the colours and marched forward beating his drum one handed till his turn came to die. He announced that his name was Willum, he was an orphan and thought that he was about 10 years old. A veteran of three years soldiering - he broke off contact and marched off back into the smoke. I was spared the trauma of his passing. You will be pleased that I shall refrain from recounting similar episodes unless asked that is (?).
Much is made on this thread about Atheism (3rd on the "Belief System" table of adherents). By my way of reasoning it one half of the coin i.e non belief, demands that there be belief on the other. What this produces is the need for choice. In the Bible which passes as 'fairy tales" for some and "holy scripture" for others there is mention that the Jews were/are the CHOSEN people. This epithet plus other minor factors like the crucifixion, being clever with money etc. has placed a curse on anyone lucky enough to be born into that tradition (6th on the "Belief System" table of adherents) - but I digress a little. What I should like to put forward for you comments is this - what if the Jews CHOSE rather than were chosen. Perhaps like Son Of Sam they heard a voice and the "In the beginning..." simply followed their vocation?
Today we are Christian, Muslim, Jew as much as we are Black, White or Brindled by an accident of birth. What happens next is the inculcation/education and propagandising which clouds rather than clarifies our real choices. Hormones and hot blood lead to tests of virility and a MY GOD IS BETTER THAN YOUR GOD situation occurs which runs contradictory to the tenets that each sect claims to be their guiding ethics and moral code. Once upon a time the "Children of the Book" were safe from any attack by the Children Of Allah"........ times change but choice still lingers on - to do the right thing or... to do what is easy!
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Latest reply: Oct 6, 2005
A diffrent concept of poverty
Posted Sep 16, 2005
It seems that in today's upside down and crazy world one measures one's affluence, not by what one can afford to buy but what one can afford to throw away. One's wealth is on show, not in the parlour but outside, sitting beside the garbage can.
Poverty ensues from following the dictate "Consume - Be silent - Die!"
Poverty is audible in the silence
Poverty is visible in the mindless consumerism
Poverty is reported covertly - behind one's hand - or in mime.
One walks away from poverty not towards it
Poverty reveals one's understanding of "Enough" in all it's guises.
Fat children or adults indicate how some people fight the war against Poverty!
If one over-feeds - eats more than "enough" - one is ostensibly rich and should be respected.
Beware the "Thin" they are not to be trusted. 
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Latest reply: Sep 16, 2005
In the beginning there was the word.
Posted Sep 12, 2005
"Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of Truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the
dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever widening thought and action;
Into that Heaven of Freedom, my Father, let my country awake!"
Rabindrinath Tagore
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Latest reply: Sep 12, 2005
multiple universes continued
Posted Apr 25, 2004
As I said already we live in multiple universes.
We live in the world as it is, full of horror, suffering and death but at the same time we live in the world as it is supposed to be. The two worlds are similar - the difference between the world as it is and the world as it should be is a mirror of the difference between me as I am and me as I should be.
I should know better. However I have been slightly hampered by the misinformation which I have been fed over the years. Reducing the effect of the faulty programming takes time and effort and meets no small countermeasure put in place to maintain the status quo. Freedom is not something anyone can give to another nor is it something that one is born with. Freedom is much misunderstood concept and like so many other conditions we strive to experience for ourselves it come most readily when we fight for the freedom of others.
If we do not have a valid claim to personal freedom - if we have not paid the price in blood, sweat and tears then complain as we like about the injustice of our living condition nothing is going to change until we find the right challenge.
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Latest reply: Apr 25, 2004
Living in multiple universes
Posted Apr 24, 2004
I don't know how we do it - but we do!
The other day I was pondering my feelings about "Life.....& Everything" and had a brain shaking revelation - we do it to ourselves!
We use every method known to our species to convince ourselves that if we could intervene we would intervene... but we don't!
From the safe vantage of "in here" we see the world "out there" and we put on our dismayed, disgusted and agrieved look and decry the horror as shameful and unjust but... We live our pampered, privileged lives pretending that "it is not our fault that... ethnic group X has done all it could to erradicate ethnic group Y or any number of brain numbing occurrences that regularly blight the media of our times. We read the news. We wring our hands. We turn our backs and silently give thanks that it is so far away.
We pretend that our education precludes all possibility that blame might be attributed to "US" fot the heinous acts of "THEM". We know better - we are superior!
Actually this is all B***S***.
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Latest reply: Apr 24, 2004
tzadok
Researcher U571185
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