Cultural flux

Fascinating. The Daily Mail tells us that 'reasonable force' is back in British schools. The Holocaust and the Crusades are out. We are again in a 'state of flux', shall we say.

Marvellous, innit. ''You can't confiscate me mobile cuz it infringes me civil rights to peaceful ownership" and "I don't get to learn about wholesale massacre on the grounds of religion 'cause the Muslims are told it didn't happen, innit." Don't get to learn about the Crusades either, 'cause the imams tell 'em all different stuff to what we learn about."

We might remember what the Daily Mail said about Jews fleeing from Nazi Germany “The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage..... the number of aliens entering the country through back doors is ­ a problem to which the Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed” Daily Mail, 20 August 1938.

Or, going back further “They fought, they jostled to the foremost places at the gangways.. ...When the Relief Committee passed by they hid their gold and fawned and whined in broken English asked for money for their train fare.” Daily Mail, February 3rd, writing about Jewish immigrants in 1900.

H'm....The image is of a medieval birch, used for chastisement.

Beetlejuice and God

I seem to have found myself enmired in apologetics recently. Does God exist and would he prefer Coke to Pepsi? Nothing wrong with that. A more esoteric chain of reasoning crossed my path recently. Betelgeuse, in Orion, whose name is derived from the Arabic for "Ibt al Jauzah" (the Armpit of the Central One) is one of the brightest M-type stars in Earth's night sky, yet having a density approaching that of a vacuum, hence being nothing more than a cloud of nebular dust. Why then does it glow so brightly? Some allege that 'it's God', perhaps not realising that the thing has a maximum radius the size of the orbit of Neptune. Thus, not much stuff per cubic metre but a shedload of cubic metres, making up to 17 solar masses' worth, hence lots of stuff and able to burn. Some apologetics is like that. Short on information, long on flawed reasoning. I was going to include an image, but the prettier ones were just concentric orbits of orange and yellow,rather like a streetlamp in thick fog, plus a scale, so I thought it better to leave a massive amount of not much to your imagination.

Towards Understanding

Pessah again. JP informs me that we celebrate, if that's the right word, two Pessah anniversaries from 64 years ago- the discovery of LSD's potency by Dr. Albert Hofmann, and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The true meaning of the Pessah Holy Day, Zman herutenu, is "the Season of {our} Liberation." The former is an archetype of the liberation of the psyche, the latter a real, hard struggle for liberation against flesh and blood oppressors.
A Jewish commentator writes:

The first accidental absorption of lysergic acid diethylamide-25, and then, three days later, the first conscious ingestion of a minute quantity (250 micrograms) of this chemically synthesized psychoactive substance, have had, through its subsequent manufacture and distribution, a transformative psychological, social and cultural influence on the world.

Not all users experience the same effect. For some, it has been a spell-binding journey of kaleidoscopic colours and spiritual exultation, while for others it has been a visit to an abyssal of despair and depression. The human psyche is a delicate mechanism, an arena where powerful internal forces strive for dominance and control, conceptually little different from the paradigm of dominance represented by Nazi Germany. The uprising, although unsuccessful, punctured the myth of Aryan invulnerability and changed the course of the war.

Aldous Huxley described one function of the brain as a filter, one which consistently screens input and prevents overload. Chemical imbalance causes a shifting, or, in kabbalistic terms, an excess of light for the strength of the vessel, a crisis which can cause a shvirat hakeilim, or shattering. Rather different to me getting smashed to see the colours all those years ago. The brain imports 100kbits per second of processable information, of which less than one twenty-thousandth is conscious or sentient in the form of concept, image or feeling. Chemical stimulation lifts the sensory barrier, resulting in a tsunami of new information, opening the doors of perception wider. William Blake wrote, "When the doors of perception are cleansed, everything will appear as it is, infinite." Struggle widens perception, it would seem.

Seamus and me

I share Heaney's inner tensions sometimes. At the heart of his poetry is the conflict between speech and silence. His father was exceptionally taciturn, his mother, well, rather voluble.

Both standpoints can be justified. A man's 'yea' being 'yea' is the archetype of silent strength, whereas women, proficient at multitasking, can effortlessly mend, clean, organise and set the nation to rights, additionally complaining about male monocular vision which of course is no longer necessary for food provision.

Thank God we can navigate better than they can.



From "Personal Helicon" by Seamus Heaney:

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,


To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring


Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme


To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Marvellously wordless, after all....

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Days of Wine and Roses...not

"Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage which we did not take, towards the door we never opened into the rose-garden."
T. S. Eliot
(1888-1965)

Shamelessly plagiarised this evening from another blog not a million miles from this one, my rose garden seems thornier than usual. After a fraught and difficult day, I almost had my (very early) dinner thrown away and... a new DVD has a virus. H'm.
Why are those around one allowed to insult and demean with impunity, but when their own tactic is returned to them, worlds implode?

As a later addition, implosion postponed, I think, but the detonator is touch-sensitive.

Whoever was kind enough to remind me of this

כִּי אָנֹכִי יָדַעְתִּי אֶתהַמַּחֲשָׁבֹת, אֲשֶׁר אָנֹכִי חֹשֵׁב עֲלֵיכֶםנְאֻםיְהוָה מַחְשְׁבוֹת שָׁלוֹם וְלֹא
לְרָעָה, לָתֵת לָכֶם אַחֲרִית וְתִקְוָה

..has my thanks.

Secrets and Half-Truths

Having little to find to amuse this evening, I found myself doing a little aimless blogtrawling. Amazing what one comes up with. Sandwiched between a collection of stories from around the world on Islam and pan-Arabic affairs and a quite delicious morsel on hair care, I came across a beautifully wide-eyed, almost believable little entry about Rhonda Byrne's "The Secret". A little further investigation revealed a huge infrastructure of Web entries, much like discovering vast numbers of paramecia under a slide of apparently clear pondwater.

Rhonda defines The Secret as the law of attraction, which is the principle that "like attracts like." Rhonda calls it "the most powerful law in the universe," and says it is working all the time.

H'm. It might be stranger if it suspended activities for a while. What if gravity took a lunch break? And how come positive charges seem to dislike each other's proximity?
Or, the strong nuclear force's muscles got tired?

"What we do is we attract into our lives the things we want, and that is based on what we're thinking and feeling,"

When I was little, I was taught that "I want doesn't get." A homespun principle, teaching the quite novel life skill of unselfishness. Most unfashionable.

Rhonda says - "The principle explains that we create our own circumstances by the choices we make in life. And the choices we make are fuelled by our thoughts—which means our thoughts are the most powerful things we have here on earth." Die gedanken sind frei. Oh goody. I shall begin visualising beaches in Fiji immediately. The hype is spectacularly massive, as are the inventive methods people are choosing to exploit this hitherto unknown principle, invariably at the expense of others. The whole thing makes me tired.

Awe Exchange

Discovered a rare nugget - thanks Ben - in the form of a website devoted to the teachings of 'the Rebbe' a 19th century Jewish mystic, almost a Kabbalist.

Just to brighten everyone's day, a few morsels to ponder...

"Develop your awe of heaven and you will diminish your fear of everyone else's opinion."

The grandeur of the morning overshadows small nocturnal fears, something I get to see every day as I watch the sunrise over the Arabian Gulf. Small ambitions are thus easier to abandon.

"The human being is a composite of body and soul. Consequently, all our affairs and activities likewise contain elements of both body and soul-the material and the spiritual. One's mundane and routine activities are generally motivated by material and physical gain. Yet the "soul" within all these mundane affairs calls out for recognition-for the infusion of these ordinary affairs with an awareness of greater objectives and a higher purpose."

Quite easy to forget when a class is close to riot and the AC has stopped working.

"Each one of us is a microcosm of all Creation. The achievement of harmony between one's soul and one's material life, is the achievement of harmony between the heaven and earth."

Something of St John of the Cross here, I think. The idea that the soul must empty itself of self in order to be filled with God is the eternal human paradox, against which we kick and snarl.

I really must get out more..