Education
From The Outsider onwards, published in 1956, Colin Wilson was concerned to investigate the nature of human consciousness: an ‘outsider’, a term he sought to refine later, was/is a person with a cast of mind different from the norm. In The Age of Defeat he is explicit about the way consciousness can be defined as […]
The Wild Beyond Echoing (James Hackett’s Haiku Way) – Paul Russell Miller. Grandad Publishing 2021 145 pages ISBN 978-1-9995931-4-8 Published Friday August 6th 2021 marking what would have been James Hackett’s 92nd birthday. £10 plus postage directly from pr.miller@live.co.uk We write haiku perhaps often by imitating what we see in print. It might be worth […]
Having hunted through the tons of files in my computer as I sometimes do, I seem to have addressed the issue of ‘consciousness’ many times for one purpose or another. My renewed enthusiasm for pursuing the subject of ‘consciousness’ has been stimulated by finding the writing of haiku dumbed down by the popularity in some […]
We amble along living from day to day, whatever the circumstances, locked into the prison of a long succession of present moments which we don’t normally think about; they add up to what we have grown into the unexamined habit of calling ‘consciousness’; because we have the word we take it for granted that ‘consciousness’ […]
In this time of plague we constantly hear from the profiteering Power Possessors how everything must be done to ‘save the economy’, including opening the schools and sending children back into what could still be a dangerous environment. Though I’m fairly convinced that sending them back is probably just so their parents, instead of having […]
It is suggested that one result of Lockdown is that people are reading books. Wow! They haven’t been doing that? In the last three months I’ve had my habitual average read for the last 60 years – 15 quite demanding books. I have been described as a ‘chain reader’. Having completed my third or fourth […]
In the same dark corner where I found Living by Zen I discovered another book by DTSuzuki – Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism. Alan Watts did the introduction and wrote about the cultivation of intellectual silence when desirable ‘to be aware of whatever happens to be, without thinking about it, without forming words & symbols in […]
For the whole of 2020, I was reading the works of JBPriestley. I found that a familiar pattern in his novel writing went like this:- • First you imagine what’s going on ‘elsewhere’ • Then you endow it with something more wonderful than could ever be the case • Then you realise it couldn’t be […]
Music is a pump for inflating the soul: hypertrophic souls turned into huge balloons rise to the ceiling of the concert hall and jostle each other in unbelievable congestion… (Milan Kundera: Immortality) ✺ In Plaguetime I greatly miss playing the recorders with CoMA Firewire in Colchester; I have composed some music in the mean time […]
‘We’re all in this together’ is a meaningless slogan invented by the Boss Class to make us think that we’re all suffering the hardship they impose on us to the same extent as they do – whether as a result of Austerity (a political ruse), getting out of the EU (an absurdity forced on half […]
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