I’ve been pondering the idea Gurdjieff/Ouspensky, refer to as ‘Magnetic Centre’, a certain something-or-other inside us that plays some part in the development and maintenance of enhanced consciousness in human life. It sounds very elitist but in the circumstances of life as we find them, it is an objective fact that only a very few […]
‘I believe I’m on a train going to Colchester…’ At the time of writing with a fountain pen that certainly was the case: I could feel the train wheels doing just what they were supposed to do and I felt the periodic jolts, slowings down and gettings faster. But to use the words ‘I believed […]
A Facebook friend Joe Van Myers posted a paper by SCRWeightman called ‘The Domains of Discourse’ (Systematics Vol 7 December 1969). A previous paper contained a pyramid-shaped model which was intended to depict the relationship between Language, Speech and Meaning as mutually exclusive contributions to the supposed Unity of the experience of self:- ‘Self-unity’ is […]
How do we make sense of things? At a meta-level, how do we make sense of the way we make sense of things? Making Sense of Sense-making is the title of an article by Thompson & Stapleton first published on-line on 20th December 2008. It is subtitled ‘Reflections on Enactive and Extended Mind Theories’. For […]
I’ve just produced ROOM FIVE—a loose collection of philosophical, literary, anti-capitalist and anarchistic autobiographical ramblings. The series started in 2001 with a book, originally simply called ROOM, that was supposed to be stand-alone but the book’s format and discipline has become a kind of obsession: ROOM SIX is in production and I have it in […]
Thus spake Socrates… For the past eight weeks or so I have been engaged by a very stimulating Coursera on-line course on the subject of Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)—Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity. He’s a philosopher who does not warrant a mention even in the footnotes of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy—probably because […]
Under a Spell My struggle to come to terms with the concept ‘God’ goes back fifty-five years. In those days, I had not long emerged from a very severe bout of attendance at all the Sunday services in the quaint & homely early 20th Century suburban church where my parents had, before this, insisted on […]
Open-mindedness You have no business to believe me. I ask you to believe nothing that you cannot verify for yourself… If you have not a critical mind, your visit here is useless. GIGurdjieff In the beginning it feels like we cannot but choose to believe certain things: that food will appear from somewhere, bottle or […]
Bunter Brown At Kingston Grammar School (1949-1954) ‘Bunter’ Brown taught us Ancient Greek. You could see when he was not too sure whether he was actually succeeding in teaching us the ins and outs of irregular verbs and Xenophon’s glittering strategic excitements or Socrates’ Defence because he would start to chew the inside of his […]
This is a complete re-write of something I first penned in September 2008… There’s a preamble that emphasises how the Enneagram functions as a universal generative model of ‘reality’. It can be made to apply to anything. I tell of my first brush with the Enneagram in relation to Personality Constructs. There is a description […]
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