In The Pageant of Summer (the first essay in The Life of the Fields (1884)) Jefferies wrote:- My heart is fixed firm and stable in the belief that ultimately the sunshine and the summer, the flowers and the azure sky, shall become, as it were, interwoven into man’s existence. He shall take from all their […]
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 […]
All life is fiction but it fails to get recorded as fiction. Reading high literature is the cleanest, neatest form of learning about life that there is. Last Christmas I determined to re-read the whole of Iris Murdoch – all 26 novels. I’ve got to number 8… The Italian Girl In The Unofficial Rose, Mildred […]
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 […]
This scheme of things is familiar to all followers of the 4th Way – The Ray of Creation depicted on the Octave… What are we to make of this? Unless we attempt to go beyond intellectual acceptance – to feel it on the pulse and take deliberate steps towards understanding – it will remain a […]
Multiple-I’s? We imagine that we are just one single ‘I’—‘I’ brush my teeth, ‘I’ go to work, ‘I’ play with my kids, ‘I’ get angry, ‘I’ think, ‘I’ feel tired, ‘I’ dig the garden, ‘I’ shell peas, and so on; talking & thinking in a language with ‘ego’, we are bamboozled by the linguistic necessity […]
Humankind has Experience Or rather it has experiences which it builds into what it likes to think of as the invented abstraction ‘Experience’. Things happen down the years and it—humankind, better thought of, with its eager bombs & drones, as ‘humanunkind’—builds them into some kind of homogeneity—‘Experience’. Things happen—they are built into an edifice called […]
Do you, as I do, have rows of old notebooks, going back years and years? I once used the yard of adolescent diaries to make a novel called The Unremembered Joke, thinking I’d be able at last to throw them all away; the joke is that, though writing the novel helped me to deal finally […]
Make a determined effort to capture it, right now! It’s a slippery customer, isn’t it? As soon as you shift your attention from this flow of words and begin to stretch out your hands (as it were) to capture whatever it might be wherever it is it eludes your grasp, doesn’t it? If you deny […]
Book-learning often has a bad press. Mere book-learning, they spit out between pursed lips… But it’s worth asking exactly what one does get from books… The short answer might be that it depends what you do with the words you ingest. The longer answer is, perhaps, that it all depends on what is happening to […]
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