The plane is doing its approach to the airport. There’s a small crosswind and the aircraft sideslips onto the runway with a bit of a jolt. The left-hand wheels are on the runway now and gravity soon ensures that the right wheels touch down soon after. There is a dramatic braking and we are thrust […]

The Australian psychologist, Dorothy Rowe, who has written extensively on the issue of depression, makes the point that depressed people manufacture prisons for themselves – not to keep themselves in, but to keep the world out. Whilst this is a phenomenon taken to extremes by depressives, it seems to me that it is something we […]

Way back in July, I quoted T S Elliot, from “Little Gidding”.. “We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.” We have a prescience here, that something profound has been conveyed to us. It has […]

In last week’s blog I quoted Alfred Lord Tennyson from his Memoirs. “A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from my boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me through repeating my own name three or four times to myself silently, til all at once, as […]

Alfred Lord Tennyson, the nineteenth century English poet wrote this famous passage in his Memoirs. “A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from my boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me through repeating my own name three or four times to myself silently, til all […]

The originator of Taoism is thought to be Lao-tzu. Lao-tzu lived around 500BCE and was a contemporary of Confucius. Alan Watts, with his usual insight wrote, “The essence of Lao-tzu’s philosophy is the difficult art of getting out of one’s own way – of learning how to act without forcing conclusions, of living in skilful […]

In Chapter 13 of Augustus Finds Serenity, the sage Takygulpa Rinpoche has been asked to give advice to a religious community. Among other things he tells the assembled throng: “Do not take life too seriously. The glue that holds our communities together best is made from shared joy and good humour. Just as we are […]

My good friend, Dr Phil Harker and I have been communicating about intuition. He has some useful insights that I will share with you shortly. We shared recently, the comments of Aldous Huxley in his introduction to the Bhagavad Ghita (translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood). Huxley referred to what he called the “Perennial […]

In the Four Noble Truths the Buddha reminds us that the origin of suffering is attachment. I am going to try and convince you of the truth of this assertion. You might remember the quote from “A Course in Miracles” that I commenced my previous blog with: I am affected only by my thoughts. This […]

We have seen in a previous blog (“Consciousness and World Views” June 20 2009) of the importance of world views and how we learn to interpret the world in different ways. Chapters 2 and 16 of “Augustus Finds Serenity” deal with this subject. In essence there are essentially only two world views (or paradigms through […]