A Facebook group I belong to has been dredging up old photos of my mother’s side of the family. It has been a real delight to see them. As I sit here on Mother’s Day, appropriately, I have been reminiscing over photos of my mother and maternal grandmother, two fine women who were very influential […]
The English Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, wrote a sonnet with the great title The World is too much with us. And indeed far too often in our lives this seems to be the case. We forget about the great wonder and mystery of life and are overly concerned with paying the mortgage, our personal appearance, […]
It seems as though an outburst on Facebook inspired by his fundamentalist Christian beliefs might have ended the international rugby career of Israel Folau. Folau reportedly posted on his Facebook page an admonitory warning that “drunks, homosexuals, adulterers, liars and fornicators” are headed to hell unless they repent. It was nice of him to be […]
Once we become aware of our consciousness, human beings have to negotiate life taking into consideration we have to deal with a world “in here” (our internal world which is really our theatre of mind) and a world “out there” (the external world which provides the physical environment of our existence). (The transpersonal psychologist, Ken […]
It seems to me that many attempts at social engineering with regard to the equality of the sexes are doomed to failure because they don’t recognise the inherent biological differences between men and women. A recent ABC news bulletin decried the fact that there were still many more male CEO’s than female CEO’s and on […]
Over the last four centuries Western Societies have evolved to more liberal and more inclusive democracies. Democracy was famously defined in Lincoln’s Gettysburg address as: ……government of the people, by the people, for the people. Notwithstanding the fact that Lincoln seems to have plagiarised the words of American Unitary minister and abolitionist, Theodore Parker, it […]
There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families. Margaret Thatcher Modern Western nations seem to be obsessed with consumerism. This is attested to by the fact that the principal measure of progress seems to be Gross Domestic Product (GDP). I have in other essays explained the […]
In Buddhist philosophy we are warned to counter and avoid “afflictive emotions”. Such emotions are unhelpful because they result in no useful outcomes but have deleterious effects on those who experience them. The sages maintain that the worst of such emotions is guilt. Guilt helps no one and yet can be quite debilitating to those […]
I take up this topic with some trepidation. It will more than likely cause me to be labelled racist or xenophobic, but there are a few concerning issues here that we cannot continue to ignore. With respect to migration Australia has been a generous country. After the Second World War we opened our gates to […]
In the history of Western civilisation, the notion of undertaking paid work for a living is a relatively modern idea. Hunter/gatherers worked somewhat cooperatively in their various tribes and to a certain degree shared the fruits of the hunt, the catch and the various gatherings. But these were subsistence societies who only occasionally traded and […]