Coming to Grips with Spirituality

As many of you would know, after resigning as CEO of an electricity generator, I pursued a career as an executive coach which I found extremely rewarding. Whilst I mainly worked in organisations where I was encouraged to enhance the personal development of executives, I was sometimes also asked to coach executives that were deemed […]

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On Ageing

Being now in my eighty-first year, I thought it might be appropriate (but more likely patronising) to give you young folk some ideas about what ageing is about. I can’t pretend I’ve got it all right, but I’ll give it a shot!   There are many impacts of aging, but let’s start with some of […]

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Stacks of Energy Issues

When I graduated from university with an engineering degree I felt decidedly incompetent compared to those who were my peers. I have tremendous admiration for engineers.  They deal with and master technical complexities that leave me baffled. But, as Jordan Petersen has alluded, their competence is dealing with the Physical world and they often lack […]

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Parliamentary Contrast: Labor Cynicism vs Jacinta Price’s Courage

We recently endured budget week. There were no surprises as such because, as seems usual nowadays, everything of consequence had already been leaked to the press. But some of the detail turned out to be alarming Labor has recently found another hook to hang its profligate spending on – it’s called “intergenerational equity”. But it […]

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Is Unhappiness a Mental Illness?


Mental illness wreaks havoc with individuals, their families and friends. Most of us, unfortunately, will know someone who has suffered or is suffering from severe depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or the like. And these are serious disorders. In recent decades, society rightly, (at least on my opinion) has sought to destigmatise mental illness. But this […]

September 20, 2010

What About Relationships?


It is a source of some sadness to me, that as I get older I know more and more people who have felt compelled to end their relationships. Don’t get me wrong. There are people who have been trapped in awful incongruence and separation and divorce are gratifying escapes from intolerable situations. But it makes […]

September 15, 2010

Getting Off The Treadmill


In the tumult of modern society I see more and more people struggling psychologically. They struggle with anxiety, despair and depression. Many are on a treadmill that they are finding difficult to keep up with. The treadmill is driven by expectations of employers to keep improving the bottom line. It is driven by expectations of […]

September 8, 2010

Being and Meditation


It is difficult for human beings to just be. We are driven to meet the expectations of others, to pursue the goals of organisations and to meet, what appear to be, essential imperatives. Consequently we are soon lost in our strivings to achieve and our desires to be something we are not, to meet the […]

August 31, 2010

The Struggle With Self


Many years ago my good friend Dr Phil Harker taught me that the route to good psychological adjustment had three steps, viz. Know Yourself>Accept Youself>Forget Yourself. This has over the years, proved to be good advice. This seems such a simple formula – and it is. But it is also very profound and quite difficult […]

August 24, 2010

The Way of Vedanta


Vedanta is the wisdom of the Vedic sages. It is one of the oldest forms of religion and was the precursor to Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism and Buddhism. It is the spiritual path outlined in the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. The Ultimate Reality, according to Vedanta, is all-pervading pure consciousness. As one adept wrote, “ […]

August 19, 2010

Power and Fear


‘The Emperor of Tsin Chou province was a proud and haughty man. He was jealous of his power and authority and went to great pains to defend his little empire. He had numerous spies who were always abroad in the neighbouring provinces gathering intelligence because he was anxious that he would be attacked. Anyone who […]

August 11, 2010

The Mind of Ted


What a paradox it is that I have had an ongoing sense of identity all my life. The “I-ness” I now experience seems little different to that which I experienced when I was younger. Yet I am substantially a different person from that Ted Scott that existed thirty or forty years ago I am older […]

July 26, 2010

The Ground of Being


It is all there, all the time, everywhere and everywhence. How overwhelming but how strange seen from the limited perspective of one man or woman’s eyes, or discerned by their senses; beyond our perception and our conception and therefore beyond normal belief. And so we break it down to that little bit we can physically […]

July 21, 2010

Where To After The Monarchy?


One of the more pleasurable things that have happened to me in recent times was to become the Chair of the Fitzroy Basin Association (FBA).FBA is one of Queenslands thirteen community based Natural Resource Management (NRM) Groups. As a result of this position I get to sit on the Board of the Queensland Regional NRM […]

July 15, 2010