Practical Thoughts

Dear Reader, With all that has been going on these past few years, do we not feel that we are in need of not just practical solutions but some enlightened leadership? From where might we obtain the most beneficial leadership? A few months ago, I wrote a piece that described the cultural debt that Europe and the western world, in general, owe India , However, I did not go into a discussion about how India influenced the whole of the Far East as well, as far as China and Indonesia. If I had then it is certain that India's past would appear as having been truly magnificent. And it was. India itself, in fact, once covered far more territory north, west and east of its current domain - far more, even, than the 19th c. map shows below.  There is an educated tendency to think that if that was so, that is pure history, that time has moved on and other world influences have taken over; that the India of old is pure history. And, that is how it might appear on the surface. The key matter is ...

Dear Reader, Well, in the past two years we have experienced COVID and are still trying to find out how to live with it as it continues to mutate, and now we have another war at hand - virtually on the UK's doorstep - in the Ukraine. This war has sparked off a crisis in two major economic respects - the supply of energy forms (gas and oil) and the supply of wheat and other foodstuffs. The effect of the foregoing issues - and the already existing  effects of the   Climate Change situation - has precipitated an enormous increase in the cost of living, not only in foodstuffs but also, and particularly, the cost of energy. We all know that the situation for many has got to the point of having to choose between eating or heating. The UK prime minister has gone so far as to admit that poorer people in the UK may have to choose between buying food to keep the body alive or energy to keep warm. This has come after the prime minister announced what the government's energy strategy woul...

Dear Reader, Who remembers Mantovani, Frank Sinatra, Matt Munro, Doris Day, Kenny Ball, Cat Stevens or even Sounds Orchestral or Dana? And who remembers " What A Wonderful World" as sung by the throaty Louis Armstrong ? More particularly, firstly listen to his intro. Once upon a time, popular music contained a great variety of different forms (genres) of music, including many ballads, folk music and light jazz, as well as beat music in general. I can remember the occasional piano  recital  or even an orchestral 'hit' in the 'charts', but that occurs no more. Once upon a time, you could usually understand what a singer was singing about! And the change has all happened in the last 30 years. Increasingly over that time, noise and gadgets and the drive towards an improved national economy, 'getting on in life' and ownership of 'things' have taken over the lives of many people. And to the extent that the need for the ability to sit quietly and cont...

Dear Reader, As we can all see, Ukraine and its people are already so badly damaged to the extent that it is hard to believe what Russia will gain out of it apart from a bloated ego. At the same time, surely it is wrong to blacken the name of all Russian people, a country that has produced the likes of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky and Solzhenitsyn. The ordinary people have suffered hard and long and it is their great misfortune that the leadership of their country has usually been found wanting.  Yet it would seem that serious attempts are being made in some quarters to tarnish all Russians because of their ego-centred leader. Is the West so good? When we think back to what has been perpetrated by the West in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya (all under 'false flags'), apart from the Syria situation, I can only think that Putin has been looking at what has been done by the 'good' West over the whole of his reign as Russia's president and has decided, "Well, if th...

Dear Reader, My last four posts have talked a lot about India and how its advanced civilisation of thousands of years ago influenced the rest of the world, as recently as within the last 500 years. And yet we are generally unmindful of that influence; we do not acknowledge it even if we know about it. Yet that wisdom is still there in the place of its origin, India. Now, why is this such an important issue and not just a lesson about history? It is so important because we in the West have only absorbed the end product of India's wisdom, in its numerical system and sciences in general. We have absorbed them as facts and have ignored the basis from which those facts emerged so very long ago and so far away. The essential corollary to those facts is the wisdom teaching itself, and if we have ignored that wisdom teaching while accepting only that which we have taken to be practically useful, surely we have missed something. What do I mean by that? Well, part of what I am alluding to is...

Dear Reader, The technology of today is amazing, isn't it, compared to what I remember back in the 1950s when we were only just emerging into the world of TV and jet aircraft. Though computers were then being developed, ordinary people knew virtually nothing about them then and that was true of other technology such as lasers. The structure of DNA had still not been identified. In the UK, quite a number of people still lived in houses with outside toilets back then. Supermarkets only began to take hold in the late 1950s while comparatively few people could afford a motor car. Travelling abroad was a mere glimmer of hope in the eyes of most. Many people took pride in looking after their gardens and even growing their own vegetables. A fairly ordinary garden in the UK of ca. 1960 So, today, when many people concern themselves almost entirely with their I-pads and streaming videos, it might do no harm to reflect back on how everyday life has changed so dramatically in the last 60 or 7...

Dear Reader, We have just been made aware of the United Nations report on the state of Climate Change from their perspective, and it's a daunting picture. But it's a picture that the world knew of decades before, is it not? Many ignored the indicators that were clear back then. In 1975 I came to a realisation about what was happening and started to make adjustments to my life. In 2013, in my 70th year, I wrote a book. It was the culmination of many years of observation on how the world was developing, combined with a proposed philosophy (born out of no little experience) to meet the situation that existed. The book included, near its beginning, the following quotes from Albert Einstein, famous for his theories on physics but also a philosopher in his own right. The quotations are all to do with Man releasing himself from 'the prison'  in which Man has put himself: A human being is a part of a whole, called by us ‘universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experienc...

  Dear Reader, The situation that exists today calls for a certain action based on a real consciousness of what life is supposed to be about. Kahlil Gibran, the spark of poetic genius in the early 20th c., wrote: All things in this creation exist within you, and all things in you exist in creation; there is no border between you and the closest things, and there is no distance between you and the farthest things, and all things, from the lowest to the loftiest, from the smallest to the greatest, are within you as equal things. In one atom are found all the elements of the earth; in one motion of the mind are found the motions of all the laws of existence; in one drop of water are found the secrets of all the endless oceans; in one aspect of you are found all the aspects of existence. Like the mystic William Blake, the Christian yet eastern-inspired Gibran thinks that there is an entire human soul distributed to partial souls, and that man is an entity in his soul as well as in his ...

Dear Reader , My previous post - suggesting the need to change our way of thinking - is entirely relevant to today's post. For the call is - and has been for a very long time - to be more imaginative in how we deal with all kinds of matters, especially in considering the impact that our ideas and actions have on the planet and the environment. But it does seem to me that imagination has been increasingly stifled in the past 20 or so years in the era of globalisation that emerged with the new millennium, and the corresponding attempt at standardising educational systems, particularly in the West and countries strongly influenced by Western thinking. In particular, the clamour and the focus seems to be definitely fixed on AI as the means to a better economic future. No matter how adaptable and useful AI may become, however, it cannot replace the human ability to check in on feelings and intuitive stimuli. Simply speaking, human connectivity is surely worth a great deal more t...