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, 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, 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, This is a real "Where do I come from, Daddy?" story! There have been many plausible attempts to identify the location of the Biblical Garden of Eden and, after my research over the last three years, I can now present what seems to be (to me, at least) the most likely story. This account is based on a combination of two important sources, one ancient (again from India!) and one from modern research into an ancient source. Having discussed, in my last three posts, the topic of the importance of India in the development of western thought over a very long period of time, the question could be asked why it was that while Europe was apparently evolving out of a Stone Age, India (and Egypt for that matter) was in an advanced state of civilisation? The answer, partly at least, is because India and Egypt and surrounding lands were not in the grip of the Ice Age that caused the very northern parts of Europe to be uninhabitable for a long stretch of time. The various peopl...

Dear Reader, We have, clearly, mismanaged the resources of the earth, water and the sky. With all the universities and halls of knowledge that we enjoy in the West, just where have we gone wrong in our identification of Truth and how to apply it? Western education still appears to be telling us that everything we now know comes from the study and experimentation of the last four hundred years or so, based on rational thought. My previous two posts will have surely put a seed of doubt into the reader's mind, as, based on the sources of considerable evidence available, what I have written is correct, and that western knowledge is very much based on previous knowledge of great antiquity; that the source of that knowledge lies in India.  Even then, much of what India knew was unknown to the West until very recent times. And, very importantly, India knew (and knows) one more important aspect that the West has yet to address: how to live in balance with nature. Despite receiving such poo...

Dear Reader, When we look at what is happening around us in the world, it would be easy to feel negativity in response to what we see. Afghanistan is one place that causes me to feel utter sorrow at what has been perpetrated there. Much has been wrong in that country for decades - before Western intervention - but now that 'we' have pulled out, the situation has just got immeasurably worse. But it's not just there. There have been several Middle Eastern countries where people have been reduced to desperate measures just to survive. And the effect of Climate Change in many countries, such as (but not only) Madagascar. South America is another region where much desperation exists.  But there are rays of hope. In Peru a simple country woman named Maxima fought largely American-owned gold mining giants who had perpetrated the deaths of local people as a result of poisoning their water supplies, and in general behaving like bullies towards Maxima and others. They tried to usurp ...

Dear Reader, Daddy's answer to the child's question about his origins might lie in the proverbial gooseberry bush, of course, or Daddy could be more forthright and tell the child more fully about the birds and the bees. But there's another, possibly more profound, meaning in the question. It could be interpreted as a question about who we are as a culture; what is our culture?  I suppose we all know that we British are more of an amalgam created from Latin and Germanic sources than anything else, but where lies the root of the Latin and Germanic peoples? This is a question that you might say is only relevant to the academic; that in this day and age we are merely concerned about survival and "progress". Er, except that the definition of "progress" is now very questionable given the nature of environmental and climate change issues, apart from social problems - not just in our little part of the world but increasingly around the world where 'the West...