Practical Thoughts

Dear Reader, My comment (last week) about how the main news channels seem to deliver superficial reporting led me into reading the results of some disturbing - and other elevating - investigations into what has really happened in the world over the last 15 years. Although I have been aware of a fair amount of it for some time, the scale of it now astonishes me. Without wishing to sound like a doomsayer, I detect a certain feeling that the future of the world is coming to a head. How we are to get through the next few years, in my view, will be determined very much by how we come to see ourselves. "What are we really, physical or spirit?" is the leading question, as I see it, and I would suggest that the question can be answered individually by seeking to determine whether we allow ourselves to be controlled by fear. An article I recently read partly addresses the matter in the following statement: One of the central features of traditional societies, as outlined by ...

Dear Reader, If you think - as I do - that the news is so often of a severe nature that it can perhaps be quite unsettling, then you have my sympathy. However, the passing of a renowned boxer (Muhammed Ali a.k.a. Cassius Clay) seems to have attracted a highly disproportionate amount of attention. Having lived through the same era as he, and a keen follower of sport, I would be one of the first to applaud his very unique contribution His poetical licence, creating phrases such as "I float like a butterfly and sting like a bee" are possibly as memorable as anything Shakespeare produced. But his stand on civil rights and Vietnam considerably stand out and almost surpass his feats in the boxing ring. And in the boxing ring his style itself was often sheer poetry in what is, nevertheless, a brutal sport. But, to devote so much 'air' space to his demise on the news channels, when (for example) children are being killed and maimed in huge numbers around the world, do...