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Archive for August 2011

Doing what comes naturally (again)

29/08/2011 by Ted.

Some yeas ago I had the  privilege of travelling to Brazil and, courtesy of     P & O, cruising up the Amazon River.  During the course of the cruise passengers were invited to board a motorised canoe to explore the nearby igapo - a water-covered area of tropical rain forest - and to catch Pirhana fish. As we journeyed among the densely packed trees in our canoe we came upon a clear area and there saw, on a hill overlooking the igapo, a settlement of Brazilian Indians, men, women and children, whose bronzed skins were clad in loincloths and little else and some clutching what appeared to be spears or staffs.  Alerted by the sound of our engine they watched us pass by just as we, passing by, were watching them. And as we and they watched our Brazilian guide remarked, “They are not jealous”.  My knee-jerk response, seeing the little community of people standing there in the sunshine in that beautiful place, was, “No, but I am!”

I have often thought about them since then and compared what they are and have to what is going on in our country today.

It is a fact that in wherever “uncivilised”  man has been discovered he is observing the same basic order for his society - an order based on the family.  Invariably there is a male adult and a female adult living together and producing the next generation. Also invariably the male adult is the breadwinner responsible for begetting the necessities of life for his family, whilst the female adult has the responsibility of taking the necessities he provides and using them for the benefit of all the family members.  The community of families comprising the village or tribe all corporately share an often unspoken responsibility for the welfare of the individual families and individual members of the village or tribe, providing the support and whatever is needed in times of crisis, bereavement and so on. They rejoice together, they grieve together, they suffer together.  A village or tribe leader assisted by elders oversees the well-being and safety of the whole community, corrects transgressors, and safeguards the rules of behaviour essential to protect the community’s accepted and agreed way of life.

The UK tribe was governed by the same natural order of things up to around sixty years ago. From that time changes, too numerous to list here, have been introduced which have resulted in the fragmentation and destruction of this natural order. Today we are an unnatural and consequently sick nation.

Our tribal leaders are invariably self-seeking with energies and efforts reserved for the begetting of their own enrichment - not the welfare of the tribe. The family unit is considered  non-essential even though what has taken its place is obviously ripping the tribe apart. With the collusion of our tribal leaders the social and sexual standards of behaviour which used to  protect the family unit and the tribe in general no longer exist.

“Enlightened” tribal members argued that the pattern of life we lived by was restrictive and prevented people from doing whatever they wanted. So the pattern was discarded and allowed to be replaced by social and sexual anarchy. Seemingly, everyone is now permitted to do what seems good to them, and for them, regardless of the consequences for the rest of their fellow tribes people.

It can only get worse, for today the country is multi-racial, that is, multi-tribal. Beneath the common family pattern of each individual tribe, each sub-tribe has its own standards  of accepted behaviour and norms.  One sub-tribe may believe this is right and another believe it to be wrong to do it that way and so on.  The country now contains a mish-mash of often conflicting norms all of which have equal value and equal validity because we have dissolved the tribal rule which once gave the standard of behaviour which applied to all who lived here - whoever they were and whichever tribe they came from. And the result of that mish-mash is seen worked out in our midst every day in confrontations, conflicts and violence.

Furthermore, perhaps worse, having allowed our own tribe’s norms to dissolve into a state of social anarchy, we see ourselves now qualified to terrorise other tribes living within their own territories and to enforce them to “better their ways” and align their culture with what we do.

Today whenever I remember the folks in that little community on the hill in the Brazilian rain forest I am glad that there are people who are still living  a natural life, untroubled by all the woes and sickness of our “civilised” ways.  And if I thought that they would have me I would be there like a shot.

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Where has all the flotsam gone?

27/08/2011 by Ted.

Years ago it was true that if you needed an odd bit of something to finish a job or fill a hole you would find just what you needed if you took a walk along the tide-line on the local shore. There, washed up by the tide,  you could find a never ending supply of almost everything under the sun, from a wooden barrel or a message in a bottle to a piece of plastic or a length of rope, there were bottles and cans bearing mysterious inscriptions in strange languages - well,  just about anything.  A walk along the shore was a magical thing, almost a treasure hunt.

I remember when I was young I was particularly thrilled to one day find the weathered wooden hull of a model  yacht lying among the tangled seaweed and assorted flotsam and jetsam the tide had left behind. It had originally boasted a mast and sails, of course, and, as I tenderly picked it up  I imagined some lad sailing it, perhaps from Morecambe beach, on a receding tide and, dismayed,  watching as it was inexorably drawn out to sea by the tide.  Whatever the reason for its loss, the little yacht must have tossed around in the Irish sea for ages until, stripped of everything, the sun and sea-bleached hull finally became a castaway on a Cumbrian beach. I had never possessed a boat of my own, and that sea-worn hull became a treasured possession until at some time, as I grew up, it went missing again.

But, today, things are not the same as I particularly noticed the other day.    In this area of the coast, at least, there is very little bric-a-brac coming in with the tide.  There is the customary seaweed and on the day I was walking a number of deceased jellyfish of various sizes and one or two coke cans …….. but nothing else.  No plastic bottles, no corlene rope, no pieces of torn fishing net, no broken spars or planks of wood.

I imagined that this lack is the consequence of years of brainwashing about being green, re-cycling, not chucking stuff overboard from ships etc. - all very ergonomic and environmentally correct, but it has taken a lot of fun away from a beach-combing ramble on the seashore.

On the other hand the tides are low at present and the summer weather calm. It may be that the coming winter gales and high seas will bring in all the missing treasure to replenish that which is  now lacking, and that next year I can once again use the bounty of the seashore to provide what I am looking for.

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Millom Ironworks Local Nature Reserve.

23/08/2011 by Ted.

When I read that Copeland Council had created the Millom Ironworks Local Nature Reserve on a local slag bank, the unlikely partnership of slag bank and nature reserve did not impress me.  I didn’t even make the effort to go and see it.  The location was on the site of the long vanished iron works. I just couldn’t imagine it as anything worth either the construction or the effort of going to see it.  I was so wrong!

I hadn’t intended to visit it yesterday. The morning was bright and sunny with just a gentle breeze.  (Some might call it a wind, but anything up to a force 3 or 4 counts as a gentle breeze round here).  I had intended to follow my favourite walk through the RSPB nature reserve to White Rock and then along the beach to Millom Pier (remains of). But on my way I chanced to see a sign indicating that I was passing the entrance to the Millom Ironworks Local Nature Reserve, the home of Natterjack Toads and an abundance of worth-seeing flora and fauna. So I turned off my planned route to have a look.

The short road led to a stile which gave access onto the slag bank.  I climbed over the stile and felt the slag crunch under my feet as I ascended the bank.  I didn’t know what to expect when I got to the top, but there was my first pleasant surprise for in front of me lay the beautiful sands of the Duddon Estuary flanked on the far side by a panoramic range of the Lakeland Hills. An impressive and beautiful surprise indeed.

Just ahead of me on the slag bank was a mostly-dried-up pond which a nearby notice board said was the Natterjack Toad breeding site.  About four hundred metres further on towards the estuary was a form on which two (elderly?) gentlemen appeared o be having an animated discussion about something. And just a few hundred feet ahead of me lay what might be termed the Ayers Rock of Millom - a gi-normous iron ingot almost as big as a house, presumably created by the late Millom Ironworks and then either lost or abandoned by them.

Apart from the aforementioned Ayers Rock of Millom and the two gentlemen I had the place to myself.

The path of crushed slag gave way to shale and led off to the right. I followed it’s twisting course until it brought me eventually to the shore of the estuary.  Here a dozen brightly-painted boats lay scattered on the  sand - the tide was well out and the whole estuary was sand with just water-filled hollows and channels here and there. Noisy seagulls were making their voices heard as they waited for the tide’s return. It was a breathtaking sight. So very beautiful.

The path finally petered out and I realised that I was now walking onto Millom Pier.  This is not a pier as at Blackpool or Brighton built for entertainment purposes.  Millom Pier is massive, one of the former industrial props of Millom Iron Works, built for ocean-going ships to use for imports and exports to and from the Ironworks and Millom.  Today it is just a shadow of its former glory, but it is still massively impressive. No ships call here now.  It is scarred and has been abused by the ravages of nature and man, but it still makes its presence felt, and in a new way today.

Just like most of Millom’s former industrial sites it was accounted unworthy of further development and abandoned to nature. And over the intervening years she has turned it from an industrial showpiece into a place of natural beauty with rabbits and wild plants and sand dunes and marran grass where myriads of wild flowers grow. Today it is one of my favourite places, and, for me,  a fitting finale to my unintended venture into Millom Ironworks Local Nature Reserve. It is well worth a visit if you are in the area.

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Just imagine …..

16/08/2011 by Ted.

As a picture projected onto a television screen is only an image, so what I call “seeing” is only the perception of light energy protons reflected from an object onto the retina of my eye. The object I see may exist as a physical entity, but what reaches me is merely an image carried by light photons – a form of energy. The physical substance of the object imaged on my retina is only my assumption.

When I close my eyes and imagine, what I perceive are, again, images – images as unsubstantial as the images impressed upon my retina by photons of light when I have my eyes open. The images are, however, created by me and may be of anything I choose.

For instance, there may be a number of rabbits in the park. When I walk past them with my eyes open I observe them move under cover when they see me, and their images then become unperceived as far as I am concerned.

However if I later close my eyes and perceive the rabbits with my imagination I can cause them, instead of moving under cover, to move towards me unafraid. They allow me to stroke their fur, and I am able to feel the texture of their fur beneath my hand. My mind’s eye easily perceives the colour of the fur which I am stroking.

Both instances are the impression of unsubstantial images upon my senses. Both are composed of the same basic energy which comprises everything. So which image is most real – or is each as real as the other?

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What happens when you die?

05/08/2011 by Ted.

Don’t panic - this is not a religious tract.

In about 2001 I came across and purchased a book, Life after Life by Dr. Raymond Moody, in which Raymond Moody investigates more than one hundred case studies of people who experienced “clinical death” and were subsequently revived. Dr. Moody’s findings were exciting and triggered my interest in actively investigating what other evidence existed concerning the after-death state. The internet provided the means to discover and access this evidence.

Perhaps my first encounter was with a gentleman named Frederick Myers, one of the co-founders of the Psychical Research Society.  He was a victorian who had no belief or interest in life after death until his wife died - and then, according to some, apparently personally contacted him in a way which convinced him that she was still a living, conscious entity and not “dead and finished” as it was fashionable to believe. So significant was this wifely contact that his life from then on was devoted to an investigation into the evidence for and against survival after death. His research is minutely detailed in large Victorian tomes which now rest in the archives of the Psychical Research Society but to which access is available on the internet. However, despite his unceasing search for evidential proof that life continued after death, he died without discovering it.

Then, “within a few weeks of Myers’s death in 1901, some very strange communications began to be received by psychics in England, the United States and India. They came through automatic writing to a total of a dozen psychics and continued for a period of thirty years and then later by his fellow leaders of the Society for Psychical Research, Professor Henry Sidgwick and Edmund Gurney as they too died. What was strangest about them was that they made no sense. Or perhaps they did - for they were so mysteriously worded that it almost seemed their meaning was being deliberately concealed. And most of them were signed, “Myers.” In all more than three thousand scripts were transmitted over thirty years. Some of them were more than forty typed pages long.

But although the text of the messages seemed indecipherable, the ‘instructions’ which often accompanied them were clear. These instructions repeated a number of themes. The ’script’ should be sent to a particular person, who would turn out to be one of the other psychics involved. Or it should be sent to the Society for Psychical Research. And that although its content may seem to be senseless, it was in reality anything but: it was an attempt by the deceased communicator to prove his continued existence. These instructions and explanations were, in fact, frequent and explicit. “Record the bits,” wrote Myers, “and when fitted they will make the whole.” And again, “I will give the words between you that neither alone can read but together they will give the clue.”

These communications are today known as the Cross-Correspondences.

(the above paragraph is an extract from http://www.trans4mind.com/spiritual/myers1.html, which please read for the remainder of this fascinating window into survival after death.)

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Doing a what comes naturally.

05/08/2011 by Ted.

This morning I watched a family of house martins skimming around the field at the side of my house as they caught and ate their breakfast of flying insects.  In a month or two they will fly to South Africa, but next year at this time the scene will be the same again. Two adults of the group will have returned to their mud nest under the eaves of the house across the way, and there, once again, they will raise two broods of young. When the young leave their nest next year they will join their parents and,  just as today, feed on the local flying insects until it is time to go to South Africa - and so on, and so on - as regular as predictable as clockwork. They do this every year just to produce the next generation - to perpetuate the species.  It is for them natural - what they do best - and they never want to do anything else.  They are just being house martins.

Later this year the farmer will put some of his livestock into the field - usually cows first and then sheep.  I used to wonder at the boredom of their lives as they spent the whole day with their heads down just grazing.  But it doesn’t seem to bother them - they just get on and do it.  They are just being sheep or cows.  That is what they do.

Later this morning I went for a walk along the sea-wall. Unusually for this part of the world there was not a breath of wind,  just a gentle mizzle of tiny raindrops which was quite refreshing.  At the sea-wall the tide was coming in.  Without a wind behind it the water  flowed gently across the sand.  There were no waves. Sandy gullies were filling with hardly a ripple.  I stood and watched this rare sight for a while - usually waves beat against the sea-wall, but not today.  It was a scene of peace and tranquility, so that even the mewing of the gulls on a distant still-waiting-to-be-covered sandbank could clearly be heard. So beautifully natural.  And, once again, the sea was just being itself and, peacefully this morning without the wind, doing what it did best, just as it will do tomorrow and next week and next year and so on.

Later I turned on the news which gave an account of what mankind was doing on that day.  What a drastic change.  Mayhem and murder, violence and trouble, crisis and confusion. Totally shattered my euphoric state of the morning.

Why is mankind, the most advanced and intelligent of all living things,  in such a sad way? With himself, and almost everything else? What are we doing wrong? It surely isn’t natural, but it seems, without doubt, what we do best. Why?

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