We live in a strange world where its inhabitants, called humans, have a weird tendency to believe that other humans are fundamentally different to them and opposed to them. Don’t go to Planet Earth – the inhabitants there are dangerous, mainly to themselves. This is a bizarre aspect of this particular world.
That’s a paragraph from my book Blogging in Bethlehem. I woke up this morning with the idea to serialise it as an audio book.
But then I wondered whether enough people would be interested to justify the effort. It’s not a very long book (unusually for me). At a guess it would land up as three hours of listening, sectioned into 30ish minute segments.
So I’m wondering about that. Any views?
I can’t start today anyway, because the wind is rattling around too much for sound recording! But I have my cancer treatment tomorrow/Weds – a nurse comes round and it takes just 45 mins. I might well be buzzing on that sufficiently in the following two days to start recording – you never know. Depends on the winds.
My life goes in four-week cycles and treatment affects my psyche, stomach and daily life for around a week. That’s weird for an astrologer who has lived life attuned to natural cycles of a more elastic kind, rather than to a calendrically-regularised grinding cog of time, with a periodicity determined by medication.
Down’ere at the end of Cornwall, stuck out in the Atlantic, we’re getting a lot of high wind and storming. It’s a bit reminiscent of the stormy winter of 2014. The birds are lying low.
And talking of calendars – specifically Gregorian ones – may the rest of your year remain happy. In the end, happiness is a decision of the heart, not an ideal set of circumstances that only occasionally crop up – then they go again. Happy times.
Rather like Greenwich Mean Time, the Gregorian calendar is a vestige of European imperialism. Nowadays it’s neatly called the ‘Common Era’, as if to conceal its origins, and GMT is re-named UT, or ‘universal time’ – except the universe doesn’t follow it.
It might be one of those post-colonial vestiges that stick around for some time. Perhaps the only situation to change this will come when we finally adjust our lives on Earth to the wider universe.
Until such a time, since we’re dangerous, we’re under a form of quarantine. Dangerous to the universe and dangerous to ourselves. Most strange.
It sounds simple, but the solution is happiness (as a decision of the heart). The way things are now, though, it looks really complex. Especially with vexatious warring and all manner of dissonances going on.
It needs modelling and shoving through supercomputers because we believe we can sort things out mentally, if only we have enough data. But mentality simply sorts data, even if intelligently. Decisions are made in the heart, the womb and the gut – the parts that AI can only imitate, though it cannot reach.
At this juncture of history, we have a lot of rather big decisions to make. We humans need to get more happy and become less dangerous. Less dissonance, more resonance.
It will affect climate change in a big way, with instantaneous results.
Think about it. But not too much. And I won’t either.
With love, Palden
‘Blogging in Bethlehem’ is available free to download as a PDF here:
www.palden.co.uk/pop/order.html
Notes from the Far Beyond 