Creativity as Medicine

Creativity is Medicine: It allows the Tao to flow through your existence.

True creativity, not just the act of drawing or designing something to order, but the act of allowing your conciousness to play with and re-arrange bits of reality according to whatever range of frequencies it happens to find fascinating at this moment.

If you feel stagnant and stale, you need to free this Creative Spirit and allow its untrammeled expression to blow away your cobwebs and give your life some zing! Irrational and pointless it may seem, but life reduced to a series of rational points soon becomes Very Dull Indeed.

Evolution

I never really accepted the theory that evolution is a random process, rather than a response to environment. A plant responds to its environment by turning its leaves towards the light. This isn't a random thing (you don't see random fluctuations in the way the leaves are facing), it's a direct response to the light source.
Isn't it likely that a species indulges in the same response to environment, only over a longer timeframe? Generational mutation as a means of maximising survival in the current environment. Primal cellular conciousness adapting to changing conditions rather than a haphazard random walk...

Honourable Members of Parliament

Amidst all the accusations of MPs fiddling the system that've come out these past couple of weeks, I think probably their worst (and most characteristic) action was to force the Speaker of the House to resign. They made him a scapegoat essentially because he refused to condemn THEIR actions! Typical of politicians to try to deflect attention from their own wrongdoing.

Dark Moon Rising

Just had a BNP leaflet come through the door, in aid of our upcoming local and Euro elections, and you can see how they're playing on all the nationalist sentiments in order to capitalise on both the recession and the recent expenses scandal in British politics. Sickening thing is they're probably going to do well as people are so hacked off with the mainstream parties that they're not going to bother voting. Reminds me of Weimar Germany in the 1930s - hard times leading to people losing all faith in politics leading directly to nutters getting into power and making things a hundred times worse for everyone. There's no easy solution to what's going on at present, but I hope it isn't the thin end of the wedge for a return of nationalist hatreds. People forget far too quickly.

Foolishness

It never ceases to amaze me how some people can spend hours and hours of their lives talking about how they never have enough time to get things done.

Paper Christians

I saw some news footage last week of the ridiculous fisticuffs between rival sects of self-proclaimed Christians in the shrine at Bethlehem. It's hard to think of any better example of rank hypocrisy really. There they are in what they consider to be one of the holiest places on Earth, followers of a preacher of peace, love & fellowship, and they're brawling like schoolchildren, or egotistical soccer stars, or Friday night binge-drinkers. Official monks and priests this is mind, not the great unwashed.

How can they actually claim to follow Christ if they indulge in this sort of behaviour? Where does it say in the gospels, "If someone disagrees with you, thou shalt smite him in the face"?
Perhaps they should read Matthew 15, 8-9 - they wear the costumes and talk the talk but they're certainly not walking the walk. I'm no Christian but it seems abundantly clear that the man these people claim to revere would be horrified by their conduct.

Maybe it's a case for Martin Shaw's new character Father Jacob!

Politicians, eh?

I heard our Foreign Secretary on the radio yesterday, speaking about the Russia/Georgia debacle going on at the moment. He said something along the lines of Russia having to accept that the days of solving international disputes by force belonged to yesteryear.
Someone should tell him what our British armed forces have been up to in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last few years. He's obviously completely unaware of what's been going on else he'd not have come out with such rank hypocrisy.
Mind you, if it's the one I'm thinking of, he looks like he hasn't left school long so perhaps he was too busy sitting exams to notice when we trundled in ill-equipped and under-financed.

Thinking further on this Russia/Georgia situation, it's interesting how forgetful our western media can become when it's convenient for them. It strikes me that the two provinces who want to secede from Georgia are doing exactly the same thing that Kosovo wanted to do in removing itself from Serbia a few years ago. Russia hasn't done anything to Georgia that NATO didn't do to Serbia - we bombed the hell out of Serbian infrastructure until they gave in. How come it's okay for NATO to do it but not for Russia to do it? At least they've got some ethnic Russians they can claim to be "liberating". All we were "liberating" in Kosovo were their coal and mineral reserves!

Violence is rarely the answer to anything of course. When the tanks start rolling and bombs start falling it's invariably civilians who suffer the most. I find it hard to believe that war-mongers can still get away with this sort of behaviour in the 21st century but I suppose human nature only changes very slowly, if at all. You'd think without all the communism/capitalism rubbish getting in the way we'd all be able to get on alot better now, but it seems like various interested parties are determined to keep things boiling over occasionally. When politicians cave into them, they cut away any claim they subsequently make to higher moral ground , which is why this western clamour over Russian behaviour sticks in my throat. It's like a diving footballer complaining when a member of the opposing team takes a dive! "You can't go thundering into Georgia like that, ya damn Ruskies! Why, if we weren't busy accidentally killing scores of civilians in Afghanistan with our gung-ho, trigger-happy, kill-em-all punitive policies we'd come right over there an' sort ya out!"