For a long time whenever i meditate i have wandered in my mind back to Arunachala, the holy mountain in Tamil Nadu, India, which i visited when i was 19. The mountain, and the Ramana Ashram at its foot, have stayed...
I began writing my memories in this post, and i think i’ll put down some more though it is a very messy state right now. my first three years were at Farrer Primary, a small public (government) school in the newish...
At the hour of midnight on 1 January 2000 I was up a tree outside the Tate Modern, watching the fireworks shot from a barge in the Thames bursting through the smoke and London fog. I had become separated from my...
One of my favourite times in London was circa 2000 when I lived in West Hampstead, at 13 Ravenshaw street, with Jula the bellydancer and her many cats and dogs. The window of my little first floor bedroom looked out over...
my first sensations are of the light and the sun.. flooding into the front room of my grandparents’ house where my parents and i were living in Farrer, Canberra, in 1978, and the sounds of mum playing the clair de lune...
Despite his ineffable charm, Trump has again been shown to be unpopular. What this suggests to me is that if his strategy is to remain in office past the next election, then he is not going to be able to rely on...
The challenge for humanity in this century is to coordinate itself into a single organism. With the internet we now have the beginning of a central nervous system and are able to be conscious of the state of ourselves as a...
The philosophy of tolerance and of tolerating intolerance is of course an interesting paradoxical one, much more interesting than any philosophy of intolerance. The reason I can’t understand ideologies of intolerance, is that they seem to be mired in hopeless contingencies....
Imagine going about your daily life and never being sure if the people you meet around you are real humans. Some of them, no one knows quite how many, are AI powered robots that churn out the propaganda of their creators....
Science is not normally considered to be in the same category of thought as religions. And in some ways, it is in a different category. It doesn’t have quite the same ossified structures of most other religions, and it doesn’t have...
A meritocracy is a kind of evolution, a social evolution. Like biological evolution, its business is to reward the survivors, and winnow out the weak. It is a hard game but the rules are set by Nature herself. For all its...
