ISOLATION is something SAS: Who Dares Wins star Ollie Ollerton knows a thing or two about.

During his time in the Special Forces, he would spend weeks locked down with just a handful of comrades for company, waiting for high pressure operations to begin.

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TV host Ollie, 48, says: Youd be in a remote hangar somewhere, or waiting on a frigate, and youd have no idea if or when the operation would go down. We would have no contact with the outside world, its just you and your crew.

It could be tense not knowing if or when you were going into battle, but you just get through it. I think its why this lockdown isnt bothering me too much now!

But Ollie knows that for many people, lockdown is proving enormously challenging - financially, mentally and physically.

He hopes his new book, Battle Ready, will help - with techniques for changing your mindset for the better, no matter how dark the circumstances.

In the book, Ollie reveals for the first time that he was suicidal, after years of abusing alcohol and drugs.

Having left the Special Boat Service (SBS) in 2000, he went to work in Iraq as a security consultant, before following a girlfriend to Australia. It was during the subsequent years that he had panic attacks so bad he considered ending it all.

He writes: Id had a death wish sat on my shoulder for years. Maybe once or twice Id tried to appease it, pushing the envelope of danger a little too hard. But this was different, it wouldnt be a case of Ollie Ollerton, Special Forces soldier died bravely while engaged in a clandestine operation, but by my own hand.

Ollie says it has taken him until now to reveal exactly how much of a pit he had sunk into because he feared being seen as a cliche".

He says: In my own head I thought I sounded like a cliche. I think thats what holds a lot of people back from speaking out. But I wanted to be totally open and honest in this book. I am sick of people faking perfection.

At one point I could barely string a sentence together because I was in that much of a world of pain

For the same reason, Ollie speaks candidly about his alcohol addiction. While he was in the military, Ollie describes himself as a successful working alcoholic, bingeing while on leave but keeping it separate from the daring work he did in the SBS.

But once the structure of military life fell away and he entered the civilian world, his addiction spiralled out of control.

Meanwhile, he bounced between toxic relationships - Ollie says the first time he was ever single was aged 41 - and also started overusing Valium and steroids.

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Ollie says: At one point I could barely string a sentence together because I was in that much of a world of pain.

"A lot of that was self-induced because there were drinking issues, I was over-excessively using Valium, I was on a path of destruction. I am an extremist, so once I went down that road I got very good at it unfortunately.

It was a chance meeting with a Special Forces contact who organised missions to save kids sold into the sex industry in South East Asia which was to provide Ollie with a path out of the darkness.

He went to Thailand with his contacts organisation, Grey Man, to rescue children sold into prostitution. On one mission alone they rescued 22 kids.

Ollie recalls: We had to do the job without weapons, so there were a lot of risks involved. But knowing these kids had been sold by their parents into a life where they knew they were going to be abused, that just didnt compute.

"For me, the goal was greater than than any risk. I had never felt settled in the Special Forces; it was my dream but when I got there it still didnt fulfil me. But then doing that work in Thailand, I finally felt fulfilled.

The Thai authorities, embarrassed by how Grey Man had highlighted their own failure to deal with the sex trade, put a stop to the organisations activities and threw them out of the country. But a new goal had been planted in Ollie - he wanted to do work that helped people.

He was living in Australia at the time but decided he needed to move back to Britain - and get clean.

Ollie says: I went to my mums cottage in Cornwall, which was empty, and I put myself into my own personal bootcamp to get my drinking under control. I got into a routine of healthy habits and that is still something I do to this day.

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I dont drink anymore. Everything in my life has to have a purpose and if it doesnt it has to go. And alcohol just for me wasnt serving any purpose whatsoever.

Newly sober, Ollie set up his training company, Break Point, and later accepted a role as one of the DS (directing staff) on Channel 4 show SAS: Who Dares Wins, alongside fellow ex-Special Forces heroes Ant Middleton, Jason Foxy Fox and Mark Billy Billingham.

Having had time to reflect, Ollie says his addiction issues dont stem from any of the horrors he experienced in the Special Forces, but from his unusual childhood trauma - almost getting killed by a rogue circus chimp when he was ten.

Ollie had been transfixed by a baby chimp backstage at the circus in his hometown of Burton-on-Trent, when its 50kg mother suddenly leapt from the darkness and almost mauled him to death.

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The experience was so traumatic that Ollie says it erased all his happy childhood memories, and as an adult it was what he tried to drown out with drink and drugs.

Ollie says: You cant expect something like that not to haunt you if you dont deal with it.

Recently, Ollie made an attempt to address his chimp trauma once and for all - with a mystic drug ceremony in Costa Rica.

He travelled to South America to take part in the ritual consumption of ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic plant said to induce visions which heal past trauma and spark spiritual enlightenment.

It may sound weird, but Ollie says it worked for him. He said: Ayahuasca helped me to stop seeing myself as the victim. In my vision I literally was the chimp and it helped me see it from the chimps point of view. She must have been very unhappy chained up in the circus, then she saw me as a threat to her young.

As the coronavirus crisis continues, Ollie is currently isolating at home in Shropshire with partner Laura, her son William and best mate Foxy - his co-star on SAS: Who Dares Wins.

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Foxy had come to visit before lockdown was announced so stayed rather than return home to London.

Ollie said: I know Im very lucky and we have to appreciate the situation we are in because it is extremely tough for many people, and there are many more harsh times to come. I want people to be battle ready when this is over.

For now he hopes a new series of Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins, filmed last year in Scotland, will help keep the nations spirits up.

It sees the DS take on an unlikely lineup of celebrity recruits - including Joey Essex, John Fashanu, Anthea Turner - and Katie Price.

Ollie laughs: When you look at these personalities its like putting the worst recipe for a cake together, ingredients which do not go, and having to taste the cake at the end of it - when youre not allowed to spit it out! The nation will be gripped.

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Extract from Battle Ready

In the Special Forces, a break point is used to Breathe, Recalibrate and Deliver in a pressured situation in order to engage the courage required to accomplish the uncomfortable. Its the difference between blind panic and taking control of your environment before it spirals out of control.

I latched on to the term break point when I was living in Australia. At the time Id started to realise that for years of using drink and drugs and chasing adrenalin highs in war zones in order to feel alive, Id been a fugitive on the run from the real me. Who am I? I wondered.

My recovery began with the self-admission that I had a problem I needed to address. It wasnt the world that was broken and needed fixing, it was me.

Id drunk myself into a cul-de-sac of blackouts from three-day binges that barely masked the pain, only for it to return with bigger teeth. But as soon as I started looking inwards for the answers all these positive molecules seemed to grow and coalesce and creative ideas started flowing.

Break Point is about changing the way we think as people. Its the moment you decide nothing will stand between you and your goals and youre prepared to step into the discomfort in the short term for the long-term gain.

Ollie has recommended an exercise to help people who are struggling amid coronavirus, titled: 'What's worth worrying about and what you can't control'.

He says: "Write out a list of things that worry you and get you down. It may be a long list.

Now make a second list from the first, but this time only include the entries you can control. Youll see that there are actually very few things you currently worry about that you can control.

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By accepting that there are things you just cant change, you start to let them go and immediately feel lighter.

The one thing you have 100 per cent control of, the one person whose behaviour you can change, is you. Accept you cant control others, forget about things that havent happened yet. When you reduce your list of worries you create more space for creativity and to focus on your priorities.

This is essentially what being Battle Ready is all about identifying the stuff that holds you back, dealing with it and getting on with your goals."

Ollie Ollerton 2020. Extracted from 'Battle Ready: Eliminate Doubt, Embrace Courage, Transform Your Life' to be published by Blink Publishing on 30 April 2020 at 20. Audiobook read by Ollie Ollerton available as a Digital Download.

Read the original:

SAS: Who Dares Wins Ollie Ollerton reveals horrific childhood circus chimp attack left him addicted to booze - The Sun

As soon as the first humans learned to manipulate tools, they created works of art to make sense of the terror, wonder, and mystery of their existence. From the very beginning, art was inextricably bound up with what we call religion, which is itself an art form. The Lascaux Caves, a cultic site since 17,000 BCE, are decorated with numinous paintings of local wildlife, and nearby, in the underground labyrinth of Trois Frres at Arige, there are spectacular engravings of mammoths, bison, wolverines, and musk oxen. Dominating the scene is a massive painted figure, half man, half beast, who fixes his huge, penetrating eyes on visitors as they stumble out of the underground tunnel that provides the only route to this prehistoric temple. This hybrid creature transcends anything in our empirical experience but seems to reflect a sense of the underlying unity of animal, human, and divine.

From the very beginning, men and women deliberately cultivated a perception of existence that differed from the empirical. Humans have an instinctive appetite for the sacred, for a more enhanced state of being. Until the modern period, it was taken for granted in all cultures that the world was pervaded by and found its explanation in a reality that exceeded the reach of the intellect. In the modern world, we may not cultivate this sense of the transcendent as assiduously as our forebears, but we have all known moments when we are touched deeply within, seem lifted momentarily beyond our everyday selves, and inhabit our humanity more fully than usualin dance, music, poetry, nature, love, sex, or sport as well as in what we call religion.

Throughout history, artists, poets, and mystics have carefully nurtured apprehensions of an ineffable unity of reality. Some of these seers expressed their insights in scripture. Others were inspired by scripture to exercise a natural faculty that brought them important insights that are essential to humanity.

The deep-seated human yearning for transcendence and transformation is a major theme of scripture, as are descriptions of ways of achieving these. Today we are less ambitious than we were through most of our past. We want to be slimmer, healthier, younger, and more attractive than we really are. We feel that a better self lurks beneath our lamentably imperfect one: we want to be kinder, braver, more brilliant and charismatic. But scriptures go further. In Understanding Religious Life, the American scholar Frederick Streng has this working definition of religion:

Religion is a means of ultimate transformation. . . . An ultimate transformation is a fundamental change from being caught up in the troubles of common existence (sin, ignorance) to living in such a way that one can cope at the deepest level with these troubles. That capacity for living allows one to experience the most authentic or deepest realitythe ultimate.

The myths, rituals, sacred texts, and ethical practices of religion develop a plan of action whereby people reach beyond themselves to connect with the true and ultimate reality that will save them from the destructive forces of everyday existence. Living with what is ultimately real and true, people have found that they are not only better able to bear these destructive tensions, but that life itself acquires new depth and purpose.

Scripture emerged when human beings started to live in larger and more complex societies and needed a common ethos that bound them together. The earliest civilizations were founded in the Middle East in the mid-fourth millennium BCE. Before the development of our modern industrialized economy, all states and empires were based economically on agriculture and were maintained only by ruthless exploitation. In every agrarian society, a small aristocracy, together with its retainers, seized the surplus grown by their peasants and used it to fund their cultural projects, forcing 90 percent of the population to live at subsistence level. No premodern civilization ever found an alternative to this pattern. Yet, historians tell us, without this iniquitous system we would probably never have advanced beyond a primitive level, because it created a privileged class with the leisure to create the arts and sciences on which our progress depended.

One of these civilized arts was scripture, and it depended on the civilized science of ritual. In the premodern world, a science was a body of knowledge that required specialized skill and training. Most of historys sages, prophets, and philosophers belonged to the elite classes, who alone had the time to engage in intensive contemplation and ritualized practice. Yet nearly all scriptural traditions express a divine discontent with the inequity of their societies and insist that even the humblest human being was not only worthy of respect but potentially divine.

A scripture can be defined as a text that is regarded as sacred, oftenbut not alwaysbecause it was divinely revealed, and forms part of an authoritative canon. Our English word scripture implies a written text, but most scriptures began as texts that were composed and transmitted orally. Indeed, in some traditions, the sound of the inspired words would always be more important than their semantic meaning.

Scripture was usually sung, chanted, or declaimed in a way that separated it from mundane speech. Even after a scripture became a written text, people often regarded it as inert until it was ignited by a living voice, just as a musical score comes fully alive only when interpreted by an instrument. Scripture was, therefore, essentially a performative art, and until the modern period, it was nearly always acted out in the drama of ritual and belonged to the world of myth.

Today, in popular parlance, a myth is something that is not true. But traditionally, a myth expressed a timeless truth that in some sense happened once but also happens all the time. It enabled people to make sense of their lives by setting their dilemmas in a timeless context. The myths of scripture are not designed to confirm your beliefs or endorse your current way of life; rather, they are calling for a radical transformation of mind and heart. These myths are a way of envisaging the mysterious reality of the world that we cannot grasp conceptually. Myths come alive when enacted in ritual, without which they can seem abstract and even alien. Myth and ritual are so intertwined that it is a matter of scholarly debate as to which came first: the mythical story or the rites attached to it.

In the Protestant West, ritual is often regarded as secondary to scripture or even dismissed as superstition. But before the early modern period, reading scripture outside its ritualized context would have felt as unsatisfactory as reading the libretto of an opera. Sometimes, in fact, ritual was regarded as far more important than scripture. Some essential teachings, such as the Christian belief that Jesus was the incarnate Son of God, are rooted in ritual practice and have little valence in scripture. Other traditions, such as Chan (or Zen) Buddhism, find scripture entirely dispensable. But ritual was rarely discarded: in the past, those reformers who rejected the ceremonial rituals of their day nearly always replaced them with new rites. The Buddha, for example, had no time for the Brahmins elaborate Vedic sacrifices but required his monks to so ritualize their everyday physical actions that the way they walked, spoke, or washed expressed moral beauty and grace.

The myths of scripture are not designed to confirm your beliefs; rather, they are calling for a radical transformation of mind and heart.

Our modern society, however, is rooted in logos or reason, which must relate precisely to factual, objective, and empirical reality if it is to function efficiently in the world. For our full functioning, logos and mythic thinking, or mythos, must complement each other. Both are essential and both have limitations. Myth cannot bring something entirely new into existence, as logos can. A scientist can cure hitherto incurable diseases, but this cannot prevent him from succumbing occasionally to despair when confronted with the mortality, tragedy, and apparent pointlessness of our existence.

The prevalence of logos in modern society and education has made scripture problematic. In the early modern West, people began to read the narratives of the Bible as though they were logoi, factual accounts of what happened. But scriptural narratives never claimed to be accurate descriptions of the creation of the world or the evolution of species. Nor did they attempt to provide historically exact biographies of the sages, prophets, and patriarchs of antiquity. Precise historical writing is a recent phenomenon. It became possible only when archaeological methodology and improved knowledge of ancient languages radically enhanced our understanding of the past. Because scriptures do not conform to modern scientific and historical norms, many people dismiss them as incredible and patently untrue. But they do not apply the same criteria to a novel, which yields profound and valuable insights by means of fiction. Nor do they dismiss the poetic genius of Miltons Paradise Lost because its account of the creation of Adam does not accord with the evolutionary hypothesis. A work of art, be it a novel, a poem, or a scripture, must be read according to the laws of its genre, and, like any artwork, scripture requires the disciplined cultivation of an appropriate mode of consciousness.

Scriptural traditions prescribe different ways of living in harmony with the transcendent, but on one thing they all agree. To live in genuine relation with what Streng called the unknowable ultimate, men and women must divest themselves of egotism. What the Greeks called kenosis (the emptying of self) is a central scriptural theme. Kenosis requires a transcendence of self that is extremely difficult to attain. That is why some traditions insist that you cannot read scripture by yourself. Without going beyond the ego, dismantling our instinctive tendency to place ourselves at the center of the world, scripture remains impenetrable. But nearly all the scriptures present us with the human being who has achieved this transformation and achieved a more authentic mode of being. The scriptures insist that this is not the attainment of a few exceptional people but is possible for anybody.

Before the early modern period, when the Renaissance humanists and Protestant reformers sought to return to the wellsprings (ad fontes) of Christianity, scriptures were routinely revised, updated, and their message dramatically reinterpreted to meet the demands of the present. The art of scripture did not mean a return to an imagined perfection in the past, because the sacred text was always a work in progress. The art of scriptural exegesis was, therefore, inventive, imaginative, and creative. So, to read the scriptures correctly and authentically, we must make them speak directly to our modern predicament.

In many ways, we seem to be losing the art of scripture in the modern world. Instead of reading it to achieve transformation, we use it to confirm our own viewseither that our religion is right and that of our enemies wrong, or, in the case of skeptics, that religion is unworthy of serious consideration. Too many believers and non-believers alike now read these sacred texts in a doggedly literal manner that is quite different from the more inventive and mystical approach of premodern spirituality. Because its creation myths do not concur with recent scientific discoveries, militant atheists have condemned the Bible as a pack of lies, while Christian fundamentalists have developed a Creation science claiming that the book of Genesis is scientifically sound in every detail. Many would be in tacit agreement with the character in Mrs. Humphry Wards novel Robert Elsmere: If the Gospels are not true in fact, as history, I cannot see how they are true at all, or of any value.

This literalistic mindset subverts the traditional art of scripture. Here we have a confusion of genres. Scripture is an art form designed to achieve the moral and spiritual transformation of the individual and, if it does not inspire ethical or altruistic behavior, it remains incomplete. The art of science is quite different, because it is morally neutral. In fact, that is one of the reasons for its success. Science can say nothing about what we should do or why we should do it. It cannot and does not prescribe or even suggest how its discoveries should be applied. Science and scripture, therefore, are chalk and cheese, and to apply the disciplines of one to the other can lead only to confusion.

Scripture has never yielded clear univocal messages or lucid incontrovertible doctrines. On the contrary, scripture was usually regarded as an indication that could only point to the ineffable. Sometimes it even forces us to experience the shock of total unknowing. We see this, for just one example, in one of Indias most popular scriptures, the Mahabharata, which induces a spiritual and conceptual vertigo. Or Mahayana Buddhism, which rigorously rejected essentialism and produced a multifarious canon that demonstrated, insistently, that all our most basic assumptions about the world were untenable.

The purpose of scripture was not to confirm the reader or listener in their firmly held opinions, but to transform them utterly. The art of scripture demanded that it issued positive, practical action; otherwise it was end-stopped, its natural dynamic frustrated. In India, Buddhists devised a form of yoga in which the practitioner extended loving sympathy to all quarters of the world, until he had achieved a state of perfect equanimity and impartiality toward all creatures. Furthermore, the Buddha sent his monks out to travel through the world to help suffering people deal with their pain. Contemporaneously, Jains saw their rituals, which expressed their loving care and reverence for all creatures, animate or inanimate, as far more important than their canonical scriptures. The Quran gave Muslims a divine mission to create a just and compassionate society in which wealth was shared fairly and the poor and vulnerable were treated with respect. Essential to the art of scripture, therefore, was what medieval European monks called intentio, a concentration or intensity of intellect that impelled them to better the world by practical, altruistic action. As Augustine famously remarked: I call charity a movement of the mind toward [the goal of] fruitfully enjoying God for his own sake and myself and my neighbor for Gods sake.

In modern secular society, the privatization of faith has overturned the dynamic intentio of the scriptural genre. Secularizationthe separation of religion and politicscould have benefited religion by liberating it from the inherent injustice of the state, but it has not inspired a prophetic critique of society. Instead, by reducing religion to a private search, it seems to have subjectivized and even trivialized the art of scripture. Instead of extirpating egotism from the psyche, yoga has become an aerobic exercise or a means of easing personal tension and improving physical flexibility. Mindfulness, designed to teach Buddhists anatta (no self )that the self we prize so dearly is illusory and nonexistent is now used to help people feel more centered and comfortable in themselves. The old scriptural ideal of kenosis seems in abeyance.

None of the scriptural traditions could eradicate the systemic violence of the agrarian state, but they offered an alternative ideal, acting as a continual reminder of what should be done. Scriptures express an awareness that such attitudes as reverence for others and respect even for the stranger or the enemy were not easily acquired; they had to be cultivated assiduously. They insist, in their different ways, on the divine core of every single human being. This ideal needs urgently to be restated in a way that speaks to the modern world. In the past, scripture did not slavishly return to a presumed purity in the past; it always moved forward creatively to address new challenges. Unless our traditions can meet this urgent need, we are rendering our scriptures irrelevant.

The Episcopal theologian Hans Frei (19221988) pointed out that in the pre-critical world, even though the scriptures were seen as historical in the pre-modern sense, readers had always reached beyond the texts to address the issues of the day. Origen, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas had assessed current events as either negatively or positively reflecting patterns established in scripture. But during the Enlightenment, the biblical narratives began to be read as history in the modern sense. People forgot that they were written as stories that were merely history-like and began to regard them as wholly factual accounts, and, therefore, for some they became incredible.

Christians, Frei asserted, had a twofold task. They had to read the gospels and their history-like stories with all the critical, literary, and historical acumen that they could muster. They also had to read and interpret their own times with all the historical, sociological, and cultural sensibility at their disposal. Like the renowned Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, Frei believed the Bible should be read in conjunction with a critical interpretation of current events. This should not be a complicated, abstrusely hermeneutical discipline. It simply meant that the Bible and the newspaper should, as it were, lie side by side.

Politics and the Bible should coexist in a symbiotic relationship, Frei argued, because it would prevent scriptures from becoming a convenient instrument for the clerical and political establishments. The gospels dissident ideas about God, justice, equity, compassion, and sufferingmust be brought to bear on our mundane circumstances. This, of course, was not achievable in a single, superficial reading; it could only be the result of a continuous process in which the readers daily transformed their understanding of themselves and the world in which they lived, and then acted accordingly.

Writing in a similar vein, the American theologian George Lindbeck concluded that the Bible should be read in a literary manner. Our reading of scripture, Lindbeck argued, must be innovative. In the past, scriptures were altered and reinterpreted quite dramatically to meet changing conditions, and Lindbeck was convinced that we should continue this tradition. This require intellectual skills that go against the grain of the modern academic reverence for the integrity of the original text. Yet unless scripture is made to reach out creatively to meet our current predicaments, it will fail the test of our time.

Every scriptural tradition has a central theme or motif, which reflects its unique view of the human predicament. Each tradition invests with dignity and significance a way of life in a world that can otherwise seem brutal, pointless, and terrifying. Scripture, when practiced as art, is language made numinous. Scriptures are, as they have always been, works in progress, which draw on the past to give meaning to the present. The message of a scripture is not cast in stone, and no scriptural text has all the answers. Even the inspired words of scripture must eventually segue into the silence that is an expression of awe, wonder, and unknowing.

Adapted from The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Textsby Karen Armstrong 2019. Reprinted with permission of Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

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Karen Armstrong: The Lost Art of Reading Scripture - Tricycle - Tricycle

Canon Paul Oestreicher writes:

THE young Simon Barrington-Wards Eden was a Regency terrace close by London Zoo. He heard the animals being fed. God was in his heaven. All was well in his world until Hitlers bombers shattered it. That, as he saw it, was to be the pattern of his life: aspirations shattered and restored. God in Christ had come to earth. So, like Jesus, Dying and behold we live.

A simple recitation of his career reveals none of that. The son of the Editor of The Times went on, as one did, to Eton; service as a pilot in the RAF; Magdalene College, Cambridge; Westcott House; ordination; lectureships in Berlin and Ibadan, Nigeria; the Church Missionary Societys (CMSs) Training College, Crowther Hall, as Principal, and then the post of the societys General Secretary; a Chaplaincy to the Queen; the see of Coventry; and, quietly, a knighthood (KCMG). In retirement, he was back at his beloved Magdalene.

If class were lifes determinant, this obituary would not be worth writing or reading. Were Karl Marx still alive, however, he would have found in Simon a challenging friend. Hegels dialectic would have kept them talking deep into the night. But Simon was a friend to one and all, not one for any party; nor was he a man for fence-sitting. His undivided commitment was to Jesus. He described no moment of enlightenment though enlightened he most certainly was but he could admit to breaking down in tears at the birthplace of Jesus. This was love, passionate love. If only we could start again, he cried. But you can, came the answer. That set the path for his pilgrimage. Christ would be at his side.

From Magdalene, he went to teach democracy to Germans in the Free University of a Berlin that was in ruins. He found himself the learner. With a group of Christians, former Nazis, and former resisters, forgiving and being forgiven, he worshipped in the Dahlem parish church where Martin Niemller had preached sermons that went around the world, published in Britain as The Gestapo Defied by Christ Crucified. Eight years of imprisonment was the price that he paid. Simons new-found Berlin friend who had been ordered to defend the city to the very last introduced him to both Nietzsches philosophy and Brechts plays.

More illusions were shattered. Simon had again to be remade on returning to a chaplaincy at his old college and to holiday work in deprived housing estates. From a defeated Germany in ruins to an impoverished Britain, there was no longer any doubting that discipleship without commitment to social justice was unthinkable.

Three years of teaching at Ibadan University in Nigeria were an immersion in a new world and in a vision of what a world Church might become. In Ibribina, an African prophetess, he saw possibilities of an indigenous Christianity freed from the limitations of the post-colonial missionary assumptions.

For a further six years, now as Dean of Magdalene and with Jean, a Scottish doctor, as an equal partner Simon had time to prepare himself for his significant contribution to the mission of the world Church. Building on the visionary work of Max Warren and John V. Taylor, Simon was invited to establish a CMS training college, Crowther Hall, at Selly Oak, to prepare men and women from home and abroad for mission partnership. This would no longer be our serving them, but a mutual exchange of gifts to serve a rapidly changing world.

The word missionary, with its Victorian overtones, would give way to mission, certainly no longer one party in the Church of England exporting its assumptions to the erstwhile colonies. It was still true that CMS could, in its reincarnation, look both back and forwards to the English triumvirate of Warren, Taylor, and then Barrington-Ward for leadership and inspiration.

There was, however, still a long way to go before the past had really given way to the future. Simon faced an uphill struggle and would go on breaking and remaking himself and his students. In 1975, he was made General Secretary. With the grace to break through every barrier, he led CMS for a further decade by doing what came naturally to him: sharing love with everyone.

Simon arrived in Coventry as its Bishop to do just that. He brought a special gift. In an Essex monastery, he had encountered the Jesus Prayer, a short simple prayer with its origins in Eastern Orthodoxy. It was to become his constant lifeline to Jesus, a line that is open, at all times, in all places. Having been given this gift, he had to pass it on to others. Simon and his soul friend, Brother Ramon, wrote Praying the Jesus Prayer Together. It was published in 2001, shortly after Brother Ramons death.

Simon was good news. With the gospel in his heart, he was a man of joy, bubbling over with ideas: half a dozen before breakfast, as one of his colleagues joked. The good ones would survive, the rest be forgotten. He was ever eager to learn from others. He was an enthusiast. His churchmanship? That word did not feature in his vocabulary. He had charisma, but was no more signed up to the Charismatic movement than to any other Church party. He embraced and took what was good from them all far beyond Anglican frontiers, or even Christian frontiers. His liberality knew no bounds.

That did not make him a signed-up Liberal. He well knew that the market left too many hungry. On the pros and cons of social liberalism, he tended to think that the Holy Spirit could be relied on to move Church and nation forward. A campaigner he was not. There were too many truths in contention. He was, in the full meaning of both words, a Catholic ecumenist with more than a trace of the mystic. If, at times, his feet left the ground, Jean, his rock, would bring him back to earth. Their hospitality, their open house, and open table were a blessing to many in the diocese and beyond.

Some thought Simon nave. His intellect was too good for that. But he did have a childlike simplicity, not too unlike Archbishop Michael Ramseys. If need be, let mind and heart grapple: that is part of the dialectic that he took from Hegels philosophy. And that philosophy he owed in large part to his spiritual and intellectual friendship with the Jewish social philosopher Gillian Rose. For her, his dedication was boundless. It was a soul affinity that, to Simons joy, enabled him to baptise her on her deathbed.

The Church was wise to make Simon Bishop of Coventry. Everything that had been fitted him for Coventry Cathedrals international ministry based on brokenness and reparation, the ministry that I had the privilege to lead during his years as bishop. Diocese and cathedral had in him a true friend. I came to see how much that was worth. There was a downside. If I came to him with an idea that needed testing and critique, he decided to run with it before I was sure it was worth pursuing. That was easy to forgive. His farewell was a pilgrimage round his parishes maybe a little late. Some did wonder, could a bishop who had never been a parish priest really understand them? He saw that as part of his brokenness, which an exchange of love would repair.

In retirement, Magdalene called Simon back to share his many gifts. Finally, with his beloved Jean, separated most recently by the virus, they were in the same rest home and while still on this side spoke last words together by phone.

My epitaph: Fear not little flock, it is the Fathers good pleasure to give you the Kingdom (Luke 12.32).

The Rt Revd Simon Barrington-Ward KCMG died on 11 April, aged 89.

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Obituary: The Rt Revd Simon Barrington-Ward 01 May 2020 - Church Times

At one point, Daniel Monkman, also known as Zoon, was educating indigenous peoples on Turtle Island. Somewhat of a nomad from his late teens through early 20s, Zoon, a person of First Nations heritage experienced victimization when he was younger, which led to drug and alcohol abuse, and led him on a journey to rediscover himself, come to terms with his past, and make music.

Referring to his sound as moccasin gaze, the Ojibwe-born singer and songwriter says he found music through spiritual guidance and 12-step therapy, all leading to his debut album, Bleached Wavves (Paper Bag Records), out June 19.

Zoon, a name derived from Zoongideewin, an Ojibway word that means bravery, courage, and the Bear Spirit, opens up another chapter in his self discovery on third single Light Prism.

For Light Prism, Monkman wanted something gentle with no chorus with a vocal melody, so he spliced it from scratch and created his own abstract instrumental.

Light Prism is a memory college, Zoon tells American Songwriter. Parts of it are from my time teaching around Turtle Island, while other imagery is of my home town of Selkirk. Selkirk was effected heavily by drugs and gangs and with that came deaths of youth I had known. Light prism is also about reflection and being able to put things to rest.

Writing Bleached Wavves was like a form of exposure therapy, says Zoon. I had to force myself to confront the source of my anxiety and depression in order to find enlightenment, he says. Years prior to recording this upcoming album I wandered through Turtle Island writing about my past, trying to triangulate the source of my depression.

Through this journey, he did moral self inventory, which he admits was a harsh process, but says it was the push he needed to rediscover his purpose.

I transposed journal entries into poetry and ideas for an album, but I was never able to create the sonic textures that you hear on the record today, says Zoon. When it came time to properly record guitars and textures, I wanted to be easy on myself. I realized that during my journey down the spiral staircase I was very harsh with myself, so throughout the album I made the music very vulnerable and soft.

Light prisms are a collection of memories, and Zoon tapped into a state of reverie from childhood through adulthood on the track from his time on the First Nations Reserve, his struggles with addiction, and friends and family who have passed away, including his best friend Barret Peterson, who is mentioned throughout the albumthe song is dedicated to Peterson and Glenn Olson (oosan).

Light Prism is a hypnotic, melancholy gaze that travels in time (and life) through its soothing trance and earnest lyricism.

Cloudy prisms blur each figures in the video, directed by Drew Rutty, who says that Zoon allowed him to experiment with new lighting techniques and create a visual experience that helped form the backbone of the video. By the end of the shoot, Rutty also became Zoons bassist.

Over the course of editing and adding a shifting pool of color and light to the footage we had,Danasked me to join the band as bassist, says Rutty. Even though the video features no one on bass, the reality is that the bassist is in the video by way of its creation and editing.

Now living 45 minutes outside of Toronto in Hamilton, Monkman says it was hard to find the right group of musicians, but when he met Rutty the two connected instantly.

In the video were missing the bassist but in a weird way were not because Drew was filming but not yet in the band, and I remember at the shoot thinking to myself how I was planning on finding a new bassist, says Zoon. I really like how it all worked out.

Another Bleached Wavves collaborator, Chris Chu from the the dream pop band The Morning Benders, co-produced and mixed portions of the album, and while it was a dream to work with Chu, collaborations are a scarce occurrence in Zoons world.

Im usually very protective of my music, because what I create is very emotional and personal, and I hold everything I do close to my heart, so my collaborations have been minimal, he says. Ive noticed that the more confident I become with my art, the more collaborations I participate in.

Monkman doesnt just sit down and write songs. Most of it comes together by improvisation, which often unravels more. Light Prism dives into Zoons battles with social anxiety and how it led him to live a very nomadic life.

[Through] a nomadic lifestyle, I found myself planting trees in northern, extremely rural communities and drifting around Turtle Island, says Zoon. I gained a lot of inspiration from being on the road and from being isolated in the woods, and a lot of that inspiration found its way into the creation of Light Prism. But the song itself is just a collage of memories from my past, present and future.

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Zoon Travels to the Past, Present, and Future on Light Prism - American Songwriter

Did Swedish artist Hilma af Klint invent abstract art in 1906?

No, but thats the myth that has been taking hold ever since a major exhibition of her remarkable paintings took the international artworld by storm seven years ago.

Klints absorbing abstractions do predate those of the male artists often tagged with the claim. But in reality, those assertions about the marvelous paintings of Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Frantiek Kupka and Kasimir Malevich dont hold up to scrutiny either. In addition to the aboriginal societies that have employed abstraction for centuries, little-known European painters like Georgiana Houghton in England and Victor Hugo in France were dabbling in pure abstraction in the mid-19th century.

A new German documentary film, Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint, brushes up against the erroneous claim but fortunately doesnt gather it up into a full embrace. Director Halina Dyrschkas movie, her feature documentary debut, was set for release in U.S. theaters at the end of the month until the novel coronavirus pandemic scuttled the plan. Beginning Friday, it will be available on Kino Marquee, the so-called virtual movie theater streaming service for art-house fare.

Hilma af Klint was born into an aristocratic Stockholm family in 1862.

(Zeitgeist Films)

Its more than worth a look not only for its careful illumination of the artists biography, plus an abundant representation of her luminous paintings, but for the way in which it exposes the obstacles af Klint and her legacy faced.

The reputation of af Klint (1862-1944) has come a far distance since her paintings were rescued from almost total obscurity more than 30 years ago. The Spiritual in Art was a sprawling 1986 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, organized to celebrate the opening of a brand new building ironically, an edifice now being torn down. The little-known Swede was put side-by-side with her famous German, Dutch, Czech and Russian contemporaries, who put abstract painting at the forefront of Modern art in the early 20th century.

What all these artists shared was an attraction to spiritual and sometimes mystical philosophies. They included the extreme occultist theosophy of Russian writer Helena Blavatsky and the more sober version found in the anthroposophy of Austrian social reformer Rudolf Steiner.

In 1915, Hilma af Klint made three Altarpiece paintings for a temple to spiritual enlightenment that was never built.

(Zetigeist Films)

Dyrschka interweaves af Klints intense spiritual interests with the radical theory of special relativity being advanced at the same time by physicist Albert Einstein and others. Spirituality collides with science in a visual exploration of invisible wonders.

On occasion the film feels like its advocating for rather than simply documenting spiritual philosophy as the arts driver, as if Raphaels greatness requires faith in a classical vision of Roman Catholicism or a belief in Buddhist principles is essential to reverence for the paintings of Guanxiu. Nonetheless, it manages an illuminating articulation of the eras social and cultural complexities.

The filmed interviews with curator Iris Mller-Westermann, who organized the revealing 2013 retrospective at Stockholms Museum of Modern Art, and gifted American artist Josiah McElheny, who is a longtime enthusiast of af Klints work, are two reasons why. The curator knows her subject as deeply as anyone, while the artist provides a working understanding of cultural forces in play. Both deftly walk the tightrope of being at once intimately enthralled and broadly eloquent.

Together with insights from a number of other historians of art and science, plus a few of the painters descendants, af Klints unusual story takes shape. Born into an aristocratic family of naval officers, and upon adulthood choosing not to marry, she first studied art as a means to support herself, with an eye to becoming a commercial illustrator.

As the alert recording of surface reality gave way to a speculative search for what lay beyond the visible, af Klint developed distinctive theories of color, line and shape. She composed them into elaborate, often large cosmic diagrams.

The largest are 10 feet tall big, radiant canvases whose color glows through the use of pure pigments mixed with egg yolk. A traditional technique largely replaced by oil paint during the Renaissance, egg tempera in af Klints hands leaves a thin veil of smooth paint that captures light within a membrane of clear, vivid color. The addition of metallic leaf adds shine.

To give a sense of the artists process, Dyrschka filmed a surrogate painting full-scale copies of af Klints work. That might not have been the best idea. Although the film includes no documentation of af Klints actual working process, the surrogate is shown painting on large sheets of paper unfurled across the floor.

An actress portrays one way af Klint might have worked on her paintings

(Zeitgeist Films)

The inevitable reference is to the innovative, even iconic abstract painting methods later employed by Americans Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler in the 1940s and 1950s, which may or may not have been the actual case for af Klint. The device comes across as an unnecessary crutch to establish avant-garde credentials.

Perhaps the intention was to compensate for one of the films most straightforward and compelling theses for af Klints obscurity, despite the self-evident brilliance of her bracing, monumental art. Although her abstract paintings were shown in a 1928 London exhibition, af Klint sold no paintings during her lifetime. She further decreed in her estate that none should be sold after her death.

Af Klints demise in 1944 and rediscovery in 1986 coincide with the birth and subsequent explosion of an international modern art market, from which her work was summarily excluded. New Yorks Museum of Modern Art, which wrote the pioneering history of abstract painting through the twin engines of exhibitions and collecting, owns not a single af Klint painting, and probably never will. The enormous, 2012 MoMA exhibition Inventing Abstraction included nothing by the Swede.

Af Klints lifes work is a direct challenge to the markets power in shaping how we tell stories about art. That shes an international sensation today makes af Klint more distinctive than any shaky claim to being the first abstract artist ever could.

'Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint'

Not Rated

Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes

Playing: Available April 17 on KinoNow; virtual theatrical release, Laemmle Monica Film Center

Art handlers crate af Klints paintings after her landmark 2013 retrospective.

(Zeitgeist Films)

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Review: 'Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint,' obscurity to art world star - Los Angeles Times

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish?

I want to talk about trying to make sense when things are breaking down.

This April weve seen some conspiracy theories blooming out of the dead land.

Sports-presenter turned conspiracy-theorist David Icke took centre-stage a week ago, appearing in a video for London Real, in which he claimed COVID19 was caused by 5G, as part of a global plot run by a secret order of alien lizards. The video was watched millions of times on YouTube and on LondonLive before YouTube and Ofcom stepped in to get it taken down.

Four days ago, a documentary appeared called Out of Shadows, recycling the 2016 Pizzagate conspiracy theory that a secret order of Democrats and Hollywood celebrities run a paedophile ring centred on two Washington pizza restaurants. The documentary got two million views in a day.

Weve also seen a conspiracy theory that COVID19 is part of a plot led by Bill Gates and the World Health Organisation to get the world to take his vaccine and implant his chip surveillance. Conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones of Infowars have claimed for over a decade that Gates huge funding for vaccines is actually a eugenicist plot to reduce the worlds population. This theory was taken up and enthusiastically spread this week by an anti-vaccine entrepreneur called Dr Shiva, who claims he invented email. A TV interview with him has been watched six million times this week.

Now in some ways this is predictable. The pandemic has led to a breakdown in knowledge and certainty. We dont know much about the virus or the best way of dealing with it, but we know its killing a lot of us and were afraid. This is happening to the entire human race at the same time, and were all connected on the internet.

This is creating a unique opportunity for fringe beliefs and fringe thinkers to take centre stage. Some might be interesting Universal Basic Income, say but some really belong back on the fringe.

I have been disheartened to see leading influencers in my community thats to say, western spirituality spreading the conspiracy theories I mention above. I want my community to be of service to humanity during this crisis, rather than actively spreading bad ideas (particularly anti-vaccine conspiracies finding a vaccine seems our best hope for getting out of this without 1% of the population, 75 million people, dying of the virus).

It makes me question the worth of my culture. Is spirituality particularly prone to conspiracy thinking?

On the term conspiracy theory

As various New Age influencers have said this week, conspiracy theory is a charged term. It can be a way of simply dismissing a topic without considering it.

Some things dismissed as conspiracy theories might really have something behind them. UFOs and extra-terrestrials, for example, are dismissed as conspiracy theories, but to me it seems probable there is life on other planets and that some of it is more intelligent than us.

The idea there was a plot behind JFKs assassination is another conspiracy theory which I think may be more than a theory. Child abuse in the Catholic church is another scandal that could have been dismissed as a conspiracy theory when it really was a conspiracy ie an epidemic of abuse covered up by the Vatican.

Still, one needs a powerful torch of critical discrimination in these murky and liminal swamp-lands. When you get to Pizzagate, we seem to be very much in the subconscious realm of archetypal, magical thinking secret symbols and codes, hidden orders of powerful and evil perverts. We are in Dan Brown territory here.

The personality traits behind spirituality and conspiracy thinking

I wondered this week, why should there be an overlap between my community western spirituality and conspiracy theories?

My first thought was, there are certain personality traits that make one prone to being spiritual but not religious free thinking, distrust of authority and institutions, a tendency to unusual beliefs or experiences, a tendency to detect hidden patterns and correspondences, and an attraction to alternative paradigms, particularly in alternative health which would all make one more prone to conspiracy theories.

There seems to be some evidence for this. This 2018 study by Hart and Graether, from the Journal of Individual Differences, found, in two surveys of 1200 people, that the strongest predictor of conspiracy thinking was schizotypy, which is a personality trait that makes one prone to unusual beliefs and experiences, such as belief in telepathy, mind-control, spirit-channelling, hidden personal meanings in events etc. People who are spiritual but not religious have been found to score more highly in schizoptypal personality traits than both the religious and the non-religious.

We have to be a little careful here, as there is a risk of tautology. The scientific definition of schizotypal basically includes having spiritual beliefs, so its not surprising spiritual people score highly in schizotypy. So this paper is not really telling us anything other than the sort of people who have spiritual beliefs and experiences are often also into conspiracies. It doesnt mean theyre wrong or mentally ill. But it may mean they dont score highly in belief-testing and critical thinking.

This article found that being into spirituality and alternative medicine correlated with being anti-vaccines, while this article found both anti-vaxx attitudes and pro-alternative medicine beliefs were connected to magical thinking. You can be pro-vaxx and into spiritual thinking as well, by the way Larry Brilliant, the epidemiologist who helped eradicate polio, was given his mission by Ram Dass guru, Neem Karoli Baba, as he recounts here.

a rapidly growing web movement expressing an ideology fuelled by political disillusionment and the popularity of alternative worldviews. It has international celebrities, bestsellers, radio and TV stations. It offers a broad politico-spiritual philosophy based on two core convictions, the first traditional to conspiracy theory, the second rooted in the New Age: 1) a secret group covertly controls, or is trying to control, the political and social order, and 2) humanity is undergoing a paradigm shift in consciousness. Proponents believe that the best strategy for dealing with the threat of a totalitarian new world order is to act in accordance with an awakened new paradigm worldview.

This 2015 article, by Egil Apsrem and Asbjorn Dyrendal, responds to Ward and Voas article by suggesting conspirituality is not a new or surprising phenomenon, but instead emerges from the historical context of the 19th and 20th century occult. They write:

The cultic milieu is flooded with all deviant belief systems and their attendant practices. Moreover, the communication channels within the milieu tend to be as open and fluid as the content that flows through them. The resulting lack of an overarching institutionalized orthodoxy enables individuals to travel rapidly through a variety of movements and beliefs, thus bridging with ease what may appear on the surface as distinct discourses and practices. Political, spiritual, and (pseudo)scientific discourses all have a home here, and they easily mix. Joined by a common opposition to Establishment discourses rather than by positively shared doctrinal content, conspiracy theory affords a common language binding the discourses together.

In other words, the Occult is a Petri dish for the breeding of all sorts of mutant hybrid memes, some of them helpful, some of them toxic (depending on your worldview).

Ecstatic globalism versus paranoid conspiracy

Let me add to this emerging discourse by suggesting that conspirituality theories are a form of mystical or ecstatic experience. I want to compare two forms of mystical experience.

The first is a sort of extroverted euphoric mystical experience: Everything is connected. I am synchronicitously drawn to helpers and allies, the universe is carrying us forward to a wonderful climactic transformation (the Rapture, the Omega Point, the Paradigm Shift) , and we are the heroic warriors of light appointed by God / the Universe to manifest this glorious new phase shift in human history.

The second is a paranoid bad trip version of the euphoric good trip. Everything is connected, there is a secret order being revealed to me, but I am not part of it. It is an evil demonic order, and it is trying to control me and everyone else. They have a Grand Plan and it is taking shape now. But perhaps I, and one or two others, can wake up to this Grand Plan, and expose it, and at least hide from it.

The first trip is a euphoric ego-expansion (I am the Universe!) and the second is paranoid ego-persecution (The Universe is controlled by Evil Demons who are against me!)

In both, the individual awakens to this hidden reality. But in the first, they are a superpowered initiate in the hidden order and a catalyst for a Millennarian transformation, in the second they are a vulnerable and disempowered exposer of the powerful hidden order. (Millennarian, by the way, means that, like Robbie Williams, you believe in a coming Millennium, or Age of Love).

These are two sides of the same coin, two sides in the same game. Both are examples of schizotypal magical / dream thinking. In both, the ego is part of a grand cosmic drama in the first, they are the divine appointed catalyst for Phase Shift / humanitys rebirth, in the second, they are the heroic exposer of the Hidden Order.

If we look at the history of the occult (I recommend Gary Lachmanns Secret Teachers of the Western World as a popular intro), ever since the Reformation there have been secret orders of spiritual-political enthusiasts dedicated to a Millennarian project of global transformation. Thats what Rosicrucians were into, and the Masons, and the Illuminati the foot-soldiers of the Enlightenment were conspiracy theorists. So was HG Wells and his Open Conspiracy he was supposedly a rationalist, but really he was preaching a sort of occult-scientific polyamorous universalist new religion. So were Theosophists like Annie Besant. So were New Age pioneers in the 1960s like Marilyn Ferguson (author of The Aquarian Conspiracy, one of the best-selling books of the 1980s) and Barbara Marx Hubbard, champion of a globalist evolutionary spirituality. You can probably think of people into this sort of scene today spiritual-political enthusiasts waiting for a golden New Age of justice, perennial philosophy and polyamorous love.

Globalist Millennarians tend to be quite optimistic and quite well-connected they connect together with fellow globalist Millennarians through think tanks, associations, conferences, networks and festivals. Barbara Marx Hubbard, the indefatigable champion of evolutionary spirituality, is an example. She thought homo sapiens was about to phase shift into homo universalis, on December 12 2012 to be precise, and she thought she and her friends were the divinely-appointed catalysts for this Millennarian transformation. She was extremely well connected and spread her ideas through all kinds of organisations and networks like the Committee for the Future and the Centre for Integral Wisdom. Indeed, networking was part of her spirituality (she called it supra-sexing.)

On the other hand, you have conspiracy thinkers who are anti-globalists, like Infowars Alex Jones or evangelical Lee Keith (his book cover is below), who may see Millennarian globalists as an evil and demonic hidden order pulling the strings of global events. Anti-globalist paranoid conspiracy thinkers trace the very networks that ecstatic networkers like Barbara Marx Hubbard work through. See!, they say. They all know each other through these think-tanks and informal organisations.

Where one group are ecstatic, optimistic, super-empowered, insider (and entitled) conspirators, the other are pessimistic, paranoid, disempowered conspirators.

But their thinking styles are in some ways quite similar schizotypal, magical, prone to seeing secret influences, hidden connections, and Grand Plans. Above all, both over-estimate the competence of elites to control the world . They under-estimate the dumbness of elites and the chaotic cluster-f*ck of actual politics. Both think the elite are superhuman either divinely-inspired or demonically-controlled.

I think it is possible to be prone to both these forms of magical thinking, to switch between ecstatic, optimistic Millennarianism and paranoid persecutory conspiracy thinking. From everything is connected and Im a central part of this wonderful cosmic transformation! to everything is connected and Im at risk from this awful global plot! I think someone like Robert Anton Wilson, perhaps, was prone to both sorts of thinking.

The value of the two forms of conspirituality

Now we can dismiss this sort of thinking as simply bullshit religious enthusiasm. Both forms of it. And I feel a strong tendency at the moment to do that, to simply call bullshit on both ecstatic phase-shifters and paranoid conspiracy theorists, and instead try to be as rationalist, sober and un-enthusiastic as possible.

However, this is probably not a very helpful attitude. There is, in fact, a value to both these forms of mystical thinking.

The value in mystical globalism is it can lead to positive things HG Wells ecstatic globalism helped to inspire forms of global governance like the UN Declaration of Human Rights, for example.

However, ecstatic globalism can lead to self-entitlement, to an inflated sense that you are the appointed vanguard of humanity, and that history and the Universe is definitely on your side. Thats dangerous. There can be a dangerous over-concentration of privilege and power, working mainly through informal or undemocratic channels.

The value of conspiracy thinking, meanwhile, can be that it holds power to account. Power can be over-concentrated the World Health Organisation is excessively reliant on funding by Bill Gates, and the Gates Foundation should be more transparent and accountable, considering the massive influence it has over global public health.

Scientific authority can be awfully, horribly wrong sometimes many ecstatic globalists in the 20th century supported eugenics ( including HG Wells, Annie Besant, Julian Huxley and Teillard de Chardin). They thought the world should be run by an elite of spiritually enlightened scientists who would decide who was enlightened and who was unfit and therefore deserved to be sterilized, locked up, or exterminated. There was no secret conspiracy about this they proudly declared their opinions. So you can see why paranoid anti-globalists might have their suspicions of secret eugenic plots today.

Balancing the Socratic and the Ecstatic

In general (and in conclusion), there is a value in non-rational forms of knowing, such as dreams, intuitions, inspiration and mystical experiences. These can be important sources of wisdom and healing. Many great scientific discoveries and cultural creations have come from ecstatic or schizotypal inspiration, from Newtons discovery of gravity to Miltons Paradise Lost.

I am prone to this sort of benign schizotypy myself, and on the whole it enriches my life and work. There is a reason schizotypal thinking has survived for millennia sometimes it is highly adaptive. It has played an important role in our cultural evolution.

However, it is crucial to balance the capacity for ecstatic / magical / mythical thinking with the capacity for critical thinking. Thats what Ive tried to do in my books: balance the Socratic and the ecstatic, or the left and right brain, if youre into that sort of thing.

Too much Socratic thinking without any ecstasy, and you end up with a rather dry and uninspiring worldview. Too much ecstasy without critical thinking, and you may be prone to unhealthy delusions, which you then spread, harming others. You may be so sure youre right, so hyped in your heroic crusade, you may block things that are really helpful and spread things that are really harmful.

One should be free to believe whatever you want, but in this instance a global pandemic in the internet age our beliefs and behaviours profoundly impact others. We need to try and be extra careful in what we believe and what we share, so as to practice mental hygiene.

There is so much fake news out there I was taken in yesterday by a story that the IMF had cancelled almost all its developing country debt. The story was on a website called IMF2020.org (since taken down). It looked totally reliable. And I so wanted it to be true! I so wanted to share some good news. But alas, it was fake.

We can do a basic test, equivalent to washing our hands.

1) Whats the source? Is it a reliable media organisation? Is it backed up by other reliable sources?

2) How likely is the fact? The less likely, the greater the burden of evidence.

3) Is there anything out there suggesting its fake? Rather than looking for evidence to support our beliefs, can we search for evidence against our beliefs?

4) Can we emotionally accept our belief might be wrong?

We can try to practice that sort of mental hygiene on ourselves, but how does one practice effective public communication to counter-act conspiracy thinking? It seems very hard. Ones instinct can be, like Skeptics and New Atheists, simply to call the other side names: idiot, moron, woo-woo, bullshit and so on. That sort of shaming probably doesnt work.

The introduction to the European Journal of Social Psychologys special conspiracy theory issue suggests conspiracy theories are emotionally grounded and socially supported so an outsider calling you names wont have much impact. Instead, like de-radicalization or de-culting programmes, perhaps it takes a trusted friend from inside your network to challenge the beliefs in a sympathetic and non-threatening way. That is slow work when one in three Americans believe COVID-19 was made in a laboratory, and one in five Brits say they might not take a COVID-19 vaccine. Our herd immunity to bullshit may be breaking down.

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'Conspirituality' the overlap between the New Age and conspiracy beliefs - Elemental

As I was sayingCould we say that the Almighty Creator created us human beings without a purpose? Can purposelessness arise from Perfection which everyone who believes in God attributes to Him? Can we say the pursuit of material endowment and raising of families is the whole purport of our existence on earth? Or are we to regard acquisition of position, power, fame as well as being overwhelmed by public acknowledgement and applause as all there is to life? We acquire influence and make merry. Yes and so? The need to find answers to these intriguing questions are what assails our minds from time to time. Yet, as I did state last week, the revelation in the unique higher knowledge spreading on earth in these times states that there is nothing in this Creation without a task! What then is the purpose of man on this planet earth?

Where to begin ought to be in asking ourselves who we are. Who are we human beings? Who are we men? When it is said, ye men in the scriptures, to whom is this addressed? And who is addressing us? Whose voice is it? It is questions and questions galore that arise in the course of contemplation by people who feel some stirring within them from time to time.

According to the new and higher knowledge, man is spirit and that part of him that is visible to our physical eyes, the part we encounter is only the body, the cover, the shell, the cloak which we discard at death. The spirit is the animating entity in us, the only really living part in man. It is an independent consistency which has come from the spiritual world. We learn that the spiritual world forms the upper and lighter part of Creation. For ages, mankind has come to the awareness that when a man is said to have passed away, it is not the end of the fellows life. He continues to live elsewhere. Until the coming of the new enlightenment, humanity has been unable to say precisely where a person goes. With the new knowledge which comes with it the revelation of the structure of Creation, from the highest heights and to this lowest plane that our earth is we can see what the journey of man is, and what his ultimate goal is and the distance he must cover and what must be done so that his journey is not hampered.

In nearly all cultures the knowledge abounds that when a man dies it does not mark the end of his life. On this part, yes, he is no more, but he is born into another life elsewhere. So is it that we see in obituaries that Papa, our beloved one, has gone home. Which home? Some sing about New Jerusalem, our home Above. Doctors say, after determined, skillful but fruitless efforts to save a mans life, We have lost him. Whom have they lost? The person the doctors have lost is the real man, the animating core of man which alone bears what we recognise as life. When it goes out of a man, he becomes motionless, the body gets cold and he is declared to be no more, for in no time, the physical body he has discarded is buried in the ground where it goes back to dust from which it was formed. At the graveside, the priest says of him: Dust thou art, and to dust thou shall return. It is even more enlightening when it is rendered in Yoruba, the language of the people of South-Western part of Nigeria.

If man is spirit, it should follow that his life must be spiritual, and the purpose of his existence whether it is on earth or in the Beyond, must of essence be spiritual. The fulfillment of life must therefore lie in that which is spiritual, and that which suits and nourishes the spirit. It cannot but be revealing when the higher knowledge states that true life takes place in the spiritual! The body we spend all our time and energy to nourish, an indispensable though it is, is no more than a tool to help the real man achieve the purpose of his existence. Whatever achievement can be said to benefit only the body is of little or no use to the spirit. Thus the attainment of that which gives pleasure and joy to the body is not necessarily of benefit to the man. Consequently we have men of means, immeasurably endowed materially, men of influence and power who do not know joy, for these do not benefit the spirit especially when they have been misapplied. That which is of benefit to the spirit always brings joy and happiness. A life lacking in spiritual goal, therefore, cannot engender enduring joy and happiness because it contains no furthering values.

There are two principal reasons therefore for mans sojourn on earth. The first is in search of development which entails recognition of the Will of God and living in it. This Will is expressed in lawfulness which governs the entire Creation and life in general. Man is required to adjust himself to this lawfulness. With the adjustment to the Will of the Creator, man gains in maturity and spiritual consciousness, this brings in its trail the unfolding of abilities and talents which are inherent in all human beings. Man is to be more of an intuitively perceptive human being. We have been created and endowed with the faculty of the intuition so that the human being on earth would form a link connecting with the beyond so that both the earth and the beyond are welded into one. Through mans special nature, the currents from the Source of Light and Life are to flow through mankind. This brings me to the second reason. Using his unique nature, man is to employ the pure power pulsating from On High through him and around him to build a replica of Paradise on earth. To consciously tap this power to do so is possible only when we swing in the Will of the Creator. The vow to build the replica of Paradise on earth is contained in the Lords Prayer we say every morning, the vow that we would hallow His Name, and we would cause His Kingdom to come to this earth which would be through doing His Will. Hence, the pledge: Thy His Will be done on earth as it is done in Heaven.

It is imperative that we know for certainty that if man is spirit, what then is the origin of the spirit itself? This should take us to having an idea of the structure of Creation itself and the place of the human spirit in it. In the structure, there are two Divisionsthe spiritual and the material: One a home, the other a school, where we train to recognise peace, joy, harmony and nobleness which are driven by the Will of the Creator. The principal purpose of life on earth is to recognise the Will of the Creator, the lawfulness in it, and learning to adjust to the said lawfulness. It is the cultivation of the nobility of spirit, its maturity and spiritual personality that constitute the qualification and therefore the pass to enter and live in the Realm of Peace which is the spiritual part, Paradise, the longed-for home for those who take their sojourn in the material, the earth seriously. In other words, man journeyed out of the Spiritual Realm, more referred to as Paradise in search of development in the World of Matter. It is the destination we long to return when development is completed and we graduate from the school. We existed in the spiritual realm as spiritual germs, unconscious of our surroundings, the splendor and beauty of paradise. It should bear explaining that unconsciousness is not tantamount to absence of life. A child newly born is alive, for example, but is unconscious of its mother, father, nurses, doctors, sisters or brothers. It will take a few days before the baby begins to sense the presence of its mother, and gradually recognise her, her father and siblings and the environment.

To gain that consciousness, which every living being longs for, the spirit germ must journey out, leaving Paradise where luminousity occasioned by the vicinity of the Light does not permit consciousness of undeveloped spirits. This can be likened to a young plant subjected to untrammeled intensity of the sun. Such a plant will be scorched. When we reach a certain degree of consciousness, the urge to be self-conscious reaches a crescendo. This urge is picked as tantamount to a supplication to be permitted a self-conscious existence. It is the attainment of this self-consciousness that makes a human spirit a truly human being with abilities and talents unfolded and the spirit fully taking on a well-rounded human form, inexplicably beautiful. In answer to the solemn supplication, the spirit germ is ejected from the Spiritual Realm. Are we not told that the Sower went out to sow? From there it descends, traversing the intervening realms and planes until it reaches the earth. On every plane, it wraps itself with the substances of the plane in order to be able to manifest thereon. On earth it wraps itself with the material of the earth, dust which it leaves behind at the point of departure from earthly life which we call death.

There is the need to distinguish between the human spirits created in the Image of God and the spirits that needed to come to the earth for their development. Those created in the Image of God were the ones that issued directly from the Hands of the Most High. They did not need to come to this earth in search of development. They were created perfect from the beginning, royal in carriage, beautiful and huge. The prominent one among them is John the Baptist. This was why the Lord said that of all born of women, there is none as high as John the Baptist; but in His Fathers Kingdom, he is the least. John the Baptist came from the Primordial Spiritual Realm, what the Yoruba following their recognition, call Akokoda Aiye. The human beings of the earth do not belong there, and no matter their level of purity and perfection after their wandering, cannot be admitted into the Primordial Realm. The earth is in Subsequent Creation that is Post Creation, which the Yoruba call Aseinda Aiye.

To teach and help mankind to develop and fulfill the purpose of their existence on earth, Prophets and TeachersTeachers of Mankind were sent down to this earth by God. So was it that we had Krishna, Moses in Israel;, Buddha in India; Zoroaster in Persia today known as Iran; Lao-Tse in China; Mohammed in Arabia: Isaiah; Elijah; Elisha; Jeremiah and Micah to list just a few. Prophet Mohammed was sent by God in 571 AD after Christ. Many of the Prophets and Teachers came as Forerunners to the Light between 500BC; 550BC; and 800BC. Lao-Tse came in 600BC; Buddha 550 BC; Zoroaster 600BC; Jeremiah in Palestine in 630BC and Elijah 800BC. Following the unimaginable failure of man, the Lord, the Son of God Himself had to come. And what did mankind do to Him, they murdered Him! Being Love that He is and will ever be, He still found the incomprehensible heart and compassion to supplicate to His Father: Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. There were protests in all spheres and Realms of Creation. The elements could not believe it, and they reacted. The curtain shielding the Holy of Holies was rent in twain, the sun refused to appear and there was darkness at high noon!

Today, the examination result sheet is nothing to write home about. We learn through higher knowledge that the situation is worse in these times than the time of the Lord on earth. Could the emergence of Coronavirus not be proof that mankind have followed only their own path into the wilderness, hence emergence of Mr. COVID-19 as a signal, a trumpeter of what is in the offing in the Judgment, and a cane for the obstinate human beings who have put their wisdom far above the Wisdom of their Creator, the Most High, our Lord and God?

Felix Adenaike is 80Have you heard? Felix Adenaike, a foremost icon of the Nigerian Press was 80 two days ago. The editor of editors, hardly matched in editorial writing, what with clarity of thoughts and lucidity of language; piercing leaders he wrote. Informed and courageous. He was a prominent member of the three musketeers at Ibadan who symbolized the unsparing Lagos-Ibadan axis of the Nigerian Press.****My editor says my time is up; the piece is to be concluded next week.

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The purpose of life on earthOpinion - Guardian

In a world quarantined during a global pandemic, April 20th (4/20 for you rubes) is the perfect time for Netflix's to launch The Midnight Gospel. The series, from co-creator Duncan Trussell (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Drunk History), is set in a virtually simulated universe using interview clips from Duncan's mind-bending podcast The Duncan Trussell Family Hour as it centers on Clancy (voiced by Trussell) a "space caster" dealing with a malfunctioning multiverse simulator. Seeking adventure and enlightenment Clancy leaves the comfort of his home to interview simulated beings surviving in dying worlds. Co-created with Pendleton Ward (Adventure Time), The Midnight Gospel feels to me like Fritz the Cat convinced Jake the Dog to drop some acid. And I loved it. Just after the nation was locked down due to the COVID 19 Pandemic, Trussell took some time to share his thoughts on the animated series, what he considers his incredible luck and his thoughts on the afterlife.

Duncan's podcast The Duncan Trussell Family Hour, featuring his fellow comedians, outsiders, spiritual healers, discussing topics like spirituality, consciousness, psychedelics, fringe theories, existentialism, and comedy is the foundation for the animated series, The Midnight Gospel. To create a cohesive story around the handpicked recordings Ducan called on some comic friends, a witch, an occult theorist, and even Weird Al came in for a writer summit held at an undisclosed location. The team was then challenged to come up with various ways that the world might end, and broke down apocalyptic scenarios into beats that Clancy, and the person that he is chatting with, could move through while they are talking. Following that, a storyboard artist would hang the dialog on top of that for the animation.

"Every day we would come up with a new, sort of "What would happen in a zombie apocalypse if the president was having to deal with that, or what would happen in a dystopian reality where a city was fueled by meat, and suddenly the meat stopped flowing. Or what would happen in a medieval world that was beginning to collapse because of some sort of connection to evil?"

Very quickly the summit realized that people aren't necessarily going to be sitting around talking about the apocalypse, they would be having normal conversations. So, to differ from apocalyptic and movies about the collapse of civilization, they steered away from what everybody might be talking about- Zombies, water, weapons, vaccines- and focused on some interpersonal relationship stuff that would be going down.

"People are going to just have regular conversations no matter what, and so that's what we realized. At the end of the world, people are going to be talking about other things besides the end of the world. Like this, or like whatever. you find yourself in a conversation with your family, with your wife, about? At some point how much we are going to talk about COVID and the rate of transmission, and how does it spread? At some point, you're going to start playing Uno."

Duncan's mother, Deneen Fendig, peacefully passed on April 3, 2013. Incredibly, three weeks earlier she had the idea to sit and record a podcast with Duncan that would end up being the final and most powerful, perspective-altering episode of The Midnight Gospel. Since recording Duncan only listened to it once, just before his wedding. Without his mother existing in the physical realm, he was able to introduce her to his wife.

"I cannot watch that without crying and being sort of spellbound and awestruck by my mom sort of prescient when she decided that she wanted to do that because when she was dying it was kind of like I didn't want to have that conversation. Not because I didn't want to have the conversation I just didn't want to deal with the fact that this is probably going to be one of the last times I talked to my mom. So to me, it's just amazing. She was dying and she said "Why don't we do it? Let's do this, let's record a podcast. so we recorded it and, of course, then I had no idea that it would end up being an animated show on Netflix and go out to lots and lots of people. So for me, there is something very powerful that my mom became something of a dandelion and she's being scattered in the winds."

With such a loving and thoughtful influence and such a powerful message, she inspired his perspective not only of life but death as well. Duncan explains what he thinks happens after we pass on: "Ask yourself "If you're alive right now?" Are you biologically alive? Sure, but I think that a lot of people have, as a sort of necessity, projected an identity that's based on the existence of a past and the potential of a future. The past, it's gone. And of course the future, unless you're Nostradamus, you have no idea this was coming outside of a so approximation of things that tend to happen, so you don't know what's coming up. So there you are sort of stranded, so to speak, in the present moment, inventing a past and imagining the future, and so in that place, every single breath is a kind of death and I think we're going to figure out what happens after we die.

Duncan continued, "The best way to do it would be to start right here and look at what happens with every exhalation, and inhalation, and you'll find that it's just like this. For me, the way that I understand what happens after you die is when I wake up from a dream. I really don't think too much about that dream. I don't know about you if you ever had a significant dream where you were hanging out with someone very important to you and you wake up. I imagine it's more than likely this entire existence seems like that, like a kind of sweet dream that you had while you were laying in some field in infinity, staring up at the clouds, and that's pretty much it. (You) probably don't think about it too much after that."

L.A. composer Joe Wong (Russian Doll, Superjail!) provides most of the soundtrack but Duncan, who describes music as "a fantastic way to plumb the depths of your own psyche," composed some of the music for the show, notably the end credit music. The reasons are obvious. Clancy is a reflection of, and to some degree is, Duncan. Clancy likes to make music, and synthesizers, messing around with gadgets and making sounds. So he would do that on Midnight Gospel, just like he did on The Duncan Trussell Family Hour: "I'm clearly not a professional musician but for me making music is a form of meditation, it's like a Rorschach inkblot test for wherever I happen to be on any given day. If my mind is scattered, or if I'm consumed by some worry, then the music seems to reflect that."

Like Thor charging Iron Man's suit, Trussell's infectious energy pulses thru the phone while he explains his connection to music: "Earlier we were talking about language, and like stream-of-consciousness articulation of wherever we happen to be but holy s*** isn't that a limited way of expressing ourselves to some degree? You have to smash your entire experience as a human being on the planet into guttural grunts, clicks, and whistles out of the thing you make you make hamburgers with. It's (language) like limiting, whereas with music, you know, it's universal. Anyone who can hear has the ability to understand even if it can't hear you can feel the vibrations of it, and so it's a transcendent mode of communication."

Trussell got his start in comedy answering phones at the Comedy Store, where he quickly moved up the ranks from answering the phones to comedy matriarch Mitzi Shore's delivery person/chauffeur. It wasn't the best job, picking up cow tongue sandwiches and driving around his comedy guru, but spending extra time with Mitzi would prove invaluable: "As you're driving her around, sure as shit, she would start telling me things, you know, and give you little lessons about comedy, about life. She would teach you and teach you in these crazy ways. I don't know I feel really lucky I got to hang out with her in that way." Duncan continues, "I've never met anyone who loved comedy the way she did. She loves comedy as though it were, she considered it to be the highest art form. She wasn't flippant about that at all. I remember she had on her wall, someone had crocheted for her, something that said 'Dying Is easy, Comedy is hard.' That was her thinking. She was one of a kind."

Trussell continued to work his way up the ranks but ended up as a talent coordinator, which he tells me is a glorified assistant to Mitzi. Despite the warnings of his friends and other comedians that the job would ruin his chances at a career, he stuck with it. As the universe would have it Duncan began a phone relationship with Joe Rogan having the same conversations they have on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast now. Aliens, DMT, deprivation tanks, conspiracy theories, mushrooms, all convinced Joe to stick around on a Sunday night and watch Trussell's six-minute employee spot: "He saw me have a good set and then he started taking me on the road with him and that we're one thing led to another that's where I got my start. It all happened because I was the talent coordinator."

Rogen is known to be a mentor to a lot of comics and as we all know now, everything Rogan touches turns to gold: "He took me on the roadway before I ever should have been going on the road and didn't care what I did on stage as long as he saw that I was progressing, developing, taking it seriously, not fucking up the stage time or squandering it. Yeah, he helped a lot of it." Fortune favors the prepared, but Duncan is practically religious about his good luck and how it brought about The Midnight Gospel. He recalls after receiving an email from Ward, Duncan couldn't wrap his mind around the possibility that the creator of Adventure Time had listened to his podcast, and he was sure it was a troll: "So when I think of that, Wow, podcasting is like throwing messages, putting messages in a bottle and just throwing it out in the sea. And you'd never know who's going to write back or what bottles are going to wash up on shore or not only that which one of them. so yeah it's luck. it's gotta be. What else would you call it, grace? Divine intervention? I don't know, a simulator maybe? I don't know. When I was sitting in a writers room with Weird Al coming up with apocalypses it was really hard for me not to believe I was in a simulation."

Duncan further elaborated: "Yeah! (like) Dandelions in the wind. that's right you've got to put it out there, and realize that anything that comes after that is icing on the cake. The thing itself, the action itself is the real joy. For me, the podcast is just getting to sit down with people for an hour or two, and we have a conversation uninterrupted, like this, is really delightful and transformative. And so the fact the podcast actually made its way on to Netflix is astoundingly beautiful to me. where the rubber hits the road, so to speak, is the moment every week or I get to meet somebody that maybe I never met before, to end up teaching me something I never heard before. That's the real psychedelic, that's the real trip."

As for Duncan's hopes for what the viewers might take away from Midnight Gospel? "My hope would be that folks if you're going through stuff, and I think we're all going through something right now, you should get a little bit of, get a little bit of light. A little bit of good news. That's what gospel is." Duncan explains that sometimes through tragedy, a window to happiness can open, "Even though the apocalypse and disaster and catastrophe can be the loudest thing out there if you just listen a little closer you can tune into something that is so beautiful, and so untouched by the chaos it can really bring a lot of comfort to be quiet. so in some way it does that for people."

What better way to end our interview then with an essential quote from Deneen Fendig, with The Midnight Gospelcurrently streaming on Netflix: "I may leave this plane of existence sooner rather than later, but the love isn't going anywhere. / I am as certain of that as I am of anything. / I want to say that I will be with you in ways that neither you nor I can comprehend. / I'm spread out throughout the world. / Not by anything I'm doing, but I'm with you. / Just pay attention, listen for me. / I'm here. / I'm there."

Jimmy Leszczynski has been blurring the line between comics and reality at SDCC every year since 1994, and was a nerd long before Lewis, Gilbert, and the Tri Lamdas made it cool. Middle aged father of 2 that REFUSES to grow up, lifelong Bat-Fan, and he thinks he's pretty funny.

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Duncan Trussell Discusses His Personal Journey to The Midnight Gospel - Bleeding Cool News

South KoreaSouth Korea reported just eight more cases of coronavirus on Sunday, the first time a daily increase has dropped to single digits in two months.

The Korea Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said this raised the countrys total to 10,661 cases, including 234 deaths. It said 8,042 people had recovered and been released from quarantine and 12,243 others were undergoing tests to determine whether they had contracted the virus.

We must not loosen our guard until the last confirmed patient is recovered. President Moon said.

Health workers wait for cars to arrive at a drive-through testing centre at Jamsil Sports Complex in Seoul

EPA

Despite the recent downward trend, South Korean officials are concerned about the possibility of a broader quiet spread with people easing up on social distancing.

President Moon urged South Koreans to support his government in saving

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As coronavirus cases fall, South Koreans warned not to lift their guard - The Times

Publish Date: Thu, 23 Apr 2020 09:54 AM IST

New Delhi | Jagran Lifestyle Desk: Ramzan or Ramadan is a holy Muslim festival celebrated by Muslims across the world during the ninth month of the Islamic calendar. The holy month is observed by observing fast and prayers. Ramadan is regarded as one of the five pillars of Islam and lasts for up to 30 days after sighting of the crescent moon.

During this period, Muslim refrain from consuming food, alcohol, tobacco products, sinful behaviour, and sexual relations from sunrise to sunset and devote themselves to prayer. It is believed that observing fast multiplies spiritual rewards. The worshippers seek blessings of Allah and try to implement the message of the Quran in their lives.

On this occasion, we bring you some messages, quotes, and wishes to share with family and friends:

May the divine Allah bless you with peaceful and prosperous life throughout the year. Happy Ramadan 2020!

After the sight of the crescent moon, may you find the utmost source of bliss and gaiety! Enjoy each and every enlightenment moment of Ramadan! Be Blessed!

I hope success and wealth come to you this month, and bring you good fortune and prosperity. Happy Ramadan 2020!

May this Ramadan bring endless moments of joy and happiness in your life. Ramadan Mubarak.

May you always be blessed with the love and protection of Allah. Wish you a happy Ramadan.

May this blessed night keep coming in your life ever and ever after. Chaand Raat Mubarak to you and your family may Allah bless you all.

The motivation of Ramadan gives us the ability to do more good works. May you have the happiest Ramadan.

May Allah bless you and your family. Happy Ramadan Kareem!

Wishing you a blessed and Happy Ramadan 2020!

Ramadan Mubarak. I wish you a blessed and prosperous Ramadan.

Also Read: Ramadan 2020 Date in India: When is Ramzan? All you need to know about month-long festival

Ramadan Shayari

Ae Chand Unko Mera Paigaam Kehna Khushi ka Din aur Pyar ki SHam kehna Jab wo Dekhein Bahaar Aake Unko meri taraf se Mubarak ho Ramadan kehna.

Zindagi ko Ramadan Jaisi Banao Taki Maut Eid Jaisi Aae! Ramadan Mubarak Doosto!

Chand se roshan ho Ramzan tumhara, ibadath se bhar jaye roza tumhara, har namaz ho kubool aapki, bus yehi dua hai qoda se humara, Ramzan Mubarak.

Ramzan Ki Amad Hai, Rehmatein Barasane Wala Mahina Hai, Ao Aaj Sub Khataon Ki Maafi Maang Lein, Dar-e-taurba Khula Hai Is Mahine Mein..

Ramzaan mein ho jae sabki muraad puri, Mile sabko dhero khusiya aur na rahe koi ichcha adhuri...

Posted By: James Kuanal

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Happy Ramadan 2020: Wishes, quotes, SMS, messages, Shayari, Facebook and WhatsApp status to share with family and friends - Jagran English

A lot of people face one common problem of not being able to sit at one place while meditating and that is lack of concentration. It often leads to not being able to meditate. Recently, holistic wellness coach Luke Coutinho was posted a video where he was having a talk with spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravishankar.

During their conversation, Sri Sri Ravishankar gave some meditation tips to those who have difficulty meditating. He also gave some useful tips on how to manage restlessness.

Also Read |Meditation Tips While Travelling, Whether You're On A Flight Or A Bus

Luke Coutinho said that people think meditation is all about stopping the thoughts. He further added that people close their eyes and try to find enlightenment and peace. Talking about how to manage restlessness, he said that when people do not get it in a couple of minutes they just giveup.

During their conversation, Sri Sri Ravishankar said that meditation is not just about the concentration. He said that many people think of meditation as an exercise of concentration and as a result face difficulty meditating. For all the people who face difficulty meditating, here are some of the meditation tips for them in how to manage restlessness.

Also Read |Meditation Tips: A Simple Guide To Practice Meditation At Home

In the beginning, if one feels restless, it is advised to start with light exercises. The light exercises that can be done are shaking and moving of hands for a minute or two. Other light exercises like jogging also help to relax the body and mind.

Also Read |Disha Patani Talks About How She Entered The Bollywood Industry; Read Here

Before meditating, starting by doing some Yoga asanas might prove beneficial in managing restlessness. Simple Yoga asanas like Pranayam are also helpful. The breathing exercise helps in relaxing and reduces restlessness.

Also Read |Beat The Coronavirus Lockdown Blues And Do A Virtual Tour Of The Picturesque City Prague

Apart from the above hacks, one can also start meditating by taking 10-15 deep breaths. This helps calm down from the restless circuit. If one follows these steps managing restlessness wont be a problem while meditating.

Read more here:

Having difficulty meditating? Here are meditation tips to manage restlessness - Republic World - Republic World

The faade of the Ges, a major sixteenth-century church, and its piazza, a major 21st-century traffic node, almost empty (all images courtesy the author for Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted)

ROME At 6 pm on March 27 Pope Francis made an extraordinary appearance in the locked-down and rain-soaked St. Peters Square. He was being broadcast live across the world, giving a rare speech, Urbi et Orbi, to the city and the world, a form of address that is traditionally only used at Christmas, Easter, and upon the election of a new pope. Behind him, lit up dramatically against the faade of St Peters, were two sacred images that had been brought out especially for this event. One was the icon of the Virgin called the Salus Populi Romani, the Salvation of the Roman People, from the 13th century, and the other was a wooden crucifix from the following century which had miraculously survived a church fire when the rest of the building had been reduced to ash, and which was carried in procession in 1522 through the city when it was devastated by a bout of the plague. Both images have been venerated for centuries, along with a host of other religious imagery in the city, for their special protection against pestilence.

This was a particularly harsh day for Italy. Deaths from the coronavirus outbreak had reached 969 in the previous 24 hours a new high and total deaths since the beginning of the outbreak in the country numbered 9134. Everyone in Italy was scared. Two of the three state television networks broadcast the popes speech. He repeated a verse from Matthew 4:40, Why are you afraid? Have you no faith? He spoke humanely of our common need for comfort, and after he had finished, he went to pray silently in front of the two sacred images. The piazza was spectral. He and a few attendants were alone in the vast space.

Just 19 days earlier, as a severe quarantine was imposed on areas of northern Italy afflicted by the coronavirus epidemic, Pope Francis did not give his customary Sunday speech from the window of the Apostolic Palace. The crowd in St. Peters Square watched him on the four papal jumbotrons as he delivered his blessing along with a short homily. I wondered why he allowed the crowd to gather there at all. They were putting themselves in danger of infection from each other, while he was safe in his palace above. In the end, as if to unite himself with the faithful from which he had initially separated himself, he opened the traditional window and waved to those gathered below.

Both the pope and the faithful who gathered below his windows were following a powerful impulse far older than they knew. A long and fascinating history of conflict interweaves disease, faith, and recovery. The Church is a community, a body of the faithful, and when the individual believers body is suffering, the believer has historically been drawn both to the faith, for solace and healing, and to the community, for comfort and nursing. What happens when an epidemic strikes and that profoundly human urge becomes part of the problem? Rome, as always a laboratory for the great human experiment of civilization, tells this contradictory story eloquently.

Last time I was in St. Peters, I was fascinated by a 13th-century statue of the apostle (with a contested and unsettled provenance). Pilgrims and tourists lined up to stand before it. Everyone kept a discreet distance from each other. One by one they approached. Then they stretched out their hands and caressed its worn bronze foot. Some kissed their hand and then touched the foot, while others put their hand to the foot and then to their faces. As I stood watching them, I couldnt help but be struck, once more, by the fearless physicality of Catholicism, as if faith alone were sufficient to overcome the threat of bacterial transmission, as if objects held sacred were exempt from the laws that govern the rest of the physical universe. This was three months ago, before Id ever heard of the coronavirus.

All over Rome there are traces of the same need for physical contact with the holy. In the church of SantAgostino there is a 16th-century statue of the Virgin of Child Birth, whose marble foot had to be replaced with silver because it was so worn from the touch of supplicants usually anxious fathers expecting a difficult delivery. Now the metal foot is also worn smooth. Two small marble crosses were inserted into opposite piers of the Colosseum, which was thought to be a site of Christian martyrdom. An inscription below each cross states the number of years and days you would be spared Purgatory if you kissed it. Theoretically you could go back and forth between these crosses and kiss your way out of Purgatory. If this all sounds like a recipe for disease transmission, it probably is.

The curative power of prayer has been a mainstay of Catholic faith from Gregory the Great at the end of the sixth century to Mother Teresa in the 20th. Prayers to specific saints, like St. Roch and St. Sebastian, patrons of plague victims, were thought to be particularly effective. People gather at churches and chapels dedicated to doctor/saints such as the brothers Cosmas and Damian, not only in the hope of a miraculous cure, but also for the comfort of the community. In the eighth century, the sick could sleep in the chapels of the anargyroi (in Greek, those who heal without payment) and hope for a curative dream. In some hospice churches, like that of S. Maria in Cappella, there were beds placed in the side aisles even in the 19th century. Religious orders administered cures and ran hospitals, and indeed still do. But there were always situations in which herbal remedies and prayer were desperately insufficient.

The Black Death of the mid-1300s, which wiped out from between a third and a half of Europes population, was one such situation. In Venice, a major trading center, ships arriving were required to wait for 40 days before debarking passengers, because that was sufficient time for the bubonic plague to show its signs and take its casualties. The translation of 40 days is una quarantina di giorni in Italian, and we get our word quarantine from it. But quarantine, enforced isolation, clashed with the medieval and early modern idea of the ecclesia, the church as a community, united in good and in bad times.

The struggle between ecclesia and quarantine had lasted in Rome for more than three hundred years when a plague originating in the port of Naples began to push outward in spring of 1656. It spurred a tiny revolution that marked a turning point in the difficult relationship between worship and epidemic.

In Rome, the most renowned protectress against the plague was the Madonna del Portico, a tiny precious icon of the Virgin and Child. A mere 25 centimeters tall, it is made of silver and champlev enamel, and dates from the late 1200s. It was venerated in the church of S. Maria in Portico, in a low-lying area of the city. Nearby was the bridge to the Tiber Island, whose buildings had frequently been used as a lazzaretto or plague hospital. The church, run down and poor, was already the center of a neighborhood prone to illness, but in May 1656 the bubonic plague arrived in Rome from Naples. Pope Alexander VII activated a special health commission headed by a priest, Girolamo Gastaldi, who was put in charge of the lazzaretti in the Papal States.

Gastaldi took strict measures immediately. He closed all but eight of the city gates, and subjected everyone entering to a quarantine which he imposed on the entire city, closing up whole houses if even one inhabitant was ill, using a highly visible wax seal of contagion that, if broken, would act as a silent informant to the police. The residents would have to wait out the 40 days, with food raised up to the windows in baskets with twine. Holy water was no longer used in the churches. The terminally ill were isolated on the Tiber Island, the lazzaretto brutto or terrible plague-house. The gates of the Jewish Ghetto were closed. The furniture of a room in which a victim died would be burned in the street. In an unpopular gesture, Alexander VII ordered the church of S. Maria in Portico closed. But crowds continued to gather in the nearby streets until dispersed by the police and nobles had themselves smuggled into the presence of the holy image via the back door. In December 1656, the city government announced a public vow to move the holy image to a more dignified church, and from that day the plague seemed to abate. In reality, of course, it was Gastaldis policy of isolation that had started to work.

By August 1657 the plague had run its course. Of the population of Rome, which was approximately 120,000 people, 15,000 deaths were registered between May 1656 and August 1657, an astonishingly low number given that Naples lost half its population of 300,000, and Genoa also had a 50% death rate. In fulfilment of the public vow, the Madonna del Portico was upgraded to a better church, S. Maria in Campitelli, in 1662 in the dead of night so as to prevent rioting.

In 1684, when he was governor of Bologna, Girolamo Gastaldi published the first formal manual of quarantine: the Tractatus de avertenda et profliganda peste politico-legalis. The Tractatus became the principal manual for plague response. While thoroughly Catholic in its form and outlook, it concerned itself more with the physical rather than the spiritual health of the faithful. Its counsel seems very familiar in todays Rome: Protect the gates; maintain quarantine; keep watch over your people. Also, close sites of popular aggregation, from taverns to churches with plague-preventing icons to St. Peters Square itself. Dont gather at icons or touch the feet of statues.

On March 9, 2020, a state decree extended the quarantine of Lombardy and 14 northern provinces to all Italy, effectively locking down 60 million people, including me. The government suspended all public gatherings, sports and cultural events, and even religious ceremonies, including Mass, weddings, and funerals. The following day, Pope Francis ordered the closure of St. Peters Basilica, the square, and the Vatican Museums. On March 11 another decree closed most businesses. All these actions stem indirectly from Cardinal GastaldisTractatus. Whether or not quarantine will save us remains to be seen. But the empty streets of todays Rome are infinitely safer for us, its residents, than the 1656 streets teeming with the faithful in front of a locked church, kneeling in the mud to pray for the Virgins intercession while the epidemic passed silently from person to person like an invisible sword.

With the advent of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Catholic tendency to defer to Church authority in all things weakened and medicine entered the sphere of science, where it remains. But the role of prayer in fighting epidemics has never disappeared. On Sunday, March 15, Pope Francis left the Vatican to make a solitary pilgrimage through the deserted streets of Rome to visit those important holy images against the plague: the Salus Populi Romani and the miraculous crucifix in the church of San Marcello. Both these images were closed to the public, during the plague of 165657 and are now in the present crisis. The pope, in making his journey on foot like a penitent, was standing in for all the faithful, to carry out the prayers of his flock, who could watch him remotely on television. The line between the spiritual and the practical had been drawn in 1656 when Gastaldi closed the churches, but the popes visit to the two healing icons reasserted the spiritual and miraculous nature of healing, building a tiny bridge between the need for social distancing and the need for social solidarity.

Even as a non-believer I think this bridge has value. The existence of a spiritual component in healing is a human constant, which expresses something inside us that reaches upward in search of a hand reaching downward. And this same something extends outward, to other people, in search of connection. Human contact of some kind is widely acknowledged to be an influence on healing. We are social animals and feeling the love and care of our communities helps us heal. In the person of the pope there is a meeting point between the believers longing for the divine and his or her longing for human contact. Father Bernard Healy, of Romes Irish College, explained to me why the pope made his solitary appearance in St. Peters Square under the rain.

The Pope is there on behalf of everyone else. Its not that he as Pope has more right to be heard than anyone else, but rather that he has a responsibility for everyone, and so part of his responsibility is to lead the whole world in prayer. Hes there representing us in that hes praying what we all want to pray; hes also leading us in that his words are shaping the prayer that were all making.

The direct efficacy of prayer on disease is debatable. But prayer as an act of reaching out is both a solitary and a social act, joining people with each other and with something larger than themselves. As I watched Pope Francis, a white figure against the background of the piazza at dusk, I felt both skepticism and a certain reluctant awe. I could understand why believers might take solace from his prayers in front of the holy images that had comforted centuries of worshippers. And I also thought of Cardinal Gastaldi, long forgotten, who codified the quarantine process that had led us to this scene, with the vast darkness of the empty square representing the isolation that protects us and, paradoxically, joins us together.

The rest is here:

A History of Disease, Faith, and Recovery in Rome - Hyperallergic

Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day, which was held on April 22, 1970. This significant anniversary is an invitation to pause and consider some of what led to the creation of Earth Day in the first place, what has happened in the years since, and how that might inform where and how we go from here.

Lets start with a brief glance backward at two contributing factors to the first Earth Day. The first major influence that comes to mind is that in 1962, eight years before the first Earth Day, the biologist Rachel Carson (1907-1964) published her book Silent Spring, which sounded an alarm about human-created pesticides harming the environment.

A second major factor is that on December 24 (Christmas Eve) 1968, a little more than a year before the first Earth Day, an astronaut on the Apollo 8 mission took a color photograph of our planet from space. This photo, titled Earthrise, has been called the most influential environmental photograph ever taken (Galen Rowell). Our planet can seem so massive from here on Earths surface, but suddenly we were seeing our home world from space for the first time: as a tiny, beautiful blue marble floating in the infinite inky blackness of space.

Sixteen months after that photo of Earthrise was published, the first Earth Day was held. Less than three months later President Richard Nixon (a Republican), proposed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which he personally put into operation later that year through an executive order (The Origins of EPA). There was a time when a greater percentage of political conservatives supported conservation of the environment.

This brief recap of history around the time of the first Earth Day shows that there was reason to hope that things might have turned out differently than they have so far in the struggle for climate justice. As Nathaniel Rich has traced in his important book Losing Earth: A Recent History (MCD, 2019), long before the 2016 Paris Climate Accords, we can see that, as far back as 1979, at the first World Climate Conference held in Geneva,

scientists from fifty nations agreed unanimously that it was urgently necessary to act. Four months later, at the Group of Seven meeting in Tokyo, the leaders of the worlds wealthiest nations signed a statement to rescue carbon emissions (8).

Tragically, the opposite came to pass. We can even fast-forward a decade to another major climate conference (this time in Noordwijk, the Netherlands) and see today, in retrospect, that, More carbon has been released into the atmosphere since 1989, the final day of the Noordwijk Climate Conference, than in the entire history of civilization up to that point (180).

So why are we moving in the wrong direction, when we have known better for decades? One reason is what the Buddhist tradition calls the three poisons: greed, delusion, and ill will. Consider that, Between 2000 and 2016, the fossil fuel industry spent more than $2 billion, or ten times as much as was spent by environmental groups, to defeat climate change legislation (6). As Bill McKibben highlights in Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? (Henry Holt and Co, 2019), the reason that almost 90 percent of Americans dont know that there is a scientific consensus on global warming is that there has been a well-funded disinformation campaign to create precisely that result (77).

So how do we better fund the movement for climate justice? How do we fund a Green New Deal? One significant starting point would be targeting the fossil fuel companies who have thrown fuel on the fire of greed, delusion, and ill will. As social activist Naomi Klein writes in On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (Simon & Schuster, 2019):

The top five oil companies made $900 billion in profits in the past decade. For years these companies have pledged to use their profits to invest in a shift to renewable energy (BPs Beyond Petroleum rebranding being the highest profile example). But[only a small percentage of profits have gone to] alternative energy ventures. Instead, they continue to pour their profits into shareholder pockets, outrageous executive pay, and new technologies designed to extract even dirtier and more dangerous fossil fuels. Plenty of money has also gone to paying lobbyists to beat back every piece of climate legislationand to fund the denier movement.

Just as tobacco companies have been obliged to pay the costs of helping people quit smoking, and BP has had to pay for a large portion of the cleanup in the Gulf of Mexico, it is high time for the polluter pays principle to be applied to climate change. (88-89)

A Green New Deal done right would be both a massive job creator (to make all the changes necessary to shift to a greener economy) and paying for it can help decrease the wealth gap, particularly if methods include a global minimum corporate tax rate (281-283).

I should perhaps hasten to be clear that in criticizing our current wealth gap, I am by no means advocating a strict egalitarianism in which everyone has exactly the same amount of money. But I am criticizing our current toleration of a tiny few having way too many resources and many more people not even having the bare minimum needed to live with dignity. I am also saying that it is unconscionable to allow a tiny percentage of people to horde enormous wealth when that money could help save this one, beautiful, irreplaceable planet we call home.

As a proverb from the indigenous Cree tradition says about storing up wealth at the expense of the environment, When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money (Loy 33). Or to flip the perspective, as the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano (1940 2015) once said, If nature was a bank, they would have already rescued it (16).

That being said, were seeing some interesting glimpses of what can happenand in fairly short orderwhen our human activity is changed. Smog has plagued Los Angeles for years, but in the wake of Californias stay-at-home order, LA is currently experiencing the longest stretch of clean air since 1980, when the EPA first started keeping regular track of LAs air pollution.

This experience reminds me of a poem titled Lockdown, written by a Franciscan friar in Ireland that made the rounds on the Internet a few weeks ago. The whole poem is worth reading in full, but one of the most arresting lines is that, They say that in Wuhan after so many years of noise /You can hear the birds again. To follow the words of this poem, are we awake to the choices we have to make as to how to live now? If so, how will we choose to live?

The cultural commentator Steve Bhaerman has put it this way: Theres good news and theres bad news. The bad news: civilization, as we know it, is about to end. Now the good news: civilization, as we know it, is about to end (vii). There is always opportunity in a crisis.

For discerning a potential path forward, I would like to begin to work my way toward my conclusion by saying a little more about what I mentioned earlierthat one explanation for why we have been moving in the wrong direction for decades regarding climate changedespite knowing betteris what the Buddhist tradition calls the three poisons:

In the Buddhist tradition, these three poisons are understood to be the root causes of dukkha, our experience of suffering or unsatisfactoriness.

In Ecodharma: Buddhist Teachings for the Ecological Crisis (Wisdom Publications, 2019), David Loy invites us to consider the three poisons not only individually, but also institutionally and systemically. From an ecological perspective, institutionalized dukkah or systemic suffering looks like:

So what might we do differently? From a Buddhist perspective, the way to create the world we dream about is through the three antidotes (or wholesome mental factors):

These practices are essential for individual and collective awakening/liberation/enlightenment (71).

And since the eight-day festival of passover recently ended, allow me to also weave in a related piece of wisdom from the Jewish tradition. One of the most famous passages from Mishah (a collection of the Jewish oral tradition) advises that whenever we are feeling daunted by the enormity of the worlds griefwhich climate change can certainly cause us to feelthe suggested remedy is to focus on the next right action within our spheres of influence: to Act justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. It is not your responsibility to finish the work of healing the world, but neither are you free to desist from it (Lay 173).

You do not have to solve this global, systemic problem alone. We are stronger together. Specifically, when you feeling discouraged about the movement for climate justice, I recommend that you take some time to check in with what the Sunrise Movement is doing (sunrisemovement.org). This youth-led movement for climate justice is a consistent source of inspiration, fierce advocacy, and persistent hope.

An increasing number of young people are awakening to the fact that they cant yet vote, but will nevertheless be stuck with the consequences of current adult inaction (Klein 4). At last years first ever global School Strike for Climate, protest signs read:

To quote the seventeen-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg (2003 ), I dont want your hope. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is (12).

As we turn toward our planets climate emergency, may we bring wisdom to the work of climate justice as we seek to encourage spiritual growth, loving-kindness for building a beloved community, and generosity in our actions for peace and justiceactions that seek to benefit not merely ourselves and those closest to us, but this planet as a wholeand all sentient beings.

The Rev. Dr. Carl Gregg is a certified spiritual director, a D.Min. graduate of San Francisco Theological Seminary,and the minister of theUnitarian Universalist Congregation of Frederick, Maryland.Follow him onFacebook(facebook.com/carlgregg) andTwitter(@carlgregg).

Learn more about Unitarian Universalism: http://www.uua.org/beliefs/principles

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If the Climate Was a Bank, They Would Have Already Rescued It: 50th Anniversary of #EarthDay - Patheos

April 19, 2020

WILKES-BARRE March 15 was a quiet Sunday afternoon.

I was home getting ready to drive up to Moosic, where I had plans to meet some longtime friends and their little girl for lunch.

Just as I was preparing to leave the house, news broke of Luzerne Countys first confirmed COVID-19 case.

County Manager C. David Pedri had called a press conference for mid-afternoon at the EMA Building.

Calls were made, plans set in motion, and a short time later found me and colleague Bill OBoyle at the press conference among the other media, exchanging nervous pleasantries with each other and community leaders gathered in the room.

Needless to say, I never made it to lunch in Moosic. (Well do it one of these days, Dana.)

We listened as Pedri calmly explained what we knew, what we didnt know, and what was expected to come next, including a state of emergency for the county.

He explained that future briefings would likely be conducted online, so as to protect the media and county staff from unnecessary interaction.

And he sought to reassure the community.

We are all in this together. Each of us together can truly make a difference in this crisis, Pedri said. We are asking you to stop unnecessary travel. To maintain good hygiene. To stay home if required.

I know some people are saying, this doesnt really affect me, Im not a person at risk. But we still dont know the full interaction of this virus yet, Pedri said.

I am the son of at-risk parents, and I am the father of young children, he added. We will do what we need to do to make sure Luzerne County is safe.

Was there a slight quiver in Pedris voice as he spoke those last words? I thought so. God knows I almost teared up when I heard them.

The panic that had mostly been the subject of headlines from other places had hit home, with the worst yet to come. It was real, and it was about to affect people we all know and love. We just didnt know how hard, but stories out of Italy, in particular, brought no solace.

On that sunny March Sunday there were 63 positive cases in Pennsylvania, including one in Luzerne County.

As of Sunday, April 19 just over a month later There were 1,741 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Luzerne County and 34 people have died. Statewide, there were 32,284 cases and 1,112 deaths.

As businesses shut down to comply with Gov. Tom Wolfs stay-at-home orders to slow the outbreaks spread, unemployment skyrocketed, with more than 1.3 million Pennsylvanians filing for unemployment in the month that ended last week, state statistics show.

Lives have been changed, upended, ended. And its not over.

My colleagues and I reached out to a number of people in the community to ask how their lives have changed in the past month.

Here are the stories we have collected. We thank everyone who took the time to participate.

* * *

Cathy Alaimo, of Dallas, who is retired from Circles on the Square in downtown Wilkes-Barre, said she has been cooking and baking more now that the coronavirus is keeping her at home.

I just made apple turnovers the other day, she said, adding that she also is enjoying having time to watch birds.

Theres a hawks nest near my house and I can watch them through the window, she said, adding she hung a suet treat outside a window to attract more feathered friends.

There would be yardwork to keep her busy, too, Alaimo admitted. But my new motto is, I can do that tomorrow.

Mary Therese Biebel

Lindsay Bezick, well known for her role with the Greater Wilkes-Barre Chamber of Commerce, has been reflecting on keeping connections strong and what comes next.

For each of us, the pandemic has changed the dynamic of our lives. Seeing each day how this had impacted our community and the world has all been extremely challenging, Bezick said. Those challenges have truly prompted me to be helpful in any way I can personally and also with my team at the Chamber, as we work each day to demonstrate the hope and strong sense of togetherness during this time.

I have also focused my energy on staying informed yet positive, connecting and re-connecting with family and friends virtually and taking the time to realize what is truly important in life, she said.

Now, more than ever, I have the utmost respect and am so grateful for those on the front lines and all they are doing, Bezick added.

I know from this many things have changed and will continue to change moving forward, and with those changes, there will also come a sense of appreciation for all we do have as we all continue to work together. I will be ready and grateful to be able to help in any way I can towards that future, she said.

Mike Murray

Wilkes-Barre Mayor George Brown spoke as a proud member of a team working daily to protect the residents, employees and visitors and during the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has totally disrupted our city for both our residents way of life, and the livelihood of small businesses and restaurants throughout the city.

I am confident that we will succeed in addressing the Coronavirus, because of the remarkable teamwork displayed throughout this crisis.

There is a feeling of teamwork between our city and local hospitals. The Health Department is keeping our residents safe and informed. Wilkes-Barre Police, Fire/EMS, and DPW crews have worked beyond the call of duty. Staff at City Hall has worked together as a team, to continue to provide resident services, since the onslaught of the virus.

We will get though this. We will make sure that what weve learned will be beneficial in our response to future disruptions and disasters.

I again urge residents to follow social distancing, and all of the CDCs and Pennsylvania Health Departments recommendations. Please stay home, stay safe, and stay well.

Jerry Lynott

Barbara DiGiovanni of Jackson Township said since everything has slowed down there is more time to do the things she didnt have time to do before.

She said she has been cleaning her floors with her new steamer, cooking and delivering more meals and trying to enjoy her new freedom and view of a much more simple life often not appreciated.

I do miss going to church, going out to dinner, shopping and spending time with my friends and family, DiGiovanni said. The least obvious and most important is my inability to go anywhere without much thought behind it. Hopefully when this is over (it never will really be over) we will be living in a better world.

Bill OBoyle

Mimi McGowan of Hanover Township, laid it out clearly.

Hey, I dont like being home either, but I would not like to be around a bunch of people who have no regard/respect for this illness, she said.

It really wont be safe to be out in public for a while. China reopened and they have a surge, McGowan added.

I want things to be normal. I cant wait to go back to my classes for the dog and the gym. I want to walk through the Christmas Tree Store and buy stuff. I want to go out for dinner. I want to not run through the grocery store like Im on a game show just grabbing things.

Im not sure how long it will be before I feel comfortable, she added. Heck, I want to see my son.

Bill OBoyle

Mike Harper, of Kingston, said the big issue for many is the uncertainty about what comes next.

Whats our lives going to be like in the future? How will I survive financially, physically, socially, spiritually, morally? Many things in our daily routines are out of our control. Is there light at the end of the tunnel, he said.

The politics of the situation increases the overall stress. I am a positive, glass half full type of person, Harper added.

The only remedy, in my opinion is to let common sense prevail, let this beast run its course and lets get back to a normal life, he said.

The word on the street is that there is not much common sense out there. I dont buy that, especially when its a matter of life and death.

Bill OBoyle

Linda Joseph, of Wilkes-Barre, reflected on contrasting aspects of living through the past month.

Since the coronavirus was diagnosed in our area, my life has changed in both disheartening ways but in positive ways as well, Joseph said.

I strongly miss my volunteer community involvement in so many different groups and organizations, especially interacting with others in residents associations, on many committees, in meetings and socializing. This became a large part of my life since retiring two years ago, she said.

I miss my family, my church and church family and spending time with friends, Joseph added.

But, I also have come to appreciate what we take for granted in our everyday lives. A hug, a smile. Lenten and Easter Seasons were especially uplifting, now having the time to truly experience this spiritual time without distractions.

Roger DuPuis

Deidre Miller Kaminski, of Edwardsville, offered these thoughts.

This has made me realize whats really most important in my life, she said.

I have started praying more. We should all be on our knees praying they find a vaccine sooner than later.

This has slowed me down from being an extrovert to an introvert. Im all about fellowship, gathering family and friends together, making memories, taking pictures. Im a hugger hugging everyone. My house was always open to everyone, whether it was meetings, or get-togethers, birthday parties, 4th of July celebrations.

Its really hard to adjust to this isolation. I havent even been out anywhere, not even to the store at all because my daughter was going to have a baby.

At times, this has been very difficult to deal with, extreme anxiety and fear about contracting the virus because I am prone to respiratory infections and bronchitis constant worrying about family and now my two-week-old granddaughter contracting it.

Im deeply saddened thinking of all that passed away with no family there to comfort them.

Im so used to doing community service projects with General Federation of Womens Clubs-West Side and now feeling helpless that I cant do anything.

It gives you a feeling of helplessness, that all I can do right now is just let everyone know Im thinking of them and praying we all stay safe.

I never thought I would be quarantined for my 70th birthday. I thought I would be dancing the night away with my family and friends.

Bill OBoyle

Michele Lane, of Kingston, is grateful to have paid time off, but that hasnt completely kept her calm.

Im afraid of the panic, but also I fear the government is under-reacting. Its hard to get the facts anymore, she said.

She is also worried about continuing her dance classes after the fog lifts.

Im also worried about local businesses, even my dance studio. How long can they go without daily sales?

Toni Pennello

Sophia Loeber, who recently moved to Kingston from Philadelphia, is unemployed due to the pandemic.

The panic has spread just as quickly as the virus, and its just as terrifying, she said, citing precautions in grocery stores meant to help patrons maintain social distancing.

Also, its so hard to motivate myself to do stuff because every day is kind of the same.

Toni Pennello

Susan Magnotta reflected on the abrupt change of pace.

When the noise and constant busyness of everyday life suddenly stopped I found myself with unstructured time on my hands, she said. It gave me the opportunity to consider if the areas where I had been directing my time and attention were aligned with the things I value most in life and make changes going forward.

So far, our family has merely been inconvenienced by the pandemic which is humbling because I know so many people are hurting, Magnotta added. It has given me great appreciation for those who cant stay home at this time and I hope to be in a position to give back to the community when all this is over.

Mike Murray

Shivaun ODonnell, of Wilkes-Barre, talked about changes of routine and what she would like to accomplish.

I am working from home a few days a week, doing diabetes education for individual Geisinger patients, and other groups over the phone and/or on video with much success.

For the last several years Ive been developing a list of things to do when I get time and my status of said things. Well, the stay-at-home order has given me the time, for sure. Heres my status report of my list of things to do:

1. Clean out back room of basement not done, not started.

2. Get family video call reunion DONE!!!! This is pretty remarkable because I have family all over the world, Japan, Ireland, Costa Rica, San Diego, New Hampshire, Vermont.

3. Re-hang curtains in bedroom Not done, not started.

4. Clean out email inbox Not done, 5,072 in gmail, 12,694 in AOL. I deleted about 200 the other day, and I think there are now even more.

5. Learn how to tap dance Started, tap shoes dusted off. Tap board located. Online resource located.

6. Exercise every day achieving about 67.6% success rate.

7. Read a new book Started Trinity by Leon Uris. My new goal on this one is to finish it by 12/21/2020.

8. Organize of my loose pictures. Not done, not started

9. Get my blog started again Not done, however I did happen to renew the domain name this year, visit shootingtheshiv.com.

10. Cook new exciting recipes Not done. But, my cousin Nora started me on a recipe chain mail, so Im hoping to get a few new recipes to try out on the fam now, and on my friends later this year.

So my quarantine enlightenment is this most of to-dos are not ever going to get to-done no matter how much time I have.

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Protesters rally in Harrisburg to demand Wolf reopen economy - Wilkes Barre Times-Leader

You might think that running around the same New York city block for 52 days straight would be an exercise in futility. Not to mention stupefyingly boring.

Runners who signed up for the Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race would go around and around 164th street in Jamaica, Queens, 5,649 times, roughly 96km each day until they had run 4,898km in the worlds longest certified footrace.

The race and extreme running itself is the subject of Sanjay Rawals new film, 3100 Run and Become, which is now available to stream.

Watching it now as the worlds major cities including New York are in shutdown feels jarring, a reminder of the freedoms we have lost: to be outside in bustling streets, where people move with purpose; to run and to breathe without fear. In the film, street life in Queens surrounds the runners as they circle the same block, past the Thomas Edison high school and Joseph Austin playground, again and again.

They struggle with the stifling summer heat bouncing off the pavement, the humidity, the blisters, the chafing, the carb loading, the exhaustion. The race was founded in 1996 by the late Indian guru Sri Chinmoy as a way for people to discover and surpass their own limits. The goal is to transcend earthly annoyances and find some kind of enlightenment.

But for the most part in this film, those taking part look more as though they are descending into a particularly unpleasant version of hell, as their muscles break down. Ashprihanal Aalto, 45, tells his mentor that after winning in 2015 he doesnt want to run the race again because he doesnt want to suffer like that any more. But he does run it, as he has 15 times now, winning more than half of them. I wouldnt do it 15 years if there wasnt something more than just a race, he tells the Guardian. For me it is part of my spiritual life You try to quiet the mind.

He was training for this years race when it was cancelled because of the coronavirus. Now hes self-isolating instead: a situation hes better trained for than most. Aalto speaks to me from Helsinki, Finland, where he is a postal worker, living an austere existence alone in a cabin.

These types of races are not for an incredibly social person says the director, Rawal. I would say his life of utter solicitude definitely gives him an edge over people. [Aalto] lives like a teenager, he has got boxes of chocolate under his bed. He drinks soda all the time, eats pizza. The one thing he works on his mental attitude, just to keeping his mind fluid, loose and free.

The most interesting thing about those who run this race, Rawal says, is that they are the most ordinary people.

One of them, Yuri [Trostenyuk, who won in 2016], is a plumber in the Ukraine. None of them are sponsored. It shows that if you have the right attitude you can accomplish what most people think is impossible.

Aalto found spirituality after his mother died. Craving time and space to reflect, he went into the forest on his own for three months, walking the 4,500km Pacific Crest Trail and then the 3,500km Appalachian Trail in the US. After many months of hiking you become one with the forest and more sensitive, your hearing and smell becomes better, he says. When he heard about multi-day races, something clicked: I thought it sounded nice to be able to run all day and night.

In his film, Rawal explores the spirituality of running as its experienced around the world; that ability to tap into something more powerful than simply the pounding of feet. It was this idea that running could be a prayer, he says. He ventures from the New York race to visit Shaun Martin, a Navajo canyon runner in Chinle, Arizona, who is continuing a tradition of moving on foot that has existed for hundreds of years. He visits bushmen of Botswana, who are trying to hold on to a now-illegal tradition of hunting by running after their prey.

He also talks to a Buddhist monk in Mount Hiei, Japan, who undertakes an ascetic 1,000-day challenge in rugged terrain wearing unsuitable bamboo shoes and who is obliged to kill himself if he doesnt complete it. Says Rawal of the monk: It was this idea that movement and running could be used to totally transcend our ego and put us into the highest realms of spiritual consciousness. That there comes a point that the bliss totally negates any pain or discomfort. If it wasnt for the bliss all he would think about was, What if I dont finish?, and fear would envelope him.

Aalto says: For some people it is spiritual music or great singers that gives their joy, their inspiration, for some people art. For me running long distances is my way of making progress, that is what keeps me motivated. As the years go by the more it is an inner thing. It is still a race but there is a kind of joy in it.

3100: Run and Become is streaming on iTunes, Amazon, Amazon Prime and Google Play

More:

'It is part of my spiritual life': the people who take running to the extreme - The Guardian

Walking around the dunes the other day, looking at the bay and the happenings of the day, listening to music as I strolled. On came Clapton playing Layla, unplugged. I had to search for the studio version and turn it up loud. For my money its the greatest rock song of the 20th century. Check out the song, and the article that I read about the song, in the link here.

The studio version by the short-lived band Derek and the Dominos is nothing short of masterful. Written by Clapton and keyboardist Bobby Whitlock, Laylas brilliance bubbles up from several sources. Musically its flat out beautiful melodically and performed magnificently by great guitar, keyboard and vocal work.

Layla it rolls off the tongue so nicely, like Lo-li-ta is a song about love, the most important and unifying subject of all time. But in this case its the painful brand of unrequited love that drives the mournful quality of the song.

As luck would have it - again refer to the ultimateclassicrock article about the song - guitarist Duane Allman happened to be in the same recording studio when Layla and Other Love Songs was being produced. He joined it and so happens the magic.

Finally, the songs roots tap into a classic Middle Eastern tale - Layla and Majnun - that chronicles another story of unrequited love. When Majnun ultimately realizes he will never be able to marry the princess Layla, his despair leads him onto a spiritual journey that ultimately opens the door to enlightenment and the realization of universal love and interconnection between all human souls.

The power of love.

Layla is another of the endless gifts given us by artists and their ability to draw us together through the pleasure of shared aesthetic experiences. If you want to follow this a little farther, read Robert Frosts poem called Tuft of Flowers.

https://ultimateclassicrock.com/derek-and-the-dominos-layla/

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Greatest rock song of the 20th century - CapeGazette.com

The books intricate title, Americas Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It, enlists readers into the spirit of revolution. It appeals to thirsty intellects and to those who long for noble actions, with its careful reading of profound documents and appreciation of monumental actions, thus asserting the political and moral power of words. We gird ourselves for an exciting read.

The book has particular fascination for me, because I know the authorwe were colleagues at Ashland University in the 1990s, and Brad Thompson is now professor of political philosophy at Clemson University. I have long admired his audacity, intellect, and love of America, even as I strongly disagreed with some of his ideas.

Thompsons patriotism is that of an immigrant (from Canada) and his determination that of an athlete (track). And, given such self-made qualities of soul, one is not surprised to encounter insightful studies of the evolution of American identity, natural rights doctrine, and the founders prudence, all organized in the form of elaborations of key phrases of the Declaration.

Do I know the author too well to do an objective review? Despite the legitimacy of this question, I offer the review as a gentle corrective of his presentation of major issues of our time. The reader will have to judgeI am no objectivist in that sense at any rate.

The book proceeds with chapters on what the author takes to be the Declarations Enlightenment background, the laws of nature, self-evident truths, equality, slavery (well worth consulting in light of the 1619 Project), rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, consent of the governed, consent and justice, and revolution. It concludes with exhortations on Americanism and the American mind. The book as a whole is scholarship with a political purpose. As Thomas Pangle says, the book is at once eloquent and erudite.

With barely a mention of him, Thompson does not take up Harry Jaffas argument from A New Birth of Freedom (2000) about the Declaration. That is, there is no attempt to find an Aristotelian or ancient grounding in the American founding. Thus the author often makes extreme claims (that he later qualifies, for example, about how and in what sense America is Lockean or how Americas Founders reflected Enlightenment principles).

In particular, he downplays the role of religion in the founding in a way that makes the book dependent on America as a sign of the advance of the Enlightenment, with its peculiar form of reason and its banishment of religion, rather than the theological-political question that the Declaration promulgates. After Christianity, freedom in the modern world requires that its defenders acknowledge the tension between reason and revelation as the source of civilization.

The book is an elaborate attempt to undo that tension on behalf of Enlightenment reason. Thus, for example, he declares

Lockes epistemological goal was moral: in a world inundated with religious mysticism, his intention was to show that mans rational faculties were in fact capable of discovering and knowing objective moral laws for the purpose of guiding human conduct.

In this regard, Thompsons portrayal parallels the dispute between Jaffa and Martin Diamond, and thus the difference between the West and the East Coast Straussians. And indeed that is reflected in some of the blurbs from George Will, Harvey Mansfield, and Thomas Pangle, not to mention several other eminent scholars, such as a principal teacher of Thompson, the historian Gordon Wood.

But we would err to label Thompson any kind of Straussian eitherrecall his often astute critique of some students of Leo Strauss, such as Bill Kristol, for their promotion of a reckless foreign policy and their compromises with Progressivism in Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea.

Rather than survey his entire argument, we should first jump to his conclusion, from which we can evaluate the book. Key parts of the book are found in this excerpt at American Greatness.

In concluding, Thompson is rhapsodic in his praise of Tocquevillian America:

This new American creed of rational liberty did not mean that its practitioners lived alienated and crabbed lives in atomistic isolation from one another . . . . Quite the opposite. These rugged American individualists joined together in bonds of civic friendship as they experienced and lived through seemingly never-ending disasters . . . . The moral and political philosophy by which they lived their lives was no antisocial creed that confined men to their own spiritual cages. Together, as friends and neighbors, the westward-moving Americans builtliterallycabins, houses, barns, roads, canals, libraries, schools, colleges, villages, towns, and cities. Freedom produced unparalleled social cooperation.

Later he hails this as a natural system of liberty which encouraged and generated new associations and bonds of civil cooperation. But it was not mere self-interest, which Tocqueville explicitly denies can be the source of those aristocratic bodies he saw in American civil associations. More to the point, the bulk of the examples Tocqueville describes are associations that are explicitly or implicitly religious, from churches to charities. Most of these associations are religious in both their origin and purpose.

This is not surprising. Early in Democracy in America, Tocqueville speaks of Americas unique unity of the spirit of freedom and the spirit of religion. The two are perfectly distinct elements that elsewhere have often made war with each other, but which, in America, they have succeeded in incorporating somehow into one another and succeeded marvelously. Moreover, as Tocqueville says later, Americans so completely confuse Christianity and freedom in their minds that it is almost impossible to have them conceive of the one without the other . . . . But Thompson would expunge Christianity not only from Tocquevilles account but from Americas self-understanding. He even goes so far as to say,

This, then, was the great paradox of American society: it united radical individualism with tight bonds of civil association. The former was responsible for the latter. It was e pluribus unum.

Thompson knows perfectly well that the one from many enshrined by e pluribus unum was the one nation out of many states, not many individuals. To speak of a natural system of liberty is as misleading as the religious mysticism he derides.

As much as I admire Tocqueville, he is a compromised source for Thompsons endeavor, because of his suspicion of American patriotism (a separate topic) and of the Declaration of Independence as a philosophic document. For the latter, see Tocquevilles letter from America to his cousin Chabrol on July 16, 1831. He honors the sentiments that the Declaration engenders but, unlike Thompson, not its teaching. After all, Tocqueville never mentions the Declaration in his 700-page classic.

But perhaps Thompson, agreeing with Tocqueville on the fading of the force of religion and hence of the mores required for freedom, wishes to supply the decay of religion with his version of reason and thus refound a dying American morality and with it the American regime.

What Thompson evidently wants to do is substitute his Enlightenment natural right epistemology for that of Tocqueville, and withal his own Enlightenment rationality for the theological-political unity Tocqueville struggled with. This is not just a point about misinterpreting Tocqueville but, even more important, it is ignoring what is central in the Declaration: the theological-political dynamic.

I dont believe Im being unreasonable to suggest he winds up doing something more like what is described in Mary Shelleys novel about a Modern Prometheus, sewing together the corpses of Tocqueville and the Founders into another, superior (as he sees it) America. This is a kind of Jefferson Bible version of America. In describing it thus, I honor this amazing and ambitious book.

Like all other attempts to undo what Leo Strauss built up, and Harry Jaffa following him tried to continue, this one falters. Much of this goes back to the way Thompson reads Locke. Compare Edward Erlers understanding of Lockes An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and its relation to the Declaration. Locke treated the pursuit of happiness not as a natural right but as a moral duty. The American founders, however, translated Lockes understanding of the pursuit of happiness into both a natural right and a moral duty, Erler argues in Property and the Pursuit of Happiness. He quotes Thomas West, for Locke the pursuit of happiness is the fundamental natural inclinationnot self preservation . . . .

Wests elaborate 2017 study, The Political Theory of the American Founding, covers much of the same ground as Revolutionary Mind but is both far more sober in its project and more revolutionary at the same time.

With its focus on state practices, Wests book can be more explicit in its treatment of both morality (including marriage and sexual morality) and property, the subjects of the second and third parts of his book, about 250 pages.. West affirms some of Thompsons views of the Declarations morality but also takes the argument to other places. For example, writes West, Pangle and Mansfield are far from being the only scholars who accept the Nietzschean view that the higher and rarer virtues are missing in the founding. He then goes on to quote Martin Diamond and Gordon Wood to the same effect.

West then proceeds to show how the American Founders and the ordinary citizens manifested moral virtues such as courage and explains how Nietzsches herd morality embraces some noble traits, Under different names, to use Nietzsches phrase, force and fraud might be called courage and prudence, the very virtues praised by the founders . . . . All this to show how work on the Founding opens up discussion even further on important, central themes. We know the founders even less than we think we do. And we distort their teaching by seeing more agreement on some issues than we might think there is.

And to use Lincoln most effectively Thompson, besides appealing to the scientific electric cord metaphor for human equality, also should have looked at the biblical one of blood of the blood and flesh of the fleshboth scientific revelation and support for the Declaration that Lincoln laid out in his famous speech of July 10, 1858. And, even more striking, Thompson omits Lincolns succinct definition of slavery there: you work and I eat.

We know today whom Lincoln was describing as the new slaveholdersthose who live off of transfer payments and globalist economics, which throttle a dynamic society of those who would rise through hard work.

Thus, Thompsons dismissal of the theological-political issue makes him miss some major points. And the book fails to acknowledge adequately other work, such as Jaffas New Birth of Freedom, which points the way to an even more revolutionary understanding.

In the preface to Americas Revolutionary Mind we see the young boy Brad reading a book about the American Revolution and then knowing that I was an American born in the wrong country. That phrase recalls a monograph by a late colleague of his at the Ashbrook Center of Ashland University, fellow immigrant (from Hungary) the late Peter Schramm, author of Born American But in the Wrong Place. Both of these imposing additions to America got to the right place and knew that patriotism was not enough, but came to understand her in different ways.

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Was the Revolution About Reason? - American Greatness

On 23 March, Drawing Room in London was set to open Not Without My Ghosts: The Artist as Medium, co-organised with Hayward Gallery Touring. The shows roster includes more than 30 artists active over the last 200 years, from historical heavyweights (William Blake) and forgotten pioneers only now gainting traction (Georgiana Houghton) to Surrealists, occultists and contemporary practitioners. Its intention is to take a long view of arts interest in mediumship, the practice of bridging the divide between the concrete realm of the living and the unseeable world beyond. The exhibition and its planned tour to Blackpool, Sheffield and Swansea has of course been postponed. But, in this period of confusion, it may be apt to turn to the alternate cosmologies of those who seek connection with invisible forces.

Spiritual Crown on Annie Howitt Watts (1867), Georgiana Houghton. Courtesy Vivienne Roberts, London

I try to paint into the unknown, Ann Churchill tells me over the phone. In Octagonal Drawing (1976) one of the three pieces she will provide for the show thick, kaleidoscopic patterns swarm the page, furling to form archetypical symbols: insects, ladders, spiders webs, snakes. Like a number of other artists included in the show, Churchill works automatically, making a mark at the middle of the page and allowing her subconscious to guide her hand outwards. Looking at her paintings, I think of something one of the shows curators, Lars Jakob Bang Larsen, has written in an email: the esoteric wave in art has to do with the ways that social control and political power have become placeless and disembodied under globalisation [] we need images and cognitive maps for this state of affairs. Churchills images read like maps, only their paths favour freedom over any sense of order.

GL 28 (Emotional Soup) (2016), Pia Lindman. Courtesy the artist

Finnish artist Pia Lindman, who will present six small diagrams in pencil and felt tip pen, also works to render the unseeable visible. In GL 28 (Emotional Soup) (2016) a human body has been atomised: its legs a wobbly blue contour, buried under a haze of scribbles; its trunk a rotund shape in orange; its head a levitating, vermillion smudge. Evocative phrases are scrawled across the sheet: Throat Lock, Heart Small, Emotional Soup. The series documents synaesthetic visions witnessed by the artist when healing people. (Her practice fuses various sensory techniques, from the Finnish tradition of Kalevela bone setting to sound and energy healing.) Lindman tells me about her initial scepticism when, during a period of ill health, she first participated in esoteric healing practices (Im a rational being!), but that they cured her. In contemporary culture faith in the spiritual has been usurped by faith in the scientific method and any deviation from this script is deemed sacrilege. But, in Lindmans view, science is just another man-made myth, a narrative framework. And its not that science is wrong, its that this myth is not working.

A Stellar Key to the Summerland (2007), Olivia Plender. Courtesy the artist

Olivia Plender (who will exhibit three comic books and a photograph) finds herself negotiating a position between being a practitioner of spiritualism and a researcher of its often marginalised histories. Because history is written by the powerful, there are a lot of stories that dont get told. Its no coincidence that the show is predominantly made up of work by women artists; historically, mediumship has been a way for women to earn a living, use their intellect and express their politics to carve out space. Spiritualism is also self-organised and anti-authoritarian, anti-elitist and anti- capitalist: low-fi, in Plenders words. You dont need much more than a group of friends to practise a seance. When I asked her why she thought there was such a trend for exhibitions focused on mysticism, she says, Theres not only one way of thinking about space, time, death, relations between humans and animals. The Western post-Enlightenment worldview is not the only worldview.

So, how do the rest of us gain access to unseeable realms? By making maps, interrogating stories, self-organising? Or perhaps theres a simpler way. When I was a kid, I asked my father, How do I become magical?, Churchill tells me. His response: Just by breaking habits.

Drawing Room, London, istemporarily closed to the public due to the Covid-19 outbreak. For more information on Not Without My Ghosts: The Artist as Medium visit theinstitutions website.

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When the medium is the messenger the art of communicating with spirits - Apollo Magazine

UNESCO has proclaimed April 15 as World Art Day, a celebration to promote the development, diffusion, and enjoyment of art. It spans the whole spectrum of visual and performing arts. The date was chosen in honour of Leonardo da Vinci, who was born on April 15, 1452.

Many galleries now have online viewings, and artists are resorting even more to social media for showcasing their offerings. Musicians are streaming their works online, collaborating across the internet, and teaching classes through videoconferencing. Memes and cartoons are cropping up around the world, showcasing the lighter and darker sides of the crisis.

During the extended lockdown, billions of citizens around the world are flocking online to watch movies, listen to music, and read books. Citizens themselves have become amateur artists by sharing videos of their creative works ranging from cooking and dancing to drawings and graphic art.

This compilation of quotes salutes the professional and amateur artists around the world in this time of unprecedented crisis. The quotes reflect gratitude to the artistic and humanistic spirit in each of us, and reinforce the importance of creativity, hope, and compassion in these dark hours.

The quotes in this compilation are drawn from YourStory's articles on art as well as a range of online resources. The photographs are chosen from our weekend PhotoSparks section on art and design. See also our compilations of quotes on the occasion of World Book Day, International Jazz Day, and World Photography Day, as well as Top Quotes of 2019 on Design and Art.

A picture is a poem without words. - Horace

A problem is a chance for you to do your best. - Duke Ellington

A societys competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity. - Albert Einstein

A true artist is not one who is inspired but one who inspires others. - Salvador Dal

A true masterpiece does not tell everything. - Albert Camus

Above all, an artist must never be too easily satisfied with what he has done. - Henri Matisse

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. - Albert Einstein

An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one. - Charles Cooley

An artist discovers his genius the day he dares not to please. - Andre Malraux

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world. - George Santayana

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision. - James Whistler

An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success. - Henri Matisse

An empty canvas is the safest addiction in the world, art is the only drug that won't kill you, instead it'll save your life. - Nikki Rowe

Art doesnt have to be pretty. It has to be meaningful. - Duane Hanson

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. - Thomas Merton

Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist. - Ren Magritte

Art has a voice - let it speak. - Rochelle Carr

Art helps us identify with one another and expands our notion of we - from the local to the global. - Olafur Eliasson

Art is a line around your thoughts. - Gustav Klimt

Art is a step in the known toward the unknown. - Kahlil Gibran

Art is meant to disturb, science reassures. - Georges Braque

Art is never finished, only abandoned. - Leonardo da Vinci

Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it. - Leon Trotsky

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. - Edgar Degas

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious. - Oscar Wilde

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home. - Twyla Tharp

Art is the queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world. - Leonardo da Vinci

As the sun colours flowers, so does art colour life. - John Lubbock

Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. - Banksy

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. - Pablo Picasso

Art wasnt supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something. - Rainbow Rowell

Artists are just children who refuse to put down their crayons. - Al Hirschfeld

Artwork is a representation of our devotion to life. - Agnes Martin

Bad artists copy. Good artists steal. - Pablo Picasso

Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing. - Camille Pissarro

Bring your humanity to your art. Bring your art to humanity. - Maxime Lagac

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. - Scott Adams

Do not be afraid of being wrong; just be afraid of being uninteresting. - T. Carl Whitmer

Do not fear mistakes. There are none. - Miles Davis

Enlightenment is the journey back from the head to the heart. - Pandit Ravi Shankar

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. - Henry Ward Beecher

Every artist was first an amateur. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up. - Pablo Picasso

Everything alters me, but nothing changes me. - Salvador Dal

Everything you can imagine is real. - Pablo Picasso

Finish the work, otherwise an unfinished work will finish you. - Amit Kalantri

Great art picks up where nature ends. - Marc Chagall

Have no fear of perfection, youll never reach it. - Salvador Dal

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream. - Vincent Van Gogh

I paint and sculpt with the blues. - John Hammond

I shut my eyes in order to see. - Paul Gauguin

I would like to paint the way a bird sings. - Claude Monet

I would rather die of passion than of boredom. - Emile Zola

If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint. - Edward Hopper

If music is a place - then jazz is the city, folk is the wilderness, rock is the road, classical is a temple. - Vera Nazarian

If you dont make mistakes, you arent really trying. - Coleman Hawkins

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. - Herman Melville

Its not what you look at that matters, its what you see. - Henry David Thoreau

Life is a lot like jazz, its best when you improvise. - George Gershwin

Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television. - Woody Allen

Life is like a trumpet - if you don't put anything into it, you don't get anything out of it. - William Christopher Handy

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. - Oscar Wilde

No great work of art is ever finished. - Michelangelo

One persons craziness is another persons reality. - Tim Burton

Painting is easy when you dont know how, but very difficult when you do. - Edgar Degas

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. - Pablo Picasso

Painting is silent poetry. - Plutarch

Perspective is to painting what the bridle is to the horse, the rudder to a ship. - Leonardo da Vinci

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture. - Thelonious Monk

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.- Aristotle

The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul. - Wassily Kandinsky

The artist sees what others only catch a glimpse of. - Leonardo da Vinci

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. - Kurt Vonnegut

The earth has music for those who listen. - William Shakespeare

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude. - Friedrich Nietzsche

The function of the artist in a disturbed society is to give awareness of the universe, to ask the right questions, and to elevate the mind. - Marina Abramovic

The great artist is the simplifier. - Vincent Van Gogh

The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us. - Alain de Botton

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery. - Francis Bacon

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious - the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. - Albert Einstein

The most creative people are willing to work in the shadow of uncertainty. - Ed Catmull

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls. - Pablo Picasso

The true use of art is, first, to cultivate the artists own spiritual nature. - George Inness

The world always seems brighter when youve just made something that wasnt there before. - Neil Gaiman

There are always flowers for those who want to see them. - Henri Matisse

There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about. - Helen Frankenthaler

There are paintings that take on a life of their own, and do not allow you to finish them. - Efrat Cybulkiewicz

To be an artist is to believe in life. - Henry Moore

To be great, art has to point somewhere. - Anne Lamott

To create, one must first question everything. - Eileen Gray

To draw you must close your eyes and sing. - Pablo Picasso

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. - John Updike

When Im playing, Im never through. Its unfinished. I like to find a place to leave for someone else to finish it. Thats where the high comes in. - Miles Davis

When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece. - John Ruskin

When people believe in boundaries, they become part of them. - Don Cherry

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Art in times of coronavirus 100 inspiring quotes on World Art Day 2020 - YourStory

Joining the Dotsis a weekly column by author and journalist Samrat in which he connects events to ideas, often through analysis, but occasionally through satire

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The coronavirus pandemic was bad enough. It is being worsened by the unchecked rise of other viruses that existed long before the novel coronavirus disease struck the viruses of blind faith and its companion, bigotry. The immediate provocation for some of the bigotry currently on view in India is over the role of a religious gathering organised by a Muslim group, the Tablighi Jamaat, which contributed significantly to the spread of the coronavirus in this country. The Union health ministry has reported that the Tablighi gathering in Delhis Nizamuddin held in March resulted in 1,023 COVID-19 positive cases in 17 states, accounting for 30 percent of total cases in the country as of 4 April.

India is not the only country where the Tablighis held that gathering. Similar events took place in Pakistan and Malaysia, with similar results. There was a big Tablighi gathering in Lahore attended by more than 1,00,000 people which has left that countrys authorities scrambling to isolate and quarantine the attendees. More than 20,000 people who attended the event had been quarantined by Monday, with the Pakistan government looking for the rest. In Malaysia, the Tablighi gathering resulted in hundreds of cases and spread the disease to neighbouring countries. Reuters reported the countrys health minister saying on 17 March that of Malaysias 673 confirmed cases at the time, nearly two-thirds were linked to the four-day Tablighi meet.

The Tablighis were not the only religious sect that put faith over reason. South Korea faced the same problem of a religious gathering leading to the disease numbers exploding. There, the group responsible was the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, which at one point accounted for half of all cases in South Korea. That was in early March, before the World Health Organisation declared it a pandemic. However, the global spread since then, and the rising number of deaths, has still not convinced Christian evangelicals in America that there is such a thing as a coronavirus threat. Influential evangelical preachers have been calling on followers to attend church gatherings and dismissing concerns over the need for social distancing. One of them, Rodney Howard-Browne, was finally arrested last week for continuing to host large church services despite government orders to residents to stay home.

In India, apart from the Tablighis, there was a case of a man, Baldev Singh, in Punjab, who attended a large Sikh religious gathering called Hola Mohalla before dying of coronavirus disease. After that, around 40,000 people in Punjab had to be quarantined. In Kerala, police arrested 28 people including temple trust office-bearers after a crowd of Hindus gathered for the Arattu procession at the Malayinkeezhu Sree Krishnaswami Temple in Thiruvananthapuram. Both these events took place in March, with the Kerala event coming after the WHO had warned that the world was facing a global pandemic.

A volunteer sprays disinfectant on a masked man as he leaves the Nizamuddin area, where several people showed symptoms of infection from coronavirus after taking part in a religious gathering. PTI

Organisers of all these events, of different faiths from different corners of the earth, chose to go ahead with holding large gatherings at a time when the world was already grappling with the spread of the coronavirus. The people who got sick after contracting the disease at some of these gatherings in various countries are the believers who attended the gatherings. By putting faith over reason, they endangered themselves, their near and dear ones, and their societies and countries. Everyone, most of all those who have been infected, is now paying the price for that.

The tendency of religious people to put their trust in blind faith over reason is a liability even in normal times. It leads to ridiculous and often unintentionally funny statements and actions, such as those relating to the magical powers of cow urine or the sexual habits of peacocks here in India. However, it also creates more serious issues, for instance relating to contraception and abortion in Catholic countries, or female genital mutilation in certain Muslim communities.

Apart from issues within communities, the tribalism and irrationality of religion also lead to often-violent tensions between communities. Yet, it is possible that these very characteristics and the related congregational nature of religious practice that is impelling people of varied faiths to risk their lives by defying social distancing orders around the world may be foundational to the idea of religion, and perhaps to human civilisation itself.

Intriguing hints of such a possibility exist in a place called Gobekli Tepe in southern Turkey, not far from that countrys border with Syria, where massive stone pillars carved with figures of animals have stood for around 11,600 years. They were built seven millennia before the pyramids, and are more than twice as old as the Indus Valley site of Mohenjo Daro. They date from before the invention of agriculture. Klaus Schmidt, the German archaeologist who led excavations at the site, suspected that the social organisation required to build them may have led to not just agriculture but to civilisation itself. His view on this, and the story of Gobekli Tepe, can be found in a wonderful report in the June 2011 issue of National Geographic magazine on The Birth of Religion.

The spiritual, philosophical, mystical and even revelatory aspects of modern religions are however far removed from such social, congregational roots. Interestingly, those other aspects are the ones that led to the birth of several of the currently dominant faiths. Social distancing of a sort was of critical importance in their genesis.

Buddhism emerged from belief in the enlightenment achieved by the Buddha through his practice of solitary and silent meditation for 49 days. Islam was born from the revelations believed to have been received by the Prophet Muhammad when he was alone in a mountaintop cave near Mecca. A critical event in Judaism and Christianity was the moment when Moses, in solitude, is believed to have received the ten commandments on Mount Sinai. Hinduism is replete with stories of sages meditating in their retreats, or on remote mountaintops, for years.

The supernatural is obviously a very big part of most of those stories. It is possible that they serve a deep need of the human psyche.

The hunger for the supernatural may come as Ramayana and Mahabharata or as Harry Potter and the X-Men. It is unreasonable and probably undesirable to expect that belief in magic will vanish from the minds of humans. However, it is reasonable to hope that even those who believe in the supernatural will respect the natural, heed the scientific consensus on social distancing, and shun congregational gatherings.

Nothing prevents anyone from meditating in whatever solitude and silence they are able to find in their homes under lockdown in this pandemic-afflicted world. There is nothing whatsoever that prevents anyone of any faith from reading the Upanishads, Bible, Quran or Guru Granth Sahib. No virus is stopping anyone anywhere from spiritual practice or study. In other words, there need not be any conflict between the advice of science and needs of faith.Blind faith, tribalism and bigotry are no longer necessary aspects of religious or spiritual practice.

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Coronavirus outbreak brings into focus elements of blind faith, bigotry in society and the need to... - Firstpost