Hampton Roads Publishing Company Blog

I wrote this many years ago — perhaps twenty — but nothing has changed for the better.

Whirlwind, with Ozone

We have turned the very sky
against us, altered it,
maimed it like the lands
and waters, as though
from malice, or by some
invincible stupidity.
Yet it was not these,
but carelessness, a bit
of scientific love play,
a hundred years or two
of tinkering, of fixing,
of conquering nature.
No offense intended,
no harm meant. No one wanted
to warp and cripple
what couldn’t be fixed.
No one meant to do it.
But we did. And now we learn
to shrink from double burning
sun; we learn to hide,
and burrow, and lament.

A friend sent me, without comment, an email announcing that a movie called “The Secret” was going to be featured on the Oprah Winfrey show on Thursday the 8th. I hadn’t heard of the movie (yes, I’ve heard of Oprah!) but the same email appended 100 quotes from the movie. They resonate! This really is the way the world works.

“But if so,” you may ask, “why doesn’t it seem that way?”

It is the difference between appearance and reality. The physical world appears to be the “realest” thing we experience. In fact, it isn’t. In fact, the realest thing we experience is, as the great British physicist Sir James Jeans famously once said, “more like a great thought than like a great machine.” Earlier ages thought of it in spiritual terms. Our age is allergic to spiritual analogies, so talks of energy. Same difference, as we used to say.

The secret to changing your life is to change your understanding of what life is; of what is real and what isn’t; of what is cause and what is merely symptom.

Our late friend Lynn Grabhorn expressed one aspect of this very well, and enough people were struck with what she opened up to them, changed by it, that Excuse Me, Your Life is Waiting became a best-selling book.

Once you realize that the world is spiritual (or energetic, if you prefer) more fundamentally than it is physical, you begin to realize your power. This is the power behind healing, behind all “psychic” manifestations. It is why the most fundamental forces in the universe are love and fear: attraction or repulsion.

I append the 100 thoughts. I hope this does for your day what it did for mine.

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I put up a poem here yesterday. Here’s another, while we’re on the subject of war and empire.

E33, Line 29

The Wall, like the war whose dead it mourns,
is one thin wedge going down and in,
another going up and out. One name, a few,
then more, more, more, more, more
27,000 more — til, like the war,
it turns a corner, angles up and out
through 27,000 names and more,
the wedge thinning to the last few.

Colonel Hatch — E33, Line 29 —
did his duty and was murdered for it
and won his name on polished marble
carved amid name on name on name,
year on year, death on death.

A long remembered colonel from another time,
murdered by chess-obsessed men in Hanoi
and Saigon, Washington and Moscow,
murdered at second hand by power and state,
ideology and abstraction. The chessmasters
retired to pensions and honor, and died in bed.
The others died in field hospitals
and were given a part of a line.

Tired, Isolated Romans

They fell, finally, those old Romans,
Surrounded by hostile foreigners who were
Prodded by envy and long memories and
Appetite and contemptuous hatred of
What these people had become.

Even their enemies remembered
When these Romans, as the old Republic,
Had been respected as well as feared; had brought
Law as well as order; had spread new possibilities
As well as never-ending disruption.

The simple republican virtues, forgotten
Or dismissed as myths of a simpler time,
Had left those Romans free within the law,
Tending their small farms and businesses,
Supporting small armies with small taxes.

Time and empire produced but order without law,
A system perfected beyond hope of change,
A few men owning everything and everyone.
What was to the benefit of few found few to defend it,
And only fools, at last, to die for it.

Of course, no possible analogy implied.

Everyone has heard of Scott of the Antarctic. What a shame that so many have forgotten Ross of the Antarctic, who long preceded him and accomplished more. This is from The Review and Observer, St. Albans, UK. http://www.stalbansobserver.co.uk/mostpopular.var.72745.mostviewed.ross_of_the_antarctic.php

Ross Of The Antarctic

A Georgian terraced house overlooking Blackheath bears a blue plaque, uncommon in south-east London, inscribed `Sir James Ross 1800-1862, Polar explorer, lived here.’

Ross was an important Victorian Arctic and Antarctic voyager. Little did he know that within a mile of his house in the Royal Maritime Museum at Greenwich, would be displays commemorating his feats and that of another explorer of the era, Sir John Ross. Ross was his uncle, a Scotsman who spent his retirement overlooking the sea at Stranraer.

James Ross first set off on an Arctic expedition in 1828 as a midshipman for his uncle, already well-known to the Admiralty, and selected to command a party to find the North-West Passage.

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Sun21 reaches port at Le Marin on the island of Martinique (Keystone)

From http://www.swissinfo.org/eng/front/detail/Swiss_boat_claims_first_solar_Atlantic_crossing.html?siteSect=105&sid=7496172&cKey=1170604839000

Swiss boat claims first solar Atlantic crossing

A Swiss-made catamaran is said to have become the first solar-powered boat to cross the Atlantic after reaching the French Caribbean island of Martinique.

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Don’t push me for the cosmic significance of this subject; I’m not convinced that it has any. I clipped it because it interested me, then shelved it because it didn’t seem too important, and now I publish it because I see that it still interested me on re-reading it.

The whole celebrity game I find distasteful and slightly comic, reminding me of high school. I have noticed over the years that I have different reactions to two kinds of celebrities.

The first might be called recognition-celebrities. You recognize their name, but only because they’ve been talked about; they’ve never actually done anything . Rather like Paris Hilton, say.

The second we might call achievement-celebrities. If you recognize them, it is because they did something. They explored something, or invented something, or wrote a book or acted in a play or got elected to office. Something.

I think it is because I don’t watch television that my reaction of the first category is almost non-existent. Reading about Paris Hilton, either in a newspaper or on the web, is not going to lead me to devote neurons to thinking about her. But apparently — if this article is to be believed — visual recognition is different. This is from the excellent British paper the Independent. From h ttp://news.independent.co.uk/media/article2141635.ece

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Via the ever-interesting Schwartzreport.

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Two reports, a month old now but no less interesting than when I first hoarded them.

The first is from http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2007/01/new_cable_may_b.html

Miniature Coaxial Cable Offers New Medical Opportunities

Michael Naughton, who is the Chair of the Physics Department at Boston College, has helped to develop a breakthrough in coaxial cables that may have a huge impact on the medical community.

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Do you know of the global consciousness project?

I won’t describe it, but will leave it to the article below, copied from wikipedia (which is a wonderful resource, peace be on its founder’s head) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Consciousness_Project

It would be hard to over-rate the importance of this on-going project. Ultimately it should provide data, in a form that scientists can accept, demonstrating that neither time nor consciousness are what they commonly seem to be. A lot of change will be unpacked from that one seemingly little shift, more change, probably, than followed from E=mc2.

I copy this article, rather than merely refer you to the site, on the theory that many more people will read it if it’s right here than if they have to click again.

The Global Consciousness Project

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Global Consciousness Project, (GCP) also called the EGG Project, is a long-running science experiment made through an international collaboration of about 100 research scientists and engineers. It is based on technology developed at Princeton to study interactions of consciousness with physical systems. The GCP has been collecting data from a global network of random event generators since August, 1998. The network currently maintains about 65 sites around the world running custom software that reads the output of physical random number generators and

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