Quillan Camper

I've only just said hello to you and now I have to go. I could have just slipped away and no one would have noticed. But that would have been rude of me. The reason I have to leave now is I have to board my train earlier than I thought. The TM lobby I joined, I see as a railway concourse where the more interesting and interested travelers have got talking to each other, to pass the time before their own train is announced. We all have a ticket to the same place. Some of us are coming back from where we're headed, some not. I shan't pursue the analogy too far, no need. However, to clarify, if I may take a last moment of your time, I would say it is really is the case that there is only one thing. There is only the mystery of the mystery. That knowledge makes me supremely happy. So, I leave you with the words of Ludwig Wittgenstein - the word with which he ends his Tractatus: "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen (Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent." So, adieu and bon voyage.

John Keats said that "philosophy (rationalism) will clip an angel's wings". It were a pity if "there is a natural explanation for everything that happens". I don't intuit that this is true. I would feel uncomfortable living in a world where someone has, or will have, an explanation for everything. Who? Mum and Dad? Nobel laureate scientists? Priests, pastors and gurus? People who claim with total conviction, "That's the way life is." End of story? Indeed, that would be the end of the story for such adamant believers. I'm with Groucho Marx who said, "I wouldn't want to join any club that would accept me as a member." I wouldn't wish to live in a world where everything could be explained to me, even if I can't understand it. Fortunately, I am an old timer of very little brain so I shall never "understand" the mysterious or "supernatural" stuff of life so I shall always be safe from another person's "explanation". Phew!

Thanks for your welcome. I'm very lucky to have had a warm, caring, semi-detached marriage until, on a whim, my wife decided to cut me free. It was a plot twist I'd not anticipated but then one's life should always hold surprises - wouldn't be much of a story otherwise. I was born in Shanghai but at the communist takeover of the mainland my British Dad decided to return to his roots, to the United Kingdom. He also determined I should become "more English than the English". So, of course, since I was to go native, I had to go the whole hog and marry a native woman. Eventually, I found one whose grandfather was Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University; she also shared a room at boarding school with the best friend of the late Princess Diana. So, definitely and definitively, a native English woman. I don't do anything by halves, me - LOL! I don't do anything, in actual fact. I'm a character in a story. There is only the story.

I strongly suspect I am not consciously or deliberately creating electromagnetic fields when I practice sexual intercourse. I'm usually too preoccupied to be doing anything so scientific sounding except as an incidental by-product. I can't help wondering at the same time, how an illusory ego can create anything, let alone an electromagnetic field which sounds pretty physical in the Newtonian sense. BTW My daughter who's gonna study Physics at Imperial College, London, having turned down a place at Oxford, sent me this interesting talk à propos the topic: Cheers!

Hello! I was wondering if anybody out there has had a recent "supernatural" thingie to report. Mine tend to be very small stuff but I quite like them. One of my girlfriend's long, straight, black hairs mysteriously pierced itself through the cotton sheet of our duvet (comforter) the other day. The soft hair penetrated the top sheet, traveled a inch of two the other side and came out again so both ends were equal in length. You could tug on them like fairy shoe laces. I have photographs of this. I am occasionally reminded by minor weirdness that there is absolutely no reason I can see why anything should exist. But something does exist, as I can see. What is it? In other words, why is there something rather than nothing? I'm dying to know. Maybe I will when I'm dead. What d'you reckon?

Honestly, I don't know we can ever be so sure what we are. It is, on the other hand, always a little disconcerting when a vehement claim is made for one view or another. Mechanistic or idealistic, a viewpoint is always merely that. The wise man standing by the elephant's tail will be absolutely certain that the world is a rope with a tassel at the end; the wise man standing by the elephant's leg will swear no part of the world is like a tassled rope (what an offensive thought!), it is, of course, a column; etc. You get the picture? The wisest man will caution himself with the terrible doubt that he doesn't have the full picture on reality and never will have. As human beings, all we have is language, metaphor, myth and imagination; what else are our convictions founded upon - divine revelation? Get out of town! So okay, we are made of star stuff. Scientists tell us that without the complex atomic material generated by supernovae there would be no flesh and bone to be us. In the same way, there would be no porridge. I don't see the essential difference between saying we are made of the same stuff as stars and that we are made of porridge. Being star children rather than porridge children just sounds better. Bit of preening in front of the mirror going on there, perhaps. Look at me, look at me. What am I like? Well, never mind the starry heaven. If anything, we are made of God stuff. There is nothing else for anything to be made of, n'est-ce pas? And anyway, what's so wrong about being a machine. It's just a metaphor, as in "The Ghost in the Machine" argument: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A_r6_GGv3U On the other hand, someone said, "If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it( like a machine), we would be so simple that we couldn't." So, I agree with your gut feeling about the brain. BTW, I hope you find the One you seek. Shouldn't be difficult. The One can't be very far where anywhere you happen to be.

Err ... excuse me. Might I register a mild protest at that ageist remark: "... the older we get the harder it is for us to change." Older people, and I've been called "old timer" on this forum, might feel hurt by this slighting judgment, this vast and unfounded generalisation, this injudicious criticism of a condition that will come to all of us as surely as death. Sorry for the interjection.

There are seekers out there. Beware! I've heard it said so often, it's like a mantra. Seek and ye shall not find because you're getting your self in the way. Your egotistical seeking is shutting your eyes closed to the obvious, the open secret hidden in plain view. There is nothing to seek because nothing is lost - nothing can be lost. Where do you hide the truth in a bounded infinity? Alors, there is nothing to find. Only open your eyes and see. What there is, right now, right in front of your nose is IT. There ain't nuffink else, mate. Wake up and smell the coffee. Intuitively, I get the point this exasperated attitude is trying to make. Do you?

I do feel like a child again, thrashing around in this welter of electronic options, trying to reply to people kind enough to respond. I want to be good. I'm jumping up and down trying to be unobtrusive. How does one get to be a competent member of the company in which I find myself. What buttons does one click? It's vexingly perplexing. All part of the story though, I suppose.

I'm immediately impressed. How do you know about balut? Yes. I am very wary of this atrocious delicacy and have yet to try it. Where chocolate-coated locusts, carrot-sized maggots and orange-coloured chicks on spits are concerned, I exercise a native reticence. I was born in Shanghai but raised in Surbiton, Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey, England. That's about as "native" as I can manage.

I'm also a 63 year old British male, long retired and currently living in Baguio City, Philippines. Since arriving here some three months ago, I have been noticing how things I have always taken for granted now seem very, very odd. It strikes me there can be nothing more strange than that which has hitherto seemed perfectly ordinary. I am writing this to introduce myself to a group of strangers I shall never meet; I am using a laptop computer connected to broadband internet; outside of my condo, just across Kisad Road, is the Athletic Bowl where a drum and xylophone band of school kids are making a fearful racket, twirling flags and batons, practicing for the Panagbenga (Flower) Festival next week. And I am talking about an "I" who is doing this and thinking that. Which am the oddest thing of all; "I" think. Cordialement !