November 2022

November 2022

For critics, the talk by FIFA’s President, Gianni Infantino, was long and rambling. I listened to much of it when not out of reach while confronting other things and agreed with much of what he was saying apart for his call to Europe to be apologising. We, the Europeans, are not giving moral lessons but are wanting others to wake up in similar manners as we have struggled to do. Simultaneously, COP27 has been disappointing – not surprisingly – despite the last minute agreement with the ‘loss and damage’ fund.

On the personal level, it has been the process of closing down my beloved Amsterdam house in which I have lived for 52 years. We could have sold it to the Gemeente with the possibility of being able to live here for the rest of our lives and with them doing the repairs and upkeep, but we had not known of that possibility until after agreeing to the sale. Perhaps just as well in the longer run or however much is left of that, but the sorting, shipping and disposing has been a constantly painful spike. We reached Amsterdam on the 3rd of October. Kostas prepared a dinner for us one evening. Our La Caramba gathering was only Richard and me

with Faye, Zelda and Jimmy. We’ve had dinners with Stephan and Koen three times – once attheir home, then at Sushi Tomo, and the third time was at Dynasty. Our final house party was on Saturday the 22nd of October. We had it catered by Greek cuisine. Wendela was the first to arrive, and Kostas came up briefly. For the rest, it was Giny, Renée, Ilonka, Santima, Carole, Stephan & Koen, Michael & Maxim, Margit & Jan, Jim & Amir, Pierre with his niece Chantal, and Laura. I had discovered a full box of Albert Sounit Crémant de Bourgogne (Chardonnay Brut) that I’ve probably had for years and years, but it was delicious. Subsequently, Pavel and Teresa came for a weekend. We had dinner at Shiva. We have also had enjoyable but brief and overlapping visits from both Marie-Laure and Eamonn as well as

a week’s stay by my daughter Chloe. She flew from here then to Ecuador. Marlowe passed away on the 28th of October; Renaud, on the 7th of November. Marlowe at least made it to 95; it was too early for Renaud – he being younger than Richard and myself.

I finished reading Pierre Hadot’s N’Oublie Pas de Vivre: Goethe et la Tradition des Exercises Spirituels and am now reading Ava Gardner’s Ava: My Story – thoroughly enjoying it. I’ve written two articles for Angela Puca and Suzanne Owen’s Paganism in Five Minutes (Equinox): “Pagan Ethics” and “Pagan Salvation in 5 Minutes.” I’ve also recorded my talk “Nephilim, Jötunar or Giants 2.2” for the Nephilim Anthropology Conference 2022 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fesvl3aSYoA) and an interview for Jeff Lippman’s Garden of Doom series (https://www.spreaker.com/user/14312308/a-professor-of-paganism). Further, I very much enjoyed listening in online to the VIIIth Sophia Centre Postgraduate Conference in London

which covered such topics as Plato and Rumi, Near-Death Experience, Surrealism, Anat & Astarte, Hindu Fate, the beyond and much more. The field of Academic Astrology, in fact, has enjoyably matured into a sophisticated colloquium for the exchange of ideas and insights. It may even be seen at the heart of an emerging educational voice for a retention of science and its empirical reality/realities but at the same time incorporating the study and/or practice of philosophical speculation and spiritual conceptualising.

Considering Brexit, I have thought that one possible solution, because of the Northern Ireland stalemate and because perhaps a majority of the British do now think that it was and has been a mistake to have withdrawn from the EU, one solution could be for the UK to piggy-back on the back of Northern Ireland back into the European Union. If the competing Irish communities cannot agree on the Northern Ireland Protocol, the rest of the United Kingdom

might possibly agree with an extension of the presently operating boundary and trade agreements for Northern Ireland and that way be able to join or re-join the Union.

Further, and on the global level in contrast to the personal, earth is unnecessarily pock-marked by terrorism in sub-Sahara Africa, the Russian destruction of Ukraine, the slaughters in Iran and Myanmar, perpetual shootings in the United States, North Korean missile testing, political imprisonments in Egypt and elsewhere, dictatorships from Byelorussia to Nicaragua, civil war in Syria, Ethiopia and Yemen, economic collapse in Lebanon and Argentina, ubiquitous corruption and questionable democracies or their futures in America, Britain, Turkey, India though hopefully not Brazil as well. With the ecological clock clicking steadily ahead to irreparable and imminent doom, our utter human foolishness and inability to cooperate together in any semblance of viable maturity are horrifying and more than disappointing.

Reflecting against our cultural, artistic, scientific and philosophical achievements, we seem to be much more than the helpless, divided and childish species that is forsaking a balanced planetary future, let alone any future at all. It’s only each nation for itself or with whatevergroup it identifies or has alliances and hence each for non-cooperation and its myopic and isolated pathway leading to ultimate destruction. Perhaps some walled off entities and some

of the wealthiest might be able to eke out some kind of terrestrial or elsewhere post-catastrophic existence, and I suppose all the more power to them, but at what miserable and cheerless cost? We have had Plato and Aristotle, Hypatia and Arete, Kant, Hume and Locke, my favourites Spinoza and Nietzsche, Michelangelo, Raphael, da Vinci and Caravaggio, Homer, Ovid, the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Sibelius,

Shostakovich, Debussy and Ravel among so many more, and yet how surprisingly little we have collectively been effectively stimulated imaginatively by any of them! Can we the people, the people’s people everywhere, not bypass our incompetent politicians and immobilise our lethal militaries authoritatively to proclaim ‘enough is enough!’ ‘Step aside, all of you who are unwilling or unable to compromise and progressively communicate on a fellowship consortium level so that we might save our planet, restore our environment and live all of us with natural harmony and freedom!’

What I find the most sorrowful is in seeing the potential dream of humanity on this sacred earth but also in seeing how rarely almost any of us can celebrate our personal needs and lives without being unaware of others, even all others, and instead be willing

compassionately to make the sacrifices and compromises that could make that dream a beautiful and holy reality.

Is not the central act of worship that of wishing? The combination of both eternity and the here-and-now suggests an incredible ‘Wow!’ For those who are so fortunate, within our privileged cocoons of comfort and security vis-à-vis the experiential outside, we can fly emotionally, mentally, shamanically. Beauty is something external to the self, though something we experience within – a beatitude. Basically, pleasing splendour is what we gain

through our senses – easily sight and sound but touch and taste as well. Through this input, the final underlying goal for all of us is to be mindfully happy.