No Pun At All!

Bed Harp

2010-02-13T12:37:00.000Z

Apparently the song is called "Waiting for the Sunrise"!

An Increase

2010-02-03T10:02:00.002Z

My left hand is suddenly bigger than my right! It now stretches an 11th (C to F)...this wasn't true the last time I checked! It's true, though, that I've been working mainly on left hand for the last six or seven months. I must think about what I have done exactly.

Hitting the Target

2010-01-18T01:00:00.003Z

This is an interesting film in which Tim Ferriss attempts to learn the Japanese hands-free, horse-riding, turnip-headed-arrow-firing discipline called Yabusame (流鏑馬). The only catch is that he wants to do it in five days.

The reason I have posted it is that I have found there are a lot of similarities between disciplines like this and the way I think about piano playing. Particularly comparing it to the archers' art of kyūdō (弓道 to you), although I do not know much about it I always thought that in both cases someone is trying to hit a target. So much is happening when you are aiming to hit the target that the only thing that matters is what you do to hit it. It doesn't matter what is happening around you, all you have to do is what you have always practised to do. It is simple - but it is not simple if you make it complicated.

Every time the audience is rustling or you know you are going to make a mistake, you are in the same position. You have practised, now do. Each attempt is the same. Same target, same arrow, no matter what the circumstances. Everything is calm inside and you already know the result.

Don't you think it's the same for any target you're aiming to reach?

I think that's why they say it's not important about hitting the target itself. It's inside, the battle. If you have not conquered the negative part that used to be within you, you have already missed. Then when there is no negative left, when there is only you (or us), you are free.

Aim strong my warriors!!

A Few Piano Practice Tips

2010-01-16T21:33:00.001Z

Having been asked for some tips, I thought it would be worth publicising them a bit. I have more!

1. There is only one most difficult part in a piece. In that one part, not everything is difficult. Not every note, not every chord. So you find the bit that is the most difficult, then understand why it is hard, and fix it. You have to understand what is hard before you can solve the problem. Then don't stop until you have fixed it = until you can play it ten times in a row with no mistakes!

2. Do you believe you can do it? ~Oh I will try my best but I am not really talented~~ OR say *I can do it*. Tough advice is: If you can't do it, don't do it! AND If you don't believe you can, then you probably won't (except by accident). BUT if you believe you can then it is possible and if you believe it perfectly then it becomes reality.

3. I think Heinrich Neuhaus wrote in his book that Richter was playing in a lesson and one difficult bit sounded really good, and the reason was he'd practised that bit for three hours! So that's what I meant, that people only can't play things because they stop learning it before it is good enough. It's not that they can't do it, but they just stop before they have finished!

(Which one is more scary, that you aren't good enough to succeed, or that you really could succeed but it's your choice??!)

OK!!!!!

Also practice tips are: if it is fast, learn it a bit faster. If you can do something more difficult, then you can do the thing at its normal difficulty level. And ten times in a row without mistakes - that's a good test!

Also if you repeat the notes - not dah, dah, but dadah, dadah, or dadadadah, dadadadah (I hope you can understand that!) then it gets better and you get more relaxed and the tone is better. Do it for every note in a chord and every voice in the counterpoint then it will all be better!

WELL. Those were some tips anyway!

Genius (Part II)

2010-01-14T22:14:00.003Z

Genius is when someone does something amazing that you could never ever do in your life. Because their genius is theirs, and yours is yours. Each can only be like itself. When we put them all together we will have found all the missing pieces of the jigsaw again. But your piece can only ever be completed by you - that is why you are you. That is why we need you. That is why you have your own genius to guide you.

It's fruitless to try to reproduce someone else's achievement. It was theirs - any copy would be imperfect. It's pointless to covet someone else's ability - just an excuse for delaying our own development.

But it is fruitful to emulate genius. When you do not know where to look or where to begin, you could always begin by examining the path of someone who arrived to a useful place. Don't you think? I like to read stories from great people. I heard what Paderewski said. I heard what Michael Jackson said. I heard what Marcus Garvey said. All imperfect examples and none of them the same as me, but somehow knowing about them helps me to arrive. Don't you think it's good to know there is somewhere to arrive to?

Let's forget about TV talents and news stories. Real ability is not newsworthy. "I Fought Cancer Battle to Play Harmonica". "Dog With 3 Legs Plays Football for Blackburn Rovers". That's the news. "Man of 60 Realises Goal of Life Without Noticeable Fuss"? You're not going to hear about that one, folks.

Genius can be a painful condition that tears at the raiment of life because the two are always in contradiction. It can be painful and confusing for precocious genius that seems not to know the ways of the world but knows the paths of the stars. But it is never painful itself. It's nice. And if it has been hard getting there, or if it is difficult now you are there, you're not likely to talk about it. Who would know what you mean anyway.

So that kind of story's not getting in the news either.

But we are not concerned with the news. We are concerned with the truth. If all we have done is what we truly were able to, what we truly saw and heard, what we truly believed in and what we always truly were, then: we will have done a good thing. And that thing was not yet genius, but it might become like it...

We will see some further steps you need to take next time.

A frog grew up. A silkworm took to the skies. A rose grew where only darkness once was. Good night my budding geniuses! Sleep well, don't forget your fertiliser!

Unhelpful Christmas Suggestions

2009-12-17T23:17:00.003Z

Not sure what to get for Christmas? Here are some unhelpful suggestions:

You could get:

a Pocket knife

or

a camera lens.

How about some

Christmas snacks?

Maybe a quiet

place to work on your DIY projects?

Or just settle for

something to drink.

Values, Goals, and Direction

2009-12-13T16:37:00.006Z

Think of it like this.

There is a sea. By the sea, there is a beach. By the beach, there is flat land. Next to that, the land starts to rise. Next to that, the land becomes hilly. Then the hills grow higher, until finally there are mountains and sky.

The sea is the starting point. There are fish in there, but they can only see their own world. A flying fish or a dolphin can jump out and briefly see outside its world, but it must return there. They don't belong outside it. Then, on the shore, you find animals that live on land, but spend some of their life in the sea. They can compare and contrast as they like. Then you have the real land animals (and people), who must live on the land, but who can always pop into the sea for a bit any time they need to.

Finally we are on the land. It is flat and regular. You can do what you want, as long as nothing interferes with your plan. If something does come to interrupt you, it will be unexpected because you can't see very far from the flat land. But on the other hand, while you can't protect yourself against big surprises, life on the whole is predictable down there.

Let's look up into the hills next. It is harder to walk there, but you get good exercise. You can see further afield too. If you are looking for something, it is easier to find it this way. Also surprises are known some time in advance of their arrival. Where the hills are high, there are more challenges, but more benefits too. Finally, there are mountains, the most difficult to climb but accessible to anyone who keeps improving from their first steps by the seashore. From the mountain you can see the sky and all the land all around. Weather is coming, maybe even some days away, but you know in advance. And at night you can see the stars.

The horizon is the limit of visibility from where you are now. Apart from special effects, caused by rising hot air and other unusual phenomena, that sometimes allow you to see beyond the horizon a little way, you cannot see further than this limit.

But if you cannot see further than that, how do you know there is anything beyond it? You don't, unless you once moved and now remember something you saw when you were elsewhere. Or a traveller comes by and tells you about something beyond your horizon. You might or might not believe it. It might not even be true, possibly. Nevertheless, there are ways of getting the information that there might be more out there. And of course on a clear day you can see the hills and maybe even the mountains. But would you ever think of going there?

Everything is here, inside your horizon. Everything you wished for and everything you need, either to stay here safely, or to expand the horizon. Yes, there is always something more to learn - something you didn't know ever before in your life! - or destinations to dream about, enjoy hearing about, or start planning to travel to.

Nowadays, travel is a luxury word. But it means to move more or less far away, so there might be any reason for that, not just for a holiday. Indeed, for some people at some times travel might have only happened for very important reasons - or even never at all. And then again, I can imagine a very free world where travel is always possible to anywhere, for any positive reason.

Of course, we are not just talking about physical travel. We are not only talking about a physical horizon. To travel beyond the horizon also means to learn something beyond what you know now. To move in a direction means to become something new.

But why change, why move, why alter the horizon, why learn anything new? Because you always are. Every day something new is coming past your window, in front of your eyes, like a wind bringing news of far away. Is anyone in exactly the same position they were at the beginning of their life? I think most people have had some change. There may be many reasons for that change, but no matter what they were, what caused the change was that you decided to change. You may say you had no choice, or that it was someone else's idea, but you went there, you did it.

Change is always here though people may pretend they don't see it. Choice happens every day though people may pretend they didn't choose.

Every direction leads somewhere, every belief creates a world you choose. Everyone has their own horizon.

Some beliefs restrict (maintain the horizon, or narrow it), some set you free (let you expand the horizon as much or as little as you like). Interestingly, you can change your beliefs if you want to. You are free to stay the same or whatever you want. There are no rules about it. The only reason to change something is if you aren't completely happy with it. Then accept that somehow you chose to be in that situation - even if you say you did not - then choose to be in another situation. That's all.

So what defines your horizon today? What values do you hold that make your world the way it is? Think of some examples. "Always try your best". "Be grateful for what you've got". "The sky's the limit!". "Do your duty". "Think of others before yourself". "You'll never amount to anything". "You can be anything you want". All different beliefs. Maybe they mean nothing to you, maybe something. Somewhere in the world, you will find a person who holds one of these. If you do not hold it yourself, then you can see how that person has decided what his life will be like, directed by various things that happened to them that lead them to make that decision. But to that person, it is real and any other possibility might be ridiculous. Or it might not, possibly.

There is an interesting tool for identifying the values that motivate you. You can try it out, it could be interesting. Here are some tips for using it. Try very hard to keep the number of your selected values below 20 - it will save a lot of trouble later in the test. Pick words that really "speak to you", things you think are important or that jump off the page (screen) at you. It says pick the values that resonate most strongly with you, which isn't a kind of English that I understand very well, but I think that's what it means. Anyway you can try it out.

Your values determine what happens to you now. They set the limit of your horizon. They are your beliefs that create the world you live in, including all the things you like and all the things you don't like. Some people have unhappy lives, and they might want to change to a better one - this is aimed at them. Some people have happy lives and don't need to change much - they are still free to change anything they want, or if they meet someone who needs help then this knowledge might be useful. This is aimed at them too. Or even there are people who are going along just fine, thank you, who don't need to change anything. Well, they don't have to. It's not required! This is purely intended to make things easier for everybody. Yes, all of us!

Look at your values list. Does it suit you? Are you happy with it? Can you see how it got you where you are? What would you like to improve next? I think you have improved already, haven't you? Do you remember when that thing happened that you didn't like? You survived it, didn't you. Isn't that because you learned something? Well, you are welcome to keep going, because...there might be something nice you can do - just around the next corner!

Meanwhile, be nice to people and accept they may be different to you - depending on their own values.

Horizon, what do you want to show me today?

Schumann Piano Quartet - Glenn Gould

2009-12-03T00:19:00.003Z

Today there is a non-existent post to read about.

I wanted to show you the third movement of Schumann's Piano Quartet Op. 47, played by Glenn Gould with Robert Mann (Violin), Raphael Hillyer (Viola), and Claus Adam (Cello). Unfortunately it is not available! So you must look for it - it's on Spotify if you have that or something similar.

There are inferior versions available on YouTube but we should only listen to good things from now on.

I hope you can find it!

If so, here are the words for it:

***

Like something that's gone but that really happened.

Like Schumann's genius that was eclipsed by his disease, but which could never completely be lost.

Like lots of things you can imagine, that seem to be no longer here, but that are always here, any time you look, and all the time even when you aren't looking.

All the good things you ever did are following you around.

Let's do more soon.

Oh, why not now?

***

A bit strange if you can't hear it, but it's worth finding!

Genius (Part I)

2009-11-30T00:32:00.001Z

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.

(Schopenhauer)

Look in from out

2009-11-05T21:16:00.002Z

I wonder, if I were studying English, what things would I like about it?

I'm liking Japanese things at the moment because I am learning about it all through the language. I'm sure that whatever language I study, I will like. Or anyway, certainly I wouldn't pick a language I don't like. Unless of course, I didn't like it so much that I wanted to learn to like it. Did you think of doing that?

English things are things I know a lot about. I've been seeing them for many years. OK, not so many, but some years! I wonder how I would know them if I were looking in from outside?

First I could have a vague idea of England. I might know about "the English gentleman" and red buses. I might know about the Lake District. I might think all Scottish people wear kilts. Maybe English people too?

I think it will help me to appreciate all these things that are always around but never noticed.

What would you see if you met yourself? What would you notice if you came to your house for the first time?

What would you like about yourself if you were someone who admires you from a distance?

It's hard to know, isn't it. It's useful though, in case we have made any mistakes. The mirror tells you if you have a dirty mark on your face, a tape recorder tells you if you have played a mistake in your music, and maybe there is also some way of discovering things about yourself...

Maybe you don't want to know about it?

I think it depends if there's something you want to improve or not. If not, then just do your best. If you want to change anything, then learn to see from the outside.

I'm not perfect you see! Not yet...that's why I have to learn things.

You know, everybody is doing fine. They don't have to change at all! The only reason is if they wish for some little thing to be different. Then soon, it is better.

That's all!

I insist on...

2009-10-12T00:03:00.003Z

You say in your letter of 28th June that the fees are not so high as they have been before the war. I think that this does not concern foreigner artists and I insist on getting the highest fees.

With Kindest Regards,

Yours Truly,

Sergei Rachmaninoff

(Letter to agent, 1918)

Always Keep Going

2009-10-10T13:39:00.002Z

Always Keep Going! It's my translation of "Never Give Up". Never Give Up includes the phrase "Give Up" so I don't want to sow that seed in your mind, you see.

If you want to achieve a target, Do It Every Day. Just do something towards the target every day. You can do something more often than that if you want, even then it still counts as Something Every Day.

Never mind how on earth you will get to where you want - it may be impossibly far away - but you are not aiming to be there tomorrow. If you can do it in one day then you don't need any help from me!

Today your job is to get to tomorrow, and to improve by one day's worth of improvement.

Do it every day, fix what is here now, and you will arrive one day.

If it takes 300 days then next year you will look and realise you arrived. If 900 days then in three years you will suddenly be there. Nobody remembers the time it took - you may recall it if it made an impression on you - because we don't live in the past. Similarly we don't live in the future. Actually not really in the present either, because where or when is that? The present is...now no it's gone! Never mind about time and what it is. Life must be a process of living. You are alive now, in the now, and that's the time to act. Do it now. If you know something useful will happen in three hours then you can save it until then. That's called planning. But for general work, the time is now. Why wait?

There are many important points about this, but the main one is Always Keep Going. If you miss a day, then the victory will be another day away. But if you never missed a day then you will have arrived in the minimum time. That means the fastest possible in the whole world.

It is so simple. But the results are amazing!

Be patient. If you can be, then one day you will be one of only a few left in the race. The others who didn't give up.

See you there I hope!

News-free Trial

2009-10-09T16:28:00.003Z

I've just completed a two week news-free trial period. That means I didn't read or otherwise learn about any news stories during that time.

The only things I missed that I consider worth knowing about were an earthquake and a typhoon. The rest was not important, as far as I can see (I may have missed someting vital though!) and would mostly have been depressing anyway. After all, nobody's going to report about positive things - they aren't considered serious enough.

What is the point of the news anyway? To keep you informed of the news? Or to keep you worried about things you can't change?

The news that applies to you is the news worth knowing - if this does include any international events then fine, you should know about them.

The news that applies to you is the news that you can change. Maybe you can't stop a war but you can stop all the people you meet from having a war. It might not change the whole world but it changes the part of the world that you touch.

If some people tried this then something might improve. It only needs some, not all - that's the good thing about it. If all are willing to help then that's the way to go, but as each person touches a lot of lives, there is an area of influence that can be quite effective (depending on the interference to the signal).

So that's what I recommend. Do what you can. If you want to do more, learn how. Keep your eye on real events. Live now.

It's worth knowing about international events, but we can only read stories about them, and that is not always the same as knowing about the thing itself. News sources are not there to tell us news, they are there to take our money and keep us entertained so they can continue to take our money. Is that the sort of information you can trust?

There is a limited commitment in certain parts of the media to distributing the truth - that's the only part worth following in my opinion. But I found over the last two weeks that there's no real need to check the news 30 times per day. It feels important or useful but it's not really contributing anything to your effectiveness. If you are one of these people then I would say just check occasionally and concentrate on making news yourself. Good news, by the way!

Think about what would be an important story to you. Bank robbed in Ontario? Mars shows traces of water? Elusive gecko variety photographed? Your daughter gets another tooth? The tax people have made a mistake and you are getting some money back?

Just think about it.

If you care about what's happening to other people and the world, you have to make this information contribute to your effectiveness. It has to be information, not just a noise of facts.

Be safe, peoples!!

Future Perfect

2009-10-08T22:37:00.001Z

I'm planning what to do with this website next. As you can see, there is a variety of material here now, some of it old and in need of work, all of it in need of unification and a good trim.

Everything is going according to plan; I have had a lot to work on but it is succeeding. I haven't mentioned anything about it before, because who wants to know about what might happen? Few people would be interested and even fewer would believe it. It seemed to me to be better just to get on with it and tell you later. This may explain a certain lack of information that the more discerning of you may have noticed around the place.

Today I went out for my walk but was tricked by the sun which now disappears much earlier than formerly (and only very recently), so it was a lot darker a lot sooner! I didn't get lost but I certainly had to walk further than I was expecting...

So the sun is getting further away...some may doubt that it shall return, most accept it as obvious. What would our ancestors have thought? And our descendants?

Anyway, the point about this time of year is that the light does appear to disappear, and during that time there is no particular guarantee that it will be back. It gets cold and dark and all the goodness of the earth hides itself away in dark places. But if everything goes according to plan, guided by the Cosmic Gardeners' responsible hands, the light will soon return and shine on new things peeping out of the earth.

It's the same with many things in life. My work is just one case of that.

Everything is always beginning and being made again, but from time to time we can step back and notice that - something really did happen! The year turns interminably but at each resting point we have the chance to take stock of what we have achieved - what harvest we have brought in. If you don't like the harvest, it's time to plan for the next one. What will you change?

We can't escape change, but one thing we can do is direct it. And that is exactly what I am attempting to do. I hope you will be interested to see the results!

Love from Philip

Kanji Amazingness

2009-10-03T20:21:00.005Z

As you may know, I am mainly learning Japanese at the moment. I have other irons in the fire too but I'm principally concentrating on this one for now.

OK so why am I doing that? Well every language has its strong points and in the case of Japanese there are plenty of art forms that I'd like to know better, which will be helped by knowing the language. Also plus I know so many Japanese people by now that it's embarrassing that they have to speak in English just for me. Well, I like Hiroshige and I like Bashō so I will be able to appreciate them better with more Japanese skills (one because obviously he wrote in Japanese, and the other because although they are images, I'm sure there are things to read about them that don't exist in English). Who knows, after I know more about them, I might not like them any more! Perhaps I have an English idea about them now...

So I am doing Japanese and as with everything, I am taking the most difficult thing first. In this case, it is the writing system. For some reason, everybody thinks it's really difficult - and it is, if you learn it in a difficult way. But obviously it is supposed to make sense, so there must be a sensible way of learning it. In fact there is. For the Chinese characters they use (called Kanji, or "Chinese characters", which is a good choice of name), they either come simply or are more complex and contain several elements. In all cases, you can give a name to the different parts and make up a story about them that makes you remember them instantly. For example, "sushi" has "fish" on the left, and "delicious" on the right.

鮨

I wonder if you can see that. If not, here is another one. "Fish" and "delicious" are of course English, and nobody Japanese calls them that - we have just chosen one meaning to remember them by. (Each one is made up of other smaller parts too which we have to remember first, e.g. "delicious" has got "spoon" on the top and "day" on the bottom - it's **so delicious you can eat it with your spoon all day**).

That character is a good example because I have only seen it once - I have never written it down or practised it but I still remember it because sushi is delicious fish. It's not because I have a photographic memory, it's just because I have a memory, the same as everybody else in the whole world.

The normal method of learning Kanji is essentially to copy them out again and again until you remember them. In fact Japanese children take 12 years to learn all the characters they officially need for reading a newspaper these days. However in this way of learning, you only have to write it once - or even never!

Now each character has several ways of being pronounced, but if you learn all this information at one time then it is harder to remember because you are of course struggling to remember the character and the pronunciations. If the character is already familiar then you've got a "hook" to hang your pronunciations on. So that's why this method - the method used in James Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji" - concentrates purely on the one-word meaning of each character first of all. There may well be other meanings, but just one is required to get it in your brain for ever.

Anyway, I have been getting on with this and it really works. It's like magic. And this week I read my first sentence for which I knew all the characters. I can't pronounce it or understand it of course, but I think it's an important step! You can work out what things probably mean. E.g. "telephone" has two characters, electricity and talk. So that makes sense even if you don't know it is pronounced "denwa".

So this is a method which is slow at first - I can hardly say anything at all, yet I'm supposed to be "learning Japanese" - but really quite soon it should start going a lot faster. I'm astounded so far!

It's the same with learning anything properly. Everything is ruined in the beginning and you can't do any of it at all, but one day (if you do it every day) - you have mastery!

But without starting at the beginning, it is all a bit of a muddle - though it works, after a fashion, more or less.

You don't have to learn things in this long way at all, but it's so good to be in control of what you want to do. There's nothing quite like it!

OK bye for now!

Truth or Lies

2009-09-22T12:44:00.003Z

I'm absolutely amazed that there are lies in this world!

Yes, it amazes me.

I just would never think of tricking somebody. It never enters my head! Obviously I am too simple.

How do you see it? I think that actually most people are pretty truthful. However it is quite shocking that fakery goes on. I think the reason for that is that the person thinks it is easier than doing something for real. OK, at stage one, they are correct in that belief - yes, they don't have to really do anything, just pretend, then take the money. OK so far. But how about at stage two? A whole lifetime of lying and tricking, when they could have been using their real skills instead? Surely it's harder work to sustain that.

OK maybe I am not very clever because stage one certainly sounds like a good deal...haha

The few (well, more than a few) people who spend their lives defrauding and faking for material gain must be in serious trouble spiritually. They are so lazy that they can't be bothered to lift one of their own fingers to do anything, but instead must give the impression of using fingers they do not really have, in order to administer help that doesn't really help. Now you can certainly say they are using skills in order to do that, but is tricking a skill we should really use?

It's all down to how you feel inside. It's possible to know if you are doing the right thing or not. "Science" and "Logic" may tell us that there is no one right way to behave, they may say it is all down to social codes or the mood of the age, they may finally posit that the need for happiness is important to us, but maybe it is not up to this Science to tell us how to behave. Science means "knowing", but I am asking you to do some "feeling".

All you can do is continue your life but with the application of some discernment. You can check to see how everything feels. Or did you think it does not matter how you feel? You just have to put up with things? Do what people tell you? Well, sometimes it's wise to do so. But when you generally ignore your own feeling, you are not an independent entity. You are a cog. In another wheel.

So listen to see if you feel good or bad. That's all it is. There are many levels of good and bad, including sometimes when one feels like the other. If you are not used to knowing how you feel, it is harder to know which is which. But if you start to think, you may perhaps continue!

The point of it is to discover where you can be applying yourself better. When you have a talent and you can use it, it feels good. If it is frustrated, it feels bad. The good feeling comes from your own genius being allowed to breathe in and out.

This feeling is the best feeling - you have contacted your real self. I think it is worth cultivating this feeling.

It is not possible to feel completely bad, to completely ignore your true self. You can think you are, but even that thought is coming from a true place - it is self-aware, not mindless. But I think it is possible to be more true.

This is what I mean about fakers - do you think they are feeling good or bad? Maybe they felt bad a long time ago and need to amass material wealth to protect themselves. It may all be rationally explicable, however much harm it is doing. Nevertheless it could be better for them, and for us of course.

I think that using your real skills is preferable to non-use of them. It must be. The problems are - not knowing you have them, not trusting that they are real, having been taught not to use them (makes life easier for people who want to dominate you), being scared. The alternatives are - being safe in a very limited way that isn't really safe, having an easy life that isn't really easy because you feel stress all the time, having a stable life with no massive excitements in it. None of these alternatives is particularly enticing.

Talents and skills may be all kinds of things. The definition of a talent is: something that gives a benefit to somebody. Yes, they are to be used, to help other people. Even more stupid! Shouldn't we just help ourselves? Well you can, but it's more lonely. And you may find that the nicer you are to the world, the nicer it is to you. See what happens the next time you kick somebody!

There's really loads of things you can do. And you don't have to do anything major, anything you do is part of learning about your skills. I'm sure you are using them right now, all today, all this week. But I just wanted to say - yes you do have a talent. You are using it all the time no matter how fulfilled you are feeling. And you may continue using it until it flowers.

You know there are key moments in the life of a flower when the scent is at its height and best for harvesting by perfume makers. Could people be like that? Maybe there is something you are working towards. And every minute is adding to the experience that will make that fabulous scent when you are ready. There are no skunks or rubbish tip smells. They only come when you try to stop the flowers blooming. No, it is all roses and violets for you from now on.

Keep working hard! Everyone will benefit, and you too.

When there's a twinge...

2009-09-03T17:34:00.002Z

Finger and hand muscles are basically very small so you have to be very careful with them. Using them is not the same as using your legs, for example. Or you could think that it is the same, but on a different scale. Running a mile might be enough for one day, but for your fingers running a mile might be a lot less than a mile simce they are rather small compared to leg muscles.

Today I felt a small pain in my right hand so I know I have to stop until it is not there any more. But it is frustrating because I want to play 20 hours! And it feels like if you stop practising then you will not improve. BUT. If you continue injuring yourself then you will get worse, not improve. That's why I'm always angry with people who say they are injured but they still have to practise. Then we know why they are injured. You have to look after yourself better than that.

Well this is an extremely temporary problem, fortunately, because I do stop when I receive the signal to stop. It's called pain and it says Hey, you are doing something wrong here, please rest now. But many of us feel the pain but do not listen to it.

Where are you feeling a pain, and what is it telling you?

Occasionally you have to keep going through pain, and sometimes it is not a true pain, just something new. But mostly we need to listen to this voice.

Your Important Advice

2009-08-29T22:30:00.002Z

Look - you can say this too:

"I can do anything, and whatever I can't do, I can learn".

Don't you think it is true?

Presence

2009-08-13T08:32:00.002Z

The past is gone, the future is yet to come, and all around us is the present. So they say. But who can say that they see what is here and now and live truly in this moment?

We don't have any other moment to live in...only this moment. Not that moment then; it's gone. This one...now!

As soon as I said it it had gone. So in a way you have to be living very slightly in the future: just enough that the moment doesn't slip past without you.

But what are you seeing?

Always something else - I wish things were different, if only this were bigger/smaller/thinner/fatter/yellower/faster/slower/hotter/colder, maybe this time next year I'll be..., at school they said I was the best/worst/good/bad/would go far/would never amount to much, I wonder what...

You have the capacity to think of far off things, places, and people. And also the ability to see the present. Can you see it?

Are you looking for something different? This is what you've got now. It's yours, for you, by you, for you to live in. You can change it if you don't like it, but don't miss it because that's your life at this moment.

You could spend your whole life wishing to be just a few centimetres less tall, but at the end of it...what did you live?

It's HERE and NOW. The present. Like a Christmas present. It's the present, a present, for you, to make something with.

All About Health

2009-08-11T19:16:00.005Z

I was giving my unwanted advice to a young mother (congratulations! - on the birth, not the advice!)

Then I decided that I would impose my views on the whole world!

They seem useful to me. They will conflict with some things you have been taught. They conflicted with what I believed, but I tried my hardest to understand things and this is the result so far.

Names have not been used - to protect the innocent!

***

Hello!

OK these are good books:

Colin Griffith:

Practical Handbook of Homoeopathy

(good for sort of home emergencies and typical diseases and situations)

Companion to Homoeopathy

(a massive book that explains Homoeopathy. It's really worth reading)

Thomas Quackenbush

Relearning to See

(massive book about eyesight)

I think they are so useful that even if you never read them it's worth having them!

All the information took me about 5 years to get to the point of believing it - I was very used to what i had been told by my society. As it turns out, what they told me wasn't always quite right!

"Everything Explained"

Philip helpfully explains everything - here only available!

1. Homoeopathy teaches that... Symptoms are the language your body speaks to tell us what is wrong with it and how to restore its vitality. Strong symptoms that last a short time are a sign of strong vitality, weak symptoms that drag on are the sign of compromised health. Health problems are partly caused by dissonance between our actual life and our ideal life, i.e. to do with how happy we are and how this affects our resistance. However they are also caused by hereditary factors such as the impact of major disease at some time in the family's distant past. It's possible to sort most things out using this information.

2. It appears that... Blurry vision comes on as the result of some type of stress but because it happens so much eye doctors think it is somehow normal. However they are unlikely to be able to show evidence of any deterioration in e.g. the lens of the eye, and are unable to explain how eyesight can improve. There is a belief that it is caused by chronic tension in the muscles of the eye - that's all. Good vision habits such as only focusing on one tiny area at once (the eye can only focus like that, look up "fovea"), moving the head and body freely as you wish (with a tiny area to focus on you have to move your eyes to see many things clearly), not staring (which is trying to see out of the sides of the eyes and generally not moving the head), breathing naturally. It takes a while to learn but not really long. Children copy the viewing habits of the parents (of course, as they copy everything so they can learn what to do!) so it's worth everybody learning healthy vision. And the very important thing: practise with the eye chart at home - it's not cheating, it's good to get used to it because when they come to the school and test them it's not exactly a fun situation and stress can result and OH WHAT'S THIS - they are children and can't read very well yet so how do they expect them to be able to tell what the letters are??? Oh dear this tiny child can't read it perfectly, he has bad eyesight.

Why do we see those tiny children with thick, thick glasses, tied on to their heads so they won't get damaged while the child is trying to have fun (while it still can)? Anything to do with the above?

As William Bates said (the sort of progenitor of this thinking - called the 'Bates Method' quite often), the sight of such little children is "enough to make the angels weep".

Hey, yeah, what about ADHD? Can it be that they are all ADHD or are some of them just naturally active and us sickos think there is something wrong with them because they can't watch six back-to-back episodes of The Dragons' Den without trying to move occasionally? Never mind, give them some drugs, that will stop their activity. OH IT WORKS, we must have been right!

You know the Special Olympics? The publicity says they were created in commemoration of the sister of JFK, Rosemary Kennedy, "who had an intellectual disability" but the extremely sad truth, not featured in the marketing, is that her disability was caused by a lobotomy performed at the age of 23, designed to correct her increasingly willful and independent behaviour. Thanks Dad.

We all know that mercury treatment of patients hundreds of years ago caused their early demise. But it was medicine then. Liszt was on his deathbed and the attending physician decided to inject camphor directly into his heart, which certainly ensured it was indeed his deathbed.

I can go on like this probably for ever.

As Samuel Hahnemann said, many vicious therapies were developed in the hope of terminating the offending symptoms, and they as surely succeeded in that as they also succeeded in terminating all signs of life.

Well...there are a lot of things going on in the health world, not all of them good. If medicine was wrong in the past, who is to say it is completely right now? But if it's written down, we believe it.

My advice is believe yourself. You know if you're well or if your child is well. Are we moving toward vitality and happiness, or away from it? Then you know the direction our health is moving in too.

Terminal illness won't set in for many years, if it ever does, but let's avoid it eh? And let's try to get a few more years of fun in. Does it sound like a good idea? OK all you have to do now is believe it...

Small Explanation

2009-07-27T18:05:00.002Z

Oh dear, usually people don't write because there's nothing to say, but I have been absent from here becauses there's TOO MUCH to say! I don't know where to start!

Heat Wave Claims

2009-06-30T21:00:00.002Z

Supposedly London is in the grip of some kind of super-extreme heatwave! That normally means temperatures have skyrocketed up to the mid twenties - for English people that is far above normal. In this case the thermometers must have all exploded because we have reached the two-digit part of the scale beginning with "3" - that's 30°C!

According to news sources and people in general, it is too hot!

But according to me, it is a little on the cool side!

Yes, I only begin to enjoy myself at 30°. It's a fact. And as we are only just touching that, I would like a little bit more.

Of course I realise that it is too hot for some people and that some of those may find it difficult to get through - or even survive (in some cases). The people here are not used to it and do not know about hydration anyway. They think a cup of tea with milk in it is hydrating! Well, I don't even know what it's like to drink a cup of tea, because I have never had one. Never ever!

Now you are starting to ask if I am really English. I don't wear a bowler hat, either! I have played cricket though. A bit. It's good as long as everyone keeps quiet, not like this modern style which is a bit like baseball. The more colourful clothes and lively music are supposed to make it more popular, and I'm sure they have, however I appear to think it is still 1952 0r 1882 or something. Yes, the lemonade has been poured and the sun's on the croquet lawn. One of the servants has been made destitute as a consequence of not bowing low enough, England are 445 for 3 against the West Indies and we have just added another six countries to our portfolio of interests, or Commonwealth as we call it. That troublemaker Gandhi is nowhere to be seen and no Kaisers or Führers have yet dared to disturb Britannia's calm seas (and iron grip over them).

As you will no doubt realise, I'm not entirely in favour of our colonial habits (many of which we have lost now) though it seems I do like the idea of that England in some choice aspects. Tough luck for me that if I were alive then, I'd probably be down a mine somewhere rather than shimmying across the lawn!

Anyway, it is England in some way or another, and it is hot, and I am beginning to thrive, as I always will at this temp!

Hurrah! Jolly good show, eh what?

The Magic of Words

2009-06-16T20:44:00.005Z

Words have a magic all of their own.

They can tell the truth. But you must test for yourself if it is true, because words can also twist your mind to embrace a lie.

Without words, many things would be different. Would a rose smell as sweet if it had no name? Or even sweeter perhaps?

Today I want to mention the magic of the written word. That is something important to take notice of.

There is one particular thing that written words can do that we sometimes find difficult.

Written words can remember things.

When you write a to-do list, or your list of goals, you are using the magical power of written words to change your reality.

Because the words are helping you remember and helping you direct your energies in a certain way.

They're not just words.

To-Do Lists and Goals Lists are important for this reason.

When you need to remember a goal that you want to achieve ten years from now...you can check the list every day and it will remind you even though you could forget without help. The world gets very busy and things try to deflect you from your preferred course. This is when your list could help.

If you need to remember who you were ten years ago, you can look in your diary. People change - sometimes deliberately - and if you have made any improvement, it is often difficult to see that. So it's good to have something to compare it to, a bit like the height marks on the frame of your kitchen door. When you were six, you were this tall. Now look how much you have grown!

But if you are planning to grow a certain number of inches, or the spiritual equivalent, then you need a similar kind of aid to plan your course. Memory is, of course, the thing that will do this for you. But when you are beginning, as I said, it is sometimes rather hard to remember in the face of a lot of confusion. So that's when making lists comes in useful.

Things you need to do. Things you want to do. Things you have to do. Things you wish you could do? Things you need to learn how to do. Things you have never done. Places to go, people to see, things to do. Things to say. Things to sing. Music to play. Games to play. Games to win. Battles to fight. Enemies to befriend. Friends to take care of. Flowers to grow. Children to meet. Your success is here. Plan it now, by saying one thing: I will do a little more each day, and I will do it a little better each day.

You can make a list if you want!

Strike Struck

2009-06-10T18:36:00.003Z

Today (and tomorrow actually) there is a Tube strike! (That means the workers of London's underground railway service are refusing to work, translated for people who don't know what tube and strike are)

It means you have to walk to your work, or sit (actually probably stand) on your bus for 2-3 hours!

So what was different about today? All the little people crawled out of their holes, yawned several times, and squinted their eyes and said What is that in my eyes? and the answer was It is the sunlight, welcome to the world!

They couldn't sit on the train scowling with their iPod banging away in their ears - they were RELEASED!

It was exciting and quite sweet because everyone had a map - they don't know where anything is in real life! Let's see, I"m standing on some kind of "road", it seems to be, and I need to get to a sort of er "street" I think it is called, but the Tube is not working. What do I do? Can you see a taxi...?

It was just like in the Simpsons when the cartoon Itchy and Scratchy is cancelled and all the children go outside to play, to the sound of Beethoven's 'Pastoral' Symphony.

Welcome!

You were annoyed about the strike perhaps, but I was happy to see you!

For the first time!

European Elections Problem

2009-06-04T08:52:00.003Z

There is a little problem. In Europe there are some elections. In the UK you can vote today. But there is some worry about voter turnout. Last time about 45% of people voted. That is taken to mean that 55% of UK people don't care about Europe.

Now the problem I have is: I haven't received any information about these elections. I don't know where to go or what to do. I don't even know what is being elected. I only know about it because a Spanish friend told me.

Is this anything to do with the low turnout that's expected?

What am I going to do? If you have the chance to vote you should use it - whether you believe in the process or not, you are at least increasing the chance that you will be happy with the result.

How many hours shall I spend on trying to locate this election?

**UPDATE** (the next day...)
I couldn't vote! It's really a shame. I was also working yesterday so I couldn't devote the whole day to this problem, but I tried the internet, I took my voter registration card out with me just in case, but there was no sign of any place to vote. So I didn't vote! It's rather a shame. One person doesn't make a difference on his own, but you still have to exercise your ability to vote. Now I wonder what it was that obstructed me this time?