In Blogistan

In Blogistan
The one-balled Mouse
Is King.

In Blogistan
All is there,
But
All is not
Always
All it seems.

In Blogistan
A burly front-row forward
With a beer-belly
And six-pack,
Can call himself
Slinky ClubGirl.

And In Blogistan
Little Miss PubeWax
Can call herself
Bushy the Lumberjack.

You don't see
The little mouses;
You don't see
Their little ballsies;
You don't hear
The pitter-pat
Of tiny clicks.

All you see
Is the busy little
Chick-chick,
Chat-chat,
Text-text,
Screen froth
Of unaccountable,
Subliminal
Screen names
Being groomed,
Invisibly,
For equivocal perception.

Blogistan is a land
Of chimeras
And shifting focus;
Shimmering smoke
And mirrors;
A mirage of identities
Evaporating like
The morning mist
And then re-forming
At night,
As heavy and globular
As the dew.

There is mysticism
In the Blogosphere;
A tinkle of
Elf-magic
Around the screensaver.

Consider the mystical texts
Of Old Blogistan:
"The First Thought in Three Fonts";
"The Imitation of Mice";
"The Mouse of Unknowing".

These codices
Give clues
About the whereabouts
Of esoteric hyperlinks,
But you need
To be there
To hear;
You need
To be there
To see;
You need
To be there
To know
In Blogistan.

The keypad
As interdimensional portal;
An Einstein-Rosen bridge
Of connectivity
Between adjacent realities.

The flickering screen
Toggling text to text
Thought to thought
Subtext to subtext
Signifier to signifier
Savoured slowly
And seen
Face to face
As in a glass lightly.

Blogistan,
In other words,
Is very like
The real world,
But more honest
And reliable.

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Bloggers - an army of irregulars
Paul Reynolds, the BBC World Affairs correspondent,
discusses the power of blogs.


Technology feeds grassroots media
Dan Gillmor argues that the media are becoming democratised,
and a global conversation is emerging.


Weblog spirituality

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Slinky ClubGirl goes out on the town

Office separation

More Norfolk koans

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Repent, the Kingdom of God is at hand!

One of the nice things
About Mr Honeywell,
The visiting preacher
At Guildford Cathedral, Surrey,
Was his refreshing
Concision.

His sermons never lasted
Too long.

Today was no exception.

"Perhaps it is the case,"
He said,
"That we will only experience,
Fully,
The freedom
Of the Kingdom of God,
When we are strong enough
To respect
The pastness of the past
And repent
Of all religion
And scripture."

"The Kingdom of God,
Exists only in the now,
In the present moment.
That is what the old rumour,
'The Kingdom of God is at hand,'
Means."

"Religion and scripture
Are tribal artefacts
Embedded in the past.
The spiritual task is to move on
And leave these distractions behind
In the closed stacks
Of yesterday's museum."

"Hear, Hear!"
Shouted the Dean and Chapter.

"Bullshit!"
Shouted the congregation.

And Mr Honeywell
Sat down.


Men make such hopeless priests

Why is church so serious?

More Norfolk koans

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Slippery questions

In a letter in today's edition of The Sunday Telegraph (London), Mr Giles Wardle of Tonge, Leicestershire, asks the following two questions:

"If the universe was designed by an intelligent being, who created the intelligent being? If the intelligent being didn't require a creator, why does the universe require one?"

These are intelligent questions.


What is the answer?

Ontological real deal

The unwisdom of belief

Gender confusion

Index of blog contents

Spirituality websites worth watching

Dangerous tree in Warwickshire

A fruitarian bird-watcher,
Named Mr Schpoch,
Was setting out his picnic
On the grassy river bank
At Stratford-upon-Avon,
Warwickshire.

In a nearby tree,
A large bird of prey
About seventy centimetres long
With talons,
Black and brown wings,
White plumage
On the head, neck and tail,
And an aquiline,
Kleptoparasitic eye,
Watched.

Foolishly,
Mr Schpoch
Placed a large peach
On the grass.

The bird of prey swooped,
Picked up the peach
In its talons
And flew back to the tree.

It was a willow tree,
But it could easily
Have been mistaken
For a walnut tree,
If one was
A Japanese tourist
With no knowledge
Of English tree species.

Mr Schpoch picked up
His binoculars
And studied the bird of prey
As it consumed his peach
In the walnut tree.

He checked
The salient details
Of the bird
In an ornithological
Reference book
Which he carried
In his cool box.

The bird was
An African Fish Eagle,
Haliaeetus vocifer,
Not common on river banks
In England,
And mainly piscivorous
In habit
When scientifically observed.

Mr Schpoch
Was troubled
By the eccentricity
Of this avian phenomenon:
Such a bird
Should not be in Warwickshire
And it should not take peaches.

Very carefully
Mr Schpoch
Took out a second peach,
Attached it by a silver chain
To his falconry finger,
Placed the peach
In a prominent position
On the grass,
And waited.

What happened next,
According to the local coroner
At Stratford-upon-Avon,
Warwickshire,
Was the stuff of nightmares.


High fells

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I am a terrorist

I am a terrorist
Catch me if you can
In under the radar
A quiet Osama fan.

I am a terrorist
On social benefit
The money's very useful
It buys explosive kit.

I am a terrorist
Look out on the bus
I've got a rucksack on my back
But you won't make a fuss.

I am a terrorist
God is on my side
White racial profiling
Can't stop my suicide.

I am a terrorist
Scripture says destroy
Body bombs are my Koran
I'm a British Asian boy.


.................................................


Religion is a terrorist behaviour

Under the radar

The game continued

Sufi Master with disciples

Pope terror talks

More Norfolk koans

Jolly frightening, this terror business

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Spirituality websites worth watching

The Ten or Eleven Commandments

Page update: 01.08.07

One of the more dogged human textual artefacts to persist in the religious culture of the West, and one most prized by fundamentalists, is the biblical text referred to in common parlance as "The Ten Commandments".

But what are the Ten Commandments, actually?"

The modern mind suggests three possible answers to this question. The first two suggestions might be described as arising from a liberal Christian perspective, and the third from a New Age Christian view.

(1) The Ten Commandments are an out-of-date, elite-led compilation of control values designed to assist tribal cohesion in an ancient culture.

(2) The Ten Commandments are a human religious code designed to give covert power to a self-appointed priest-caste responsible for inventing and enforcing them.

(3) The Ten Commandments, as originally given, were not commandments or laws or rules at all; they were concise expressions of social wisdom. They articulated levels of information, apposite to the human level of consciousness at that time, which it would have been wise to follow in order to get out of the mess which third-dimensional human spiritual culture had got itself into after Atlantis.

On this view, the original tablets, in the biblical Ten Commandments story in Exodus, were of extra-terrestrial origin (from benign, highly-evolved, alien guides acting within the Order of Melchizedek).

The original number of commandments on the "magic" tablets given to "Moses" on "Sinai" was eleven, not ten, and the commandment which was not allowed to persist in the Hebrew record was: "Thou shalt trust the human heart to be the divine representative of the soul."

This commandment was edited out for political reasons, partly because during Moses' absence up the mountain, a coordinated and highly sophisticated negative influence, emanating from the fourth and fifth dimensions (the astral and mental planes), had made ground among the Aaronic golden calf faction in the Israelite base camp.

This negative influence was opposed to the benign alien guides ("The Holy Spirit") and was the core motivator behind the Third Reich towards the end of the Armageddon conflict (1914-1945).


...........................................................



Creator creatrix creation creature

How is religion?

What is the function of religion?

Our angels the aliens

Fundamentalists' Fellowship

Preconceived idea

My name is God and these are My instructions

Index of blog contents

Spirituality websites worth watching

Under the radar

Sunrise on the 21st June
At Slapton Sands
In Devon, England,
Took place at 4.58 am.

At 4.59 am
A large group
Of German tourists
Emerged from a local hotel,
Spread their beach towels
Out on the beach
Until not a square inch
Of habitable sand
Was left exposed,
Erected flagpoles
At each corner
Of each towel,
Ran red flags up to the top
Of each flagpole,
Each flag bearing
A large black swastika,
Put on lederhosen
Held up by braces,
And started eating
Sauerkraut
And spiced sausage.

Sometime later,
At Baden-Baden,
In Germany,
A large group
Of English tourists,
Wearing out-of-date
Leeds United away strips,
Sauntered late
Into a hotel dining room
And,
With a stiff upper lip,
Ordered fish and chips
And Yorkshire Pudding
For breakfast.

According to
The Metropolitan Police's
State-of-the-art
Racial profiling unit,
Neither the German tourists
Or the English tourists
Had any traceable
Terrorist connection
With Islamic extremist madrassas
In the tribal lands
Of Pakistan.

Both groups had
Entered Europe
Under the radar.


Cheese sandwich

Jolly frightening, this terror business

More Norfolk koans

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Disclaimer in the corporate boxes

Our distinguished guests
In the corporate boxes
Are respectfully reminded
That cricket is a game
Played with a hard ball.

If such a ball
Travelling aerially
At eighty or ninety
Miles an hour
Should accidentally
Make direct contact
With the centre of your forehead
During post-prandial drinks,
You may experience
A temporary
Loss of consciousness.


Cricket on the radio

More Norfolk koans

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Unusual cloud-form over Launceston

Sophie, awaking from
An unusually vivid dream,
While lounging lazily
On a sleepy summer afternoon
In her lavender-scented garden
In Launceston, Cornwall,
Recalled a fragment of conversation.

In her dream
She had been chatting casually
With her regular teacher,
And a few others,
When he had made the comment
That down on Planet Earth,
At this important time in its evolution,
In any one place
And at any one time
On average
There were a minimum
Of eighty benign UFOs
Hovering directly overhead,
Most of which were invisible.

Considering this,
Sophie raised her head
And looked directly up
Into the sky.

Not a single UFO was visible.

However, there were plenty
Of nice fluffy white clouds
Punctuating the blue sky,
One of which,
Quite high up,
Was moving slowly
In the wrong direction.

Sophie decided
To take her glasses off.

And then she saw it.
What, with her glasses on,
Looked like a cloud-form,
Quite high up,
Moving slowly
In the wrong direction,
With her glasses off,
Looked like an enormous UFO.

Sophie calculated
Its altitude to be about
Seven or eight thousand feet
Above the tip of the tower
Of the granite-built
Parish church
of St Mary Magdalene,
Mary Lucifer,
Mary Lightbearer,
Apostle to the Apostles,
Grail of the Gospel.

Sophie looked,
And as she looked
Her vision sharpened,
And she calculated
The dimensions
Of the UFO.

It seemed to be about
Ten miles long,
Four miles wide
And twenty five miles high.

It was shining like the sun;
Starbright in daylight;
A column of fire,
City-like and sparkling,
Larger than London
But reassuringly friendly
In a big, steady sort of way.

Sophie wondered
Where this particular UFO
Had come from,
And why.

Some of the Arcturian starships
Were supposed to look a bit like this
When they manifested
In third dimension atmospheres
Of third dimension planets
Above third dimension
Centres of human population
Such as Launceston.

Arcturus, Sophie recalled,
Was referred to as
The Shepherd of Hermas
By the early founders
Of Christianity
Such as Mary Magdalene.

Then Sophie put
Her glasses back on
And the UFO disappeared,
Leaving only
A rather pleasant-looking cloud-form
Quite high up,
Moving slowly,
In the wrong direction,
Against a rather pleasant-looking
Blue sky,
Which appeared to be
Even higher.

Sophie kept her glasses on
And went back to sleep.

Bees, and others,
Busied themselves
Among the lavender.


.........................


Aquarian elf girl

No such thing

Out beyond the Gas Giants

More Norfolk koans

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