Thursday, September 22, 2016 — 19˚C / 66˚F with bright sunshine @ 12:42 pm in Atlantic Canada —
I am hesitant to call Ganesh a ‘god’. Cultural differences are too easy to misunderstand. My take on a ‘Western view’ of Ganesh would be that He is regarded the way Roman Catholics regard Saints. They ask Ganesh for help overcoming obstacles, removing obstacles from their lives, blessing them with ‘good luck’.
My friend, Jim W., told me a story related to Ganesh. While he was working part time as a cleaner when he first became a permanent resident in Canada and could legally find work- one of the places he worked was an old textile mill that was in the process of being converted into a ‘Corporate Centre’ / Office Building. The building had some creepy areas, other people who were there at night reported seeing ghosts, experienced being touched and/or pinched when nobody else was in the building.
Jim began chanting “Shri Ram” – a chant he picked up from a recording of music popular with Sufis – which was attributed to Mahatma Gandhi- He said he could feel his own voice vibrating in his chest and then all around him (after several minutes) in an unusually relaxing manner and then received a ‘spontaeneous visualization’ in which Ganesh was dancing, walking along beside him as he dusted, mopped and wet-mopped the floors. A few minutes later his visualization had expanded to include a whole traveling group of Hindu Indian musicians, playing drums and other instruments as they walked along with Ganesh and Jim, clearing the creepy vibrations away with happy smiling feelings and light.
He said he’d never thought of Ganesh as a Dancer- but apparently most Hindu Indians know Ganesh as quite the accomplished dancer.
Monday, September 19th, 2016 — 18°C / 64°F and foggy in my little corner of Atlantic Canada @ 9:14 am—
— I am not the world’s biggest fan of tweeted and effbooked pets, but I couldn’t resist this guy —
— I don’t know, maybe I’ve eaten too much genetically modified high fructose corn syrup and it’s completely freakin destroyed my brain – but today I actually wanted to do up a blog post of this stuff –
— ¿¿¿ Help – The Tweet-Us-Sphere is reading my mind and manifesting schnarr from my imagination — ???
— Imay have stolen this from another tweeter — but I’m giving her credit by leaving her “@info+etc.” intact – so maybe she won’t want to crucify me?
— I hope I spelled her name right, I need to go get my eyes checked. & ‘sans-serif’ fonts are the worst —
Saturday Morning, August 20th, 2016 — 12°C / 53°F & “Dark” in my little corner of Atlantic Canada @ 3:02 am—
— “Change your thoughts and you change your world.” Norman Vincent Peale.
— Changing habitually resonating thoughts and thought patterns is not all that easy. If you’re fighting against what you believe are your own negative thoughts – you can try to combine those thoughts with the desire to improve and become more positive. Emotions happen quicker and more deeply that what we call “our thoughts” in the human psyche. Our ‘Normal Waking Mind’ tries to define our multi-dimensional world in two dimensional terms. Don’t give up. The negative, “You can’t win-“, “Give up-“, “You’ll never amount to anything-” thoughts that may have been planted in your young mind by egotistical people who don’t know better — are lying to you. — We have no limitations. We are alive here now to prove to ourselves that “Mind Over Matter” is Reality – Your indomitable Spirit, whatever you choose to call it – can overcome anything. { This has been the voice of experience. I seem to be unusually optimistic about this life and the human race tonight/very early this morning. }
— I read a quote on-line earlier, meant for writers – “If writing your book doesn’t keep you up at night – how can you expect that reading it will keep your readers awake at night, too?” { Or something quite near that if I haven’t remembered it 1,000% correctly – } & I think that was James A. Michener who I’ve just nearly quoted. But I’m pretty sure I got the spirit of his intent there –
— Schnarr –
— And Now – For something completely different —>
— A ‘Clairvoyant’ I met told a hippy who recounted seeing weird monsters standing next to people he knew – and he knew they were real live human beings – were not hallucinations. The ‘monsters’ were beings in another dimension, right here beside us – and some of them can influence our thoughts, feelings, even pressure us to go get drunk and pass out so they might jump into our bodies and have fun at our expense. “If this scares you, good. – Stop taking drugs, stop drinking alcoholic beverages, avoid any medicines that make you feel loopy or woozy – Pray a lot and hang around with positive, highly spiritual people.” — I waited until the doubting hippy left and asked that ‘clairvoyant’ where I could find any highly positive, spiritual people to hang around with and she wrote down a couple of book titles, said I should read them, and talk to her next time I saw her.
“The Sufis” – by Idries Shah
“In Search of the Miraculous” – by P.D. Ouspensky
“Autobiography of a Yogi” – by Paramahansa Yogananda
— I treasured all three – Reading Ouspensky’s book was a challenge – I felt like I had to restructure my mind and brain in order to stay with it and understand what he was saying. It felt like an exercise in overcoming normal human limitations.
— I read everything I could get my hands on about the Sufis and felt like they were under-cover agents for sanity in a very insane world.
— Then, reading the “Autobiography of a Yogi” felt like connecting with the ultimately merciful, and loving essence of the Heart of all Creation and made me feel like I was in constant contact with everything worth living for, no matter how strongly I doubted that.
— We’re here to get as close to “God” as we can and to do everything we can to help everything positive in all of Creation manifest Heaven on Earth.
— { Told you I was feeling unusually optimistic – hope I haven’t bored you to death – }
Friday, August 19th, 2016 — 12°C / 53°F With the sun shining golden light on nearby neighbour’s houses in Atlantic Canada @ 7:18 am — Today is Bill Clinton’s Birthday —
— I am no fan of testosterone-poisoned athletes staring and glaring at each other, hoping to ‘psyche-out’ their opponents before games or ‘contests’ in which they try to prove themselves egotistically superior to everybody else in their sport.
— It was good to see the first and second place sprinters in the semi-finals looking like brothers who get along well enjoying themselves –
— Usain Bolt, a Jamaican, has now made history, winning gold medals in 100 meter and 200 meter sprints three times in a row. Tonight, if the Jamaicans win a relay race Usain Bolt will make further history turning his “Triple Double” Gold into a “Triple Triple”.
— And if you understand the above blurb about triple doubles and triple triples, you’re either a dedicated follower of Olympic athletics or someone who has a quick and nimble mind who enjoys learning anything and everything you can. 🙂
*** & When my friend, Doug, invited me to help him and his friends at “Aerendel” Communications with web problems he was having ( he’s dating one of my favourite cousins ) I hadn’t realized that there was another Jim who actually originated the web site(s) and ‘owns’ the name ‘Aerendel’ – which he says came into his mind as a mind-worm { something like an ‘ear worm’ } the first time he read “The Hobbit” by JRR Tolkein – and stayed with him until he thought “a small secluded valley in the sky” was a decent description for a web site, and later, a multi-player game. [ Castles in the Air? / A naive vision of “Heaven”? ] So I’m trying to relieve a bit of confusion by admitting that my birth certificate says, “Hermann James Van Arden” and too many people made fun of “Her-Mann!” and “H. James Van Arden” sounded too much like one of the Watergate crooks. So I asked Doug if “Jim d’Aerendel at Aerendel dot ca” sounded like a decent email name and he smiled. And apparently, the other “Jim at aerendel dot c.a.” didn’t mind – but a couple of my friends wondered why there were two different Jims here – So, now I’ll declare myself as, “h.j.d’a” and hope that doesn’t fry too many brains.
Friday, August 5th, 2016 — 14°C / 56°F & Cool & Damp @7:00 am in Atlantic Canada —
— It’s John Olerud’s Birthday – and it’s also Terry Seguin’s [ host of New Brunswick First / Information Morning out of Fredericton, NB “on CBC Radio One, local Cable TeeVee and live streaming on the web.” ] — Also a couple friends in Connecticut, Including Gail S. and a couple others who don’t want to be reminded that they’re getting older are either celebrating or trying to forget that today is their birthday. —
— We had a thunderstorm yesterday, and my malware program found a couple ‘potentially unwanted’ bits of schnarr in my files et cetera, which is odd, because that’s a computer I don’t connect to the internet much. But anyway, the “kabooms” were loud and I could feel them as well as hear them, so I shut everything down and then had a hard time getting everything back up and running. And when a browser that had been open to twitter came back up there was this photo – or whatever that is up there – that caught my eye, and I’m still checking in to see whose blogs need to have their plug ins and stuff updated, so I thought I’d change the sticky post on my eye candy blog.
— Habbin zee gooten Tahg – [he said in his fake German accent —]
Tuesday, May 11th, 2016 — 6˚C / 42˚F & very bright and sunny @ 7:56 am in Atlantic Canada & Yesterday was Rasputin’s Birthday { & by the way, he was neither ‘mad’ nor a monk. } — {{ P.S. My friend Jim W. told me May 10th was also Swami Yukteswar’s Birthday and his (Jim’s) late Uncle Bruce’s – and three young women who were like 7 years old when Jim was helping his Cousin Glenn get Glenn’s daughter, Sarah, to school in the mornings – and meeting her at the bus when she came home after school, when Glenn’s job dictated that he had to be in work at 6 am and the school bus picked the grammar school kids up at something like 8:30 am – 3 young girls in Sarah’s circle of friends plus the mother of another one of Sarah’s friends — all celebrated the same birthday. May 10th. }}
Heat & Light is a novel about the lives of Pennsylvanians – Farmers and Rural land owners – struggling to make ends meet and being seduced by oil and gas companies’ fast talking salesmen, convinced to opt-in to contracts with Frackers whose promises of lots of ‘free money’ for allowing the Gas Companies to Frack their property – poisons their water, ruins their property values, ruins the landscape around them and leaves them in much worse economic condition than they were when they were merely desperate.
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CBC News Links:
The top headline in each article is linked to the original article on the CBC.ca/news/ site.
Proposed motion suggests committee to report on alternatives to first-past-the-post system by Dec. 1
— While it looks to a lot of us that political slight-of-hand is alive and well in Canadian politics – Justin Trudeau – who’s been the Prime Minister up here for a little more than 6 months – appears to be keeping a campaign promise to come up with an alternative to the current ‘First Past The Post’ electorial system — by having a committee investigate the feasibility of weighted voting and other possibilities to make Canadian elections a bit more democratic and have the elected officials in the Federal Parliament reflect the over all vote and not just the winners from each ‘riding’.
— For instance: If – in a hypothetical Federal Election: the Liberal party received 35% of the vote, the New Democrats received 25%, the Conservatives received 22%, The Parti Quebecois received 10%, the Green party received 6%, and several smaller parties received the remaining 2% – Then – Sitting members of Parliament should more closely resemble those percentages. — Where the current ‘first past the post’ system might have populated the Parliament with something more like 52% Liberal, 20% Conservative, 18% NDP, 9% PQ, & 1% Green (depending on where the votes were cast and what the local races looked like). { I intentionally had one party get fewer votes than another while winning more seats than that party did in the above fictional results from a fictional election. }
Fear of a Trump presidency has spawned a dating site that hooks up Yankees and Canucks
“Maple Match” is a dating service advertizing that they can find Canadian mates for people who might want to escape from a nightmarish Trump Presidency.
— Earlier news items up here – reports from a couple months back – indicated that officials ( or residents? or somebody — ) in several provinces announced that they would be happy to welcome refugees from the U.S. into their communittees if they wanted to escape from the USA if and when DJ Trump became their President.
New $25M package only half of what’s been cut from student programs
— New Brunswick’s (Liberal) Premier Brian Gallant announced a new programme to give low income New Brunswick students free tuition at New Brunswick Universities. It was later revealed that this program would benefit about 7,100 students while it took away current tax rebates from between 35,000 to 40,000 students. The new program would reportedly cost $25 Million while cutting the earlier program would save more than $50 Million. -I’m not sure those dollar figures would reflect yearly costs – but that’s my best guess here.
— Zondra ‘Pricelys’ Roy, who also goes by Zoey, is an activist, spoken word poet, hip hop artist and social entrepreneur. She will be presenting at The Walrus Talks The Indigenous City in Winnipeg, May 11, 2016.
FORT MCMURRAY, Alta. – RCMP have seized some guns following the fire in Fort McMurray, but won’t be a conducting a mass seizure of firearms like they did after the flood in southern Alberta.
Sgt. John Spaans said Tuesday that officers have taken one or two guns found in public places, but are not going into homes looking for more.
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& Internet outages have been reported in parts of Atlantic Canada. — Luckily, that hasn’t effected me (yet?)
Wednesday, May 04, 2016 – Kent State Massacre Anniversary Day — // +9˚C / +48˚F @ 7:47 pm on a cool and mostly clear Day / Evening in Atlantic Canada —
— It’s been too long since I checked in on Twitter and with my blogging friends – & today there was a lot of stuff about Bernie Sanders.
Copied & Pasted from Jim W.’s “Latest News From Aerendel”
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— Monday, March 21, 2016 — // -4˚C / +24˚F & snowing ‘lightly’ @ 11:11 am in Atlantic Canada on the Second Day of Spring, 2016 🙂 —
I have become almost magically optimistic about the future lately — Hmmm? Have I clued into positive trends in the world of Spirit? Or is this not so early onset Alzheimer’s? 😉
— The Weather Network said we should expect between 15 and 25 centimeters of snow today ( um, six to ten inches? ) The local CBC channel told us this morning they expect we should get about 10 centimeters / 4 inches? – then later amended that to say we might get another 5 centimeters later tonight, after the evening commute home?
— My novel keeps growing in my mind faster than I can get it out and into word processors – In that manner I work out a lot of stupid dead ends before they waste time? At least I’m not wasting paper –
— I realized before I began to write this, that at about this time last year, I didn’t want to know anything about any more snow falling from the sky and building up on the ground- Today I pretty much knew it was coming – um, part of this is trusting teevee and radio weather people – and I still felt like the world was okay, that Spring is coming, that people are will be nicer to each other – That even nasty people will realize they don’t like being nasty? — I don’t know – Maybe something on a nearly sub-conscious level has become more optimistic since Canada elected a new ‘government’ that at least claims to value human beings over the principles of greed and divisiveness.
— And I guess none of the photos I’ve put up here today do anything to explain the odd optimism I’ve been feeling. As a matter of fact, the day is kind of grey and brooding – and the snow that is falling doesn’t feel particularly friendly or compassionate – But the world still feels like it is becoming more friendly, more loving, more welcoming? So, of course there will be set-backs and dark moments – But I still feel like something deep down and subtle has changed for the better.
— Sunday, March 20th, 2016 — // -2˚C / +27˚F in brilliant sunlight reflected on very white snow at 12:06 pm in Atlantic Canada — // — I believe today is Dona ( née Flynn ) from my hippy days in Brattleboro’s birthday —
— Yup, looks good to me –
— Jim & Cathi’s East Side Yard At Sun-Up.
— Today dawned almost as picturesquely as yesterday –
— yup, magic happens, isn’t it great when things work out better than you expect them to?