And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things

Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798 by _[William Wordsworth](https://www.poets.org/node/45773), 1770- _1850

Have you not thought about how some of the most foundational things concerning existence come in threes?

Solid; liquid; gas – three states of matter

Length, breadth and depth – the planes of normative geometry

Electron, proton, neutron – the basic particles of matter

Red, blue, yellow (or green?) – the primary colours

You might be able to call to mind a few others?

At a risk of turning you away early I say:

Is it so strange that God should be looked upon as Trinity?  - Just a thought to consider.

But it brings me to my central theme; which is a consideration of the status of science; of what it is; what it claims for itself; what it has no place with; what it holds no truck with; what distinguishes it from say alchemy or magic.

The example threes I listed above are all pretty basic; and are all objects of legitimate scientific inquiry. Earth, air, sea; sun, moon, stars; wind, rain, fire - These threes now are getting a bit Wikka, don’t you think? But you can see how they kind of relate in an antiquated and maybe moribund way to the scientific threes I began with; how historically these Wikka threes might be seen to have been the precursors, the first glimpses to humanity of the scientific threes. At least you will come with me this far?

But, so far as we are aware at present, there are only two basic forces, and some people say there is only one, but they are hopefuls and speculate on the fact. In the main we say there is the electromagnetic force which is the strong force; and there is the gravitational force, which is the weak force.

My musings about threes is knocked about a little by this only two forces.

But let’s move on.  The strong force is the cement of matter; it is what holds us and all objects together as bodies and things. One must also assume the strong force to be the force which maintains, for us and for objects, our and their, shapes.  Look upon us and all objects as model kits. You get one in your stocking at Christmas.  You build a Junkers JU88 or a Wellington bomber or a Mea space station. It begins in bits which hang together when cemented (by the strong force) which is in that little tube you get with your kit.

The strong force cement holds the shape of your model of Titanic or of The Moon Buggy; it keeps it in the shape of Moon Buggy or Titanic once the cement has set. Thus we and all objects, each owns an integrity.  That’s pretty simple.

I don’t what to drift into a discussion about shapes themselves and about how shapes are determined. I have some of my own speculations – I have read Rupert Sheldrake and Jung and Jacob Boehme and each of these guys are magic on examining the possibilities. The question is a question of forms; and Plato is the key and source still for these ruminations.

The electromagnetic force is strong and difficult to break (fission) but with extremely powerful shocks when achieved (chain reactions).  So we and all things owe to it our soundness and solidity, our not having parts of us happily drift away or fall off willy-nilly. All well and good. Thus in this way the electromagnetic force allows us to hold onto some certainty about materials and material objects, their physical and performance properties in building and other uses. We can rely on the strong force keeping materials together in certain ways and so allowing certain characteristics be present in their use and application.

The weak force is gravity. Gravity may not seem the weak force. I was transferring a tonne of slate chippings from the street outside my house to the back garden making a feature there a week or two back now. Gravity seemed pretty potent at the time.  But the fact that I was able to get about and do the transfer is due to the less stringent demands of gravity upon me as a body.  Gravity is strong enough on earth to keep us all attached to the ground but not rooted in stasis to it; and this is because we have muscle sufficient to oppose the weak force of gravity, and so to move about, nonetheless.  It has been said that the whole mass of earth is exerting its weak force upon each of us; but such a massive mass is not able to exert sufficient gravitational force on us to prevent us moving and doing things. Nor can it stop less weighty objects moving or being moved. But yet glaciers and continents move also; and to some extent gravity, the weak force, is what allows, not alone, these things to occur.

So we have some pretty useful basic forces rooting for us and on our side here on earth - Like little bear’s porridge: just right.

Of course people who are committed against argument by design for a First Mover will not appreciate this generous accommodation which the earth and nature’s forces upon it make for our continuance here.  Quite reasonably the chicken/egg co-dependency is applied which says that man was made on earth, by earth, to suit the conditions of earth; otherwise man should not have appeared on earth; and no metaphysics are required. As man shapes earth; earth shapes man; (not perhaps as a physical form I mean but human habits, behaviours etc).

This argument of course gets over the fact of convenience of design as appointed by any God. But does it?  The cement of the strong electromagnetic force is, as far as can be deemed presently, universal – literally – when active under all but conditions we are not quite sure of; such as the first milliseconds of The Big Bang for instance. We can say with some confidence that the cement of electromagnetism is at work fairly equanimously in almost all of the visible universe, near all of the observable universe.

The point is it’s not local in the same way as the circumstances of the weaker force gravity impinge upon us.  Gravity as a quantity of force actually exerted is intensely and particularly variable, and depends on local circumstances So far as I know it would be gravity rather than the electromagnetic force which would constitute a contributory problem challenging sustainability of human life on the other planets. The electromagnetic force would still be, on balance, in our favours.

This universality of the strong force raises two considerations. Firstly its universality raises directly considerations of universal order or arrangement. Secondly its non-local even-handedness denies its value as a local evolutionary accommodation, local to earth.  Unless one wants to argue that humans had no choice but to adapt to the effects of the strong force upon them so as to come into being and survive sustainably.

But this is cart before the horse, it is perhaps better said that the strong force helped humans come into being; that without the strong force or some such effectual substitute for its effects, humans, creation itself, could not have happened.  The earth would not be; but all would happen ‘without form and void, and chaos [] on the face of the deep’.

Without doubt that tube of cement in your model kit under the tree is a sine qua non for a successful build. It is put in with the kit to assist building and to keep the build together. A help, a positive asset, and not something with like the more swings and roundabouts such as the weak force might be said to offer.  Locally the weak force allows you to zoom about the kitchen and the garden with your Junkers JU88 in hand pretending you’re an ace - But at the risk of a crash.

I do not want to go into the idea of the strong force being subject to slow decay and atrophy. I don’t know enough to do this. I don’t even know the actual status of the argument amongst scientists.

But these forces, weak and strong; and whether the two are able to be unified or else are discrete actions nonetheless; they are each and together what one might call emanations from what we call matter.

(Emanations was a word used by the Gnostics of Early Christian heresy; and the Gnostics assumed that God put out emanations and that emanations multiplied serially, each further one of extension having less contact and association with God himself, so that eventually matter was able to come into being; matter being a substance distant from God and somewhat corrupted because of this distance of it from God.

Likewise the Gnostics taught that emanations distant from God allowed evil to encroach into things and into doings. To some extent material things and material life were associated with evil things and evil life by this distance from God of the emanations in which they were able to subsist.

Why I have taken this diversion and tell you about this teaching of the Gnostics is twofold.  Firstly, I use the word emanations advisedly when I refer to the strong and weak forces and their manifest effects on matter; in a hope of, by connecting it with the Gnostics and their use of the word, opening up to you a connection between science and magic (i.e. between weak and strong forces and Gnosticism; Gnosticism itself a metaphysical, and one might stretch a point and say, Wikka-type understanding of things?). Secondly I want to prepare you for seeing the strong and weak forces more clearly; for what they are; as being at bottom seriously mysterious and inscrutable phenomena.

The emanations, which we perceive as gravitational pull and as electromagnetic attraction, arise out of and come from matter.  Lately in science we have as a general public been introduced to an idea of gravitational waves; the word wave here might just as well have been emanation.  A gravitational wave we are told has been detected, observed by machinery made by humans. Now what has been detected – have you any clear idea? And has the word wave been used by the reporters of this achievement instead of the word emanation because, simply put, joe-public is at home and happy with the word wave, but deeply suspects the smell of Wikka or Necromancy in a  word like emanation? Possibly. Probably.

The word wave is comfortable; but its use for observable gravitational – what? - radiation? – well whatever - its (deliberate I believe) use abstracts as far as humanly possible the entire magic and mystery of the thing itself.  Beware; the natives might get restless. Use wave. It’s safe.

I am going to ditch emanation and I am also ditching wave: I am going it alone with the word ‘disturbance’. The flicker of a Geiger-counter, the tremor of a leaf on a bough, are equally accommodated in the word - disturbance. Now take a look at William Wordsworth’s words again with which I have headed-up this essay, and read the lines afresh in the light of how far, so far, we have got in this mini-adventure of mine.  Would you say after reading him again that Wordsworth is scientific? If your answer to my question is NO! - ask yourself – why not? Ask yourself to name to yourself the distinction which prohibits science to Wordsworth.  Ask yourself what a scientific approach to Wordsworth’s theme might look like.  I hope you are knocking down those inner barriers placed in your observations and conceptions by the social cement around you; that social cement which glues tight the doors of perception!

The weak force and the strong force are equally disturbances then. But this matter from which emanate – there I go again – disturbances; what is this? This matter is electrons, neutrons and protons, the building blocks of matter. These particles we are told are electrically-charged (neutrons?) – or even we are told – are themselves electrical charges – what of, we are not privy to.  Thus matter itself is not a substance as such. It too is a disturbance.  It is an unsettled something. Scientists today often refer to matter as being at root information; although I think the use of the word information by scientists is a technical use peculiar to their province. But nonetheless the choice of the word information by scientists absolutely points us away from solidity; from materiality, from a sense of potentially being able by hand to grasp and to hold a piece of unadulterated primal matter in ones fist. The whole drift is a way from:

“To see the world in a grain of sand _And hold eternity in the palm of your hand”  _

So; let’s briefly recapitulate.  The weak and strong forces are distinguished by a key characteristic of disturbance. Matter also is distinguished by the character of disturbance.  Thus gravity and electromagnetism come about as being a disturbance emanated by a disturbance; i.e. by matter.  Interesting.  Are you getting the vibes?

Here then we have a clear foundation from which to look at things;  by our suggesting that everything manifests that manifests, by way of disturbance. The whole shooting match and nine yards is in progress as a continuous and continual disturbance.

We are getting into metaphysics now and there will be some discussion to come about this eventuality having arisen, and about how metaphysics is unavoidable to a mind willing to be open about things. I will be writing about a strong current trend in academia which disallows discussions of metaphysics; showing you, with I hope some good evidence, it is an intellectual closed shop and dead end.

Disturbance is all. Disturbing.

But no it’s not disturbing at all – it’s absolutely liberating; absolutely joyous; absolutely you could not make it up.  That word, or rather, that Word, by which God made the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land, all nations; that Word maybe continues to echo, to resonate throughout Creation; thus having set up the vibrations which are the engines of that disturbance which made, and continues to sustain, us and all things? Fanciful? No.

Given the scientific facts as I have tried to lay them out truthful to the state of the science at present, so far as I comprehend it, I ask you to give me something more likely, better, more acceptable, more having a ring of authentic possibility. I challenge you to do so; but in good faith, both you and me.

At this point, whereat science melds into metaphysics and inevitably so; here the distinction between science and magic, between theory and Wikka, breaks down utterly.

Because I do not hope to know again

The infirm glory of the positive hour

Because I do not think

Because I know I shall not know

The one veritable transitory power

Because I cannot drink

There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again

Our science for all its seated certainties is, as are all things, situated in the final instance on the self-same seat as is Wikka, and Alchemy, and as is any other exploration by human thought.

I am not going to go into attempting to lay out for you the strong and coercive economic and social reasons why the story of science as we hear it being told to us daily in our days, adulates and professes with a dogmatic rigidity, a viewing of the world by us all, and makes captives of as many who are dragooned, pressed, persuaded by the people with the vested-interests, into viewing the world as exclusively material fact and without it possessing any extraneous, intractable, untidy, alien parts attached.

I am only going to say that when a person argues with you and says to you there is only empirical fact, materiality, and a world, a universe in which everything can be explained by science; you should please try to convince them, say, by using my disturbance arguments, how they are woefully misled.  They may add as a capstone to their beliefs be telling you that they know all things are predetermined because science is able to explain and so to predict them – or will be able to in the future. This is as much a blind faith as that which Bartimeus in his own kind held onto.  Bartimeus was healed with the gift of sight and thus his faith was vindicated.

At its frontiers science is ever neither fish nor fowl; neither magic or science.  At its frontiers science knows less, and is less certain, than were it in its settled heartlands. At its frontiers, one scientist’s research is speculation to another scientist, whose work is solid research. Just as many seeds sown by The Sower fall by the wayside, or on stony, thorny ground; so too the large portion of research at the frontiers of science leads nowhere; and has to be acknowledged at some point to have been wasted effort per se (although no effort is wasted and all effort can be turned to good account when a person who has exerted it is willing to take what it can offer and use it well).  Most new things tried fail – a general fact of life.

So has this vast amount of failed effort from scientists at the frontiers been an exercise in Wikka, or Alchemy; because it has been research conducted into a thing not bearing fruit; a wrong turning; strictly–speaking, not science? The scientists might have conducted their research is the spirit of science, adhering to scientific method best practice all the way, is this enough to have exonerated them from a charge of being Mountebanks in their researching of the barren areas they researched?  Remember the victors write the history books.  Those who are runners-up, or worse, defeated, are typecast villains and/or losers.

And then there are the examples of plate tectonics in Geology and of bacteriocins in antibacterial Medicine. Both these avenues today are current and frontline research; the first plate tectonics being a general theory accepted to be knowledge nowadays; the second, a revival of an avenue of research sidelined by Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in the 1930s; both examples were rejected as blind alleys by science, and scientists before their virtue and value became resurrected, again revealed as having good potential.  Sometimes history belatedly writes it own winners.  These ideas, once considered as good, or as bad, as Alchemy, Wikka, are now respectable and are science. Were the men who first advocated them scientists, and the guys who sidelined them, were they the alchemists, jongleurs?

I hope you are beginning to see that much of what we belive is about words, mere words.  “Tell it like it is”; this phrase is a downright lie.

Now Aristotle the ancient Greek philosopher studied lots of things including life forms; what we call animals and plants and so on. I believe he was not clear on the separation of specific life forms into animal and vegetable kingdoms; I believe he was not clear whether some of what we know as vegetables were in fact alive.

Don’t scoff. Consider a floating seed such as one like the dandelion flower emits in summer in Britain.  We called them ‘clocks’ when I was a kid because we blew on their fine cotton filigree globes, holding them by the stalk, and counting the hours.  As more and more filigree flew off we continued to puff and count.  I saw one of these in the air suspended today. It was moving in a very gentle breeze and being carried here and there by a motion of wind which was almost imperceptible. Even the filigree itself in its composition was moving within itself, again, so I understood, at the instigation of a very fine breeze.  Because I felt I knew this, and I assumed it was not an animal, because I knew it was from a dandelion plant.

But to the person who didn’t know this, a guy like Aristotle back two millennia might have seen several similar phenomenological oddities, to such a guy the floating and internally active wafting thing might reasonably be assumed animal. Why not?  There were all kinds of odd insects and bugs about in the air with it; some quite macabre in appearance and features; tiny and apparently without means of support in the air.  Why not?

Clearly the guys years ago who went to sea had similar difficulties in their understanding and naming of sea creatures.  There are animals we call sea cucumbers, and others we call sea anemones, and others called sea horses, and others called sea elephants, and so on.  We don’t want to think ourselves so knowledgeable as to think that what we know is all of it knowledge.

Besides, there are certain entities about which the jury is still out whether they are alive or not; others about whether they are animals, whether they are plants; others whether they are one entity or more than one.  So anyone who laughs at the guy who writes about Gaia; the earth as a discrete living organism, please it’s not for us to presume.

These are just a few examples I have offered whereabouts our assumed rigidly defined boundaries do not hold good.  Not only are our words by which we classify, divide and distinguish, confounded and called into question; our very assumptions, often having been fortified by these crumbling words and their categories, are likewise called to make account of themselves.

In regard to uncertainty of knowledge, I now refer to the three primary colours I mentioned in my opening paragraph.  I wonder are they objectively primary? I mean would they be primary were humans and any other life form which is able to observe them not in existence? Are our eyes responsible for their primaryness? Or do the quanta of light by which they manifest to us always comprise the precise same wavelengths so as conform to the visibility to us of the primary colours red, or blue, or yellow? Clearly colours themselves are a psychological construct; a response of our nature in us to a variety of mixtures of light quanta and wavelengths hitting our eyes. But the wavelengths of the quanta are another thing and are probably independent of our perceptions – but not certainly so. Is there always the same number of quanta elements in any quanta of the same primary colour light? Are they - always as being of a primary colour - all of the same wavelength?  Is there any other possible variables in light quanta of primary colour which act to diversify their content or effects – on our eyes and brains or else on their impact on plants, soil, on rocks, in space?

Is there a clear distinction always to be made between subjective human or life-centred responses such as self-generated ‘internal’ phenomena (e.g. most-likely colour perception) and an objective item assumed to be able to be still around were there no thing able to perceive it remaining existent?  The old philosophical problem: is the table still there when I’m not looking at it?

Certainly science is that set of all sets which it explains but it is not the set of itself in this regard. Nor can it ever be – I believe that this is a logical fact?

In our times, as science progresses and brings more and more data into a fold presumed to be sound theory; it proceeds just like Capitalism does, and for much the same reasons.  It is in fact subduing to itself, and in the process subduing us commoners to this new science; what formerly had been considered, perhaps widely (e.g. plate tectonics) to be Wikka, Alchemy. In this way science is thus expanding its imperial scope by way of poaching upon the ideas and projections of those studies which gave it birth; and which it has since spurned as being ‘unscientific’. Like a callow teenaged child will not be seen with its parents out together; and presumes all that its parents say and suggest to it is garbage; that the parents know nothing; this is the treatment of science and of scientists of the copious works of deceased men and women; copious works which have been the very foundation on which time has made science and scientists exalted in current our world.

“Our beginnings never know our ends”

Like Capital, in its own fields, science absorbs every new thing into itself; and so to achieve the same ends; of hegemony and those dreadful Freudian motivators; ‘money, acclaim; love of the other [or same] gender’. Both science and Capital behave exactly like the armies of the nations; which draught in ordinary men and women en masse so as to regulate, and to drill them, and to subdue these ordinary ones to their wills; often to an abject unthinking unabatable obedience.  Control is the mightiest watchword for all three entities; armies, Capital, science; extension of influence and of ability to exercise one’s will without baulk, to as far an extent as can be obtained. The so–called authorities of these entities, those in their fields who own most persuasion and effect to call the shots – these are those who have, and understand that they have, most to gain, and most to lose – these are those for whom steady sure continuous growth of their status quo of authority - of power, standing, influence - is the sole and whole factor determinant of their actions and their thoughts through their lives.

Words are bandied and bantered, twisted and misused so as to lie in all three fields; Capital, armies, science; an unholy trinity for our age.  Their phrases are in the language: ‘collateral damage’ ‘containment’ ‘mopping-up’ ‘pacification’ ‘peacekeeping’ ‘intervention’ (which hides invasion) - and so forth for armies; for Capital many myths have been fabricated, manufactured, and sustained in practice by those who gain from their persistent insistence; ‘Footie; Telly; a Tenner – who says you can’t!’ said one billboard I saw today, and it was advertising - what? - Wasting one’s money and time filling the pockets of those who talk to us like they are our pals, and simultaneously as though we are deficient children.  The doggedness of, the aggressiveness and ruthlessness of, the predatory nature of, unvarnished boardroom policy – which is marked ‘for your eyes only’ – displays the unleashed beast.  And science; how, how, tired am I of bedtime stories to help you sleep soundly and feeling secure in good hands.  Our TV for instance is being used in a studied way as a social engineering tool so as to proselytise and to propagate sets of ideas which are flavour of the month denials of service to God, and which are exorbitant exaltations of technical man-made things and thereby of those to be exalted, those scientists who discovered, invented, made, and continue to draw profits from their revels.

Science on TV is characterised by its presenters as being overwhelmingly benign; as a fatherly and generous figure in the hands of the fatherly generous whose lives have been dedicated to ‘serve humanity’ – i.e. to serve you and me.  Science chases the mysteries and forges the keys which it uses to have them undone. To science, and obliquely to scientists, we must be grateful and show appreciation; applaud their wonders and achievement, do obeisance; everything to Big them up in our consciousness.

Once this generously governing position has been established, then can the extraneous and social engineering coercive messages begin to come through. There’s no God. We can explain it all without him. Depend on us not on a fictional Old Man in the Sky. See, we got results. Count your blessings – and how many have we supplied you with? – Today you can check out on the bus what’s on at the cinema, whether your heating at home is switched off; but the box at the supermarket in which kindly people place donations of food for our distressed; we take no account of and eschew all liability for that phenomenon. Whole nations standing waiting for that box to be shipped charitably into a subtropical local port near you - and then there‘s the public riot to get some of it before it is all distributed.  But we of science are not to blame – we invent and discover – it is you who make a bad job of what we endeavour.

I reply Is there no tether on your scientific enquiries; can you free roam and do as you please; study pursue whatever takes your fancy?  Were you wholly free to go where you please and study that, would you not choose as often as not an inquiry of small social welfare value, of zero consequence; and then like the Scribe of The Good Samaritan, justify yourselves under the – because it’s there – and the – academic freedom arguments? You can’t rush art; you can’t force science etc etc.

Inconsequential science has led to some huge practical boons for humanity, you might say – so take the credit for an accidental benefit yes?

But this is all academic. The academicians and all their researches, are situated, take place in, Tied Cottages, and their livelihoods and their necessities for life are come by, by their frequenting of Tommy Shops.  They are obligated almost ubiquitously for their funding to the commercial barons of Capital, in whose pockets they are forced to be, or else have no funding. The unbiased standing, and the personal freedom and integrity of the scientist are a socio-economic fictions; part of that social engineering the TV carries out upon us.  These fictions are perpetrated in support of i. maintaining public order – putting us in our place – keeping us in our boxes; ii. sending us a bogus but always upbeat message – ‘science is in its heaven, and all’s right with the world’; iii. maintaining the mythical appearances of our liberal freedom and access to choice; that these remain nonetheless at work in the nation; iv. Most heinously, done so as to hide, disguise, to lie, about the fact of the dominant hegemony of Capital over and upon science and scientists; and thereby upon and over us all.

Over us all? Well. Few of us are able to build a radio, were all the radios to become smashed. This special knowledge is held in a great fund in a great silo exclusively by scientists; by scientists ubiquitously paid by and directed by Capital and its chiefs. Thus all of us except those Big Chiefs are at the mercy of a catastrophic breakdown of say, Google data centres in Silicon Valley; or in a smaller way, how Visa going down electronically in Europe recently stopped all shopping here at a stroke for most of a day.  We might as well have been headless chickens because our (ubiquitous) Visa cards were useless, worthless, and our pockets empty, but the shelves of the shops jammed full as per usual.  He who pays the piper calls the tune.

So here is a conversation which epitomises pretty well the disparity displayed by TV between actuality and the presentation of science on its programmes.

ADRIAN

The air breathes upon us here most sweetly.

SEBASTIAN

As if it had lungs and rotten ones.

ANTONIO

Or as 'twere perfumed by a fen

GONZALO

Here is everything advantageous to life.

ANTONIO

True; save means to live.

SEBASTIAN

Of that there's none, or little.

GONZALO

How lush and lusty the grass looks! how green!

ANTONIO

The ground indeed is tawny.

SEBASTIAN

With an eye of green in't

ANTONIO

He misses not much.

SEBASTIAN

No; he doth but mistake the truth totally.

Maybe, I hope I have, begun to help you to be able to say, along with the guys in this old conversation, but about TV science?:

You cram these words into mine ears against

The stomach of my sense.

The words ‘progressive’, ‘state of the art’, ‘cutting-edge’, ‘next generation’, ‘advanced technology’, ‘our most advanced ever’; and so forth; are none of them factual descriptors, they are slogans crafted by people paid to come up with ways of enticing you to buy. They have the ‘ring’ of factual descriptors, which is their marketing strength; and also their source of untruth and deception. Just like the Corporation which calls itself ‘First National’ or another which names itself ‘Premier Direct’ and so forth; these are tricks of language; they are long-deliberated upon and carefully chosen from a bunch of suggestions, with intent to impress you and me and to suggest to us priority and competence, size and reliability etc, etc; they are then ‘springes to catch woodcocks’, ‘sprats to catch mackerel’.

Their watchword is perhaps: ‘Bullshit baffles brains’.  They are phrases which allow the arising in the ordinary shopper’s minds of unsubstantiated ideas of value and might; all connected with the organisations they are fronting; basically engendering in us a low-level form of adoration. Sometimes, and meant to be, craven, cringing.

This all takes me to ideas, which for this essay I am making my final topic of discussion. I will be brief.

“Tell me where is fancy bred

In the heart or in the head?”

Words not only contain spoken the thoughts and ideas we have – or  try to express what we intend them to – words spoken also generate ideas associatively with their own meanings as they strung out in sentences.  I have given you the examples of ‘First National’ and ‘Premier Direct’ as being phrases which move us, often subliminally, without our full conscious awareness, to make assumptions and create tenuous attractive ideas, mind-pictures, thoughts, about them.  By their creators and their owners, these phrases have been selected and crafted very, very specifically and carefully so as to do this in, or to, your mind.  These crafters and selectors know well what they are doing; they know the power of the right word or phrase, to make or to break, their larger endeavours.

As one great man once said: “Words make a man; speak let me see thee.’

In short these business sharpers use stratagems, they use clever deceits, they use those undercurrents bearing unsubstantiated claims to one’s mind to fool you; and deliberately; after all, they are business-people. Advertising is a form of lies.  So too is politics.  So too is much of what passes for honest in our world.

It is because of this willingness of our age and of so many of our leading people to ‘be economical with the truth’ that one is able to see a terrorist obtain a Nobel Peace Prize – whichever side you’re on – Yasser Arafat or Henry Kissinger; - and to see a petty squabbling research thief get a Laureate in science – vide: Crick and Watson – sweets for the sweet indeed!

As for ideas, which are especially valued by people; especially good and also commercially valuable ones; all of us have them; yet how might they arise in our minds?  The ‘creative’ guy or girl isn’t particularly interested in where their ideas come from; if they are business-minded they will go and buy protection from them and so have them serve themselves.

And yet were ideas to be gifts from a God (a very plausible consideration; think on it); just as the Early Writers on The Gospels considered ideas to arise; and just as the Protestants and Puritans considered that it was God who ‘opened to them’ that is ‘gave as a gift’ to them a thought or a connection or an understanding not present with them beforehand; if indeed we are all to be thankful to God for our thoughts and our creative ideas; should we go straightway and infringe His Intellectual Property and even steal the rights to it from Him, by exploiting to the fully and self-centredly what he has allowed us and under our own title and names?

I do believe God has given me this essay. I do believe I have been gifted these thoughts; these perceptions; observations; although my own animosities and prejudices may have acted upon these gifted thoughts so as to cloud or to divert them from their original soundness at source, here and there.

The Son of Man has said and still He maintains His truth that:

Blessed are the pure in heart,

for they shall see God