Weblog von Hans-Wolfgang

In the sweet young thing's opinion the bench was far too public. Her gallant immediately suggested that they change their seat to one some distance away where it was more discreet and darker too.

"And you will promise not to hug me?" she asked coyly. Her lover nodded acquiescence.

"And you will promise not to kiss me?" Again her lover nodded.

"Then what on earth's the use of going over there?" demanded the girl angrily.

This is how hypocrisy goes on working: it pretends one thing, it hides just the opposite of it.

A man arrived at his local pub for a Friday night drink. Just as he was about to open the door, a nun jumped out from the shadows and said fervently, "My son, stop before it is too late! This pub is the House of the Devil! Repent your sins and forget the demon drink!"

The man had a bright idea and said to the nun mischievously, "How can you condemn something that you have never experienced? Have you ever tried alcohol? Have you ever felt it is health-giving and has many good properties in it?" "Never!" she cried. "I am a nun!"

After some very serious persuasion the drinker convinced the nun to try a little. "But wait," said the nun, "in these clothes I will be recognized. Why don't you bring some drink out to me in this old china cup?"

So the man entered the pub, walked up to the barman and said, "Evening, Jim. Give me a pint of your best and a large gin and tonic in this cup, please."

"By Christ!" exclaimed the barman. "Is that old nun hanging around outside my pub again?"

First see it clearly, watch it, all its subtle ways, its whole mechanism. It must have gone deep. You will have to be very aware of it. And nothing else is needed to be done -- because if you do something, that will create repression.

The miracle of awareness is that whatsoever is wrong, the moment you become fully aware of it drops on its own accord, and whatsoever is right, when you become fully aware of it, it becomes your very being.

Awareness is the most alchemical phenomenon in the world.

Just go on becoming more and more aware. Watch each act, each thought, each dream. And don't do anything -- don't be in a hurry to do something. Just simply go on watching, taking notes what is happening inside you, how you are living your life. And slowly you will become aware of a change happening on its own accord. And when any change happens by itself it has a beauty of its own.

Channelling can be very dangerous. There's no difference between animals and humans, that's one of the signs of a true pagan. Max Ernst was, very obliquely, certainly a shamanic type. Pan represents zero, the void, and nature, both aspects. The wild side. It's hedgerows. Instead of the Millennium Dome they should have planted forests, all the hedgerows should be restored. To restore the countryside is imperative. Taoism is not a cult, but a way of life, a philosophy, a code, which puts me in touch with what I really, truly should be doing on this planet. We are what we do. The aether is a real physical thing, some kind of cosmic glue - a genuine substance, or non-substance - that connects everything and allows unexplained things and ideas to be transmitted. Mushrooms are teachers. The Harmaline B molecule, like any other complex alkaloid, is represented as a ring, but when you take DMT, or Yage or Ayahuasca, there's also a ringing tone, a psychic tone. And with DMT there's a kind of crumpling sound. On the subject of dreams, by monitoring their brain waves, scientists have found that birds practice their songs while they sleep. In Thailand the drug rehabilitation unit was also for psychiatric patients. They would use loud noises to exorcise the spirits, and basically they'd be amplifying buzz saw on either side of your head with big speakers and banging gongs and completely freaking people out, but they were doing it to banish spirits. Look at what's happening now with everybody's mobile phones - peoples' brains must be completely scrambled. Outside you just can't avoid it anymore, what with visual pollution from advertising, noise pollution, both audible and inaudible, microwaves. Arabic culture uses a lunar calendar, they have moon letters and sun letters, and the pre-Christian celts also used a lunar calendar. It's so much more natural. Forget the pyramids – the world ’s most fortean ancient monument is not in Egypt, that land of overworked mysteries, but in Turkey. Take a weeping Madonna,combine it with a simulacrum and dash of trompe l’oeil, then add a case of almost supernatural survival over some 3,000 years and a sidelight on the origins of the word syphilis, and there you have her –the ‘statue’ of Niobe. According to some Greek myths, Niobe was the first woman –a kind of Hellenic Eve – whose descendants populated Greece. She can also make a good claim to be the grandmother of fortean phenomena. The ancient Greek writer Pausanias located prehistoric monuments in the hinterland behind Izmir (ancient Smyrna). He was a medical doctor who, in about AD 150, wrote the world ’s earliest surviving guidebook. In an incredibly detailed 10 volumes, Pausanias described, for the benefit of well-to-do Roman tourists, everything that was worth seeing in ancient Greece. No serious traveller to the Aegean can afford not to pack a copy of Pausanias. It was by using the clues he provided that,during the 1870s, the German adventurer Heinrich Schliemann discovered the prehistoric monuments of Mycenæ on mainland Greece.

Chris Moiser, a regular visitor to the Gambia on Africa's west coast, became intrigued by a 1944 report of a shy but ferocious, 30ft (9m) long reptile known as the Ninki Nanka. The mangrove-dwelling beast is said to have the body of a crocodile, the neck of a giraffe, the head of horse and three horns, one in the middle of its head. The reclusive reptile spends most of its time submerged in the mud in the sparsely-populated and infrequently-visited regions inland and upriver. In 1935, a white doctor found a group of locals staring at a photograph of what they said was the Ninki Nanka; it proved to be of a concrete dinosaur, though the tale doesn't state which species. A 1944 survey of the Gambia and surrounding areas describes the beast as a mythical water genie associated with rains and floods, which takes the form of a giant serpent. Capturing the snake can bring great wealth and good fortune. Of the four locals approached by Moiser in his most recent expedition, one dismissed Ninki Nanka as a myth, one made silver jewellery of it, one expressed a great fear of it, and another, a Muslim school teacher, refused to talk about it, apparently afraid. Like so many cryptids, the Ninki Nanka appears to exist somewhere between flesh and blood reality, and folklore.

Might a Kent zoo maintained by a wealthy eccentric family between 1900 and 1959 be largely responsible for many of the alien big cat (ABC) and out-of-place-animal (OOPA) sightings that have plagued the area ever since? Cobtree Manor, situated between the legendary Blue Bell Hill and Aylesford, was the location of a large menagerie and public zoo owned by Sir Carrad Tyrwhitt-Drake. Over the years his collection included one or more creatures for virtually every letter of the alphabet, including baboons, camels, gnu, mysterious-sounding "special" sheep, yak, and several types of big cat. Rumours also abound of strange cross-breeding experiments carried out in the manor's basements, but these remain sadly unsubstantiated. Leonard Cuckard, who has lived in the area all his life, remembers regular big cat escapes in the 1930s and 1940s. On one occasion in the 1930s,unfortunately undated, the Royal Engineers were called in and shot a black "leopard" on the Downs at Burham, near Blue Bell Hill. Drake admitted it was an escapee from his notoriously poorly-secured zoo.

14. December. The beginning of the Halycon Days, when kingfishers ('halycon' in Greek) nested on the calm waters and all sailors were safe. This period of tranquillity was supposed to last for two weeks.

Kaspar Hauser, the mysterious young man who appeared in Nürnberg in 1828, ran from a park on this day in 1833, crying that he had been stabbed. The park, covered with new-fallen snow, had only Kaspar's footprints, but the deep fatal wound in his heart was, in the opinion of two doctors, not self-inflicted.

A Zen initiate was meditating for years and whenever he would come to his Master, whatsoever experience he would bring to the Master, the Master would simply reject: "It is all nonsense. You go back and meditate again."

One day the Master came to the hut of the disciple -- he was sitting in a Buddha posture. The Master shook him and told him, "What are you doing here? If we needed stone Buddhas we have many in the temple! Just by sitting like a stone Buddha you will not attain to meditation. Do what I have been telling you to do. Just by stilling the body, your mind is not going to disappear, because it is through the mind that you are enforcing a certain discipline on the body. Anything done by the mind is going to strengthen the mind. It is a nourishment for the mind."

A year passed. The Master came again. The disciple was sitting almost in a kind of euphoria, enjoying the morning breeze and sun with closed eyes, thinking that he was meditating. The Master took a brick and started rubbing it on a stone in front of the disciple. It was such a disturbance that finally the disciple had to shout, "What are you doing? Are you trying to drive me crazy?"

The Master said, "I am trying to make a mirror out of this brick. If one goes on rubbing it enough I think it will become a mirror."

The disciple laughed. He said, "I always suspected that you were a little mad -- now it is proved! The brick can never become a mirror. You can go on rubbing it on the stone for lives together; the brick will remain a brick."

The Master said, "That shows some intelligence! Then what are you doing? For years you have been trying to make meditation out of the mind; it is like trying to make a mirror out of a brick."

And the Master threw the brick in the pond at the side of the tree the disciple was sitting under. The brick made a great splash in the pond, and the very sound of it was enough to do the miracle. Something awakened in the disciple. A sleep was broken, a dream was shattered: he became alert. For the first time he tasted something of meditation.

And the Master immediately said, " This is it!"

It happened so unexpectedly -- the disciple was taken unawares. He was not waiting for this to happen, that the Master would suddenly throw the brick into the pond, and the splash...