Snapshots: A Coincidence Diary

On the morning of February 27th 2009 I at last got around to making amendments to my essay Playing The Game   (The link to that essay is now defunct.) The alteration I made was to include the text of an e mail that I had sent to Bob Woffinden and the Ingrams on May 10th 2008, and which I later forwarded to Jon Ronson, as a codicil to the essay´s first point. On each occasion I had headed the e mail Another Such Cough . It read - As a further illustration of what I am getting at, at a car boot fair this morning a stall holder brought up with me the subject of Ingram´s win and mentioned the signals "... whenever the guy coughed ". At the adjacent stall was a lady, a smoker, who had earlier that morning, with myself, helped herself to one of the first guy´s chips. At the word " coughed " she coughed. She never coughed again the whole morning. I pointed this out to them. A few minutes after I did so my wife drew my attention to something which she had just spotted in Th...

In the early hours of February 22nd 2009 I made a contribution to Professor Colin Blakemore´s piece at The Guardian ´ s    Comment Is Free  section entitled Science is just one gene away from defeating religion http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/22/genetics-religion Professor Blakemore  Colin Blakemore - Wikipedia  argued hard for a materialist view of everything and suggested that we may soon nail the genes that force so many to take religious ideas seriously. ... at Cambridge... I walked to lectures past the Cavendish Lab... One day, scrawled on the wall, was... "CRICK FOR GOD". No surprise that pivotal advances in science provoke religious metaphors. Crick and Watson's discovery transformed our view of life itself - from a manifestation of spiritual magic to a chemical process. One more territorial gain in the metaphysical chess match between science and religion . Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was certainly a vital move in that chess ...

(Permit me to explain this coincidence by noting that I put up this Blog in March 2006 and gave it the original title of ´ Living the Dream ´. I only altered that to ´ Snapshots ´ in October 2025.) My Statcounter showed that at 7.20 a.m. on Feb 15th 2009 someone in Tokyo had put Chess Dream-A  into a search engine. The 2nd and 3rd hits were of my Blog. But the 8th was - Thought Experiments : The Blog: Living the Dream - [ 翻译此页 ]It's as if she has awoken from a dream, a rather pleasant dream, ... (Why couldn 't it have been chess , where I might have turned my obsession to account, ... www.bryanappleyard.com/blog/2008/07/living-dream.php - 27k - (The Link is now defunct.) I was intrigued and followed the link to discover Bryan Appleyard´s Blog. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Appleyard  I had no previous idea that he was a Blogger.  Five hours later on February 15th 2009 I jokingly sent him this e mail in which I pretended annoyance - Sir! I note a Blog entry of your...

At 9.20 a.m. on February 9th 2009 (the 25th anniversary of my commencing a diary) I was reading an interview with Jeremy Paxman  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Paxman in the online edition of The Guardian . http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/feb/09/bbc-television At the same time I was musing on how gnosis was the only really important thing. I was thinking of saying to an interviewer - maybe even him - that above all political comment, all art, all efforts to find justice, all criticism of neo-Darwinism and of the philosophical arguments for God´s existence this was really the only thing that mattered: direct experience of the Divine. Spiritual consciousness. Gnosis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosis When I had my first experience of higher consciousness, in June 1986, I found, as I reviewed it immediately afterwards, the Elkie Brooks song No More the Fool was playing in my head.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tkmje83iCA0 The gnosis I sought I ...

On the evening of February 8th 2009 I was reading from and contributing to a blog at the Guardian´s Comment Is Free section. It was by Sean Clarke - http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/06/atheist-bus-religion ?   Take a punt on Pascal's bus ' Join my campaign for a middle way in the atheist/theist bus debate. You have nothing much to lose, and plenty to gain  Saturday 7 February 2009 10.00 GMT You wait ages for a bus-based theological advertising campaign, and then two come along at once. But I think it's time for a third. If Blaise Pascal were in charge, the ad would read something like: There might be a God after all. Maybe you should factor that in. The original atheist bus campaign irritated detractors in its own camp due to the word probably:  "There's probably no God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life."  It was, said the hardliners with open contempt, an agnostic bus campaign. Then came the Christian counterstrik...