Living the Dream: A Coincidence Diary

On the morning of September 26th 2017 I mentioned to my wife a piece she had several times before told me that she had presented for Channel 4, before we met. It was on their COMMENT snippet, which followed on from Channel 4 News , when she had spoken in defence of a man convicted of sexual assault by stimulating a dolphin with his hand. She pointed out that, had the animal not enjoyed it, then it could have made its feelings known in no uncertain manner. The resurfacing of this incident surfaced after we had visited the local beach and given scraps to a local seagull whom we had dubbed "Gavin". Later that day I was surfing across Youtube and found myself watching a Bill Maher show where he was, for the first time, able to make me aware of his empathy with what Fiona and myself thought about the innocence of pleasuring an animal. Mr Maher now pleaded in defence of another chap in a similar situation.

In the mid 1980s the idea circulated that Madonna was Marilyn Monroe reborn. She denied having any confidence in it. Madonna was born in 1958 whilst Monroe died in 1962.  Yet there are parallels; American, blonde, actress, singer, beauty, superstar... The goalposts quite shifted as I later heard that it was a kind of "thematic or archetypal life". Ah well then.  Around that same time I heard, apparently stemming from a "spiritual source", that Mussolini had become Colonel Gaddaffi. I scrutinised their faces and saw that there are similar lineaments. But, without being ´armed´ with the supposition, these similarities might never occur to you. Also, of course, two autocrats who, in effect, ran their own fiefdoms and were then both killed by their own people. Around lunchtime on March 11th 2017 I was reading this piece of Jonathan Freedland´s in The Guardian -  https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/mar/11/1930s-humanity-darkest-bloodiest-hour-paying-attention-s...

On January 23rd 2017 I had already begun searching for more gen re something which had recently, once more, started to very much preoccupy me:  The Holy Grail .  An e mail arrived from David DeAngelo headed - The Holy Grail of One-Night-Stands. At lunchtime on January 24th 2017 I was rereading the Narrative Entry here,  http://james-plasketts-coincidence-diary.blogspot.com.es /2006/03/ part-two-narrative-epilogues-and.html  specifically for stuff on the Holy Grail. And just a few seconds after I had read this of point ( 12 )  - Through further researches I gathered that the quest for the Holy Grail represents very much a personal and individual attempt to contact the divine. Works such as H. Kahanne’s and R. Pietrangeli’s " The Krater and the Grail, Hermetic Sources of the ‘Parzival’  " clarified to me how the symbolism of the Grail was born from ancient cults and myths, e.g. the Greek  krater  was the deepest bowl of creation and divin...

Circa 11: a.m. on January 12th 2017 I was doing some cleaning and had on in the background this podcast of Sam Harris ́: https://soundcloud.com/samharrisorg/60-an-evening-with-richard-dawkins-and-sam-harris-2 It had arrived by e mail ten hours earlier and this was the first time I heard it. Here is the Youtube version - An Evening with Richard Dawkins – Featuring Sam Harris – Night 2 - YouTube I was thinking about my six previously cited reasons for accepting the existence of some Deity. Those are - a) My over forty very brief experiences of a compassion way beyond normal consciousness and which could only be described as Divine. b) That others report such experiences of the Divine. c) The coincidences recorded here. d) The faults with neo-Darwinism. e) The philosophical argument from design. f) The very existence of the ́Occult Classics ́. I would also now add g) The aesthetic sense in Man. To each of my six points instance there are, of course, counter arguments. Sceptics...