1 million shades of white

blogger granny getting the treatment

I went to the hairdresser this week to get ready for the summer.  Hideshi the hairdresser wears white and all the other hairdressers in the salon wear white; it is a sign of summer.  In the winter they wear black. They are kind and skilful and I go out looking quite a lot better than when I walked in.  I wouldn't say I could be mistaken for Angelina Jolie or Liz Hurley but certainly it is a big improvement on what went into the salon! The same thing is happening to all the other clients, they all come in feeling one way and go out feeling smarter and of course happier.

Dadi Janki doesn't need a hairdo

At the start of the week I went to see my friends the Brahma Kumaris who also wear white. The remarkable Dadi Janki, aged 99 had just flown into England and was meeting up with several hundred people, mostly also dressed in white.  Her beauty treatment is of a different kind, she reminds everyone that they all have beautiful souls and that they can keep them like that if they remember how important the soul is.  Her beauty regime isn't snipping hair and painting nails, it is meditation and kindness to all creatures.  It is absence of anger and no desire, no jealousy or malice and particularly not basing your happiness quotient on gains and losses.  It is contentment and it shouldn't be hard to come by.  I recommend meeting her sisters and brothers dressed in white to feel how real this wave of contentment is.  See the photograph below, all in white, all happy, no sign of hairdos or artificiality, just very sweet and committed people with open hearts.  It does though take a different kind of work to realise that beauty.  Even if you aren't ready to do it now, you and I can be very glad that Dadi and all the Brahma Kumaris are there doing it and holding the door right wide open for any of us to follow when we are ready.

This is hundreds of brothers and sister Brahma Kumari in Mount Abu, hundreds of shades of white.

Don't mess with my meditation!

Shri Shantananda Saraswati, 

Yesterday there was an article by Oliver Moody in the newspaper on Meditation messing with your head.  The Times Newspaper which Grandpa and I share because we both like different bits of it, he likes the editorials and political articles, me the main news stories, photos of babies, menus and articles on meditation!  So, for the first time in ages, there was a negative article on meditation, how it shouldn't be taken on lightly because it can mess with your head.  The sentence not undertaken lightly reminds me of the sentences which are read before the marraige service. It goes like this.. "Marriage is an honourable estate which should not be undertake taken lightly, wantonly or without due reverence".  Of course this is true, marriage is definitely not for pansies, it

Father Laurence Freeman OSB. 

takes courage and perseverance coupled with love, affection, patience, kindness, tolerance, attraction and understanding to make it through the up to 50 or more years you are going to be together.  And you should be faithful to it if you want it to work.  I think of it like being in a house, it gives you the protection you need but you have to look after it.
Meditation should be given the same seriousness when you take it on.  It will serve you well it you keep to it's simple guide lines and you make sure it has a good provenance.  It isn't just mood music and incense, it is a method of bringing your mind to a still point, of dissolving the impediments to that stillness.  A proper meditation technique will have been perfected and given by a person who has achieved it's benefits and knows it's science.  It isn't to be undertaken lightly but it is worth undertaking as a disciplined practise.  It also helps to have a guide and help, someone who has meditated for a long time.  So, you see it really is very much like marriage and the initial magic of attraction and ceremony is the best way to begin both.

Birthday blog for a boy in Dubai. HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAX

Happy Birthday from him

Happy Birthday from him

 Here is a Granny who only just remembered a birthday.  There in Dubai is the boy who had the birthday on the 27th April.  Here is a Grandpa mowing the lawn, here is a Granny snipping and weeding the garden.  That's how she remembered the boy in Dubai with the birthday as she snipped snipped snipped and thought about the summer and that boy and his  brother and his cousins skipping about in the garden.  She then thought about putting up a tent for the boy and his brother because they are about that camping size and then she remembered that the biggest had turned into a ten year old on the night of the 27th or was it during the day.  Oh dear she thought, what sort of Granny am I snipping and weeding and meditating too and not remembering on THE day.  Well, that's the sort of Granny I am, a snipper and weeder and meditator with hens and dogs and a Grandpa who likes bacon and eggs for breakfast but a Granny who doesn't think in dates.  So, I thought I would write a birthday blog for that nice boy so he would know that there are people in Russia, Spain, France, America, Ukraine, China and the United Kingdom, Singapore and Dubai who would think about that boy today and how his Granny missed his birthday and would all send him the very best wishes a ten year old boy could have.  In the meantime, there is a tent and a tenth birthday present waiting for him when he gets back to England.  HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAX from me and Grandpa and Algie and Butty and the hens and all the people who click on the blog today.

Parallel Universes? really comforting advice from Stephen Hawking

A man you can't ignore

Stephen Hawking's advice to a teenage girl in Sydney last week is a great comfort to anyone, Granny or Grandchild or teenage fan missing someone in their life.  Click on this link to hear what comforting words he uses

He was asked by a teenage girl “What do you think is the cosmological effect of Zayn [Malik] leaving One Direction and consequently breaking the hearts of millions of teenage girls across the world?”

He answered.."My advice to any heartbroken young girl is to pay attention to the the study of theoretical physics because, one day, there may be proof of multiple universes.  It would not be beyond the realms of possibility that somewhere outside of our own universe lies another, different universe and, in that universe, Zayn is still in One Direction."

We already accept parallel existences in what seems like real time, Grandpa in his study doing his thing, me blogging away, Butty the technodog stretching and snoozing, dreaming of hares.  That is already 4 and we are all in the same apparent place.  And where are all the others who lived or stayed or played here?  Getting on with their stuff, going to school, scootering around Singapore, playing rugby in Dubai, riding in Suffolk or in the case of the ancestors who are apparently dead and looking at us from photographs, where they might they be, they certainly aren't having coffee with us but something persuades us that they haven't really gone anywhere, they are just enjoying a parallel existence.  Thanks to Stephen Hawking for blessing that feeling with a probable reality found to be so through study of what actually is.

Eva Kor values

Eva Kors on why she hugged this man

Eva Kors interview (click on this) on Radio 4 last week after she had hugged Oscar Groning in the court where he is being tried for Nazi war crimes.  Listen to this before it leaves the BBC website. She speaks as the victim and survivor of Josef Mengele's experiments on twins at Auschwitz.  What is extraordinary about her is her rationale for forgiveness.  Forgiveness has set her free and many people can't understand that.  What forgiveness might do for the perpetrator isn't something she knows but forgiveness for her is an act of being free of hatred and the wish for revenge.  

I have retrieved the blog from the Butty dog especially to make certain that anyone who has any difficulty with forgiveness can read about why it works and to say that listening to her made sense of why I meditate.  The whole science of meditation is to set the mind free, to find the space where consciousness isn't clouded by thoughts or desires, good ones or bad.  I have found that not allowing the bad thoughts, literally banning them from my meditation works and hey, the good ones, I just say to them "wait and I'll think about you later".  The good ones are mostly obedient but the bad ones, the lurking feelings of justified or unjustified anger really do know that they're not allowed in if you address them forcefully.  I think they know that they have no place in the real you and that's what you are trying to realise each time you switch off from the character you seem to be and turn to the one you somewhere and somehow know that you are.  I expect that the Butty dog will be back, he enjoyed blogging too much to go back to just lying beside the computer.

Hypnotherapy suggested but meditation preferred

with friends

Me again, Butty the blogging dog!  In modern day parlance they suggest we "share our thoughts" so I am following the suggestion and sharing another suggestion.  Someone very dear to me, (hello Rachel) suggested that hypnotherapy might shift the way I think about food which isn't mine!  Hypnotherapy she thought might be just the ticket to make me into a dog without deviant behaviour.  To be honest I would rather have hypnotherapy than hydrotherapy, I hate getting into water and especially hate it when that old Granny sees how muddy I am and lifts me into the kitchen sink and shampoos me.  I wear my most woeful expression and when she finally lets me out after rinsing me off I shake as hard as I can and get as much wet round the room as I can.  

here I was, a puppy then

Anyway I deviate... but of course this is all about deviation and my particular deviousness in the thieving department.  So, I could go and sit with a hypnotist who would take me to a different realm of mind and then suggest that I should give up all thoughts of theft.   It costs to go to a hypnotist plus it doesn't always work and besides for that I like thieving and I don't really want to give it up.  That old Granny she knows about me and she says that daily meditation alongside her will gradually wash my dogginess out of me and I will quite possibly soar to transcendental heights where I won't be dog or frog or blogger and there will be no more baths and no more bother.  Sounds good to me.

See I told you so! I can manage technology

I told you so!

I know that you didn't really believe me when I told you that I could do the  blog but see here, no joking, it's me at the computer.  I believe that magazines from time to time have guest editors and that's what I am going to call myself, a guest editor until that Granny finds out what I am doing and puts a stop to it.

Whose a pretty boy now!

If you are wondering where she is I can tell you.  She and Grandpa are busy in the pond. He is cleaning it out with a net and she, god bless her, is rescuing tadpoles.  She thinks that all life is sacred, all are Spirit in different shapes and characters and that we (all creatures, dogs and all) become whatever we are and get to experience life as that very thing.  So, here I am, Spirit acting as a thieving lurcher and as that Granny says if that's true for me who knows who that tadpole might be!  It might have been a slippery character in another life and is now having to slip it's way through the bullrushes hoping not to get caught in Grandpa's net and be transported down to the river to take it's chance with the ducks.