Feudalism v. Democracy

Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher, believed that a society should be ruled by philosophers because he reckoned that they were higher minded and less likely to be corrupted than ‘ordinary citizens. Alas such a style of government he surmised would not work in practice for it would eventually and inevitably ‘decline into democracy and then tyranny.’

For a a political or social system to work well and fairly does it necessarily have to be a democracy? Winston Churchill opined that democracy was a flawed system but its main virtue was that it was better than all the others.

Feudalism was a system, undemocratic in the extreme with very little opportunity for ‘social mobility; within it every free person had their rights and responsibilities from the lowliest yeoman to the highest King.

For Feudalism to work successfully it had to acknowledge that there is a greater and higher Truth than ‘experience’. Call that Truth ‘God’ if you wish, but even God has his responsibilities as well as his rights.

If God created the Universe out of ‘nothing’ then said Universe exists/subsists in the mind of God. For the Universe and all that is in it to continue God has to hold it in his mind all the time, if he forgets the Universe it will cease to exist. That ‘remembering’ is God’s Responsibility.

If God created the Universe out of ‘something’ then the only ‘something he could have used was of himself. The Universe is part of him for there is no ‘thing’ existing beyond the boundaries of God.

It is therefore also God’s responsibility to maintain himself in a continual state optimum equilibrium and ‘health’, for if his health lapses then the universe that he has created diminishes and fades away, it declines into existentialism, atheism, entropy. Chaos.

It is the responsibility of the Universe to award God praise and glory, not because God needs it to survive but because the Universe needs God to remain in relationship with it to survive; without that the Universe stops existing.

God cannot stop loving the Universe but the Universe (the sentient part) (us) can choose not to accept or acknowledge God’s love and he cannot force it to love him (you cannot force or demand someone to love you, that is tyranny and abuse)

Feudalism in its ideal state replicates that hierarchy, that synergy, that symbiosis if you will. Democracy does not.

Can a case be made for, not a return to the Feudalism of old but for a new Feudalism?

Think about it.   

A Game of Hide and Seek

Somehow a mischievous Spirit had got through the psychic defenses that my Medium friend (actually by now she was my wife) had built around our house. It was not an Elemental just a nasty little bugger. It could not get out of the house because the defences we had built kept everything in that is in as well as preventing anything outside from getting in. The entity was rattling around inside the house from room to room disrupting everything and generally making a nuisance of itself.

We had to cleanse the house, to dispel this Spirit, but how could we do that? After consultation with another Medium who specialised in Rescue Work we set about the task. Now, a Spirit cannot wander through walls and other obstacles. it gains entry through doors, windows and other portals so we resealed all the entry points of the house; doors windows etc then began to cleanse each room. We started with the bathroom (Yes, we had sealed all the plugholes in the sink and bath, we even had psychically sealed the loo) We then cleansed and ‘purified’ that room, the SpiriThinTt was forced to flee through the door into our Utility room, we then sealed the bathroom door so that it couldn’t go back in there. We systematically cleansed and sealed each room in turn, all the upstairs room, reception rooms, kitchen, hallway until all that was left was one downstairs bedroom, we sealed the door to that room so that there was no escape for the little blighter, he was trapped.

Our plan was to unseal a window then cleanse the room so that the Spirit would leave the house, outside were waiting for it Spirits/Angels who would transport it to the Spirit Plane. We started to cleanse the room but before I could unseal a window to let it out it was gone! Where could it be? In the room was a built in cupboard/wardrobe, he seemed to have gone in there but I couldn’t sense him in there!

The Friendly Spirits told us (they told my wife actually) that the Spirit was heading up the chimney and that they were waiting for its arrival and they would help it when it emerged on the roof.

We cleansed the cupboard and sealed the door and the Sprit vanished. I wonder if he shot out of the chimney like a cork out of a pop gun but it was caught by the ‘Angels’ and taken away; we never heard from it again.

A Spirit can only gain access though a portal of some sort, it cannot pass through walls but the entry point does not have to be a current one so if you see a ghost walk through a wall it is passing through where a door used to be. The built in cupboard in our bedroom was where a fireplace and chimney had been which is why our visitor was able to use it.

Think about it.

THAT’s HER IN THE CORNER THERE.

There is a type of ghost or spirit, call it what you will, that is attached to, almost a part of, a feature or place. The Spirit is not tied to the place having died through a traumatic Passing such as a murder or other type of violent death nor is it resisting moving on to the Spirit Plane by haunting a place; it just ‘is’

In Ancient Egypt such a ‘presence’ was called a ‘Ka’ and frequently inhabited statues and the such, it did not ‘haunt’ or wander around weeping and wailing, it just ‘was’ These Spirits still exist.

Such Spirits often remain unobserved or unnoticed, which is how they see themselves; just a part of the fabric, rather like, I suppose, a brick would see itself as part of the fabric in a wall. These Kas may be all around us we don’t know and trying to find and contact one would be very tiresome because they don’t want to be contacted…why would a brick in a wall want to talk to you?

In the 1970s I lived in a flat in Ilfracombe in North Devon, the flat was part of a Victorian house (my living room and bedroom were 2 halves of what was once a ballroom!). As I grew accustomed to living in this flat I felt that I could detect a supernatural presence in one corner of the living room. It was not haunting or intruding in any way, I am not sure that it was aware of my presence at all or if it was aware it did not give a fig for my being there. It just ‘was’

I made various attempts to let it know that I knew that it was there but with no response. The old guy I had met on Flatholm Lighthouse had been curious, worried and interested in what was happening, this Spirit was not, it was just there.

My clairsentience enabled me with a bit of effort to detect that the Spirit was an old lady from the Victorian era (inasmuch as I could sense that she had been there for a long time) but that was all I could ‘see’. Like a statue she just stood there.

I called on a Clairvoyant friend of mine to try and contact the woman for me (since I couldn’t have a dialogue with this woman because I couldn’t hear or see her how I expected her to respond to my contact I don’t know. Did I expect her to dance around the room in the shape of the word ‘hello’ so I could detect her?)

My friend, a Spiritualist Medium, was able to see the woman and could talk to her but she did not get any reply (I hadn’t spoken to the Spirit just to the corner of the room where she was)

The Ka of the lady remained in the corner for a time and did not trouble me at all, although my friend and I did refrain from any hanky-panky in that room from then on.

There came a time when with the help of a Psychic circle we were able to get some sort of conversation going with the Ka and we found a way of putting across to her that there was a welcome and restful place waiting for her on the Spirit Plane.

There was still no reply or response from the woman but she did begin to fade and eventually disappeared.

Not so spooky but creepy goings on on a Lighthouse

The ghost that I met on Flatholm was the only psychic event I witnessed connected to Lighthouses but there was another occasion…

When I was transferred to Les Hanois Lighthouse in the Channel Islands I the Principal Keeper gave me the usual look around the place, familiarization with the equipment and was given the history of the place:

There was even a hole in the woodwork of the bunk which I was reliably told by the PK was caused by the bullet after it passed through the soldier’s head.

A lovely tale which I relayed to new arrivals over my time out there. I don’t think that it was absolutely true but I was glad a little while after I arrived when I was able to move to a different bunk!

Spooky Goings on

A number of years ago I was working on Flatholm Lighthouse on an island in the Bristol Channel. From this lighthouse we kept a watch on an automated Lightship some 5 miles away, we did this by observing her position on a radar screen every hour or so. The radar equipment was sited in an old store cupboard attached to the Engine Room.

Whenever I checked on the radar, especially at night, I felt that I was not alone in that room, there was a presence there of someone full of curiosity and wonder as to what I was doing in that room and what the machine I was looking at was. All this made me feel uncomfortable and discombobulated and a bit chary of going in that shed.

It then occurred to me that there was a presence in that shed that felt as uncomfortable as me.

I was what is called ‘Clairsentient’ I couldn’t hear spirits like someone Clairaudient or see them like a Clairvoyant but I could certainly feel their presence. I did some research and probing around that room and met in a corner of it the Spirit of a man standing there feeling very confused and worried about what was going on. I know he had been dead for a long time from before the Lighthouse was electrified, he may have been a Lighthousekeeper, that I am not sure about, but for some reason he had taken up residence in that shed and avoided the rest of the Lighthouse complex. I suspect he felt safe in there and by staying there could avoid contact with all the modern gizmos around the place, he had been able to do that because the shed had only been used as a glorified broom cupboard for decades and he was in there on his own.

The turmoil and upheaval of putting the radar machine in there caused the old boy much distress and when it was fully installed his solitude was destroyed and he spent his time cooped up with this machine of which he knew nothing and understood less. It was no wonder he cowered in the corner while this bleeping, flashing monster dominated the room and his life.

One night while I was on duty I crossed over to the shed to check the radar. I explained to the room and thereby the man what a radar machine was and how it worked, I told him it was nothing to worry about and wouldn’t hurt him and over that duty period and my next night watch I explained it all again and even told the old guy how to look at the screen and how to identify what he saw there.

I’m not sure of how much of what I said he understood but from then on the disconcerting feeling of fear and confusion that had filled that shed evaporated and I felt no qualms about going in there again.

The New Me is the Old Me part 2

So one of the purposes of my last post was to write something in a time limited fashion. What I wrote was not in deathless prose but I did ‘complete’ it in a relatively short time.

Why does that matter? I hear you ask. It matters because I became so engrossed in my novel that I lost all track of urgency or deadlines; I also tried to create an artistic atmosphere in the narrative that reflected the absence of personality of the Protagonist and provided no point of sympathetic contact between the reader and the Main Character, what I was creating was a long rambling story with no ‘excitement’ or interest. Hell it was boring! But I became so engrossed in the novel that although I had ideas for short stories I tried to fit them within the novel instead of leaving them as stand alone structures. I lost all sense of beginning, mounting narrative and ending; the three act structure of a story line.

I tried to set my self word count targets for my writing day and sometimes I achieved those targets but not in a meaningful way. I could not say at the end of my stint at the word processor that my narrative had progressed or developed in any way, all I could say was ‘I have written x number of words today’.

This has taken me two hours to write so I am going to call it a day now and write another blog post next week.

THE NEW ME IS THE OLD ME.

I

I have realized after a long time of trying, that as a writer I can’t write novels, so I have stopped writing the novel that I have spent the last umpteen YEARS on. The project actually began as a short story but like Topsy it just grew and grew. It started one day in 1986 when I was travelling on a train from Newcastle to London when I got it into my head to write a short story about a vampire so I penned a few pages and worked on it for a few months after I had got off the train. Then I put it aside for a while, too long a while as it turned out. I hadn’t written ‘The End’ at the completion of the story (a habit I later adopted to tell myself to not write any further) I decided that the story needed a prologue so I wrote one as an introduction to the action, the prologue took the reader back 500 years to the birth of the vampire and then from a short prologue it grew into a life story. It wasn’t a full biography but a series of episodes from the vampire’s life concentrating on 100 year intervals. 

The premise of the story was that a vampire was not the debonair lovable rogue that hung around with his blood sucking chums as portrayed in modern occult novels but was a lonely despicable parasite that fed on the life force contained in human blood.

The story was about the final days of the vampire as he finally faced his mortality, something he had been trying to run away from for years. I would explain more about it but it is an episode that I am working up into a short story so there’ll be no spoiler here!

My forte as a writer was/is in short works, flash fiction, humorous satire/piss taking and essays and so that is what I am going to get back to doing on this blog and other selected sites.

My novel is not dead, I shall strip out some of the good scenes and rewrite them in other formats; flash fiction, essays and the like which I hope you will enjoy. So watch this space folks!

To be continued…