Now that the British General Election is out of the way, we can catch our collective breath and get back to what passes for normality. That means changes here at Syntagma Towers.

Saturday Ramble will return to being a thoughtful, even speculative, wander through the byways of interesting ideas — not, as it has been recently, relentlessly political.

To compensate, the sometimes edgy Sunday Diary column will re-emerge this week, sparing nobody with a hint of red thread in their suit.

And as the hols are beckoning, we’re going to be pushing the delights of the West Country beyond normal tolerance levels.

Oh, and immortality could feature on rare occasions.

In need of a break from politics, I am away this fine weekend. Back on Wednesday.

Here’s a picture of Exeter Ship Canal, taken last week:

John Evans

Imagine the worst possible scenario: May 7, Gordon Brown and Sarah walk into Downing Street to cheers from a carefully selected crowd of Labour party agents and apparachiks. He shakes hands manically, his painted-on smile glowing like a supernova.

Against the odds, Gordon has won another five years as Prime Minister, with a parliamentary majority of 20. The predicted surge of tactical voting for the Tories failed to happen, largely because the turnout was very low: 37%. It was a battle of the core votes and client state. Only Labour could win.

Pundits claim that the three 90-minute TV Leaders’ debates were so boring they turned the nation off at the plug. The country slept through the election as a result.

The Tories are shattered. Television vox pops confirm that voters didn’t know what they were offering; it was too technical and there were no big sweeping themes to enthuse them. The gamble of relying on Brown’s unpopularity flopped spectacularly, especially as large parts of the Tory core vote simply stayed at home.

Tabloid overnight phone polls seem to confirm that if Cameron had offered a trade-only relationship with the EU at the top of his menu he would have gained enough votes to give him a 30-seat overall majority.

Naturally, Conservative Eurosceptics are furious and demand his head, which he offers without protest. George Osborne takes over as Tory leader.

Scroll forward two years: the economy is in a double-dip recession. The peak-to-trough drop in national output rises to 11 percent — a full-blown depression, dubbed by the media as Britain’s lost decade.

Brown is so unpopular a serious leadership challenge is mounted against him by senior Cabinet colleagues. At last, the old fraud is toppled and David Miliband becomes Prime Minister.

The Conservatives are 25 points ahead in the polls, while a series of by-elections reduce Labour’s majority to one. As Britain’s place in international league tables collapses into the mid-teens, while its credit rating falls to triple-B, interest rates rise inexorably.

A vote of no confidence is passed in the House precipitating another general election.

The Conservatives get in with a majority of 150. George Osborne goes to the Palace, while David Cameron becomes Chancellor, William Hague Foreign Secretary.

At a late supper of meatloaf in the Number 10 flat, Osborne says, “2010 was a good election to lose.”

Cameron’s lip curls, “For you, you mean.”

John Evans

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Extracted from: The Eternal Quest for Immortality — Is it staring you in the face? by John Evans.

… The next unexpected incident occurred to me in November 1993 when back living in England. Once again I was involved in physical activity, this time some early morning limbering-up exercises. I was reflecting that my attempts at further mystical progress had not been very successful and wondering how I could turn that around. My book had languished after the first experience. The text now seemed totally inadequate compared with the real thing, as so many mystical/spiritual books are.

I needn’t have fretted. In an instant — and there is no other way of putting this — the world turned inside out. It was so sudden, and dramatic, I could scarcely take in what was happening.

I was now oddly separated from my usual chattering thoughts. They hadn’t gone away, merely left me. I was aware of my body, now curiously dislocated from “me”, continuing with its exercise regime, but “I” was not in control of it. It was more like a computer automatically running some pre-loaded software.

My attention switched away from the body to the surrounding room. It seemed as if I was swimming underwater. The objects and furniture had become insubstantial, almost transparent.

The space around them, though, had taken on a powerful reality. It was alive, vibrant and full of intelligence. Each time I looked at an object, I was made to understand that it too was part of this overall unity of being. Nothing was excluded.

Then, the sun shone through the window and with it several dazzling reflections, which seemed to take on the forms of two demons. “They are included too.” At once they lost their power and faded.

My body had now finished its programme of exercises and went to make a pot of tea in the kitchen, which was the normal procedure. As the tea was poured, I came back to everyday consciousness.

The unexpected feature of this state was that on resuming conventional bodily awareness, I was not in any way exultant, or even remotely excited. It was as if my normal thoughts had not been engaged at all. It was clearly not brain activity involved, but some other medium beyond it. The body, thoughts and emotions had been left behind — I could actually see and hear them. Yet, something still existed, and consciousness was continuous.

It was an enormously positive encounter and has completely altered my view of space, time, reality, and especially death.

The essential aspect of the encounter was that the usual “body-mind” means of knowing were literally left behind, yet continued operating separately. Despite that, consciousness remained, and a non-discursive awareness was present.

Clearly, it is a separate faculty from perception (of the senses) and conception (of the mind) very different from the crowded, tumbling experiences of the body-mind.

I believe this faculty sits in the background of human consciousness without our knowing it, like a deep form of awareness. It underpins the body modes in the same way that all five senses develop from one, that of touch.

Without this faculty of knowing neither perception nor conception could take place. They are specialized ways of being in this world, built up during our lifetimes from experiences and conditioning.

The good news of the experience is that it clearly mirrors the death process, and may even be the essence of the Great Death Contemplation of the ancient mystery schools, largely forgotten now, but still echoing through the rituals of modern Freemasonry.

The whole body-mind package is left behind—although unlike near-death-experiences, it carries on as if nothing else is happening—while the centre of gravity of conscious awareness lies beyond its activities. This state indicates precisely what it is that survives death, in my opinion, and is powerful, if anecdotal, evidence of life beyond the grave.

This book cites many incidents of similar experiences to very credible witnesses.

The Eternal Quest for Immortality — Is it staring you in the face? is available from all good bookshops, Amazon UK and Amazon USA.

ISBN: 978-0-9563656-0-6

There’s a wonderfully dorkish bit in Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol when a scientist attempts to prove the existence of the human soul by weighing a man’s body moments before and after his death. The difference must be the weight of the departing soul.

This begs a truckload of questions, of course, not least that the soul may not be physical at all. However, the author’s “noetic” scientist reports an infinitesimally small difference so, Eureka!

All great fun. The trouble is, something similar is happening across most of the conventional sciences. The recent swine flu pandemic scare is a good example of vested interests skewing the truth and driving massive public expenditure for no other reason than greed. So is “catastrophic man-made global warming” with its vast new global infrastructure, all paid for by you and me in the middle of a long and crippling recession.

I was thinking of that passage in Dan Brown’s book last week while watching someone blowing bubbles from washing-up liquid. The bubbles seemed to be weightless, even though they are made up of physical substances. But then that’s the nature of bubbles, they appear to be miraculous at first … then they come down to earth or just burst in the air. One should never invest hard coin in bubbles.

Unhappily, lots of people do, and go on doing so even when countless bubbles have burst down the centuries.

Human bubbles are made up of ideas and mental states composed of wishes and deceptions. They form into powerful psychological contagions as they mature, and even take on an apparently material basis as they grow, often posing as something different.

The two current global bubbles are, 1) the myth of catastrophic man-made global heating, and 2) the notion that global decisions are self-evidently better than local ones. Both are underpinned and given force by one of the most lumberingly under-performing institutions in history: the United Nations.

In the economic realm, there are the surpluses of cash built up by exporting countries, China and Japan, matched by the gaping deficits of the US, the UK and many European nations.

Bubbles define our world. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Trillions of our electronic banknotes are now being thrown at the global boiling hypothesis by unrepentant politicians, some well meaning, others self-promoting. The problem is, that bubble has burst.

Global warming by man-produced carbon in the atmosphere has been found not to exist, at least on any timescale we can measure or plan for. The data has been shown to be wrong, or deliberately tampered with. The politicians and their less-than respectable allies — hordes of anti-capitalists and unwashed any-cause hysterics — have gone too far down this road to pull back now. Most will retire to rewrite their personal histories, leaving a new generation to clean up the mess at huge further costs to us.

Here’s a proposition. All new ideas involving the spending of public money should be examined painstakingly for speculative (imaginary) content:

1. What do we actually know, and what are we being advised to believe?
2. Is there a real problem that we can see before our eyes?
3. If it becomes necessary to spend public money to avert an apparent threat in the future, let’s spend it on things that will be useful even if that threat is found to be baseless.

A good example from the past is London fog. In Victorian times, right up until the early 1950s, London was often draped in a pall of yellow smog caused by the burning of cheap sulphurous coal. Millions of lives were lost early from respiratory diseases, heart problems, and simple misery. China and India are still burning this stuff.

The solution was the appliance of science at its best: practical technology. The National Coal Board, then a nationalized industry, brought in two eminent philosopher-scientists: Dr Jacob Bronowski, best remembered for his stagey, but brilliant, BBC series, The Ascent of Man, and E.F. Schumacher, author of the evergreen Small is Beautiful, which was based on Burmese Buddhism. Polymaths both.

They developed the first smokeless fuel. Politicians did their bit and passed laws making it an offence to burn anything else in the big cities, and hey presto, problem all but solved.

The trillions now committed to various schemes for carbon reduction, dreamt up by naive politicians, including the fraudulent brokerage schemes and the “new industries” devoted to pulling wool over our eyes, should be re-evaluated by incoming hard-eyed administrations looking for real value, not notional empires in the stratosphere.

Once again, reducing smokey particulates in the air is worth spending money on for solid health reasons. But the vast array of wind farms and new French nuclear reactors, should be replaced by cheaper, simpler, and more reliable, home-grown alternatives: for example, natural gas derived from Britain’s own methane beds and oil shale deposits. While the Americans and others are pioneering this new technology, Britain — led by the proboscis by bureaucrats in Brussels — is prevented from doing so by self-inflicted barriers reaching as far ahead as 2050. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.

By what natural right do these people boss future generations around? The answer lies in the feeble compliance of our lacklustre politicians.

Why not cut free from the whole ridiculous rigmarole and go our own way for our national interests alone. Everyone else is secretly doing this to some degree. If we succeed, you can be sure others will follow. That’s real influence, not the shadowy, pretend kind put forward by Gordon Brown.

Summary: Always be aware of bubbles as they form, and only ever spend public money on what is immediately apparent. Speculation on thinly-based science is rarely profitable. Nature is cyclical and comes and goes, rises and falls in roughly predictable ways. Mankind’s lives are too short to grasp the full picture. Some kind of trust in the future is essential. Most of it is unknowable. If we accept our limitations, we will be happier here and now.

Solution: Replace the top tier of government scientists with practical philosophers who can think any situation through without spending money.

John Evans

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