A review of Collected Prefaces: Nicholas Hagger’s prefaces to 55 of his literary and Universalist works (O-Books, UK £26.99 / US $31.99, March 2022) Reading Nicholas Hagger, venerable Englishman of letters, is to become rapidly aware that one is in the presence of a remarkable thinker; one cannot fail to…

‘We all get a little dirty rolling around in the mud of samsara.’ Daniel McKenzie The Eastern spiritual concept of samsara has many related meanings but they all arise from the idea that we suffer because we’re unable to see the truth about reality; that reality is not the familiar…

My new poem ‘Battlefields’ has been accepted on to the website of the fundraising ‘Poetry for Ukraine’ anthology, published in April, in which I was featured among more than 250 poets from around the world. Battlefields ‘Through the smoke the walking wounded come.’ There’s chaos after the explosion but the…

‘The One of which I speak is consciousness, and consciousness goes by many different names: God, Higher Power, Tao, Brahman, the zero-point field.’ Ren Koi I’ve often remarked that everything would change in one’s attitude to living and existence if consciousness was accepted as primary, causal and fundamental, indeed, as…

Around 2,300 years ago, the Hellenistic philosopher Zeno of Citium in Cyprus, began teaching at the Stoa poikilē, or ‘Painted Porch’ in Athens, and the philosophical tradition of Stoicism, taking its name from the city colonnade, was born. And the authors of a book that recently came my way, Kai…

A US physicist in his first book likens the universe to a ‘cosmic brain’ and says we humans are miniature models of it Physicist Melvin A Felton Jr proposes that the human brain is a physical model of the universe because of the structural and dynamical similarities between the two…

One of my poems is included in this fundraising collection I’m very pleased that my poem, ‘I might go barefoot on the receiving earth’, is included in the new ‘Poetry for Ukraine’ anthology just published (April 7, 2022) by ‘The Poet’ magazine, both online and in book form. More than…

Appreciating the reader’s role in creating meaning in literary works In Thomas Hardy’s poem, ‘We sat at the window’, the narrator describes how he and his partner watched the rain on St Swithin’s Day at Bournemouth in July, 1875. With ‘nothing to read, nothing to see …’ for the couple…

‘The human mind is the consummate and undisputed world champion of division, duality and separation’. Pathik Strand As the tragedy of international events continues to show, the world’s madness will continue as long as we define ourselves as separate entities, as egos, belonging to a particular race, religion, nation, family…