May battle begin

[David Pinnegar]

Hi!

I have been documenting in these posts ways in which perhaps life can be better than it is currently with a more holistic approach to the teachings about our relationships with each other and our relationships with our environment of which we are aware from our contact with organs as coming from a book which starts from the point at which is recognised the strange force that creates order out of disorder, chaos, or increasing entropy.

Contrary to such ideas are the awkward squad in the nature of the National Secular Society http://www.secularism.org.uk/ who seem to want to isolate and eliminate people's introduction or contact with them.

Without civic focus on what is the "good" thing to do, it's rather easy for people blazenly to set up bank accounts in Monaco to syphon monies into their dog's name and forget about having done so. Without personal focus on what creates order in human society, it's easy for people to behave as amoebae in the sea and for the human race to descend to the level of animals in the jungle.

It is about time for those responsible for the places where organs live most to raise the profile and relevance of such places and fight against the blindness of secular blandness.

Best wishes

David P

[KB7DQH]

I have been delaying my "post number one thousand" for some reason, likely wishing to bring something "profound" to the forum, :-[ :-[ :-[ but unfortunately as they say in the media "it has been a slow news (insert unit of clock time here)":o

But David has certainly thrown down a challenge with this post ;) and having done reading elsewhere on slightly related topics I have decided to relay some of what I have read to the forum.  The articles in question are likely too large to fully quote so I implore you to read through what is found in the following links  to put what I have quoted into context...

http://larouchepac.com/node/17204

andhttp://larouchepac.com/node/17173

Both articles cover a great deal of ground, and those familiar with what has been presented in numerous boards scattered across this forum will no doubt see some correlations... one of the reasons why I was so fascinated by the theses presented... 

I have dragged out some selected text to underscore the points David has made of late, and to stretch them a bit further into something
I hope will make an even greater case for the wind-driven pipe instrument ??? ??? :o ;) 8)

The organization of human society depends upon its ability to transmit profound moral, scientific, and cultural ideas. There is no physical structure which can be identified as a "nation state" or a "culture." The boundaries of a nation or society do not exist physically, but rather as an idea in the minds of a population. If this idea is destroyed, so is the nation, and human society more generally. The ability to achieve this kind of agreement depends on the maintenance of a coherent language culture, and the tools which help to maintain it -- public education, but most importantly the arts, and artistic composition generally. A collapse in the artistic and cultural level of a society will always express itself as a collapse in the physical and economic conditions of that society.

If a language loses its capability to express ironies, or the population loses its ability to recognize them, science suffers, because it is just such an ability to recognize and respond creatively to the ironies and paradoxes presented by the universe -- as opposed to dry logical deduction -- which represents the basis for true scientific creativity. But such an ability depends upon a recognition of the subtle ironies of human sense perception which, as we have seen, are much more nuanced than they would at first appear.

For instance, if hearing has (as the above investigation would seem to indicate clearly) an electromagnetic component, to which people are able to respond both consciously and unconsciously, what might be lost as a result of digital recordings (or perhaps any recordings) of classical musical compositions?

Interruption--One could include here the use of "non-pipe" organs :o :o :o


It has been demonstrated repeatedly that even the mere exposure to classical musical composition from childhood has a drastic effect on the cognitive capabilities of the human individual, and history has demonstrated without question that active participation in classical musical performance is a necessity for true scientific and political genius. But the characteristic of such composition is centuries of scientific work on the creation of instruments which physically mimic the human singing apparatus.

(Sorry for another rude interruption... Reread the last sentence again...)

This apparatus itself may even have an electromagnetic component to the sounds produced.

(This in itself has intriguing possibilities...)

How much of this nuance is lost in the recording of such composition?


This is to say nothing of music which is entirely composed on digital instruments, and thus incapable of even approximating the effect of an actual human singing apparatus.

Even the cases where a human singing voice is involved in modern music, all nuance is digitally reduced by the fact that a modern singer, as opposed to a singer trained in the bel canto classical singing method, requires their voice to be transmitted to a crowd via microphone.21A humorous example of this dependence on a microphone, even for live performances, can be seen in video recordings of Pavarotti singing alongside "modern" singers, such as Bryan Adams, available online. This is again a step above the ridiculously comical recent development of "auto-tuning," which takes performers who sing out of tune and digitally adjusts their voice to match the desired digitally correct pitch.

Must we agree that the modern understanding of what "hearing" is and what the ear's functions are, is a closed subject? And if not, as these phenomena goad us to, then what are the implications? If recording devices can not yet record these cosmic sounds, yet living human beings can hear them, then what is possibly going on in our ears? Is sound just a frequency of vibrating air waves? Take a more complex example: what might we actually be listing to when we hear a live string quartet or a chorus of bel canto trained singers? And inversely, what could our mp3s and even vinyl records not be allowing us listen to?

We've looked into the cosmos for some new clues for our senses, we've looked at the animals and their extra-powers, now let's look back, where all good scientist must look, into ourselves. A fresh study of hearing and making music, from a standpoint less weighed down by common assumptions, could bring us closer to a more free understanding of what is actually happening in the real, unsensed universe. This investigation could bring what we call sound nearer to the domain of light and magnetism, and reveal what a galactic impression classical music can have.

That said, the idea that all sound, but not only sound, has an electromagnetic component is not so strange.  But, further, if the electromagnetic effects do not register as sounds, due to their subtlety, what do we experience them as?  A hunch?  A bad mood?  A depressed state?  An intuition of danger?  A feeling of anxiety?  A deep sense that massive change of some sort is in the air?  A pressing desire to fly south for the winter and mate on another landmass?  What would be the effect of losing these sensitivities?

Helen Keller is again an interesting illustration in this context. That she was able to develop a concept of her own identity as distinct from her sense perception is, without a doubt, attributable to her own creative capabilities. It is also, however, attributable to the action of organized human society, and the work of her teacher, Anne Sullivan, who managed to impart certain socially maintained concepts to Keller, starting at a very young age. What would happen if everyone at that time lacked both vision and hearing, as well as the platonic sense of the soul which Anne Sullivan adhered to? We risk entering a comparable situation today.

Technology advanced from wax to vinyl records and also to magnetic tape, all the while remaining "analog". The step to "digital" recordings was taken, as in Laserdisc, CD, mp3, WAV, etc. whatever the excuses were, it was a most dangerous step. The effect recorded was now assumed again for the purpose of reduction of information amount, the data played back was shrunken, "to the limits of human perception," and the sound emitted is only an approximation of the original sound.

Keeping in mind, that the unimportant "extraneous noise," which is cut out of digital recordings, are the signals which are "too high" or "too low," for human hearing. It is assumed that young people can hear up to 22,000 Hz, while most adults can't hear frequencies higher than 15,000 Hz, so provided that the sample is in depth enough, "there is no audible difference between an analog original and a digital transfer of it ... our ears can not tell the difference." After the phenomena presented above, and thinking about that presented in the rest of this larger report, the question is better posed as, "is the mind which uses those ears listening?" In any digital recordings what can be thought of as the "living-noetic sound" of the performed music is assumed to be reducible.


It is as if your living dog was cut into a thousand parts, those parts were then frozen in ice-cube like chunks, and then your dog was reassembled of these chunks in the shape of the dog – playing fetch would be a difficult task.

Remember, the electromagnetic component of unheard melodies, as from an aurora, have not yet been recorded by any device, analog or digital, yet people are able to respond both consciously and unconsciously to these "sounds." What then might be lost as a result of digital recordings (or perhaps any recordings) of classical musical compositions? How much of the nuance is lost in the forced digitalization of such performances which utilize the slight changes, as the register shifts imply, as discussed before? Taking the approach of Riemann while thinking about these phenomena, taking the implications of the complicated process in human singing and register shifts, the assumptions of regular sound mechanics really do "confine" what we could be hearing, and therefore should be thrown out the window, along with your collection of mp3s.

With this process in mind, think of another interesting aspect of the classical musician's power to communicate: silence. Silence is very important for making classical music. It is the apparent nothing that causes that which follows it. The greatest performers speak of a unique musical silence as something which could not be reduced to just a "lack of sound." Any deeper study of a Beethoven piece, where one might find a fermata, also known as a corona, 20The difference of terms is important. Fermata, a more recent name for this notation, means to stop, or halt; while corona on the other hand means "crown", or as a verb, "to fulfill." over a rest, would reveal an entire world of "unheard" substance, which the scope of this paper can not bring us to. To hint at the idea, one very good pianist, once told me, "for Beethoven, silence becomes the most beautiful music. He provides you with a dense moment, which in performance it must be defined by many factors... This pause ,must reflect a total change in the idea, of the overall space. It is much more difficult to play silence, because it must be determined by the conditions of the whole concert, by the state of the audience, the way the entire night has gone, in other performances and by the way you've shaped the whole performance until that moment. This expression of musical silence must be determined by all this, and you have to be aware of all of it in this instant when you create it." Any reconstruction of so-called "silence" mus necessarily discount this idea, it could only be read as, "no information = empty space." Would you really want to put that into your head through your earphones?

I would hope the information presented above could serve as a sufficient counter argument to anything a digital organ salesman would have to say about the "sound quality" of their instrument :o :o :o   among other things ;)

[David Pinnegar]

Currently on radio 3 and available to "listen again" for the next wee. on http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3 Dr Raymond Tallis presents an interesting point of view in which he describes the paucity of current approaches to neuroscience in examining brain structure for consciousness commenting that both music and sex are thought to stimulate approval processes in the brain, releasing dopamine, and comments appropriately about such approaches that cannot differentiate between Bach being played on the organ and his organ being played . . .

Michael Berkeley's guest today is one of the most remarkable men of our time. Dr Raymond Tallis has recently been acclaimed as one of the world's leading polymaths. He trained as a doctor and went on to become Professor of Geratric Medicine at the University of Manchester and a consultant physician in the Care of the Elderly at Salford. In 2006 he retired from medicine to become a full-time writer. Over the past 20 years he has published fiction, poetry, and 23 books on the philosophy of the mind, philosophical anthropology, literary theory, the nature of art, and cultural criticism, offering a critique of current predominant intellectual trends and an alternative understanding of human consciousness. His most recent books are 'The Kingdom of Infinite Space', reflecting on the mystery of embodiment, 'Hunger', exploring the basic drives behind humanity, and 'Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity', a critique which exposes the exaggerated claims made forr the ability of neuroscience and evolutionary theory to explain human behaviour, culture and society.

Music is deeply important to Raymond Tallis. He has chosen the last movement of Beethoven's Quartet Op.135, which asks the existential question 'Must it be?', to which he thinks we may find an answer in the Beatles' classic 'Let it Be'. Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder explore the celebration of death and sex, while Tallis's great motet 'Spem in alium' creates an awesome wall of sound. Finally,the opening aria of Bach's cantata BWV 82 (Es ist genug) is related to Raymond Tallis's own views on assisted dying when an individual feels that 'it is enough'.

From what I understand of his thrust, it's quite apparent that good brains are thinking more deeply than the current pursuits of the National Secular Society.

Best wishes

David P

[KB7DQH]

From what I understand of his thrust, it's quite apparent that good brains are thinking more deeply than the current pursuits of the National Secular Society.

In light of what has been presented thus far, the following article generally supports this hypothesis...

http://www.geekwire.com/2012/notech-sundays-working

Do you unplug? Making the case for 'No-Tech Sundays'
January 31, 2012 at 11:46 am by Mónica Guzmán 6 Comments

 
I woke up, went to the window, saw the new blanket of snow, and knew exactly what I wanted to do next:

Tweet.

If this had been Saturday, or Monday, I wouldn't have hesitated. I would've dashed to the office, woken my charging phone, surveyed the yard for an ideal snapshot and sent it, as soon as possible, to the Facebook/Twitterverse. There it would have joined a digital dance that was no doubt gaining momentum that very instant all across the city, as people ooooh'd and aaaah'd and worried at another heap of the fluffy white stuff that never fails to drive Seattle crazy.

Instead, I stayed at the window, watching the flakes fall while my phone snored in its cradle. That day, I was on my own. That day was No-Tech Sunday. It's not a holiday or movement you would know about, like that day Wikipedia went dark to protest SOPA. It's my own thing, meant to address my own need for digital awareness.

And it's working.

Before I tell you why, and how, let's get one thing clear. I am not, nor am I becoming, a tech hater. They're out there. I've spent a good part of the last few years taking them on, and it's been fun. I can go on for days about the superpowers tech is giving us. Making us more informed. Productive. Social. And connected — that's the incredible part. Because just about anything you can do with technology you can do anywhere, as long as you have a trusty smartphone around. I don't have to tell you this. You're reading GeekWire. You live and breathe this stuff.

If I'm honest, the Monica of 2010 would look at the Monica of 2012, see "No-Tech Sunday" pop up weekly on her calendar alerts, and go, WTF?

On no-tech Sundays I don't touch email, Facebook, Twitter, the Web, or connected technologies of any kind — not even my phone, which, initially, huuurt. The idea started brewing when I decided to leave my iPhone at home over vacation last summer, and found its spark when I met Tiffany Shlain, director of the documentary "Connected," in the fall and learned about her Tech Shabbats.

There are a few reasons I'm doing it. They start with the idea of relevance.

Everyone who creates content and everyone who creates products or services that deliver content is obsessed with facilitating relevance, for one very good reason: giving us what matters to us is the best way to win us over. They've done good work. Whether it's sports scores, photos from friends or the latest buzz on our favorite thing, the ease with which we can customize our apps and devices to give us only what want — combined with the vast quantity of information that floats around us every second — means that each of us is never more than a tap away from learning something very interesting. Goodbye, idle moments. We won't miss you.

Or will we?

There's an inertia to the stream of information that flows through my apps. After I stop checking, the stream keeps moving, pushing its way into my brain until I can't stand another moment without checking ... something. I used to check only when I needed to look up info, when there was nothing else to do, when it was safe, when I was alone. But at some point a little voice in my head chirped, why not check while you're looking for cereal at the grocery store? While you're stopped at a red light? While you're walking to the coffee shop? While you're talking with friends and there's a lull in the conversation? Heck, why not just excuse yourself and say you have to go to the bathroom, so you can catch up with all those new tweets? After all, if you pit the world you carry in your pocket against the world around you, the former wins on relevance, just about every time.

Sometime in the last few months, this started to feel ... wrong.

I couldn't put a finger on exactly why, or what part. I still can't. Nor can I say that it should also feel wrong for you, or you, or anyone. But I sensed it one night in November when I saw a photo of a beautiful Seattle sunset on Twitter, and realized I could have seen it myself that evening, if I had just bothered to look around.

So on Sundays, I do. For all the idle moments, the wait times, the transitions, it's just me, the world around me, and the people in it. Period. It's peaceful, noticing how quickly the clouds move, how the bus driver tips his hat at boarding passengers, how a seagull lands on a rooftop, how rain-soaked downtowners step off the curb to cross the street, feeling only my keys, gloves and wallet in my pockets. When the itch comes to check my filtered, digital world for something more "relevant," I'm left wondering if it really would be. That's perspective. I think it's done me good.

But it's not been all smiles and musings. Those superpowers tech gives us — they're tough to switch off. This Sunday I had an appointment I'd forgotten to locate while I was tech-able. When my husband found it was far from a familiar area, I almost stayed home. How was I going to drive there without my iPhone's trusty blue dot to guide me? No phone means no calls, no texts. How do I tell my friend that I'm running late to meet her? How does she tell me? I need a refresher: How did we live before cell phones again? And why oh why would we want to? I guess that's perspective, too.

Bottom line, no-tech Sundays are helping me notice all the things that connected tech is changing about the ways we behave. It's not about rejecting tech, or recovering a life without it. It's about taking this power that's appeared in our world and slowing it down just enough to look at it, understand it, and maybe, just maybe, take control.

Twitter can wait. I'll watch the snow

But the following bit of editorial opinion points out there are plenty of "bad brains in high places"
who think in the manner of the 'National Secular Society'...

February 11, 2012 5:00 A.M.
The Church of Obama
The president has issued his own Act of Supremacy.

By Mark Steyn



Announcing his support for Commissar Sebelius's edicts on contraception, sterilization, and pharmacological abortion, that noted theologian the Most Reverend Al Sharpton explained: "If we are going to have a separation of church and state, we're going to have a separation of church and state."

Thanks for clarifying that. The church model the young American state wished to separate from was that of the British monarch, who remains to this day supreme governor of the Church of England. This convenient arrangement dates from the 1534 Act of Supremacy. The title of the law gives you the general upshot, but, just in case you're a bit slow on the uptake, the text proclaims "the King's Majesty justly and rightfully is and ought to be the supreme head of the Church of England." That's to say, the sovereign is "the only supreme head on earth of the Church" and he shall enjoy "all honors, dignities, pre-eminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, immunities, profits, and commodities to the said dignity," not to mention His Majesty "shall have full power and authority from time to time to visit, repress, redress, record, order, correct, restrain, and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offenses, contempts, and enormities, whatsoever they be."


Welcome to Obamacare.

The president of the United States has decided to go Henry VIII on the Church's medieval ass. Whatever religious institutions might profess to believe in the matter of "women's health," their pre-eminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, and immunities are now subordinate to a one-and-only supreme head on earth determined to repress, redress, restrain, and amend their heresies. One wouldn't wish to overextend the analogy: For one thing, the Catholic Church in America has been pathetically accommodating of Beltway bigwigs' ravenous appetite for marital annulments in a way that Pope Clement VII was disinclined to be vis-à-vis the English king and Catherine of Aragon. But where'd all the pandering get them? In essence President Obama has embarked on the same usurpation of church authority as Henry VIII: As his Friday morning faux-compromise confirms, the continued existence of a "faith-based institution" depends on submission to the doctrinal supremacy of the state.

"We will soon learn," wrote Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, "just how much faith is left in faith-based institutions." Kathleen Sebelius, Obama's vicar on earth, has sportingly offered to maintain religious liberty for those institutions engaged in explicit religious instruction to a largely believing clientele. So we're not talking about mandatory condom dispensers next to the pulpit at St. Pat's — not yet. But that is not what it means to be a Christian: The mission of a Catholic hospital is to minister to the sick. When a guy shows up in Emergency bleeding all over the floor, the nurse does not first establish whether he is Episcopalian or Muslim; when an indigent is in line at the soup kitchen the volunteer does not pause the ladle until she has determined whether he is a card-carrying papist. The government has redefined religion as equivalent to your Sunday best: You can take it out for an hour to go to church, but you gotta mothball it in the closet the rest of the week. So Catholic institutions cannot comply with Commissar Sebelius and still be in any meaningful sense Catholic.

If you're an atheist or one of America's ever more lapsed Catholics, you're probably shrugging: What's the big deal? But the new Act of Supremacy doesn't stop with religious institutions. As Anthony Picarello, general counsel for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, put it: "If I quit this job and opened a Taco Bell, I'd be covered by this mandate." And so would any of his burrito boys who object to being forced to make "health care" arrangements at odds with their conscience.

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Mark Steyn
None of this should come as a surprise. As Philip Klein pointed out in the American Spectator two years ago, the Obamacare bill contained 700 references to the secretary "shall," another 200 to the secretary "may," and 139 to the secretary "determines." So the secretary may and shall determine pretty much anything she wants, as the Obamaphile rubes among the Catholic hierarchy are belatedly discovering. His Majesty King Barack "shall have full power and authority to visit, repress, redress, record, order, correct, restrain, and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offenses, contempts, and enormities whatsoever they be." In my latest book, I cite my personal favorite among the epic sweep of Commissar Sebelius's jurisdictional authority:

"The Secretary shall develop oral healthcare components that shall include tooth-level surveillance."


Before Obama's Act of Supremacy did the English language ever have need for such a phrase? "Tooth-level surveillance": from the Declaration of Independence to dentured servitude in a mere quarter-millennium.

Henry VIII lacked the technological wherewithal to conduct tooth-level surveillance. In my friskier days, I dated a girl from an eminent English Catholic family whose ancestral home, like many of the period, had a priest's hiding hole built into the wall behind an upstairs fireplace. These were a last desperate refuge for clerics who declined to subordinate their conscience to state authority. In my time, we liked to go in there and make out. Bit of a squeeze, but it all adds to the fun — as long as you don't have to spend weeks, months, and years back there. In an age of tooth-level surveillance, tyranny is subtler, incremental but eminently enforceable: regulatory penalties, denial of licenses, frozen bank accounts. Will the Church muster the will to resist? Or (as Archbishop Dolan's pitifully naïve remarks suggest) will this merely be one more faint bleat lost in what Matthew Arnold called the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the Sea of Faith?

In England, those who dissented from the strictures of the state church came to be known as Nonconformists. That's a good way of looking at it: The English Parliament passed various "Acts of Uniformity." Why? Because they could. Obamacare, which governmentalizes one-sixth of the U.S. economy and micro-regulates both body and conscience, is the ultimate Act of Uniformity. Is there anyone who needs contraception who can't get it? Taxpayers give half a billion dollars to Planned Parenthood, who shovel out IUDs like aspirin. Colleges hand out free condoms, and the Washington Post quotes middle-aged student "T Squalls, 30" approving his university's decision to upgrade to the Trojan "super-size Magnum."

But there's still one or two Nonconformists out there, and they have to be forced into ideological compliance. "Maybe the Founders were wrong to guarantee free exercise of religion in the First Amendment," Melinda Henneberger of the Washington Post offered to Chris Matthews on MSNBC. At the National Press Club, young Catholics argued that the overwhelming majority of their coreligionists disregard the Church's teachings on contraception, so let's bring the vox Dei into alignment with the vox populi. Get with the program, get with the Act of Uniformity.

The bigger the Big Government, the smaller everything else: First, other pillars of civil society are crowded out of the public space; then, the individual gets crowded out, even in his most private, tooth-level space. President Obama, Commissar Sebelius, and many others believe in one-size-fits-all national government — uniformity, conformity, supremacy from Maine to Hawaii, for all but favored cronies. It is a doomed experiment — and on the morning after it will take a lot more than a morning-after pill to make it all go away.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn

"Blindness of secular blandness"?  There is much more at stake than "blandness" I am afraid...

Eric
KB7DQH

[dragonser]

Hi,
well it seems that now Councils and other Organisations may be able to  use prayers if they want to.
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17082136>

"Communities secretary Eric Pickles says he is "effectively reversing" the High Court's "illiberal ruling" that a Devon council's prayers were unlawful.

He says part of the Localism Act that aims to give councils greater powers and freedom will be brought in early."

regards Peter B
 

[AnOrganCornucopia]

Hahahaha! That'll put the cat amongst the pigeons! Next thing, accusations of him abusing his power, the NSS will be trying to get his verdict ruled unlawful... oh, how I love to see the secularists getting wound up! They make it far too easy, which makes it all the funnier... and did you see Richard Dawkins' reaction when he was asked what the full title of Darwin's Origin of Species is? "Oh God!", quoth he!

[David Pinnegar]

Hi!

What an extraordinary coincidence that Healthcare and Dawkins have been mentioned in this thread. I have just found myself writing to a pop-singer friend who is suffering from a particular dis-ease and who has chosen a path of natural healing . . . and in referring to Dawkinsitis I hope also that perhaps it goes to demonstrate the relevance of organs and of the free will to pray or otherwise focus on "God" is universal to all. Indeed, whilst having been incommunicado during the past week I have been privileged to have enjoyed the company of Muslims, Hindus, Parsees, Jains and Christian people from the Irish isle and Scotland who consider themselves either Protestants or Catholics and the idea of "God" expressed below is common to all, and the teachings of Jesus quoted below could be contradicted by none . . . and one evening an after-dinner time sectarian discussion between the Protestants and Catholics was silenced entirely, they retiring immediately to bed.

Apologies to regular readers for whom a little of below may be repetition but perhaps the flow of ideas is helpful.

Reading between the lines do I understand that people are telling you that you need to change your lifestyle? Slow down? Find harmony? Find vibrations that harmonise?

If so this is why I tried to guide you into possibly taking interest in the sound of the organ. It can be slow, so that the body absorbs the sound and the mindwaves too, but most of all, its harmonic structure puts sound in order, a mathematical and resonating order.

In addition, this is also why I am tuning pianos in the way that I am, so that the sound in many keys locks solid, so that there is a contrast between sounds that are still as well as sounds that beat and move. Music is also about that contrast too.

In recent times I have realised that the problem with religious ideas is that we call God "God". By giving God a name, we focus on something like a big person - which is not correct. God is not a big person. God is bigger and beyond that description. The first chapter of Genesis is interesting in which God creates the world and all within out of the chaos. People dismiss this because they think timescale is important - a day could not exist before the world was created so the "day" means nothing more than an era, and then of course it was not a big person who did it: much more fundamental.

We have a lovely word which measures disorder. It's called Entropy. The law is that entropy always increases and that is what we are used to. Therefore it's a very strange and odd situation that there should be any sort of peculiar circumstance that within the context of increasing entropy, fundamental particles and matter should come together to form the world, to order itself to do so, and to order itself to create life. Yet we are here because such a very strange situation existed, some peculiar force that creates order out of disorder.

That is what you need to harness inside your body. Because your body is made of it, that order out of disorder is within you and you need to harness it and encourage it as a tool.

Jesus, born of "The Idea" of bringing order out of disorder, said that there were only two rules - Love your God
God is not a person - God is the force that is strange that brings order out of disorder from which all the atoms came together and made the world and made all life, the environment, all that exists, AND YOU TOO!
Love your neighbour as yourself
This brings the world of finding order out of disorder into the human realm and these two rules put you at peace with everything and all around you and with you within you yourself! Neat isn't it?

Jesus said "Who are my brothers and sisters?" He said "Those who hear my father's word and do it". This defines him as "Son of God", son of Order out of disorder, and similarly defines also all of us who strive to create Order out of Disorder as sons and daughters of god.

No mumbo jumbo. It's as simple as that. And people who don't believe in God because they say that Evolution did it are merely ignoring that evolution itself is a process of this strange phenonomen that brings matter and atoms together in an ordered fashion to create that order that creates life out of which would only be a goo of nano-particles, perhaps even only a black hole.

So within you, it's necessary to help that order within your body to start resonating with order outside your body to achieve the equilibrium within.

Calm and ordered sound is therefore so important. This is sound that creates resonance and long thoughts in your mind. Your music of 30 years is real good fun, and I understand that, but it excites short mindthoughts and adrenal hormonal reactions in the body. It's a "high" possibly of the wrong sort that may not be helping your body.

Upon returning to the "known" world, it has been a pleasure to pick up the newspapers of the past week and read in The Times of Her Majesty the Queen's defence of faith:

. . . these traditions are also contemporary families of faith. Our religions provide critical guidance for the way in which we live our lives, and for the way in which we treat each other. Many of the values and ideas we take for granted in this and other countries originate in the ancient wisdom of our traditions. . . . They remind us of the responsibilities we have beyond ourselves.

The local Observer reports matters at Mid Sussex District Council:

Council set to defy ban on prayers at meetings - Anger at High Court ruling on lawfulness . . . . Coucillor  Liz Bennett added: "I think it will be a fight to keep it. But if you read the prayer it's actually a moment that brings us all together, no matter what party you are.

The prayer at Mid Sussex District Council  .  . . asks the Lord to guide members to act in the interests of the district"

Oh Lord, grant us courage to strive for what is right and good, courtesy to listen to those of different opinion, strengthen us through difficulties and pressures and guide us in our deliberations so that we may act in the interests of all in our District, to the glory of your holy name.

Amen

One can imagine few gatherings in any decision making process where such a prayer would be in any way inappropriate and wider adoption of such prayers and deeper understandings of the creation of Order out of Disorder can only work better in the public good.

The sound of the Organ and the spirit of places of its usual abode usefully can be championed more than perhaps others previously have dared . . .

Best wishes

David P