The Unorthodox Website Blog

One more post before I go off on holiday.

I believe in the after-life, having had direct evidence not just via Spiritualist mediums, but by messages coming direct to me of a deeply personal nature, which have convinced me that they could have only come from one source – people I knew who have died.

I have described some of the most astounding such evidence elsewhere, but here I want to write about keeping an open mind and maintaining a healthy skepticism, because there are always charlatans out to exploit the gullible. They write books, do demonstrations of supposed mediumship, etc. with the main motive of making money. Trying to distinguish between those with a genuine gift of mediumship, and those who are fakes is very difficult. However you develop a sort of ’sixth sense’, and I am also a good judge of character. If something or someone doesn’t seem quite right, I remain a skeptic until I can be proved wrong.

I’m off on holiday for 8 days, leaving tomorrow, so won’t be blogging till the weekend after next. It’s a 4 nite over-50s break at a holiday camp in Suffolk with my mother, but I’ve also managed to squeeze in Ritchie Gee’s Wildest Cats In Town Xmas Party on Saturday/Sunday at the same holiday camp. Rocky Burnette Trio, Crazy Cavan, Lennerockers – perhaps not the most spectacular line-up, but it beats Bobby Crush and the two surviving Bachelors, which is what we had at previous over-50s Golden Breaks!

 Abnormal service will be resumed as soon as possible!

This blog was inspired by a dream I had last night about the High Road, Wood Green, which was the nearest shopping center when I was growing up in the 1950s.

The dream got me thinking about how London has changed almost beyond recognition over the last 50 years or so. In a few areas, the changes are so dramatic that the area is completely different. Two such areas spring to mind immediately: the Elephant and Castle, and Swiss Cottage.

At the Elephant, all that remains of the old is the building containing one of the entrances to the Tube station. Bleak 1960s blocks and a shopping mall have replaced the old. Even the Elephant and Castle pub has been rebuilt in bleak 1960s style. The whole junction/roundabout area reminds me somehow of the Alexanderplatz redevelopment in East Berlin, once the showpiece of the German Democratic Republic.

My life-partner, George Miller, passed to the Other Side over 16 years ago now. Since then all our gay friends, except one couple, have been split up by one of the partners passing to the next dimension. For this is what happens when we ‘die’, our eternal conscious entity or ’spirit’ leaves this universe and moves on to another one alongside our own.

When George and I met, we knew quite a few gay couples, all his friends who later became mine too: Lenny and Frank, Brian and Noel, Tom and Norman. Now Frank, Brian, Tom and I myself are on our own as our partners have passed on.

I have never seriously sought out another life-partner in these 16 years, and my friends on their own feel the same way. We were all with our life-partners many years, and it would be very hard to adjust to a new one at our stage in life.

Last night BBC4 showed a program on the Hungarian uprising of 1956. This was just the most violent of several attempts to loosen the grip of Moscow in various Socialist countries.

The first Socialist regime to be established after the Soviet Union in 1917, was in fact in Hungary two years later, but it did not last long. The next Socialist government was established in Mongolia, which had recently come under Chinese rule, but had previously been under the dominance of Tsarist Russia.

Mongolia came under increasing Soviet influence, but never became part of the Soviet Union. The U.S.S.R. included countries occupied by Tsarist Russia before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

What is quite significant, is that the Soviet Union, even under Stalin’s autocratic rule, never expanded beyond its borders until the threat from Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

This progam, shown on More 4 each side of midnight and lasting over two hours, is a repeat of a program which I originally saw last year.

It is very cleverly put together to give the impression that most UFO sightings can be explained away as top secret aircraft being tested by the United States, and that the CIA positively encourage a belief in UFOs as a cover-up for these top secret projects.

My comment is: so what? Is this startingly ‘new secret evidence’ which justifies a two hour program? We already know that the majority of reported UFO sightings can be explained away as conventional and experimental aircraft, weather balloons, meteorites, ball lighting, freak cloud formations, etc.. It is the thousands which can’t be explained away in these terms which are classified as real UFOs.

Tonight, and once every year, BBC TV has their ‘Children In Need’ fundraising night. Every time I see or hear Terry Wogan or Pudsey the one-eyed bear on the TV raising funds for this charity, I cringe. People seem to go soft in the head when the word ‘children’ is mentioned.

One year I rang the donation number and asked: ‘Excuse me, but where is this child in need we keep hearing about?’ The woman the other end of the line tried to convince me that there were many ‘children in need’ in Britain. What utter poppycock! No child is in need in this country, at least not the kind of need which can be solved by the public throwing money at the problem.

Yes children suffer physical, mental and sexual abuse at the hands of parents, relatives and others, and it is up to the Social Services and government-funded child welfare organizations to protect these children.

‘Government of the people, for the people, by the people’ is the classic definition. But even this can mean very different things.

The Western interpretation is a multiple choice of political candidates, most of them members of various political parties, standing for election. The candidates with the most votes get elected, the political party with the most representatives elected to the legislative assembly forms a government, or a coalition government with other parties if there is no absolute majority.

Even within this form of democracy there are many different formats. UK and USA have the ‘first past the post’ system of voting for national elections, in which millions of votes are, in effect, wasted. Under this system voters in the marginal seats decide the government of the day, everyone else’s vote is devalued and most are completely wasted. Once a majority of 1 has been achieved in any parliamentary constituency, all other votes for that candidate, and all votes for other candidates, are wasted.

With gangs of teenagers roaming our city streets, many involved in drugs, knife and gun crime, is it not time we considered some sort of compulsory Community Service (not military service) for all teenagers of both sexes? Or at least for those in gangs, found in possession of knives, guns and other weapons or involved in muggings and violence?

A year or two’s service to the community, properly supervised, might do wonders to teach youngsters self-respect and to give to the community. There is plenty of work to be done – helping charities, elderly and disabled people, keeping the streets clean and clear of graffiti, etc.. There could even be something like America’s old Peace Corps who went overseas to help people abroad. The youngsters would of course be paid, need not necessarily live away from home (unless volunteering to go abroad of course), and could be given training for their careers after finishing their Community Service.

Let’s remember today everybody from all countries who has died, suffered and continue to die and suffer in wars. All the soldiers, civilians (including women and children) and, yes, the animals. This includes the German, Austrian, Japanese and other victims of Allied bombing (including the two A-Bombs) in World War II.

Let us remember what harm all this butchery does to our spiritual development, to Nature and the environment.

Let us remember all the money spent by the world’s governments on arms, which could be put to much better use relieving famine and improving our world instead of destroying it.

Let us pledge to halt the obscene arms trade, which is the real motivation for war and weapons of mass destruction, and which props up dictatorial regimes and encourages terrorism.

Let’s halt the production of all weapons of mass destruction, and indiscriminate weapons, such as nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, all bombs and landmines, hand grenades, machine guns, etc..