On account of this weather I phoned John to cancel our coffee meet for this morning. This since my walking remains precarious and I do not want the additional risk of snow added. But, warm weather is on the way ready and willing to melt the snow.

Last night was our evening session with Herman, completing number three of the five. Thomas phoned to pick me up, which was a welcome and kind gesture. We also like to chat a bit during such drives, comparing notes so to speak, about some shared events.

I made more progress with my talks’ catalogue page and am close to a final prototype and production model even, as we used to call that at Space Optic back in 1970-3, in Bell’s Corners near Ottawa. I should be able to post the whole improved version of the audio files and catalogue pages before the weekend.

Last Tuesday I arrived at two concepts that I have not worked out as yet. One relates to the god-image idea I wrote about on Monday and Tuesday and the second one goes by the name ‘Celebrate Diversity’.

First the additional notion relating to the ‘god-image’. This is that any particular god image can be interpreted as a symbolic representation of the connectedness to Existence Divine for a group and its member.

Any particular case of such an image is the one that is applicable and functional for the revelation and tradition at hand for a community. This view validates each case in its own uniqueness and accommodates each different such image as valid within the mystery of our human existence, which I have given the received name of ‘Existence Divine’.

We can then interpret each such god-image as a revelation in its own right about this mystery that we are so getting to know. To this we can then add our insight of today, that all such images are symbolic expression of us humans being connected as participating participants to and in this mystery.

Finally, this view makes a place for the handed down human traditions, validating them as such and providing for further development of this essential aspect of the human experience. Essential, because humankind always faces the boundary where the known merges into the unknown and right guidance is at a premium.

The second notion, which I named ‘Celebrate Diversity’ has quite a different aetiology. It began with my putting the question: “What is the central motivation within Existence Divine for our world today?” This question arose when I looked for the central messages of Buddhism - detachment - , Christianity - love your enemy -, Islam - the five pillars - and Hinduism - purity.

Each one of these established human traditions has this central tenet that a believer strives for to realise in her or his life, while informing daily conduct of the community and its members. Given this as a fact, the above question arose for me as to what this guiding principle would be for ‘Existence Divine’, which addresses the diversity of our global community today.

The affirmation that I have composed and use at the close of my talks says that we work towards ‘wholeness in diversity’, but that does not pro-scribe specific behaviour, such as ‘love your neighbour’, which is Hebrew, or ‘love your enemy‘.

This then was the setting within which emerged the admonition - almost - of ‘Celebrate Diversity’. This was accompanied by the specific awareness of using a festival calendar of such celebratory days in a common yearly cycle of celebrating each others festive days. Who would say no to that, except for your boss, the president or the tax collector! So, there it is, celebrate our world wide diversity!
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