Yesterday I had my talk “My Belief Shared”, with about half a dozen of good friends attending. My talks are quite different from Herman’s. He speaks more in a motivational manner to the theme of how to conduct yourself in daily life.

In contrast I tend to examine the human situation in our world, both in the past, present and even with a look to the future. This I attempted yesterday, but the talk was too complex to be clear and the theme will need more work as I now realise; more will follow below.

John has invited me for dinner on my birthday and offered me a pair of show tickets for September. This turns out to be a go. In the aft Shirley and I will meet up for a tea at one of the new places along forth street. I have not seen her since the flood last June.

Sharen’s nephew told me that Sharen will get a less aggressive room mate. Last week both Garda and I noticed Sharen’s bruised nose, which I had noted also in May. The management of that many old people together is not always an easy task to bring off successfully.

My writings entry for the ninth was interrupted and left unfinished. I’ll have to revised that one, since not even the descriptions and the grammar checks have been completed. However, I have writings for today that relate to yesterday’s talk and that comes first while I still have those notions in mind.

Yesterday already after I had completed my talk I realised the complexity of it. My friends during coffee after the presentation kidded me at getting started later in preparing, that way there would be fewer ideas to present! The notion of complexity lingered all day, but I could not reach a conclusion on it. But, this morning I awoke feeling that this talk was an important accomplishment, giving me something of a celebratory feeling even.

This notion of having reached an important milestone waxed on me so to speak as I started to realise that I had made an attempt to formulate a new belief perspective. This realisation in turn let me to recall my definition of religion. This definition came to me as an outcome of having read all of Joseph Campbell’s four books on World Mythology. This was back in the mid 1980-ties.

A (re)- structuring of the past, creating a perspective on the future enabling us to act in the present.

I asked myself then, after this reading, what is the most general idea that emerges from all these myths? My answer was: “Structure”. The myths provide structure and lately I have added ‘of the world of experience’. A few weeks after the initial ‘structure’ realisation I made this formulation about myth, that it is: ‘A (re)- structuring of the past, creating a perspective on the future enabling us to act in the present.’ This was followed by: ‘If the belief is alive it is a religion, if dead it is a myth.’

If the belief is alive it is a religion, if dead it is a myth.

After this aside and recall, my notion this morning was that the whole group of my four talks on belief for this year can be captured under this definition of religion cum myth, the one I described above. So, this morning I actually caught myself in the act of ‘fulfilling’ that very definition with my four belief talks.

My discovery this morning that I executing the very process I defined back in the 1980-ties accounts for this feeling of having accomplished this very thing, without even realising it.

As I mentioned in at the start of my talk, I have always - since my youth - looked for a way to make the accomplishments and insights of our ‘Western Civilisation’ a part of the overall perspective of all our human culture and traditions. Describing such an inclusive perspective was my aim with this talk titled ‘My Belief Shared’, but not realising that I was working on bringing that old wish into expression in the very way I had defined religion back in the 1980-ties.
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