Yesterday’s yearly Lilac Festival is behind us again and a success at that with the fine weather and a very good crowd. The latter filled 4th Street from the Mission Bridge at 26th Ave down to 12th Ave with people, dogs, hypno-pads and of course the booths on both sides of the street.

I bought a tooth fairy pillow for Alec and a kitty play cushion for Annie’s cat. It would not be hard to spend a few hundred dollars on the nick knacks that are for sale, but I kept it to three dollars each.

Herman dedicated his talk to the late Norman Vincent Peale, whose birthday it was yesterday. This author of the world best seller ‘The Power of Positive Thinking’ had dumped its manuscript in the waste paper basket, because no one would publish it! However, Norman’s wife persisted and found a willing one and the rest is history, wherein an important lesson lies.

On Saturday I phoned my sister for her upcoming birthday. She is doing well and enjoying her electric bike, counting all the clicks as she accumulates them. The weather there too had been quite cool like is was here and will be again tomorrow, but for yesterday and today we’re in the mid twenties.

She [Els] is doing well and enjoying her electric bike, counting all the clicks as she accumulates them.

This aft coffee talk with Jack, which will take care of most of the afternoon. We have not had our regular talk for last month, so there will be much to discuss.

On Sunday morning I found an article on Trouw’s webpage on ’Moocs’, where Mooc stands for ‘Massive Open Online Courses’ offered on the internet by various Universities around the world. My search yesterday led me to a Wikipedia article that credits Alberta’s Athabasca University as one of the initiators of this new trend. But, the Dutch Delft Universit is not far behind with their prize winning solar car.

Over the weekend I spent time on framing some basic ideas for my November talk. Herman had given me a suggested date for November and I wanted to define an outline for it at this time.

This to help me focus the two up coming talks as lead-ins to this forth talk of the year. My intention is for that talk to address the interplay of the main human religious/ ideological traditions, which have more in common than we acknowledge, as we tend to emphasize our differences.

In the ‘Norcom Basic Notebook’, blue dated 2015-05-28, I started my notes for the November 22nd as yet untitled talk and those occupy seven pages already! The first two pages recount a dream, which urges me to bring my message. So, the energy is present evidently.

The next few days I made some more notes, which I concluded last night on page seven. There I suggest that the idea of Existence Divine would most appropriately act as an enabling framework within which the various human traditions could find ways to accommodate each other.

Its purpose is to offer a perspective that leaves in place the traditional believes, convictions and traditions.

So, rather than starting a revision of the existing tradition, I suggest that the present traditions can find ways to identify common grounds using the concepts offered within the understanding that Existence Divine provides as a generalised structure.

Its purpose is to offer a perspective that leaves in place the traditional believes, convictions and traditions. But, it asks each such contributing tradition to acknowledge other such frameworks and assist in a fostering of mutual understanding, validation and honouring of differences.

As an example let me present the basic idea that revelation within Existence Divine is an accepted and valid process for humans to become informed about new insights, ideas and/or knowledge or action to be taken. There is no judgement here about the means by which this process takes place, but there are the criteria of ethics that our human traditions share and must form a test for the content of the newly revealed or acquired knowing.

This means that a newly experienced revelation about human actions to be taken such as martyr-ship must be tested against handed down ethics values, as must a newly discovered cluster bomb or drone design. Both are products of a certain ideology and value set, which must fit ethically within handed down and mutually accepted norms.
<10:42am and 10:55am~