It’s still dark at this hour since we switched to Daylight Saving time yesterday. And now I‘m extra early, being out of my routine I suppose.
Yesterday I met with friends at the Palliser and coming Sunday I’ll be up as speaker. Thomas was still absent, recovering from side effects of the operation.

I have a rough outline for my talk in my head and a theme that I want to work out. Yesterday I made a start with my reading; see below. Metta, formerly Derrick called saying hello on the fly as he is want to do. Busy with his consultation and counselling now with six days a week. Among his clientele is a group of homeless people, which is very different from the mainly one on one sessions that he does. Good experience he finds I take it.

On the way to the Palliser yesterday I met Michelle at the back, where she was watching the towing service guy replacing a front flat. So we chatted for a few minutes not having met for some time. Later in the day she gave me a some stew from the Nature Coop and I gave her my last ‘Haagse Hopje’, as token of appreciation; Peter may bring new ones.

Reading Otto’s “the Idea of the Holy” I came across his reference to Old Testament Genesis 28:17 where Jacob says “How dreadful is this place …” as he comments on his ladder dream experience at Luz and later named ‘House of Elohim’. Otto is making the point here that the holy cum sacred - he interchanges the two - was not seen as ‘the good’ the way we do today.

Our modern rational approach has ‘moralised’ the sacred to mean ‘good’. This Otto says was not the early human experience of sacred or holy, where it is reported as ‘full of aw’ as in aw-full. Otto then introduces the idea and word ‘numen’ from luminosity, to designate this original feeling value experience of times when humans were grappling with this overwhelming experience of the holy that fills one with awe.

I want to use this to show that god, sacred, holy and other like descriptors are now rationalised concepts that describe modern rational aspects or attributes. Otto refers to the earlier human feeling experience that preceded these modern descriptors and refers to them as ideographs having still the experience of the ‘ineffable‘.
<8:28am~