Cause every bit of land is a holy land and
every drop of water is a holy water and
every single child is a son or a daughter of the one
Earth mama and the one Earth papa
All water is spiritual, why? It is essential for the Earth, around 70% of the Earths surface is water. All animals (including humans) have a large percentage of water inside themselves. However, we humans need clean, fresh water to survive, and much of the human world does not have that. So water is an essential part of our living, and we need to improve our situation (as a whole world, a collective of humans) if we are to improve and progress as a world. Water is essential, and has always been essential.
From a religious point of view the essentialness of water has been encapsulated in various traditions as:
- Baptism in Christianity, Mandaeism and Sikhism
- Holy Water in Traditional-Ritual Catholic Christian Traditions
- The Mikveh in some Jewish Traditions
- Blessed Water in some traditions of Buddhism
- Healing Water in some traditions of Islam
- The Hindu Tradition of Bathing in the Ganges
- The element of Water in many systems, including Alchemy and the Western Mystery Tradition
Water is scientifically proven and religiously/spiritually appreciated. Can we really continue to pollute water, and ignore the needs of our Brothers and Sisters in water-deprived areas? Please support this years (2010) Blog Action Day petition to support the UN’s efforts to bring clean, safe water to millions of people around the world… and you may also be interested in the charity WaterAid.
Please note that Daniel Lewis (of Vanir Systems) is passionate about humanity, and helping humanity progress. He has an interest in charity, and an interest in helping research into Climate Change and Green IT – in addition to the spiritual side of life. Daniel respects that many people do not believe in the spiritual side of life, and hopes that those people who do not believe appreciate the charitable endeavours of those who do have belief in a supreme being/essence. Thank you for understanding
Hi all,
I’ve slotted this into both the vanirsystems category (as it is a article written by me, Daniel Lewis), and the interesting category (as it is something other than technology – namely spirituality/theology).
I have written a new article for the company TRCB, it is about specific forms of Mysticism/Philosophy which have been inspired by Christianity. They are namely Theosophy, Anthroposophy and Swedenborgianism. The article attempts to compare them, their societies and their attached churches.
Heres the summary:
Theosophy, Anthroposophy and Swedenborgianism have had a reasonable amount of influence on modern day life: Theosophy brought many Buddhist and Hindu texts to the west, Anthroposophy brought new forms of teaching and mystical elements of Christianity to the mainstream, and Swedenborgianism has influences on philosophy and poetry. This article explores all three schools, and their respective societies and churches.
Heres the link to the full article:
Theosophy, Anthroposophy and Swedenborgianism – Their Societies and Churches (on TRCB)
Please do have a read, give me a good rating, and comment (either comment on here, or via a share on twitter or facebook or something like that). It is of course quite a concise article, its a topic which could definitely fill at least one book! So please keep that in mind. I’m happy to describe things in further detail if people need/want me to. One thing I forgot to mention is that Gandhi was involved with the Theosophical Society.
Many thanks, and the Brightest Blessings to all,
Daniel
Cats! They are amazing creatures, incredibly intelligent too. The above is a picture of one of our kittens, her name is Ishtar (named after the Babylonian/Assyrian Goddess Ishtar) – and as I write this she is currently sleeping. Our other kitten, Lucy, is also sleeping.
The web is free to roam, much like a cat should be. The web was created for collaboration, to share news and to share information etc. Paywalls will fail (see here), because there will always be, and should always be, a free alternative for the web. This is of course, my opinion, but I hope to have a worthy opinion because I’ve worked on the web for many years and have seen it grow in many ways. The web is free.
- When organisations first started publishing on the web they treated it very much as a way to advertise in exactly the same way as they can advertise in a printed magazine or newspaper. With a big heavy image, with hardly any detail whatsoever. This wasn’t great! It meant that the web was not a web.
- Luckily search engines required text and links in order for sites to be findable. So corporate websites have been slowly seeing the light since then, and have been improving their sites with text, links and search engine optimisation.
- Then came the idea of web connectivity. Connecting with your friends, family and business contacts over the web. This was often, but not always, using methods which were free. The Social Web was born! First Yahoo Groups popped up, and LiveJournal and then things like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. Blogs became popular, and then microblogging became even more popular. Wikipedia releases free and open articles about millions of subjects.
- Then, in the background to all of the above, we have people making web data real workable data. People and research groups began working on things such as XML and webservice APIs, RDF and the Semantic Web, Microformats, DataPortability, OpenID, OAuth and recently WebID. The Data Boom begins to happen! With Governments, Universities, Public Organisations and Private Companies start releasing real and useful data.
- We also have people working on making the web more ambient, and more integrated with other things and physical life itself. Just look at Augmented Reality, Mobile Banking, WebGL, Linux Phones (e.g. Maemo and Android) and web-based operating systems (such as Google Chrome OS).
So where are we headed next? It’s certainly not News Paywalls! That would be more than one step backwards, a step back to number 1 above. There is room for paywalling out there, e.g. for genuinely useful functionality or highly bespoke reporting, but certainly not for news. It just feels wrong. I say that web users such as us need to wake up and say “no” to journalism paywalls, and The Times needs to wake up and understand the web.
p.s. the cats can stay sleeping for a bit ;-)
Welcome to the New Vanir Systems Blog.
It is true that I used to have a blog called “Daniels Blog“. I hadn’t posted for a while, and it seemed to become a bit redundant. It will still continue to run in the background, but I’m treating it a bit like an archive now. It will be replaced with this blog, the Vanir Systems Blog.
The mission of this blog is:
- To update everybody interested with the work done by Vanir Systems, this will be using the “vanirsystems” category.
- To highlight interesting bits of technical news, along with my opinion, using the “technical” category. This may be on the topic of the Semantic Web / Linked Data, or Artificial Intelligence, Programming or Web Development.
- To highlight interesting bits of general news, along with my opinion, using the “interesting” category. This may be on the topic of religion, spirituality, theology, philosophy, psychology, or a mixture of science and technology.
- To provide code snippets in various programming languages, using the “codesnippets” category.
- To provide reviews or previews of products (hardware, software, etc), using the “reviews” category. If you have anything that you would like me to (p)review then please to get in touch, and I am sure that we may be able to work out a deal.
It will attempt to:
- Use relevant inbound tags
- Use outbound links to relevant information
- Be 100% valid XHTML that is reasonably POSH – wish me luck ;-) (maybe with sneaky bits of RDFa or Microformats)
Thank you for reading, and I hope you join me here again soon.
Daniel
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