Krishnamurti Centre Sydney

Kurt Vonnegut

This year’s Krishnamurti Australia annual gathering at Springbrook will be held between the 10th and 15th of December.

As ever it promises to be a deepening experience of Krishnamurti’s teachings with others in dialogue and fellowship, in beautiful sub tropical environs with healthy vegetarian catering.

Pat Rogers is the contact person and can be reached C/-: [email protected]

The cost will be $166 per day and this includes catering, all meals.

An expeditious response is sought to ascertain the viability of the gathering.

Great idea. Once in a while let's put our cellphones away. 📲

How the Universe may view Humankind — Bertrand Russell (1919)

“In the visible world, the Milky Way* is a tiny fragment; within this fragment, the solar system is an infinitesimal speck, and of this speck our planet is a microscopic dot. On this dot, tiny lumps of impure carbon and water, of complicated structure, with somewhat unusual physical and chemical properties, crawl about for a few years, until they are dissolved again into the elements of which they are compounded. They divide their time between labour designed to postpone the moment of dissolution for themselves and frantic struggles to hasten it for others of their kind. Natural convulsions periodically destroy some thousands or millions of them, and disease prematurely sweeps away many more. These events are considered to be misfortunes; but when men succeed in inflicting similar destruction by their own efforts, they rejoice, and give thanks to their God. Such is man’s life viewed from the outside.“

— Bertrand Russell, Dreams and Facts (1919)

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* Following the 1920 Great Debate between the astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Doust Curtis, observations by Edwin Hubble showed that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies. Until the early 1920s, most astronomers thought that the Milky Way contained all the stars in the Universe. Shapley argued in favor of the Milky Way as the entirety of the universe. He believed that "spiral nebulae" such as Andromeda were simply part of the Milky Way. Curtis, on the other hand, contended that Andromeda and other such as "nebulae" were separate galaxies, or "island universes" (a term invented by the 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, who also believed that the "spiral nebulae" were extragalactic). Later in the 1920s, Edwin Hubble showed that Andromeda was far outside the Milky Way by measuring Cepheid variable stars (a type of star that pulsates radially, varying in both diameter and temperature) proving that Curtis was correct.

Image left: Bertrand Russell, 1919. National Gallery. London, United Kingdom.

Image right: The "Great Spiral Nebula" in the constellation Andromeda (1902 photograph).

This is all you have to do to freeze your garden tomatoes so that you can use them all winter long. Just wash, take stems off and freeze. When you take them from the freezer put them in the sink while still frozen, turn the hot water on them and the peelings just come off so easily this way. I then cut them up while still frozen and add to any recipe.

'My Opinions' — Bertrand Russell

”I have been accused of a habit of changing my opinions in philosophy. I am not myself in any degree ashamed of having changed my opinions. I claim only, at best, that the opinion expressed was a sensible one to hold at the time when it was expressed.”

'My Opinions' — preface to The Bertrand Russell Dictionary of Mind, Matter and Morals (1952) full excerpt

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”I have been accused of a habit of changing my opinions in philosophy and, in so far as this is true, the dictionary will enable readers to find it out. I am not myself in any degree ashamed of having changed my opinions. What physicist who was already active in 1900 would dream of boasting that his opinions had not changed during the last half century? In science men change their opinions when new knowledge becomes available; but philosophy in the minds of many is assimilated rather to theology than to science. Where nobody knows anything, there is no point in changing your mind.

But the kind of philosophy that I value and have endeavoured to pursue is scientific in the sense that there is some definite knowledge to be obtained and that new discoveries can make the admission of former error inevitable to any candid mind. For what I have said, whether early or late, I do not claim the kind of truth which theologians claim for their creeds. I claim only, at best, that the opinion expressed was a sensible one to hold at the time when it was expressed.

I should be much surprised if subsequent research did not show that it needed to be modified. I hope, therefore, that whoever uses this dictionary will not suppose the remarks which it quotes to be intended as pontifical pronouncements, but only as the best I could do at the time towards the promotion of clear and accurate thinking. Clarity, above all, has been my aim.”

— Bertrand Russell, Preface to The Bertrand Russell Dictionary of Mind, Matter and Morals (1952), p. 7

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The Bertrand Russell to The Dictionary of Mind, Matter, and Morals (1952) contains more than 1000 selections from over 100 of Russell’s books and articles. It serves as an introduction to Russell’s style of analysis, argument, and exposition, the purpose of which is to develop a clear notion of Russell's method of approach to his fundamental principles and many of his leading ideas.

Image: Bertrand Russell by Ida Kar (1953). National Gallery. Ida Kar (8 April 1908 – 24 December 1974) was a photographer active mainly in London after 1945. Her most celebrated portraits document the bohemian social circle of artists and controversial writers in which she moved.