Two Experiments
A partial barquette of cranberries and a slew of kiwis inspired me to make some chutney and relish. I looked at a recipe and then just did my own thing.
I knew the chutney would go brown with the apple cider vinegar and brown sugar in addition to the heat, so I took a photo before all that happened.
Lemon zest, cloves, coriander, cinnamon, bird of paradise piment, walnuts …
Then I did a raw relish, the colours remain. Nuts and orange with white sugar to keep the colours.
Then today, the test, the tasting. (Yesterday, I forgot.)
I enjoyed the sweet and sour of the chutney and the raw crisp freshness of the relish.
Old Enough
Do you remember “I can’t wait until I’m old enough to….”?
I remember saying I am eleven and three quarters. I don’t know why twelve was important; no special ceremonies were planned. I was anxious to be allowed to read books in the adult section at the library. One had to be old enough to drive, to drink, to have one’s own place.
And then suddenly, but I only realize that now, I was old enough to do anything I wanted to do.
Now, I realize I am old enough to die. Some might say I am not that old, but no one can now say she was too young to die.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not looking forward to death. We were not created to die, but rather to be perpetual. However, the necessary changes to recover that will not occur in my lifetime. We can only give an impetus towards Good, do our best to make it contagious.
Tro Menez Are 2023
Today we walked a circuit, as has become habitual, at a festival of hiking to support the Diwan schools, the Tro Menez Are
Diwan schools are bilingual, Breton and French. This festival moves around in the Arrée mountains, taking place in a different town each year.
We did the 15 km. The weather was perfect, the paths very pleasant. Here are a few photos:
Can you speed read on a telephone?
I have noticed that these days people do everything on their phones— social media, e-mail, even musical scores. The screens are small, the writing is small, I guess one can always zoom up, but wouldn’t you then see only one or two words? How could you see a sentence, a whole paragraph at once? How can see where you are in the piece of music? How fast would you have to swipe for an allegretto?
It seems to me that in general we may be seeing only what’s at the end of our nose. Does that explain anything about the way we are being governed?
How Can We Love Our Enemies?
You say to me, Brother D.: “I would like you to insist more on the application of the Sermon on the Mount, such as learning to truly love in the evangelical sense, to truly forgive.” Insist more? My arms fall off, beloved Brother D. How could I? I keep insisting on the love, forgiveness, peace, intelligence, etc. that we owe to humanity. If it were a question of feeling, I would understand if you asked me the right method to awaken this feeling, but it is not a question of feeling. It is a question of wanting or willing: That we may do Thy Will (Rev. of Ares 12/4).
I love all men and yet among them there are many whom I do not like at all naturally or, if you prefer, whom I do not like at all sentimentally and whom I even distrust. But I refrain from condemning them, from flogging them, from wishing them ill, etc., I oblige myself to neutralize all the negative feelings that I cannot help feeling towards these men whom I do not like sentimentally. I do not rush to their necks to embrace them, I limit myself to neutralizing my hostility, to refusing to put my fist in their faces and my foot in their asses, to expressing my enmity to them, to refusing to create an active animosity between them and me.
This is why I have always said that evangelical love is a love-of-duty, but not a love-of-feeling. It is not necessary that the people you meet see or feel you love them; you simply love them out of duty, forgiving them even if you don’t feel like it sentimentally, it is an interior act that has value for you. If it has no value for them, it is not serious and in any case it is not possible for the time being: four generations will not be enough (Rev of Ares 24/2). Do not try to be angelic; it is impossible in the present state. Always remain courteous to all and it will be a considerable effort in the direction of a love that will only be truly remarkable and natural in more than four generations. To withhold in word, deed and behavior – one can also say love-retention instead of love-duty – all that you feel negatively about some humans is all you can do at this time. Sure, some of us can go further in our impulses toward others, but if you can’t, just stay in control of the Good you represent and that will be enough. You know, forbidding yourself to be practically hostile and remaining courteous to all humans is already very good.
Love is not a forge that blazes under the bellows to redden the metal that is then hammered on the anvil; love is not this human volcano that you seem to dream of. It will become one, but we are not there in this generation. The ideas, the feelings, the sensations towards humans reminiscent of those of a young mother crazy about her baby, can only be attitudes that the true Christian of the Sermon on the Mount obliges himself to without necessarily feeling them in himself. There is, in short, a bit of theatricality, formalism, facticity in your courtesy, but it is still better than waging war, doing harm, spitting venom. That’s what the Sermon on the Mount says. To love your enemy is not to give him a bear-hug or to give him gifts, it is to forbid yourself to engage in combat with him, it is to seek dialogue, even if it is difficult.
Réponse : 21déc22 246C58
https://michelpotayblog.net/246.html/246-comments-french.html
Translated with http://www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Edited by djd
Wise, Stoic
“I am particularly sensitive to your evocation of Seneca. My memories of the seven years of Latin study (seven hours a week at Hoche!) remain vague, the fatal destiny of the high school student of my adolescence, who inevitably did his “humanities”: Latin, Greek. Paragraphs of “De la constance du sage” were studied, indeed. The sage of stoicism, of which Seneca was one of the great, was particularly scrutinized during the German occupation, a difficult period which required a lot of patience, even heroic restraint sometimes. Wisdom was then above all a way of life that allowed us to forget hunger, cold, censorship, in short, to bear the hazards of life. “On the constancy of the wise man” by Seneca was a stoic vision of this way of life of the time. Seneca said that it was a difficult path. Wisdom required height of vision, not easy to reach. “How do you get to the top by a flat route,” he asked, “if not by great effort?”
But the wise man is invincible, he clarified. Not that he is immune to hard knocks, but when something bad happens to him, he does not suffer. One must even receive blows to become a wise man. “The soul of the wise man is strong.”
The wise man, in particular, is not vulnerable to the attacks of the wicked. The wise man shows, guards, composure and passivity in the midst of attacks. Seneca especially wants to protect us from injustice and insult. The Pilgrim of Ares must be a wise man and not feel the injustice. One does not have anything of one’s own! Why be moved by the loss of what is not one’s own? If the wise man loses what he has publicly, including his good name, he loses nothing of what he is intimately, whereas if the non-wise man loses what he has, he loses all that he is. “The wise man is of the species of those who, by long and patient exercise, have the strength to endure the violence of their enemies and to wear them down.” As for insult, it is much less serious than injustice. One does not sue a rude, devious or mocking person. The wise man is never a mediocre person who thinks he is belittled by an insult that demeans him.
The wise man, according to The Revelation of Ares, but also according to Seneca, remains human. He can overcome everything. He repels attacks with wisdom… . To castigate the attacker is to give him consideration. It is necessary to dispense with answering, if the answer does not have all its chances to succeed. In short, we should not give consideration to people who commit injustices and insults. We do not accomplish anything good, nothing great, nothing that can change our lives (Rev of Ares 30/11) and change the world (28/7), if we are anxious or simply worried by what others say about us. Seneca says, “Freedom is placing our minds above insults, it is making ourselves such that the reasons for rejoicing come from ourselves alone, it is turning away from ourselves everything that can only lead the anxious life of a man who fears the laughter and tongues of others.”
In other words, there was stoicism in both Jesus and Seneca. Let us be stoics ourselves … “
Réponse : 29nov22 246C24
https://michelpotayblog.net/246.html/246-comments-french.html
Translated with http://www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
edited by djd
Original blog entry in English: https://michelpotayblog.net/246.html/246-comments-english.html
Co-creation without religion
“To be a Pilgrim of Ares is to leave time behind, to begin again to create the Universe with the Creator. …
The patience of the loving man, compensatory patience always necessary to obtain peace, cannot be a law just as love cannot be a law; patience and love are acts freely consented, which make man greater. We have no law, therefore no religion. We cling tenaciously to the necessity of love, not as a law but as wisdom, as the Creator clings to the necessity of His Nature, which is to create. Our hopes and aspirations, but not promises which if they come from God will be fulfilled in any case, play the primary role in our earthly existences. We have no dogmas, no leaders, no obligations other than that which our loving conscience dictates to us. When I say that “the Ear of God is my conscience” I add here what goes without saying, namely that this is the case of every Pilgrim of Ares and of every man of love on Earth, whoever he may be. We are not building any system, we are basing ourselves on the common experience of all men in the world: Loving, forgiving, making peace, seeking spiritual intelligence free of all prejudices is everywhere better than hating, condemning, making war, obeying only the law, being free only from what one wants or believes to be community or divine law.”
Extrait de Réponse : 26nov22 246C19
https://michelpotayblog.net/246.html/246-comments-french.html
Translated with http://www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
edited by djd
Working Towards Eden
“…I have been trying for some time to raise my brothers and sisters higher and higher above everything that religion and popular traditions think they explain about the Father in error. God exists, but it is impossible for us to say, in our sinful state, what He is, who He is, how He is, where He is, and how He can be at the same time indefinable and capable of speaking to us and loving us. He is at the same time in the smallest of our cells and spread out on the infinite horizon of limitless space!
In the Hebrew Bible there is a word: olam or owlam, which is generally translated as eternal, but which in fact has a meaning that goes beyond human understanding and language. The great Basil of Caesarea said that the idea of eternity does not exist in the Bible, that it means rather intensity, paroxysm, infinite supererogation. In fact, for me, this word olam or owlam designates something untranslatable, which, I would say, is akin to the Power of overcoming, which is also the Power of creation of the Universe, Life that is stronger than any idea that we humans may have of Life. Olam or owlam contains the meaning of totality, absolute, universe, surpassability and these translations are still far below the untranslatable idea impossible to find. In any case, it is impossible to dissociate the idea of intensity or paroxysm from the idea of an unlimited universe, and it is also impossible to dissociate the idea of intensity or paroxysm from the idea of a man who struggles in the fog of sin, but who will have the intrinsic strength to understand if he finds holiness, which escapes the human being for the moment. What is the Universe if not space that lasts indefinitely and all that it contains?
I am accelerating my teaching in the metaphysical field, because I am already 93 years old and I know that at this age a man’s carcass can be extinguished at any moment of the day or night. If tomorrow my heart stops and my soul flies away, let it be after I have said everything I have to say.
The Father and the heavenly forces are impenetrable to sinful man, because sinful man has only a very limited brain, certainly capable of the most subtle mathematical reasoning, but it is something far below what man will have to conceive in the state of holiness, which is the total image and likeness of man to his Father. The human brain has fallen to the point that the human can say that good and evil can co-exist… Yes, but that only seems true to a sinful brain. No, not in Eden. But it is to our return to Eden that we begin to work now.”
https://michelpotayblog.net/245.html/245-comments-french.html
Réponse : 12nov22 245C56
Translated with http://www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
edited by djd
An Active Weekend
Yesterday
The Singing Cyclist – From the Scrignac station on “la voie verte” to Kermeur station is all uphill, very gentle, but definitely slanted upwards. I found some chestnuts. Somewhat hurtling back, all downhill, there were some muddy spots. Not much time to decide what to do– take it to the right, the left, or down the middle? I bobbled and wobbled but did not fall down. I saw a salamander. Lovely weather for cycling and warbling. 
Today
The Humming Hiker – This morning I walked 11km, humming and occasionally breaking into scat. No records for the time or maybe I was the slowest– 3 1/4 hours. It was quite pleasant with hardly any hardtop roads and varied trails and paths, well-indicated. Underfoot there was often the cushiony feeling given by hundreds of years of leaf mold. I wandered through winding woods, went along fields and enjoyed one of our Breton specialties, chemin creux, literally hollow way. These paths run between fields where the rocks have been removed over a period of years and chucked to the edge, the hedgerow. Sometimes they would be so muddy that people would have to walk up on the top of this wall-like structure instead of on the path. I saw majestic beech trees with their confetti carpet of beechnuts. Large oaks which had dropped their acorns, and plenty of chestnuts. There was a very very tall antenna with 3 small propellers and 2 wind direction indicators, also maybe a solar panel. To my surprise, it made noise. The weather varied from gray to sunny to another one of our Breton specialties—le crachin—and back to sunny again. Le crachin is heavier than mist but lighter than drizzle, gives a nice volume to one’s hair. Meanwhile at the town hall, others were cooking. The two meals I had ordered were ready for take-out when I arrived. The proceeds will go to help some women in Senegal cultivate vegetables.
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