Notes - Scottish genealogy to date / working /

         Late mid-morning. The clouds are overwhelming the open sky. You all had breakfast at Mama’s Kitchen near Madeira Beach before Kim, Paul, Owen and Brennan headed to Tampa International and their Delta flight home about fifty minutes from now. The quiet is settling in. You completed today’s Tampa Bay Times as Carol was beginning her read. – Amorella

         1030 hours. We are hoping to return this coming March or April. The four of us have also decided, assuming Apple meets the technological, cosmetic and comfort expectations, to buy their new watches in the Spring. I like keeping up with the times as far as electronics are concerned. Showing an example of what I didn’t know until last night – I asked Paul how to set the alarm on the iPhone and Paul pulled up his phone and said, “Suri, set the alarm for six-thirty in the morning.” She did and it blew me away. We have used a 1972 travel alarm all these years and the lettering is slowly fading away even with a new battery every year so I decided to use the iPhone. It works but I never dreamed I could ask Suri to set it. I do want to use Apple Pay sometime this month so I don’t feel uncomfortable using it. Obviously I don’t keep up with the youth in all that appears to matter technologically, but I am not an old fogy about it.

         Later, afternoon. You have been working on the genealogy and for the Scottish descendents you have twelve generations since Lord Thomas. You have the English descendents to do. This put you up to 1066, which is the setting for Grandma Six in book two. – Amorella

         1654 hours. I rather fell into this focus out of nowhere so I suppose I was working on it subconsciously at least. There is no sense waiting around to make changes and bring the story up to the moment. I have a list, which I may include in an appendix. As for the first book’s Grandma characters I might work something up also, little stories that suggest how each may have become a part of Renaldo and Criteria or added to the family through the centuries into the twentieth. This is one of the points of the Grandma stories, to show suggested genetic webbing for which we, as cousins, may belong one way or another. Here is my working list at present.

** **

Criteria             b. 555                        d. 642                        Scottish Merlyn b. 514            d. 620

Renaldo           b. 549                        d. 636

Lord Thomas   b. 590                        d. 679

Lady Hilda       b. 600                        d. 696

Judah               b. 630                         d. 686

Anne                b. 633                         d. 686

Daniel                b. 661                        d. 750 [Frodisharg]

Treasa               b. 667                        d. 740 [Vigdisdottir]

                                   

Wilfred               b. 692                        d. 773 – great grandson of Lord Thomas

Nairne                b. 700                        d. 781

Dana                  b. 724                        d. 805 – 2^nd great

Douglas             b. 719                        d. 754

Corey                 b. 750                        d. 822 – 3^rd great

Rhonana            b. 758                        d. 835

Markus               b. 783                        d. 858 – 4^th great

Retta                  b. 788                        d. 856

Robert               b. 808                        d. 900 – 5^th great

Janette              b. 808                        d. 901

David                 b. 839                        d. 921 – 6^th great

Emme                b. 842                        d. 910

Anne                  b. 870                        d. 949 – 7^th great granddaughter

Gregory              b. 865                        d. 945

Allander             b. 900                        d. 983 – 8^th great

Lindee               b. 909                        d. 990

James               b. 934                         d. 1001 – 9^th great

Shandy              b. 935                        d. 1007

Thomas              b. 960                        d. 1025 – 10^th great

Joane                 b. 965                        d. 1030

Jacob                  b. 1000                     d. 1066 – 11^th great grandson of Lord Thomas

Ruth                    b. 1005                     d. 1075

Dane                   b. 1022                     d. 1066 – 12^th great grandson of Lord Thomas

Vendela               b. 102

Luella                  b. 1051

The Scottish side of the family to date, which both Richard and Cyndi and Robert and Connie are directly related.

** **

         This has taken you some work to show to yourself a kind of authenticity of reasonable dates. Post. – Amorella

         1729 hours. Even though the English side is not completed to date, it will be and I feel much better about it. - rho

         2129 hours. I have completed the listing for the English side but have not transcribed it. Enough for tonight. It is rainy and quite cool. This has been the worst day weather-wise. Tomorrow we go to the Park Place Theatre to see Gone Girl at 12:30.

         Post. - Amorella

Notes - working under mind / unawkwardness /

         Turquoise Gulf waters this morning. Little writing work accomplished yesterday but it was a good day nevertheless. Kim, Paul and the boys are about to head for the beach. You had one of your more traditional breakfasts while reading the paper this morning. The night before last after Owen and Brennan were to bed the four of you watched Captain Phillips. Last night you and Carol watched Dustin Hoffman’s Quartet once again. You watched two people walking from the condo to the beach and head north. You think they look like your version of Criteria and Renaldo. – Amorella

         0933 hours. Yes. It was an immediate surprise. I thought, ‘There go Criteria and Renaldo. The two look just as I imagine them, but rather than walk from a condo in my mind they walked from a real condo on Madeira Beach. Very cool.

         Once  the Grandma segments are re-completed through chapter seven we need to create several generations for quick explanation to later centuries. You are already considering how to do this semi-consciously. We’ll work it out, boy. Post. - Amorella

         You spent an hour or so in the pool with Kim, Paul, Owen and Brennan. Carol spent time talking the Mary Lou and reading quietly. You tried a new place for lunch upon recommendation from condo neighbors, the Sea Breeze Grill about a mile further north of the Conch Republic on Gulf Boulevard. Linda, Bill and Jen are stopping by this afternoon. - Amorella

         1503 hours. I just saw this. And, here all this time my ‘presences’ have been a robot.   Ha ha!

** **

Wired Science -

"This Robot Makes People Experience a Ghostly Presence"

BY Greg Miller

People who’ve stared death in the face and lived to tell about it—mountain climbers who’ve made a harrowing descent, say, or survivors of the World Trade Center attacks—sometimes report that just when their situation seemed impossible, a ghostly presence appeared. People with schizophrenia and certain types of neurological damage sometimes report similar experiences, which scientists call, aptly, “feeling of presence.”

Now a team of neuroscientists says it has identified a set of brain regions that seems to be involved in generating this illusion. Better yet, they’ve built a robot that can cause ordinary people to experience it in the lab.

The team was led by Olaf Blanke, a neurologist and neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. Blanke has a long-standing interest in creepy illusions of bodily perception. Studying these bizarre phenomena, he says, could point to clues about the biology of mental illness and the mechanisms of human consciousness.

In 2006, for example, Blanke and colleagues published a paper in Nature that had one of the best titles you’ll ever see in a scientific journal: “Induction of an illusory shadow person.” In that study, they stimulated the brain of a young woman who was awaiting brain surgery for severe epilepsy. Surgeons had implanted electrodes on the surface of her brain to monitor her seizures, and when the researchers passed a mild current through the electrodes, stimulating a small region at the intersection of the temporal and parietal lobes of her brain, she experienced what she described as a shadowy presence lurking nearby, mimicking her own posture.

The new study also implicates this region, the so-called temporoparietal junction, as well as two others. Blanke and colleagues examined 12 people who experienced a feeling of presence after brain damage resulting from epilepsy, stroke, or other causes. Like the epilepsy patient in the earlier study, these patients tended to describe the presence as somewhat menacing, Blanke says. “It’s an uncanny feeling … that they’re not exactly in danger, but this other presence doesn’t want anything good.”

Using MRI scans, the researchers identified three brain regions that were most often damaged in these patients: the temporoparietal junction, the insula, and the frontoparietal cortex. All three are thought to play a role in integrating sensory signals from outside the body (like what you see and hear around you) with signals from inside the body (like signals from the joints and muscles that indicate your posture and the position of your limbs).

To see if they could create the feeling-of-presence illusion in healthy people, the used what they call a “master-slave robotic system” built by roboticist Giulio Rognini, who’s also based at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. To interact with the robot, subjects insert an index finger into a mechanical arm. This arm is the “master” part of the robot. The “slave” component is another arm located directly behind the subject that mimics the motion of the master. So, for example, if the subject makes a poking motion, the robot pokes him or her in the back.

With the robot in this configuration, subjects reported the strange feeling that they were poking themselves in the back. But things got even weirder when the researchers introduced a delay, so that the poke in the back lagged by half a second. This caused some subjects to feel they were being poked by an invisible presence lurking behind them. The illusion was generally weaker in the healthy people than it was in the neurological patients, Blanke says, and some people were far more susceptible to it than others. The researchers report their findings today in Current Biology.

Here’s Blanke’s hypothesis about what’s going on: Normally, the parts of the brain that initiate movements send a signal to sensory regions of the brain to give them a heads up; But when the robot is in delay mode there’s a disconnect between the movement signal (initiate poke!) and the sensation (um, not feeling any poking). It’s a mismatch that almost never happens in real life. The researchers suggest that the subjects’ brains reconcile this mismatch by creating the illusion of another presence that’s doing the poking. After all, something is poking them in the back.

This kind of sensory-motor mismatch has been proposed previously to explain some of the symptoms of schizophrenia, most notably by the cognitive neuroscientist Chris Frith at University College London. For example, it’s very hard for healthy people to tickle themselves—you don’t experience that funny feeling if you know what’s coming. But Frith and colleagues have found that people with schizophrenia can tickle themselves, suggesting that they perceive motions that they themselves have initiated as coming from another source. In a similar way, people with the disorder might misattribute their own internal speech to an external agent. It’s no wonder paranoia is so common.

“There’s convergent evidence that this type of action monitoring is essential for the sense of self, the sense that we are in charge of our own bodies,” said neuroscientist Peter Brugger of University Hospital Zurich. Blanke’s new study is important, Brugger says, because it makes it possible to study an experience that’s very real to many psychiatric and neurological patients, but very foreign to everybody else. “It’s a very elegant way to explore something that other people think is just bizarre and a part of their world we can never access.”

As to why feeling of presence seems to be especially common in life-threatening situations, Blanke says he can only speculate. In some situations, the lack of oxygen might make the illusion more common, he says. But he also notes that people who are recently widowed often report feeling the presence of their lost spouse. Clearly there are other psychological factors that can come into play, he says.

Selected and edited from – http://www.wiredDOTcom/2014/11/robot-ghost/

**  **

         Since you consider me a ‘Presence’ and I have acknowledged such. This would appear a little awkward to most people but you are very accepting of your conditions and my own. Post. - Amorella

         1518 hours. So I am, Amorella. 

Notes - horizon / sunsets /

         Mid-morning. The Gulf is quite calm again today, however the color is varied with quite harmonic shades of blue to the horizon. Up from the horizon a light mist up to white and subtly mottled gray in clouds above, which is a Florida, blue Autumn sky. The seemingly vast space can easily fit in Merlyn, Arthur and those like times for an endlessly rebounding on paper and in tablet. The setting makes it easy for human imagination to soar along low along the west coast in large stable pelican-feathered wings. – Amorella

         1001 hours. I owe my friends at least this much – a horizon no closer than the vertical black kid safety bars across the Meiber’s condo outer balcony.

         Time to head for the pool, boy. Post. - Amorella


          Sunset photos - Monday and Tuesday:

                While not spectacular I still find them interesting in texture and light.

Notes - working on G. genealogy / supper and more work

         Mid-afternoon. You are Carol spent about an hour at the pool swimming with Kim, Paul and the boys. You had lunch at Dockside Dave’s (excellent onion rings) and supper last night at the nearby Brown Boxer after you found the pizza place is closed on Tuesdays. You are finding this genealogical work is more time consuming than you thought it would be. You have changed dates and people along the way into Grandma Five but you are pleased to be seeing the descendent lines from Renaldo and Criteria filling out in a more logical manner. – Amorella

         1526 hours. Carol and Kim are reading and Paul is working on his computer while the boys are napping for another afternoon at the pool. I am about to clean up the mess in the Grandma Five descendant’s list at the beginning of the segment.

         Post. - Amorella

         2027 hours. Carol made dinner tonight, baked chicken, green beans and a tossed salad then we drove to Kandy Kitchen for small scoops of ice cream. I am finished with the genealogy for the night; stopping at the English segment of Grandma 5.

         We will continue tomorrow as time permits. Post. – Amorella

         2034 hours. We had a wonderful sunset tonight. I will post it tomorrow. 

Notes - a Grandma 3 revising / genealogy in Grandma segments

       Mid-morning. Everyone was up early for breakfast sandwiches built and cooked by Paul. You had a good discussion on education and medicine while the boys played after breakfast. The education arguments you have heard many times, but the medical procedures used by Paul in near emergency or emergency situations in the OR are interesting in themselves. It seems to you that the operating room is a purely existential exercise played out in real time as patient conditions warrant. Sometimes the patient is on cruise and other times in seconds the patient is on crash. The patient has no conscious idea what is going on in crisis or no. – Amorella

         1033 hours. Currently Kim, Paul and the boys are at the pool after beach play for the last hour. The house is quiet other than Carol talking to Mary Lou (which well within the range of normal conditions). The Gulf is a continuing placid in motion and a light green in color. The setting is quite calming with the sea color and the blue sky and a thin line of cirrus clouds about 25 degrees above the horizon.

         1543 hours. Grandma dates are working out okay.

** **

Newly Revised Grandma 3:

          In Scotland in 590 AD, Merlyn is seventy-six and King Arthur is thirty-one. In this same year forty-one year old Lord Renaldo’s wife, Lady Criteria, who is 35, gives birth to a son they name Thomas. The year 590 AD also begins the use of the Julian calendar. And, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Ethelbert becomes King in Kent. In this same year in Northumbria along the northeast coast of Scotland and England the Celtic-Britons on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne are invaded by Germanic tribes of Angles.

            In 622, Lord Thomas marries an Anglican from Northumbria, Lady Hilda. By 636, Glastonbury, St. Albans, and Winchester, England and Southern Ireland are Roman Catholic, and by 679, the Anglicans of Northumbria had begun to threaten Scotland.

** **

         Post. - Amorella

         Tonight after supper and after the boys were preoccupied, and then to bed, you and Paul watched “Edge of Tomorrow”. Last night you both watched “Divergent”. Carol and Kim read on their books.

         2150 hours. This ‘date’ mix up business in the Grandma stories is falling into place easily; however, I need to have this genealogy software updated so I can more easily tell how many generations are taking place since Criteria and Renaldo. Both are the focus before working on chapter eight.

         Post. - Amorella

Notes - up the coast / 53.4 for 30 / Merlyn: AD 0514-0620 /

         Mid-morning. Everyone had breakfast to each their own. The boys are squirting each other with water canisters on the balcony and you completed thirty minutes of exercises. No talk of going to Tarpon Springs yet so perhaps not today. Linda is coming over around three for a visit. Everyone else is getting dressed. You had a shower before the rush for preparing to meet the public day.

         0900 hours. We are settling into a routine. Tomorrow it will be back in the eighties. Kim, Paul and the boys are looking forward to use of the pool. It is heated but not so much for as cool as it has been. Young life brings so much commotion with it. They are fun with lots of energy, commotion or not.

         Before working on Merlyn and the necessary accompanying dates check out Merlyn on Google and assortments for reasonable time sources, plus check out historical events for needed dates as reinforcement much as we have already. This may take some time but there is not much of a difficulty level involved. The family is readying for Tarpon Springs, once, not too long ago, the sponge capital of the world. Post. - Amorella

         You took the recommended route to Tarpon Springs (Rt. 19), walked about after a run-by of the Greek sponge area docks and small shops and restaurants. Kim chose Dimitri’s on the Water on Dodecanese Boulevard owned by The Salivaras Family. After an excellent Greek lunch experience another walk-about by Kim, Paul and the boys. You took Rt. 19-A to Clearwater Beach and Gulf Boulevard on home to Madeira Beach – a thirty-mile adventure at fifty-three point four miles per gallon; the highest you ever recorded for that many miles distant. Even Carol was excited to see such a high mark driving the recommended speed limit almost the whole way. – Amorella. Paul and the boys are asleep, Kim is reading Lisa Scottoline’s Don’t Go and Carol is buying a newspaper while awaiting a call from Linda. The Gulf is very placid today. Four old men are sitting in chairs fishing, a few women, young and old are in bathing suits, that’s about it outside the Meibers’ condo you having been renting at least once a year for some ten or eleven years. - Amorella

         You took the recommended way to Tarpon Springs (Rt. 19), walked about after a run-by of the Greek sponge area docks and small shops and restaurants. Kim chose Dimitri’s on the Water on Dodecanese Boulevard owned by The Salivaras Family. After an excellent Greek lunch experience another walk-about by Kim, Paul and the boys. You took Rt. 19-A to Clearwater Beach and Gulf Boulevard on home to Madeira Beach – a thirty-mile adventure at fifty-three point four miles per gallon; the highest you ever recorded for that many miles distant. Even Carol was excited to see such a high mark driving the recommended speed limit almost the whole way. – Amorella. Paul and the boys are asleep, Kim is reading Lisa Scottoline’s Don’t Go and Carol is buying a newspaper while awaiting a call from Linda. The Gulf is very placid today. Four old men are sitting in chairs fishing, a few women, young and old are in bathing suits, that’s about it outside the Meibers’ condo you having been renting at least once a year for some ten or eleven years. – Amorella

** **

Merlin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Merlin is a legendary figure best known as the wizard featured in Arthurian legend. The standard depiction of the character first appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, written c. 1136, and is based on an amalgamation of previous historical and legendary figures. Geoffrey combined existing stories of Myrddin Wylit (Merlinus Caledonensis), a North Brythonic prophet and madman with no connection to King Arthur, with tales of the Romano-British war leader Ambrosius Aurelianus to form the composite figure he called Merlin Ambrosius (Welsh: Myrddin Emrys). He is allegedly buried in the Broceliande forest, near Paimpont in Brittany.

Geoffrey's rendering of the character was immediately popular, especially in Wales. Later writers expanded the account to produce a fuller image of the wizard. Merlin's traditional biography casts him as a cambion: born of a mortal woman, sired by an incubus, the non-human from whom he inherits his supernatural powers and abilities. The name of Merlin's mother is not usually stated but is given as Adhan in the oldest version of the Prose Brut. Merlin matures to an ascendant sage-hood and engineers the birth of Arthur through magic and intrigue. Later authors have Merlin serve as the king's advisor until he is bewitched and imprisoned by the Lady of the Lake.

Name and etymology

The name "Merlin" derives from the Welsh Myrddin, the name of the bard Myrddin Wylit, one of the chief sources for the later legendary figure. Geoffrey of Monmouth Latinised the name to Merlinus in his works. The medievalist Gaston Paris suggests that Geoffrey chose the form Merlinus rather than the regular Merdinus to avoid a resemblance to the Anglo-Norman word merde (from Latin merda), for faeces.

Clas Myrddin, or Merlin's Enclosure, is an early name for Great Britain stated in the Third Series of Welsh Triads.

The Celticist A. O. H. Jarman suggests the Welsh name Myrddin was derived from the toponym Caerfyrddin, the Welsh name for the town known in English as Carmarthen. This contrasts with the popular but false folk etymology that the town was named for the bard. The name Carmarthen derives from the town's previous Roman name, Moridunum, itself derived from Celtic Brittonic *moridunon, "sea fortress.”

Geoffrey's sources

Geoffrey's composite Merlin is based primarily on Myrddin Wylit, also called Merlinus Caledonensis, and Aurelius Ambrosius, a mostly fictionalised version of the historical war leader Ambrosius Aurelianus. The former had nothing to do with Arthur: in British poetry he was a bard driven mad after witnessing the horrors of war, who fled civilization to become a wild man of the wood in the 6th century.^[10] Geoffrey had this individual in mind when he wrote his earliest surviving work, the Prophetiae Merlini (Prophecies of Merlin), which he claimed were the actual words of the legendary madman.

Geoffrey's Prophetiae do not reveal much about Merlin's background. When he included the prophet in his next work, Historia Regum Britanniae, he supplemented the characterisation by attributing to him stories about Aurelius Ambrosius, taken from Nennius’ Historia Brittonum Nennius. According to Nennius, Ambrosius was discovered when the British king Vortigern was trying to erect a tower. The tower always collapsed before completion, and his wise men told him the only solution was to sprinkle the foundation with the blood of a child born without a father. Ambrosius was rumoured to be such a child, but when brought before the king, he revealed the real reason for the tower's collapse: below the foundation was a lake containing two dragons who fought a battle representing the struggle between the Saxons and the Britons, which struggle suggested that the tower would never stand under the leadership of Vortigern, but only under that of Ambrosius. (This is why Ambrosius is 'given' the kingdom, or the 'tower' -- he tells Vortigern to go elsewhere and says 'I will stay here'. The tower is metaphorically the kingdom, which is the notional ability to beat the Saxons.) Geoffrey retells this story in Historia Regum Britanniæ with some embellishments, and gives the fatherless child the name of the prophetic bard, Merlin. He keeps this new figure separate from Aurelius Ambrosius and, with regard to his changing of the original Nennian character, he states that Ambrosius was also called 'Merlin', that is, 'Ambrosius Merlinus'. He goes on to add new episodes that tie Merlin into the story of King Arthur and his predecessors, such as the bringing of the stones for Stonehenge from Preseli Hills in south-west Wales and Ireland.

Geoffrey dealt with Merlin again in his third work,Vita Merlini. He based the Vita on stories of the original 6th-century Myrddin.

Though set long after his time frame for the life of "Merlin Ambrosius", he tries to assert the characters are the same with references to King Arthur and his death as told in the Historia Regum Britanniae.

Merlin Ambrosius, or Myrddin Emrys

Geoffrey's account of Merlin Ambrosius' early life in the Historia Regum Britanniae is based on the story of Ambrosius in the Historia Brittonum. He adds his own embellishments to the tale, which he sets in Carmarthen, Wales (Welsh: Caerfyrddin). While Nennius' Ambrosius eventually reveals himself to be the son of a Roman consul, Geoffrey's Merlin is begotten on a king's daughter by an incubus. The story of Vortigern's tower is essentially the same; the underground dragons, one white and one red, represent the Saxons and the British, and their final battle is a portent of things to come.

At this point Geoffrey inserts a long section of Merlin's prophecies, taken from his earlier Prophetiae Merlini. He tells only two further tales of the character. In the first, Merlin creates Stonehenge as a burial place for Aurelius Ambrosius. In the second, Merlin's magic enables Uther Pendragon to enter into Tinagel in disguise and father his son Arthur with his enemy's wife, Igraine. These episodes appear in many later adaptations of Geoffrey's account. As Lewis Thorpe notes, Merlin disappears from the narrative after this; he does not tutor and advise Arthur as in later versions.

Selected and edited from Wikipedia – Merlin

** **

         2045 hours. Looking back to 29 October Amorella wrote:

** **

         You have been doing some research in the last hour and found, according to Gardner’s The Illustrated Bloodline of the Holy Grail Arthur was sixteen in A.D. 575 that would make his birth in 559 and he lived until 603. Pendragon and Merlyn were both titles.

** **

         2109 hours. I am going to go with Merlyn’s birth in the 6^th century and die sometime in the early 7^th century.

         I agree. Let’s say 514 to 620. Post. – Amorella

Notes - Madeira Beach / Papa is an arthur

        Mid-morning. You were up for Paul’s breakfast and read the Sunday paper. The others headed down to John’s Pass for a walkabout before heading to Target for prescription meds for Brennan’s cough. You did thirty some minutes of exercises. Linda will arrive around eleven. The Gulf is much calmer today. When you arrived yesterday shortly after noon it looked like Atlantic waves on a stormy day; very turbulent but quite romantically pretty with the high white tipped waves shining in the sunlight in the quite brisk chilly north wind. 

         Yesterday when Kim, Paul and the boys drove to Linda and Bill’s from the airport they were met with Bill’s Halloween fare of tricks and treats in the front yard. Also, they took a tour, as you had, of the backyard, which won a Tampa Garden award last week (on the local news with photos and an interview with Bill). Most everything growing in his back and side yards is native to Key West. In fact, sitting in the swing in the back is like sitting in Key West. On the way to Madeira Beach after crossing the Gandy Bridge, following tradition, you stopped at the old 1950’s Crab Shack for lunch. - Amorella

         1029 hours. Bill’s yard is most awesome. Sitting in the backyard is like sitting at a bit compacted Hemingway’s yard at Key West or more like the back yard of one of the homes on a side street off Duval – cool, laid back thoughts and memories herein invoked. The Gulf has a varied greenish cast this morning, few white caps. From the balcony it is what one might see looking out at Lake Erie – Linda just called, she and Bill are meeting us at eleven thirty at the Conch Republic. The others just returned.

         You discovered an interesting article on page 5P in the Sunday Tampa Bay Times titled, “Perspective: Things don’t occur for a reason” by Konika Banerjee and Paul Bloom. Banerjee is a graduate student and Bloom is her professor of psychology at Yale. Post. - Amorella

         1618 hours. Here are some excerpts from the article.

** **

           . . . “Unsurprisingly, a majority of religious believers said they thought that [these] events happened for a reason and that they had been purposefully designed (presumably by God). But many atheists did so as well, and a majority of atheists in a related study also said that they believed in fate – defined as the view that life events happen for a reason and that there is an underlying order to life that determines how events turn out.

            These atheists’ responses weren’t just the product of living in America’s highly religious society. Research done at Queen’s University in Belfast by the psychologists Bethany Heywood and Jesse Bering found that British atheists were just as likely as American atheists to believe that their life events had underlying purposes, even though Britain is far less religious than America. . . .

            This tendency to see meaning in life events seems to reflect a more general aspect of human nature: our powerful drive to reason serves us well because it helps us figure out why people behave as they do and to respond appropriately. But it can lead us into error when we overextend it, causing us to infer psychological states even when none exist. This fosters the illusion that the world itself is full of purpose and design. . . .

            Whatever the origin of our belief in life’s meaning, it might seem to be a blessing. Some people find it reassuring to think that there really are no accidents, that what happens to us – including the most terrible of events – reflects an unfolding plan. . . .

            Even those who are devout should agree, at least here on Earth, things just don’t naturally work out so that people get what they deserve. If there is such a thing as divine justice or karmic retribution, the world we live in is not the place to find it. Instead, the events of human life unfold in a fair and just manner only when individuals and society work hard to make this happen. We should resist our natural urge to think otherwise.”

From – Konica Banerjee and Paul Bloom. Tampa Bay Times, “Perspective: Things don’t occur for a reason,” p. 5P, Sunday, November 2, 2014

** **

         You fervently believe that this sort of scientific hypothesis is closer to the truth in the world than any other. This is the main reason why you once believed that your ‘seeing aspects of Angelic manifestation’ early in your life or later or both was accidently. You would swear this is a sense of ‘accident’ is true in a court of law or metaphysical circumstance. – Amorella

         1649 hours. Yes, if the angelic-like presence was real or imagination, either way it was accidently. That is, I opened a door expecting to find nothing and something was there instead so I shut the door, as I was being impolite and rude. That is the way I look at the experience. It makes no difference really because for a short time in 1987-88 my actions were that the Angelic Presence was real. The surprise and shock still exists that I thought it was real, that is the underlying psychological state I have the difficulty with. I think the Merlyn stories are an amends to my sense of self. I made a mistake and am attempting to make an interesting and readable story from it. Thankfully no one has bought a copy as far as I am aware. I like the invisibility right out in the open. Very funny. I would just as soon nobody buy a copy. How cool would that be, have a book out there, and eventually a series, and not one buyer. I imagine though I will eventually have one, and what would be the irony if it were accidental. This is an example that fits my sense of humor. While I have my doubts on many things in this world, dark humor is something I do not doubt, because I have an example of it. Humor gives me all the element of meaning I need about life, the world and the universe and perhaps even the beyond.

         Owen just came in and said, “Why are you in here [the bedroom writing]?” and you said, “I am a writer.” He immediately went to his father on the balcony and said, “Papa is an arthur.” So there's more humor for you. Post. - Amorella