Site notes — Clarity of Being

The design of this site

This site has grown in piecemeal fashion since late 1997 from a very small and crude beginning as a very basic 'shop window' for my literary works (only). Eventually the steadily accumulating 'spirituality' and self-actualization material, including my Alexander Technique page, split off from my personal site and then progressively that new site took on its own identity.

All along, because I was presenting significant content, I wanted to sidestep all temptation to copy others who create 'professional'-looking websites full of frames (slow loading, often a cluttered screen, and impossible for most search engines to index), distracting logos, images and animations, and taking an age to load into one's browser. As explained in Exit 'spirituality' — Enter clear-mindedness, it wasn't till well into 2007 that I finally recognised the true nature of 'spirituality 'and then dispensed with it — this site's title then changing from Self-Realization and Spirituality to Self-Realization and Clear-Mindedness. Much more recently it changed to the current one.

I seek in this site to put priority on clarity, directness and fast loading. Any graphic or picture here has to have strong justification for its inclusion; it must point to or enhance the content and 'message' without adding distraction or unduly lengthening page loading time. I totally exclude animations, for they're a great distraction from the contents of a serious site such as this. For this reason too I use plain colours and for the most part not images as backgrounds for text, and keep them to light colours for maximum readability.

Light pastel colours in any case resonate with and encourage a clear-minded and expansive outlook and, when used in a focused, functional way, have minimal resonance with the extremely problematical astral non-reality of illusion and delusion (whereas the colours used for the vast majority of 'spirituality' sites resonate strongly with it — not only because of the colours chosen but also because of the ways they're used), and thus the sort of colours that I've chosen are particularly appropriate generally for sites that truly aim to benefit people.

Those running or thinking of setting up spirituality-oriented sites would do well to heed this latter point, and to read Exit 'spirituality — enter clear-mindedness and start understanding what extremely serious trouble their 'spirituality' is leading them into.

From about 2017 onwards I've been applying changes to all my sites to make them increasingly 'friendly' to mobile device users.

Compatibility with mobile phone type devices

This had become an ongoing headache for me as search engines get increasingly demanding that sites be 'mobile-friendly'.

For a long time it had been clear policy of mine to ignore the requirements of such mobile devices for a site to display properly, apart from doing my best to keep my page design as flexible as reasonably possible. However, as from late 2017 I finally bit the bullet and much surprised myself by succeeding in converting all pages on all my five sites to notional 'mobile-friendly' status, compatible with any screen width down to 320px, using 'responsive design' CSS coding, and redesigning sections where side-by-side elements wouldn't fit usefully within 320px screen width.

I say 'notional', because actually a fair number of the pages are really too long to be at all convenient on a mobile phone, and there's nothing further I can workably do about that, apart from having split a few very long pages into two. Basically mobile phones are unsuitable devices for such long, content-packed pages.

I was effectively forced to bring about this change because of Google and presumably other search engines starting to penalize sites that were considered not to be 'mobile-friendly', together with a sustained decline in traffic to all my sites. It was thus an essential part of my clutching at straws in attempts to stem or reverse that downward trend.

As from August 2020, I've been systematically going through all my web pages to increase their score in Google's new Core Web Vitals page ranking system, which is geared towards making pages as fast-loading and readable as possible in a mobile device. That includes ensuring that all images have their dimensions individually specified, and putting all CSS code for the top screenful or so into the respective page — i.e., transferring that from any linked CSS file.

— Er, well, except that when I started looking at the practicalities of transferring the relevant CSS code into individual pages I backed out from that one, as it would make the pages' styling much more difficult for me to manage. There's bloody good reason for using a common stylesheet file, so that the site owner can change styling on all pages simply by making changes in the stylesheet file. That wouldn't matter much if I had one to a few pages, but I have a lot of them, and have to seriously take into account ease and efficiency of site management at this end.

In the course of doing that overhaul, I also split the many over-long paragraphs and, where workable, also splitting some seriously over-long sentences where I noticed them.

I'd also have liked to split up long pages altogether to make things easier still, but it would be unworkable for me to do that willy-nilly, because I simply couldn't cope with a substantially larger number of pages to manage than I already have. There were just a very few extra-long pages that I was able to split into two, because they both had excellent natural break points reasonably near half-way through, but I haven't found suitable break points in other excessively long pages to enable me to do a similar split of them into two each — at least, that would make sense from the reading or management standpoint.

So, at least for the moment we're stuck with a fair proportion of over-long pages, but I am still seeking to work out one or more ways to ameliorate that issue.

If you find the text size too small…

Occasionally I get a complaint that the normal body text size is too small on my sites. If you have a body text size issue yourself specifically on this site rather than generally, please note that I've set the default body text size on my sites to be a little larger than standard — 120% Times New Roman / Serif. So, if you have a problem with that, what you probably need to do is to set a default body text size or/and font in your browser. However, if this site's default body text size is an issue for you, please do let me know, being specific about how it differs from what you get on most other sites, so that I can look further into the matter.

Google suppressing this site

Trust 'God' Google to throw out the baby with the bathwater and make itself unavailable for wronged site owners to raise serious ranking errors with them!

I have to say this loud and clear — Shame on you, Google! — Impartial? Non-partisan? — Never! (i.e., except when it happens to suit your own beliefs and financially-driven agenda.)

What Google is doing in the name of down-ranking poor quality and harmful sites (on the face of it, a great and honourable thing to be doing) is, among other things, playing 'God' and supporting widely accepted and cherished orthodoxies against the true honest brokers who blow the whistle about the harmfulness of said orthodoxies, and, at least in the case of this site, misinterpreting articulate and rationally based challenge and presented alternative as misinformation and indication of a poor quality or potentially harmful site.

I can only reasonably assume that Google has misinterpreted this site — whether wilfully or through their over-reliance on 'blunt instrument' algorithms — as contradicting scientific or at least 'expert' consensus. The fact is that neither this site nor I myself in any aspect of my life contradict genuine scientific or expert consensus — though, like anyone with their head properly screwed on, I do on occasions hold such consensus up to proper scrutiny in case it has become a mere orthodoxy, as all too often happens.

What I do contradict (outspokenly) is belief systems and orthodoxies (which latter are simply more belief systems, albeit generally more specialized). No matter how consensual those may be, they are intrinsically unscientific and 'self-dishonest', because genuine science and expertise requires an open mind with NO belief / orthodoxy at all, and is based upon carefully gathered observations and rational deductions and working hypotheses (not beliefs) based on them.

As I repeat ad nauseam on this site, any belief is a total block against seeing what's really there and what's really going on, in any subject area impinged upon by that belief. — And failing thus to gain that information, at least in undistorted form, means no genuine understanding and therefore no resolution of any issue impinged upon by that belief.

Yet most Google searches that are extremely relevant to particular pages on this site get results lists full of piles upon piles of belief-based sites, which are all intrinsically harmfully misinformational, given priority over this truly authentic site, which latter is often left off the list altogether. Frankly, this is an outrageous situation. Web searches for Google suppressing this site show that this site is far from alone in being wrongly suppressed — though admittedly I expect that some of those aggrieved parties may not necessarily have been very effective with their SEO, or may have undistinguished content — I can vouch for high-grade content and good SEO only for my own sites.

Try doing a search query for the following two strings, both of which are particularly relevant to a respective page on this site: and clear minded practicality (a query that led somebody to this site's homepage), and experiment to close the astral. Note that the 'the' in the second query is important; no results from this site will be readily found without it.

Run the query in DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Ecosia, Google, Bing, and Yahoo!.

I myself found that the first query showed nothing from this site in Google's results list at all, even when the small 'show all results' link was clicked — whereas the five other search engines all showed this site's homepage, three at top of list, and the other two at sixth position.

The second string again got no results at all from this site on Google's list, and the other five engines all listed this site's page The Astral about to be Closed Down? — four with it top of list, and one at seventh.

That's just a tiny sample of the situation that's been just getting worse and worse despite all my best efforts, over a number of years.

Clearly, then, the high rankings in those other search engines speaks volumes for the sterling work I've put into this site, with unique and particularly high-grade content, which dramatically turns around the lives of people who take up the rationally-based (as distinct from belief-based) self-actualization methods I present here, and indeed it actually saves lives. In addition, at this stage this is a particularly high quality site with regard to presentation, accessibility and SEO, even though of course always having room for further improvements.

So, don't any nasty little troll or 'holier than thou' supposed 'expert' come telling me that this is indeed a crap site and that Google is right in suppressing it! People who do that are largely describing themselves or their issues rather than what or whom they vent their spleen upon!

Usually the only way to get any page on this site to show at high to top of list in Google is, to enter the page's title or something exceedingly close to it as your search query — which hardly anyone would have cause to do.

That tallies with the real human traffic for this site nowadays being only some 6%* of what it was in 2014–15 (when human visits per day were in the 600s to 700s), despite the fact that this site back then was a real mess in SEO terms, completely mobile-unfriendly, and built with no regard to accessibility for devices for vision-impaired or otherwise disabled people. Since then I had periodic round upon round of site improvements, but the traffic continued to fall regardless. In fact the fall in search engine referrals was almost all down to Google, for the other search engines, having enormously fewer users than Google, always got this site only a small number of click-throughs, and their referrals have decreased only a little (no doubt a little knock-on effect of this site's loss of nearly all its Google-sourced traffic).

Indeed, nowadays google.com referrals for this site are mostly in single figures per day, whereas it used to be in the 300s to 400s. DuckDuckGo, with hugely less users (though getting a little more popular now because of the privacy aspect), is nowadays up from single figure to around mid-teens.

A lot of online research over the last couple of years has pointed to the reason for this suppression of this site in Google. It appears that the primary factor would be that this site is vociferously speaking out against psychiatry and so-called 'mental health' (the latter just a euphemism for psychiatry), and against ALL religion and other forms of 'spirituality', because of their complete lack of a rational and genuinely scientific basis, and, of all things, is 'arrogantly' putting forward a tested and validated rationally-based alternative to the whole lot that really works for those who properly take it up.

That is, this alternative, presented on this site, recognises the underlying cause(s) of the problems embedded in the 'human condition' and gives people the means to resolve those issues themselves — for which of course the psychiatry, religion and 'spirituality' orthodoxies seek to dismiss and discredit me, seeing that it demonstrates the bankruptcy of their respective whole belief-based approaches, and challenges a wide range of vested financial interests (effectively socially acceptable scams and semi-scams) in the process.

Psychiatry / 'mental health' is 'scientifically' based only with regard to means to suppress what are extremely unhelpfully regarded as 'symptoms' (which isn't the real need at all), but it's grossly unscientific in its fundamental basis, because it fails to apply the basic principles of resolving ANY issue!!! — And therefore it fails even to recognise that there would be actual addressable causes for what it extremely unhelpfully interprets as 'mental illness'.

I explain about that, complete with the real, genuinely scientific (i.e., rationally based), alternative in How all psychiatrists could begin genuinely to help their clients. I explain there how actually ALL psychiatric and 'mental health' workers are total NON-experts on what they're supposed to be experts on (i.e., the human mind), because their materialist-reductionist belief system distorts out of all recognition their notion of what 'the mind' really is, and so they try to treat it as though it were a part of the physical body, which it's not at all. So, their whole modality is based on a non-expert and indeed consistently brazenly ignorant consensus — NOT a scientific nor an expert consensus at all, and it does countless patients victims of theirs immense harm, long-term.

How do I 'know'? — Why, because, as I explain on the aforementioned page, I myself was forced to work out the real solution for my own survival after I'd unwittingly dropped myself into deep trouble through involvement in spirituality and especially 'spiritual healing' of various types.

For more pointers to the genuine integrity and authenticity of this site, please carefully read:

• How This Site Stands Out From the Crowd…

• About Philip Goddard

This site 'goes secure'!

As from 24 November 2016, this site now has an active SSL certificate, which means that its basic URL now starts with https instead of http. Connections using that URL are encrypted (i.e., secure) ones.

In practical terms this measure was hardly necessary security-wise, because nobody is being asked for private personal information on this site. Where they're asked for passwords, credit card details and the like, it's on secure pages on the respective PayPal or Amazon site.

I chose to 'go HTTPS' for this site for two reasons:

(a) I had a so-far unused free SSL certificate in my 1&1 website hosting package;

(b) I'd read that Google is increasingly seeking to encourage and eventually pressure all site owners towards making their sites secure, and would be presently giving a small ranking advantage for those sites that are 'secure' in that way — which of course translates into a small ranking disadvantage to sites that haven't done that.

That free certificate was applicable to only one domain, and as the need was really to have all my sites covered, in January 2016 I transferred all five sites from 1&1 to Kualo — a much superior hosting company in virtually all ways, who is all set up for their customers to install auto-renewing free SSL certificates for all one's sites at a single click per site.

Please let me know if you run into any problems with the site's redirection system, which is supposed to ensure that all requests for pages or other files at http://www.clarity-of-being.org are all immediately changed to the https version of the respective URL. Thank you.

Images used on this site

All images used on this site, whether they're photos or other graphics, have been produced by me — with the exceptions listed below. I claim copyright on all the photos of mine, but not on the non-photo graphics. However, as noted further below, I do NOT allow deep linking to any images or graphics at all on this site, because doing that is bandwidth theft.

The photos of me used on this or any other site of mine have been taken by other people on my behalf, but the photos are still my copyright.

The images to which I have no rights are as follows:

• The smileys , and — from a forum board
• The 'smiley demon':
  , from a supposedly free icons / graphics site
• Rowan Williams, one-time Archbishop of Canterbury, shaking hands with Tensin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama
• Artistic representations of Archangel Michael, Kwan Yin, Melchizedek (but the text and skull-and-crossbones sign are my additions)
• Stylized representations of a church and of a stained glass window with crucifix (again, all text and skull-and-crossbones signs are my additions)
• Image of a patient about to undergo ECT
• Images of various psychiatric medications.
• Photo of a ouija board being used (the warnings on it are added by me).
• Photo of a couple of Highland cattle, taken by a friend of a friend, and apparently in the public domain. The words of the cows' comment are mine — though plenty of other people have got there first, as revealed by a Web search.
• Photo of Donald Trump ranting, from some news site. I've adapted his words, however, for a more positive purpose!
• The sign (from a range of apparently free informational icons found in a Google search), as distinct from my much longer-standing home-made little sign used for my Glossary references.

Accessibility Policy

The original design of the site was carried out a very long time ago, with no regard to accessibility for the special browsers and screen readers used by visually impaired people. In particular I used tables extensively for various layout purposes, and I didn't give any of the tables 'summary' attributes. Tables are notorious for their incomprehensibility to such screen readers.

I now use a minimum of tables for layout purposes, wherever possible using CSS for layout- though it's proved impossible to avoid using tables altogether.

My wish is eventually to make this whole site fully accessible to all comers, but that would be a big task that I can't realistically be expected to accomplish quickly, and, by the look of things, is unrealistic to expect to be fully implemented. I do, however, occasionally make further accessibility-oriented changes where I see that they'd be workable, and this is an ongoing process.

If you have any particular accessibility recommendations concerning this site, I'd be interested to hear from you about it — though I'm really interested only in genuine assistance with accessibility, for I'm well aware that many people simply feel that they have to nitpick and make issues in order to impose their will upon others, and I'm not interested in that sort of agenda.

Privacy Policy

Right from the beginning I set up my five websites all to respect visitors' privacy, and not to track them. Indeed, I use no cookies at all, and I've employed no 'spying' techniques such as web bugs.

I do carry out a check of my daily website statistics, but these don't show visitors' personal information apart from certain technical details — their host or IP address, their browser, their operating system, and usually any search text that they've used in order to find the particular page they've requested. That's standard data supplied by any hosting company. I don't share that information with anyone, and unlike various organisations, I do NOT put my website logfiles online for others to see — an incredibly stupid thing for any person or organisation ever to do, because of all sorts of problems that are caused by that practice.

The forms that I use for contact or visitors' book entry do ask for your email address, but I guarantee that those addresses and any other personal information that you may supply (such as postal address, required for some purposes) won't be passed on to any third parties, nor placed in public view — except in the very unlikely event of it being required in the course of a criminal investigation or legal proceedings or serious misconduct of a particular site visitor.

I also give assurance that I'm very proactive with regard to security on my computer and websites, and I've still not had one instance of my computer or any of my websites being infected or compromised by any 'virus' or hacking attempt, since starting with my first computer (1986 or 87); I first went online in late 1997. Thus so far I have a spotless track record with regard to keeping my data and sites secure.

Also, through daily examination of very detailed activity statistics of all my websites, I'd know at least within a day if any of the sites had been hacked, and, because I keep my master copy of all the sites on my own computer (with a multi-prong backup strategy), I could at once simply re-upload the whole of the affected site, while also wiping out any files / folders/ configurations that hackers had put there.

One notable security feature of my sites is that, apart from a particularly secure form-mail script, they don't use any server-side software such as FCKEditor, WordPress, or the multitude of other server-side systems people use to run or edit their pages. Thus my sites lack the great security hazards that so many have. I'm reminded of that great advantage every day when I examine my website statistics and see the long lists of attempts to locate FCKEditor and all manner of server-side scripts (which fortunately are not there to be found), clearly for the purpose of hacking the respective site.

So, while 100% safety is more of an ideal than a reality anywhere in our life experience, my sites must be very high in the safety stakes as compared with sites generally.

I'm pleased to report that I've now (late September 2021) extinguished one small privacy compromise that I'd made on my sites. Please see next item…

The Facebook 'Like' and 'Share' buttons now replaced with more benign 'Share' button

The small standard Facebook 'Like and 'Share' buttons that had (dis)graced the top of all my significant content pages (on all my sites) have been replaced, as from late September 2021, by a more conspicuous and enticing home-made 'Share' button.

This isn't just a cosmetic change. For one thing, I'd come to the conclusion that the Like button was probably harming rather than helping my sites' reputation in the eyes of the majority of site visitors, who have the 'sheep' mentality — so it would be really worthwhile to abandon for that reason alone.

Secondly, both the standard Like and Share buttons used an actually hideously large embedded script, which lengthened page loading times and had been an unnecessary drain on many mobile users' data allowance. One purpose of that script is to further Facebook's tracking of its users across all sites carrying FB buttons — regardless of whether those people click on the buttons. That's sneaky and rather disreputable practice, and I'm glad to see the back of it on my sites.

What's significant about the new Share button isn't just its appearance and size but also that it isn't using an embedded script at all. Instead, it uses a special 'share' URL — a plain hyperlink. That means faster page loading times and no tracking of any visitors to any of my sites. Of course, however, anyone who clicks on that button is taken to a Facebook page, so they do get tracked — but then anyone who uses Facebook is at least tacitly consenting to FB tracking them anyway.

There's still a catch, however, because I found that that 'share' URL doesn't work properly on at least a fair proportion of mobile phones, and this is a long-standing issue that Facebook has shown no interest in fixing despite many complaints. For this reason, to avoid annoyance and reports of the problem to me, I've pragmatically chosen to make that button invisible to all devices up to 480px viewport width, which should cover just about all mobile phones.

This site's rating in site-rating systems such as WOT

The site-rating system called Web of Trust (WOT) isn't at all the ideal indicator of a site's safety and trustworthiness that the WOT people seek to make out, and that we would all, surely, wish it to be. Much as with TripAdvisor, its rating system is widely misused by unscrupulous people with particular agendas.

For a long time this site here had a middling-'good' WOT rating, but at times had slipped into the 'unsatisfactory' range, and had even briefly gone into the red ('poor') range when there was a particular campaign against it by a group of individuals with beliefs that were evidently challenged by this site's contents. However, more recently it's become apparently firmly stuck in the 'middling' range (nowadays generally about 3 out of 5), while my Music Compositions site has a red 'Unsafe' rating and my Broad Horizon Nature site an orange 'Suspicious' rating, which are 'false positives', which WOT stonewalls against doing anything about despite repeated complaints from me.

It's really quite mortifying for me to see this site listed with a 'middling' rating, while masses of religious and 'spirituality' / New Age sites with extremely harmful contents and agendas, all proclaiming supposed 'truths' or 'facts' that are at best unverifiable and generally nonsensical to an aware and properly intelligent person, have 'good' or even 'excellent' ratings. That tells us of course about the 'sheep' mentality and nothing about the genuine worth or lack of it of either those sites or this one. However, at least WOT has now condescended to giving the site a green 'Trusted site' icon, so there has been a tiny bit of progress…

Rating sites on the basis of an agreeing or disagreeing belief is a blatant abuse of the WOT system, which results in various safe and trustworthy sites getting seriously misleading 'unsatisfactory' or 'poor' ratings. Typically, hardly any of the negative raters leave comments to explain their ratings, and a fair proportion of them seek to double the impact of their spurious ratings by adding a 'poor' child safety rating for sites that, as was the case here, have absolutely NO child safety issues.

The WOT system STILL doesn't make any genuine provision for filtering out or deleting such malicious / abusive ratings. In response to complaints about that, they simply give the opportunity to invite ratings for one's site from WOT members, supposedly to balance out the negative ratings. That's all very well, but WOT itself, while undoubtedly including many decent and highly principled members, also includes a significant faction of opinionated individuals who will give any site a 100% 'poor' rating if the site or its owner appears to be rocking their boat in any way. Those individuals are unsurprisingly quite commonly referred to as the 'WOT Mafia'.

In any case, if previous malicious ratings are left in place, which indeed they are, that means that even with quite a string of subsequent really positive ratings the site's overall rating can never rise very high and can all too easily slip back into the 'red' again. That has to be wrong, and the WOT admin are seriously at fault in not changing the system to a fair one that actually discards all spurious ratings. If a site is found to be safe and trustworthy (aside from whether one agrees with its contents), then all ratings that are claiming it to be otherwise should be discarded — surely!

Facebook 'Friend' requests

Please note that, with a FEW exceptions, I have a general policy NOT to accept Facebook 'friend' requests from people who know me only from this site.

Generally, Facebook 'friends' of mine would be established personal friends or particular individuals with whom I have one or more active interests / pursuits in common (apart from self-actualization) — such as natural history, nature photography / recording, classical music performance / composition, other quality artistic work, hiking / mountaineering, and in some cases even the odd really open-minded scientific or medical worker in particular fields. I do not include creative or other involvement in non-classical music, most of which is alien territory for me.

Anyone is welcome to 'follow' me on Facebook — i.e., to get automatic alerts to new posts on my Facebook timeline — but, with only a very small number of exceptions, my accepting people as 'friends' on Facebook on the basis of their interest in this site or self-actualization generally, would have pretty much the same negative effects as my accepting such people as social friends, and having them wasting my time and draining my energy with all their personal confusions and obstacles to genuine self-actualization.

Even if a person were scrupulous about not trying to grab my attention with their own life story, the mere fact of my accepting their 'friend' request would give out a wrong signal, sending out an implication that I accept the person along with all their confusions, so, supposedly, they needn't be diligent any more about getting on with their own self-actualization process.

So, if you know me just from this site and think there's really good reason to send me a 'friend' request, first of all you need to look with considerable honesty at your own motivations for wanting to take that action rather than just 'following' me on FB. And if you're really sure that that's an appropriate thing to do, the way to go about it is to use my Contact page to tell me that you're wanting to do that. In any case there's absolutely no point in doing so unless you've been using my self-actualization methods for quite a long time and have gained very considerable clarity, or/and you have some major practical interest in common with me, such as being a composer or naturalist or keen hiker / mountaineer. I routinely delete 'friend' requests that don't fit those criteria.

My Facebook profile isn't a place for the sort of idle tittle-tattle that saturates Facebook and makes my doing anything there feel like wading in an open sewer!

If you want to download a copy of the whole site…

It's much preferable to be reading the pages online, because I'm frequently updating or adding to them, and a downloaded copy would thus quite rapidly become out of date. However, I do understand that a minority of site visitors have practical reasons for not always being able to access the fully up-to-date online version.

On the other hand, as I'm not a deity, I'll definitely most inconsiderately die at some point, quite likely without giving advance warning, so on that basis it would be a good idea for anyone to have a reasonably up-to-date backup copy of the site.

Warning! Please don't use whole-site download agents on any of my sites. If you do try to download a whole site you will likely just get a 'forbidden access' response for every page or file request — but in some cases, where a mass download apparently starts okay, you'd most likely find that your IP address gets automatically banned from all my sites — i.e., at the point where your mass downloader has fallen into one of the site's bot traps. This restriction exists because my anti-bad-bot filters can't tell whether a mass download is legitimate or is a potentially harmful scraper bot — and I do my level best to keep my sites clear of all bad bots as well as more focused hacking attempts.

The Good News, however, is that you no longer need to use site-downloading software to get a backup copy of this site, because this is now available through a link on this site's Home Page. The download is in the form of a single zip file of the whole folder.

My policy on naming individuals mentioned in my personal narratives

In December 2019 I rethought my long-standing policy of giving only initials in most cases, and chose to default instead to giving a person's actual name just once on a page, then generally subsequent mentions of each respective person being identified just by initials.

I'm applying this in a flexible and sensitive manner, however, and take into account the factors / circumstances of each 'person' reference, and the appropriateness of identifying a particular person at all.

While I'm sure some people would strongly disapprove (Tell me something new, Mrs McStew!), I see this new policy as being the fairest and most rationally based. Pages that highlight problematical behaviours of named individuals or organisations generally have quite prominent disclaimer panels, as follows (or very similar):

This disclaimer, then, is a sort of safety-valve, to ensure that I'm not only being fair and objective in my accounts, but that I'm actually seen to be so — and that I'm not at all attacking poor defenceless individuals who have no opportunity to give their side of the story!

As I'm bluntly forthright over so many things, why am I coy about the odd 'swear word'?

Use of the occasional thoughtfully-placed taboo word, not over-frequently, and done in a creative manner, is part of anyone's healthily playful sense of humour, and definitely nothing to be so f*cking coy about! So, why the eff am I repeatedly considering it necessary for me to call a f*** a f*ck rather than a *uck a duck, even though I wince in discomfort every time I do it (because it's so silly and un-genuine)?

Surely, the whole point of my using such words here and there is a matter of being genuine and authentic in the way I express myself, so why am I being so confoundedly inconsistent? — Read on for my pathetic excuse!…

Years ago I was using Kaspersky Internet Security on my computer, and one day, in my regular browser (Firefox or Pale Moon at that time), I sought to load a page from the online copy of my literary works website — and Kaspersky BLOCKED it! — WTF??!

It turned out that the Kaspersky parental controls had got turned on despite my having turned them off originally, and my literary works site was on the parental controls blacklist for 'profanity' / 'obscenity'! What the hell had they found, that I didn't know I'd put there? There was absolutely no taboo content at all on that site!

Eventually I had to conclude that the cause of that site being blocked by Kaspersky was because in the summary of one of my short stories (Nothing, Sweet Nothings), the word 'p*ssy' (yes, with a 'u' — 'u' for 'disgusting', evidently!) was used twice, primarily with the informal meaning of 'cat', though, sure with a certain humorous double entendre intended. — And apparently they'd blacklisted the site just for that — unless their system had got confused between that site and another one! At that time my sixth novel (Forbidden Flood Warning) was still incomplete and thus not mentioned on that site. It would have added one further reference to a 'p*ssy', again primarily meaning 'cat' — and indeed not any old cat but Jeoffry, joint star of the novel —, but again with an initial humorous double entendre.

So, very reluctantly, I made a clear policy decision, which I did and still do detest, to 'fig-leaf' almost every possibly taboo word on any of my sites, to ensure that, surely, no over-prudish parental control algorithm would go blacklisting any of my sites. I'd SO much like to cut out all that stupid fig-leafing, but not at the price of losing some worthwhile site traffic.

Why did you give me a summary brush-off when I contacted you?

Unfortunately, the very vast majority of people who seek to contact me have unhelpful agendas. In many cases these are obvious, because the individuals concerned are seeking to be argumentative, criticising, or timewasting through asking questions that they actually need to answer for themselves if they really need them answered (much of the time they don't), or through seeking 'help' of one sort or another from me.

On the other hand there are plenty of others who contact me making out to be striking up some sort of friendship — and indeed many of those no doubt really believe that's all they're doing — while others contact me as would-be 'helpers', offering to rewrite pages on this site or giving me unsolicited advice on particular matters.

Just think about it. Somebody contacts me out of the blue, maybe with some appreciative words about this site, though generally showing that they haven't really understood very much of what they've read, and is offering to rewrite pages on this site, or to advise me about this and that, because, he claims, he has some special experience or indeed just considers that he's done a better job of such things himself (whether it be web pages, photography, sound recordings or music composition). You seriously believe that somebody contacting me out of the blue like that would be (a) trustworthy, (b) suitable to carry out any proffered service(s), and (c) free from intrusive and potentially disruptive agenda???! — Pull the other one, Cedric!

One such person actually showed all the more clearly how out of touch he was with what I and this site are about, for he was rather pushily offering to rewrite an initial, trial, page from this site for me, at $25 to $40 according to length. Did he mean him paying me, I (don't) wonder! In truth, the only category of people who I'd even consider letting loose on any task of improving web pages of mine would be no-soul people who are pretty long-established personal friends of mine. Such people are rarer than hens' teeth!

What those people contacting me don't realize is that they're effectively seeking to intrude upon me, and in one or more ways to dominate my life, with various agendas that would be a complete block to their and my self-actualization process if I allowed them to have their way. Genuine, healthy, friendships arise not in such a way at all, but through getting to know each other in everyday practical and often working situations.

Generally speaking, the people who make out to be prospective friends or helpers are remarkably blind to the agenda that they're running, and experience has shown that when I attempt to explain to them why I don't want contacts from them, it's a waste of time because the person doesn't understand what I'm going on about and then continues to try to persuade me to accept his/her 'advances' or gets argumentative, perhaps in quite negative ways.

That behaviour shows straightaway that the respective person is best 'cut loose' without further ado — and so nowadays I usually cut such people loose right at first contact or as soon as I'm reasonably sure of their agenda. It's too much of a drag on me and a waste of my time to give a personal explanation each time I get such a contact, so I simply accept it as given, that some individuals will feel hurt and rejected or abusively angry when I give them a summary brush-off (or simply don't reply).

Those people do need to have their intrusive behaviour patterns interrupted, so when I give them a brush-off rather than completely ignoring them, that's potentially a bit of help for them, as it's meant to be their cue to put themselves and their motivations /agendas to proper scrutiny — a task that neither I nor anyone else can do usefully on their behalf.

ANYONE can avoid getting such a brush-off by carefully reading the notes on my Contact page and being properly honest with themselves about to what extent whatever they're intending to say to me comes within areas that I say will lead to ignored messages or summary brush-offs. I know various people complain about the great long screed there, but it's there for good reason, and is my own attempt to be helpful so that nobody need end up with a figurative bloodied nose, if only they'd be properly honest with themselves, quite apart from with me!

Please also see Why won't you answer the questions that I want to ask you?.

Your site is too verbose and difficult to navigate. Can't you make it more concise?

Naturally I'm sorry that anyone has difficulties with my Clarity of Being site, but the issue isn't really quite what the complainants think. Periodically somebody or other complains to me in such terms. The problem here is that many people — no doubt the vast majority — don't properly understand the significance of this pioneering and extremely challenging site, and would always have great difficulty in doing so, never mind how I tried explaining to them.

It's basically a matter of flexibility or otherwise of one's mental functioning. They're clearly wanting a limited number of straightforward statements of supposed fact that they can then either believe or reject, and a simple set of instructions for self-healing and self-actualization, with a minimum of contextual and background information, so that they don't have to do a great deal of mental work in order to 'get there' (wherever 'there' might be!).

'Unfortunately', that mental work they're seeking to avoid doing (basically retraining oneself to observe and understand rather than read a short(ish) set of statements / instructions and remember / believe each) is essential work, and I'd be doing everyone a serious disservice by giving them a convenient-looking short-cut that in reality would ensure that they never got much from my working model and methodology.

So, to make the site more concise may appear to be a very reasonable thing to request of me, as also would requests for me to create a condensed, summary, version of the site without the detailed explanatory and background material. However, unfortunately my working model and methodology would be of very limited effectiveness for people who are unwilling to build up a broad understanding of the basis of that.

It's significant that other people have contacted me, greatly appreciative of the mass of information, and actually saying that they find it not at all over-verbose, and indeed easy to navigate! Just look at the means of navigation that are available, all listed in the first item on this page (the grey panel)! I'm sure those who find this site difficult to navigate do so only because they've still not understood what navigation facilities are available to them — or are simply unwilling to use them, of course.

A really important point to keep in mind also is that this site is a very challenging ground-breaking one, in which it's important that I 'put all my cards on the table' and properly explain the basis of my working model and every part of it. Without all the explanation and contextual / historical information, nobody could get a proper understanding, and people would be left to take on my (then) set of unsupported assertions as 'articles of faith', i.e., beliefs!

That's not at all what I want or intend to be happening, for then people would be just 'going through the motions' of using my methods, and would in most cases have taken on another confounded belief system to boot!

A related issue that some individuals comment adversely on, and which I expect adds generally to the criticizers' impressions of gratuitous wordiness, is my playful sense of humour that's often evident. To the grousers about my showing such a playfulness and humour, I'd say this: you just think clearly what my writings would be like without playfulness and sense of humour!

Dammit, to most people the whole subject area without that element would be unbearably 'heavy' and miserable reading! Indeed, it would have been an unbearably 'heavy' and dreary task for me to write about. For example, you just work out what it would be like to read the following pages (or, indeed for me to write them in the first place) if they were written in a consistently serious and poker-faced manner, without significant sense of personal narrative, as though each were a traditional-type academic thesis:

• The 'forces of darkness' ('astral beings') — My own tough experiences

• Night terrors and hell experiences — Understanding and clearing them

• The true nature of 'the forces of darkness' and its interference and attacks.

Need I really go on…?

That playful lightness of touch of mine is all part of a balanced self-actualization direction, and by keeping that reasonably in evidence I'm actually being something of a living example of a more self-actualized outlook and mode of living, so that all that playful creativity or creative playfulness of mine is actually part of my 'message'.

So, my message to those particular criticizers is simply, Tough! — Hard cheese! If you don't like it, you can always go off and cock the other leg somewhere else far removed! — Have a nice day!.

This site is primarily for those who are able to apply their minds fully to the task at hand (which, yes, is fairly lengthy) and can therefore build up the requisite proper understanding and use my insights and methods most effectively. All other people, sorry to say, yes, will feel left out in the cold to whatever extent they aren't able or willing to do the necessary 'homework'. The simple truth is that this site was never written for them in the first place.

Why no videos on this site?

I appreciate that it would be helpful for many people if this site had video clips of various of the methods and procedures (though I draw the line at video versions of the original writings themselves). Indeed, some time ago two users of my methods kindly donated sums for me to buy a webcam for that purpose. But I have to admit with some embarrassment that that webcam sits on my desk unused after a little initial testing.

The simple reasons for this are that it became clear that (a) when used on the computer the webcam's widest angle required me to be awkwardly far from the computer in my small living room / diner; (b) a suitable second person would be required, in order to do the 'shooting'; (c) a webcam isn't really suitable for that sort of use — a proper video cam is needed in order to get the necessary viewpoints; (d) any room at all in my small flat gives unsuitable, far too cluttered backgrounds for useful videos, except possibly for a few with real close-up views.

Theoretically, I'd greatly appreciate somebody with a video cam to work with me to make some video clips. However, as in the case of individuals wanting to produce supposedly improved versions of some or all of this site's pages, when somebody approaches me out of the blue offering such a service, there's generally a problematical agenda involved.

I was reminded of that by one such person who did contact me in August 2018, seeking to arrange one or more filming sessions. That soon ended up with the arrangement falling through because of a possible oversight of hers that I pointed out, and then, in a distinctly accusing tone she was seeking to cover up her little oversight by making a series of excuses for dropping the project, which were all putting some sort of blame on me, including finally criticizing the alleged verbosity and 'waffliness' of my writings to the point of abusiveness.

It was thus clear that she was one of those people who this site was never written for in the first place (please see previous section), and so she was clearly a totally unsuitable person to work with me on anything at all.

What this comes down to is that, yes, I'd really like to have somebody make the requisite videos, BUT that person would have to be either an established personal friend of mine or at least to have been in correspondence with me for some time and to be clearly one of the more aware minority who appreciate my writings in their fullness, and who is using my methods in an ongoing fashion and gaining significant benefits from them. It would also be essential that I have ultimate control over what goes into each video. If you stop and think about it, it has to be that way, because otherwise any supposedly collaborative work would be riven by stress and conflict because of the conflicting interests involved.

So, to anyone else who wants to help add videos to this site, and has a significantly criticizing view of me or my writings, or at least, who I don't already know pretty well, my clear answer is Thank you, but no thank you.

Your site would be more balanced if you gave space to the views of others who disagreed with you

That's real agenda-driven weasel words. Here's a really educational example of a devious, agenda-driven response to this site, posted as a Visitors' Book entry:

My observations and comments are as follows: Philip Goddard, his ethos or rationale, and his site are original quite unique! Moreover, his systematisation of logic and profound thinking is the antithesis of superficiality as one is forced to use one's brain in a way that one has never done before; for this he deserves much credit, though I hasten to add this doesn't automatically presuppose complete compliance or acquiescence to everything that he states. 
 
The information on his website is stupendously immense and can't be assimilated at one sitting: it is a course that can take up to anything up to a few weeks to inwardly digest.
 
I begin to understand though others might not and will not—the ubiquitous and summary brush off in endeavouring and failing to have meaningful dialog with Philip a gratifying relief that it wasn't just me! It is quite clear that Philip enjoys a huge support for his sites which results in the consequence of giving positive and constructive help to many. His apparent unassailable position here might make him consider putting up those views that don't necessarily sing from the same hymn-sheet as his, and therefore give a more balanced perspective-

Now, at first glance it looks as though this guy has a very high view of this site, doesn't it! — Well, except that if you look with care and awareness you'd see clear signs that something distinctly sly is going on there. I'd already, a few weeks before, given him a summary brush-off as he'd emailed me with rather similar glowing words about my site and then asking a couple of 'curiosity' questions, which I wasn't going to answer for him because, as made clear on my Contact page, that wouldn't be good use of my time as he could answer those questions for himself, at least if he reads properly on this site.

There are two main points to which I want to draw attention.

• His words about this site are glowing — with an almost too-good-to-be-true sort of feel about them, which itself puts me on guard straightaway — but nowhere, either in that Visitors' Book entry, or in a previous Visitors' Book entry of his, or in the two emails he sent me privately, does he give any intimation that he is actually using or even considering using any of my self-actualization methods, nor that his life has actually been positively changed by this site.

  Now, how can he really know how worthwhile my working model is if he isn't actually testing it out by using the methods to at least improve his life?! The only really meaningful appreciations of the contents of this site come from people whose lives have been positively changed by them. All the signs are that this particular gentleman is, shall we say, not being particularly genuine here in all his praise, and there's a subtext to look out for!

• And then, he lets the cat out of the bag and makes the most preposterously irrational suggestion, which shows, as I was already well aware, that he had little or no worthwhile understanding of this site at all, and is really being driven by his own beliefs and preconceived notions, clearly seeking to get me engaged with some 'disagreeing' beliefs / notions of his own.

  Just think. You go to an astronomy website and in various oblique ways you intimate to the webmaster that their site would be more balanced if it made space for people who believed that the Earth was flat or the Moon made of Gruyère cheese!

  Or you go to a site devoted to the wonders of the evolution of living organisms, and seek by various sneaky means to suggest to the webmaster that their site would be more balanced if it gave space for the religion-based views of 'creationists' — people who believe that 'God' created everything as it is, including all the rock formations including their fossils, and that evolution is simply a fantasy of the scientists and actually has never happened.

  Or you seek to have the 'creationist' belief system taught in schools alongside the biological understanding of the evolution of life forms, all in the name of supposed 'balance'.

• All not only plain stupid but seriously, poisonously, harmful. Or you go to the NASA website and suggest to them, ever so discreetly, that their site would be more balanced if they made space for, e.g., the views of people who believe that the Moon is a giant spaceship housing extra-terrestrial beings who are seeking to take us over and rule us for evermore, and also people who believe that there are human-like beings in at least one star system in the Pleiades, who are seeking to help humans on Earth (or seeking to take us over, according to which believers we're talking about!). — Doing things like that makes great sense, right?

Let me remind people here about the remit of this site. Basically, what I've put forward on this site is a working model that's based on my own actual practical observations / experiences. I built up that working model NOT as an attempt to fool myself or anyone else that it was a statement of absolute fact or 'truth', but to give a practical working basis for getting clear of the tremendous, potentially lethal, disruptions and attacks that I myself was getting from a seriously troublesome non-physical influence, which wasn't helpfully described / explained by any tradition, discipline or 'teacher' of whom I was aware.

That working model and the set of self-healing / self-actualization methods based on it have worked brilliantly for me in enabling me to get clear of all but very minor interferences from that influence, which latter, for good reason, I call the garbage. I know from many responses to this site that many people who got using my methods have also had dramatic turnarounds in their life situations — often indeed situations at least as troublesome as what I'd inadvertently dropped myself into.

There is thus intrinsically nothing for people who have areas of 'disagreement' to discuss on this site or with me personally. What I put forward is NOT 'unbalanced' as the frustrated disagreers seek to make out, any more than a nose or Mount Everest is unbalanced, for it simply is as it is, and is NOT an opinion or belief system. A website on noses or Mount Everest would be more balanced if space were made for believers in Mickey Mouse the Mighty, or for a rampant sect of cockatoo fanciers, would it really? C'mon Cedric, pull the other one yet again!

The people who want to discuss my working model with me do so only because they have some degree of belief, which latter, frankly, is rubbish — worse than useless. There's NO place for belief within a genuine self-actualization process or website! Self-actualization (and thus this site) is very much about seeing with increasing clarity what is actually there — NOT what one person or many believe is there! You see what's actually there by directly looking, not listening to other people's opinions on the subject — surely!

If you want to waste your time and hinder or fully block any self-actualization option or process of yours by means of discussion of one viewpoint against others, the place to do that is in discussion forums intended for the purpose — which none of my sites is. What you get in such discussion forums is NOT balanced or genuinely helpful, but simply a mess with no real clarity — for whatever good that does anyone!

For people who want to give me unsolicited advice

Because of my relatively high-profile life and strong motivation for bringing about really worthwhile positive change, it's inevitable that many people want to contact me to give unsolicited criticism or advice, and really I've already made it as clear as I can on my Contact page that such approaches are intrinsically unhelpful and thus unwanted, and generally I either ignore them or send the intruder packing with a flea in the ear.

That policy has generally worked well, though of course very occasionally the odd person chooses to ignore the Contact page notes and still makes a nuisance of him/herself.

One thing I am noticing is that the odd individuals who've actually benefited a fair amount from using my methods get to a point where they've got relatively comfortable with their situation, and then 'turn cheeky' towards me, posing as being some sort of 'expert' in relation to me, and then seeking to advise me about how, in their inevitably limited view, I'd do best to live my own life, or, what they think I need to do to make this or all my sites more effective / gain more traffic.

This is generally being done with a distinct implication that if I didn't follow up their suggestions it would show that I'm being stupid / obstinate, because they know better than I do. Inevitably also, my Project Fix the Human Condition 'pushes buttons' for a fair number of people, so the odd individuals uncomprehendingly urge me to 'take it easy', not to get the bit between my teeth so much, and all that, and with the odd caution about getting an 'inflated ego' and such terms.

What those individuals need to do is to get out of the respective rut each of them has got into with regard to their own self-actualization process, and hold up to proper scrutiny their urges to put pressure on me in such ways — in particular, to get honest with themselves about what threats they're feeling from me and my projects. They may believe their intentions are of the best — but actually they cannot be so, because they're being driven by agendas to affirm to themselves that they're doing fine just coasting as they are, and all this rather silly Philip guy needs to do is to take on board some of their 'wisdom' — i.e., restrictive control agenda in response to the threat they feel from any thought of their going significantly further in a self-actualization direction.

Generally speaking, the only people really able to make useful suggestions (which I do really appreciate) are the odd no-soul individuals who've come a long way in using my methods — even though one of the rather intrusive types of more limited awareness did make one actually useful suggestion with regard to my web page coding, which I did choose to implement (but on the basis of my own assessment of its usefulness, not his).

So, I recommend that people wanting to give me advice just accept that this Philip guy is a bit stupid, obstinate, stubborn, egotistical, arrogant, or however they might word it, and, as I say, hold up to proper rational scrutiny their motivations for wanting to give said advice, and use The Work or/and Grounding Point to get addressing the issues of theirs so revealed!

Do I mean to imply that I myself don't make mistakes and poor choices? — Of course not! But do you really imagine that somebody giving me unsolicited advice, including such obviously daft things as saying to me Take care! or Do take it easy! is going to cause me not to make those mistakes and poor choices? — Pull the other one, Cedric!

But at least I hold all outcomes from my own choices and actions up to proper scrutiny, correcting errors and succeeding in keeping myself on an overall reasonably even keel, give or take some variation intrinsic in my explorations and deliberately risking making mistakes in order to learn and move forward. My own self-scrutiny uses masses of data that the would-be Philip advisers don't have, so, generally speaking, paying attention to unsolicited advice would be a total wast of time for me.

— But then again, the compulsive advisers for the most part still wouldn't understand what I'm going on about in the above. Perhaps for a laugh I'll come out with Break a leg! upon parting once in a while to wake them up a bit — though (sigh!), of course they still wouldn't understand what I was getting at!

Why are you so defensive?

That question always comes from individuals who have strongly intrusive agendas towards me. I quickly notice what such people are doing in their firing questions at me or trying to get me into a discussion with them, and I disengage myself from them, refusing to have or to continue any sort of exchange with them.

It's part of their intrusive strategy that they then go accusing me of being 'defensive' — as though I were under some obligation to let those insufferable people walk all over me and trample me into the mire of their confusions. They themselves cannot bear to see themselves as 'wrong' in any way — it's always the other person, and so I'm a sitting duck for accusations of 'defensiveness'.

Because this site cuts through all the world's belief systems and traditions with regard to spirituality, 'healing', occultism, metaphysics and indeed psychology, and presents a working model and methodology that renders them all redundant (to put it politely), huge numbers of people want to tell me how 'wrong' I and my working model and methods are (i.e., according to their respective beliefs). Among those are a liberal sprinkling of controlling, manipulative individuals who see my openness and honesty as a weakness they can exploit.

That's one of the reasons for the comically dreadful long screed of notes on this site's Contact page. I'm only one man, and it makes no sense to be having to field a whole succession of problematical communications coming to me, instead of getting on with the really valuable work that makes sense of my life and why I'm here.

For this reason it's necessary that I maintain a much stronger personal boundary than most people would have cause to, and rebuff all manner of people who seek in various ways to intrude themselves and their confused ideas / beliefs upon me. That's just a fact of life, and if anyone doesn't like it, that's tough, and hard cheese! I don't have to justify myself any further to those people, and if I tried to do so I'd simply be giving them an inch so they could take another few miles (and still accusingly asking why I'm being so defensive as I refuse to allow them still more miles)!

Image display problems

When images fail to appear and there are just 'broken image reference' icons or an 'Image blocked' image showing…

Occasionally new images may not be correctly referenced, so that I then need to correct the image link on the appropriate page (usually a matter of capitalization in the filename, or the inadvertent use of a path on my local system for the file). Generally I'd notice and correct any such problem within a few days of its appearing, because it would show up on my daily web statistics.

Deep linking is antisocial

To use an image or a sound file on a website of yours or in, say, a forum, which is sourced from a file on somebody else's website, without the site-owner's or webmaster's permission, is antisocial as well as extremely discourteous and usually a copyright infringement. Most websites, including this one, and including ones with purportedly 'unlimited' bandwidth, have a limit upon the amount of bandwidth they can use (i.e., their volume of traffic), and it's a type of THEFT to use somebody else's bandwidth for your own site or in a forum — quite apart from the copyright infringement involved.

I have a daily inspection of the previous day's statistics and, when necessary, the raw logfile for this site, and I can tell generally when a deep link is being used, what file the link is to and where the link itself is situated.

Where necessary I can set up a redirect so that all visitors to the rogue deep linking site will see the above message image in place of the intended one.

I therefore ask that people who want to use files from this site write to me to seek my permission to use them, and then, if that's granted (which it usually would be), to host copies of the particular images on another site so that they aren't stealing any of this site's bandwidth. Where permission has been granted and files from this site are used, they should in all cases be credited to me, with a link to this site. Fair's fair.

Requests for reciprocal links

I don't currently have anywhere for reciprocal links to be placed — and almost all that people would wish me to place on any of my sites wouldn't be appropriate anyway.

You want to share a page from this site…

Please feel free to link to any page here (but not directly to images or files offered for download, or the one particular page which contains a clear request not to link to it), but do not place a copy on any other site, at least without my express written permission. To do so wouldn't only be against my wishes but would also be breach of copyright.

As it is, one inconsiderate website owner placed a copy of my (long obsolete / deprecated) substantial text Finding a Path Towards Wholeness on their site without any consultation with me. Although it is fully credited, no link is given to this site, and the text soon became seriously out of date as I made various major revisions and additions since that copy was stolen, and then in 2007 I disowned that particular piece altogether, because it was a 'spirituality' tract, and, having then come at last to understand the true nature of 'spirituality', I ditched 'spirituality' in favour of the 'clear-mindedness' approach that you can see in this site today.

That theft of the particular nowadays-obsolete page is in particularly bad taste as it's supposedly a spirituality site (and thus high-principled, one would have thought), which itself is asking for financial donations, and when I emailed the webmaster about that I got no response whatsoever. That site is still there, though now probably no links at all in it would work. Please don't be another hypocrite like that site owner.

However, there is one exception, in that it's possible to live-embed any of my web pages in a page on your site. Generally that's not a good idea, but I did find an Iranian spirituality site that had this site (i.e., its homepage) embedded in one of its pages. That meant, amazingly, that one could visit this site through that other one, and navigate through all its pages. And I checked that it really was a live embed and not a pirated copy of the site, by amending a page, uploading it, and then seeing if the change showed up in the embedded version. It did, immediately.

One practical problem about doing that nowadays would be that such embedding means that there would be wasted border / frame space around the embedded page / site — which would give too little space for the embedded material when viewed on a smartphone.

Why the Affirmations and Helpfulness Testing Guide are zipped

I really do understand that my zipping those particular files would be inconvenient for those who want to download them. Actually it's considerably more inconvenient for me, and not at all something I wanted to have to do!

The reason for my having done this (as from October 2010) was that I found that certain rogue websites* had discovered the Microsoft Word documents on this site and, pretending to be some kind of search engine and e-books resource, were displaying the files themselves -something that's in breach of my copyright and my clearly stated intent that such files should not be displayed on other sites — only linked to. In any case, it's not appropriate really for the Word or PDF documents on this site to be linked to directly, for they need to be encountered and read in their context on this site.

Periodically somebody or other writes in to tell me that they can't open the zipped files. Their difficulty is actually not due to any issue on this site, but comes down simply to (a) the particular people's device or at least its operating system being partially unfit for purpose, because NO computer or Internet device is fully fit for purpose if it can't open standard zip files — and (b) a certain lack of initiative on the part of the particular device users. All the latter need to do is do an online search with a search string like can't open zip file on [Android | you-name-it] device, without the quotes, and they will find one or more solutions.

Why no book of my Original Writings?

I've periodically been asked to produce a book (or e-book) of most or all of my writings on this site. Sounds a great idea, doesn't it! Indeed, if I were simply writing down definite facts or reasonably unchangeable beliefs, that would undoubtedly be a sensible thing for me to do. However, the situation isn't like that, and I see no book on the horizon, at least in the short term. This site, therefore, is in effect my 'book'.

The point is, by the very nature of my writings, which I'm constantly updating and adding to, a book containing them would be already significantly out of date even by the time of publication.

That completely rules out commercially printed books, and, although theoretically I could keep updating an e-book or produce-on-demand physical book, (a) that would be another load of work for me, as though I haven't already more than enough work in just keeping my website writings up to date, and (b) the moment somebody downloads something called an e-book of my writings it's more likely than not that the person would consider that (s)he now has a copy of my writings that are set in stone, and would no longer look here for updated versions of anything.

Those people who've visited this site over a number of years would have seen the great changes that have occurred in my writings as I gained new insights and clarifications, and I think they'd usually understand that any type of book of these writings would actually not be a workable proposition. On the other hand, certain individuals who've come to this site more recently feel daunted by the large amount of information that I present, and fondly imagine that it would somehow be more accessible and navigable if it were all put into a book.

In fact I'm sure that the writings are easier to navigate and explore anyway on this site rather than in a book, and my impression is that various people's main problem is simply in their not having sufficiently focused attention / awareness to cotton-on to the navigation aids that are right here on my web pages. Hence the Navigation Reminder that I've now put further above on this page and linked to on most of the Original Writings pages.

Is there an audio version?

No, nor will there be. It's been, and still is, a huge task, producing and maintaining the site. I'm only one man, with other things that I need to be doing too in order to have a healthy balance of activities and pursuits in my life, and I can't justify time / resources spent on such a project.

Criticisms that this site gives negative judgments upon other people's beliefs and practices

It's inevitable that a big majority of people will (and do) come out with such criticisms — though I should point out that those criticisms could themselves be just as easily seen as judgments upon this site and my 'message', and tell one genuinely much more about the criticiser than about this site.

And why are people making such criticisms? — Because the contents of this site are challenging beliefs of their own, and such people commonly react to any such challenge by publicly dismissing or indeed trying to suppress the source of that challenge, rather than hold their own outlooks and beliefs up to proper scrutiny.

It's also because there are extremely pervasive vested interests in maintaining those beliefs and cultivating them in others. Those vested interests are both a strong attachment to maintaining a perceived personal status, and protecting and further promoting the individuals' strong financial interests that are exploiting the gullible masses — selling their useless and generally harmful services (as 'healers', practitioners, teachers, and so on), and their myriad more or less useless and normally insidiously seriously harmful supposed life improvement aids.

How can anyone find what's genuinely most beneficial for them if they aren't motivated to hold all theories, beliefs, traditions and so on, up to rational and constructively critical scrutiny?

As I've explained in many places on this site, there's a very good reason why I point to the problems with belief systems and traditions, however widely they're respected or even revered, and why I point to particular examples of their absurdity / harmfulness. Of course I could have chosen to be less 'blunt' instead and make various discreet statements, naming no beliefs or traditions, and not 'rock the boat' so much, or even pretend that there's no real issue; then undoubtedly the 'disagreers' would have been making less of a fuss.

However, this site isn't about seeking to (more or less) appear to conform and 'accept all', but to point out straightforwardly what's really going on and, thus, just why my own working model and methods have particular significance. That couldn't be done effectively through using discreet coded language or simply ignoring the immense problem that the stranglehold of belief and traditions is causing for all people, whether directly or indirectly.

How you can 'donate' without paying extra for the privilege…

Because the 'Buy now' links in my Bookstore are Amazon affiliate ones (new, October 2017), there is now a brilliant way that some people can 'donate' and assist me and my sites, time and time again, if they're finding any of the sites helpful / beneficial, and without paying a single dime extra for the privilege!.

All they need to remember to do is, anytime they intend to shop at either Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk, first to go to my Bookstore and click on one of the Amazon links there. That would take them to the respective Amazon product page, and then from there they could search / navigate to wherever they wanted on the Amazon site and do whatever shopping they were going to do.

Amazon does have a cap on affiliate payments for very expensive purchases, so if, for example, anyone bought their own private jet airliner from Amazon after clicking on one of my links I'd not see more than some $200 from that — but I'd still be very happy at receiving that much out of their purchase! 

N.B. Currently this applies only to people ordering from the USA or UK. The Amazon affiliate programs aren't Amazon-wide but are country-specific. I've enrolled in the USA and UK affiliate programs, and unfortunately anyone in any other country who orders anything through my affiliate links wouldn't generate me any affiliate income, though of course I'd still get due royalty payments from their purchases of any of my books.

I see it as really not being practical for me to enrol in additional affiliate programs because that would require too many links to work well in my page design — especially for mobile devices — though I'm keeping the matter under review and might just possibly include Canada at some point.

Do say 'Hello'!

I know I'm by no means the only person to be running a site with significant content that benefits many people and yet who gets extremely few entries in the site's visitors' book. It can be quite disheartening to be putting so much into a site for the benefit of others and to have a whole month pass sometimes with hundreds (indeed nowadays thousands) of visitors but without a single entry in the visitors' book or even one direct email from someone for whom the site has meant something. Please do stop to leave your mark.