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Great news story on BBC today - 12 year old mare who apparently had, for the last couple of years, been having a pint of John Smith’s and a packet of pickled onion crisps (only in the UK :P) with her owner in a Jarrow pub has been ‘banned’ - well the bar has just been refurb’d with new carpets ‘n all…

Says owner Jackie: “People come into the pub and the first thing they say is ‘Where’s Peggy?’ - I tell them she’s kicked the habit and is teetotal now.”

Skipping sideways…

Watching “God and Buddha - a dialogue (1999) - Deepak Chopra & Robert Thurman” (video online) - which incidentally isn’t quite what I expected, or quite a dialogue either  - but still interesting, and I particularly liked Deepak Chopra’s explanation of the Vedanta tradition’s way of looking at ‘dream states’. Roughly, (please forgive any inaccuracies I might introduce through brevity or ignorance here) there are three states:

1) Rational mind - your concious day time mind, “the rational mind weaving stories around your ‘karmic software’”, what we all call everyday experience;

2) Dreams - at night, your rational mind is asleep, but your conciousness is still using your ‘karmic software’ to make stories out of your ‘thoughts’. The assertion is then that the ‘mechanics’ of these two states is the same. And we all know that you get really ‘caught up’, or ‘lose yourself’, in dreams - so much so that it isn’t until you wake up that you realise that that story was in a ‘dream state’…; and

3) Then a circular possibility is that if you “peel back the layers of your soul” - searching for truth and reality - the Vedantic path - seeking enlightenment - that you may ‘awaken’ from even the first state and realise that that was just another ‘dream state’ too…

Appeals to my intellectual ‘wetware’ - I think it’s a lovely concept :)