Personal Website of Philip Goddard
— Composer, Author, Naturalist, Pioneer in rationally-based Self-Actualization
(Home Page)

1. Clarity of Being

Original writings that are challenging (Uniquely so! ) and clarifying. Read about enlightenment and the nature of reality.

Empower yourself for self-actualization and self-healing, and to resolve for yourself emotional and 'mental health' issues and troubles with addictions, habits, compulsions, fixations, attachments, 'dark force' interferences, 'voices' and troublesome 'entities'… — All the writings free of religion-speak (or indeed religion) or esotericism!

Potentially life-changing original writings include:

• Affirmations & declarations of intent for healing & self-actualization

  Ditch the convolutions, obfuscations and harmful garbage connections of so-called 'spirituality' and point …

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  …yourself straight 'there' — enlightenment included! So simple, yet this will challenge you as you have never been challenged before. And it's nothing to do with esotericism or meditation!

• The Alexander Technique — An experience-based guide

  Put paid to back and neck problems and develop a general lightness and poise; make walking and indeed all movements easier and less tiring…

• "Am I a healer?" — Explaining 'healing' and the problems it causes

  Originally intended particularly for people who have just been told they're a 'healer' or are simply wondering if they are one — but actually also very much for established 'healers', …

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  …to give them a loud and clear wake-up call for them to hold up to proper scrutiny their own situation and what they believe they're achieving in the name of 'healing'. This refers to all varieties of 'spiritual healing' / 'energy healing'.

• Emergency self-help — Life upturn the SMART way

  

  Although originally written for, yes, people in crisis, this concentrated guide is actually just about everybody's best starting-point …

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  …for establishing the right mindset for turning one's life around through using the self-actualization methods that Philip Goddard presents on that website. It's particularly about getting grounded and practical in one's approach to life as well as to using the methods, and gives some challenging and potentially life-changing understandings.
• Project Fix the Human Condition
  — Enormous implications!
  >> Hot Topic

2. Music Compositions

3. Literary Works

4. Broad Horizon Nature

5. And now, on This Site…

Please read on for Philip Goddard's personal 'feature' pages…

Breaths of fresh air…

COVID-19 Lockdown Stress-Reduction!
— Free Natural Soundscape MP3 Downloads

A selection of Philip Goddard's high-grade natural soundscape recordings available as free MP3 downloads …

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…to help save your sanity during lockdown / self-isolation. Relevant photos and commentary given for each recording, to make the best sense of it.

Desktop Wallpaper

A small selection of photos of exhilarating views, including Scottish mountains for you to download, …

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…specially optimized for use as wallpaper on the Windows desktop.

Photos from hikes

A selective picture gallery from his regular hikes in South-West England.

Selected Hiking routes

Join him on some of his favourite hikes!
Itineraries, with some photos and interesting notes
— And the joys and sometimes educational tribulations of hitch-hiking to and from his hiking routes…

And more…

Philip Goddard's Blog Pages

A new place, from June 2017, for him to present interesting experiences and pieces of current thinking and breaking news.

My 'lights-out' time approaches…

This errant monkey isn't going to hang around to degrade and suffer before finally dying, and neither is he going to 'commit suicide'. Instead, it appears that he's going to do the unthinkable thing and simply die in his sleep at a time that makes best sense, rather than go along with anyone's beliefs on the subject — i.e., to treat the matter intelligently and treat the matter as something positive and joyful to contemplate and pursue…

>> ChatGPT — Astoundingly human-like responses

Something not just interesting but possibly unprecedented has started going on here!

Two out of a series of really challenging and very revealing test conversations I've had with ChatGPT in late November 2024. Not just fascinating reads, but inspirational.

• Test 5: Challenging hitch-hiking situation challenge

• Test 6: Challenging 'pinnacle' poem comprehension ultra-challenge!

Fun with AI-generated images

Added in December 2022, this presents the Author's first exploration of the potential of DALL-E 2, an amazing online system that can generate really telling images drawn from a simple verbal description — and now the much more advanced and useful DALL-E 3 (via Bing Image Creator)…
— but we also need to be aware of relevant ethical considerations (artists' rights)…

How I became a hospital bed blocker
(— Franz Kafka lives on in the RD&E Wonford hospital, Exeter!)

At least the little operation on the Author's backside went amazingly smoothly and healed fine with none of the expected troublesome pain. …

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… — But that small event took him through a highly educational showcase of a darker and subhuman aspect of the hospital system, reminiscent of some of Franz Kafka's fictional representations of a labyrinthine dehumanized bureaucracy…

Plantar fasciitis — My own weird experience
— How I turned a potentially life-threatening situation upside-down

A slightly more recent educational page, in which he recounts a seemingly desperate situation that developed for him, …

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…leading on from his initially getting a relatively minor pain under his left heel resulting from his first really long hike of the 2012 season, and how eventually he made a truly dramatic turn-around of the whole show, once, in desperation, he had at last made that necessary little extra effort really to understand…

Dartmoor in trouble

Overstocking with grazing animals — burning — and then the Army inflicts another nasty upon Southern England's little wilderness
(a 'legacy' page now)…

Miscellaneous Box

Useful suggestions, references and links to other sites of interest: Friendly or / and useful links, Music, Computer matters

Some Second-hand Items For Sale

These items are only for personal collection in Exeter, UK.

Do You Want to be 'Appropriate'? …Or Authentic?

If there's any basic 'message' underlying this and my other websites, it's about the tremendous advantages and benefits of allowing yourself to be truly authentic as distinct from merely 'appropriate' in your outlook and lifestyle. Being truly authentic is the ultimate mental health, which makes a mockery of the travesty of the 'mental health' that is aspired to in so-called mental health services and organisations.

The vast majority of people are to varying extents actually programmed* to shy away from authenticity and take refuge in 'appropriateness'.

So, what do I mean here by these terms?

• Authenticity is being truly and deeply yourself. In other words your outlook and lifestyle and behaviour are determined by your deeper nature, which is thus allowed to 'flow' and become manifest. You could say that a person who is being authentic is 'genuine' or 'self-honest'. Such a person has no agendas apart from being 'naturally him/herself', and has no need nor cause to project any particular (inevitably false) image of him/herself to others.

  That deeper nature is naturally 'dynamically relaxed', vibrantly and deeply aware, positive, energetic, alert, unconditionally loving, secure, happy and creative, and gives rise to a vivid and abundant life experience. A natural powerfulness flows from that deeper nature, which has nothing to do with personal status or power / control agendas.

  To dispel any possible misunderstanding here, it's necessary for me to point out that a truly authentic person, being deeply aware and also flexible in their outlook and behaviour, does NOT go around like a bull in a china shop, just 'doing his own thing' and upsetting everyone everywhere (s)he goes. No, such a person, being strongly and deeply aware, is much more genuinely considerate to other people than anyone who is locked into the 'appropriateness' model, which is based in unawareness.

  A truly authentic person learns quickly where, when and how to avoid pushing people's buttons in unhelpful ways, even if sometimes this may require the temporary concealing of their own 'truth' in order not to set up needless barriers.

  That doesn't at all mean that a truly authentic person seeks to be unchallenging all the time. Far from it. Rather, such a person is flexible in his / her approach and makes sensible and practical choices in order to maintain a healthy balance of fearless direct challenge and harmonious parallel existence.

• 'Appropriateness' is trying to be how you want people to see you — which is usually, but not necessarily, what you believe people around you expect or want of you. It's not real appropriateness, which is why I'm putting it in quotes every time, because really the most appropriate thing is always to be genuine and authentic — but the vast majority of people have by certain means been programmed not to understand this very simple logic and to live false, ersatz lives that are not truly their own but are to varying extents set up to conform to other people's perceived expectations of them*. By living 'appropriately', a person is being 'self-dishonest'.

  * Although the 'other people' involved would normally be what is assumed to be 'everybody', in some cases the 'other people' may themselves be some minority group, such as Buddhists, Christians, 'Goths', paganists, 'healers', Satanists, 'twitchers' (bird watchers), Social Democratic Flower Arrangers, astrophysicists, doctors, psychiatrists, left-handed albino Rosicrucians, and so forth.

  The programming therefore tends to steer people into conventions and traditions, whether those be of the majority or a particular minority. People set up close relationships and even get married, and procreate, with no idea of whether all or indeed any of that would actually be for their own deepest and ultimate good. Likewise, they choose their clothes, buy their consumer products and their entertainments without reference to what would truly and deeply benefit them or truly reflect their deepest nature or true identity, and without consideration for what would serve or fulfil any genuine underlying purpose in their physical existence.

  'Appropriateness' always limits people's life experience, greatly narrowing their awareness and their life options. Because all the time it involves personal agendas of status and power / control issues, it leads to all manner of conflicts, negativities and indeed all the troublesome things we see going on in the world.

  'Appropriateness' is pattern-based and thus rigid in nature. It has no concept of maintaining a flexible balance, and will always tend to put pressure on non-conformers to conform. Unsolicited advice such as You should do xxxx., Why don't you do xxxx?, and the absurd robotically delivered valediction Take care!, are typical control measures of people's 'appropriateness' outlooks. They don't see the true human being at all and instead see only another focus for exerting control.

  Indeed, sorry to say, the latter is one of the primary reasons for people wanting to have children (without regard to whether it's really in their or the world's best interests that they do so), just as it's also one of the primary reasons for keeping a pet (though rarely acknowledged!).

Authenticity is for LIVING, not discussing or critiquing!

Always at the risk of being accused by members of the 'Appropriateness' Brigade of brazenly flaunting a super-big ego (indeed on occasions they not only accuse me but abuse too!), on my websites I point to what true authenticity can be like, for I myself have always been dedicated to my own authenticity and am nowadays doing what I can, within the bounds of maintaining reasonable balance in my own life, to stimulate and catalyse the cultivation and growth of authenticity in others.

The process of cultivating your own authenticity — making yourself increasingly a manifestation of your own, perfect, deepest nature — is what I mean by the terms self-realization and self-actualization, and on my Clarity of Being site you get a whole and very challenging perspective on how you can progressively become fully authentic yourself, free from all hindering and obstructive influences, whether those are from other people, emotional issues that you are carrying, or from troublesome non-physical sources (particularly interferences from the garbage, many of whose actually illusory manifestations get described as astral or 'dark' entities).

Through being authentic rather than 'appropriate', at various times in my life I've caused bewilderment among people who knew me, because I'd get deeply into some particular interest or activity and then, after a while, I'd move on and take up something else. It was amazing how seemingly highly intelligent people would berate me for suddenly not conforming to one or another stereotype they'd placed upon me, and that I had suddenly broken for them.

Some wanted me to be a stereotype 'gay' to comfort them in their own sexuality issues, which latter they were not doing anything to resolve. Others wanted me to be a devoted entomologist with no significant other interests. Others wanted me to remain just a poet, or just a writer of novels and short stories, or just a nature photographer, or just a composer of major musical works, or just a 'healer' or 'spiritual teacher'. They were all seeing and to varying extents attaching themselves to limited images of me, rather than actually the authentic me!

For the same reason, quite a few people get edgy and uptight about me on the basis of what's on my websites, because they find my own expansiveness of outlook and life experience to be alien to their 'appropriateness'-related restrictedness of outlook.

You can see the odd examples of that sort of thing in my Visitors' Book, and I get the occasional personal communications of a similar nature. The words 'ego' and occasionally 'arrogant' get thrown at me like mud pies, and such individuals who are themselves in some supposed self-realization / self-actualization or 'spiritual' path are additionally inclined to seek to impose upon me their own opinions and beliefs, lecturing and haranguing me, seeking to convince me or the world that I'm a misguided impostor or charlatan who is falsely claiming that I'm enlightened and falsely claiming that I've found true clarity or truth.

Of course I'm accused of seeking to impose my own supposed 'beliefs' upon other people — yet these people show no evidence that they themselves are enlightened or particularly self-actualized (they simply have strong beliefs about enlightenment and self-actualization), and they offer nothing positive nor constructive that would in any way make their communications worthwhile.

What those people are really communicating is fear. Their particular programming makes them react out of fear when they countenance a person being as authentic as can be and demonstrating a true abundance of life experience, because their more limited view born in their own 'appropriateness' is then being implicitly challenged, and it's fear that is the distorted 'consciousness energy' that holds their 'appropriateness' programming in place.

A particularly common distorted 'appropriateness'-sourced opinion that's put to me is that anyone who is seen to be some sort of 'spiritual teacher' (not that that is an appropriate description of me nowadays anyway) should be very modest, quietly spoken and humble, and should have no abundance in their lives, and should not publicly mention any special achievements, abilities or 'gifts' of theirs, including such things as their being enlightened*.

That, dear friends, is one of the sick distortions of supposedly enlightened living that come from certain religious traditions — notably most Buddhist traditions — and actually is among the things that demonstrate the harmfulness of those traditions through their permeation with control agenda (albeit sometimes quite subtle). On my Clarity of Being site I explain the source of such distortions*, and how all religions, without any exception that I know of, and indeed all so-called spiritual paths, are leading people in a direction that would horrify virtually everyone if they came to properly understand what's really going on.

However, my 'message' isn't in the slightest a paranoid one, because it's about seeing the problem clearly in order to effectively address it and, as far as possible, actually resolve it. True paranoia has no thought of real solutions! And, to the best of my understanding, the issue of the garbage's interference in everyone's lives, giving rise to 'appropriate' rather than authentic living, and indeed virtually all the world's significant problems, is indeed apparently soluble at least to some degree — to the extent that people wake up to the fact and are willing and motivated to take appropriate simple, painless, safe and completely non-scary measures.

… And a reminder of the most fundamental and crucial thing that every single person in the whole of 'Existence' needs to understand:

Are you really so sure you want to be 'normal'?