Philip Goddard — Personal bio
— Composer, Writer, Nature Photographer / sound recordist, Pioneer in rationally-based Self-Actualization
— Joking name: Mickey Mouse the Mighty
— fundamental name: (Oq'q-)Hooq'um
BIOGRAPHY — SUMMARY
never, ever, 'gets it'!
Oops — Where's my detailed bio gone?
Apologies to all bona-fide visitors. — And naturally, to all non-bona-fide visitors it's 'up yours, dirty paws'! 
On 12 February 2020, at long last I sent down the plughole the relatively detailed chronological biography that had been here over the years (though not materially updated beyond 2015), complete with bathwater and probably baby and all! 
Yes, I've deleted it! I'd been hankering after doing that for quite some time, and in the meantime my position in keeping it here was becoming crazily untenable, so now the break-point has come and I've done the dirty deed.
You surely understand what I'm on about, don't you! — Yes, I'd been making myself increasingly a major sitting duck for identity theft by putting so much relatively detailed personal info up here in public view — though thankfully I'm still not aware of any instances of that having happened for me.
I'd still much prefer to share that info with the general public, BUT, with the enormous increase and pervasiveness of identity theft nowadays, and all sorts of other fraudulent activity based on various stolen personal details, sadly it makes best sense for me to become much more sparing than I ever wanted to be in how much of my personal info I put in the public domain.
However, it wouldn't be healthy for me to get really paranoid about the situation and hide all my personal details in the way that so many people are being warned to do nowadays, so I'm still giving a very brief rundown here — hopefully not giving out any details that would be significantly useful to the hordes of criminals out there — and in fact quite a lot of personal details are still given in various places on my sites, where those details would serve particularly useful positive purposes. So I give below something like the sort of brief potted bio that I build up verbally in answer to the various questions asked of me while in conversation with some of the people who pick me up on my hitch-hikes.
Also, there is now (January 2021) a more detailed bio, for a very specific purpose, on my Clarity of Being site.
Photo: Jon Zaple, 2 June 2022
My replacement mini bio
I was born (1942) and grew up in North-West London suburbia.
I always had a strong nature interest and preferred to be out in the wilds, often on my own, rather than be a social animal — a 'sheep'. There was something 'different' about me, which made life a very lonely experience for me back then. I was thus bullied and ridiculed a lot at school, both primary and secondary schools. Back then I rarely had the self-confidence to stand up for myself, because absolutely nobody understood that 'difference' about me that they perceived, so I got no reinforcement from anyone. Instead, what I was getting from people all around me was all manner of direct and indirect pressures to be 'normal' and be as irrational, unaware and generally dysfunctional as everyone else who I was aware of at that time.
One thing seeming to mark me out as having some unique, dark and troublesome issue was the bizarre and unspeakably troublesome experiences I'd gone through whenever my eyes were closed at night, from age of about two, to six. I didn't know at all what all that was about, and felt that it was something I couldn't speak about to anyone because I was sure they wouldn't understand at all (And dead right I was, too!) and would think there was something wrong with me. That very much exacerbated my feelings of loneliness right through my childhood and through into quite late in my adult life, when eventually I did start finding out what the eff all that was really about (a range of types of true hell, as it happens, of which so-called 'night terrors' are a smallish subset).
— Yes, you yourself can now start finding out what hells really are — and it isn't what any of the religions or other traditions / belief systems, or indeed medical / psychiatric professions, would tell you.
What all that (and masses more) boils down to is that, according to my understanding nowadays, I'm one of a relatively rare type of person who has no soul; I'm what I refer to as a no-soul person. To understand properly about that, please read carefully what I've written about the true nature of the soul (as distinct from what all manner of belief systems and traditions believe it to be) in The true nature of 'the forces of darkness' and its interference and attacks. Yes, the soul is actually not at all what people almost universally believe it to be, and I'm the chump who's at last come to something of a proper understanding of its real, seriously untoward, significance.
So, all those factors described above, and plenty more too, account both directly and indirectly for my exceptional level of awareness, freedom from beliefs, strong rational rather than belief- or pattern-based responses to life situations, lack of attachment to what most people are attached / addicted to, and strong creativity, and also my strong tendency to have little regard or respect (except where personal survival requires it) for orthodoxies and stultifying traditions.
All that, then, is the background of my quitting my early career in biological research and concentrating on developing various of my creative aspects. I did a lot of nature photography, but in 1973 I broke out into writing a lot of highly original and exploratory poetry, then a sequence of short stories, followed by six actual novels, which in 2015 I self-published (see my literary works site). Then, from 1995 followed ten years of highly individual classical music composition, including ten symphonies.
Then developing and running my eventually uniquely challenging pioneering website eventually titled Clarity of Being took over as my top priority, and it remains so today.
However, for balance in my life I go out on long, challenging hikes when weather invites, hitch-hiking from and return to my abode in Exeter, Devon, UK. Nowadays I also spend a lot of time on the natural soundscape recordings that I started making, mostly on my hikes, from 2012 onwards. From 2014 onwards, each late spring included a few particularly challenging and inspiring / thrilling all-night sound recording sessions out there alone in the wilds, including on rugged Cornish clifftops, the Teign Gorge, Branscombe Landslip (near Beer, Devon), and on high Dartmoor. Those are up-all-night sessions, not camping, so are distinctly physically challenging, but worth every bit of it! See The inspiring frisson of an all-night recording session alone in the wilds.
While gaining considerable respect from some people through my seeing through and standing up to bullshit that's quite often directed my way, many others — the 'sheep' of course — take a dim view of me indeed because of my often undiplomatic forthrightness where a bit of bullshit from somebody requires a lovingly direct confrontation in order for any positive change to come about, and I actually rock the boat a little in the course of seeking to get the odd necessary message through to where it's needed. As they say, Beware of the Philip!
— at least, if you have any sort of agenda or bullshit you want to foist upon me!
There's much of considerable value that one can learn from reading about my sometimes hair-raisingly bumpy self-actualization process. Here are some links to put you on course if you'd like to read up about any of that:
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My Own Self-Actualization Process or 'Path' (Part 1 and Part 2) — Re-evaluation counselling; Alexander Technique; opening up a monumental can of worms as I got into spiritual healing of a range of types…
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'Spiritual' enlightenment — Personal experience, clarifications, tips — How I got ambushed by 'enlightenment' (the real thing!) without ever having done formal meditation…
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The 'forces of darkness' ('astral beings') — My own tough experiences — How I unwittingly dropped myself — plop! — right into the potentially life-threatening 'hole' that then forced me for my own survival to progressively gather data from my often desperate-feeling shenanigans and work out for myself how the hell to get myself out of that dire predicament. Yes, I was, and still am, pioneering outside all belief systems and traditions (which are all part of the underlying universal problem).
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Night terrors and hell experiences — Understanding and clearing them (Part 1 and Part 2) — This is particularly educational, even including descriptions of clips of the particular types of hell experience that I've been through and eventually recognised. Almost universally most of them wouldn't be recognised at all as hells, because to almost everyone 'hell' just means the supposed hells (mostly the 'fire and brimstone' sort of thing) described in various religious / spiritual traditions for the purpose of intimidating people into following those particular traditions / belief systems.
- Psychiatry: my personal experience — Gaining fundamental insights (Part 1 and Part 2) — How I gathered a huge amount of insight in the course of my brief contacts with the local psychiatric services during my almighty shenanigans that were brought to me so kindly by the garbage — which insights were to take me forward greatly in developing my rationally-based methodology for getting clear of garbage interference and attacks, and indeed cultivating a fully comprehensive self-actualization process for broadly-based life turnaround.
…And for some idea of what all that was leading up to, you can now begin to see the very positive direction and results that are now emerging:
Note that this 'selfie' shot makes me look peculiarly small because (a) the typical 'selfie' close wide-angle view gives a distorted perspective effect, and (b) I hadn't thought to stand fully on the verge as Jon was, so I look to be a few inches shorter than I really am!
Photo: Jon Zaple, 2 June 2022
The 'Go-to' page if you'd like to know something about the very unusual and challenging way I developed as a composer is Musical influences on Philip Goddard's music & literary works — a major essay that's highly educational in a variety of ways, and covers much more ground than can be acknowledged in a reasonable-length title.
Are you really so sure you want to be 'normal'?
never, ever, 'gets it'!
Some 'Favourite' composers
The word 'favourite' is really not right, as it implies a simple classification on the basis of a primitive 'like / dislike' response. I use the word here simply as a convenient label for those creative artists who in some way have given me particularly important positive experiences. The composers aren't listed in any special order, and the following list is very far from exhaustive; I couldn't pick out a simple small bunch of favourites in the conventional sense.
Where particular works are named, except where otherwise indicated the message is that apart from those works the composer in question doesn't do that much for me. In the case of Mozart and especially Beethoven this has nothing to do with my view of the stature of their music (indeed I feel Beethoven to be a great kindred spirit), but simply the general lack of resonance I have with the musical idiom of the period from (say) Bach up to the start of the 20th century.
Western Classical
- Jean Sibelius
- Carl Nielsen
- Vagn Holmboe
- Rued Langgaard (the more visionary works only)
- Ralph Vaughan Williams (many of his works; Sea Symphony*)
- Gustav Holst (Egdon Heath & The Planets)
- Eduard Tubin
- Bohuslav Martinů (outside his massive self-imitative oeuvre)
- Leos Janacek (later works)
- Bela Bartok
- Igor Stravinsky (most of his works; Symphony of Psalms*)
- Hector Berlioz (Sinfonie Fantastique, Te Deum* & Requiem*)
- Wolfgang Mozart (Requiem* & Mass in C Minor*)
- Ludwig von Beethoven (Missa Solemnis*)
- Benjamin Britten (War Requiem* and a few other works)
- Harry Partch
- Giacinto Scelsi
- Iannis Xenakis
- Thomas Tallis
- Mikolaj Zielenski
- Giles Swayne (Cry)
- Giovanni Gabrieli
- Guillaume de Machaut
- Olivier Messiaen (organ music)
- Jehan Alain (organ music)
- Sergei Rachmaninov (Vespers)
- Havergal Brian (Gothic Symphony — only!)
* indicates a very deep connection through my having sung in the particular work (as an ordinary and undistinguished choir member).
Other
- Georgian polyphonic choral music (e.g., as performed by the Rustavi Choir)
I explored much non-classical and especially rock music, back in the early- to mid-1970s. Although I certainly gained from that exploration, in learning something of what was engaging a large proportion of our population musically, I didn't find sufficient variety or depth in such music to sustain my interest. Also I usually found song lyrics trivial or / and offensive through their sexism and emotional reactiveness. This isn't a statement of judgment about any music type, but of simple fact that I didn't find much to resonate with personally in those types of music.
Nowadays I recognise that such music simply doesn't cultivate, and indeed tends to close down, any really deep awareness, and indeed tends to reduce one's ability for flexible, rational thinking and responses to life situations. That appears to be why the majority of people are controlled by the garbage (mistakenly equated with 'forces of darkness', 'dark force', 'forces of evil') into preferring such types of music — for the purpose of cultivating limitation on and shallowness of people's awareness, to keep them right away from self-actualization and still further into the control of the garbage.
I was sometimes accused of having 'narrow' musical tastes, but this was always by people who had no inkling of the huge range of types and idioms of music encompassed by the term 'classical'. Not one such criticizer knew more than a handful of classical composers, yet they happily described their own musical tastes as 'broad' and mine as 'narrow'.
'Favourite' and influential writers
I've read remarkably little and cannot give a meaningful list. I've read and enjoyed Tolkien, of course, and Mervyn Peake, Hermann Hesse, Ray Bradbury; various science fiction writers — special mention to Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, The City and the Stars and 2,001 — A Space Odyssey (the book I mean — not the film with all its visual and musical distractions). And of course Salman Rushdie, about whose work I have healthily mixed views. Shakespeare was inevitably rammed down my throat when I was young.
While I've never really enjoyed Shakespeare, I think his work was influential in showing me how a story line could be filled with an intricate web of allusions and deeper layers of meaning, so providing a treasure house of experience for those who are prepared to re-read the work and look below the surface. This is very much a feature of most of my own literary writing, though developed in my own quite different way.
Writers such as Franz Kafka, William Burroughs and Hubert Selby Jnr (Last Exit to Brooklyn) can't rate as favourites in the pleasure stakes, but have been powerfully influential in somehow giving me an inner permission to allow my own 'craziness' and inner experiences to flow into my creative work rather than try to fit the work into prescribed forms or please particular people.
I'm sure there are many wonderful writers out there, but as an active creative artist myself I simply don't have the time and resources to locate their work and read it — and these days what reading time I have is given primarily to computer and hiking magazines, not fiction! For a year or two after I became enlightened (1997) I spent a lot of time reading books by very highly regarded / revered Tibetan Buddhist so-called 'Masters', and am enormously glad that I did, because that caused me to become progressively alienated from their whole mindset, which I quickly saw to be full of belief, illusory realities, and emotionally based control agenda.
That was to turn out to be a great data-gathering exercise that came into its own for me when I eventually was starting to get a proper understanding of my desperate shenanigans of 2003–2007 and get clearing myself of all that garbage. Then my earlier Tibetan Buddhism readings were a powerfully educational data resource that tremendously helped me come to a quick understanding of the real nature and source of 'spirituality', including religion of all types, and their pernicious harmfulness.
As to poets — you may not believe this, but for the most part I don't read or particularly enjoy poetry. This fact has brought me harsh
criticism from time to time on
account of my writing poetry over some years. According to various people I'm
not entitled to
communicate things to other beings in poetic form unless I read other
poets' work widely too, and so therefore, I'm told, I'm very arrogant.
Hmmm… Yes…
Let's bear in mind that, whatever the correctness or otherwise of such criticisms of me, they first and foremost reflect something that the criticizers don't like about themselves — in an important sense we are all 'mirrors' to each other. If the criticizers, instead of overtly criticizing, subjected their criticizing thoughts to inquiry using The Work, or better, 'zapped' them by use of the Grounding Point method, they would wonderfully transform their own lives through clearing the issues of theirs that were causing them to criticize.
'Favourite' painters
Although not tremendously versed in the work of the great painters, I can list a small number who've made a deep impression upon me or / and with whom I feel an affinity. I shall no doubt add a few more as I remember or discover them. These are not listed in any deliberate order of preference. Dalí and de Chirico in particular have emerged strongly recognisably in two of my novels — respectively Still Life With Strangled Porcupines and Forbidden Flood Warning, and Magritte was influential in my Symphony 5 (Magritte Gallery).
- Robert Lenkiewicz
(a particularly outstanding painter of the 20th century) - Salvador Dalí
- René Magritte
- Pablo Picasso
- Giorgio de Chirico
- Paul Delvaux
- Diego de Velásquez
- Caravaggio
- David Cheepen
Today's mighty oak is just yesterday's nut that held its ground.
That must be why I see myself as two mighty oak trees…
