Author: David Lawrence Preston
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10 years hiding in a room
A young friend of mine, Naomi, has spent the past ten years hiding in her room with the curtains closed, scared to go out because she dreads being seen in public. On the rare occasions she ventures out, she smothers herself in makeup and wears a floppy hat or balaclava, scarf and baggy clothing to…
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What are you?
What are you? When you think, exactly who or what is doing the thinking? When you stare into a mirror, who is doing the looking? There’s a story of a young philosophy student who went to see his professor. ‘Please help me,’ he pleaded. ‘There’s a question that’s been eating me alive. I can’t sleep…
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Placebos – the Best Medicine
It is well known that pills and potions with no active ingredients can be just as effective as pharmaceutical/chemical medicines. Sometimes they are more effective, depending on how they are administered. They can cure illnesses for no other reason than the patient trusts the doctor and believes they can. Despite the research evidence, placebos are…
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Your Inner Power
We all have a unique and wonderful power within us which holds the key to our ultimate happiness and fulfillment. It originates from the way we think, and what we imagine, say and do. This inner power is non-physical. When we are attuned to it and allow it to guide and support us we are…
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The Molecules of Emotion
Anyone who has ever felt sick with worry or cried at the cinema knows that there is a close connection between our thoughts, emotions and bodily state, but only in the last couple of decades has the medical establishment acknowledged this connection and begun to take it seriously. The reason was that scientists could find…
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Happy Easter Everyone
Every year on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox, Christians celebrate Easter, as they have ever since the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. Easter is the day on which they believe their Saviour’s body came back to life after suffering a horrendous death, and that he was…
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Heresy and Truth
In the early 1980s, the newly appointed Anglican Bishop of Durham, Dr David Jenkins, said he did not believe the gospel birth stories nor that that a physical resurrection had taken place, and that such beliefs were not necessary to be a good Christian. You may remember the uproar in some Christian circles. Many –…
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Can We Really Think And Grow Rich?
In the Victorian era success was believed to be about hard work, serious effort, application and persistence, and maybe a slice of privilege or good luck. Later Deepak Chopra and other ‘New Age writers taught that by raising our consciousness we achieve everything while doing nothing, and it doesn’t matter what our background. Somewhere in…
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The earliest passages in the New Testament
Not many people realise – even Christians – that the earliest passages in the New Testament appear in letters written by the apostle Paul of Tarsus around 52 CE. They think the gospels came first, but they didn’t. Paul’s genuine letters predate the first gospel, ‘Mark’, by 15-20 years. By the time the official gospels…
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All visible things come from the invisible and depend on the ‘unseen’
Before Einstein, the world was thought to be a collection of atoms behaving according to fixed and observable ‘laws’, and space was exactly that – empty space. This explanation seemed to fit the data in Newton’s day, but it changed with the advent of Quantum Physics. We now know that matter is merely energy condensed…