by Greta Woodrew, an eyewitness

One of the friendships I most remember and cherish – and one that gave me some of my profoundest insights into the world beyond the five senses – was with the remarkably brilliant, multilingual Helen Keller. She was an emotional earthquake in my life, shaking me to my very soul.

When the play, The Miracle Worker, opened on Broadway in 1960, Dick and I went to see it and were profoundly moved. A year or so later, I took my daughter Jill to see it on her seventh birthday. She too was deeply touched by the electrifying story. Jill expressed a desire to meet Helen Keller, and I agreed that it would be a marvelous experience. My husband had a friend who knew her dedicated secretary, Evelyn Seide. Through her, we arranged a date for me to meet the great lady, who lived only ten minutes away from our home in Connecticut. (more…)

by Rodney Davies

Our traditional view of time as a river inexorably sweeping us along like flotsam from the past towards an unknown future is wrong. Time, in fact, has no existence outside ourselves; rather, its presence is suggested to us by the positional changes of physical objects around us, most notably those that occur regularly, like the earth’s rotation which brings about the rising and setting of both the sun and the moon, and thus time’s seeming reality. In this respect we resemble the prisoners in Plato’s cave who mistook shadows for real things.

Indeed, what we call time is apparent only because our consciousness, informed as it is by our sense organs, is normally only aware of consecutive ‘moments’ in our lives, which we call ‘the present’. This naturally suggests that if our consciousness could be widened, we would be able to view what we call ‘the past’ and ‘the future’ now, because both are as much ‘now’ as now is. (more…)