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Beautiful black cat came and lay next to me, adopting a foetal position. The words of W H Auden came to mind: "Lay your sleeping head, my love/Human, on my faithless arm." All I could feel was my love for this cat. Yesterday, I spoke to a cat sitting under a chair. It was looking very gracious and full of noblesse oblige. "You're king of the castle, I can tell." I find it very difficult to talk to girls, but talking to cats comes easily, and my heart overflows with love for them. I read the view of Jacques Lacan in a book called "Why do women write more letters than they post?". Lacan "reasons": A couple are sitting in a cafe and another couple walks down the street outside the window. The guy looks at the girl, but the girl also looks at the girl and thinks, "What is it about her that makes her attractive to him?". Lacan concludes that women do not exist because they are defined through the man. All the girls I have asked agree that this is what they think when they see a couple. Sometimes I look at guys in a heterosexual couple and ask myself, "What is it about him that makes him attractive to her?" Does this mean that men do not exist? Further, both parties are looking at the woman. The man may have the virtue of existing, but it is the non-existent woman who gets looked at. I'm actually in a state of anxiety about the necessity of sustaining and maintaining a woman in consciousness. Is woman sustained in the consciousness of man? Roll with it.

Reminds me of a woman, Susan, who has committed herself to several years in Hebron. She stepped out on evening and found a Palestinian woman at the side of the road, very upset. She had been visiting friends and had not noticed that the curfew deadline had passed, and now she could not get through the police checkpoints to her family. Susan offered to go with her. At the first checkpoint, the Israeli soldiers were nice, but at the second checkpoint, the soldiers said, "You're a foreigner so you can come through, but she must go back." Susan, a Quaker, told me that she didn't know where the words came from but she said to the Israeli soldiers, "Why don't you just turn around and pretend like this woman doesn't exist". And they did.

I'm an uxorious man, and it is terrible to be uxorious and not to have a wife. If I think of a woman as a sacred flame that should be tended for a hundred years, is that kind of thinking a real turn-off? Interestingly, both of the women who have cruelly rejected me recently have both given me significant looks, where they have taken a moment to really, really look at me--so I have been held in their consciousness for a few seconds. I was so embarrassed that I averted my eyes, (Mars governs sex and aversion). In both instances, I have thought that I could see a cosmos behind their eyes. I have not known what the look meant. It may have meant nothing. But the rightness or the wrongness of my conduct in respect of them didn't seem to matter for a moment and although this may be the notion of a sunburnt brain, it seemed that the Universe opened up for a moment, a vista or panorama of the cosmos. Is there a connection between "cosmic" and "consciousness"? I've talked about both in this paragraph. If the experience is of spiritual worth, I can only say that I had to endure months of intense suffering for that one moment.

Reading The Labours of Hercules yesterday. The task that corresponds to Aquarius is the cleansing of the Aegean Stables. The thought has often come to mind. I woke one morning in Indonesia with thoughts about a mountain of shit and dismissed the thoughts as irrelevant. When I got to work that day, however, the report I had written had been rejected on the grounds that a) the English was not pitched at the right level of the Indonesian guy who was going to read it, whom I had never met, and never been told about and b) it did not portray my organisation as the best thing since sliced bread, another agenda about which I had not been informed. When my line manager used an observation to get rid of a colleague, I flipped out and got into big trouble. My manager called me an arsehole (he was born under Scorpio, the sign of Hercules). Ironically, I had gone to work that morning and discovered a mountain of shit. This is the metaphor I used at the time. The effort to cleanse those particular Aegean Stables was immense.

Up a mountain at St. Katherines, Sinai. Following the footsteps of Moses, the juggler. Is it any wonder that the new group of world servers despair of their ideals when even on the top of Mount Sinai one has not escaped the spirit of commerce? You may not come down with Ten Commandments carved in stone, but you could come down with an ample supply of teas, coffees and biscuits. Moses went up and heard the voice of God. I went up and heard a sales pitch. I have often wondered if God is into marketing--whether inferior intelligences succeed over superior ones, like Windows over the Macintosh, because they happen to be better marketed.

Although I practise harmlessness, I make an exception with insects and animals that transmit disease. Like a Red Indian asking pardon of the tree spirit before he cuts down a tree, I usually apologise to the animal kingdom. I wonder how my karma is shaping up for the next life, if there is one. In my room at the camp, eaten alive by mosquitoes. My response the next morning was mad. Even though I had no intention of staying another night in the camp, I went round the room and crushed all the mosquitoes I could find that had supped on my blood, and maybe some that hadn't. I left ugly red stains on the wall and sheets, to the distraction of the owner no doubt, and did not stop to think that the mosquitoes were only doing what mosquitoes do. What an astonishing waste of life--theirs and mine.

Listened to a creationist lecture at church recently. Someone in the audience suggested that Darwin had been a Christian. As I understand it, Darwin lost his faith in God because of the conduct of a certain wasp--the one that paralyses a caterpillar and lays its eggs inside the body. When the eggs hatch, the baby wasps eat the caterpillar alive from the inside. Obviously, Darwin could not reconcile the conduct of this wasp with a benevolent, loving Creator. When I thought of our pastor and the memes he puts in people's minds, I felt like saying, "YOU are that wasp."

Amazing. Reading through the glossary at the end of Letters on Occult Meditation, I encounter the definition of Wesak: A festival which takes place in the Himalayas at the full moon of May. It is said that at this festival, at which all the members of the Hierarchy are present, the Buddha, for a brief period, renews his touch and association with the work of our planet. My immediate thought was "Now is the time of the full moon in May", and I opened my Esoteric Astrology program to check on the status of the Moon. It was, at that moment, in 5 degrees Sagittarius, and the Sun in 5 degrees Gemini. In other words, at the precise moment I read about Wesak, there was a Full Moon in May. I went into meditation and performed The Great Invocation.