Steven Colborne's Blog, page 43

30% off all my books (today only)

Hello, friends. I hope you’re feeling happy and are excited that the weekend is here. You should be excited, because over the weekend you’re going to be reading one of my books!

That’s right, I’m here with a whopping 30% off all orders on TealightBooks.com, today only!

To participate, shop at TealightBooks.com/store today and apply the Coupon Code: Friday30

If you weren’t already aware, Tealight Books is the publishing imprint through which I have self-released all of my books. On the Tealight Books website there is a store through which I sell all of these books in digital format. My books are also available in paperback editions from Amazon, but the discount I am advertising today applies only to eBook versions, and only those purchased through TealightBooks.com.

You will be able to download any books you purchase in EPUB format, which is the industry standard for eBooks and compatible with most eReaders. You can also download software to read EPUBs on your computer, smartphone, or tablet, if you don’t own an eReader.

There is no minimum spend and all books are included in the promotion.

Take me to the Tealight Books Store

If you have any questions, or encounter any problems, feel free to contact me at steven@tealightbooks.com and I’ll be happy to help. Remember, this offer expires at midnight tonight so get a wiggle on!

Decorating my Flat

If you missed yesterday’s philosophy post, you can catch up here.

I’m excited to share that I’ve been doing some decorating. A few months ago I bought a pot of teal paint and it has been sat in a cupboard unopened. Last night at around 11pm the idea suddenly struck me that it would be fun to go ahead and do some painting. As I already had brushes, rollers, dust sheets, and everything else I needed, I thought I would just go ahead (despite it being night time!).

The flat where I live is rented accommodation and I don’t know whether strictly speaking I’m allowed to paint the walls. From what I can remember, the contract just states that you have to vacate the property in the same condition it was in when you moved in. So I may have to return the walls I’ve painted to their original colour (or close to it) if I have to move out one day.

I was unsure which walls to paint, but I decided to paint a convex wall in the living room (convex?! I don’t think I’ve ever typed this word before :-D) and a concave (that’s a debut too I think!) wall in the bedroom. The idea is just to bring a bit of interest to the rooms. Of course, I had to go with teal — everyone knows that teal is the best colour in the world.

Here’s the living room with the newly painted wall:

I’m aware that there’s a thin layer of white at the top of the blue wall, I need to go over that with a very small brush to tidy it up.

Here’s how the bedroom looks:

I really hope I won’t have to move out anytime soon because I’ve expended so much energy getting this flat organised and decorated. When I moved in it was an empty shell, no carpets or curtains and only very few basic furniture items. I do dream of owning a place of my own one day (buy my books!) but I’m so delighted that God has blessed me with this flat. I’m not going to mention my neighbours (oops).

I’d be interested to know your thoughts about lamp shades. At the moment my lights in the living room and bedroom are just hanging from the ceiling with no shades. When you look directly at them you scorch your eyes, of course, but I’m reluctant to get light shades because I feel they would make the rooms too dark. Surely I’m not the first person to wrestle with this conundrum?!

Also, let me know if you’ve done any decorating yourself during the lockdowns Thank you for reading!

Are You Thinking What I’m Thinking?

It’s interesting to picture two people chatting with one another, and imagine one person experiencing the conversation one way, and the other person experiencing the same conversation a completely different way. Have you ever stopped to think how your understanding of every conversation you’ve ever had has been completely in your own mind? You have no way of experiencing anything outside of your own awareness. In conversation, whatever you think somebody is saying to you is actually the product of your own thoughts and consciousness; you have no access to the mental experiences of other people, even if you feel you are connected to them.

I remember having one of my first meetings with a mental health consultant after a particularly chaotic few weeks of mental health crisis when I was working a really stressful job in the music industry around 2007. As I described to the consultant what had been going on with me over the preceding week or so, he asked some searching questions, which I believe were aimed at helping me to make sense of things. I remember there was one particular question he asked (I don’t recall its content) which cut through the mess of thoughts I was experiencing and made me realise that everything I was going through was really only going on in my own mind.

If you’re thinking what I’m saying is only relevant to people with mental health problems you would be mistaken — the very same thing applies to every human being. In our interactions with others, we are actually interacting only with our own perception of their thoughts and feelings, rather than their actual thoughts and feelings. If you’ve ever had a misunderstanding with someone, that is a simple but perfectly adequate example of what I’m talking about.

For a long time, I’ve been interested in the philosophical idea of solipsism, which is the perspective that the entirety of reality is contained without our own perception. I wrote a chapter on solipsism in my book Ultimate Truth: God Beyond Religion and I argued that solipsism is actually a very logical philosophical perspective to embrace, because it would be true to say all I have ever experienced is my own reality, and therefore why shouldn’t that be the sum total of all that exists?

In relation to solipsism, I am particularly interested in the nature of God. I feel that there must be ‘outside forces’ controlling my thoughts, words, and actions, because if that wasn’t the case I would have a perfect understanding of everything. As it happens, I am deeply mystified by my own nature; this body I seem to have and these strange things called thoughts that I seem to experience. There must be a greater force at play in these things, because I am certainly not doing all of this myself, I’m quite sure of that.

(I hope I’m not spooking anyone out too much!)

I’ll end with a related thought to do with morality. If it’s really the case that in our interactions with others we cannot know what is going on in their mind, it is surely always best to give them the benefit of the doubt in any misunderstandings. We may very well be fabricating the misunderstanding ourself (under the control of God), so best to just be kind, always.

On the other hand, if people are truly separate from one another in the way I am describing, can we really be held responsible for influencing the thoughts and actions of others?

Vegetables for Emergencies

Greetings! Fully understanding I have strayed quite far from philosophy and theology in my last few posts, I’m going to… stray even further, today! I thought I would share a food related tip which I think is really valuable.

Due to the pandemic and the uncertain times we live in, a lot of people (myself included) are making contingency plans. I realise for some this can manifest as buying copious amounts of toilet paper, but for me personally it manifests as buying copious amounts of kale!

You see, the thing is, kale keeps for ages in the freezer. You can freeze it straight from the supermarket and it will last a couple of months, but if you blanche it (I’ll explain!) then it can keep for up to a year. It’s difficult to find vegetables that will keep for so long (leave a comment if you know otherwise!).

So, here’s my kale before I blanched it:

I actually didn’t blanche all of that because I ran out of patience and space in my freezer. I would say I blanched about two thirds of what you see in the picture. Here’s the process:

Boil some water in a large pan. You don’t need much water because the kale leaves will shrink.Add handfuls of kale (chopped) to the boiling water.Cook (blanche) for two minutes. Maybe set a timer.Prepare another saucepan with ice cold water.After two minutes cooking, drain the pan with the kale under a cold tap and add the kale to the icy water. This will have the effect of stopping the kale from cooking any further, which is what we want.Place a towel on the work surface, then put handfuls of kale onto the towel, then roll the kale up in the towel to get rid of as much moisture as possible.Separate out the kale and freeze in freezer bags (write the date on the bags for reference if possible!)

Here’s what my cooker looked like when I finished the process:

And below we have the kale in freezer bags (they look a bit icy because I put them in the freezer before I felt inspired to write this post!). I like to put about two portions worth in a single bag. I produced more bags than are pictured, the rest are in the freezer…

So all you need to do when you want to eat some is transfer a bag from freezer to fridge, let it defrost, and then cook it for a further 5 minutes or so to have with a meal. Ta dah!

Let me know if you think you’d like to try doing the same, or if you have any tips for how to make food-related contingency plans in case the pandemic goes on for many more months.

We’ll get back to philosophy soon, promise!

Downgrading and Upgrading

It’s important to keep busy during these lockdowns. What I find myself doing is agonising over decisions regarding what technology I might be able to afford to buy, and how I can live in an ever-more minimal way, reducing stress and improving efficiency in all I do. Avoiding stress is particularly important to me because I used to suffer from severe anxiety and panic attacks. I think that’s why I find minimalism so appealing — the more organised I am the less anxiety I feel. I guess that’s the motivation for many minimalists.

In the last week, I’ve downgraded my phone, and in the next couple of weeks, I’m looking to upgrade my laptop. The phone decision was due to really disliking using Face ID and (more importantly) needing to save money. I realised that if I sold my phone, I would have just about enough money to upgrade my laptop towards the end of this month. So I’m excited about that, and I hope none of you reading this steal all the good deals on eBay

I’m delighted to have a revamped blog as well. What I’ve achieved with this redesign has made me really happy, as I expended a lot of effort on it. Blogging is such a big part of my life and so redesigning my blog is a big deal for me (as far as anything like this can really be considered a ‘big deal’ — you know how much I love to relay the sentiment of the Book of Ecclesiastes…).

I think with this new blog design I’m going to post more often, but relatively short posts. For one, the way the blog page functions on the new design lends its favour to that style of blogging. And also, I feel short and punchy posts are more likely to be read because if other people are anything like me, it’s much easier to ignore and delete long posts than it is short ones (unless you really love the blogger in question, of course).

I’m actually feeling really happy about having opened up the comments again as well. I don’t know why, it could be the redesign, but I’m no longer feeling anywhere near as worried about what people are commenting. I think it must be an answer to prayer.

If you’re reading this and follow my blog, but don’t comment often, I realise that it’s probably at least partly my fault for policing comments too strictly in the past. But please, feel free to contribute, as I’d like for this blog to feel like a friendly and supportive community, and that means you have to be involved.

Have you found yourself thinking about technology upgrades a lot during these lockdowns? Feel free to leave a comment and share your thoughts. Have a great week, everyone

Playing Around with CSS

Hello again friends. I’m posting a lot at the moment, sorry! I don’t have anyone who I can call at 1am to help me wind down so I’m posting to the audience that never sleeps. I just want to share a few reflections on blog customisation and I have a few tips regarding how you can make changes to your blog to improve its appearance, if any of you are interested in doing so.

Obviously the first stage of customising your blog is choosing a theme. You can change your theme at any time without losing your content, which is so awesome. With the ‘live previews’ feature you can see what your blog will look like with a particular theme before committing to installing it. This is very handy. No theme will give you a perfect looking blog ‘out of the box’ which is why I want to write a little about CSS.

Don’t be put off by the acronym CSS, it just refers to a method of customisation. You can add short ‘snippets’ of CSS code to the ‘back end’ of your blog in order to customise your blog’s appearance. Go to My Sites > Design > Customize and the Customiser will load (yes, I prefer an ‘s’ to a ‘z’ in customisszze but whatever floats your boat!). After the customiser has loaded, scroll down and you should see an option to add Additional CSS.

Now this will all feel a little daunting the first time you do it, but don’t worry, start with a simple customisation and then when you feel more confident you can experiment to your heart’s content. Using CSS snippets you can change the size of headings, the colour of links, the ‘padding’ around certain elements, you can centre align your widgets, etc etc etc. Honestly, with CSS snippets you can achieve pretty much any customisation you could think of.

In order to find CSS snippets you have two choices. You can do a Google search for something like “CSS WordPress change link colour” and then try to find a forum where someone has asked the same question and received a satisfactory answer (normally that answer will include the relevant code pasted in a forum for you to copy and paste yourself). This method can be quite frustrating and time consuming, but it’s a really interesting process and you’ll see what a friendly bunch coders are; dishing out awesome advice for the good of humanity (possibly).

The other option you have (if you have a WordPress paid plan) is to hop on the chat and ask the happiness engineers to sort you out some CSS snippets for your customisations. So, you could ask for a snippet to centre your navigation menu, or to make your headings more bold, for example. You might be a bit scared to do this the first time, but as my friend’s rock band’s motto went: Step Outside Your Comfort Zone!

That’s all I want to say; I just wanted to share about this nifty feature of the WordPress content management system that many bloggers probably aren’t aware of. With lockdowns and everything pandemic related it’s a good opportunity to improve your blogging skills and finding out how to add CSS customisations is one way of doing this. I hope you will explore this feature and enjoy the process of customising your blog as much as I do. This post will self-destruct in a few days, because my blog is a philosophy blog and I don’t want to confuse anyone by having random posts like this popping up. But yeah, hope it helped someone! Night night zzzzzzzzz… [but first tea and cake].

Every Blade of Grass

Lord God, I am deeply awed by Your wisdom and prowess and creativity; how You have been unfolding a plan for creation longer than I am aware of or could possibly comprehend. There are no words that could describe Your incredible skill when it comes to creating and unfolding plans.

How can a human comprehend that You have carefully created every blade of grass in the world? This demonstrates that Your power is immeasurably great. Not only have You formed every blade of grass, You have formed every atom in every blade of grass, and that is too vast an idea to make sense of.

Life is a great mystery, but I trust that You understand it, and I hope that You will always be merciful to every sentient being under Your control. Amen.

Refreshing!

Now I know you’re picturing cocktails on the beach, but that’s not the kind of refreshing I’m talking about. I’m talking about digital refreshing which is much more exciting (although possibly less relaxing!). I’ve given Perfect Chaos an overhaul; ladies and gentlemen — we have a brand new theme.

It’s coming up to 3:30am here in London, which is such a silly time that I’m unsure whether it’s night or morning. I do know that it’s an odd time to be publishing a blog post, but I’m excited to share the redesign with you, so what the heck (we’re all on lockdown hours after all, one of you must be awake).

I’ve gone for a more colourful look with this blog refresh and the background is dark as opposed to the very light colour scheme I was using with the Maxwell theme. The general feel of the site (to me, anyway) is that it leans more to being a website than a blog, although the blog is still central, of course.

Because it feels more like a website than a blog I’ve made a couple of changes accordingly. One is that I’ve taken the word ‘blog’ out of the tagline, and the other is that I’ve changed the default domain name to perfectchaos.org rather than perfectchaos.blog (all links with .blog in them still work perfectly fine, they just redirect to the .org domain. Such is the luxury of having two domain names registered!)

To coincide with the refresh I need to talk about my favourite (and your favourite) subject: comments. With the previous version of the blog I had started closing comments on almost every post, because I found reading certain comments from certain people very depressing. I know that I have to ‘be the duck’ (as my friend David said I must) and not let it get to me, but something about the digital age has made me more defensive and less patient. I’m going to try to change this, so will be allowing comments for every post. Every comment will still be moderated and I probably won’t reply to them all, but I’m fully aware of the frustration it causes when someone wants to share their feelings and can’t, and it really is an honour that anyone feels the urge to comment on my writing, and I really don’t want to lose anyone. On the other hand, I ain’t willing to be no punch bag, so we’ll have to see how it goes. Leave me lots of positive encourgement, that’ll help!

Okay I’ll shut up now because I’m worried this post is too self-indulgent and perhaps no one cares that I’ve refreshed the design of my blog. But I know I love checking out what other bloggers are up to with the design side of things, so I hope this post is of interest to someone. Definitely take a look around and leave me a comment and let me know what you think. As long as you don’t hate it, if you do then just go back to sipping your margarita!

You’re not going to believe this but my ‘a’ key has just started jamming. I’ve got one of the MacBooks with the sticky key problem (Apple offer a free replacement keyboard but…. lockdown) and I’ve actually been thinking about selling this laptop and getting an M1 MacBook Air or possibly just an old 12 inch MacBook because writing doesn’t require as many bells and whistles as, say, video editing. Although actually, I do that as well. I don’t know, it’s late, forgive me.

I hope you appreciate the hard work that has gone into the refresh. It’s not perfect and I still have a fair amount of tweaking to do, but most of the important bits are in place so I feel confident sharing. Wishing you all a wonderful, peaceful Sunday, and thank you for reading.

Click here to visit the new Perfect Chaos!

Why ‘3’ means three

In a recent blog post, I discussed the ancient Greek philosopher Plato and his theory about the existence of a ‘realm of forms’. Plato argued that the reason why we can identify objects as being of a certain kind (or category) is because they exist in their perfect form in a kind of non-material ‘realm’.

Plato’s arguments got me thinking about the reason why we identify objects as being of a certain kind; why we recognise every cat as a cat and every number 3 as a number 3. I have come to believe that we recognise objects as being of a certain kind not because they exist in a Platonic ideal realm, but because God gives us thoughts related to particular objects with consistency and regularity.

As an interesting hypothetical experiment, one could write the word ‘coffee’ on a piece of A4 paper and stick it to a tree in a mountainous area. Then one could walk away from the tree (with eyes firmly fixed on the word ‘coffee’) until the writing gets smaller and smaller, and eventually there will come a point when our perception of the word will change; it will appear so small as to be illegible. The change that we have experienced was in our perception rather than being the result of any material change related to the object in question.

An interesting philosophical question one might ask is; when the sign becomes illegible or ‘out of focus’, in what sense does its meaning still exist? Thinking about this problem led me to the conclusion that words are only words in the embodied experience as being perceived as such. The sign in our experiment does not say ‘coffee’ in some kind of ideal realm; it says coffee because God brings a certain impression — a thought — to its viewer’s mind at a particular point in time and in a particular way.

The scientist-sceptic will try to argue that things have meaning due to neurophysiological processes that go on in our brains when we look at objects and symbols. Many people in our day believe that human beings are rather like ‘brain machines’; everything related to our mental cognition is the result of brain activity and nothing more. But is the experience of understanding and recognising things a purely biological process?

It is my philosophical contention that brains are not machines in the way many neuroscientists suppose. In my understanding, human beings (and all creatures) are puppets in a grand puppet show which is orchestrated and directed by God. A living and omnipresent God is the reason why our hearts beat, our blood circulates, our food is digested, our hair and nails grow — and is also the reason why thoughts related to the perceiving of objects appear in our minds.

In a book I released in 2019 entitled God’s Grand Game: Divine Sovereignty and the Cosmic Playground I discuss the idea of God’s sovereign control over the unfolding of all events in a lot more detail, so if the arguments I’m presenting here are interesting to you, please do check out the book or, to get a free sample, check out the video series which accompanies the book, on YouTube.

Call for Reviews

Good evening all! I hope you are doing well. I posted yesterday about the subject of author perfectionism, and how it’s impossible for any author to write the perfect book. If you missed the post and would like to read it, you can do so here.

As part of my efforts to reach a wider audience with my own (imperfect!) books, I am currently seeking reviews. Well, I’m always seeking reviews, but I’m currently asking for them

If you would like to receive a free copy of one of my books in exchange for a review, please email steven@tealightbooks.com stating which book you are interested in reviewing. You can see a full list of my books (any of which you can request for review) on the books page. You don’t necessarily have to review the book on your blog or website (though it is encouraged!); a review on a site like Amazon or Goodreads would be fine.

Please note that due to the costs involved, I can only send physical copies within the UK. If you are outside of the UK, I will instead provide you with a digital copy which you can read on your device of choice. If you have a preference for a specific digital format, please let me know in your email.

Wishing you a happy weekend and looking forward to hearing from you!

Regards,

Steven