Prince Charles, The Prince of Wales is the son of Queen Elizabeth and a protege of Lord Mountbatton, the eminent wartime leader. The Prince was divorced from Princess Diane, who was a spectacular human being comparable to Princess Elizabeth in the time of King James I. This Princess Elizabeth should not be confused with Queen Elizabeth I, and it is significant to me that she lived at the time of James I. In the UK, the enthusiasm and support for lovely promising princesses is truly remarkable, so when Princess Di passed, it was traumatic affecting all and sundry in a negative way, whether they liked Princess Di or not. Prince Charles was a target of anger not the least cause of which was that the death of Princess Di formed a dangling loose end, out of harmony with everyone's ideals.
When Charles married Camila, his mistress of many years and his true love, we all wanted to be in another history book in which such an event did not take place. But, we would be wrong, for the marriage did close off one dangling end, which was Prince Charles being with someone he did nit love and very alone. For my part, I loved the Prince as an ideal of good cheer, fun, and harmony. To me he was never an ogre or someone to think bad of. My views are not shared, but there they are! People experience harmony and discord in many different ways.
I, am not much different from many when I like to think in ideals. In an ideal world, the marriage of Princess Di and Charles would have succeeded and She would be alive today. That would be such harmony. Thus, when Prince Charles comes out with a book with the heading of harmony, a new way of looking at the world, I am slightly ill at ease. It's not that I am puzzled because I do regard Charles as a person in search of harmony, and as such I am enormously respectful of him and truly joyful that he has this bent in personality. I don't like or dislike him because he is so far removed from my world. He belongs to a fairyland of people that I could never believe myself associated. They are fascinating to me and form a pastiche of colour to what otherwise is a pretty dull world. Yes! The Royal Family and it's personages are an amazing addition to our lives and we would be all the poorer without them despite the notion that they are sustained at some cost to many of us. That I don't believe. For me the cost is significantly lower than the benefit that I receive in terms of it allowing me to forget the horror of the alternative which in our reality was a dictatorship under Hitler, or some such madman, or a system of government possessed by the Solviet Bloc of yesteryear.
My Queen Elizabeth apparently spoke of King James I with great respect and she did mention that he made a lasting contribution to English society through the effort of translating the Bible. This hits a soft spot for me because in the margins of the translation are the hand writing of someone who bears my name. I once came across it in Wells Cathedral, but I leave that to you as a puzzle if you are so inclined.
My reason for discussing Prince Charles and his harmony book are because his ideas are very similar to my own. I am currently playing an iPad game in which the object is to create a matrix of zen like harmony out of a maze of pieces that have different lines within the matrix. Harmony exists when all the loose ends are joined and thus eliminated. In zen harmony, there are no loose ends, or so it is assumed in the game. In my view, such a games very much like life in harmony, but the only problem is that we see total disharmony because our lives are not joined when we die. We are as it were dangling ends. Or, so it seems, but I believe otherwise. Do you?
Time is, was and will be. Without time we would not be. What a load it has to carry! Time seems eternal! You might even ask whether cycles in time exist? If so read Roger Penrose's book on new attitudes in physics towards possible "Cycles in Time".