The Impact on my Reading and Writing of JK Rowling's Harry Potter Series

As a book writer, I can quite proudly say that my desire to writing and subsequent writing was tremendously influenced by JK Rowling's success with the Harry Potter series of books. I came across Harry quite by accident. Many times, I would visit Borders Books or Barnes and Noble at lunch time in Washington, DC. Books are my passion, and I like all kinds of books, fiction or non-fiction. I am aware that I was aware that he was being promoted. However, my interest was in series of books because I loved to read on the metro, and when I did read I would read a whole series. This was over a period of a decade, at least. There may have been three or more Harry Potter books out there before I really became aware of them.

For several months, Harry would be staring at me from the store book shelves, but I must have missed him many times before I made the plunge and bought the first Harry Potter book in my life. It has had a profound influence on my perspectives in every sense of the word. I bought the book because there was a Harry Potter series of books. This made sense to me since the Harry Potter books require an investment in learning characters. I am not very good in remembering all the different characters in books before losing interest, so I have to think there is a payoff from all the effort.

One of the comments on my own book series of Wuh Lax has been that there are so many characters. To be honest, I don't really care, and to be frank its because I can remember them and I think young people reading my books will remember them. It may be now because they play computer games and in such games one has a host of different characters. It may be easier for kids to remember a larger number of characters. If one invests the time to learn the characters in the Wuh Lax series you will be rewarded. I don't really expect you to buy the first in the series until I have about three or four of the series in print and on the books shelves.

If you have read the first Wuh Lax book, you will know that some of my characters are based on real people who have influenced my life and have passed on to the other side. In my book, they come back as actors within an ethereal realm interacting with our matereal world. The ghosts of the past people are what drives events in our present day life experiences. That I am sure of, so it is not very difficult for me to imagine my mother or my cousin, or former friends and relatives visiting me and my characters in the here and now or in the past. Another thing that you will know is that my book is very philosophical at its roots and has a lot of science in it. The first book is only an introduction to these aspects. My writing will be educational as well as entertaining and will contain all sorts of discoveries.

What the Harry Potter series did for me was show me how to develop a world using words and then populate that world with information and mystery that will ultimately provide entertainment while it educates. The reaction of many people to the Harry Potter series was that it was evil in some ways because it took kids minds away from Jesus Christ or religion. Many churches wanted to ban the book. Of course, this is absolutely against what I felt about the book, the series, and the author. I could relate to Harry as a closet boy, bullied and deprived. Immediately, I wanted him to rise up and be somebody important. What Rowling did was give him a destiny and for that I was eternally grateful because harry Potter really came alive as a being within my mind. He is as real as Captain Aubrey in the Patrick O'brien series, or Hornblower in the Forrester series.

My favorite author, as you may know is Captain Frederick Marryat. He is one of the few writers to satisfy my yearning to read within a single book. Marryat's book, 'Children of the New Forest' was transforming. Another writer, who is stupendous in building a story is Sir Walter Scott, the author of Ivanhoe.

The Cosmic Lantern

The cosmic lantern is a very strange device that has existed through several millenia. It was recently discovered by the author Arthur Lake in London, England in an antique shop. The lantern has inspired a series of books based on Lake's experiences and those of a host of people that have interacted with the people who have possessed lantern through the ages, and around the globe. Lake has researched the story of the Lantern and its association with Tintagel, Wookey, Glastonbury, King Arthur, Lancelot of the Lake and the Knights of the Round Table.

The story of lantern reveals many of the mysteries surrounding the current search an understanding of the mysteries of the Holy Grail, the learned societies of ancient Druids, and several secret Guilds of London formed in the middle ages that influenced the renaissance in Europe. This series is a must read.

An unusual property of the lantern is that it does not obey normal physical laws and endows its possessor with amazing powers. In ancient times, shortly ofter the Romans had invaded South West Britain, the lantern appeared mysteriously in the possession of a peasant boy, son of a fisherman, who lived in a tree house that sat in the dark regions of Wookey Marsh hidden away from the Roman soldiers. But, only for a time because a famous General of the Roman Army named Vespasian came to learn of the lantern through his Commander of the Roman Cavalry, a man called Corellus.

The story of Wuh Lax and the Cosmic Lantern is now selling exclusively by Togwells at Amazon or from the author directly at Togwells Publishing. This is an independent publishing effort. Support your independent writers.

Explaining the Wu of Wooh

As readers are undoubtedly aware, the author of this blog, AW Lake, is also the author of the very successful book "Wuh Lax and the Cosmic Lantern." The leading character of the book, which is the first of a series of books featuring a large cast of characters, is Wuh Lax, who is a mythological character. I say mythological, but the irony of it is that Wuh is an archetypal hero with a very great presence. As my stories unfold, the devoted readers of the series will become aware that Wuh, the mythological individual, really does exist on an ethereal plane. This is why the books are aimed at the ethereally challenged. But, I should explained a bit about what is meant by the ethereally challenged?

Most of us are ethereally challenged. Wu-wu is a pre-Taoist state in which there is absolutely nothing. Out of the state of wu-wu comes the Tao. The Cosmic Lantern is a story about the new physics. The ethereally challenged include all those reading in the area of the new physics. Scientists are on the threshold of discovering that the cosmic concept of the big bang has to be re-written through revelation coming from both science and inspiration. In reality the concept of the big bang is as much a mythology of science as it is of religion. In the beginning, God did not create our universe. There is very good reason.

The state of wu, of complete nothingness, is a myth, Similarly while Christian creationism spells the mythology of God creating the universe, the Taoists spell out their mythology which results in Ying and Yang. Both are inspired by man's quest to unveil the mysteries of the universe. I say this knowing that my father was a Christian minister, a missionary, and a devout believer in a personal relationship with Christ. His reality was based on an inner transformation that he very successfully documented in a series of daily writings and readings. He insisted that one could come to know God through inner transformation arising from what one saw and read.

It was the ethereal departure of my father, that brought me to create Wuh and to explore those regions of our existence that are rarely explored because our mythologies about truth get in the way. My father was also a devout student of human nature and knew the secret of dancing with God. This is what wu is all about, dancing with the truth. Our fate is that we will never know the truth of what has happened or what is going to happen. That does not stop us from creating our mythology of what the truth is all about and then believing our mythology, and indeed experiencing it as our reality.

God exists, but God exists in the wu, and is the all pervading essense of being, fullness or emptiness depending on whether your glass is half full or half empty. Wu is all about attitude, about dancing with God, about dancing with the unknowable truth. From where do I get my knowledge?

For many years at Cambridge University in England, I studied the nature of invention and knowledge, how it arose and what happened with it. My studies were focused on knowledge creation as it applied to the science of economics, but that did not stop me from understanding the bigger picture. While a student at Cambridge in the early 1970s , some of my fellow students had a little red book that they carried around with them all the time. They constantly spoke to me about Mao and his words, how important they made them feel. They had purpose and direction. To them Chairman Mao spoke the truth and they were not going to listen to anything that I said concerning that truth. Instead my response was to give them a book about the Tao, which I said contained more truth than Mao's little red book. Gary Zukav in his book, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, wrote that science and religion are only dances, and that those involved in these enterprises might claim to be seeking the truth but their reality is that they as dancers and love to dance.

I invented Wuh, but wu is a magician and a worker of miracles. My task was to let him perform those miracles in the minds of my readers. Aloha and Uweeeee!

Lost Knowledge and the Very Real Significance of Wuh Lax

Stonehenge and my stories of Wuh Lax are very closely intertwined hystorically. I use the term hystory to distinguish it from history, which I am claiming is further from the truth when it comes to the early period of Britain. History needs to be rewritten after it is thoroughly researched.

It saddens me to think that the successes of the early peoples of Briton go unnoticed relative to the worship historians seem to have for Roman history. To my mind the Roman history of South West Britain is more like fiction than it is history. By focusing on the Romans the British historians have missed the significance of the lax in the history of early Britain, hence the name of my main character Wuh Lax, which almost seems to have mystical or religious properties when placed in its correct context.

There are a number of facts to consider. The first is that the lax like the drax were of religious significance to the early Britons, and in particular those people who lived in Dumnonia and Durotriga, i.e. the South West of Britain. Drax becomes drake and lax becomes lake. Drax is a foul and it is a drake, and the drake was worshiped by the early peoples. Lax is the word for salmon and the salmon and the lake they swim in are worshiped by the ancient people. The fact that the hero of Britain was a man called Sir Francis Drake, who had cousins in the West Country should start you thinking that perhaps the surname name of this fellow goes back into ancient times. Why should one think anything otherwise, I have to ask?

As it happens the names Lax and Drax and very ancient and are very closely related in actual, but unwritten history of the early peoples of South West Britain, those people whose capital was closer to Athelney than London. Those people who spoke english before it was supposed to have been invented. The 'ing' people as I like to think of them, the people of the hero whose image sits on so many hills across southern Britain, or the 'bri' people, the people of the hills and the people of the tin found in the hills. Britons, and these people of the hills of the South West, my ancestors, most probably did not come from Anglia or Saxony, as the conventional history books would incorrectly have us believe.

How ancient? Well if you think that these people chose their words and named their special places well before the time of Stonehenge, and possibly several thousand years before Stonehenge, then that's pretty ancient.

You can, for example, forget that the notion of ley lines is fiction. No, ley lines are very very real and they can be seen by the naked eye from aerial photographs. Hows that for linking the past to the present. Ley lines and the ancient surveying of South West Britain go well into the period of more than a thousand years before Stonehenge. In fact, Woodhenge lies on a visible ley line that stretches right across South West Britain to the fort at Hod Hill, the ancient home of the Durotriges people. Hows that for ley lines not having historical significance. No! Ley lines really do exist, did exist and were very important to the ancient peoples, who ever they were. It is significant that the ley lines connect the henges with settlement rings at Maiden Castle, Badbury, Sarum and Woodhenge.

My evidence will be strewn, within my Wuh Lax novels and will explain among many things, who the real 'historical' King Arthur really was, where the capital of Briton, really was, and some of what the ideas of the ancient peoples really contained. My books, novels, about Wuh Lax will show the path of knowledge that these ancient peoples possessed and why they located at Stonehenge the stones they did. The Wuh Lax adventure, "The Lost King" tells the King Arthur story the way it was before his legend took over and Glastonbury and Cadbury rose to archaeological significance. For the real King Arthur story you will need to read my book when it comes out.

You might say that I figured it out. And, why did I have to figure it out for myself. It was/is because historians have thought linearly and used Roman ideas to sort out history that the Romans sought to hide. As I might say, you ain't read anything yet until you have read Wuh Lax for within Wuh Lax many of the mysteries of Stonehenge and the Pyramids are revealed. Many bits of ancient knowledge are unearthed once more and can be examined and verified or disproved by the archaeologists.

Possibly, Plausibly, Probably, Predictably and Practically

You know what it is like to be challenged by an idea. Well, this morning, I had to deal with the uncertainty of many ideas. It is more than obvious that facts come in different shadings. I had a list of observations in front of me. The question was what I could make of them. Fortunately, my mind is one that can enjoy many colours. Things are not black and white, nor are they various shades of grey. Happily they are usually in a wonderful array of colour. Nor am I colour blind, which means that I enjoy the fullest range of colours.

What we see is information

However, I am not like a bat, and so I cannot see radar. I cannot even see infra-red or ultra violet even though I may assume that it is there. My eyes, like those of most humans, are tuned to see the colour spectrum, which is very lucky, indeed. They say that if you have something wrong with you, your brain will process colours less effectively. Probably, the first thing that you will notice is that you like certain colours more than you used to and others less. There is a range of colours that healthy people enjoy most of the time. Moreover, if you enjoy some colours more than others, it makes sense to find out why.

Colours are like facts that our brain processes. We can see things in the various combinations of black versus white, shades of grey, in most but not all colours available. Some of us are lucky enough to see all the shades of truth about something, and see it extraordinarily clearly. To do that one has both a brain that can process information about the truthfulness of some fact or another in numerous ways to bring out the various colours of confidence that one could, would, or should have about any given fact presented to one.

Information about Wuh Lax

This morning, I reviewed the facts of a story that I have in my head about the topography of the ancient world of Wuh Lax. The first thing to note is that Wuh Lax is supposed to have lived almost two thousand years ago, and his name may not have been Wuh Lax. I had to start somewhere so I came up with the name Wuh as it reflected a very ancient expression. We often say 'wooh' when we see something extraordinary, in awe, or when we need to take a breath after exertion. So in my mind, its possible that in 50 AD someone was called Wuh. Not only that, it is plausible because the name is not so extraordinary. We don't hear of many people called Wuh today, but then we don't hear of many people called God today. I could have chosen the name God, but that might have been taken in the wrong way. Godney would have been better, I suppose, but Wuh is even better still!

The name Lax is not only possible, but it is probable. It is a name surname available today in the place where we find Wookey Marsh. I saw it in a local church grave yard in near Wells cathedral not far from Wookey, the modern day place, and it started me thinking.

Salmon and Sacred or Ancient Knowledge or Teaching

Where did the name Lax come from? I have the idea that it is pre-Roman, but it would certainly have been available to the Romans. My idea, which I think is plausible, is that the name refers to a type of fish, namely salmon. I have seen plausible derivatives of the name Lax in places that one would expect to catch salmon, namely streams. Since in my mind the name Lax is very ancient, it seems to me that there is a significant between the location of the name today and ancient beliefs about salmon. Salmon was a pseudonym for knowledge, but why?

I think that it is plausible that the life of the salmon was the knowledge that was being considered by the ancients. Mature salmon swim upstream to die. In death they lay eggs which then turn into fish and swim downstream into the sea. The life cycle of the salmon was the knowledge that the ancients were thinking of when they thought of knowledge, or possibly the teaching of life.

The teaching of the life process is that as we mature we swim against the stream and eventually are so worn out we die. In the process of going against the stream, we give birth to new offspring, which then produce the cycle of life anew.

Teaching built into Lake Barrows and Stonehenge in Wiltshire

In my mind, it is plausible that Stonehenge and the Long Barrows at Lake 'Lax' in Wiltshire, England were seat of the teaching or the knowledge about the salmon, the lax, which swam the Avon and died at the upper reaches of the Avon stream. It is fitting that the Avon was the vehicle of transporting new life into the sea in the form of baby salmon.

Plausibly, the significance of Stonehenge and the Lake 'Lax' Barrows of more than 4,400 years ago, is that they were places of the seat of knowledge of the life cycle.

Cosmic Relationships?

The symbol of the salmon is also to be found in the stars and there may be a connection there to a search for the birthplace and place of retreat of earth as being one of the many stars in the sky. We see the symbol of the salmon in the earliest drawings of the peoples of the Middle East and Africa.

Thus, to my mind because I carry forward the idea of Wuh Lax, I am very lucky.

Does Your View Point Matter if it is Not Humourous

My blog earlier this week discussed the Wuh Lax discovery that the universe was an inside out universe and that light was not moving and there was something to the idea of a cosmic lantern. The main point behind the blog was to get the reader to think, but at the same time there is an element of humour involved. The notion that all the many millions of scientific hours spent researching the movement of light when it is in fact standing still has to be funny.

The question is what do you think I, the author, believe. If you think my view point is one of humour and I am sitting back think how clever or witty I am having cracked a joke, then that is one thing. But, if you think I am deadly serious when I say that science may have got things wrong. That is a very different thing. In any event, does it really matter what I think or what my real point of view is?

What is really paradoxical is that I don't believe I am right nor that I am wrong in saying that science has got its view point incorrect. I can hold both viewpoints simultaneously. That has to be strange. I can believe two things at once that are diametrically opposed. This suggests, does it that I am a bit unlike a computer. A computer generally requires one answer, either this or that. Unless we were trying to build a world of uncertainty, we would not want a computer to dither or hold two opposing views. So I am not a computer, and if Professor Penrose is right, I may be linked in a very exact way to the world of quantum matter. What does that really mean?

For one thing, it suggests that my behaviour or belief may not be programmed. Wow! I could tell you either this or that in complete honesty and be wrong in both cases. I could change my mind from moment to moment. There is no predicting what I really believed because there is no section of me that I can find, or any one else, that contains the things that I believe. Does that make me in any sense abnormal.

I suspect that sitting on the fence in ones beliefs is pretty normal. If I said to you that I have a coin in my hand and it is a pound coin, what would you believe. You would probably not believe anything. You would say to yourself that you would not have an opinion on the matter because you did not have enough information. The question, I would ask you is whether you would have enough information if two people said that I had a pound coin in my hand. How many people would you need to have faith that what I was saying was the 'truth.'

The fact is that you would probably not believe what I am saying if a thousand people were to tell you that light is standing still and you are exploding at the speed of light along with all the other things around you. You might be willing to take a bet on it, but that would depend on whether you thought that you would win the bet, but that would in turn depend on who was judging the bet and determining what was true or untrue. Who would be this marvelous judge?

If the judge were a member of the scientific community, you would probably make the bet that I was full of nonsense in thinking that we were exploding. We can see the universe is exploding, but we don't see ourselves as exploding. Strange that? So do you hold one belief or two? Do you think that the scientific method would be adequate to determine that light was moving or standing still? What would you accept as a method of testing the 'truth'?

Michio Kaku Makes a Timely Impression on BBC Time

My three favourite authors at this very moment are Michio Kaku, MJ Harper, and Ronald Brech. Kaku appeared on BBC 4 to tell us all about how the future of technology was going to shape the directions of change looking forward. Harper recently (2006) wrote a book entitled 'The History of Britain Revealed - The shocking truth about the English language'. Paperback or Hardcopy Ronald Brech in the 1960's wrote a book entitled 'Britain 1984 - The History of the Future' I tried to find a copy of it on Amazon, but could not find one. It would appear that the history of the future 1984 is now known and no book need predict it.

Are you sure? Last year, I debated with my brother whether or not time existed as a dimension. His argument was that I was an idiot. There was no real debate over whether time existed or not. It seemed to him that it was obvious that the whole question was a stupid question. Of course, time exists. I should listen to my brother because he was trained as an astra physicist in Massachusetts. I think he helped find a super nova.

Ooops, I must have made a mistake because time does not exist. I am sure that you believe it does, but I am equally sure that that you are wrong. This is because I am a student of time and have researched it thoroughly for many decades and could not find it anywhere. Everywhere I looked I saw motion and change but no where could I find time. No time does not exist. Time is a figment of the human mind. It simply is not there. I am mistaken, you say. No I am not, say I.

The problem that I have with time is that it suggests that a unique future exists, but having read Ronald Brech's book, we know that it does not exist and no matter how hard we try to predict it, we will fail. The problem is mathematical in that there are more things moving around than things to stop them or control them moving around. Even things that move backward in our illusion of time, such as positrons, cannot be uniquely controlled. This means that the past is not determined any more than the future.

It is said that if you were able to go back in time you would be able to kill your parent and then you would not be born. The problem with this silly argument is that it insults the intelligence of the mathematics I have just described that doesn't allow for a single solution of existence of anything.

What I mean to say is that obviously and mathematically we have a world that has more than one pathway that we would call time if we thought time exists, which suggests that there are obviously multiple paths of time. Ok, you might say, but how many paths of time are there? The answer is that we simply do not know, but the number could be very large as I have not seen any future people saying hello to me recently.

Remarkably, when we examine the past in the way that MJ Harper does, we find that there are many anomalies as he describes them. It would appear that we are not really in a position to say definitively that the English language was originally an Anglo Saxon language or that it had much to do with Anglo Saxon. All we really know is that the people of Britain in the time of the early Romans spoke a language very similar to that spoken in the rest of early Europe. No one to my knowledge wrote the language down in such a way that one in modern times could see, read or hear it.

MJ harper in his fascinating book claims that it is more likely that the sounds of the English language were already part of the vernacular in Briton well before the arrival of the Romans. Its just strange that no one seems to know what the early Britons sounded like. When I wrote my book about the amazing life of Wuh Lax in 50 AD See I took great care in deciding to have my characters speak English. This seemed logical given that the people of the day probably sounded like they spoke English.

Harper is also very good at revealing the pit falls of accepted truths of sciences such as evolution. He shows that the history of the past may be very different from what we would like to think because we only see it in a causal way. We tend to look at things as causal. Some thing causes something else therefore it must have preceding the thing it caused.

I have a very different twist on this idea of causation because if time does not exist as I say it does not exist, who is to say that past times cause future times. It could be the other way around. Suppose that in earthly past a group had uncovered a cold fusion energy machine and had discovered a way to travel very very fast using this machine. This is only fiction since I have no evidence for it, but they could travel slower in time relative to people on earth. I am not sure what technology they would need to travel backward in time, but I think it would have to do with light.

Now what does this all have to do with Michio Kaku and the BBC program on future technologies? The big question in my mind is whether we need to go back in time in order to change the past. Maybe the answer is that we can never go back in time because time does not exist and so the question is irrelevant, or is it. Could a future technology presently being research help me to answer my question about travelling somewhere that does not exist. Michio describes superconductors, metamaterials, invisible cloaks, nanotubes, highways into space, abundant energy sources, nano materials, swarms of nano robots or nanobots, disassembly technologies reassembly technologies, digital fabrication, personal fabricators, teleportation systems, the synergy of technology revolutions, the mastery of matter and life, but he fails to answer my simple question. Do we need to go back in time to change the past? What is the past? For that matter, what is the future?