Nexus - 1804 - New Times Magazine-pages

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REVIEWS REVIEWS ¢ where visions, intuitions and promptings can help us create a uture that we want to live in. Perhaps, Dr Felser suggests, these End of Times expressions are really repressed yearnings to reconcile our inner and outer worlds in harmony with nature and spirit. He concludes hat the Great Ending myth is not about the future, but is a distorted echo of the distant past when we lost ouch with nature. It's up to us whether we realign ourselves. THE MYTH OF THE GREAT ENDING by Joseph M. Felser, PhD Hampton Roads Publishing, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, 20II ISBN 978-1-57174-645-0 (255pp tpb) Available: www.hrpub.com; www.deep-books.co.uk Tres nothing new about apocalyptic forecasts. In every culture from the ancient to the modern there have been beliefs about a Great Ending, and some of them have been right in that perhaps their adherents did foresee the end of their own civilisation. In other cases, Doomsday cults have fulfilled their own fanatical beliefs in mass suicide or murder. Curiously, some belief systems can persist despite the predicted scenarios not coming to pass; the particulars aren’ necessarily important. Joseph Felser, PhD, philosopher and associate professor at CUNY, New York, wonders, then, whether the "Myth of the Great Ending" is "hardwired" into the human imagination. Inspiring and informing him on his journey is the work of psychologist Carl Jung, mythologist Joseph Campbell, quantum physicist David Bohm, the Sioux sage Black Elk, and out-of-body explorer Robert Monroe. So, too, is the world of dreaming, AUSTRALIAN BIG CATS by Michael Williams & Rebecca Lang Strange Nation Publishing, Hazelbrook, NSW, Australia, 2010 ISBN 978-0-646-53007-9 (434pp tpb) Available: www.strangenation.com.au Tr is compelling evidence to suggest that big cats are roaming ree in isolated parts of Australia and New Zealand. Sydney-based researcher/writer Michael Williams and journalist Rebecca Lang have been studying eyewitness reports and iaising with sympathetic scientists or a decade, and they've pooled their resources on their website, www.australianbigcats.com.au. For heir book, they've pieced together archival reports and accounts from colonial times up to the present in an attempt to find the truth behind the 72 * NEXUS phenomenon, which also involves livestock being killed in particular ways. While Australia has no native big cats, the authors suggest that part of the answer may lie in the existence of an animal thought to be long extinct: the Thylacoleo carnifex, or "flesh-eating pouched lion". But other parts of the picture, with sightings of black panthers and brown pumas, had to be addressed— sightings that began in the 1880s, possibly of escaped circus animals and US military mascots respectively. The big cat problem has become a political issue in the Hawkesbury/ upper Blue Mountains region, and locals are fearful of a tragedy if the errant animals aren't caught. A gripping yarn with intriguing photos. An Unnatural OLPANT! JUNE - JULY 2011 www.nexusmagazine.com