If you wish to make a query, or contact us before purchasing a service, please use following form:
Or contact us by telephone on: 01445 712114 (UK callers)
+44 (0)1445 712114 (outside the UK)
Address: 10 Big Sand, Gairloch, Ross-shire, IV21 2DD, Scotland, UK
Please give consideration to our ethics, a statement of which we have included below:
ETHICS
The work we do here is the result of many years of research, and is part of an ongoing process of research and development. This site is the start of a much bigger project aimed at continuing this research, applying it, and disseminating it. Each and every person who participates in the project will gain huge personal benefits, but will be required to show a willingness to work, to be self-motivated and to be able to take adverse criticism. We accept clients only on this basis.
It may be illuminating for prospective clients to see part of the process that went into the creation of this statement of ethics, particularly since it goes counter to the modern trend of pandering to the whims and caprices of prospective clients.
It is often hard to escape the imperatives that are fed to us by the media, business interests, and the like, and we, too, when we began work on the website, fell victim to many ideas and concepts that were bred in the minds of businessmen whose sole concern is to make money. However, our acquired ability to interpret dreams came to our rescue. One such dream, experienced by Susan, was the following:
She was in a room in a building. There were many windows along one wall, and these were overlooking a harbour. There was a staff meeting of the (school) maths department in progress, and one of those present (we shall call him Joe), was known to Susan. The meeting was very informal, with people sitting on cushions on the floor and leaning against the walls etc. The department had just undergone its second school inspection, and had, like the first time, received some adverse criticism. On that first occasion, management had, for various reasons, put the blame for this on one member of staff, Bob. Bob had since left, and Susan was commenting that management could not, therefore, let Bob carry the can this time round. Further, the second bad inspection, she suggested, implied that the first bad inspection had probably been nothing to do with Bob after all. The staff were shocked by this, and the meeting dissolved.
In the second part of the dream, Susan was down at the harbour, meaning to take a ferry to an island, but not certain which ferry of the two available she should take. At first she got onto the passenger ferry, which was very busy and full of people. But in a moment she realised she had made a mistake, left this ferry and went for the car-ferry instead. The dream ended there.
There is some background information which is necessary to know for the purposes of interpreting this dream:
Susan and Joe have two things in common. They both originally had a background as maths teachers. Also, Susan was once Joe’s boss. The remarkable thing about Joe was that he was a ‘yes-man’, a crawler, the kind of person who will do anything to please the boss, and who puts on a show of liking and admiring the boss. When the situation changed, and Susan was no longer his boss, he did a chameleon like change, becoming a humorous, cheeky, and quite likeable, if somewhat predictable, person.
While Susan was teaching at Joe’s school, before she became his boss, the maths department did receive adverse criticism on two occasions after visits by the school inspectors. The first time this happened, the head of department blamed Bob, whereas, by the time of the second inspection, Bob had left and so could not be made to carry the can.
When this dream occurred we were in the early stages of starting our internet enterprise. I was creating the website, and had just got to the point where I was wondering what we should offer, and how to describe it to prospective clients, and had begun to think about formulating a statement of our ethics, while Susan was dealing with creating our business plan, chasing up web hosts, and considering issues of marketing, and the like.
Perhaps the key word is ‘marketing’. We are selling something, but what? How do we describe it? What lengths do we go to to persuade people to buy? And when thinking of employing web hosting services, and of expanding in the future, we must also think about how we approach the problems of staffing. However, in so far as both of these issues are about people, and in view of the fact that we would hope that our staff of the future will be drawn from our clients of the present, they are very much interlinked, and what is true of one is also true of the other.
First, many people have a great love of informality, but this is usually just an excuse for sloppy thinking. In mathematics, there is no room for sloppy thinking. Logic, precision, and clear thinking are necessary. In a good maths class, there should be more importance attached to the ‘working out’ than to the answer. You may, by luck, be able to guess the answer to the occasional question, but if you can think clearly, then you can, in time, answer any question.
The next issue is one of ‘changing colour’, as Joe did. People like Joe are generally ‘yes-men’, and they wear whatever colour suits at the time. If they were working for a cut-throat, business enterprise, they would claim to believe utterly in the rat-race ethics of that enterprise, but if, the next month, they were to get a new job with a charitable organisation, they would suddenly be claiming that they were, and had always been, utterly of the conviction that the giving of charity was the greatest of all goods. They could be scientists one minute, claiming to believe that there is no God, and be devout Christians the next, claiming they had, and always had had, belief in the existence of God. Such people are bad news, both as clients and as staff. It is extremely important to us that both staff and clients do not claim to believe what we are teaching until they have thought it out and experienced it for themselves. The loyalty of all people, for their sakes as well as for ours, must be to TRUTH.
Then the dream highlights the issue of how people deal with adverse criticism. Some people will find someone else to pass the blame to; some will shrug it off by saying that it was not genuine, but just the critic being bad-tempered; some will look shocked, and try to use techniques of emotional manipulation to get the critic to withdraw the criticism, and even to feel bad about ever having made the criticism in the first place! All these are symptoms of the same thing: these are people who are more concerned to save face than to understand a situation and get to the truth of things. Again, such people are bad news, both as clients and as staff. They are never going to try and think things out, never going to try and understand things, and so they are never going to make progress as clients, and are never going to contribute anything to our enterprise as members of staff.
The second part of the dream is, in fact, a metaphor for the ‘thing’ we are ‘selling’. The best description I can give of what we are offering is this: to ferry clients to an island. Let me unpack the metaphor: according to Shakespeare, ‘no man is an island’. What he means is that no-one exists in isolation from the rest of humanity. We affect each other and depend on each other. We take advice from other people, some of them friends, some ‘experts’; we draw our confidence from what others say about us, or the way they behave towards us; in all sorts of ways we are bound up, emotionally and intellectually, with all sorts of other people. This need not, and should not, be the case. With the kind of training we offer, and with the ability to interpret dreams, everyone can become totally and completely self-reliant, self-sufficient, and be able to rise above, and thus be unaffected by, all the emotional games that are used to control and manipulate us. That is, everyone can become an island.
In the dream, Susan got onto a passenger ferry first, then realised she was on the wrong one, and so got off that one and went for the car ferry instead. That is to say, she realised that we can carry no passengers. Clients and staff alike must be prepared to work, to ‘drive’ themselves. If they are not prepared to work with us, then they will get no-where, and they will only hinder our enterprise.
Thus, as I said at the beginning, there are huge rewards to be gained from what we have to offer, but only if clients are prepared to work, to be self-motivated, to be able to take adverse criticism, and to be loyal to truth and understanding above all else. We will, therefore, only accept clients, or staff, who fit this description. |