Don’t think you are in just for a stroll
This page is a black hole
Jump in, it won't extract a toll
I hope that for your soul
It will be a welcome dole
And even squeeze diamonds off your coal
That it will not just console
But widen your bowl,
Change your goal,
Give you a different role
And from this cosmic torus' other pole,
You'll probably come out whole

In the following pages, you can find some of my' views on life issues such as science, philosophy, work, money, society, culture, spirituality, the paranormal, creativity, etc.. I sense humanity has been wallowing for too long in bull sh... excuse me, bovine doodoo and outright nonsense. So I intend nothing less than solve all human problems, untangle all the riddles and mysteries that have held the human mind shackled and bound in darkness and ignorance.. so we can all finally move on to better stuff. For some it will be pure therapy for existential ills of all kinds but for most these ideas will be like “conceptual bombs” in the brain that will just add to already existing confusion, or even worst, ruin the romance of a life lived in clueless stupor, one that is rich with drama and flavored with contradictions. So be warned.

How To Read The Content:

- The only viable purpose of a knowable truth is not to be believed but to be transcended. You must apply that to every idea exposed on this blog. It shouldn't come as a surprise, but my intellect hasn't been yet crowned with the holy grail of final knowledge, thus I can only pretend to present my ideas as simple contributions, with the expectation that they will constitute viable material for building stepping stones for an ulterior, improved understanding of the issues discussed.

- Eventhough I won't mind you falling prey to my contrived bewitchments and succumb in ecstatic seizures of appreciation of this literary endeavor :), my aim is not to gain your adulation, and it is not to win you to any particular cause by force of intellectual arguments. My premise is that we cannot change by mental proddings alone without a subsequent brain-jolting experience of the realities exposed. Otherwise we will be just pitching abstractions and getting air-filled conceptual balls in return. My hope is that instead of just giving you another lame interpretation of the facts, I can build you a path straight to the true version; that instead of just providing you with more ideological tools for your already overcrowded toolbox of beliefs, I can skillfully string my syntax and form powerful connection protocols that can hook you straight to the motherboard of all knowledge. This is the impossible task I have undertaken.

- While you wade your way thru the sea of my numerous attempts at making sense of things, you may encounter seeming contradictions. Contradictions in my discourse may happen for three main reasons:
1) I do eventually change my mind on issues as new ideas and insights arise, for my commitment is to closing in on truth and not to closing up in consistency.
2) Unwitting ignorance of important facts, my intellectual incapacity to fully comprehend all the angles of an issue and failing to square my views with complete, reasonable and satisfying arguments.
3) The simple fact that I cannot pretend to swim in the deep oceans of high ontology without eventually encountering conceptual cross-currents where both opposites of an argument meet in perplexing and strange ways and seem to paradoxically both meet my expectations of logical congruence. Your job as a reader is to overcome the ever present twitching critical nerve and gracefully withhold judgment for the sake of judgment but instead use the ideas found here to construct better answers for your own and everybody else's edification. It is without saying that I am impervious to criticism and frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.

Disclaimer: Due to the mature content of this blog, it is recommended that viewers be on thinking gear and with their mental immune engines on. Acting upon these ideas without taking this particular precaution may result in serious personal injury. The writer also uses modern language: viewers living in previous centuries may find some material offensive.

About Prime Numbers

In mathematics, prime numbers are those divisible only by one and themselves. Examples of prime numbers are 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19 etc.. Prime numbers have very peculiar properties such as the fact that any nonzero natural number greater than 2 can be factored into primes. In this sense, they constitute the building blocks of all other numbers. This and many other characteristics make them really intriguing entities and mathematicians are still pondering about many of their aspects and feverishly working at cracking one of their most unyielding mysteries: the presence or not of a definite pattern in their sequential enfoldment.

Lately, I have been studying the Riemann Hypothesis, which is considered by many in the field as the greatest unsolved mathematical mystery of all times (with the Fermat Last Theorem and the Poincare Conjecture having already been proven). I will not burden you with the nitty details of what this famous conjecture seeks to prove, but just that it has to do with prime number sequences and the presence or not of a sensible pattern in their seemingly infinite distribution. I do not claim to understand the hypothesis in its entirety, and as a matter of fact, I often felt dizzy going up and down the complex equational hills and negotiating the convoluted formulaic bends of what I am convinced was a premeditated attempt by a hermetic and sinister click of beady-eyed, vicious and self-centered abstraction-paranoid professional scientists to obfuscate the view from a closely held secret, one that is reserved only to the very select and the initiated.

This is what I gleaned from my frustrating outsider proddings:

No doubt about it, prime numbers must have a pattern and the pattern will be most likely found when we arrive at a deeper understanding of the space-nature of time, its physicality as opposed to its abstracting chronological aspect. In the same manner that the known 92 or so naturally occurring chemical elements are the building blocks of the natural physical space, prime numbers, in their apparently random sequencing have a method in their madness, are indeed a mathematical notion of the most relevant and deep kind and are the building blocks of the natural physical time, time being that hyper-dimensional ocean of existence, that subtle vibrational fountain-head from which everything manifest emerges.

As weird and flaky as it may sound, numbers are things, and some particular numbers are very special things ( and I did arrive at this conclusion many years ago while studying guess what... Mathematics? Chemistry? Physics? No, abnormal psychology, but that is another of my stranger-than-you-can-suppose stories, however true and non-confabulated :). Numbers are not just imagined representations but are truly the one-dimensional source-points from which higher dimensional categories ramify forming the backbone of our five-senses' revealed reality. I believe that prime numbers are not just sterile mental abstractions but have instead a character, a property, a flavor and a distinct energy that makes them as palpable and real as oxygen, carbon or hydrogen. I came to be convinced that the prime numbers' role in the general architectonic configuration of being, is that of forming the joining vertices of the distinct polyhedral, geometric structures of the hyper-dimensional body of time and the axial poles around which they spin, gather "cosmic dust" and eventually appear (thru some not yet fully understood "alchemical" process) as the spiral tornados of manifest objects that make the three dimensional landscape (from microscopic DNA helices of the human gene to the light-years spanning galactic arms of the Milky Way), and the long and undulating corpus of history that filters thru our lower-dimensional consciousness as the discreet and concatenating string of unfolding natural and cultural events.

I have about 25 pages of further material on the subject, with formulas and equations to boot, just to show that this is not just brass-sounding or cymbal-tinkling rap but a serious scientific hypothesis. I will elaborate more once I find a simpler and more dignified way of hanging out this stinky salmon to dry.

About Mental Disease

We can think of the brain as that extraordinary computation machine, tirelessly capturing sensible information from the environment and beyond, and translating it back to the self in comprehensible ways, a process which makes us the well-adapted, conscious and sentient beings that we think we are. But we can also perceive the brain as a filtering device, a buffer so to speak, whose main function is to modulate the avalanche of ambient data and gradually release that flow into our consciousness in ways that are not compromising to our nervous circuitry or overwhelming to our natural processing abilities. When cracks appear in this complex sieving mechanism for genetic or other reasons, and this very necessary mental holding dam gives way, our psychic space is inundated with a staggering flux of material, from this and other-dimensional provenance, we become overpowered and subsequently we start exhibiting behaviors that are generally categorized as abnormal or incongruent with the consensus gentium, a widely accepted notion of sane and normal human conduct.

I do not need to emphasize the reality that the cauliflower shaped, two-sided and rippled lump of stuff floating inside our cranium, still remains our most uncharted territory and that most of what happens within it and comes out of it is as mysterious and obscure as ever. But the gravest sacrilege we commit when approaching the altar of the most high mind, is to fail to remove the soiled shoes of a hopelessly arrogant belief that we know what normal is. Did you know that what differentiates the visionary and exalted madness of a highly esteemed tribal shaman and the fragmented delusions of a mental-board committed schizophrenic is that the former is socially sanctioned and has relative control over his state and the latter is shunned and is practically swept in the wake of his tormenting hallucinations. The same altered states, just different cultural attitudes and different outcomes. My hope is that we will be more understanding and compassionate towards individuals whose behaviors and utterances may fall outside accepted norms or lie beyond the fence of widely accepted social paradigms. In cases of obvious mental sickness we should absolutely provide adequate treatment and therapy, particularly if there is danger to self or others, but that at the same time we be discerning enough to consider the possibility that thru the gaping rift of these anguished and split souls, God may find a convenient wedge thru which to push a timely message or impart a needed lesson, and this has happened more than once in our history. It is a proven fact, God often finds a much better interlocutor in our madness than he does in our sanity.

Ode To The Beloved
Inspired by Omar Khayyam

Disheveled, with raiment torn
by god and man forlorn
but I was never sorry I was born
for I have wine, the beloved and the morn

I don't think of tomorrow nor yesterday
the bidding of many can't sway
my peace and childlike play
they say, with hell-fire I shall pay

Heaven to me is also dear
but I do want it here
angels may for ever cheer
but they are far, and you so near

The Cup Of Wisdom

I looked long in a wiseman's scroll
but I found this wisdom in a bowl
that the body, as well as the soul
are dutifully playing a role
sometimes angel, sometimes troll
sometimes valley, sometimes knoll
sometimes flower and sometimes coal
We may seem going down a hole
but there is a purpose and a goal
It may seem madness, out of control
but there is a method in it all

How Do We Invent Things?

Henry Poincare once said: "by logic we prove, by intuition we invent". On the same line, my opinion is that our greatest and most relevant human creative accomplishments were not attained up a continual thread of individual rational cogitation, no matter how trained and deep, but are instead delivered in quantic bouts of transcendental intimations into the collective unconscious thru the dreams and altered mental states of a few selected individuals that we usually categorize as geniuses. A genius is not just a mentally super-endowed virtuoso, but is also the brainy wedge thru which the high and "superpersonal" intelligence of which we are all a part, gradually and conveniently drives the little secrets of its true reality into the domain of human history. This is why I believe we must stop worshiping talented people and start inquiring seriously about the energies behind their seemingly unusual abilities.

Rooms Full Of Big White Elephants

It is really sad when we are so obtuse, so unconscious that we loose sight of the fact that this life is by all observable and reasonable accounts, a great unknown, a tremendous mystery. Our highest esteemed interpretations, our most cherished certainties and most unquestioned beliefs are at best lame attempts at fixing in space what is in essence the fleeting notes of a passing tune, sung with lyrics of a foreign tongue.

Let me tell you a few things about what is going on here: we find ourselves mired in this great conundrum, that we feel we must build a material world but the only bricks available to construct our glorious personal and institutional ideological monuments are made of false illusions and damning lies. We cannot build with truth, it is an outright existential impossibility because the truth is very simply that we know doodoo about who we are, what we are, why we are here and where we are going, and you can't say that publicly and expect to get invited at a garden party or put that on your resume and hope to get a job these days. Our greatest personal (and cultural) fear is not to be able to sustain the fiction anymore and some fateful day be unmasked for the great frauds we are... and this, in my opinion, is probably going to be the most liberating experience and the greatest and happiest day that humanity has ever seen.

What Is Infinity?

Infinity is a relationship that is also a thing. Infinity is the decimal ever-unfolding ratio of space and time, but is also the bounding measure of something. In fact, Infinity is not a limitless number of moments that extend for ever and ever amen, but is instead, the exponential curve of time asymptotically converging in a particular point in the complex space-time matrix and indwelling it. That point can be either an object or a calendar date. That is what we mean when we speak of the end of time or the end of the world , and man's soul being eternal, and that is what William Blake meant when he said "hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour". In this sense infinite (infinitely big) and infinitessimal (infinitely small) are different directions on the same curve of the wave of space-time, and which appear to be converging or diverging according to our frame of observation.

You may be quite befuddled to hear that infinity is not only one but many, that individual infinities do actually have a converging end, and that living things, to be considered truly living, had to have infinity embedded in them. The truth is that we have been badly conditionned by a culture that understands time in its linear, quantitative and chronological expression but completely ignores its spiral, qualitative and dynamic aspects.

There is also another problem, human consciousness cannot apprehend descrete things but only things as they interact with other things, or in other words, we grasp by comparing and contrasting. Infinity cannot be easily understood using the tools of reason but can only be inferred thru imagination and the diverse and convoluted contraptions of high mathematics. What I mean by that is that "infinity" and the popular mental concept of it, is more a construct of our brains than its actual, encompassing reality.

Our brains, as I mentioned in previous insights, is a mathematical, computational machine. It perceives things and matches them to a preexisting frame of reference. Infinity happens when our brains are confronted to a plane of existence where time is not relevant (in distances that are infinitesimally small such as in atoms and distances that are infinitesimally large such as in galaxies) and a plane of existence where time is relevant, such as in our daily human life. The brain starts computing both planes (circular plane per linear plane) and gets an irrational number, a number whose decimals are infinite. If you ever wondered what is the significance of the symbol pi in mathematics, well this is it. Pi as you may know is the ratio of the circumference of a circle by its diameter which is relatively constant and equals approximately 3.1416. Circumference/circle is a symbol of timelessness. A diameter is a straight line and symbolizes linearity, measurable quantities, cause and effect, rationality, etc... 

In my opinion, answers to many mysteries about the universe may lie in mathematical concepts such as prime numbers, Fibonacci series, pi, phi and complex/imaginary numbers, whose significance and applications are all but fully understood.

Very quick but very telling observation about complex and imaginary numbers. Mathematicians represent imaginary numbers with the letter "i" and it's the square root of -1 which is not a real number because no number multiplied by itself will yield a negative number. Then what is the purpose of "i"? In order to solve some very complex equations, mathematicians cannot limit themselves to real numbers but have to resort to using imaginary ones. Can you believe your ears, mathematicians, scientists use stuff that practically exists only as a figment of their imagination because they realize it helps them solve real problems.

So it is true: you can believe in something that is not really there but still have that something solve (or eventually create) tangible, real life problems. I may be wrong but I think I have just solved a conflict that has tormented humanity for hundreds of years: it is ok to believe in Santa Clause if it makes children happy. Big brain scientists do it, what shouldn't you.

About 2012

Check section "About The Great Year"

Let me first say that this seemingly great debacle of 2012 is not a prediction, but just an old observation, the precession of the equinoxes (also know as Perihelion Advance, a phenomenon that according to famous physicist DeBroglie, happens at the atomic level as well -another example of the fractality of the universe-), that was always there but that just recently begun to take relevance. 2012 is the end date of the Mayan Calendar, the begining of the Golden Age of Vedic prophecy, the year of the appearance of the New Star of Hopi prophecy, the zero point in the Auric Time Scale Spiral of Sergey Smelyakov, the year zero in the Timewave Zero of Terence Mckenna, the Galactic Center Conjunction of John Major Jenkins, and on and on. These are not just people on the looney fringes of society, they are serious, rational, methodical philosophers, historians, scientists and mathematicians and they all seem to somehow converge on this date, and if you asked me, for very good reason. They all have one thing in common: they understand the fractal configuration of the cosmos, the spiral, cyclical and wavelike nature of time and the upper-dimensional escalatory drive of the universe.

Without casually diving into speculative conjectures or waxing dogmatic about the matter, I believe that the date is relevant. 2012 is not the end of the world but only the end of a world and the ushering in of a new one. 2012 is not just another pathetic, apocalyptic theory competing for teleological validation, but is instead the bell ringing the closure of a particular session of civilization and the introduction of a higher class of consciousness.There is no such a thing as an eternal drama and eventually the curtains fall, the actors remove their masks and move on to other, hopefully, better roles. No civilizational organism can pretend to unfold to infinity and ineluctably will reach a point when further growth is impossible within the same form and will need a new, more fitting configuration to fulfill the universe's need for novelty and complexification. Human history is littered with examples of whole civilizations that came and went, leaving but lifeless lapidary witnesses of their passage. Imposing species thrived and practically conquered the earth before they were wiped out entirely, yielding fossilized bony remnants as only memory of their past existence.

2012 will probably be this epoch's culmination of our hopes within our despairs, our ecstasies within our agonies, our renewals within our degenerations, our generosities within our cruelties, it is the four horsemen of the apocalypse and the return of the son of man. It is when the tidal wave of time will recede and the wreckage of the sunk galleons of human history, with all their bitter cargo of illusions and delusions, will be exposed. It is the time when evil and deceit will have exhausted their contributions and justice has its final say. If 2012 is the end, it is end not as fatigued finality, but end as potent purpose.

Since time immemorial, some very sharp and perspicacious lookouts on this planet's crow's nest have seen the iceberg, but the question is, would this big ship that is our human race, heed to the alarmed calls of upcoming danger and maneuver in such a way to avoid a collision, or will it hit it head on, or sideways like the Titanic, and sink to the depth of oblivion. My take is that we are too close to the iceberg to turn around, and no matter how hard and how fast we swing the bow or skid the stern of this behemoth of civilization we won't be able to avoid catastrophe. Eh oui mon ami, we will meet the proverbial iceberg of transcendence, we cannot run from it. However, not being central to the plot is not a permission for irresponsibility, as a matter of fact we have a very important function in the smooth denouement of future events. There is a difficult birthing taking place and we are the assigned midwives. We have been commissioned to bring comfort and assuage the delivery pangs, counter any possible complications and ensure that this promised new born of consciousness sees the light of days as gracefully as possible. In fact the question is not if the birth is going to take place, but are the midwives going to be available. This is a tremendous responsibility and when those who hear the call don't answer, we all pay in pains, plights, pogroms, and plagues.

What to watch for as 2012 approaches?
First, I believe time and events will seem to be speeding up like water going down a sink and spiraling faster as it gets closer to the plughole. The internet (which in my opinion is the pinnacle of human technological achievement, our civilization's graduation moment and the intersection point between human mental ability and the true nature of the cosmos) has a lot to do with this quickening of time. In fact we will see mind-boggling technological accomplishments and at the very same time witness the dissolution of the social fabric into a strange schizoid mesh of unbearable misery of the many and obscene opulence of the few that will generate exacerbating violence and mayhem.

Second, I believe that the major upheavals will be of an electrical nature so we need to watch... water (eventhough I have a faint hunch that the final seal of the age will come thru some kind of fiery event). Water and electricity do not mix very well. Watch not only for water in floods, melting ice and tsunamis but most importantly, in humans, whose body -particularly the brain- is made of 75% of the liquid substance. Can you say "it is going to be a mad, mad world out there", where some will reach for the gun while others for canvas and brushes. The artist, like before, will spearhead the charge on this novel domain of consciousness and will appear as the anointed savior of humanity's desperate circumstance, reconciling its wounded and bloody past with its eternally virgin future and finally and heroically, saving the day. Well, this is my scenario of choice, what will actually happen, only God knows.

Third, this is somehow speculative and may sound a little apocalyptic, but I will go ahead and venture the possibility that on that fateful day humanity may in some strange fashion loose its historical memory: memory needs the frame of chronological time to append its contents and at the great asymptotic convergence day in the year 2012, time will be zero, or the exponentially unfolding curve of time will enter one solitary calendrical day and literally disappear in a mist of infinitely smaller and smaller momental quanta, never to be seen again, at least not on this side of the current dimensional membrane.

If this is what happens, humans as a species will manage to survive, but like all other glorious civilizations of the past, the only indicia of our passage will be the stone monuments we left behind (for our good credit, Dubai's Burj Khalifa couldn't have come in a more convenient circumstance), and in the same manner, we will also be inscrutable mysteries to the generations of beyond the event horizon despite our current vast digital libraries and our immense book collections. These haven't helped our present ignorance, why should we expect them to help our future curiosity.

About Gravity

No one, to this day, has been able to determine its nature. We surely have intimations of what it does, but not even our most illustrious physics and astrophysics luminaries have the faintest clue about what is it is exactly, where it comes from and how it does what it does.

Gravity and our eventual full understanding of it, will probably be science's graduation day and the crowning achievement of human long search for cosmic truth, the grand Unified Field Theory of physics lore.

Sometimes we fail to find satisfying answers to our dilemmas because, very simply, we do not pose the right questions. Is gravity a mere mechanical, magnetic force whose purpose is solely to pull impersonal matter together? Or is gravity, instead, another word for love or nostalgia, and the yearning of a hopelessly fractured and sadly exiled planetary essence and its instinctive drive to seek a return to its original home, and regain the unity of an ideal experience forfeited in the wake of some fateful big bang? We may ultimately find that, indeed and to our great Newtonianly dripped surprise, gravity is more a personal emotional link between creator and creation, rather than dry, drab, dull and robotic attracting interactions of aimlessly whirling and weightlessly floating masses, between themselves and the unwitting objects that inhabit them.

What is Life?

Cycles of perturbation and equilibrium, followed by more cycles of perturbation and equilibrium. The alternation of equilibrium and perturbation between opposite poles of a spectrum (1) creates energy and motion which occasionally crystallize into stable forms or what we call matter. The difference between one cyclical period and the next seems to be:

1) An increase in complexity at higher and higher levels of existence expressed as "octaves of behavior within spirals of expansion".

2) and if the rules of harmonics are maintained, there is a higher degree of freedom. In other words, future cycles will tend to have more freedom than past ones. For example, plants have more freedom than minerals, animals have more freedom than plants and minerals, and man has more freedom than animals, plants and minerals. This freedom is sometimes referred to as novelty, innovation, evolution, mutation, inspiration, creativity, art or just shift.

3) Cyclical movements to ever higher dimensions seem to solve problems in lower dimensions. In fact, when a problem is created in one dimension, it can never be solved at that same level but only if a higher and more expansive domain of unfolding is reached. This is the main reason for biological and mental evolution and why worlds and civilizations do eventually end.

About Genesis And The Garden Of Eden

Genesis is the actual story of the universe's material beginnings told in mythical and oniric language. The fact of it being or not a true historical rendering of factual events is in my opinion, irrelevant. Adam and Eve are archetypes, cosmic protagonists faithfully enacting a divine script, the drama of which we are all both actors and spectators. To make the story short and I could write a whole book on this one, Adam is space, Eve is time and their union formed the intricate and ever-unraveling matrix of infinite possibility that we call life. Abel (and the tree of knowledge) and Cain (and the serpent) are representations of the vegetal (spiritual) and animal (carnal) man respectively, and their millennial struggle for dominance. In fact, Space and time are the initial dimensions from which all other dimensions, with all their contents, sprung.

Adam is hydrogen, Eve is oxygen and their coupling brought forth the waters of consciousness and the awareness that our origins are divine and our destinies inextricably bound with the fate of the rest of God's creation. Worth noting that God blesses with water (bountiful rains and holy baptisms) and also chastises with water (damning deluvial floods).

The Great Fall (and our original sin) is a representation of our descent into history and the tyranny of time. The Apocalypse (and our final redemption) is our rise to the rarified space of our true divine nature.

About Seers And Prophets

Every time God intends to turn the sharp corner at a certain dispensational bend or is about to engage the shift handle of a higher dimensional gear, He makes sure he gives us ample warning. Given our innately obtuse disposition and our general tendency to be shamefully undiscerning in matters of divine revelation, it is His accustomed compassionate manner to promptly dispatch this illumined and anointed individuals as crying signing posts, announcing upcoming changes in the zeitgeist circulation patterns, reminding us to fasten our spiritual seatbelts, exhorting us to trust the conductor but still get ready for a vigorously bumpy and dazingly winding road. When people fail to heed the call they usually miss the signals and end up unnecessarily roughed-up and bruised and very often, down ravines of unspeakable suffering and misery.

About The Large Hadron Collider

A hadron collider is a very powerful particle accelerator. The largest complex is found at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, and there are others, one big one in Long Island, New york, in the United States. It consists of a couple dozen miles of pipes containing superconducting magnets, thru which particles are propulsed at luminal velocities. The goal is to see what happens when you crush superatomic particles at speeds near that of light, as to reveal the real nature of the atom by shuttering it into pieces and exposing its basest contents.

I am personally an inveterate proponent of courageous and adventurous research but this, in my opinion, is quite a dangerous proposition. Despite the many and well documented reassuring statements of the scientists involved in these projects, I am still very skeptical about their safety and I will even venture to suggest that these have absolutely no clue about the full potential ramifications of these experiments. What if they succeed in performing one of this collisions with particles whose potential they do not fully understand and they end up unleashing energy chain reactions of big-bang proportions. Next time, when you browse Google Earth on satellite view and you notice a big hole where Switzerland or New York used to be located, you will know why. Surely, the occasional sneaky terrorist with his dirty bomb suitcase will then become the least of our concerns, that is for sure.

Note: Some prominent physicists ( Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya) working on these projects are hinting that unknown insidious forces that seem to ripple backwards straight from the future are actively sabotaging their attempts at making these particles behave in a certain manner. This may sound strange to you, but to me, a tempered veteran of the boobytrapped jungles of man's most outrageous imagination and fearless defender of the strangest sounding notions, what I say is, "and very rightly so, gentlemen".

What Is The Difference Between ...

Knowledge And Wisdom?
Knowledge is scooping the water of truth with the bucket of ignorance. Wisdom is realizing that the bucket has holes, and that the water is from an ocean and not a pool.

Harmony And Melody?
Harmony is to melody what a cube is to a square, same base structure, different dimensions.

Deduction, Induction and Abduction?
Deduction is reasoning from the larger to the smaller or from the general to the particular. Induction is reasoning from the smaller to the larger or from the particular to the general. Abduction (and the best method) is reasoning laterally from similarity to similarity or by considering similar relationships and patterns.

Number And Quantiy?
Number is for counting and its precise. Quantity is for measurement and can only be approximate.

Soul, Spirit And Body?
Soul is what gets kidnapped when spirit is distracted. Body usually pays the heavy ransom.

Religion, Atheism And Spirituality?
Religion sustains that there is a god. Atheism proposes that there is no god. Spirituality hints that all is god.

Joy And Happiness?
Joy is the known emotional state of boundless glee and ineffable satisfaction. Happiness, instead, is an ideology, or a vain human attempt at fixing in space what is in essence, a dynamic and shifting time quality.

Chronological Time, Zeitgeist Time And Reality?
Imagine you are a pastry chef and you are gingerly working on a new voluptuous and tasty creamy confection. Zeitgeist time is the recipe where ingredients are listed out of sequence and is missing the end part. Reality is the cake that you want to eat and have too. Chronological time is where you watch the whole drama unfold.

Illusion And Delusion?
Illusion is the reality of an existence composed of two equally opposite natures, one seen and the other unseen, with the latter being the source and the former the image. Delusion is not knowing which is which.

Eros Love And Agape Love?
Imagine you are a painter and you are portraying two lovers locked in passionate embrace and engaged in affectionate and sensual romance. Eros love is the prickly and warm sensations that those two feel for each other. Agape love is you with your art, the couple with its tenderness and the whole painted canvas with its enchanting beauty.

Innocence And Naivety?
Innocence is finding the bejeweled and so much coveted treasure trove of "everything is possible". Naivety is putting an ad on the Pirate's Sentinel and telling that you did.

About Hippies And Potheads

Be very careful how you view these folks. They may be hopelessly lacking, but they are so extremely relevant to our evolution as a human species. These socially-decoupled, eternally broke, rebellious, tree-hugging, long-haired, uncouth, fashion-challenged, world-trade-summit-busting, sexually gregarious, work averse, joint-rolling and mind-altered bundles of human contradictions are in fact the very necessary cracks that show at the surface of the eggshell of civilization when it is about to deliver a new born of consciousness. Yes, you got it, love them or hate them, we need them for our upcoming transitional quantum jump, so treat them nice.

If You Are A Hippie

No matter what anybody else thinks, you are rather the glorious pioneers of the new emerging paradigm, the cornerstone of a new enlightened civilization, or brave men and women spear-heading a new living movement of change of restoration. You may seem to behave like maladapted people, marginalized and incapable of complying to the requirements of the established order, continually beating your heads on this wall called "money", thrashing around impotently in the cultural ghettos to which you were relegated by the current socio-economic juggernaut. The mercantilistic ideology and its mechanized universe seem to always be gaining the upper-hand over your holistic, conciliatory vision of the world. My word to you, my friends, you will be vindicated.

Life Is A Stage

During your life
You divorced truth and married lies
At the straws of make-believe you were clutching

Just before you die
Your life will flash before your eyes
But it will not be worth watching

About Constants

Physics and mathematics constants, that is. Example of constants are G for gravitational constant; h for Planck's constant; c for speed of light and so on.

My own personal opinion and by what I know about the workings of the cosmos, which by the way, I see no self-respecting scientist adopting, is that there cannot be such a thing as a constant in the universe, may be divine temporary allowances but not constants, and the fact that there is no firm agreement on the values of most of these, is a telling testimony that these creatures of humans' deep cogitation and their best attempts at quantifying the minutia of existence, may be mere convenient tools afforded to us by a very generous universe and one that is well understanding of our intellectual need for fixed axial poles around which we can perform our pathetic theoretical whirling dances, rather than actual, existing, faithful-to-nature gauging instruments for the measurement of cosmically dynamic realities with their elusive and ever shifting geometries.

Humor: Politically Correct

That day I had a few too many spumous libations [beer] and I was by all accounts, chemically inconvenienced [drunk]. I saw her terminally attractive face [cute], undulating figure [a babe], she was pectorally superior [big boobs] and graced with a manifest rotund posterior [nice ass], Though she was, by my estimate, a little metallically overburdened [too much jewelry], cosmetically amplified [too much makeup] and fragrance indulgent [too much perfume]. I couldn't help experiencing a temporary blood displacement to my cylindrical masculine protuberance [I was prickled]. When I expressed my desire for a horizontal encounter [have sex] she replied in a vocally unappreciative manner [she was disgusted] that I had a nuanced facial geometry [butt ugly], too vertically challenged [too short], follicle restricted [bald], skeletally prominent [skinny] and odor retentive [stunk], and that in any case she already had a previously enjoyed companion [boyfriend] and were planning for mutual domestic bondage [getting married]. In semi-stupor and in somewhat choleric vituperation [I was fuming], I remarked that she was an affront to all known cannons of esthetics [plain], had an excess of digestive detritus [full of shit], was reality impaired [stupid], most likely thermally deficient [frigid], and a bonafide metabolic underachiever [fat].

About Change

No we can't, Mr Obama. I have often sustained that all is change in the universe, so here comes another of my self-scathing contradictions, or another shining notch in my long and talented belt of mind-befuddling paradoxes, which ever way you want to slice it.

There is no such a thing in nature as change, intra-systemic change that is. Things are what they are and they continue being what they are, until they cease to exist. Real transformations can only happen with the death of the staling old and the birth of the refreshing new, and mere manipulations of form will not alter their existential reality nor intended purpose, and superimposing living ideological layers on already dying institutional tissue will yield the same result as grafting new skin on a fatally gangrened leg. In addition, human historical experience corroborates the evidence that individuals who identify with established and stonified modes of thinking do not simply morph into convenient change agents but these must first physically pass on and new and more competent generations gradually take their place before new and more fitting realities are introduced into the social landscape.

About True Human Progress

Genuine human progress happens when higher dimensional material and value layers are superimposed on existing technological and cultural formations. In this sense, poverty could be defined as a particular generation's failure to establish solid cultural and material footings upon which descendants can conveniently stand and erect progressively higher tiers of relative comfort and prosperity. Generally speaking, true and lasting wealth cannot be created by sole individuals in isolation and that It takes several generations of gradual sedimentation of resources and knowledge to build sound foundations for meaningful economic and technical accomplishment. In fact, an individual is rich, when he is graced with a prior generation's patrimonial legacy (not necessarily his own) and is successful at maintaining and increasing what was bequeathed to him and passing it down the genetic or social line. When that succession is interrupted by some devastating historic influence, we get material poverty and the consequent spiritual ramifications.

What does this mean to you? It means that your future plannings of success cannot be limited to your personal and selfish aspirations alone but must include your children and your community at large. Remember that you will be the ground upon which your progeny and their peers will walk, make sure you provide them with a solid footing and a flexible catapult from which to launch to even higher levels of happiness and prosperity. You must position yourself as the conduit between the great things done by your ancestors and the still greater things to be done by your heirs. You must feel the responsibility of creating an adequate substrate for following generations to thrive and of providing them with as many tools as you can afford for their welfare and fulfillment. No one should be starting from zero, nature doesn't, nor should we.

Quotes From Remarkable People

Welcome, youth, who come attended by immortal charioteers
and mares which bear you on your journey to our dwelling.
For it is no evil fate that has set you to travel on this road,
far from the beaten paths of men, but right and justice.
It is meet that you learn all things
both the unshakable heart of well-rounded truth
and the opinions of mortals in which there is not true belief.
-- Parmenides, Greek Philosopher, 500 BC

About Biodiesel And The Electric Car

Real solutions to our energy problems will not come from the supply side, and unless we pay attention to the demand variables in our dire economic and environmental equation, we will be squandering precious resources down the deep sinkhole of our many misguided social programs. I am convinced that the only way out of our dilemma is a thorough and complete rethinking of the way we live and practice our local and planetary citizenship. We have invested so much in the old paradigm that it has become practically untenable for most to relinquish the old ways and make tabula rasa of anachronistic models that obviously do not work and will not work.

What we need, and soon, is courage to face our reluctance to put a stop to our losses and minimize the damage before it is too late. We do not need to create new forms of economic agency as much as we need to rein in the old ones and engage in processes that entail a more judicious, more responsible approach to earth and community. Most of the promised technologies that are currently heralded as the ultimate panacea for everything that has gone wrong in our modern civilization will very likely not deliver. We do not need more spunky material creations, but today's pressing imperative is to scale down, to streamline, to deconstruct the runaway structural misfits of our soulless cities and mallified suburban areas and redesign our residential spaces and commercial centers to meet the requirements of the age we are about to meet, an age of even scarcer energy resources and stingier financial credit.

We do not need better cars but less of them and more available and efficient public transportation. We do not need less expensive or more abundant alternative fuel sources but lower consumption, smarter procreation habits and less corporate greed. We do not need better producing industries as much as we need more social, triple-bottom-line entrepreurs. We do not need more or cheaper food as much as we need food that is more nutritious and that is grown locally or within short distances. We do not need more efficient homes as much as we need to compose fitting human habitats, better designed and more compact cities and towns.

These are commonsensical steps that we could all easily take and smart and serious economists and ecologists have been singing this rap for decades. The reason why our civic leaders and politicians haven't been heeding the call and forthcomingly stepping up to the plate, instituting adequate policy and vigorously churning fixative plans, is because of a timid legislative culture, fearful of possible electoral backlash and that would recklessly watch the ship sink rather than upset the tender sensitivities of an ecologically uneducated and financially overextended populace, or poke at the nervous balance sheets of the established and ever so powerful corporate groups. Calm logic and reason may midwife the birth of most of our glorious human institutions, but to remove the calcareous ideological tumors that eventually infest it and transform it into a sickly, weakly and ill-adapted bundle of contradictions, we need the raging, sharp scalpel of committed social activism. Raging not in reactive violence, but in unequivocal, well articulated indignation. Raging not in misdirected, adolescent mayhem, but in focused and intelligent channeling of political pressure, social discourse, popular energies and economic resources into operational pathways that are congruent with our highest aspirations for a meaningful, sane and truly livable world.

La Plus Grande Tragédie

C'est de vivre ma vie
sans en savoir rien
c'est de pleurer mon chagrin
seul comme un chien
c'est de celebrer mon bonheur
sans te demander où est le tien
c'est parfois aimer et constamment haïr
sans en comprendre le lien
c'est de prier aux anges et a Dieu
et jamais les faire mien
c'est de mourir avant de mourir
et ça, c'est vraiment pas bien

About Materialism

Matter is well underrated and yes, matter is primary, matter is magical. We cannot possibly divorce particular entities from their quintessential energetic constituents. Separating matter from spirit leads to existential schizophrenia and we cannot live a soulful life without taking into consideration the supreme importance of the physical domain in which we evolve. Many a misguided religious ideologue has predicated that we should work exclusively on polishing our spirits in preparation for an eventual blissful sojourn in a beyond-the-grave gated heavenly community, but this breeds only condescension and irresponsibility towards the body and the earth, ominous attitudes that transpire in our modern societies as blithe aloofness for the welfare of future generations and reckless disregard for environmental sustainability.

Materialism on the other hand, is holding fast to the skewed notion that there is a inherent difference between an object and its essence while insisting on the absolute supremacy of the solidly manifest. It is our obstinate clutching at the straws of ephemeral experiences and passing thrills. Materialism is the illusion of a happiness obtained by possessing the contrived contraptions of our own creation. It is the bewitching siren song of the sea-maidens of consumerist deception, tenting to allure our affections and deflect us from our true mission in this odyssic journey of transcendence.

What Is A Paradox?

Generally speaking, when energy or information travels at speeds faster than the speed of light relative to a fixed frame of reference, its travel vector reverts to negative, or going backwards in time and the natural principle of cause and effect, is by consequence, violated. From this particular perspective, "effects" happen before their "causes". Paradoxes happen because of this breakdown in the law of causality. According to classical physics, speeds higher than the speed of light cannot be attained and a backwards flow of time is a practical aberration. On the other hand, the principle of Quantum Entanglement, the EPR paradox (Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox) and the Bell's Non-Locality Theory argue that it is impossible to account for some observed phenomena in the universe without impinging on the possibility that energy and information can in fact move at superluminal velocities and that time reversal processes are inevitably involved.

Required Reading: Did you ever wish that someone would bring the latest high flying research in Quantum Physics down to nest in the fluffy brains of people like you and me, whose command of high mathematics is not that famous? Here is the answer to your prayers.

About Consciousness

Consciousness And Man: We say that humans are conscious because of their ability to observe objects, events, information and energy move thru three dimensional space in discrete time.

Consciousness And The Universe: When time ceases to be a quantitative measure and becomes a quality of space I call this type of time, Quality of Epochal Consciousness and it is simply the universe observing the wave of its own unfolding as it moves asymptotically towards singularity, crossing the event horizon and into a higher dimension. The end of the process is characterized by time speeding up and eventually being integrated into space, and probably and only God knows how, existence itself may become independent of passing time.

Quotes From Remarkable People

"Anything dead tends to remain within the three ordinary dimensions, while anything living constantly transcends them". -- Rudolf Steiner

About Guardian Angels

It is quite obvious that whatever intelligence is administering the affairs of the universe is of a very high order and her intentions are guided by immense acumen. Thus, we shouldn't be surprised if she extends her attentions in a somehow discriminatory manner, what, by the way, any self-respecting supreme investor with great cosmic ambitions, clear prophetic agenda and expectations of satisfying eschatological returns, would naturally do.

It appears that some particular individuals (possibly ones with needed skills and potentialities) are singled out, do enjoy special protection and are offered breaks in life that would resist any other successful explanation outside of the sphere of the miraculous. This, however, does not necessarily presuppose a life lived to a ripe age nor an existence dripped with bliss, unspoiled by contradictions and free of trials and tribulations. We may legitimately argue that a hapless chap on whom these propitiatory graces have been bestowed will be somehow spared the customary earthly agonies that other mere mortals endure, but this is not the case at all. Having special, dedicated angelic escorts and being crowned with God's royal consideration, is actually, ominous news indeed. Our own glorious historic landscape is littered with one tragic marking example after another of the inscrutable irony that every time these anointed human messengers of redemptive virtue are delivered into our cozy cultural space, we (the orphan and boorish plebe left out to its own devices at the fringes of God's divine dispensation :) are ready and eager to receive them with prompt and adequate treatment: we celebrate their inspired oratory with stone-throwing fits of appreciation; we reward their courage with exilic appointments to other more hospitable lands; we grace our shabby prisons with their colorful and iconic presence; we entrust their genius to the good care of our psychiatric facilities, and if by any chance none of these obliging niceties do, we dispatch these blood-sucking pests of established belief and skin-gnawing fungi on the body of our beloved institutions, to meet their maker. And we do it without a moment of hesitation and with unrepenting savagery.

What Are The Most Critical Human Inventions?

Negative and fractional numbers. They may be the source of most or all of our sorrows :(

Both negative and fractional numbers are mental constructs. They don't exist in nature but are fuzzy creatures whose native habitat is the rarified substrate of our brain's gray matter. Any number below 1 is imaginary. Zero is the state of "neither or" and represents equilibrium and the status quo (1).

Negative Numbers: the negative sign before a number denotes that a quantity instead of extruding forward in the three dimensional space of positive reality, it intrudes inwards in the domain of imaginary feeling and experience. In other words, we have negative states because of a human consciousness that experiences movements away from positive as lack (when an object is diminished or removed such as in our experience of material poverty or scarcity) or as pain (when pleasure is diminished or removed such as in our experience of physical sickness or suffering). In fact, "we do not have something" not because there is a positive state (positive in the sense of actual, true presence in the three dimensional domain) of "not-having-somethingness", but because that experience is interpreted mentally and emotionally as a deprivative state, where an expected object or feeling should have been there but isn't.

Fractional Numbers: There is no such a thing as a part of something in reality. All there is is wholes. Fractions are mental devices for proportional relativism. In other words, our mind utilizes them to telescope from a large frame of observation into a smaller one. Let's for example take a squared surface made of four sides that measure eight little squares each. The one big square is, in this instance, made of 64 little squares (2). What is 1/8th (one eighth) of the big square? It is one little square. So here, one eighth (a fraction) of the big square is equivalent to one (whole) little square. Thus, you can always translate a fraction into a whole number, if that number, does in fact, represent actual measurable quantities rather than mere mathematical labeling abstractions .

What About Irrational Numbers?

Irrational numbers are numbers that cannot be expressed as factions of integers. Examples of irrational numbers are e (of the exponential function equaling approximately 2.718), phi ( the golden ration equaling approximately 1.618), pi (the ratio of circumference and diameter of a circle equaling approximately 3.141). Irrational numbers are also the square roots of 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 etc..

I see irrational numbers as the blurry-bounded wedge thru which the universe drives its weirdest and most mysterious aspects into the square agenda of solid and sensible materiality. Irrational numbers are (particularly e, phi, pi, square root of 2, square root of 5) the semi-permeable membrane separating the domain of real manifest entities (explicate and unfolded) and imaginary (3) ones (implicate and enfolded). In other words, an irrational number is the noise that the big yawning yap of a blackhole makes when spewing the contents of a gazillion higher dimensional universes into the narrow plate of our limited rational comprehension. I am convinced that the magic properties of these numbers will eventually explain with formulaic clarity, how the other-dimensional energies of the dense vacuum are transduced from infinities into matter, intruding in three dimensional space as the objects and events of our daily experience.

Notes:
(1) Did you ever wonder why we haven't been able to win our many wars on social plagues such as poverty, greed or corruption and human diseases such as depression, diabetes or cancer? it is because we have been fighting ghosts, we have been engaging non-entities. Very simply and as strange as it may sound, these do not" exist", and what I mean by "exist" is that we feel the [excruciating] presence of these negative states not because" they are there", but because something that should have been there, is not. In other words, we see the empty cup and we feel the absence of wine, and that absence somehow impinges on our brains, fires our neurons and translates in our minds as yearning, deprivation, the opportunity for a good time lost, but still, the cup is very empty, there is nothing there.

What about tumors and throbing aches? The universe hates a vacuum, and will seek to fill any empty space with replacement material, be it deadly rebellious cells or infernal torturing sensations.

What about killing viruses and germs? Viruses, bacteria and germs are always present in our bodies or in the environment, but they only start causing problems when some physiologically critical defensive element is missing.

Now the biggest question is, "what is the elusive thing that should have been there but isn't?", or "what is the precious libation that was meant to fill the bottomless cups of our human agonies and quench our thirst for relevance and meaning?" The answer is the most mysterious, the most inscrutable and the hardest concept for humans to apprehend and one that when fully understood will liberate us from our millennial shackles: Love. Nothing to do with prickly romance. The very ondulating particles that make our physical bodies are made of love, our faces and our organs are carved our of its aethereal surface, our noblest feelings and most heroic actions are sober testimonies to its presence, our most deprecable deeds and our most gut-wrenching pains are crying witnesses to its absence.

(2)In a multi-dimensional space with dual or polarized structures , 8 squared or 64 (not sure why of this particular number but I suspect that 8 is the number of dimensions needed to account for ordinary manifest reality, eventhough there may be many more dimensions than that) parts of a whole, is the maximum number of parts needed to form a fractal body that can scale down to one single part and not loose its geometric integrity. And this is the reason we find number 64 in all relevant biological (microscopic human DNA) and physical structures in the universe (macroscopic vector dynamic geometry of the infinite vacuum).

(3) Imaginary not in the sense of made up or contrived, but imaginary signifying a reality, a domain of being that exists in another different or higher dimension.

People You Should Pay Close Attention To

Those are people that are learned, educated, eloquent, rational, eclectic, non-religious and iconoclastic who use speaking in tongues (otherwise known as glossolalia or unstructured language) as a regular meditative practice. These dudes (and dudesses) are not crazy, they just know something you don't ;).

More About The Environment

Can you imagine! Nobel prizes are meted out to people who simply realize we are in deep doodoo. Yes, we are rewarding people for the superhuman feat of not being blind. What are we going to dole out on people who actually find real solutions to our environmental dilemmas? I am being obviously facetious here because this is clearly more a reflection on our blithe aloofness and our insidious and chronic dispassion for global planetary issues rather than a badge of praise for great intellect and foresight on the part of people like Al Gore for example, whose effort in the field, by no means should be appreciated.

I can't but wonder how the numerous hurricanes of climate change summits and heated international voiced concerns can blow so strongly thru the warm waters of cultural trendiness, political opportunism and mediatic hype and reach the cooler shores of genuine and committed policy as barely a breeze that won't raise a ripple. In fact, colorful rhetorics abound, but who are going to be the brave and smart people who will catalyze the stale chemistry of a humanity simmering in dissonant beliefs and deadly contradictions and finally couple compelling discourse with effective action and form solid social compounds for new and better fitting forms of ecological consciousness?

How To Properly Evaluate A Theory

Researchers who discover a new idea or method, or just sustain its validity or universality, become personally and professionally vested on their unique positions. Thus, uncompromising intransigence (which often erupts in acrimonious defensiveness) is to be expected in regards to critical and detracting views, which are conveniently dismissed as heretical, no matter how plausible and fact-based they may be. Many an illustrious luminary went to the grave insisting, with unmitigated certainty, that his was the right judgment even when solid proof was provided to the contrary. I can also account for a slew of instances where famous scientists manipulated their findings to fit a pre-held theory.

My own personal approach is to thoroughly study both sides of the argument and sculpt my own synthesis from the available data, always considering the possibility that both seemingly conflicting inferences and contradictory conclusions can very happily coexist in the same observed phenomenon. This is called paradoxical thinking, or the notion of holding two diametrically opposed concepts in your mind and still retain the ability to function. Apparently, most scientists and philosophers are incapable of such feat of mental prestidigitation. In fact, the essential truth of any event in the universe is found not on one fixed pole or the other of a wave's local and timely manifest character, but in the overall, complex dynamics of its unfolding.

Required Reading: Study Karl Popper's works, particularly "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" and "The Open Society and its Enemies".

About Seeking The Meaning Of Life

Some say that the purpose of the journey is not to arrive but it is the journey itself. That is nonsense. It is neither the journey nor the destination that are most important; it is rather the quality of the “journeyer” that matters. The only quality or essence that you can hope to grasp and improve is your own, anything or anybody else's is ancillary.

On the other hand, the biggest problem with most of us isn't not having found what we seek, but what to do with it once we have finally found it. the question then becomes "would we have the guts and courage to follow thru?"

What Is The Final Proof Of Truth?

Truth answers all questions. Until all questions are answered, a so called truth is only probably true, at worst a lie or at best, wishful thinking.

Is There Life After Death?

When we insist on the unity of the godhead, our true human anguish is the unity of our bodies and our souls. Are they separate? Will the soul leave the body at death or will it die with it? In any case, there won't be an afterlife with me: my body and my soul will go down together into the belly of the earth like a ship and its captain, just like two inseparable lovers: They will die together locked in a mutual embrace :).

On the other side, life after death may feel the same as life before birth: absolute bliss. But seriously, Life and Death are part of the same continuum. The problem we have with this concept is due to Western and the Judeo-Christian culture which sees the unseen (supernatural) as separate or superimposed upon the seen (the natural) and not as two apparently separate processes that are in essence one thing.

What about retributions of the divine variety? This life reality show of ours is probably the best staged drama ever made. It is fascinating, it is enthralling, it is engaging, it is entrancing, but when ...

the curtains fall and the credits scroll,
all the actors, the good guy and the troll,
will just remove their fleshy masks
and move on to another role.

I was also wondering, why is it that we all want to live forever and if we have to die we absolutely insist in being resurrected? Wouldn't that defeat the whole purpose of living? Don't we understand that nature is determined to get rid of us once we have reached a certain age? Knowing how stubborn, hard headed and change-avert humans can be, nature has devised a system, called “death”, to get “fresh salad on the table”, new stuff, new blood, new ideas. Do me a favor, when you die, stay dead, for the new generations' sake: having your stubborn and curmudgeonous self around forever would just be too stressful for the poor things.

Who Is A Good Friend?

• A good friend stabs me in the front.
• A good friend will lie just to make me feel better.
• A good friend will have me on his quick-dial at number 5 or lower.
• A good friend doesn't have a second agenda.
• A good friend was not economically or emotionally deprived in his childhood and if he was he has dealt with those strong emotions of early deprivation.
• A good friend is responsible with money. He thinks twice before he asks for it and when he does he always returns what he borrows.
• A good friend does not compete with me but will help me when he can even if that means that I will become richer or appear smarter that he is.
• A good friend shares my spiritual and civic values.
• A good friend will defend me when people speak behind my back. 
• A good friend …

[ To be continued]

What About The Physical Punishment Of Children?

This is my challenge to you: try to find other, more creative ways of disciplining your child, without resorting to violence and beating and if you absolutely have to do it, I surely hope you know what you are doing (I doubt it) and have the interest of the child in mind. There is a saying: "Love me, beat me but do not ignore me". If a child (and for that matter an adult) accepts or actively seeks abuse as a form of emotional fulfillment, then there is a serious pathological problem with that person and that needs to be dealt with and resolved before he or she ends up sucked in a spiral of violence, which usually culminates in madning crests of suffering and misery. Humans have been investing on their progeny with generous thrashings for millennia, and by what I see in our modern households, hands a'slappin, whips a'crackin and many a bloody red buttock, haven't yet delivered on their promise of agreeable and submissive behavioral dividens.

No one can argue that violence can be a very “expeditious” way of solving some problems, but lets face it, it always comes back to bite us in the ass because and I can't emphasize it enough, humans do not learn thru suffering and pain, they just perpetuate it on other weaker victims, and this is the strongest argument against physical punishment of children: not that it is not effective in changing behavior, but that is, in fact, an extremely dangerous pattern that you perpetuate in society. If a parent uses violence against his child, it legitimizes violence in the mind of the child, and violence will be naturally used later on as an option for conflict resolution. I personally am no authority in child rearing, but I don't see any good thing coming from hulky cyclops hitting tiny little elves under the pretext that they are doing it for some elusive disciplinary ideal. No matter what you call it, violence is violence, no matter who is its recipient.

What about the old saying "sparing the rod, spoiling the child"? The only true reason why you are using corporal punishment is because it was used on you. How did you feel when it was you the sore butt of that savage whip? If you feel entitled to torture your child to extract a certain behavior then what is your position in regards to the physical and emotional mistreatment of prisoners for example? My point is that you can't humanly and reasonably sustain your stance without encountering damning contradictions with your other social positions. In addition, we all end up suffering the consequences of wrong child-rearing methods. You may also just be acting out your own pent up frustrations, weaknesses and lack of control in your personal or work life: If your employment conditions are not ideal, you most likely feel abused and disenfranchised and to survive emotionally you will most likely look for a “smaller animal” to vent on. Abusing smaller and weaker individuals- in this case children- does feed our misguided search for personal validation and gives us a false sense of power and control. Corporal punishment of children is also a cop-out for people who don't want to take time to really learn about them and what makes them tick. In other words, we beat our children because either we are too stupid or too lazy to do our god-assigned homework and fully meet the obligations of civically responsible and truly civilized parents. In final analysis, it is all a matter of awareness and waking up to the reality that we must quit doing things just because grandma did them that way.

What Is A Myth?

Myth and Dream: A myth is to the collective what a dream is to the individual. A myth, like a dream, is a story whose meaning-or meanings- is not immediately comprehended. Humans tend to normally seek interpretation but interpretation in my opinion, is ancillary. The mythical dream (as well as the individual dream) can very well do its assigned work without the help of our intellectual proddings.

Myth and Trauma: Myth often encapsulate the unresolved traumas, pent-up energies, deep fears and future aspirations within a group. In this sense myth is the collective psyche's reservoir of the unconscious, reenacted in narrative, song or dance form.

Myth and Life: Myths use metaphors, fables and legends to tell a truth. Myths are a reflection of life itself, raw, mysterious and ever unresolved. Life has a core that will always remain unresolved no matter how much we scratch our heads. Some things may never be fully grasped. Myth, as life, is multidimensional, multifaceted and the same account may have different explanations depending on the observer's perspective.

Myth and Human Secrets: Ancient humans were aware of the fact that life's secrets when discovered could only be retold in ritualistic and circumspect manner. When the Bushmen of South Africa kill an antelope, they apologize to it before eating it. In the same manner, when you discover a deep life's secret, you somehow intrude into life's business and you need to show respect and deference. That is when myth comes in. you still tell the story but not bluntly and directly, instead you make sure you don't "give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine" and do it obliquely and in a less obtrusive manner. Also, when an individual or group discovered something new, that knowledge became an asset and could be used to leverage one's position in society (priests, magicians, politicians, etc.). That knowledge was transferred only to select people and only after very elaborate initiation rituals. Riddles and oblique writings were one way of hiding that knowledge from the outsider or the uninitiated.

How Do I Become Enlightened?

There is a lot brouhaha about this term, enlightenment, which in my opinion is much undeserved. Enlightenment is the most accessible of all human experiences. Nothing glamorous about it. The fact that most humans walk in darkness is due to the fact that we suffer from chronic apnea of the soul and not because enlightenment is hard to attain.

Now let me try to define enlightenment. I understand enlightenment to be the simple fact of drawing reality from the center rather than the periphery of existence. This center is the meeting place of our ecstasy with our agony, of our actions with god's grace, of the crystal clarity of the spirit with the confusion of the manifest world, of our worldly attachments with our soulful alienations and so on and so forth.

Enlightenment is surely not about finding perpetual peace, but is more about full engagement in the conflicts of life and winning the wars that are continually raging in our souls. An enlightened being is a fighting warrior more the she is a navel gazing saint. She willingly throws her boat on the fast moving whitewaters of passion rather than pitch her tent on the cozy grass of balanced domesticity. She won't think twice about giving up the comfortable mounts of sermonic pontification for the battlegrounds of human warring demons, enduring trials and tribulation and risking golgothic retributions. But enlightenment is above all, dismounting the horse of the ego and walking the tight rope of transcendence. The ego is the translation of ourselves to ourselves. An enlightened being has direct access to the original version. Transcendence is what happens when the salt of who we are dissolves in the oceanic waters of the akashic consciousness.

About Cognitive Dissonance

After the fox tried in vain to reach the cluster of grapes that dangled from a vine above his head, he leapt high to grasp the grapes, but the delicious-looking fruit remained just out of reach of his snapping jaws. After a few attempts the fox gave up and said to himself, ‘‘These grapes are sour, and if I had some I would not eat them."
--Popular Fable.

Cognitive dissonance is why people become dogmatic and ideological fanatics. Cognitive dissonance is what keeps people believing in notions and ideas that are not practical and obviously do not work. Cognitive dissonance is why one solitary man can take such a hold on power to the point of controlling a whole nation and keep millions of people in fear and terror. It is the reason why we are condescending and nasty to our own old people (well aware that decrepit senility is also our inevitable fate) and to the poor (because of our innate, pathological fear of material lack), and it's also the reason why people you help and take under your wings end up stabbing you in the back.

Stanford University social psychologist Leon Festinger defines cognitive dissonance as the distressing mental state in which people do things that don't fit with what they know, or having opinions that do not fit with other opinions they hold. In the example of the fox's renouncing the grapes, the fox knows the fruit is tasty but by changing his attitude toward the grapes, he provided an acceptable explanation for his behavior. I other words, to keep our sanity and when confronted to the discrepancy between what we know [knowledge] and what we are force to do [attitude] we are pushed to change either what we do or what we think.

Can We Communicate With The Dead?

Are you kidding me? We can barely communicate with some of the living. I myself have problems communicating while alive. Can you image me dead and communicating with you... good luck.

About Origins

Make it your rule of thumb: the origin of "some'thing" is not "some'thing else". The ultimate origin of everything is in fact, beyond the nothing and behind the so eagerly an so fretfully raised high walls of our philosophical and scientific compounds. In other words, it is impossible to pinpoint the absolute true causality of a phenomenon or an event by simply impinging on observable processes and to finely peel the hard rind of observable reality we must cast its projections not on the beige background of ordinary, agreed upon cultural precepts, but on the darker screen of mystery and ambiguity so as to, paradoxically, better reveal its pure and true essence. The truth of where things come from and the reason why they are the way they are, must be found outside of rational linkages and methodological inferences and into the saltatory, energy transducing universal properties of the quantum leap variety.

Indeed, the material experiences of the three dimensional world are not separate floating entities but are integrated interfaces, which emerge from an infinite consciousness with undeclared intent, and are rooted in a substrate of complex circuitries operating by information coding rules of the most mysterious kind. These, in my opinion, necessitate the seemingly bizarre tools of platonic contemplation and arcane sophistication of the alchemist, as well as the brain-dipped Cartesian ratiocinium and measured refinements of the scientist to decipher.

Continues below...

Which Came First, The Chicken Or The Egg?

Is Jesus coming again
If yes, then when?
Are women less than men?
What came first the egg or the hen?
Is there really a now and a then?
We are bogged in a fen
Carved by the word and filled by the pen
For reasons beyond our ken
All, truly, is paradox and zen

Neither, in my opinion, in the beginning it was all a messy omelet. Let's face it; the question of beginnings is a tricky one. How it all started? When did the universe begin? When did the first man appear on the earth?

The reason behind this conundrum is that humans tend to think rationally and linearly, while the universe is in reality a very irrational (mathematically speaking) machine and it evolves in an illusive four-dimensional (meaning a dimension non-reachable thru the five senses) spiral manner rather than a linear one. Outside of the three dimensions, everything happens in the “now”, there is only one moment, the present. However, our brain tells us that everything is supposed to start at point A and end at point Z. At a certain level or dimension, it is a matter of fact that there is a beginning and ending to practically everything: we are born in a certain date and we do die eventually. But the universe seems to follow different rules: Reality may in fact possess no spatial or temporal boundaries and may be characterized as a circle where the circumference is nowhere and the center is everywhere, rather than a progressive line of events. In other words, we can think microscopically (individual entities) in a linear, cause-and-effect manner, but at a macroscopic level (societies, systems, ecosystems) the process becomes irrational, cyclical and its origins and nature are tied to the overall system's functions and needs within a timeless existential matrix.

Also, we should not forget that the "seen" universe is a growing entity and this growth requires the presence of specific functions which become more numerous and complex with time. Number and complexity transform implicate functions into explicate forms, such as amoeba, fish, dinosaur, mammal, etc... Dinosaurs for example are a visible form of an implicate function in the ecosystem. Dinosaurs may disappear but the function remains and will eventually take other better fitted forms. So in this sense, dinosaurs didn't exactly appear and disappear but rather functions that evolved from previous basic functions took form and when those functions became more complex, they took yet other different, more suitable forms.

Man is product and part of an ecosystem. To understand how man originated and how he evolved, we have to first understand the system that felt the need to create him and the nature of “time” is one key to understanding the mystery of origins. Until then we can just let our imaginations roam... and that is a very good thing in itself.

Hypathia

She was bound to die
for a hideous spell
man's fallow wound
was her gate to hell
remember Archimedes and the dagger
that knowledge fell
Pythagoras all wisdom and purity
but he was done as well
Socrates with a hemlock cup
and a soul he won't sell
to those who later served
Hypathia's flesh on oyster shell

Symbols Series

This is the beginning of a new section that I would dedicate to discussing the meaning of symbols, mythological and otherwise. I will try to cover (as succinctly as possible and giving you only the meaty and juicy parts) their origins, their evolution and why they were important to our ancestors and what is their relevance to our current historical time. Most of my interpretations you probably have never heard of so get ready for the ride.

Thy Pyramid (coming soon)

The Tree of Life (coming soon)

The Cross (coming soon)

The Swastika (coming soon)

The Hexagram or Star of David (coming soon)

The Pentacle or Pentagram (coming soon)

The Tao or Yin Yang (coming soon)

Uroborus (coming soon)

Khamsa or Hand of Fatima (coming soon)

The Mandala (coming soon)

About Human Communities

Or, is there a right size for a lasting and fully functional working human group, and if there is what is the ideal headcount? In other words, if there is a selective advantage in people sticking together and forming larger units for the purpose of harnessing individual specialized traits and fitness factors and combining those to create more viable and efficient bodies of synergistic activity, at what level or at what number, does that harmonic combination breaks down and we reach the point of diminishing returns, and at what level in the collective interaction curve do we start experiencing the inflecting, bending influences of dissipative and destructive social forces that characterize some of our smaller towns and all of our larger urban centers?

I personally believe that there is such a size but I am not sure what it is exactly at this juncture. However, I am convinced that the answer is hidden somewhere in the annals of biology (1). For that purpose, I am currently dabbling in cellular biology and more particularly, how specialized human cells coalesce into a group and how does individuality emerge from that diversity giving us the panoply of multi-functional organic forms that we know as tissues, organs and so forth. I will relate my findings in another occasion.

Notes: (1) Also mathematics and the concept of bifurcation theory, which studies the non-linear dynamic changes in the qualitative or topological structures of given groups, may shed some light into the processes and mechanisms of human community formation, eventhough I am not aware, to the day, of any scientific research undertaken connecting the two. Other interesting reading can be found in the area of Hierarchical Thermodynamics and particularly the works of Russian Chemo-physicist Georgi Gladyshev, whose notion of near-to-equilibrium systems, in my opinion, holds truer to reality than Ilya Pregogine's far-from-equilibrium approach.

Can Some People Control Your Mind?

Yes, but only if you act like a zombie or a robot and you wend your way thru the slippery glaciars of our complex reality with penguin-grade intelligence. That pretty much includes 95% of humans. It just takes a skilled psychologist, hypnotist, illusionist or media savvy, conniving weasel. They play with the already chaotic realm of human perception and use suggestions, language manipulation, word games, inductions or just plain confusion to push this button or that button and make you act or react in specific ways. The whole propaganda and advertising world is build on this concept. However, most of what we normally see on TV thru illusionists like Criss Angel and Derren Brown (who no doubt are very gifted individuals), are mostly plain neurolinguistic programming tricks and very little to do with superhuman abilities. Come on, let's not be naive here, you can't be successful in any field if you do not exagerate and stretch the truth once in awhile. Ask any successful salesperson and he will tell you. Not that I agree with that but it is just how things are in this wonderful and exciting world of ours. Sorry for ruining the magic, but again, these people are entertainers and business people and they will never tell you the full story about how they do things. Their tricks may sound outlandish but these guys are professionals, they do that for a living, and besides dealing with chronically confused and easily manipulated humans, they have the extraodinary advantage of using a medium, television, where reality is often bent, where the full truth is not always told and storytelling devices are used to capture audiences, increase the ratings of TV stations and make Mr Angel and Mr. Brown very wealthy, not that there is anything inherently wrong with that...

When power and money involved
Enigmas and questions never solved
Truth and honesty in human greed dissolved

Quantum Unification Theory and Holograms

From Einstein, to David Bohm and countless others have tried or are trying to find a link between the fractal structure of the vacuum (the quantum vacuum that is) and the fractal geometry of the hologram and I see they have all but thrown the towel on this one. They have pretty much settled on the evidence that holograms are just pretty metaphors to illustrate the observed transformations from the implicate order of the vaccum into the explicate domain of three dimentional space, but that there may not be a true mathematical correlation between the two. My word to them (at least those who are still alive and kicking) is to continue searching because there is a mathematical link and my hunch is that it is going to be formulated within the concept of Fourier Transforms and more particularly, Discreet Time Fourier Transforms. I personally tried to delve into the mathematics of the thing but my legendary genius ;) doesn't reach that far, but I am still sure it is there somewhere.

How Evolution Works

Or how old, anachronistic forms, representing particular functions, are phased out and new, more complex and better suited forms emerge in the environment. First let us establish the fact that there are two main aspects to evolution. One is biological, or genetic, and the other is mental, or epigenetic. Biological evolution comes about thru chemical and physical manipulations that involve chromosomic mutations initiated by dietary or climactic changes that manifest either as morphological transformations or outright species' extinctions.

Mental, epigenetic or memetic evolution, on the other hand, takes place within the province of ideas and language. Complexification and improvements in this domain happen when strategies of ideological boundary dissolution are implemented (because very simply, it does't happen naturally) and current embodiments of established and crystallized cultural positions are allowed to thaw and then reform into new, more congruent, more fitting paradigms to the ever changing environment of human affairs. I realize I just opened a pandora's box of befuddled questions and down-the-rabbit-hole types of implications here, but I'd better let you ponder...

Genius Or Madman

I was scorned and shunned
I was a strange breed
because I didn't share
in your stale creed
dripped with the insanity
that you all need
in a crack in my soul
God placed the seed
not for meat nor bread
but of true feed
not for rest nor glory
but a just deed
so you can finally say
we are now freed

The Meaning Of Technology

Technology and Biology : I am mortified to ruin the romance and be the one to bring the awful news to all of you, committed back-to-nature buffs, extreme natural minimalists, archaic revivalists of the most primitive variety and gadget averse creatures that won't come near a new invention with a ten foot pole. Technology, despite its contrived manipulations and often alienating artificiality, is the evolutionary extension of human innate biological capabilities within a complexity bound and novelty embracing universe. Love it or hate it, it is here to stay. In other words, we have automobiles, hydraulic cranes and computers, because we cannot anatomically afford longer legs, larger muscles nor bigger brains, without compromising our present physical configuration and other vital and necessary bodily functions. Technology is like God saying to us with His accustomed humorous playfulness: "Let's stop fiddling with your monkey frame and let's fashion you some spunky toys to make you faster, stronger and smarter."

Technology and History: Technology is what makes things go faster at the end of a particular age. Scientific and industrial advancements are commonly perceived solely as a product of human ingenuity, but that is a short-sighted view. Technology is mostly an agent for the quickening of time and what I believe closes the loop of the epochal membrane around a civilizational organism that has fulfilled its assigned morphic potential. In fact, one of the main functions of technology is to hasten the process of moving from one dying dispensation to one that is newer and about to emerge. If you think of time as a free vortex, time near the center of the vortex (end of an age or civilization) flows faster than time far from the center (beginning of an age or civilization). Legendary civilizations like Mythriac, Egyptian, Maya, Aztec, Vedic, Greek, Roman and eventually our own modern one, couldn't evade this ineluctable destiny. In their apogee and right before their demise, and no matter how far removed from present day, they all experienced great technological, intellectual and architectural progress (it is uncanny that the completion of some of the greatest human architectural marvels, form the pyramids to Burj Khalifa in Dubai coincide with great civilizational and economic downturns), in concomitance with the most outrageous moral dissolution -a vortex is hollow at the very center-. As a matter of fact, the main characteristics of an epoch that is about to end is "speed" and "shallowness". Sounds familiar?

Where is technology speeding up? It is running towards the point where the time meets space (not sure what this means exactly but if we are lucky enough to be alive we will find out), logical and the imaginary, the real and the virtual will meet. Technology is taking us to the place where the illusion and its object, the allusion and its truth, the shadow and its passing form, the dream and its source, the psychedelic and the lucid will rejoin after a long estrangement, like bridegroom and bride at the grand wedding reception at the end of the age.

About Free Infinite Energy

There is much talk these days about Tesla free energy receivers, zero point and vacuum energy, scalar energy generators and so on. Some people claim that if harnessed and deployed into viable devices, these methods could provide humanity with means to quench its bottomless thirst for ever cheaper and easily available fuel sources.

Now, do I believe there are forms of energy in the universe that are potentially infinite and very much free of charge, and ones that we will eventually be able to mobilize and use? The answer is an unequivocal yes. But will the thinly laid filament resistors of our civilizational circuitry handle the outpour of such magnificent charge download, and flood the rarified air of our current cultural, industrial and technological atmosphere with brighter and more meaningful adumbrations? The answer here is a round no, and will continue to be no until humanity experiences a genuine social and spiritual transformation.

If free energy is delivered into our current dysfunctional reality, and like new wine in old skins, we will burst at the seams, not able to handle the uncontrollable fermenting consequences of a new powerful technology released into the hands of a morally bankrupt, material-growth entranced and socially irresponsible human.

About Cooperation

When certain microbes, plants, insects and even animals, are placed under natural environmental stress, either thru extreme atmospheric and climactic changes or thru strictures in resource provision, they tend to normally switch into survival modes that generally entail engaging in symbiotic forms of cooperation with other neighboring organisms that share the same plight (1), instead of the habitual competitive, survival-of-the fittest type of schemes. Will we humans, seemingly biological organisms of the highest order, have the same timely and insightful disposition?

Notes: (1) In higher organisms, this exchange can be within the group or species or outside of it, and will be generally characterized by both utilitarian fitness tradeoffs and integrated bahavioral altruism.

About Atomic Energy

Mine may seem a very extreme position but to make the story short and for what I know about uranium and plutonium, these should have never been taken out of the ground. The same goes for dearest petroleum by the way. The lethal potential of extracting these elements from their subterranean natural habitat is so immense that I doubt we will ever have the technological ability to counteract all the possible negative ramifications of their use and misuse. There will be an exorbitant price paid for our addiction-driven need for cheap forms of energy .

What Is A Vacuum?

In final rest I am heaving
in loneliness I am conceiving
in deprivation I am giving
in contentment I am reaving
in betrayal I am still cleaving
I arrived but still achieving
I know but still believing
I am clothed but still weaving
I am emptiness, but very much living

If you don't know it already, we are not made of indivisible atomic particles (1), but of energized, polarized, structured, patterned bundles of nothingness (or better still, a not-yet-defined somethingness) that translate in our consciousness as phenomenological apparitions that we call matter, writ large. When the energy vector of matter is positive, meaning that it has angular momentum and spin revolving on the Z axis of the three dimensional function, we call it matter proper and those are the objects and events of our waken lives. When that same matter's energy vector is negative, meaning going the other way (you must use your imagination here), you get what in physics we call a vacuum. So a vacuum is not exactly empty space, but an infolded, implicate and chaotic (2) spectral entity or event, that has geometrically connected proto-elements (3) and latent force potential (4). This reflects the general notion that from a certain cosmic perspective, the everything and the nothing, the vacuum and the plenum, the singularity and the infinity, the big bang and the black hole, are in essence the same fundamental thing and the forms of our manifest lives, are basically, their bounded fractal components and these emerge into our experience in a multicolor, multiform range of possibilities, which appear as parts or as wholes depending on our telescopic level of observation.

To illustrate my point let us imagine a fish being you and the waters of the sea being the vacuum. Let's assume that this fish has never been to the surface and has known none else but the aquatic profundities of the ocean. Because the fish has nothing else to compare it to and water for him has no felt nor effective materiality, he simply gingerly floats about in blissful bubbly weightlessness, totally oblivious to the reality that water is in fact, not only the element in which he moves but the life giving substance that he could not exist without. Water doesn't become relevant to the fish until he is taken out of the sea and into the "other-dimensional" space of the open air, where the vital importance of water becomes so tragically evident.

So in the same way as a fish would "perceive" the element in which he evolves as "nothing", because he has no other true referential frame to map it onto, we also think of the vacuum of space as "nothing", while in fact all life originates from its even so illusive emptiness and is the very source and essence of our existence.

If you have a hard time conceiving that we are essentially topological morphic structures made from "nothing" and your mental scaffolding cannot possibly hold this much revelational gravitas, do not fret, if you stick with me and you keep cool and don't casually dismiss me as an extravagant freak or a lunatic of the most unredeemable variety, we will both layout conceptual foundations that can sustain the highest ontological skyscrapers. And these are not just "empty" words, pan not intended :).

Note: (1) Sorry I can't reference authoritative sources for this section, but I am almost sure I am just reinventing the wheel here and some serious research has already been done on the matter. We are just having fun here and at the moment, I don't feel the urge to take my cogitations thru the rigorous sieve of the established scientific constabulary, but I promise to check later, I have tomatoes to plant and a sick goat to tend to today.
(2) Chaotic as immanent, hidden order or order found at a different level or perspective, and not in the casual sense of disorganized and disorderly.
(3)Proto-element is my own word for archetype. When studying these geometries I noticed numbers 6, 8, 64, phi and e the exponential function mysteriously recur at every turn. I am convinced that these numbers hold the key to our understanding of the vacuum and its dynamic relationship to time and organizational transformation in three dimensional space. I have further insights on the matter but I believe you may have had enough to chew on for now.
(4) Which is my own personal definition of "spirit". The same as saying, another rhetorical hematoma on this already battered and bruised word.

Creative Suffering

I prod your body
with deadly stings
out of your strained souls
I make my strings
from your emptied hearts
my song springs
with your barren hands
I fashion all things
from your rusty chains
I forge gold rings
till you are drowning
then I make you wide wings
till you know you are pawns
then I turn you all kings

Quotes From Remarkable People

".. If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in your struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos. In your struggle for justice, let your oppressor know that you are not attempting to defeat or humiliate him, or even to pay him back for injustices that he has heaped upon you. Let him know that you are merely seeking justice for him as well as yourself. Let him know that the festering sore of segregation debilitates the white man as well as the Negro.." -- Rev. Martin Luther King Jr

___________________

If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,
do you think ghosts will do it after? ...
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.
-- Kabir, Indian Poet and Mystic

About Charity And Goodwill

True charity and goodwill must not be actions that we initiate from our own self-centered, hierarchy entranced individuality, as this will only breed unavoidable condescendence in the giver, and disenfranchisement and parasitism in the givee. Instead, charity and goodwill must be perceived as environments of charged virtue that we have the opportunity to catalyze thru wholesome intent towards directions of integral fulfillment of all relevant human needs, physical and otherwise.

About Modern Philosophy

Post-modernism, existentialism, objectivism and on and on. I have to say, and I make no claims of better knowledge, that I have extensively read and thoroughly studied human philosophy from Aristotle to the latest trends in deep thoughtful cogitation about our human condition and I always almost come out feeling that there must be a missing link fallen amidst the cracks of some imperceptible but ever clamoring truth, that there must be someone out there who may have caught a better angle and a wider perspective of the illusive and fleeting moments of being that we call life; someone who may have gleaned a truly wholesome interpretation of the facts, an explanation of reality that would ultimately reconcile the dry and soulless conclusions of many of our illustrious intellectual and pragmatic luminaries with the transcendent and mystical allusions, even so ethereal and inconclusive, of the mages, shamans, prophets and avatars of our spiritual past and present. I am convinced that the truth lies somewhere between these two and those who will finally fill the gap and harmonize the dissonances of these bipartisan versions of life, will be the ones who have mastered the art of gracefully integrating the healthy skepticism of the pragmatic inquirer with his critical rationalism on one hand, and the heart-lead intuition of the spirited mystic, with his magical fuzzy-edged oratory and mystery riddled intimations on the other.

Required Reading: Before we can go beyond what we currently know and rise to timely and original insights, we must first be acquainted with what those who came before us thought and wrote. Here is an overview of ancient and modern Philosophy that I consider required reading for anybody who is interested in building the necessary mental structure for what is coming. Philosophy on Wikipedia.

About God And Natural Disasters

Blaming God for the deadly outcome of natural disasters is from my perspective infantile and rooted in human cultures simmering in an existential soup of half-baked religious ideas and bland and spiceless spiritual insights. The images of innocent children and by most accounts, godly people ravaged by the latest Haiti earthquake made all of us cringe with horror. Even if historically speaking, natural and other catastrophes have never been sufficient to dissuade the many from an inflexible faith in an overarching, benevolent deity, they become in many instances, periods of deep eschatological reflections about our real place in the universe and our ultimate and true relationship with the godhead. I have heard many times the recurring refrain "why would a good and loving God do such awful things to innocent children?" and I can frankly tell you as a man who empathizes with other humans' suffering to his very beating core, that it still rings in my battered ears with the same dissonant cacophony reverberating from the same wounded human soul, that despite the insistent indicia and the boisterous signs all around, has the hardest time dealing with the essential unity of all things. That in fact there is not God and us but there is just only God, in all His encompassing beingness (and for all of you staunch atheists, committed Sartrian existentialists and Randian objectivists out there, who believe there is no God, here is one dude who believes that all there is is God, the proverbial singularity of quantum physics' lore, go figure). When we say God, we are not outside of that glorious loop but inextricably embedded in that divine matrix. Consequently, the question is not "why is God doing that to us?" but "why is God doing that to Himself?", and that is a very legitimate question.

About Global Warming

My concern is that some countries attempts to curve Co2 emissions by monetizing it thru a trading mechanism that would issue credits to those who pollute less by those who pollute more, may degenerate into some kind of stockmarket where financial imperatives rule and real solutions based on proven scientific research dissolve in an unrecognizable mess of particular interests and self-serving political agendas.

In addition, it is not yet clear that man is the sole culprit in this debacle. As matter of fact solid climatic research has proven with very little doubt that the sun and cosmic rays and their effect on cloud covering in the atmosphere have a much heavier weight in determining extreme changes in temperature than human industrial pollution (which by all means should still be managed and curtailed). This other view has been all but completely shunned by the scientific and political establishment for the reason I stated above: man produced CO2 as the sole cause of extreme climate changes and its eventual global monetization thru CO2 credits can make some well placed middlemen (and we know who they are) a lot of money.

Watch this video on the sun's cosmic rays and their effect on extreme climate changes. It is a five parts documentary. Do not be turned off but the initial short introduction in Danish, the rest is all in English with Danish subtitles.
... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1qGOUIRac0

About Quantum Physics and The Observation Theory

The central axiom of Observational theory in Quantum Physics is characterized as: “The act of observation by a motivated observer of an event with a quantum mechanically uncertain outcome influences that outcome.” I have a tiny little problem with that. I believe this would be only true in an empty, completely isolated environment, which in my opinion doesn't exist, particularly if we were to consider all events as "quantum mechanically uncertain". Even if I am convinced that individual human observation and purpose may tilt the balance of probability, it does not however, determine its final manifestation. In the real world of three dimensional space with its swarms of competing existential ideological and topological manifolds, one individual observer's intent has to contend with all the other hovering reification plans vying for a place under the sun. And this is not the end of the story: we cannot correctly compute a final outcome equation with just the human observation and intent variables (and proponents of "name it and claim it" and positive thinking of all extractions open your ears here), but we must factor in the teleological element (I guess, and mark my words, hidden in the Cosmological Constant and Higgs Particles' theories), the ultimate purposeful cosmic steering force that permeates all that exists and seems to take us in a very particular direction. Unfortunately, memetic competition and a possible teleological aim to existence is to a mainstream scientist's brain like fried eggs on a well oiled teflon pan: they won't stick.

Now, the question is: Is quantum physics really the so much heralded rosetta stone that would solve the most intricate mysteries of our physical reality and the holy grail that would crown our millenial search for a final and unified knowledge? The answer is obviously no. Quantum physics, as all forms of human knowledge is plagued with false premises and lacunar misconceptions that only reflect a timely and limited intellectual position that can only afford to pretend to be a stepping stone for ulterior, superior and more viable ways of thinking, ones that are nearer to how the universe really works.

About Time Reversal

Did you know that there are serious physicists studying the possibility that the flow of time may actually happen in both directions: present forwards to future and future backwards to present. I am not a formally trained physicists but just intuitively, I have been sustaining that time vectors for space events had to flow in both those directions to account for the panoply of colorful and sometimes hard to explain observations (by current widely held scientific models) in both our own human experience and other more exotic domains. I believe that the closest natural phenomena and one that may help illustrate the way reverse time may work, is lightning. In fact and contrary to what most of you may have been lead to believe, a lightning strike, the visible bright streak of zigzagging electric incandescence, is initiated from the ground up and not from the cloud down.

Read this article about how a lightning storm actually happens:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/lightning.htm

Read this other article (PDF format) on time reversal by Dean Rodin: Time-reversed human experience: Experimental evidence and implications

[ To be continued ]...

Of Illusions And Delusions

Color of square A is the same as color of square B. You don't believe it?
Copy the image and with your favorite graphic program,
use the color-drop and check the Hex color decimal number
for both: it is #797979.

What Is One Of Our Greatest Problems

It is not when we don't know, but it is when we believe we know. It is when we think we have found the edges of the realm of possibility and are convinced without a shadow of a doubt that the matter has been settled, when the jury, is in fact, still out. It is when with self-congratulatory arrogance, we presume that we are in posession of the most accurate discription of reality while all others, past and present, are not. People who fret to close ideological loops and refuse to leave a single window of reasoning open to new findings and insights, are the gravest danger to our hope of ever achieving full potential. This doesn't mean that new ideas should have free range and no detractors, because any new and positive conceptual intrusion in mental space without the proper solid critical pressure will wax lazy and lack memetic competitive fortitude, but only that If the proponents of reactionary stances succeed in hogging the limelight of social discourse, things go awry and we become stuck in vicious circles of intellectually flawed arguments, rationally untenable positions and morally incongruent behaviors.

About What Moves Us

Hemlines lengthen and shorten
Not because of what you see or what you hear
Civilizations rise and fall
Not because of a king’s might nor the magic of the seer
Economies boom and bust
Not because of shoddy barons nor the whims of money dear
No, it is the wind behind the wave of time
It’s father sun and the wobbling of a sphere

Happy New Year 2010

Dans cette vie et ses orages
les vicissitudes de cet age
ses contradictions et sa rage
Je vous souhaite mes amis
la confidence du mage
le calme divin du sage
un sourire pérenne sur vos visages
Car si vous vivez la vie du cœur
vous direz jamais dommage

The Truth About Human DNA

There must be a terrible misconception about the nature of human DNA. I strongly believe that the great mystery of our DNA lies in the number of its codons, 64. 64 is the product of 8x8, and the number 8 is strangely linked to the concept of infinity (1). Thus 64 - and our DNA- is the product, the interaction of 2 infinities: the infinity of our ancestral history and the infinity of our future becoming, the combined memory of our past and the entelechy of our potential destiny. Time will tell, but I sustain that DNA is not just about our individual genetic legacy but also contains the germinal memetic seeds of our collective promised future inheritance, the coding that will compute the unfolding of our final interface with the rest of creation (2).

Note: When we speak of the future, we tend to get lost in the convoluted epistemological labyrinths of free wills and predestinations, dictating gods and human scribes, angelic prophecies and inexorable apocalypses. But Man cannot be a passive recipient of his destiny. He just can't. Despite his pathetic current state, he is a cocreator and must act as one. He cannot divorce himself from his imminent future. He cannot relieve himself from his responsibility as the highest steward of the galactic consciousness, whatever that is.

In fact, Man is called to "see" the future and see it clearly, not just to have faint intimations of it. He must coax and woo with lucid dreams and limpid visions and into the present, the best, the most humane, the most beautiful, the happiest and most divine possible scenarios. But he must not only dream, but he must appropriate the expansive oratory of the seer to efficiently articulate it and the courage and soul-force of a death-defying warrior to see it thru. Because if he doesn't, the promised son of our potential great future will emerge as the stillborn child of our many past human tragedies and our numerous historical nightmares. We have the ability to destroy ourselves or save ourselves, and all we need is clear direction. Without vision people perish, the prophet said. Yes, they perish in the ideological prisons of lame and half-baked convictions that breed schisms, strife and mayhem; they perish in the I-am-better-than-thou pogroms of social segregation and inequality that create poverty, alienation and ultimately murderous violence; they perish in the selfish and short-sighted interests of the few and the induced paranoia of the many; they perish in the exodal deserts of a life full of self and golden calves but devoid of soul and awareness. It is not this future that I want, nor anybody else wants for that matter. Am I wrong to believe this?

In our modern world, with its immense scentific acumen and its high technological sophistication, we don't seem to be able to wrap our intellectual arms around what is really important for our true accomplishment as human beings, and the unfurbished and dilapidated spiritual and visionary toolbox of our present condition is an alarming call for some new provisions, may be provisions of the thinking-out-the-box kind, possibly provisions that may fall outside of the paradigms of some cherished cultural ideal..

Notes:
(1) Check the section on Numbers
(2) In the language of physics and without going into complex mathematical formulas, this could be told this way: the energy resulting from the intrinsic energy/information density of the vacuum (the future), will generate negative pressure which will drive an accelerated expansion in empty space (unfolding of historic events in time). If you want to go deeper and venture into some mazed mathematical latifundia, study infinite integrals in perturbation theory, a branch of quantum thermodynamics. Particularly the notions of extropy, vacuum energy, cosmological constant, octonions, discreet time Fourier transforms and renormalisation. The works of Hendrik Lorentz, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, Kurt Godel and John Baez make for some fascinating reading but are not for the timid and the mathphobic.

The Meaning of Tattooing

People choose to be tattooed for all kinds of reasons, some sane and others border on the self-destructive and pathologic. But that is not what interests me here. What is really fascinating is the less than shy intrusion in western popular culture of an archaic art that was practically almost exclusively relegated to the primitive and aboriginal cultures of the world and not to the "civilized" ivory skinned heirs of the industrial and technological age.

I believe the reason lies in what I have often been speaking about on this blog, namely, that something deeper than deep within us is bidding us to return to the body (and by natural extension, to the earth), the space within and which is awkwardly manifesting in body painting and piercing.

The symbolism of the tattooing phenomena lies in the fact that the tattooing pen (or drill) is pointing to the body. After centuries of aiming the pen of our creativity onto paper and with ink we sketched the ever evolving, abstracting patterns of our intellect, now we are turning our gaze to the body, and on paper made of our skins, we are tracing curves and carving shapes, that subconsciously, we hope will take us magically back to some long lost state and conjure the return of a spirited-away essence.

It always amazes me how Nature (for lack of a better word) can take one of the weirdest, apparently useless and irrelevant human activities, sometimes even harmful ones, and use them to get a certain timely message across. She will use aliens and crop circles, diseases and epidemics, wars and terrorisms, and even tattoos and piercings, to get our attention to some vital existential dysfunction and calling us to fix it, but the message is somehow almost always lost on us: "when the prophet points to the stars, the fool him, stares at the finger."

Paradoxes

- The more control we have over our individual free will, the more predestined we will be. In other words, a life of regular careful self-examination and conscious awareness of ones ideas and actions, will result in the realization of your full potential (which by the way, has nothing to do with you getting the woman of your dreams, that coveted promotion nor the last model BMW).
- We have to work very hard to be who we already are. Meaning that a life lived in discipline and is energized by courage and purpose will bring you closer to what you were meant to be.
- Our biggest responsibility as human beings is to express our freedom by dreaming... but awake.

About The Crisis

We are on the brink of the adventure
for which we left the trees
we overcame draughts and floods
and the killer great freeze
we crossed seas and conquered worlds
and brought nature to her knees
we plundered her lands and oceans
without ever saying please
and now we find ourselves in a bind
in an ever tighter squeeze
will we drop the ball
and melt like soft cheese
or will we rise to the occasion
and god's redemption seize

It is terrible isn't it? Particularly if you are one of the millions of people who haven't taken advantage of prior decades' economic booms and garnished your bony frame with some fat for the winter. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the dangling dissonances of our culture, the overwhelming mounting contradictions of our time, will not just dissolve and go away. The rising curves (1) of environmental degradation, fossil fuel extraction, financial institutions' insolvencies, global inequalities, illiteracy, unemployment, over-population, squalid poverty, blinding greed and so on, must culminate in a radical reversal of some kind. It could not have just gone for ever. If you believed it could, then there is something fundamentally wrong with the models with which you perceive the world. Our concern should be, will we fail to see the imminence of what is coming and watch the tensions of our current situation rise in a spiraling crescendo of chaos and mayhem that will culminate in national or even planetary disintegration ushering in a new dark age, or will we rise to the occasion and stand in the face of the false prophets of eternal economic growth and the white-toothy-smile wearing peddlers of unsustainable happiness, these unwitting merchants of doom of whose madness we will put an end. It took two atomic bombs to jolt the Japanese out of their expansionistic delusions, and the allies had to raze half of Germany to the ground before the Germans were jolted out of theirs. What it would take to put an end to our global foolishness?

I see the time we are going thru as the time of truth. The cows are coming home for milking, the chicken are back to roost, the pigs have landed and the doodoo is about to hit the fan. I contemplate this great paradox, that even if I know we are still in the dead center of God's will and in the middle of a potentially monumental disaster, we do have an important and decisive function that may tip the balance, not of our final destiny, but of how speedily and how graciously we get there. Just know that your greatest ally and your greatest enemy as well, is yourself and for your sake and the sake of those you care for, I hope you make the right decisions. I cannot emphasize this enough, we are not going into an apocalyptic mode transition of the fear-mongering religious kind but into a transcendental shift of the highest spiritual order. Your job is to push forward thru the difficulties of daily material life and pass the cobweb of false hopes and wishful thinking and be ready for the pressures and strictures of the upcoming birth. Truly, this is exactly what we are, the fetal creatures and future graduates from the cozy womb of a stuffy and over-stretched civilization, about to be introduced to the open air of a new and more expansive reality.

If this doesn't give you hope, nothing will. If you still chose to fear, that is fine but I recommend courage. If you chose despair that is OK too but I suggest that you makeup in energy (work on your body and your mind) what you are loosing in money and possessions, and harness that force and break thru this mess with the determination and confidence of a Socrates, a Jesus or a Martin Luther King Jr, one who has been to the mountain top and has seen the glory of the lord.

Note: (1) Well, let me also say that we should not loose sight of the fact that things are rarely what they seem and that behind the fuzzy screen of human historical events, lies an insidious machinery whose intent is undeclared and that only the most perspicacious can discern. What I am trying to say is that the real nature of our current economic crisis may represent indeed, the final steerings of an organism that has reached its assigned morphological (form), physiological (function) and ecological (environment) potential and must move to a more complex level of evolution, another dimension in civilization so to speak. Why? Because, my dear friend, complexity and novelty is the name of the game. And you thought the universe revolved around you getting that so much coveted career promotion :)

And how do systems, organisms, events and geometries move to different, higher dimensions? The graphic representation curve (to get a picture check the statistical graphic illustrations for the curves of rising population, ever increasing fossil fuel extraction and environmental pollution) of their evolutionary progression makes a brisk turn from a horizonal, gradually accruing line and into the upward, exponential and almost vertical direction (in the case of geometric forms, dimensions are added by shifts of 90 degrees orthogonal movements in the three dimensional space function) and subsequently into the farthest areas far-from-equilibrium (a thermodynamic term coined by Ilya Pregogine) where the system is submitted to extreme pressures and pushed into radical transformative states in which present configutations are dissolved and former rules of engagement cease to apply (a kind of a black hole, another word for crisis). From this indifinite and by most observable accounts, problematic state, the system will either reemerge as another more complex, more fitting, more adapted entity or becomes extinct all together. The significance and implications of this is ominous for our current situation.

What Is The Great Mystery Of The Pyramids?

Do you know what a cosmic giggle is? It is what God does when he sees humans ponder about things that our obtuse minds deem inscrutable, like for example: how did the ancient Egyptians (and very possibly some other more ancient people) manage to build with that much precision and with such enormous stones? I am almost sure the answer will not be found in some hidden drawer of our intellectual and technological toolbox. The answer must be very obvious, right there before our eyes. My take the answer is.. love. I do not mean sentimental, self-involved love, but another kind of animal, one of a more immanent nature. The kind of love that makes you identify fully with the other, with the different, with the unknown, with the alien. The kind of love that completely displaces fear and frees our bodies and our minds from the gravity of ideological and cultural limitations so we can float in the rarified air of god's full potential. This kind of love has no direction and no target (what I call vectorial energy), but is a love that is all magnitude and quality but with no direction, no target, no position, no mass: what is called scalar energy. Watch out for this term, scalar, in the next few years and all the incredible technologies that will spring from it.

There is another important fact, love as scalar energy can only be attained when the ego is reined by the soul and thinking consciousness is subordinated to divine grace, and this is one reason I believe that the pyramids must have been built not 2000 yrs ago, not even 10,000 years ago, but much, much earlier (and most likely not by the pharaohs as we were made to believe), when man hadn't been yet thrown on the conveyer belt of modern history and before the written alphabet, when his relationship to the earth and the cosmos was more synergistic and when his existence was fully integrated with the rest of creation.

In fact, scalar love makes people see clearly (what is and what is to come), does marvels to your health and must even affect gravity (I am almost sure the gravitational pull of the earth was much weaker then now, so objects were lighter, and it is one of the reasons by the way, we had gigantic animals -and possibly humans-, which in my opinion were not victims of a meteorite but went extinct because gravity became stronger and they collapsed under their own weight). Truly, those architectural marvels of antiquity must have been built when humans lived in a completely different Age and quality of Time, when gods were actively involved in the affairs of man, when Love was all there was and when human divine consciousness wasn't yet soiled by the ego -what we call ego may have emerged much more recently than we think (1) -. I suppose that was before man ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the glorious days of Eden ; ) It couldn't have been done otherwise.

Read Below For More Paradoxial Points...

Notes: (1) Read Julian James' work on the Bicameral Mind.

More About The Pyramids?

First let me say that the jury is still out as far as who truly built the pyramids. It is not yet completely settled that Egyptians were the culprits. The reason for the scant allusions to the mystery of the pyramids in the annals of serious cultural discourse and their practical total relegation to marginal circles, is because modern science has no academically "dignified" theory nor methodologically viable models to fit them into. There is nothing in contemporary logic or technology to account for their reality, so these reason-defying but ever so marvelous and astounding creatures of human ingenuity, were left orphans at the doors of denial-erected rhetorical warding boards at the fringes of quirky and esoteric speculation. Nevertheless, in my opinion, the origine and meaning of the pyramids is a matter that we have to contend with seriously if we are to ever gain a firm hold on our place in the universal congress of truly sentient entities.

The following are some of my views on this issue, which are by no means totally comprehensive and additional elucidating points will be gradually adjoined as they are stumbled into:

The Pyramids And History:

I have no doubt that the original giant pyramids of antiquity were built before the advent of writing and that is why no historical records have been found explicating their purpose, technology nor who actually built them. But that didn't stop the gods, or whatever cosmic intelligence running the show. Not being able to abstract meaning thru linguistic tools and create alphabetic memory (God loves history) didn't preclude the use of other modalities of conveyance, in this case artistic expression of the highest order. This is another way of saying that He didn't just leave us with mere fodder for our intellectual proddings, but he has instead bequeathed us with a potentially cathartic experience that was intended to lead to a final noetic realization. In fact, pyramids are not there just to impress, but within the magical proportions of their triangular facades, in the seeming intentionality of their sacred geometric arrangements, in the bewildering techniques of their stone structures and megaliths, and in the intricacies of their architectural design, is hidden a subliminal message, a stone-encapsulated cryptic knowledge waiting for its eventual timely revelation, which when decoded and understood may allow us to untwine the twisted threads of our own convoluted modern existence.

The Pyramids And The Stars:

The 3 major pyramidal complexes in the world, the Egyptian, the Meso-American (Mayan) and Far-Eastern (Cambodian), were all built around the same period and at about the same geographical latitudes (either at 30 or 19.47 degrees latitude north, latitudes that strangely recur for geographic location of major volcanoes on earth and other planets, and the dark spots of the surface of the sun). The layout of these structures is of a beauty and precision that is uncanny and still amazes modern architects and archeologists. To this days, no one has been able to duplicate these magnificent works of human genius. Also, the position and design of all three reflects the configuration and shape of overlooking constellations during that period of history when they were built. Coincidence? I do not think so. The relationship of humans with the stars is a strange and intriguing one, and the pyramids may just be one of the many manifestations of this ageless romance.

The Pyramids And Architecture:

Architecture appears to reflect an age's cultural, social and psychological make-up. In other words, our most relevant building structures-religious, political and economic- are physical metaphors of our deeply held beliefs and world-views, they are product of collective, organic intelligence (the highest form of intelligence) and this may account for the incredible precision and accuracy with which these structures were built startling even modern engineers. It is no coincidence that humanity has gone from pyramidal (Egyptian and Andean temples), to round shapes (Arab mosques and Christian cathedral domes), to rectangular shapes ( New World skyscrapers) reflecting our actual cultural evolution from hierarchical social systems (pyramidal) to more egalitarian (rectangular) ones. So now you know: when you see incredible ancient structure such as the Pyramids, it is not extraterrestreals that built them, it is just those glorious ancient humans who somehow knew, even as far back as 10,000 year, how to tap into the “mind” of the “ultimate great designer”. It appears to me that there was an inflection point somewhere down in history before which men seem to have been more open to intuitive knowledge than we are today, the same kind of knowledge that allows a spider to build extremely complex webs and migratory birds to fly for thousands of miles without getting lost> I believe that inflection point may coincide with the time when men lost touch with the infinite knowledge of the earth and the stars or the start of our current modern western civilization.

The Pyramids And Human Politics:

Sometimes, extreme acts of madness, cruelty and paranoia that at first view may seem senseless, do have a universal meaning and a purpose. So neither The Egyptians built the pyramids, nor did the Chinese the wall of china... human paranoia did. Pathological fears seem to sometimes be handy tools in the hands of our teleologically driven deities. Most of these extraordinary projects were initiated by very powerful rulers out of sheer paranoia and mostly, megalomania and the god-man-syndrome (men who have a big head and think they are god). Crazy people with a lot of power can accomplish astonishing things, for evil or for good. According to some historians kings and rulers of those days were extremely parasitic, fulfilled no functional or productive task and their role was mostly ritualistic and protocolary. Just think about it, who would envision the building of such structures but a complete nut (with a lot of power) or someone who wanted to overcompensate for something lacking ...that something lacking in my opinion was a real leadership that was in step with the times. When rulers can't solve real problems they usually busy themselves with fancy projects. The Pharaohs, in other words, were in "de-nile" (pun intended, very much so) and the pyramids were a symptom of ills that started to creep-in in those societies and that will eventually drive them to bankruptcy and even complete annihilation by new and more energized nations.

About Aliens And Extraterrestrials

"We have met the alien,
and it is us"
-- You can go ahead and quote me on this one :)

I first have to say that to my great disappointment, I never had an encounter with a UFO and I am sure they are reading this blog... because they are smart. So I am impatiently waiting for a message, an apparition, even an abduction.. here I am, take me. :)

Jokes aside, I am convinced that the issue of aliens is not a trivial one and that there is a truth to their intrusion in history that is not intelligence-insulting and is completely divorced from the highly mediated new age UFO and Extraterrestrial cults that litter the spiritual marketplace. Life is sometimes weird it is true, but it still needs to be approached with a modicum of reason and common sense. We can't deny the fact that many people all over the world, have had visionary experiences of beings that they characterize as aliens but if these exist, who are they really and where do they come from? In fact human encounters with aliens may not just be fodder for tabloids and the speculations of science fiction buffs, but is instead a guiding metaphor of what is about to happen to our culture, our imminent encounter with the proverbial "other", which in my humble opinion is just a future, more accomplished, more evolved and more fulfilled version of our own selves. Read on..

I have a view on this matter that I haven't heard anybody else proclaim and I am not surprised because it is, from all reasonable angles, preposterous, but nevertheless, I will bet you a couple of peanuts that it is going to be the view that will finally prevail. I am almost certain , aliens are neither extra nor intraterrestrials but are our own ... pocestors! You don't know the meaning of the word? nobody does, I just invented it. Pocestors are for our future what ancestors are for our past. Then you said " so much for reason and common sense". The future, contrary to what most of you may have been conditioned to believe, is not an empty vacuum but is teeming with life, a life that has a lot to do with us because, my dear friends, those ghosts of dreamspace that you so much want to believe are strange creatures from another planet and other galactic civilizations (remember duality is a contraption of the mind and the existence of both the "human" and the "other" is an essential impossibility) may just be in fact the future version of our little pathetic selves, who, because of an obviously more evolved intelligence, must have found a crack thru the membrane of time and who in anguished desperation and not being able to share in our physical space (in the same manner that our dead ancestors cannot share in our physical space), are using all kinds of other means (pyramids and crops circles may be) to get our attention to some vital cosmic matters or to warn us of the impending dangers of our misguided creations. This may make sense to very few of you, the usual choir of demented ones I guess, but don't despair, the rest of you will eventually catch up later :)

I have little doubt that If my theory (which, I am sure, cannot be entirely original) is correct and we, modern humans are a sort of holographic interference pattern of an object beam made by the past (ancestors) and a reference beam made of the future (pocestors) then it is not that unlikely that in the same manner that some shamans receive intimations of our archaic ancestral past, so can other people with the same kind of sensitivity capture similar "vibes" from our technologically more advanced pocestral future. This can also be viewed in this fashion: Human consciousness (whatever that is) works as a modulating agent, a central axis around which resonance waves of events that have undergone the formality of occurring and resonance waves of future potential indefinite reality gravitate in stochastic interdependence and form the three dimensional standing waves of timely observed actuality.

And why hasn't anybody been able to prove the physical existence of aliens? For the same reason your dead ancestor and you, cannot share the same physical space: the only space you can share with both your here-no-more ancestors and your still-to-be pocestors, is hyper-space, the realer than real psychic domain of dreams and hallucinations.. oooh

It is quite befuddling to conceive that a "future us" can intrude in our present reality and not compromise the logic of his own existence, or the infamous butterfly effect. But we must consider the possibility that logic may not be the final thread that holds the beads of unfolding historic events but instead it is imagination, writ large, in all its irrationality, fuzziness and fluidity that is the mold on which the molten metal of future potential occurrences are poured, solidifying into the cast of present coalescing experienced reality, the process being modulated by some not yet fully understood mechanism. May be the Higgs Boson Particles and Random Dynamics can provide us with some serious answers, or may be not.

We should also concede that our current perception of time is so desperately ingrained in its chronological linearity that if we were to dismiss this theory off-hand as just another meaningless jumble of no better use than science fiction consumption, will be tantamount to closing the door to ulterior, even more accurate tangential insights, which may rise on this ever twisting curve of search for self and meaning.

The Meaning Of Man

Trying to define Man without referring to his woundedness is missing the point. The human in his current state is a flawed entity and so is everything that stems from him. In his ideologies and his technologies, in his progress and in his regress, in his solitude and in his multitude, in his profundities and in his platitudes, in his institutions and in his destitutions, in his glories and in his miseries, every endeavor seems to be pregnant with the bastard children of self-deceptive love-affairs, failed unions and unintended consequences. It is not a mystery what we are, for we are mortally wounded beasts wallowing in pain and flailing in distress, finding lame solace in unsatisfying materiality. The real mystery is, when will the mask fall and the drama finish? When will the millennial cut be mended and where lies the true balm of our final healing?

What Is Karma?

The real meaning of Karma cannot revolve around the dual nature of existence. Our understanding of karma as the stockmarket of good and evil deeds and their subsequent disbursement in cross-life reincarnational dividends in the form of positive or negative retributions, may be incorrect. That spin of the word must have came much later, when the ego, or the thinking self, was established as the absolute ruler of human identity and its uncontested, final existential reference. The original meaning of karma is: being and action in its purest form, devoid of duality, free of opposite, liberated from earthly tensions, unbound by emotion, emancipated from cultural demands and unshackled from materiality.

The Meaning Of The Zodiac

The true original purpose of the Zodiac may have nothing to do with individual human temperaments and propensities (which in my opinion there are only two: asleep and awake) nor private propitiatory timely calibrations by using charts or what have you. These may provide for some personal relief from fear and anxiety about the future, but they are not the crux of our existential matter which is not tomorrow but now, and by all observable accounts, is not particular but global and planetary.

The Zodiac and its fauna of characters (in fact there are mostly animals, some real some mythic, a few humans and a couple of props) are the script of Gaia the Plant Spirit (not just the biological earthy and grassy entity but the cosmic principle that it embodies) chronicling the great drama of all ages. Its inspiration stems from the heart of this millennial planet and is etched in the deepest recesses of human consciousness.

The Zodiac is not about outer space as much as it is about the Vegetal Man and his true aspirations, expressed in oniric language then projected on the observable celestial space. Just think about it, if you were a plant, what would you dream of? Obviously, to be something that can move around, run wild in the fields, have mad passionate sex, fly high in the air, freely swim in the oceans and why not, to be able to think rationally and eventually build things like pyramids, skyscrapers or even travel to the moon and the space beyond. In fact before we humans dreamed of steam engines, airplanes, space shuttles and world wide webs, the mighty oak tree and the lowly mushroom did too, and by what I see, we are barely catching up ( I am sure I have lost most of you at this point but having one's own blog has its advantages: you can write whatever the heck you feel like writing, as long as there is no blood shed and the blog remains free of charge I am sure no one will be seriously complaining, and probably I may be earning a crack or two from some bemused readers who may think I have my marbles all over the floor.. and they may be right).

So there you have it, the Zodiac is the Gaia Mind setting her future action plans and keeping track of its progress across the ages. And what is her way of doing it? writing a screenplay of the most fantastic kind and with the most unusual cast of characters. Horned animals, hybrid creatures, virgins and water bearers, are what Joseph Campbell would have called the masks of god, these are other-dimensional intrusions in mental space, energy archetypes pointing to an essential nature, psychic models doubling as animal actors on the stage of consciousness, and this whole troop was magnificently put together for the purpose of portraying the great drama of creation and the odyssey of man, from his primitive unconsciousness and dual existence, to his future transcendence and promised full humanity.

About Healing

If you have been reading this blog regularly you might have gleaned already most of what I have to say now.

Sickness And You:
Outside of viruses and bad oysters, the most fascinating reason why we fall sick is found in the way we tend to forget that we are all made of a community of independent body parts and microscopic creatures –bacteria- that function for a common purpose: the survival of the individual body and the evolution and growth of the collective body. You remember in psychology class when you learned that the more we repress a feeling, the strongest that feeling will manifest itself in ways that will claim for attention. Well, in the same manner, when you neglect or mistreat a body part, that body part will rebel and let you know with pains and aches that it is unhappy. My point is that we have to make an effort to be more aware of our bodies and the needs of its individual components. There are ways and techniques to do this so I invite you to do some homework on the subject.

Sickness And The Cosmos:
Healing of the human, the individual and the group, is simply the timely, intelligent, judicious and insightful management of always existing potentialities. When I speak of masculine and feminine it has very little to do with biological traits and more to do with cosmic principles, namely the acidoid, aggressive, explosive, matter building and spirit dissolving pole on one side, and the alkaloid, passive, conciliatory, matter dissolving and spirit enhancing pole on the other.

Sickness arises when there is an imbalance in the interplay of these two principles. For example, at the individual human level, an excess of acidity in the body relative to its alkalinity will cause illnesses whose symptoms can manifest in all kinds of known pathologies. On the human group level, a deficiency in the feminine softening apport to the societal fabric in a relatively over- masculinized, dogmatic and aggressive culture will cause disfunctions whose symptoms are usually bellicose tendencies, counter-beneficial competitive environements, excessive and non-judicious exploitation of natural resources, uncreative scientific and literary libraries and a sclerotic art scene...

I believe it is worth pointing out that the result of a happy balance of opposite alchemical principles is not neutralization, but the paradoxical presence of both elements simultaneously, with the full expression of all their innate attributes and in all of their power and glory.

About Conspiracy Theories

No one is in control
thus I deem
we well deserve
our given regime
and without the damned
who will God redeem?
I am telling you
it isn't the usual theme
like a flash in the pan
our thoughts gleam
we try to explain
with elaborate scheme
aliens and saucers
on a cosmic stream
or the channelling of archangels
on the quantum of a beam
reptilians and illuminati
even if they reign supreme
reality will still unfold
with the logic of a dream

There are undoubtedly human conspiracies of high order and we do see their desperate attempts at control all over the place, from capitalist empires, to religious fundamentalist movements and shady organizations of all sorts. But these as impressive as they may appear, are just bozos playing with a god. In fact, I have good news for everybody, there is an even greater conspiracy lurking in the background of human history that will inexorably frustrate all the slef-serving machinations of these short sighted power-mongers. This other conspiracy is not instigated by dark figures in a smoky room in some power palace in Washington, Moscow or Tel Aviv. This conspiracy is a much more benevolent one. I do not have a name for it and yet its intelligence penetrates every fiber of the cosmic fabric and every act of human undertaking. It doesn't have a CEO, a president nor a pope but still is led with the most magnificent acumen. It has an army but its faithful soldiers have always been composed of the alienated and the marginal peoples of the world, but still it advances thru the battlefields of history with unmitigated ease. This conspiracy is not built on an ideology nor a dogma but can still create forms around which ideas and actions of the most exquisite type can find a solid gravitational axis. This conspiracy knows our true past and it is the one taking us to its future. To this conspiracy I say, how can I help?

Humans and Machines

Let me first say that I am all for machines. Thank god for automobiles, hydraulic cranes and computers. Can you imagine if evolution was limited to biology and genes? I don't believe humans can handle longer legs, larger muscles nor bigger brains :). So machines are good extensions to our existing capabilities and are more than a welcome addition to our ever growing toolbox of adaptive technological gadgets.

However, humans are different from machines, at least in theory. In fact, if left to their own devices, humans will act like machines and will fall into unexamined repetitive patterns of behavior and programmed routines that do not always fit the context in which they are recalled. Thus, for the human as well as for the machine, strategies of continual updating, upgrading and adapting must be adopted to keep the workings of these two bundles of complexity congruent with the functions that they are meant to fulfill and the environments that they seek to serve.

Human Violence And Earthquakes

Under the physical crust of the body, the smooth (e)motion of the tectonic layers of the subconscious encounters an irregularity (usually a blockage made of undigested memories) that increases its friction resistance, and as (e)motion continuous, stress increases and pent-up energy builds across the fault lines of past childhood traumas. This energy is eventually released in the form of more or less powerful waves of seismic violence.

What Is The Meaning Of Messiah?

Or why most messiahs portrayed in human myth and religious history are said to be born of virgin mothers? Jesus, Krishna, Horus, Dyonisus and the list goes on. Who is the real virgin and what is the nature of its progeny? The virgin in my opinion symbolises the mystery of the future, whose truth and virtues no one has ever been able to penetrate. The future, represented in the pure, undefiled begetting of a promised child, is not only that empty, passive, impersonal vacuum ahead of us, whose only function is to give room to our civilizational expansion, but is indeed an honorable, real, intelligent, breathing, life giving entity and the messiahs of our old spiritual memory are the millenial heralds and harbingers of our imminent encounter with this unfathomable, unimaginable, eschatological attracting force at the end of time.

What Is The Real Meaning Of Evolution?

It is this: Nature doesn't like stupid species. She makes no quarrels about getting rid of unfit creatures when better designs are available. From the dodo to the tyrannosaurus rex, she has shown no mercy. The implications are ominous for the human species as we are currently behaving like incorrigible morons.

It is a telling irony that the entire content of our collective historical memory is a concatenation of events that ineluctably led us to our current state of almost total alienation from this great order of nature. Before that and for hundreds of thousands of years, humans lived and thrived with a deep intimation of the planet's true agenda, and when that connection was lost so was our existential compass and the whole foundation of our true being. Thus, a call to a return to that original gaia-linked state is an absolute imperative if survival is what we want. When we do that and at the end of all of our exploring, we will go back to that first place, and we will know it with new eyes, not of a primitive hominid primate, but those of an intellectually savvy and technologically accomplished human.

What Are Some Big Problems With Society?

Institutions and Money:
All our human institutions, which were originally created to solve problems, have become themselves problematic. In fact, Our political, judicial, economical, financial, educational, health and media institutions have fallen prey to the bottom-line imperative, which has practically disenfranchised the recipient of services and his needs and crowned the shareholder and his dividends. When the means of a process -or money- becomes its end, the process becomes imbued with a certain existential madness where noble original intentions are dissolved in the morass of conflicting power interests, balance sheets and stockmarket ticker fluctuations.

Institutions and Evolution:
Most human institutions have without any doubt a worthy and valid evolutionary purpose. Institutions are above all aggregators of functions, and they take momentary forms around which new timely ideas gravitate to shape necessary realities. However, whitin the institution, there was supposed to be built a mechanism that allowed for strategies of ascent to the next level of evolution and impede the new organism from seeking to crystallize into a self-perpetuating, self-contained, habit-driven, paper-shuffeling burocratic entity that may forsake the original intent of it creation and the needs of the social ecosystem in which it is embedded. Political, economic, social or religious, the end that seems to befall all of these human institutions is this calcification of ideological arteries that inevitably leads to a coronary infarctus of the social order...

Quotes from Remarkable People

"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. If you retreat from your creation because you cannot envision the means of its support, then surely, no support will materialize. Find your role. Commit your self to its playing. And you may find the theatre you need. A producer may emerge. Other actors may arrive. And an audience may assemble to help you realize your dreams and accomplish other destinies."
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Mike's Rules For Lasting Happiness

- Solidity and permanence are an illusion: all in the universe is fluid and continuously shifting. On final account, the atom is indeed a spirit.

- This very list of rules for "lasting" happiness is an illusion itself. So why of this inconsistency? Contradictions in my discourse may happen for three main reasons: 1) I do eventually change my mind on issues as new ideas and insights arise, for my commitment is to closing in on truth and not to closing up in consistency. 2) Unwitting ignorance of important facts, my intellectual incapacity to fully comprehend all the angles of an issue and failing to square my views with complete, reasonable and satisfying arguments. 3) The simple fact that I cannot pretend to swim in the deep oceans of high ontology without eventually encountering conceptual crossroads where both opposites of an argument meet in perplexing and strange ways and seem to paradoxically both meet my expectations of logical congruence. Your job as a reader is to overcome the ever present twitching critical nerve and gracefully withhold judgment for the sake of judgment but instead use the ideas found here to construct better answers for your own and everybody else's edification. It is without saying that I am impervious to criticism and frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.

- The "I" (also known as the self or the ego) is not the ultimate arbiter of your identity and is not your final existential reference. There is so much to your story than that. A mere superficial understanding of this fact would suffice to solve 90% of your existential troubles.

- An interpretation of an event is mono-dimensional and thus, biased. An experience, on the other hand, is three-dimensional and reveals both sides of a given nature.

- A mystery is more about inadequate instruments of perception rather than inherently inscrutable truths. In other word, all reality is right there, laid out bare before you, your business is to just open your eyes.

- A truly simple life can only be created by people who are mentally complex.

- Being ecologically minded doesn't necessarily mean making vows of poverty. There is absolutely no redeeming value in poverty which just breeds malnutrition, ill-health, bad teeth, parasitism, substance addiction, squalor, social tensions and ultimately violence . As long as you evolve in the current economic system (no matter how flawed) you must do your best to fully provide for yourself and those you are responsible for. At this juncture compromise is allowed. The only condition is that you never forget who you are and why you are here for.

- The solution to almost every problem in life is ruthless-to-self discipline.

- To realize the impossible you must first not know that it is impossible. People who have reached the seemingly unattainable did not bend to the bravado of those who said it couldn't be done.

- Blaming God for the outcome of deadly natural disasters is infantile. The right question should not be "why would a good and benevolent God do that to us?" but ""why would he do such execrable things to himself?", because our pains are his too.

- Don't give too much weight to what others say or do: You can go from being unanimously thought an ignominious despicable moron of the lowest order, to becoming a paparazzi haunted public sensation of the brightest constellated type, an all in a matter of a few days.

- All events are bipolar: both potentialities, positive or negative, are always present. When you ask for a sword to cut thru the thick and thin of your life's dilemmas and problems, that sword will always be double-bladed and with its handle in the middle. Holding the sword anywhere outside of the center-part will result in "injury". You get my drift!

- The only viable purpose of a knowable truth is not to be believed but to be transcended (this by the way, applies to everything said in this blog).

- If you adopt an ideology treat it like a dangerous medicine: manage the dose carefully.

- If you are a nice person you won't probably understand evil and how far a nasty individual can go with his cruelty.When dealing with bullies (including those you are related to) don't just hope for their redemption but either ran as far as your legs can afford you, or defend yourself if you have the physical capacity but do not, do not be victimized, not in action nor in attitude.

- Even a good thing taken to extremes will transform into an evil thing thru cynicism and eventual madness, and an evil thing taken to extremes will transform into a good thing thru exhaustion and eventual reform imperative.

- Strive for success but stop half way up. Going any higher is equivalent to going backwards. Too much success is in fact contra-productive in the long run. Just look at modern civilization, our glorious industrial success has given us much comfort but at the price of excessive pollution, over-population and foods with barely any nutritious value.

- Your final goal should not be that of excellence but of authenticity. Excellence comes and goes but authenticity no one can take away. Authenticity happens when we come to terms with our true humanity and its material impermanence, our need of others as inextricable parts of ourselves and acknowledging the sacredness of all things even the seemingly inert.

- If you are confronted with nasty individuals, know that it is not after your irritation they are after, but after your energy. Do not give it to them, not a single joule of it.

- When you seek life, health and prosperity, never try to avoid death, sickness and poverty, but actively go after the positive and cheerfully welcome the negative. If you are capable of doing this gracefully, you never loose.

- You can be the smartest person in the world, know more that anybody else in the planet and still fail your driver's licence test, have a messy love life and get a brain tumor.

- If you look for a companion, don't do it to fill an empty hole, but to add to an already complete life.

- If you sense animosity, antipathy or hate for someone, it is most likely mistargeted self-deprecation that you are experiencing. So watch out and try not to act on those feelings and make innocent others the butt of your misguided rage.

- Never demand closure from life, relationships nor love, but try to keep a steady center within a state of continual dynamic flow. Asking for exclusive affection, eternal health and success and universal acceptance is infantile and neurotic and most of all, leads inevitably to disappointment because change and dynamic flow is the real nature of the cosmos.

- The infinity within reflects on the infinity without and vice versa: always consider this angle with dealing with issues and problems.

- There are two kinds of love, vectorial and scalar, one with a target and the other without. The former will provide for good drama, the latter for lasting sanity.

- Real community is reached only when each person's individuality is respected and highly regarded.

- Our best humanity is attained not by learning something by thinking, but by experiencing something by "transcending".

- Life is not the opposite of death, ecstasy is, and a life lived fully is a life lived on the
sharp razor edge of danger.

- Pay attention to the story of your life and keep a journal of some kind. Your past is a fractal of your future, a version of it but just of a higher order and complexity. If we believe that time is in fact circular, once you pass a period of your life it becomes somehow your future, because you will be coming around, that is what a circle is. However, you will not be encountering your past head on, you will just be experiencing the resonances of it having occurred (what in physics is called Quantized Harmonic Oscillation). These resonances are more pronounced when we deal with groups of humans rather than with just individuals.

- Intoxication, dissent and rebellion are highly underrated. These are usually either balancing mechanism for an out of kilter social system, or catalytic forces for a universe that is continually seeking change and novelty. The intelligent way to deal with powerful phenomena, negative or positive, is not thru unconditional condemnation and total suppression on one side or unrestricted approval and unqualified institution on the other, but thru equanimous and judicious management of the manifest energies and their channeling into paths of sane and purposeful intentionality .

-Be open minded but not so open that you can hear wind whistle between your ears. Never dismiss unusual arguments as invalid a priori but try to give the benefit of doubt, and at the same time use the smallest holed intellectual and rational sieve to filter the information and parse the facts and make sure you do not hurry to conclusions.

- Spiritual attainment by "doing" is a cop-out for spiritual attainment by "being", which is being -and action- in its purest form, devoid of duality and free of opposite. The only "doing" that is expected from us is to wake up, and that is the hardest and last thing we will ever do.

- A Certain level of alienation from culture is healthy, particularly when it behaves in a trivial, infantile and stupid manner.

- The cosmos speaks not with the dead scribbles of the alphabet but with the living lines and curves of sacred geometry.

- The forces that brought you up to the pinnacle of success, will be the very same forces that will eventually take you down to the gutter of failure and mayhem, particularly if you are obsessive and you haven't examined your life carefully.

- Sickness is 50 percent language, so watch what you say to yourself and others.

- Moral goodness, honesty, generosity, self-sacrifice, self-effacement and self-realization don't necessarily ensure other humans' appreciation or divine rewards. You should more likely expect trials and tribulations.

- Predictions of the future are useless: it is not faint intimations of possible futures that we need, but a deeper and more anchored awareness in the immediate present.

About Ecovillages

Are ecovillages the answer to our current dilemmas of imminent pick-oil and dire environmental problems? May be three years from now. The ecovillage and Intentional community movement is a wonderful trend, the expression of a rediscovered connection to the earth and to each other. Ecologically managed communities may mitigate some of the repercussions of a mad, run-away civilization, but for reasons of scale and scope it probably won't make a dent in the current situation. What would really save the day is a global and comprehensive shift in human behavior from lifestyles that emphasize consumerism in its most vicious and destructive forms to ways of living that are more judicious and mindful of our legacy and the well being of future generations. And for this redirection to be effective, first and sine qua non condition and without which no amount of Global Climate Change Summits will do, we need "to go back to the earth", we must regain a true, genuine emotional link to our planet instead of just a relationship based on utilitarian terms, in other words, we must stop treating lady Gaia like a whore; and second, it should translate into solid, implementable policies and an unmitigated commitment to reroute resources and investments to real and intelligent solutions to our environmental, energy, economic and population problems.

Finnegans Wake

I spin words like skein of wool
And human language I retool
To sift between the ready and the fool

I tore the veil between reality and the dream
The river I made to flow upstream
And whole destinies revealed in a haze of steam

I forgot the meaning of frugality
Causality for me, is futility
And sanity is outright banality

Here the dog is wagged by its tail
The minnow swallows the whale
And the hare is outrun by the snail

Can never tell who is doing and who is done
Who has lost and who has won
You are even finished before you begun

When you were cozy and snug
I came in the dead of night like a thug
I removed time from under your feet like a rug

Blake’s grain of sand I’ve blown
And the Alchemist stone I’ve thrown
At those who say that all is known

I made Caesar meet Napoleon
The lord serve the peon
And a day the same as an eon

Rome falls ten times a day
Gods bow to those who pray
and prophets led by those who stray

Thus I tell you, all your former certainties forsake
of this new madness partake
and with me shout, ye finnegans, wake

About The Health Of The American Economy

Do not look at the stockmarket, do not listen to what the politicians say and you'd better not pay heed to the talking heads of mainstream media. The stockmarket is rigged and does not reflect the true health of the economy but only the fact that billions of dollars of taxpayers' money was funneled into an otherwise insolvent system. In addition, Wall Street insiders -with the collusion of politicians who are either clueless or driven by self-interest- have acquired more power than we wished to give them. The result will be catastrophic unless this great sleeping giant, called the American People, wakes up and puts an end to the madness. It appears that 30 years of deliberate dumbing-down thru an intentionally misguided education system, pervasive pointless entertainment, a scarcity of honest and truthful information outlets and an intelligence-insulting form of religion usually proclaimed by flamboyant temporal-power-seeking Christian tele-evangelists, are taking their toll on this otherwise great and intelligent people.