Way too easy...

It's become way too easy to not do things, even if they feel right. And it's become way too hard to understand what right is. There comes a moment when you respond to the anger that exists in the world and then you are part of the schema.

I got up early today and watched the sun rise and it was bautiful. And in such a simple act I reaffirmed to my self that there is beauty in the world that exists outside my own thoughts, outside my own perceptions.

There is a danger here, a very real one that I may be on a path that runs out sooner rather than later. And then all that will be left are these electronic thoughts.

None of us can ever really know for sure when things happen and what will be. None.

The loneliness of the one

It's not that we want to live in small enclave communities again where everybody pokes their nose into everyone else's business. That never really worked and we aonly put up with it because it was expedient. But there is a need sometimes to connect, make contact with someone at a level that goes beyond sex.

We also feel the need to belong to a cause. Something bigger and greater than our day-to-day job. These are impulses to be resisted.

Friendship comes at a high price and causes demand absolute loyalty and spilled blood and churn people up as fuel.

What needs to be said here I guess is that the only place which is truly home is the space behind your eyes. There you truly belong.

Altered States

Back in the 80s, when the film came out it confirmed in all of us that in the Age of Aquarius we could reach new heights in the evolution of human consciousness.

I have a favourite snippet from that time: "I have argued that every human being is born with an innate drive to experience altered states of consciousness periodically -- in particular to learn how to get away from ordinary ego-centered consciousness. I have also explained my intuition that this drive is a most important factor in our evolution, both as individuals and as a species. Nonordinary experiences are vital to us because they are expressions of our unconscious minds, and the integration of conscious and unconscious experience is the key to life, health, and spiritual development, and fullest use of our nervous systems. - Andrew Weil, M.D."

We didn't and the New Age movement has evolved and devolved into a niche lifestyle that has more to do with fashion than intellectual development.

We have gone from believing that man was capable of a higher evolution to regressing through a loss of higher analytical functions through the use of socially acceptable narcotics, whether they are alcohol or drugs.

And in this, by degrees, we are reverting back to a mindless mass, doing without thinking, living without feeling.

The truth inside your mind

If you think carefully about it, but never tell anyone, you know that the world around us is made up of little truths. Things you see and totally understand without being able to explain. The way a bird flies in the morning. Or the way the dew hangs off green blades of grass. There is something about it all, the way it just clicks that makes you realise it is real.

Reflective of something bigger.

There is the way your best friend accepts exactly what you are, who you are. And the way the sun tints the early morning sky with a colour that really makes you feel you are alive.

All these things, if you thinkg about them tell you something you cannot explain. And yet the world is not like that. Made up of so many tiny, tiny truths, it escapes our gaze. We sense it is more, greater than we see, bigger than ourselves and yet and yet we can't explain what the feeling is that drives us on.

We know though that the world we see is false. But what is the real world? What does it look like? Why can't we see it?

People kill people, not guns

In the most post-analytical knee-jerk reaction to the Virginia tech massacre story the old NRA saying about "people killing people" as a defence against any law restricting the freedom to buy guns makes exactly the kind of sense one would expect of narrow-minded, self-centered, social bigots, which of course they have to be.

Now that I got you riled think that if Cho Seung-hui had been armed with a toothpick instead of an easily available semi-automatic, high-powered, handgun the death toll count might have been a little lower.

There is an adage that goes "we get the world we deserve" - the NRA has been sowing dragon's teeth through its lobbying for the best part of last century and this one is beginning to see the reaping of their toils.

Why is this happening?

The Virginia Tech Campus shooting is all over the news. There is a tendency to rationalise this, look for motivation, motives, "try to learn from it" so that it may not be repeated. This is a defence mechanism. We take things in our stride and move on. This is how we survive traumatic events. This is how we have reacted since 9/11, the London Tube bombs, the Madrid train bomb, the Iraq War.

It's like an escalating sledge ride down a mountainside strewn with boulders and trees and crevasses and we keep going faster and faster, each bump or narrow call being just another thing that did not kill us and which we can learn from to avoid the next one, and our speed is picking up.

The question has to be: "Why is this happening?" How did life, which we used to hold sacred, suddenly become so cheap?

I really do not have the answer here. Just the questions. The sense that it is not as it should be. When students go to lessons and don't come back, when stockbrokers go to work and don't come back, when commuters get on trains and don't come back you need to ask why. Why?

This is not the world I thought I survived the chances of a nuclear war for. This is not the world that used to inspire me to leap out of bed in the morning, revelling in the feeling of being alive. Being part of something bigger and more beautiful and more lasting than myself.

This is a dystopian nightmare. How can we make it stop?

The internet space age

In Altered Carbon Richard Morgan explored the possibility of needlecasting consciousnesses across the universe to be downloaded into the cortical stacks of pre-fabricated bodies. The seeds of this may already be in place with the next move to put internet into space. In which case I want a Kumalo body and my consciousness beamed to a beach-planet paradise with a perpetually hot climate, 10ft waves for surfing and a sea that's free of sharks.

Ok. I wil get more meaningful once I have ad a chance to absorb all this and think the ramifications of interntet in space through but for now, flippant will have to do. It's early in the morning still where I am and my synapses have not yet received their regular caffeine jolt.

Something is wrong with the world

If you, like me, went through the first twenty years of your life living under the bomb and then grew your hair long and wore jackets with the sleeves pulled up in the go-go 80s because it felt so cool and liberating and we thought the world had got better, then you'll know the feeling of elation that crept under our skin as all the four digits of the calendar turned at the same time in the year 1999.

We expected a lot, thought it was a brand new world, discovered that it was our time, we were going to somehow "turn swords into ploughshares", rework the old world order, take things online where everything was friendlier, cleaner, faster, better and enter the 21st century with a blank slate in hand ready to write a brand new story.

Mired in a world where the “war against terror” is threatening every hard-fought civil liberty we’ve had, where we have managed to turn misogynism, racism and cynicism into art forms.

So, what the hell went wrong?

I’ve been asking myself the same question since planes flew into buildings and before you start arching your eyebrows and pursing your lips, this is not a rant against terrorism, the US presidency, restriction of freedoms or even the Iraq war. All of this is symptomatic. Things went wrong at a deeper level. A fundamental shift happened somewhere and we all found ourselves transported into a world where the things that mattered were not important any more.

You get that feeling?

Be honest with yourself.

I too, felt sorry, got mad, tried to rationalize it, got up went to work and thought about my next online venture. I kinda talked it up or down with friends, colleagues, went about business as usual. And yet this thing is bugging me.

Something happened that escaped us all and no one really wants to face it. On one level everything is pretty much the same as before, except our computers are now faster, our bandwidth higher and we have all had a few more seasons of 24, The Shield and Lost.

But is it really ok?

Has everything just become…what exactly?

Yep. I know you’re thinking he same thing if you’re reading this. I would really, really. Like to dismiss me too. Hell, it’s taken long enough to put this together. It’s been boiling and boiling and boiling, building up pressure and sort of lurking, a brooding thought, there behind my eyes, sometimes coming across like lens, when viewing the world and causing everything to go out of synch, just a little, so that it makes sense but not quite so.

It’s like a smile that never reaches your eyes, or words that are never meant.

This is our world and we have broken it and maybe we can no longer fix it and if this reads, right now, like I am on an acid trip it’s because it has been eating me up for so long that the only way to get it all out is to let it drip and drip and fill the page.

Am I alone in feeling all this?

Is there no one else who has felt the need to say it aloud? To make it real? To be real and ask “Why?”. Why did this happen? How can we have so much hate in us still that we enter the 21st century more divided than before, selling more weapons, manufacturing more bombs, with Africa in as much of a mess as when Biafra was making the news and I, a kid myself, used to hear about it on the radio.

Why have we not been back to the moon? Colonised the stars? Learnt all there is to know about our planet?

I wanted this to be really smart but the words have all flowed out and this is really how I feel. I have precious few answers and here, at least, I can explore.

The 21st Century has become unbound and we are the undertakers of a world that is seeing its end.

I know you think this is pessimistic. It needn’t be because each end is, as you can imagine, a beginning. Each fall sees a new rise and we have to make things work still.

So we all log online and click and program and network like mad and post articles and blogs and get involved in online business and sometimes we find ourselves lost in a world that makes more sense than the real world. But we need still to find the answers, inside as well as outside.
So, for me, this is the beginning.

Join me, if you will, give me your comments, I will respond.

I really hope I am not alone.