The future is here so what are you going to do?

Futurologists please take note. You are now redundant, join the soup queue at the end of the corridor and hand in your VIP passes because the future belongs to science fiction writers.

An article by Firefox and either we are getting there (which Playstation games suggest we are) or we aren’t. Employing a bunch of self-congratulatory has-beens to mine the tropes of the future to explain the present and then justify it through the phrase “we spend most of our careers in the future” is like saying the best person to create a successful dogfood recipe is a dog and we should sack all those food technologists we now employ because hey! They are not dogs, right?

It’s exactly this kind of thinking that makes me thing we are slipping, by degrees into an Orwellian world where language is used against us. Science fiction writers of intent please note, real science fiction is rarely about the future. It is a parable-at best and an extrapolation from the present which has a didactic scope which applied crassly to the present would have seemed out of context.

Ok, now that the double-good US government has these ‘young guns’ on its side I am prepared to give up the fight for a free world and some logic and throw my lot in with the terrorists. Maybe we need something to shake us out of our illogicality!

What you feel inside

There are times when I want the world to make sense. I can't be the only who feels this way which begs the question why it doesn't. This is more than an academic question that has no answer. It can be deconstrcuted in a way that breaks it down to all the elements that govern it.

If the world is made up of people looking for meaning why is there so little cohesion and why progress of any kind is taken in a mass-lemmings sort of way where critical mass has to be reached for a sort of national inching forward (and several slips back)?

Take democracy and freedom. High ideals by any standard. Apply them to the masses (that's me and you so stop snorting) and see how they work. If personal freedom is so highly prized at what point do you start defending it with restrictions, checks and controls?

If democracy is such a great idea what exactly does it mean? Why freedom of speech in America is defended right alongside the right to bear arms which kill just about anyone who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong point of view?

Why is Britain considering bringing in ID cards and why 'Show me your papers' (a slogan rightly associate with fascism) is heard in democratic Greece, the birthplace of a democracy which, by historical accounts, was designed to level the playing field downwards, not upwards?

All of these ideas are pertinent and the questions are relevant because it is in their external articulation that they manage to change the world. What we feel inside finds its way, slowly, to the outside. Our thoughts mold our reality, shape our outlook, stoke the fury, love or rage we feel.

Is there such thing as a harmless thought?

I don't think so.

Fatwa me: A blow for reason!

In the Quaran (Koran to many) there is an edict that separates the roles of men and women and allows for a segregation of duties and rights which, in a far, far different world, 3,000 years ago made perfect sense and allowed for the veneration and protection of women at a time when neither attitude was the norm.

Islam's founder, Muhammad, so believed in this attitude that he educated his daughters at a time when education was both expensive and a purely male preserve. Why is all this so important, because, when a 3,000 year old edict is transliterated by inferiority-complex ridden, inadequate males in the 21st century it leads to a male-dominated society where women are repressed, treated like objects (the very thing the edict in Koran was trying to avoid) and killed or beaten because they disobey men (who must, by definition have some sort of invisible divine line to God, higher reason and perfect morality).

Normally I would take a reasoned, reasonable view here that would express my indignation as a Westerner who has been brought up believing that personal freedom is the holiest aspiration possible and individual rights are worth fighting for.

I would explain that I respect Islam (I do) and I respect Christianity (again, I do) and that I think the fundamental edicts of each hold about as much water now as a bucket made of sand. I would normally explain that the politics of religion and sex are power-games played by males eager to assert their dominance in society and get all the best positions and an easy life without competition by women and in all this I would, quite correctly, focus on the role played by education and personal understanding in actually progressing the world, which may explain perhaps why the West thought about the Atom 3,000 years ago (Democritus, should anyone wish to check) and went on to build nuclear power stations, while Islam (which had managed to invent the zero, make progress in agriculture, medicine and architecture and tile making well in advance of the West) has since descended in a world dominated by a goat-culture, where they still dress in the same clothes they wore back in the Crusades (a little more threadbare I think), spout the same old bullshit (I will explain my choice of language in a minute) and expect the rest of us to give them the personal freedom and respect they do not give each other.

Fuck that for a lark!

Where does it say that reason will triumph over ignorance with reasoned arguments? Taken to a national scale I don't advocate we Nuke the fuckers back to their amoebal stage but enough is fucking enough. Political correctness be damned someone must make a stand, somewhere, sometime.

I mean look at this: Pakistan is about to descend into the Taliban mentality (and in case anyone is wondering I have personally never forgotten the fuckers for dynamiting the statues of Buddha in Afghanistan).

It's like 'we are right because we say so or we Fatwa you'. Well boys and girls, let's put this pudding to the test. Islam, is a great intellectual religion. The majority of its followers are people I feel humbled to meet because of the strength of their faith and the general goodness of their nature.

To the dickless, bearded wonders railing against women, trying to uphold the kind of rigid morality we all know gives men a cart blanche to screw around and create a harem mentality everywhere, I say "Fatwa me!".

In case you are interested, I can talk about Islam, Buddhism and Christianity in two languages and have spent the last 35 years studying martial arts at a deep-adept level, so little, two-bit sticks ain't really gonna cut the mustard here (fair play warning in effect beardies!).

For these people I have about as much respect as I would reserve for coelacanth (probably less because at least that ancient organism had the decency to evolve and die). I say let's stop being so patient and understanding and let's apply our own big stick to their pathetic impotent widgets (and if the latter statement is not true what gives with the beards, robes, uneducated, ill-thought rumblings, head coverings and bullshit ideology?) and let's see just how far they get then!

Be Real

The moment you decide to be real you run into all sorts of problems. Being real is a selfish act. It rejects society and it rejects relationships and it may even reject love. It's like packing up and heading into the desert and forgetting about the world and keeping on going and going and going letting the purity of the surroundings sanctify what you feel inside.

In a way it's suicide. Not literal. You're killing all the careful constructs you have created and you are killing all the pretenses a lifetime's conditioning has made you accept so readily. The truth is we lie. We lie all the time.

We lie to ourselves, first and foremost. We plan things in detail which we never do, all our energy instead going in the mental planning. We lie to women we want to sleep with and men who we admire. We lie to kids and tell them 'truths' which we know aren't but we really wish they were. We lie to our parents and tell them we are doing great because we don't like to think we are not doing a million light years better than they did in every possible way. We lie to our friends and make out we are Ok, even when we are not.

The lies are so multi-layered and so habitual that we forget we are lying. Lying is a response you learn from very young and if you do not embrace it you will never get to be old enough to read something like this.

Because we lie so much we look for truth in unexpected places. Sometimes we find it in our work, creating through an imperfect means a perfect solution, a perfect job something we can really be proud of no matter how small. Sometimes we find it, incredibly enough, in a pet. We know deep down that here is truth. The food provider/food consumer, master/pet relationship works along such clearly delineated lines that then everything else which comes with it, adoration, friendship, mutual respect, is real.

We know that. We cannot articulate it and we anthropomorphosize our pets and wish they were real friends or children or parents, but we feel it all the same. We feel the power of this truth and it makes us humble.

Then there is the truth we feel in the world sometimes. In a selfless act of altruism, an unexpected act of friendship or generosity. In an act which requires the crossing of an invisible divide, something which we know swings the balance and keeps the world from sliding into the oblivion of total lies.

These are all things we sense. We know they are out there and we respond, every time, intuitively, to them. We do this even as we continue to live a lie.

Getting real hurts real bad. It means that suddenly all the 'white lies' (and can lies ever be white? - Get real and shed the conditioning, this is like a 'little' stealing is ok, or injuring someone but not killing them, yeah baby! That's ok!) we have been telling are shown to be false and this turns you into a liar and a manipulator whereas before you were someone who could be trusted and always knew what to do and always did the right thing.

The pain is real, even if you peel off a false relationship. You've hurt people who are not bad. People whose only mistake was to trust what you said because they did what you did: they believed the lies.

Truth No 1: Not everyone wants to be free.

Truth No 2: The moment you break free you experience such a deep sense of sadness and loss you which you never really shed the illusions.

Truth No 3: Break free and you are alone.

This, baby, is your desert walk. You go out with friends and the meaningless posturings and empty waffle leave you untouched and detached. You go to work and you realise that this is a soulless contract you entered into making out that it is really important that a deadline is met and the glossy fashion ad gets to print on time so that a thousand dresses to anorexic, body-image obsessed women can be sold just so you can pay your rent, your credit card bill and your food bill.

Being real is not easy which is why so few of us actually do it. Why should we? If we all did maybe the whole thing would grind to a halt, or worse, come crashing down and, whatever we may want to believe about the power of real truth, the civilisation we have built and the multiple complexity of so many lives, is a thing of beauty in itself. That we can see in every state we are in.

That's why we buy into the lie so readily. The damned thing works.

So you want to get real? In most cases I would say don't... or do, but keep the cloth of the lie close to hand. Wear it as camouflage. Adorn yourself with it when in public. Be real inside yourself. Stop lying to yourself, saying you are a hero or a nice guy or a person who really matters to the world (because you meet work deadlines). Feel the desert and the searing heat beating relentlessly down upon you. See the featureless landscape in your mind's inner eye. Know your steps take you deeper and deeper and deeper. And realise that this is a one way journey baby. Truth that takes you inside yourself does not allow you to come back out again.

Then, in that inner loneliness and the bleakness which allows you to understand what's real, you can make decisions which are true. You may still decide to lie. We all do. But, for once, you will know that you are lying to yourself for a reason. A real reason, rather than simply the desire to not think about the world.

A thought a day

You know that feeling when you start the day with a thought that then colours everything? Sometimes it has to do about the future. Sometimes it’s a thought about the past, or a memory. It seems to kick-start a process which then goes on to create a powerful sense of perspective and you end up feeling lost in a long line of thought which makes you feel completely insignificant.

When I was just a kid I used to jump out of my bedroom window at 6.00am (it was easier than crossing all the house to get to the back door) to go running. Sometimes I was sleepless, having spent the night watching TV or reading and by then I would be tired but the body I lived in would still work and I would force it to go through the grueling pace of a morning 6km run.

I used to think then of surviving. How life would by the time I reached my thirties, have given me all the answers. It’s been a while since I was thirty and I know there are no answers. Just questions.

We get up and go through each day somehow telling ourselves that everything is ok, that the world spins the way it should. But you know, it isn’t, and I’ll tell you why. Had I been born in South Africa, Namibia, The Congo, life would have been much different for me now, even if the person inside my head was exactly the same.

It raises an interesting question about what it is that exactly makes us what we are. And it also makes me wonder if we are little more than the product of chance and chemical compounds. In which case the very fact that we can organize ourselves into swarming societies that take over entire areas and build cities has to be pretty amazing.

The though coloured my entire day and everything I did was either the result of instinct or circumstance. Makes you think sometimes.

In the spaceship of my mind

It's the day's end and I feel the urge. This is a new feeling for all of us because we can suddenly sit in front of the screen and allow the mouse to take us across the world. Like Neo in The Matrix searching for answers in the net we travel across the globe consuming international-flavoured porn and politics with equal ease.

Suddenly the physical attributes of Asian porn stars (they never shave) assume equal importance as the Kosovo plans for closer ties with the West, the discovery of mini-tornadoes in laboratory Petri dishes and the war in Iraq.

We can now immerse ourselves in a digital medium that never sleeps, re-shaping our perception and augmenting our knowledge to a degree that must, at some point, in the early hours of the morning, create a certain exosomatic experience of perception as if our bodies fall away and all that exists of us is mind.

Were it that easy. To escape into a world where information is the coin of the realm. We would then evade that inner pain that gnaws at our gut and heart, that tells us that "The Centre cannot Hold/Things Fall Apart/And Mere Anarchy rules the world."

Scientology and the need to believe

If you have any kind of common sense at all you're going to ask the obvious question: 'Why?'

Why does Scientology, a religion founded by a Science Fiction writer who, in his own lifetime, had quipped: "You want to make a million dollars? Find a religion." still have the power to attract as many people as it does, willing to believe in its extraterrestrial Thetan message, willing to pay money (up to $200,000 apparently) to discover 'the secret' and willing to work so hard to defend it afterwards?

John Travolta and Tom Cruise excused (they are actors and troubled souls, or at least more troubled than the rest of us - but their belief makes the case funnily enough, should we choose to take them into consideration), the ordinary people who struggle hard across the world to make money only to hand it over to what must be, per-head-count, the world's wealthiest religion must have a reason.

Right?

Yes. They do. And think about it. This morning when you got out of bed and thought that we are facing yet another day in a world that sometimes feels too pressured, too fast, too artificial. A world without real boundaries, where all our idols prove to have feet of clay and where each of our beliefs is tempered by the need to make it at any cost, to survive in an environment which feels driven only by success and only by money.

I know that feeling. And so do you. Let's get real. When things are going great for us we thrive in this environment, we feel it's our playground. Then there are times and days when it feels a struggle. When each compromise we feel forced to make takes away a thin sliver of our soul, when we long for nukes, revolutions and World War III and the need to start over again.

Clean slate.

This is where Scientology comes right in. Each one of our religions and a great many of our cults feels fuzzy, not quite havin gall the answers, demanding more of us than we can give. Have faith but your reward is going to be a heavenly treasure but only if, and there are conditions, and requisites and even worse, our very success and cutthroat instinct that allows us to succeed and survice is then turned against us, becomes something we should be ashamed of.

Have faith...but, it begins and we accept that we need to have faith and not answers. We need to stop asking questions and just need to believe. We need to feel everything important is inside us but unearthing it may never happen this lifetime and even if it does the huge effort it takes will bring about a transformation that may well change us forever.

We know all that. We feel each of these things.

Religions are huge organic affairs which come about as a response to the deep-seated inner urge we feel to exceed the boundary limiting us in this world, to surpass the barrier of our skin and to become something other. Greater. Lesser. To listen to a voice that only then can be clearly heard.

It's the way things are. Real is imprecise. We fight all our lives for a moment of crystal clear clarity when everything we perceive, everything we know and everything we have done makes sense.

Scientology is not like that. In the way of the unreal (or I should say the scripted and artificial) it has ALL the answers. It provides all the questions even. And then gives youthe means to put the two together via the simple conduit of your wallet.

"Pay and join us brother!" - I like that kind of message. It comes with the certainty that decades as a consumer have conditioned me to expect. Scientology gives it to us, more than that, it dresses it up with just the right kind of initiation mystique, sense of bortherhood and feeling of revelation necessary to actually feel that way-hey! This is something cool, the kind of thing I see on TV or the Cinema where moral ambivalence and confusion over issues seems to be non-existent.

Ok, it can do that because it's made up, it's not real, it's a product you buy and it is after your money. But tell me you have not woken up at least one morning in the month craving a sense of mission and duty under an unshakeable umbrella of moral certainty supported by a brotherhood that ats as a shield against the world and I will call you a liar in public without fear of lawsuits for defamation of character.

Scientology exists because of us not despite us. It exists because we do. It exists because one failing science fiction writer was astute enough to take his own advice and start a religion in the only place on Earth where such a religion could start. It continues to exist because we all get up and hope that maybe the answers are really that simple, that complexity does not have to exist, that maybe the questions are even simpler and all we need is verification.

Then again we know, deep down, that there is more to it all than that. We know the same way we know that when we buy a flat screen TV or upgrade to a more powerful computer it is not really going to make us happier, we are just using a sop, spending our money to make us feel good.

Spiritually this may be crass but it is also largely harmless and helps support the economy and progress and jobs and makes the world go round. Consumerism is cool provided we understand its limits. It begins to become something else when we apply it to our need to believe.

All the answers are within

There are days when a single thought sets the trend: Look inside yourself because that's where the answers reside.

The mornings sometimes are hard to face

You lie in bed and think of nothing. It's morning and what has woken you up is the first glimmer of sunlight. Your body's relaxed and your muscles are inactive. Your brain thinks nothing and you know that you are balanced in harmony between alive and dead.

There is no telling what keeps you going, what makes you wake up, what drives you on, what, what what.... but something does and you make a move.

What is it that makes you get out of bed in the morning, that reaffirms it's ok to be alive again, that it's ok to go through the day and try?

There is hope deep inside all of us. Even on the bleakest, darkest day.

Hope.

Hope makes us do it.

Hope wins.

Black Days

Maybe, we are chemically imbalanced a little. You know the feeling when youget out of bed in the morning and everything is really black? You can't really sense why except you are not doing what you want and probably are not where you should be.

It's like you've taken a wrong turn in a road that forked somewhere and you know there is no going back. You need to go on, see where this heads, where it leads but you have no real idea how. You get on and do things but sometimes on some mornings the blackness hits you.

It takes a huge effort just to get out of bed.

That's when some things help immenselly. It helps to be able to get away, hide into an activity that gives you release but at other times this is not possible. You are stuck in a place where things need to go on and nothing can save you or give you reassurance and that's when you feel small and the world large and you are convinced you can make no difference at all.

I don't know if this is a recent thing. I noticed it in myself in the last ten years. Maybe it's a sign of getting older or maybe life itself has got more complex, or maybe the world has truly changed and we are all subliminally aware of how different it has become.

I find myself craving a quick cure and that's when I think of drinking or maybe taking drugs except I have never done anything like this and I knwo it won't help because quick-fix chemical cures simply don't.

So this leaves me empty-handed and without any other recourse except to get up and go through the day one single step after the other and then, at the end of it, by the sheer fact of having survived another twenty-four hours, physically and mentally intact I can get out of the dark well my soul resides in and find some hope in the world.

We all need hope. We need to feel that things are moving that we are going on to another place, faster, better. Sometimes that place is invisible. Xanadu and Sangri La exist in our minds but our minds create the world we live in.

Our minds...

These are also the place where we live.

You know you want to know the truth

There is a sense we sometimes get that we live in a two-tier, two-speed world. Things happen on the inside. Thoughts, ideas, feelings. Sometimes we respond to them, sometimes we do not. On the outside things are different. We have a role to play and it never stops. We go through the motions of being in charge, appearing to know what we talk about.

There is a sense at times that we connect with others (or fail to) on a cosmic scale. You pass somebody in the street, you make brief eye contact and you know... suddenly you know!! That they are more than they seem... so much more. It's like you know them.

It's hard to explain what I mean. It begins as a tug, a pull deep inside. Then you want to reach out, say: "Hey, it's cool. We all hurt inside. The world does that to us. We just need to figure out what to do."

You don't. I don't.

We move on, thinking a little longer perhaps, wondering what was it exactly that made us feel that way. What? How did we know? Why can we not be real? Then the world closes in again all around us and we are left floundering in it and the mask comes down, the script gets read and we know what to say, know how to act because that bit is expected, we do it... but that's not real!

Real is hard. And we have not figured it out yet.