21st Century unbound

Why do we write?

2007-07-24T17:40:00.001-07:00

It's such a jaded world that even publishing has devolved from a calling to a black art ruled by a bottom line figure. Which begs the question: why do we write? Why?

Because there is a need. A desire. It wells up from deep inside us and does things which make us want to overflow with words and ideas.

Publishers do not get this. So authors are left struggling unless we make it big and then the only revenge is to make them pay.

Politicians should do drugs at least once

2007-07-19T12:19:00.000-07:00

Politics is a funny game and politicians are…well. Ok, let’s not get too overindulged. Politicians are human like the rest of us and what we expect of them when we vote them into office is neither the purity of a friar nor the connivance of a Svengali. Most of the times we expect them to do their job more efficiently than the rest of us because (let’s face it) they are on a gravy train at our expense, and when push comes to shove we expect them to display the higher attributes of the human condition one expects of public figures invested in a position of authority or leadership.

So that means no pettiness, no back-stubbing and lots of sagacity, wisdom and generousity of spirit. I know, I know, in a few more minutes the effects of the class C substance I am smoking now will wear off and I will see them as they really are, but while I am under the influence I just cannot bring myself to write anything bad about them, which is exactly the point.

Jaqui Smith came clean with this and admitted to smoking cannabis and, you know, because she’s in charge of the government’s drugs campaign I felt – really- that much more reassured. Here was a person who had the strength of character to own up to having done what probably half the country did back in the 80s and earlier, except perhaps of former US President Clinton who had the presence of mind not to inhale, but that is an exception. The rest of the world not only inhaled but puffed and puffed and almost forgot to exhale.

So Alistair Darling and Ruth Kelly all joined that tier of politicians who understand the human condition, are part of it and when it comes to legislating have at least a perspective which those who publicly started that they haven’t and what’s more, may not possibly even imagine, have no recourse to and are therefore incapable of legislating about except in a blind, lip-serving (and possibly sycophantic) way.

So let’s keep it real. The sins of the past, in retrospect, do not instantly make us incapable of deciding between right and wrong or even understanding the set of conditions which lead us down certain choices.

We are, in the 21st century, balanced upon the edge of radicalising the very way we perceive those who are in public office. If we are happy to have asexual, puritans who have never spent a day living in the real world and understanding its pressures, then fine, but those are not the kind of people who get my vote and just to put things in perspective, we have troops involved in two war fronts in the Middle East precisely because there were societies ran by just such men, which we perceived as a threat.

So next time a politico admits to a little sinning, let’s laugh, ridicule and crack some funnies and also feel confident that they know their current job and duties and our expectations are in safe hands.

Things under the sun

2007-06-25T03:23:00.000-07:00

Bright sunlight and the sea have a way of making things appear simpler than they are. It becomes difficult to think that there is anything wrong with the world then and even harder to care if you actually start thinking that there is something wrong.

The question that is raised here is are we subject to our environment to the degree that our thoughts and concerns are shaped by it? Is this why Eskimos have never started a war or why Brits have started so many?

Why Salman Rushdie deserves a knighthood

2007-06-19T04:21:00.000-07:00

I first came across Rushdie's writings and the power of his words to move the reader in the book that propelled him into literary stardom: 'Midnight's Children'. I felt moved, humbled and informed in equal parts and in that volume Rushdie became one of the greatest ambassadors for India and Pakistan explaining cultural differences without sinking into the debasement of exegesis, contrasting the East and the West in such stark, yet gentle terms that I often, in retrospect felt ashamed not to belong to a culture whose roots went as far back as that.

I loved the 'Satanic Verses' and laughed at the Iranian regime's fatwa except it cost the British tax payer a cool £1 mil a year to protect him. We have come a long way since then, we are in a new century and Rushdie, it seems has lost none of his power to polarise opinion, arising the hatred of the very people who should be supporting him as their ambassador to the West and being liked by those who should be less sympathetic to him.

I am, quite deliberately, going to take a balanced view here, precisely because it will serve to better make the case. Rushdie and his knighthood have become focal points by a chagrined sandal-footed throng (and yep inflammatory imagery is deliberately used here) precisely because it gives focus to their ire against the West (which somehow is held responsible for all the ills they experience at the hands of their own governments and societies).

Religion has always been a powerful focal force. In the West we use to burn apostates and heretics and brand anyone not falling in line as a witch. So in that respect we were no more enlightened than Pakistan is today. But our darkness was over 1000 years ago and we have since come such a long way that Amazon freely sells books like: The case against Christianity and The Atheist Manifesto which takes a remarkably balanced view against all three of the world's religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

What is remarkable here is that goatherds (and please correct me if I am wrong, but sandals and white robes went out of fashion back in King Herod's time) feel so strongly about literature that they are prepared to go to war against the West, threaten acts of terrorism and consider killing a writer.

Either they all possess a remarkable genetic mutation which allows them to appreciate literature to a degree that must be truly remarkable or else they are all a bunch of ignorant fanatics listening to equally ignorant (but far more sly) self-titled clergy which have a hidden agenda and can whip them into a frenzy to suit their own purposes.

In all his writings Rushdie did not ever come near again to the potency of 'Midnight's Children' and yet he has the ability to stir up such passions (which he no doubt revels in) simply because of ignorance, illiteracy and fanaticism, the very things literature is supposed to stand against.

Should people in Pakistan learn to read they will realise that the most effective weapon against a writer is obscurity. Then again, should they learn to read they might take it upon themselves to study the Koran rather than have it read out to them by those who serve not God, but themselves.

Have we got religious zealots in the West? Welllll, looking at the reaction to Gibson's 'Passion of the Christ' should be enough to answer that question. If Islamic countries really want to be taken seriously then they will need to somehow pull themselves up out of the primordial soup where they currently mentally reside and try and reclaim some of the past intellectual glory of the civilization that made inroads in mathematics and medicine the West could only dream about.

Then, and only then, they might command some respect. But until they get to that stage, they will serve only as a reminder that en-mass they hold about as much credibility as last year's zucchini salad (and I am probably doing now a huge disservice to zucchini salads everywhere).

Barbarians all around

2007-06-13T13:59:00.000-07:00

Rome was sacked by Alaric, King of the Visigoths in 410 and then again 45 years later by Geiseric, appropriately named King of the Vandals and in 546 Totila, King of the Visigoths sacked it and depopulated almost as an aside in his war against the Byzantines. Yet none of these managed to even scratch the Aqua Virgo (or Virgin Water) one of the city's underground viaducts supplying one of its most famous fountains, until this month of course when in 2007 Ano Domini, builders building an underground car park damaged its structure and then, adding insult to injury and sealing for eternity the cretinous nature of their ilk (and I will explain why I so strongly word this here in a minute) they walled it off stopping the waterflow and causing further damage (which they thought they had successfully hid).

We live in an age where most things are permissible. We can all get hold of 'recreational' drugs that would knock out an elephant and we all are capable of finding the kind of porn online that would have got us behind bars a few short years ago.

Our children go around, if you believe the pundits, in a perpetual, mind-warping sex, violence and video-game fuelled fugue which will serve in little more than dissociating them from reality to the point that they become aliens to their own world. Yet none of this is really worrying. Whether you think the arrow of progress points north or south it is all part of evolution, the flip side of moving on and we have to learn to deal with it.

Yet there are a few things which are sacred and that is the beauty found in objects from our distant past.

Whether it's the structure of the Aqua Virgo, created to flow water to a fountain in the ancient world's most important city, or the world's tallest statues of Buddha mindlessly destroyed by a bunch of illiterate, bearded, goat-herding, insecure misogynists (and guys feel free the Fatwa me over this allegation) they are sacred because in them we see not what they are but what they represent.

Their existence, their creation, speak volumes of thought and human passion. Ingenuity, endeavour, the ability to overcome problems, the ability to dream and the ability to hope. In them we see not just the past but also the future because they are part of what makes us intrinsically human rather than better-equipped apes.

There are exceptions. The builders in Rome. The Taliban in Afghanistan. Mindless acts of such destruction repudiate not the past but our future. Our ability to be human. Our sense of being special. Everything that we can be as well as many things of what we were.

Stoning was too good for the Taliban and as a liberal Westerner raised on accepting other people's faiths I was all for nuking them after they destroyed the Buddhas for in that act they showed that they cannot be reasoned with any more than one would be able to reason with a herd of cattle, without the means of a cattleprod.

Ok, now it's your turn. What do you think should happen to the builders in Rome? They succeeded in doing what even the barbarians who sacked the city failed. I've had a few issues with builders in the past (albeit not Italian ones and over a conservatory rather than an aqueduct) so this now makes me a little biased (though nuking is out of the question, Rome is full of antiquities), so let me know what the punishment should be.

A blow for free enterprise

2007-06-13T04:45:00.001-07:00

I tend to sometimes walk too much in my inner dark side. Depending on your demographics you will think that either I am unusually moribund, dwell too much in the opposite direction of the Force or have issues which need resolving and, as it happens, you will most probably all be right.

The thing is that I took the decision this morning to expand the brief here a little bit and the news on the Albanian Crowd (rented, right?) and the President's wristwatch proved to be so auscpicious that I took it as a sign and forfeited the ritual sacrificing of the goat (I could not find a virgin and I was assured the goat was that way untouched), that my decision was right.

Now Bush is so keen to visit countries where Capitalism and free market enterprise is taking hold that he has, on this occasion, led by example. Ever since Robin Hood "robbed the rich to give to the poor" a little light-handedness has gone a long way towards equalising the dispersion of wealth amongst the masses. Not that I am condoning this in any way, shape or form. Far from it. But if we stop being judgemental and laughing at the US President's apparent misfortune at the moment (and the excuse about him taking it off is about as believable as the evil pretzel attack) we must, at length, concede that stealing is about as democratic an activity (albeit fraught with risks) as any free market enterpreneurship can possibly be.

Let's analyse it for a moment. Here are the ingredients needed to make it happen (and they are all true in this case):

Opportunity - such activity cannot flourish in an environment that is inherently deprived. Historically, such environments produce solidarity and group desperation and dispiritedness, but not entrepreneurial activities. For these to happen you need the opportunities created by inequality. The demands made by those who have in terms of goods, services and habits (not to mention behaviour) create the opportunities while at the same time inspire those who have not to aspire to a higher status.
Talent - ok, this does not need a lengthy explanation. Either you have it, or you don't.
Planning - and in the lifting of President Bush's watch we have ample evidence of it. The other alternative is to believe that such talents as stealing wristwatches are second nature to most Albanians (it is possible you know) and accept that here was an individual, unfazed by circumstances and willing to seize the opportunity presented.
Style - without it no business an ever hope to take off the ground. Imagine Robin Hood doing his bit with a grimace instead of a smile and yelling in rage instead of homespun, witty repartee. He would have been a mere brigand.

Put those ingredients together and presto you have the formula which spawned Kentucky Fried Chicken.

I realise, of course, that I have forgotten the seasoning: A hefty dose of desperation. Because stealing, like entrepreneurial pursuits, is a high-risk activity we need to have a sense of desperation and a clear-cut lack of alternatives for it to really flourish.

So all you louts who read this Blog (and I hope there are some) and are now laughing at the leader of the free world, consider that at least his presence affirmed values which, taken to their natural conclusion may one day help Albania become the next world-leading economy (or at least, failing that, stop being the butt of jokes - it now has more than one set of traffic lights which was operational on special occasions, you know).

And the paranoia just grows and grows!

2007-06-07T05:15:00.000-07:00

Traditionally, technology has always been on the side of government. Prior to the age of the net governments were the ones employing superior technology to spy on their own people, erode personal liberty and, in the name of security, create a climate of control.

In democractic countries this was less noticeable though still present, in countries which did not even bother to pay lip service to democracy. The net changed all that by moving technology faster than governments and politicians could understand it and by putting it squarely in the hands of the 'little guy' who now had the power to project his voice and views and seek information beyond what a government might approve.

Governments are catching up. The latest story is on the rise of censorship on the net. and it points to hoe fast the practise is expanding.

At some point we will all need to make a stand in some way or face the fact that we have nowhere to run and no means to do so. The paranoia must stop, somewhere, some way.

We are going backwards

2007-06-05T05:41:00.000-07:00

Most days I get out of bed feeling that I am lucky. I am lucky I was born in the West. I am lucky I live in the age of the internet and instant, online communication. I am lucky I belong to a generation that has seen all this happen and really thinks nothing is impossible.

I get up and start the day and I feel lucky I am alive, now, lucky to be here, lucky to just ... be.

And then there's the flip side which tells me that with each advance and each step forward we slide back, slipping towards an age when ignorance was the norm, when everything we did and everything we tried was part of a knee-jerk reaction driven by mistrust and fear.

We are becoming increasingly insular, increasingly reliant on those we elect to protect us who then do it through the implementation of means which increase the sense of injustice and fear and make a whole lot of other people feel less than lucky when they start their day.

We, have the power to make, or break our world.

We do!!!!

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

2007-05-31T08:53:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-27T07:12:00.000-07:00

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!

2007-05-24T02:28:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-23T23:15:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-20T09:43:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-14T13:24:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-14T04:55:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-12T08:29:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-07T03:59:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-04T01:21:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-03T02:23:00.000-07:00

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.

Way too easy...

2007-04-29T21:14:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-24T13:21:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-19T18:16:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-18T14:58:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-18T10:25:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-04-17T05:46:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-13T06:50:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-12T16:03:00.000-07:00

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.